Six Months, Three Days, Five Others

by Charlie Jane Anders

  The ghosts at the guest wedding, I mean guests at the ghost wedding, are random dead people plus some that I knew when they lived, like my mom’s parents and even my great–grandma Julia and my great aunt Danielle, and that chain–smoking piano–playing raconteur my parents used to have over when I was little, whose name was Ed or Fred. They see me looking at them and raise their glasses to me, and I salute back. What do you call the congregation at a ghost wedding? Deadly beloved.

  I’ve spun halfway across the room from where I drank the champagne. I look back at the spot where I collapsed, and I’m still there, on the ground. Except it’s not me, it’s my ghost. She has shorter hair and an older face, and she’s wearing a white dress instead of a blue dress. My ghost is talking to Raj, and he can actually hear her, and whatever she is saying, he is nodding very seriously. I can’t hear what she’s telling him, and I can only see it through the end of a long hazy reverse telescope. Drunk tunnel vision. I want to get closer to them, but no matter how I stumble and twist my angle and sweep my arms for balance, I can’t get going in the right direction.

  As my ghost talks to Raj, he nods and nods and oh shit now he is crying and still nodding, and I have never yet made him cry in all the months we have dated. He’s never given me the look he’s giving my ghost. What the fuck is she telling him? Now at last I vomit but it comes out from my eyes instead of my mouth. The ghosts around me are all gossiping too loud for me to hear a damned thing. Raj’s glasses dark frames big brown eyes—which, serious Raj looks like a totally different person, older and more physically present. I try to get Raj’s attention by shouting and flailing but he’s only looking at ghost me.

  The gossiping of the ghosts around me gets louder and more shrill, and it’s all: Look at her in her shiny dress and her pristine flesh and her red lips, she thinks she’s all that just because she’s alive, look at that blue–haired man over there, he probably thinks he invented breathing. The ghosts are getting louder and crankier, and I see them more clearly while Raj and my mother and Cassie are like chalk outlines. Zydeco band salutes me and starts a dirge and I am so blitzed that walking is dancing is falling. I gotta sober up right now or I am lost in the land of the dead forever and maybe my ghost takes my place.

  The doorway to the Veterans Hall is open and the caterers are coming in through a ribbon of darkness, bearing weird canapes made of pure decay and fake crab, plus oblivion–in–a–blanket. They keep shoving the trays in my face and trying to make me take a bite, as the ghosts grow more and more vivid and everything else fades. The ghosts urge me: take one, just try it, don’t be ungrateful, don’t you know what this wedding cost? You think you’re too good to eat with us.

  I look over at Raj, still talking to my ghost, and I feel a pure sour anger—why can’t he tell that’s not me? This proves he never really cared!—and I’m so pissed that I almost want to open my mouth and let the other ghosts push pieces of the dead wedding feast into my throat. Why the fuck not? And then I stop, and see Raj again, his face just a wall of tears. Whatever is going on with him and my ghost, from his perspective, he sees that I’m hurting and he is desperate to make it right. I look at Raj’s face and I see love, like actual honest–to–god, walk–naked–on–broken–glass love, and my mom is there too, weeping over the ghost and squeezing the ghost’s bony hand.

  And I feel sorry for my ghost, because she doesn’t know how to cope with the two of them caring about her that much. She looks flustered and scared. I see my poor ghost, looking from Raj to my mom and back again, like she’s trapped with their love. I barely notice the spectres from the ghost wedding now, I’m so fixated on the two of them and my ill–equipped ghost. I am overcome by a mixture of pity and gratitude, two emotions I did not know could be mixed up. The feelings are too big to wrap my mind around, the longer I look at the three of them, and I feel like I am going to fly apart in a million pieces. Soul and mind, intermixing like matter and anti–matter. Unthinkable, terrible, amazing.

  And then, I am vomiting ghost champagne from my eyes, in huge salty gouts.

