The Nobody People E-Book

Bob Proehl

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

A group of outcasts with extraordinary abilities comes out of hiding. They are the nobody people and they want one thing: to live as equals in an America that is gripped by fear and hatred. But the government is passing discriminatory laws.Violent mobs are taking to the streets. And one of their own has used his power in an act of mass violence that has put a new target on the community.The nobody people must now stand together and fight for their future, or risk falling apart.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Leave us a Review

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue: The Incident At Powder Basin

One: An Unearthly Child

A Null Sphere

The One-Legged Detective

Owen Curry and the Shimmering Room

Room 152

The Door That Wasn’t There

The Boy in the Box

Kept Like A Secret

Two: Academy For the Arts

The Tour

Academy Fight Song

The Physical Kids

Fade Away and Radiate

The Interview

The Pageant

Abscess

Three: The Tower

The Day the Story Broke

A Walk in the Park

The Orientation

Debriefing

Owen Curry and the Friend Who Came Back

This is Happening

Four: Annus Mirabilis

The Angel of Montgomery

Leftovers

A Sort of Homecoming

The Confession in Powder Basin

Enclave

Coney Island Baby

Five: Last Year’s Man

Owen Curry and the Full Bizarre

Examination

On the Air

Glitch

The Five of Cups

Arrival

The Excommunication

Bargain

Six: The Next Movement

Gathering

Owen Curry and the Helter-Skelter

The Investigation

Crazy Classic Life

The White Van

Between the Bars

Barricade

Faction

Fall

Seven: New Skin For Old Ceremony

Wake

This is How We Walk On the Moon

The Last Visit

Working For the Clampdown

Owen Curry and the Judgement of Power Basin

The Diamond Sea

Device

This Must Be the Place

Eight: Putting Out Fires With Gasoline

Pulse

Legislation

Defense

Siege

Aftermath

Epilogue: In Our Rags of Light

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also Available from Titan Books

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THE NOBODY PEOPLE

Print edition ISBN: 9781789094619

E-book edition ISBN: 9781789094626

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

www.titanbooks.com

First Titan edition: September 2020

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Copyright © 2020 Bob Proehl. All rights reserved.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

For Story and Alex, who are growing up with strange abilities

I can only hope to understand

The earth keeps some vibration going

There in your heart, and that is you.

—EDGAR LEE MASTERS, “Fiddler Jones”

THE

NOBODY PEOPLE

PROLOGUE

THE INCIDENT AT POWDER BASIN

In the years before, when hateful men warned of the coming, crushing aluminum cans in their hands while their friends threw darts, or in rowboats tying flies, they spoke only of darkness.

—EVE EWING, “Arrival Day”

When reporters from the Gillette News-Record asked the survivors of the Powder Basin mine collapse how they survived, all twenty-three gave variations on the same answer: It was an act of God. The will of God. God’s own mercy. Bruce Bennett, cornered on camera by the blond anchor from K-DEV down in Cheyenne, said it was the darnedest thing. Like the hand of God Hisself reached down and pulled them out of that pit.

The twenty-three survivors hadn’t had time to confer. Once they were past the blockage, they trudged upward to the mouth of Shaft L in silence. They emerged, owls in the late autumn daylight. News vans were already there. Spouses with supervisors who let them off when the news broke or with baby-sitters who could show up on short notice waited within the circle of cameras, along with gawkers down from Gillette, phones ready to catch footage of miners or their bodies coming out of the tunnel.

The survivors had been underground nine hours. There was six solid feet of rubble between them and the surface, too much for God to cut through. God had nothing to do with getting them out. It was Tom Guthridge’s oldest boy, Sam, whose forged employment papers said he was eighteen.

* * *

The Friday afterward, the Powder Basin mine was closed. All 140 employees were given the full day off with pay. The holding company went over maintenance records and noted how long since an inspector had seen the inside of Shaft L. The best course of action was to keep everyone happy.

The men who hadn’t been in Shaft L gravitated toward the Chariot Lounge in Gillette that afternoon. Some said they’d had a bad feeling when they came in Thursday morning. Many claimed they’d heard the shaft go. They lied to feel like part of it. The lies were the way they understood the accident. True stories, made up after the fact.

Among the survivors, twenty spent their free day at home. They clutched their children more tightly than they had since the kids were babies. Dinners tasted better than anything the steak house in Gillette could grill up. That night, with the kids in bed, they made love to their wives the way guys did in the movies, knocking over lamps and tearing at clothes in a rush to get skin pressed to skin. As if they’d found something they’d forgotten losing and only now understood its value. All of them slept deeply and dreamlessly.

Sam Guthridge didn’t leave his room the whole day, which wasn’t unusual. He was a solitary boy, kind and gentle. His father, Tom, used to say Sam was too soft for this town. Not in anger or disappointment but regret that he couldn’t offer Sam better. Tom and Lucy Guthridge had been socking money away for Sam’s college. All that came to nothing when Tom got sick. Medical bills ate up the savings faster than the cancer ate through Tom’s lungs. Lucy took it as a blessing that her husband hadn’t lived long enough to see Sam go into the mines.

Sam didn’t talk much to his mother about what happened. “We did what we had to, and we got out,” he said. Lucy knew the truth and knew there would be consequences to come. There were times she wished she could take her kids out of the world. Hold them safe and away until the storm passed. But that wasn’t the way of things, and as Lucy’s mother once said, it rains on the just and the unjust alike.

Sam was a brave boy, but he carried too much. Tom had been the same way. A goofy grin covered the fact that he was holding the world up with his hands. Sam never knew that side of his father, but he picked it up all the same. You couldn’t hide what was in the blood. When Sam didn’t come to the dinner table Friday evening, Lucy sent his little sister Paige in with a plate. Sam thanked her quietly and kissed her on the cheek, because among his three little siblings, Paige was his favorite.

