The Sadness of Spirits

by Aimee Pogson

  The officer takes my arm. “Really,” he says. “We should get you to the hospital.”

  I shake him off. I don’t want to go to the hospital. “I don’t feel sick,” I say. “We weren’t even to the cleansing yet.”

  He doesn’t know what I’m talking about, but he doesn’t have to. I’m not going to the hospital, and my fierce expression tells him so. I cross my arms over my chest and stare him down until he says fine and backs away up the stairs.

  I am finally alone in the basement. I survey the massage table, the candles that have been blown out and are cooling, the light that tumbles through the tiny windows above. In this moment, the office has lost its magic. It’s just a basement once again, a dream rejected by reality.

  I turn to the shelves stacked with marked and unmarked liquids. Without thinking about what I’m doing, I take an unmarked jar, stuff it under my shirt, and hurry up the stairs to where the police are waiting to take down my name, number, and statement. All the petty details of my existence. All the details that aren’t even worth remembering.

  I don’t get in my car.

  I wait for the police to drive away, and then I begin to walk.

  The October sun shines down on me, bright, tenuous. The leaves burn red and yellow and brown. I shuffle under them, through them. I wish I could shield my eyes.

  There is always too much. Too much to see. Too much to feel.

  I think of the baby. The baby I thought I was going to have. I remember sitting down on the couch once I realized I was late. I remember the ache in my chest, my abdomen, the way the room swirled. I remember thinking: feet, kicking feet; hands, tiny hands; and a mind, a mind like mine.

  That was what scared me the most—that mind.

  I come to a coffee shop tucked into the bottom of an old brick building, and without making a conscious decision to do so, I step inside and order a latte. I take a seat by the window and watch the people stroll past. A few tables over, a man catches my eye, stares at me like I am a cherry Danish.

  I am not afraid of him. I am composed of nothing he can take.

  I remember the day I understood my mind. I was four years old and my mom was driving me home from day care. The car windows were rolled down to let in the sunlight, the fresh summer air, and I thought: I exist. I exist and I am separate. And in the glory of that existence, that separation, came the knowledge of a whole vast world bearing down on me, a world that was never going to go away. It was amazing then. It became less amazing with time.

  The man a few tables over continues to watch me. When it seems like I might notice him, he smiles. He might be the one to save me, assuming I can be saved. I don’t really assume anything. I reach under my coat, pull out the unmarked bottle. I pour the liquid into my coffee, more liquid than Dr. Brown ever prescribed for me, set the cup aside, and gaze out the window at the pressing shades of the passing day, wondering how much I must break myself in order to feel better.

  The Invisible Boy

  It is hard to be an invisible boy, traipsing along the backyard while mom is inside taking a nap with “Uncle Rob.” Uncle Rob is not really an uncle and Rob is not really his name. His real name is Brian, but he prefers to be Rob because as he puts it, “Rob is short and tough. A man’s name.”

  The boy likes to think he has a man’s name: Chet, although the ch sound is soft and the way his mom says it, tucking him in at night, saying “Good night, Chet,” makes him feel like a little kid, but he is eight years old and well on his way to manhood, or so his dad says when he’s actually around.

  But now Chet is not Chet, but is rather the invisible boy, swinging on his aluminum swing set like a ghost, jumping from the highest point and landing on both his feet, his body absorbing the impact in a rush that moves from feet to knees to chest. He is a superhero, and if he could find an even higher point to jump from, the top of the house maybe or the old oak tree, he would, but there is no way up to those places, no way that he can think of, and so he draws pictures on the rainy days. Pictures of him jumping from the roof, green cape aloft because Superman has already claimed the red one and, besides, he has to blend in with the forest, which is his true home. Pictures of him flying through the air like a kind of bird, like a kind of plane, not unlike Superman.

  But these are only thoughts inside his head, which is always, always hard at work, and the rest is silence punctuated by the occasional screech of the swings and the birds and the wind moving past his ears. Then he is bored with the swing and continues his ghostly trek to the edge of the woods, which is as far as he can go. The rest is forbidden. “Forbidden,” his dad told him once, emphasizing the sound, and so now he always stops at this point and peers as far into the brush and trees as he possibly can, imagining the exciting things he might see within.

