by Bob Proehl
“I don’t think I like those, do I?”
“No,” Fahima says. “You said they tasted like pine needles soaked in paint thinner.”
“Then no, thank you,” Sarah says. She stands in the doorway, awkward, waiting for something.
“What’s on your mind?” Fahima asks. As soon as she does, she regrets the wording.
“I asked…the man…a question,” she says. Some days she remembers Omar’s name, but not today. “He told me I had to ask you.” Fahima nods. She already knows the question. They go through this once a month. Sarah is an assemblage of loops, certain conversations repeated at intervals.
“What happened at Bishop that day?” Sarah says.
“You don’t want to talk about that,” Fahima says.
“It’s the only way I can remember.”
“Maybe it’s better not to remember.”
“Sometimes I wake up and I don’t know how we got here,” Sarah says. Her hand trails back to where Cortex used to sit at her heel. Her fingers trace the outline of where the dog used to be, a memory written into the nerves of her arm. “What’s in the jar?” Sarah says.
“Patrick,” says Fahima. “Or maybe not; I don’t know.”
“Do you think he’s gone?” Sarah says. “You still talk to him, don’t you? Or work with him?” Since Cortex was killed, Sarah has trouble keeping track of things. Even the things she remembers, she’s unsure of. She’s at most a hundred memories held together by a handful of personality traits. It’s like watching someone give a poor performance of her friend. She’s lost Patrick because he’s becoming something more, and she’s lost Sarah because she’s becoming something less.
“He says it’s still him,” Fahima says. “He makes a point of telling me every time we talk. It’s still me in here, Fahima. Your old buddy Patrick. He must think it’s what keeps me from killing him.”
“Is it?” Sarah says.
Sarah and Fahima have gone over every memory Sarah has of Patrick, all the ones she’s kept: the two of them swimming off the coast of Maine or backpacking through the Swiss Alps on their parents’ dime. They’re beautiful and dear to Sarah because the truth of what Patrick is now doesn’t stick with her. Fahima’s memories of Patrick are tainted with the present. She wonders which would be worse: knowing their friend is dead or knowing their friend had done the awful things Patrick’s done. But it’s not as if Fahima’s hands are clean. Once again, she’s bought time. More of it, but at a higher price. The bill is coming due, and she needs a way to cheat the Devil. She hoped Yorick might be the key, but she has nothing.
“What keeps me from killing him is I don’t know how,” Fahima says.
Emmeline rejects several activities Alyssa proposes out of loyalty to mothers she’s had before. She did the same thing to Kimani at first, refusing to be read to not because she was too old for it but because it was a thing she used to do with her mom. It wasn’t until Paris that Emmeline had submitted, allowing Kimani to read her Les Misérables under the stipulation that they take turns so there would be an alteration from the way it had been with her mother. With the separation still fresh, everything Alyssa suggests reminds Emmeline of Kimani. All board games indicate chess, which is their thing. Alyssa’s collection of DVDs has no overlap with the library they had in their room—Alyssa favors rom-coms and early 2000s medical dramas, whereas Kimani preferred noir and turned her nose up at television—but watching a movie with Alyssa feels like a betrayal. In the end they listen to some sad singer with a deep baritone and Emmeline pages through a 1950s nurse novel, one of dozens of paperbacks on Alyssa’s shelf.
“I used to collect them when I was a kid,” Alyssa says. The apartment is surprisingly full of knickknacks, and the kitchen is stocked with culinary gadgets and other ephemera. It clashes with Emmeline’s understanding of how the evacuations had worked. She thought everyone left with only what they could carry.
“I was special,” Alyssa says. “Fahima gave me everything I could want. She kept me like a princess in a tower. Some of it’s mine from before.” She picks up a brass statuette of a man with an elephant for a head and runs her fingers over it before putting it back on the shelf. “Some of it must have been looted from houses back east.” She looks at the kitchen as if it’s haunted.
“She sent you here?” Emmeline asks.
“Not at first,” Alyssa says. “I was in Chicago, then someplace else, all by myself. I got tired of being a bird in a cage, so I came here. She helped. Found me the apartment. Got all my things here, and all the things she found for me. I guess this is where she put things she thought she might need later.”
