by Adam Selzer
“Right.”
“I was gonna take care of this guy in his bed later this week, anyway. They just found another kind of cancer in him to add to his collection. With chemo he’ll make it three to six months, if he’s lucky. And it’ll be three to six months of hell with no light at the end of the tunnel. He tried and tried to get out of the chemo, but his family just wouldn’t hear of it. Selfish bastards.”
“Sure.”
I’m speaking in monosyllables, just letting her talk. What else can I do? But now I start in with questions, making sure this is all . . . ethical.
“So, this guy knows what you do?”
“I told him. He thinks I’m full of shit about the ghost part, but if I modify things a bit and actually do scare him a bit right before, I think we could get a better imprint than we got before. He’s not as friendly as Mrs. Gunderson, but that shouldn’t make things any harder for us.”
“And no one will know what happened?”
“Not a chance. They’ll think it was the cancer. After some reflections they’ll decide it was better that he went quietly, without suffering.”
“You got the gorilla mask?”
“It’s in the back.”
We drive into the bus lot in silence, then transfer into Cyn’s pickup truck. I ask what happened to Marjorie Kay Stone’s memoir, the one that told her about the brain punch in the first place.
“Burned up. Her whole house burned after she died.”
I don’t ask how she died. I decide I don’t want to know. She was pretty old. Old people die.
“What happened to the ghost you said was there?” I ask. “What happens to ghosts with nowhere left to haunt?”
“She just found another place to hang around. She just lives like a normal person most of the time.”
“I’ll have to meet her sometime.”
Cyn doesn’t answer.
We drive back out of the bus lot and onto Halsted in Cyn’s truck without saying much more. We talk about TV shows a bit. Weather. Books. Street closings that we’re going to have to work around on upcoming tours.
Everything except the fact that we’re going to go kill a guy.
Ten minutes later we’re in one of the bedrooms in the nursing home, and Cyn is nudging an old man’s shoulder as he sleeps. He looks up with an annoyed scowl from beneath a push-broom mustache.
“What the hell?” he asks.
“Mr. Sturgeon?” she says. “Do you really want to be gone before chemo can start?”
He blinks and turns over a bit. His skin is leathery and tough, like the wrinkles have to fight for every dent they make. But they fight hard. Aaron Saltis has a misshapen face that looks like it was busted out of alignment in one quick fight with a blunt object. Mr. Sturgeon looks like he’s been beaten down slowly, by degrees, for eighty years.
He looks up at Cyn, then says, “You mean that shit about making me a ghost?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I’m an atheist,” he says. “I don’t believe in ghosts.”
“Well, when we say ‘ghost,’ we don’t mean, like, your soul,” I say. “Just, like . . . energy. The reeks and fumes of your puddled brain.”
He stares at me for a second, then says, “The what of my what?”
“Look,” says Cyn. “Do you want a quick, painless death tonight, or what?”
“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah. You’re damn right I do.”
“Get up and hit the bathroom first,” she says. “As a favor to me. The less there is to leak out when your muscles relax, the better.”
He gets out of bed and uses a cane to hobble into the en-suite bathroom.
Everything sort of seems like a dream to me at this point. Cyn and I stand awkwardly in his room, looking at his stuff; she reads the titles of the books on his shelves out loud. All nonfiction, mostly by cable-news loudmouths. I tuck a corner of his bedsheets back in, just because, and wait for the flush sound. He’s old, and it takes a while. Cyn takes a book from the shelf, flips through it, and writes a response to something in the margins.
When Mr. Sturgeon is ready, we put him in a wheelchair and sign him out at the desk. Shanita smiles and says, “Thank God for you.”
She totally knows what we’re doing. I’m sure of it.
It’s sort of reassuring that she so clearly thinks it’s a good deed.
So we push Mr. Sturgeon out to the van, set him up in the back seat, and start driving him away.
“So, where are we gonna do this?” I ask. “The park again?”
“We already hit the park,” Cyn says. “I’d kinda like to experiment with other places.”
