Loving Day (14 page)

“And this is my daughter, Elissa,” Dot tells me and I look to the side and there is Cindy Karp, twenty years older and back from the grave to haunt me. Same kind of eyes, same kind of hair, exactly the same kind of general disapproval I imagined on her face that last phone call. I know it’s not her, just a cousin, a co-sharer of genetic memory, but I start to sway anyway. I remember to introduce myself. I am Warren Duffy. I’m a grown man now, but I was once the callow youth who owned the penis that once poked your angelic little Cindy, no doubt dooming her. This is my lovely daughter, you know her much better than I, but without her I would be unconscious at this moment. But all I say is my name, and my great joy at meeting them. They look down to the side of me. Smiles freezing. At Roslyn, who has been pushed up to a place setting at the table. They look at Roslyn’s skull; her neck has quit its job. The head has lobbed forward, stopped only by her chin on her breastbone. All you can see of her is the curls of her hair: thick, mostly salt-and-some-pepper spirals rolling from her scalp and stopping just short of the table in front of her.

“This is my friend. Roslyn. She directs the learning center Tal is enrolled in,” I tell them when they look back at me, wondering. “Roslyn?” I ask, leaning in closer to her, smiling enough for both of us. “Roslyn?” again, yet nothing but a light moan comes back to me.

“Is she…?” Art drifts, waiting for me to complete his sentence. What he is asking I have no idea. Is she disabled? Is she my mom? Is she sick? Is she dead?

“Yes,” I tell him, then give a sad look as further answer, and both he and his sister smile knowingly and suddenly all this is normal.

“I thought you’d be blacker,” Dot tells me.

“Mom! No! You can’t say things like that. Please forgive her,” the daughter says to me. Elissa even reaches out her hand in front of me like she can shield me from her mother’s lack of tact.

“No, it’s okay. I totally expected to be blacker also. Every time I look in the mirror, it’s a shock, trust me.”

“You know I don’t mean anything racist by it,” Dot tells me, and I look deep within myself, but I don’t know that at all. Still, I’m very willing to pretend, so nod accordingly. “It’s just, I remember when Cindy said she got pregnant by a black guy, we were expecting a much darker baby, but Tal came out white. I just thought maybe she got confused: Cindy was a wild one.”

“Oh my God, please kill me,” Tal says, and with a thump her forehead hits the table as she hides her face like an ostrich. She looks like she’s doing a Roslyn impression.

“Mother, cut it out, or I’m leaving. Just stop. Just stop now.”

“My daughter thinks I’m a racist. Ever since I voted for McCain.”

“You are not a racist. So stop acting like one.”

“This is why I never had kids.” Art laughs.

“You’re gay. That’s why you didn’t have kids,” Tal mumbles into the table, but we all hear it. Oh dear. Oh my. My daughter is a homophobe.

“Tal!” both mother and daughter yell together. This family, they yell. Now mother and daughter are united. They look at each other silently, and the look says,
The demon is back
. Art gets up, asks if anyone wants anything from the kitchen, and leaves. Then, no one talks.

Dot reaches for her drink, then finally mutters, “Not true. And mean.” Elissa excuses herself to escape to the kitchen as well. On my side of the table, I’m the only one sitting upright to witness this disaster.

“My brother has always lived alone. Always has. That’s the problem with being a single man of maturity. People cast aspersions. It’s as if, despite all of the overcrowding on this planet, the environment and all that, somehow living the life of a bachelor is suspect, perverted. Now that’s racist.”

“Yes,” Art says, returning with a glass of Irv’s whiskey in hand, looking me straight in the eye. He winks at me.

“And because he chose to work in the theater. He’s just creative,” Dot adds.

“Sure,” Art, rolling his eyes at someone, agrees with her.

“I mean: even his name is Art!” Dot says, and we all laugh too hard, because we are back on script again.

—

Horseradish is hot sauce for Eastern European Jews. These guys put it on everything, even apples. When the food comes, Tal lifts her head up, acts like nothing has ever happened, and thereby joins the rest of us. I turn to Roslyn.

“It’s dinnertime,” I tell her, just to not be rude, and a miracle takes place. Roslyn’s head lifts. The hair pulls back, and that face pops back into play.

