by Proehl, Bob
“Is he dead?” Miquel asks, looking down at Mister Herschel, who could be sleeping.
“I’m afraid so,” says Edith.
“We have to go,” Carrie says. “I don’t know what’s going on, but they could figure out how to shut us back down in a minute. This is our chance.”
“This is our wedding,” Miquel says. He looks at her, in his ill-fitting suit, asking her to come back, stay. They are speaking different languages, and Carrie knows it. This path she’s started on, toward making a life here, Miquel is far ahead of her.
“We have to go,” Carrie says. Bryce and Hayden lead the others out the door. “We have to go now.”
“We won’t be able to get the kids out,” Miquel says.
“We can’t save everyone right now,” says Carrie. “But if we can get out—”
“Go,” he says. “Come back when you can save everyone. I’ll stay here. We’ll be ready.”
Carrie wants to drag him along. She wants to explain that she can’t go without him. She wants to say it, but she doesn’t. She doesn’t know what version of herself is waiting out there, what shape she’ll be apart from him. But if it’s impossible for her to stay, it’s more impossible for him to leave.
She kisses him. This kiss she’s present for; she tries to memorize it. Not the last time, she tells herself, but there’s no conviction in the thought. She holds the hem of her wedding dress and takes off, over the hill. After a few steps, she stops and turns back, thinking she heard him call out. Miquel stands there, watching her go. Carrie realizes that he knew it would come to this. Even at Bishop, he knew that if they got together, she’d be the one to leave. He understood her love, the limits of it, better than she did. She wants to stay, if only to prove him wrong. But she hears metal strain as Bryce rips open the chain link. She hears shots fired along the eastern fence.
She’ll go and bring help, fight her way back here. There must be a way to save all of them. She’s insufficient to the task now. It calls for someone else, someone better. She can become that only if she gets out.
It takes place in a moment, a switch flipped. Across North America, 200 million people nod off like late-night drivers pushing too far in search of a welcoming rest stop, eyes drooping as their minds slip away for a blink. Within that blink, infinite space. A sex dream, a terror vision of a fiery crash. After the Pulse, people find themselves in the Hive for the first time. Startled, they look to people around them for answers. Some begin conversations, ask questions, before they wake up. They’re in the Hive for minutes. In the real world, a fraction of a second passes.
They’re changed, but not all the changes are immediate.
Ahmad Roche notices a patch of goose bumps on his forearm. He doesn’t grow downy pinfeathers for a few more days.
Omar Wright wakes from his moment in the Hive with a splitting headache, a burning right in the center of his skull. He meets up with friends that night at one of Cleveland’s divier bars, intending to self-medicate with tequila. In the morning, the headache is gone, replaced by a new one, more diffused through the entirety of his head. His mouth is dry and fuzzy. There’s a man next to him in the bed, although he can’t remember coming home with anyone. Omar gives him a prod in the ribs, and the man rolls over to face him. He’s a perfect duplicate of Omar: every hair, every tattoo, even the pockmark above his left eyebrow where he’d picked off a chicken pox scab as a kid. Terrified, Omar scrambles backward, tangling himself in the sheets and toppling over the side of the bed. His double pauses breathing, then returns to gentle, undisturbed snores.
Jeneva Cheatham believes she ate something spoiled at lunch. She swears off clams the way she’s sworn off hard liquor and guys who claim to be writers. That night she vomits up a sticky, opalescent black liquid that cools into glass in her hands.
Dorian Manzo feels a spring in his step. Finally over him, he thinks. He’d hoped his grief about the breakup would die this way, starved for the sunlight of his attention rather than picked apart in therapy. He doesn’t notice that his feet are no longer touching the ground. Tomorrow he flies.
