by Bob Proehl
Carrie leans her back against the bar, watching how the kids dance. She and Miquel and Hayden and Jonathan used to dance with abandon, thrilled with the irrelevance of an old world aging away around them. They wriggled and writhed like they were sloughing off old skin, molting into something new. There’s a mean side to the way the kids at Vibration dance, a razor edge in the music the DJ plays. Songs aren’t given space to finish; there’s no time. At the end of things, everything has to collapse. Songs and bodies crash into one another. They intersect at wrong angles. They create something static, a supersolid, striving toward a moment that can pass through a singularity and survive.
Bryce, rum and Coke in his massive bark-covered hand, smiles at her as he makes his way over. If Bryce is here, it’s a Friday. He doesn’t drink on weeknights; it would mean having less than his best self to give to his students in the morning. Carrie needs these markers to keep the days from bleeding into one another.
“How’s the patient?” he asks.
“Don’t call him that,” says Carrie.
Bryce huffs apologetically. He’s circumspect when talking about Miquel, but the liquor’s loosened him. “How’s Miquel?”
Carrie raises a finger to signal Jonathan for a beer, careful not to give him the eye contact he wants. Jonathan stands at the edge of Carrie’s peripheral vision, the light in his chest pulsating out of sync with the beat of the music. He grins at her, waiting for some acknowledgment, then heads off when it’s clear none is coming.
“He’s a mess,” Carrie says. “Sometimes when he gets better, it makes it that much clearer how bad off he is.”
Bryce nods and stares into the throng. “You choose to be a caretaker,” he says.
“What’s that?” Carrie asks. She lost track of him for a second, trying to parse the transition from a danceable Lorde song to a minor-key dirge off Hayden’s second album. The bodies on the dance floor sway like seaweed, a tidal rhythm.
“You fall for someone,” says Bryce. “It’s a blind fall. You realize he’s someone you have to care for. It’ll never balance out. Never pay back. And you choose.”
Carrie wonders how much this is true and how much Bryce is projecting his experience onto hers. Bryce and Waylon balance each other out, with each fixing the other’s flaws. Before Carrie and Miquel got together, their friends knew they would. Fuck him already, Hayden said at least once every party they ever went to, sometimes encouraging and sometimes bored with what Hayden called the will-they-won’t-they sitcom bullshit. Carrie moved toward Miquel like an object rolling downhill. When he was in Topaz and she was out in the world, the distance between them, the unlikelihood she’d see him again, allowed her to look at their history. Her love for Miquel was shaped by everything around it, negative space bordered by expectations she dutifully inhabited. It didn’t make their relationship any less valid.
The day they liberated Topaz Lake, Carrie and Hayden wrenched open the sealed metal door to the fallout shelter under the community center to find Miquel and a dozen children, huddled and starved, the last ones alive. Clothes soaked in someone else’s blood, Carrie saw Miquel and felt absolved of everything she’d done, every faithless thought she’d harbored. She was so cleansed, she was surprised to see the blood was still there. She didn’t register the horror on Miquel’s face at the sight of it. As his ability came back like a bone badly set, it was clear she hadn’t saved him, only moved him from one basement to another. But she treasured the time when they were pulling each other out of the dark. It was the wedding album they didn’t have; she took the moment out now and then, along with a handful of others, to draw the energy she needed to move forward with him. Their relationship was a charm bracelet, baubles strung together on a barely visible chain.
“Miquel got broken,” Carrie says. “It wasn’t his fault.”
“It’s never their fault,” Bryce says.
“You should talk,” says Carrie, swigging her beer.
Bryce shrugs like a breeze through bare branches. “I went in eyes open,” he says. A smile tugs the corner of his mouth upward. “Waylon’s the same pain in the ass he was at Bishop.”
“Worse,” says Carrie. As if summoned, Waylon sits down on the stool next to Bryce.
“Creeper at table five’s asking about you,” Waylon tells Carrie. He nods his head at a corner booth. There’s a man in a sharp suit sitting alone, sipping whiskey, watching the dancers with a smirk so overly prurient that Carrie goes translucent to prevent him from taking her in with his voracious gaze. It’s the suit from the coffee shop. He stands out here as much as he did in Pilsen, put together in a way no one in Chicago bothers with anymore. His jacket, sharp at the corners, traces the lines of a body at home in the gym. His tie is tight at his Adam’s apple this late in the evening, rather than tugged out like a hanged man loosening the noose. There’s control in how he carries himself; he moves like an actor in a play.
“Fuck, you want to hand me to the filth?” says Carrie.
“I don’t think he’s Faction,” says Waylon.
“He’s something no good,” Bryce says. “What do you read off him?”
“Nothing,” Waylon says. “He’s white flame–trained.”
“That’s not possible,” says Bryce.
“I’m telling you he is.”
“Too young,” Carrie says. “Younger kids were image aversion–trained.” Image aversion technique involved remembering the worst thing you’d ever experienced and throwing it at anyone trying to read you. Students who’d gone through real trauma were the best at it; Hayden could chase anyone but Sarah Davenport, their teacher, out of their head within a minute. Some people never needed to learn anything else. For the rest, it was a gross-out contest, useful for deflecting a psychic invader into a fit of giggles. It was easier than white flame but easier to break through.
