by Bob Proehl
* * *
—
Emmeline folds back, rejoining the world a year after she left. She takes a train from New York to Chicago. She wants to move on a fixed path through time and space, through the interstitial zones where people are figuring out what the world will be like now. Progress radiates out from the cities, but changes are starting everywhere. People move back into homes they were forced out of, and as the train stops in small towns and villages, there’s life there again, if only early stirrings. It’s like watching dead leaves in spring twitch with the growth teeming beneath them.
She takes a cab to the house on Jarvis Avenue. It doesn’t fly but chugs along Lake Shore Drive, spewing exhaust. People are coming back to Rogers Park and Jarvis Avenue, although she doesn’t recognize any of them. The house looks better than the last time she saw it. Her father was never any good at taking care of things and let the place fall apart even before it was abandoned, but Clay and Dom have built it back up. The lawn is trimmed and the stucco scraped away, replaced with bright blue siding that makes the house look like a carved-out piece of the sky. Clay told her she was always welcome, even gave her a new key, but she hadn’t come back. She waits across the street, tucked behind a tree, to be sure none of them are home, then unlocks the door and enters. She has the feeling of being inside a museum exhibit dedicated to her own life. She goes upstairs to her old room, where Rai has decorated one wall with flocks of Polaroids arranged in a galaxy swirl: a year’s documentation of his life, his friends, his dads, his school. In the center is the picture of the two of them, sitting on this bed, grinning as if everything was wonderful. The camera, passed now from Carrie to Emmeline to Rai, sits on the bedside table next to a stack of spent film.
The other wall is covered in Emmeline’s childhood drawings, rescued from the attic. They’re illustrations for stories she used to tell herself at night, thinly veiled warnings about what was coming. A tour bus speeding across the desert. The tower seen from Central Park. Teenagers flying over a field while a little girl chases after them. A magical door perched on the top of a hill. Emmeline thinks about the pictures she took with the old Polaroid. The band and the tour bus in the desert. Carrie and Hayden and their beautiful kids. Kimani lying on a couch holding a whole building in her mind. It all turned out so much better and so much worse than she had imagined it or than she’d been able to communicate to herself. Pictures and drawings didn’t capture the heart of any of it; they only point her back to the place in her memory where she holds on to the true thing.
She sits on the edge of the bed and folds backward. She isn’t sure when she’s going to land, but as soon as she gets there, she knows which night she’s chosen. The girl stirs in her bed, covers tucked in tight around her. Her mother sealed her up like that on nights she put Emmeline to bed, as if her daughter would float away.
“I was hoping you’d come,” the girl says.
“Bad night?” Emmeline asks.
The girl shakes her head. Emmeline hears her curls rustling in the dark.
“Indian food, right?” Emmeline says.
“I had chicken makhani,” says the girl.
“You should try the tikka,” Emmeline says. “It’s spicier.”
“I’m not big on spicy.”
“Maybe someday.” She puts a hand on the bed somewhere short of the girl’s shin. It’s remarkable how little space she occupies, how tiny she is, like a seed. “A good night, then?” Emmeline asks.
“They were getting along,” says the girl. “It felt like the last time they’re going to.”
Emmeline thinks about the night she played a shepherd in the Christmas pageant at her grandmother’s church. She knew how bad things were by then and heard them fighting when they got home. They could act like they were okay, but this night—when they ate takeout on the living room floor and read comic books out loud, and Emmeline went to bed early—this was the last night it had been real.
“Why did we go to bed early?” Emmeline asks. “Why not stay and soak it up?”
The girl takes a deep breath. “Last year Daddy took me to see birds of prey at the library,” she says. “There was a youth group from one of the high schools that trained owls and falcons. He thought I might be interested.”
“Raptor Club,” Emmeline says. The girl always acts as if she doesn’t know who Emmeline is. She treats her like a fairy godmother, which makes Emmeline think how in the story, maybe the fairy godmother is Cinderella coming back to save herself. She remembers when her father took her to see the birds but lets the girl tell it.
