The man took something out from his pocket. It glinted.
A knife.
He sliced off the skin from the woman’s chest, exposing her muscles. Blood trickled onto the bed.
I pressed a hand against my mouth.
He continued to cut and pull, tearing the skin. The music piped to a quick tempo while the blood made strange patterns on the bed.
I stood up, stepped back, towards the door.
I fumbled with the lock. It would not click open.
A tapping on the plexiglass partition made me raise my head and I stared at the crimson curtains. Fingers slid upon the glass on the other side, nails scrapped the plastic surface.
The skin from the woman’s arms fell loose and she tugged at it, ripping it as though she were taking off a pair of gloves. He cut at her legs and she tore the skin with the same indifference she might employ if she were removing her stockings.
I rattled the door, pounded my fists against it. It would not budge.
I grabbed the chair, ready to smash it against the door, but it was welded to the floor.
The tapping against the partition increased. Somebody was trying to get through, to burrow a hole and reach towards me.
“Hey! Hey let, me out!” I yelled.
There was a gash near the corner of the cabin, a small opening, and an eye blinked and looked at me through it. Other holes were unplugged or suddenly revealed and a dozen eyes blinked.
The music had turned into a loud piping, a cacophony that was not music but still retained some bizarre rhythm to it. I covered my ears and squeezed my eyes shut, that’s how loud it was.
And then I opened them to see the fleshless woman, dripping red, in the center of the bed. The muscles were slicing off her body, pooling at her feet.
Though the window separating me from the show was black, and though one could not possibly see from the outside in, the woman seemed to stare at me. Then her companion, who had his back to me, turned around.
The latch slid. I stumbled from the cabin, rushed past the doors with the red lights. I stumbled and almost fell when a stray, yellow dog which had wandered inside bumped against my legs. The dog panted and had a man’s head.
All around me in the darkness of the hallway a thousand eyes opened like night flowers, piercing me with their white gaze.
I kicked the dog away and I ran, stumbling into the street where the two boys who had not gone inside waited for us.
I wept and one of them hugged me. Eventually the others came out.
Their faces were cool and composed. Faces I’d never seen before. I looked at Jaime and rubbed my eyes.
“Did you see it?” I asked. “Did you see it?”
“It’s just a live show,” Jaime said.
I felt as though he’d just slapped me. He smiled his golden smile and turned, leading our path home.
When we reached the block where Jaime and I lived — the others had already spread through the city and gone their way — we slowed down but did not speak.
I stared at him from the shadow of my doorway as I regained my voice.
“What did you see in there? What did you really see?” I asked.
He opened his mouth, his eyes were bright and earnest. Then his tongue went still and the eyes narrowed. He paused and scratched his head.
“Just a show,” he said. “Just some skin show.”
He chuckled. I watched him step away, towards his own building; watched the light brown hair and the slim silhouette I knew so well receding until I stood alone.
And after that day we never spoke again, never walked together back from school, never paused in front of the sex shop with its neon letters and its sign which read “toys lingerie magazines performances.”
Vancouver is a young city, and a city of few ghosts. The dead have had little time to find purchase among its blue skyscrapers. Yet that morning I looked across the street and saw Ana standing under the rain, water droplets sliding off her translucent skin. Dead more than ten years and still wearing her little yellow sundress with the heavy, laced boots.
I shook my head and added another sugar to my coffee. I’d have to move. Ghosts may follow the living, but the farther you go, the longer it takes for them to arrive. I had not seen Ana in three years but she was persistent in life, and persistent in her death.
I stepped out of the coffee shop, avoided looking at her and headed to work.
Ana was there the next morning, rather wretched and wet, head bowed, her hair dripping onto her shoes. The little yellow dress looked frayed, the boots were caked with mud.
She looked silly haunting this street, so busy and bustling, no hint of Gothic in the architecture. Though, if you think about it, where can a ghost haunt in Vancouver? Yaletown, in the industrial buildings turned ritzy abodes? Or Gastown, the original heart of the city, the one place where brick buildings rise in orderly fashion across the streets? Without a European backdrop Ana resembled the party girl who has arrived four hours late after everyone has started putting on their coats.
A dog tied outside the coffee shop began to bark and I knew it could see Ana. I felt embarrassed. I thought — though it’s impossible, only I can sense her — someone was going to politely tap my shoulder and ask me if that was my ghost. Sir, would you please leave and take the ghost with you.
I tried to read my book. Sometimes, if you ignore the dead, they go away. When I looked up after twenty minutes she was still there.
I searched for plane tickets online and tried to calculate how many boxes I’d need to move my things, but by the time I got home the desire to escape had been reduced to a simmer.
She might leave. Perhaps.
I have no pictures of Ana. I burned them long ago: physical possessions of loved ones may draw them back. I have literally nothing of hers. Not her CDs, nor her clothes, not even the ferns she bought for the apartment.
I have nothing of Ana but she returns to me, like the tide, always begging for a kiss.
