by Bob Proehl
When she makes delivery runs, she stays with Peter Massey, a single dad with a four-bedroom he’s been living in for years. Peter was a literature professor in Boston. His wife died in the evacuation. A lot of American academics found jobs in Europe after the Armistice, but now it’s impossible. Peter does some tutoring and takes in boarders. Every time she stays here, Carrie tries to pay and Peter refuses. Carrie leaves money with Reuben, who’s twelve and reliable about sneaking the money into his father’s wallet.
“We weren’t expecting you,” Peter calls from the doorway, Reuben shielded behind him.
“I’m on a quick errand,” Carrie says, shouting through the rolled down window. “If you’ve got room for the night.”
“We’ve always got room for you,” Peter says. His eyes flick toward downtown. “How about you park out back?”
Carrie pulls the car around the house. She’s startled by a horse batting its nose against the back window of the garage. She peers in at it, shielding her eyes from the light, but the horse has lost interest in her.
“I was about to get dinner started,” Peter says when she comes around front. “Hope you’re hungry.”
He cooks them potatoes and chewy greens from the garden and so much garlic Carrie coughs on the first bite and eagerly bolts down the rest. An old floor fan wired to stolen solar panels takes the teeth out of the heat. Peter couldn’t garden or build worth a shit before—he taught himself, to keep him and Reuben alive. “One of the things about being a parent,” he told Carrie, “is that you’re never allowed to die.”
The horses are a new addition since the last time she came through, bought from a hostler in Ames. Reuben’s been learning to ride.
“Hustle’s my favorite, but Wendigo is a jerk,” he says. Great clumps of greens are wedged between his teeth. “He tossed me the other day, and I got this.” He pulls back his blond bangs to show a short, angry gash.
“I almost told him that was the end of horseback riding,” Peter says.
“Dad,” Reuben says, embarrassed.
“I figured it’s a good idea to be ready to make a quick getaway. Off into the sunset, like in the movies.” Peter smiles as if this is a joke, and Carrie forces herself to return his smile. “You’re traveling light,” he says to change the subject.
“I’ll be back through again soon,” Carrie says. “We’ve got some water filters they need out in North Platte.”
Reuben and Peter both stare down at their plates.
“North Platte’s gone,” Reuben says. Carrie doesn’t know what to do with this information. She doesn’t know where to put it because it doesn’t make any sense.
“They went west?” she asks.
“They’re gone,” Peter says. He lowers his voice as if he can prevent Reuben from hearing. “Culled. Faction.”
Carrie has heard the word cull used before in reference to disappearances. It’s a myth, a phantom. Three people strike out on their own and are never heard from: culled by the Black Rose Faction. A family in a farm at the outer edge of a settlement gets sick and dies before the one doctor in town gets to them: poisoned by the Faction as part of a program of genocidal culling. It gives meaning to meaningless deaths, but it makes no sense even on a small scale, much less a whole settlement. Especially not now, when the Bishop Foundation is in diplomatic talks with the Europeans. They wouldn’t commit genocide back home while playing nice abroad. Peter’s face brightens into a mask of optimism. He stands up with his hands clasped, chipper as a television housewife. “We’ve got cherries for dessert,” he says.
The cherries are bitter and underripe, and afterward Carrie feigns exhaustion and retires to a room upstairs. She lies on the twin bed, paging through one of her dad’s Le Carré novels with a plot she can’t make sense of, listening to A Tribe Called Quest with one earbud in. Peter knocks almost inaudibly on the door. When she opens it, he’s standing behind Reuben, presenting the boy like an offering. Carrie imagines the man Peter must have been, so different from the mousy thing he is now.
“Roo’s been having headaches,” he says. “I know sometimes that can be a sign.”
“It could be a lot of things, Peter,” she says.
“But it might.”
“I didn’t resonate till I was fourteen,” Carrie says.
“I heard in Boulder they’re screening kids,” he says. “They’re taking them back.”
