by Lily Markova
“Yeah, you too. I’ll call you. Bye.”
For another minute, I stand with the receiver still pressed to my ear, listening silently to the short beeps of the disconnect, then hang up, and turn around. Chase is constructing some sort of breakfast on the coffee table. This town must hold an annual competition in eavesdropping on private conversations, otherwise I don’t get why its residents are so eager to practice this skill.
He casts a quick, wary glance at me. “Morning. Sleep well? Hey, you know what would be at the top of the list of dead people rules, if there was such a list? If you’re dead, you don’t phone your folks to ask how their day was, you don’t tell them you miss them, and definitely, under no circumstances do you promise them you’ll come back soon! Not trying to be judgy here, but it’s kind of. . .ugh. . . Look, I’ve actually got goose bumps on my arms!”
“What on earth are you on about? I’m not dead. If that’s your discreet way of implying I look rather worn out, well, I’ve had a rough week and—”
Chase snorts. “Pfft. Girls. I’m not implying—I’m making an official statement: You’re dead, or you wouldn’t have gotten here in the first place. Just eat a cookie and get a hobby. I’m not a therapist, so if you’ve got some denial defense reaction or whatever, you should find the one who called you here and whine at them. Hmm, I think I might have got the thermoses mixed up again. So tell me, how do you feel about cognac in the mornings?”
Dead. This word arouses in my mind a cascade of images from yesterday.
“Tom!”
“Remembered something?”
“Yesterday, I met someone named Tom,” I say, and a chill runs through me. “I’m pretty sure I saw his photograph in Levengleds, in—in the cemetery.”
“Ugh, I hate cemeteries.” Chase gives a small shudder, stirring the cognac in his cup with a teaspoon, out of sheer habit apparently, oblivious to what he’s doing. “Somebody pickpocketed me once in a cemetery.”
“Do you believe in ghosts?” I wince at the stupidity of my own question. All of a sudden, I feel as if a cool, clammy breeze had crept into the Shelter’s lobby.
“You’re kidding, right?” answers Chase, looking at me earnestly. “Who do you think Dude is? A fairy godmother?”
I take a seat at the table, ponder that for a moment, and hazard a guess. “Dude is a by-product of my stress, a figment of my imagination. Or yours. But you are a figment of my imagination, so basically—” So basically, something rusty has just splashed into my cup.
“I think what the figment of your imagination is trying to say, in his usual unrefined way, is that he heartily disagrees with such a state of affairs. I’ll make you another coffee. And when I say ‘coffee,’ I mean—”
“No, he didn’t look a thing like Dude, that Tom. He was visible, for starters. Real. Like you, like me. No, I’m getting worked up over nothing, right? They were simply two very similar-looking people. Same names. So what? Nothing supernatural. Right?” While I try to convince myself of this, Chase fiddles with his backpack.
“Or,” he says, “that Tom really is a ghost who has lots of friends here. Or there.”
“I don’t—”
“Oh, I shouldn’t be the one explaining it all to you. You’d better ask whoever called you here. I’m not sure I can be tactful enough. . . . Oh, all right, then. Okay, see, when you’re dead, you have a problem.”
“Do you now?”—Can’t help it.
Chase flops down in the armchair opposite me, pushes a new cup closer to me, and says, gesturing profusely, “Okay, maybe a couple of problems. When you die, you don’t have a physical anchor anymore, a substantial, heavy body to keep you within its boundaries. You’re just its projection, weightless and unstable. And you will only continue to exist as long as you’re remembered. As long as you’re mourned, as long as your image is clear and bright in the memories of those who love you. But they will inevitably begin to forget you; forget the sound of your voice, the exact shade of your skin color. . . . Once they forget the way you laughed, you will unlearn to. You will grow quieter and paler. Less and less often will they remember you as something whole, and soon you will be to them nothing more than a sore name. No one will look through your pictures on the anniversary of your death anymore. You will become almost completely invisible. . . .”
