“. . . bag, in m’ pocket . . . drop’t in th’ hole. ’N’ on t’other side, d’n by th’ belt . . . gun. . . .”
A drop fell on the corner of his raw mouth, wet and hot; Judy laid one small palm on either side of his jaw, using her thumb to brush it further in. He felt it on what was left of his tongue, like a benediction.
“I won’t need that,” she said. And gave his head a short, sharp twist.
Judy stood by the open ice as the sun rose, sweating under the weight of both parkas, her feet slopping out pigeon-toed in Joe’s too-large boots; though she’d cut some fishing line from the tackle she’d found inside his tent and tried to tie them on tighter, she suspected she’d eventually have to go back to her own impractically thin shoes once more. Which was why she now wore them looped around her neck by their laces, heels knocking hard against her heart whenever she turned her back on the numbing wind.
Something stirred at the outer edge of her vision, vaguely silver, roughly man-shaped. And long before it remembered how to talk, she knew it would probably speak in Joe Tulugaak’s voice.
Looks like I really am dead, huh?
“Looks like.”
Well, now. That’s sure something you don’t see every day.
Still not quite able to look at him, Judy made a fist and knuckled her eyes, the snow’s gloss suddenly also far too dazzling to contemplate directly. Saying, as she did: “You’re actually taking it pretty well, all things considered.”
Joe smiled at that, a faint crease left hanging in the lightening air. Replying, mildly—
Hell, Judy-like-the-food—all things considered, I’d rather be in Philadelphia. But what did you think I thought was gonna happen?
No easy answer, there. So Judy skipped past it, offering instead: “I . . . just wish I hadn’t got you killed. That’s all.”
If ghosts could snort, this is what it would sound like. You didn’t, girlie—I got me killed. Like I always kinda knew I would. A pause. Besides, we all end up like this, sooner or later. Don’t we?
“If we’re lucky,” she whispered. But he had already broken apart into a shoal of phantom fish—their scales shining like glass—and swum away past her, veering down into the hole by her stolen boots, where they disappeared without a trace.
Judy stood there for far longer than she ever might have thought she would, just a few days earlier. Finally, the cold became pressing, even to her; she shouldered Joe’s pack and set off across the ice. Became a dot on a line, blending in, until she too was gone.
Within hours, all the strange poisons that had leached up into Windigo Island from the mine’s open sore had begun to boil away. Animals turned their heads towards it once more, from every direction; beneath the ice, fish made cold, slow progress through the lake’s currents, fumbling towards its shores. A bear moaned in its winter sleep, dreaming that Windigo might be a place to make and raise cubs. It was as though even the insects, dug deep in the frozen wood of the island’s trees, knew that, since Judy Kiss had agreed to take her tainted self away, the only evil likely to flourish here would—from now on—be strictly of the human kind.
Meanwhile, Joe Tulugaak’s body lay at the bottom of the open shaft, broken and bent but otherwise unmolested, until it was far too covered with snow to be recognizable. And though the Rez Elders sent people to look for his truck, his tent, the radio they had given him, none of them ever searched far enough—or deep enough—to find it. Since he had no relatives alive to ask after him, and no (real) profession, it wasn’t much longer before he was almost completely forgotten.
Eventually, spring came.
HEART’S HOLE: TIME, THE REVELATOR REMIX (2005)
We were already setting up the decon chamber when he came in; had this voice like new money, a great wad of it flipping fresh onto the counter with this sharp, papery kind of snap. “Oh, that’s a great idea: the suits, the, uh . . . That’s so it looks just like you’re a legitimate, uh, cleaning company to anyone on the outside, is that right? And who came up with that angle, exactly?”
“That’d be Ms. Cirocco, Mr. Gall,” I say, turning.
“Very professional. Very nice.”
I just nodded, slightly—thinking, as I did: Well, ’course it is, you great git. Seeing that’s what she’s best at, after all: all craft, no service. Could sell shite to a colostomy case, that one, and make ’em ask for more; she’s just that sharp, not to mention that crooked.
