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

catching them as they come, as if he doesn’t already know them. The sheriff holds Avi loosely, glaring at him as a litany of murderers washes over them, broken up by Scott Lipscombe’s sobs.

—

He calls Kimani from the rental car, sitting in the parking lot of the police station. It’s started to snow, occasional flakes like glitches in his visual field. The line rings and rings until Avi’s convinced that voice mail should pick up. He’s formulating what he’ll say if it does, what phrasing he can use to impart a sense of emergency, when Kimani answers.

“I need you to get me to New York,” he says. “I’m in Wyoming, and I need to get back.”

“I’m off the clock,” she says. Her voice is flat. “Try Delta.”

“I’m missing dinner with my daughter, Kimani,” he says. “I need your help.”

“I’m not a cab, Avi,” she says.

“I’m here for you,” Avi says, losing his temper. “I came all the way out here on Patrick’s say-so, and I got a confession out of one of the Powder Basin killers. He gave up all their names. Twenty men who killed those kids and their mom. I did that. Me. Now I need you to get me back home to my daughter for Thanksgiving.” He waits, out of breath. There’s a click, and the line goes dead. Avi throws the phone at the passenger door and bangs his palms on the steering wheel as snowflakes melt into the windshield.

Alyssa eases the car around the first hairpin turn of Oceanside Way, a branch off Highway 1 just north of Ogunquit, Maine. A Leonard Cohen album blasts on the stereo, loud swirls of synthesizers and backing vocals, a wall of sound graffitied with Cohen’s baritone.

Despite the cold, the windows are down. Alyssa wants to smell the ocean.

“This is ridiculous,” Fahima says, gesturing at the massive empty houses that line the street. “Who lives like this?”

“I always wanted a beach house,” Alyssa says. “Imagine: in the fifties, everyone had beach houses. They all went up the shore in the summer.”

“A golden age for white people,” Fahima says. “A chicken in every pot, a servant in every kitchen.”

“You think the Davenports have servants?” Alyssa asks.

Fahima shakes her head. “I asked Sarah,” she says. “Servants get Thanksgiving off. Their mother teleports everything in piping hot from Dovetail down in the city. Walks out the door onto 77th, then pop, here on the beach.”

“Have we eaten there?” asks Alyssa.

Fahima laughs. “It’d cost us a month’s rent.”

The house where Patrick and Sarah grew up is set into a natural levee so that the first floor opens out on the shore side and the upper three look out onto the ocean. A salt breeze smacks Fahima and Alyssa as they round the corner of the house. Standing in the doorway to greet them, Mrs. Davenport looks like a senator’s wife from a seventies political thriller, down to the string of gob-stopper pearls around her neck. She smiles, and Fahima feels a ping in her brain. Mrs. Davenport reaches through the Hive to check Fahima’s bona fides. Her smile goes flat as she tries the same thing with Alyssa but finds nothing. A momentary lapse in decorum, but she recovers quickly.

“You’re Paddy and Sarah’s friend from school,” she says, as if Fahima is in gym class with her son. “And this is your partner?”

“Alyssa,” says Fahima. Alyssa holds out her hand. Mrs. Davenport is unsure what to do with it, like she might kiss Alyssa’s knuckles. She takes it, and Alyssa gives her a firm, businesslike handshake.

“Your generation is so progressive about these things. I think it’s wonderful. And this,” she says, pinching the trim of Fahima’s hijab, rubbing it like a cloth merchant in the souk, “is beautiful.”

“This is going to be aw-ful,” Alyssa sings into Fahima’s ear as they follow Mrs. Davenport inside.

Sarah rescues them before they reach the living room, a glass of wine in her hand. She pauses when she sees Alyssa, looking momentarily confused, but then Cortex trots up behind her, brushing her leg, and her memory returns. She hugs both of them: long, genuine embraces that give Mrs. Davenport time to make an exit.

Fahima speaks into her ear, teeth gritted. “You never mentioned your mother was such a—”

“Total bigot,” says Sarah. “Was it the Muslim thing, the lesbian thing, or the interdating thing? You guys are a three-fer. I forgot how terrible everyone I grew up around is.” She hugs them both again. “I am so glad you’re here.”

Here turns out not to be the small family dinner Fahima expected but a gathering of a dozen wealthy, aging white Resonants. Fahima has trouble telling the guests apart, so she gives them little nicknames. Old Teddy Roosevelt. Captain Walrus Stache and his wife, Weird Neck Thing. Steel Hair. Oceanside Way is an enclave, a testament to what you can do with money. Everyone on this three-block stretch of beachfront is a Resonant and also rich. Oceanside’s residents think about the world in abstract terms because they don’t have to live in it. They’ve built their own world, a bubble of comfort where concerns about civil rights and the responsibility that comes with Resonance are topics for light conversation and not much more. Fahima met a few Muslims like this when she was a student at MIT. There was always an alum made good, some slick ‘am looking to adopt a promising Muslim student as his mentee. They invited her to the Back Bay brownstones and showed off their wives, silk-clad ‘ammes who thought of themselves like any other American wives and didn’t understand what everyone else was so worried about.

Seeing Sarah in this element recalls certain things about her that Fahima sometimes forgets. That she is funny, that she is rebellious in the bored way of people who’ve had to deal with mildly terrible things all their lives. When her mother starts to make a statement about breeding,