I listen as if spellbound to this burring weirdo in yellow-whale pajamas and channel all my strength into making Iver’s image more vibrant, color-saturated in my mind. I wish I could remember the sound of his voice. . . . But I do remember the sound of his music. And the way he smiled. I won’t let him fade away.
“One day, the last living person who knew you will no longer be there, and then you—” Chase snaps his fingers, and I give a start at the unexpectedness of the loud click. “A cookie?” he says with an airy smile as I take a sip of cognac from the coffee cup, dazed. “That was the bad news. The good news is if you die in Levengleds and you’re around fifteen to thirty-five years old, there’s a good chance you’ll nail the audition and claim your prize: some living space in Immortown. Although the word ‘living’ in this context sounds like a slap in the face. It’s extremely simple; in Immortown, if you want the show to go on, you just need to hang out with your late buddies a lot. Even one would be enough, though. Remember to remember each other in detail, and you will preserve both of your so-called lives indefinitely.”
“And here I thought I was the sanity-free one,” I mutter. “I’m glad I met you. If everything you just said is true, why isn’t your buddy as rosy-cheeked as you? And what’s with the age qualification? Fifteen to thirty-five? Like student afterlife privileges?”
“Dude was already like this when I first met him. I don’t know who he used to be, what he looked like, or what his name was.” Chase’s expression darkens. “That was three years ago. I guess if it weren’t for me, Dude wouldn’t be able to—to throw knives at people!”
Chase tugs at the silver knife stuck between his thumb and index finger and nearly touching his skin, yanks it from the tabletop, and flings it over his shoulder without looking back. He doesn’t accomplish much with that, however, apart from creating a cobweb-like crack in the wax-stained mirror.
“Final warning!” he yells. “I’ll move out! I’ll leave you on your own here! How would you like that?”
The air above the table seems more noticeable somehow, as if it’s shivering, as if its molecules vibrated at a higher frequency. Apparently, this is what it looks like when senile, close-to-oblivion ghosts laugh. Chase finishes his “coffee,” snatches a hurried bite of his cookie, and tells me something with his mouth full—I can’t decipher what, exactly, so he chews, swallows, and repeats, “Look, I really don’t feel like babysitting you. Go to the Drunk Dead. The one who called you to Immortown must hang out there. Everybody does.”
“Already been, thanks. First I got kicked out of there, and then some guys from that bar nearly butchered me.” I draw a thumb across my throat.
“Well, everyone has their own way of making friends, I suppose.” Chase spreads his hands in a what-can-you-do way. “I gotta go for a walk.”
“I’m coming with you.” Demonstrating my readiness to set off, I get up, push my silk-upholstered chair back under the table, and stand waiting as he pulls a pair of jeans, a sweater, and a waterproof jacket out of his backpack. “So far, you’ve proved to be the only person here who doesn’t wish me dead.”
“Yeah, but if you keep being clingy, I might change my mind. I’m not the sociable type.”
“Great, just help me get back to Levengleds, then, or wherever, just somewhere far enough from Immortown, and I’ll leave you be. Are you going for a hike?” I ask, when Chase, already changed, shrugs his gigantic load back on.
“You still don’t get it, do you?” he says, scowling. “I’ve been here three years! I would gladly board the first Immortown-to-Levengleds train myself, but it doesn’t work like that.”
“Why not?”
“Because they’re the same town,” s
naps Chase, stopping at the front door. “Ooof. I’m warning you, if you come with, you’ll just be bored out of your mind. You’re wasting your time.”
I button up my coat, ignoring his attempts to talk me out of joining him. Chase opens his mouth to try something else but lifts off the ground instead, his feet pedaling the air a few inches above the parquet as he dangles from an unseen hook.
“Not now, Dude!” He kicks the ghost away and collapses to the floor with a painful-sounding crunch. “Not bones. Just something in the backpack,” he says, palpating his neck and ribs.
“I’m not staying here,” I say.
“Yeah, you’re probably right. Dude, you jealous creature!” grumbles Chase as we hasten to evacuate the Last Shelter and put some distance between us and the disconcerting crackling sounds coming from within the hotel. I’m afraid to even wonder what Dude is up to in there now.
