Joplin's Ghost

by Tananarive Due

  “I don’t like having it here,” Carlos said, his voice low.

  “Hey, I don’t like it either.” Gloria sighed. “But what can I say? My instincts have been wrong about this whole thing since day one, so I want to trust the psychic, you know? She said to bring it here. She wouldn’t leave unless I promised.”

  Phoenix’s room had exhausted the team of psychics. Johnita Poston and Heather had left for much-needed rest right before the movers called. Even Finn was gone, since his cold had worsened and he’d decided to get a hotel room for the night. As always, his camera remained behind, watchful. When Carlos realized the piano would be arriving tonight after all, he’d called every number he had for Heather, Finn and Johnita Poston, but he got voice mail everywhere.

  He wasn’t going to reach them, he knew. That, apparently, already had been decided.

  Everyone else was gone tonight, too. Leah, Serena and Gloria’s parents had caught an afternoon flight for Atlanta for Marcus Smalls’s funeral tomorrow, waiting as long as they dared before leaving in case Phoenix’s condition changed.

  “You can still try to fly out tonight, Gloria,” Carlos said, although the last thing he wanted was to be alone with Phoenix and the piano.

  Gloria murmured, nodding. “Yeah, I just got a message from my travel agent, and she said she can get me on a flight from Newark at ten. Last-second opening.” While Gloria talked to him, her eyes never left the piano. “I’d just feel bad leaving you.”

  And believe me, I’d feel bad getting left. “Go on with your family, kiddo. Phoenix would want you with her mother and Serena. Somebody needs to help them manage, especially if there’s press. Tabloids will be there looking for Phoenix and G-Ronn. Bet on it.”

  Gloria nodded, half-shrugging. Her lips thinned. “I know the shooting happened, and I know Sarge died, but…it’s not real yet. The background music was so loud, we couldn’t tell what was going on from the audience. A guy behind me said he heard gunshots, but I was like, ‘Yeah, right.’ The next thing we know, cops are everywhere. Bam, just like that. That’s why Phoenix won’t wake up, Carlos. She doesn’t want to see Sarge put in the ground, so it’ll never be real.”

  “That’s part of it,” Carlos said, but now that the Rosenkranz was here, he was certain the piano was responsible for Phoenix’s condition, somehow. That knowledge filled him with dread, but there was hope nestled there, too.

  “I can imagine the stories people will tell at the funeral,” Gloria said. “Everybody has a Sarge story. You don’t know the half of it. But he loved Phee more than life, he kept me in line when nobody else could, and I’m so mad about how he died, I feel like I need to kill somebody. You ever felt like that, Carlos?” Her voice was husky.

  Carlos shook his head. He’d lost his grandparents to old age, a twenty-year-old roommate at Stanford to an unexplained cardiac arrest and three musician friends to AIDS, but he had never felt angry about death. Baffled sometimes. Sad, always. But never angry.

  Gloria’s eyes burned with fury as she gazed at the piano, as if she blamed it for Sarge’s murder. “I hope you never do. I hope you never lose somebody to something as sick as this, because nothing will make this go away. No wonder Phee is so fucked up.” Suddenly, Gloria was crying with clumsy, silent sobs, her face red. Gloria did not cry often. He could see that.

  Carlos held her, but he didn’t urge her not to cry. He would never understand why people told mourners to stop crying when crying was exactly what they needed. “She’ll be back,” Carlos whispered, but their mantra sounded like an empty phrase, an outright lie like the ones people always told when death left them with nothing else to say.

  “What’s that word in Spanish you always say to me? Be careful?” Gloria said, sniffling.

  “Cuidado.”

  “That’s the one. Extra careful, Carlos. I’d keep my eye on this piano, if I were you.”

  Gloria sounded just like Phoenix then, the way sisters mirrored each other’s cadences. It made him miss Phoenix more. “I will. Go catch your plane.”

  Carlos escorted Gloria out of the room, standing halfway through Phoenix’s doorway while he watched her walk to the elevator. Carlos realized the hallway was empty. Where were the bodyguards? The guards switched off at night, but there was usually someone on watch. He didn’t remember seeing the bodyguards when the movers finally arrived. He didn’t see any staff, either. There were only closed doors on either side of the dignified hallway. Carlos fought off the idea that if he went from door to door, he would discover that no one was here except him and Phoenix. That idea cut too close to a reality he didn’t want to know about.