“The alley would be good, since it’s the first stop, but we need more privacy than we’d get there.”
“Yeah,” she says. “There’re cameras all over it, too.”
“Do they ever pick up anything spooky?”
“Dunno. They never actually play the recordings back unless there’s a crime in the alley or something. Even if they did, they wouldn’t tell us. How about the body dump?”
“That’d work.”
“Like fudge!” says Mr. Sturgeon. “I’m not dying in a body dump. Or an alley, for that matter. Dying in alleys is for poets and hippies.”
“We have a limited list of options, Mr. Sturgeon,” says Cyn.
“Well, who’s dying here, me or you?” he asks.
“Dude,” says Cyn. “Do you want to die or don’t you?”
“I do. But you’re gonna have to do a little better than this. Honestly. I don’t understand you millennials.”
“I’m not sure I count as a millennial,” I say. “I might be whatever comes after them.”
“Well, I was part of the Greatest Generation,” he says.
“You survived the depression, won the war, and came home to fight against integration in schools,” I say. “Whoopty-do.”
“Like you were even old enough to fight in that war,” says Cyn. “Your whole wartime experience was probably watching those racist Bugs Bunny cartoons where he fucks with the Japanese.”
“I collected tin, I’ll have you know.”
As we head toward downtown, Cyn suggests a new tour stop she and Rick have been experimenting with: Death Corner.
Death Corner was an intersection right in the middle of a neighborhood called Little Hell, which started out as Irish slums in the 1800s and morphed into Italian and Sicilian slums in the early twentieth century. In the 1910s, the intersection of Oak Street and Cleveland Avenue—Death Corner—averaged about one murder per week. It seems like it ought to be haunted. Most of the deaths would have been sudden, traumatic, and so fast that the victim didn’t have a chance to react much. Just the kind of death the brain punch was supposed to simulate.
The city eventually tore the whole neighborhood down, but then they put up the Cabrini-Green housing project in its place. Cabrini-Green was synonymous with crime for decades, so if there were any Death Corner ghosts, no one wanted to go looking for them. Now that Cabrini has been torn down too, and Death Corner is just four vacant lots, Cyn says we have a window of opportunity to find some ghosts there before they put up luxury townhouses.
“Fucking gentrification,” she says. “Chases out the ghosts every time.”
Looking at the vacant lots as we pull up, it’s easy to forget we’re in Chicago at all. But if you glance upward, you’re staring right at the John Hancock Center, the Bloomingdale’s building, and the Park Hyatt Chicago, three massive skyscrapers on Michigan Avenue, all of ten blocks away from us. To the south there are some boarded-up row houses left over from the Cabrini-Green days, all in pale brick rows with dirty wood covering the windows and doors. Behind them, you can see the antennas of the Sears Tower through the leaves on the trees. To the left you can see the Wenis Tower (which is what Rick calls the Donald Trump building).
Death Corner is a fantastic space, really. Overgrown fields surrounded by an art deco skyline.
But Mr. Sturgeon looks around and says, “Not here.”
“I would totally die here,” says Cyn.
“It’s the old Cabrini-Green site,” he says. “The projects. I am not going to die in the projects. I’m putting my foot down on this one.”
So Cyn turns the van around.
Mr. Sturgeon tells us how even the cops wouldn’t drive through this neighborhood thirty years ago, and when he starts getting political (by which I mean racist), Cyn gets him to switch gears and talk us through all of his aches and pains. And about how he only said yes to chemo to get his idiot children off his back. He’d always planned to find a way to die first, even before Cyn suggested anything. But no one would bring him a gun in the nursing home.
“You aren’t using a gun, right?” he asks.
“No. It’s a technique that sort of simulates a gunshot without the mess or the noise.”
“Good. I wouldn’t want my last act on earth to be giving those gun-control morons one more story to tell.”
He’s in pain, but still.
Mr. Sturgeon is a crusty cum-twang.
