by Keith Rosson
The man next to me held up his phone, elbowed me and grinned. “Smoke City, man. Love it.”
“What’s that?”
He gestured with his phone. “The smokes. The ghosts. Started out with like, what? Fifty sightings a day in all of California? Pulling in a hundred a day now, just in LA. There’s more and more of ’em. People say they’re sticking around longer, too. Smoke City, baby. End of the world.”
He winked and went back to his phone, hooted, bouncing on the balls of his feet.
It was true. The ghost looked like that: smoke drifting but held still in the shape of a man. A thing continually peering around, lost, abandoned. Entirely uninterested in us.
No, not that. Blind to us.
• • •
Further down the street we came upon an unlikely blending of commerce, something I would have thought more likely to find in Portland rather than some bland section of Culver City: a hairsalon-slash-yogurt-shop, with the truly unfortunate name of Cool Bangs. As terrible as it sounded, the place was surprisingly busy.
We grabbed a booth near the windows and Casper decided, with the air of a man who truly did not know what to do next, to go ahead and get a haircut. His number was called and I sat there for a moment until the panic gripped me again, the sense that time was running out, had already run out. I went outside.
I looked at my phone, pulled up Julia’s number, thought about dialing. But what would I say? What was the point?
I put my phone back in my pocket and watched Casper through the window. He was sitting in the chair with a bib shrouded over his body, his hair wet and combed. He said something and the woman cutting his hair titled her head back and laughed loud enough that I could hear her through the glass.
I stood outside watching traffic. The panic, the sense of uselessness, was like a low current thrumming through me, making me edgy. I watched cars pull in and out of the parking lot, idly wondered where Vale was, how I could help him. How he could be helped at all.
When Casper came out his hair was cut short, combed over to one side, faded. His beard trimmed. He was beaming. I’ll admit he looked pretty good, even with the t-shirt.
“Looking sharp,” I said.
“Thanks.” He winked—he did, he actually winked—and held out a business card between two fingers.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Oh, this? Nothing.” He ran a hand over the helmet of his hair. “This is just Casper getting Ananda’s personal phone number, is what this is. Boom.”
“Ananda?”
“That would be my hair stylist.”
“Really,” I said. “Well. Nicely done.”
Casper inhaled slowly, gazed at the car park with his chin raised toward the sun. “LA is shaping up nicely,” he said. He admired his reflection in the window for a moment and then clapped his hands, all business. “Where to now, Marvin?”
6
He drove without purpose, his anger wavering like smoke, and everywhere he looked saw neon signs that clamored OPEN in red, blue, white, yellow. Could not unsee them. Bars and taverns and liquor stores seemingly on every avenue he passed, places that suddenly appeared to make up the bulk of the city.
Everywhere he looked he saw placards and posters in windows, fluttering above awnings: airbrushed, hyper-detailed photos of chilled bottles of beer, pint glasses kissed with frost, bottles of liquor backlit with golden light, as if imbued with holiness. Women reclining on beaches wearing bikinis and sea-foam, bottles of beer suggestively placed between breasts. He drove, turned, drove, saw tavern windows dark as eyes.
He passed a shuttered movie theater, its marquee proclaiming SMOKE CITY—ALL YE ROUND HERE ARE DEAD. WE PRAY FOR THEE!
He reached a stretch of roadway where left turns were not permitted and so he circled the same five block stretch a half dozen times, biting the inside of his mouth until he finally found street parking between a cell phone store and a take-home pizza place, both with their entrances shuttered.
He took a wad of bills from his shoebox, shoved the box under his seat and walked into a bar he’d seen around the corner. Thinking the entire time that he should go back to the parking lot, to the cemetery, go find them. Go apologize. The bar seemed to have no name, but above the door, a martini glass tilted left and then right—more neon—and Vale stepped inside.
