The Somebody People Read online

  Kevin reached into what was left of her mind. It was noise and horror, nothing coherent enough to be called a thought. Laura, honey, it’s me, he told her. I’m going to make it better. I’m going to make it stop hurting. Laura, it’s me. It’s Dad. He could count on one hand the number of times either of them had used the term. Her wedding. The death of her mother. Once, when she was thirteen and he’d made a particularly atrocious pun and she let it slip.

  And now.

  He found a static place, the still center where a determined mechanism kept her shocked body alive despite itself. With less effort than snuffing a candle, Kevin shut the machine down. Laura’s body went mercifully limp. He eased her eyelids shut and then her husband’s.

  I’m sorry, Mona, he thought. I promised you I’d keep her safe. If I’d been a day sooner. An hour. A million things had lined up in a sequence and brought him here. Kevin stood silently over the bodies, his eyes streaming tears but his body taut and still. His mind searched the house for an impossible presence, someone he knew couldn’t be there but he nonetheless suspected. There was nothing.

  “Sad old idiot,” Kevin muttered to himself, his voice broken and hoarse. The Tori Amos album faded out, and Kevin heard the soft babble of a child, punctuated with the caws of a gull, coming from the hallway off the kitchen, the direction Laura had gestured. He heard the whir of the CD player as the disc returned to the beginning and started up again.

  Bobby sat cross-legged on his bed, cooing baby talk to a seagull with the hindquarters of a silver tabby. Kevin’s mind reeled at the implication: somewhere in this house was the rest of Tom’s body, topped with Laura’s missing arm.

  Bobby’s features favored his mother, delicate and girlish. They reminded Kevin of Laura’s father, whose image Kevin had seen in Laura’s face the day he went and got Laura to hide her from a man who never bothered to come looking. Laura had her father’s beautiful face, which she’d passed undiluted to Bobby. Bobby’s hand ran along the animal’s back from feathers to fur. Its tail went up, erect and panicked. Bobby stopped talking and looked up when Kevin stepped into the room.

  “You’re not my real grandpa,” he said.

  “Have you been talking to your grandpa, Bobby?” Kevin asked slowly and quietly. “Has anyone other than me talked to you in the shimmering place? Someone named—”

  “They called you here to take me away,” Bobby said. “Because of what I did to Easter.” He stroked the animal in his lap. “But she’s better like this. See?” He held the animal up for Kevin’s inspection, his little hands under its wings, which flapped in a sad attempt at escape. Bobby dropped the thing to the floor, where it landed with a thud. Its claws made skittering noises on the hardwood.

  “I don’t want you here,” Bobby said.

  Kevin felt a pinch in his stomach. A cramp doubled him over. He jumped into Bobby’s mind, looking for that still center, the static place he could shut down, or at least a memory he could exploit, a moment Bobby felt enough kindness or love toward Kevin to give him pause. He couldn’t concentrate through the pain in his gut. Flailing, he found Bobby’s ability instead and seized it. It was a writhing thing, hot with power but clumsy. Kevin tried to use it to undo whatever damage Bobby had done to his insides, but it was like molding raw meat with numb fingers. He managed to ease the pain before Bobby’s ability wriggled away from his control.

  Bright lights exploded behind Kevin’s left eye as two blood vessels were soldered together. Kevin concentrated through it and gripped the boy’s ability again. He extended it down into Bobby’s chest; like slamming a door against a strong wind, he sealed the valves of Bobby’s aorta and pulmonary artery shut. Bobby looked at him, surprised. His little hand clutched at his scrawny chest, and he fell off the bed. All Kevin could see were his sneakers twitching and spasming. The gull cat let out an inquisitive croak from the foot of the bed. Rubbing his stomach to ease the knot of phantom pain there, Kevin walked out of the room. He glanced at Laura’s broken body for a moment as if he might have missed some detail and she could be hanging on to life, but he looked away and left the house.

