by Bob Proehl
Carrie feels the anger that flashed at the woman in the café, but unfocused. Something in her wants to jump off the bus, to get herself away from these people. She tells herself it’s shame. At Bishop they talked like they were morally evolved. They saw enough oppression and rejected it outright. It took work to put hurt aside. The last seven years had shown Resonants willing to recycle old scripts, roles reversed, lines read more emphatically this time, delivered with the vitriol that comes from knowing the feel of the boot heel on your neck.
“It isn’t natural,” Bryce said to her once. “All the shit we’ve done to regular people and we’re okay with it? How do you have it done to you and then you turn around and do the same shit back? Something in us got twisted up. Something went rotten.”
Carrie puts her earbuds in. She spins the click wheel on her ancient iPod, searching for something calming or distracting. She starts a Joanna Newsom album, but the waterfalls of harp make her edgy and impatient. With nothing but dead air in her ears, she sticks her nose into the bag of churros, inhaling the deep earthy smell of cinnamon. The bag is Swiss-cheesed with transparent spots of grease. She watches the city change as the bus moves uptown. They’re renovating the university. Obsidianists cover red brick with dull black glass. Makers coax it up from the ground, gnarly and branching like coral. Shapers work in teams of two, melting it down into balls and flattening it into sheets. A lot of Pulsers turned out to be obsidianists, an ability that didn’t exist before the Pulse. It’s a point of pride, a retort to older Resonants who say that Pulsers aren’t real Resonants. We even discriminate among ourselves, Carrie thinks. The black glass is a symbol of progress, of possibility in the new world. Carrie can’t stand the sight of it here or in the Hive, where it pops up in formations like scrub grass, some as tall as she is. Everyone she knows stays out of the Hive. Everyone she likes, at least. The people who spend time there have something different about them. A mean edge.
Carrie gets off at Hyde Park. The school isn’t far from the university, a beat-up brick building at Cottage Grove and 55th. The Bishop Foundation took over the schools in Chicago after the first Bishop school, the megachurch on North Avenue, was repurposed as a training academy for the Black Rose Faction. This one is unique among all the schools in the city. The Unity School is the only integrated high school left in America. Carrie scans the temporary security card Bryce gave her and enters. It’s before first period, and kids loiter in the halls. A handful are visibly Resonant; Carrie sees a girl with a row of four bright blue eyes and a boy whose body is a rapidly spinning sandstorm below the neck. With many, there’s no way to tell. They interact as equals. She assumes the normal striations of high school social life are at work, with kids glomming on to their own kind, but the groups seem to be mixed. It doesn’t prove her cynicism unfounded, but it impresses her. Maybe kindness and tolerance increase from one generation to the next. There may be hope even if that hope excludes Carrie, who’s fought so hard for it.
“You’re late,” Bryce says as he emerges from the principal’s office.
“I brought churros,” she says.
Bryce grabs one from the bag. “You get these around here?” he asks, knowing exactly where she got them.
“A place,” says Carrie.
“Uh huh,” Bryce says. He hugs her, his skin rasping against her cheek. Carrie thinks of her closest friends as a star inscribed in a pentagon: five points connected by ten lines. The time in Topaz Lake bonds Carrie, Hayden, Miquel, and Bryce, leaving Waylon on the outside, constantly aware that he dodged captivity. In the months that followed, her friends dropped away one by one: Miquel left behind when they escaped, Bryce returning to Chicago instead of fighting with them to attack the camps, Hayden going back to normal life after they finally returned to liberate Topaz. The thrum of pride and shame over everything they did is strongest between Carrie and Hayden, but she feels it with Bryce, too. A signal passed back and forth, an undersong to every word and gesture that says You’re okay. We made it, and all of that is over, and you’re okay.
“You’re going to shadow me for the day,” he says.
“Is that supposed to be a joke?”
“Was it funny?” he says. “Come on. I’ll give you the tour.”
There isn’t much to tour. There’s nothing novel or revolutionary about the place itself. It feels prewar, the way Carrie remembers the school she went to before Bishop. What’s remarkable about the Unity School is how unremarkable the students seem.