  Then he is moving back, taking the long way around the perimeter of the yard past the newly constructed shed, placed there by Uncle Rob so that he would have room to store his motorcycle, which is shiny and broad and fills the boy with a deep loathing every time he looks at it. He passes this shed quickly because it is a stranger to this lawn, but not quickly enough because he is suddenly stopped by a nail piercing through his foot, entering the soft, soft skin between two fragile bones and continuing up, up, and invisibility fades as his screams fill the air, and he hops, then falls, watching the blood pour, not in a trickle but in a long stream that covers weeds and grass and the dirt below, and he is crying, crying and his mom is there, pulling on his foot, shaking her head, and lifting him, eight years old, to the car, where she hurries him off to the emergency room.

  At the hospital, everything is routine. The fluorescent lights shine down until they create a buzzing in his head that will later be a headache his mom tries to heal with water. “You cried so much,” she’ll say. “You’re probably dehydrated.” The smells seep in and remind him of a bathroom after a good cleaning, only worse, and he feels dizzy as the doctor takes X-rays, then slowly removes the nail from his foot while he looks away, holding his mom’s hand even though he is close to being a man now. Then there is a shot deep within his arm that aches even though he refuses to say so, and his mom is called out to complete paperwork because apparently there is a lot of information to give when a person comes to the hospital and has to have a nail removed from his foot.

  What isn’t routine is the doctor returning to the room and closing the door softly behind him. He takes a seat in front of the boy and says, “I’m not supposed to do this, but I thought you might like this as a reminder of your war wound.” And he holds up the nail, still encrusted with the boy’s blood, and the boy stares at it a moment, this object that caused him so much pain, before he cups it in his own hand and thanks the doctor.

  “You’re welcome,” the doctor says. “Next time be careful where you step.” And he tousles the boy’s hair, which is annoying but not completely unwelcome. Then he is gone, leaving the boy alone again.

  For an afternoon, the boy is less invisible. His mom lets him sit on the couch—she usually sends him outside on sunny days so that he won’t become “one of those couch potatoes”—and she props his foot up on the footstool and tells him to pick out a movie. “Dracula,” he says, pointing to the DVD he has been eyeing for months, and his mom shakes her head because that movie is forbidden, but then she looks at him and relents. It’s been a long day for both of them and perhaps he is old enough now. Perhaps he won’t find it too scary, and if he does, if he spends half the night awake from nightmares, he shouldn’t come crying to her.

  The movie is all he thought it would be and more. There are vampires and dead girls and wolves and even vampires who turn themselves into mist so they can slip under doors and float through the night sky like clouds, and in his mind he adds that to his repertoire of superhero abilities. There is flying, and then there is becoming a mist. There is becoming a wolf, but maybe he’d rather become a deer. They’re graceful.

  He continues to debate these points during dinner when Uncle Rob asks him how h
is foot is and then turns to his mom and begins questioning her about what she’s going to plant in the garden and what he should do about a situation at work, and his mom is all ears and the boy becomes invisible again. He could become a deer, but then he would be at the mercy of wolves and dogs, although he doesn’t think there are many wolves around here. He could become a fox, and that might be a better choice because they are sleek and agile and smart, but an owl might also be a good choice if he’s going to be a creature of the night.

  His mind is still racing when his mom tucks him into bed, accentuating the softness of his name—“Good night, Chet”—and reminding him to wake her up if he wants another Tylenol. He only half listens because he realizes he doesn’t have to limit himself to just one animal, but rather can become a shape-shifter, which is exciting indeed, and he turns to face the window, imagining all the creatures he could be.

  A few hours later he wakes up to a throbbing foot. It feels hot and swollen under the sheets, and he considers getting his mom, but that would mean encountering Uncle Rob, who stays over almost every night now. So he forces the pain from his mind and turns to the window and the cool night air and wonders if there are any vampires out there. If so, could his interest inadvertently invite them in? Could his thoughts accidentally bring a vampire to his home?

