by Bob Proehl
After the war, the Bishop Foundation poured massive resources into education. Berkeley Carroll is among the city’s best, though not by so stark a margin, and comparable options brought the price down from the stratosphere. It would have been out of their budget, but arrangements had been made. This is one of Dominic’s favorite things to get to say, offhandedly, as if the influence he’s expended is drawn from an infinite wellspring of clout. When they were dating, it was such an established Dominicism their friends adopted it to announce they’d saved seats at a movie or picked up beer on their way over. Like so many things about Dom, Clay loved it on the days he loved it and seethed at the sound of it on days when anything Dom did was too much, too him.
On the subject of Berkeley Carroll, Clay was torn. He wanted the best for Rai. He wished the best wasn’t so stereotypically bougie. Every time life required him to step into the hallowed halls of Berkeley Carroll, he worried he’d be told to use the back entrance or greeted with “What are you doing here?” He feared the day he’d commit some faux pas in front of Rai and his friends, prompting his son to hide his eyes in disgust, or explain to his chums that they mustn’t blame his father for being a bit low; he hadn’t come up with the same opportunities they had. They’re irrational fears, as Dom never gets tired of telling him, but irrational fears are the most persistent. Taking a glass of champagne off a tray, Clay would be more comfortable taking the tray, serving the elite the way he did back at his college catering job, and smoking with the cooks at the end of the shift.
A bell tinkles, and the parents file into the auditorium and take their seats. As far as he can tell, Clay’s the only one here on his own. Berkeley Carroll attracts superparents who move heaven and earth to attend parents’ nights and school plays. Not the kind who hustle their asses out of a bar to get there on time. On the stage, the boys and girls of Berkeley Carroll line up on risers, standing as still as wax figures. Rai is in the top row, tall for his age, staring determinedly at a spot on the back wall of the auditorium. Clay stands up and waves, trying to avoid being the hokey parent by being a parody of the hokey parent. Rai’s mouth twists into a knot that’s a smile and a scowl combined. It’s an expression he inherited from his mother.
Maaya and Koyo Taneda, Rai’s birth parents, were part of Clay’s Bloom during the war. Each group of five was organized on the basis of compatible ability sets; Clay’s time dilation allowed Maaya to launch rocks the size of beach balls at the government troops as if she’d shot them out of a gun. Rai was six when his parents joined up, and they talked about him all the time. During the calm between fights, Koyo constructed a hard-light projection of Rai and set it toddling around their encampments. Stationed a few blocks from the Houston school, Maaya held Clay’s hand in both of hers and asked him to take care of Rai if anything happened to her and Koyo. Clay laughed. Their Bloom had the highest success rate in the Faction. They were untouchable. It was an easy, inconsequential promise to make.
They made it to the second floor before they realized the school was rigged. An inhibitor surged once like a flashbulb, wiping out all of their abilities. The little voice that buzzed in their heads was silent for what seemed like the first time in months, but by then they could predict orders before they came in. Rather than abort, as they should have, they continued, as they imagined they would have been ordered to. The psychics said students were locked in their dorms on the upper floors. When the bombs started going off, he lost track of the rest of his Bloom as he weaved his way through blast and shrapnel. He saw Koyo fall through a tile floor as it melted under his feet, and watched Jorge vaporized as he opened a classroom door. Maaya’s body he found later, crisped. He never found out what happened to the Kid. Only a handful of Faction made it out of the school, and none of the students or faculty inside survived. Clay saw a chance to walk away and took it, wandering across the wreckage of the school rather than back to the medical tent. He left the fight a father, although the reality of that wouldn’t settle in until he’d suffered little Rai’s sobs and fists at the news that his parents were dead, until the survivor guilt subsided and the monotony of raising a boy, the repetition and the act of it, worked like a trellis for the real feeling to cling to and grow on.
Clay gives Rai a double thumbs-up. Rai rolls his eyes in a way unique to teenagers expressing loving exasperation and embarrassment with their parents. The headmaster, a posh skeleton of a man whose name Clay forgets, takes to the podium in front of a wall of stoic-faced students. He welcomes everyone to parents’ night and produces a stack of index cards from the inside pocket of his suit coat.