The small empty space between songs is broken by a rattle of the front door lock. Alyssa goes to the kitchen, looking for the most menacing knife she can find as the dead bolt shoots back. The door swings open, revealing no one behind it. It slams shut again, and Carrie appears in the middle of the living room, face and clothes streaked with blood, carrying a boy on her shoulders. She’s clutching two thin pieces of metal in her hand.
“Help him,” she says, collapsing to her knees under the weight. The boy rolls off her, a jumble of limbs. He looks sickly, impossibly pale, as if his skin is made of rice paper.
“Jesus,” says Alyssa.
“Blood’s not mine,” Carrie adds. “Drugs. Help him.”
Alyssa straightens the boy out, laying him on his back and checking his breathing, his pupils.
“Rez,” Carrie says, pointing to the boy. “A ton of it. He’s overdosing people. Trying to get them to resonate.”
“Who is?” Alyssa asks
“The man with the mayor,” Carrie says. Her mouth shapes a sound, possibly an s. “He was there, at city hall, with her when I met her.”
“There wasn’t anyone with the mayor,” Alyssa says.
“He was right—” Carrie stops. “He eats memories,” she says. “You met him, but you don’t remember.”
“Okay, that’s enough,” Alyssa says. She pulls a flip phone from her pocket and dials. She stands, impatient, with one hand on her hip, waiting for someone to pick up on the other end. When they do, she launches in.
“How is it you’re still in the business of fucking up my life?” she says. “I’m supposed to be back among normal people, Fahima. But I’m standing here in my apartment with a girl you told me was dead and another girl who says somebody ate her memories, and none of it feels remotely normal.” There’s a pause before Alyssa repeats ate her memories, then another pause. Alyssa puts her hand over the phone.
“The man with the mayor,” she says to Carrie. “What was his name?”
“Cedric Joyner,” Carrie says. “He’s running a lab. He’s doing experiments on people.”
“I know who he is,” Alyssa says. She turns away, as if turning her back will silence her conversation, but she’s still audible. “It’s him,” she says. “She says I met him and I forgot. He could have been here the whole time.” She turns back, hand over the phone again.
“Did he know about Emmeline?” she asks.
Carrie nods.
Alyssa leaves the room to finish the conversation. While they wait for her to come back, Emmeline checks on Carrie, doing the things she imagines she’s supposed to do for someone in shock. She asks her the date, which Carrie gets wrong by three days, and has Carrie follow her finger with her eyes. She wets a washcloth and cleans away blood to be sure there are no wounds underneath.
“Who is he?” Emmeline asks once she’s convinced Carrie’s okay. “Another job?”
“He used to be my brother.”
* * *
—
Alyssa makes another call from the landline in the kitchen, and within ten minutes paramedics show up from the hospital to take Carrie’s brother. He’s in and out of consciousness, muttering about comic books and a room made of black bone. Carrie stops one of t
he paramedics, grabbing him by the arm.
“Can you do one more thing?” she asks. “Can you send someone to get my dad? He might already be…” Carrie trails off. “He’s all alone, and I don’t think he has long left. I want to know someone is taking care of him.”
“Of course,” he says. Carrie writes down the address for him, but Emmeline can see her struggling to recall it. Alyssa goes back into her bedroom with the cellphone and comes out with a suitcase that’s been sitting, packed, for when this moment came.
“Is the car ready?” Carrie asks. “Even if there’s not enough gas, we can start back.”
“You can’t go back east,” Alyssa says. “We don’t know how much he pulled from your head, but we have to assume he thinks you’re taking her to New York.”
“I know sixteen routes to get us back across—”
“He could know all of them,” Alyssa says. “Anything you thought you were going to do is compromised. Fahima has a plan. She always does. Apparently I’m fucking part of it.” She hoists her suitcase. “Grab your gear. We’re meeting one of Fahima’s people downtown in an hour.”
“Wait,” Carrie says, shaking her head like she’s trying to remember something else she’s lost. “Fahima Deeb?”
Alyssa stares at her blankly. “Who did you think you were working for?”
“Part of the job is you don’t ask,” Carrie says.
