The Sadness of Spirits

by Aimee Pogson

  She thinks of the mailman. She wonders if he is also on fire.

  She doesn’t know his last name even though he knows hers. It seems that names don’t matter much in this world.

  She knows he dreams of his grandparents’ farm in Virginia, a place he used to visit as a boy. He described it to her in whispers past her hair: the white farmhouse with the wraparound porch, the old horse, the acres of corn. She followed him there, temporarily letting his dreams mesh with hers as the two of them meandered down old dirt roads and hid from each other in the corn until the temptation to be together grew and they fell into each other’s arms again.

  He knows when she slips from his apartment one night and lies out in the grass, her body shaking. He brings her a towel. He says, “You looked cold so I brought you this.” He doesn’t notice that the towel is too small and hardly covers her thighs. He doesn’t notice that she’s still shaking, nor does he understand that her trembling has nothing to do with the cold.

  They sit together, and she watches the stars while he stares at some point down the road. There’s so much that can be said in this moment when she is hot and cold and aching, but she can’t bring herself to speak, and he doesn’t bother to say anything, and in the silence she knows that despite the time they’ve shared, they’re not truly meant for each other. Someday she’ll look back and remember the loneliness of this summer, she’ll remember the heat, but she’ll have trouble remembering just what was real and what was fantasy.

  “We should go inside,” he says and reaches for her hand. “You’re going to catch a cold.”

  “I’m already cold,” she says, but he doesn’t understand what she means. He doesn’t see the way the sky is icing over, crackling around the glowing stars, and maybe he doesn’t have to. This sky is her sky.

  One night after work she sits by the bay and watches as a couple launches glowing lanterns into the sky. They hover for a moment over the water like shimmering jellyfish, and then rise up and up until they look like fiercely glowing stars that shine and then fade.

  She wonders what they are celebrating. A religious tradition she’s never heard of? An anniversary? The souls of departed loved ones? It doesn’t matter. When she watches the lanterns she thinks of love, the outpouring of devotion in the form of fire sent floating, and that’s enough.

  Two kids are fishing to the right of her, and to the left the mailman is nowhere to be found. The kids laugh and reel in pieces of weed and the occasional fish, and she stands up to get a better look. The water is glass, but the kids are still fishing. Somehow, somehow, there has to be a better world down there. She slips off her shoes and carefully reaches one foot toward the glistening surface, then the other.

  She stands on the water, and then begins to walk, her feet sizzling. She doesn’t know if anyone sees her and she doesn’t know where she’s going, but she goes on, beyond the city, beyond the prying eyes of the mailman, hoping to fall through, following the burn of a lantern as it leads her deep into the night.

  Winter

  More and more there is this: Cecilia wakes to find the edges of her existence turned crystalline and hot. She can’t see them clearly, wrapped as she is in an afghan on the couch, but she can feel them slowly closing in on her. They crackle with heat; they reach out with blazing fingers. She wants to reach back, but can’t. Who knows what she will find or if she will find anything at all.

  She is an old woman, of course, given to moments of forgetfulness and senility. Even she knows she is no longer functioning at her best.

  The muted winter light glows gray through the window and snow falls. Snow always falls. It is eternal winter now, the robust summers of Cecilia’s youth long gone. She misses them and the way the sun once stretched broad and blue overhead, but somehow this change is fitting. As one season ends, another must begin. Life and time and weather and matter are always passing away, changing form. It doesn’t matter that the house is so cold that in some places Cecilia can see her breath. It doesn’t matter that the furnace can no longer keep up. Cecilia is far past worrying. So things are, so they must be.

  Her habits are carefully timed rituals and she needs to get up and start making dinner, but she doesn’t have the energy to lift a hand, much less climb to her feet. She watches the snow fall and thinks, I can wait an hour or so. There’s no hurry. She lets her eyes fall closed. She allows her conscious mind to give way to whatever lies beneath.

