The Somebody People

by Bob Proehl

  In her pocket, the phone buzzes, pulling her out of the picture. Dizzy, drunk, hopeless, Carrie answers.

  When Clay gets home, Rai is sitting at the kitchen counter, the contents of his backpack splayed across its surface as if he’s autopsying it.

  “Hey, Dad,” Rai says. He’s looking at a photo, a Polaroid like the ones that had a hipster revival before the war. Clay can’t remember if he or Dom ever bought one, but if they hadn’t, one of Rai’s friends’ parents had.

  “You eat?” Clay asks.

  Rai tilts his head at the stove, where one slice of a frozen pizza sits, tide pools of grease congealing on its surface. Clay crosses the kitchen, gripping Rai’s shoulder and using it as a pivot. He glances at the photo quickly so Rai doesn’t catch him at it. It’s a selfie, Rai and a girl Clay doesn’t recognize, although she must have been in the gym this evening, playing at the game of flirting by completely ignoring that the whole school seemed engaged in it. That settles one question, Dom would say if he saw it. If it were any day but today, Clay would laugh.

  He eats the lukewarm pizza without a plate or paper towel, something he does only when Dom’s out of the house.

  “Your teachers all think you’re great,” Clay says, his mouth full.

  “They like me because I’m not a rich shit,” says Rai. “I’m a breath of fresh, lower-middle-class air.”

  “Watch your language,” Clay says. Rai smirks. “Anyway, we’re middle-middle class.”

  “Everyone I go to school with has two houses,” Rai says. He puts the photo in the front pocket of his backpack. “We have heaters that sound like a bad drum solo. I feel like that’s not middle-middle.”

  “We’re in a good neighborhood,” Clay says. He sounds like his dad, who slowly moved the family out of public housing into a cookie-cutter suburb and thought of that as his crowning achievement.

  “Did they make you talk to everybody?” Rai asks.

  “It was like speed dating,” Clay says.

  “Gross.”

  “Mr. Castillo’s intense.”

  “Castillo’s creepy,” Rai says. “It’s not his fault, I guess. It’s his job to get into our heads and shit.”

  “Language.”

  “But it feels rapey,” Rai continues. “And he looks you right in the eye. I hate that.”

  “Yes, human contact is to be avoided at all costs,” Clay says. He’s making a good show of everything being perfectly normal. He’s pretending to put it out of his head. Nothing will get decided tonight; there’s no rush.

  “What did he want to talk to you about?”

  “Psychic defense,” Clay says. His voice sounds false.

  Rai nods. “He’s always like this is the most vital skill you will ever learn.”

  “It’s an adult thing,” Clay says. “You convince yourself your job is the most important thing in the whole world. Then you have to convince everyone else.”

  “You don’t do that.”

  “My job is self-evidently the most important thing in the whole world,” Clay says, “plus I’m not allowed to talk about it.” When Rai was younger, he used to ask Clay about himself all the time, badgering him with questions Clay would put off by saying he couldn’t or didn’t want to talk about it. He assumed it was the way kids were, until he mentioned it to friends. They said their kids had solipsistic lacks of interest in their parents’ lives. Clay also assumed Rai’s curiosity would persist and he could answer Rai’s questions when they were both ready. Whether he grew out of the phase or grew tired of being put off, Rai stopped asking, even when Clay floated hints or telegraphed that he was open, finally, to being asked.

  “So nothing bad?” Rai says.

  “Nothing bad,” Clay says.

  Dominic’s keys jangle, ineffective and clumsy, in the lock.

  “Dad Number Two,” says Clay.

  “I thought you were Dad Number Two.”

  “I am clearly Dad Number One.”

  As soon as Clay sees Dominic, he knows something’s wrong. He has a haunted stare that barely takes Clay and Rai in.

  “Dad?” says Rai. His son’s voice snaps Dom out of the trance he’s in. He goes to Rai and hugs him, which reminds Clay he forgot to do that when he came in. It used to be the first thing whenever he walked in the door. Little gestures, tiny attachments that wither over time.

