The Nobody People

by Proehl, Bob

  “Do I have to identify him?” Emmeline asks.

  “That’s only in the movies,” Fahima says.

  “If I was in a movie, I’d swear revenge,” says Emmeline. “I’d dedicate my life to avenging my family, like Red Emma in the comic books. My mom used to like her.” She turns to Fahima. “Have you ever killed anybody?”

  Fahima thinks of her list. Everyone who died in Revere. Every accident that’s followed the Pulse. Every new Resonant they didn’t get to before someone got electrocuted or disintegrated or had her mind wiped like a chalkboard. Every suicide by a new Resonant Fahima created who couldn’t handle what he was given.

  “Owen Curry’s dead,” Fahima says, avoiding the question. “You’ll have to find something other than revenge.”

  “What else is there?” Emmeline asks.

  Life, Fahima wants to say. Your whole life. But it feels like a hollow answer, so the two of them walk a few blocks in silence. They stop on the path looking out on the lake near the Ladies Pavilion. The sun is weak and milky, but NYU students soak it up on the lawn. Girls roll up tee shirts to expose midriffs; boys pull off polo shirts to reveal carefully curated musculature. Fahima chuckles at how the whitest white girls aspire to brownness, pursue it until their skin goes leathery, but would never deign to date a brown girl. She misses Alyssa, and she scans the skyline for Mount Sinai Hospital, where Alyssa’s working until late tonight.

  A trio of Yemeni boys in their teens play in the patch of grass by the rocks. Fahima first saw them here the day after the Pulse. She spoke to them about the Bishop Academy, but they laughed her off. The youngest, close to Emmeline’s age, raises a mound out of the dirt like a skateboarder’s half ramp. The oldest runs up it, flying into the air. The middle boy tries to knock him down with a gust of wind. They talk trash to each other in Arabic and start it again. Parents herd their transfixed kids away as if it’s obscene, but it isn’t. It’s beautiful, a pure thing.

  “Hey, al’ukht alkubraa,” the oldest one calls over to Fahima as he picks himself up from the ground. Fahima chafes at the boys’ Arabic nickname for her, older sister. They also call her the woman from that school. “I didn’t know you had a kid.”

  “She’s not her kid,” says the young one. “She’s a student from that school.”

  “Is that right, al’ukht alsaghira?” the oldest says to Emmeline. “You have magic powers?”

  “How’s the food at that school?” the youngest asks. “They have fries?”

  “Fries are okay,” Emmeline calls, cupping her hands to amplify her voice. “Burgers are pretty good. It’s no Shake Shack.”

  “Can I come have lunch with you sometime?” asks the youngest.

  “Shut up, Dirar,” the oldest says.

  “What?” says the youngest.

  “She doesn’t want you to come to lunch at her school,” the oldest says. “She said she likes Shake Shack.”

  “So what?”

  “So ask her to Shake Shack, dipshit.”

  Dirar turns back toward Emmeline and Fahima as if they hadn’t heard the last five seconds of conversation. “So you want to?” he calls.

  Emmeline smiles shyly. She looks down and gives a barely perceptible shake of her head. Dirar shrugs and returns to his game. Fahima is struck by the prevailing power of normality, how the everyday shines through in crisis. The world collapses, and kids flirt clumsily. Siblings rag on siblings. People like Fahima feel the weight of everything on their shoulders, and others don’t. Both ways are wrong. The best way to save the world may be to stay out of its way.

  Behind the low mumble of the boys starting another round of their game, Fahima hears the water lap onto the shore. The park has gone too quiet. The students tanning and grab-assing on the lawn have vanished. There are no families on the path. Four men in blue suits appear on the ridge behind the Yemeni boys. Three carry bulky inhibitors. The long tubes that focus the devices’ signals rest on their shoulders like old-timey muskets.

  “Emmeline, we have to go,” she says.

  Emmeline follows her stare. “Are they here for us?”

  “No,” says Fahima. The boys don’t see the Homeland agents even as the lead agent closes within twenty feet of the youngest’s back. They’re absorbed in their game. A ramp rises from the dirt. A boy launches into the air. Another gathers wind in a ball, ready to toss it when his brother hits his apex. The lead agent points at the middle boy, singling him out as the most immediate threat.

