by Adam Selzer
I snort, and the old lady sitting with us laughs a little bit herself. This only encourages Rick.
“Have you thought about what you’ll be when you get out of here?” he goes on, in the kind of voice people use to impersonate salesmen. “Consider a career in the ghastly arts! You don’t have to settle for being an orb; with the right training, you could be a poltergeist, a full-body apparition, or even a phantom foul-mouth! You have so much potential!”
“Phantom foul-mouth?” I ask.
“Yeah,” says Cyn. “Ghosts who swear at people. There are a few of those in town. And there’ll be one more when I kick it.”
“Me too,” says the old woman at our table. “That’s what I want to be. One of those.”
“Megan,” Rick says, “this is Mrs. Gunderson. She’ll haunt the crap out of everyone when she goes.”
“Hi,” I say.
Cyn starts to take a bite of an apple, but Mrs. Gunderson taps on the table and gives her a look. “We pray before we eat, young lady.”
Cyn nods, puts down the apple, and gives me a “play along” look. I nod back, and Mrs. Gunderson puts her hands together and says, “Dear Lord, please hurry up and take me, because I am ready to go. This place smells and I do nothing but ache all day long. I can’t see or move, but my brain is still sharp enough to know how miserable I am. Please bring me into your loving arms soon. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.”
Then she smiles at me sweetly as the nurse starts spoon-feeding applesauce to her.
“Oh, Mrs. Gunderson,” says Cyn. “You’re so silly.”
When we finish eating, Rick and Cyn lead me outside.
“Is she always like that?” I ask. “Praying to die?”
“Every day,” says Rick. “It’s all she talks about. She’s in a lot of pain. Lots of those people are.”
“That really sucks,” I say.
“Don’t worry,” says Cyn. “We’re taking care of her.”
At Second City, the comedy school where Rick is taking classes, we follow him up a maze of escalators and down a series of halls into a bare-walled room with nondescript carpet, fluorescent lights, and exposed pipes. While he chats with the lanky, gray-haired teacher, and the other students look at their phones, Cyn and I hang in the back by a stack of disused music stands. I send Zoey the pictures I took of the hallways, which have photos of all the famous comedians who got their training here: Tina Fey, Steve Carrell, Stephen Colbert, three out of four original ghostbusters. Everyone, really. I always like to impress Zoey with big-city name-dropping. She lives in some small town in Arizona.
“How’s Zoey?” asks Cyn, reading over my shoulder.
“Okay, I guess,” I say.
“Still no picture?”
I shake my head.
“I’m gonna set you up with a friend of mine,” says Cyn.
“No thanks.”
“Seriously. I’ll have her come on the tour. She’s about your age. Big into ghosts. And you can see what she looks like and be sure she’s not twelve and all.”
I lean back in the chair. “The reason Zoey won’t send a picture is an anxiety disorder. What kind of asshole would I be if I broke things off because of her mental health?”
“You’re not being unreasonable. There are safety issues. Not to mention physical ones.”
I shrug. “I can deal.”
“Have you ever at least kissed anyone in person?”
I don’t answer for a second, then say, “I almost kissed the girl who played the other old lady in Arsenic and Old Lace, but she got freaked out when I tried.”
“Not into girls?”
“I thought she was.”
“Were you both still dressed as old ladies at the time?”
I pause, then nod. Cyn can’t help but chuckle. I don’t blame her. I chuckle too.
I was still sort of reeling from that particular misadventure when I first starting e-mailing back and forth with Zoey. If I hadn’t had Zoey, I’d probably still be seeing that girl’s heavily made-up face looking horrified every time I closed my eyes.
“You don’t have to die a virgin for someone who won’t even meet up with you,” says Cyn.
“I don’t feel like I am one.”
“Just from cybersex?”
I shrug. “I think it counts. Virginity’s a social construct anyway.”
I sort of wish I really thought that more than I do.
And I do at least want to kiss someone. Soon.
Maybe I can be in another play where I get to kiss a costar.
