by Bob Proehl
It’s an intramural game, and the first problem came down to the selection of teams. According to Rai, some kids, most of them baseliners, argued the game should be baseliners versus Resonants, to prove a point. Bryce stepped in to nix this. So mixed teams were created, names picked at random to avoid the mythologized relic of the adolescent emotional trauma of someone being picked last. Bryce told Clay he’d put his thumb on the scale of randomness a bit to ensure an even distribution of kids with and without abilities on each team.
As it often did, the question of the use of abilities came up. Some kids said it was insulting to ask anyone to play at less than their best, so the use of any ability should be allowed. This was quickly knocked down, but then what constituted an ability? This Resonant could fly, but that baseliner was taller by a head, so who’s to say which is fair? Rai said it was a good talk. “I know Bryce planned it that way; I’m not dumb,” he said. “But it was one of those ‘we’re all special in our own special way’ kinda things, and it made me feel better about stuff.” As he pointed out, “Reading minds isn’t going to help you sink a free throw,” a statement that turned out to be directed at one kid who was preternaturally strong on defense despite the promise not to “anticipate” anyone’s moves but useless at the line.
It was good to see Rai lost in something big enough to eclipse everything else going on. He had become passionate about basketball, although it had never been more than a hobby before. Clay suspects it’s that it’s something Rai can own, something his dads can look in on without being part of. Clay has downplayed his interest in and understanding of the game to preserve this as Rai’s territory; if Clay did something as stupid as offering to assistant coach, Rai’s interest would wither.
“He’s good,” Dom says, giving Clay’s hand a squeeze.
“He’s got to learn to go left,” Clay says quietly, as if Rai might hear. “Point guard’s no good if he can’t go left.”
“I don’t even know what that means,” Dom says. Clay pulls his eyes away from the game and looks at his husband.
“We’re doing okay, aren’t we?” It’s more of an affirmation than a question, but Dom answers anyway.
“Not as good as we were, but we’re going to get there,” he says. “I don’t know that I would’ve said that two weeks ago.” He looks down at their intertwined hands. “We’ve been through worse.”
“That other thing wasn’t worse than this,” Clay says. They’ve never come up with a nickname for Dom’s cheating. It would be useful to have one, a way to refer to it without giving it too much conversational weight, but then they’d need to title each of their domestic disputes. The Dishwasher Incident. That Thing at Your Mother’s. It sounded like a list of B movies playing at a second-run theater.
“I thought that was the end of us,” Dom says.
“That was you and me, and it wasn’t him,” Clay says, pointing his chin at Rai as Rai steals the ball from the free throw–impaired psychic. Clay stands up to clap for his son while Dom cheers from his seat. Rai misses an easy layup and falls back to set up the defense. Clay sits down. “I mean we’re easier to fix,” he says. “We could’ve done couples therapy, we could’ve—”
“We didn’t, though,” says Dom.
“We would’ve found some way to fix it,” Clay says. “This? We can’t talk this out. We can’t word it away. I think of the stuff I’d be willing to do, and it’s either impossible or wouldn’t do any good.”
“You mean to make him like us?”
“Rai is like us,” Clay says. “He’s charming like you, but he plays his cards close like me. He’s as kind as his father was, and he’s as trusting as his mother. He’s like all of us.”
“I didn’t mean that.”
“I know, Dom,” says Clay. Sometimes Dominic’s defensiveness can be exhausting, an offense all its own. “I’m saying, for what little we could do from where we were at, with what we were given, I think we’re getting to be all right.”
Rai throws up a shot that’s off to the left, and Clay’s sure the girl who grabs the rebound extended her arm farther than an arm ought to reach. “Watch nine, ref, watch nine!” he shouts, and the girl looks directly at him, clearly guilty, before passing the ball up court.
“Are we going to Bryce’s thing after this?” Dom asks.
Clay shakes his head. “It’s a high school reunion,” he says. “All the kids that went to their gifted and talented school going on about their glory days. You want to tell them about being a teenager without anything special about you?” Dom chuckles. “Besides, Rai doesn’t need to be around that. Or in that bar.”
“It’s sort of a dive,” Dom whispers.
“You ever go to a gay bar when you were a baby?” Clay asks. Dom shakes his head, slightly embarrassed. He was barely out when they met and had never put in the hours on the dating scene. “They were all dives, done up with tinsel and a lighting rig. When you build a place to feel safe, all you need’s the space and a decent sound system.” Rai ducks by the psychic kid with a solid pump fake, pulls up, and takes a shot from the top of the key that swishes soundlessly through the net. Dom and Clay are both on their feet. When they sit back on the bleachers, Clay finishes his thought. “That bar must have been like that for them when they were kids. Places like that feel used up to us because you and I don’t need them anymore.”
The sun goes down and comes up and droops again, and they do not leave their apartment or their bed. They’re supposed to meet everyone at Vibration at nine, but Carrie refuses to go anywhere until they are starving, every calorie in them depleted.
“We should go,” Miquel says. He sits at the foot of the bed, watching the sky turn purple.
