by Bob Proehl
“We need to know about Raymond Glover,” Fahima says.
“I should have guessed,” Headmaster Bishop says. “Is there something specific?”
“Anything you can tell us,” she says.
Headmaster Bishop looks at the half-empty gin bottle on the counter. “We’d better take a seat,” he says. Fahima and Emmeline sit on the couch, and Bishop takes the armchair, which is so worn he sinks into it like it’s about to swallow him. He sighs, and his face goes distant, that of a man who’s rehearsed a confession in his head for years. “The first time I met Raymond Glover was on the train from Poughkeepsie to Santa Fe in April of 1940.”
It’s hard for Fahima not to sweep him up into the kind of hug he would have suffered stoically while he was alive. She listens to his entire story as he piles martinis on the two of them like weights while Emmeline sips tea that’s long gone cold. Fahima keeps up with Bishop drink for drink because she understands that it’s necessary for him: the pauses to fix another round like breaths, the alcohol a lubricant to keep his memories from locking in place. Now Fahima understands why he dodged her questions about where he came from. He’d already told her, and the telling was so hard he couldn’t bear to do it again. He’s as young as he was the day he showed up in the garden at Lakeview when Fahima was fifteen and rescued her from a gray existence in a mental health facility. He revealed what she was and what she could become. As his story winds down, she sees the same burden he carried before he died: the guilt for his mistakes and the things he felt forced to do. She thinks of his hand shooting out to stop Emmeline from going into the other house by the beach and wonders what fresh horror they caught him in the wake of committing.
“The extent of what Raymond had done was amazing,” Bishop says. “I read articles about the suicides. I heard about them on NPR and saw them on the news. I understood they’d jumped off the building I’d visited, but I couldn’t connect the apparent suicides to Raymond. It would have been a deft bit of craft on anyone, but I…” He clears his throat. “I assumed I was stronger than Raymond. Part of that was moral superiority. Raymond wasn’t evil, but he wasn’t my match when it came to integrity.” He cleaves a plump olive with his teeth. “I was so self-righteous I believed everything I did was virtuous, evidenced by the fact I’d done it. I expanded that through children’s book logic to a belief that I must be stronger than Raymond, whose morals were compromised by personal interest. But I couldn’t have done what he did to me. Not out of ethical purity. I didn’t have the strength or the skill.
“I’d like to say the spell broke, but it didn’t. He couldn’t stand the thought of no one knowing what he’d done. After a few days, the media turned their attention to other atrocities. I had an urge to come here to the coast to relax. No doubt Raymond put the idea there. When I arrived, he was sitting on that couch, contemplating that hurricane lamp like he was an antiques appraiser.”
Fahima has a flash of memory. One Thanksgiving, she and Sarah and Patrick broke into this house. Patrick knew about a window that was unlocked. She remembers Sarah saying he used to sneak in here when they were kids, to try his ability out, that he had an imaginary friend who told him about it. I had an imaginary friend who talked to me in my head, Patrick had confessed, lounging on that couch as if he owned the place. And I called him Raygun.
“The first thing I did was kiss him. I can’t say if it was because I wanted to or because Raymond wanted me to. We’d arrived at the place where we would be safe together. I imagined that’s what this house would be. I was trying to bring him into that dream with me, and here he was.
“In the middle of the kiss, I felt his mouth twist up into a smile against my lips. He undid whatever he’d done to my head. The memory of those men and women plummeting came back to me. Raymond held me in the kiss as it happened. He let me struggle against him a moment before allowing me to pull away. There was a taste like ashes in my mouth as I gripped the counter for balance.
“Raymond told me I was embarrassing myself before I even spoke. He said I knew exactly why he’d done it.
“ ‘I was in so many of their minds,’ he told me. ‘More than I’d ever tried at one time. And I thought of an experiment. I made them all aware of what I was. I handed them that knowledge in a way that they understood it was undeniably true. And then I told them there was a school full of people like me blocks from where they were standing. That these people, they were children, defenseless, for now.’ Every one of them, Kevin. Every one of them imagined coming to your school and burning it down.”
