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

of those days before New York dives into the swelter of full summer, before the air stagnates and curdles, when cool breezes blow through the streets and Manhattan feels like a city by the ocean. It’s a different city than it was a week ago. Bike couriers race each other in the air overhead, no longer limited by the streets but by the canyon walls formed by the buildings on either side of Lexington Avenue. A boy with glowing eyes sits on his stoop calling I can see your tits at women as they pass by. On the corner of 58th and Fifth, a man leans over the edge of a fifty-gallon steel drum full of water, chatting with a news vendor in a thick Brooklyn accent. Occasionally he dunks back under to keep his shining new scales moist. People eyeball these new additions to the landscape, but doing so marks them as tourists. The locals and the city itself absorb all of it, accepting it as their new normal.

“I asked Viola to come,” Emmeline says as they make their way toward Central Park. “She said she’s tired.”

“It wears on you,” Fahima says, not sure what specific thing she’s talking about. Leaving the building feels like an act of resistance. She has a feeling of her body as a thing at risk for what it is. It’s a feeling she hasn’t had since before she resonated. She associates it with childhood, the low thrum of fear she carried out into the world every day as someone recognizably other, Muslim for all to see. Bishop made that go away for a time. Not the academy but Kevin Bishop. His dopey confidence in the arc of history, even as he kept his students hidden from it, ready to rejoin the narrative of the world when it had better roles for them to play, safer spaces for their bodies to occupy. That fear returns, and Fahima remembers the positive aspects of it. She sees more, if maybe she feels less. Her consciousness doubles, looking at the world from inside herself and at herself from the outside. It’s part of why she wears hijab, to keep herself other, to remind herself of what she is and how she’s perceived. She can tell who feels the same, thinks the same, by the way they move among other people, other bodies. The ones with the fear are aware of how much space they take up, where they end and the world begins. They pass through crowds the way water seeps through packed gravel, finding gaps and filling them, pooling into empty spaces. At the end of the day, when they get to places they think of as protected, the surface of them burns from exposure to the world. They curl into themselves, exhausted, protecting their centers, their hearts.

“When I was little, there was a kid who got shot by the police. It was all over the news,” says Emmeline. “He was twelve. My dad said he wasn’t like me, because I don’t look so black that someone could tell. He said it was messed up and unfair, but it would help keep me safe.” Fahima hears the insufficiency of the word help. “He said I’d be safe because he and my mom would protect me, only I knew he was lying. That kid had parents who wanted to keep him safe. And he was dead.” Fahima looks to see if Emmeline is crying, but her face is distant. She absently spins the inhibitor bracelet on her forearm. “Adults say they’ll protect you, and you get hurt. I don’t look like a Resonant. Not like Bryce or the other kids that came from the Commune. When I have my bracelet on, I hardly count as one. I pass as normal. Doesn’t mean I’m safe.”

“No one’s ever safe,” Fahima says. “You wake up and you go out in the world. You take care of the people you care about. You do your best.”

Emmeline looks at Fahima like she’s said something vapid, the kind of platitude Fahima can’t stand. She keeps walking. She’s nearly as tall as Fahima, mostly leg, and Fahima falls behind. Emmeline is lanky like her father. It might be temporary. She’s at that point in adolescence when the body is buffeted with contradictory messages, arguing with itself over which set of genes it wants to express. It’ll work out given time.

“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