by Keith Rosson
“Yes.”
The woman raised her chin, her lips quivering. “Five dollars.”
Vale realized, suddenly, that the woman was furious.
“Excuse me?”
She pointed at the stack of brochures on the counter next to him. “We charge five dollars for a map of the celebrity gravesites, sir. For looky-loos such as yourself.”
“For what?”
“Looky-loos. People come here for the celebrities? Fine. We generate a fair amount of revenue through tours and such, the maps. But someone comes in and lies? To my face? Saying they’re the husband of that poor woman? Looking like he just rolled out of a garbage can?” There was a small brooch at her neck and she touched it with her finger. Inhaled sharply. “Well then. Five dollars for you, sir.”
Vale knuckled his eye and laughed quietly. “Listen. I really am her ex-husband.”
“Oh, clearly,” she said.
Vale opened his wallet. “You already put her gravesite in a map? That’s crazy. Her funeral was yesterday.”
With mock sincerity, the woman said, “Oh no, sir. Mrs. Hessler isn’t in our maps yet. That would be macabre, wouldn’t it? No, I’ll be providing you with personal directions.”
• • •
Her grave was at an end plot and he knew it was hers, even as he crested the slight hill, because no other one nearby was mounded and stacked with so many blazing bouquets of new flowers. He was half a dozen rows away when another burst of nausea and dizziness gripped him and sent him retching in the grass, his hands on his knees. Spitting up nothing, nothing else left inside him. When was the last time he’d eaten?
Nearby, palm trees leaned around a ring of stone benches. As he topped the hill he saw a woman rise up from Candice’s grave, the mounded flowers, and for a moment his heart leapt, but it was just some celebrity-hunter, some woman who’d been crouching down photographing the headstone. He kept walking, saw the grave a rectangle of freshly laid turf, so new it looked like a doorway in the ground. He cleared his throat and the woman turned and looked him up and down, tucking a length of hair behind her ear.
“I didn’t even try to show up yesterday,” the woman said. “I knew it would be a madhouse.”
Vale stepped to the other side of the grave, the headstone between them, the flowers. He didn’t want her there.
“Mike Vale, right?”
He looked at the woman. She wore a thin corduroy jacket over a t-shirt, her hair tied back. Worn blue jeans, tennis shoes. Pretty. Mid-thirties, maybe. “How’d you know that?” he said, and she smiled and ran a finger over her own knuckles. “Oh. Right. Yeah.”
“Valerie Sands.” She held out her hand, saw his splint, and gave a little laugh. “Sorry,” she said, and held out her other one instead. “I’m doing a piece on Candice,” she said. “She was a really amazing woman.”
“She was,” Vale agreed.
“So unexpected, it’s terrible. I’m really sorry.”
Vale nodded and stared down at the flowers. “Thank you,” he said.
“Listen. It’s in incredibly poor taste, I know, but my editor would kill me if I didn’t ask. I don’t suppose you’d be up for doing an interview?”
“Look,” Vale said, “I can’t really . . . I’m not really well right now.” He jammed his hands in his armpits and let his breath drag out loudly. “I’m not doing very good right now.”
Her eyes widening, she reached in her purse and handed him a wad of paper napkins.
Vale gave a bitter little laugh, held up a hand. “I mean, I’m done with the crying, thanks. It’s not that bad.”
She pointed at her face. “No, your nose. You’re bleeding.”
Bright rose-red blooms on the napkins, a hot color like some of the flowers at his feet.
“Listen,” he said, “you don’t want to talk to me. We haven’t hardly talked in years, Candice and me. I don’t have anything new to add.”
Valerie tilted her head. He could see her wanting to lift the camera, wanting to point it at him. Quietly, she said, “Do you really think that’s true?”
Vale balled up the napkin and looked at her. “I do.”
“Anything would be great, Mr. Vale. Anything you have to say.” She took a small notebook from her pocket, held a pen above it, ready. Her camera hung there in front of her. “There’s no wrong answer.”
“You sound like a shrink.”