Bishop tilts his glass back, but it’s empty. Fahima can’t tell if he’s drunk; exhaustion and alcohol blur into a warm slurry.
“It was the moment I came closest to understanding him,” Bishop says. “If I ever shared Raymond’s anger, it was then, thinking of those men and women coming for my children, for my school.”
Fahima remembers a night toward the end of Bishop’s life, a dinner summit with James Lowery and a noted television bigot. There had been a mention of government troops coming for the academy, a prediction of what happened after Bishop died. His flare of mother bear aggression seemed so out of character, but it burned at the core of him, fueling everything he did.
“I collected myself,” he says. “Retreated to my proper thou shalt nots. I told him he couldn’t punish people for their thoughts. He smirked and said, ‘Obviously I can. I’ll keep doing it until they understand. Or until they’re all gone.’ ”
“What did he want them to understand?” Emmeline asks.
“That they were over,” Bishop answers. “That the age of man was at its end. He wanted a war. He said it didn’t have to be a war. It could be as simple as blowing out a candle: take them out one by one. ‘It’s not as if we don’t have time,’ he said. He didn’t think we could die because we weren’t getting any older. I had noticed, too. I was too vain not to. I was nearly eighty, and my students still looked at me like an uncle rather than a grandfather. Part of what allowed me to be patient with Raymond, to wait for him, was my increasing sureness that we had infinite time. Time wasn’t the issue; Raymond was. Given an eternity, we wouldn’t have been together. It was a false future. A silly dream.
“I would like to say I struck Raymond because I saw the threat he’d become, but that wasn’t it.
“He broke my heart. He took my dream from me.
“I grabbed hold of his mind and pulled him down into the Hive, like diving off a cliff into a lake. Our Hivebodies manifested as titans, creator gods, returned for a reckoning. I could see others watching us, terrified. The ground of the Hive, a communally agreed upon delusion, cracked and buckled under our struggle. The sky fell, raining down in shards everywhere in the Hive at once. People fled, their Hivebodies blipping out of existence until it was only Raymond and me in the Hive, destroying it in our efforts to destroy each other.
“I found people later, adults who resonated that day, that moment. Unintended consequences. Through the cracks we created, extra light snuck through.
“Raymond fought me, wrestling my mind. I felt him push me through the surface of the Hive. Not the ground but through what the Hive is, into what’s beyond it.”
Fahima’s hand drifts into the air to indicate her barrage of questions. “I can’t fully explain,” Bishop says. “It’s the place our abilities come from. It’s what we resonate with when we use them, and we access so little of it, infinitesimal amounts. When we built the bomb, we unlocked a boundless energy contained in the smallest component of matter. What we do with our minds, with the barest effort, is to break open that same potential inside a moment. We channel the energy inside time and allow it to burst into the world. I was drowning in it, every sense flooded with unrealized futures. I was outside of time and history. I looked out at the world, and everything was different. It was like…” Bishop trails off, contemplating whatever he’d seen while he was submerged in the Source.
In the silence, Fahima hears gulls on the shore, the soft whoosh of tide.
“It was like everything happening at once,” Emmeline says. “Everything that ever happened or ever would.”
Bishop smiles sadly at her. Fahima used to bring all the strangest new students to Bishop as soon as she could. When a new ability arose, it was her nature to document it, study it, suss out its implications for the way all abilities functioned. Bishop could see what it felt like and what the ability meant to the person who had it. He sees Emmeline that way, assessing the burden her abilities put on her.
“Yes,” he says. “It was exactly like that.” Emmeline’s face is unreadable, but Fahima knows what she’s feeling: there’s nothing in the world like having Kevin Bishop tell you you’re right.
“I came back a second before I’d left,” Bishop says. “I don’t know how, but there were two of me for a moment: one grappling with Raymond and me, outside him, watching. I knew in a second Raymond would plunge me into the Source. I grabbed him, along with my seconds-ago self, and I pushed. We pushed. We shoved him all the way down into the Source until everything that was him disappeared from the Hive. The other version of myself was gone, and I was alone.”
