“I’m dead.” A young man with short-cropped hair materializes on her right.
“You’ve no one to blame but yourself for that, Darby.” Her favorite singer in the porkpie hat grins and takes a big gulp of his coffee.
“But if we’re stuck in the 70s, shouldn’t I be alive?”
“Memory is as unstable as reality, particularly tonight. Things overlap. That’s sort of the point.”
Yolanda smells something. Could be spoiled bacon, but no, she looks more closely at the young man next to her and discovers that he’s putting out a cigarette on his arm.
“Knock that shit off, Darby. No one cares. No one’s interested in your crap. You got to grow up.”
“I never did. I thought that was my point.”
Their bickering fades into the background. The chatter of the diner, clank of silverware hitting plates, and the hiss of the coffee maker take over as Yolanda ponders growing up. Has she ever grown up? If so, why does she need so badly to speak to her parents? Hasn’t she learned enough? And if not, why is growing up so important anyway?
She’s not sure when she stops talking to the two men, if she left the diner first, or if they did, but by the time she’s stopped thinking about the singer’s words, she’s bewildered to find herself sitting on another bus. Streetlights warp past. The brakes squeal and the door opens.
The spirit of the singer she likes is in the driver’s seat. “I’m afraid this is where you get out. You see, I have to be making a turn up ahead.” He chuckles and mutters something to himself she can’t quite hear.
She knows better than to ask. She steps off the bus, turns in place to get her bearings. She’s near her tia’s home in East L.A. When she turns back to the street, she watches the bus evaporate into mist in the intersection ahead.
***
Walking up Whittier Boulevard, the street is oddly empty apart from a lone shade standing in front of a Christian Church. The spirit of a middle aged Latino man nods to her as she walks by. “All I wanted was a cold beer. Now the Silver Dollar Bar is a church. No chance I’ll ever get that beer, I suppose.”
“Not here anyway.” She shrugs. She wonders if the spirit is tied to this spot. She doesn’t even consider who he is until she realizes that she’s passed that church before and there’s a plaque on the front wall honoring the memory of journalist, Ruben Salazar, killed at the Silver Dollar Bar by the L.A. Sheriffs.
She turns back and watches as he fades away. “Nothing has changed. Nothing will ever change again.” His image is gone before his words dissipate to silence.
Her tia’s door is open when she gets there. At first she worries that the shadows have beaten her here, but then she catches the first whiff of incense and hears 70s punk playing on the jukebox, and she knows the old woman is home, enjoying the night.
Light flickers from the twenty-three candles stacked on the ofrenda between the foyer and the entryway to the living room. Five candles on the bottom shelf, ten on the next, three with the pictures of Yolanda’s mother and grandmother. Five more on the next shelf, and ten in front of the pictures of the two people most important to her tia. In place of the traditional Virgin Mary or saints, the top shelf holds pictures of Frida Kahlo and Alice Bag.
“Why are you here? This is the one place you cannot find what you seek.”
She hadn’t counted on this. It hadn’t occurred to her that the woman who has helped her the most in her life wouldn’t be receptive to aid her now, but maybe she should’ve known that when her tia had given her the recipe for the rite, but hadn’t offered to help her perform it that she’s meant to do it herself. “But I need help.”
“Once you started the quest, what more help can I offer?”
“They’re after me. I think.”
It’s clear her tia knows which “they” she means without her having to say so. Or did she? Yolanda’s not sure which words came out of her mouth. Her tia frowns and winces as she thinks aloud. “You’ve been warned not to empower them with such thoughts.”
“I didn’t think that I did.”
Her tia moves past her toward the door. She shuts it and locks the deadbolt first. The next lock is a clockwork mechanism. A five pointed star sparkles over the face of it when she finishes winding it. “They’ve followed you here. We only have a few minutes.”
Yolanda steps into the kitchen to peer through the window. A similar five-pointed star is etched into the glass. The smoky wraiths, black as the night, trace back and forth in front of the star, occasionally darting at it before reeling back again.
