The Nobody People by Bob Proehl (manga ereader TXT) 📕

birth, blood and fluid, and then this screaming thing in the world, a raw red semicolon crying out for him and the urge to take the child from the nurse, wrench the baby from her hands even as she offers it to him, kiss the fury of its little face, but he’s fumbling with a girl, not Kay, someone before her whose name is lost on the whitecap of a different wave, but her tongue is warm and wet in his mouth and her hand creeps down into his teenage disbelief that anyone will ever touch him, and the JLTV hits a bump, a pothole probably but part of him knows already it isn’t as the vehicle lifts into the air and a metal panel slices Garcia in half but Kay is talking about class while he makes dinner, days they ate for survival rather than taste but she says this is great and has seconds, even comes home from class starving so she can wolf down whatever he cooks and the wine tastes coppery but everything is better with her and all of them at the big school say the same thing which is go home, Avi, we did not ever need you and yet you are here go back to somewhere we do not care where but you are not were not were never the hero of this story and that you ever thought you were is making us sad now, and Emmeline says, I’ve got to go, Dad, I’ll call you this weekend, and Kay says nothing because she’s a smooth wall with no handholds or grips and everyone else is polite and cold and the warm water feeling spirals down a tube, a path Owen Curry is carving through the inside of Avi’s neck, and it drains away and Avi opens his eyes.

“You’re okay,” Miquel says. His hand is on Avi’s knee, steadying. “I mean, you’re not. You’re kind of a mess. But you’re here. You’re in the studio. We’re on North Avenue, and none of those things you were feeling are happening now.”

“They’re always happening,” Avi says.

“That’s true, too,” Miquel says. “I’m sorry. I would have warned you, but that’s not usually how it goes. Mostly, I read someone and it’s passive. Everything in your head was knotted together. I gave a tug, and it all came loose.”

“So put it all back,” says Avi. “Put things back where they go.”

“It doesn’t work that way. Believe it or not, you’re better off with it all rattling around. Things get lodged into place. We stop being able to see them. We can’t take them out and examine them and put them into a better place.”

“Then let’s start reorganizing,” Avi says, tapping his forehead.

“Our time is up for today,” Miquel says.

“It’s been two minutes.”

“I’ve been in your head for an hour,” Miquel says. “For clients it doesn’t feel like much time has passed. Sometimes it doesn’t feel like any time has passed. You were reexperiencing old emotions, moments you knew. This can register as all of them happening at the same time. But I was in there like a funnel, making sure they didn’t come at you all at once. It’s more than the mind can handle. Even the body isn’t equipped for that kind of massive emotional aggregate.”

Avi can feel the truth of this. He’s bone-tired, the way he might feel hitting his bunk at the end of a long day on an embed.

“So what do I do now?” he asks.

“You come back,” says Miquel. “You spend some time in your head. You pick up what’s broken. And you come back.”

—

The poet with the glow in his chest is off shift. The sun goes down over the buildings across the street. Avi stares at the half-finished piece for the Reader. He’s had too much coffee and not enough to eat, which accentuates the feeling of a nest of sparking live wires in his head.

At the center of it, a still eye, sits a moment that feels to Avi like the last time things were right between him and Kay. It’s the two of them sitting on the couch, reading comics. It’s the one before he asked her to look at the footage from Salem Baptist, before this world and his marriage smashed into each other. Everything after that felt inevitable. That was the last time Avi feels like he could have stopped it all.

He wants to call Kay but instead decides to call Emmeline, to let no excuses from her keep them from talking, seriously talking. Better, he’ll fly to New York, catch a red-eye, and surprise her with bagels before class in the morning. He’s typing in a search for cheap tickets when something on the street catches his attention. A white van, unmarked, pulls up in front of the apartment across the street. Three men in dark blue suits load out. Avi recognizes the shade, the deep navy Homeland Security agents used to wear, back in their early days. They go to the door of Radical Empathy Studio. One faces the door. The others watch the street. Two let themselves in.

Avi gets up, knocks into his table, and spills coffee precariously near his laptop. He weaves through patrons and stands in the doorway, watching the entryway across the street. An agent comes out, then Miquel, then another agent. The van door slides open. Avi looks around to see if anyone else is seeing this, but no one registers it. The van door slams shut. One of the agents comes around the back and gets into the driver’s seat. He pauses as he climbs in, seeing Avi watching him. He moves like he’s about to come barreling across the street and throw Avi in the back of the van. Then he closes the door and pulls the van into traffic. Avi starts after the van, but it runs a red and turns down Western, off North Avenue, and back to the real world.

—

Avi’s enough