My right hand catches on something sharp as I fall. It cuts through the scarf and rips my already bruised hand open across the palm. I scream, hug my injured limb to my stomach, and feel warm blood begin soaking through the sleeve.
The scarf is lost—caught on a jagged nail or piece of pipe halfway down the chute.
I don’t try to catch myself again. I curl myself into a ball. I shut my eyes as I Jack and Jill down the hill towards whatever gruesome end awaits me.
The truth is far gentler than my imagination. The pipe gradually levels out, tempering my plummet. The curve straightens and I find myself now skidding, now rolling, along the hard copper. I slide for a few moments more, and then, at last, the metal’s friction puts a stop to my fall.
I feel the gentle touch of my silly cowboy hat as it slides down after me and rests against my back.
I peek at my surroundings. I’m still in the copper chute.
I lie on my back for a time, drink the penny-scented air, marvel that I’m alive. I gingerly pull my hand from my stomach and see that fear and surprise deceived me—the cut across my palm is long, but shallow, and the bleeding has almost stopped already. I’m all right.
And, with any luck, I’m almost out.
Some ten or twenty metres away, I see the exit to this pipeline. White light tempts me towards that gaping mouth. I crawl forward, favoring my left hand, as quickly as my battered body allows.
The opening yawns ever wider, but as I get nearer I slow down. I see that white walls are through that opening. Only white walls. And as I crawl to the lip of the tunnel’s exit, I hear the familiar hum of those goddamn fluorescent lights.
The maze is welcoming me back.
• 12 •
MY GRANDMOTHER MADE HER LEMON-FACE when I told her that I didn’t want to hold hands with a girl. I said girl, but what I meant was her, specifically. I might’ve held hands with, say, the girl who sat behind me in Math class. Not that I had a crush on her. Girls were gross! But, well, she gave me a Valentine back in February and she’d dotted her ‘i’ with a heart….
I didn’t say this to my Grandmother. What I said was, “I’m too old to hold hands with a girl.”
“Oh, well, if you’re too old….” Her pursed mouth melted into a slow smile. If I hadn’t been so satisfied in my victory, so self-absorbed in my need to be rid of my parental figure, I might have seen the devious gleam in her eye.
She’d taken me to the Wild Rapids Waterslide Park. Our beach blanket was emblazoned with Garfield’s face, orange and black and hating Mondays, and laid out as our claim on a small patch of grass.
My Grandmother wore an embarrassing, blue, one-piece bathing suit. Her everything sagged with age. So, I said that I wouldn’t be holding hands.
“In fact,” I told her, “you should go swim. I can handle the waterslides by myself.”
I sucked in my stomach and pushed out my chest, adopted a stance that I imagined looked brave. I was old enough to be self-conscious about my lack of a six-pack and my undefined pectorals. I was only ten years old, but I knew that I was supposed to look like the models on the cover of Men’s Health.
My Grandmother was courteous enough not to comment.
“Go on then,” she said, “I don’t see the appeal in sliding down a distilling tube, anyhow.”
With that said, she lay back on the blanket, sunglasses on against the glare, and looked for all the world as if she’d instantly fallen asleep. I crept away across the lawn, lest she wake and change her mind.
Of course, I headed straight for the best waterslides. Not the longest, no—the steepest. And the newest. The two most talked about at school. Kami Kazi and Hari Kari: twin slides named after suicide, to amuse children too young to understand.
The chatter among my classmates was that competitive speed-runs down the side-by-side slides were to be the new ritual of birthday parties and field trips. It was universally known that the losers of said races—the rotten eggs—were due for ridicule. Chickens wouldn’t be invited at all.
I was determined to practice—if one can practice at sliding down a piece of plastic—before too many of my peers had beaten me to it.
The line leading to the top of the waterslides took an agonizing ten minutes to traverse. I ignored the people around me, save for the heavy-set man immediately in front. His grey arm hair was streaked with water and chlorine and his moustache glistened with water. Whenever he moved, I followed—so close that I almost stepped on his oversized sandal heels.