  And then there is this: she is a little girl standing in a parking lot, a purple scarf around her neck, her face upturned to the snow-sputtering clouds. The sky is slate gray, and the cold cuts through her jacket and settles deep into her bones. She wants to run, but she stands. Her feet bob up and down. And then the girl turns to Cecilia—the child’s eyes meeting the woman’s—smiles, and reaches out her hand.

  That cold. This cold. That girl. This woman. She drifts in and out of consciousness and can no longer differentiate between the two.

  Cecilia’s daughter, Diane, comes to get her early in the morning. Diane moves through the house, preparing coffee and a couple of eggs for breakfast, dragging a sweater and coat and thermal underwear from Cecilia’s closets. Diane is thick bodied with strong hands and a very determined way of going about things. Growing up, Cecilia never would have imagined that she’d give birth to a daughter like this, but then again Diane has had to adjust to a very different set of circumstances: endless winters, endless cold, an endless life.

  “We need to update your furnace,” she tells Cecilia. “There’s no reason for you to be living like this.”

  “It’s nothing to worry about. I get by.” She pauses for a moment to run her hand across the sweater Diane has taken from the closet. It is still soft and pleasing, despite its age. Her husband gave it to her for her forty-fifth birthday, and it’s still one of her favorites.

  They simply don’t make sweaters like this anymore.

  “Here, this will help you warm up.” Diane shoves a cup of coffee into Cecilia’s hand. She doesn’t make eye contact. “We need to get going or we’ll be late.”

  Diane drives slowly, maneuvering the truck over patches of ice and snow. In some places, it seems like the road hasn’t been plowed at all, and Cecilia leans against the window to get a better look. Plow drivers are running out of places to put the snow, and they pass fields where piles of snow stretch higher than the truck. Trees lean beneath the weight of accumulated snow, and single-story homes are mostly buried with cleared sidewalks indicating their existence, leading up to their carefully excavated doors.

  “The trees are going to die,” Cecilia observes.

  “Maybe, or else the hardy ones will survive.” Diane keeps her eyes focused on the road.

  Cecilia’s not sure what survival is worth in this world where leaves are unwelcome, but she doesn’t say anything else. It is snowing again, and she tells herself that Diane needs to concentrate even though it seems Diane can do most things with her eyes closed. She herself would not want to drive in this weather, which is mostly why she keeps to herself, knitting and cooking at home, looking through old photographs, living off the contents of the pantry.

  She turns her attention to Diane. “How’s Jackie?”

  “She’s fine. She got all As and Bs on her last report card, which we’re happy about.” Diane pauses for a moment. “She always asks about you.”

  “She could call me.”

  Diane says nothing. Apparently, the idea of a phone conversation doesn’t warrant further discussion.

  At the doctor’s office, Cecilia is immediately whisked into the examination room. Not many people need physicians anymore, and she is the only patient. She sits for a moment on the table, and there is that warmth again, burning at the edges of her. She swings her feet, tries to focus on thoughts of her daughter in the waiting room, her granddaughter away at school, but it is hard to concentrate. Snow tumbles to the floor, and she doesn’t immediately realize it’s only her imagination.

  The doctor is young in appea
rance, although that doesn’t mean anything anymore, and he pokes and prods, takes some blood. He has been schooled in a kind bedside manner, as all the doctors have, but that must have been his weakest class because she catches him giving her strange glances out the corner of her eye. Old women are rare. Her visit is a unique opportunity for him.

  An hour later—everything is so fast now, she thinks—the results are in and the doctor sits down across from her. “I have good news and bad news,” he says.

  Cecilia nods. Good news and bad news have gone hand in hand for as long as she can remember.

  “The bad news is you have bone cancer,” he continues. “The good news is it’s very treatable. We can put you on a regimen today.”

  Cecilia breathes in slowly, breathes out. Sometimes this world she now inhabits is like a dream: always iced and snowy, the cancers that once killed now curable, old age a strange circus act. She doesn’t know what to expect from one moment to the next. She doesn’t know what to feel.

  “Well, I hope that sounds like good news to you,” says the doctor. “And if you wait just a moment I can show you how to do the first injection.”