Alyssa’s expression softens, and Emmeline can see the moment when she wants to be kind. Once, this woman probably had it in her to be kinder than she is now. Her face sets into a cold resolve. “That’s a stupid job, kid,” she says. “Get your stuff. Let’s go.
Emmeline grabs her rucksack and looks at Carrie, who has nothing.
“All your stuff,” Emmeline says.
“It was just some clothes,” Carrie says.
“You had books and a picture,” Emmeline says. “Your music thing.” She mimics the way Carrie holds the gadget and traces circles on it with her finger.
“That I’m not happy about,” says Carrie. “But I’m not going back to that place. Not ever.” She doesn’t look scared or shaken. She looks as if she’s seen lots of horrible places and has learned to put them someplace in her head once they’re behind her.
Under the cloak of Carrie’s ability, they ride bikes downtown, passing the Boulderado Hotel. Emmeline slows her pedaling as they go by. She wants to go in and check to be sure Kimani isn’t there, but she knows Carrie’s right. The hotel was never her home, only Kimani’s room, and that isn’t there anymore. Emmeline’s vision flutters, and she thinks it’s tears until she realizes she’s become visible again, with Carrie and Alyssa well ahead of her.
“Keep up,” Carrie calls, and Emmeline pedals hard to get back under the umbra of Carrie’s ability.
A tour bus waits for them in the loading zone of the Fox Theatre, its windows opaque. It idles like it’s trying to build suspense. Roadies load gear into the compartments underneath, some of which are filled with large plastic tanks of gas. The front door folds open like a curtain drawn back, and Hayden Cohen descends the stairs in postshow attire of ripped jeans and a hoodie, holding their arms open.
“I am so fucking happy to see you,” Carrie says, rushing over and sweeping Hayden into a hug. She sobs, the sound muffled by Hayden’s shoulder.
“Easy, hon,” Hayden says so quietly that Emmeline barely hears them. They wrap their hand around the back of Carrie’s head, knitting their fingers into her hair. It’s the first time Emmeline considers what Carrie’s gone through since she got here, how much has gone on outside her own attention.
“Rafa,” Hayden says. “Throw their things in with ours.”
“I’m a guitarist, not a roadie,” says an olive-skinned boy with a greasy hank of hair concealing a patch over his right eye.
“Fuck you, man,” says one of the women telekinetically lifting an amp onto the bus. Rafa seems to think this is a valid point. He flashes Emmeline a smile as he eases her bag off her shoulder.
“Rafa, no,” Hayden shouts the way they might at a dog considering getting into something it shouldn’t. He shrugs, smiles sheepishly, and takes the bag to the luggage bays under the bus. “That’s Rafa; he’s mostly harmless,” they tell Emmeline. “Don’t take anything he says seriously.”
Emmeline nods. Hayden rubs their hands together. “Apparently one of you is supposed to tell me where we’re going,” they say.
“The fuck out of here,” says Carrie. “Faster the better.”
“I got that part,” Hayden says. “High-speed getaway, check. But I was told you know where we’re going. Compartmentalization of intelligence. It’s like Fahima’s pickup line.”
“I know,” says Alyssa.
“Who are you again?” Hayden asks.
“Alyssa’s our friend,” Emmeline says.
“Cool. I love putting my complete trust in strangers,” says Hayden. “So where are we headed?”
“Phoenix,” Alyssa says.
“That’s fucked up,” Rafa says. The crew congeals around Alyssa, arms folded.
“A lot of us lost people in Phoenix,” Hayden says.
“There’s nothing there,” says the roadie.
“Your people—” Rafa starts, but Carrie cuts him off.
“Phoenix is gone,” she tells Alyssa. “I’ve seen it. The Gate at the school there collapsed. The whole city—”
Alyssa shakes her head and waves them off. “Fahima hid it,” she says. She looks at Emmeline. “She’s very good at hiding things.”
“A whole city?” Carrie asks.
“Fucking look around,” Alyssa says. “She sets me up down the block from Emmeline—who is supposed to be fucking dead, by the way—for years, just in case. She sends you out here”—she points to Carrie—“without telling you fuck all and sends in a whole goddamn rock tour as a backup plan, just in case. You think she couldn’t hide a city?”