“You sure his family won’t press for an autopsy?” I ask. “They sound kind of vigilant.”
“The brain punch won’t leave any marks,” she says. “I wasn’t lying when I told Rick it would show up as an aneurysm. And that’s only if they keep looking once they’ve taken note of about four kinds of cancer.”
“Five,” Mr. Sturgeon says. “Just hurry up, will you?”
“Relax. You’ll be naked on the slab in Megan’s basement by tomorrow afternoon, Mr. Sturgeon.”
“Lucky her,” says the old asshole.
“For the record, I will not be going to the basement until you’re safely in an urn,” I say. “And if you don’t shut your gingerbread trap, I’m not gonna come to your funeral at all.”
“Like I’d even notice,” he says.
“Gingerbread trap?” asks Cyn. “OED?”
“OED. Mouth.”
“Very different from a gingerbread-office.”
We share a laugh at our inside joke.
Eventually Cyn just pulls back into Lincoln Park, which I guess is our standard spot. Anything Mrs. Gunderson left behind is probably gone now anyway, so reloading isn’t a bad idea.
“All right,” says Cyn. “How’s this?”
“I can live with this. What’s the gorilla mask back here for?”
“We think it’ll work better if we scare you just a bit right at the second we do it,” says Cyn. “The last person was in a really nice frame of mind when she went, and there wasn’t much of a ghost.”
“I better not see you wearing one of these when you kill me. I didn’t live this long to get killed by a teenager in a gorilla mask.”
“I’m not doing the killing,” I say.
“I think a dying man has the right to ask not to have a gorilla mask involved in his death.”
Cyn looks at me with a tilted head and nods. He’s right. If you can’t ask your assisted-suicide facilitators not to wear a gorilla mask, what can you ask for?
But as Cyn wheels him toward the Couch tomb, I try to think of something else I could do that would scare the old man enough to get a good ghost. If I stood beside him and shouted, “Look out! Immigrants!” that’d probably do it. But what if someone heard me? They’d have no choice but to beat me up, and I wouldn’t feel right about stopping them.
When he’s up by the tomb, Cyn walks back to me.
“Okay,” I say. “How you wanna do this?”
“I don’t know. Just stand behind him and yell, I guess.”
We walk out and I stand behind Mr. Sturgeon.
“Thanks,” he says. “Thanks for this. Don’t bungle.”
“Count backwards from ten,” I tell him.
He does, slowly, and I nod to Cyn, holding up four fingers. She nods, understanding. I know he’ll be expecting to go when he gets to zero, so we take him by surprise. When he gets to four, I yell, “Boo!”
He jumps. And as he does, Cyn punches him in the brain.
Or, anyway, I guess she does. I’m not really watching, and she moves very quickly. There’s no scream, no blood, no thunking sound like someone getting hit, or anything else I would imagine might happen when you get brain-punched. Her arm moves so quickly I don’t see what she’s doing with it. And Mr. Sturgeon just sort of falls forward in the wheelchair.
Simple as that. No mess. No pain.
Cyn kneels down and takes his pulse and stuff.
“So that’s it?” I ask.
“That’s it. He’s gone.”
“I guess it worked, then.”
She looks around the park at the passing cars, who would just see us standing there with an old man. “You okay?”
I shrug. “I’m a bit disturbed about the fact that I’m not disturbed,” I say. “Tagging walls felt more like I was doing something wrong.”
“You were. This was a good deed. One of our charities.”
“You think he was trying to make it easier on us by being such an asshole?”
“Maybe.”
“That was nice of him. . . .”
We stand there for a second, then Cyn says, “Well, now what? You want to say a few words?”
I shrug, then say, “Nitwit, blubber, oddment, tweak.”
“That’ll do, Dumbledore.”
And she starts wheeling Mr. Sturgeon’s body back to the van. When we drive away, she puts on a Nick Cave album that seems very apropos.
Back at the home, Shanita smiles and crosses herself as we wheel Mr. Sturgeon past her and back to his room to be laid out in his bed, like he just died of cancer in the middle of the night.
