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

him of Kay, the way she carries herself like she’s walking against a strong wind.

“Where’s the beast?” Avi asks, scanning the set.

“He brings his own makeup team,” Lakshmi says. “He says our people make him look ‘unmasculine.’ Which, by the way, is not a word.”

“Bringing your own makeup team is supermasculine,” Avi says.

“You know how it is with these guys,” says Lakshmi “If you want to know what turns them on, look at what they’re most afraid of. Look at what they claim to hate.”

“Why have him on the show?”

Lakshmi shrugs as if they both know the answer. “You talk to your kid?”

“I talked at her,” Avi says. “She’s busy with friends.”

“I was a boarding school kid at that age,” says Lakshmi. “Other kids are your whole world for the first couple years. It passes. She’ll come back. It’s good she has friends.”

Avi nods as the makeup people beset him. This is what they wanted for Emmeline, the thing she never had at her school in Chicago. They assumed it was the mixed-race thing, but now Avi thinks the kids there intuited something different about Emmeline. They pushed her to the margins. He loves watching her relax into her new world at the academy even if it means she’s moving away from him. Some days he wants to call Kay up and talk about it. Some days he brings up her name in his contacts before thinking better of it.

A door bangs open, and Jefferson Hargrave enters, yelling at a hapless lackey. He travels with an entourage, this lone wolf, this voice of the common man. He’s a bloated sack of wind whose rise to media prominence has run parallel to Avi’s. Or, better put, they’ve been entwined. Parallelism implies that their paths have never intersected, which is sadly not true.

Lakshmi comes up behind Avi, puts both hands on his shoulders. “You smell brimstone?” she whispers.

—

The taping hasn’t started, and Avi is perspiring under the lights. Someone dabs his forehead with a cloth. New droplets form. Jefferson Hargrave sits across from him, sweating like Nixon. The stage manager calls for quiet and counts them in. Lakshmi throws Avi one last eye roll before she dons a mask of professional neutrality.

“Good evening and welcome to NightTalk. I’m your host, Lakshmi Rameswaram,” she says. Her voice carries the sweet tonal quality of her NPR past. A Resonance, Avi thinks. It’s hard to make that word nonspecific in his vocabulary. A word he hardly ever used creeps into his speech all the time, like trying not to think of a polar bear. Resonance. Ability. The words are weighted. They’re scared out of their common meaning, permanently capitalized.

“With me tonight are two leading experts on Resonants. Avi Hirsch, author of The Coming Race: Resonants and Their Place in the World. Avi, nice to see you again.”

“It’s great to be here, Lakshmi,” Avi says.

“And also with us, host of The Monster Report on the Kindred Network, Jefferson Hargrave. Jefferson, thank you for joining us.”

“Thank you, my dear,” he says in the smarmy southwestern accent he adopted after he graduated Yale Business and moved out to the desert to live deliberately, or whatever half-ass Thoreau quote he took as his mantra. “I’m proud to be here to defend the rights of normal humans to live free of fears of violence and predation by these creatures who, for the moment, walk freely on our streets.”

“Jesus, Jefferson, are we not even going to get to the questions before you start?” says Avi.

“Mr. Hirsch, I think the company you keep has impaired your ability to keep a civil tongue,” says Jefferson.

“You want to talk civility?” Avi says, “Last week you called for Resonants to be forcibly sterilized.”

“I don’t see any way around it,” Jefferson says. “We already have an indeterminate number of dangerous individuals—”

“You can’t label all of them as dangerous.”

“I certainly can,” Jefferson says. “Just the other day I read a report about a veritable massacre out in Damascus, Ohio. Three dozen God-fearing Americans brutally—”

“How many Resonants were killed in hate crimes last year?” Avi asks.

“I object to the term hate crime.”

“They hung a kid from a lamppost in Pittsburgh last night,” Avi says. “In Wyoming, Samuel Guthridge and his mother and two little sisters and little brother were lynched by the very people Sam had saved from—”

“There’s no evidence—”

“There’s a confession!”

“From a man on trial for killing his own son.”

“They killed little kids,” Avi shouts. “They killed them because they thought maybe the kids were Resonants. Maybe. By definition, it’s a hate crime.”

“The police ruled it an electrical fire,” Hargrave says. “And you’re being hysterical. Now what I’m talking about, these people in Damascus were torn up. Pieces missing like they were attacked by animals. A man with a hole on the inside of his head. Wounds cut as smooth as glass.” The phrase triggers a thought Avi doesn’t have time to fully form. “Do they mean less because they don’t have wings or scales? Because they’re not special?”

“Resonants have never claimed to be special. They—”

“They don’t have to claim it,” says Hargrave. “They brag about their inhumanity and then cry when they get hurt.”

“The Guthridges didn’t cry, they bled,” Avi says.

“What color?”

The question shocks both of them into silence for a beat.

“Mr. Hargrave,” says Lakshmi. He waves her off.

“I’ve never seen one of them bleed,” he says to Avi. “I’m curious what color it was.”

“Mr. Hargrave,” says Lakshmi, “I’m wondering how you respond to accusations—”

“I am happy to hear they can bleed.” He leans back in his chair. He looks like a sated tick, bloated and ruddy-faced.

“About accusations that your program incites racial violence against—”

“See, there you go with race, dear,” Hargrave says, turning back to her, all smiles and gentility. “I love black people. I love brown people. People. The introduction of these individuals into our midst has done wonders healing the divide between the actual races.”

“In referring to Resonants as a race,” she says, “I’m respecting their stated self-definition as such.”

“That’s very respectful