“Say I’m not here,” Carrie says. She spins on her stool and slumps toward the bar.
“He said he’s got a job for you,” says Waylon.
“It’s a fucking trap,” Carrie says.
“I’ll watch your back,” Waylon says.
“You already gave me up.”
“I’ll watch your back,” Bryce says, crossing his arms over his chest and drawing up to his full height. The suit, who’s been watching them this whole time, appraises Bryce and smiles approvingly.
“He asked about you is all,” says Waylon. “I’ve got nothing for you the next two weeks. I thought you could use work.”
“I told you I was offering her a job,” Bryce says.
“You told me she wouldn’t take it.”
“Not if you’re lining up side work for her.”
“I didn’t line it up,” Waylon says. “Guy came in, asked for her. I said sometimes she’s here.”
Carrie raps her knuckles on the bar. “Sold. Me. Out.”
“You going to talk to him?” Bryce asks.
Carrie eyes both of them warily. “You two are not my friends,” she says. She grabs her beer and crosses the room to the stranger’s table. The bar is filling in, and she weaves clumsily between bodies to make her way. The kids don’t have this problem; they move through crowds like water running through gravel. There should have been a time I felt at home here, she thinks. There should have been years without this taken away from me. Who would I have been without the war?
An exiting dancer bumps her shoulder so hard Carrie nearly drops her beer. She braces herself on the edge of the suit’s table. Regaining composure, she slides into the chair across from him. He waits a beat before he looks up, fixing her with the same lecherous leer he affords the dance floor.
“Miss Norris,” he says, standing and extending his hand.
“Mystery Date,” Carrie says, nodding to dismiss the proffered hand.
The stranger smiles, shrugs, and sits back down. “Can I buy you a drink?”
/> She holds up her half-empty beer. “One of these,” she says. “You can talk until I finish it.”
“That’s fair.”
“I drink fast.”
He calls a server over and orders. He gives her a smile and calls her “hon,” but it’s not with the prurient condescension of some patrons. There’s something sweet and sad, Southern manners shielding a need to connect. It doesn’t mean his attention isn’t about sex, but there’s a human sentiment behind it. “You come highly recommended,” he says to Carrie.
“If I had clients, they’d be smart enough not to recommend me to strangers.”
He makes a small shrug of apology. “You have a reputation.”
“That’s a liability.”
“It’s a good reputation,” he says. The server puts a beer in front of Carrie, and the suit nods in thanks.
Carrie leans in. “I don’t like you,” she says. “You give off—I hate to use the word vibe.”
“I’m not Faction,” he says.
“It’s a vibe, though,” Carrie continues. “An impression that says whatever this person wants, I should do the opposite.”
The suit nods. He’s letting her blow off steam, waiting her out. On the dance floor, a girl made of smoke wends around her partner, wisps of her drifting out of his collar and the cuffs of his sleeves. A dancer hovers above the crowd, contorting her body into impossible shapes. She stays out of reach as people stretch hands upward, mesmerized, to touch her. At the far corner, a man who looks like the suit grinds with a burly Voider who was here when Carrie first came in.
“My employer wants something brought back from out west,” the suit says, drawing her attention back before she can register what she saw. He holds Carrie’s gaze but then gets distracted by a thin wisp of a boy who wanders sweat-soaked off the dance floor.
“Who’s your employer?” Carrie asks.
The suit’s eyes follow the boy all the way to the bar, then return to Carrie. “I’m not at liberty to say.”
“I’ve got no patience for cloak-and-dagger shit.”
“You’re in the wrong line of work.”
“What’s my line of work?”
“You get people and things to the places they can do the most good,” says the suit. It’s a generous description. It would be more accurate to say Carrie gets people and things to where they’re worth the most; not all her jobs are altruistic. Systems of value have shifted so much that when Carrie steps across certain lines, mundane objects become magical, base metals turn to gold. Every little town where she drops a parcel of medical supplies or fresh citrus, she thinks of as nothing. When she leaves Vegas with pockets full, knowing the luxury goods she smuggled in will be auctioned off to the bourgie and desperate, she reminds herself the money buys those medical supplies and citrus. The journey isn’t important, and neither is the destination, which leaves the constancy of motion. “My employer left something in a place it’s not helping anyone. They want you to go retrieve it.”
“What’s the payment?” she asks.
“My employer will help solve your problem.”
“Right now my problem is answers on a postcard.”
“We’re asking for trust,” says the suit.
“You’re in the wrong fucking town,” Carrie says. She’s been thinking this herself, wondering if the flare-ups of anger and disgust she feels mean she’s not cut out to live in an integrated city. Anywhere else might be easier, if she didn’t have Miquel to worry about.
“I like it here,” says the suit. “It feels real.”
An obviously underage boy who seemed to be swaying along with the music lurches past their table, cheeks distended and palm pressed to his lips in the universal medical sign for about to puke. “Yeah, it’s very atmospheric.”