Barbara Stannis, single mother first, dental hygienist second, attributes the buzzing in her head to last night’s third glass of red wine and gulps a handful of Tylenol when she gets home. The noise persists the next day and the next. It’s a week before it resolves from a staticky distraction to a bell-clear running feed of her teenage son’s contemptuous thoughts about her as he sits at the breakfast table, waiting for her to serve up eggs. Barbara doesn’t last long in the brave new world. Before support services can emerge, she’s overcome by the barrage of other people’s honest, cruel thoughts. Pills and the most expensive bottle of vodka she’s ever bought chase her into the quiet. She’s not alone. The suicide rate in the United States skyrockets for six months. One in four newly minted psychics take their own lives before the year is out. It turns out that lying and concealment save lives.
Many of the affected are children, babies. Their abilities manifest in their early teens, in a changed world. They remember the Pulse as a time they felt safe. I feel like a cell in an organism, Rosa Nash tells Mr. Saunders, her sixth grade science teacher at Allentown Middle, who has grown stone-hearted to the intuitive insights of children. Years later, after the war, Rosa floats above Mr. Saunders’s house, watching him load up his minivan so his family can join the parade of the displaced. She feels vindicated watching someone who pissed on her dreams crash hard against reality.
Some changes are immediate. In a marketing meeting, Lucie Arsenault bursts into flames. She’s fine. Ronnie Eggleston, sitting next to her, is rushed to the hospital with second-degree burns on his arms. A polyester swath of his cheap suit fuses into his flesh, leaving him a houndstooth-patterned tattoo.
Syd Buckner breaks out in eyes, all over his skin. Each one pops open with a wet unsticking noise, flooding his visual cortex with information until he manages to get the bulk of them to shut.
Clay Weaver’s boss is talking about the summer numbers, gesticulating enthusiastically, but the sound and his motions are slowed down. Clay feels as if he’s watching a movie, and the film’s become stuck in the projector, warping and melting.
In Central Park, a pregnant woman floats into the air. She grabs at a lamppost to keep from drifting away.
On Main Street in San Jose, a teenage boy rips a mailbox out of the ground and holds it effortlessly over his head to impress a girl, grinning idiotically.
At a diner in Syracuse, a wife looks at her husband in horror and begins screaming curses at him. The words emerge from her mouth, streaming hot pink letters that crash into his face like the torrent of a fire hose.
In the common room of an Omaha nursing home, an elderly woman pets the luxuriously furred tail she’s sprouted and invites others to do the same.
At North Fremont and Michigan in Portland, Oregon, a cop pulls a gun on her partner, aiming it at his face, which has the consistency of melted wax. Through drooping lips, he begs her not to shoot.
On Delta Airlines Flight 2377 from Los Angeles to Chicago, the passenger in seat 15F explodes in a burst of nothingness. Null. He turns up unharmed on the ground directly below, cradled in the piece of fuselage he took with him. The passenger in 12A, acting on instinct, unbuckles her seat belt, brushing aside the bright yellow mask dangling from the ceiling. She pushes through panicked passengers to the wound in the side of the plane and presses her hands toward it. A shimmering wall expands out, sealing the breach. When Flight 2377 lands, the passenger in 12A is taken into custody. The passenger manifests are scrubbed from Delta’s computers. Of the 189 people on the flight, 103 are Resonants when they land. None say anything as the passenger is taken. Photos of the plane on the tarmac at O’Hare, gaping hole in the side, are drowned in the noise of that news day. The hero of Flight 2377 never resurfaces and is never named.
On the floor of the Senate, Senator Frank Adki
ns at the podium argues that although the Japanese internment was a mistake, we now face a clear and present threat. He looks down to see his hands, gripping the edges of the lectern in his fervor, are glowing blue. The minority leader, Stewart Quinn, can hear the thoughts of all the senators present, along with everyone in the gallery and the protesters outside. He bangs his gavel frantically to adjourn the session. Senator Lowery grasps what is happening and who’s responsible. Why didn’t they tell me? he thinks. Why do they never trust me? He reaches into the storm of Senator Adkins’s mind. Frank’s a bigot, yes, but also a colleague. Senator Lowery broadcasts ineffective words of calm.
Eleven members of the upper chamber gain abilities in the Pulse. This is statistically low compared with the general population. In the House of Representatives, the percentage affected is even lower. When enough time has passed to make jokes, a late-night host quips that whatever power intervened that day had no use for rich old white men. As the audience cracks up, a flicker of sadness crosses his face. He wasn’t changed either.