“Starved,” she says, and we’re back to single syllables, but this is still an improvement. The others look over at her, grin and nod, but keep talking, as if she only left to take a little nap, a little necessary self-indulgence, and now she’s right as rain and not reaching all the way across the table to violently yank a chunk off the challah. Roslyn says no more after that, but it’s okay because I don’t talk either, and Tal barely does, even when asked direct questions. Seeing her interacting with them, I realize how honored I am. In my presence, she has been downright gregarious in comparison. Tal catches me staring at her, and her tongue sticks out in my direction. There are bits of bread on it that look like little brown slugs and I flinch in disgust. Tal looks at her reflection in her spoon, giggles. I smile with her. Irv looks over at her, me, grins too. His face is red. He is completely lit. In a second, he’s up to get even more wine, but he leans over and whispers into my ear, “So what, I’m drunk. Tonight’s the night I got to tell my granddaughter I’m dying.”

—

I feel tipsy, decide to slow down. For my daughter. And so I can drive out of here. The door’s closed to the study and I can see it from the table and Tal went in there with Irv and after ten minutes I know she knows he’s battling cancer. I strain to listen for crying. The table is loud, though. Because they’re all drinking, too. Just a few bottles of malbec, but enough to get things lubricated. I stare at the door, and I keep one of the bottles in front of me and when the family is distracted I pour back the rest of my glass.

“This school you have Tal at, the one for all black kids, what’s that all about?” Dot asks. I don’t really hear the sentence at first, it’s background noise, something I have to go back and decipher once I realize it’s aimed at me.

“It’s a special program for biracial children.”

“Black, kinda black, black-ish—you know what I’m talking about.”

“Mother, please. I will leave. You’re being a boor.”

“No, you always say I treat you like a child—you love saying that—well don’t treat me as one. We’re all adults. We’re all adults here. This is an adult conversation. We’re all supposed to be ‘post-racial’ now, right? Everyone’s saying we have to be ‘post-racial.’ It’s segregation. I don’t know why Tal couldn’t just go to Kadima like Cindy and you did.”

“ ‘A school for open Jews who want their children to have it all.’ ” It comes from Roslyn, who’s looking up at Dot. Dot stares back, speechless. I can’t tell what she’s more surprised about: what Roslyn said, that she’s not mentally impaired, or that she’s even talking.

Roslyn looks fine now. Groggy, but fine. I have not killed her. So there’s that.

“That’s offensive,” Dot says, and I agree with her. I would say I agree with her, but my mortification has moved me past verbal expression.

“That’s the motto, Mom.” Elissa smacks her own head. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen a real person do that.

“Class of ’74,” Roslyn tells them. “I did all thirteen years at Kadima. Well, twelve really, I did my junior year abroad at Kibbutz Lotan, in the
Arava Valley. That’s where the concept for the Mélange Center comes from: a holistic community of outreach, a society of ideals, a home for the wanderers. What I set out to do was give mixed-raced people that same vision my faith gave me.” Roslyn keeps going. She is just starting, and she’s already going. There’s a speech coming; this is the preamble.

A text message that appears on my phone says,
Come to the door
.

I go to the door Irv closed. I try to open it again, do so as loudly as I can, but nothing follows. So I knock. Tal opens it. She’s been crying. She knows. Past her, I see Irv sitting on the edge of a made bed, head in hands.

“Never mind. I’m fine.”

“Are you sure? I’m here. I’m here for you. You know that, right?”

“I’m going to spend the weekend here,” she says, staring off. Then, looking back at my eyes again. “I mean, I want to spend the weekend here. I need to. With Irv. Is that okay?” my daughter asks me, and of course it is.

When I come back to the table, the wheelchair is empty. Roslyn is standing. Roslyn is talking with Elissa; Dot leans in too. Art sits on a chair in front of them, legs folded, taking it in.

“We create our communities, our identities, but we do it by maintaining our heritage,” and Roslyn makes it sound like something she has never said before, like she’s just thinking it up on the fly. I wait, listen to the whole spiel one more time, just like I listened to it at the campfire days before. After a while, Roslyn pauses for air, and I lean in to tell her it’s time to go.

Goodnight, Pops
, my phone’s display tells me. I look back at Irv’s door, it’s closed again. I want to text her that I love her. Because I do. But I haven’t told her this truth to her face, and a text is no way to begin.

