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

“You’ve been fighting it,” says Fahima. “A war inside yourself that you’re not winning and you’re not losing. Détente.”

“For the moment,” he says, tapping a pen on one of the pages. Fahima nods and points to the monitor screen.

“Look at this,” she says. “You know what that little glowworm is?”

“My Resonance,” Bishop says. He has an annoying habit of saying Resonance as if it’s a holy word.

“Your parahippocampal gyrus,” Fahima says. “It’s glowing because it’s active. Your ability is actively engaged.”

“Always,” says Bishop.

“Fighting the cancer,” she says. “Maintaining détente. Let me show you something else.” She types in a command, and the screen splits, the image twinned almost. “This is your EEG scan six months ago. Last time you let me give you a physical. Look at your little glowworm back then.”

“Bigger,” he says. He leans in to confirm. “I’m burning out.”

“You are engaging your ability constantly,” Fahima says. “I’ve never seen anyone do that. The toll it must be taking.”

“I’m not tired, Fahima,” he says. The pen seesaws back and forth in his hand, quicker and quicker, slapping at the paper.

“Kevin, do you sleep?” The familiarity of his first name sounds strange to her. But if she can’t be informal telling him he’s dying, when can she?

“In my way,” he says.

She puts her hand over his, stilling it. “You’re burning out.” He looks up at her. She forgets sometimes how old he is, because he doesn’t wear all of his years on his face. But they’re in his eyes, years of hiding and fighting. Horrible actions taken for the right reasons. A ledger of his dead.

“How fast?” he asks.

She looks at the screen as if the answer is written there, but it’s only an excuse not to meet his eyes. “I’d be estimating,” she says.

“Estimate.”

Fahima sighs. She closes her eyes, tugs at the edge of her hijab. “You’ve lost a quarter of the mass of your gyrus in the last six months.”

“So eighteen more months.”

“Assuming a constant rate of decay.”

“More likely?” he asks.

“No way of knowing,” she lies. “Maybe weak cells burn off faster. Maybe it’ll speed up.”

“You’d say a year.”

There it is, the truth she’s been tap-dancing around. “A year, yes,” she says.

“And then what happens?”

She takes the capped marker, traces an imaginary circle around the glowing spot on the screen. “This region is classically associated with memory encoding,” she says. “You’ll be unable to form new memories.”

“But I keep my old ones?”

“You won’t be able to access them,” Fahima says. “It won’t be dissimilar to Sarah’s condition, but you won’t have a mechanism like Cortex to compensate. We’re talking endgame stuff, though. Severe late-stage atrophy.”

“What about the early stages?”

“You’ll start missing social cues,” Fahima says. “You won’t be able to detect sarcasm.”

“That might make our conversations difficult,” he says, grinning.

“Asymmetrical atrophy of the parahippocampal gyrus is associated with schizophrenia, and stop fucking around about this, Bishop,” she snaps.

“I’m listening,” he says calmly.

“You’ll be dead.”

“Yes,” Bishop says.

“When you lose enough mass in the gyrus,” Fahima says, returning her attention to the screen, “and we don’t know how much that is, you’ll lose your ability. You won’t be able to wage this constant cellular war on your cancer, and it will advance. Rapidly. And you will be dead.”

“Within a year,” says Bishop.

“Yes,” Fahima says.

They stare at each other in silence.

“You know what my mother used to tell me?” Fahima asks.

“What’s that?”

“She said it was important to find something only you could do,” she says. “You and no one else. And then do it.”

“I’ve had a school to run,” he says.

“Anyone could run this school,” Fahima says. “Sarah’s been basically running it since Public Day.”

“What about you?”

“I barely want to teach here.”

“Sarah can run the academy,” says Bishop. She can’t tell if he’s trying to convince her or himself that this is true. “A year?” he asks.

“Maybe less,” says Fahima.

He nods grimly, but the EEG helmet makes him look silly, a bobblehead doll.

“Then I have things to do.”

When Avi was on embeds, Kay would hold the phone so Emmeline could see her dad on the other side of the planet. Like most kids who grew up this way, at ten years old Emmeline has a knack for framing her shot: her phone is propped up against something stable, negative space on either side of her. Avi holds his too close. The thumbnail in the corner is all nostrils and white teeth.

“They have your book in the library,” she says. “They have lots.”

“I donated my author copies,” he says.

“Then nobody will buy them and you won’t make any money,” Emmeline says.

“I’ll be okay.” Emmeline’s eyes dart back and forth, watching other kids, communicating like bees as they pass. Her eyebrows send silent hellos. She taps her watchless wrist to indicate later. She twitches her head at the screen to say sorry, I have to finish this thing.

“I should let you go,” says Avi.

“No, it’s okay,” she says. “I have a couple minutes before class.”

“I’ve got to do this taping,” he says. “It’s going to take them a while to make me pretty.”

“You’re a TV star!” she says, throwing her arms in the air the way she did when she was little. “I’m going to stay up and watch. Some of the older kids said they’ll have it on in the common room.”

“You don’t have to stay up,” he says. “You know what I look like.”

“But you’re going to be pretty,” she says, then giggles. Out of frame, a kid says something to her, drawing her full attention. “Dad, I’ve got to go. Love you, okay?”

“Love you,” he says. Her image freezes, disappears. Avi pockets his phone and steps out of the green room into the NightTalk studio, where cameras, teleprompters, and lighting fixtures are being readied. Lakshmi goes over script notes with one of the show’s writers. She’s an NPR darling graduated to network. He’s interviewed with her a half dozen times, all for radio. She reminds