She laughed and pulled a string of hair from her mouth, turned her face into the wind. “Not me. Just a fan who messes with journalism on her days off. I mean, I get paid three cents a word. I’ll be able to buy a cup of coffee after I write it.”
How would I paint this, he thought. This woman standing next to me, the flowers tiered, furiously bright before the headstone. He rubbed his eye with his thumb and hoped she would leave, and when she didn’t, when he looked up and she hadn’t magically disappeared, he said, “Look. You want to save someone, and you try and try, and they won’t let you. You can do everything for them and they just turn away from you. How crazy is that? Even if it kills them, there’s no way they’re going to let you help them.”
“Is that what happened? Were you trying to save her?”
Vale laughed, scrubbed his hand down his face. “What? No. God, no. She wanted to save me. She tried for years, man. I destroyed a marriage, walked over her, stomped on her kindness, right? Threw it in the trash. And still she tried to help me. Again and again.”
He turned away from her, realized he was afraid of what he would see on her face. See his own self-loathing reflected back at him. Looked at the sad, withered palm trees instead, leaning around those gray stone benches.
“That should be on her fucking tombstone,” he said, biting his lip. “She loved insistently, in spite of great and continued disappointment.”
He chanced a look at Valerie’s face then, her tight-lipped smile, and saw it: it wasn’t loathing, it was something parked way too close to pity. Seeing it was like someone using his heart as a strike-strip for a match, whoosh. He said, “Can you please leave me alone now? Seriously.”
She gave him a last look and seemed poised to say something but finally turned and walked away. Was she pissed? Hurt? Vale stood there among the flowers, the napkin still in his hand.
He looked for the first time at Candice’s gravestone. There was her name, the dates of her life and death, Loving Wife and Daughter below that. This summation. A life encapsulated. Candice, bracketed.
An ugly, wracking sob loosed itself in his chest. This was all he seemed able to do anymore: cry and bleed. He slowly banged the heels of his hands against his forehead, once, twice, mewling like a child. Mike Vale, little more these days than a storage facility for self-pity and rage. He stood in front of Candice’s grave and the world wheeled relentlessly on and he just felt so tired.
3
From the journals of Marvin Deitz:
My lives went on and on as I sang the same endless refrain through the centuries:
I’m sorry.
I’m so sorry.
I saw a man beat a child nearly to death beside a clapboard building on the outskirts of some dusty town. Oklahoma somewhere. I trudged by with my sore-shanked mule, so thirsty, my lips chapped to the point where they bled. I was dying. We were all dying there. Drought, starvation. And I said nothing, simply raised a fist as I passed, too weak to do anything else even though the man himself was so tired he took great pauses between kicks to gather his strength.
Still I had the presence to think: Damned again, then. For my inaction.
I once crossed a stream with a hundred other men somewhere in the glittering Malaysian noon, all of us festooned with rifles and clearly defined intentions. Murder in our hearts. I saw a small burr on the pant leg of the man ahead of me, my friend, while the river itself gleamed like a writhing snakeskin. I knew full well what I was about to do. I ran toward it.
Another time came the rich stink—garlic, horseradish, a chemical bite—of mustard gas as it wafted across the lip of our tr
ench. Seconds later the burning began, and a thought skated like a flare across my mind: You’ve earned it. Whatever happens next, you bought and paid for it a hundred times over.
Even watching Coltrane’s long skittering runs in the Blue Note, sweat lit like tiny jewels on his face, his face limned in light and then darkness again as he bent and rose, propelled by his own visions, the sound itself arching like an animal in the room, his perspicuity of movement and sound and how I felt pure joy unfurl inside me like a flag watching them all, these men move in tandem through song. The wonderment of it, the gift of it. Riding on the back of this respite was the knowledge I didn’t deserve it.
And through it all I saw the cords in Joan’s neck pull taut as the flames touched her, as they took hold. Saw my father lay the spike below an eye, rest it there, felt my own feet rooted to the floor.
My God, who was I to know joy? To allow myself that?
Me of all people?
I’ve long ago grown tired of asking myself these questions. I’ve wanted to end this for so long now.