I take the wheelchair out to the car, then come back for Roslyn, who’s still going. She ends with, “As Rabbi Hillel said, ‘If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am not for others, what am I? And if not now, when?’ ”

The first contribution comes from Elissa. It’s written out leaning
the checkbook high against the wall, and with a look to her mother as soon as she puts it in Roslyn’s hand in exchange for thank-yous. The older lady follows.

“I gave McCain and Romney less than this, combined. Am I absolved now?” Dot asks her daughter as she writes out her check as she presses it vertically on the armoire.

Roslyn looks at the donation amount and says, “I believe you are.”

I drive Roslyn back to my house, where she says her car is parked. Down Kelly Drive, through the woods, windows open to wake me up. She plays with the radio, sings along to some oldies I’ve never heard before, turning it up loud enough that we don’t have to talk. Around us, the trees of Fairmount Park, the snake of Lincoln Drive, as we go through the forest that brings us to Germantown. I want the night to be over. The whole night, from the alarm to this moment, all of it needs to be over.

It isn’t until after I drive the Beetle up the hill toward the garage and turn off the engine, that Roslyn says anything to me. And that’s after I go to open my car door but she doesn’t, and I’m forced to ask her why.

“Where’s your ride?” I ask, and she points to an old hatchback on the street. She didn’t say anything when I drove past it. Still, she makes no move to get out.

“You want me to drive you back over there.”

“No. I want you to give me the Taser.”

“What?” I ask, but I know what. I start laughing. Roslyn laughs too. But then she stops, and waits for an answer, and I realize she’s serious. And suddenly this isn’t funny anymore.

“Come on, Warren. You were a bad boy; you have to face the punishment. Families have rules. I have my dignity to consider. It’s going to hurt me to do it, but now I have to Tase you, then we’re even. You have it on you, don’t you?”

“Yeah, right. Listen, I’m so sorry about before. I thought you were a burglar.”

“I’m not,” Roslyn says. “And you shouldn’t have done that; it was very naughty. Now hand it over.”

The Taser’s in my pocket. It has been all night. Roslyn knows this; she’s looking right at it. Its bright yellow plastic handle is hanging out. She could just reach in and take it if she wanted. But she doesn’t. She wants me to hand it to her. She wants me to go out back and pick my own switch for my whupping. But she’s not my mother. I don’t know who she is, really, beyond someone who wants something.

“Give it to me, Warren. If you want to continue at Mélange,” Roslyn orders, and I, too exhausted to argue, give it to her.

Roslyn inspects it for a moment. She holds it out to the window, says “Pow,” smiling. Her other hand goes to the rearview mirror, angling to herself. She holds it straight up beside her head, squinting into the reflection of her own action-hero pose. Then she turns it on.

“Yo! You got to be careful with that.” I scoot away from her in my seat as if three inches will change anything.

“It’s a beautiful thing, Warren, to actually feel a physical representation of power,” Roslyn says. “In your hands,” she adds, and then shoots me.

—

I wake up and it’s still dark and I’m still buckled into the driver’s seat and every cell in my body has been individually extracted, beaten with a ball-peen hammer, then set afire before being shoved back to its original form. I ache in spaces between crevices I could have gone a lifetime without feeling. I’m wet all over, from sweat mostly, but in some areas probably from urine. My testicles have retreated so far into my body cavity I very well might not ever see them again. I turn to the street. Her car is gone now. It isn’t until this moment that I think, Wait, why did Roslyn come to my house in the first place?

I look over at the passenger seat to ask her. But Roslyn’s gone. There’s someone there though.

In her place, sitting next to me, is a crackhead dude. A naked one. In the seat, in the dark, in Germantown, at 2:37 in the morning, next to me, is a naked crackhead man.

The hair on his chest is thick and blacker than the brown of his skin
and it runs from his nipples to his thighs. His cock is shriveled and deflated and lies in a crevice of dark wool. His chest shakes, the upward head snaps repeatedly back, violent shudders, and it’s this that forces me to look at the face.

The mouth is open as he shakes his head. He’s crying but the only sounds are gasps. There is no hole blacker than the space between his lips, and it grows wider. It swallows his words. It must. Because I hear nothing before losing consciousness once more.

WHEN I WAKE
back up, I stay in the car, immediately start it up, and begin backing out again. It’s daytime. It’s possible I’ve just dreamt the vision. But I’m not going in the house. Not alone. Never alone. I don’t even like being alone on the lawn.