  “No,” says Emmeline.

  Fahima grabs her shoulder, but Emmeline is already moving toward the boys, down the hill to the grass.

  “We have to go,” Fahima calls after her. The agents unshoulder the inhibitors, training them on the boy.

  Emmeline strips the bracelet off her forearm.

  A ripple moves through the air, spreading out from Emmeline. It isn’t only the air. It’s everything. The ground and the water tremble. Fahima’s insides quiver like a cage of birds. It passes over everything once and then is still. Two of the boys scramble backward in the grass, away from what’s happened. Away from what Emmeline’s done.

  On the crest of the ridge, three agents unshoulder their weapons and aim. Their weapons rest again on their shoulders. They unshoulder them and aim. Their weapons rest on their shoulders.

  The group leader points, raises his hand, clenches it into a fist. Points. Raises. Clenches. Points.

  A seagull makes a low, lazy half circle overhead, then jumps back to the beginning of its arc.

  The youngest boy, Dirar, cranes his neck to watch the path of his brother’s flight, although his brother is on the ground, backing away. Dirar grins. His lips part, about to say something. His face scoops upward again. Repeat. Loop.

  Fahima runs down the hill and picks up the bracelet from where it’s fallen in the grass. “Em, fix it,” she says, holding it out to her.

  “What did you do to him?” shouts the oldest boy.

  “I can’t,” Emmeline says. She’s in shock, transfixed by the sight in front of her.

  “It’s like before, with Viola,” Fahima says, trying to calm her. “It’s a loop. A little knot in time. You have to untie it.”

  “Fix him!” yells the oldest boy.

  “I can’t!” Emmeline screams, turning on Fahima. Fahima feels the tremor again. It’s smaller this time, a warning.

  “Hold still, Em,” Fahima says. She slips the bracelet over Emmeline’s forearm and clicks it shut. She feels it buzz against her hand before she looks up.

  The agents unshoulder and aim their weapons. Point. Raise. Clench. The bird arcs, begins again. Dirar grins, lips parting to speak.

  “You have to fix him!” sobs the oldest boy.

  Fahima taps at the bracelet. It’s working, but nothing is happening. Something has been permanently broken. Time is looped, a knot that can’t be untied or sliced through.

  “I’ll come back,” Fahima tells the boys. “I’ll figure it out, and I’ll come back and fix this.” She knows she won’t. The boys are the least of her worries. But Emmeline will need the assurance that this is fixable, even if it isn’t.

  The students and families that were hustled away from the conflict appear on the ridges and at the edge of the lawn. There is something about the scene that’s physically hard to watch. The brain refuses to process it and pushes the horror into the body, landing it in the stomach. Fahima knows because she’s seen it before. She turns to Emmeline.

  “Em, we have to go.”

  Fahima checks connections while Sarah sits on a table in the old teachers’ lounge, looking unimpressed. Sarah will never be impressed. The Gates are a big stupid attempt to wow Sarah with technology that bends and bruises the laws of physics.

  “You’re going to love these,” Fahima says. She compensates for Sarah’s lack of enthusiasm with an overabundance of her own. Cortex
gives a bored whine.

  Each of the three Gates is a freestanding doorway of exposed wire and coil. Fahima ordered chrome casings for them from a fabricator in the Bronx to make them look less janky, but they weren’t ready. She wanted to mount them on the walls, but she can’t figure out how Kimani’s door manifests along a solid surface without disintegrating the matter of that surface. Small-scale tests turned pieces of drywall into so much fine dust. The Gates create a membrane, a physical interface between the real world and Hivespace. It turns out that the real world can’t stand the strain.

  Fahima flips the first Gate on. It’s as loud as a jet engine, the other problem she hasn’t been able to fix. The best modes of travel should be deafening, she tells herself. Cortex cowers under a chair, and Sarah is on her feet, mouthing something angry but inaudible. Fahima points at the empty space within the Gate. The round tables and empty vending machine waver like a heat mirage as another room superimposes itself on the space, becoming more solid until the only image there is the Gate room in the new Bishop school in Chicago. Karen Nowak, formerly a psychic defense teacher and now the headmaster of the Chicago school, is on the other side, hands clamped over her ears.