“The question is, how best to live in the world?” he proclaims. Heads in the crowd bob as if they had been, moments before, pondering this exact problem. “But then, when was this not the question?” This gets a polite chuckle from the crowd before the headmaster’s face returns to its serious mien and everyone hushes up. “While others look to what has changed, here at Berkeley Carroll we look deeper, into what remains. So much is different than it was when you or I last stepped into a classroom. In this brave new world, there are still truths. And there is, still, Truth.” He says this so it’s understood to have a capital T, and the audience nods to show they’ve received the message. “I like to think that if you were to take one of the young men or women of this school and place them at any point in time, they would possess not only the skills to thrive but the wisdom to live a life both upstanding and wondrous.”
The word, delivered with swooping rapture, elicits the polite rendition of thunderous applause, fingertips rapidly tapping the meat of hands wrapped around the stems of champagne flutes. The woman next to him clinks her glass against Clay’s in what can only be a toast to themselves as paragons of parenting. The gentle chime of crystal on crystal throughout the room is as loud as the preceding applause.
As the clapping fades, a single male alto voice hangs high in the room on one sustained note. Clay finds the sound of young boys singing unsettling, ghostly. Another voice joins him a step lower, followed by a third on the same note. The sopranos come in on a cascading series of eighth notes, grouped in fours. The tenors, Rai included, take the vocal line, lyrics about coming home to an empty apartment, words Clay has loved since he was Rai’s age, too young to understand their meaning. He looks around to see if any of the other parents recognize the song, but he’s apparently the only Duran Duran fan in the audience.
“Easily the best power ballad of the nineties,” he told Rai when he played “Ordinary World” for him last month. In typical Rai fashion, he described the song he wanted but not what he needed it for. Power ballad wasn’t a phrase in Rai’s vocabulary, so it took a while before they hit on songs that met his criteria.
“Is there anything more…modern?” Rai asked.
On the couch, Dom busted out laughing. “That song’s older than we are,” he said.
Grumbling for show, Clay played more recent songs, songs he and Dom danced to when they were dating and still went out dancing. “All My Friends” by LCD Soundsystem was too long and rhythm driven. “Maps” by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs was too romantic. Clay played songs he’d loved in college. Lorde’s “Green Light,” Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Run Away with Me.” Both too dancy. He thought about songs the Kid used to play as they traveled from one battle to the next. She had an old-school iPod full of new music, songs that sounded like folk standards run through a wood chipper and reassembled, singers whose voices bypassed the rational brain and played the listener’s emotions like a harp. It had been easy to forget that culture was still happening. People were making art and singing songs and fucking and going to work while other people got ready to kill one another. All those songs got lost, swallowed up in the war.
When Rai failed to find the perfect song for his obscure purposes, Clay let his annoyance flare up. “Do some pop song,” he said. Rai, not so much wounded as trying to keep Clay happy, asked him to “play the nineties one again.” Cla
y watched as the song sunk in, as Rai’s mind moved past the specifics of the verses into the plaintive sense of being permanently lost that rang through the chorus.
“Yes,” Rai said. “That.”
The student’s a cappella rendition swells to its ending; harmonies thread together and peel off one by one until the alto is alone in the room. Then nothing. Clay doesn’t give a fuck about decorum. He gets to his feet, unabashedly whooping and cheering, clapping as if he’s trying to smash the champagne flute between his hands. People throw side eye his way, but Rai looks directly at him, so proud of himself, and so grateful to see that pride reflected in his dad’s face.
The parents are herded back into the lobby, where each is handed an individualized schedule, a minute-by-minute agenda for their evening at Berkeley Carroll. Clay reads down the list of Rai’s teachers, whom he’ll be meeting in ten-minute snippets to review Rai’s progress. He exchanges his empty glass for a full one. A better class of parent could manage this without being seen.