  The moon was low on the water, forming a figure eight with its own reflection. Easter dragged herself over and head-butted Kevin’s ankle. Why give the name to the head but not the tail? Kevin thought. His mind swayed drunkenly with the thought, and he laughed, an unsteady hiccup. He bent down and picked her up, cradling her. Her weight was out of balance, top-heavy. He remembered her as a kitten, a puffball of claws and curiosity. She’d brought some piece of Laura back, something Kevin had worried was destroyed by her mother’s death, and for that, he forgave the cat all the scratched furniture and pissed-in shoes.

  Easter looked at him with the same pleading eyes as Laura. The minds of animals were alien things, and attempts to use his ability on them came with the danger of being lost within. Kevin petted Easter’s neck. He took her head in one hand and braced her lopsided body under his other arm. He twisted, like taking a stuck lid off a jar. Easter shivered once and was still. Kevin rested her body on the damp grass and trudged out onto the beach. He sat down at the tide line, the waves flirting with his heels. Vision returned to his left eye, which was blurred with tears.

  “No more,” he whispered to himself. The surf swallowed the promise, as if the world didn’t believe him. Kevin doubted the words himself. He’d said them before.

  Behind him, he heard footsteps on the sand, the crunch of tiny shells crushed underfoot. He was sure it was Bobby, alive and coming for revenge. Laura and Tom, or Mona, or Raymond, or one of the countless other dead. Whoever it is, they can have me, he thought.

  Kevin Bishop was done.

  Fahima Deeb looks out the window of the headmaster’s quarters of the Bishop Academy onto the glittering and changed face of New York. The light in the mornings is pale and milky but illuminates a city warped from drab concrete into a science fiction dreamscape. The map of the city is altered: office buildings repurposed for housing or torn down to provide green space, sidewalks widened to shift dominance from cars to pedestrians. Looking up shows the biggest changes: well above the ground, the air is full of traffic. Bullet-shaped public transit craft piloted by telekinetics slice the air between spires of polished onyx that gleam in the dawn light, their architecture inspired by coral growth and the mycorrhizal root structures of fungi. She’d been concerned about the likelihood of collisions. People had enough trouble not smacking into one another with two vectors; introducing a third opened up the potential for an exponential increase in accidents. What she didn’t account for was the amount of space. Every street in the city was a Grand Canyon. As long as the number of objects in the air didn’t see a massive increase, there was space enough for all above the streets.

  Fahima is not the first to adopt New York City as her home and alter it indelibly. She wonders if the ones who came before her felt they’d evolved the city into its final form. Her changes are more than cosmetic. The buildings are a sign of shifts beneath. Capitalism is an inefficient engine: so much waste for such a low yield. New York was built to fuel it with bodies, huddle around its meager light, suffer the punishing heat it gave off as by-product, and choke on its noxious exhaust. The city, the country, and the economy are machines constructed of obsolete components, with necessary inputs, outputs desired and undesired. But Fahima has improved it. She dreams in machines. She’s inventing something better.

  She looks down onto Lexington Avenue, where a film crew sets up lighting rigs and lays thick cable along the gutters. Trailers cordon off the block at either end. It shouldn’t worry her: this is still New York. Occasional film crews are a mix of excitement, curiosity, and inconvenience she accepts as part and parcel of living here. But she’s shaken. She picks up a Polaroid that’s been sitting on her desk since she found it taped to the window last week with 5:45 A.M. Wednesday June 8th written in black marker in the white space under the image. She holds it up,
comparing it with the street below. It isn’t a perfect match; she’s twenty minutes late, and some things have moved, the light shifting with the speed it does in the early morning. But the angle is right and the parked cars are the same, the lighting rigs and the trailers that weren’t there yesterday but are here today. The photograph was taken from her apartment window this morning and stuck to the glass a week before it was taken.

  Fahima dresses and starts the coffee. There’s a collective that grows strains of Ethiopian Yirgacheffe out in Nyack, creating microclimates to mimic its home, adjusting chemicals in the soil. People swear by it. There’s plastic in the palate, a burnt rubber taste as if the plants are rebelling, aware they’ve been displaced. Fahima gets Sumatran coffee in the Bed-Stuy black markets. It’s an indulgence, a confession that capitalism has perks for those in the ruling class. For all her egalitarian plans, Fahima lives in a tower.