And here she comes ’round the corner, like I just dreamed her up that same second: my Davina, scrubbing her rexed hair back with both hands, already in full biohazard drag. Sardonic half-smile, pig-snub Mick nose; freckled skin sheer enough to see through, the light’s just right.
“Somebody lettin’ on how we’re not really in the removals business, Jo?” she asked me, skipping over this fool like he was slag-spill. “’Cause last time I looked, this stuff we keep on mopping up still counts as waste—on the psychic scale, at least.”
“Ectoplasmic byproduct, yeah. Fumigation, like.”
“Detoxification, more like.” Fixing him: “Right, Mr. Gall?”
To which he just gives a little fluttery grin, and pulls out his keys. Then has us on the Grand Tour from top to bottom for the next hour or so, swanning us ’round like he was showing us the Ritz instead of some private cancer clinic turned condos. Last been active maybe five years back, but the traces were still dripping down everywhere you looked.
“We’re gonna clean up on this one,” Dav mutters sidelong at me, no trace of visible irony. But I had to agree; place was a fount of ghosts, full to the eyes if it’d had any. Kind of building my Nana’d’ve called not fit for habitation, and me too, maybe—before personal experience of “Toronto’s mounting homelessness pandemic” (that was our other partner Ross talking, with his big words and his politics) disabused me of the notion that no one with the brains God gave a goat could ever willingly live in a haunted house.
“Canada” meant “snow,” most places, but I’d seen little of that. It was high summer now, triple smog alert in the downtown area, brown-outs, humidity, and all. Just walking around hurt, made your eyes burn and tear; breathing felt like you had your head lodged halfway up Jesus’s own exhaust-pipe. A crown of thorns worn stylish, inside-out.
Not to mention how the ghosts pressed up against every window, ’round every corner, only made it seem the hotter. Drifting like spores through this carpeted honeycomb of Gall’s and sniffing me on the wind like an accident. Sticking their eyeless heads through walls, floors, and ceiling just to gape, their mouths all teeth, all nude flapping tongue and airless, voiceless, ceaseless howl.
Rife with it, and bad—a bad, bad place, this. Which set it apart from every other place we’d done to date . . . not at bloody all.
It’s a job, J., Dav always said. Nothin’ but. Free money, baby. Pausing, then adding: ’Sides, you don’t like how it shakes down, we can always go back to construction.
But that wasn’t exactly true, now. Was it?
You can live with a hole in your heart, long as you’ve something to plug it with. That’s the lesson I learned at birth, though it did pop up again later on, here and there: in paramedic training, for example, back when I still had my ambulance licence. Back when people weren’t afraid to let me ’round the drugs.
Real trouble comes when you try to pull that plug out, though, and get on with it. Delirious pain; a sudden rush of air and blood to your oxygen-starved brain. Liquid crash-out, bright red blink.
I was born with a hole, but the doctors at that Clinic in Glasgow patched it up—the one where my Mam dropped down like a sack of potatoes on the clean white floor after picking up what’d be her very last hit of methadone. Dropped herself, but not me.
Me they had to cut out the hard way, and quick-smart at that.
So I took my first screaming breaths in a plastic bubble-bag, fed and held through gloves in the walls; five operations to stitch my v
entricles back the way they were meant to go, and all before I was two. Not to mention how they had to crack my breast-bone over and over while doing it, so I’d never be able to bend it like Beckham—such a terrible scar they left behind, a long, furled chain of knots inching down between my breasts. Davina used to trace it every night, telling it, like a rosary.
When I was a kiddie, some of the doctors my Care workers took me to thought I was blind, some daft. This ’cause I’d sit there watching trails in the air and laughing at the patterns they made: the hovering faces, the half-bared teeth and moaning mouths. I didn’t feel their sorrow and pain, their desperate need to communicate—just watched, and laughed, and sometimes said: “Do it again!”
A headless torso in the upstairs bathroom hallway, silver-gelid with decay, hanging and turning slightly, like a slug on a line of mucus—one leg mainly there down to the knee, dangling limply; the other one gone in a shredded nest of bone and a single raw red knob. A pale little boy crouched down in the sandpit at the playground where women from my Nana’s work dropped their bairns, staring at anyone who’d stop to build a castle like he wanted to eat ’em alive; couldn’t tell he was any different from them, crashing trucks and screaming over the other side ’til he turned away, and the whole back of his head was one big hole.
