The Nobody People

made sense for her to move into his apartment. Any time the annoyances of cohabitation built to near the point of rupture, Avi was off to the other side of the world for a month. When he got back, they were both so relieved he was alive, the counter was set back to zero. In their wedding photos, he has a black eye from the butt of a Ugandan military rifle.
He stopped when Emmeline was born. When he looked at his daughter’s face, the risk and the adrenaline were ridiculous. He threw himself into parenting, spending all day with Emmeline while Kay studied for the bar. At night, he’d lie awake half hoping to hear her cry. Needing a reason to spring out of bed. A minicrisis. A dim echo of sirens and blasts. A few days after Emmeline’s second birthday, he got a call from Newsweek about an embed in Damascus. Kay had landed a job. There was no financial justification for him to take dangerous work. She was making more than he had in his best years, and foreign journalism paid shit money. No one cared about a decade-old war. It was background noise. Page 10 fill. Avi knew all this and took the job like a dry drunk convincing himself he can handle one beer.
When he got back, they had the talk. Kay proposed that once a year Avi could accept a foreign assignment. The rest of the year he’d cover domestic terrorism, school shootings, and subway station gas attacks. He’d pick up local murder stories for the Trib. Mostly he’d take care of Emmeline and the house. Kay gifted him those terrible vacations because she understood something in him that Avi couldn’t articulate. His need.
A year ago, embedded with Joint Terminal Air Controllers outside of Mosul, their JLTV hit a roadside IED. A garden hose across the road for a trip wire, triggering buried paint cans packed with triacetone triperoxide. You could make it from nail polish remover, hydrogen peroxide, and battery acid. Three of the men in the JLTV were shredded when the blast went up. A column of flame lifted the eight-ton vehicle fifteen feet and dropped it. Avi’s left leg was burned away to nothing below the knee, the stump cauterized.
The next day, doped up on pain meds in a military hospital in Kirkuk, he thought how he’d been chasing this bomb most of his life. You couldn’t even wait for it to come to you, he thought. You had to go get it.
—
Salem Baptist is right off the interstate. Homeland has it tented, wrapped like a present. If the intention is to discourage curiosity, it fails. Traffic crawls by. Even in the cold, drivers roll down their windows and crane their necks as if they can peek behind the curtain. Only the locals remember what’s underneath. The bombing made the news, but people don’t keep track of the locations of these things unless they’re nearby. What difference does it make where this one went off? Where those kids were shot? The important thing is that it wasn’t your town. Wasn’t your kid. You wait for one you can connect yourself to second- and thirdhand so you can talk about it at parties. You heard it from your house. Your friend’s cousin is in a wheelchair for life. The other details blur into the next incident. As long as you and the people you love remain intact.
Avi takes the right up the drive. Someone from Homeland is on him immediately, shooing his van back onto the road. His attire, thrift store parka over a ratty cable-knit sweater, does not scream professionalism. Avi rolls down his window and holds out his driver’s license.
“Avi Hirsch for Agent Hoffman,” he says. The kid from Homeland snatches the ID. The department is less than twenty years old, and no one’s been in it since the beginning. They come in clean cut and young and leave broken and scruffy. Louis says the life span of a civilian recruit into Homeland is five years. They burn out and transfer to a desk job at the IRS, and no one ever hears from them again. The only people who stick around are ex-military. Those are the guys who bust doors down in a cloud of tear gas and flashbang, never the kids checking IDs at the gate. This kid sizing Avi up, comparing his picture to his driver’s license. He’s hard now, fixing Avi with a stare designed to reduce a suspect to tears. Avi’ll bet the kid didn’t see this scene until it was cleaned up. Somewhere down the line, something is waiting for this kid. A bloody mess. A dog’s dinner. Something he won’t be able to unsee. The hard will go out of those eyes, and he’ll put in for a transfer to somewhere safe.
“You’re the gimp expert,” the kid says. Faked military contempt for outsiders. Rookie badassery.
“Expert gimp is better,” says Avi. The kid waves him through. Avi catches a look of envy from the drivers left in traffic behind him. As if Avi’s been ushered through the velvet rope into an exclusive club. The tent opens around the back, away from prying eyes. Louis rushes to help him out of the car. Louis knows other amputees, but he treats Avi as fragile, an invalid. Avi imagines what he looks like stepping out of the minivan. The mechanical plant of his left leg on pavement. The slow, careful shift of weight. He moves quickly to preclude assistance and has the door shut behind him by the time Louis reaches the van.
“You’re early,” Louis says.
“Lead foot,” says Avi. It doesn’t get a laugh. None of his jokes about the leg do. Kay laughs sometimes but won’t make jokes on her own. The forums online are full of jokes. The Endolite Elans are nice, but they cost an arm and a leg. Did you hear what the kid with no hands got for Christmas? I don’t know;