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

effort to abandon girlishness. Riot grrrl posters on pale pink walls, Sharpie drawings of flying V guitars, princess dolls bursting from behind the closet door. Bishop is propped up in a canopy bed under sheets the color of cotton candy. He’s reading Tripmaster Monkey, plucked off a shelf where it sat with The Second Sex, Rubyfruit Jungle, and a full set of Pippi Longstocking books.

“How are you?” Fahima asks.

Bishop takes off his glasses and sets them on the nightstand. “I am in an incredible amount of pain,” he says. “It feels earned. It’s mine and no one else’s.”

Fahima ducks under the canopy and sits at the foot of the bed. “Patrick’s here. I saw him a while ago.”

Bishop nods. “We talked this morning.”

“He has very different ideas about what’s going on here,” says Fahima.

“Good,” Bishop says. “Maybe we’ve all had enough of my ideas for a while. It’s nice feeling obsolete. No longer needed.”

She pats his knee under the thick down comforter. “You’re needed.”

“Do you see what they’ve done here?” Bishop asks. “What these kids have built?”

“A hill to die on?”

“Maybe,” he says. “There’d be a power in that, too. You shouldn’t underestimate the metaphorical weight of dead children.”

“Is that our strategy now?”

“I don’t know what our strategy is,” Bishop says. “Or if we have one. There’re so few of us. If there’s a war, we lose. We have no strength to bargain, so we lose the peace as well. Maybe what’s best is to gather on a hill and fight for the sake of fighting.”

Fahima laughs because she’s been thinking the same thing. “You sound like a Greek myth.”

“You sound old before your time,” Bishop says. “Get some rest, Fahima. The rain’s coming tomorrow.”

—

The sun never shows, and rain batters the windows. Alyssa snuck into bed in the middle of the night, and Fahima lets her sleep. If they hurry, they can carve out the last stretch of ditch before the camp floods. Fahima checks the case of needles. Three left. Enough to get them through today. Tonight she’ll insist that Bishop let them take him to a hospital. Or a hospice. Tomorrow these kids will continue on their own.

She knocks on his door, but no one answers. He must have woken up and taken something for the pain. Alyssa brought a grab bag of purloined narcotics. Oxycodone and Percocet. Vicodin and codeine. If Bishop dipped in, there’s no chance of waking him. She tries the door, which turns out to be unlocked, and lets herself in.

She knows he’s gone as soon as she enters the room. It’s the way the air sits. Bishop’s eyes stare blankly at the stucco ceiling. Fahima kneels down next to the bed, numb. She puts her hand on Bishop’s cold forehead. She reaches back into her memory to find the dua for closing the eyes of the dead, words she learned from her mother before the concept of death held any meaning. Meaning came later, saturating the words and giving them weight, substance that outlasted the end of Fahima’s faith. The ritual of words is a home, too, a place of returning.

“O Allah, forgive Kevin Bishop,” she says. “And elevate his station among those who are guided, and be a successor to whom he has left behind, and forgive us and him, O Lord of the Worlds. Enlarge for him his grave and shed light upon him in it.”

She slides her hand down, forcing his eyelids shut. They pull upward against her fingers as if there’s more he wants to see.

Fahima assumes that the standoff is over when they open the barricade to let Kevin Bishop’s body out. Magnetics and dendrics and lithics peel back each element they built into the wall, unweaving it. Isidra Gonzalez raises her hand and extracts threads of silvery liquid from the barricade. They float around her like streamers. The curtain draws back to reveal an audience of Guardsmen and news vans.

Patrick carries the body out. Fahima lifted it out of the deathbed herself. It’s as light as balsa wood. Patrick’s arms coil around it like a winding sheet, a cocoon of flesh from which Bishop might be reborn. In the ambulance, at the urging of paramedics, his arms unwind and give the body over.

“I’ll go with him,” Patrick says. Fahima has already converted the body to an object in her mind. Patrick sees Bishop in the skin and bones.

“You should stay,” says Fahima. She looks around at the Guardsmen. They’re unsure whether to move in, flood through the gap. “They’ll need you.”

“Make sure they don’t,” Patrick says. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

The ambulance eases between tactical vehicles and transports, bearing the body away. Fahima looks back across the hundred yards between her and the barricade. She expects hands forcing her down, the bite of zip cuffs on her wrists, but the moment holds. Slowly, alone, she crosses the mud and tire tracks until she’s within the border the enclave has set for itself. Behind her, the barricade knits back together like the edges of a healing wound. A crowd is gathered. Fahima sees Ji Yeon and Hassan and Lynette. They’re looking at her for answers. It’s hard, even when you’re young and rebellious, not to want a leader. It’s hard to ward off the urge to be led.

“I’m going to take a shower,” Fahima says, “then I’m going back to work.”

Ji Yeon looks at her, then turns away. “You heard her,” she shouts. It’s not an order, but they take it as a directive, eager to be set back into motion.

On her way back, Fahima passes the statue. It’s mottled with cavities like a rotting tooth, as if it’s receding back to wherever Bishop pulled it from. When Fahima touches it, she feels nothing.

—

The Guard comes through the next morning, before dawn.

When the barricade goes down at the corner of Cambridge and Dedham, it’s under the blade of a bulldozer rather than