She shook her head.
“Why? I thought that’s what you wanted.”
“Throwing money at a more expensive apartment isn’t going to solve anything.”
“It might help.” She shook her head again, with a finality I found unnerving. “Kris, what?”
“How much cash do you have on you now?”
“Not enough for a hotel room, if that’s what you’re thinking. And I didn’t bring any cards out with me.”
“How much?”
Wincing, I managed to lever my wallet out of my pocket and check the contents. “About eighty bucks.”
She took the bills and shoved them through the slot in the glass toward the driver.
“That’s what we have,” she said to him.
The driver, an elderly man in a turban, looked surprised—but didn’t give the money back. “Where to?”
“Just drive.”
“I need a destination.”
“Take us to wherever forty bucks gets us, and then come back. In the meantime, shut this slot thing, please, and then turn your radio up.”
The guy decided the money was worth the attitude, and did what he’d been asked. Kristina sat back in the seat, and—after a couple of false starts—told me what had happened to her before she turned up at the hospital.
I listened, and tried not to interrupt.
The money bought us half an hour, enough for me to get Kristina to repeat the sections of her story that I found hardest to believe and also to establish that she at least half believed what Lizzie had told her as they sat together in the park. I spent the last five minutes in silence, watching out the window as smeared neon and streetlights flowed across the pane like bright horizontal raindrops. It was hard to push focus past these and other reflections in the glass and out onto the people on the sidewalks, leaning in doorways, sitting on benches, the people who are always out there, on their way somewhere or back, glimpsed from the side or behind, people whose identity and business you’ll never know and who really, in your heart of hearts, you afford no more reality than the shadows of birds flying overhead.
Yes, clearly they represent something. But something real? Something as substantial as you and me? I didn’t understand how what Kristina had told me could possibly work, but that did not mean it could not be so. There had been a time when I didn’t understand how I could live in a world where my eldest son was dead, in which I could look at the woman I married and see someone I didn’t recognize, or how I could now be living three thousand miles from Tyler, my remaining boy, and not have seen him in a year or have the faintest idea of what he was like now that he was six years old and older than Scott ever got to be. It had seemed impossible that I could find or take the steps that would lead me from a previous reality to these new ones without breaking apart on the journey. I did not, in fact, handle the events well—except perhaps in that I did ultimately survive, and woke up one morning and understood that this new world I lived in was real, and that therefore I must be real too.
Did that mean that the previous one had been unreal? That reality in which Scott walked the earth, or my mother, come to that—where did it stand now? It did not feel as if it lay back in time, that a mere sequence of events was what had moved it away from me. It felt like it still existed to one side, through a glass wall a hundred feet thick. I could see the land on the other side in my mind’s eye, and sometimes in melancholy fantasy or sleeping dream it came closer than that, as if when I poured my soul and all the emotional energy I had into it these shades on the other side of alive/not alive and true/not true remained far more proximal than I’d thought. Close, in fact, to still being real.
If you believe life is worth living, it is. If you believe you are fat, you are. And if you believe for long enough, and strongly enough, that someone imaginary is real, and they were to come to believe it too …
Kris waited as patiently as she could, but in the end dug me in the ribs. “Well?”
“Ow.”
“Sorry. But … well ? Talk to me. Say something.”
I leaned forward and opened the slot to the driver’s compartment. “How much we got left?”
He glanced at the meter. “About five bucks.”
“Take us to Chelsea,” I said.
I leaned against the railing at the bottom of the steps as Kristina hesitated at the door.
“John, it’s two o’clock in the morning.”
“Push the thing.”
She pressed quickly on the door buzzer, trying to make a noise that should be audible to someone already awake, but hopefully not enough to raise the sleeping.
At first nothing seemed to happen, but then we heard the slow tramp of footsteps coming down the staircase inside. There was a pause, then the sound of a bolt and a chain being slid across. The door opened.
Father Jeffers stood in yellow glow inside. He looked me up and down. “What on earth happened to you?”
“Not what,” I said. “Who.”
Chapter 48
An hour later, three things had happened. I’d been given several cups of strong coffee, which had helped. I’d seen myself in a mirror, which had not. Though I felt Kristina’s and Jeffers’s reactions had been extreme, a look at my face would leave you in no doubt that I’d been in a fight and lost. Apart from a few stitches in a cut under my left cheekbone, it was mainly bruising and scrapes, however. I wouldn’t want to have to apply for a job in childcare or public relations, but I’ve seen worse, and the coffee and a fistful of painkillers from the priest’s bathroom cabinet had made me feel better.
The third thing was that Kristina had told the priest what she’d told me, and I’d sketched out other events of the last week. Jeffers had listened impassively, as though withstanding a parishioner’s doleful recitation of excessive drinking or unwholesome thoughts toward his neighbor’s ass, in preparation for trotting out the prescribed means of atoning for such deviations from accepted moral practice. Only at one point did he seem more affected, when Kristina confirmed that Lizzie had been our first point of contact.
