by Bob Proehl
Kevin looked at the couple engaged in oral sex and at Bowen. “I dealt with it,” he said. One of Raymond’s more annoying habits was leaving it to Kevin to handle problematic Resonants as they emerged and taking the high hand when it came to how Kevin handled them.
“I have some data I want you to look at,” Raymond said. “Are you staying a few days? You could come to the labs with me on Monday.”
“I could stay a little while,” he said. “The real estate deal in New York that Davenport set up is supposed to close next week. There’s paperwork.”
“It’s hard to imagine you working with Davenport,” Raymond said. “He’s a bit unscrupulous, isn’t he?”
“He’s a swindler,” Kevin said. “He’s secured me an entire block of Manhattan for the kind of money you could find in the cushions of a couch. But it’s for the greater good.”
“The school, yes,” Raymond said, waggling his eyebrows. “But what about the little place he sold you up in Maine? Cui bono, my dear?”
Kevin blushed. He wasn’t planning on telling Raymond about the bungalow on Oceanside Drive yet, and he’d never intended to tell him how he’d gotten it. Davenport had psychically bullied every owner on the street to sell at pennies on the dollar, as he had with the block in New York, and sold it back to Kevin at cost, hoping for a favor down the line.
“It was meant to be a surprise,” he told Raymond. Raymond smiled, the smile that had always marked the end of Kevin’s resistance. “Are you disappointed in me?” he asked. “Consorting with such low company?”
“I’m proud of you,” Raymond said. “You’ve developed a pragmatic streak. And I can’t wait to see the place.” He kissed Kevin on the cheek like a priest absolving a sinner.
“Where’s Mona?” Kevin asked. “I thought she’d be the first out to greet me.”
“She’s around somewhere,” Raymond said, waving a hand dismissively. They passed the kitchen, where a young couple were sculpting a great swan out of water, their abilities working in concert.
“What are you up to here?” Kevin asked.
“A school of my own, I suppose,” Raymond said. “A house for independent study. We do a lot of meditation work. Self-actualization. Nothing compared to your plans, of course.”
“They’re all so young,” Kevin said. “And so pretty.”
“None as pretty as you,” Raymond said, but it had the flat tone of a bored, placating husband. “Come on; there’s a girl upstairs I want you to meet. And Kevin, I’d like you to help her rather than deal with her.”
The door looks out of place. The house was built on the cheap, and the doors were flat pieces of pine with brushed metal knobs, the same kind Kevin had had in his family’s cramped Brooklyn apartment growing up. Except this one. It was made of rich dark wood, the handle burnished brass. When Raymond rapped a knuckle on it, it sounded like a bass drum being struck.
“Miss Moore?” Raymond said. His voice was gentle, solicitous. “I have someone here I’d like you to meet.”
“I’ll meet him at dinner,” said someone inside.
“You haven’t been down for dinner all week,” Raymond said, a hint of chiding creeping in. “My friend is only on a brief visit. It would mean a lot to me if you’d speak to him.”
There was a long pause before the doorknob turned. A young woman poked her face out of a thin sliver. She was black, not older than twenty, with high cheekbones, skeptical eyebrows, and her hair in the natural style popular on campuses, like a cloud of dark steam emanating from her head.
“This your friend?” she said.
“This is Mr. Kevin Bishop,” said Raymond. He never missed an opportunity to highlight the fact Kevin never finished his degree. “You’ve heard me talk about him. He helps people like us when we have problems.”
“I don’t have problems,” she said.
“Then step out and say hello,” Raymond said. The girl glared at him as if Raymond had dealt her a cruel blow that Kevin didn’t understand. She stepped back, and the door swung open. The room was dark inside, framing the girl.
“Come on in,” she said, dejected.
Raymond nodded. “You two talk for a bit,” he said. He handed Kevin a pair of candles and a book of matches, which Kevin looked down at, puzzled. “I’m going to check on dinner, and I’ll be back up in a little while.” He headed down the stairs, leaving the two of them standing on opposite sides of the threshold. The sound of two people aggressively fucking could be heard from the next room.
“Joey and Merilee,” said the girl. “Or Joey and Tall Stephen. Or Joey and Veronica. Joey’s basically a hard-on with legs.”
“Sounds like a suboptimal housemate,” said Kevin.
The girl shrugged. “Can’t hear him in here,” she said.
“We can talk like this if you want,” Kevin said. “I don’t have to come in. Also, I’m…not a hard-on with legs.”
The girl laughed. “It’s cool,” she said. “Light that and come in.”
Kevin pocketed one of the candles, then fumbled to light the other. When he managed to apply a lit match to the wick, he held the meager flame up for the girl’s approval. “I’m Kimani,” she said, giving him a hand wave in.
“Kevin,” he said. He stepped over the threshold tentatively, as if he were crossing an invisible boundary rather than entering a closet.
“It’s tiny,” Kimani said. “It used to not be, but it’s gotten smaller.”
“Your room is shrinking?” Kevin asked. He explored the corners of the room with the candle. In the paltry light, it was difficult to make out colors, but the walls were black: they barely reflected the flame, casting back a portion of it and consuming the rest.