Something happened in the car at my father’s house after my boss electrocuted me, but I don’t think about it. I drive the same car to the store, back, but don’t think about it. Can’t think about it. Won’t let myself. Instead, I spend Saturday prepping the classroom for the rest of the term, go to sleep in my office studio that night and don’t open my eyes until I’m sure the sun has retaken the sky once more.

I don’t leave the art trailer. I don’t use the lights. I don’t want Roslyn to know I’m here, or any of her followers. I only go out to use the porta-potty after I’ve checked to make sure there’s no one around. I pull the blinds closed so the dim light of my computer screen isn’t visible to anyone wandering through the camp. I see the others, the rest of the resident staff, out there walking around. I go to the window and watch them pass. So many couples; with school out they stroll the
grounds, holding hands. I hear their music, their laughter. Then late Sunday afternoon, I hear someone try to open up my door. I manage to kick the blankets I’ve been sleeping on under the lectern before the keys unlock it the whole way.

Spider’s standing there.

“I knew he was in here. I knew it. I’m like fucking psychic. This is some telekinesis-level shit.”

“What are you doing here?” Sunita Habersham, trailing behind him, thinks to ask me. I don’t look at her. I’m tired of looking at her. I’m disgusted with my lusts and desires. Testing this theory, I steal a glance. Yes, Sunita Habersham’s so beautiful. But so what? There have to be other attractive women of similar interest to me on the surface of this planet. There have to be other women with whom Tal could form a maternal bond. This reoccurring notion, this desperate belief that Sun is my sole avenue to secure romantic love, is obviously absurd.

“I’m squatting,” I tell her, and give up all pretense. I pull the blankets back out from under the podium, put them back into the shape of a bed, lie down.

“You know, my couch folds out, if you need someplace,” Spider says, but I’m fine. I like being alone. And that’s what I tell him.

I look up again, because they’re still here, making noise.

“Why are you here?” I reverse on them. “Why are you bothering me?”

“I’m going to need you to stop making sounds with your mouth hole, Warren,” Sunita insists. It’s a tone I’ve never heard her use before, both unusually firm and utterly informal. “I see the way you’re looking at me. Let’s establish something between us. Before we take this conversation any further.”

“Okay,” and behind that word comes a flood of anger. I wasn’t even looking at her, for once. I wasn’t even thinking about her.

“Good. Now listen: yes, we are really, really high right now.”

“Totally high,” Spider chimes in. “Yet not like, ‘Danger, danger, Will Robinson’ high.”

“But still, very, very high,” Sunita Habersham clarifies. “So I’m
going to need you to talk slowly. And quieter. And I’m going to need you to not make any sudden movements.”

“We want your snacks. We just need to get your snacks. I know you have them. Give us your snacks and nobody gets hurt. We’ll share. Your snacks.”

“I don’t think he’s hungry.” Sun swings around, arms out like she can feel the wind ripple. Walks away yet again. This is how she’s flirting with me, now I am certain. By showing me she doesn’t even have to face me to get to me. Sun’s wearing a Wonder Woman T-shirt that drapes so far down you can barely see her shorts. And underneath that, hiking boots. Heavy, worn gray, mud-covered hiking boots.

“Can we ask you something?” she asks. “Did you really Tase her?”

“Yeah, did you do it? Tase Roslyn? Tase her with a Taser?” Spider wants to know, but I can see from the way both look at me that they already do. Roslyn told them. So I give them my version. Tell them the circumstances of said electrifying and its retribution, and finish with “I’m pretty sure she shocked me for longer than I did her.”

“Is that why you’re hiding? She scare you that bad?” Sun wants to know. Spider’s nodding at me slowly, still smiling, permitting me to say yes, to succumb to her patronizing conjecture.

“No. I saw a ghost,” I say to shut them up. To let them know I’m crazy, that they’re high, and to leave me alone. I even tell them what I saw, in detail. Not just Friday night, waking up in the car, but the time by the garage, and the first night I moved in there. Into their blank silence I add, “These crackheads, they’ve gotten into my head. They’ve got me seeing things. They got super crackhead powers.”