  The wind seeps through the walls. It curls around her, and she smells snow, that crisp scent of November. There is cement beneath her feet. She is hopping through Oklahoma, and there is a football game in the distance. Maniac Magee, she thinks. Maniac, Maniac, Maniac Magee.

  There are moments to stand and moments to run.

  The snow sputters down on her. It floats around invisibly in this frigid office.

  Once inside the school, she will run cold water over her fingers, slowly warming it so as not to shock her skin. She will sit on the reading carpet as the teacher takes a seat on the beanbag. He will read the story of Maniac Magee, and she will stare out the window at the clouds, imagining all the places she could run to.

  She is distantly aware of a vibration. Then. Now. Here. There. It is in the air, wrapped in the embroidery of space and matter and time, but it is also within her. It is the beating of her heart, the mystery of DNA curving around and around, dictating a single destiny. People can preserve life, but they can never define it. To prolong life is to perhaps never know its source.

  “What do you say?” the doctor asks. “Are you ready to get started?”

  She stares at him. How could he ever feel what she has?

  “I don’t know,” she says. “I’ll have to think about it.”

  His kind attitude diminishes slightly. “These injections will save your life.”

  “I know.”

  He is quiet a moment. “You understand that there is protocol involved in declining a treatment?”

  She nods. In this world there is always protocol, there are always permissions to get, hoops to jump through. People can never just be. “Let’s get started,” she says. “My daughter is waiting outside.”

  Again, there is this collapsing: a rush of air so cold it burns, a child’s voice whispering of Magellan’s fated journey around the world and its sad juxtaposition of discovery and death, the unsettling flip of déjà vu as if she has lived this moment again and again and again. Cecilia presses her face against the frosted bus window and breathes out warmth and memory, a past standing both behind and ahead of her, waiting, waiting to meet her.

  The other passengers know enough to draw toward the center of the bus for warmth. They stare straight ahead, wrapped in heavy coats and scarves and hats. A few of them glance toward her, this strange woman who acts as if she’s never ridden on a bus before, and it’s true. It’s been years since Cecilia has boarded a bus and visited the world beyond her comfortable house. She can’t see much now. Blurred shapes speed past the window, but still she strains to watch. Reality has always possessed an otherworldly quality for her, as if what she sees is just a thin disguise for a system much more complex, but it’s just a feeling. No one gives feelings much thought anymore. Emotion has been reduced to chemicals, hormones, random electrical surges.

  She listens to the bus driver announce each stop, the names forming a map that is both distant and familiar to her. When her stop is called, she rises unsteadily to her feet and carries her heavy purse to the front of the bus. The passengers’ eyes are on her; she can feel them, but she is careful to stay focused on each slippery step, the salt-splashed tops of her boots.

  Outside, the city is a sad semblance of what it once was. Cecilia can remember the days when it was just a small, rural town with a single blinking yellow light at its one intersection, but the population gradually grew as people flocked from up north in an attempt to escape the increasingly brutal winters and people began living longer, extending their lives first with stem cell therapy, then with DNA resequencing. There was the boom time when the buildings stretched fine and stately into the sky and the trees bloomed and restaurants and stores lined the main street, but now overpopulation and cold and scarcity have taken their toll. Still, people hold on, especially since the situation is worse in the slightly more temperate regions further south where the majority of the displaced settled. Poverty and starvation. People huddled together on the streets without enough warm clothes to go around.

  Cecilia makes her way down the sidewalk, which is slushy from so many footsteps. “You could have gone anywhere,” Diane often tells her as if it is her fault they didn’t settle in a better location before the climate shifted. “Yet you just had to stay put.”

  Diane’s right. As a girl, she loved to hop across the map of the United States painted on the school parking lot, her feet taking her from Massachusetts to Oregon and back again, but as an adult she realized none of those faraway places held magic for her. Excitement, she found, was always right in front of her.