I try to keep up with Chase’s long, determined strides while constantly glancing over my shoulder, searching the surroundings for any sign of threat. Immortown, with its brooding, about-to-crash-down-on-you walls, seems quiet for now, but I can tell that this repose is nothing but deceptive; the town is just lying in wait for the right time to ambush, to pounce on me from above like a lynx.
“Let’s say there really are ghosts in Immortown and some of them, like Tom, look like the living. How do you tell which is which?”
“You won’t need to. You won’t have to identify the living,” Chase reassures me, “for you will never see any of them again.”
“I see you. Hang on, you mean you too are a. . . ?”
“Uh-huh.” Chase stops abruptly as if bumping into an invisible barrier.
“And what was it?” I say, bumping into the quite visible barrier that is his back. “What happened to you?”
Chase glowers at the emptiness of the foggy side street. What happened to you? I’ve heard this question a dozen times in the two days I’ve spent in Immortown. Could it be that here, this question means “How did you die?”
“I was asking too many questions,” Chase snarls back, “and died of being over-informed.”
Whoever designed these houses that are looming over us as if leaning in to take a closer look at who has strayed into their trap, was definitely inspired by the Tower of Pisa. I’m starting to freeze, and I’m tired of this purposeless standing around, but it looks as though Chase isn’t going anywhere.
“What are you waiting here for?”
“Man, you’re exhausting. Try and remember, didn’t you get into trouble lately? Something dangerous, maybe? Something that normally leads to death?”
“No, nothing like that. . . . I mean, there was this fire at the lighthouse several days ago, but—”
Chase holds up his index finger in triumph. “That’s it! Sorry, but I’m afraid you burned to death. That sucks. Deepest condolences.”
“And do people get up and drive a couple of thousand miles after burning to death, normally?” I ask, just to clarify the details.
“No, that’s new. Huh.” Chase rubs his red-cold hands together, eyes still trained on the uneventful stretch of space before him. “It has to be something that happened in Levengleds.”
I stare in front of me too, discerning a child’s face through the fog—my older brother’s childhood face. Tousled brown hair, wide-open green eyes, in which there’s so much reproval. A fresh scar on the right cheek.
“Can you see him?” I whisper, pulling at Chase’s sleeve. “This is the kid I told you about.”
“No one else can see your demons,” Chase says wearily. “Only you. They’re not dangerous, and you shouldn’t hurt them, either. Demons are deeply in love with the ones they haunt.”
“Wait,” I breathe, scared of, but at the same time desperately clinging to, this impossible, insane idea—“if somebody dies in Levengleds. . .what are the odds of meeting his ghost here?”
“Well, if that person was young and someone called him here, or if he wasn’t ready to die. . . . You see, those who die of old age or excruciating diseases that kill them slowly don’t come to Immortown. They’re ready. They bow their heads and accept death. Children, animals—when dying, they don’t wonder if that’s supposed to be happening. To them, it’s just a natural part of their existence, and they take it as dutifully as everything else they encounter for the first time. But to the young, death is unfair, even when they think it was their choice. They still feel as though they haven’t played their part in full, haven’t experienced much of what was meant for them.”
“So, say, if someone killed themselves. . .” I hold my breath.
Chase nods energetically. “Oh, yes, suicides are a major portion of Immortown’s population. You think you might have—?”
“No. . . . Not me.”
“Well, whoever he was, I do believe you’ll find him,” says Chase quietly.
“So. . .I died. . .without even. . .noticing. And here, I can meet those who were buried in Levengleds,” I summarize, hoping that if I can say these words without skepticism, it’ll make them sound less ridiculous.
“Uh-huh.”
“And Immortown is one big ghost commune, so the living keep away from the town because of. . .um. . .prejudice, as a discriminated minority?”
“Not exactly. Tsk.”
Chase pokes around in his backpack and draws out a yellowed newspaper clipping, the ink so faded that practically nothing is legible or clear apart from the headline and one photograph. “Entire Town Vanishes in Flames—Causes Investigated.” Under the photo, which depicts a tall tower with a sphere-shaped clock on top of it, it says, “Immer, Fall 1963.”
