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

door is still there. He thinks of the Winchester House in San Jose, its metastatic architecture spawning staircases to nowhere, rooms inaccessible from anywhere in the house. This door would open to the outside, fifty feet above Jarvis Avenue. On the record, strangled saxophones fade out and die. Avi stands up, steps toward the door as if he’s approaching a rabid animal. Sidesteps. No sudden moves.

The knob turns. Under the music, a creak of metal hinges as the door opens inward. A young black woman looks out. Her face is round with high soft cheekbones. She has dreadlocks heaped precariously on her head, tottering to the left.

“Good, you’re here,” she says. “Last time we came by, you all were out. I’m Kimani Moore. This is all going to be a little strange.”

Through the door, where there should be only open air, Avi can see a living room that is not part of his house. The walls are bright orange with blue trim. Warm lights make the room glow behind her.

“Come on in,” Kimani says. “I’ve got coffee up.”

Avi walks to the door as if he’s under a spell. This is fairy tale stuff. A door in the air. A room that can’t exist. Kimani pulls the door open, and Avi thinks of Dorothy stepping into Oz, the burst of Technicolor scarring the sepia of her little world. He steps across the threshold, fingers trailing along the surface of the door to be sure it’s real, as if touch is truer than sight. The wood is smooth but solid. Kimani shuts the door behind him, and the music goes silent, not muffled but cut off. A blond woman sits on a couch, teasing a German shepherd with a knotted rope. Behind her, a tall white man with dark hair browses a bookshelf. Neither looks at Avi or greets him. Standing next to Kimani is another man, older, with a trim salt-and-pepper beard, round wire-rimmed glasses, and a pained expression he’s worn long enough to carve lines into his face.

“Mr. Hirsch,” he says. “I’m sorry to come into your home like this.”

“This isn’t my home,” Avi says, looking around. Avi’s house is furnished to be soft. Every piece of furniture was bought when Emmeline was small for her to bounce off unharmed. This room has clean lines and abrupt corners. There’s a Stevie Wonder poster on the wall, a concert from his Talking Book days. A print of a William Eggleston photo, the back of a woman’s beehive shot in a Los Alamos diner, the turquoise of the bench and tiles psychedelically bright under the lights. On the floor, there’s a bone-white rug, shag pile. No one with children owns a rug that white.

“There’s a lot we have to tell you,” says the man with the wire-rimmed glasses. “You should sit down.”

“I’ll stand,” Avi says. As soon as he says it, he becomes aware of the ache in his leg: a low thing that will expand.

“Here, sit,” says Kimani. “You’re making me nervous.” She takes his arm and leads him toward an oddly angled chair. Avi sits, looking from one person to the next.

“He’s spooked,” says the tall man by the bookshelf.

“Of course he’s spooked,” Kimani says. “He just stepped out the side of his house.”

“You came very close to being killed the other day, Mr. Hirsch,” says the man with glasses.

“That should calm him down,” says the woman on the couch.

The man with glasses shakes his head and smiles. “You’re right, Sarah. I’m going about this all wrong.” He puts out his hand. “My name is Kevin Bishop,” he says. Avi leans forward, takes his hand, and shakes it. It’s an automatic action, a script the body carries out reflexively when given the proper signal. The part of Avi’s brain that observes and reports notices that his hand is sweat-slick against this man’s cool, dry palm, while another part, frantic and barely coherent, shrieks that this man cannot even be here, that the room they’re standing in does not and cannot exist. Bishop lets go of Avi’s hand, and it hangs in the air, shaking nothing, before Avi becomes aware of it and tucks it under his leg. “This is Patrick and Sarah Davenport. They work for me. They’re teachers.”

“Siblings,” says Sarah. “He’s older.”

“And Kimani is…” He pauses, searching for the word.

“I’m your driver, Kevin,” she says. “Call it what it is.”

Bishop winces. “I don’t love the visual of me being driven around by a young woman of color.”

“You’ve also got me serving coffee,” she says.

“That visual is going to be the least of our problems,” Patrick says from the corner.

“Do you take cream?” Kimani asks. Avi shakes his head. The question is too normal, a leftover piece of some other conversation. Avi tries to retreat to that conversation as he takes the coffee from her. The heat of the cup startles him, and he drops it. He sees motion in the far corner of the room. Patrick reaches for the falling cup. His arm stretches across the room, elongating like pale taffy strung from shoulder to wrist. He catches the cup before it shatters. Avi stares down into the coffee cup, which is cradled in Patrick’s hand at the end of an impossible arm. Silver dollar drops spatter the white rug and bloom like time-lapse flowers.

The German shepherd nuzzles Avi’s knee, trying to get his attention. Avi looks down at the dog.

“Mr. Hirsch,” the dog says in the blond woman’s voice, “my friends and I are very special people. And we want you to tell the world about us.”

The dog looks at him quizzically as if Avi is the thing out of place here. Which he obviously is. The problem isn’t talking dogs or floating rooms; it’s dull, ordinary Avi Hirsch, spilling his coffee on the rug, with nothing to say to a talkative German shepherd. Avi lets out a high-pitched sound, something between a nervous laugh and a panicked yelp.

“If the two of you are done showing off,” Bishop