We Will All Go Down Together (31 page)

My mind clicking helplessly through metaphors, obvious and un-. Water; mirror. Faces in the mirror, submerged, subterranean. Sub judice. Sub rosa.

(Pen umbra.)

From downstairs, two voices intruded; one low and indistinguishable, one higher, clearer—Carra’s, again. Saying:

“I checked myself out. No. No.” Mumble, mumble. “No, I’m actually allowed to do that.” A questioning murmur. “Not exactly.
No
.”

Slowly, almost unnoticeably, the light in the room had begun to take on a watery quality; from farther away still, a clicking, hissing sound started to mount through this one-sided argument I was eavesdropping on, as of a needle bumping against the inner groove of an old vinyl record. And the voice just went on, calm, reasonable—the sort of tone you adopt when you’re A) dealing with a crazy person and B) not too sure about your own sanity, either (albeit far surer of it than you are of hers).

“Look, I can’t stay; I’ve got someone here, and I have to get back. A girl.” More murmuring. “
Nobody
, Gala. Just a girl. I’m going now.”

Click, hiss. Click. Hiss. And that stuff, like dirty string, like desiccated tears—draining from the corners of Carra’s tight-closed eyes to spin a tight off-white ball which hovered over her younger self like a leering stalker. Like pain given physical shape.

What the hell
are
these, anyway?
I thought.

“Not what. Who.”

It was the rankest kind of horror movie jumping-jack jolt—hadn’t heard her come back, not with the click-hiss taking up mental space. Though that, of course, seemed to already be long gone.

And: “Fine,” I gritted. “
Who
, then?”

“Oh, depends on the year; I get a lot of . . . visitors, and none of them seem to leave cards. You’d pretty much have to ask them.”

She waved me over to the chair; I brushed at its dusty coat, gingerly, then sat. Watching her flop down on the equally disgusting carpet next to that shaky vanity’s rickety left front leg, her knees incautiously crossed—a bit better light in there, and I probably could have been able to tell whether or not she was a natural blonde. Not that that was exactly uppermost on my list of immediate pressing facts to check right now, mind you.

“Am I going insane?” I asked her—straight out, no chaser. She considered a minute, then said:

“Not unless I am, too.”

Which made me feel . . . oh,
so
much better.

Great segue, huh?

But I have to. Because here, believe it or not, is where I find nothing but a dead spot in my mind: something that narrows my hindsight in such a very specific way that, while it seems likely Carra spent the next few minutes telling me something, I have only the very vaguest of ideas what the hell said something might have been.

How often in life do we find ourselves saying—well, not out loud, not usually—but thinking, definitely: if only I could
see
something, for once . . . God, the Devil, my dead uncle Steve. Anything beyond the purely mundane and predictable boundaries of what we’ve come to recognize as “reality,” this standard we’ve somehow all apparently agreed upon as “true” vs. false, without really
agreeing
on anything at all.

Then everything would be revealed, confirmed, denied, answered at last, for good and for all. The gates of perception would roll back, and nothing we think we know would ever be the way it was again.

Yet praying also, in almost the same breath: but oh, Jesus Christ Almighty, please don’t let me
see
something.
Please
.

Sometimes, you can be living right in the middle of something and
still
need your face rubbed in it. And you never see it coming towards you, either, because—whenever you do take the time to glance around—everything looks exactly the same.

When my mother told me the story about her growth, she added that what was so wrenching to realize, in the end, was that what she’d been feeling up to that point
hadn’t
just been the way things were. That when you were in it, deep in it like she’d been, it was like you’d always been there. And you always would.

Pop the skull, play around, pry out the Stone of Folly; sharp medicine, the medicine of necessity. Sometimes, the oldest ways really
are
still the best.

I’ve thought so much about it, for so damn long. And all I’ve been able to come to, in the end, are these two irrevocably linked (and rather useless) conclusions:

A) That it’s not so much about what I drew, but what drew itself through me. And—

B) That it’s not so much about what I saw, but what I
refused
to see.

Contamination, spreading always outward, tainting all it touches. Is it a grudge, a curse? Is it something aware and malign, or unaware and desperate? And finally—considering how we can never see it coming, only track it by where it’s been, is it really any
thing
at all?