  Or maybe it was lack of imagination that kept her in the snow. Maybe it was fear. It’s so easy to second-guess your motives when you’re looking over the span of decades.

  She finally locates the building she’s looking for, 311 Main, and stops outside on the sidewalk. The siding is dark brown and as drab as all the other buildings on the street. The windows are covered with the customary black thermal curtains to hold in as much heat as possible. The therapist’s office is on the third floor, and she feels tired at the thought of all those steps. The office itself is sure to be cold. A chill in the air. Wind gusting through the cracks in the walls.

  Her whole body aches, from cold, from malfunctioning cells. Inside, the therapist is waiting to tell her that life is always worth living even when it’s dreary, perhaps especially when it’s dreary. You never know what the future will hold. The sun could come out any day.

  He’ll remind her that it’s not too late to begin the resequencing. She could feel years younger in a few months.

  She continues walking. The cold and long stares from the other pedestrians are dizzying, and she focuses on the movement of her own feet, the sound of her own voice in her head: Maniac, Maniac, Maniac Magee. What was he running from? She doesn’t remember. Someone laughs in the distance. A little girl. A little girl spinning in sputtering snow.

  The wind slips through the thin parts of her coat, the sweater below, the undershirt she wears. It is a cold like she has never known before, and somehow that is fitting. She doesn’t know exactly where she’s walking, although she feels like the direction is faintly familiar. A left at the intersection. Wait for traffic to clear. She is gray hair and fine lines and a slow, crouching walk. She isn’t even completely off the road before cars tear past her, their passengers leaning close to the windows to get a better look.

  The pressure of each step is hard on her knees. Her purse feels like it weighs a ton. Slushy snow splashes onto her pants, and her breath comes hard and ragged.

  When she reaches the elementary school parking lot, she has to lean against a parked car to rest. Briefly, she wonders what she looks like: an old woman dressed in a mismatched assortment of old clothes, holding on to a car for dear life. Everything here feels old and mismatched. Many of the cars are actually collages of other cars, p
arts taken here and there, wherever they can be found. People will drive them for as long as they run.

  The elementary school isn’t much better. The bricks seem to be crumbling in places, and again the windows are concealed with black thermal curtains. She imagines the kids hunkered at their desks, bathed in dim light, scarves wrapped tightly around their necks, practicing addition and subtraction, phonics and spelling. They aren’t allowed outside even for recess, partly because the playground equipment is buried in snow and partly because the frigid temperatures are too dangerous.

  Jackie is somewhere in there. Jackie, who always wants to hear about Cecilia’s childhood. Jackie, who doesn’t stare at her aging face. Cecilia could go inside and visit with her. Who would deny a grandmother time with her granddaughter? They could slip off to the cafeteria or to a quiet table in the library and just talk together. Jackie would tell her about her friends and their games or about the books she is reading or about the questions she asks herself. Really it doesn’t matter what Jackie talks about, Cecilia would listen, her granddaughter’s words fascinating, opening up other worlds.

  Jackie is studying, though, and Cecilia doesn’t want to interrupt her. She can wait until the end of the school day. It isn’t that far away. She pushes off the car and hobbles to the end of the parking lot. She can’t quite feel her legs anymore, or most of the rest of her body, but the sensation doesn’t bother her. This end of the parking lot is unused and the snow is deep and drifting, but she pulls herself up as far as she can go, dropping her purse somewhere along the way to better keep her balance. At the top of the snowdrift, she pictures the pavement beneath and the map that is probably long gone by now. Standing in Texas. Hopscotching to Wisconsin. Splashing across the Great Lakes.

  And that sky. Gray purple with the setting sun and the coming winter. Those billowy clouds racing across her line of vision. She strains to see past the clouds, to understand what comes next. Beside her a little girl hops, her purple scarf lifting in the wind. Maniac, Maniac, Maniac Magee. The girl turns and shields her eyes. Some days are like doors. Time collapses, expands. Potential pulses in her chest. Heat flickers at the edge of her skin, the edge of her eyes. The little girl reaches out her hand and patiently waits.