Somehow I was both hot and cold. The sun-soaked asphalt was blistering against my bare feet, while at the same time a cold breeze pimpled my wet skin with gooseflesh. I was dry before I reached the top of the slide.
When my turn came, I lingered on the lip of the slide. I stared down at the steep decline and at the roaring waterfall between my legs, as one might look over the edge of that world.
The lifeguard asked me if I was OK, if maybe I didn’t want to try a different slide.
I told her no. I told her I could do it.
I steeled myself. My legs and arms tensed, my stomach clenched into a knot. I willed myself over that precipice … but I didn’t move.
I told the lifeguard I had forgotten that I really needed to go the bathroom first. She excused me from the line. I watched a child half my age take my place at the waterslide’s mouth, push off, then plummet like a missile aimed at the earth. He hit the water ten seconds later—an impact that sent spray flying high in the air.
I walked to the bottom of the line, shame hot on my face. I didn’t look at the people around me, just reinserted myself at the very bottom. I wasn’t so eager now. I didn’t shuffle forward quite as willingly. Whenever the line moved, I forced my legs to follow. I had to try.
When far too short a time passed, I once again stood at the front of the line. The smiling lifeguard ushered me into the lips of one of the slides, though whether Kami Kazi or Hari Kari, I didn’t know. And once more, I stared down the river Styx flowing into Hades below.
Then I heard a shrill whistle and I looked over at my slide’s twin. My Grandmother grinned back at me. She sat in the froth of the other slide and said, “Race you. When I win, I get to hold your hand back to the car.”
Then she snapped a pair of terribly embarrassing swimming goggles up over her eyes and pushed off the edge.
A strangled protest emerged from my lips. I launched out after her, my fear forgotten in the wake of my shame. I made myself as small and frictionless as possible as I shot through that plastic tube, desperate to win.
Even over the roar of the water, I could hear her laughing from the other slide, whooping as she sloshed her way down to the pool below. I chased that laughter all the way to the pool at the slide’s end. I didn’t win our race.
• 13 •
“A TE CONVIEN TENERE ALTRO VÏAGGIO—” a silvery voice says.
I open my eyes. I’m staring at a corkboard ceiling and a fluorescent light. I close my eyes again and will this maze away.
“—se vuo’ campar d’esto loco selvaggio,” the voice finishes, flourishing the final word as if casting a Harry Potter incantation.
I sit up, my eyes now wide open. A voice. A woman’s voice. An honest to god human voice. She’s found me, my Italian friend. I wasn’t expecting a woman.
I crane my neck to try and find her in the room. “Bastard,” I creak. “Give me back my—”
A girl, maybe seventeen or eighteen years old, sits cross-legged against the wall behind me. She has my orange Bible propped open in her lap. She has my Stetson perched atop her pale hair. And she’s only half here.
I see her, then I see the wall through her. Were this a film, the effect would be comically cheesy. I’ve seen tutorials on how to layer videos atop one another, by recording an empty room and then the same room with someone walking through it. Simple smoke and mirrors. But that’s not what this is—this girl is see-through.
I wipe my eyes with a dusty, abused hand, hoping it might hel
p. The effect lingers.
She looks up from the book. “Isn’t it sacrilegious to scribble in the Bible?”
I open my mouth, but no words come out.
“Or is it OK, because it’s in Latin?” She stares at me staring at her for a moment, and then shrugs. She tosses the Gideon New Testament down between us, so that it slides across the floor to rest against my foot. She looks down at it, then back up at me. She bites her lip. “That may have been sacrilege too.”
She wears blue jeans and a shapeless sweater striped with tan, orange and blue. The sleeves are too long, and she’s apparently formed a habit of gripping the cuffs in her palms. Her blonde hair, mostly obscured by my cowboy hat, is tied back in a ponytail.
I’ve been staring and she’s noticed. She leans forward to scrutinize me with similar intensity, only to recoil back. Her eyes grow wide, “Wait….” she whispers, and I catch an odd echoing quality to her voice. “I can—oh my gosh—you’re, like, transparent….”