It was dark and cool and the foot of the bar was lit in runners of lights. On a large television he saw a clown punch a horse in the face and then jump over a fence. The bartender sat below the television, reading a book. A scattering of bar vultures sat on their stools, their shoulders hunched toward their ears as if they expected blows to start raining down at any moment. Wood rot, beer, decades of cigarette smoke embedded into the ceiling. No one spoke and the only sound was the wet rattle of the air conditioner.
The bartender stepped over and raised his eyebrows. He was a thin man in a button-up shirt, pale as something pulled from beneath rotted wood. Mustache as narrow as a pencil lead.
“Whiskey and a beer back,” Vale said.
“Well?”
“It doesn’t matter. Sure.”
The drinks arrived and the whiskey went down burning and Vale exhaled like a movie monster. The other men eyed him sourly. The beer helped settle things a little.
He raised his bandaged hand and ordered another round and drank the whiskey. It sloshed around hot and searing in his guts. Minutes later, and the problem was his hands were still shaking and yet he seemed suddenly drunk, stunningly drunk, more drunk than he had possibly been in years. His legs kept wanting to slide out from under him, spill him out on the floor. What was happening to him? What was this?
An old man a few stools away lifted his craggy head as if on some swivel and gazed at Vale, a look as if he knew exactly what was happening. He had a yellowed bandage on the side of his neck and Vale, weak-kneed, touched the scab on his own forehead. The man belched then, a sound so wet and horrific and possibly internally damaging that Vale felt his gorge rise. Vale opened his mouth and the whiskey and beers came back up on top of the bar, a burning, foamy mess that he tried to cover through his cupped hands. Tears poured from his eyes.
An explosion of cries from the vultures, hands slapping the bar top in merriment, caws and laughter and mockery directed at the bartender to mop it up, Jonesy, mop it up, here’s a fella can’t handle his drink anymore.
Vale held up his hand, gestured uselessly. I’m sorry.
“Get your ass out of here,” the bartender snarled, and Vale left on shaking legs.
7
Excerpt from Recent Spectral Sightings in the Western Nest of Fornication and Their Relation to the Approaching Armageddon: An Evangelical Primer:
Do we as THE FAITHFUL believe in coincidence, brothers and sisters? We do not. God does not deal in coincidence! He deals in MEANING and SWIFT and RIGHTEOUS ACTION!
So we ask you, brothers and sisters, you who seek a holy and righteous life, is it coincidence that such specters have appeared where they have? Is this coincidence, or is such a thing HEAVY and FRAUGHT with THE LORD’S MEANING?
That such specters have appeared THERE and nowhere else—the very vipers’ nest of amorality and liberalism, chiefly within 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 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 gleefully TURNED THEIR FACES AWAY FROM THE LORD GOD?
Ask yourselves, brothers and sisters, if we really have the TIME and LUXURY of believing in the foolishness of coincidence any longer.
• • •
The plan wasn’t complicated. Get grounded, hit the To the Point studio and see what we could see. Most importantly, move. Even if it felt like we were treading wate
r. But first, before all of that, we needed a base, a grounding.
Everywhere we went, places were full—hostels, motels, everywhere. California was packed, LA sardine-tight. Everyone wanting to bear witness. We finally found a motel on Slauson Avenue. Serviceable was a generous term for it, especially for what we were paying: double beds that would look like a surrealist horror painting under a black light, a winding trail of cigarette burns in the carpet. A barred window with a view of the parking lot, traffic beyond that. The TV remote hung from the nightstand on a chain.
I heard the sad rattle of old pipes as Casper turned the shower on in the bathroom. I turned the TV on and there it was, the same episode of To The Point. Like time itself was grabbing my skull and shaking it. I couldn’t escape.
There was Lyla on the screen, somehow both meek and confrontational. I looked for Joan again, buried there somewhere inside her countenance, but I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t see her. The bodyguard sat next to her, big veins curling along the backs of his hands, into the cuffs of his suit. And there stood Jesse Pamona, looking at that moment very skeptical as she panned toward her audience.
