by Keith Rosson
3
“I bet it’s a ghost,” Casper said.
“It’s not a ghost.” Vale leaned back—he’d let Marvin drive, finally—and folded his arms behind his head. He put his sunglasses back on. “It’s a fender bender.”
Vale had drunk eight beers in his motel room the night before. Eight exactly. Not a horrible night, all told. The hangover was not bad today and he’d quickly downed another bottle in the bathroom before they left. It settled his nerves, smoothed out his guts, and now with Marvin at the wheel he felt like this was good, this was a good thing.
He’d left the rest of the beers on the dresser along with a fifty. A blessed tip for the cleaning staff. He was doing okay. He was petitioning the universe’s good fortune with hard cash.
Today was the funeral and he would make it there. Anything beyond that was cake, unnecessary. They’d left early and were making good time but by the time they passed a little town called Volta, traffic had slowed down greatly, moving forward grudgingly only after long periods of stillness. Now they’d reached more sun-blasted fields, hills blue in the distance. You could hear stereos through the open windows of other cars as emergency vehicles sped past them on the shoulder, lights pulsing.
“Nah,” said Casper from the back. “Ghost.”
“Bull.”
“See,” said Casper, slapping the back of Vale’s headrest as a truck passed on the shoulder. “CDC, not the Highway Department.”
It was like that for an hour. Everyone was getting edgy. But he found an atlas and a map of the West Coast in the glove box, and was able at least to figure out which freeways they’d need to take and the exit to get off at to reach Richard and Candice’s place. No small feat, navigating that. Casper read them snippets of the Foundation pamphlets for entertainment.
And then they rounded a curve of the highway and it turned out it was both things, that they were both right.
Two of the southbound lanes were blocked by a jackknifed semi—those lanes and again the shoulder were thronged with fire trucks, police cruisers, an ambulance. All those spinning lights so robbed of their power in the light of day. But aside from that, down past the shoulder in a field of knee high grass, maybe a hundred yards away—
“Holy mother,” Casper said, rolling onto his knees and pressing his face to the passenger window of the van like a child.
A trio of CDC panel trucks were parked further in the grass and a half dozen men in hooded hazmat suits were setting up a perimeter, a half circle of bright orange sawhorses, DANGER stenciled across them in black. Traffic oozed, stopped, oozed. A mustached cop spoke into a bullhorn: “Do not exit your vehicle. Do not take photographs. If you exit your vehicle you may be charged with obstructing traffic and endangering a federal investigation. The appropriate authorities are on the scene. Do not exit your vehicle . . .”
Within the cordon of the orange sawhorses, a ghost child stood pale and smoke-rimed in the dry grass.
They all looked as they passed, even Marvin, who craned his neck to see, the van rolling along at five miles an hour or so, the cop himself flinching at a bloop of the bullhorn’s feedback, and there it fucking was, Vale couldn’t believe it. It was right there, this thing, this remnant. A little girl.
“Prime footage right there,” he murmured.
“I don’t have a camera,” Casper said.
“What about your phone?”
“I’ve just got a burner,” he said, enrapt.
“Jesus, man.”
“I know.”
It was a young girl—impossible to tell how old from this distance—and there was that sense about her, about it. A sense of shifting; how the form stayed the same but the opacity, its thereness, seemed to waver, to bend and snap at the mercy of something the living weren’t privy to.
It stepped one way in the grass, turned, looked the other way. Its hair was dark, pulled back in a bun, its dress bone-colored and falling to its ankles. The thing’s color wavered between smoke and aged newspaper. It stood in the grass and raised its chin as if testing the air for fire or as if it heard something calling to it, and then turned around again. And then its hands went to its face and they saw, everyone saw, this tide of people, they all saw its shoulders rise and fall as it stood alone in the yellow grass of a shadowed foothill by the side of the highway.
“It’s lost,” said Vale.
Casper said, “That’s a girl, Mike. That’s a little kid.”
Vale said nothing, and Casper said it again, “That’s a person,” and something inside Vale, something that had nothing to do with the smoke, or at least not much to do with it, something way down inside him broke clean as a piece of glass.