  When the elevator door hissed closed, Gloria was gone, too.

  As soon as he was back inside Phoenix’s room, Carlos’s eyes went to the Rosenkranz, which was still where he’d left it, a relief. But he stared longer than he’d planned, because something was wrong already. The piano hadn’t moved an inch from the wall, but…

  Something was different, as soon as he’d turned his back. What?

  Then, seeing the discolored piano keys, he knew: The piano’s key cover was raised! The piano’s stained, dirty keys were bared at him like teeth.

  Carlos’s cross fell to the carpeted floor without a sound. “Phee?” Carlos called, his heart prepared for either terror or jubilance. Could Phoenix be awake? Had she found it already?

  Holding his breath, Carlos ran around the corner to the bedroom. There, Phoenix was still in bed where he’d last seen her, fully reclined. With a sheet pulled up to her chin, she looked like she could be sleeping. Except for those wide-open eyes.

  “Shit,” Carlos whispered. He turned back to the piano, a quick gotcha pivot. The key cover was still open, the horrible keys still visible.

  Carlos tried to remember if he or Gloria had opened the key cover. Every time he concluded that neither of them had touched the piano—why would they?—his mind faltered. Had the cover always been open, then? Memory was tricky. An open key cover wasn’t like Burnside’s claims that the piano hopped from building to building, but the idea of the piano moving behind his back made Carlos’s heart barrel. This is going to be a long night if you’re already having a meltdown, Carlito, he thought.

  The red recording light atop Finn’s video camera near the door gave Carlos an inspiration. Still watching the piano from the corner of his eye, Carlos went to the video camera and checked the viewfinder. He saw a tiny black-and-white image of the Egyptian sofa, the love seat, the suite’s window, shades pulled closed—and the piano, key cover up.

  Carlos rewound, his heart drilling his breastbone, and he stopped when he saw himself hugging Gloria beside the piano. This time, he couldn’t see the cover because they were blocking the camera’s view. Carlos fumbled for the headphones dangling from the camera so he could hear the sound. “…I’d keep my eye on this piano if I were you,” Gloria’s voice said.

  “I will.” Carlos repeated the words in unison with his videotaped image.

  He and Gloria loomed huge as they walked toward the camera, and suddenly the room was empty. Finally, he could see it: The piano cover was down, just as he’d remembered. The piano keys were hidden from sight. Carlos paused the tape, startled, and looked up at the Rosenkranz a few yards across the room. The cover was still up.

  “Finn’s got you on tape, you sonofabitch,” Carlos whispered, pressing his eye back to the rubber viewfinder to watch the tape play. After days of psychic phenomena that yielded maddeningly little videotaped evidence, he felt starved for something indisputable. Preserved.

  So far, nothing. An empty room, a closed piano. The image remained fixed. Carlos waited, his heart pounding. This couldn’t be right! He was only in the doorway for a few seconds, and he’d come right back. Watching the tape, he counted off: Fifteen…sixteen…seventeen…eighteen… He felt agitated as he watched, his feet squirming in his shoes. Twenty-nine…thirty…thirty-one…

  Was it impossible to capture supernatural activity on tape? If so, no wonder—


  Motion sprang from the tape as the piano’s cover flew up. It opened with a BAM so loud in the headphones that Carlos cried out, tugging them off. His ears rang.

  Mierda. Carlos sucked in his next breath, forcing his lungs open again. He had been standing right in the doorway when the cover flew up, and he couldn’t have missed that racket. How could something have happened on the tape that hadn’t happened in life?

  Carlos gazed at the Rosenkranz again, and its keys leered at him. The optical illusion refused to go away when he blinked. The piano was grinning.

  “J-Jesus help me,” Carlos whispered, unaware he had made a sound. Carlos’s eyes swept the carpet in search of the cross he’d dropped. When he didn’t see it at first, he fell to all fours.