  She looks into the guest bedroom where Sarah Davenport sleeps. Some days she doesn’t wake up at all. Others she screams in the middle of the night because she doesn’t know where she is. People with small children talk about how beautiful and peaceful they look when they’re asleep, but Sarah’s rest is fitful, if prolonged. She mutters names without context, twitches like she’s being hit. Fahima quietly closes the door.

  She sips her coffee as her mind rattles through lists of the people she’s about to meet. Omar gave her dossiers and a cheat sheet with names spelled phonetically, position, country of origin, and predilections. Eito Higashi, Japan’s minister of economy. Two daughters, a dog, a list of proclivities Fahima hadn’t known there were names for. Malik Antoun, low-level Saudi prince and avid horse breeder with a penchant for alcohol while abroad. Niklas Babisch, former German ambassador to the United States, now the Großonkel of the New Left in the Bundestag. On paper, Babisch is Fahima’s greatest ally out of the dozen in the group. He’ll be a pain in the ass.

  All men, powerful but not too powerful. Each one has a reason for being here that avoids the perception his country is reopening diplomatic relations with the United States. Everything is run through the Bishop Foundation, orchestrated by its executive director, Fahima Deeb. Last night she dreamed Kevin Bishop came back from the dead and saved her from having to go through with this.

  She goes over the dossiers, comparing her incorrect and incomplete recollections with the facts as written, then puts them in her bag. She tucks the photo in as well, quickly, like she’s trying to pull a sleight of hand on herself. She picks out a hijab Ruth bought her in Chicago, a piece of shimmering blue cloth with whorls of deep green that coalesce into a map of the earth, spin like a globe, then sublimate back into abstraction, repeating on a hypnotic loop. Fahima thinks it’s on the nose. Ruth reminded her these are government employees and the most obvious symbolism might fly over their heads. Fahima arranges the hijab perfectly, tucking in errant strands of hair, then clasps it with a gold pin in the shape of a handshake. I might as well wear a fucking tie-dye and beads, she thinks as she steps out her front door.

  Omar Wright waits for her in the hall. His tan Yves Saint Laurent suit offsets his dark skin. Omar perpetually informs Fahima and anyone else who’ll listen about the brands of his suits and has tried to encourage Fahima to be less schlubby for big events, going as far as to pick out her outfit for this evening. Between Omar and Ruth, she feels like a doll being dressed by enthusiastic children: Muslim Barbie.

  “Oh, hi,” Omar says, as if surprised to see her. Omar’s official title has never been decided. He calls himself her majordomo, but refuses to tell her what that means. He takes the edge of her hijab between his index and middle fingers and lifts it to assess. He gives a slight shrug. “Sort of on the nose,” he says.

  “Ruth,” says Fahima.

  “Sweet kid,” Omar says. He shimmers and divides into two identical copies of himself, each in the same Yves Saint Laurent suit. They face each other, then launch into a game of rock paper scissors that takes five rounds before one of them loses. The winner gives a triumphant hmmph and proceeds into Fahima’s apartment.

  “Should it bother me that I get the loser every morning?” she asks.

  Omar shakes his head. “Watching Ms. Davenport’s a cushy job,” he says. “Chances are she’ll sleep all day and he’ll sit around watching porn.”

  “I was better off not knowing that,” says Fahima.

  “You asked,” Omar says as he steps into the elevator.

  When they redesigned the building to accommodate the new floors above the thirteenth, Fahima decided on a maglev shaft. The ride is fast and smooth, and unlike an Einstein-Rosen bridge up the building’s spine, there’s no risk of rending space-time, which is a plus.

  A pack of students load in with them, conversing in the stage voices of teenagers, asserting their place in the world by sheer force of volume. Below the thirteenth, the students own the building. Fahima insisted on it. What goes on above the old headmaster’s quarters, in the new floors obsidianists built after the Armistice, might be antithetical to everything Bishop believed in, but the original building Kevin bought and loved remains a school.

  “I’m telling you, I could see her down there,” says one of the kids.

  “Bullshit,” another retorts.