  “Go through so we can turn it off,” Fahima shouts to Sarah. She gestures in case she can’t be heard.

  Sarah, Fahima, and, begrudgingly, Cortex step through the Gate. Karen powers it down behind them, and the sound dwindles away to nothing.

  “I’m working on that,” Fahima says.

  The Gate room is in the Chicago school’s basement, the concrete walls sweating, thick air warm with heat pouring off the air-conditioning units, which are cranking to ward off the early onset of summer. The school is an old community center on North Avenue and Washtenaw, one of the churches that sprang up at the eve of the millennium and struggled through the decade after it before folding.

  “I’m so glad you had time to be here to see how we’re doing,” Karen says. She’s one of those white women whose skin is turning into porcelain as she eases into her sixties.

  Sarah has spent every hour since the Pulse scrambling to set up three new schools. She and Patrick tapped their parents for cash to add to the endowment Bishop left. A network of old Resonant money emerged from the shadows, allowing Sarah to make cash buys of property in Chicago, Los Angeles, and Houston. None of the buildings are perfect. The building in LA is an old dance studio, and although the one in Houston once had been a school, it’s been closed for years because of hurricane damage. Sarah drafted Bishop’s teaching staff as administrators and called in alumni to pick up temporary teaching jobs at all four schools. Fahima and Sarah used to approach new Resonants who popped up in the Hive individually, laying out the philosophy and ethics of Bishop, extolling the academic benefits of the academy. Now Sarah can’t hang a Bishop sign in front of a building without a queue forming.

  “We have Kimani for this,” Sarah says, waving dismissively at the Gate.

  “Kimani is busy as fuck,” Fahima says. “The Gates are locked paths between the schools. They fold the user through Hivespace.”

  “Fold?”

  “It’s not as bad as it sounds,” Fahima says. “They’re key-coded so only administration can activate them. I can upgrade that to biometrics if you want.”

  Sarah’s face indicates that she doesn’t care about biometrics. “How many are there?”

  “Six. Each school connected to all the others. When you close on the place in Phoenix, I’ll network it in with the rest.” She’s lying. Both doors of the Phoenix Gate are built. The Phoenix half is sitting in Fahima’s lab, ready to be shipped to the former Sunkist Growers’ Association Building that Sarah is buying to serve as the site for the fifth school. When that goes live, it’ll make sixteen Gates. Four only Fahima and Patrick know about. Two only Fahima knows about.

  Trust is difficult for lots of people.

  * * *

  —

  Fahima spends more time in the Hive now. She feels a sense of ownership she didn’t before the Pulse. She walks among crowds of new Resonants like a mafia don walking down Main Street, bolstered by the sense that they all are indebted to her in ways they might not recognize but that are there nonetheless.

  The walks are data-gathering missions. She has stacks of papers about the new applicants to the schools. Problem cases Patrick and Kimani deal with. She’s been able to glean a few things from those reports. There are new ability sets, ones they haven’t seen before or only rarely. There are the ones who can produce or manipulate the black glass. There are more Resonants exhibiting abilities like Owen Curry’s, able to null out matter, though on a smaller scale. As reports pile up, statistics rise out of the anecdotes. But in the Hive, Fahima can observe the new herd and spot trends. She’s convinced if she figures out who changed and who didn’t, she can address it in subsequent machines. If machines are even the way to go. Maybe a change in approach is what’s needed. She’s been wondering again about Rez, the drug that’s big around the North Avenue community in Chicago. Chemistry isn’t her wheelhouse, but it might be worth exploring.

  Since the Pulse, Fahima’s Hivebody feels more solid, but the Hive itself feels like more of a physical presence. When she feels the tug at the back of her brain as James Lowery gently reminds her that she’s keeping twelve senators and twenty-six members of the House of Representatives waiting, Fahima tries to move through the Hive in the all-at-once way she used to. It doesn’t come as easily as it should, and that worries her. The Gates are built to exploit the transspatial properties of the Hive. If those properties are shifting, Fahima needs to know. She makes a mental note to ask Kimani if she’s noticed a difference. Fahima rises out of the Hive and manifests again back in the designated meeting spot.