When Ana was alive, I told her I loved her one April Monday. It was not my doing. I do not like those three words and I was not truly, really, in love with her. But Ana insisted. First she had asked it as a joke: “Tell me you love me, won’t you?” When I did not answer it turned into pleading, later a threat, it devolved into a fight and I ended saying it.
Sunlight streamed through the curtains and the air smelled of lemon, and I said it and then she asked if I’d love her forever.
I promised I would.
Ana stood outside the coffee shop all week, sniffling in the rain, her skin growing more crystal-like with each day. Her heart and lungs glowed a soft green and showed through her dress, pulsating to the rhythm of my watch.
Ghosts can acquire the semblance of life. Their flesh can have the appearance of muscle and bone again and they may even taste, breath, feel the world. All it takes is a kiss. But every kiss from your phantom lover is a bit of life trickling out your body.
When I exited the coffee shop Ana raised a hand towards me, as if reaching for my shoulder.
I walked away, hands in my pockets.
Ana and I did not share similar tastes in books, movies or music. Convenience and youth brought us together. We met in the standard way: university, through friends. Four semi-dates later we were living together.
I left a year later out of boredom and no-good reason, which was as much as I could stomach.
By the time she died in a car accident we had been separated for nearly six months. I did not expect her ghost to roam into my room. She tiptoed in one night, snuggling next to me under the covers. Her skin was like a block of ice and had the grayish appearance of meat that has been freeze-burned. But she looked so damned sad, shivering and pouting and begging me to hold her because she wanted to feel alive again.
I kissed her and she pressed a hand against her chest.
“I think I feel it again,” she said. “Yes, it’s there.”
Her heart, she meant.
She’s been followi
ng me ever since.
I saw Ana on the bus, late one night. It was almost empty and she was not hard to spot, even half-visible. She was sitting at the back, holding her head between her hands, and rocked back and forth at certain intervals.
When I prepared to step down she stood up, almost looking happy, and spoke.
“Do you remember that summer we went to Amsterdam?” she asked. “We went with Alto and the others and you got sick at that little restaurant. Remember?”
We had never gone to Amsterdam. She was remembering wrong, a sign of her worsening condition. Maybe she’d fade for good, soon.
I did not reply.
Ana followed me home like a stray dog, standing guard outside my apartment. I looked outside and saw her with her head bowed, shivering though the rain should make no difference to a ghost because they are never warm.
She cried in the way ghosts cry, without tears, crystal face turned up towards the rain.
I wondered what it might feel like to kiss her thin lips, cool as glass, and breath warmth into her icy limbs.
I felt old and tired.
When I used to kiss Ana she came back to life for an hour, for two; maybe even a day. She’d sit in my kitchen and have a cigarette and she’d speak just like Ana had spoken, forgetting she had died, talking as though time had turned back and we were together.
I’d watch her, sitting at the edge of the couch. I’d watch as the colour drained from her body and her skin grew translucent and then she cried, she knocked my paintings down and rattled the furniture like a cheap poltergeist. I sat at the edge of the couch, rubbed my jaw and wondered why she’d decided to haunt me.
I went to Granville Island and she was there, standing in the aisles of the public market, lurking in the corners, sitting on a bench next to a solitary seagull.
I sighed and thought about kissing her and giving her the minutes of life she craved. She would be cold like ice, like a window pane in winter, and her smile would glimmer in the dark. She’d wrap her arms around me, smelling faintly of lemon and the grave, sorrow and stagnant water, and I’d comb my hands through her thin hair.
I stretched out my hand. Ana lifted her head and stood up, as if to meet me. Her green, throbbing heart glowed and she opened her lips.
My fingertips rested against her chest and I shoved her back.
She shattered like sugar candy, little gleaming shards spilling all over the ground.
The gull shrieked and flew away.
I opened my umbrella and walked home.
I read a photocopied copy of the Necronomicon in Mexico City when I was in junior high and living on the fourth floor of a building which smelled like garbage.
The neighbours used to dump their trash bags outside their doors and there was always a broken light bulb dangling from the ceiling. Which was not so bad. The other apartment buildings around us were even shittier. La Bola’s elevator, for example, had a big hole in the floor that nobody fixed. One night, one of the hobos that used to sneak into the building got his leg stuck in it, then made a bloody mess trying to pull himself out and they had to call the cops.
Some kids said they had to amputate the man’s leg when he got tetanus from the cuts. La Bola got a good laugh out of it.
He was the one who found the Necronomicon.
I knew nothing about Lovecraft until this fat dude who liked to smoke a lot of dope and watch foreign movies lent me a copy of At the Mountains of Madness. I was in my Poe phase back then and the dude — his name was Leonardo but we called him La Bola — had seen me thumbing through it.
He circled my desk, shark-like, as I read “The Fall of the House of Usher” and told me that if I liked Poe, I would really like Lovecraft.
Now this dude, he wasn’t friendly. The other kids teased him with some creative nicknames. The nicest one of them was La Bola, because he was so big, but he got called much worse.
La Bola had a pierced ear, which was a no-no at our school, and he carried magazines of girls with big boobs and heavy metal music tapes inside his knapsack. In short, he wasn’t my sort of friend.