Joe Sabine, who’d never kept a woman around more than a week, and Danny Randall, whose wife had run off to Denver with an IRS auditor the previous year, burned Friday on Joe’s back porch, both wearing their ratty varsity jackets against the cold of the November evening. They were a long time getting around to what needed talking about. They sucked back cans of Coors and threw the empties over the railing onto the lawn. Danny crushed his third on the armrest of his Adirondack chair, same as he did in high school. Joe followed suit, tossing the resulting disk away like a Frisbee. It was past dusk, and both of them were drunk before Danny mentioned the blue lights that had shot out of the Guthridge kid’s eyes. The light cutting through the rock. The thin wisp of smoke, a serpent rising out of the stone. How the boy carved away manhole covers of shale. How the men heaved them aside as the light sheared them from the wall of rubble, edges hot to the touch. Down to the last one, the one that peeled away to show sickly sunlight. And air, air pouring out like beer from a tap, so the men crowded toward the opening, mouths gaping for it. Except Sam, who stepped back and let them, then started in again, widening the hole with his light.

“Wasn’t normal,” said Joe.

“No shit,” Danny said.

“Wasn’t any act of God either.”

“No,” said Danny. “Not God.”

Monday, Danny Randall called in sick and drove up to the public library to use the computers. He had to wait in line. No one bothered to chase off the crazies and jerkoffs until the school let out. He was looking for context, a word for what Sam Guthridge was. There was something he remembered hearing on a radio show maybe a year before, driving back from the Chariot after last call. He tried a bunch of searches, but it was “strange abilities am radio late” that hit pay dirt. It was a radio show called The Monster Report with Jefferson Hargrave. Tinfoil helmet stuff broadcast on one of the Kindred Network stations to which his mother kept her car radio dialed. Danny borrowed a pair of headphones from the desk to listen.

Jefferson Hargrave reminded Danny of the Pentecostal preachers he’d been dragged to see when he was a kid. Sweaty men in starched white shirts railing on about the Lord and His wrath while Danny’s mother swooned. Hargrave pounded words like nails into wood. “I’ve got reports here going back to the fifties,” he said. “Government reports. And if you’re surprised the government knows about these people, then you have not. Been paying. Attention.

“The thing is? The numbers are increasing. I’ve charted this, and it’s, over the years, it goes . . . swoop, upward and upward. But what do I know? Maybe gamma radiation levels are on the rise, or it’s hormones in hamburgers. I mean, the sun causes cancer. In a world where the sun causes cancer, anything is possible.

“This I can tell you. There’s no links between these people that I can see. There aren’t pockets or hot spots. You know, when some corporation leaks something awful and everyone on Shit River gets ball cancer? It’s not like that. Their people, their parents, are normal, like you or me. Which means you could have a kid with gills or x-ray vision right out of nowhere.

“And then what happens to them? Because I can tell you, once one of these people gets spotted? They’re not sticking around to talk to the press. They’re not registering themselves as weapons. Which, from what I can tell, a lot of them are. They’re weapons. And once they’re found out? They disappear.

“So you’re thinking I’m going to say it’s the government. That these people are being rounded up and trained at black ops sites to fight the war on terror or come take your guns and your women.

“You know what? That’s the best. Case. Scenario. That’s what I’m hoping for. Because what’s more likely? What, it seems to me, is the real nightmare? Is that they are organizing themselves. That they are forming, under our noses, their own army.

“And you have to ask yourself, to what end?”

Danny sat staring at the screen. He clicked the share button and sent the recording to Joe Sabine. After thinking about it another minute, he sent it to the other survivors. All except Sam Guthridge.

* * *

Tuesday after shift, the Chariot seemed like a safe place to talk, although who knew? Maybe the Guthridge kid could hear them from across town or read their thoughts like the sports section of the News-Record. That was the damnable thing. You could never know.

Danny bought a round of pitchers. He sprang for the fancy ones from the brewery in Jackson Hole even though it shot his beer budget for the month and left a taste in his mouth like sucking on a penny. Danny let the other men talk. He’d planted the seed and could tell it had found purchase. Alvin McLaughlin brought printouts of blurry photos and typed witness statements. Marc Medina fancied himself an expert on DNA and the effects of gamma radiation thereupon.

“Imagine a string of letters, except only four of them, repeating,” he told Scott Lipscombe. “This radiation slices right through them. GTT slice! Like that. Then you’ve got two loose ends floating around. And they can join up again wherever.” He laced his fingers together, then bent them into a tangle. “Genetic mutation,” he said.

More rounds got bought. Troy Potter, the weeknight bartender, caught a couple of sideways looks and found things to busy himself with in the back. Talk turned to the subject at hand. What to do about Sam. They all made a point of saying they liked Sam. They acknowledged that they were indebted to him. They owed him their lives for what he did.

“With his abilities,” Danny added, throwing it out there. “What he did with his abilities.”

He let the strangeness of the word do its work on them. Some of the men nodded. Others squirmed.

Lowell Tyler, the oldest rockbreaker at the basin, met Danny’s eyes.

“I don’t like where you’re taking this conversation, Danny,” he said. “Even if Tom’s boy hadn’t saved your ass, which he did. This kind of talk doesn’t go anywhere good.”

“It’s talk,” Danny said. He held his hands up innocently. “Situation like this merits discussion, don’t you think?” He gave Lowell his best “we’re all friends here” grin. When it didn’t work on Lowell, he turned it on the rest of the room. People were eager to chime in with agreement.

Lowell had lost a kid in Iraq and trained Tom Guthridge when Tom wasn’t much older than Sam was now. He took Tom’s death harder than anyone. In the weeks after the funeral, Lowell would show up at the Chariot spoiling for it, daring the young bucks to take a swing at him, like he needed physical pain to match what he felt in his gut. No one stepped up and decked the old man even though they would have been doing him a favor.

“I’m having no part of what you’re talking about,” Lowell said. “I’ll tell you, Danny. Put it down. And you two—” He pointed at Alvin McLaughlin and Joe Sabine. “— don’t forget this asshole talked you into breaking into Antelope Valley’s locker room to shit in their helmets when you all were kids.”