Anything. Or . . . anyone.

Being a ghost is like being invisible, so being invisible must be like being a ghost. Like being inside the shadow, always blundering towards people with your hands out, angry that they can’t see to comfort you.

The Asian idea is that what remains behind after death by violence is less the murdered person his or herself than an echo created by the moment of the person’s death—a rip in the fabric of space and time itself. A doppelgänger husk, ectoplasm with pretensions. Not “so and so’s ghost” so much as just
a
ghost. Or just . . . “ghost.”

The Idea of Ghost, like the Idea of North. A mere looped whisper, in darkness or in light. And no matter what this person may have been like before he or she died, no matter what they—specifically—might have wanted, ghosts only really want one thing: you, with them.

Not to be alone. Not to be trapped. Not to be where they are. Not to
be
.

Just living in the house wasn’t enough; but when I refused to
see
—and I did refuse—I set it off. It had to rush my door, and spilled all over everybody else in the process.

The fault is mine and always will be.

Funny word, that: “fault.” As in San Andreas. The crack through which one world intersects with the next, or vice versa. This crack in my head, still gaping open—a magnet, a haematoma, a dark and spreading pool. A cigarette-burn hole in the fabric of everything I see, or hear, or do; right in the middle, impossible to mend, impossible to disguise. Impossible to ignore.

A perpetually gaping mouth just waiting to be filled with breath, or tongue, or words. Or—

—
teeth
.

“Janis. Are you listening to me?

I shook my head, resurfaced. “Excuse me, what?” Caught her edge-of-colourless eyes on me, bleached even paler in this weird light, and blushed. “Um . . . no. Must have just zoned out there for a minute, actually.”

“Uh huh. That happen a lot, these days?”

Trying for sparkling wit, but willing to take mild sitcom-banter amusement value as the nearest default: “On my own or just around you?”
Would’ve gotten at least a snort on that one if this’d been Vivia. But Carra simply nodded ever so slightly, as though the idea’d already occurred to her—raised near the very beginning of our “relationship” by necessity only to be quickly discarded from experience, but certainly worth another moment’s consideration, nonetheless. If only in terms of a concept to be debunked.

“I don’t meet a lot of people like me, Janis,” she said. “Partly because there aren’t very many, which is what you would expect. And partly because, as far as I can figure. . . .” —looking me square in the eye, this time. And finishing, without even opening her mouth:

 . . . on some level, they can see me coming.

I swallowed. “Suh—see you?”

See me . . . 

Out loud, though barely above a whisper: “. . . and avoid me.”

A true conversation-stopper, just like that burning man who might (or might not) be haunting my home. I stared; she waited. And when—after a minute or so had passed—I still hadn’t gotten myself together enough to reply, she simply started to speak again, in much the exact same tone. Like none of the above had ever happened.

“Back when I was a kid,” she said, “when I was sole breadwinner for this ‘family,’ and my Mom used to rent me out to every fakir cum faker with a floating séance on the circuit—well, back then, there weren’t a lot of ways for
I Was A Tween-Aged Medium
-types like myself to wind down. So I’d wait ’til it was really late at night, after she went to bed, and I’d put a bag over my head; just an ordinary plastic bag from Becker’s or whatever. I’d tie it around my neck, and I’d breathe in and out ’til all the air was gone, so I could black out and not be bothered by anybody before the hole I ripped at the bottom let the air back in again.

“Anyways: this went on for a while, until—like usual—stuff started to build up. I’d wake up, and the bag would already be off, like halfway across the room and ripped to shreds, and I sure as hell knew it wasn’t
me
doing that. Or all the furniture would have moved around my room, or I’d find messages in dryboard marker on my wall, like: DON’T. STOP. VERY DANGEROUS VERY DANGEROUS FOR YOU. ON NO ACCOUNT MY LOVE.

“But I didn’t stop, because I didn’t want to. Because, at the end of the day, it was basically the only goddamn thing I had to call
mine
. Not until the night all the windows in the house blew out at once, that is, and Gala found me, tore the bag off, beat my ass black and blue. And then just because I had to, because she knew, now. So after that, she was always
watching
me.”