“The rift wraiths are an ever present danger when we approach the barriers. But there is worse. They serve much worse. Now, why have you come?”
Gravity comes and goes in waves under Yolanda’s feet. She could graph its intensity versus time and it would be a perfect parabola or maybe a cosine. She looks back to her tia and realizes that she hasn’t answered the question. “I can’t find them. I’ve looked for mom and dad everywhere I remember being with them, but they’re not there.”
“The goal of your ritual still eludes you?”
“Unless you can answer for them. What do I do? Do I leave the city? Take the job I don’t want because it pays better? Or do I take the job I want, stay here where it costs more, but I’ll earn less?”
“If I had the answers you want, you would not have gone through the trouble to see through the barriers between worlds.”
“But they’re not here and I still need an answer.”
Her tia looks over her shoulder as the glass on the windows rattles. “We have so little time. Three cards of the tarot? Past, present, and future?” She moves to the kitchen table. The table cloth is covered in scattered ash from the incense, beeswax from candles, and coins from a ritual that Yolanda does not recognize.
Her tia clears a space on the cloth and hands Yolanda a small bag containing the cards. “Ask your question and shuffle the cards.”
Yolanda does as she says. She takes the top card and places it in front of her.
“The Queen of Wands. The black cat symbolizes her protector. She is passionate, she is accomplishing her goals.”
“But that’s my past.”
“Yes, it could be that these are what you find lacking in your life. Are you without passion, mija? Is that why you dwell on the past? You’ve lost your path and are looking to find where you went off it?”
Yolanda shakes her head, though she’s not so sure. It’s hard enough for her to think about these things without a head full of mushrooms, not to mention the weird mathematics, and the collision of worlds from both the holiday and the magic of Los Angeles. She tries to put the lid down on the million separate thoughts firing through her head as every stray neuron attempts its own unique investigation, and she flips the next card.
“It would appear so. The Hanged Man. A life in suspension. You may just need to let go. To let yourself fall so you can set about achieving what it is you want.”
“Maybe that’s the problem. I’ve always wanted to find out all I can, but sometimes I get stuck. And I just want to ask them why? I just want to hear them once more tell me that I can do anything if I set my mind to it.”
“Child, how can you not know that they would say this if they were here? Don’t you know that they’re proud of everything you’ve accomplished?”
Yolanda understands but she can’t accept it. She wants to see the future. She wants to see the last card. As she starts to flip it, glass shatters from the kitchen and the temperature in the house drops twenty degrees in the blink of an eye.
The black smoke sweeps in accompanied by a howl so loud, Yolanda’s ears sting despite her attempting to muffle them with her hands.
Her tia tries to rise from her chair. She raises her hands and starts to chant, “En el nombre de Kahlo y Bags salir de este lugar!” Before she can say it a second time, the shadow blast hits her, and she’s knocked back into the wall so hard her chair bursts and her head dents the drywall. A tempest swirls thro
ugh the living room, picking up and twisting the debris. Yolanda backs away, but the shadows pick her up and swoop her towards the mirror over her tia’s couch.
It draws her in at what seems like thousands of meters per second.
Yolanda puts her arms over her eyes to protect her from the glass that’s sure to break when she hits, but instead she and the shadows go right through, and blackness surrounds her.
***
When her eyes focus and the world stops swaying around her, she finds herself in a place she does not recognize. Desert? It’s rocky around her with dry brush leading to a clearing. The hills on either side are riveted with ruts eroded by fast moving water in the distant past. The smoky shadow wraiths swarm and swirl into a cyclone and then dissipate revealing a man in a black tuxedo and carrying a cane.
“Mr. In Between?”
He smiles revealing teeth so white that they glare in the darkly lit vale and reflect off the pool of inky blackness in front of him. “I see you already know me. Introductions, I suppose, aren’t necessary.”