“Do this for us and my employer can fix him,” says the suit, finishing off his drink and fishing out his wallet. Carrie’s eyes flash toward the doors to the kitchen, sure she’ll see a Bloom with Miquel in cuffs. It’s her biggest fear, bigger than being caught: descending the stairs to find him gone, having him used as leverage against her. It scares her because it would be effective. She’d give them everything.
“We want to help,” the suit says, as if he knows what she’s imagined. He reaches across the table to touch her hand, then thinks better of it and pulls back. “We’re the good guys.”
“You don’t come off like a good guy.”
“I’m a charming rogue. A lot of people like me.” When the server comes over, the suit points to Carrie’s beer and hands the server a couple more bills.
“Why not get in touch with me through the Hive?” Carrie asks.
“We don’t use the Hive,” says the suit, looking around nervously. It’s the first time his cool breaks. It makes her trust him more. Anyone who knows to be wary of the Hive has one thing right. He reaches into the inner pocket of his jacket and takes out an old flip phone, a beetle shell of brushed metal with what looks like a nub of ivory for an antenna. He places it on the table between them, and Carrie makes no move to pick it up.
“Is your employer’s office in the nineties?” Carrie asks. “There isn’t a live cell tower on the continent.”
“This one works everywhere,” the suit says. “My employer will call you.”
“What is it I’d be retrieving?” Carrie asks.
“A weapon,” says the suit with forced nonchalance. “You’ll know it when you see it.”
“You don’t know,” Carrie says.
“My employer likes information compartmentalized,” he says, his jaw tight.
“Burns your toast, doesn’t it?”
The suit shrugs. The lines of his shoulders shift angles as if on hinges. “More I know, the easier my job is,” he says.
“Then why didn’t you ask?”
“No one said a job’s supposed to be easy.” He asked and didn’t get an answer, and this is the first time he’s found himself on the outside. He gazes at the dance floor, looking wistfully the way you do at people who are having more fun than you are. While he isn’t watching, Carrie snatches up the phone and pockets it.
“It’s bullshit,” Carrie says. “He can’t be fixed.”
“My employer says when you find the weapon, you’ll understand.”
“What if I don’t answer when your employer calls?”
“They call me and I find someone else,” he says. “I figured start with the best and work down.”
Carrie grins despite herself. “See, right there I almost liked you.”
“This DJ’s good,” says the suit. He leans back, nodding his head steadily to a beat that flutters and jerks like an erratic heart. “Music scene sucks in New York right now. Half nostalgia, half futurism. As if there’s a future.” He lifts himself out of his chair. “I’m going to go dance.” He holds out his hand, palm up, an inversion of the proffered handshake that started their meeting. “Want to come? I bet you had some moves back in your day.” Carrie doesn’t know whether to be flattered or insulted. Before she decides, the server passes between them to deliver Carrie’s beer, and the suit fades into the crowd. Carrie takes her drink back to the bar, where Jonathan’s been leaning, watching the conversation.
“Who’s that?” he asks.
“Nobody,” Carrie says. “Potential client.”
“He’s cute,” says Jonathan. “Young.”
“Sure,” Carrie says, not listening. She pulls out her wallet. “Can you close me out? I should get home.”
Jonathan folds both his hands over hers. “You know your money’s no good here.”
“Thanks,” Carrie says, thinking how much she prefers knowing the cost of things.
“You going home or are you going downstairs?” Jonathan asks. The question catches Carrie off guard. It’s pitched as casual curiosity, but there’s an accusatory note.<
br />
“I’m going home,” she says.
“You could go to my place,” Jonathan says. “Maybe Waylon will let me—”
“Not tonight,” Carrie says more forcefully.
Jonathan grabs her forearm lightly, only enough to stop her. “I know our thing is casual and I fully understand my place and all,” he says. “But picking up guys in here while I’m working is…it’s not cool by me.”
Carrie looks at his hand on her arm, feels a gentle but present telekinetic push on her hip back toward him. She wants to pull out her knife and plunge it into Jonathan’s wrist, piercing the divot where the arm bones meet the carpals and pinning his hand to the bar.
She yanks her arm away from his loose grip.
“Fuck off, Jonathan,” she says, the swearing a poor substitute for stabbing. “I’m going home.”
Fahima isn’t into music. She doesn’t need it the way Alyssa did, constantly humming or whistling, filling the pleasant unsilence of cooking or a long drive with endless albums. She doesn’t use it as a component of her identity the way some of the Bishop kids do, conceptualizing themselves as punks or B-girls, mall Goths and hard-core kids. As she listens to Hayden Cohen play songs on acoustic guitar, the world falls away and Fahima understands how music becomes your life.
Dominic, the event planner, taps her on the shoulder, and she crashes back into normal life. Background and foreground shift, and the music is only a hum in her ears, not a hook in her heart.
“Is everything exceeding expectations?” he asks.
“No, Dominic,” she says, smiling at him. “Because I know all your events will be perfect.”
“Nothing’s perfect when there are people involved,” he says. “One of the servers found your British friend passed out in the bathroom.”
Fahima smirks. The British delegate had cried when he agreed, and although she’s ashamed about it, she counted it as a victory. The United Kingdom had been staunch opponents of any recognition of the new government. “Where is he now?”
