by Adam Selzer
“Someone you want to know?”
I blush and say, “Shut up.”
I can tell Mom is about to make some comment to embarrass me, so I take a step away, then call out, “All right, folks, we can head on back to the bus.”
There’s no physical sign of a lingering psychic imprint from Mrs. Gunderson at the Couch tomb tonight, but everyone agrees that it seems particularly eerie out there, which I don’t think ever happened in the days before my “initiation.” Even Mom says it’s giving her chills. And Brandon at least seems to think it’s cool when Rick demonstrates the Tomb Snooper 500.
Then, as we’re passing the old Water Tower on the way back to the McDonald’s, toward the end of the tour, Morticia raises her hand.
“Hey,” she says. “My hotel is right around the corner. Can I get off here?”
Cyn pulls over and Morticia stands up, says, “Great tour, by the way,” and slips off the bus. I watch her vanish into the crowd and almost chase after her, but don’t. I have a girlfriend already, right?
Cyn drives another block before slamming on the brakes and laughing out loud.
“What?” asks Rick.
“1830s. Water Tower. What was here? And what just happened? Tell them. It’s perfect.”
“Oh no,” says Rick. “I’m not gonna say it. It sounds made up!”
“Oh yes, you are, doinkus,” says Cyn. “Right now, or I’m turning this bus right back around.”
Rick groans a bit, says that she’s the doinkus, then takes a deep breath.
“This might seem cheesy,” he says. “But we mentioned earlier that people who died in cities used to end up buried in crowded churchyards, so Chicago started putting land aside on the outskirts, right? Well, the first two places they put aside, back in the 1830s, were down by Twenty-sixth Street, and right where we are now. So we just had a quirky girl in an old-fashioned dress, who hitched along for the night, disappear at an old cemetery. Our own vanishing hitcher, like Resurrection Mary!”
Everyone has a good laugh, and I open the door and look back behind us. Morticia is gone, all right. Vanished into the crowd on Michigan Avenue.
Well, what the hell. Maybe she did disappear into thin air.
When the tour comes to an end a few minutes later, everyone comes off the bus looking excited, and Brandon says he’ll be in touch very soon. We make twenty-five bucks each in tips—a record for a night when we’re splitting it three ways. Rick and I stretch out on the bus while Mom and Cyn go into the McDonald’s for coffee. They’ve hit it off pretty well over the course of the night.
I’m really pumped up by how good the tour was, but Rick seems depressed, or maybe even embarrassed.
“Lucky that the disappearing girl happened right in front of Brandon,” I say.
He lowers himself into a seat three rows back. “That looked like we staged it. All that told him is that we’re willing to bullshit people.”
“But we didn’t.”
Now he shakes his head.
“The hell of it is, that’d be the best ghost sighting ever, if she was one, but real ghosts make crappy tourist attractions. People think ghosts all look like old-timey translucent fucks. I only ever met the one real one, but she just looked like a normal person. No one who saw her would think she was a ghost.”
“So, would blurry psychic imprints be better than actual spirits?”
Rick snorts. “Those imprint things aren’t real. That’s a goofball pseudoscience thing that Marjorie Stone was into. Real ghosts . . . they’re just regular people. I almost feel like the tours are problematic because we act like they’re all scary and shit. It’s kind of . . . I don’t know. Ableist.”
“So you and Cyn didn’t find a manuscript about punching them out of people’s brains?” I asks.
“Well, we did, but you’ve gotta remember, Marjorie Kay Stone was out of her mind. God. This looked like a cheap stunt, and I’m afraid that’s exactly what Brandon wanted. Someone who’ll just go up there and bullshit people. Cyn says it’ll make me famous anyway, but I say it’ll just lead to think pieces about what an idiot I am.”
Mom and Cyn come back, chatting about death-industry stuff, and I join in the talk with them as we drive off to the bus lot.
Rick sits silently, in the same seat where Morticia had been.
Mom teases me about Morticia all the way home.