  “I’m okay,” Dom says, his voice muffled by Rai’s shoulder. “I was near the blast, but I was crystal and I was okay.”

  “Dom, what are you talking about?” Clay asks.

  “Do we have anything to drink?” Dom asks. They don’t usually keep liquor in the house, but there’s a bottle of rum someone brought for Christmas in the back of a cupboard. Clay pauses to remember where it is, then digs it out, puts ice in two glasses, and pours. “There was a bomb at the gala,” Dominic says. “One of the servers blew themselves up a couple feet from the delegates.”

  “Holy shit,” says Rai.

  Eyes wide, Clay pats Dominic down, looking for injuries, for bloodstains hidden by the darkness of his suit. It’s an old habit kicking in, and he notices Rai watching him, fascinated but also scared.

  “I’m okay,” Dom says, swatting his hands away. “My ears are ringing, but I’m okay.”

  “Was anyone—”

  “A Faction agent stopped him,” Dom says. “Jumped on the bomb.”

  “Who attacks a gala full of…whoever?” Rai asks.

  “It was fucking Damps,” says Dominic, too loud. “It’s like the war is still going on. There could be one of them left and they’d try to kill us. Swatting at us with a stick like a cornered animal.”

  “Honey, calm down,” Clay says.

  “You’re telling me this?” Dominic says. His eyes are frantic. Clay wants to check his temperature. He tries to remember the signs of shock. “How calm were you after Denver? Did you cool out after Damps killed Maaya and Koyo?” Rai flinches at the mention of his biological parents. “Fuck calm, okay? Fuck. Calm.”

  “Hey, buddy,” Clay says to Rai. “Why don’t you go hang out in your room for a bit? Give Dad some space.”

  Rai glares at him. He’s teetering between being a child and being a teenager, and there are only so many more times he’ll let himself be dismissed like this.

  Doesn’t matter for shit now.

  His displeasure registered, Rai retreats down the hall. Clay puts his arm around Dom, tentatively at first and then firmly, as if trying to hold him down. He wants to say You shouldn’t talk like that in front of Rai, but he can’t. Not without explaining it all. Dom’s shoulders shake with rage and fear. He didn’t go through what Clay did in the war. Dom’s part in things was the one Clay publicly claims: a communications job, a cog in a machine that moved people toward their deaths without getting itself bloodied. Dom’s not inured to horrors. The world can still touch him.

  Clay will have to carry this thing with Rai a while longer. A day or two until things go back to normal. Until he has to shatter everything anew.

  Propped against the wall in the hallway between the elevator and Fahima’s front door, Ruth drinks red wine from the bottle. Fahima’s keys rest in her palm.

  “What took you so long?” she says, smiling nervously. She’s so young, Fahima thinks, situating Ruth on the other side of an indeterminate age divide, in the land of the still sexually viable. It’s toxic; we form attractions at a certain age, and some part stays there, pining not for people younger than us but for a younger version of ourselves that could keep up with them.

  “Cleaning up,” Fahima says. “I’m sorry.”

  Ruth hands Fahima her keys and holds up the half-empty bottle. “I started without you,” she says. She hoists herself up from the floor and steps aside for Fahima to let them in. Her confidence is attractive. Fahima unlocks the door.

  “You could have w
aited inside,” she says.

  “I didn’t want to go in without you,” Ruth says. “Is everyone okay?” She wanders around the room, running fingers over surfaces like she’s reading Braille. She drops onto the couch without being asked.

  “A couple delegates got their suits singed, but they’re tucked away for the night,” Fahima says. Ruth looks at her expectantly, and Fahima realizes she’s forgotten to perform the normal human response to this situation. “Are you okay?” she asks.

  “I’m fine,” Ruth says, forgiving the lag. “I feel wired, like I won’t be able to sleep.” She grabs her bag. “I almost forgot. I got you a present while I was in London.” She extracts a bottle of gin by the neck and hands it to Fahima. “Is it a good one?” she asks. “The man in the shop said it was the best.”

