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

he hasn’t opened it yet. Jokes soften the reality of it, but they also assert ownership. This pain is mine, and I will do with it what I choose. Avi wonders how he’d react if Kay did make a joke about it.

Louis leads him into the tent. The white fabric amplifies the sunlight, turning it fierce. The whole space is a slide on a microscope. An array of spotlights hangs from the corners and edges. Light from every direction. Every shadow blotted out by light from a different vector. Louis puts on dark aviators. They make him look like a G-man in the movies, broad shoulders and dark blue suit, eyes obscured.

“It’s ridiculous in here during the day,” he says. He gestures at the lights. “Techs say we can’t shut them off.”

Avi squints up at the building. What’s left of it. It looks like God came down and took a bite out of the church. Half of it clipped away. A rapture in miniature, Avi thinks. His terrible swift sword. It’s an old church, one of those Black Baptist churches where they planned rallies against Jim Crow. How many bomb threats did Salem Baptist get over the years? How many bricks through the window? How many times did they have to paint over hateful graffiti on the front doors before Sunday service? How hard and often did they fight to exist, only to have some white kid blow it up?

He approaches slowly. Destruction at this scale demands respect. It holds you in a sick sense of awe. He takes out his phone and brings up the footage, playing it back in slow motion. He holds up the screen and moves around the edge of the blast crater. He steps behind the last row of pews. When he gets to the point where the picture overlaps the reality, he stops.

“Anyone else in the press seen the footage?” he asks.

“You think I’d double deal on you?”

“The woman who shot it,” says Avi. “Was the girl her daughter?”

Louis shakes his head. “Preacher’s granddaughter. Her parents died when she was a baby.”

That’s good, Avi thinks. He’s relieved there are no grieving parents for him to think about, empathize with. He walks forward toward the blast crater. He puts his left foot in and slips. The surface is slick. Louis is there to catch him, holding him at the elbow.

“Everyone here’s gone ass over teakettle at least once on this thing,” he says. “It’s smooth as glass.”

Louis guides him along the curve to its nadir. The blast ate two feet into the ground. At the edges, techs scrape and peer. This has become familiar. Not just to Avi but to the world of viewers. A building ripped open, its guts exposed. Rebar severed and pipes idiotically leaking fluids into midair. This one is different. There are no jagged edges. Once he notices this, Avi starts to notice the other things he isn’t seeing.

“You sanitized the site?” he asks.

Louis shakes his head. “This is how we found it.”

“Where’s the debris?” says Avi. “Where’s the scorching?”

Louis shakes his head again. It’s as if someone carved a sphere out of the world. There’s a symmetry to it. A perfection. The movement of a blast aspires to this, but the real world gets in the way. The blast expands haphazardly. Nibbling here and feasting there. It’s a collection of vectors moving at different speeds, each with a life span of nanoseconds, spending themselves in a race away from their point of origin.

This is different.

“Let me say that if you have anything on this,” says Louis, “it would be a huge help to me. Because a week in and I have whatever is less than zero as regards ideas.”

“Is that why you asked me down here?” Avi asks.

“You’re good with this stuff,” says Louis. “I thought you’d pick up a vibe.”

“I’m not a hotline psychic.” Avi climbs up the other curve and lays a hand on the severed wall. Concrete, a foot thick. He traces a line from inner edge to outer. The barely detectable curve. The edge of a spheroid of lack, of void. “Tell me about the bomber.”

“Are we going right to that?” Louis asks. “Are we skipping over the tonnage of debris that doesn’t exist?”

“It’s the same kid that blew up the mall,” says Avi.

“It would appear to be,” Louis says.

“You think it’s, what?”

Louis shrugs. “Twins? I like the idea it’s twins. Gives it a real murder mystery feel.”

“It’s not twins,” Avi says.

“The boys with the facial recognition software swear it’s the same kid,” he says. “They say telling twins apart is consumer-grade shit. It’s the same kid. Owen Curry, eighteen, of Seat Pleasant, Maryland. Perfect overlap of boring and crazy. Lived with his mother, who we haven’t been able to find. Worked as a fry cook at Planet Chicken in the Ballston mall food court. Bottom third of his class in school. No girlfriend. No friends. We ID’d him from witness statements. And the footage.”

“But he didn’t have a bomb on him in the footage.”

“Certain people were willing to overlook that in favor of having a shut case.”

“You find supplies at his house?” Avi asks. “Bomb-making instructions? Anarchist’s Cookbook?”

“Nothing,” says Louis. “Makes no sense. For one thing, angry white males tend to be shooters, not bombers. Bombing’s for believers. But then also, his place is clean. No bottles, no stray wire clippings. If you’re going to blow yourself up, why clean up afterward? Leave a mess, I say. Fuck, help us out and leave a note.”

—

Sunlight from the porthole window creates a glare on the top of Avi’s screen as he watches the video from the church again. His brain picks it apart, like watching a magician do a trick to figure out how it’s done. He can’t be seeing what he’s seeing: a dead boy blowing up a church without a bomb. He tries to see something else, something that makes sense, but the reality of it persists.

There’s a banging from the hatch. Kay