“But Warren,” Sun says. “You didn’t say, ‘I saw a crackhead.’ You said, ‘I saw a ghost.’ ”

“Okay, I’ve heard enough. Change the subject. I’m too stoned for this.” Spider goes to my desk, grabs some Tastykakes and starts walking toward the door. “I don’t mess with spirits. I draw the line at ghosts. Also, I’m against denigrating victims of substance abuse.”

Sunita Habersham’s not leaving. Even as Spider calls for her.

“Show me them. The ghosts,” Sun whispers, as if one might hear us.

—

Sunita Habersham’s got her window open, and her hand out. Her fingers are flat together, angled off her wrist and bent from her arm like the head of a swan. As I speed up, she tilts her hand forward, lets the weight of the wind push it up and back again. Slowly, Sun repeats, only pausing when I hit a light as we drive down Wissahickon Avenue.

“Spider says this street used to be a toll road. Two hundred years ago. Some old lady would sit on the side with a gun, make people pay to use it. That sounds like a great job.”

“That’s your dream career? Sitting on a road and shooting people who don’t pay you?”

Sunita turns, looks at me, seems to realize for the first time that I’m really there. That I’m not some animated character from her THC haze. She sits up and shakes her head a bit like this will make her lucid.

“Yes. Yes, that would be my dream job. It’s very simple, isn’t it? No politics. No people, really. Just,
guardian
. Plus, you get to work outdoors. I wouldn’t use a gun, though. I’d get something harmless, like your Taser.” She picks it up from where Roslyn left it. I forgot it was even there, between the seats. Sun aims it out the windshield. She’s turning it around to aim it at me.

“No.” I knock her hand so it’s pointing at the window again. Sun laughs at me. She puts the weapon down, but she’s still laughing.

“Oh, come on. It couldn’t have been that bad.”

I stare straight ahead. “That old lady Tased me.”

“Come on. I’m sure there was a larger, holistic reason. She doesn’t just do things like that for no reason.”

“She had a reason, she wanted revenge. She did that shit in cold blood.”

“No. Roslyn’s not like that. She’s like our…Professor X. And we’re her school of runaway mutants, training for the new world.”

I let that stoner logic soak in. “How do you know she’s not Magneto, taking those same runaways and warping them into The Brotherhood of Evil Mutants?”

“Come on, Warren, they didn’t call themselves that, only the X-Men did. They called themselves just ‘Brotherhood of Mutants.’ ”

“That’s my point.”

“You’re just mad because Roslyn zapped you back. You ever wonder if the state of not being in pain, if that is the true deviation?” Sunita asks me. “That the pain is how life really feels, and moments of trauma, they just make it so you can’t ignore the fact? That that’s…” Sun pauses, and she’s lost in the labyrinth of her own philosophy.

I pull onto Greene Street, past Manheim. I lived here with my mother until she passed. It hasn’t changed much. The same two-story homes, now further along in their decay. All the little semidetached row houses huddling together, covered in all the paint that’s failed to chip. Many of the solid wood pillars on the porches have been replaced with cheaper metal pylons. The streetlights have become stop signs because the city’s broke, and there’s another layer of trash, but basically it’s as miserable as it’s always been.

At my gate, I get out, undo the padlock then pull the twisted metal rails back. When I get back in the car, Sun says, “That’s why you feel so alive in those moments of suffering?”

“You’re stoned.”

“I think we established that fact. Take me ghost hunting.”

I should not be here. I’ve brought my crush to my house, at night, but I have no immediate plans for seduction. I have the desire, the pragmatic reasons too—they haven’t gone away—yet still I lack adequate motivation to risk getting out of this car and going in that damned house. I don’t even want to shut the engine off. I just wanted to be around her. Sunita Habersham. All this is because I must have wanted an excuse to be in her presence.

“Are we going to go in?”

“Look, you asked me where I saw the intruders. There. I saw them right there. Coming out of the garage. And right here, next to the car. We done, yo. We don’t have to go inside.”

Sun gets out of the car anyway. I don’t. I think she’s going to go look in the garage window, which is fine by me, but she comes to the driver’s-side door. I roll the window down.

“You’ve got cameras out here. All over.”

“Security.”

“It looks like you’re running a meth lab. Where do the recordings go?”

“I’ve got a hard drive set up with my laptop, in the house.”

“Then we have to see what’s on the tape.” Sun skips off into the darkness toward the front porch. I don’t even unlock my door. I look at the garage. For a second, I think I see movement in the window. I do see movement. It’s the reflection of a bus’s window as it pauses to let off a passenger on the street behind me.