  Senator Lowery set this up, which Fahima imagines was no mean feat. None of the newly resonant members of Congress have made a public statement since the Pulse, even Senator Adkins, whose hands glowed blue on C-SPAN before they cut the feed. Fahima manifests in the middle of the collection of congressmen. All eyes are on her, not entirely because she’s the new arrival. Fahima is also the only woman here. It’s James Lowery and a gaggle of white men, mostly elderly, who regard her warily. Fahima has a flashback to her oral exams at MIT.

  “Gentlemen, this is Fahima Deeb,” says Lowery, throwing Fahima an impatient glance. “Ms. Deeb is my liaison with the Bishop organization and has offered to advise us.” The group grumbles hello. Fahima looks around to see who she can recognize. She spots Stewart Quinn, the Senate minority leader, who has the poise and presence of a yacht club member even after the life-changing events of the last few days. Lowery says Quinn’s a passable reader but can’t project anything beyond garble. Keith Williams, whose career in tech Fahima paid some attention to before he threw it away for a California House seat. Of all of them, Williams was the one Fahima expected to go public, but he’s kept to the closet. And Frank Adkins, the sweaty little bigot who was in the middle of introducing an internment bill when the Pulse hit. Fahima’s seen pictures of him with his arm draped around the late Jefferson Hargrave. She’s heard him on the Kindred Network, offering defenses of violent anti-Resonant hate groups. She can’t help feeling smug satisfaction seeing him here, his Hivebody barely sustained, flickering in and out like a lightbulb on the fritz. I did this to you, you hateful fuck, she thinks. I made you into exactly what you’re afraid of.

  “I know we come from both sides of the aisle,” says Lowery, “but I think it’s important that we discuss among ourselves what the new world might look like and the ways we might shape it at a policy level.”

  “How the fuck can you talk about policy?” asks one of the men, whose Hivebody looks like a russet potato in an off-the-rack suit. “Everything I touch is trying to tell me where it’s been. Do you know what my assistant’s been doing with my pens, Jim? He’s been sticking them up his ass after I go home and setting them out for me to use in the morni
ng. Every fucking one of them. I pick one up to sign a donor letter, I can feel the pen sliding right up his ass.”

  “It’s called telemetry,” Fahima says. “Psychic impressions off objects via touch. You could try wearing gloves until you can control it a little better.” Lowery glares at her as if she’s failed to give the correct answer. “And I’m sorry. About the ass thing.”

  “My pens hate me,” he mutters. “All my pens.”

  “We’re all grappling with personal situations, Tom,” says Lowery. “But the nation is grappling, too. And we’ve pledged ourselves to serve.” It’s hokey, but it strikes a chord. The men stand up straighter, prouder. Even Tom the potato man becomes a little less amorphous. The shoulders of his cheap suit fill in; the lumps that make up his face smooth themselves out. It’s the first time Fahima sees potential in Lowery. His earnestness is a virtue. There are people who speak it as their native tongue. Those who don’t, like Fahima, can hear it and can wish it were their first language. Lowery might be something people could aspire to. This man might be their model minority.

  He’s going to be president, Fahima thinks. When it happens, Fahima will share some of the credit. She’s created a constituency for him. Of those here, Lowery will be the quickest to grasp that. He’s the reason they’ve all kept quiet about what they’ve become, Fahima thinks. He wants to be the first to come out.

  Lowery outlines the proposal package he and Fahima worked on, although her name is absent in his discussions. Federal funding for Resonant schools, overseen by the Bishop organization. Emergency and disaster relief funding to deal with accidents like the blackout in San Jose and the earthquakes in Cleveland. A legislative committee and a civil rights committee. Ideas spark with certain members of the group. Lowery crafted the package this way, shaped the ideas she gave him into individual pet projects. The whole thing takes hours. The men drift into cliques and knots, ignoring Lowery once he’s moved on from whatever aspect of the plan appeals to them.