The Nobody People

quality that catches in Avi’s throat is gone.
“They’re perfect,” he says. Emmeline nods. She knew they would be.
—
After he drops Emmeline off at school, Avi trudges up the steps toward his home office. Kay wants him to move his office out of the attic. There are no railings on the drop-down ladder, and she’s sure he’s going to topple. She imagines him lying on his back for hours like a stranded turtle, waiting for someone to get home. But the office is familiar. It’s one thing that’s remained normal in his life since he lost his leg, and he needs it. A place to return to even if getting there is hard.
This prosthetic, his third, is the best he’s had for walking over flats. He misses the last one when it comes to climbing the ladder or ascending stairs. His doctor says he’ll be ready for a permanent leg next summer. It takes time for the swelling to normalize. Avi reads up on prostheses the way some men shop for new cars. Kay says go all out. “Shoot the moon,” she says. She imagines something robotic. She sees him as a comic book hero, a cyborg. Avi reads articles on the torsional strength of certain plastics. He visits online forums for amputees that winnow into more and more specific groups. Vets stick with other vets. Users with prosthetic knees don’t have time for shin shoppers like Avi. Nested within every inclusive community is another whose losses are worse. Avi has settled into one of the outer circles of the group, his tragedy major but not as bad as it could be.
He makes it up the ladder and pulls the hatch up behind him. He drops heavily into the chair at his desk, the one Kay bought at a yard sale the month after they moved in. Everything in the attic is secondhand. Bookshelves at staggered heights. Mismatched rugs, some chosen for ugliness, covering the wood floor he’s sanded but never finished. The computer is an ancient desktop, a glorified typewriter. It takes a minute for it to whir to life, another to open his in-box. Kay wants to buy him a new one. She wants him to know that they’re doing okay moneywise even though he hasn’t been writing since the hospital. Avi drums his fingers. The e-mail has been calling to him all morning, more loudly than he cares to admit. He turns on the space heater, and the room fills with the smell of toasted dust. The porthole high up on the western wall, opposite the desk, is the only place sunlight comes in, one octagonal shaft through the dust motes that creeps across the floor over the course of the day. If there’s sunlight on his computer, it’s time to stop working and return to the world.
The message from Louis is the only one in his in-box. Two videos, one dated last week, the other the month before. He recognizes the dates. The older one was the bombing at the mall outside DC. Nineteen killed. Homeland identified the bomber as some angry white male, killed in the blast. The more recent one was in Roseland, an hour’s drive from here, near Kay’s mother. Salem Baptist, a black church. Two dead. The black community in Chicago was livid, the mayor caught hell, but the national press didn’t do much with it. These things happen too often to be newsworthy. Avi was surprised these fell into Homeland’s lap: the agency rarely was let loose on white indigenous terrorists. Louis called Homeland’s unrelenting focus on Muslims its “mandate for Mecca.” Avi had gone out for beers with Louis and his coworkers. Off the clock, they said they were more scared of being shot up by an angry white male than by an imagined jihadi. They all knew guys like that or guys who were one bad day away from becoming guys like that.
Avi clicks on the first video. The mall. It’s camera phone footage, grainy and jittering. It pops up in a small window on his screen. A girl, early teens. She’s chubby and sweet-faced, ears newly pierced at the kiosk by the food court. She turns left, turns right. The stud catches the fluorescents and throws them at the camera. A flare, an x of bright pixels.
Here is the truth of all evidence: it hides in the ordinary. The moment believes you can’t see it because it looks like everything else. Avi attends to backgrounds. He watches for glitches in the pattern. A van parked where it shouldn’t be. A man in the souk who moves through the crowd more slowly than those around him. Avi wonders about the camera’s operator. A boyfriend, maybe, or a best friend. His mind flashes to Emmeline, perpetually friendless, proudly alone. Then he focuses. A couple, boy and girl, argue in the corner of the frame. Escalating, drawing attention. The camera shifts. The glittering stud at the center of the shot hovers at its edge. The boy is shouting, but the audio is muddy. He’s skinny, hatchet-faced. Sunken eyes and dirty blond hair. Avi leans in, searching for the vest. The belt. The detonator in hand. He expands the image until it covers the whole screen. The low resolution becomes more pronounced. People are stacks of squares. Colors move like storm fronts on a TV weather map. But there’s nothing. The boy and girl wear tan polo shirts, uniforms from one of the franchise restaurants in the food court. With better resolution, you could read their name tags. The boy holds out his empty hands like he’s begging her for something. His palms turn out, pushing her back. His hands are empty.
There is no bomb.
Then comes the blast.
The frame goes white. As if the glint off the earring had been a precursor, a trial run. From this distance, the blast wave of an explosive device should be enough to blow the camera backward. But the person who’s filming holds steady long enough