The crew look at one another, and Emmeline wonders about the extent to which they understand that they’ve been working for anyone other than Hayden. Compartmentalization of information, after all. As seconds of silence tick by, they turn from each other to Hayden, waiting to be told what to do. Hayden shrugs.
“Westward ho,” Hayden says. “Rafa, you’ve got first shift. Let’s get a couple hours away from the city at least.”
Emmeline climbs up onto the bus, which smells deeply lived in. Rafa starts the engine and puts Aladdin Sane on the stereo. Emmeline curls up on a bench. Hayden distributes beer from a minifridge, motioning to offer one to Emmeline before Carrie wards it off. Alyssa declines, opting to sit by herself. Hayden clinks their bottle to Carrie’s as the lights of the city recede and the bus moves into the darkness of the Wastes. Even with the path clear, the trip has a doomed feeling. But if they’re fucked, at least they’re among friends.
Kevin was surprised when he rechecked the address Raymond had given him and found it was in a burned-out block on Haight, between Buena Vista and Golden Gate parks. He could see the seedlings of the San Francisco counterculture he’d read about breaking through the soil. Cheap real estate had drawn artists and bohemians until the concentration hit the point where businesses that catered to them became viable. Kevin asked for directions in a shop that sold marijuana, LSD, and substances he hadn’t even heard of alongside spinner racks of comic books that ranged from superheroes to sex dreams. The girl behind the counter, pupils like saucers, looked at the address and practically shrieked, “I live there!”
“This is the home of Professor Raymond Glover,” Kevin explained in a voice that bordered on condescension. “He teaches physics at—”
“It’s the professor’s house, but we all live there,” said the girl. “We’re so glad he’s back. Are you going to live there, too?”
Kevin bought a pack of gum and, worried it might be laced, threw it in the t
rash. Haight Street was full of the lost: some burned and broken, some merely searching. Kevin reached out, looking for other Resonants. There were communities forming in knots and whorls: a block in Chicago, a seaside cul-de-sac in Maine. This wasn’t one of them. The people on the street were only people, nothing special about them. He felt the pull from the house at the end of the street, the top of the hill. It called to him the way other Resonants always called out to him: a voice in another room. This time it was louder. Resonants had an amplifying effect when they grouped together, and it was that multiplied call he heard from the house at the top of the hill.
A stunning young Asian boy opened the door wearing a silk tunic and torn faded jeans. He smiled beatifically at Kevin, then pulled him into an abrupt, awkward hug. “You’re the professor’s friend,” he said into Kevin’s ear. “He told us you were coming.”
“Bowen, let him go,” said Raymond, coming down the hall with his brisk long strides. “Mr. Bishop is joining us from the East Coast, where there are stringent rules about physical affection.”
Bowen released Kevin. Raymond extended his hand formally, which broke a tiny piece of Kevin’s heart, but the moment he took it, Raymond promptly swept him up in an embrace. “It is so good to see you,” Raymond said. “Talking in our heads is not the same as having you in my arms. Nothing is.”
“I’ve missed you, too,” Kevin said. Something trembled and fluttered in his throat like a trapped bird. Since the last time they had seen each other, he had shared psychic intimacy with hundreds of people but only a scattering of awkward physical encounters. His biggest fear was that Raymond no longer felt that way for him, that his mask of heteronormalcy had become his face. To have Raymond say exactly what Kevin thought meant the world to him, so much so that he never questioned the preciseness of it, the mirrorlike quality of his own words coming from Raymond’s perfect mouth.
“Did you solve the problem you mentioned?” Raymond asked as he led Kevin down the hall. In one room, a group of young people lounged on tatty couches, smoking cigarettes that gave off the sweet smell of campfires. A boy with no shirt and carved muscles levitated a silver tray across the room to a girl who licked her finger, pressed it to the tray, and came away with a square of paper tinier than a postage stamp, which she laid gently on her outstretched tongue. Their thoughts flowed together into a pool of glowing liquid, swirling with color so that Kevin could not tell where one of them began and the others ended. He paused in the doorway of the living room and watched as one of the boys knelt in front of the shirtless boy, unzipped the boy’s pants, and delicately placed his cock in his mouth. Raymond and Bowen were a few steps ahead by the time Kevin wrenched his attention away.