  I look up. Raj and my mother are looking down at me and I am laying on the floor. I laugh but it becomes a cough. Oh shit, I say, I’m back. I think I ate drank something that didn’t agree. My mom says an ambulance is coming, and I tell her that I’m sorry I jacked up her special day, but I don’t think anything could really ruin what she and Cassie have going. Because you guys are awesome and I’m proud of you, I say. My mom cries harder than ever, on Cassie’s shoulder, and Raj is supporting my head. I tell Raj that I love him—words I have never spoken—and I’m glad he’s Team Me. He says he loves me, but I get the impression he already told my ghost that.

  I don’t see my ghost anywhere. She doesn’t show up at the hospital at all, where they find a tiny brain infarct thingy. Nor do I see her hanging around, after they finally send my ass home.

  Raj looks at me funny when I try to ask him what my ghost said to him. Not that I phrase it like that—I just demand to know what I said after I collapsed at the wedding. He’s kind of embarrassed, like maybe it’s bad form to remind me of my drunken brain–attack rambling.

  But I beg and cajole and emotionally blackmail, and he finally says: You told me you felt cursed, and that you blamed yourself, and that you were going to keep hating yourself more and more until you died, and then it would be too late to try and make peace with your past, because your past wouldn’t let you in. Honestly, it didn’t make a lot of sense to me, and the gist of it is that you need to try a different shrink, and maybe no more regression therapy or whatever. But I’m just a layperson, right?

  I agree that regression therapy sucks and that Raj is indeed a person that I want to lay. I climb on top of him, even though he protests that my head is still like a Faberge egg, and I grind into him while telling him that if he’s going to be a kept man, he’d better put out the goods. Dry humping, we are alone together for maybe the first time. I laugh between kisses.

  Victimless Crimes

  Teri Lewis was obsessing about her sister’s bad marriage and the president’s latest compromise, so she barely listened to Flo’s improvised song about pandas and dandelions, coming from the stroller in front of her. Maybe if she’d known this would be the last time she’d ever hear her baby sing, she’d have stopped to relish the moment: the sun perched between two clouds, her baby in a pink–dragon onesie and the birds and street noises harmonizing with Flo’s almost–nonsense chanting.

  Teri pushed the stroller into the crosswalk at 18th and Guerrero, and just barely noticed a truck leaping through the intersection, on the memory of a yellow light. She pulled the stroller back towards the curb so fast she missed the ramp. The stroller’s wheels thump–thumped back onto the sidewalk, and it nearly tipped over, thanks to a rickety three–wheeled design. Teri leaned over Flo and make sure her fighter–pilot straps were still secure, and Flo gave Teri a Clara Bow smile.

  Teri heard a whooshing sound, a tidal wave of white noise, and turned to see a bizarre trio descending from a VTOL jet on ropes. They landed on their feet just behind her, right by the organic grocery store’s fruit bins. Teri glanced to see if the traffic would let her cross the street and get away from these lunatics, but they were already advancing towards her. They were looking at her—no, not at her, at the stroller.

  “There she is!” one of them shouted. They rushed over and surrounded the stroller before Teri could maneuver away.

  “Stay away from my baby!” Teri shouted.

  “Stand back, ma’am,” said the big lunkhead with the odd nozzles sticking out of his bald scalp. His arms bulged with unnatural muscles and knotted veins, and he had a huge belt that kept changing color. Teri tried to make a break for it, but the big bald man and the other man, the red pirate, grabbed an arm each and restrained her. She kicked and clawed, but they were both many times stronger than her. She started screaming. A crowd was gathering around the four adults and the baby in front of the organic grocery store, and all the people had thei
r phones out. Teri hoped for a moment that the bystanders were phoning the cops, but then realized they were taking pictures and videos. This incident would make people YouTube famous. There was no point in struggling, and that knowledge just made Teri struggle harder. The third attacker, a girl with her head shaved except for a pink swoosh, squatted down in front of the wide–eyed Florence and put her pacifier in her mouth. The pink–haired girl, who had fishnets and giant black boots, looked through an assortment of high–tech hypodermic needles. “It’s the orange one, right? We don’t want her to remember all of them, just the most recent.”

