by Bob Proehl
“Are you up?” Raymond asked quietly.
Kevin sat with his back against the wall, and clicked on the lamp. “What are you sneaking around for? Can’t you sleep with who you want?”
Raymond smirked and climbed in under the covers next to Kevin. “Are you jealous?”
“Of which one?”
“Of me for having my pick.”
“What makes you think I haven’t been out in the world having my pick?”
“I know you,” said Raymond.
Kevin rested his head on Raymond’s shoulder. “What are you doing here?” he said. “These children. An actual child!”
“I was worried you’d be upset,” Raymond said.
“I am upset.”
“It was an experiment that failed,” Raymond said. “Last year Mona was ready to leave. I should have let her. But I wanted to keep her happy. It’s not as if there wasn’t an easier way. But I’d been trying to keep her leash slack.”
“Her leash?”
“I thought a baby would be good for her,” Raymond continued. “She was nearly too old to have one. She’d have someone to care for. I’ve never been that for her. Never needed her, really. I needed a person to fill a role, but it didn’t have to be her. I think she forgot we were playing roles.”
“She can’t be happy here,” Kevin said. “All this. It isn’t like her. It isn’t like you.”
“It isn’t like her,” Raymond said. “I’m not certain it works for me either. It feels like a half measure.”
“I’d hate to see the full measure,” Kevin said. “Where did you go? They keep talking about you being away.”
Raymond took Kevin’s hand in his and ran his thumb along his forefinger. “Japan,” he said.
Kevin sat upright. “Did you find it?”
Raymond nodded. “I found it years ago,” he said. “I was back for a visit.”
“You’d already found it?”
“Mona and I went to Tokyo in 1961,” Raymond said. “There were rumors of a performance troupe that had been through the city doing impossible things. I caught up with them in Niigata. They’d heard me coming for days. They said they heard my song. They came from a village south of Hiroshima. A tiny fishing village on the coast called Onomichi.” Kevin formed the name with his lips; it felt like a magic word in a storybook. “Everyone in the village was like us, Kevin. They don’t call it Resonance. They speak of it in terms of song. Your ability. Your song.”
“That’s incredible,” said Kevin. They had talked about the possibility that the bombs had induced Resonance. If it was true, there would be pockets near the bombing sites in Japan, not to mention Atomgrad, Monte Bello, Reggane, Lop Nur.
“We were even close about the distance,” Raymond said. “Sixteen miles from ground zero. There were only a hundred people there, but all of them, Kevin. It’s where the idea for this house began. I felt stronger there, away from humans.” There’s a contempt in the way he pronounces the word, one Kevin hasn’t heard from him before. “Surrounded by our people, my ability, my sense of identity, felt stronger.”
“Was Mona with you?”
“I left her in Osaka,” Raymond said. “I told her I’d be back in a day or two, but I was gone for a month. I couldn’t bring myself to leave. I feel as if my heart is still there.”
“We should go,” Kevin said, taking Raymond’s face in his hands. “You and I. And Laura. Laura must be like us. I can feel it from her, can’t you?”
“No,” Raymond said. He put his head onto Kevin’s shoulder, and something between them was momentarily reversed. He couldn’t tell what Raymond was saying no to: the possibility of them going to Onomichi together or the possibility that Laura was like the two of them.
“I went back a few weeks ago,” Raymond said. “It was right after Laura was born. I can’t explain what I thought it would be like becoming a father, but whatever I believed it would be, it wasn’t. I didn’t feel anything. Or if I did, it didn’t compare to the feeling I had in Onomichi. I left instructions with the children here to take care of Mona and Laura. They think of them like pets. Basic feeding, cleaning, and occasional expressions of affection. I left enough money to keep everyone alive. I took leave from the college. I had no intention of coming back.”
Why didn’t you call for me? Kevin thought. I would have left it all too. The school, the idiot role of itinerant savior. I would have thrown it all over in a second.
