by Bob Proehl
“It’s also about shit blowing up,” Fahima says.
“We’ll have that, too,” says Emmeline. She sits on the edge of the Chair, resting her elbows on her knees, head in her hands, as she slips into the Hive. Something stirs, and she thinks how Kimani told her some predators see their prey only when it moves. She’s dancing in front of Raymond Glover because there’s no more point in hiding. The last time she was in the Hive, it flooded her with memories of when she first resonated and the Hive itself had reached out to grab her. She panicked and screamed for Kimani. This time she speaks Kimani’s name calmly and quietly. Emmeline’s eyes flutter open as a door appears on the wall of the basement lab.
“My ride,” Emmeline says. She kisses Fahima on the cheek. She feels the tension in Fahima’s body, her resistance to all this manifesting in her jaw. Ruth hugs Emmeline as if they’ve known each other forever. “Take care of her,” she says to Ruth.
“No one touches her but me,” Ruth says. Emmeline smiles at them as she opens Kimani’s door. They are nothing alike and have nothing in common, but by some magic they work. Two elements smashing together can change the whole world.
* * *
—
It’s strange to find Kimani in a room that isn’t the one they shared for so many years. She lies on a shabby couch in what was once a storage closet, staring at static on a television. The room has none of the grace notes Kimani loves: no art on the walls, no eye for design. Emmeline can see the wear and strain of bearing this much weight. It’s possible Emmeline is doing all of this to ward off what might happen to Kimani. Maybe none of this is about the world, she thinks. Maybe it comes down to saving at least one of my parents.
“It’s grim in here,” Emmeline says.
“I asked Fahima to put me somewhere with no windows,” Kimani says. “It creeps me out, looking out into it. I know what’s out there, but there’s something unsettling about looking.”
“You made me get posters and tape them up,” Emmeline says. “When we lived in Paris, you sent me to tourist shops, looking for posters of the Eiffel Tower and Notre Dame. We hung them around the apartment and framed them like they were windows.” When they left Paris, Emmeline took down the posters and left the frames, but that made it worse. Kimani made approximations of the moon and the sun that alternated space in the sky outside holes carved through the walls of her room. Emmeline considered what this felt like, how it might be like cutting out chunks of her own skin. Sometimes people hurt you because they love you, and sometimes they hurt themselves, she thinks. She remembers her father when he died and her sense that he’d paid in pieces of himself to keep her safe as best he could.
Emmeline reaches out and touches the static on the screen as if she could push her hand through it, into something behind. Snow, Kimani used to call it. Emmeline pulls out the Polaroid camera that was left in her room here in Phoenix when she jumped away.
“Can I take your picture?” she says. “I tried to draw you once while Carrie and I were together. There was something I couldn’t get.”
Kimani sits up slightly and offers a weak smile. In the flashbulb light, the circles under her eyes are more pronounced, the concentration lines on her forehead deeper. When the picture comes out, Emmeline tucks it behind her back before it develops.
“I can’t keep my mind on anything,” Kimani says. “I try to watch movies, but I get headaches. It’s hard holding all this together. I feel like I’m at my limit.”
“It’s amazing,” Emmeline says. “It’s like our home was.”
Kimani smiles. “You never used to call it that,” she says. “You called it ‘our place.’ ”
“It was home,” Emmeline says. “I know that now.”
“I’m glad,” Kimani says, holding Emmeline’s hand.
“You’re almost done,” Emmeline says. “You can set it down soon.”
Kimani laughs. “It’s a ten-story building, not a helicopter, Em,” she says. “I can’t land it in the middle of Manhattan.”
“Of course you can,” Emmeline says. And because Kimani can’t exactly see the world the way Emmeline does but doesn’t think like Fahima and because it will at least get a laugh out of her, she tells Kimani her whole plan.