“You’re absolutely sure she was taking an interest in this friend of yours?”
“Yes,” I said. “I told you the time I disturbed your piano practice. It’s been going on for some time.”
“What do you mean by ‘some time’?”
“I’m not sure,” I admitted. “Certainly a few weeks, and that’s what had been freaking Catherine out. But she also seems to think it happened a long time ago too.”
Jeffers didn’t appear surprised. We were in his study, dimly lit by a couple of yellow lamps. He and Kristina had insisted that I take the comfortable chair, and were perched on wooden ones.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” he said eventually. “Lizzie starting to follow again is a backward step. I shall need to discuss it with her.”
Kris was watching him, as if beginning to get an idea about something. “Fine,” she said. “But it’s not just about Lizzie. There are others, too. Flaxon, the other ones that call themselves Angels. Lizzie’s friend Maj, too. And she mentioned another … Golzen?”
Jeffers smiled stiffly. “I’m aware of him, yes.”
“How many of these people are there?”
“I must have met fifty over the last three years, perhaps closer to a hundred. I suspect there are many, many more. I have been trying to work with some of them.”
“Work how?”
“Develop a program of recovery. Help them to move from their current state to a more positive one.”
“But who are they?” I asked. “They’re basically people who’ve fallen between the cracks, right?”
“No,” he said. “It’s … more complicated than that, and you’re not going to believe it.”
“Try us,” Kris said.
“You really want to know?”
“Yes.”
“They’re dead.”
Kristina and I stared at him.
“I told you.” He sighed. “One of the biggest pro
blems with my job is that ‘dead’ is a word that startles people.”
“It’s a big word,” I said.
“Of course. Because these days it says a world-changing event has happened. It didn’t use to. People had a relationship with those who had gone before. Some believe one of the reasons our species turned from a nomadic lifestyle was we started to bury the departed, housing them before we even housed ourselves. If you have an ongoing dialogue with the dead then you don’t want to leave them behind. Heaven was a way of getting around this—a realm that is always ‘above,’ wherever you are and from which the deceased can be benignly looking down even if you keep moving. For thousands of years religion supported people’s grief by telling them the dead remained in reach, but now science says that when someone dies they’re gone forever except in memory, and that those memories are merely electrical impulses in a bundle of fragile flesh, and so death has become the big divide. The bigger the chasm, the more terrifying it becomes.”
“But how does that relate to Lizzie and her friends?”
“They’re ghosts,” he said. “People who died in the city but haven’t moved on.”
“Lizzie is not a ghost,” Kristina said. “She’s there. Her friends are, too. I spent two hours with them stealing drinks off people in bars, for God’s sake.”
“Nobody said ghosts can’t interact with the physical world,” Jeffers said. “There’s all the stories about them passing through walls and vanishing at will, but the ability to disappear is just about whether you’re noticed or not. Real people can do that too. And for every story like those there’s another about poltergeists—spirits that can manipulate objects, however crudely—or elves or pixies that take things and move them around, or phantoms that run cold fingers across the back of your neck.”
“You’re saying these are all the same thing?”
“The same kind of thing. We’re able to see some of these spirits, once in a while, in the right conditions. With others we only experience their effects, but that holds true of normal life too. If someone claps their hands together out of our sight, we still hear the event; we don’t need to see it or suffer the hand smacking against our own body to prove it. Just as there are many types of human, with different abilities and ways of being, so it is with souls, too.”
I couldn’t work out whether the guy was serious or if this was some weird priest metaphor that I was too tired to get. “So why are these spirits still here?”
“Unfinished business. Or because there’s someone still alive, refusing to let go, maintaining a relationship that is too strong for the departed to progress according to the natural order of things.”
I remembered giving the priest’s address to Lydia earlier that evening—an event that felt like it had taken place about two weeks ago—and wondered if that had been such a smart idea after all. “But how would that work?”
“Strange,” Jeffers said. “I wouldn’t have taken you for a staunch defender of science.”
“I’m not. That doesn’t mean I’ll believe any old crap. Seriously. How would it work?”
“Do you know how love works? Or hate? Or hope? Yet you wouldn’t deny their existence or power to change human behavior.”
“Those are emotions, not states of being.”
“I’m aware it’s a category error in the minds of a philosopher, but they’re seldom the most practical of thinkers and I’m not sure there’s a big distinction in the real world. The universe is a different place to someone who’s in love than it is to one who is withstanding grief—different worlds that exist side by side, brought into being by emotion. If emotion can structure reality then why shouldn’t it enable an individual soul to persist beyond its intended span?”
I shook my head, knowing there were a million flaws in this but not being able to nail them.