The conferences confirm what Clay already knows about his son. Rai is sweet and adept, impossible not to like. Unlike Clay or Dom, he excels at most things he tries, if without the commitment or engagement his teachers might like. Each teacher wants Rai to select their subject area as his lifelong passion. “I believe he could…” followed by some astounding and imminently possible feat of academic prowess Rai might accomplish.
Lightly buzzed, glazed over from the assault of effusive praise, Clay knocks on the door of Rai’s psychic defense instructor, Mr. Castillo, his last meeting of the evening. Dominic had singled him out to Clay at parent orientation, tugging at Clay’s belt loop and pointing from the hip. “Your type,” he said. It might be true; Castillo’s the waifish, nerdy kind of man Clay chased before he and Dominic got together. Clay resented Dominic pointing it out and took a determined dislike to Castillo. Clay and Dom had never been a couple who called attention to outside objects for the other to desire. Dominic started doing it after he slipped, before Clay found out about it. It went away for a while as they worked things out in the wake, figuring how and if to move forward. It resurfaced when Dominic was explicitly forgiven, at which point the implication was clearer. Dominic wanted Clay to stray once so they’d be even. He wanted it to happen so he could forgive it. It was typical of Dominic to fail to understand that their relationship was not a mechanism made of inputs and outputs, scales in need of balance. He could construct events with dozens of moving parts, vast orreries of social interactions, but he understood the heart as a machine of ventricles and atria working in perfect rhythm rather than as its true shape, a mess of frayed and sparking wires tangled in inextricable knots.
What made it worse was that the introduction of forgiveness put infidelity on the table for Clay in a way that was counter to who he wanted to be as a partner. As he sits across the desk from Mr. Castillo, his mind strays a moment down that path. I’m allowed one, he thinks. I’m owed one. One slip. Like an extra arcade token in his pocket, the idea hums with possibility.
“Mr. Weaver?” says Castillo, returning Clay to the room, the correct path.
“Sorry.”
“Sorry, no,” Castillo says, flustered. “I was saying this is probably the most practical class Rai will take. It’s a life skills issue rather than something academic. Not to say it isn’t important, but it’s not as if he’s going to pursue a career.”
“Right,” says Clay. He thinks of boys like Castillo he dated in college, how their sweet self-effacement rankled after a while, set him up to be swept away by Dominic’s swagger and assuredness.
“That said, Rai is doing well for someone in his position.”
“In his position?”
“Pre-Resonant,” says Castillo.
“He’s young for his grade,” Clay says. “His father, his biological father, was a late bloomer too. Nearly sixteen.”
“Is his biological father…in the picture?”
It could be a come-on line. It’s hard to read through Castillo’s general sense of discomfort.
“He died in the war,” Clay says. “Dominic and I adopted Rai when he was seven.”
Castillo nods, and Clay searches his expression for a trace of disappointment. “They start younger than we did, mostly. We, I mean, are you a—”
“Pulser,” Clay says. “You?”
Castillo shakes his head. “I was a student at the Bishop Academy when the Pulse hit. I wasn’t there for any of what happened. They evacuated us before things started. I spent most of the war hiding in Chicago.”
“That was a good place to be,” says Clay.
Castillo shakes his head to clear it, but he’s flustered. “There are always a couple, though, who haven’t resonated yet. External defense is more meditative, but for Hivecraft, we have the option of more of a theoretical curriculum.” He laughs. “It’s like watching Enter the Dragon instead of taking a karate class.”
“Boards don’t hit back,” says Clay.
Castillo smiles warmly at him. “Exactly.”
Your type, Clay thinks.
“Rai has the knowledge,” Castillo says. “When he reaches the point where application is an issue. I mean, there are concerns, of course.”
“Of course.”
A gentle bell rings, signaling the end of their session. Clay stands up and extends his hand across the desk. “Thank you, Mr. Castillo,” he says. “I’m sure Rai will be ready when the time comes, and he’ll have you to thank.”
Castillo takes his hand, shakes it, and holds it a beat too long. He looks Clay directly in the eye. “Mr. Weaver, would you like to grab a quick drink?”
“I’ve got to get Rai home.”