  “Don’t!” Teri screamed. “She’s never hurt you! Why would you—”

  The girl injected her baby with the orange syringe, which made a kludgey burbling noise as it emptied into Florence.

  “Welcome back, Captain Champion,” said the girl.

  Teri’s baby blinked, confused but not crying. And then her expression changed to a snarl, a look Teri had never seen on Flo’s face. She bit down on her pacifier, as if expecting it to be a cigar, then spat it out.

  “Zora Aster,” Florence said. “What are you doing here? Wait, what am I doing here? And why the hell are you so tall?” Then she glanced at her hands, and her eyes opened wider as something clicked into place. “Oh. I died, right? How long ago?”

  “About six months,” the girl, Zora Aster, said. “Took us a while to find where you’d reincarnated. Seems like a nice neighborhood.”

  “Yeah. Charming.” Florence looked around, still strapped into her stroller. “So what happened to me?”

  “Demonico put a bomb in your Infinity Glider.”

  “I just had that thing detailed. With flames on the sides. And I had all my DVDs in the back. Bah.” The baby spat. “So, I’m touched you guys came and found me. . . but did you have to come and interrupt my happy childhood so soon?” The baby glared up at her mother. “It was happy, right? I remember bits and pieces.”

  Teri recovered from her shock long enough to protest. “Yes! Yes, it was happy! I swear. I’m a good mom. I was just taking you to the park. You like—she liked—Florence, my baby—she likes the park.” Teri started to cry, because it was becoming obvious this wasn’t her baby any more. The two men restraining Teri let her go.

  “I bet. You seem like a good mom. And ooh, I like your shoes. Stylish, but good arch support.” Florence—or Captain Champion—turned back to Zora Aster. “So what was so urgent you couldn’t let me be?”

  “It’s Demonico,” said the big bald guy with the head implants. “He’s traveling back in time and killing all his past lives one by one. He’s convinced that something really awful happened to him in a past life, and if he kills the right previous incarnation before it happens, he’ll be well–adjusted.”

  “Huh.” Captain Champion, the baby, spat again. “Sounds like good therapy to me. And it’s a victimless crime. So what’s the problem?”

  “One of his past lives is George Washington. And he’s killing them as babies, using a rocket launcher.”

  The baby that had been Florence sighed. “Okay fine. I have to do everything myself. I assume you at least brought an exo? Not that this body isn’t lovely and all, but these hands aren’t going to be karate–chopping henchmen any time soon.”

  “Got it right here.” The big man snapped his fingers, and a giant exoskeleton came lunging down to the pavement, landing in a crouch. It looked like a headless metal man, with huge shoulder fins and rocket launchers strapped to both wrists. The boots were big jets. As soon as the exo–suit landed, it swung open to reveal a baby–sized compartment in its torso. The members of the super–group—Teri realized this must be the Action Squad—lifted her baby into the suit and snapped her in.

  Teri’s baby was seven feet tall and built like a metal sumo wrestler, with her head poking out between those huge shoulders. A see–thru reinforced plastic bubble swung over to protect Florence’s head.

  “Flo, baby.” Teri looked into the face that was barely recognizable as her baby’s. “I know you’re still in there somewhere. Please don’t let them do this. You can’t let them. You can stay with me and be my little girl. It’s not too late.”

  “Sorry.” And Florence did look sorrowful. “History’s at stake, ma. Maybe when this is all over, I can come back, and we can talk. I hate to leave you like this.”

  “Don’t! Don’t take my baby!” Teri fell to her knees as the exoskeleton slowly lifted off the ground.