  “You have, like, a passing interest in her,” says the first. “I’m a superfan who happens to have telescopic vision. I’m a student of her work, and I am telling you I can identify Leida LaPlante by the top of her head from eight stories up.”

  “We’re all sorry your ability is basically doesn’t need binoculars.”

  “Five bucks says Harris used his ability to look down her shirt and jerk off.”

  “No one is going to take that bet.”

  “Fuck every one of you and I’m telling you it’s her.”

  “Who’s she even playing?”

  “I heard she’s playing Ji Yeon Kim.”

  “They got a white lady to play Ji Yeon Kim?”

  “Not a white lady. Leida Fucking LaPlante.”

  “It’s some bullshit.”

  The doors slide open at the fifth-floor cafeteria with a ding, a digital approximation of the physical bells once installed on every floor. We should have left them, Fahima thinks, the tinny facsimile in her ears. We should have kept one real thing.

  “You ready for this?” Omar asks once they’re alone.

  “Not remotely,” says Fahima.

  The elevator hits the ground floor and bounces. One more thing she keeps meaning to fix.

  The Bishop lobby is slipping into slow decline. Flakes of gilding peel off the columns, and tile floors are scuffed to the texture of pumice. A senior art sculpture old enough it took damage in the siege sits in the center of the lobby, waiting for a student to announce their brilliance by replacing it with their own work. Building resources are unlimited, but new floors would erase desire paths worn into the tile by decades of rushing students, and Fahima won’t let it happen.

  “Good morning, Dr. Deeb,” says Shen. He’s the only person who attaches the proper title to her name, and she’s endlessly grateful. “Big day all around.”

  Like the lobby, Shen is getting old. In his case, it’s physical degradation related to his ability. Shifting sizes ravages his joints and connective tissue, but Fahima’s afraid metal hips and knees wouldn’t shift along with the rest of his body. Resonant-specific medicine is an infant field. He’s useless as a security guard; he moves with leaden slowness. Fahima can’t bring herself to replace him for the same reason she hasn’t had the lobby redone. There are so few remnants of the old Bishop. So much has been changed and written over.

  “Where do I take a dozen international diplomats with various dietary exclusions for breakfast in this city?” Fahima asks Shen.

  His brow crinkles. “Breakfast’s tough,” he says. “Foundation’s dime?” Fahima nods. “Norma’s at the Parker on 56th and S
ixth. It’s not what it used to be, but they can cook an egg.”

  Shen’s understanding of the changes in the city is unique. For him, the displacement of millions of non-Resonants from the city primarily resulted in a restaurant holocaust, with hundreds of the city’s finest chefs shunted off to the Wastes or, at best, the Bronx. Where Fahima built a miracle of urban planning, Shen sees an apocalypse for takeout options.

  “Make a reservation,” Fahima says to Omar. She’s already lost the name of the restaurant in a tide of names, titles, hobbies and interests, lactose intolerances, gluten allergies, and religious restrictions.

  “Don’t worry, Dr. Deeb,” Shen says. “They’re only people.”

  There is a way they’ve taken to talking about the world outside that catches Fahima’s ear strangely. The implied sentence is They’re only people, not like us. It’s the product of a war won, a verbal expression of the policy of “separation as protection” that followed. It’s also the seed of an ugly form of racism, one today’s meeting, along with the government’s discussions of reunification, might stamp out. Equality was built into Kevin Bishop’s teaching, and it was the first thing discarded when the situation came to open blows. Shen is one of the kindest people she knows, but he looks down on common humans with bemused contempt, as if they’re children. Because of this, he thinks today’s stakes are low. Assuming a group is weak blinds you to its strengths.

  Once they’re through the revolving doors, Omar doubles again so he can stand on either side of Fahima, guiding her through the scrum of people out front. Lexington Avenue is drenched in lights. Fahima turns back to look at the Bishop building. Lit up as it is, something about its appearance that’s been teasing at the edge of her brain finally comes to her. With the black glass stripped off the lower floors of the edifice, all the floors that still hold classrooms and dorms, and the new upper floors that housed Black Rose Faction offices and Patrick’s quarters, all reinforced with black glass, the spire that was once the Bishop Academy looks like a match stood on end.