by Keith Rosson
Even now I feel I had done nothing to elicit her resentment or mistrust.
And yet the kick came one windswept rainy morning as I leaned behind her, reaching for that very coat my father had worn before me. I had cast it to the floor the night before, a stinking and blood-soaked thing. I reached for it, and the kick came from an animal who had never shown me any inkling of ill will, an animal so old I hardly thought her capable of kicking at all.
It’s enough to make you wonder, isn’t it?
• • •
We were nearly at the California border. The van was infused with Vale’s rancid sweat and deep sense of melancholy. I was trying to write in one of my journals, the words wavering, while quelling a bout of nausea. I’ve never quite gotten the hang of cars, even as a passenger.
The wind roared through Vale’s open window. Outside were vistas of grape fields and mountains dim and snow-shot in the distance, wineries and their tasting rooms like gaudy toys flung on the hills—but next to the highway itself were the boxy outlets, the strip malls, the parking lots and gas stations.
I had just put my journal in my duffel bag when someone in the back of the van said, “Hey, you guys are still going to LA, right?”
Vale screamed and swerved to the left, very nearly colliding with a rust-battered Camaro that appeared to be leaking pot smoke from its windows. The Camaro swerved toward the shoulder, fishtailed and swerved back toward us. A hand with its middle finger extended rose from the window’s smoky depths. Well, I thought, this is how I’m going. Highway collision. Damn. But the Camaro smoothed out and drove ahead of us. It was a close thing.
“Motherfucker!” Vale bellowed into the rear view mirror, then lashed his head over his shoulder, trying to look through the fortress of stacked boxes in the back.
And that’s when Casper’s head and shoulders rose up; he’d built himself a little fort back there, hidden himself amid the boxes and blankets. Vale had his hangover, but what was my excuse? How in God’s name had I missed that?
“Better pull over,” I said.
3
They stood on the shoulder of the highway, the passing traffic flattening their clothes against them. Casper refused to come out from behind the boxes. Vale leaned in the open sliding door and yelled at him.
“I’m not coming out when you’re like this,” Casper said. He sat there, cross-legged and resolute.
Vale was incredulous. His mouth hung open, his dirty bandage waving behind his head. “When I’m like this? You’re in my van, man. You’re like, inside it.”
Casper held up his palms. “I’m just trying to get a ride to LA. Just like you guys. Gary told me to hop in, keep my head down. Come on, Marvin. It’s just a ride”
Vale pointed. “I’m Mike. He’s Marvin. And you’re a stowaway.”
“Well, this explains why Gary was so generous,” Marvin said quietly.
“He’s looking out for me. You know? Listen,” Casper said, “I really have to pee. But how do I know you guys won’t drive away if I come outside?”
A semi passed, the van rocking in its wake.
“Drive away? I should kick your ass,” Vale said.
Marvin hiked an arm up on the roof and leaned in the van’s doorway. “Get out of the van, Casper.”
Casper sighed and pushed his way past the boxes. He clambered out and held up one finger. “I’ll be right back,” he said. “Don’t leave.” He trotted down into the trash-strewn ditch, below the sight line of passing traffic.
“Jesus,” Vale said. “I am not turning back and taking that kid back to Hicksville. I’m already late.”
Marvin nodded. “I don’t want to go back either.”
Vale blew smoke, looked down at Casper pissing into the weeds. “What a mess.”
“Could’ve been worse.”
“That Camaro?” Vale said.
“Yeah, that was close.”
Vale sighed. “Should just leave the dipshit right here.”
“Too late,” Marvin said. “He’s coming back.”
• • •
The tails of Vale’s bandages snapped in the breeze. He was full of a bubbling, jovial fury. Marvin was back to writing in his notebook, and Casper had pushed some boxes aside and now sat behind the two seats and peered out the windshield.