We watch a few students stumble their way through stand-up routines, then Rick comes up and absolutely blows the others off the stage with a routine about an uncle of his whose hobby was buying new insurance plans.
“Seriously, folks,” he says. “Every time I see the guy, he’s got some new policy that he’s all amped up about. He’ll show up to Thanksgiving and be like, ‘All I got to do is pay ten bucks a month, and they’ll give me fifty grand if I lose one lousy limb!’ Then at Christmas he’ll have some new plan that costs fifteen bucks a month, but they’ll give him half a million for a severed arm. I learned long division by him making me figure out how many months he’d have to pay before he lost money by losing a leg!”
He milks certain words perfectly, wringing all the laughs he can out of them. The class roars with laughter.
“See?” Cyn whispers. “Star.”
She’s right. Rick is head and shoulders above everyone else we’ve seen in the class.
“I’m totally serious,” he goes on. “One day Uncle Carlos is going to be a very rich man. With no arms and no legs. We can hang him on the wall and call him Art. Throw him in front of the door, call him Matt.”
It’s a third-grade joke, but even the teacher is cracking up.
“Or toss him in the pool, and BOOM! Bob’s your uncle!”
Now the class explodes.
Cyn has heard the routine a million times, but she smiles proudly when the class laughs. “That’s my crazy bathroom,” she whispers.
Between the teacher’s notes and what Rick tells me on the way home, I can see that it’s all in the delivery. It isn’t just that the things he’s saying are funny (they only sort of are), it’s how he says them. Waiting until just the right second, when the laughter from one joke is just dying down, to throw out the next line. One change in word choice can make or break a joke. An extra syllable can screw up the rhythm.
And the same goes for ghost stories—one word, one pause, can be the difference in a gasp line working or falling flat.
Back home, I spend all night practicing in front of the mirror, just quietly enough that Mom can’t hear me. I refine my stories a word at a time.
And I forget all about how Rick had said something back at the cemetery about an “initiation” after my next tour.
Chapter Six
Two days later, when I next come on a tour, I am a Resurrection Mary expert. I’ve learned my way around genealogy sites and found death records for lots of girls named Mary who ended up at Resurrection. I’ve pulled their obits from the Tribune. I’ve found academic articles about the urban myth of the vanishing hitchhiker from the 1940s. I am totally ready to tell the story on a tour.
On the Blue Line train into the city I sit across from a guy who seems to think he’s a werewolf or something. He writhes and grunts and howls and licks his fingers as though they were claws, and he rambles something about cross-breeding gorillas with hippos. Everyone just goes about their business reading their books like nothing unusual is going on, because it’s the Blue Line, after all, and he’s not biting anyone or anything.
When I get to Clark Street, the necklace guy and the portrait guy are plying their trades again. A costumed guide from Al Capone Tours lets a little kid pretend to shoot him for a charming photo his family can take home.
Edward Tweed is running two buses for DarkSide Chicago tours tonight. He’s standing in front of one of them, and next to him is a scruffy red-haired guy in a thre
adbare brown sport coat that must be sweaty as hell in the heat, plus a fedora that has seen better days. He looks like the kind of guy who gets kicked out of pool halls.
Tweed tips his cowboy hat at me, and the other guy gives me a two-finger salute.
I meet up with Rick and Cyn by their bus, and Rick tells me the other guy is Aaron Saltis, Tweed’s protégé. “He’s younger than he looks,” says Rick. “Actor. Nice guy, but he really needs to fact-check Tweed. Now and then we bump into him in the alley, and he’s always saying a serial killer in the 1970s used to pick people up there. Pure BS.”
The pure BS is clearly popular; Tweed’s thirty-seven-passenger buses both look full, and our one smaller one is only half full. It feels half empty.
The customers we have are mostly tourists with kids, including a woman who shows up with a tiny accessory dog and insists that she has to take it along. I think that pets are officially against the rules, but she’s with a party of five, and Rick and Cyn aren’t doing well enough to turn away a party that large. And anyway, it fits in her purse.