“What!” I jump to my feet and begin to pat myself down, looking for any ethereal quality. “No, I’m not, I’m—”
“Are you a ghost?” she whispers. She leans over, breaking her cross-legged stance to study me. She reaches out a tentative finger and then hovers it over my heart.
“I don’t—what are you—” She plunges her arm into my chest and screams.
Her arm juts through me. I can’t see her fingers on the other side, but she twists her arm like a corkscrew between my ribs. I’m too startled to scream, despite the fact that there’s no chill down my spine, nor any hot and cold flashes. Indeed, I can’t feel her arm at all. Only my sense of sight confirms that she’s passing through me.
“Weird,” the girl says. “Like pins and needles all over my arm. I’m wiggling my fingers on the other side, but I guess you can’t see that. Or can you? Can you make your head do a one-eighty? Or is that only possessed people? I’ve never met a ghost before.”
“Wait,” I splutter, “I’m not the ghost. It’s you who—oh god.”
It strikes me that I haven’t been thirsty. I haven’t been hungry. But I’ve been wandering for at least a day or two now. I have no recollection of arriving in this maze. The laws of physics are clearly out the window, and … and….
And the girl is laughing.
She removes her hand from my chest and sits back on her haunches, mirth bubbling from her lips. She pauses a moment to catch her breath, looks back at me, then laughs harder.
“What!” I shout. “Am I dead? Is that the joke?” I rise to my feet and stare down at her, a lump rising in my throat.
The girl doubles over, clutching her side and howling.
“I don’t understand!” I wave my arms, desperate to be let in on the joke. “What is this place?”
The girl holds up a finger, a motion for me to wait, but doesn’t look at me again until the last of her giggles have subsided. When she finally does look up, an impish grin paints her lips. “Heh, sorry.” She hiccups.
“What?”
“Pity I couldn’t hold it together longer.” She smiles. “I wanted to ask you how you died. See how you reacted to that one.”
My eyes narrow. “I’m not dead. You lied.”
Still sitting on the floor, the ghost gives me a mock bow. “I’m a ghost, not a saint.”
“You’re a ghost?”
She cocks her head. “The transparent look is really hot right now.”
“I—” My mouth snaps shut. I’ve just been voicing the first thoughts in my head, without pausing to form a real question.
The ghost, if she is that, has a sarcastic tone of voice and a tendency to stress at least one word every time she speaks. This whole exchange feels vaguely dreamlike. I try again, try to phrase a question that’s more than a simple voicing of whatever’s on my mind: “What do those words mean?”
The ghost gives me a look like I’m sour cream a week past the expiry date and she’s taken a dubious whiff. “Well,” she stretches out the word. “‘Transparent’ means that you can see through someth—”
“No, sorry,” I reorganize my thought. “In the Bible. The words you read. Are they instructions?”
“Oh!” The ghost’s expression softens. “Thank gosh, I thought maybe you had a concussion. No idea.”
“Sorry?”
“I have no idea what it means. I don’t read Latin.”
“Italian,” I correct her.
The ghost frowns. “How do you know it’s not Latin if you can’t read it either?”
“No, that’s not—why were you reading it if you don’t know what it means?”
She rolls her eyes. “I was nosy. And I hope I called you a loco savage and maybe an ultra vegetarian.”
“An ultra …”
“Altro vïaggio!” the ghost shouts, pointing an accusatory finger at me. Self-satisfied, she stands and holds out a hand for me to shake. I look at the proffered hand, wondering if my fingers will slide right through it, but when I reach out to take it she feels solid enough.
“Name’s Willow,” she says. “A pleasure, et cetera. Looks like I’m your guide.”
• 14 •
I WALK ABOUT FOUR PACES BEHIND WILLOW, mesmerized by her insubstantial quality. She still wears my Stetson, and this, too, I can see through, so long as it rests atop her head.