“We won that game,” said Joe. His voice was a high whine.

“You two listened to it on the radio in county lockup,” Lowell said. “And Danny got himself off without a hitch. The three of you forget that part.” He held out a ten to Danny. “Here’s for the beers.”

“I got these,” Danny said.

“This is for mine,” said Lowell. Danny took the bill. He looked at it like Lowell had wiped his ass on it. They watched Lowell walk out, then turned to Danny. They weighed what Lowell said. They wondered if they ought to follow him out the door.

Danny slapped the ten down on the bar.

“Looks like Lowell stood us another round,” he said. It got the desired laugh. More important, it put Lowell Tyler’s blessing on them. Lowell said he had no part of it, but Danny had him buying the beers.

“The thing is,” Danny said, “there’s a risk this is the start of something. You can’t know where something like this is going to lead. That’s what we need to find out. The only way to do that is to go have a talk with Sam.”

There would be time later for all the survivors to reconcile their actions and their consciences. Although, as it turned out, not much time. For now they were resolved. And as Danny Randall said, “It might as well be tonight.”

* * *

Lucy Guthridge hadn’t been to bed since the incident. She drowsed on the sofa or in the armchair after the kids were asleep. When she answered the door in her gray uniform from the diner, she knew this was what had kept her up. A vision of this assemblage, this mob camped out on her lawn. It’s a wonder you all aren’t sporting pitchforks, she thought.

These men had visited Tom in the hospital, where Lucy had held constant vigil. They took up a collection to help Lucy and the four kids, and they kept quiet when Sam, too young to grow a patch of beard if you gave him a month and a miracle, applied for a job in the mine. They’d been at Tom’s funeral and come to the reception after at this same house whose lawn they were trampling over.

“It’s awful late, Danny,” Lucy said. She ignored the rest of them. “Is there something you’re needing?”

“We came for Sam,” Danny said, avoiding her eyes.

“Sam’s earned his rest. Don’t you think?”

Danny didn’t answer. He stepped past her into the living room. The other men followed, crowding in until Lucy was pressed against the wall. Woken by the noise, the four Guthridge children stood in the hallway that led to their bedrooms. Sam was in a tee shirt and baggy shorts. He looked, Scott Lipscombe thought, like a boy. It was easy to miss that working alongside him, but now, thin limbs jutting out of clothes that were once his father’s, Sam didn’t look old enough to drive. His younger brother, Jeb, was in flannel pajamas, and the girls, Melody and Paige, were both in nightgowns. The three little ones huddled behind Sam, who held his hands stiff at his sides, fists clenched.

“Come with us, son,” Danny said.

“Not your son,” said Sam. He didn’t move. Paige coughed, shaking off a cold she’d picked up at school. Little Jeb patted her back and rubbed it, then put his hands at his sides, fists tight like his big brother.

The room seethed with drunk energy. Marc Medina giggled nervously, and Alvin McLaughlin shushed him. Scott Lipscombe had his twelve-gauge hanging at the end of his arm, chambers full of rock salt. He felt a fat bead of nervous sweat roll down his temple, and he raised the gun to wipe it with his sleeve. That was when he saw it. He was sure he did. A blue glint in Sam’s eye. He remembered the smell of rock burning as the light cut through it. He imagined himself sliced in two and wondered what burnt-meat smell his own body would give off. If the smoke would hit his nostrils before he died.

He emptied two chambers of rock salt into Sam Guthridge’s gut.

Sam doubled over, the wind knocked out of him. Lucy pitched forward toward Scott, but Alvin McLaughlin grabbed her around the waist and spun her like a drunken dance partner. Paige, the littlest one, screamed. She held the side of her face where she’d been struck. She pulled her hand away to check for blood.

There was none. Where the salt crystals had hit, seven on her cheek and forehead, bright blue light shone through punctured skin.

“Shit,” said Danny, “it’s all of them.”

* * *

When the fire burned itself out, the men dispersed. Most went home, where they lay awake next to their wives until dawn. Their minds were full of sounds that would wake them some nights for what was left of their lives.

A small knot, Danny and Joe and a couple of others, took bottles to the mouth of Shaft L. It was blocked off. The fence was a row of sickly teeth. It was the only time the men would talk about what had happened.

“Those lights in her head,” said Scott Lipscombe. “They reminded me of a toy I had when I was a kid.”

“Lite Brite,” Danny said. “I thought that, too.” He could picture the lights, the way they traced jagged lines in the dim room as Paige Guthridge’s body hitched with sobs. Every time the men cut her, light poured out of the wounds. Danny Randall thought that when she died, the lights would fade like in a theater at the start of a movie. But they went out suddenly, like a candle

ONE

AN UNEARTHLY CHILD

There was a door & then a door surrounded by a forest. Look, my eyes are not your eyes.

— OCEAN VUONG, “To My Father/To My Future Son”

A NULL SPHERE

The phone on the nightstand buzzes and pulls Avi Hirsch up from a dream of being tossed in the air and falling, tossed and falling. The arc his body makes in the dream becomes a loop. He flails awake. The dream is recurrent, felt in his body rather than his mind. A year out of the hospital and he can’t remember on waking where he is. Kay has lost patience with this morning thrash of limbs and makes it a point to be up and out of bed before him. Avi grabs at the phone as it skitters toward the edge of the nightstand.

“I sent you something,” says the voice on the other end. “A weird one. Take a look.” The voice pauses, waits.

“Good morning, Louis,” says Avi. Louis Hoffman is Avi’s friend and occasional informant at Homeland Security. He works out of Homeland’s Chicago office, but he and Avi have known each other since Louis’s days as an army liaison. Louis hasn’t called since Avi got out of the hospital.

“Look at it,” Louis says. “Right on your phone. I’ll wait.”

“I’m in bed,” says Avi, rolling himself up to a seated position.

“What happened to ‘the news never sleeps’?” Louis says.