Sun yells, “Come on, you can’t just burn the whole place down because you had one crazy vision.” And there it is, out loud. Exactly what I’m thinking. And that scares me. But Sun comes back to the car, reaches in for the handle then pulls my door open. Grabs my hand and pulls me out. She keeps holding my hand, even when I’m standing outside.

“Take me into your
House of Mystery
.” And that was one of my favorite comics when I was a kid, but still, I don’t want to go. “Look, my life is hard and boring too, just like everyone else’s. Entertain me, Warren. You want to get me in your house, this is your chance,” she says, and I believe her. And I remember how Sunita was, dancing in the air with my daughter, and how Tal talks about her. Like she needs her. So this time, I answer the call. Then we’re walking into an empty mansion at night while holding hands.

“In third grade, I watched every season of
Scooby-Doo!
Finally, my paranormal investigative training is coming in handy. Knew I’d grow up to be Velma.”

“Who in their right mind aspires to be dumpy Velma?” I ask her.

“I was pudgy, had thick glasses, wore a short bob cut. Velma isn’t a mantle you attain. Velma is thrust upon you. I just embraced it, wore matching clothes. It wasn’t called cosplay, then. It was just called, ‘That Fat Girl Is a Loser.’ ”

As the computer boots up, I give Sunita Habersham a tour of my father’s house. This is the old tent I make my daughter sleep in, it’s conveniently located in the dining hall. This is the part of the ceiling
that hangs down from water damage, despite repairs. That flash is from the fuse box outside. This is the dining-room table; it’s made from a door. The chairs are empty buckets of primer paint. There’s a couch over there: it’s from the thrift shop. All the furniture is from thrift shops except the mattresses, which were new when I had them delivered. Tal won’t use hers, which is upstairs, because she prefers the tent. Even though my father died in it.

“This place is huge. It’s like an abandoned bus station. Don’t you get lonely here? Just you and Tal?” Sun asks. “I mean, I think of these old houses as being small, built for small people. But these ceilings must be fourteen feet high. And the rooms are wide, too. Even bigger than they look from outside. You could fit a small army.”

“The British Army, during the Battle of Germantown, actually. The upstairs, those rooms are smaller. I’m in the master bedroom and it’s tiny. Let me show you,” I say, and I genuinely mean that. Still, I hear how it sounds, even before I see Sun turn her head at my directness. Just the tiniest of reactions, but I see it, and I want to say,
That was not an attempt to get you up to my room so that I can have sex with you
. Why would I need to do that? People have sex in living rooms, and we’re standing right next to one.

Then there’s the sound.

It comes from upstairs.

Sun looks at me. “Did you hear that…?” she begins, but answers her own question. “Yeah, let’s go upstairs. Adventure time.”

I shake my head. “No.” I am perfectly fine not to go upstairs. I am perfectly fine never to go upstairs again in the history of all that is everything. In fact, I’m okay to seal off the entrance to the upstairs altogether, keep it like that from now till the moment it all goes up in char and red ember. But Sunita Habersham starts walking. She walks up. Why walk up? But she walks up. Toward it. We are supposed to be going in the opposite direction. It’s time to run. I follow behind her.

“Hey, hey, remember that joke? About black people, that they’d run away in haunted-house scenarios? I think it was Eddie Murphy. Or maybe it was Paul Mooney, one or the—” I stop when Sun flings her arm back at me. We’re at the top of the steps. The plaster from the
ceiling hangs down into the hall in shreds. The walls, murals of water stains. Five doors. All closed. Each one hiding something. One’s to the bathroom. One my room. Three, bedrooms I don’t go in, I never go in them. There’s been no reason to, there’s no reason to now either. Sun stares, at the doors, then at me. She wants me to shut up so she can see which room the sound came from. So she can swing a door open and whoever’s in there can be, I don’t know, surprised. I don’t want them to be surprised. I want them to be gone. No, I want us to be gone.

“Well, you know that joke? That black people would just leave at the first creepy sound? I’ve been thinking about that. Escaping? That’s actually normative behavior. Staying, when you know there’s a ghost, that’s what makes no damned sense. So when you think about it, that’s really the pretense of all ghost stories: white people are so confident of their omnipotence that they’ve lost their goddamn minds.”