“Why have you brought me here?”
“I think you know that, too.” The darkness around her vibrates and shimmers into a deep purple. The temperature drops and rises again, matching the cadence of his words, and causing Yolanda to sweat and shiver in rapid succession.
“No. I don’t.”
“You’ve been here for ages. You didn’t start out here. But lately more and more of you resides here. I’m starting to think it’s time to charge you rent. Or to begin your apprenticeship.”
“Apprenticeship?”
“The way you’re going? Or rather not going, I can’t think of a better Mrs. In Between.”
Yolanda realizes her jaw has dropped. She starts to giggle, can’t believe who she’s giggling at, and then starts to laugh all the harder. “This is the weirdest proposal I’ve ever had.”
“Oh I know you won’t accept. It’s too big a change. But you won’t go anywhere either. You can’t. You’ll just linger here until we both wither away in the wind, sun, rain. Your indecision will be measured in geologic time.”
“You’re wrong.” She shakes her head and tries not to lose focus, but there’s a light in the distance, a lone spot of white in all the darkness around her. It pulsates and then explodes into a thousand separate lights before contracting, withdrawing back to darkness. Yolanda worries she’s forgotten something, and then realizes all this has taken place in no time at all, it’s just the mushrooms. She’s only just stopped telling him he’s wrong.
“Oh, please. I recognize it when I see it. It’s like staring into a mirror.”
“Didn’t you have to change to become who you are now?”
“Probably. But who can remember if there was another Mr. In Between. As far as you’re concerned, I have always been here before. And you’ve always been here. Always in this action state. Whether you realized it or not.”
“No. If I’ve learned one thing about the past, it’s that I was different. I was always changing. I was always improving. If I have to go back to move forward I will.”
He twirls his cane, tosses it in the air and catches it like a drum major leading a parade. “Ha! You will? All you’re going to do is stay uncommitted and uncertain. Look at you, you’re already rationalizing that if you can’t go back, you’ll stay right where you are.”
Yolanda shakes her head. “No. You’re wrong. I’ve had enough.” She feels like she can’t breathe. She wonders if it’s the air here, panic, or more likely the mushrooms giving her stomach problems.
“You’ve had enough for a long time. It hasn’t done you any good.” The smile curls up and then back down into a frown. “Why are you so sure it’s different this time?”
“Because I’m ready to take the plunge.” Yolanda dives into the black pool. It’s icy as hell, and for a moment she thinks she’ll sink forever and drown, but she bobs up in the surf, and catches a wave, bodysurfing to the shore at the beach where she started the evening.
***
She’s sat on the beach so long the sun’s come up again. She wonders if she ever left the beach, if the whole night has been a hallucination-fueled trip on the sands until she ended up in the water, but that’s probably too rational, and she doesn’t want to give into reality just yet, even if she’s definitely coming down.
Coming down. With the dwindling effects of the mushrooms, so goes the potential of the ritual. There still is Dia de los Muertos, but without the accompanying rite of the drug and the shared belief of the Halloween celebrants working in conjunction, she doesn’t have much hope that the rites will last.
Yolanda shivers and hugs her knees. “It’s not like people get that second chance to talk to the dead,” she says to no one.
“But you were always special.”
Yolanda whips her head around, not having expected the answer, particularly from the voice of her mother.
Her mother and father are standing in the sand behind her, holding hands. They’re half-faded, half-transparent. Their image flaps in the wind like it’s painted across a sheet of paper held by one upper corner.
“I’d given up. I thought I went through that all for nothing.”
Her mother’s arms flash from translucent to opaque, just long enough to wrap around Yolanda’s shoulders.
“I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to move forward.”
The wind brushes past her ear. Her mother whispers, “We love you. You’ll choose the right way for you.”
“I don’t want to have to make the choice. I want to do both things, take both jobs. I want to do neither. I want to know what you think.”