“There’s nothing definitive,” Carrie says. “People back east, some of them are still angry.”
“But if he has powers, he’s one of you,” Peter says, shaking the boy for emphasis. “They’d take him in. They’d take him back.”
It would be easy enough to check. It wouldn’t be a hundred percent—sometimes a kid’s potential wasn’t apparent to an amateur like Carrie and it took a deeper scan called a sounding to be sure—but if there was a glimmer there, she’d probably be able to sense it. The problem that confronts Carrie is no news is good news. If she tells the kid he’s a Resonant, she’s driving a wedge between him and his father, one she’s experienced. If she tells him he isn’t, she’s damning him to spend the rest of his life here or somewhere worse. She has no interest in delivering either message.
“You have to wait,” Carrie says. “You have to wait to see what happens with him and what happens with the law.” She puts her hand on Reuben’s flushed cheek. “For now, the best thing he can do is work on his horseback riding.” Relieved, Reuben runs out of the room, but his father stays. Carrie looks at him sadly. She’s subjected to these conversations everywhere she goes, a parade of children offered up for inspection. She’d love to find one she could bring back with her. The new government is good at getting things built but bad at creating policy. The Path to Return has been in talks for two years. It would grant citizenship to any Resonant born in the Wastes. The name has a feudal air, the sense of a ruling class reaching down and plucking an occasional peasant out of the shit.
“Even if he was,” she says, then pauses. “If they took him back, it’d be just him. They’d take him from you.”
“They’d get him out of here,” Peter says through clenched teeth. “There’s nothing here. I’ve tried to get him papers to get out of the country, but the people on the West Coast, they want so much money that I—”
“Don’t deal with anyone on the West Coast,” Carrie says. She’s heard horror stories about people trying to get off the continent from ports in Seattle and Vancouver, sympathetic Resonants who will teleport you across the ocean for a price. The better ones are scams, the worst are traps. There’s a slave trade all up and down the coast, baseliners who show up attempting to buy their way out and end up in situations unimaginably worse. “Keep him here,” she says. “Keep him safe. That’s what a parent does.”
Peter’s face twitches and twists. She can see him swallowing something he wants to say, but he turns to go instead. The door is nearly closed when he comes back in; whatever he tried to swallow has come back up, burning his throat. “A parent doesn’t just keep their kid safe,” he says. “They do what’s best for their kid, even if it fucking hurts. You take care of your kin.” The word is hot and mean, the sound of a stick breaking over a knee. Maybe it’s only a word, but Peter knows the significance of that word out here. He chose it for her. Regret mixes with the heaviness of travel, the pull of the bed behind her, and Carrie mutters “I’m sorry” as she closes the door on him.
“We used to have more options than safe,” she hears him say in the hallway before he leaves. She expects the words to follow her down into sleep, but she’s out in minutes and sleeps dreamlessly.
Why don’t you have Ruth fly you?” Omar asks. “Did you two have a fight?”
“We did not have a fight,” Fahima says. She doesn’t know whether Ruth told him or whether he had a copy listening at the door, but Omar knew immediately that things had turned physical between her and
Ruth. He isn’t shy teasing her about it either; one of the downsides of his unclear job title is that he never treats Fahima much like a boss. “Descending on them in a magical bubble wouldn’t send the message I’m looking for.”
“Fair enough,” he says. “Be careful with her, though. She adores you.”
I adore her, too, Fahima nearly blurts out. But the word isn’t right; it has a hint of idolatry. “I’ll be careful,” she says.
“Speaking of careful, I would like to restate how much I hate this thing today,” Omar says.
“Your concerns have been noted.”
“My concerns have been summarily ignored,” Omar says, cramming into the same wedge of the revolving door as Fahima so he can continue to gripe. “Why not have him come here?”
“He’d be out of his mind to come here right now,” Fahima says.