Vale was sweating for a beer, smoking furiously. He kept thinking about pulling over and putting the sack of unopened bottles on the side of the road and couldn’t bring himself to do it. He kept thinking of picking Casper up by the collar of his dumb shirt and throwing him out onto the shoulder of the highway and couldn’t do that either. He stared at the kid in the rearview mirror and said, “So tell me, what is it that’s going to keep you afloat in Kodiak chew and ironic shirts when you’re in Los Angeles? My new friend Casper?”
Casper peered down at his chest. “What do you mean, ironic shirts?”
Vale’s eyebrows arched up. “I mean your shirt, man. The bald eagle holding the beer? Driving the truck? It’s ridiculous.”
“How is it ironic?”
“You mean it’s not ironic?”
Casper shrugged. “I don’t know. I like trucks. I like beer. Eagles are cool. I like it.”
Marvin laughed into his notebook.
“Okay,” Vale said, rolling his shoulders. “Whatever. Let me rephrase. Why are you going to LA, Casper?”
“Truth?”
“Sure,” Vale said. “Yeah.”
“I want to do a show about the ghosts. Specter Detectives. I’ve got the whole thing planned out.”
Sagging fence posts ticked past like metronomes. Vale sat with it for a moment. “You want to do a show. About the smokes,” he said slowly.
Marvin turned around in his seat. “You want to make, what? A documentary?”
“Reality show.” Casper drummed his fingers on a box beside him. “Me and Dunk were filming the pilot.”
“Dunk being the guy in the restaurant,” Vale said, changing lanes, “that you kind of pussed out on going after with a baseball bat.”
“Dunk,” Casper said, “being the guy that quit going to his NA meetings a few months back and sold all of our gear for crystal. We’ve been friends since sixth grade, me and him. I should’ve seen it coming. He’s had a tough time with it.”
“So you’re going to go to LA to become a movie star.” He looked over at Marvin. “Nothing clichéd about that.”
“Come on, Mike,” Marvin said.
“Man, I’m a paranormal investigator. There’s a science involved.”
“God help us,” Vale said, switching lanes again.
As if in response, the bottles beneath his seat clinked. He felt the warmth of the sun on his arms, the breeze, heard the static roar of the open window. If he could stay living in every single moment and just not move from there, always stay poised in that specific millisecond, he might have half a chance. Beyond that was where everything got screwed. A lifetime ago, such a notion would have made a decent painting. The reality of that, the simple loss of it, the ghost of that love of something, hit him like a blow to the chest.
“There’s ten thousand people,” he said acidly, “who’ll knife you in the ass before you even get started, Casper. That’s the entertainment world. Trust me. I know. That’s the world for you.”
“Whatever, man.”
Candice would have loved this, he thought. She’d have welcomed the ridiculousness of it all, even his vitriol directed at this sweet kid. He could practically hear her: Nice work, Mike. Even though you’re an asshole, it’s nice to see you getting out of the house.
4
Some people argued there were certain hot spots. Geographic focal points. Scientists weren’t offering up all that much information yet; the country still seemed restricted to a bevy of talking heads and unfounded speculation—but if there was one thing Brophy knew, it was that every layman wanted his opinion heard.
So people argued. Incessantly. Callers on radio shows, the girls in his office, whoever. And Brophy lis
tened. People were saying that there were particular places with a commonality, where smokes seemed to gather, to appear more frequently. Heavy traffic, one guy on his sports show had said, and that stuck with him. What people couldn’t fathom was why some of them appeared in the most goddamned inopportune places. Was it just the law of averages or what?
A perfect example: where Brophy was right now. Sun heavy in the sky, late morning. Traffic should be reasonably light. Right there where Highway 10 and Highway 60 joined together, right before the river, and a radio station’s traffic report had just called in another sighting, claiming that it was a “point of repeated apparition appearances” and to expect heavy delays. The highway shoulders were bracketed with the now-familiar fleets of cop cars flanking CDC vehicles, the dicks in their hazmat suits wandering around, yellow lights painting the air. All for a single smoke a mile up the road, an apparition morose and distraught and oblivious, one who would most likely walk around in circles for a minute or an hour and hurt nobody, and then vanish.
Meanwhile, an hour-long commute got stretched to two, three. More.