“Shame she turned out to be a vanishing hitchhiker,” says Mom. “You two would have made a cute little goth couple.”
“Whatever, Mother.”
I tell myself it was just a silly little one-night crush thing. No different than getting a celebrity crush when you see a really hot person in a movie. Everyone’s allowed to have a celebrity crush or two.
Still, I wonder if I would have kissed her if I’d had the chance. I’m happy with Zoey, but still. I go back and forth between thinking that what we do counts as sex and thinking it totally doesn’t, and that I’m missing out on a basic part of being a human if I just settle for a life of long-distance sex.
While I wait for her to sign in online, I distract myself by looking up words for “mixed up” or “confused” on the OED.
My favorite is “puddled.”
One example sentence is from a 1651 book called Enthusiasmus Triumphatus by Henry More: “As for those terrible mysterious radiations of God upon the Chaos . . . which thou wouldst fain shuffle off thy absurdities by; I say, they are but the flarings of thine own fancy, and the reeks and fumes of thy puddled brain.”
Maybe that’s what ghosts are. The reeks and fumes of your puddled brain, floating around in the environment.
I think this over and troll through the archives until Zoey signs on, then talk with her until it’s almost dawn.
I picture her looking like Morticia all night long.
Chapter Ten
On the Fourth of July you can literally fry an egg on the sidewalk. They do it on the news.
The weather grows hotter and hotter, and the haze makes everyone and everything in Forest Park look diseased to me. The satellite dishes on the houses look like smallpox blisters.
One day, when I walk to work at the grocery store, it’s so humid out that I feel like I’m swimming down the sidewalk, sweating out half of my brain cells through my pores. The air-conditioning in the store feels like heaven, but the fluorescent lights hurt my eyes and drain what little energy I have. I was up late digging through articles from the newspaper archives again, and I’m exhausted.
Plus, it’s Sunday. Sunday afternoons are usually the worst days at the store—it’s like everyone just got all of last week’s sins forgiven at church, and they’re all set to get a fresh start on this week.
Then there’s the noise, noise, noise, noise, noise.
The noises in grocery stores are just awful. Not an instant goes by when there isn’t a beep or a bloop or a clang from a register somewhere down the line, beating out of time with the elevator music that pipes through the speakers high above in the ceiling. Then there are louder beeps from the scissor lifts in the back room, the trucks out in the loading zone, and the cell phones in people’s pockets. Beep, beep, boop. Constantly.
Most days I can tune it out. Today I can’t. Every sound is like a needle pricking my inner ear.
I’m tired from staying up late researching, annoyed at even having to be here, and sick of old people giving me the evil eye for not treating their loaves of bread like priceless works of art. When I take groceries to cars it gets me away from some of the noise, but into the sweltering heat.
Bag after bag, customer after customer, beep after beep, I look up at the old people who glare down at me disapprovingly, and wonder if they’d volunteer to be punched in the brain. They sure do seem miserable.
One sees me adjusting the Band-Aid over my lip ring and says, “You shouldn’t be bagging groceries with open wounds.”
“Sorry, ma’am,” I say. “I cut myself shaving this morning. My manager thinks my goatee is really unladylike.”
She doesn’t think this is very funny, but Kendra, who is running the register, cracks up. And apologizes to the woman about five thousand times.
Before I got started with the tours, I never would have had the nerve to talk back to a customer like that. I would have thought about it, but just stood there, mute.
Things are different now.
I’m not just a grocery bagger anymore. I’m a murdermonger.
After one customer nearly runs me over driving out of the parking lot, I notice Kacey grabbing a smoke break at the picnic table by the dumpster and go to join her. The smell of nicotine and garbage wafts through the sweltering and greasy air.
“Honey, I’m home,” I say.
Kacey smiles, and I sit down and text with Zoey a bit, in between looking up OED words. There are no synonyms for “apeshit.” Even the OED is letting me down today.
I’ve only been there a minute when Doug, the manager, pokes his head around the corner.