“They wanted to call it the Kevin Bishop Unity School,” Bryce explains as they walk the halls. “But I wasn’t having it. I mean, yes, the man was a saint or what all. But if Kevin Bishop wanted a unity school, he could’ve built one. You can talk about protecting us from them or teaching us to protect ourselves. But at the end of the day, you have to look at the fact that we went to a segregationist school.”
“That’s an interesting way of looking at it,” Carrie says.
One of the female teachers coos “Good morning, Principal Thomas,” batting her eyelashes before fixing Carrie with a back-off glare. It’s all Carrie can do to keep from laughing. When Bryce started out at Bishop, a towering sixteen-year-old, he was the hottest commodity in the school’s sexual economy. Girls were shattered when he came out. It’s funny how within a school patterns repeat infinitely, the same dramas played out forever and always for the first time.
“What we’re doing here is something completely different. Completely new,” Bryce says. “We’re saying to these kids, be kids. Don’t be baseliner kids, don’t be Resonant kids. Be kids.”
“How is this not an all lives matter thing?”
“Because we got ours,” Bryce says. “That all lives matter I don’t see color noise was white people asking people to get over stuff that wasn’t over.” There’s a hesitation in his voice every place he wants to use the word shit, a tiny hitch as he searches for something G-rated. “This is us, and we won the war. Now we decide who we’re going to be. If we choose to be like them, the whole thing repeats. We stay locked in this forever, hating on and beating the stuffing out of each other until there’s nobody left.”
“Sign me up for the newsletter,” she says. “Put me down for a donation. Why am I here?”
“I’m offering you a job,” says Bryce.
“I have a job,” she says. “I work for your husband.”
Bryce leans in as a passel of students runs by. “I want to offer you a job where you don’t have to carry a knife,” he says.
Carrie’s hand moves reflexively to the small of her back, finding the bone handle of the knife holstered there.
“You think I’d come into a high school unarmed?” she says with a forced grin.
“Waylon told me what happened in Vegas,” Bryce says.
“I haven’t even told him what happened,” says Carrie.
“He knew the minute you got back into town,” Bryce says. “He said you were freaked out. Said he could’ve seen you from the air.”
“He’s being a drama queen,” Carrie says. Her reports on her sorties to the Wastes usually amount to I’m back, aren’t I? Three days’ drive from Vegas hadn’t dulled the buzz of adrenaline in her blood. She hadn’t talked to Jonathan about it because that would be outside the boundaries of their arrangement. Miquel would make too much of it, more than Waylon apparently had. She wishes she could talk to Hayden about it. Hayden would see the joke in it.
“We worry about you,” Bryce says. Carrie never gets tired of Bryce or Waylon referring to their couplehood as we.
“Don’t,” says Carrie, but it sounds unconvincing even to herself. She won’t admit it, but she never tires of their parental concern for her either.
“You can do some good here,” he says. “I need a psychic defense teacher. You were always good at that white flame thing.”
She smirks with pride. “That’s hippie meditatio
n stuff,” she says. She’d been the top of their class in psychic defense at Bishop, which was like winning an award for most emotionally unavailable. Still, top of her class.
“Come on part-time,” Bryce says. “As a mentor.”
“I am terrible with kids,” Carrie says.
“Spend the day and think about it,” he says.
Carrie wraps her arm around his waist. It barely half circles him. “I am going to spend the day here because my friend has built something amazing and I want to see it,” she says. “But that’s all. Understand?”
“Yes, ma’am,” says Bryce.
“Don’t say that,” Carrie says. “It makes me feel old.”
A girl flies down the hall, fists forward like a cartoon superhero. A small boy rides on her back, whooping with joy.
“Look around,” Bryce says. “We’re ancient.”
