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

and Sunday school. Trappings of the dream of white suburban America, the kind of shit you see on television.

Even if Fahima’s life hadn’t jumped the tracks, she would have grown up other. She’d watch from the intersection of Immigrant and Muslim while blond girls rode by on bikes with streamers that bloomed from the handles, hair billowy in their wakes while Fahima’s curls stayed secret under wraps. After years in Lakeview, she skipped the normal world for Bishop, exchanging one asylum for another. She hadn’t emerged until she was fully formed. The carapace crust of a twenty-year-old. Striding into her first class at MIT ready to swing at the first person who asked to touch her hijab. Normality was a thing to combat, take down. When Fahima saw Alyssa at a party, picture of an all-American girl, she saw a target. Fahima drew a bead on her, hiding in the corner like a sniper, sipping lukewarm soda out of a plastic cup while Alyssa floated around the room.

Fahima felt powerless in the face of this normality. She felt second place to it, a shadow of the thing itself. In the end, swagger went only so far. Alyssa had to make the first move. Always the driver.

“He should be in a hospital,” Alyssa says for the seventeenth time. Her eyes stray off the road to check Bishop in the rearview, and Fahima tenses up.

“How can you look at anything other than where we’re going and not drive us right off a cliff?” she says. What she thinks is, My girl’s got superpowers.

“That is the sound of one lung breathing,” Alyssa says. There’s a note of pedantry and annoyance in her voice that’s been more and more present in their conversations about Bishop. Fahima notices but doesn’t have time to fix it. Too busy fixing everything else. “His insides are more cancer than organs. Not the ideal situation for a road trip.”

“I’ll wake him up, and you can talk him out of this,” says Fahima. Alyssa goes on about metastatic spread and renal function, but Fahima thinks about Patrick that night outside Bishop’s house in Maine. Her realization that he might be a mass of undifferentiated cells, the possibility that all of them resonated. What if instead of using his ability to fight the cancer, a losing battle, Bishop allied himself with it? It’s impossible. But what about them isn’t? Could he force the cancer to resonate? And if he could, would it save him?

“Are you even listening?” Alyssa asks.

“Dyspnea. Dysphagia,” Fahima says. “Catastrophic hemorrhage.” She plucks words she’s caught in Alyssa’s monologue or read in the literature. Alyssa knows but doesn’t bother to call Fahima on it. They hit a pothole, and the glass vials resting in her lap tinkle musically in their steel case. Alyssa glances down at it.

“What is that stuff you’re giving him?” she asks. “And please remember, I am a doctor and you are a sexy machine genius who is not a doctor.”

“They’re sexy genius machines,” Fahima says. “Tiny, tiny ones.”

“What are your tiny sexy genius machines doing to him?”

“They’ll keep him alive,” Fahima says.

“How long?”

A week, thinks Fahima. Tops.

“As long as he needs them to.”

—

They’re out of Connecticut when Bishop pings her from the Hive. Communicating there is easier for him than speaking, at least without a recent dose. The tiny sexy genius machines amplify Bishop’s Resonance, but they burn out after a few hours, like lightbulb filaments running too hot.

“I’m going to space out for a minute,” Fahima tells Alyssa.

“Where are we on the map?” Alyssa asks.

“We stay on 84 another half hour,” says Fahima.

“Go talk to him.”

Fahima rests her head against the window and goes into the Hive. Bishop is waiting for her, sitting full lotus in a field peppered with black flowers. In the real world, he couldn’t contort his legs this way without screaming pain. His Hivebody is younger, fully fleshed. Seeing him like this highlights how thin he looks, tossed in the back seat like a bag of sticks. His fingers trace the petals of one of the flowers.

“These shouldn’t be here,” he says. “They’re like needles poking through the skin of the world.” He looks up at her, face cherubic with subcutaneous fat and an acceptance of oncoming death. “Have these always been here?”

Fahima bends over and tries to pluck one by her feet. It’s rooted to the ground. It’s so cold her fingertips stick to it and pull away hard. There are tiny circles on her fingers where she touched the thing, angry mouths on index, middle, and thumb.

“I never liked it here,” she says. “I only come here to talk to you.”

“We worked very hard on it, you know,” he says. “Like God separating the land and the water. Poor Raymond and I spent years creating this place between the actual and potential. I used to love it here.”

The way he skirts around the edges of his biography grates on Fahima no end. But this isn’t the time to dig deeper. That time isn’t ever coming.

“We should be in Revere in an hour or two,” Fahima says. “Alyssa’s a good driver.”

“She’s nice,” says Bishop. “Listening to the two of you reminds me I should have found someone. Then I realize the fact it’s an afterthought for me, like I should have tried the salmon, is the reason I never did. I had everyone.” He taps his forehead. “I never felt the need.” When Bishop talks about his abilities in interviews or public speeches, he tells people he’s telepathic and telekinetic. One night, after an ill-advised third martini, he told Fahima it would be closer to the truth to say he was omnipathic. “Everyone all the time,” he said. Fahima wonders what it’s like for him to be without his abilities. It must be like losing one of your five senses and access to the Internet at the same time.

“Do you need another shot?” she asks.

“Not till we get there,” Bishop says, flicking the flower with his fingernail.