Turning back to Lyla, she said, “So it’s like a split personality thing?”
My phone rang. Julia. I put my phone back in my pocket.
Lyla shook her head. “No. We’re . . .” She squinted, raised her head. I saw the tracery of a tattoo beneath the collar of her shirt. “We’re in here together. She’s in here.” She tapped her breastbone. The rattling of the pipes stopped in the bathroom.
Jesse tucked her chin down and purred into her microphone, “Tell me something that only Joan would know,” and I felt my heart clang like a stone down a well, like I was about to be found out.
“Hey, Marvin?” Casper called from the bathroom, his voice muffled through the door.
Lyla smiled. “Come on, Jesse. A girl never tells.” The audience whooped, laughing. Some men in the audience stood up and pumped their fists.
“Just a sec,” I said.
“Marvin,” Casper said. “Seriously. Can you come in here for a second?”
Still staring at the TV, I said, “Gotta admit, I’m really not that interested in seeing you shower, Casper.”
“Yeah. Funny. Just come in here.”
I dropped the remote on the bed, stepped into the bathroom. It wasn’t a large room. At all. A tiny window inset high up in the wall, milky glass gridded with wire. Blue floor tile, grout embedded with grime. A reasonably sized bathtub made for tight quarters. Steam clouded the room, made the mirror above the sink purl and run with condensation. Casper stood in the bathtub, a towel around his waist. He pointed at the sink.
Which was, of course, entirely unnecessary.
“You believe this?” he whispered. “And me with no camera, God dang it.”
A ghost woman.
Weeping in front of the sink, imploring the air.
She was like pale smoke trapped under glass. Her form shifted, took hold, shifted again. I saw the sharp collar of a dress, hair in a tight bun and then a hand, a sleeve cuff. Shifting, shifting. The honk and blat of traffic outside, the world resolutely moving on. I caught a glimpse of her seamed face in the mirror, a brooch at her throat. She was oblivious to us, her hands gesturing in front of her as if she were explaining, petitioning.
“Holy shit,” Casper said. “Holy shit. Where is my camera? Why do I not have a camera? What is wrong with me?”
I couldn’t look away. “Casper, be quiet.”
At the sound of my voice, the woman turned, her eyes widening.
I knew recognition when I saw it. It was obvious. Like she had discovered me. She turned to me, her hands now clasped together in front of her belly, knotted into each other. It was one of my stranger moments, yet mostly heartbreaking for the anguish so evident on her face.
And she spoke. The sound of her voice was like her form: a shifting, coruscating breath with words half-buried within. I could’ve sworn I felt it tousle my hair slightly. A breeze, a hushed river of words.
“What is that? Is she talking?”
“Chinese,” I said. “She’s telling me . . . about her son, I think. Her husband.”
“You know Chinese?”
“A little bit,” I said, still not looking away from her. “Learned it a long time ago.”
“I should be getting footage of this. Still photos even. Can I borrow your phone? Sweet Jesus I’m an idiot. Who doesn’t have a phone?”
“Casper. Just be quiet for a minute.”
She spoke of her husband and son. I doubt it even took that long, her story. The three of us in the cramped bathroom, the wan light through that high-set, milky window. It only took a few minutes maybe. But how long, I wondered, had she waited for the telling of it?
A simple story, probably common enough. Irrevocably entwined, I imagined, with Los Angeles itself, and most certainly with America. Her name was Suyin. Her husband and son, Kim and Xan, were hired as laborers for the Southern Pacific line from Goshen to LA. Good money, great money, for the times. Worth uprooting their lives for. And by the spring of 1830, they were able to send for her. Kim and Xan, the totality of her life, her summation, but only two of the hundreds of men hired to bore the nearly mile-long San Fernando Tunnel, the last significant obstacle for the rail line before it reached LA.