* * *
—
Happy hour at Vibration is slow, and Waylon’s behind the bar, prepping for Jonathan to come on later. Electrics who spend the night sitting on conductive chairs generating clean power for the city work their way through the happy hour special. They smell like ozone and sweat. A quartet of off-duty bus drivers sits in a corner booth with two stringers from the Trib. Voiders, fat on the trash they consume, toast call girls and rent boys who need a solid buzz before they hit the streets for the evening.
“He’s been asking about you,” Waylon says before Carrie can sit down.
“What did you say?”
“I said you were late,” says Waylon. “That you’d be here when you could.”
“You want a churro?” Carrie asks. “They’re cold.”
Waylon reaches across the bar, then draws his hand back and rests it on his burgeoning gut. He hasn’t been idle, but he’s grown soft. He’s the man in the chair, the spider who can wait on prey. Waylon’s earned the right to get thick in the middle, and Carrie’s happy he’s content. He sleeps assured he’s doing enough good, unhaunted by anything outside of his sphere. He hands her back the bag unopened. “Go see your man.”
Carrie heads for the kitchen, where Carlton is doing dinner prep. Unlit joint hanging out of the corner of his mouth, he takes a potato out of the burlap sack, tosses it into the air, and juliennes it with the bright red monofilaments that extend from his fingertips. The slices fall into a ten-gallon bucket with a wet thud. Carrie lets herself into the walk-in cooler, pulling the door tightly shut behind her so Carlton won’t scream at her on the way out. She pushes aside a cart of lemons and limes Waylon gets from a thermic farmer in eastern Ohio, then pushes the back wall till it clicks and pops open, revealing the stairs to the basement. Carrie takes a deep breath before she descends. She tries to scrub all thoughts of Jonathan out of her head. She imagines her mind is a cool white flame.
At the bottom, everything glows green. Inhibitor tech has been illegal since the Armistice. Practically all the extant machines were turned over and destroyed. The lights are such a heavy electrical draw, Carrie couldn’t get away with setting one up in the apartment. It would be a red flag on the city power grid, like when cops used to find meth labs because of microwave ovens. The club has excuses for massive electrical draw. Waylon hired contractors he trusted to build the room. It’s got a twin bed, a two-range stove, and a makeshift inhibitor made from plans they found online. Carrie offers to bring pictures and posters, single-purpose kitchen gadgets. Miquel insists he has everything he needs.
The buzz of the lights makes Carrie feel like her transgressions are written on her skin. Miquel huddles under a blanket, watching a black-and-white movie. He has an infinite supply, from classics to trash, and watches them constantly, reveling in the emotional responses they evoke. He keeps journals of the synesthetic effects of each one. Carrie reads them while he sleeps: “Casablanca: cool crimson cube with pocks on the surface like old concrete. Harold and Maude: cat with thick brown fur, sleeping. The Matrix: spikes of yellow and blue.”
He turns to Carrie as she comes in, smiling although his face is wet with tears. On the screen, Montgomery Clift clutches Elizabeth Taylor like a life preserver. Miquel takes two fingers and wipes his eye. He holds them up like he’s pledging an oath, fingertips shiny in the dull green light of the inhibitor.
“Look,” he says. “All mine.”
She hunkers down, holds his sleeved wrist lightly, and kisses the tears. He winces as her lips touch him and pulls his hand back like he’s been burned. The inhibitor does a decent job, but when he touches someone skin to skin, their emotions blare at him like a trumpet. Miquel got broken at Topaz Lake. It took weeks for his ability to function, and when it did, it was like a thousand radios tuned to different stations with the volume cranked. A lot of people exposed to the inhibitors long-term had trouble afterward. There were discussion groups in the Hive, real life-support groups in church basements all over the city. Most people got better within the first year. Miquel didn’t. The inhibitor didn’t shut him off, which would have been easier. Carrie hoped recovery was something they could do together. They had scars coming out of the war, but taking care of Miquel was the priority; anything she might have shared would burden him. If he got better, he’d know what was going on with her. If he wasn’t broken, she wouldn’t have to say.
“I brought you churros,” she says.
