by Bob Proehl
Shade by shade, the boy changes. He glows dark—not dark like the black glass; his darkness is a lack, a void. It seeps out of him, mingling with the sweat slicking his skin. It pours from him, devouring the light around him, devouring the space around him. Her mother’s face registers confusion, then shock, then horror. The void moves toward her, and the moment throws Emmeline out. It pushes her back to her room in Phoenix, sitting on her bed, alone.
She tries again. Again and again. Each time is the same: the doorway, silence, a dark glow. Every time, the moment lets her almost see, then throws her out, as if trying to protect her. She tries until she’s exhausted. Each attempt is the same. The doorway. Silence. A dark glow. Out.
The repetition of the failure makes it harder to quit. If she hadn’t started, she would have been able to stop. She cycles from now to then, across a divide of seven years. Duration gets fuzzy, but time passes for her body, and eventually she collapses. She’s lucky—sleep takes her in her bed and not trapped in the doorway of the bar, watching her mother eaten away into nothing.
When she wakes up, she goes looking for her father. She thinks she might find him on the roadside in Mosul, leg freshly burned away, the wreckage of the jeep that carried him scattered across the desert. Instead, she’s in a place she knows, a place she’d been days before. It’s Headmaster Bishop’s house in Maine, where they stayed up all night talking. The biggest difference is the heat. Like sound, heat needs time to happen—heat and cold are by-products of time. Emmeline stands in one of the rooms off the hallway to the bathroom that looks out on the ocean. The room is bisected by a thick glass wall, with a circle the size of a manhole cover missing. Thrown into the corner like a rag doll is the boy she saw talking to her mother in the bar in Powder Basin. His shirt is covered with blood, and there’s a wound above his right eye, a dark angry circle. She can sense the black thing coiled in his head, writhing and twitching in the dead tissue. She hears hitched intakes of breath and looks down. Sitting by her feet is her father, panicked and confused. His right arm has been chomped off at the shoulder, leaving a smooth cauterized cutaway of meat and bone. There’s a black coil in his head, too, thrashing and feral, destroying everything in his mind. He looks up at her, and Emmeline knows he doesn’t recognize her. There’s a blankness that runs all the way down, a pond of clearest water. He’s hollowed out, here but gone.
He looks at the scar on Emmeline’s arm, and there’s a ripple of recognition, motion on the water’s surface, but then it disappears.
“Did I hurt you?” he says.
“No, Daddy,” says Emmeline. “You didn’t hurt me.”
“I don’t know you,” he says. All of him ripples, and Emmeline thinks the moment is throwing her out again, sparing her what’s next. It’s only tears. Her father looks at the gun in his lap. “Everything’s gone,” he says. “Can you fix me?”
Emmeline is sure she can. She folds up, intending to come back a minute before this and stop what’s happened. She will try until she fixes it even if it kills her. She comes back exactly where she left, her father looking up at her, beseeching. She tries again and again, folding up and down, in and out of time, a moth beating frantic wings against glass. She will save him if it breaks everything. But nothing changes. It’s like trying to blink the world away. She opens her eyes, and everything is still there. Her father, hurt, in need. He’d been that way his whole life, and she hadn’t been able to see it. The pain of parents is invisible to their kids, which is how it needs to be. Emmeline can see it now and realizes she can do one thing. She can be here for him at the end. She runs her hand through his hair. She forgot it had gotten so thin by the end of his life. An island of pale brown curls, pulled away from the rest, adrift in a sea of scalp. She feels him shudder under her hand. Can you fix me? he asked a second ago, a heartbeat before, and in that time she tried a hundred times, a thousand, only to end back here.
“I can’t,” she says. “There are things that happen, and they always happen. There are things I can’t fix.”
He nods. “You should go,” he says. “I have something I need to do. I don’t think you should see it.”