  A noise came from deep inside the piano, like a scurrying mole, gone as soon as Carlos noticed it. Still, the unmistakable sound of long, scrabbling nails resonated across his clammy skin. Instinct made his frame tighten, ready to spring for the door. But he didn’t. He kept his eyes on the floor and looked for his cross, sure it must be close.

  It was. The cross was at his feet, an inch from his soles. Any closer and you’d trip over it, boy, Nana would say. Hardly blinking, his eyes trained on the piano, Carlos snatched up the small, simple gold cross and tightened his palm around it. He wished the cross had been blessed by a holy man. He aimed his cross at the piano, a shield.

  “What do you want?” Carlos said to the Rosenkranz. “Let Phoenix go.” The seven bravest words of his life. His mouth was so dry it hurt.

  The piano clicked from somewhere low, near the pedals. The sound was barely audible, but it made Carlos scoot backward. “Shit…motherfu…” he whispered, before his breath left him.

  Carlos Harris prided himself on knowing the rules for situations across cultures, but he had exhausted his knowledge of diplomacy with the Unseen. Seeing gentle, deceased Abuela’s dance in his aunt’s living room had not prepared him for this piano. Breathing in heaves, Carlos fought for power over his thoughts to decide what to do. Should he try to call the psychics again? Press the emergency buzzer and bring a doctor to Phoenix’s room?

  Once we have the piano, Phoenix will show us what to do, the Queen Psychic had said.

  He would go to Phoenix, he decided. Phoenix had no use for psychics or doctors now, but she might have a use for him.

  In the bedroom, Carlos said a prayer of thanks when he saw that Phoenix was still breathing and didn’t look worse even if she didn’t look better. He didn’t see any new flies, just the old ones that hadn’t escaped the flypaper.

  But he didn’t feel thankful long. Standing closer to Phoenix, Carlos realized that her lips were as purple as her bruised jaw. When he touched her hand, her thin fingers and palm were cool. Too cool. He pressed his hand across her forehead, and her skin felt bloodless. Only then did Carlos notice that a cold spot had settled over Phoenix’s bed, precisely where she lay and nowhere else. This one spot was a meat locker.

  Phoenix was fading before his eyes.

  “Phoenix?” Carlos said, shaking her. She didn’t answer, not even a bob of her lips.

  Carlos jabbed the red button above the bed marked CALL, because every instinct in him clamored that Phoenix was dying, and right now. Death was close.

  No buzzer sounded, and no red light went on to comfort him that help was on the way.

  Carlos picked up the telephone at Phoenix’s bedside, which was so cold that he felt the warm pads of his fingertips cleaving to it. He didn’t hear a sound, no matter which buttons he pushed on the keypad. He knew his cell phone would be useless before he pulled it from his back pocket, but he checked anyway: Searching for signal, it said.

  “Fuck.” Carlos rubbed Phoenix’s hand, then her frigid cheeks. It had been a mistake to bring the piano here! Something had happened. Something was happening. “Oh, Dios. Don’t do this, Phee. Come back. I know you can come back.”

  Carlos disentangled Phoenix from her IV tube, ignoring the droplets of blood that spattered her pale arm when he pulled the needle from her skin. Then, he bundled her into his arms, surprised that she weighed so little, almost a ghost already. The lyrics to Nana’s favorite gospel song beat through his veins with his rushing blood: I was standing by the bedside of a neighbor / Who was just about to cross the swelling tide, / And I asked him if he would do me a favor; / Kindly take this message to the other side.

  He scrambled around the corner and through Phoenix’s room, every fiber in him leading him toward her door. Yet, Carlos stopped himself midway across the room, glancing over his shoulder because he felt someone watching him from behind.

  The Rosenkranz, of course. The piano was the first thing he saw when he turned his head.

  The piano’s cover was down again, but Carlos wasn’t interested in the cover anymore. He was so steeped in fear that he no longer felt it, a calm he welcomed as he held the woman he loved and tried to decide how best to save her. Carlos closed his eyes. What now?

  Phoenix had to be near the piano, or she would never be free. Punto. That was what the psychic had said, in her own way, and that was what he had known when he asked Burnside if the movers could bring it to Phoenix right away. He could not take Phoenix away from the piano. Maybe a psychic’s heart was buried in him, but Carlos knew that one thing like nothing else.