Two hundred million change. Not only with the manifestation of their abilities but with a connection to one another. Their minds link together like their fates. The argument could be made that everyone is connected that way all the time, tied together in common cause. Someone is always around to spout off how the bell tolls for thee, all lives matter. But 200 million feel it, deep and visceral. It’s a feeling not unlike love. It shares with love the potential to curdle, warp into its opposite.
For a moment, they are all together.
* * *
—
Fahima stares at the bedroom ceiling, Alyssa’s arm draped over her. She should be at Bishop. She should always be at Bishop. A week has passed since the Pulse. Anything could happen at any second. But Fahima is late getting out of bed, waiting for Alyssa to wake up so they can be together a few moments more. I’ve earned this, she thinks, as if she’s arguing with a world trying to take it away from her. Like a prayer answered with a no, Fahima’s ears pop. Alyssa stirs next to her. Fahima scans the walls of their room for the door. Kimani opens it slowly and peers out.
“You got a second?” she asks.
“Hey, Kimani,” Alyssa mumbles.
“Hey, A. I’ve got to steal your girl.”
“Sharing her with the whole world,” says Alyssa as she turns over and goes back to sleep.
“You couldn’t call?” Fahima asks. She pulls a robe on over her nightshirt.
“They found him,” Kimani says.
Fahima stops what she’s doing. “Which him?”
“Both.”
The day before, Chicago police had found the bodies of Avi Hirsch and Owen Curry in the attic of the Hirsches’ house on Jarvis Avenue. Kimani got the call because she was listed as Avi’s emergency contact, a demonstration of how few friends Avi had left that makes Kimani and Fahima both profoundly sad. The narrative is unclear, but the police think Owen Curry followed Avi from Powder Basin to his home and attacked him, severing Avi’s arm with his ability before Avi shot him in the head. Then Avi shot himself. This last part, no one could quite parse. But they reasoned that Avi Hirsch had recently lost his wife. Add in a traumatic injury on top of an existing traumatic injury, and it wasn’t a huge jump to get to suicide. The police said the bodies had been there several days before a neighbor found them.
“We should tell Emmeline as soon as we can,” Kimani says. “It’s not going to get any easier.”
“Yeah,” says Fahima. Her head plays a greatest hits compilation of every terrible thing she’s ever said to Avi, with bonus tracks of things she thought but didn’t find the opportunity to say. “It’s good, though, that it was him. Avi.” Her own voice sounds distant. “That he was the one to get Owen Curry. He must have been happy with himself.” The thought fails to comfort her. How happy could he have been as he shot himself? Maybe he’d reached a place where he could finally stop.
“When I tell her, I’ll say Curry killed him,” Kimani says. “No need to tell her the other stuff.”
“You’re going to tell her by yourself?”
“Unless you want to—”
“No,” says Fahima. “She trusts you. It’ll be easiest coming from you.” She’s aware how badly she handled the death of Emmeline’s mother, leaving the girl alone until she needed her, pulling Emmeline out of grief for her own purposes. She hasn’t spoken to Emmeline since the Pulse, even to thank her. She’s thought about Emmeline only when considering ways to replicate it. Fahima and Emmeline and the device on a European tour.
“She trusts you, too,” Kimani says.
Maybe she shouldn’t, Fahima thinks.
* * *
—
That afternoon, with the relish of a drunk settling in with a bottle of scotch, Fahima opens a folder of gas chromatography results on the black glass substance some of the new Resonants produce and manipulate, along with a comparative report on a sample of the silvery substance Isidra Gonzalez creates. Reading about chemical compounds while the world threatens to burn is a luxury she doesn’t have time for, and a lot of the chemistry is lost on her. But the black glass is fascinating. It looks similar to the black flowers in the Hive, as if they’ve seeped into the real world. If they are the same substance, this is a gift, the meal Fahima’s dreamed of appearing on her table. Imagine putting a cloud of dreamstuff through a gas chromatograph to see what it’s made of. The building could be on fire and Fahima would be here at her desk with this report.