• • •
We found a coffee shop a few blocks from the cemetery. Pumpkins and squash sat in decorative clusters on all the countertops. Techno music played just quietly enough over the speakers to be subconsciously irritating. The barista had a tribal tattoo on his neck and called me “bro” when he handed me my coffee, then he grinned and told Casper his eagle shirt was “totally meta.” Sometimes I thought of the world now, this particular time around, this life—with its internet sites centered around public sex, and Hollywood gore-porn films that raked in millions at the box office, the metronomic eradication of endangered species and civil rights, conservative politicians’ refusal to acknowledge global warming and on and on—and I felt like we were inevitably rocketing toward something, some final collapse that would put Rome’s toppling to shame.
Then again, I’d been moaning about the exact same thing for centuries.
Sometimes I just felt like what I was: six hundred years old or so, and exhausted.
We sat at a corner table, the place bustling, traffic passing outside the window in front of us. Casper took a sip of his drink—something orange and mounded with nutmeg and chocolate, more of an art piece than a beverage—and said, “Can I ask how you lost your eye, Marvin?”
I drummed my fingers on the table. “I got shot, actually.”
Casper reared his head back. “Seriously?”
“It was an accident. One in a million chance.”
An armored police vehicle trundled down the street in front of the shop, something we’d already seen more than once in just our short time here. How such a thing could possibly help or hinder any ghost sighting, I had no clue.
“Listen,” Casper said, frowning and lacing his hands around his drink. “I’ve been thinking. We need to get serious. We need a plan.”
“A plan?”
“Yeah.” Casper took his hat off and ran his hand through his hair. The lump on his jaw was purpling. “I mean, I came here for a reason, you know. Didn’t you?”
“I’m trying to find someone.”
“Someone from that show, right? To The Point? I heard you talking about it when we were in the motel room.”
“I was talking to myself? Like in my sleep?”
“Oh yeah,” said Casper.
“Huh.”
“Lyla? Is she your daughter or something? Your wife?”
“Just somebody I knew a long time ago,” I said, and looked away, Joan’s face right there in my mind, vivid. Lavendu holding the cross so she could see it from the crowd. The pity she’d looked at me with.
“Okay, then. There you go. I mean, I’m here, you know? We made it. We’ve arrived. I’m all for making some contacts here and then heading back to Roseburg and getting my shit and moving, you know? Moving here for good. I don’t know about you.”
I didn’t even know how to respond to that. Did I just say, At best, I’ve got about seventy-two hours to live, buddy?
Casper was on a roll. “We should stop dicking around and start getting stuff done. We need a plan. I say if you want to head to the studio where that show’s filmed, we should do it. We might find some answers.”
I squinted, tilted my head: I don’t know.
I was afraid, I knew. For the first time in a long time, I was afraid of failing. Of wanting something and not being able to find it. Of losing, when it seemed that I’d already lost so much. I was freezing up. But Casper was right. I was here, and I had so little time left.
“Okay,” I said.
“Awesome,” Casper said as he jammed his cap back on his head. He stood up, gingerly explored the knot on his chin. “Let’s go see if His Lordship is done.”
4
Vale sat trembling in the driver’s seat of the van. He’d be struck with them occasionally, these flurries of cold like he’d been flung in an ice locker. He couldn’t predict it. It was like a thing totally separate from him, outside of himself. Whatever it was, it was a pain in the ass. He held onto the steering wheel, watching people tread the grass of the cemetery, and even with the ignition off, half-expected the van to start shaking. Sweat dotted his face, slicked his arms, his thighs.
Vale and Casper rounded the corner and walked up to the van and Vale rolled down the window and called out, “Let’s go.”
Casper and Marvin stepped up to his door. Casper frowned when he saw Vale. “You’re done? Everything okay?”
Vale tilted his head toward the passenger seat. “Let’s go. I need to get a little hair of the dog and all that, you know? Get in the van.”
Casper scratched his neck and said, “Actually, Mike, what do you think about going to a movie studio instead? Marvin’s trying to find someone there, and I wouldn’t mind checking things out.”