  As Carlos’s adrenaline burned off, he realized his arms were tired from carrying her. She was heavier than he thought. Two steps took him to the Egyptian-style sofa, and he rested her gently there, easing himself onto the space beside her. He touched her cheek again, and the lifelessness of her skin brought tears to his eyes.

  “Phee, listen to me. Come back,” he said, leaning closer to her. He kissed her forehead, her nose, then her lips, very lightly. “Stay with me, sweetheart. Stay.”

  Carlos’s forehead brushed Phoenix’s lips as he nuzzled her, and he froze. Her lips already seemed warmer than they had been when he kissed her the moment before. Startled, he tested her lips with his index finger.

  Yes. There was warmth. Phoenix’s soft bottom lip was hoarding warmth at its core, and Carlos felt the warmth strengthen when he nudged his finger against her lip. There was life in his touch. “Phee?” he said. “I know you’re there. Come back.”

  Carlos kissed her lips again, pressing harder now, with a mission. The warm core of her bottom lip answered him, flaring. When he nibbled her top lip, he felt heat flush that one, too.

  Suddenly, Phoenix’s staring eyes seemed intent on him alone. Carlos beseeched her with his own eyes: Come back, Phee. I’ll help you through. You know I’m not going to leave you.

  Phoenix’s newly dampened lips pulled apart, slowly. Willfully.

  “Phee?” Carlos said. “Talk to me. I’ll hear you, hon.”

  “Tuhh…” she whispered, a cool draft from her lungs.

  He lowered his ear until her lips brushed his skin. “What, hon? Please tell me, linda.”

  Then, he did hear, two words meant only for him.

  “Touch me,” Phoenix said.

  Scott was dying.

  Dying was much worse than its outcome, but how could she expect him to know that? No one should have to die in a madhouse, she thought, even if there were ways in which a madhouse was the perfect place to watch the world unravel before your eyes.

  Manhattan State Hospital would be recited by biographers forever as the place where Scott Joplin drew his last breath. Considering that, she thought the hospital ought to be better up to the task. The Graphophone in the dayroom had no needle, the first of many flaws. The young man crying on the floor looked filthy, as if he hadn’t been washed in days, and his gown smelled of urine. The sanitarium attendant was patronizing, which annoyed her because she could remember a time to come when Uncle was no longer an acceptable name for a man not related to you.

  But to her, the worst injustice was that Scott was suffering so close to spring, knowing it was too early for one last sight of the peonies, irises and roses in bloom. This hospital on Ward
’s Island had lovely grounds—right along the East River, where excursion boats would be passing soon—but Scott had never been well enough to enjoy the view.

  In the end, Scott caught her in a moment of confusion and pity. He was a scarecrow sitting at his Rosenkranz in an asylum, and she felt sorry for him. She loved him, which was reason enough. Her heart was multitudes. She had loved his soul before, and she would when they met again. She loved him now as much as she would when he took a new name, a future face. They belonged.

  She could not resist him in the moment he needed her most. She never could.

  As soon as her image appeared, his eyes clawed for her. He had prayed to see her.

  “F-Freddie…” Scott begged from his chair, struggling to speak as he looked up at her, his longing not yet dead in his eyes even if his body was frail. “Take me.”

  She was glad Lottie had sent the piano. The piano would have come to him whether Lottie sent it or not, but the gesture meant more this way. It didn’t matter that Scott couldn’t play; Lottie wanted to know something was there to remind Scott of what his life had looked like.

  She shimmered for him, showing him a glimpse of his light to come, but she could not escort him. Leaping was always done alone. That was the way of it. The alone part was the reason no one wanted to go.

  She wished he could use her memories to help him know what the Leap was, afterward. He would laugh at himself. Most people knew to laugh, at the very end, even if they had never believed there was laughter where they were going, but Scott was too mad at life to let go an inch of it. He should have left weeks ago.

  The beautiful piano had brought him the joy Lottie intended, but it aroused his anger, too. He might live two or three weeks on his new anger. His dying would be all the longer.

  “Do you want me to help you play?” she said.

  She spoke the words of her own accord. She knew she shouldn’t, but she did. If he played, he would be laughing sooner, and she wanted to see her beloved laugh. That was all.