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

He’s relieved it wasn’t an affair. He wants to hold on to all the blame. Even here at the end, agency has power.

“I’ll be back and forth a lot,” he says. “They’ll want me around as a media liaison.” He hasn’t talked to Bishop yet about what his role will be moving forward, but this seems likely. “I was going to take her to lunch afterward if you want to—”

“I’ve got apartments all day,” she says.

“Next time I’m in New York we can—”

“You should go meet your photographer,” Kay says. She puts her hand on his elbow, gives him a gentle shove.

“Right,” Avi says. “I hope it goes well.”

“Yes,” says Kay.

Avi steps toward her, unsure whether he’s offering a hug or a handshake. What happens is somewhere in between, a collision of bodies, arms squashed between stomachs, as clumsy as their first night together. They’re like magnets with the same polarity: pushed together by outside forces, they repel each other and stand, held apart.

The next week, Kay files divorce papers in Illinois. They never get around to signing them. It isn’t a priority, and the world changes too much for it to matter. In any way that truly counts, this is where their marriage ends.

The library of the headmaster’s quarters on the fifteenth floor had been like a home to Fahima. When she started at Bishop, she thought she was special because the headmaster had personally recruited her. She soon found out that Kevin Bishop spent most of his days away from the school, gathering new students. He had very little contact time with them after that except for occasional broadcasts into everyone’s head through the Hive, the Bishop Academy’s equivalent of a public address system. What got Bishop’s attention was her persistent and pointed questions on the nature of Resonance. Apparently most teenagers, when told they have incredible abilities and access to a globe-spanning psychic network, blithely accept that they can push the limits of what’s possible. Fahima was obsessed with figuring each ability out. She analyzed her fellow students like math problems. How could a body produce superhuman levels of energy without consuming massive amounts of fuel? If someone’s ability caused permanent physical change, was that ability constantly engaged, or did the initial manifestation result in a new base or resting state? The human body was a machine like any other, and all around her she saw late-model Chevettes racing like Ferraris. Something didn’t add up. She was angry that none of the teachers had answers for how Resonance worked or even seemed to care. Would knowing change anything? they asked. Of fucking course, Fahima shouted. After Fahima derailed Mr. Duncan’s Energy Manipulation class with a barrage of questions, he sent her to Bishop’s office, ostensibly as a punishment. Instead, it became the first of many bull sessions held weekly in that office, then among the old wood and soft leather of Bishop’s library. At some point, he started drinking martinis during their meetings, sipping as he pondered whatever paradox she brought up to the top floor with her that week. Eventually, he offered her one.

As the elevator deposits her on the top floor, Fahima hears music coming from within, the complex guitar wail of a Prince album. Bishop’s record collection tends toward classical, with a particular affection for mid-twentieth-century Russian composers, but he also has a shelf full of funk, soul, and rhythm and blues records and is a religious Prince fan. “Part of the American songbook,” he told Fahima once, “Darling Nikki” grinding away on the speakers. It’s an aspect of his charm, an effortless, unassuming cool. One of the myths of cool is that it involves not caring when it actually requires very deep caring. Bishop chooses objects and ideas precisely and loves them with devotion.

She knocks and lets herself in. Bishop is lying on the couch, reading an old comic book. On the cover, a scantily clad woman with her spine impossibly twisted fires energy bolts out of her fist at a shadowy figure.

“Is that Patrick’s new syllabus?” Fahima asks.

“Did you ever think about the fact that superheroes showed up in the culture around the same time Resonants did?” Bishop asks. “OtherMan was created seven years before I was. And then the flood of them in the sixties, when our numbers started to rocket.”

“You weren’t created,” Fahima says.

“Before I became?” Bishop says. “How do you talk about it?”

“Before I resonated,” she says.

“Well, yes,” he says. “But you had context.”

“I had you.”

“We had no idea, when it happened,” Bishop says. “It felt like being born as something completely new.”

“You’re feeling philosophical,” Fahima says.

“It’s that kind of day.”

“I brought treats,” Fahima says, holding up her bag. She sets it on the coffee table and extracts a bottle of gin, then one of dry vermouth. She takes a metal flask out of the bag. It’s wide at the base and has a thin neck, and the silvery metal surface flows like liquid. She pours in five counts of gin, then one count of vermouth. She takes the bottle by the neck and begins swirling it.

“You could be curing cancer,” Bishop says.

“Where’s the fun in that?” She pours out two glasses of ice-cold gin. “Fuck. Forgot the olives.”

“We’ll make do,” Bishop says. He picks up the drink closest to him, raises it. “I’m glad you came by.”

“Feels like a day to celebrate,” she says. “It’s been a long time coming. And it’s time we talk about what happened with the girl.”

He glances up from his drink, directly into Fahima’s eyes. He’s older than he looks. After the liberation of Europe at the end of World War II, he toured the camps. His wartime work with the Office of Scientific Research and Development earned him some favors. “I knew I had become something different,” he told Fahima. “I needed to see firsthand what people did to those who were different.” He never told her specifics. He said any telling