“There are things I still want to talk to you about,” he blurts out. “They really don’t give us much time here.”
Clay thinks about how much time he could give them. He could envelop them in a bubble where seconds last hours.
“Please,” says Castillo. Something in his voice is unambiguously not flirting. Clay can’t tell what it is, but he knows what it isn’t.
“Rai can get home on his own,” he says reluctantly. “Not like he hasn’t before.”
“There’s a place on Flatbush,” says Castillo. “Sharlene’s, not the 333. The whole Berkeley Carroll staff will be at 333 in twenty minutes.”
“Sharlene’s on Flatbush. In, what, half an hour?”
“Perfect,” says Castillo. “Thank you.”
The handshake, held limply in the air through this exchange, finally breaks, and Castillo dashes out of the room, leaving Clay alone among the desks and framed motivational posters.
* * *
—
In the gym, the students divide neatly along gender lines. The boys play basketball with shirtsleeves rolled up, ties loosened. The girls choreograph dance routines to a Hayden Cohen song. Each group studiously avoids checking to see if the other is paying attention. Rai passes the ball when he sees Clay and jogs over, sweaty dark bangs falling into his eyes.
“What’d you think?” he asks.
“You guys sounded great,” Clay says, pulling Rai under one arm for the closest thing to a hug the boy will allow in public.
“I did the arrangement,” he says. “Ms. Zimmerman helped, but it was mostly me.”
“It was amazing,” Clay says as they exit the gym. In the hallway, parents schmooze, in no rush to retrieve their children. For some people, kids are the least interesting thing about being a parent.
“We ready to go?” Rai asks.
“I was wondering if you could get home on your own,” Clay says. “One of your teachers wants to talk to me.”
“Which one?”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“Nothing good comes out of you talking to my teachers,” Rai says.
“I’ll be home in an hour,” Clay says. �
�I’m sure he wants to tell me how as a Berkeley Carroll man, there are certain expectations.”
“Fundamental truths,” Rai says in a snooty imitation of the headmaster.
“Eternal ideals,” says Clay, his impression not as spot-on as Rai’s. Probably every kid at the school does a killer version of their headmaster. “Go home, throw a pizza in the oven. I’ll be home before the cheese melts.”
Rai grunts. “Can I order one?”
“Preheat the oven,” Clay says. “Wait till it dings. Throw it in. This is well within the skill set of a Berkeley Carroll man.”
“Be back before it gets cold,” Rai says, pointing at Clay to hold him to his word. Clay nods, and Rai joins a pack of kids who’ve grown impatient with their chattering parents and decided to make a break for it on their own.
They expect it, so it happens. Fahima would prefer a massive soiree she doesn’t have to attend. Omar took on the planning but refused to strike Fahima’s name from the guest list. It’s held at the Edison Ballroom on 47th, a large space renovated before the war to look like an early twenty-first-century vision of thirties Deco. Dull orange ghost lights haunt the crystal chandeliers, swooping down to the parquet dance floor to twirl and minuet among the guests before returning to the air. Flowing silver sculptures writhe and twist to catch pale illumination, chrome flowers bending toward the sun. The artist is in attendance; Isidra Gonzalez’s work is displayed in European galleries that are willing to ignore the embargo in the name of the avant.
Omar has gathered a few Resonants with celebrity status abroad. Sanford Vang, a model with glistening blue scales who relocated to London because the Brits can’t get enough of him and because, according to Omar, he’s burned his way through everyone fuckable in New York. Marcine Walden, a film director working with images lifted from people’s dreams. Aaron Faber, a lithic and stand-up comedian whose deep self-loathing makes his blatantly anti-Resonant routines a favorite of foreign audiences who like their bigotry served under a cover of ironic deniability. As asked, a few of the actors filming out front of the school that morning are here in costume. The actress playing Ji Yeon Kim wears a punk T-shirt with the band logo shiny and new, carefully cut to expose a hint of the bottom of her breasts, and purposefully small jean shorts. A young black girl who is supposed to be Emmeline Hirsch, her face streaked with bloody makeup and dust, sips a Shirley Temple through a straw.