Her father’s spirit doesn’t fully materialize, but she hears his words come across and echo on the wind and reverberate with the sound of the waves crashing into the shore. “My child, you came to us for what? For wisdom? What wisdom do you think the dead have that the living do not? We are in the past. You have surely discovered more? Better yet, you are still discovering more. If we have any wisdom, it is this: we have lived our lives and they are over. You still have the time that is left to you. Do not dwell on our lives. Find a way to make your life what you want it to be.”
The sounds of his words fade, and her parents are gone again. The trip is over, as is the power of the spell.
Yolanda wanders along the shore until she finds the integral ∫ she drew, somehow not faded from the surf or the wind. She reaches down with both hands and erases it. Finding the stick right where she dropped it, she replaces that integral with the delta. The past is past. What’s ahead of her is change.
Yolanda inhales a large breath of air coming off the Pacific, turns and leaves the beach in search of breakfast and coffee to fuel the start of the change she will make for her life.
THE FRIENDLY MAN
Thomas Vaughn
The Friendly Man planted the last of the heads then studied the sky. The forecast called for a slight chance of rain, but the clouds were receding and it looked more and more like they would have a clear night. A smile spread across his face because Halloween was the most important evening of the year for the Friendly Man. He looked down the street where the children were playing in their yards, showing off their costumes before they began circulating through the neighborhood. The girl across the street was watching him intently. She stood at the end of her driveway with a plastic pumpkin container rocking on her heels. His smile broadened.
The Friendly Man’s house stood at the top of Main Street where it came to dead end. Most of the Victorian homes that lined the street had been remodeled, making it one of the most desirable real estate locations in the city. The Friendly Man’s home was one of the few that had not been remodeled since the day it was built. Down in its bowels the open flame gas furnace was coming to life and the noxious warmth began drifting to various rooms through the metal tentacles which branched from the iron hull. The window glass was occluded by age and the trim was cracked. He had been offered a lot of money to sell the house
so that new, more industrious owners could replace the dark green paneling and ancient black shingles. But the Friendly Man would never sell. This was the street that attracted the children on Halloween.
Almost all of the homes had decorations. Some were half-hearted while others were more spirited. There were the usual witches on broomsticks and cats with their backs arched. Some displayed pumpkins which had been so elaborately carved they bordered on obsessive genius. But the Friendly Man’s house stood out among the scarecrows and pillow ghosts. Every child viewed the street as a gauntlet and at the end of the road you had to get by the Friendly Man.
He turned and studied his decorations. There was a row of heads planted on sharpened sticks along the walkway. The Friendly Man made them himself using his own special process of brining and plastination. Most bore expressions of profound terror or sadness. He could still call each one of the donors by name. Along the gutters hung various hands, legs and torsos—all of which had been subjected to the same technique. The Friendly Man had no patience with rubber prosthetics. He was a man that prided himself on the authenticity of his display.
Sometimes he would see the uneasiness on the faces of his neighbors as they pondered the verisimilitude of his ghastly display, but the plastination gave off just enough sheen in the colored spotlights to make the objects look like they could be artificial. Every so often someone would ask him in an indirect way if he ever thought about “toning it down”. This idea never occurred to the Friendly Man who always had an extra surprise waiting for the kids when they got to the door.
He went back inside the house and initiated the power to the display and his house came to life. Some of the heads he had preserved before his technique was perfected had that sleepy look heads get after they have been cut off. But soon he had learned how to pose the faces in ways that were more to his liking. He tried to remain true to the individual’s expressive inclinations in life. Recently he had discovered that working from photographs taken during their last moments worked best. The lighting this year was red because it activated the fear responses in the children. In addition, his yard echoed with the sound of buzzing bees. This was a deviation from last year when he used a recording of pigs being slaughtered. He hoped that the unconscious fear of angry insects would heighten the children’s cortisol production. It was important that they were in a peak state of agitation by the time they reached the door.
Doorbells at Dusk Page 17