4
Excerpts from the twenty-seven articles drafted on May 4, 1456, and used as a basis of Joan’s nullification trial. Original witnesses were asked to verbally confirm or deny the truth of each charge in regards to their questioning during Joan’s original trial in 1431:
4) That neither judges, confessors, or consultants, nor the promoter and others intervening in the trial, dared to exercise free judgment because of the severe threats made against them by the terrorizing English; but that they were forced to suit their actions to their fear and to the pressure of the English if they wished to avoid grave perils and even the peril of death. And so it was and that is the truth . . .
8) That they kept Joan in a secular prison, her feet fettered with irons and chains; and that they forbade anyone to speak to her so that she might not be able to defend herself in any way, and they even placed English guards over her. And so it was and that is the truth . . .
25) That Joan continuously, and notably at the moment of her death, behaved in a saintly and Catholic manner; commending her soul to God and invoking Jesus aloud even with her last breath in such a manner as to draw from all those present, and even from her English enemies, effusions and tears. And so it was and that is the truth.
• • •
“I just have to do this,” Vale croaked. “I have to get to Los Angeles, man. Can we just hurry the fuck up, please?” He put his foot up on the dashboard and tucked his hands into his armpits. Sitting there like that, with his posture and his bandages and sunglasses, he looked like history’s most ravaged and sullen teenager.
Traffic had picked up. “We’re going,” I said. “We’re on our way.”
“Dude,” Casper said, leaning over our seats, getting in Vale’s face, “we just saw a ghost, Mike.”
“I know, Casper,” Vale said. He sounded miserable. “It’s just . . . I have to get to LA for a funeral. My wife’s funeral. I have to. Do you get that?” He took his sunglasses off and pressed his heels to his eyes. He might’ve been crying, but it was clear you’d have to be an idiot to ask him about it.
“Hey, it’s cool,” Casper said. “We’re moving again. We’re on our way.”
Vale put his sunglasses back on. “It’s not cool, Casper. There’s nothing cool about it. Name one fucking thing that’s cool.”
I watched Casper shrug in the rearview mirror and sit back on his knees. “My shirt’s cool, remember? Bald eagles and shit? Beers? You’re cool, Mike. You look like a really shitty extra from The Road Warrior. That’s cool.”
Vale nodded once. “Thanks.” I watched a small smile creep across his face.
Casper leaned over the seat again. “Don’t worry about it, dude. I totally cried last night. Didn’t I, Marvin? I figure if there’s little ghost kids lost in random fields by the side of the road? Dead and lost? Things are weird enough that it’s no big deal if guys like me and you freak out every once in a while. We’re the last ones anyone’s gonna care about. Go ahead and melt down, I say.”
5
By the time they hit Santa Clarita, Vale remembered why he had grown to despise Southern California in general and LA specifically. The ceaseless traffic, the noise, the phalanxes of single occupancy vehicles stretching as far as the eye could see. The ball-of-yarn confusion of the freeways. The great and callous waste of
it all, just the sheer volume of shit being taken and used and irrevocably thrown away. It was the same everywhere, of course, all over the planet, but nowhere did it seem as pronounced as it did here. Los Angeles. Christ.
He thought for approximately three seconds about calling someone he knew, and then realized there was absolutely no one he wanted to see. What was he going to do, go hang out with Edwin Tanazzi? Get a cappuccino with Jared Brophy? See if Mindyfrom-Pratt wanted to do a few more lines of blow? No. There’d been one good thing about Los Angeles, one good thing left to him at all, and she was gone now.
• • •
Vale only had to ask directions once to find the place. The familiarity of the city coming back to him. Memory, that old reluctant ghost.
Candice and Richard’s home was a sprawling one-level sandstone in Culver City. There was a half circle of a driveway and an iron fence laced around the property. Beyond the fence the sloping lawn was just as Vale had imagined it, emerald-green and lush as carpet. In front of the house was an island of raked gravel studded with blooming cactuses. Cars filled the driveway and lined the street. Nice cars. They found parking a few blocks away.