But why there? Why so often in that spot? It was a question—one among many—worth asking. No one could say for sure, but everyone had an opinion. One of the guys in Brophy’s office argued that sites with heavy traffic could be places where great violence had occurred. Like hauntings.
There’d been talk of investigations in certain areas, looking for mass graves, perhaps. Some kind of evidence, which Brophy thought was hilarious. If people thought the President, the Governor of California and anybody at Caltrans were going to unanimously green-light digging up the ground beneath the 10 and the 60 and potentially exhume a bunch of bones, they were fucking nuts.
A lot of people took it as a sign of a flat-out gleeful malevolence on the part of the spirits—the smokes making standstill traffic even more choked up—that they were sentient, at least to that extent. Like gremlins, rooted in mischief, getting off on humanity’s discomfort and irritation.
Brophy, who was, in his doctor’s words, terminally ill, and who felt his own mortality perilously crouched on his shoulders like an animal about to jump off, thought that was a pretty lofty and self-centered view of humanity’s desperate need to get home and watch reruns of New Girl.
And still others argued the “if a tree falls” theory: Yes, the smokes were seen repeatedly on freeways, and in the stands at Dodger Stadium, at bus benches in Irvine, in a particular hospital emergency room in Ensenada, Mexico, yes. But it was at least arguable: it wasn’t because there were more of them coming through in those particular spots, but there were just more people around to see them. There were more of the living there to lay witness. What about the forests? someone posed on one of the call-in shows, and Brophy had nodded, felt this minute sense of vindication. It was exactly right. What about the deserts? How many smokes were wandering right this minute through the dusty, broiling expanses of Death Valley? Or alone among the rock-strewn gorges outside of Cananea? If there was no one there to see them, did they still appear?
Traffic surged forward a few car lengths and Brophy found himself idling next to one of the CDC trucks, a safety-orange beast festooned in whirling lights and stencil fonts proclaiming people to keep their distance. The guy inside had his hazmat hood off and was eating a sandwich, his eyes glassy as he chewed. The guy on the radio said, “Just doesn’t look like there’s any end in sight, folks,” and Brophy changed the station.
5
From the journals of Marvin Deitz:
What comes after death?
For me, I mean.
Yup: birth. Right.
The Curse works like this: Memory arrives in lockstep with sentience, with self-awareness. It arrives all at once, boom. A detonation. I’m a newborn handed this sudden bomb-blast of identity, this explosive memory of all previous lives lived all at once. Even as synapses struggle to form, neurons connecting with muscle cells.
I’m not sure specifically when this detonation occurs, this awareness, but I’d say it generally happens before my first birthday. Certainly before I’m crawling. There’s probably, like my deaths, never a specific time—or at least one that I’ve yet to discern.
Let me put it like this: I died as Geoffroy Thérage from a kick from my horse, a graceless and laughable death, and was reborn. So much of that first rebirth is thankfully lost to me. I do remember the physicality of it, brief shutter-clicks of imagery as my memory came back to me: howling until my tiny throat rent itself hoarse, trying to scratch at my own body with those hands that would not, could not, act out my desires—a simple issue of motor control. I lay there roiling inside my own skin.
I had no idea where I was, of course, and sanity was a fleeting thing that first time around—I’m sorry, but how could it not be? Time was elastic, malevolent. They put little swatches of fabric over my hands to protect me from myself. Blurred swatches of color slowly became tapestries that hung against stone walls, as rugs on the floor.
Dark-skinned women cooed over me in no language I had ever heard. I was eventually aware of the sputtering candles clustered around my crib, their falling flames marking the passage of my hours, my days. Sleep came stealthily and often, an interloper I was grateful for.
I would dream of Esme and Riva giggling as they tried to fit my father’s hood around the head of one of the mules until my mother came out and scolded them, a twinkle in her eye. I would awaken smiling at this and for a moment the face hovering over me would brighten—He’s smiling!—until the understanding of my circumstances returned to me and I would begin howling again.
