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

to show that the girl with the earring is gone. Everything that had been there is gone. The camera clatters to the floor. The screen goes black. In the dark, people scream.

Avi watches the footage nine more times. He pauses the screen on the whiteout and calls Louis.

“What did I see?” he asks.

“Did you watch both?”

“I’m watching the mall,” Avi says. “There’s no blast.”

Louis chuckles. It’s a grim sound. Louis took a job with Homeland after three tours with army infantry and a year as a military press liaison. When Avi met him, he was the kind of guy who’d get drunk and brag about the shit he’d seen. Now when he has too much, he gets a deep blank stare as if something in him has shorted out.

“Watch the other footage,” he says. “I’ll wait.”

Avi clamps the phone between his ear and his shoulder and clicks on the other file. The one he was avoiding. It’s similar. Shaky cell phone footage. The nave of Salem Baptist, shot from the back. A little girl zigzags through the pews in the methodical way small children play. The camera follows her. She has short hair in cornrows, and she’s younger than Emmeline. Avi doesn’t conflate the two girls. He doesn’t put Emmeline in the picture. A boy, white, walks up the center aisle. The preacher, elderly, black, is at the pulpit. He’s wearing reading glasses. Leaning in close, so he doesn’t see the kid coming toward him. The preacher’s name is Marshall Baldwin. Kay’s mother talks about him even though she goes to First Corinthians. Baldwin was the pastor at Salem Baptist thirty-some years. Served on the Roseland city council. Started the community’s meals on wheels program, along with a garden beautification initiative. Avi has read about the bombing, about Pastor Baldwin. In every article, he skims over the name of the girl, refusing to let it into his head.

The audio on this file is better. Avi can hear the boy talking, but he’s facing away from the camera and Avi can’t make out what he’s saying. Pastor Baldwin looks up. “You can’t be in here, son,” he says. Interviewed afterward, parishioners at Salem Baptist remarked on the deep basso of his voice, the way it resonated through the church, shook something in them. The boy continues his approach. “Miss Henderson,” the preacher says. “Call the police.” The boy turns to the camera. “Don’t bother,” he says. His voice is flat, emotionless. Then the flash. Again, white.

Avi scans back a couple of frames. The moment before the flash. A clear shot of the boy. Dirty blond hair. Eyes sunk into a hatchet face. Tan polo shirt.

“Jesus,” says Avi.

“You want to see the scene?” Louis asks. “I can send a car over.”

“I can drive myself,” Avi says.

“Meet me there in an hour,” says Louis.

—

Reporting on bombings is a low art among journalists. Information is tightly controlled. Reporters are left to paraphrase press releases. Avi has a gift for rendering these incidents in a way that can affect an audience that’s numb to them. His old editor at the Trib called him the poet of the detonator.

Avi’s obsession goes back to the first American bomb. Home sick from school, he watched coverage of the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. There was no live feed, no footage of it happening. Only aftermath, the Federal Building sundered. Its face torn away revealed the rough structure beneath. Avi followed the investigation in the Trib and on the nightly news. He stared at pictures of the bombers, who looked like guys he went to school with. He read the descriptions of their grievances, their plans. He read stories of the victims, the survivors, their families. He read up on the bomb itself, cobbled together out of stolen blasting caps, fertilizer, and racing fuel. The bomb compressed the past of its builders and the futures of its victims into a point. Everything led up to it, and everything emerged from it.

Through college and grad school, bombs haunted Avi’s dreams. It was a good time in America to dream about bombs. Old guard reporters were cold war kids. Their nightmare bombs were nuclear and bloodless. They imagined vaporization. An aftermath of ashes. Crowds reduced to a pile of powder. They were unprepared for broken bodies. Pieces of limbs without identifiable owners. They thought in terms of blown away rather than blown apart. A nuclear bomb was an end to all things. America had failed to dream about a bomb someone could survive. Worrying about smashed atoms, they forgot about fertilizer and racing fuel.

Avi got his first embed in 2003, a year before he met Kay. It was where he met Louis, whose company he was stuck with for two months. Avi was in the market in Kandahar when some idiot blew himself up. He spotted the bomber before it happened. People at the market meandered or darted. Buyers moved slowly, sellers dashed. The bomber plodded, unrushed but deliberate. Avi saw him open his jacket to reveal the bomb. Ethylene glycol dinitrate, a clear liquid. It registered for Avi as a belt made of water bottles around the man’s waist as the bomber raised his cell phone like a tourist taking one last selfie in the souk. Avi was far enough away from the blast to remain standing and unscathed, mentally recording people’s frenzied reactions. He saw the smoke within the blast radius settle and the destruction it revealed. He saw the chaos around it, people frantic to get away from an event that was already over. Surrounded by panic, Avi was a calm eye.

The Washington Post picked up the piece he wrote. It won the kinds of awards that were being given to well-written war journalism at the start of things. Other assignments and embed offers came in. Sudan. Aleppo. When he started dating Kay, trips to war zones were part of the rhythm of their relationship. If anything, it sped things along. Avi was away so often, it