“It used to be a regular room,” she said. “I used to be able to leave.”
“You can’t leave?”
“No.”
“Have you tried?”
“No.”
“You just know you can’t?”
“It’s like that,” Kimani said. He caught hints of her expression in the candlelight. He took the other candle out of his pocket, lit it from the first, and handed it to her. She held it near her chin, lighting her face.
“Better,” Kevin said. Kimani smiled. “How long have you been staying here?”
“Couple months,” she said. “I took an intro to physics class with the professor. I’m studying to be a filmmaker.”
“They have a whole program for that?” Kevin asked.
She tipped the candle side to side to indicate a shrug. “Probably have to major in English or something.”
“When I was in school, there were fewer choices,” said Kevin.
“And zero black people,” Kimani said.
“A handful,” Kevin said. “No black women that I can remember.”
“I’m on a leave of absence,” Kimani said.
“I took one of those,” Kevin said. “Never went back.”
“That’s not really what I wanted to hear.”
“I know it’s not polite to ask,” he said, “but what is your—”
“I don’t have one,” she said. “Professor swears I’m like you all, but I can’t do anything special.”
Kevin ran his hand along the wall. It was cold and bumpy. “Can I ask you a weird question?” he said. “This room. Did you pick it out yourself? When you moved in?”
“It wasn’t this small when I picked it,” she said defensively.
“I don’t think it was here before you picked it,” Kevin said. “I think this room is your ability.”
“My ability is being trapped in a janitor’s closet?”
Kevin let out a little laugh. “I know this keeps being weird, but can I come into your thoughts?”
Kimani considered for a moment, then shrugged. Kevin went into her mind and immediately saw the piece of her wher
e her ability lived. He was looking at something he thought was impossible. Kimani’s ability was connected directly to the Source, but it operated on some space that was between the source of where their abilities came from and the actual world. He pulled back out of her mind and looked around the room. He tried to orient himself, north-south, even up-down, and found that whatever cues he normally relied on were missing.
“We’re in it right now,” he said.
“In what?”
“Nothing I am about to tell you is going to make any sense,” Kevin said. “When you opened that door, you pushed a bubble of the real world into a space that…isn’t in the real world. There is some way that we can recognize each other as having abilities, and I think it’s across an interstitial space. I think we’re in that space right now.”
“Cool,” she said. “Can I leave?”
“I don’t know,” Kevin said. “But I think what’s happened is that space is pushing in on this one. I think that space is bigger than space the way we think of it, and it’s crushing your bubble. It’s a matter of pressure.”
“You were right about this making no fucking sense,” Kimani said.
“Push back,” Kevin said. “Instead of focusing on getting out, push the walls away from you. You should feel a tingle. It will feel like it’s at the spot where the back of your skull meets your neck, but it’s deeper than that. It’s in what’s called your parahippocampal gyrus. Can you do that?”
“Yeah, parahippo whatever,” Kimani said.
Kevin waves this away. “Push out,” he said. “Give yourself space.”
Kimani stepped to the nearest wall and laid her palm against it. “Not like that,” Kevin said. “In your head. Imagine this bigger.”
In the sputtering candlelight, Kevin could see her eyes were closed, her forehead furrowed as she concentrated. He felt a shiver through everything as her ability moved out from her, shoving the walls backward until the room was too big to fit in the physical space it occupied.
Kimani opened her eyes and looked around. “Holy shit.”
Kevin licked the tips of his thumb and forefinger and reached out to pinch the flame of Kimani’s candle between them. He blew out his own flame, leaving them in the dark.
“What’d you do that for?” she asked.
“Imagine us a light,” Kevin said.
“After that should I invent you a sandwich?”
“Imagine a light in between us,” he said. “Or pull a floor lamp up from the ground. It doesn’t matter. Everything within this space is yours to shape.”
Kevin felt something move underneath his foot, and the dimmest light appeared at the height of their shins. It was the tip of a white tendril growing up from the black ground. As the tendril grew, so did the tip, and so did its light, until it was an ivory stalk with a glowing yellow globe perched on top of it.
“It’s sort of phallic,” Kimani said.
Kevin laughed. “So fix it,” he said. Kimani closed her eyes. He could watch her now, see how little effort the shaping took her. Three branches extended out from the main stalk, each one dangling a light like a ripe fruit.
“That’s better,” she said. She circled around the tree, examining her work. “So this is my ability? I can shape the room I’m trapped in?”
Kevin rested his hand on the wall again, and the black calcified coating melted under his hand, running down like snot and revealing ivory walls underneath. “I don’t think that’s even the beginning.”
* * *
—
At dinner, Kevin met Joey, the hard-on with legs, and Cassidy, the girl from the head shop whose Resonance had been so muffled by the acid she took at the start of her shift that Kevin hadn’t noticed it when they met. He sat between Raymond and Bowen, who was kind enough to keep reminding him of the names of the twenty Resonants seated around the table, passing bread and vegetarian dishes back and forth like an elaborate card game. Raymond, who didn’t seem to eat, pontificated on shifts nascent in the social strata: the death of capitalism and the end of mere humanity, the birth of the world to come.