It was not the damnation I’d expected, of course, but the simple memory of the atrocities was enough.
Sometimes, one of the women would set me on the floor, make sounds to encourage me to crawl to her. I felt the smooth purl of the tapestry’s weave beneath my little hands, the baying wolfhounds and knighted men emblazoned across it. I crawled toward her.
Soon I began using the walls and banisters of my crib to pull myself upright: my first shuffling, stumbling steps. It felt like perhaps seconds had passed—that this was simply a nightmare I was locked into.
The woman would laugh and clap as I crawled, until the day I rose on my little stilted legs and, her back momentarily turned, pulled myself to the lip of my crib and spilled myself upon the stone floor of the nursery.
Picture it, the texture of any given moment: the slats of a crib around your tiny, kicking legs, broad swaths of coarse fabric against you, voices in the hall speaking in unknowable tongues. But also in your mind: Esme’s face, and your father pressing the clotted spike against a man’s eye, and Luc, and Joan the Maid’s pyre turned to glowing ash, and all the terrible things you had wrought upon men.
And that was just the first life, right?
Imagine that three dozen times—four—each with its own set of requisite horrors.
What do you think happened?
What do you think happened when death had become simply a brief moment of silence between lives?
After I cast myself to that stone floor, dashing my skull upon the stone, I woke again to that memory—the tapestries, the nursemaids—as well as my life as Geoffroy.
My world the third time was a hut of some kind, a hole in the roof for the smoke to climb, the blazing, dripping green of a jungle outside.
I remembered it all. I always did.
So this is what happened to me. My post-Geoffroy biography:
I lived and died and lived again, and centuries of madness followed.
• • •
We stopped at a rest area just short of the state line where a man stood in front of the cinder block restrooms proselytizing with a box of tracts at his feet. Vale went into the restroom, and Casper stood and stretched and listened to the man’s sermon. I sat in the van watching him.
He was a strange one, Casper, but mostly in the fact that he seemed open and unharmed in ways that Vale and I clearly had been harmed. I watched him walk up and spe
ak to the preacher while everyone else hustled in and out with their heads down, trying their best to avoid contact.
After a while, the man reached down and thumbed through the box at his feet, handing Casper a stack of pamphlets. They shook hands. Casper came back and sat in the open door of the van, thumbing through them.
“You made a friend.”
“I’ll be honest, guy made about as much sense as jumbo shrimp, man.”
“It’s a strange world these days,” I said. “A cult?”
“Definitely,” Casper said. In a stiff, formal voice, not too loud to catch the preacher’s attention, he read, “From Static to Signal: Discovering the Almighty’s Resonance in a Time of Sin. Issued by the Transmittal Foundation for Eternal Life. These guys apparently think that God’s next instructions will come through radio frequencies.”
“Not even the internet, huh?”
“Guess not.”
“Points for creativity, at least.”
“Maybe,” Casper said. We saw Vale stomp out of the restroom and Casper tucked his feet in and slid the door shut. “I feel like ghosts appearing? That kind of levels the field. You know? I mean, I think he’s a kook, but he could be as right as anyone, seems like. Like you said, it’s a strange world.”
As science stumbled to find a reason for the ghosts, religion had strode forth and laid claim. Cults bloomed. Most sat squarely in the field of doom, hellfire and the end of days. Like most people, the idea that they could be right—that we were counting down to some kind of oblivion—scared me. I mean, I had lived for centuries and never seen them. This was different. But Casper was also right—the world was up for grabs.
Maybe, somehow, this was something good. Who knew?
Maybe, ultimately, it was just something that was happening, and people ascribed good or bad to it.
Casper mock-roared when we passed the California border, shaking his fists, and we gassed up in Mount Shasta, a town as close to a medieval village as you could probably get in America today.
In front of the police headquarters an old man sat smoking a pipe and wearing suspenders, an American flag jutting waggishly from the handle of his walker. “Asshole,” Vale muttered. Apart from the town’s abundance of crystal shops, Norman Rockwell would have spasmed with the quaintness of it all.