  Fahima appraises the bottle. There are new distilleries in Brooklyn hustling to fill the export gap. They have fake future names: Gyn. Jyoonper. Intoxant. In the future, we will only use the last quarter of the alphabet, Fahima thinks. They all err on the side of too big: like their names, they lack the stately calm of dry British gin. It’s a problem when you remake the world. In the rush toward the new, everyone wants to abandon everything, even things that were perfectly good.

  “It’s lovely,” Fahima says. “I haven’t had this in years. Would you like some?”

  “I’m good,” Ruth says. Fahima goes about the stage business of fixing herself a drink at the Deco liquor cabinet with Kevin Bishop’s chrome shaker and crystal martini glasses. She sits on the couch next to Ruth, who clinks her bottle against Fahima’s glass. “I’m glad you’re here,” she says. They’ve tap-danced around getting together for months, held back by Fahima’s shyness and worry about being seen in public with an employee. Telling her to come here advanced things more than Fahima’s ready for. Ruth, for her part, seems prepared. Fahima takes a big gulp of her drink.

  “You’ve got all night,” Ruth says. She rests her fingertip on the base of Fahima’s glass. “Pace yourself.” A tiny laugh escapes her throat, and Fahima sees Ruth is as nervous and unsure as she is. She’s converting adrenaline into something else, covering shyness with an attempt at sultriness. It’s the shyness underneath that’s the draw, heady enough that Fahima tries to shut it down.

  “Ruth,” she says in the unmistakable tone of an adult speaking to a child. Ruth curls her legs up under her and juts out her lower lip in a pout.

  “I can go if you want,” she says.

  “I don’t want you to go,” Fahima says. “I like spending time with you.”

  “Then spend time,” Ruth says. She makes it sound so simple. The benefits are obvious, and what could be the harm? Hasn’t Fahima earned a little comfort for how far she’s made it, how much she’s done? Where is it written that she has to lose everything all the time?

  “I just got out of a long-term relationship,” she says. It’s a line from a bad soap opera. Some sentences feel false even when they’re true.

  “I’ve known you five years, and you’ve been single that whole time,” Ruth says.

  “I haven’t,” says Fahima. “I am now. But I wasn’t.”

  “So why did I never meet her?” Ruth asks. “It was a her?”

  “It was,” Fahima says. “She was. She didn’t come around.”

  “Who ended it?” Ruth asks. She seems determined to logic Fahima into bed. Fahima isn’t beyond convincing.

  “She did,” Fahima says.

  “She thought you worked too much,” says Ruth.

  “Good guess.”

  “How long ago?”

  “Three years,” Fahima says.

  “Three years?” Ruth repeats. Pulsers think in apocalyptic time. History is stupid and meaningless; the past has no fucking point. There is no time available; there is all the time in the world. The idea of mourning a relationship for three years is ancient, out with hair shirts and self-flagellation.

  “We went through some serious shit together,” Fahima says, trying to translate her feelings into the foreign language of youth.

  “Were you married?”

  “Muslims don’t believe in gay marriage,” Fahima says.

  “They don’t believe in gay anything. Or drinking booze,” she adds, tapping her fingernail against Fahima’s martini glass.

  “Marriage I was willing to abstain from,” Fahima says.

  “She dumped you because you wouldn’t marry her?”

  “There were other concerns.”

  Ruth crawls nimbly across the couch. She leans on the armrest, looking up at Fahima. “I don’t want to marry you.”

  “Ruth,” Fahima says. This time she doesn’t know how it sounds, only that it doesn’t come out the way she wants it to. One word, a name, a field across which meaning can be disputed.

  Ruth puts her hand on Fahima’s wrist, and Fahima’s head goes light. For a moment she thinks she might be fainting like a heroine in an old-time novel. She feels the downward yank on her consciousness of someone pulling her against her will, submerging her into the Hive.