“That’s not a saying,” Avi says. “Besides, I’m not—”

“Put your eyes on it and call me immediately,” says Louis, and hangs up. Avi sees the subject line on his home screen: Roseland/Ballston Common Bombings. His heart speeds up a little, that junkie rush. He thinks about opening it right now, before anything else. But Kay has let him sleep in, which sets them all behind schedule. He puts the phone on the nightstand, facedown. He picks up the sock from the floor and his prosthetic from its spot against the bed. The physical therapist says that over time, amputees start to think of their prostheses as part of their bodies. It feels like a foreign object to Avi. It looks like a plunger capped with a plastic foot. A half-witted piece of sculpture. He goes through the ritual of attaching it to his left leg below the knee. The process is boring while requiring close attention. A bad fit becomes painful as the day wears on, unbearable by lunch. In the beginning, Kay tried to help. The angles were better. It was easier for her to perfect the fit. But Avi was so angry in those first days home from the hospital. He yelled. Swatted her hands away. He apologized, and she assured him there was no need. It was important he accept his anger, understand it as justified. She knew that in time it would flow into the correct channel rather than spilling out at her like lava over its cooled levee. Eventually she stopped offering to help with the prosthesis. She stopped offering help with stairs or getting into the minivan in case assistance implied that she thought he was helpless. She leaves him this moment every morning. Alone with his leg.

He hears the first click of the pin into the socket and eases his weight on it. There’s the deeper click, the one that echoes up his thigh. The one he can feel in his teeth. He rolls the leg of his sweatpants back down and examines his feet. The foot of the prosthesis is a shiny plastic foam, its color chosen to match Avi’s skin tone. It’s too pink, like cartoon flesh. The toes have toenails carved into them. He wonders if customers demanded this detail from the manufacturer or if the designers came up with it themselves. A little attempt at normality that makes the thing even stranger.

The floor is cold against the sole of his real foot. Avi puts on slippers and goes downstairs. Kay is at the kitchen table in the rattiest of her several bathrobes, the lavender one that offsets her dark brown skin. Her hair is up in a green silk wrap, a few tight curls escaping. She’s reading a Nnedi Okorafor novel. The amount she reads amazes Avi. She works in immigration law, zeroing in on the minutiae of the government’s shifting edicts and decrees, then fills her spare moments with science fiction and detective novels. She takes the train into the city rather than accepting a ride for the extra hour with her books. As he comes in, she gives him a bored grin that says, oh, you’re here. It’s what Avi feels reduced to this past year: the guy who keeps showing up every morning, wanted or not.

Their seven-year-old, Emmeline, is at the stove cooking eggs, standing on a stool to reach. She’s wearing an old apron over her school clothes. It’s so long on her that Avi worries she’ll trip over the hem. Her hair, a riot of dark corkscrews, is pulled back into a tie, exploding out the back of her head.

“Did you teach her that?” Kay asks. There’s an accusation built into the question, and Avi is quick to defend himself. It will be a long time before he invites Emmeline near the stove. Kay doesn’t cook. Avi taught Emmeline how to make toast, not much else. But here she is, flipping the eggs and folding them back on themselves, deft as a short order cook. Avi watches over her shoulder, then pushes her bangs back and kisses her forehead.

“Where’d you learn to cook, Leener?” he asks.

“They’re for you,” says Emmeline. “For your big day.”

It’s a smooth dodge of the question, put forth with Emmeline’s strange assuredness. She fixes Avi with her eyes, blue made paler by contrast to her skin, darker even than her mother’s. Then she goes back to work. Around the girl’s icy irises runs a ring of navy blue. When Emmeline was born, Kay’s mother said that this meant she’d have second sight. Kay told her to can it with that hoodoo noise. But there is something ethereal about their daughter. She seems to know things as if she’s come prepared for all the big moments in her life, along with some of the small ones. On Emmeline’s first day at kindergarten, when Avi dropped her off, he told her she was going to have a great day.

“No, I’m not,” Emmeline said, not sad but factual. “But you’ll come get me after I fall.”

“Always,” Avi said. He thought it was a testament to Emmeline’s faith that he’d be there for her. A verbal trust fall, he said when he recounted it. After lunch, Avi got a call from the school. One of the other kids, some racist little shit, Kay called him, had pushed Emmeline off the top of the slide. Avi sped to pick her up. Emmeline wasn’t hurt or upset. Avi told the story to other parents in the vein of isn’t it funny how prescient they seem sometimes. No one ever responded with a similar story, and Avi stopped bringing it up.

“Big day?” says Kay. She doesn’t look up from her book, but a smirk plays on her face.

“Not that I know of,” he says.

“Who was on the phone?” Kay says.

“Louis at Homeland. He sent something. I’ll look at it once I’ve got you all out the door. It’s probably nothing.”

Kay shifts her bookmark from its arbitrary spot near the back to where she’s at and closes the book. “Is it about the church by my mom’s?”

“I don’t know what it’s about,” he says. “I haven’t looked at it yet.”

“If it’s the church, you should pass it on to someone else.”

“Yeah,” he says. “I probably will.”

“Avi,” she says, hanging on that probably. She looks at him, then at Emmeline’s back, then at him again. Her meaning is clear from the fact that she won’t talk about it in front of Emmeline: I don’t want you writing about dead black girls in this house. Avi wants to tell her it’s not her business what he writes about and it’s not her decision what he can and can’t handle. He doesn’t.

“I’ll pass it off,” he says. “If that’s what it is.”

Kay holds him with her eyes a second longer, then reopens her book.

Emmeline clicks the burner off. “Today,” she says, half to herself. “Today things will start.” She scoops eggs off the skillet and onto a plate, which she hands to Avi. A moment of reversal, the child performing the action of the parent with uncanny accuracy.

“None for me?” says Kay, trying to be playful, to wipe the tension away.

Emmeline shakes her head. “You had toast,” she says. She points at the plate. “Try.” He obeys. Kay prefers her eggs a gooey, amorphous mass, so that’s how Avi cooks them. These are made for him, the way he’d make them for himself. Dry, overcooked so the snotlike quality that catches in Avi’s throat is gone.