* * *
—
Pikwitonei, Manitoba, is too small to be called a town. It’s got fewer than a hundred people, the rail station Miquel got off at, and the bar Emmeline finds him in, which doubles as a general store. The Drink & Feed is a repurposed trailer with a wooden sign out front. Inside, the wall is stocked with dusty liquor bottles on one side and canned goods on the other. The bar is a slab of wood on sawhorses long enough to accommodate three. Miquel sits alone while the bartender busies herself checking the inventory on the grocery side. She turns to Emmeline as she enters.
“You better have about ten forms of ID if you expect a drink, kid,” she says.
“I’m not here to drink,” she says. “I’m here for him.” She points to Miquel.
“You can have whatever’s left of him if you pay his tab,” the bartender says.
“I can pay my own tab,” Miquel says. His voice is raspy, more breath than sound. The shining bronze edge of the shackle peeks out from the cuff of his parka.
“I know you can, honey,” says the bartender, giving him a sad mothering look. “I’m giving you grief.”
“All stocked on grief,” he says.
She runs her finger down the sheet on her clipboard. “Yep, looks like our morbid drunk shipment came in on time.”
Emmeline approaches Miquel and sits down on the barstool next to him, which wobbles so much she’s afraid it will pitch her off. “We haven’t met,” she says. “I’m Emmeline. I’m a friend of Carrie’s.”
“That is not going to make me more inclined to talk to you,” Miquel says.
Emmeline taps the edge of the shackle on his wrist. “This used to be mine,” she says.
“You want it back?”
Emmeline is surprised to find she pauses before shaking her head. “I wore it long enough.”
“She gave it to me as a gift,” he says. “Who does that? Who cuts part of you off and calls it a gift?” She wants to tell him about the first shackle, a brutalist chunk of metal that chafed her arm, and how Fahima worked with jewelers to make it into something beautiful. She wants to tell him both of those were gifts.
“You have to care very much,” Emmeline says. “It’s not a pretty kind of love.”
Miquel considers this, sips his drink, then nods. “I don’t want it,” he says. “But maybe I need it.” Emmeline doesn’t know if he’s talking about the gift or Carrie’s feeling behind it.
“The things we can do can feel like a weight,” Emmeline says.
“Mine feels like a fissure,” he says. “A crack in everything.”
“That’s how the light gets in,” says Emmeline.
Miquel laughs. “Carrie loves that song,” he says. “She loves all that depressing shit.” He means it as an accusation, but it comes off wistful.
“I need you to come with me,” Emmeline says. “I can bring you back here after, and you can shut back off and run away.” She taps the shackle with her fingernail. “I need you to take that off and come with me.”
Miquel looks into his glass as if he can see through it into every drink that will come afterward. He sets it down on the bar unfinished. “Yeah, all right.”
* * *
—
In Emmeline’s old room, Rai listens to records on the turntable from her father’s office. When she was little, they had two turntables in the house. There was the nice one downstairs her mother bought as a Father’s Day gift, slick and black and shaped like a pill. The first time Emmeline saw black glass up close, she thought of the way her father took that turntable out of the box, unsure what it was. Her mother’s face soured when her
father failed to be as excited as she’d hoped, and he got it together a moment too late and said how amazing it was. Emmeline remembers him saying it had a warm sound as he laid the needle down on a brand-new copy of the Purple Rain soundtrack, a record Emmeline knew he had upstairs in the office, and she tried to hear the warmth he was talking about as they sat around the living room listening, watching the record spin.
Then there was this one, older than her, older probably than her father had been. It was dinged and dented, a mix of brushed metal and faux wood. Its built-in speakers produced a sound like an old-time radio underwater. It was the one he used to play records for her when she was little, setting the needle in and watching her bop around to the Ramones on chunky legs or precariously pirouette to Queen ballads.
Seeing Rai with it doesn’t evoke possessiveness so much as joy and relief at its being used again. He’s focused on the music and doesn’t register the stir in the air when Kimani’s door opens. It’s a David Bowie song, the last one on her father’s favorite album. Bowie sings about the clock waiting on your song. Bowie tells them they’re not alone, and Emmeline remembers her father singing along. Oh, no, love. Not alone.