“We can tell them we got lost,” Carrie says, pulling on her jeans. “You haven’t been out of the basement in years. I’ll say you led me astray.” Carrie sees the soft bruises of hickeys forming at the base of his neck and flowering on his ribs. She reaches over and touches one of them, the thrill of being able to touch his skin again still not abated.
“I think they’re going to suspect the truth,” he says. It’s an adolescent thing to leave her mark on him, but they never got to be lovers as teenagers. It’s appropriate for them to act like teenagers now—or forgivable at least.
Eventually, they make their way out into the city. Miquel is amazed by everything, as if he’s seeing Chicago for the first time. They’re already late, but he stops to chat with everyone on North Avenue, slowing them down. He hasn’t seen any of them in so long, and they are so happy to see him. Carrie feels the way she used to when she walked around with him in Topaz Lake: as if she’s the wife of the mayor, basking in the secondhand sunlight his loving constituents direct at him. Even with all the time that’s passed, he knows everyone’s name, remembers tiny personal details that cause their faces to light up when recalled.
At Vibration, it’s exactly what Carrie asked Waylon not to do: a surprise party. It’s manageably small so as not to overwhelm him, but Carrie can’t help but worry. Waylon and Bryce are here. Travis and Diane and Edith, who were at their wedding in Topaz, and Thought Bubble, an old bar regular whose thoughts materialize in pink puffy letters over his head and who Carrie now remembers is named Leonard. Jonathan is here, sporting a black eye and a scabbed lip. She heard he got into a scuffle with some Faction agents in Pilsen the other day. They came for one of his neighbors and Jonathan tried to help. He was lucky to get off with the shiner and split lip. His expression says everything between him and Carrie is forgiven and forgotten. That was the appeal of Jonathan to begin with, her sense he’d be willing to set the counter back to zero when she decided to end it. She loves him for not needing an explanation.
On Waylon’s cue, the DJ starts in on a nostalgia-heavy set, leaning into the stuff they listened to in their first days living on North Avenue, along with mixtape fodder from Bishop. It all sounds dated, like transm
issions from another planet. When she and Miquel make their way to the dance floor, it’s as if they’re acting in a play about the people they used to be, trying to invoke some spirit that’s gone.
Hayden shows up late and already drunk. They kiss Carrie chastely on the cheek, then hold Miquel out at arm’s length, appraising him. Carrie knows Hayden sees the toll his ability has taken on him and wonders if they clock the hickey on his neck. Hayden pulls Miquel in and holds him.
“The minute Carrie turns her back, I’m stealing you from her,” they say, winking at Carrie over Miquel’s shoulder. They’re trying to be playful, but they have the same look of hurt they had both times they walked out of Carrie’s apartment.
If the booze doesn’t improve their impersonations of their past selves, it makes them less inclined to judge themselves on their quality. This won’t be a perfect night; the magic of perfect nights is that they just happen. There’s an effortless element required, and all of this is trying hard, striving toward perfection. But it’s a good night, and it’s difficult to remember the last time she had one of those. After a while, things even feel comfortable with Hayden again, as if they’ve gone back to the place where their friendship was only that, anything beyond it unspoken and unconsidered.
In an inversion of the way things used to be, the tipping point where a night would wobble into chaos becomes the apex of the party, from which everything recedes. The DJ, younger than all of them by ten years, keeps throwing out jams, but the dance floor clears as they settle into small groups to finish drinks they don’t necessarily need and shout stories about other nights over the noise. Eventually the DJ reads the room and drops things down a register, but by the time that happens, the party has the feeling of a wake or, worse, a reunion. Everything points backward; nothing is new. It’s everything Carrie was afraid she’d become back then, before the world gave her bigger and better things to be afraid of.
She orders what she tells herself will be her last beer and finds Waylon, who’s assumed his usual position slightly outside it all. His preference has always been to orchestrate, whether it’s smuggling networks or webs of information or social gatherings like this. He is the one who cooks the dinner, who makes the arrangements, and his pleasure doesn’t come from involvement so much as seeing everything play out.
“What are you hearing?” she asks him.
“I don’t know; is this Depeche Mode?” he asks. “You have a better ear for this stuff than I do. You should DJ sometime. Drinks are free.”
“My drinks are always free,” Carrie says. “And that’s not what I’m asking.”
“It’s a party, Carrie,” he says, the hint of a whine sneaking into his voice.
“A friend out west told me the Faction was gearing up for an evacuation,” she says. “Does that track with what you’re hearing?”
“There’s a lot of activity around Willis Tower,” he says. “They’re moving people in, but not at the levels they’d need to evacuate the city. The Faction is committed in the Bronx right now.”
“Evacuation?”
Waylon shakes his head. “That’s how they’re playing it to the press. We have someone who came from there, and he says it’s a bloodbath.”
“Evacs were ugly,” Carrie says.
“He says it was a culling.”