“They’re perfect,” he says. Emmeline nods. She knew they would be.

* * *

After he drops Emmeline off at school, Avi trudges up the steps toward his home office. Kay wants him to move his office out of the attic. There are no railings on the drop-down ladder, and she’s sure he’s going to topple. She imagines him lying on his back for hours like a stranded turtle, waiting for someone to get home. But the office is familiar. It’s one thing that’s remained normal in his life since he lost his leg, and he needs it. A place to return to even if getting there is hard.

This prosthetic, his third, is the best he’s had for walking over flats. He misses the last one when it comes to climbing the ladder or ascending stairs. His doctor says he’ll be ready for a permanent leg next summer. It takes time for the swelling to normalize. Avi reads up on prostheses the way some men shop for new cars. Kay says go all out. “Shoot the moon,” she says. She imagines something robotic. She sees him as a comic book hero, a cyborg. Avi reads articles on the torsional strength of certain plastics. He visits online forums for amputees that winnow into more and more specific groups. Vets stick with other vets. Users with prosthetic knees don’t have time for shin shoppers like Avi. Nested within every inclusive community is another whose losses are worse. Avi has settled into one of the outer circles of the group, his tragedy major but not as bad as it could be.

He makes it up the ladder and pulls the hatch up behind him. He drops heavily into the chair at his desk, the one Kay bought at a yard sale the month after they moved in. Everything in the attic is secondhand. Bookshelves at staggered heights. Mismatched rugs, some chosen for ugliness, covering the wood floor he’s sanded but never finished. The computer is an ancient desktop, a glorified typewriter. It takes a minute for it to whir to life, another to open his in-box. Kay wants to buy him a new one. She wants him to know that they’re doing okay moneywise even though he hasn’t been writing since the hospital. Avi drums his fingers. The e-mail has been calling to him all morning, more loudly than he cares to admit. He turns on the space heater, and the room fills with the smell of toasted dust. The porthole high up on the western wall, opposite the desk, is the only place sunlight comes in, one octagonal shaft through the dust motes that creeps across the floor over the course of the day. If there’s sunlight on his computer, it’s time to stop working and return to the world.

The message from Louis is the only one in his in-box. Two videos, one dated last week, the other the month before. He recognizes the dates. The older one was the bombing at the mall outside DC. Nineteen killed. Homeland identified the bomber as some angry white male, killed in the blast. The more recent one was in Roseland, an hour’s drive from here, near Kay’s mother. Salem Baptist, a black church. Two dead. The black community in Chicago was livid, the mayor caught hell, but the national press didn’t do much with it. These things happen too often to be newsworthy. Avi was surprised these fell into Homeland’s lap: the agency rarely was let loose on white indigenous terrorists. Louis called Homeland’s unrelenting focus on Muslims its “mandate for Mecca.” Avi had gone out for beers with Louis and his coworkers. Off the clock, they said they were more scared of being shot up by an angry white male than by an imagined jihadi. They all knew guys like that or guys who were one bad day away from becoming guys like that.

Avi clicks on the first video. The mall. It’s camera phone footage, grainy and jittering. It pops up in a small window on his screen. A girl, early teens. She’s chubby and sweet-faced, ears newly pierced at the kiosk by the food court. She turns left, turns right. The stud catches the fluorescents and throws them at the camera. A flare, an x of bright pixels.

Here is the truth of all evidence: it hides in the ordinary. The moment believes you can’t see it because it looks like everything else. Avi attends to backgrounds. He watches for glitches in the pattern. A van parked where it shouldn’t be. A man in the souk who moves through the crowd more slowly than those around him. Avi wonders about the camera’s operator. A boyfriend, maybe, or a best friend. His mind flashes to Emmeline, perpetually friendless, proudly alone. Then he focuses. A couple, boy and girl, argue in the corner of the frame. Escalating, drawing attention. The camera shifts. The glittering stud at the center of the shot hovers at its edge. The boy is shouting, but the audio is muddy. He’s skinny, hatchet-faced. Sunken eyes and dirty blond hair. Avi leans in, searching for the vest. The belt. The detonator in hand. He expands the image until it covers the whole screen. The low resolution becomes more pronounced. People are stacks of squares. Colors move like storm fronts on a TV weather map. But there’s nothing. The boy and girl wear tan polo shirts, uniforms from one of the franchise restaurants in the food court. With better resolution, you could read their name tags. The boy holds out his empty hands like he’s begging her for something. His palms turn out, pushing her back. His hands are empty.

There is no bomb.

Then comes the blast.

The frame goes white. As if the glint off the earring had been a precursor, a trial run. From this distance, the blast wave of an explosive device should be enough to blow the camera backward. But the person who’s filming holds steady long enough to show that the girl with the earring is gone. Everything that had been there is gone. The camera clatters to the floor. The screen goes black. In the dark, people scream.

Avi watches the footage nine more times. He pauses the screen on the whiteout and calls Louis.

“What did I see?” he asks.

“Did you watch both?”

“I’m watching the mall,” Avi says. “There’s no blast.”

Louis chuckles. It’s a grim sound. Louis took a job with Homeland after three tours with army infantry and a year as a military press liaison. When Avi met him, he was the kind of guy who’d get drunk and brag about the shit he’d seen. Now when he has too much, he gets a deep blank stare as if something in him has shorted out.

“Watch the other footage,” he says. “I’ll wait.”

Avi clamps the phone between his ear and his shoulder and clicks on the other file. The one he was avoiding. It’s similar. Shaky cell phone footage. The nave of Salem Baptist, shot from the back. A little girl zigzags through the pews in the methodical way small children play. The camera follows her. She has short hair in cornrows, and she’s younger than Emmeline. Avi doesn’t conflate the two girls. He doesn’t put Emmeline in the picture. A boy, white, walks up the center aisle. The preacher, elderly, black, is at the pulpit. He’s wearing reading glasses. Leaning in close, so he doesn’t see the kid coming toward him. The preacher’s name is Marshall Baldwin. Kay’s mother talks about him even though she goes to First Corinthians. Baldwin was the pastor at Salem Baptist thirty-some years. Served on the Roseland city council. Started the community’s meals on wheels program, along with a garden beautification initiative. Avi has read about the bombing, about Pastor Baldwin. In every article, he skims over the name of the girl, refusing to let it into his head.