“Rai,” she says quietly as the last violin chord dies. It’s the first time she’s shown up out of nowhere and managed to startle him. There’s something she likes about that.
“I thought you were off fighting a war,” he says.
“I keep telling people it’s not a war,” Emmeline says. She sits on the bed next to him. “My dad said the only thing that sounded good after the end of this album was the beginning of this album.” She reaches across him and flips the record, setting the needle on the platter. A bass drum and a high-hat stumble across the room.
“How long?” Rai asks.
“This morning,” she says. “What’s that, ten hours?”
“Me too,” says Rai.
“I know how long it’s been for you,” Emmeline says.
“I’m superboring, huh?”
“Today we were both boring,” Emmeline says. “Walking through the world one second at a time, in the order they come.”
“It had to be normal once, I guess,” Rai says. He can’t know what a charged word that is. At Bishop, normal had been a profanity. He watches the label on the record as it revolves.
“I got you something,” she says. She hands him the Polaroid Sun 600 camera she “borrowed” from Carrie’s bag in Boulder. “There’re only a couple shots left, but you can probably find more film.”
“It’s old,” Rai says, hefting it in his hand to assess its bulk.
“Doesn’t make it bad,” says Emmeline. “It’s been fun to have, but I think I’m done with it.”
“Thanks,” he says as he places it on the nightstand.
“Rai, I need you to come with me.”
“Why? I can’t do anything,” he says. He holds up his hands and turns the palms to her as if to show there’s no power, no strength in them. “I’m not part of this.”
“Everyone is,” Emmeline says. “Especially you. You’re critical.” She smiles again, thinking how Fahima would have gotten this little joke. She has the punch-drunk feeling of having stayed up into the hours when everything is too funny or too sad. Exhaustion amplifies her emotions, and outsized feelings contribute to her exhaustion. Everything is circling, spiraling, coming together at once.
The jet engine roar of the Gate means that they communicate in gestures and mouthed words. Ji Yeon is prepared for this, having worked out a complex if idiosyncratic set of signals in her time as head of the Faction. Carrie feels a swell of relief that in being “cured” of the dark voice in their heads, they haven’t lost everything. She imagines the worm in her head as a thread with jagged hooks, yanking out every memory in its proximity as it’s removed. Thankfully, that hadn’t happened. They were allowed to take what was best from that time and carry it forward as long as they remembered the worst alongside it.
She steps through the Gate into a room where she’d spent her first months at the Bishop Academy. Fahima Deeb’s basement lab was one of two places in the school where students were admitted only by invitation; the other was the headmaster’s quarters on the thirteenth floor, which was seen only by Kevin Bishop’s favorites. The lab hosted the misfits and freaks, people like Carrie whose abilities threatened to harm themselves or others. Fahima worked one on one with Carrie because when Carrie first resonated, she was invisible by default. Fahima compared it to a muscle always tensing. Those are the knots they knead out of you in a massage, she said. We’ve got to figure out how you can let go and not disappear. She helped Carrie so she no longer disappeared when she slept or when she forgot to concentrate on being there. Carrie’s feelings about this room are mixed. She got attention here when she was a kid, something she’d struggled to get from her own parents, but her sessions had been intense and full of failure. Sometimes she had wondered if disappearing wouldn’t be better.
She turns back and looks through the Gate. The others hesitate before coming through. She wants to explain the way Emmeline is staging this moment. She wants to tell them about the chessboards in the room in Boulder and how Emmeline made it look as if she were losing on two boards while she rushed to victory on a third. She wants them to understand that the schools linked by the Gates are one school. By stepping across, they aren’t leaving the school in Chicago but moving to another room in a massive, multifaceted structure. The mechanism of the Gate is too loud to tell them anything but the simplest sentiments, and so Carrie plants her feet and points to the ground. “We fight here,” she shouts, overemphasizing each word so they’ll be able to read her lips.
Hayden comes through first, followed by Clay. Confident that the rest will follow, Carrie turns toward the elevator. Clay, Hayden, and Ji Yeon step in with her.