“I don’t understand. Immer?”
“Found it in the town archives. I spent a great deal of time there at first, reading everything, trying to work out what’s going on.” Chase indicates that it’s time to move, and we finally set off once more. “October tenth, nineteen sixty-three. That day, a fire broke out in the town of Immer, and in a matter of minutes, there wasn’t a grain of sand left—only piles of ash where stone buildings had been. The police, all sorts of experts—they never did find out how a fire of such intensity had even been possible, so the case was kept quiet so as not to create panic. The town died as quickly as it had been built—I hear there was this architect who’d suggested the design of an inspiring-looking town that would draw many creative minds of the country together. Immer was built in a few years’ time, but never got to blossom into anything.”
Chase stops again and takes a seat on the edge of a fountain, in the middle of which there is what looks like a giant tilted wine glass, water streaming up into it as if in rewind. Chase continues to speak, watching something I cannot see—his own demons, perhaps?
“At the time of the fire, there were no more than a hundred first settlers in town, so that story didn’t become one of a flaming Atlantis. I couldn’t believe it had actually happened until I found dozens of articles published in the first days after the tragedy; back then, reporters were still certain that the answer to the enigma would be discovered. And if a quarter-century later Levengleds hadn’t been founded on that—this—very spot, Immortown’s ghostly population would have been forgotten and reduced to zero. This is a town of the dead, a literal ghost town. Everything you see around you went up in smoke dozens of years ago. Even this fountain”—Chase pats the wet marble of the fountain’s rim—“is just a memory of the original. Everything is fake here, which means nothing really matters. The buildings can disappear and reappear. The people you’ll meet here can kill themselves again and again over the insufferable truth: They will never get out of here, and nothing will change, be it tomorrow or a thousand years from now.”
“So when the waiter tried to kill me,” I say, “he just thought it was the fastest way to convince me I couldn’t die as I was already dead. But I’m not, this is beyond stupid, I can’t be.”
“And this is why you’re here. You’re not ready to come to terms with it. No one here is. Everyone wants
to find some magic way back to life, and no one ever does—since nineteen sixty-three.”
I refuse to believe this drivel. Of course I don’t want to come to terms with the prospect of spending the rest of my—spending eternity here, a monotonous and dreary eternity, pouring tons of alcohol into myself, wearing Chase out with chatter so that we won’t fade away. Maybe it is the better option, to lock myself up in a room in the Last Shelter, until no one can remember me, until I become like Dude, and then cease to be altogether. . . . But I’m alive!
At these thoughts, my head starts spinning again. The world grows dusky in front of my eyes, and a second later, I can see snowflakes whirling in the air before a red-brick building. I don’t need to ask Chase about it. I know what I see. This is number eight, Caulfield Street, Levengleds, where Iver used to rent an apartment.
What if he’s still there? I search for his window. The room is filled with a cozy orange light; inside, a girl wearing square-shaped glasses, with her hair up in a bun, is reading a book. Chase is watching her too. Turns out he hasn’t taken his eyes off that window the whole time we have been by the fountain.
“Who is she?” I ask, barely audibly. “The girl in the window?”
“You can sense her?” he says, a touch of fear in his tone. “Didn’t expect you to learn this quickly. Don’t you dare call her, or I—”
“What? Even if I shouted, ‘Hey you, dial nine-nine-one, I don’t feel so well, think I’m kind of dead,’ would she even notice us?”
“No, I mean call her. You can sense people from Levengleds when they’re close enough. When you can recognize one of them among the rest, you can call them.” Chase is peering into my eyes as if waiting for me to understand. “To Immortown.”
“You mean kill them?” I shiver. “When you said somebody had called me here. . . ?”
I fall silent. This is real, all of it. I am really gone. All I can do now is look at Levengleds as if through one-way, scream-proof glass.
“Aria is my friend,” says Chase reluctantly, after a minute or so. “I’ve known her since we were children. We got into the same college in Levengleds, and then I. . .got stuck here.”