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

“Here on Planet Earth we say superpower,” he says. “Let’s see it.”

Carrie nods and slips down into invisibility. The visible world shimmers when she’s not part of it, as if she’s looking at everything through frosted glass. Brian stares gape-jawed at the spot where she is, the vacant space in his vision. She smiles, enjoying the voyeuristic thrill of watching his expression without being seen. She reaches across and plucks the glassie from his hand. This part requires concentration: objects close to her when she’s invisible disappear as well. Otherwise there’d be an empty set of clothes walking around whenever Carrie sank down. Focusing on the points of contact between her fingers and the glassie, she keeps it outside her field, so it floats in the air. She does the same with the lighter. Suspended in nothing, the lighter flicks twice, catches, and traces little orange circles on the pot. Carrie inhales deeply, and a second later, a plume of smoke emerges out of nowhere. Then she rises up, visible again, offering the pipe and lighter back.

“That’s fucked up,” he says.

Carrie shrugs, because yes, it is fucked up. It’s also her life.

“So how did it happen?” Brian asks. “Did you like get hit by lightning or something?”

“I think we’re born like this,” she says.

“Then how come you and not me?” says Brian. He laughs after he says it, but he stares at her, waiting intently for an answer she doesn’t have. She wishes that she could gift it to him, that Resonance was a virus she could pass or a door she could open and invite him through. But there isn’t a way, and without it, they’re on opposite sides of that door. She can show him the world where she lives now, but he can never visit, much less live there.

After the rest of the family’s gone, her mother shows her to the guest room as if Carrie doesn’t know the house anymore. Her mother kisses her on the forehead and retreats to her own room. Carrie can hear her parents through the wall. Not every word but enough. She doesn’t disagree with them. It would have been easier if she’d never come back.

Carrie goes into the Hive. Not because she wants to be there but because she doesn’t want to be here. She paces among itinerant ghosts. The Hive feels crowded, and Carrie wonders how many Resonants there are in the world. Once, in Ability Theory, Fahima said the numbers were increasing, but she never said what the numbers were. Carrie has trouble thinking of Resonants outside Bishop, working regular jobs or whatever. She wonders about the ones who don’t end up at Bishop or at the school out west. There have to be lots who say no, who stay out in the wilderness on their own. To the extent that Carrie feels like part of a community or a race, the feeling comes from Bishop rather than from a connection to something larger. Who would she be if she didn’t have that? If she’d stayed in Deerfield? Who will she be when her time at Bishop is up?

“So how bad was it?” Miquel asks, stepping out of nothing to be there in front of her.

“How did you find me?” Carrie asks. Did I call you without meaning to? she wonders. Thoughts are dangerous here. They have a way of not staying in your head where they belong.

“Just lucky,” says Miquel. He gives her a hug, and although there are no bodies to press together, it carries a physical kind of relief. “Were china plates thrown? Wineglasses shattered?”

“We’re Midwesterners,” she says. “We don’t throw plates. We quietly seethe.”

“Sounds nice,” he says. Carrie imagines Miquel’s mother, cursing him down the street.

“How’s Bishop with no one there?”

“Dead,” he says. “I walked around the neighborhood. All of Manhattan’s deserted. Now I know what it’ll be like after the end of the world.”

“Did you break into Dylan’s Candy Bar and gorge yourself?” she says.

“I walked to Central Park,” he says. “Fed the geese.”

“That’s a very old man thing to do.”

“There was an old couple on the next bench,” he says. “The geese liked them better than me, I think. They were woven together. The couple, not the geese. I couldn’t read either of them alone. It was kind of beautiful.”

“That’ll be us,” she says, then wishes she could take the words back, that the physics of the Hive would let her pluck them out of the air and stuff them in her pocket. “When we’re old and nobody else wants us,” she adds. “Feeding the geese after the end of the world.”

“I can imagine worse things,” says Miquel. He smiles at her in a way she wills herself not to think about. The underlying problem with Miquel as a friend is that he’s an empath. He reads the feelings of other people like flyers on a corkboard. And Carrie’s right in front of him most hours of the day, wanting him like a neon sign in the desert, and somehow he doesn’t see it. Or he does and has to pretend he doesn’t to keep her close but safe, to keep their friendship protected from the way she feels. She doesn’t know which it is or which would be worse.

Everyone agrees that something’s missing. The book feels like a collection of articles, and the evolving nature of the situation makes that a dicey sale.

“We need one story in there that’s timeless,” Avi’s agent says. “Something where the moment expands, the particular becomes general.”

Avi has spent the last five months looking for that story. He was chasing it at Janine Coupland’s manslaughter trial in Montana. He’d been to a warehouse in Laredo where Immigration and Customs Enforcement held a dozen Resonant women who fled Guatemala to avoid being burned as witches. He road-tripped through the South with a con man who swore he could induce Resonance in baseliners, charging hundreds for what amounted