Or a woman lying sprawled out in that vacant lot we climbed through to get to school, with rusty wire growing up through her stomach like weeds: she’d smile at us all as we went by, from two mouths—one on her face, uneven with smeared lipstick. The other on her neck, so deep you could see her voicebox, gleaming like a rind of frost.
Never bothered me, at the time, how I was the only one ever seemed to smile back.
But oh, the way they all shone, like they still shine. That lovely mothlight of ghosts, quick blue-white-grey-silver fragments spinning ’round some unseen vortex in a drizzle of fine-scraped souls. The dead have a half-life, like radiation; half in both senses, far as I can tell, for it’s not like they ever seem to know why they’re there, or who you are, or what in the hell it is keeps sticking them to you like flies on a strip, anyways. Just always pressing in closer, closer, closer—close enough so’s they can warm their see-through hands at your soul and whisper in your ear, twittering away like blackbirds with their tongues too split to talk.
“Is there something inside me, something they want?” I asked my Nana once, when I was maybe eight; she nodded, still knitting. Then, worried: “Can it get out?”
“One day, sure—ye won’t be able t’stop it, will ye? Just like everybody else.” And I must’ve made some noise at that, ’cause she looked up at last, softening. Said: “But they’ll never get in, for all their trying. So might be ye can take some comfort from that.”
It’d sounded plausible, back when I was still too much the child to know why she must be exaggerating.
Here I was, though, nineteen years later. Listening in with half an ear, as Davina struck her usual hardest possible bargain, and smiling at the result: this wanker Gall’d never know what hit him.
“Five thousand the full job, payable in installments. We get two up front no matter what, non-refundable, plus expenses; say about three hundred a day, just to keep it doable. You down with all that, Mr. Gall?”
“And, uh . . . no receipts?”
“No receipts? The hell you think we are, man, some kinda scam?” That sharp grin, eyes narrowing like a double wink. “Call it asbestos, you have to—that’s what it’ll look like from the street, or even if somebody wants to send inspectors in. Glouwer-Cirocco-Puget ‘locates and relocates,’ same’s it says in the phone book. ’Cause you do want what’s in here gone, right?”
“. . . right.”
“Well, then. When you want us to start?”
“Soon as possible? We’ve already started showing units, and. . . .” He trailed away; did seem to do that quite the bit, our Mr. Gall. Finishing, finally: “At any rate. The worst of it seems to be—”
“Through there, yeah?” I says, nodding.
And: “Yes.” He looks at me then, full on, for maybe the first time. “How can you—”
But then he saw where my eyes were goin’ next and stopped. Gulped. Then asked, all soft-like—
“Miss Glouwer?”
“Mr. Gall.”
“Uh, um.” Another pause. “Is there . . . something . . . in here, too?”
To which I just held his gaze with mine, mild as milk. And didn’t even let myself smile.
Might’ve thought Davina’d elbow me one for scaring the customers over that, but I knew she could sense it too, if only the barest tip of it: what with the Irish on one side and Italian on the other, her chances of being full ghost-proof were always pretty bloody slim. Rare as them who’re colour-blind, almost, or tone-deaf. Or what the Discovery Channel calls sociopaths.
“I’m sorry,” Gall says, at last. “It’s just . . . I just didn’t think there’d be something in here, too.”
Davina shrugs. “Drift. Get that a lot, huh, Jo?”
I nodded back, trying to look like I cared how scared he was getting, poor bastard.
Agreeing: “Oh yeah, certain. Old city, Toronto. Lots of people, lots of incidents . . . only stands to reason, right?”
Right.
Which is why I should have thought twice before I came here, all told. ’Cause in a place this bloody crowded, there’s bound to be “something” pretty much everywhere you look.
“I saw an angel once, when I was yuir age,” was the next-to-last thing my Nana ever said to me in person. “A black angel.”
“Oh, aye.”
“Aye, ‘aye,’ an’ I’ll thank ye not to laugh at me to ma own face, Jodice Glouwer.”