Emmeline thinks about what Kimani told her, how they found his body in the house on Jarvis Avenue. Her father and Owen Curry, the monster he chased for the last few years he was alive, both dead in a shootout with only one gun. It felt like a curse was lifted off her house, knowing her father hadn’t died there, knowing the boy who killed her parents never set foot in their home while he was alive. She looks at Owen Curry’s broken body. She spent years wishing he was still alive so she could kill him. She imagined great cataclysms in history she could cast him into: the eruption of Vesuvius, the Chernobyl meltdown. But he was a pawn Raymond Glover moved around the board, a weapon to be aimed and fired, like she is.
“I’ll stay here with you, Daddy,” she says. She bends down and kisses him above his eyebrow. His skin is fever-hot. She lays her hand against the side of his face the way he used to when he suspected she was sick, when he didn’t want to alarm her by checking her forehead. She pulls her hand away, then nods, telling him it’s okay.
Her father puts the gun under his chin and shoots himself in the head. The shot rocks his head back, bouncing it off the blood-spattered glass. Emmeline looks away before she sees anything too gory, anything she wouldn’t be able to unsee. As the echo of the gunshot fades and the ringing in her ears subsides, there’s a stillness disturbed only by the sounds of waves crashing into the shore. The moment lets her stay for all of it, to be with him and bear witness. Then it lets her go. Tricky fucker.
She comes back to the room at the Phoenix school, and someone is knocking on the door. The hem of her nightshirt is wet with her father’s blood. Moving with the shocked grace of a sleepwalker, she gets up from the bed and opens the door. Alyssa stands there with a sandwich on a plate.
“I thought you might want—” She stops, arrested by the sight of the blood, and Emmeline can see a switch flip in her head as the doctor part of her comes online. She drops the plate, and it shatters on the cement floor, the shards skittering away from one another. “Where are you hurt?” she asks. Her eyes expertly scan Emmeline’s body, looking for tears in her clothes, patterns in the way the blood is distributed.
“It’s not my blood,” Emmeline says. She folds back a few seconds, retrieves the unsullied sandwich and the unshattered plate.
“That is in no way comforting,” Alyssa says. She notices the plate in Emmeline’s hands and the shards of the same plate on the floor. “How does that work?”
Emmeline shrugs. “It doesn’t work,” she says. “I can fix little useless things. Anything that matters is fucked.” Emmeline sets the sandwich down on her bed, pulls off her nightshirt, and throws it into the corner. She fishes another out of her backpack and puts it on; the fact that Alyssa is a doctor erases any shame about undressing.
“What happened?” Alyssa asks, down on her hands and knees picking up pieces of the broken plate.
“I tried to save them,” Emmeline says. “Either one of them. I tried, and it didn’t work. What are my abilities even for if I can’t save them?”
“This stuff gives me a headache,” Alyssa says. She collapses onto Emmeline’s bed, cradling the pieces of the broken plate. “It’s like every undergraduate metaphysics class I ever slept through has come back to haunt me. Maybe everything has happened and you can only go back and be part of it the way it was. A witness.”
“I don’t want to be part of things if that’s how it works,” Emmeline says.
“It’s also possible I’m wrong,” Alyssa says. “I have a plate and you have a plate, and I think they’re the same plate. So seriously, I would not listen to me about any of this. But you need to eat.”
“I will,” says Emmeline.
Alyssa leaves, shutting the door softly behind her. Even though she feels like her insides are made of
broken glass, Emmeline tries again. She folds up out of everything until she can see her entire life as if it’s separate from her. At the same time she feels the blazing line of it pass through her. She’s observing it but also part of it.
She’s surprised when she folds down into her old room in the house on Jarvis Avenue and finds it occupied by someone else. The boy is a few years younger than her, the same age as the kids in the Flagstaff mall, but he looks healthier. This boy has been cared for all his life; he has the relaxed smile of someone who has never doubted that he’s loved. He’s sitting on Emmeline’s old bed, studying a Polaroid. He looks up at Emmeline and smiles. “Hey.”
“Hey,” she replies, thrown off by his calm.