“I’ve got the clearance codes for the upper floors,” Ji Yeon says as the doors shut. She steps over to enter a key code, but Carrie holds her off.
“They’ll be sending agents from all over,” Carrie says. “We need a rear guard.”
“What, the kids?” Hayden asks.
“We were kids when we fought,” Carrie says.
“I’ve seen these kids,” Ji Yeon says. “They’re not ready for this.”
“Nobody’s ever ready.” Carrie presses the button for the first floor and is thrown off when the elevator shoots upward. “They fixed it,” she says to Hayden. “Remember how slow it used to be?”
“Slow enough Doug Collins once got to second with me on the way up to the tenth-floor dorms,” Hayden says.
Carrie makes a face like she’s swallowed a snail. “Lame Doug?”
“I was on so much ecstasy,” Hayden says, rolling their eyes.
“How were we even friends?” Carrie asks.
“Because you loved me,” Hayden says, flipping their hair glamorously. Carrie wonders if she loved Hayden like that back then and decides she didn’t. It’s silly to think that love is an eternal, static thing you find and keep like a treasure. It’s something you build, something you maintain.
The doors open on the lobby, and Shen stands in a wrestler’s ready stance, puffed up so the top of his head scrapes the ceiling tiles. Behind him are four Faction agents, equally at the ready. A glowing spear lights up in Ji Yeon’s hand.
“Faction, stand down,” she says. “That’s an order.”
“We’re done taking orders,” one of them says. Carrie recognizes him as Nolan Emerson, one of the kids they graduated from Bishop with. “We know what you put in our heads. Now that it’s gone, we’re—”
“He did it to me, too,” says Ji Yeon.
Carrie taps her temple. “He’s not in here,” she says.
“I never joined your Junior Fascist League to begin with,” Hayden says.
Shen sighs, and as he does, he diminishes to his normal size, still fairly huge.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “It’s wonderful to see you, but you picked a real bad time.”
“You remember us?” Carrie asks.
“I remember all my students,” he says. He blushes and scuffs his shoe like a gigantic child. “I’m a big fan of your records, Hayden. I tell everyone, ‘I knew them when they were a kid.’ ”
“Thanks, big man,” Hayden says.
“What’s the status here?” Ji Yeon asks Nolan.
“Confused,” he says. “Something happened, like a wave. There was a surge, and then the voice in my head was gone.”
“Emmeline,” Carrie says. It feels like faith rewarded even if it only means the first trick has been pulled off.
“Where’s your fifth?” Ji Yeon asks. Nolan points to the fountain in the center of the lobby. A man’s body is slumped over the edge, facedown in the water.
“Whatever happened to us didn’t happen to him,” Nolan says. “He came at us rabid, thrashing. Florence overpowered him. She didn’t mean to kill him. He wouldn’t stop.”
“It’s okay,” says Ji Yeon.
“I’m remembering things I did,” Nolan says. “We were in the Bronx yesterday. We were—”
“That wasn’t you,” Carrie says, but there’s no conviction in her words. She wants to exonerate herself from everything she’s done, but when she remembers things, it’s not as if she was manipulated like a puppet but goaded, cartoon devils on each shoulder affirming dark, cruel thoughts that were ultimately her own.
Clay remembers days of nothing but fighting, hours dragging on in a slurry of pain and hate. It’s strange to be back with Carrie; he’d counted her among his dead. He hadn’t made time to mourn her after Houston, and by the time the war was over, grief was too big to attach to any one lost person. Clay remembers how she became the leader of their Bloom despite being the youngest of the five. She saw the whole field. She moved with sureness and the grace of a dancer. People followed her without being asked, without realizing they were being led. Ji Yeon barks orders like she’s in a World War II movie, but Carrie’s the one they listen to. When she told the civilians in Chicago to march through the Gate, leaving the ground they had secured to join a fight elsewhere, no one questioned her. When she tells a Bloom of Faction agents to hold the door of the Bishop lobby, they obey.