“It was gone,” said Raymond, as if in answer to Kevin’s thought. “Burned. Abandoned. I hope it was abandoned. I didn’t find bodies, but Kevin, everything was ash. Even if all of them had been in their houses, there would have been nothing left. I reached out in the Hive to find them, any of them. Nothing.”
“The performing troupe,” Kevin said. “They might know—”
“The troupe got lazy,” Raymond said. “They came back, too close. They played two weeks in Takahashi. Long enough. It’s on a different island, but it’s only a ferry ride away. The fishermen there had seen things. They suspected things about the village. When the troupe appeared, they put two and two together.” His body was rigid, and tears escaped like water from the fingers of a clenched fist. “That’s how it will happen, Kevin. Someone will put two and two together, and then they’ll burn us all.”
Kevin held Raymond until his body relaxed. He kissed the top of Raymond’s head, his thick blond hair. It had occurred to both of them in the last few years that they were aging slowly. He wondered if Raymond having Mona in his life made that more noticeable, a youthful Dorian forced to hang his weathering portrait in the living room for all to see. He lifted Raymond’s face and kissed him, and grief transformed into a need that wasn’t passion or lust. Kevin had suffered a loss, too: the promise of a heaven he hadn’t seen burned to ash before he could witness it. The connection of their bodies was a substitute for that one, the volatile form of a more stable element. It was what they had and what they had to settle for.
When it was over and Raymond collapsed against his back, letting Kevin bear his full weight, Kevin looked back and saw that the door was open. Mona watched them from the hall, her expression blank. Upstairs, a baby was crying.
Emmeline has few places she thinks of as home. The house on Jarvis Avenue where she grew up. Kimani’s room, wherever and whenever it is in the world. She never considers the Bishop Academy home. She was so nascent, barely a person, and the place became part of her. People say I found myself there as if there’s a preexisting self to be discovered, left for them by someone else. Emmeline didn’t find herself at Bishop. She built herself out of Bishop. She used it the way a house uses a forest; the two were contiguous, the latter an earlier stage in the life of the former.
For these few days, Hayden Cohen’s tour bus is home. It’s what Bishop would have been for her if she had stayed, what Bishop was for Carrie and Hayden. She’s a whole person, fully formed but open to change, and she’s in a place where she’s accepted and loved. How else could she define home?
They make their slow way west as if no one told them they’re running. When Emmeline says as much to Rafa, he laughs.
“Touring musicians are always running,” he says. They sit together on the long bench near the front of the bus. Emmeline twists to look out the window behind her. Rafa plays with a ball of multicolored light between his hands, turning it this way and that so different facets shine.
“Running from what?” Emmeline asks. The way she sits means that when she turns toward him, they’re nearly touching, and when he looks at her, their faces seem poised to kiss.
“We are running from ourselves,” he says. His voice has a faux depth to it, and he gives Emmeline a look like he’s said something incredibly deep, which cracks her up. It isn’t the first time she’s laughed at a boy flirting with her. There were boys in the Boulderado Hotel who tried to chat her up in the lobby, an u
navoidable inconvenience. They threw out their lines, and when Emmeline laughed at them and not with them, they crumpled, defeated.
Rafa smiles and doubles down. “I haven’t caught me yet,” he says. He stands up and does a shoot from the hip gesture with his fingers, complete with pew-pew noises and a three-second rendition of the running man. He looks around as if to go, then remembers they’re on a bus with no place to retreat to and sits back down. “So what kind of music are you into?”
Flirting is the lingua franca of the bus. It takes time to get used to. At first Emmeline assumes everyone is sleeping with everyone else. But the flirting is about play and making each other feel good. It’s never lecherous, rarely even sexual. An outsider watching Rafa might think he was trying and constantly failing to fuck everyone on the bus. Kristal, the bass player, assures Emmeline it isn’t so.
“Bad dynamics, fucking on the bus,” she says, gnawing on a hank of homemade jerky a fan in Boulder gave them. “Rafa knows that; he’s a good boy. We do a show, he’ll chase down three, four girls a night, but he always seems sad about it. Doesn’t keep score. I think he’s in love with Hayden, but who isn’t?”