The audio on this file is better. Avi can hear the boy talking, but he’s facing away from the camera and Avi can’t make out what he’s saying. Pastor Baldwin looks up. “You can’t be in here, son,” he says. Interviewed afterward, parishioners at Salem Baptist remarked on the deep basso of his voice, the way it resonated through the church, shook something in them. The boy continues his approach. “Miss Henderson,” the preacher says. “Call the police.” The boy turns to the camera. “Don’t bother,” he says. His voice is flat, emotionless. Then the flash. Again, white.

Avi scans back a couple of frames. The moment before the flash. A clear shot of the boy. Dirty blond hair. Eyes sunk into a hatchet face. Tan polo shirt.

“Jesus,” says Avi.

“You want to see the scene?” Louis asks. “I can send a car over.”

“I can drive myself,” Avi says.

“Meet me there in an hour,” says Louis.

* * *

Reporting on bombings is a low art among journalists. Information is tightly controlled. Reporters are left to paraphrase press releases. Avi has a gift for rendering these incidents in a way that can affect an audience that’s numb to them. His old editor at the Trib called him the poet of the detonator.

Avi’s obsession goes back to the first American bomb. Home sick from school, he watched coverage of the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. There was no live feed, no footage of it happening. Only aftermath, the Federal Building sundered. Its face torn away revealed the rough structure beneath. Avi followed the investigation in the Trib and on the nightly news. He stared at pictures of the bombers, who looked like guys he went to school with. He read the descriptions of their grievances, their plans. He read stories of the victims, the survivors, their families. He read up on the bomb itself, cobbled together out of stolen blasting caps, fertilizer, and racing fuel. The bomb compressed the past of its builders and the futures of its victims into a point. Everything led up to it, and everything emerged from it.

Through college and grad school, bombs haunted Avi’s dreams. It was a good time in America to dream about bombs. Old guard reporters were cold war kids. Their nightmare bombs were nuclear and bloodless. They imagined vaporization. An aftermath of ashes. Crowds reduced to a pile of powder. They were unprepared for broken bodies. Pieces of limbs without identifiable owners. They thought in terms of blown away rather than blown apart. A nuclear bomb was an end to all things. America had failed to dream about a bomb someone could survive. Worrying about smashed atoms, they forgot about fertilizer and racing fuel.

Avi got his first embed in 2003, a year before he met Kay. It was where he met Louis, whose company he was stuck with for two months. Avi was in the market in Kandahar when some idiot blew himself up. He spotted the bomber before it happened. People at the market meandered or darted. Buyers moved slowly, sellers dashed. The bomber plodded, unrushed but deliberate. Avi saw him open his jacket to reveal the bomb. Ethylene glycol dinitrate, a clear liquid. It registered for Avi as a belt made of water bottles around the man’s waist as the bomber raised his cell phone like a tourist taking one last selfie in the souk. Avi was far enough away from the blast to remain standing and unscathed, mentally recording people’s frenzied reactions. He saw the smoke within the blast radius settle and the destruction it revealed. He saw the chaos around it, people frantic to get away from an event that was already over. Surrounded by panic, Avi was a calm eye.

The Washington Post picked up the piece he wrote. It won the kinds of awards that were being given to well-written war journalism at the start of things. Other assignments and embed offers came in. Sudan. Aleppo. When he started dating Kay, trips to war zones were part of the rhythm of their relationship. If anything, it sped things along. Avi was away so often, it made sense for her to move into his apartment. Any time the annoyances of cohabitation built to near the point of rupture, Avi was off to the other side of the world for a month. When he got back, they were both so relieved he was alive, the counter was set back to zero. In their wedding photos, he has a black eye from the butt of a Ugandan military rifle.

He stopped when Emmeline was born. When he looked at his daughter’s face, the risk and the adrenaline were ridiculous. He threw himself into parenting, spending all day with Emmeline while Kay studied for the bar. At night, he’d lie awake half hoping to hear her cry. Needing a reason to spring out of bed. A minicrisis. A dim echo of sirens and blasts. A few days after Emmeline’s second birthday, he got a call from Newsweek about an embed in Damascus. Kay had landed a job. There was no financial justification for him to take dangerous work. She was making more than he had in his best years, and foreign journalism paid shit money. No one cared about a decade-old war. It was background noise. Page 10 fill. Avi knew all this and took the job like a dry drunk convincing himself he can handle one beer.

When he got back, they had the talk. Kay proposed that once a year Avi could accept a foreign assignment. The rest of the year he’d cover domestic terrorism, school shootings, and subway station gas attacks. He’d pick up local murder stories for the Trib. Mostly he’d take care of Emmeline and the house. Kay gifted him those terrible vacations because she understood something in him that Avi couldn’t articulate. His need.

A year ago, embedded with Joint Terminal Air Controllers outside of Mosul, their JLTV hit a roadside IED. A garden hose across the road for a trip wire, triggering buried paint cans packed with triacetone triperoxide. You could make it from nail polish remover, hydrogen peroxide, and battery acid. Three of the men in the JLTV were shredded when the blast went up. A column of flame lifted the eight-ton vehicle fifteen feet and dropped it. Avi’s left leg was burned away to nothing below the knee, the stump cauterized.

The next day, doped up on pain meds in a military hospital in Kirkuk, he thought how he’d been chasing this bomb most of his life. You couldn’t even wait for it to come to you, he thought. You had to go get it.