I translated for Casper, never taking my eyes off the woman. This litany of heartache as she stared at me, her form dimming and sharpening. This rawness in her voice drifting throughout the room. I’d lived lives as desperate as Suyin’s, yes. Been the one to bring anguish to someone like her, too. Now, here, I listened.
The mountain was heavy with water, she told me. Mud mired their shovels, weighted them. The work was slow-going and brutal. Backbreaking. They worked six days a week, but her husband had proven to be a diplomatic man, a man who frequently calmed disputes between the laborers and the white line bosses and, as such, the family was allowed the rare privilege of living outside the work camp.
They were allowed to move to a rooming house in Chinatown, the three of them. She would spend most of her time alone there until Saturday night, when Kim and Xan hitchhiked or got rides from the line bosses back to LA.
Xan, her boy, was twenty. He was young and strong and was quick to make friends. The money, compared to what he could earn in Chengdu, felt like untold riches. Kim worked alongside his son most of the time but coughed and walked stiffly and seemed to shrink each week she saw him. But he was honorable and recognized their fortune and didn’t complain, not even to Suyin.
On Sundays Xan would leave to go walk around Chinatown with his friends and she would put balm on Kim’s muscles, bathe him in their tin tub with water she boiled on their small stove. Later, the three of them would sit in the small room on their mats and talk and drink tea as if they were still home, as if nothing had changed, as if even the light here was not different from what they were used to.
Kim and Xan would wake early Monday morning, before dawn, to make it back to the job site before daylight. Kim would sigh, putting his clothes on, and speak of their torches hardly burning in the tunnel, as if there were no air to feed them. He spoke of the frequent shifts and groans of the earth, the dustings of soil that fell on their shoulders as lines of men stood silent, waiting to see if the mountain would bury them. She held her tongue during these times, which was a hard thing to do.
And then the day came:
The Saturday in which they did not come home.
She waited. Cleaned the room, brushed her hair. Drew distractedly in the small notebook Kim had bought her. She didn’t sleep that night, waiting for the sound of their voices in the hallway.
She got on the road to the camp before dawn Sunday morning. It was a ways outside of the city but not as long as it had been—they were almost done with the line, after all. But soon she saw that many of the cars on the road were going toward the camp very fast. An emergency, Suyin thought, and felt the skin of her scalp tighten.
When
she made it to the camp she looked for Liwei, a friend of her husband’s who had traveled from Mukden to work on the line, and a man who had occasionally come and drank tea with them. The camp was in disarray, with many laborers quietly weeping or staring solemnly at the ground as knots of white men stood around yelling at each other and pointing at the mountain.
She found Liwei and looked at his face and knew everything before he said a word to her. She knew. How could she not? It fell, Liwei said. His mouth looked like a cave, a dark hole falling in on itself. It fell on them, Suyin. Many men were buried. I’m so sorry.
And she walked back down the road with the mountain behind her. She walked very slowly. All the way home until sunset sent spears in her eyes and she had to cover her face to shield herself from the glare. She went into the room she had shared with Kim and Xan and lay down on their mat. She had been mending a pair of Xan’s trousers and gathered them and clutched them to her chest.
For a moment the silence stretched out between us all until Casper said, “She killed herself, didn’t she?”
“Yes,” I said. My legs felt useless, blocks of wood. Inside me, sorrow held court, sorrow thrummed a chord of such sadness inside me. A sadness that I hadn’t felt in years. Centuries, maybe. Even my time at the hospital hadn’t done this to me.
“I’m sorry,” I said in my stilted, terrible Chinese. “I’m sorry for your loss.”
I stepped forward and touched her hand. She was made of smoke, Suyin, but I reached for her anyway, without thinking. Concerned only with the simple human kindness of it. That ache to somehow absolve another of pain.
Suyin cried out. Casper’s feet squeaked a bit as he backpedaled in the bathtub. I pulled my hand back, afraid I had hurt her, but she was smiling. Less a cry, I suppose, than an exhalation.