Casper and Marvin stood awkwardly on the sidewalk, squinting in the dazzling sunlight as Vale unwound his bandage in the front seat, peering into the rearview mirror. He probed gingerly at his scab. It was about as bad as he expected, which was pretty bad. My God, he thought. It looks like I’ve got fruit leather on my forehead. This was compounded by that fact that the flesh around his eyes looked bruised and purple, and his hair, filthy and wind-blown, had formed a kind of stringy, blown-back pompadour.
He turned to Marvin. “Be honest. Does it look better with the bandage or without it?”
Marvin winced and tilted his hand back and forth. “That’s kind of a tough question, Mike.”
They walked back to the house. Wide stone steps led up to the front door, which was braced by a pair of huge picture windows. Two men stood there in dark suits. One had a clipboard. They both had the jaws of comic book superheroes and, as they watched the three approach, were clearly telegraphing fuck off vibes. Casper took his baseball cap off and wrung it in his hands.
Vale said, “I’m Michael Vale.”
The doorman looked at his clipboard and then looked up. He looked at the other guy. For a moment, nobody said anything.
“I’m sober,” Vale said flatly.
The second doorman looked over Vale’s shoulder. “These gentlemen are your guests?”
Vale turned to him. He’d decided to leave the bandage off and could feel the scab tighten when he made certain expressions. Like when he scowled, which he did now. “Yes. They are. These gentlemen are my guests.”
The one with the clipboard nodded and opened the door. “The memorial will be held back here after the funeral, which will be held at Woodland Park Cemetery. Programs are available in the foyer. The procession leaves in approximately half an hour. Mr. Brandt can answer any of your questions.”
Vale thanked him, felt a flurry of anger at himself for doing it, a bird snapping its wings against a cage.
The foyer was marble and beyond that the rest of the house was blond hardwoods or pale ceramic tile depending on where you were. High ceilings, and panels of sunlight fell everywhere from skylights above. The rooms themselves were dense with low-slung furniture, everything done in clean lines, neutral. A painting on the dining room wall was easily eight feet tall but little more than an abstract collision of aquamarine panels. Clearly Richard’s influence. Right? Candice had loved his work, or people like Barbara Kruger, her faux-clumsy earnestness. Did she actually like this stuff?
People stood in their dark clothes, murmuring in small clusters, holding bottles of water and cups of coffee. Marvin stood next to Vale with his hands clutched behind his back, nodding at the funeral goers looking at them, of which there were more than a few. Even for Hollywood, they stuck out. Their dishevelment, Vale felt, bordered on obscene here. Casper stood near him with his hat pressed to his stomach, gazing at the floor, looking like he’d flinch at a cough.
They stepped out to the enormous backyard. Another green expanse battling the turquoise pool, the top of it dappled in sunlight. Between Richard’s copyright work and the Janey books, the two of them had done very well. There was a buffet table and waiters walked rigidly among the guests with carafes of coffee and trays of bottled Evian, appropriately solemn. Casper, with a wince of apology and a slap of his hat against his leg, beelined for the buffet table as discreetly as he could.
Vale caught a glimpse of someone across the lawn amid all the faces staring at him. He stopped, his breath seizing in his chest. The world around him seemed to freeze, turn crystalline.
Fifteen steps away? Twenty? He started moving.
Behind him, Marvin said, “Hold up, Mike. Wait.”
Twenty steps on the grass at most and there in front of him was Jared Brophy, his ex-agent, he of Paris, he of Mindyfrompratt, he of the contract that ruined Vale’s life. It’d been years, but there he was. Older and clearly ill. Brophy was sick, anyone could see that: he looked like a skull wrapped in tanned, liver-spotted burlap, with a pair of obviously false teeth pressed into the mess. He looked like dog shit in a dark blue suit, honestly, like he would be dying soon. But the eyes were the same. Liquid, searching, darkly mirthful. “Mike Vale,” he crowed, “long time, no see,” and his voice had become terrible, like he was trying to speak while slurping up the last dregs of a milkshake through a straw.
Vale’s fist pistoned out, caught him beneath the eye.