* * *

Salem Baptist is right off the interstate. Homeland has it tented, wrapped like a present. If the intention is to discourage curiosity, it fails. Traffic crawls by. Even in the cold, drivers roll down their windows and crane their necks as if they can peek behind the curtain. Only the locals remember what’s underneath. The bombing made the news, but people don’t keep track of the locations of these things unless they’re nearby. What difference does it make where this one went off? Where those kids were shot? The important thing is that it wasn’t your town. Wasn’t your kid. You wait for one you can connect yourself to second-and thirdhand so you can talk about it at parties. You heard it from your house. Your friend’s cousin is in a wheelchair for life. The other details blur into the next incident. As long as you and the people you love remain intact.

Avi takes the right up the drive. Someone from Homeland is on him immediately, shooing his van back onto the road. His attire, thrift store parka over a ratty cable-knit sweater, does not scream professionalism. Avi rolls down his window and holds out his driver’s license.

“Avi Hirsch for Agent Hoffman,” he says. The kid from Homeland snatches the ID. The department is less than twenty years old, and no one’s been in it since the beginning. They come in clean cut and young and leave broken and scruffy. Louis says the life span of a civilian recruit into Homeland is five years. They burn out and transfer to a desk job at the IRS, and no one ever hears from them again. The only people who stick around are ex-military. Those are the guys who bust doors down in a cloud of tear gas and flashbang, never the kids checking IDs at the gate. This kid sizing Avi up, comparing his picture to his driver’s license. He’s hard now, fixing Avi with a stare designed to reduce a suspect to tears. Avi’ll bet the kid didn’t see this scene until it was cleaned up. Somewhere down the line, something is waiting for this kid. A bloody mess. A dog’s dinner. Something he won’t be able to unsee. The hard will go out of those eyes, and he’ll put in for a transfer to somewhere safe.

“You’re the gimp expert,” the kid says. Faked military contempt for outsiders. Rookie badassery.

“Expert gimp is better,” says Avi. The kid waves him through. Avi catches a look of envy from the drivers left in traffic behind him. As if Avi’s been ushered through the velvet rope into an exclusive club. The tent opens around the back, away from prying eyes. Louis rushes to help him out of the car. Louis knows other amputees, but he treats Avi as fragile, an invalid. Avi imagines what he looks like stepping out of the minivan. The mechanical plant of his left leg on pavement. The slow, careful shift of weight. He moves quickly to preclude assistance and has the door shut behind him by the time Louis reaches the van.

“You’re early,” Louis says.

“Lead foot,” says Avi. It doesn’t get a laugh. None of his jokes about the leg do. Kay laughs sometimes but won’t make jokes on her own. The forums online are full of jokes. The Endolite Elans are nice, but they cost an arm and a leg. Did you hear what the kid with no hands got for Christmas? I don’t know; he hasn’t opened it yet. Jokes soften the reality of it, but they also assert ownership. This pain is mine, and I will do with it what I choose. Avi wonders how he’d react if Kay did make a joke about it.

Louis leads him into the tent. The white fabric amplifies the sunlight, turning it fierce. The whole space is a slide on a microscope. An array of spotlights hangs from the corners and edges. Light from every direction. Every shadow blotted out by light from a different vector. Louis puts on dark aviators. They make him look like a G-man in the movies, broad shoulders and dark blue suit, eyes obscured.

“It’s ridiculous in here during the day,” he says. He gestures at the lights. “Techs say we can’t shut them off.”

Avi squints up at the building. What’s left of it. It looks like God came down and took a bite out of the church. Half of it clipped away. A rapture in miniature, Avi thinks. His terrible swift sword. It’s an old church, one of those Black Baptist churches where they planned rallies against Jim Crow. How many bomb threats did Salem Baptist get over the years? How many bricks through the window? How many times did they have to paint over hateful graffiti on the front doors before Sunday service? How hard and often did they fight to exist, only to have some white kid blow it up?

He approaches slowly. Destruction at this scale demands respect. It holds you in a sick sense of awe. He takes out his phone and brings up the footage, playing it back in slow motion. He holds up the screen and moves around the edge of the blast crater. He steps behind the last row of pews. When he gets to the point where the picture overlaps the reality, he stops.

“Anyone else in the press seen the footage?” he asks.

“You think I’d double deal on you?”

“The woman who shot it,” says Avi. “Was the girl her daughter?”

Louis shakes his head. “Preacher’s granddaughter. Her parents died when she was a baby.”

That’s good, Avi thinks. He’s relieved there are no grieving parents for him to think about, empathize with. He walks forward toward the blast crater. He puts his left foot in and slips. The surface is slick. Louis is there to catch him, holding him at the elbow.

“Everyone here’s gone ass over teakettle at least once on this thing,” he says. “It’s smooth as glass.”

Louis guides him along the curve to its nadir. The blast ate two feet into the ground. At the edges, techs scrape and peer. This has become familiar. Not just to Avi but to the world of viewers. A building ripped open, its guts exposed. Rebar severed and pipes idiotically leaking fluids into midair. This one is different. There are no jagged edges. Once he notices this, Avi starts to notice the other things he isn’t seeing.

“You sanitized the site?” he asks.

Louis shakes his head. “This is how we found it.”

“Where’s the debris?” says Avi. “Where’s the scorching?”

Louis shakes his head again. It’s as if someone carved a sphere out of the world. There’s a symmetry to it. A perfection. The movement of a blast aspires to this, but the real world gets in the way. The blast expands haphazardly. Nibbling here and feasting there. It’s a collection of vectors moving at different speeds, each with a life span of nanoseconds, spending themselves in a race away from their point of origin.

This is different.

“Let me say that if you have anything on this,” says Louis, “it would be a huge help to me. Because a week in and I have whatever is less than zero as regards ideas.”

“Is that why you asked me down here?” Avi asks.

“You’re good with this stuff,” says Louis. “I thought you’d pick up a vibe.”

“I’m not a hotline psychic.” Avi climbs up the other curve and lays a hand on the severed wall. Concrete, a foot thick. He traces a line from inner edge to outer. The barely detectable curve. The edge of a spheroid of lack, of void. “Tell me about the bomber.”

