The Liminal People

by Ayize Jama-everett

  Chapter Eleven

  Yasmine is dead. My organs are fully healed, but I am not. I smell of the waste of London. I am famished, half naked in half-burnt clothes. Someone tried to kill me and ended up hitting the only woman I’ve ever loved. They made a big mistake.

  I wait until nighttime, part out of design and part out of lack of energy. I cause a drunk young neo-Nazi, about my weight and size and walking alone, to pass out near me. I take him down to the river and strip him of his leathers, his boots, his jacket, and his shirt. Fuck him. He’s got sixty quid in his pocket. I find the nearest curry stand and demand five orders of tikka masala and butter chicken. I’m done in five minutes. I think about ordering more but then realize that my face still looks like a half-baked pizza.

  The concierge and the rest of the staff look at me funny when I finally get back to the hotel. I’ve grown enough of a face back after the masala to not care anymore. I’m crying in the elevator. I’m crying in my room. I’m crying in the shower. I’m crying ordering room service. Four suits are resting on the bed. Near twenty-four hours ago, I left this room fresh-pressed to impress the woman I thought wanted me again. I hate the suits. My tears don’t stop when the bellhop arrives with the food. I tip him. He doesn’t bother to ask what’s wrong. I thank him mentally for that privacy. I gorge myself, then pass out on the floor. Beds are for people that don’t watch their true loves die.

  I’m awake. Maybe it was a dream. I’m starving again, and my facial skin is two-toned. My lungs are as clean as a baby’s. That means I did have to do the healing. Which means I was in a car that blew up. Which means Yasmine is gone. I’m bawling again. I turn on the TV, more to drown out my own sobs than any quest for entertainment. Of course it’s the big story. Not because of Yasmine, but for Fish’n’Chips. They’ve spun it to be—hell, maybe they actually believe it is—a plot by terrorists against the current administration. Politicians are running wild. They say the car was hit with “as yet unidentified explosives.” Speculations include road bombs and ICBM’s. They don’t know. I know. Someone like me hit us. Someone who can make things explode. I felt their brain focusing on us right before . . .

  I’ll find this power. And when I do, I’ll kill them. No. I’ll make their ribs go through their spines; I’ll make a wired mess of their spinal cord. I’ll make them allergic to their own blood. Then I’ll kill them.

  But I can’t yet. I don’t know where to find them. What’s more, the public nature of this thing—it isn’t what we do. People like me, we go under the radar. We don’t attract attention unless we’re ready to square off with the norms and all the other powers that don’t want the attention. People like me don’t do that. Sane people like me don’t. The kid in India, his powers had made him crazy. I’ve met three others like that: a girl in Singapore who jumped between dreams and was unable to distinguish between the dream world and this one; another girl in Ankara who found everything she touched, including her parents, turned to liquid; and a third in Garoua, Cameroon, whose body was in constant flux, shifting its physical characteristics based on the desires of the people around it. Nordeen had me cull them all, and I was thankful that was his order.

  But the one who killed my Yasmine wasn’t crazy. Whoever they are, they’re sane enough to work with the animal girl. The animal girl was a street kid, hungry, desperate, scared out of her mind, but not crazy. And if I’m right about the animal girl being subordinate, that means the one who caused the fuel in the car to blow is superior to her, maybe the one calling the shots. So they’re not crazy, they’re just bold. Bold can mean stupid, or it can mean backed up by an even larger power. A power unafraid of killing a semi-famous politician and another power in broad-ass daylight.

  I’m killing the asshole either way. But I’ve got to know which way the wind is blowing. I tried to go mellow on this one, tried to keep it all away from the boss. But that’s not the way it’s destined to go down. He’s going to know about this. Hell, it’s on the BBC. Maybe he was always going to know and I was just deluding myself. But I’ve got this much control over the situation: I can call him.

  I’m half dressed in a clean suit, one that makes me feel like I’m going to a funeral, when it hits me. I held her severed arm in my hand. I forced the snags and sinews of bone back into place and made marrow and red blood vessels rejoin, but it was no good. Yasmine is dead. She’ll never come back. I can’t heal her. I thought I could handle it.

  I’m throwing up. I just make it to the bathroom, the tub. Succumbing to involuntary, unconscious physiological activity brands me as weak, distracted, not on my game. It’s the first surprise my body has given me in years. I’m bawling without making a sound. Before my powers, when Mac used to beat me, this is how I cried in my closet when he was done, just so I wouldn’t disturb anyone else. That’s not the concern now. I just don’t know any other way to cry. I don’t know how to stop, either.