Rick introduces me to the passengers as “part of the team,” and I feel like people are giving me skeptical looks, like I’m too young to have this job and have no business being here. Maybe they think I’m Cyn’s sister or something. I’ll have to make myself look a bit older. I don’t usually wear much makeup—I sort of associate it with dead people—but I know some tricks.
As we start, Rick says, “Now, this neighborhood isn’t all that spooky these days, except that occasionally we do have this guy in a frog suit standing outside of Rainforest Cafe, and that guy scares the bajeezus out of me.” When people chuckle, he says, “Yeah, you guys laugh, but I have to go through life without a bajeezus now.” He pauses for another chuckle, waits until just the right time, then adds “Boom! You all just got privilege-checked.”
While he points out all the murder sites, hanging sites, and disaster sites between the Rock and Roll McDonald’s and the Alley of Death and Mutilation, I’m obsessively going over the Resurrection Mary story in my head, thinking of all the ways I can change it if I have to, like if there’s some miracle and all the lights are green and I have to leave out a lot. I am nervous as hell. I’ve done a few plays and all, but I’ve always been in a zombie outfit, or an old lady costume. I’ve never just been, like, myself.
But I can do this.
After the alley stop, as we cruise onto Wacker Drive, Rick says, “Now, to tell you about a girl who died here in 1934, here’s our own Miss Megan Henske, Mistress of Darkness and Shadows.”
Mistress of Darkness and Shadows. That’s me. Hell yeah.
I feel a surge of confidence for a second as I take the mic, but just as I’m about to talk, I hear some lady a few rows back saying, “Is she supposed to be scary?” to the guy she’s with, like she’d expected me to show up in costume or something.
I try to ignore her or picture her in her underwear. Neither helps. I swear that even the dog is giving me a skeptical look as I take my place at the front of the bus, like even a chihuahua knows I have no right to be working this job. I forget just about everything I was planning to say and try to improvise.
Badly.
“So, uh, here at the ‘L’ tracks,” I say, “this girl Mary Bregovy died in 1934. Some people say she’s Resurrection Mary, a famous Chicago ghost. But there’s an academic article that lists a sighting from three years before that, so . . .”
And then I freeze. For what seems like an hour. In grocery-store-hell time, which is infinitely slower than normal time. My knees start to shake, my vision goes blurry. I’m a trembling mess.
The silence sounds like a vacuum about to suck me back to Forest Park.
But just as the bus is getting to the spot where Mary Bregovy died, and I’m half-wishing I were her, a miracle happens.
Outside of the bus, a rail-thin woman is standing on the corner wearing a fur coat that’s probably six sizes too big for her frame, and orders of magnitude too warm for the weather.
“Hey, look!” I say. “Special bonus tonight. On your right, it’s Cruella De Vil, from 101 Dalmations!”
All twelve passengers burst out laughing, and Rick nearly chokes on his Red Bull. When he swallows and opens his mouth, he’s cracking up.
“That’s got to be a ghost, right, folks?” I ask. “Why would a living person be wearing fur in this weather?”
“Why would ghosts wear clothes at all?” asks a guy in the third row. “Your pants don’t have a soul.”
“Well, maybe yours don’t, sir,” I say. “They must not have any good vintage stores where you live.”
Rick laughs and says, “Just because you’re dead doesn’t mean you want your bits and pieces showing, man.” Then he pats me on the back, retrieves the mic, and says, “A lot of people don’t really think ghosts are peoples’ souls or spirits, exactly. Some people think it’s more scientific, like some sort of leftover energy. Some people call it a ‘psychic imprint.’ ”
“Or a ‘residual haunting,’ ” says Cyn.
“Right. As opposed to an ‘intelligent haunting’ that floats around and knows where it’s going. And they’re not always even from dead people—just something left over from a really intense emotion. Theoretically.”