Kristal is ace but has what she calls a “cuddling arrangement” with Newton the sound tech that she swears does not violate the “no fucking on the bus” policy. Jerrod the drummer has a boyfriend back home with whom he has a “loyalty arrangement” he claims is too complicated to get into.
“Cheating’s like obscenity,” he says while Daniel, the waifish costume manager, lounges in his lap. “I know it when I see it.”
“And both of them look like a throbbing cock,” says Hayden, throwing the whole bus into hoots and hysterics. Emmeline suspects that Hayden shifts their features, riffling through faces like a children’s flip-book, their aggregate allure never in a single place. She’s seen the big photos of Hayden postered in Boulder and knows it isn’t true, but it feels right. When she closes her eyes and pictures Hayden’s face, something is missing, the keystone against which disparate elements lean and hold. Hayden is stunning even before they speak, but their voice bypasses senses and travels nerve pathways that snake through pleasure centers like a river that winds through parched towns. Once they speak, no matter what they say, it’s impossible not to fall in love with them. On their first full day out, Hayden harangues Lana, one of the roadies, with a string of expletives over a pedal rig left behind in Boulder. When Hayden walks away, Lana, in tears under the verbal assault, watches them go the way a puppy watches its owner leave for work.
Carrie expands her mandate so she’s no longer Emmeline’s keeper but everyone’s. She takes stock of supplies and interviews each member of the band and crew on their abilities, assessing defensive potential, which for most of them is zero. Emmeline watches Carrie make her way through the passengers on the bus like a vulture circling overhead. Inevitably one night, Carrie comes to Emmeline in her bunk.
“There’s something we need to talk about,” she says.
“I’m sleeping,” Emmeline says. She’s not tired, but she likes hiding in the bunk and listening to the way the rest of them play off one another, improvising filthy songs and laughing at unfunny in-jokes.
“It sucks, but I have to ask,” Carrie says.
“I can’t do anything,” Emmeline says, rolling over to face away from her. “My ability is broken.”
“If they come for us again, I need to know what we have in our favor,” Carrie says. “I need to know who can fight.”
“Not me,” Emmeline says. She wraps her hand around the shackle on her wrist, assuring herself it’s still there. She has dreams in which it’s gone, and she wakes gasping and grabs for it, sure the world is about to collapse into her.
“Hey, Carebear,” Hayden calls from the front of the bus. “What’s that Mountain Goats song about I hope we die?”
Carrie sighs, understanding that she’s gotten all she’s likely to. “ ‘No Children,’ ” she says over her shoulder.
“See, I knew she’d know it,” Hayden says. “C’mere, sing the first line. I think it starts in C.” Carrie lets the curtain drop. Alone in the tiny dark space, Emmeline listens to them singing, disjointed and off-key, bitter lyrics set to a joyful tune.
On the lunar landscape of Utah, Hayden insists on a detour into Monument Valley. Carrie argues against it, but she’s outvoted, the first instance in which the bus has to resort to democracy rather than consensus.
“Play that Arthur Russell song about the moon,” Hayden tells Carrie as the bus sails through an abandoned parks department checkpoint. They hold out the audio cord plugged into the bus’s stereo system.
“I lost my iPod,” Carrie says, patting her pockets. “It’s at…it’s back in Boulder.”
“Oh, that sucks,” Hayden says, dropping the cord. “You had that forever.”
“Yeah,” says Carrie. “Sucks.”
Emmeline recognized Monument Valley as the backdrop for a bunch of the Westerns Kimani made her sit through. “It’s like New York,” Hayden says. “It’s part of this mythic America, but also it’s a real place. Everybody’s been here before.”