  Figure it out. Focus on death. That feeling of pull that shut down each of my broken girl’s systems, when all I could do was watch. I couldn’t break free of her, couldn’t let her face the darkness by herself. I know in the end she didn’t love me. I was a poor substitute for her massacred man. Didn’t matter. I couldn’t let her go. So I felt her brain shut down; I suffered her heart pumping as she bled out. I sensed her lungs pulling in blood and mucus and marrow—futile and useless bags of organs not capable of saving her. Just like me. Her pull on my arm, weak already, went limp, and I felt the lack of electrical impulse in her body. I didn’t just feel it; I recorded each and every sensation. I can replicate each one. I will. I’ll play it back plus ten for the bastard that caused my love to fall. And before they go down, I’ll wet concrete with their brain matter. I’ll explode their marrow out of their bones and make a mess of capillaries. I’ll make a paste of their eyes, Yasmine, I promise. I’ll make them bleed from their ears and turn their digestive system against them. They’ll digest their own organs. I’ll increase their pain receptors so that their clothes feel like sandpaper. I’ll make their own breath sound like a DC-10 is landing in their chest. I’ll fill their lungs with every excessive fluid in their body I can find. I’ll make a decomposing mess of them, I swear I will. They’ll pray to gods they don’t believe in for the pain to end before I explode each taste bud in their mouth and inflame their genitals with the stray parasites their immune system usually fights off.

  Nordeen said the best I could hope for would be to at one point be of assistance to a god. He’s wrong. I’ll turn into a god of pain and disease, and build an altar to you from the bones of your murderer. Their suffering will be my first odes, and they will not end until I feel satisfied that even dead, resting wherever you are resting, you can hear the pain of the idiot that thought your death would go unavenged. In the end I’ll make their skin like taffy and pull it across a full city block and set fire to it. Even then I won’t let them go unconscious, let alone die. They will feel what you felt; cry as you were too strong to do, beg for the death that already claimed you. And when they can take no more, I’ll heal them completely and totally. I’ll take every moment of pain and suffering from their body. I’ll make them feel better than they ever have in their life. I’ll give them that peace for a full minute. Then I’ll tear them apart, cell by cell again until there is absolutely nothing left for them to do but kill themselves. And then, when they’ve put themselves out of their misery, then I’ll find your little girl and let her know her mother’s killer has truly suffered for what they did.

  I’m calm now, replete with purpose. I make my way downstairs and to the nearest bus. I ride it to Essex. It takes a while. I’m overdressed for the bus. Luckily I’m carrying the “Fuck with me” look in my eye, so even the drunk kids with their singsong neighborhood patois leave me alone. I get off the bus with an hour to spare before the bars close. I find a hopping club. The Black Dog. Perfect. It’s how I feel. I order a drink, and in under a minute I’ve pilfered a cell phone from a chav woman’s purse hanging off her chair. Everyone
’s drunk. Nobody cares. I dial eight different international codes from memory. I’m beginning to think I screwed one up when, after half an hour of waiting, it finally rings.

  “Speak.” It’s Suleiman. He’s speaking in Arabic. I used the hash wholesale number we have.

  “It’s me,” I say in French.

  “There are many me’s in the world. Give me a name or I lose the connection,” Suleiman responds in deadpan French.

  “The Godfather to your second child shouldn’t have to identify himself.” I wait for a second and interpret this silence as acceptance. “I need to speak to our big brother.”

  “At this number?” His voice is full with as much happiness as he’ll ever allow on the phone, and I miss my old life. It feels like a distant shore getting smaller and smaller.

  “If it’s tonight. If not, I’ll call from another number in thirty-six hours.” When he’s confident I won’t say anything else, the consummate professional hangs up. Somehow, I can feel his concern.

  I set the phone to vibrate, then hide it deep in my pocket. Finally, it’s back to the bar, where I demand a Black and Tan with a double shot of Jameson to start off. I want to kill off my body’s ability to process alcohol. I want to feel drunk. I want to wreck my system. If not for the call in to Nordeen, I would. But the small razor sitting on my chest seems to burn when I think about it, and I know whose property I am.

  Norm life, drinks at a bar with the mates, trying to pick up some fit girl—it doesn’t usually bother me. I’ll admit to a private jealousy when I see the tourists in Marrakesh or Moulay Idriss holding hands with their children, casual. The norms don’t know, can’t perceive the world around them the way I can. They don’t see the old powers in the darkness, the ones that make such grand machinations and movements that they seem predestined. Usually, I envy such innocence. But not tonight. Tonight I’m on a murder mission. That means someone is going to die. Most likely it will be the idiot that tried to make a kabob out of me. But I’d be a moron if I didn’t realize that whoever angled in on me almost took me out with his last attempt.

  Times like this, I don’t wish for ignorance. I look around and I see the bloated ignorance of the lumpen proletariat: roly-poly, sausage-fingered, ginger-topped fathers of at least two illegitimate children trying to massage the asses of waiflike, peroxide-scarred students who are themselves trying to navigate adulthood with their new-found freedom from outdated parenting. Luckily, booze makes it all seem rational, or at the very least palatable. This was the world that would have been mine had Yasmine not . . . What? Died? Left me? Rejected her power? Married poor dumb Fish’n’Chips? I want to honor the dead and pretend that this life of pubs and anorexic waitresses would have been fine for me. After all, even Fish’n’Chips’s NGO circles are just champagne versions of the larger party I’m watching now. In truth, all permutations of this life bore me. Yasmine got it wrong. She thought I was chasing death when I was searching out wisdom. I beg for all the knowledge in the world. But I’m in this for the death right now. So I order another of the same before the last call sneaks in on me. Two minutes later, the stolen phone in my pocket vibrates.