“You’re a high-value asset,” Omar says as he opens the car door for her. “You don’t put a high-value asset into a nonsecure environment.”
Fahima glares at him. “Where do you get any of those words?”
Omar shrugs. “I’m seeing a boy who’s way into spy movies.”
“We need to get past spy talk and have a conversation with these people,” Fahima says.
“With all due respect, boss,” Omar says, “maybe we don’t.”
After the Armistice, when the Bronx established itself as a refuge community, the decision was made to separate it from Manhattan as much as possible. The little bridges that spanned the Harlem River were closed off or destroyed, although the Washington Bridge to the north and the RFK Bridge that crossed Randall’s Island, which had been converted into a training facility for the Black Rose Faction, were still in use. It was an impractical, spiteful thing to do, but spite drove a lot of policy in the first weeks and months. It made getting into Manhattan from the north impossible without routing through Jersey and cut off commuter towns like New Rochelle and Norwalk. Separation was key to the peace.
One of the Omars drives them over the RFK, across a barren stretch of fields fenced off on both sides with trespassing warnings posted regularly. Fahima mentally tags him as “Front Seat Omar,” willfully ignoring that this makes the Omar sitting next to her “Backseat Omar,” an appellation that has seedy implications. Front Seat Omar eases them into the snake’s nest of off-ramps and roundabouts where traffic from Queens and Manhattan once converged and takes the exit north toward the Bronx. Before the bridge over Bronx Kill, they’re stopped at a checkpoint. No cars ahead of them, no cars behind. No cars through the southbound lane. A solitary Faction agent sits at a lonely little booth at the edge of a body of water Fahima could swim across if she was determined.
Fahima flashes her credentials. “Reason for entry?” the agent asks. He’s a portly white man in his late fifties with a thick Brooklyn accent and a beard that glows with nebulous lights, a helpful reminder that not every member of the Faction is master race material.
“We’re with the Bishop Foundation,” she says, showing her ID. “It’s sensitive.”
The agent rolls his eyes. “Sensitive reason for entry?”
“I can’t discuss—”
“I need something to put on the paperwork,” he says, clearly bored.
“We set up sewage treatment in Morrisania a few months back,” Front Seat Omar says. “A charity thing.”
“I didn’t hear about that,” the agent says.
“We didn’t make it a big deal.”
“What’s it got to do with today?”
“See this?” says Front Seat Omar, pointing to an inch-long scab across the high crest of his cheek that Fahima missed earlier. She looks at the Omar next to her and sees that he has the same scab. “I got sliced when one of these motherfuckers blew himself up at a party last night,” Front Seat Omar says. “We’re here to shut it down. Let these fucks drown in their own shit.”
The agent gives the smallest chuckle, nods, and waves them through. As they cross the bridge, Backseat Omar keeps his eyes on the water, out the window.
“That was convincing,” Fahima says.
“You have to speak to them in their own language,” he says. But he doesn’t turn to look at her, and his finger traces the scab on his cheek. Fahima can’t help but wonder if he believes what he said. It’s not as if she’s never thought the same thing. They tried so hard to kill us. They hate us so much. Why is it on us to keep them alive?
American ruin porn was an established visual genre even before the war. Tourists came to see the empty factories and abandoned housing developments of Detroit the way they snapped infinite selfies in front of the Colosseum and the Parthenon. Something about standing in the ashes of empire appeals cross-culturally. The truth of occupied ruins bears little resemblance to the photogenic face tourists seek out. It’s not an echo of empire but an indictment of it. As the car moves through the Bronx, Fahima is confronted with the flip side of everything she’s achieved. She doesn’t want to believe that for some to live in a utopia, others must suffer in a dystopia, but she can’t argue with the streets around her. People slumped against buildings, passed out drunk or dead. Dogs fight over pieces of trash that hold a whiff of food. An empty bottle smashes on the roof of the car, raining glass into their path. It’s an obvious target because none of the other cars here run. Both Omars crane their necks to see where the bottle came from and if there are others coming. They can’t spot any source, as if the streets chucked the bottle as a form of welcome. Dogs look up at the sound, then return to their scraps.