For a moment I think back to the Summer I spent living in my dad’s apartment, back when I was nine. I thought it was haunted because of the moaning noises I heard in the next apartment over on the other side of my bedroom wall at night. I knew “the facts of life,” but I hadn’t yet figured out that sometimes people had sex when they weren’t trying to have a baby, so it didn’t occur to me that the eighty-year-old couple next door, the Weyhers, might have been doing it.
And the last time I stayed there, over spring break, I heard those sounds again. Even though the apartment has been empty for months, since Mrs. Weyher died. Maybe I was hearing some sort of psychic echo of her getting it on. I guess I could get behind that sort of ghost.
Go, ghost of Mrs. Weyher, go.
From there on, I relax a bit. Disney villains have saved my ass. I never do finish the Mary story, but Rick lets me tell some of the Hull House story myself, and then a bit about H. H. Holmes at the body dump.
There’s a little parking area and a “senior living” apartment complex on the site of the old garage where the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre happened. The old people don’t like buses to stop there, so it’s usually just a drive-by, but tonight Cyn slows the bus to a stop as Rick finishes the story.
“Okay,” Rick says. “Remember what I was saying earlier about psychic imprints?”
We all nod.
“Well, there’s supposedly one right here at the massacre site. There was a German Shepherd named Highball who was tied to the axle of one of the trucks in the garage during the massacre. Even though he wasn’t shot, he was apparently so scared that he left some sort of energy behind. For years, people said that dogs would freak out if they walked by this fence. Wanna try an experiment, since we have a dog with us tonight?”
The woman with the dog gets up and takes it outside to see what happens. The dog hops through the fence, trots right over to the spot where Rick said the bodies fell, and poops.
“Well, there you have it,” says Rick. “It scared the shit out of the dog.”
We all have a good laugh, the dog runs straight back to the woman, and the tour goes on.
The tips are good, and Rick and Cyn cut me in, even though I barely did anything.
“Total props for that Cruella joke,” says Rick. “That was really thinking on your feet.”
“I was screwing up the story before,” I say. “I don’t even know what I would have done if she hadn’t shown up.”
“No worries. You proved you can handle stuff as it comes up, and that’s huge. And if we get any reviews from tonight they’ll be good. So you’re in the clear.”
I take a deep breath and resolve not to check Yelp or whatever. I never read reviews of the fan fic I post online. I d
id once, and it took me weeks to get over the bad comments. I hadn’t stopped to think that I could get reviews of tours, too. But I don’t have to read them, I guess.
“Hey,” says Cyn. “Weird night to have all that psychic-imprint stuff come up, huh?”
“I know, right?” says Rick. “It’s like there’s something in the air. Cosmic.”
They both look right at me, grinning like they’re about to let me through a door into a surprise party.
“What’s up?” I ask.
“Your initiation,” says Cyn. “One. Of. Us. One. Of. Us.”
Rick switches to a more serious tone. “Megan, do you support assisted suicide for chronic patients?”
I nod. “Of course.”
“All right,” he says. “Let’s head up to the north side, then. We’re gonna see if we can create our own psychic imprint, and you get to help.”
Chapter Seven
You, uh, aren’t going to kill me, right?” I ask.
Rick laughs. “Nah,” he says. “You’re not an elderly chronic patient. People would ask questions if you died. Too much trouble, besides the ethical stuff.”
“They’d probably assume Zoey did it, though,” says Cyn, as she loops the bus around onto Dearborn Street and heads north. “Tell her about the brain punch, Ricardo.”
“Right,” Rick says. “The brain punch.”
“Brain punch?” I ask.
“Brain punch. It’s a Marjorie Kay Stone thing.”
“Ah.”
“Did you ever stop to wonder why we knew so much about her and her house?” asks Cyn.
“Not really. I guess I figured, you know, small town. Everyone knows everyone?”
“Magwitch Park isn’t that small,” says Cyn.
“We were kind of her slaves for a while,” says Rick. “She had, like, six thousand handwritten memoir pages, and she hated computers too much to type them herself. After she caught me burying my hamster in her yard, she sort of blackmailed us into doing it for her.”