  “After all you’ve been through, I would’ve expected a better outing from you.” Nordeen’s voice is paper thin, with more timber than bass. Still, he’s not angry, which relieves me of a small part of my anxiety about calling him.

  “I didn’t know what I was dealing with,” I’m saying, walking away from the bar into the back patio. “Your last words to me have been proven false.”

  “I believe I said we tend to stay away from each other for good reasons. Are you now saying we all tend to stay close to each other?”

  “Maybe just those of us in London,” I say, taking a swig. No use even trying to hide where I am from him anymore. Most likely he knew where I was going all along. If not, my calling from a random cell phone with an Essex callback would be all he needs to figure it out.

  “London is much like Marseilles now, though its security can be seen as much more benevolent, according to some.” There’s a familiar acridity in his voice, though I can’t place when I’ve heard it before.

  “Could that benevolence be behind what I’ve been going through?”

  “The motivations of the mover in those regions are a mystery to most, even myself. It claims one motivation but will often act in ways that seem contraindicated.”

  “You’re losing me.”

  “Never,” he says, way too sharply.

  “I mean I’m not understanding you.” I’m trying to muster supplication, but it’s hard with the vision of dead Yasmine going through my mind.

  “Then come home. This is a poor medium for truth-based conversation. Your mission has ended tragically, true, but it is over.”

  “I still owe the ones who did the deed payback.” I want to scream my protest to him, want to tell him how I’ll kill them. “But I’m concerned about crossing greater powers, including you.”

  “Your reason for staying is solely to settle this debt?” Only a few days away, and I’ve forgotten the danger of his questions.

  “Like you said, a poor medium we’re on. I don’t want to return until I fulfill an old friend’s final request.” I don’t want to bring Tamara too much to his attention.

  “Then we shall have to find a better medium, yes?” He hangs up before I can respond. The call is so confusing I chuck the phone over the back wall of the patio and into someone’s bird pond five units over. I’m out the bar with the rest of the early quitters.

  I take a cab back. The cabby’s a Nigerian. After offering me weed, stolen jewelry, and khat, he settles his eyes on the road and leaves me to his dubbed version of “Dark Side of the Moon.” Fucking Nordeen. He knew where I was. He knew about the explosion. Hell, half of the world knows about it. He knew I was dealing with powers. He knew it all and told me nothing. I’m ready to move. I think I can track the exploder down. I know I can find the dog girl again. I just need one of them. I bet the boss knows where both of them are. I don’t know what he wants. I can’t find a better medium. He’s like a petulant god, demanding offerings but not revealing what foods or spices he enjoys. I lost more than I gained by calling him and should have expected as much. The cabbie overcharges me for my return to the hotel. I pay the inflated charge and reactivate his oral and genital herpes as a tip.

  I’m completely ignoring the lobby when the concierge politely asks for my attention.

  “This was hand-delivered for you about half an hour ago, sir.” It’s a small envelope with a black-encrusted razor on the front. Nordeen.

  “Hand-delivered?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “By who?”

  “I would say a normal delivery person.”

  “And would you happen to remember the height of this normal delivery person?”

  “Height, sir?”

  “Yes, height, or age, race, at this point I’d even settle for gender. Do you know if it was a man or woman that delivered this letter for me at 12:45 a.m.?” I shouldn’t be castigating this sad norm.

  “I’m sorry, sir. It’s been a long night. I can honestly say I don’t remember. If it’s important, I can check our video logs to—”

  “Forget it.” I don’t even bother looking at the letter again until I’m alone in the elevator. A black jeweled razor across the front of the envelope. Big deal. Maybe it is from Nordeen. Or maybe it’s from somebody who knows I work for him. Either way, someone found me. Either way, someone wants me to do something. In this line of work, you only send letters when you want something. Wanting something’s not an issue. If it’s not Nordeen and they want something from me, the answer is “no” . . . assuming the request has nothing to do with finding Yasmine’s killer.

  I’m more concerned that another power like me was at my hotel. I’ve passively scanned everyone I’ve come across here for the ability to turn an electrical storm on in their brain, and gotten nothing. But the letter means that someone who knows I work for Nordee
n is looking for me. I’m opening my room door with my keycard, wondering if this is how all those other powers felt when Nordeen sent me to them.

  The door is closed before I realize there’s someone in my room. I’m sloppy. Tired. I turn to look behind me and get hit with a wave of pure force. No hand could deliver this blow. It doesn’t just hit me—it sweeps the room, pushing everything twenty feet forward. For a moment, I panic. The last time I felt someone “push” me this powerfully it was my brother. But I look ahead, brace for the impact into the wall, and see that, it, too, has been pushed forward and ripped from the rest of the building like a stray plank off a wooden ship caught in a typhoon. It’s not Mac. My brother would never let pass the opportunity to push me hard against a wall. Good. Not Mac. Now, how do I deal with being pushed out over the street by a massive invisible wave?

  Chapter Twelve

  I am so sick of powers that I don’t know trying to kill me. But I’ll survive being pushed out of my thirtieth-floor room if for no other reason than to prove that it’ll take a lot more than that for these assholes to kill me.