Vale leveled his gaze at Marvin, who could clearly read the need in Vale’s face. Marvin quietly said, “Or, maybe after you get a drink, how would that be?”
“I don’t care about after. I need cigarettes and I need a drink. Right now.”
And it wasn’t even anything anyone said. It was just a look that Casper gave Marvin, this deft little look, and piled on top of everything else—jail, his fingers, the fact that he’d wanted to do one important thing and somehow managed to fuck it up—it was just too much. One little look that said: See? Told you. That’s Mike for you. Dude just pinballs between chaos and ruination.
“You know what,” he said, throwing the door open and stepping out of the van. Casper and Marvin backpedaled. “Fuck you. Get out.” Vale stomped around the side of the van and threw open the sliding door. The van rocked. Vale grabbed Casper’s backpack and hurled it into the parking lot. He felt the sour-battery taste of adrenaline and was at least grateful for something he recognized. Casper was right, of course. He leapt from tragedy to tragedy. People turned to watch them.
“Mike,” Marvin said.
“You too,” Vale said, flinging the passenger door open, throwing Marvin’s bag out, a journal slapping to the pavement like a shot bird.
Casper said, “What the hell, Mike.” He trotted over and picked up his backpack.
Mike reached into the back of the van and grabbed a box. “And take your shit with you,” he yelled, which admittedly made zero sense, and hurled the box as far as he could. Since the box was empty, it was pretty far. He rammed the sliding door shut, closed the passenger door.
Stalking around to the driver’s side door, he felt more warmth running down his septum. His knuckle came away bright red after he ran it beneath his nose. Casper and Marvin were staring at him. A lot of people were staring at him.
“I picked you up,” he said, pointing. “I did you a favor. You and you.”
“What?” Casper ripped his hat off. He pointed at his jaw. “Are you kidding? I got punched by a bouncer, dude. A funeral bouncer knocked me out. Don’t tell me what you did for me.” Marvin, Vale saw—and it was such classic Marvin—had picked up the box, breaking it down. God forbid someone make a mess wi
th Marvin Deitz around.
“I didn’t ask you to do jack shit for me.”
Casper shook his head. “You have a drinking problem. You have a serious problem, dude.”
“What did you say to me?”
“You are an alcoholic, Mike.”
Vale stomped toward him, chin down, loose-limbed, feeling heat spread through his guts. Casper dropped his hat and bounced on his toes a few times, holding his backpack by one strap. Vale took another step and Casper swung his backpack like a mace. He missed. There was easily ten feet of empty space between them. Someone in the parking lot trilled laughter.
“Guys, come on,” Marvin called out, tucking the folded box beneath his arm. “We’ve got to stick together.”
Vale got in the van, extended his middle finger out the window, and drove out of the parking lot.
5
Excerpt from CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) pamphlet:
DO NOT ENGAGE WITH APPARITIONS!
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention urges you not to engage with an apparition should one appear.
If a sighting occurs:
• Remove yourself from the area.
• Do not attempt to verbally communicate with the apparition.
• Do not attempt to touch or threaten the apparition.
• Notify police or emergency personnel immediately.
If an apparition appears on a street or freeway, do not slow down your vehicle—this will cause congestion and increase the possibility of accidents and you may be charged with a crime.
Research has shown that there is little to no concern of infection, disease or physical danger from these entities—but long-term effects still remain unknown. Again, citizens are urged to keep their distance and immediately report sightings to police or emergency personnel.
• • •
We watched him go.
“Seriously?” Casper said, squinting, his backpack held by a strap and scraping the ground. “That really just happened?”
We walked. What other choice did we have? Past the cemetery, a furniture outlet store, its windows soaped white, an office park. Another office park. We kept walking and the street was eventually cordoned off and we stood for a while and watched—with many, many other people—as a ghost flailed his arms and beseeched the sky. An old, white-bearded man in a suit, the smoke, ringed by a line of police while one of those tanklike vehicles of theirs told us all to move on over its loudspeaker.