The Liminal People Read online

  The last time I saw Yasmine was seven years ago. I had been working for Nordeen for a year and a half, mostly watching and using my passport as a shield for the young men who were becoming less afraid of me and more like friends. Suleiman was the number two. Everyone knew it. I was the voice box. I held Nordeen’s opinions but had no final say on actions. When drama jumped off in Rome, in Segovia, in Prague, I stood up and fired back just like the rest of the crew, more afraid of the boss than the bullets passing overhead. I’d been around guns for a while, and while no expert, I knew how to shoot and run at the same time. That was a passable enough skill amongst the razor-necks. But it was also evident the boss and I had a special connection.

  Not using my powers was disconcerting. At first it was like being sighted but refusing to see. I felt retarded, simple, delayed. I asked Nordeen why he’d made me promise.

  “You and the thing inside of you must figure out who is the boss. Just because it keeps you alive does not mean you are in control. Think back to your trek across the original lands. Your skin darker, better to absorb the sun, your feet more calloused to protect from burs and thorns. Your scent even changed, causing confusion amongst the beasts. But which of these changes did you dictate? When you heal, are you conscious of what you are doing or is it more instinct?”

  “Instinct,” I said quickly. “All the more reason to develop skill, yes?”

  “I agree.” He smiled that ruthless smile again. “I didn’t say not to use your power.”

  It was true. He had only told me no more healing. Took me about a month and another bullshit crossfire over bullshit, not even work, in Manchester with a bunch of Australians for me to get it. Two razors hit on the wrong women in the wrong bar and the wrong Aussies caught wind of it. Bar fight. On instinct my bones went denser as my muscles snaked stealthily around them, enabling me to catch a brawler’s fist in my open hand. The boss’s prohibition still rang in my mind, along with our recent conversation. I held the Aussie’s arm tight, and for the first time I thought about what else I could do to a flesh and bone aside from healing. In a second I dissolved every tendon in his arm by redirecting his stomach acids. The Aussie fell like a brick. I felt like I’d spit on a cross or pissed on a Koran. Imagine thinking in reverse, or breathing backward. I made a body do what it shouldn’t. The Aussie’s scream alone broke up the rest of the fight. I felt his vocal cords straining as he made a sound that should never come from a human throat. I did it with a touch. And so I ran.

  Bar fight be damned. I’d realized my potential for destruction to the human body. I did it on instinct, the same way I healed. I was a freak, and so I went to the only woman who had ever properly named me. I took the van we’d all driven up in and sprinted down to London where I hoped she still lived. In the three-hour drive, I had time to actually think about what I’d done. It was the first time I’d used my power to hurt. Even when I beat my brother, I did it with my fists alone. But with this new development, I felt closer to him than I ever had before. Closer to him, and to Nordeen. His twisted smile beamed out from an inky blackness in my mind. He knew this would happen. He saw the pain and discomfort not using my powers caused. His little suggestions were enough to get me thinking in the wrong direction. I’d fulfilled his bent desires and prophecies, and now my spirit was twisted, too.

  Of course, I’d also just run from the man while still wearing his razor around my neck. I couldn’t care. I was too distraught from the pain I had previously thought the province of my brother. I scurried back to my only family, to my lost love.

  The apartment, in an up-and-coming section of Brixton, was where we’d first settled. It was still occupied, but my years away had seen the neighborhood change; like Yasmine, it had become classier than its roots. I felt beyond out of place, but it didn’t matter. The second-story flat overlooking the old skate park was still lit. Dusk had turned to night hours ago, but I could still make out her outline in silhouette at the window. I relaxed in the van, parking across the street, and reached out with my senses just to “feel” her body. I expected comfort. I should’ve known better.