“Megan, if you’re done smoking, I need you back on the line.”
I turn toward him. “I don’t smoke.”
“Then I need you back on the line.”
“I’m taking a cigarette break; I’ll be back in when I’m done.”
“You just said you don’t smoke.”
“I’ve read the Fair Labor Standards Act,” I lie. “If Kacey can take a break to smoke, I could probably come out here to have sex and you couldn’t stop me, if I was so desperate as to do it by the dumpster.”
Doug turns about nine shades of red.
“Well, except for public decency laws,” says Kacey. “But we could take a make-out break and probably get away with it.”
She grins suggestively, and I look at her to see if maybe she’s serious. I mean, if we kiss now to prove a point, that wouldn’t really be cheating on Zoey, it would just be, like, theater. It wouldn’t even be a pity kiss. In fact, it’d actually be a pretty good way to have a proper, physical kiss that I’d never regret.
But Doug doesn’t give us a chance.
“You could at least say something respectable, like you’re studying for a test or something,” he says.
Kacey grins, stands on one foot, and starts touching her nose while reciting the alphabet backward, like she’s practicing for the drunk driving test. Or the version they do in cartoons, at least.
I think it’s funny. Doug does not.
“Both of you,” he says. “Back inside before I write you up.”
Kacey stubs out her cigarette, mouths the word “loser,” and giggles at me as we make our way back into the clanging, beeping hellhole.
Inside, I go through my usual routine of avoiding looking at the clock, hoping that it will make time go faster, but it never works. I write out a whole story in my head where Doug falls off a cliff into a deep chasm, lands on the mangled-but-still-living bodies of several Disney villains who’ve already fallen off the same cliff, and becomes their prisoner.
And just as I’m thinking that, a text comes in from Cynthia.
SWITCHBLADE CYNTHIA FARGON:
Minor emergency. Rick got food poisoning at a diner in the Gold Coast. Can you come run the 7 p.m. tour?
I’m supposed to be working until six thirty, which doesn’t give me enough time to get downtown for a seven p.m. tour, but I tell her I’ll see if I can get off early.
I go around asking people who are off at four or five if they’ll stay late for me, but I don’t get any takers, and finally I just ask Doug straight up if I can leave an hour or so early.
“It’s kind of an emergency at my other job,” I say.
“Other job?”
“I do have a life outside the grocery mines, you know.”
He looks over a notepad and moves his head around like a worm has crawled up his nose and he’s trying to help it get comfortable. “I seem to recall that when you applied you had unlimited availability,” he says. “It’s part of why we hired you.”
“That’s gonna change once classes start anyway.”
I don’t mention that I haven’t actually registered for community college yet, and that I’m thinking I’ll probably wait until at least the winter semester, when I won’t be as busy with tours.
He mutters something about how this is why they shouldn’t hire students, and I decide I just can’t take it anymore.
Fuck it all.
I rip the Band-Aid off my lip ring as dramatically as possible, drop it on the ground, and stomp out of the store, storming through the parking lot, onto the sidewalk, and toward my house. On the way I text Cyn and tell her I’ll be there in plenty of time for the tour.
Kacey sends me a text:
WORK WIFE:
Doug wants to know if you quit.
I tell her I did and she says she just might join me.
She won’t, though. She’ll be here for years, the poor unfortunate soul. Probably not as long as Doug, though. One day some funeral-parlor owner will bury him with his name tag still on.
I get home with enough time to grab a shower, do my makeup to make myself look a bit older, and put on a nice goth-casual ensemble. I’m ready to go with enough time left over to set fire to the porta-potty-blue uniform in the charcoal grill in the backyard.
I roast a hot dog off the flames and eat it on the way to the train station.
On Clark Street, Edward Tweed and Aaron Saltis say, “Rolling with the rotters.”
The Al Capone Tours guy says, “Ghost girl!”
Terrence the caricature guy bumps fists with me.
