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

“Who?” she says.

He hands her the printout again.

“I’d’ve told you if he wasn’t in there,” she says.

“How’s he been paying?” asks Avi.

“Crisp twenties,” she says. She rubs her thumbs roughly along the edges of her index fingers, miming the difficulty of separating fresh bills. “Fucking things stick together.”

Nothing comes together. Owen Curry’s journals are babble. Each page is titled in block letters: “VIBRATION = GODHOOD?” “THE TRUE LOCATION AND MEANING OF THE BLACK BONE ROOM.” Owen Curry has built an entire world in his head. Diagrams of nonsense science, treatises on imaginary physics. When someone’s mind breaks off from the world as cleanly as Owen Curry’s, the writing takes on an alien aspect that is flat and opaque. Curry’s sentences are grammatically correct but unintelligible. Avi feels as if he needs a cipher key, a Rosetta stone, to begin to make sense of them. He keeps coming back to the word vibration, but it’s gibberish to him.

In the morning, after he drops Emmeline off at school, Avi heads out to Roseland. Homeland is wrapping up the scene at Salem Baptist, making room for the church to start the slow work of rebuilding. They’ll put it back exactly the way it was. No modernizations or improvements. Erasure of a wound is a form of healing. One of the things that bothers Avi about his prosthetic is that it reasserts its difference from what was once there. He’d prefer a less comfortable prosthesis that looked more “lifelike,” one that wouldn’t remind everyone of his handicap. From his phone, in the parking lot, Avi makes an anonymous donation to the Salem Baptist reconstruction fund.

He checks back at the Roseland Rest and at Planet Chicken. No one’s seen Owen Curry in days. Out of ideas, Avi drives home. He calls Louis to see if Homeland has had any luck finding him.

Louis laughs. “I can barely get permission to go looking for this fuck,” he says. “Officially, Owen Curry died in the Ballston mall bombing and we are looking for an identical suspect in the Salem Baptist bombing. The whole thing’s gone cold.”

“Until he blows up something else,” Avi says.

“I’m having trouble selling that argument to my superiors,” says Louis. “Maybe if there was some sort of public outcry.”

“You want me to publish?”

“It would move things on my end,” Louis says.

“The Trib won’t take it without a verified source,” says Avi.

Louis pauses. There’s no way he’ll go on record. No one from Homeland ever goes on record. Homeland speaks in press releases.

“Fuck it,” Louis says. “Use the footage. Don’t run it, but you can show it to an editor to verify.”

“It’ll be obvious it’s from you,” Avi says. Part of him doesn’t want to keep at this story. Maybe it’s the dead girl in the church, the fear that she’ll come to haunt him. That he’ll start to see her running around the living room furniture, playing in the backyard. Shadowing Emmeline. Maybe it’s something else. Last night he dreamed he was back in Mosul, in the JLTV. In the dream, Owen Curry hoists the vehicle over his head like it’s nothing. The other guys in Echo Company disappear, blinking out one by one.

“If this shows up in the Trib, it forces my boss’s hand,” Louis says. “I get to go find the kid. Right now he’s a ghost.”

Avi thinks about the Roseland Rest. The feeling that Owen Curry had been in the room a second before Avi opened the door. Maybe the kid is a ghost.

“I can’t guarantee the Trib will take it, even with the footage,” Avi says. He can’t guarantee Carol will pick up the phone. He hasn’t talked to anyone at the Trib since the sympathy calls dried up. He’s a ghost himself.

“Do what you can,” Louis says.

He gets up from the desk and puts a record on, laying the needle down gently. A stumbling drumbeat floods the attic space, one leg dragging behind the other, followed by the opening guitar and keyboard flourish of Bowie’s “Five Years.” The Ziggy Stardust album should clear his head, but as soon as it starts, he thinks of something Bowie said in some stoned interview from the seventies about the mythology behind the album. Bowie’s starmen were black hole jumpers. Creatures who leap from universe to universe. They come on like saviors, but they’re tourists. They can’t save anyone. He thinks of Owen Curry at the center of a blast, disappearing into nothing, popping up somewhere else. He wonders what that would feel like.

The side ends. He never minded the inconvenience of records until the first time he sat in his chair listening to the needle scratch along the label edge, unable to make the walk across the room. It was a motivator, a reason to move. Every second the needle scraped was a rebuke for his self-pity and laziness.

Avi flips the record and goes back to his chair. He picks up Owen Curry’s journal:

The entrance into the null is through me, and through my vibration. The null is not me. I am the gate that opens. I am the mouth gaping to swallow the world.

Black hole jumpers, Avi thinks. He wonders where Owen Curry goes the moment after the flash. Where he disappears to in the split second after everything around him blinks out of the world.

There’s a knock on the door.

His first thought is that it’s Kay pounding on the ceiling with the broomstick. That he’s drifted again, lost the day, and stranded Emmeline at school. But the album marks time, breaks it into pieces of twenty minutes a side. He looks across the room, checking for the sun in the porthole window.

Under the porthole, there’s a door that doesn’t belong. Dark wood and a burnished brass knob. The jamb stands out against the pale wood paneling of the attic, highlighting the door’s not-rightness. Its unbelonging. Avi closes his eyes and opens them again. The