  Fahima comes here so rarely that she’s shocked at what it’s turned into. It looks like the root structure of some vast plant grown upward from the ground, each branch cast in black bone, knobby and knuckled, jointed and forked like a cast of fulgurite in sand. The sky, which Fahima remembers as shimmering like pale pearls, is the purplish yellow of a half-healed bruise. The Hive bustles with people chatting, oblivious to the horror around them. Maybe they see it differently, she thinks. Before her mind can swirl into the eddy of freshman-year epistemology, a dark canopy arches over her and closes her off from the rest of the Hive. She’s confronted by Ji Yeon Kim, her Hivebody spiked with spines. Her Bloom, short one, stands behind her. A mousy-looking Babbitt of a man has replaced the girl who stopped the bomber. He looks nervously at Fahima, then away.

  “Miss Deeb,” Ji Yeon says. “I hope you weren’t hurt.”

  “I’m sorry about your friend,” Fahima says.

  Ji Yeon’s Hivebody ripples, a wave passing over it. When it’s gone, what’s left behind is softer.

  “Heidi was nice. We aren’t all, but she was nice.” The ripple shivers up her Hivebody, starting from the ground and rising to the top of her head. How much of you is still in there? Fahima wonders. “But you,” says Ji Yeon. “You weren’t hurt?”

  “I’m fine,” Fahima says. “Don’t let me take up your time.”

  “You’re a major asset,” Ji Yeon says. “I wanted to be sure you were secured.”

  “I feel all warm and fuzzy.”

  Ji Yeon flashes toward Fahima, her body traversing the space between them all at once. “I have never understood why he doesn’t keep you on a leash,” she says. Her face is close enough that if there were breath in the Hive, Fahima would feel Ji Yeon’s on her cheek.

  “Because I’m not his fucking pet,” Fahima says.

  Ji Yeon smiles. “It’s not as bad as you imagine.” She makes a sweeping gesture that takes in the whole of the Hive. “It’s like this all the time,” she says. “Constant connectivity.”

  Fahima pulls away from her. “I treasure my alone time.”

  Ji Yeon shrugs. “Who vetted the waitstaff?” she asks.

  “Dominic Pastorius,” Fahima says. “He’s beyond reproach. Fought in the war.”

  Ji Yeon laughs. “A lot of people ‘fought in the war,’ ” she says, throwing air quotes around the words. “You ‘fought in the war’ from your lab. Any reason to think he might be sympathetic?”

  “To whom?”

  “To Damps,” says Ji Yeon, spitting out the word. “Like the one who wandered into your dance party wearing a catering uniform and a bomb.”

  “Dom had nothing to do with this,” Fahima says.

  “We’ll talk to him.”

  “The bomber was Kindred,” says Fahima. It’s a mi
stake to volunteer information.

  “We assumed,” says Ji Yeon.

  “I’m telling you,” Fahima says. “He was spouting off before he—” She mimes an explosion with her hands. “Real cult stuff. Not like you hear locally.”

  “We’re shaking some trees in the Bronx.”

  “He didn’t sound like them,” Fahima says. “Those guys are a frat. They’re a boys club. This was something else.”

  “We’ll look into it.”

  “I’m trying to help.”

  “Of course,” says Ji Yeon. “There was one more thing. We got a head count on the delegates afterward. We came up one short.”

  “I can send the dossiers over,” Fahima says. “Although I don’t think the safety of the lesser duke of Luxembourg is a problem for the Faction.”

  “Your delegates would be so much meat if Heidi hadn’t stepped in,” says Ji Yeon. “That makes it a Faction problem.”

  “I’ll send Omar up with everything we have first thing in the morning.”

  Ji Yeon smiles the way Fahima imagines call center employees used to, her face twisted to wring a drop of pleasantry out of her words. “That would be really great, Miss Deeb,” she says. “Thanks so much.”

  Ji Yeon nods to her lackeys, and the gang of them disappear soundlessly from the Hive. A pressure lifts from Fahima, and she flies upward, back into her body, gasping like she’s been let up for air.

  “Where were you?” Ruth asks, kneeling next to Fahima, lying on the couch.

  “I’m okay,” Fahima says. “You should go.”

  “You were in the Hive,” Ruth says.