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

Her brain shifts, and she effortlessly imagines the inner workings of a device she’s only seen. A feedback circuit with a sensor and driver coils. A signal that moves something otherwise inert. Makes a dead string resonate. Connections begin to form, implication of the smaller thing upon the larger. If you could induce vibration in a string, could you induce Resonance in a baseliner?

Alyssa arrives home from her shift at the hospital in a clatter of opened locks and kicked-off boots and breaks Fahima’s reverie. She comes up behind Fahima, wraps her arms around her waist, and kisses her neck. She’s half a head shorter than Fahima, and her kisses often land there, where shoulder becomes neck.

“Working on a death ray, babe?”

Fahima smiles and leans back into Alyssa. The buzz of the idea is gone. The kettle whistles.

“Could be a freeze ray,” Fahima says. “Too early to say for sure.”

“It looks like a very awkward vibrator,” Alyssa says. “I’m going to go clean up.” She and Fahima have been dating for three years, living together for one. Alyssa believes that Fahima works for a think tank downtown, a blue-sky idea factory with a mission statement about inventing the future now. Fahima never explicitly told her this, but she’s never disabused her of it either. Alyssa doesn’t know her girlfriend dreams of machines that don’t exist. She doesn’t know Fahima can hear the kitchen appliances lovingly telling one another good night.

—

The day the FBI came to arrest Fahima Deeb’s father, there were still bootprints on the rug from the Homeland raid that took her uncle.

Fahima and her family lived on a block in a Polish neighborhood on Buffalo’s north side. A handful of Lebanese families happened to live there, drawn together the way immigrant families often were in a new place, like droplets of water on glass. Her parents and uncle co-owned a kebab stand at the Polish market, a run-down building on Broadway and Gibson that once had been the province of Polish Catholic vendors but now housed soul food diners and halal butchers along with the standard kielbasa and pierogi. Fahima worked at the stand from the time she could walk. She’d chat with the babcias who ran the bakery and called her the Angel of the Market, or with Eva, who sold ropes of hair extensions and gave Fahima a leopard print shawl that Fahima’s mother wouldn’t let her wear as a hijab. Most of her time was spent in the kitchen, shaping ground lamb into patties and laying them on broad metal sheets.

When she was ten, an idea came to her for a machine that could scoop lamb from the plastic tub and mold it into a patty. She’d been dreaming of machines for weeks. In the dreams, one piece of a mechanism floated in a field of white. Other pieces swooped in and attached themselves until they completed an elaborate apparatus. Fahima didn’t know the function of those gadgets. They faded when she woke up. She looked forward to the dreams. They were better than the others, the dreams of the big, crowded room. Those dreams felt like drowning to Fahima, who was already prone to social anxiety. But the dream of the meat machine stuck with her long enough that she drew a schematic on the classified ads while she chomped on dry Cheerios. Her uncle Muhair, who lived with them, performed a late and hasty fajr in the corner of the kitchen.

“What’re you working on, habibi?” he asked, looking over her shoulder. Fahima covered up the drawings with her hand, then moved it to show him.

“For the shop?” Fahima nodded. “You’ll put yourself out of a job!” He shook her shoulder and left her to finish. That night, after isha’a, her parents settled in front of the television, she showed Muhair the completed drawings. He was like a second father to her, sometimes kinder than her own father. He agreed to help build this dream thing of hers.

They worked on the device in the shed in the backyard. Fahima told Muhair what they needed, and Muhair acquired parts. Auto junkyards in the suburbs, mail-order catalogs, the appliance repair place down on Hertel Avenue. Anything Fahima asked for materialized and was slotted into the meat machine, which came together as it had in her dream, piece by piece.

When it was finished, it looked like a car engine with spider legs. Exactly as she’d dreamed it. This was the first of the dream machines Fahima had seen made real, and it was beautiful. More beautiful than a person could ever be. Muhair made Fahima promise not to tell anyone the device’s purpose until it made its debut at the market on Palm Sunday. It was the busiest weekend of the year, when all the babcias in the city descended on the market to buy butter lambs and crown roasts. It was the perfect moment to show off Fahima’s dynamo. The device sat in the shed for two weeks, covered by a half dozen old prayer blankets Fahima’s mother had deemed unfit for use but too dear to be thrown out. Muhair brought half the neighborhood, Lebanese and Polish alike, around to see it. He’d lift one sajjada for one group, exposing a single arachnid limb, and another for a second group, showing a complex of gears. Within the neighborhood, the meat machine was like the elephant assayed by the three blind men. People argued and speculated about its purpose, its appearance, and the likelihood it would burn the whole market down come Palm Sunday.

Maybe it was Mr. Pryzborowski, who ran the appliance repair store on Hertel and sold Muhair odd bits of wire and gear over the previous month, who called Homeland Security. Or one of the neighbors who hadn’t been invited to preview the device but watched from behind curtains as Muhair and Fahima went out to the shed day after