“From La Catrina?” he asks. “That sounds amazing.” The first time she brought them, he asked where they came from. Carrie lied about making a run down to Pilsen to deliver crates of fresh produce. She added details about scurvy outbreaks, embellishing until the lie was improbably ornate. Miquel said they were great and encouraged her to pick up more whenever she could. She was sure he knew and was giving her his blessing. Every time she brings them, his gratitude stings.
“From Here to Eternity?” she asks, pointing at the screen.
“A Place in the Sun,” says Miquel. “Eternity is Clift and Donna Reed.”
“But it’s sad,” Carrie says, sitting next to him. She takes one of the cold churros from the bag.
“Movie sad is good,” he says. “Movie sad is dark blue, but soft like fabric.”
“What’s real sad?” Carrie asks.
“Same color,” Miquel says through a mouthful of churro. “Slick like a raincoat.”
He leans into her. The blanket forms a border between them, and she kisses Miquel’s shoulder through it.
“Every time you leave me for a minute, it’s like goodbye,” he says. “I like to believe it means you can’t live without me.”
The words startle her. It’s rare that he talks about emotions as analogous to other emotions, the way a normal person would. She smiles sadly. “I always come back,” she says.
“It’s from the movie,” says Miquel, pointing at the screen. “Taylor says it to Clift near the end.”
“I can’t live without you,” she says. She trails her fingers near his cheek, not touching. She imagines they brush his stubble, enough contact for an electrical charge to jump between them, but she’s swiping air.
After A Place in the Sun ends in a swell of violins, they watch two Marx Brothers movies. Carrie sits on the couch, and Miquel sits on the floor at her feet. He makes them a salad with vegetables he grabbed out of the walk-in cooler. “Don’t tell Carlton,” he says, winking. She knows he goes upstairs sometimes. Waylon finds Miquel in the club chatting with strangers. Miquel swears he can manage it in short bursts, but he sounds like an alcoholic saying one drink won’t be the end of the world. He binges on emotions. He looks in from the outside, and before he knows it, he can’t differentiate other people’s feelings from his own. He’s inhabited by them, experiencing them without the coping mechanisms people build for themselves. Someone’s decade-old grief at the loss of their father hits Miquel as if he’s just gotten the call from the hospital. A buried grudge against a friend erupts as fighting rage. Once, he convinced Carrie he coul
d handle a “date.” Carrie got dressed up and met him at the bar. Two drinks in, it was going well. It felt normal. While Carrie was in the ladies’ room Miquel followed another woman out of the bar with her boyfriend. “But I love her,” Miquel told Waylon, joyful tears welling in his eyes as Waylon dragged him back into the club past a stunned and confused Carrie. Carrie didn’t visit for a few days after that.
While Carrie washes the dishes, he recites lines back at the screen.
He says, “I’ve had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn’t it.”
He says, “You canna fool a me. There ain’t no sanity clause.”
She imagines versions of them in black and white, speaking in movie quotes. She’d be bumbling Cary Grant to his cool Hepburn. He’d be Bacall to her Bogie. He’s more fluent, quicker on the draw. She’d be Margaret Dumont to his Groucho Marx.
Carrie nods off halfway through A Day at the Races, and Miquel shakes her awake.
“Your dreams are purple liquid,” he says. “Children’s cough syrup.” His face looks stricken, and Carrie tries to remember what she was dreaming about. When her dreams seep into his head, it’s time for her to go. She puts her hands on his shoulders, leans down, and kisses the center of his chest through his shirt.
Officially, it’s the Roosevelt Island Research Facility. In four years working there, Clay Weaver has never heard anyone call it that. On his paychecks, he’s listed as “Operator, Remote Site Five.” The site numbering developed during the war centered on the Bishop Academy in Midtown as Site Zero, an origin point. Their Fort Sumter. Clay didn’t buy into the mythology of the war, but the structure of thinking about places as strategic points never left him. He can list remote sites up into the midtwenties like some fucked-up nursery rhyme: One for the Chicago school, two for LA. Three for the Houston school the feds blew away. Four is the Phoenix, lost in the collapse. Five is the island where Fahima builds traps.