  Her body had changed. She had had a tumor. A seven-pound eight-ounce tumor that she held inside of her for nine months before releasing it into the world. She’d given birth. It read like an old wound on her womb, her hips, her breasts. But they’d all long since healed. Her child was at least six years old, by the feel of it. I choked, cutting my probe off so suddenly she was bound to notice. When we were together she had become accustomed to my searching her body for any signs of infection or disease. It’s a type of intimacy one has a hard time forgetting. Yasmine came to the window quickly, searching the streets. I sunk lower into my seat, realizing I was doing the exact opposite of what I’d set out from Manchester to do. I didn’t have long to sink. A limousine pulled up to our old apartment, hers now, and a black-suited man in a gray tie exited. Maybe seven years her, our, senior, his pale skin, rakish frame, and blemished skin told me he was British. He bounded up the stairs to the front gate. My stomach turned with the possibility I knew would prove fact. In no time, Yasmine descended, a small girl in tow, looking more refined and polished than I’d ever given her opportunity to be. The girl had her mother’s hair, her smile, and the rake’s bounce in her step.

  She hadn’t waited for me. There were no reasonable grounds to think she would’ve. Didn’t stop me from thinking it, though. Didn’t stop me from crying in the van, calling myself a freak for over an hour. When I was done, I called the only one who understood me.

  “To be king, you would have to be as them. You can never be like them” was all Nordeen said when I called. No “Hello,” not even an acknowledgment of who I was. When I asked if there was any way I could come back, he laughed. “Why do you think you left? I have business in London. Put yourself some place nice and wait for instructions,” he said with the kindness of a grandfather. It was the first hint of genuine affection I’d ever felt from him. I was smart enough not to bank on it again. A few days later the rest of the crew would come down. No questions asked about my disappearance or the pain I’d caused in the Aussie. In fact, no mention of the bar fight at all. The only evidence I had of anything having occurred at all was the returned reluctance of Fou-Fou and Suleiman to touch me. The others didn’t share the reservation, but I got the sense it was because they actually didn’t remember what happened.

  In turn, I told them nothing about Yasmine. I did my boss’s bidding along with the rest of the crew. There was a mid-level street gang gaining more power every day in Hackney. Nordeen wanted to know what they were about, if they were to be made allies or tombstones. We tested their mettle through emissaries, hiring other local crews to take shots at them, and found that either our intermediaries weren’t up to the task or the Hackney boys had come by their reps honestly. In the end Nordeen ordered us to deliver a small Ethiopian woman, maybe eighteen years old, to their big man, a black giant of a proper East Ender who never looked excited but whose heartbeat constantly raced. He accepted the woman like he knew who she was. She never said a word, and none of us were dumb enough to ask about it. I was tempted to “feel” more of his body or hers, but my powers had shown me enough new tricks for a while.

  The whole bizarre fiasco lasted three months. It, more than anything, made me wonder about Nordeen Maximus. He’d sent his Number 2 and his healer off to foreign lands and didn’t seem pressed about it. He even gave us fifteen thousand dollars each when we were done and told us to take a week off before making our own ways back to Morocco.

  I used ten thousand dollars of that money to set up the phone. Then I wrote a note giving Yasmine the number, telling her not to leave her name or how to find her on the message but to call if she ever needed help.

  It’s true that I was a freak, and in her own quiet way, so was Yasmine, but I’d done enough ear hustling around Nordeen to realize there were bigger freaks with real sadistic tendencies out there. Nordeen told me about a person like us who killed others like us just
to prove it could be done. I didn’t want Yasmine stumbling into one of those freaks and not having anyone to call on. I’ve never stopped loving her. I can’t.

  Chapter Six

  It was less the cold than the predominance of pale faces that surprised me as I came into Heathrow. The London of my memory was so multiethnic it felt almost forced at times. But the airport was populated with a majority of white travelers and colored staff. It only distracted me for a second. Then it was back to work.

  I’m thinking about the best way to search out Yasmine. I’ve still got some contacts over here. It wouldn’t be too hard for them to run a trace. But if they know where she is, then they can sell that information—or have it beaten, burned, or shot out of them. Until I know what’s going on, I’ve got to do this solo. I’m about to get on the tube and hit the old apartment, hoping she’s still there, when I see she hasn’t been there for a while. I pick up a paper from the stand and see her face plastered all over the cover. “Diplomat’s Daughter Still Missing,” reads the headline. “Family Distraught.”

