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

day. It was 2003, and people were wary of Muslims tinkering in sheds and garages and basements. Regardless of who made the call, Homeland Security agents, bulletproof vests over their dark blue suits, broke down the Deebs’ door one night in April as the family rolled up their prayer rugs after Maghrib. The smell of cumin was thick in the air from the pot of fuul her mother had on the stove all day. The men dragged her uncle out the front door; his heels left trenches in the living room carpet. In the morning, her mother pitched the contents of the pot out the back door into the yard, killing a patch of grass the shape of a tulip blossom.

Her parents met with a Yemeni lawyer from the suburbs. Muslims had developed a cross-national immune system for random and senseless arrests. An envelope of cash appeared in the mailbox: donations collected at an Iranian mosque on the north side. Egyptians and Turks and Pakistanis Fahima had never met showed up on the doorstep with Tupperware containers full of food. Every ‘amme on the block had a theory about who had sold Muhair out, although no two agreed. They drank endless pots of tea with her mother while Fahima finished homework in the living room, convinced that the women could read the guilt on her like the tea leaves in the bottom of their cups.

Not long after the machine dreams started, Fahima began to hear the appliances around the house and at the market. They weren’t precisely talking, but she could sense feelings coming off them along with their radiant heat. The industrial mixer that blended the lamb, egg, and spices pined to be used each Saturday morning when Fahima and her mother arrived. The aging fridge understood that there was no rest coming for it and wanted only to die. In the days after her uncle’s arrest, a voice rose out of the soft clamor of the house. It was the desktop computer in her father’s office, which he used to keep the stand’s accounts and e-mail family members in Beirut. It called to Fahima. It said it could help.

Her parents off with the lawyer again, Fahima sat at the computer in the empty house. It didn’t tell her what to do, but it guided her hand like the planchette of a Ouija board. First to the public website for Homeland Security and then, through a series of log-ins, deep into the site’s working guts. From within, you could access everything. The computer urged her toward her uncle’s name. Fahima marked Muhair Deeb as FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE.

In their flirting days, Fahima told Alyssa a version of the story that left out the machine voices and painted Fahima as a gifted inventor and hacker. “It was poor timing,” Fahima told her. “By 2006, everyone at Homeland was so bored, they would have let something like that slip. Paperwork says let him go, let him go. But it was 2003, and they all had raging hard-ons to fuck brown people.”

Homeland caught the change in Muhair Deeb’s status and called in the FBI to investigate the hack. They traced the IP address to Fahima’s father’s computer. As soon as the Deebs heard the knock, interrupting dinner this time, Fahima knew what it was.

“Baba, I made a mistake,” she said too softly to be heard as the newly replaced door came down. The men, this time in black suits, grabbed her father out of his chair. Fahima screamed, “It was me! It was me!” Her mother, worried that the FBI would believe her, held Fahima around the waist with one arm and clamped the other hand over her mouth.

With the second arrest, the outpouring of community support ceased. It was impossible that the government had erred twice was the consensus. Even if it had been a mistake, the family was bad luck, likely to be catching. The Deebs, now only Fahima and her mother, were ostracized. With the house empty and the kebab stand without customers, the machine voices got louder. Fahima’s ability to filter them diminished. She broke down in the lunch line at school, yelling at the soda machine to leave her alone. The ambulance came directly to the school, and Fahima was paraded into the back of it in front of her classmates by paramedics who held her by the arms. The scene resembled the one she’d seen twice before, and Fahima felt a moment of kinship with her father and uncle. Prisoners, all three.

At the hospital, medical devices were a cacophony in Fahima’s head. They existed in a constant state of panic, their beeps and bells external signs that these monitors and defibrillators and imagers were undergoing a barrage of people’s pain. In oncology, two floors above the psychiatric ward where Fahima was housed, a husband flatlined. His wife picked up the heart monitor and threw it on the ground, kicking at it in a blind rage as nurses tried to resuscitate him. Fahima felt each blow as if it were delivered onto her own body. She cowered on the floor while upstairs the new widow savaged the hapless piece of equipment.

Fahima was sent to Lakeview, an institution in central New York. She was catatonic by then. Lakeview was the best her mother could afford, which blessedly meant it hadn’t been able to purchase technology since the late 1980s. In the quiet, Fahima’s mind began to heal. It was three years before her thoughts felt coherent again, before she could keep all voices but her own out of her head.

While she was unresponsive, the orderlies had taken her hijab. She asked Ms. Gudrun, the facility’s director of youth therapy, if she could have it back, and Ms. Gudrun told her the other patients found it “strange and upsetting.” The next day in the common room, when one of her fellow patients switched the television to an evangelist station at defeaning volume, Fahima shrieked, “Turn it off!”

“Ms. Deeb, there’s no