Front Seat Omar pulls the car over in front of what used to be a butcher’s shop. The window is covered over in brown paper, but a decal depicts a pink pig grinning as he raises a carving knife to slice into a piece of ham on the bone.
“I’m going in with you,” Omar says. “Like sixteen of me.”
“We told him I’d be alone,” Fahima says. “I’ve got a panic button. You can come flooding in by the dozen if I give you the sign.”
“Panic button won’t help if he shoots you in the head,” says Backseat Omar.
“They won’t kill me,” Fahima says. “I’m a high-value asset.” If it goes south, it’s much more likely they’ll take her as a hostage than off her on the spot. She steps out of the car and does a quick scan of nearby rooftops. She doesn’t see snipers, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t there. She grips the handle of the front door, thinking that any resistance might be a sign it’s rigged. She won’t be able to tell without pulling. When she yanks the door open, she isn’t blown back into the street. So that’s good. Fahima gives Omar a quick nod, then steps in.
The room is candlelit, almost romantic. The power’s out more often than it’s on in the Bronx, but it’s morning and the room would get ample light if they took the paper off the windows. The object is to keep this meeting secret, but half the Bronx watched Fahima come in. Surrounded by candles, flanked by what look to be lumberjack backup singers, Gavin Olsen, leader of the Bronx cell of the Kindred Network, looks like a hipster wizard or some demonic bartender. He has a full beard and a mustache twisted and waxed until it extends to arrow-sharp points at either end. His skinny tie and suspenders stand out like a shiny new penny among the roughshod denizens of the Bronx.
“I thought we said alone,” Fahima says, gesturing at his entourage.
“I didn’t mean I’d be alone,” Olsen says. “I wouldn’t risk being alone with one of you.”
“I was thinking the same thing,” Fahima says.
“We’re no threat to you,” Olsen says. “Please, sit.”
Gavin Olsen was an inevitable side effect of the policies of the Armistice. He was a wounded ally. He had been a professional influencer, one of those people who mastered social media before anyone else had ideas about what it was for. He was one of the first to come out in support of Resonants’ rights, immediately after they’d gone public. As tensions e
scalated, he wrote articles for a number of outlets against the rising tide of xenophobia and encouraged his followers to calm the fuck down and accept Resonants for who they were. Only half the general public ever favored policies like internment or worse. Most were indifferent, and some, like Olsen, were actively against it.
Reading over his pieces in retrospect, Fahima could see a change after the Pulse and the realization that he hadn’t been one of the chosen. Once fighting broke out, people quickly chose sides. The bulk of them sided with the government. How could they not? The prevailing narrative was that Resonants were the aggressors. But there were still people rooting for the Resonants to win. The Armistice threw them out along with everyone else. The sting was brutal, and some, thus betrayed, joined anti-Resonant groups like the Kindred Network. Olsen rose quickly through the ranks, using the same skills that had made him a social media guru to create real life networks in the enclave the Bronx became.
“You know we met once,” he says. “It was after Kevin Bishop’s speech at Columbia. This would have been, what, eight years ago? Different world.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t remember,” Fahima says. “That was a tough day.”
“It’s difficult to imagine what you mean when you say tough day,” Olsen says. He turns to the men behind him. “Mark, you had any tough days lately?”
“My mom died of a staph infection last year,” says one of the lumberjacks stoically. “Treatable, but they couldn’t get the antibiotics. Those were tough days.”
“Died of a staph infection across the river from the greatest city in the Western world,” Olsen says, shaking his head. “That does sound tough. But I’m sorry, we were talking about your tough day.”
“You know what I’m here to talk about,” Fahima says.
“You didn’t need to come all this way,” says Olsen. “We didn’t do it. The Kindred Network didn’t bomb your party.”