I don’t believe in ghosts any more than I believe in hell or purgatory, but it’s difficult to argue with the figure skipping along in front of me. She’s indistinct—sort of fuzzy at the borders—as if someone knew they were supposed to colour in the lines, but had no lines to guide them. Each time I try to study her I find my eyes shift through her, and I’m watching the empty hallway beyond more than the ghost herself.
Willow ignores my scrutiny. She hums while she walks. I can’t place the tune, but somehow it sounds familiar.
Despite my tumble down the copper chute, nothing seems to have changed—I’ve returned to the tedium of eggshell white drywall, ninety degree turns, and corkboard overhead. But now I have a guide, according to Willow, and she chooses forks without hesitation. I find no logic in her decisions, but I’m happy to let her pick a direction for me. That is until—
“Wait,” I say. “We’ve turned left four times.”
Willow looks back at me, apparently not seeing the problem.
“Our first left, four times,” I repeat. “That means we’re back on the same path we were a few minutes ago. Full circle.”
Willow smiles. “Greenhorn, huh? I don’t know how long you’ve been here, but how well has all that logic worked out for you thus far?”
I hold my silence.
“Uh huh. This place doesn’t like to play by the rules. How many bridges have you crossed?”
“What are we talking about?”
“Bridges. Long things made of metal or wood. Often suspended over streets or bodies of water. How many?”
“I haven’t crossed any bridges.”
“Darn,” Willow sighs. “A ways to go, then.”
She turns around and starts skipping ahead again. I jog a few steps to catch up, so that I’m not left behind. Questions lodge in my throat, crowd my tongue for priority. “What is this place?” emerges first.
Willow glances at the sterile walls and floor as she walks. “Looks like an office building.”
“You know what I mean.”
Willow shakes her head, “Honestly, I don’t.”
“This maze,” I growl. “This goddamn maze. Canada? The moon? Purgatory? Am I dead or a lab rat?”
Willow shrugs. “Which would you prefer?”
I surge onward, “And what are you for that matter? Aside from ‘a ghost.’ Aside from ‘Willow.’”
“And aside from your guide? A local, I guess.”
“A local with no knowledge of the locale?”
“If you spend all your time wondering where you are, how do you expect to get where you want to be?”
“And where do I want to be?” I grumble.
“Out. Or so I assume. Am I wrong?”
Tired of talking to her back, I put my hand on her shoulder, intending to spin her around to face me. However, my hand swipes straight through her. “You mean you can take me out? You’re not trapped in this maze?”
Willow’s eyes narrow and she assesses me with a bemused smile on her lips. “I didn’t put you here, if that’s what you’re implying. This is your labyrinth, not mine. You can’t fault me for seeing the path more clearly than you.”
As she says “you,” Willow jabs a finger into my chest. To my surprise, I feel it.
“Wait. Just now. You didn’t pass through me.”
Willow lifts her finger to her lips and blows, as though it were a smoking gun. “’Course not. That’s my superpower.”
“But—” Willow interrupts the thought by clamping a hand over my mouth. I move to pry her off, but my fingers still sink through hers as though they aren’t there to begin with, and I wind up scrabbling at my own lips. I harumpf at her indignantly from behind her hand.
“My turn,” she says. “For your sake. What did you meet before me?”
She removes the hand pressed over my mouth and allows me to answer. “Nothing. This maze is really fu—”
Willow smushes a finger against my lips again. “Don’t swear. And don’t whine. Tell me what you saw.”
“A bunch of red string. And I climbed through a ceiling that turned out to be the floor tile of the floor above me. And I tumbled down an office corridor that turned into a copper pipe.”
“Any other … locals?”
“Until you, I thought I was alone.”
“Any sound of pursuit?”
Now I squint at Willow. “Why?” I ask, “Who would be pursuing me?”
Willow shakes her head again before turning around and moving purposefully down the corridor. With nothing else to do, I fall in line. As we walk, I notice Willow’s eyes flicker to every branching hall before selecting which one to take.
Does she really know the way, or is she just guessing? And why does she keep glancing behind us, as if expecting to see something there?
59 Glass Bridges Page 4