“There was a girl with a kestrel perched on her wrist,” the girl says. “She had thick leather gloves that looked furry. The bird was tiny compared to the others. There were eagles and owls as big as fire hydrants. The girl looked so proud. It must have been the first time she got to show everyone her bird. Her teacher came over and said it was time to put the bird back in the carrier, but the girl didn’t listen. The kestrel fidgeted, and I remember looking at its tether and thinking it was long enough to keep it from getting to me. There was danger, but I was safe from it. The girl beamed, looking at everyone but the bird. She held her arm out straight at the shoulder, crooked at the elbow, but it sagged. Her arm dropped, and this little bird flew right across and nipped a bite off her cheek. I saw it in its beak, fresh and bloody. It looked like—”
“A ripe strawberry,” Emmeline says. She never told anyone that. The whole summer after, she felt sick whenever she saw a bowl of strawberries, thinking of the hole in that girl’s cheek, the hunk of flesh in the kestrel’s beak.
“Anything good can bite you if you wait too long,” the girl says. It’s a strange moral to learn from the incident and not what Emmeline remembers as her takeaway. Her hand finds the girl’s ankle under the sheets.
“Maybe it means little things can be dangerous if no one’s looking,” she says. The girl lays her head back down and pulls the covers up to her neck.
“It’s going to get bad soon,” she says. She puts it out as a statement in the hope Emmeline will deny it.
“Soon,” Emmeline says. “Then good again, then bad again. Same as ever.”
“But you’ll be there,” she says in the same tone, stronger, surer.
“One more time,” Emmeline says. “There’ll be others to help you. Wonderful people, Emmeline. You’re going to care for them so much.”
Emmeline stands up and walks to the head of the bed. She holds back her curls with one hand, pushes back the girl’s with the other, and bends down to kiss her on the forehead, then on her cheek, which is wet with tears.
“Where are you going?” the girl asks.
Emmeline considers this. She’s been to the end, and now she’s come to the beginning. It’s time for her to go back, to find a way to move through the world. There’s only one thing she needs to do first. “Downstairs,” Emmeline says. “For a minute.”
“Be careful,” says the girl. “The fourth step from the top creaks.”
“Don’t worry,” Emmeline says. “They’ll never know I’m there.” Emmeline hears her parents voices from downstairs, her father laughing at something her mother said. As she opens the door, light from the hallway comes into the room. She can see the girl’s face, bound up in the idea of what’s possible, the limits of what she’s able to do. If there were more time, Emmeline could tell her none of that is true. There aren’t rules or limits. There are no impossibilities except the ones they put on themselves.
“See you soon,” Emmeline says as she closes the door.
To those charged with fixing things we broke,
and those whose broken things we tried to fix
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book is less a sequel to The Nobody People and more like its second half. In fact, the scene that originally ended that book ended up at around this page in this book. It was always one long story in my h
ead, so if these acknowledgments look similar to the ones at the end of the first book, that’s the likely reason.
Thank you to my agent, Seth Fishman, for encouraging me to not just dip a toe into science fiction writing but to dive in facefirst, and to everyone at the Gernert Company for their advocacy and support.
Thank you to my editor, Sarah Peed at Del Rey, who kept this book from sprawling out endlessly. Especially as we came down the home stretch, she helped the book maintain its grounding in the emotional lives of the characters, even when I was showing more interest in, say, detailing at length how resource economies might work in a post-capitalist America. Thank you to all the folks at Del Rey who made every edition of both these books super good looking and helped get them out into the world
Relatedly: thank you booksellers for putting this book in the hands of readers. I’m wrapping this book up at an extremely weird time, and I hope by the time these particular words are in print, you’ll be back at it connecting books and readers.
Thank you to my reading group, Melanie Conroy-Goldman and Jennifer Savran Kelly, for helping see this book through rewrites large and small, even when doing so required charts and spreadsheets and who all knows what.
Finally, thank you to my wife and partner, Heather Furnas, who has put up with me keeping a couple hundred extra people in my head for the last four years. The good news is I’m letting them all go. The bad news is, new folks are moving in, and they might be worse.
BY BOB PROEHL
A Hundred Thousand Worlds
The Nobody People
PHOTO: © HEATHER AINSWORTH
BOB PROEHL is the author of The Nobody People and A Hundred Thousand Worlds, a Booklist Best Book of the Year. He has worked as a bookseller and programming director for Buffalo Street Books in Ithaca, New York, a DJ, a record-store owner, and a bartender. He was a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow in Fiction and a resident at the Saltonstall Arts Colony. His work has appeared in Salon, as part of the 33⅓ book series, and in American Short Fiction.
Twitter: @bobproehl
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