He tucks the photo into his back pocket. “I wasn’t sure if you were gonna come the first night we got here or what,” he says. “I’ve been hanging out up here after dinner every night. I tell my dads I’ve got homework.”
“You knew I was coming?” Emmeline asks.
“You told me when we met,” he says.
“When was that?”
He shrugs. “A month ago?” Pieces come together in Emmeline’s head. She thinks about how Kimani made her play three games of chess at once, how she felt as if she could see the three boards layered on one another. By the time she left Kimani’s room, she could feint on one board to set up moves on another. They were clumsy attempts and Kimani caught her before the trap sprung, but Emmeline imagined the possibilities in a wider field of contest.
“I wish you’d told me what was going to happen,” the boy says. “I know you said it was all going to be okay, but honestly it’s been shitty.”
Emmeline pauses before she responds. She doesn’t know this boy’s name, much less what’s happened to him, only that he’s met her before and she hasn’t met him yet. There are things that happen and they always happen, she thinks. Maybe everything has happened and I can only go back and be part of it.
“There are rules,” she says as much to herself as to him.
“I know all about special people and their rules,” he says bitterly. “This is what you meant when you said it would be all right?”
“I guess so,” Emmeline says. She looks around the room, which feels familiar and strange at once. “I mean, you are okay. I used to live here. I thought something bad happened here and the house was cursed. But it’s not. It’s a good place; it’s only haunted. You stay in a place and you fill it up with memories, and they’re like ghosts.”
“Is that what you are?” he asks. “A ghost?”
“What do you think I am?”
“I thought I was going crazy and you were like my imaginary friend, only a hallucination,” he says.
Emmeline thinks of the ghost who came to her when she burned herself with the pot off the stove. She thinks of the woman who visited her in this room before her abilities manifested. I can’t, she thinks. There’s nothing I can do to help that girl. I don’t know any more than she does.
But I did help her.
“I was sure you weren’t real until I showed my friends the picture,” the boy says. “Once I knew they could see you, I knew I hadn’t made you up.” He looks down at his shirt, pinching it between his thumb and forefinger. “It’s today.” He takes the Polaroid out of his back pocket and shows it to Emmeline. “See, we’re wearing the same stuff.”
It’s a photo of Emmeline and the boy sitting on her old bed. They’re wearing the clothes they currently have on, and the Polaroid is from the camera in Emmeline’s backpack in Phoenix.
“It must be today,” she says. She folds back to where she started and fishes the camera out of her backpack before returning to the house on Jarvis Avenue. Something goes slightly wrong, and she folds into her father’s office in the attic in the spot where Kimani’s door first appeared and took her to the Bishop Academy. There’s a man sitting at her father’s desk, and although she can tell by the color of his skin and the breadth of his shoulders it’s not her dad, she thinks for a second she’s landed farther back, when he was still alive. She takes a step toward him. The floorboards creak underfoot, and the man spins the desk chair around. Emmeline folds away before he sees her, and she’s back in her old room, next to the boy, who blinks quickly as if he’s seen some amazing magic trick.
“Ready?” She holds the camera out as far as she can, thinking how stupid it is to have a camera you can’t see yourself in. She presses the shutter button, and the camera makes the loud click that comes before the mechanical whir as it spits out the picture. She pulls it out of the camera and stares at the milky surface, hoping an answer will appear like the die rising out of the blue murk of a Magic 8-Ball.
“Should I see it?” the boy asks. “Maybe I shouldn’t look at it yet. I know what it looks like, but still. And is it in my pocket and also right there?” Emmeline thinks about the plate: broken and intact. “This shit is really weird. You must be used to it.”
She looks at the picture as it resolves. “I don’t think I’ll ever get used to it.”
“Shit, I wasn’t thinking,” he says. He’s using more swear words around her the longer they’re together, and she can’t tell if it’s because he’s getting more relaxed or if he’s trying to show off. “Do you even know my name?”
“I—I don’t,” says Emmeline.
“It’s Rai,” he says.
“It’s good to meet you,” she says. “I’m Emmeline.”