  “Think of it as I’m being emancipated early,” was the last thing Captain Champion said before roaring into the sky, then banking towards that VTOL jet.

  Teri watched them disappear, then pulled herself back upright. She pushed the stroller for two whole blocks before she realized there was no point, then she pushed the lever that immobilized the wheels and left it on the sidewalk in front of the liquor store. Teri thought about a documentary she’d seen, about people who left their children behind in their SUVs, because they forgot the kids were even there. She went into the liquor store and found a jug of bourbon almost the same size and weight as her baby.

  John, her husband, phoned while she was still paying for the bourbon. She picked it up. “It’s not your fault,” he said, which didn’t make Teri feel any better. John had seen the Youtube, which had already started getting picked up by the cable networks.

  “Come home,” she told him.

  Teri hadn’t tasted alcohol since she’d known she was pregnant, and the first swig nearly killed her. She sat on the pavement. The paper bag’s crushed edges rubbed her hand raw.

  John and Teri spent two days asking questions with no good answers. Do you call the cops to report your missing baby, if you actually know where your baby is? Was the superhero thing something that passed down in the same family, and if so, which one of them had marked their daughter for this? Was either of them something weird in a previous life? What were they going to do with Flo’s clothes and toys? Do you hold a funeral for a baby who’s not actually dead? John stopped shaving, and it only took him a couple days for his look to go from “nerdy stand–up comic” to something closer to the Unabomber. He didn’t sleep or bathe. Teri slept for twelve hours, three times as much sleep as she’d gotten in a twenty–four hour period in the past year, and then felt guilty for sleeping when her baby was gone.

  “It’s really not your fault,” John said over and over, until she was sure he was searching for a way to blame her. Teri drank whisky from the bottle until it became an extension of her face and occluded her view of her husband.

  Teri tried to take a week off work, and they told her to take a couple. She tried to do errands like any other day. When she bought toilet paper, she thought to herself, “What am I doing at the drug store? They took my baby. I should be doing something.” When she went to buy groceries, she felt like everybody was watching the star of “Mom Jacked by Action Squad” picking out the freshest rutabagas for her now–childless family. Every time Teri turned her head, she saw people look away in a hurry.

  And then Teri saw Florence again. On television. Racing through the clouds to smash her engorged metal fist into the jaw of a giant koala, which toppled over and landed on its back in the middle of the Potomac. Florence still wore her exoskeleton, her red little face barely visible in its sternum, and she’d added a garish purple cape. Florence and the pink–haired girl—Zora Aster—high–fived each other.

  Teri looked at pictures of Captain Champion from before she’d died, trying to see a resemblance to her baby. Captain Champion had been tall and fit (of course) with long wheat–brown hair and lips that looked pouty when they weren’t wrapped around that trademark cigar. She’d been imposing and butch, but with firm, half–exposed breasts and touches of femininity, like a big belt and pointy boots.

  “Mom Jacked by Action Squad” had a million views, then two. People kept calling Teri to come and tell her story on cable TV or late–night network TV. A few times, someone jumped out of a car and took Teri’s photo on the street, then
drove away. And a couple of stylishly dressed young people came up to Teri when she was buying painkillers or jugs of whisky to ask her if she wanted to do an interview.

  “Maybe we should do it,” John said. “I mean, it’s terrible what happened, but our little girl is also making a difference. She saved the President! From that army of Teddy Roosevelts. Single–handed. I feel good about that. I wish I could tell her I was proud. She belongs to everybody now, but she’s still our girl.”

  “That wasn’t our little girl,” Teri said. “That was the thing that’s taken over her body. She already died for them once, but they wouldn’t let it be enough.”

  Teri felt ashamed, like she’d gone out of the house naked, like her bereftness was an offensive lifestyle she’d chosen. And then she remembered that none of this was her choice, and the anger came back. Teri couldn’t be around people without wanting to apologize and/or scream at them, possibly both in rapid succession.