I’d’ve taken it a bit more serious, but she was always saying things like that: like how she was five hundred years old, how this wasn’t really her body, how she’d sold her soul to change places with somebody so’s she wouldn’t have to go up in smoke during the Burning Times, and this whole life we lived was her reward for faithful service to the Laird of Horns. Or how the radio was full of tiny little men, and it was fly-the-lights made the toaster work.
“Was an angel from God, I expect?”
“’Course not, are ye soft? Away wi’ that lot.” She paused. “Them others’ll give ye all ye need, ye only ask.”
Them others.
I just nodded, like always, and put it out of my mind. I was off to Canada in the morning, though I hadn’t told her as much yet; never did. Never even tried.
She wouldn’t’ve listened, anyway.
“When I see ye next, might be you’ll have the mark upon ye also,” she said, as I walked out the door. “Remember it, Jo: like this.”
And she held up her hand.
Look down at my own arm now, and I can see that same raised weal of flesh hovering ghostlike above the place prepared for it, knotted white in on itself the same way that scar over my heart does. The way they tied my flapping pipes back down when I was too young to know the true hurt of it, and sealed it fast with a lump of melting plastic thread.
The thought before the deed, with no one to blame but myself for what I’m yet to do, if I just let it happen. The future already flushing bright under my skin, like blood.
We were in bed when I first told Davina how bad the Gall job could cost us, it turned out the way I saw it going. To which she snorted.
“$2,000 per down the drain, we pull out now—that’s what it’d cost us. And who’s gonna pay the difference then, you? Ain’t comin’ out of my pocket.”
“But. . . .”
“Look, what do you know about this thing, exactly? I mean, exactly.”
“Enough to know it’s bad.”
“Oh, ‘bad.’ As opposed to all the nice ghosts we usually meet, right? Ones who want to kiss us and take us home. . . .”
And on and on and on. ’Cause she could never quite bring herself to think
someone else could know more than her, Dav, no matter or not if she knew bloody well it was true: known her so long at that point I’d just come to expect it as her first reaction to anything, even me.
Truth be told, I didn’t really want to think about the cancer condo, no more than she did. Yet it crept up on me all the same, once I was half-asleep—Gall’s grim card-house with its eddies and swirls and spectral slug-trails, tan-cured men humping along like spiders and smoking through their tracheotomy scars, bewigged women without hair, eyebrows, breasts. A little kiddie looking out one doorway, could’ve been boy or girl at that distance, with her poisoned skeleton shining up through her crepey young/old skin like some evil x-ray.
Guests don’t last long in that room, Gall’d admitted, as we passed by; one look in her eyes told me why. Munchausen’s by proxy, yeah? And why not—no better place on earth to cover up slow murder than one where nobody ever came in thinking they had the right to leave again, except in a wooden box.
My Mammy says I’ll be better any day now, Jo. She gives me my favourite special soup when the nurses aren’t watching.
Aw, Jesus.
Later, I lay there in the dark with my eyes wide open while Davina snored on beside me, and thought: a place like that’s stained black, through and thoroughly, so’s it can’t ever be clean. You can holystone all you want, but the fact is it’s a confluence—one of the deep pores of the world, a pocket full of sin, where misery washes up like trash on the tide. Been doing this my whole life, but I still can’t tell whether it’s human suffering creates such places or whether they’re made to call humans to linger ’round ’em, suffering: it just all goes so bloody deep to plumb, laid top on top on top. All the way down to the very bottom.
It’s not just misery human beings pump out, though. Is it?
Supposedly not. But that’s all that collects . . .
All I could see collecting, anyroads, there or any other place. All I’ve ever seen.
Was our partner Ross who finally helped me figure out how I did what I did, in the end: broke it down into sections like a fourth-form science prof, all neat and clear and (mainly) understandable at last. Told us how most ghosts are a rag and a bone and a hank of hair at best—a memory fragment stuck on continual loop, just dust and PKE and water-vapour with no real “there” there. Leftover fragments of psychic energy deluded into believing in their own personality; an echo cobbled together from memory and pain, with no self-awareness as such ’cept what we give them. Survival instinct, with no survival.
We Will All Go Down Together Page 21