And:
Gala, that’s the voice through the wall
, I told myself. That scritching, fumbling noise, like somebody too sick to straighten up dragging a cane over carpet; that’s her, the former child abuser, living fat off the payoff from her kid’s “gift”/curse. Her daughter’s former metaphysical pimp.

“That’s a very sad story,” I said, finally. Not knowing what else to say.

Carra nodded. “Yes. Yes, it is.” Then: “Janis—do you know
you
have a bag over your head?”

(What?)

“Let me show you.”

She reached behind her, rummaged in one of the open boxes of detritus, came up with an ancient Polaroid camera—the same one that’d taken those other pictures, no doubt. Angled its lens slightly towards me, along with her dead-calm eyes, and . . . 

“They call this spirit photography,” she explained, as the flash went off; for the life of me, though, I don’t ever remember her touching the button. A half-second later, the photo popped out, full-on square and ugly whitish-yellow, like some diseased robot tongue. Carra waved it back and forth briskly, a professional snap in her wrist—something she’d done a thousand times, with this making an even 1001. Handed the result to me, and let me take it in at my own pace.

Strikes me, thinking about it now, that that photo’s probably sandwiched between Hotspur and Glendower right now, along with the others; not that I have to check, or anything. Since I’ll never forget what it looked like, no matter how long I live.

The bag . . . well, it wasn’t one, not as such. More like a bonnet or a hood drawing ’round my features, muffling me from the neck up in thickening, tightening shadow. A cancer-caul. A penumbra as plain as any National Geographic ever captured, any the Discovery Channel ever covered: Janis Mol, in near-to-full eclipse.

I don’t know what my face must have looked like in the waking world, but it was probably just as bad. Yet Carra kept on looking, affectless as a cat: mild, vaguely sympathetic, preternaturally still. Like she’d had all capacity to be otherwise burned out of her, a very long time ago.

“It’s always like this,” she said, so low it might have been more to herself than to anybody else, including me. “Half of what you learn is useless, the rest is depressing, and everything you touch wants a piece of you in return. And just because you can see things other people can’t, it doesn’t mean those things can’t see
you.
. . . .”

I’d gone all the way through “stare” now, right past “gape” and into “goggle.” Thinking:
Jesus Christ, what’s wrong with me, anyways? What’s wrong with you, you stone bitch freak?

My first thought would be: a lot.

But: “You need to get out of there, Janis,” Carra told me, not reacting to the insult, even though I
knew
now that she could probably “hear” me as clearly as though I’d voiced the thought aloud. “Seriously. Sometimes money’s not a good enough reason, and I can tell you that for absolute fact. You need to get out, and you need not to go back, ever . . . and if you were looking for my advice, I’m sorry. Because that’s all you’re going to get.”

I don’t know how I got out of her house; through the front door, one assumes. But when I came to, I was blocks away, bent over with my hands on my thighs by that empty schoolyard just north of College and Bathurst, bile in my throat and spit hot as blood in my mouth—the both of them far too full for me to do anything but pant, and gasp, and drool to keep from vomiting right then and there.

Having run and run with nothing but my own fears chasing me, obviously—run and run and run, ’til I couldn’t breathe to run any farther.

I made my way home in the unseasonably cold early hours of dawn, sky going grey-pink to blue overhead, like brain tissue freezing over. Hesitated on the porch, feeling the mass of the house looming over me, like a reactor technician or a biohazard medic without a suit: naked. Vulnerable. While even the door seemed to gaze blankly back at me, an idiot look of inquiry in its empty glass panes:
Yes, Janis?

I shivered.

Then, from inside, I realized I could hear Vivia and Aaron moving about the kitchen, exchanging what sounded like their usual banter—partly mutual amusement, mostly mutual irritation. And all the fear that I’d run from Carra’s house to elude, that I’d walked shadowed streets for hours trying—and failing—to reason myself out of, was instantly drowned in a rush of sheer relieved normality: boring, mundane, beloved bullshit. All power to the tentacle-porn-addicted bastard, but it was very hard to think of any house that had Aaron Coby living in it being haunted.