Brophy tumbled to the grass like a puppet with his strings cut.
6
Excerpt from the Transmittal Foundation for Eternal Life pamphlet, From Static to Signal: Discovering the Almighty’s Resonance in a Time of Sin:
And we ask you IS IT COINCIDENCE that such specters have appeared THERE and nowhere else—the very viper’s nest of amorality and liberalism that is HOLLYWOOD, CALIFORNIA, home of the GOD-HATING ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRY; and south of that, where the once-vibrant border towns of MEXICO are now run by narco-traffickers who deal in MASSACRE AND HUMAN SLAVERY, who publicly DISMEMBER judges and policemen and fling their severed body parts from bridges.
Ask yourselves if it is coincidence that the specters of the dead—the lost ones, the unclaimed—have appeared in the very same place where so many have TURNED THEIR FACES AWAY FROM THE LORD GOD?
Ask yourselves, brothers and sisters, if we really have the TIME and LUXURY of believing in coincidence any longer.
And will you be ready when He comes?
And will you be diligent?
And will you hear and act when God SINGS OUT His Commandment across the airwaves and AROUND THE LIP OF THE WORLD?
• • •
The old man toppled and Vale’s fist hung there in the air; he looked like he’d surprised himself with it. Looked more than a little aghast, actually. A woman in the crowd screamed, high and dramatic, a horror movie scream, and a man near her brayed laughter. The two doormen appeared as if they’d been teleported there, just like that, and one of them pulled Vale’s arms behind him while the other jabbed him in the kidneys, just once but hard enough to make him gag.
People went to help the old man up, but he waved them away, his other hand pressed to his eye. Casper stood wide-eyed at the buffet table, a three-inch tall sandwich of crackers, cheese and cold cuts poised in front of his mouth.
The kidney-jabber drew a fist back and laid his hand flat on Vale’s chest, as if looking for the perfect spot.
“Do it,” the man holding him said. “Go.”
I stepped forward in the hopes that some half-memory of combat would serve me like it had in the Tip-Top, but Casper was there first. He grabbed the doorman’s fist and then awkwardly leapt on his back. Half of his pale and substantial ass hung out the back of his jeans as the two of them spun into the table, a pyramid of bottled waters falling and scattering on the patio. There were more screams.
; Vale reared back and rammed the back of his head into the face of the doorman still holding him. “Goddamnit,” the man said almost conversationally. He let go, his hands rising to his mashed lips.
Casper reached around the man’s head and latched onto his bottom lip with his thumb and forefinger. As Marvin, I’d grown soft: this all unfolded in front of me so surreal, so slow. I shifted this way, that way. Too slow. Too old and timid. Casper pulled on the man’s lip like he was peeling the lid off a can and the man screamed and flipped Casper over his back. Casper landed on the cement around the pool, hard, and the man dropped a knee onto his chest and punched Casper once in the jaw. Looked like something from an MMA highlight reel. Casper could’ve been an appliance he’d unplugged, the kid went out so quick, a pale diamond of belly showing between his pants and his eagle t-shirt.
Vale scanned the lawn, his fists balled, chest heaving, his terrible forehead gored and bleeding again. Finally the doorman, standing behind him with his lips bloodied, just hoisted Vale up by his armpits and threw him into the pool.
7
They stood in a spare bedroom somewhere in the labyrinth of the house. It was quite the little vignette. Casper and Brophy sat on opposite sides of the king-sized bed with ice packs pressed to their faces, and Vale held a wad of toilet paper to his ruined, disgusting forehead. Richard stood next to the bureau and beside him were a pair of policemen, their thumbs hitched in their belts. There was a quilt on the wall, flowers in little ceramic vases.
Did Candice actually like this room? Did he know her at all? The doormen had traded some secret handshake or ball-tickle with the cops and were somehow excused from the proceedings, and Marvin was lurking out back with the rest of the deliciously scandalized crowd. Vale couldn’t stop looking at Brophy—he’d seen scarecrows with healthier physiques. His fury was tussling with the mortification that he’d struck a senior citizen who looked about fifteen minutes from tumbling into a grave.