Fahima thinks about how many times Bishop had to kill to protect them, yet this is the murder that haunts him. She wonders how often he’s returned to this spot, hoping to be absolved.
“I waited to see if he’d reemerge, but his Hivebody was gone,” he continues. “I waited hours before I came back out of the Hive to this room. Raymond’s body was on the floor, breathing, eyes open. I have seen too many bodies of people I loved, but his was the worst. Maybe because it was a body I’d known so intimately, every inch. Maybe it was the breath. Breath is a lot like hope. I knelt down, held his nose and mouth shut. He never struggled. His body hitched like a stalling car and stopped.”
This crushes one idea Fahima formed while Bishop told his tale: that Raymond Glover was lying in a coma all this time and had woken up at some point. If he was controlling Patrick from a hospital bed, her solution would be as simple as sneaking by the night nurse and snuffing him out with a pillow. But Bishop already had taken care of that.
“What did you to do with the body?” she asks.
“In the morning, I weighted it down with rocks and chartered a small fishing boat. The man who took me out saw the body. I told him what I was doing and that he shouldn’t worry about it, so he didn’t. We went out several miles, far enough I couldn’t see the shore. He helped me haul the body over the rail and into the ocean. When we got back to shore, I gave him a ridiculous amount of money and took away all his memories of the day.”
Fahima tries to imagine Raymond Glover walking out of the sea, shoulders strewn with kelp, but it’s a Creature from the Black Lagoon–inspired nightmare rather than a working theory.
“I keep thinking I see him,” Bishop says. “I know his body is dead, but I imagine there’s part of him locked away, outside of time.”
He straightens up and looks around as if remembering he’s been speaking to them and not to himself. “Not too different from you, is it?” he says. “Once you step outside of time, you never entirely come back in. When Raymond held me under, I saw myself on the hill with Raymond and Mona, watching a sun being born. I saw how I’d die, although my mind has been kind and let me forget. Moments in sequence seem alien when you look at them from above. Human beings are like millipedes, trailing segments of themselves behind them in time. It’s easier the more you can forget of it.”
“They don’t look like millipedes,” Emmeline says. “They look like trails of light. They’re brilliant, all interwoven. It’s so beautiful you can hardly bear it.”
Fahima has a memory flash of how they got here: something too big to hold in her head is gone without being grasped.
“There’s the sun coming up,” Bishop says. “Talk about outside of time. Every sunrise is the same sunrise. We only look at it from a different place in space and in time.”
He stands up and gathers their glasses and mugs, carrying them to the sink. “That’s more or less the entirety of it,” he says. He fills a kettle, and the pilot light on the range clicks as the burner comes to life. “Will you stay for coffee?”
“We should go,” Emmeline says. Fahima doesn’t want to go. She wants to stay here with her friend. She wants to tell him everything she’s done wrong so he can absolve her and set them all right. His death was when things fractured. It was when the fighting started in earnest, when she first saw the shadow inside Patrick. We could bring him back with us, she thinks. He’d beaten Raymond Glover once; he could come with them and do it again. Emmeline, intuiting what she’s thinking, gives an almost imperceptible shake of her head.
“I’m sorry I’ve kept you up the whole night,” he says, spooning instant coffee into a filter. “Probably not the best idea for myself either. I’m meeting two new students this morning. A brother and sister, twins. I knew their parents years ago. They live nearby. I should get myself cleaned up.” Fahima imagines little Sarah and little Patrick waiting in the living room of the Davenports’ beach house, primly dressed for their prep school audition. She wishes she could stop him, save the two of them from everything that comes afterward, even if it means she’ll never meet them. Bishop runs a hand over the stubble on his cheeks. “It was lovely to meet you both. How does it work when I meet you again? Do I tell you about tonight?”
“You didn’t,” Fahima says. “You never told me.”
