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

though he barely remembered the rapid-fire Hebrew lyrics. They laughed about it on the way home, the three of them shouting gobbledygook to the song’s bouncy tune.

On a parallel earth, he thinks, Kay and Avi are doing better than all right. On Earth-X, they are fantastically in love.

“What happened at the restaurant?” she says.

“Food poisoning,” says Avi, turning away from her.

“Bullshit it was food poisoning,” she says. He can tell she gets a little charge out of turning his phrase back on him. “Instant salmonella?”

“I felt sick,” Avi says. “Figure it was something I ate.”

“It’s what you put in your head,” she says. “It’s dead girls and bombs creeping out of your head and rotting your guts.”

“You sound like one of those books you read,” Avi says. He flicks his wrist at the paperback pile on her nightstand.

Kay picks up Avi’s phone from the nightstand and holds it out to him.

“Call Louis,” she says. “Tell him you’ve got nothing. Have you even talked to an editor about this story? Are you even getting paid? Or are you chasing ghosts on your own dime?”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Call the Trib and tell them you don’t need the money,” she says. “Tell them your marriage is more important than—”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he shouts at her. It echoes in the sleeping house, and they both stop, shocked by the volume of it. They wait to hear if Emmeline wakes the way they did when she was a baby and some loud noise ran the risk of startling her. The shared response strengthens a sense of their history together, but it doesn’t mean anything anymore. If Kay presses now, he’ll fold. He has to. She could dig until what he’s hiding is revealed, until she’s won. But she has no interest in winning with him anymore.

“Go write your fucking story,” she says. Not knowing what else to do, Avi starts toward the door.

“You know you’re not going to solve this, right?” she says. “Whatever fucked up mystery case Louis dropped in your lap, you’re not going to figure it out. Even if you did, it wouldn’t save that girl in the church. Even if you did save her, she’s not Emmeline.”

It stops him, because all of this is an effort to save her. Even if Kay can’t see it, even if Avi doesn’t know what he’s trying to save his daughter from, the goal, the dream end product now is Emmeline, safe.

“I’ll be in in a little bit,” he says. He closes the door gently behind him.

Avi takes a few steps down the hall and stands outside Emmeline’s door. Can you hear me? he thinks as loudly as he can. He holds the sentence clearly in his mind, like it’s printed on a page. When he doesn’t get an answer, he knocks quietly so Kay won’t hear. Again there’s no response. Avi eases the door open.

As soon as he steps into the room, he knows something is wrong. The sound of Emmeline breathing in her sleep is written into the base code of his thoughts. A hundred nights he’s stood in her doorway in the dark, listening to it, marveling at the fact she even exists, much less breathes. He’s sat up with her nights when her breathing was labored and hitched, struggling to draw through snot-clogged sinus passages, or when it rattled through inflamed bronchioles. He knows how it speeds up when she has fever dreams, the change in its cadence when she moves from one level of sleep to another, like a stone dropping through wet tissue paper into waiting water. Her breathing is shallow and quick in a way he’s never heard. He shuts the door behind him and crosses the room in the dark, crumbling her drawings underfoot. Standing by the side of the bed, he puts a hand on her forehead. She’s cool and clammy, like granite in spring. He tries to shake her awake, but she won’t stir. He knows this is not within the normal scope of illness. This is something to do with them, with the thing that’s strange and new about Emmeline. He fumbles his phone out of his pocket and calls Bishop, but there’s no answer. He calls Kimani’s number. She answers after four rings, long enough that he almost hangs up and calls again.

“It’s late, Avi,” Kimani says, sounding sleep-fuzzy and annoyed. “What’d you need?”

“She won’t wake up,” he hisses, trying not to be heard. “Something is wrong, and she won’t wake up.”

In the middle of the wall the room shares with Avi and Kay’s bedroom, the door appears, visible in the dark by the warm light that seeps from underneath it.

Fahima Deeb puts the kettle on and washes up in the kitchen sink. She lays out her prayer rug, deep emerald with gold cross patterns. Watching out the window as bundled pairs brave a December night in Prospect Park, Fahima hurries through the rakat on autopilot. Isha’a is more about slowing the gears of the Rube Goldberg device of her brain than communing with the divine. She likes the mechanics of it. She turns her head to the right, to the left, murmuring her As-Salaamu-Alaikums. She makes dua, palms up as if she’s about to be handed a brimming cup. Nearly inaudible in the empty apartment, she asks for the same thing she asks every night: more time. Allah, slow down the world for me. She stands. The water hasn’t come to a boil.

Clearing off the kitchen counter, she stops at an odd bit of a drawing she’d made, scribbled over with notes. Her handwriting is a scrawl, illegible even to her. She examines the drawings, trying to make sense of them. An obelisk wired to a series of thrones or electric chairs. Something to gather energy from a group of Resonants, focus it.

“Those handheld things with the blue lights guitar players use,” she mutters. “Like