“In Mesoamerican literature, the universe repeatedly dies to be reborn,” he said. “Each time, there are new gods at the ready to take over from the dying ones. The ‘gods’ aren’t beings or entities the way we think of a Judeo-Christian god as an omnipotent Santa Claus in the sky.” This got giggles from the room. “They’re idea sets. Ideologies that run their course, exhaust themselves, and die. We see these dying gods staggering in their last steps all around us. The God Money. The God Nation. The God Sex. As they die one by one, what new gods rise to take their place?”
The shirtless young man who’d been on the receiving end of the public blow job raised his hand tentatively.
“Us?” he offered.
“No, Arthur, and you don’t have to raise your hand,” Raymond said. It felt like a Sunday school class, not a discussion but the impression of knowledge on minds too young to comprehend it. These were children, absorbing rather than digesting the things Raymond told them. “Not us but the ideas we provide. New models for living in the world.”
“So what are they?” Kevin asked, seated at Raymond’s right hand. Raymond looked at him, flustered, startled to find another shepherd among his sheep. He considered the question, then gestured to the room.
“Look around, Kevin,” he said. “You want to build a school. You want to replicate the old. Teachers and students. Knowledge poured from a pitcher to a cup like wine that’s gone sour. How does newness enter? Where is the space for novelty and innovation? Here we learn from each other. We allow our ideas and experiences to combine, hybridize, in the pursuit of metamorphosis and breakthrough.”
Kevin considered mentioning the evangelical dynamic Raymond had established with these kids or saying that every “hybridization” he’d seen was in pursuit of nothing more glorious than an orgasm. Instead he said, “It’s a noble experiment, Raymond,” and sipped the bathtub gin Raymond’s disciples had made for his visit, which tasted so much like lacquer that he worried it would harden in his guts.
“We’re so glad the professor is back,” Bowen whispered to Kevin as people cleared the table.
“Where did the professor go?” Kevin asked loudly enough for Raymond to hear him. Before he could get an answer, Mona came in, looking harried. She carried a bag of groceries in one arm and in the other had a bundle that was unmistakably a baby. The rest paid no notice, but Kevin jumped up to greet her, rushing around the long table.
“Oh,” she said. “I didn’t know you’d be here.” Kevin kissed her on the cheek, and she received the kiss numbly. “I was out getting groceries.”
“Mona,” said Kevin. “Who is this you’ve got with you? Raymond, how did you not tell me?”
Mona pulled the baby closer and lowered the grocery bags to the floor. “This is Laura,” she said. “She’s…a couple months old?” She seemed confused and embarrassed.
“May I see her?” Kevin asked. Mona looked to Raymond, who nodded with an expression of minor annoyance. Mona handed the baby over to Kevin, and he shifted her into a comfortable holding position without waking her. “She’s so beautiful,” he said to Mona. “How could you not tell me?”
“You move around so much,” Mona said. “We never know where to call.” Kevin heard the words in his head a half beat before she spoke them, broadcast from Raymond to Mona, a script to be read aloud.
“There’s more in the kitchen,” Raymond told her. “Why don’t you make yourself a plate while Kevin and Laura get acquainted?” Mona nodded and disappeared with the groceries.
Raymond resumed his sermon, and Kevin allowed his suspicions to fade in the face of little Laura, an entirely new thing in the world. He speculated whether she would be like her father or her mother, a common question that carried great stakes. This too faded, concern over what she might be s
ubsumed in the miracle of what she was already. Laura demanded presence; she grounded Kevin in the moment and gave him an immediacy he hadn’t felt since the night of the Trinity test. It was the feeling of the future pressing itself into the present so heavily that the two merged, the present became charged with potential. Everything was possible for Laura. Everything began with her.
All around Kevin and Laura, Raymond and his disciples rattled on, oblivious to the fact their replacement slept soundly in their midst.
* * *
—
Mona went to bed early, giving Kevin barely enough time to catch up. “I get tired lately,” she said, looking mournfully at Laura before ascending the stairs. The rest stayed up drinking and philosophizing, their numbers dwindling as people left in pairs, threes, and fours. Somewhere around midnight, the effort expended working with Kimani caught up with Kevin, and he excused himself, hoping Raymond would follow. Raymond responded with a curt good night and a kiss on the cheek and told Kevin he could take the third room on the second floor.
The room was furnished with a banker’s lamp and a mattress on the floor that probably had been host to a dozen couplings or whatever one called the permutations beyond couplings. Thankfully, there were clean sheets folded at the foot. Kevin made up the bed and climbed in, clicking off the lamp. He replayed the last conversation he’d had with Raymond in his head. Had Raymond invited him? Was this intended to be more of a house call than a visit? Not telling Kevin about the baby was such a huge mystery that it shocked Kevin every time his mind came back to it, wounding him anew. His body was spent, but his mind reeled with anxiety, the psychic clamor of young people in enthusiastic lust creeping into the edges of his mind. Kevin lay awake for hours before he heard the creak of the doorknob turning, saw the hall light falling across the bare floor of the room.