The bus is almost full for my next tour, two days later, and it’s a good crowd, too. They’re laughing at every joke in my opening monologue, even when I stumble and screw up a little.
When we get off to walk through the Alley of Death and Mutilation, one little girl who can’t be older than nine comes up to me.
“Are you doing okay?” I ask. “I know these stories get pretty gory.”
She smiles so big I worry that she’ll be sore in the morning. “They’re awesome,” she says. “I love dead people.”
“Me too,” I tell her.
Her mom comes up, smiling a dopey sort of grin of her own. “Ava adores this stuff,” she says. “Blood, guts, gore. We think she’s going to be a doctor.”
“I wish I was a ghost,” Ava says. “That way I could suck people’s souls out of their ears.”
“Oh, Ava!” says her mom, who obviously doesn’t find this disturbing in the slightest.
I decide to keep an eye on Ava.
She kind of reminds me of me, in a way. But I never went so far as to fantasize about killing people, especially as openly as she is. Even now, when I write up new endings to Disney movies where I’m the villain and the villain wins, I never imagine killing the princesses or anything.
But, come to think of it, there are always skeletons in the dungeon, so even in my tamest self-insert fan fiction, I must have done some killing once upon a time.
At Hull House Ava tells me she wishes she was a devil baby, so she could eat people’s heads. “I’d pretend I was a cute little baby, then when they tried to kiss me, I’d eat them!”
Eating people is a particular favorite thing of hers.
And when I tell her about Cyn having a headless ancestor, she gets all excited and asks her mom if she’s part headless too.
Nothing on the tour scares her until we get to the Couch tomb.
When we’re walking up toward it, across the field, she starts out skipping along, laughing about how she’s skipping over dead bodies, but then she stops midskip.
“You okay?” I ask.
She suddenly looks terrified, her face frozen like she’s just watched someone die right in front of her and realized that it wasn’t as funny as she thought.
Slowly she raises her shaking arm and points toward the tomb.
�
�There’s a . . . a . . .”
Up against the stone wall of the mausoleum is a solid, unmistakably human silhouette, small enough that it could only be the shadow of someone standing right in front of it.
It’s there for a second, and then it’s gone.
Well, shit.
It freaks me out a bit, but poor Ava is frightened out of her mind. She screams and starts crying and won’t take another step toward the tomb.
I try to play it cool and just calm her down.
“You mean the shadow?” I ask. “Is that what you saw?”
She nods. Behind her, her mother takes pictures, oblivious.
“Oh, that’s nothing,” I say. “We see that a lot.”
“Was that a ghost?” she asks.
“Nope. Just the shadow of a rat. A big, ugly rat with fangs,” I say. “When the light from the street hits a big enough rat just right, its shadow looks like a person.”
Ava stares forward, and the color gradually comes back into her face. She stops crying. A minute later she’s asking if the rat eats people, then says, “I wish I was a rat, so I could eat people’s heads!”
“Oh, you wouldn’t want to eat a head,” I say. “They’re full of boogers.”
“Ew!”
“A hundred years ago, ‘booger’ was another name for ‘ghost.’ ”
That gets her laughing, running around, waving her arms and shouting “Wooo! I’m a booger!” She’s forgotten that she was scared, and I feel like I’ve handled the situation extremely well, though I have to explain the whole history of the word (and it’s connection to “boogeyman”) to Ava’s mom.
The shadow appears again for a second, and everyone on the tour sees it and goes nuts.
After that I don’t even have to hop the fence or talk about the tomb much—everyone is looking for the shadow, or trying to find out if we’ve rigged up a projector to make it look like there’s a shadow there.
I tell Ava that she and I are sharing a secret that it’s just a rat, but everyone else is fired up and thinks they’ve seen a ghost. I don’t know if it’s really some of the reeks and fumes of Mr. Sturgeon’s brain or if I was right about it being a rat or what.