  He feels nervous thinking about that and so he instead turns to the nail, which he hid in the top drawer of his bedside table. He turns it over in his hand, remembering the feel of it piercing through his foot, and the blood. He has never felt that much pain before, at least not physically, and he considers the power of this nail. If birds eat spiders to gain their power and people eat birds to gain their power and vampires eat people to gain their power, then maybe he can put this nail to good use. And he does, popping it in his mouth and turning it over on his tongue, tasting cool metal, the copper of his own blood, before swallowing it down in one, two painful gulps.

  The boy cannot eat breakfast. It hurts to swallow his oatmeal and it hurts to sit and it hurts to stand and walk from the table to the couch, where his mom instructs him to go when she presses a hand to his forehead and realizes he is running a fever. On the couch, he drifts into the background as his mom makes call after call, first to his grandma to see if she has any advice, then to the doctor, then to her boss, then to Uncle Rob to let him know what’s going on. She talks to Uncle Rob for a long time and ends the call with “I love you,” which brings back memories of his dad in a way that is like having his stomach twisted around, but in a worse way than it already is.

  What follows is routine: they return to the hospital and there are more X-rays, more blood tests. Then he is wheeled into a room where everything is both too bright and too dark, and a nurse puts a mask over his face and instructs him to count backward from one hundred. When he wakes up there is a long line of stitches across his stomach and the nail he carried around inside him is gone and his stomach hurts more than it ever has in his whole life. The room spins and he is nauseous and his mom is there, bending over him, angry. “What were you thinking?” she asks. “Why would you ever eat a nail? How did you even get it?”

  Somehow he knows better than to blame the doctor.

  There are hospital expenses, she continues, expenses they can’t afford, and he is eight years old; he should know better than to go sticking things in his mouth where they don’t belong.

  There is nothing to say in the face of her wrath, although his own anger is building because he knows why he did it. She would never understand because she doesn’t know the things he knows: about superheroes, about strength, about finding power in whatever small places you can, and so he silently fumes until she finally says that she has to go to work, she couldn’t take the whole day off for him, and then she is gone, leaving him alone in this hospital room that feels a little too white, a little too quiet, and a little too big for one boy alone.

  There is time for his stomach to heal: days spent in the cool quiet of his bedroom, surrounded by books and action figures, days spent on the couch watching movies. His grandparents come to visit, and they bring him a toy fire truck to drive across the couch cushions, and he likes it, although it reminds him of his dad, which brings back that familiar ache in his stomach. His dad pulling on the fire gear he kept at the house for emergencies, when he would drive directly to the scene. His dad coming home smelling of smoke and sweat. The boy leans against his grandpa, who has a tanned and leathery face, kind and often smiling, and who is somewhat like his dad, and listens to him tell his stories, but it’s just not the same. His dad never once comes to visit.

  He grows bored, which his mom says is a good thing because he’s healing, but it doesn’t feel like a good thing to him because the days stretch before him, long and uninterrupted. His mom says he is old enough to stay home by himself—eight years old means he’s a big boy—but there is a list of things he is forbidden to do: no going outside, no climbing up the stairs, no jumping of any kind. His stitches are fragile, she says. They can’t afford another doctor’s visit.

  And so he sits alone on the couch, watching TV. Most days he’s by himself, but sometimes Uncle Rob is there with him, sleeping in his mom’s bedroom until close to eleven. “Be quiet for Uncle Rob,” his mom tells him before she leaves, and he wants to ask her why when Uncle Rob is never considerate of him, but he doesn’t ask this because she would, as she herself puts it, smack him upside the head, and so he is quiet and he watches TV quietly and he pours cereal quietly and he thinks quiet thoughts about how much he hates Uncle Rob and how if he could only grow wings he would leave this house and show them all just how special he really is.