“What an odd secret to keep,” Bishop says. He adjusts his glasses and gives Fahima the sideways smile he often deployed when they were about to try something that was likely to fail in an interesting way. Fahima decides the space-time continuum can get fucked and hugs Bishop as tightly as she can, as if she can squeeze him back to life. He hugs her back politely. He understands there’s a bond between them, but he doesn’t feel it. It hasn’t happened for him yet.
“I need you to do something for me,” she whispers, hoping Emmeline doesn’t hear, certain she does. “There’s a girl in a mental health facility in upstate New York. She’s like us, and she needs your help. Will you find her?”
“Of course,” he says with a sigh. “That’s what I do.” She can’t tell if the exhaustion in his voice is a result of talking all night or comes from the burden of being the one responsible for finding every lost child and bringing them home.
Emmeline tugs at Fahima’s sleeve. Emmeline and Bishop shake hands, and there’s a long pause Fahima recognizes as Bishop communicating with Emmeline psychically. Emmeline nods and whispers thank you. The teakettle whistles, and the sound gives them their chance to exit.
“What did he tell you?” Fahima asks as they walk toward the ocean.
“When we first got here, he looked in my head,” Emmeline says. “He saw what happened to my parents. He promised to keep them safe.”
The two promises—to find Fahima, to protect Emmeline’s parents—sit next to each other in Fahima’s mind. She knows one will be kept and one will be broken, but her attempts to understand what this means about how time works fail. She looks back at the house one last time.
“Why couldn’t we bring him with us?” she asks.
“He has so much to do,” Emmeline says, taking Fahima’s hand. “Did you find out what you needed?”
As Emmeline folds them upward, away and back to where they left from, Fahima can’t give a confident answer. She had gotten something she needed. She has no idea if it’ll be enough.
Emmeline wants to jump over the plan. She wants to be so confident in whatever Fahima decides to do that she can meet herself on the other side. Someone who can move through time might come to think of time as something without value, like a billionaire dropping hundred-dollar bills on the sidewalk, but it’s the opposite for Emmeline. She obsesses over time passing, time wasted. She ponders whether she can learn to be reste
d after sleep she hasn’t had, full from meals she has eaten but didn’t eat. How much is it possible to cheat, to skip the boring, painful parts and arrive at hard-earned joy without putting in the work?
Waiting suspends agency; it makes Emmeline feel less human, stuck in time solidified like amber, holding her still as she watches the rest of the world in motion. The dull paralytic throb of waiting lends itself to bad ideas. Emmeline wonders if people in full-body casts make terrible plans for themselves, imagine reprehensible crimes they might commit. Emmeline makes terrible plans. She imagines reprehensible crimes.
On the third day with no word from Fahima, Emmeline sits in her bare room at the Phoenix school and folds up out of the world.
It takes effort to find her mother. Not every moment wants to let her in, and this moment is a tricky fucker. It’s something Headmaster Bishop said to her once. She remembers it because when she was a kid, swear words contained a special thrill. An aphorism with an embedded f-bomb was a thing worth keeping.
The moment is a tricky fucker.
She knows immediately something is wrong. This moment does not want to let her in. It writhes and snaps as she folds down into it. The world comes into focus around her, and she’s standing in the doorway of a bar, a run-down place meant to look like a saloon in a Western. The first thing she notices is that the door stays open rather than swinging shut. There is no sound; sound exists only when time is in motion. The people in the bar are static. Pint glasses tip but don’t spill. Hands hover over shoulders, waiting to slap them affectionately. The moment’s tricked her: it let her in and holds her trapped.
She sees her mother sitting at the bar, talking to a white boy with a hatchet of a face, slick with adolescent grease and nervous sweat. She’s across the room, on the other shore of a sea of bodies, and Emmeline tries to go toward her, but the moment restrains her. The door moves slightly on its outswing from the entrance of the men in front of her, blocking her view of her mother. Time creeps. The boy leans in, saying something to her mother, a look of regret on his face.