She makes it only far enough to see that unlike the substance Isidra produces, the black glass is nonmetallic when Emmeline knocks on the lab door.
“You have a minute?” Emmeline asks. Her voice is a small bird in the room.
“Yeah, Em,” she says. “I was meaning to come see you.”
“I was hoping you might want to go for a walk,” Emmeline says. “I need to get out of here a little.”
The debt Fahima owes Emmeline goes unimaginably beyond an hour’s walk and is past due. Fahima shuts her report and follows Emmeline to the elevator. On the way out, Shen puts a hand on Fahima’s shoulder and whispers, “Be safe.”
It’s one of those days before New York dives into the swelter of full summer, before the air stagnates and curdles, when cool breezes blow through the streets and Manhattan feels like a city by the ocean. It’s a different city than it was a week ago. Bike couriers race each other in the air overhead, no longer limited by the streets but by the canyon walls formed by the buildings on either side of Lexington Avenue. A boy with glowing eyes sits on his stoop calling I can see your tits at women as they pass by. On the corner of 58th and Fifth, a man leans over the edge of a fifty-gallon steel drum full of water, chatting with a news vendor in a thick Brooklyn accent. Occasionally he dunks back under to keep his shining new scales moist. People eyeball these new additions to the landscape, but doing so marks them as tourists. The locals and the city itself absorb all of it, accepting it as their new normal.
“I asked Viola to come,” Emmeline says as they make their way toward Central Park. “She said she’s tired.”
“It wears on you,” Fahima says, not sure what specific thing she’s talking about. Leaving the building feels like an act of resistance. She has a feeling of her body as a thing at risk for what it is. It’s a feeling she hasn’t had since before she resonated. She associates it with childhood, the low thrum of fear she carried out into the world every day as someone recognizably other, Muslim for all to see. Bishop made that go away for a time. Not the academy but Kevin Bishop. His dopey confidence in the arc of history, even as he kept his students hidden from it, ready to rejoin the narrative of the world when it had better roles for them to play, safer spaces for their bodies to occupy. That fear returns, and Fahima remembers the positive aspects of it. She sees more, if maybe she feels less. Her consciousness doubles, looking at the world from inside herself and at herself f
rom the outside. It’s part of why she wears hijab, to keep herself other, to remind herself of what she is and how she’s perceived. She can tell who feels the same, thinks the same, by the way they move among other people, other bodies. The ones with the fear are aware of how much space they take up, where they end and the world begins. They pass through crowds the way water seeps through packed gravel, finding gaps and filling them, pooling into empty spaces. At the end of the day, when they get to places they think of as protected, the surface of them burns from exposure to the world. They curl into themselves, exhausted, protecting their centers, their hearts.
“When I was little, there was a kid who got shot by the police. It was all over the news,” says Emmeline. “He was twelve. My dad said he wasn’t like me, because I don’t look so black that someone could tell. He said it was messed up and unfair, but it would help keep me safe.” Fahima hears the insufficiency of the word help. “He said I’d be safe because he and my mom would protect me, only I knew he was lying. That kid had parents who wanted to keep him safe. And he was dead.” Fahima looks to see if Emmeline is crying, but her face is distant. She absently spins the inhibitor bracelet on her forearm. “Adults say they’ll protect you, and you get hurt. I don’t look like a Resonant. Not like Bryce or the other kids that came from the Commune. When I have my bracelet on, I hardly count as one. I pass as normal. Doesn’t mean I’m safe.”
“No one’s ever safe,” Fahima says. “You wake up and you go out in the world. You take care of the people you care about. You do your best.”
Emmeline looks at Fahima like she’s said something vapid, the kind of platitude Fahima can’t stand. She keeps walking. She’s nearly as tall as Fahima, mostly leg, and Fahima falls behind. Emmeline is lanky like her father. It might be temporary. She’s at that point in adolescence when the body is buffeted with contradictory messages, arguing with itself over which set of genes it wants to express. It’ll work out given time.