Hayden declares a mandatory picnic, proving the bus is not a pure democracy but a benevolent dictatorship. With Alyssa at the wheel, trying to find an appropriate spot, the rest gather looted snacks into something resembling a meal. When they stop and get out, Carrie reconnoiters the perimeter, checking for points of potential attack, divining escape routes. Lana and the roadies go into setup mode, laying out blankets on the clay-rich dirt. Everything burns bright red and orange. Kristal pantomimes giant slow-motion steps, and Newton talks into his curled hand, broadcasting bad pickup lines from mission control. Alyssa squints at the sky, where clouds float like dumplings in soup and the sun bears down full bore.
“We should find some shade,” she says, shaking her head at the spot where the roadies have laid out the food. “Or some SPF one million.”
“Nobody’s going to live long enough to die of cancer,” Hayden says, lighting a cigarette.
Emmeline makes them clump together for a selfie with the Polaroid in front of the bus, with a striated outcropping the shape of a perilous stack of quarters rising behind it. Rafa holds the camera because his arms are the longest. He balances it on an outspread palm. Emmeline worries it will fall and shatter in a spray of broken plastic, but he gets his thumb on the shutter button and snaps the picture as they all shout “moon!”
They huddle around the picture as it develops, their faces rising out of the surface. It looks as if all of them are singing, their lips pursed like a choir’s.
“It doesn’t really get the colors,” Rafa says before the picture has fully resolved. Emmeline sees something unbearably beautiful in the photo, an iteration of the way she feels. Unwilling to let anyone else criticize the picture, she takes it from them, hiding it with the picture she took of Carrie in the hospice by accident.
After the picnic, everyone’s exhausted and no one is willing to take a driving shift. Lana points out that it’s Daniel’s turn, and he says he’s happy to do it if no one minds dying in a fiery wreck. They decide to stay the night in Monument. Some of them build lean-tos out of sheets, and others bunk on the bus.
Her skin sunbaked until it feels like the crust on bread, Emmeline is lured out of her bunk by the sound of Hayden playing guitar, something in a minor key, softly strummed to avoid waking anyone. They’re singing quietly enough that the sound is a cloud around them. Emmeline approaches, trying to hear the words, but as soon as she’s close enough to discern them, Hayden stops. They look at Emmeline and smile.
“Hey, Em-Bomb,” Hayden says. “Did I wake you?”
Emmeline shakes her head. Maybe they had. The guitar wove into her dream; there was no telling if she came up from sleep to find it or if it burrowed into her and pulled her to waking.
“Carrie’ll kick my ass if she think
s I’m keeping you up,” Hayden says. “She thinks if you get enough rest, you’ll be a weapon.”
“I’m not a gun,” Emmeline says.
“It’s not such a bad thing to be,” said Hayden. “Carrie and me, we were guns for a while.”
“You fought?” Emmeline assumed Carrie was in the war. It’s the only way she can understand the way Carrie is. She imagined Hayden outside of things like politics and time.
Hayden shrugs and strums the guitar. As they speak, their words lilt along melody lines, turning their story into a song.
“We fought to get out,” Hayden says. “We were in the camp at Topaz Lake together. Me and Carrie. Her boyfriend, Miquel. When the Pulse happened, some of us got out.”
A small ember of pride glows inside Emmeline. The Pulse didn’t happen, she thinks. I did that. I helped get them out. “Did you kill anyone?” she asks.
Hayden focuses on their left hand, leaning close to it, shaping it into an intricate claw. “People got killed,” Hayden says. “Not nice people. But I don’t know. Maybe no one deserves it. We didn’t know where we were. We didn’t know where to go. Everything was in flux. Going home wasn’t safe. We didn’t know if they were coming after us. The camp we were in was run by a private company. A conservative television network called Kindred. We didn’t know how much they were linked up with local law enforcement or the feds. Somewhere along the way the camps were made official, which was a holy shit moment for us. We knew exactly who was after us, and it was everyone. The law didn’t create the camps; it put the stamp of approval on them. The same assholes who kidnapped us in their plainclothes could do it in their uniforms. We were scared. We holed up in a motel, watching the war start at Bishop. We were watching our country attack the place we grew up.”