“It’s not a permanent state,” he said. “It’s unstable, precisely because it relies upon emotion. Some of their number, the ones they call Hollows, they’re closer to moving on. They retreat from the world, often settling in graveyards, as if they dimly remember the circumstance of their interment and wish to rejoin the process of transition. There are others who appear not to even realize they’re dead—the Dozenos. On the other side of the spectrum, the strong and self-actualized dead, there are Fingermen, who possess a poltergeist-style ability to manipulate objects. There are especially restless spirits called Journeymen, who have no desire to remain near the person holding them here, and there are Cornermen, who remain stationary for long periods—as if tied to one particular locale—and pass messages among the other ghosts. There are more of these souls on the loose than there ever used to be. The dead have always been with us. There have always been spirits that lost their way. But now that our society has taken down the signposts it will happen more and more.”
“Surely it doesn’t matter if we pull the plug on ways of understanding death. Doesn’t God call them home?”
Jeffers looked at me as though I were a member of a Sunday school class who, having previously shown promise, had revealed himself to have understood nothing at all.
I wanted a cigarette but couldn’t face the four-floor trek downstairs to the outdoors. I felt exhausted and in pain. But I wanted to understand.
“So according to you, Reinhart has built himself a team of ghosts to help him steal shit?”
“Yes. These souls, or ‘friends’ as they tend to call themselves, are in moral danger. Many may still be here as a result of shortcomings in their lives. To encourage them to engage in further acts of turpitude is to damn them forever. I am not prepared to let that happen.”
“Speaking as someone with recent experience in the field,” I said, “you may not have a lot of choice over what Reinhart does. Unless you’re prepared to get biblical on it in ways different to the ones you’re accustomed to.”
Jeffers reached to the desk in the corner, opened the drawer, and pulled out an ashtray. “Another leaving from my predecessor. Open the window, please.”
I stared at him. “How did you know?”
“People’s feelings and desires are often visible, sometimes even tangible,” he said. “That’s precisely what I’ve been trying to tell you.”
“What I still don’t understand,” Kristina said, “is why some of the friends work with Reinhart.”
“His main contact among them is this Golzen person. Every now and then one of these souls tries to raise themselves above the others. Usually that’s been a positive thing. But Golzen has … a different take.”
“Different how?”
“More militant. There’s a widespread misapprehension among the friends about their state of being. This ‘imaginary friends’ delusion that Lizzie told Kristina about—unfortunately, she believes it. A great many of them do. Golzen has exploited this, along with legends and stories that have gained credence over the years, including one concerning a promised land.”
I laughed. “Dead people have their own myths?”
“Gather three individuals together and by the end of the evening part of their relationship will rest upon something supposed, rather than demonstrably true.”
“But what if they are imaginary?” Kristina said. “Are you sure they’re not?”
The priest stood. “I’ve told you what I believe. I have a spare room. It’s never been used, so I daresay it’s rather dusty, but you’re welcome to it.”
Kris and I looked at each other, and knew that given the chance not to have to go back home, we’d take it.
“Thank you,” I said.
“They’re dead,” he said flatly. “Don’t believe it if they tell you differently. Sometimes the dead lie.”
Chapter 49
David sat with his back to the wall. He could smell clean carpet—Dawn had gone ahead and vacuumed around the boxes that evening, not pointedly, but the point was still made. He couldn’t see much. That wasn’t because it was the middle of the night and the spare room was dark. It wasn’t that there wasn’t much to
see in the room even during the day.
He just wasn’t seeing anything outside his own head.
When he got back he’d tried to work, of course. Nothing had come of it—of course. He’d read more of Talia’s book and glumly accepted that the further she’d gotten into her stride the better it became. Her writing possessed authenticity and directness and a simple pleasure in the act of creation, something he doubted he’d be able to replicate. For him it was always going to be more complicated. Talia was a real person and made things up for fun. For him the act of imagination was more deep-seated. It was who he was, and that made it harder; if you’d made your own self up, written yourself, reality will always seem compromised.
At dinner he and Dawn talked of inconsequential things. She seemed distracted but when asked said she was fine. It could be concerns about the pregnancy, he supposed, or wondering how his book was going but not wanting to ask because she knew it would stress him out to have to admit it wasn’t going well. It could more likely be that David was finding it hard to mesh with the world, and as a consequence everything seemed off balance and skewed—even positive things like going to an ATM and knowing there would be money in their account. After such a long time where they’d been scraping by, being solvent made the world strange.
The thing with Maj was the same. He’d tried to forget about it, to run with the idea it was something he didn’t need and could thus be excised. It didn’t work. It was like trying to put a looming tax bill out of your mind. You keep pretending it’ll be okay and think furiously about other things—about anything else at all—but it’s there in the twist in your stomach and in the way you hold your shoulders.
As he got into bed with Dawn, David finally decided to try to talk to her about it, tell her about the stranger who’d come to visit and what had happened in New York. He couldn’t keep burying it, and he knew himself well enough to realize that when he had something on his mind he behaved awkwardly—and it might be this that was making Dawn quiet.
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