“I know,” Rai says. She catches him trying to peek at the photo and pulls it back.
“I gave this to you a month ago?” she asks.
Rai nods. “You told me it was proof everything would be all right,” he says.
Emmeline looks at the picture. It’s two kids smiling like idiots at the camera. Looking at them, it’s hard not to feel like maybe everything will be all right.
“I should go deliver this, then,” she says. The photo feels as if it’s buzzing, humming in sync with the other iteration of itself tucked in Rai’s pocket. If there can be two of a thing, maybe time and the world aren’t as static as Emmeline fears.
“Will I see you again?” Rai asks.
“Yeah, but before,” Emmeline says, still parsing what all this means.
“What about again?” Rai asks. “Like, the normal again.”
“I don’t know,” she says. “Nothing after this has happened yet.”
Rai nods like she’s said something deeply meaningful, and Emmeline thinks of Rafa and smiles. Thinking the smile is for him, Rai returns it. He looks like he’s about to hug her when Emmeline, suddenly uncomfortable, folds herself back up and then down into the room, before.
There’s a girl lying on her belly on the floor, her legs kicking back and forth, intent on the piece of paper in front of her. She’s wearing shorts and a T-shirt, which she does only when she’s alone. She’s shy about the scars on her arm even around her parents, because one of the kids at school saw them and called her Swirly Skin. Emmeline listens. She can hear talking downstairs. There’s a vent that connects this room to the kitchen, and sound carries clear through it. The girl’s father is saying it’s a one-month embed in Mosul. He says they’re not even fighting there anymore. Fine, the girl’s mother says. Fine.
“Hey there,” Emmeline says to the girl. “What are you drawing?”
The girl looks up, unsurprised. She’s seen me before this, Emmeline thinks. The girl smiles coyly and turns back to her drawing. “Me, but I’m a grown-up,” she says.
“What are you going to be when you grow up?” Emmeline asks.
“An artist,” says the girl, as if it’s the most obvious thing. Emmeline hunkers down next to her.
“I knew a girl like you,” Emmeline says. “She grew up and had amazing adventures.”
“Tell me,” says the girl.
And because if there are rules, Emmeline doesn’t know them, an
d because you can’t be punished for breaking a rule no one told you about, Emmeline does. She folds back into the room night after night and tells the girl about every amazing person she’s met. People who can fly, people who can disappear. A man who can grow as big as a house but is the nicest person and a girl who’s as warm as bread that’s right out of the oven.
Each time she folds back into the room in Phoenix, it’s as if no time has passed. The night there goes on forever, leaving room for a thousand stories.
Until she folds into the house on Jarvis Avenue and knows exactly what day it is. Something about the cool evening air means it’s October. More than that, there’s something about the girl. She gives off the same buzz the photo of Emmeline and Rai did when it was in the same room as another iteration of itself. It’s also an insistent call to Emmeline from the Hive, the come find me murmur that calls Resonants to one another.
“Tomorrow’s a big day,” Emmeline tells the girl as she works on a pencil drawing of a boy with skin like tree bark whom she won’t meet for months. “Things will start with your dad, but everything is going to change.”
“Is it going to be okay?” the girl asks her. Emmeline is looking at the back of the girl’s head, the mess of corkscrew curls. She watches the fast-twitch movements of the girl’s right arm as she draws, the only time she entirely forgets about her burn scars. Emmeline wants to snatch her up and carry her to the far shore, but she doesn’t know where or when that is. It’s as if being alive means never feeling safe.
“I don’t know,” Emmeline says. “It isn’t over yet. But I guess the fact it’s still going means it’s okay.”
It’s hard to imagine that “how do you play basketball?” would become an issue of deep import. The reconceptualization of a game so intrinsic to Clay’s upbringing as to feel genetic is an unlikely bearer of serious political implications. Clay sits in the bleachers of the Unity School, Dom’s hand gripped anxiously in his lap, watching an attempted answer to this newly crucial question play out on the court.