I was the nerd with the glasses and the baggy uniform. My mom had bought it two sizes bigger because she thought she’d save some money if I could grow into the clothes. I never did grow and remained short and skinny, rolling up my sleeves all year long so I could see my fingers.
Anyhow, he gave me the Lovecraft one Friday and on Monday he asked me what I thought.
“It was cool,” I said.
“Wasn’t it,” he said as he sat next to me, giddy with excitement. “You want to read another one?”
That’s how we became friends. It was a good friendship. La Bola lent me books and I fed him. His mom, just like mine, worked until late at night and there was rarely anything to eat in his house, so I kept inviting him to have supper with me and my sister. Then we’d rush to my room and listen to some of his music while we chatted about horror stories.
On our way back from school La Bola purchased copies of La Alarma, which was a thin, yellow newspaper with graphic crime stories and a naked chick on page five. “Followed Murdered Raped!” screamed the front page.
My sister Marilu loathed the crime rag and she did not like the fact that La Bola ate huge portions of the chicken she cooked for us. However, she was willing to keep her mouth shut about him as long as I did not tattle to mom about Marilu’s boyfriend.
Marilu’s boyfriend had gone off to the States a few months before and was working in Texas. He phoned her once a week, collect call, and they chatted for a good hour. Mother had forbidden her from accepting his calls and told me to hang up if anyone called collect, but I always passed the receiver to my sister and feigned stupidity when the bill arrived in the mail.
I did not bother Marilu and she did not bug me, and La Bola continued to come over to eat my sister’s food and talk about horror stories.
And then there was the whole mess about the book and La Bola stopped visiting.
One morning, when were on our way to school, La Bola stopped to talk to a hobo. We were following our usual path, zipping next to rundown 19th century buildings, art deco apartments with tiles falling off the facade and modern monstrosities shaped like boxes built in the seventies. Some neighbourhoods had turned their old buildings into fashionable nightclubs. There was a colonial church now transformed into a spiffy bar. But not ours. Factories jutted next to vecindades, buildings that had gone up during Iturbide’s empire served as a backdrop for prostitutes, and a sad park with more concrete than trees stood as the heart of this grey collage.
The hobo stumbled through a garbage-littered corner just as we left behind the park. I knew him — or knew of him — he sold all kinds of trinkets: old magazines of girls with big titties and drugs were the most crucial items for kids my age, but rumour was he could get any merchandise you wanted.
I stepped aside, pressed myself against the wall to let the stinky fellow go by. But the man recognized La Bola and started cooing, talking to him like they were old friends.
“Hey, long time no see,” said the man. “I got some new stuff, some nice stuff for you. You want to take a look?”
He probably meant drugs. I didn’t do drugs and there was a strict no pot rule at my house for fear that my mother would belt my ass red if she smelled it. But La Bola bought drugs, smoked cigarettes. He liked to demonstrate his superior sophistication with his knowledge of stimulants.
“Can’t right now,” La Bola said.
“But this is big stuff. Good stuff. It’s that book you wanted. The N.”
“Maybe a peek.”
“We’re going to be late,” I reminded La Bola.
He ignored me and started following the panhandler, and I in turn followed La Bola until they crawled inside the abandoned pantyhose factory where some of the kids liked to have sex. The old building had tons of shattered milky-white glass panes and it was easy to sneak inside, but I did not like to go in there, and when La Bola insisted he didn’t want to go alone, I
said I’d keep watch from outside.
I didn’t dare to crawl in.
Through the glass plane I made out two murky figures, shadows, Bola and the man talking. There was a noise, a cry. Not a scream. A cry. Might have been a “no.” Might have been nothing at all.
Stuff happens at the old factory and you’ve got to be careful. Just look away. That morning I put my hands in my pockets and rushed to class, left Bola alone. Left him behind.
I saw nothing.
La Bola was late to school.
A few weeks later, La Bola talked about the invocation and showed me the grease-stained photocopies then man had given him.
It was October and the Day of the Dead was right around the corner. The streets were filled with sugar skulls and pictures of death in a long Porfirian dress. We were walking next to the offices of Telmex when La Bola suddenly stopped in the middle of the street — it was the same street where the whores gathered at nights to ply their trade, causing my mom to pull my arm very quickly whenever we were out late — and said we should try to put the Necronomicon to good use.
“Like seriously,” he said. “We should call Cthulhu.”
I had no idea what he was talking about. We went to sit in the park and I opened my math book so I could do a bit of studying while La Bola went to get some sodas and chips from the corner grocery store. The daughter of the store owner was a plump, gap-toothed fifteen year-old who had a crush on La Bola on account of his “dangerous” earring and the inverted-star drawn on his backpack with red marker. La Bola would spend some ten minutes sweet-talking her and she would give us the junk food for free.
But instead of lining up behind the construction workers who were buying beer and tortas, La Bola sat down. He pulled out some photocopies from a yellow envelope and gushed about how he had purchased an authentic facsimile of the Necronomicon from the man we had met on our way to school.
“It’s the real deal,” he told me, very seriously.
Love and Other Poisons Page 7