“Are we going right to that?” Louis asks. “Are we skipping over the tonnage of debris that doesn’t exist?”

“It’s the same kid that blew up the mall,” says Avi.

“It would appear to be,” Louis says.

“You think it’s, what?”

Louis shrugs. “Twins? I like the idea it’s twins. Gives it a real murder mystery feel.”

“It’s not twins,” Avi says.

“The boys with the facial recognition software swear it’s the same kid,” he says. “They say telling twins apart is consumer-grade shit. It’s the same kid. Owen Curry, eighteen, of Seat Pleasant, Maryland. Perfect overlap of boring and crazy. Lived with his mother, who we haven’t been able to find. Worked as a fry cook at Planet Chicken in the Ballston mall food court. Bottom third of his class in school. No girlfriend. No friends. We ID’d him from witness statements. And the footage.”

“But he didn’t have a bomb on him in the footage.”

“Certain people were willing to overlook that in favor of having a shut case.”

“You find supplies at his house?” Avi asks. “Bomb-making instructions? Anarchist’s Cookbook?”

“Nothing,” says Louis. “Makes no sense. For one thing, angry white males tend to be shooters, not bombers. Bombing’s for believers. But then also, his place is clean. No bottles, no stray wire clippings. If you’re going to blow yourself up, why clean up afterward? Leave a mess, I say. Fuck, help us out and leave a note.”

* * *

Sunlight from the porthole window creates a glare on the top of Avi’s screen as he watches the video from the church again. His brain picks it apart, like watching a magician do a trick to figure out how it’s done. He can’t be seeing what he’s seeing: a dead boy blowing up a church without a bomb. He tries to see something else, something that makes sense, but the reality of it persists.

There’s a banging from the hatch. Kay keeps a broom in the hall for when she needs to roust him from work. It hasn’t been used in a year.

“Avi!” she yells. “Where the fuck are you?”

Avi jumps out of the chair, nearly toppling. He goes over to the hatch and gives it a push, too hard. It drops fast, swinging toward Kay. She catches the edge and lowers it.

“Where the hell have you been?”

Everything clicks into place. Avi returns to the world. The sunlight on the computer screen. Hunger growling in his gut.

“What time is it?” he asks. He eases himself down the ladder. Going down is harder.

“Six-thirty,” she says. “The school’s been calling you. I’ve been calling you. I had to get a cab from work and go pick her up.”

“My phone—”

“It’s in the living room,” she says. “Doing no one any good.”

“Shit, Kay,” he says. “I’m sorry. This stuff Louis sent me—”

“You said you were going to pass on it,” she says. She stands with her arms crossed, watching to be sure he doesn’t fall but not helping him down. He doesn’t have anything to say. Once he’s off the ladder, she turns away from him. “We stopped at McDonald’s. You’re on your own for dinner. You should go apologize to her.”

Kay goes into their bedroom and closes the door. The argument feels like a relic, something left over from the time before. Avi doesn’t want to be the person who forgets anymore. The one who climbs out of a bomb crater to discover he’s broken a promise. Tomorrow he’ll call Louis and tell him he’s got nothing. He’ll call Carol at the Trib and ask for assignments. School boards and common council meetings. Double homicides. Something local, safe.

He stands outside Emmeline’s door. She’ll be over it by tomorrow. An apology is meaningful only right now. Inside, she’s talking to herself. He can hear the tone but not the content. The high musical cadence and bounce of his daughter’s voice, broken up by long pauses. Emmeline has always had imaginary friends. She retreats to her room to talk with them. There’s another pause, then she says, “I know you’re out there, Daddy. Come in.”

Avi opens the door. Emmeline is sitting cross-legged on the floor, drawing a blackbird in crayon. She looks up at him. “You haven’t eaten anything all day, have you?”

Avi sits down on the bed. He’s most aware of his handicap around Emmeline. She is of a size to be occasionally lifted and carried and tossed. She isn’t too old for them to play together on the floor. But he hates needing her help to get up.

“I wanted to get you a hamburger,” she says. “But Mom was mad at you.”

“She was right to be mad,” says Avi. “Are you mad at me?”

Emmeline shakes her head. “Where were you?” she asks.

“I was upstairs,” he says. “There’s a person who hurt a lot of other people. I was trying to figure out how he thinks.”

Emmeline nods as if taking in information she already knew. “I bet his brain is a mess,” she says. “I bet a bad idea got pushed in and grew. Like roots.” She presses the heels of her hands together, fingers curled, then extends her fingers out until they are tree branches, antlers. Roots.

THE ONE-LEGGED DETECTIVE

Avi should have called Louis right away, standing outside their bedroom door so that Kay could hear his performance. Look what I’m giving up for us. Look at how I’m being better.

But he waits until morning. Kay is on to a Chester Himes novel with a smoking pistol on the cover. Emmeline attempts a series of gambits to trick Avi and Kay into talking to each other.

“I think our yard is big enough for a dog,” she says. “A small one. A yippee dog.”

“If Daddy got arrested, Mom, would you defend him? Or would it be a conflict of interest?”

None of them catch.

Kay gives Avi a dry kiss on the cheek and hugs Emmeline long and deep before she leaves. In the car on the way to school, Emmeline says, “I’m not mad, Daddy.” Avi thanks her for saying so. “Are you going to catch the man who hurt people?” she asks.

“I’m not trying to catch him, Leener,” says Avi. “The police will catch him.”

“You think they will?”

He pauses. He wants her to live in a world where the bad guys get caught and little girls don’t get turned into nothing while they’re at church. But he decided a long time ago to trust his daughter with the truth, no matter how unpleasant.

“No,” he says. “I don’t think they will.”

“Do you think he’s going to hurt someone else?”

“Yes.”

Emmeline nods and looks out the window. “If they were trying to catch me, they would look at all the places that serve French fries,” she says. “Even if I was hiding, I would eat a lot of French fries. You could check the hotels near French fries and you’d find me.”