  I’m on the train heading to Piccadilly Square. Destination’s not important, just need the time it takes to read the paper. She’s been gone for a month now. Scotland Yard and MI5 are clueless. They’re still not sure if it’s a kidnapping or a runaway case, but all attempts to contact the fourteen-year-old, to ask her to just call and let her family know she’s okay, have yielded nothing. Pictures of her are up everywhere, and the BBC has her picture on TV every hour on the hour.

  The story has everyone talking because of the timing. Yasmine’s husband is the diplomat. Of course he is. He’s considered the go-to man for appropriate humanitarian-aid advice. I guess some people haven’t been too happy with the aid he’s offering, while others are miffed at not getting enough. No one’s claiming responsibility for the kidnapping, but as the weeks drag on, it’s seeming more and more of a possibility. Parliament, in its ultimate wisdom, is debating whether to suspend all humanitarian aid to foreign countries until this crisis is properly contained. While Mr. Shining Knight diplomat is thoroughly against the proposal, his raging against Parliament in this arena is what’s keeping the story in the news.

  This situation is filled with everything I do not want. Number one, the spotlight. With MI5 and Scotland Yard on it, if I make any kind of move on Yasmine, I’m getting flagged. While I don’t have an official record anywhere, I’m one of the more suspicious characters who could be associating with a diplomat’s wife. Number two, she went a married a damn diplomat, which could be code for MI5 handler or just a civic-minded nitwit who doesn’t realize how little humanitarian aid can actually do. Number three, everyone, and I mean everyone, knows about this. Any chance of using my undercover skills and contacts went out the window a month ago, when newspapers and TV started blaring about the situation. Truth of it is, I’m the wrong guy for this. Either the girl ran away or she’s been kidnapped. If she ran away, I’m too far removed from the London scene to be much help. If she was kidnapped, I would’ve been able to help if they hadn’t been showing her face everywhere, making any reasonable person in the kidnapping profession completely wary of any new operators in their vicinity. I’m off the train before I know it, about to go back to Heathrow.

  I’m waiting on the opposite platform when I notice someone reading the same paper as me. On the front page I see her again, Yasmine. She’s holding tight to her man’s jacket as they try and get through a sea of cameras. It’s that face she only she puts on when all the others are unavailable. She is defeated. It looks like she’s stalwart and tough. But I know her better. She’s got nothing. The diplomat is waving his arms around high above her head, trying to get the paparazzi to leave them alone. Yasmine cowers under him, but she isn’t that much shorter than him. Her knees are buckling. God, she’s beautiful.

  Fine. Maybe I can’t help her. But I can try. I’m special. I can do things. I know people.

  I’m seeing things in this photo that no one else could. She’s grieving. But the picture, her huddled below her man, is a sham. Her eyes don’t turn that way, and her crow’s feet aren’t that close together. Someone doctored the photo. She didn’t seem distraught enough. That’s my woman. She doesn’t get overwhelmed or sad—she gets angry. The truth of the picture is in her hands. She’s grasping her man’s jacket tight, not for support, but to have something to grip rather than a photographer’s neck. The veins are tight, lots of blood coursing through them. She’s been working out.

  I get off the train near Piccadilly Square and search for an internet café. It takes all of a minute. I buy two hours of time and some disaster of a caffeinated beverage along with a too-sweet tart. I’ll have to get used to Western food again.

  I don’t start with her. She’s always been private, not wanting anyone to know even the first thing about her. It’s why she was a reporter: so she could tell other people’s stories. She never even wanted our number listed. If people knew too much, they might connect her to the rash of fires she started as a child, before she got her power under control. They might find out she was a freak. She only showed me what she could do with fire by accident. I molested a roasted-chicken dinner, which led to the kitchen curtains going up in flames. She talked the flames down, then passed out. I took care of her until she woke up, realizing the whole time that I’d never be able to stop loving her. We exchanged stories that night. About who we were and how we wanted to be seen. . . .