From across the room, she hears Miquel’s laugh piercing through the music. He and Bryce are cracking up over something. She’s gotten conspiratorial giggles out of him in bed, but she can’t remember the last time she heard his full barking laugh. She feels like it’s a disappearing sound, one she’s already moving away from. She runs some loose numbers in her head. After the Armistice, the evacuations were kept as bloodless as possible partly because the world was watching. If the Faction had escalated to a massacre in the Bronx, they must feel as if no one’s looking or as if no one who’s looking cares.
“What do you know about the efforts to create the Pulse abroad?” she asks Waylon.
“Funny you should ask,” he says. “The guy I mentioned who got out of the Bronx? He was working with Project Tuning Fork.”
“Are they close to making it happen?”
“He said they could do it tomorrow but the fatality rate would be off the charts,” Waylon says.
“That’s only an issue if people care about the costs,” Carrie says.
“A week ago Fahima Deeb was heading the project,” Waylon says. “She wasn’t about to let a bunch of people die. But she’s out. Disappeared.”
Carrie sips her beer. Whatever Fahima has going, whatever she wanted Emmeline for, must be moving into its endgame. She wants to take comfort in this, imagining Fahima as a chess master thinking ten moves ahead, but something tells her Fahima’s as much in the dark as she is.
“Who’s running it now?” Carrie asks.
“Cedric Joyner,” Waylon says. “You remember a couple years ago, he—”
“I know him,” Carrie says. The final piece clicks into place. The reason the Faction isn’t worried that they are watching is that soon there won’t be a they. Soon everyone is going to be us. Or dead.
* * *
—
The room tilts and spins, and she’s grateful to have Miquel to hold on to. “Sleep,” he says. She doesn’t, but it’s nice to have him here to say it. She’s sure she stays quiet and still long enough for him to believe she’s fallen asleep in his arms when he asks, “What did you talk to Waylon about?” He’s quiet enough that it wouldn’t have woken her if she’d been asleep.
“Local work,” she says.
“You were different after,” he says.
“It wasn’t anything.”
“I still know when you’re lying,” he says. “I don’t need magic powers to—”
“You’ve never known when I was lying,” she says. “I used to wonder why you didn’t know how I felt about you when we were kids. I was a blind spot in your ability. And then when we were together and I started running drugs for Waylon and you thought I was temping at a dentist office. And the war. And this last year when I’ve—”
“I knew,” he says. “I didn’t say anything because I thought you didn’t want me to.”
“I wanted you to,” she says. “Every time. I wanted you to so bad. You left me alone with it when we could have been together. We could have fixed things, and you left me to make them even worse.”
“You didn’t,” he says. “You didn’t make it worse. You tried your best.”
She rolls over to face him, although it’s pitch-black and she can see his face only as vague shapes. “How much do you know about what I was?” she asks. “The things I did after Topaz Lake?”
“It felt like an invasion,” he says.
“It was your job,” Carrie says. She’s holding her voice low, as quiet as she can, but she can feel the alcohol trying to pull the lid off, to let this seething thing explode into an all-ending argument. “You went into people’s heads and you fixed their horrible shit, but you didn’t do that for me.”
“It was too much,” he says. “I couldn’t help you. You were so strong to get through the day with everything you carried, and I couldn’t help.”
She knows he’s telling the truth; she’s always known he would have helped her if he could. But it makes no difference. She resents that he didn’t try. She rolls away, facing the wall.
“It’s going to start again,” she says. She’s thinking of what Waylon told her but also of the dynamic between her and Miquel, the way they cycled close and distant in permanent elliptical orbits.
“You don’t have to be part of it,” Miquel says.
“They’re going to kill people.”
“There are other people who will stop them,” he says. He puts a hand lightly on her shoulder but with enough pressure for her to register it. It feels less like pulling her close than like holding her bac
k. “You can be done. You can rest.”
“I don’t think I can,” she says. His hand on her shoulder goes slack.
“You can choose me instead of the whole world this time,” he says. With his hand barely touching her, she feels as if maybe it’s true, that she does have the space to choose. “Sometimes I think that’s all I wanted from you, was for you to pick me rather than everything else.” She closes her eyes. She can remember Miquel’s face every time she’s walked away from him, his heart breaking each time.
Every time you leave me for a minute, it’s like goodbye. I like to believe it means you can’t live without me, she thinks. She can’t remember if it’s something he said or a snippet of dialogue from one of his movies. That’s the problem with Miquel: she can’t tell where the borders of him are, what’s him and what’s everything around him.
When she was with Alyssa, it never occurred to Fahima that the body is a set of inputs and processes that can be manipulated to achieve certain outcomes. She has approached things with Ruth from this mindset, and the results have been overwhelmingly positive. There’s a cost: Fahima misses sex as something to get lost in, a space ruled by nonlogic. In return, she gets to experience sex as something to be good at, with obvious indicators of success. There’s been so little Fahima feels good at lately, so few obvious indicators of success. As Ruth collapses against the headboard, breathless and spent, Fahima’s brain floods with a different kind of pleasure: the dopamine rush of a job well done. She rolls over, resting her head on Ruth’s thigh.
“The problem is that basically we’re trying to kill a god,” Fahima says, staring up at the drop ceiling.