But Cyn doesn’t say a thing when I first come up to the bus. She’s leaning against it, twirling one cigarette in her fingers while another one hangs from her mouth. I don’t normally see her smoke.
“What’s wrong?” I ask.
“We’ve got eight people,” she says. “Tweed has two full buses. Almost ten times as many people.”
“We’ve had fewer before and gotten by.”
She sighs and nods. “So far. But insurance for this thing is insane. The licenses we need are coming up for renewal soon, and they aren’t cheap. Not to mention Crook County’s three-percent amusement tax on top of all the other fucking taxes. God. We’ve got to have something happen, or we’re fucked. We aren’t even coming close to breaking even tonight.”
I nod.
“What about the TV show?”
“Rick’s still not convinced he trusts Brandon, and Brandon’s still talking with Tweed, too. If Tweed gets the show or Ghostly Journeys opens a Chicago branch, we’re just fucked.”
“Well, shit,” I say. “I hope we can hold on. I quit the grocery store today.”
She exhales. “Yeah, that was probably a mistake.”
I’ll be screwed if the company goes under. Royally. Back to suffering through some crap job with nothing to distract me but an invisible girlfriend. Back to being completely pathetic. I realize that a good deal of my self-image, my self-esteem, is tied up in being good at this job now. What else have I got? I’m okay at acting, but not good enough to make it big or anything. You hear about people making a living writing erotic fan-fic, but I think it’s a one-in-a-million shot, maximum.
I try to make it sound like I’m probably joking when I look at Cyn and say, “Think someone else at the nursing home might want to volunteer to become a ghost?”
She looks away from me, then up at the giant golden arches and the Ronald McDonald statue.
“A couple,” she says. “If we want to go that route.”
Just like that. She doesn’t smirk or act like it was a joke, like Rick would have. She just acknowledges that making our own ghosts is an option.
I should be more shocked. But I think a part of me already knew that Mrs. Gunderson didn’t just happen to die that night in Lincoln Park. And that part of me never felt guilty.
It’s a good tour. But any way you cut it, we have just a few people. Tips come to six dollars.
When she slips me my three bucks, Cyn gives me a long, serious look.
“What?” I ask.
“You know what happened with Mrs. Gunderson, right?”
“I have a pretty good idea.”
She stares a bit more, then looks out the windshield. “I don’t want Ricardo to know. He’d freak out. And it’s better if he thinks any ghosts we run into might really be ghosts from a long time ago.”
“I understand.”
She leans back in the seat and watches people pouring out of the DarkSide Chicago tour buses ahead of us. Edward and Aaron shake hands with customers and collect tips.
“Rick should be a star,” she says. “But he’s never gonna get there if he keeps being so stubborn.”
“You have to be willing to make some compromises to get what you want,” I say. “At least when you’re starting out.”
“Usually you have to sell your soul to get the kind of life he wants,” says Cyn. “You have to step over everyone in your way. Make them wriggle like a worm on a hook.”
“Eyes on the prize.”
A trolley full of bachelorette partiers rolls past, and they all shout “Wooooo!” like they’re imitating a ghost in a cartoon.
Cyn looks right at me and says, “So, you wanna go again?”
Chapter Eleven
So, just to be clear,” I say as we ride along, “Mrs. Gunderson did volunteer, right?”
“Oh, yeah. Of course. It was all thoroughly planned out between me and her. We let Rick think it was a hazing prank, but she knew she was dying and she was totally on board. I wasn’t sure the imprint thing would work, but since then it’s been weird enough out there that I think there must be something to it.”
“Yeah.”
“If we’d actually done the gorilla-mask thing it might have left a stronger imprint, but I thought if she actually died right then, Rick might get suspicious. Better to do it on the sly.”
“True.”
She stops at a red light, then says, “Nursing homes are full of people who are way past average life expectancy, who are never getting better and can’t wait for it all to be over with. If they were dogs, people would say it’s inhumane to keep them alive, but people expect other people to suffer as long as they can.”