  But she made a detour on the mystery path. She married a camera hog. He doesn’t come off as it, but it takes a lot to be in the news at least once a month for five years. Darren Bridgecombe comes from fish-and-chips, literally. His parents owned a fish-and-chip shop in Derry, before it became a curry joint in the eighties. At sixteen he did his first volunteering overseas in Jordan, teaching Arabs how to speak like Brits. An interview he gave four years ago says he became “obsessed with making education available for the world on that trip.” Self-righteous prick. Same interview says his next major trip abroad was to Sri Lanka. He beat me there by a good eight years. He says that interviewing both sides in that scrap was what led him to his theory of world peace through equitable distribution of knowledge. Guess you’ve got to be like Fish’n’Chips and have a master’s in economics and education to understand that one. I sure as hell don’t.

  Right out of university, the permanent Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs scoops him as a speechwriter. I read three of the speeches then take a bite out of the oversweet pastry. I wonder which one has more filling?

  About fourteen years ago, the undersecretary changes Fish’n’Chips’s job description to unofficial ambassador of education. He goes to Liberia, where he meets Yasmine. Some gossip rag that tries to pass itself off as legitimate news by only gossiping about politicians asks him how long the courting process was. He says it was love at first sight. I almost retch.

  The press knows Yasmine as notoriously shy. She never gave an interview before her girl was kidnapped. Even then her words are sparse. Never any back-and-forth interviews, only statements. They’ve all got this undercurrent of anger in them.

  I’m image-searching for them when I get what I need. It’s from last year. A photo taken near the family home as the three of them head out for a walk. The girl’s taken Yasmine’s naturally red hair and gone a step brighter. Tamara, they call the girl, keeps her hair long, down to her waist. She’s a camera hog, looking almost inappropriately at the lenses trained on her father. Yasmine has a put-on smile, while authentically trying to hide from the flashbulbs behind her husband. She doesn’t play the ethnically ambiguous wife of the up-and-coming politician very well. The thirteen-year-old is in front of him; hand on her hip, leaning forward in a pose she’s seen in a thousand music videos. She’s more focused on the humor of the situation than anything else.

  The picture’s irrelevant. It’s the caption “The Bridgecombe family takes a well-deserved stroll around their new neighborhood in Kennington.” She lives in Kennington now. Shouldn’t be to
o hard to find her.

  Two hours before the sun comes up the next morning, a hotel staff member’s ulcer pain wakes me up. She knocks on my door. The ache on her ankles tells me she’s been on her feet more than twelve hours. I don’t open the door. I know she’ll be back. Probably Nigerian, maybe from a poorer Kenyan family. Back when I was living here, the posh hotels only had white help. But more than ever London’s an international city now, full of ethnic underclasses from every landmass in the world. So many of the poor and unwashed need jobs that even the Charos Grand Hotel, with its excellent view of the most gaudy tourist attraction on the planet, the London Eye, hires them. Creature comforts and the rest be damned, I chose the hotel for its centrality and its order-in-anything service. The concierge looked cross-eyed at me when I paid a week in advance with cash, but the extra tip got me the type of suite I wanted: on the least populated floor and far away from that damn Ferris wheel. The suite is impressive; Suleiman and his family could all fit in here comfortably. A bedroom, a main chamber, a kitchenette of sorts, and a full-sized bathtub. Plus there’s a glass wall facing the office building across the street. Early morning light bounces off of those windows and reflects into my eyes if I don’t close the blinds. Other than that the room is perfect. Too perfect for a black guy who pays in cash, I remind myself.

  The boss got me to figure out how to change the way I look. How to change my bone structure, my body fat, my fingerprints, even my teeth. It was one of few times I saw joy in his dehydrated face. “Now you are truly useful,” he told me.

  I make myself two shades lighter and force my hair to grow about five inches longer. I compact my vertebrae and shrink my thigh and arm bones so that I am effectively about three inches shorter. I smooth out the forehead and cheek wrinkles that desert and beach living have graced me with. In the mirror I smile at my lie. I look like I’m twenty-one again.