  On this particular morning, he watches TV until his feet twitch and his legs twitch and his whole body is twitching with energy. He can’t sit still, but he also can’t go outside, and so he stands and walks to his mom’s bedroom door. He leans close and listens to Uncle Rob’s snores, and he feels a boiling in his chest that has been going on since Uncle Rob began showing up on the afternoons when his dad was at work. For a while it seemed that Uncle Rob was showing up more and more and his dad less and less until his dad wasn’t around at all, replaced by this blond man with his fake smile and his motorcycle.

  The boy pushes the door open slowly. He isn’t supposed to bother Uncle Rob, but Uncle Rob bothers him. The air is musty and heavy even though the air conditioner is going full blast, and he can just make out the hulking shape of Uncle Rob beneath the blankets. Even though the whir of the air conditioner covers the sound of his footsteps, he tiptoes across the room and stops before the bed. Uncle Rob is breathing heavily and the boy can smell his morning breath, his sweat. His arms are thrust across the bed like a doll, and for the first time it dawns on the boy how fragile a man really is.

  The boy hovers and then steps away. He makes his way to the dresser, where he opens first one drawer and then another, searching, searching until he comes across a little cardboard box. Taking the box in his hands and casting another glance at Uncle Rob, he slips from the room and closes the door behind him.

  The living room isn’t safe, and so the boy shuts himself in the bathroom. Flipping on the fluorescent light, he sets the box on the counter, opens it up, and begins taking its contents out one by one: a man’s ring, a watch, extra buttons for flannel shirts, a package of cigarettes, a lighter, a Swiss Army knife—all the little objects his dad left behind and his mom hid away. He runs his fingers across the watch, lifts a cigarette from the package and sniffs it, and then takes out two buttons. They are smooth and clear and plastic, no larger than a dime, and they bring back memories of being held close to his father’s chest.

  He takes each button and places it on his tongue. They are easy to swallow and don’t get caught in his throat. The Swiss Army knife goes in his pocket, and he hides the box under the sink behind a stack of old towels to be revisited another time.

  He spends the rest of the day contented, two buttons resting on his stomach floor.

  The boy is back
outside in no time, although swinging and jumping are still forbidden. Summer is in full force, and since he can’t entertain himself through movement he takes to the dirt, gathering grasshoppers into jars and wiping their spit off his hands and rooting through the grass for worms and ants to pick up and examine. “You’re getting yourself dirty,” his mom says, but he doesn’t care. There’s a whole world down there he’s never stopped to investigate before.

  The buttons ride along safely. They don’t cause him any trouble.

  He is holding a woolly bear caterpillar, soft streaks of black and brown curled in his palm, when Uncle Rob calls to him. “Hey,” he says. “Come help me with this wood.”

  Slowly, the boy draws himself up and trots to the driveway, where Uncle Rob is opening the bed of his pickup truck to reveal a great pile of freshly chopped wood. “It’s about time you started helping out around the place,” Uncle Rob says. “Start stacking over there.” And he points to the side of the shed where the rest of the wood is piled beneath a blue tarp.

  The boy stands next to the truck and waits to receive the wood. He is silent on the outside, as always, but inside is a seething array of anger and injustice. He always did chores around the house before Uncle Rob arrived, helping his dad to stack wood and plant seeds in the garden and rake grass clippings. Uncle Rob just never asked, and he can’t be expected to read minds.

  He thinks of the buttons within him, though, and decides to copy some of his dad’s patience. “You have to be smarter than other people,” his dad told him once when other kids were picking on him at school. “You have to be patient and outthink them.”

  It won’t be hard to outthink Uncle Rob. He doesn’t seem especially bright.

  He clutches each log carefully to his chest, mindful of his stitches, those fine bits of thread holding skin to skin, but even when he moves carefully he can feel them pulling against each other, and after many trips from the truck to the woodpile and back again his whole body feels like it is pulling apart, arms from shoulder blades, neck from back, and he would stop to rest except that Uncle Rob is urging him to go faster. “We don’t have all day,” he says. “I have to work tonight.”