Where the Dead Sit Talking

by Brandon Hobson

  For three days she consumed my thoughts. Something strange was going on, and I felt completely distanced from whatever it was. For a while I wondered whether she wanted me to check on her, if her isolation might be a call for help. Late on the third night, I finally gave in and tapped lightly on her door. At first she didn’t answer, but I kept tapping. “It’s Sequoyah,” I said quietly. “Can we talk? I want to talk to you.”

  I waited. Then I heard the floor creak from her footsteps and she opened the door slightly, peering out. She looked terrible. Her eyes were puffy, like she’d been crying. She looked exhausted, sick.

  “Hey,” I said. “Are you okay?”

  “I can’t talk,” she said.

  “Why not?”

  “Don’t take it personally. It’s not you, Sequoyah. I just have all this shit I’m dealing with.”

  “What kind of shit?”

  “Seriously,” she said. “I can’t talk. I’m going outside and I need to be alone.”

  “Outside? What for? Can I go with you?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  She looked at me, and I could feel the pain in her stare. It was as if I was no longer anyone she wanted to be associated with.

  “Why not?” I said again.

  “Hang on,” she said, and closed the door. I stood in the dark hallway waiting. I looked down at the floor. I looked back at the door. She took forever. Then, finally, she opened the door fully and stepped out. She was now dressed and wearing a dark jacket and white gloves.

  “Fine,” she said. “Fine, you can come if you want. Just be quiet about it.”

  I followed her downstairs, through the living room and out the back door. I didn’t bother to put on a coat myself. Outside it was freezing, the wind blowing bitter cold. The moon was full with a ring of light that stretched into the dark sky around it. We walked through the yard, past the swing set to the shed. The dust as we entered powdered my throat. Rosemary turned on the light and knelt down to the floor, where she removed the bricks that hid Harold’s money, but there was no money there.

  “Where’s all the cash?” I said. “He put it somewhere else?”

  She didn’t answer. She remained kneeling there in silence a moment before putting the bricks back. Then she stood, breathing heavy. She almost looked like she was sweating, which was odd since it was freezing in there. I stood with my arms crossed, shivering without a coat. I recall the way she was breathing, her look of wild abandonment.

  “What’s up,” I said.

  “Fuck,” she said. “Fuck, fuck.”

  She turned off the light and left, and we were back outside again in the night. I saw tall black telephone poles stretching into the sky. I saw the willow tree in the distance, shadowy and monstrous. It occurred to me now how much Rosemary must’ve liked to abandon herself to danger, as she grasped a fallen branch that lay near the shed. I watched her pick it up and, for reasons not clear to me, begin clobbering it into the ground.

  “Don’t be so pissed off,” I called out.

  She hammered the branch harder. She gritted her teeth, her face frozen in anger.

  “Goddamn it!” she screamed, and threw the branch down. She stomped on it with her boot, still gritting her teeth. She was livid. I’d never seen her so angry, and truthfully I found it a little bit exciting.

  “Hey,” I said, “Hey, what’s wrong?”

  She didn’t answer me. She stomped and then stopped herself and rested, hunched forward. In the darkness I wondered whether she was crying. Even if she were, I knew she wouldn’t let me see. So I gave her a minute while I stood there freezing.

  “Let’s go inside,” I said.

  “Yeah,” she said, out of breath. “Yeah, all right, Sequoyah.”

  I remember my jaw was trembling from the cold while I waited for her to walk back to the house, and I followed like a dog, trailing behind.

  Inside the house, where the blinds were closed and the long curtains covered the windows downstairs, the ceiling light was bright in the living room. Standing in the center of the room was Harold, in pajama pants and slippers, holding a flashlight.

  “Where are you going?” he asked Rosemary.

  “Upstairs.”

  “Wait a minute.”

  “Leave me alone,” she said.

  He was staring at her as she headed toward the stairs, but she wouldn’t look at him.

  “Shouldn’t we talk, Rosemary? Don’t you owe me that?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Rosemary,” he said again, his voice sounding more hurt than angry.

  I followed her upstairs, afraid to look at Harold.

  In the hallway upstairs she glanced over her shoulder. “Why are you following me?”

  I didn’t answer, but I followed her anyway. And though she said she didn’t want me in there, she didn’t close the door on me, so I sat on her bed. In her room, her body looked shallow, almost frail in her white T-shirt. I sat with her in silence a long while, until she told me to leave.

  “I don’t want you here,” she said.

  “Why not?”

  “It’s not fair. They’re taking me out of here. They’re sending me back to rehab.”

  “No.”

  “There’s not shit I can do about it,” she said. “You can’t say anything to help.”

  I thought for a moment. “I don’t get what you mean.”

  “Sequoyah, just leave me alone. I don’t like you anymore.”

  I thought I felt the light flicker, but I’m not sure it flickered. She got up and went into her closet while I crossed my arms and sat there, watching her. I wanted her to see my face. I wanted her to see a different, more masculine side of me when I got angry. All the time she had spent with me, all the things she said and the looks she gave me were concentrated in that moment. I bunched up the fabric of the comforter in my hands while she rooted in the closet. She was talking to herself, that I knew, then the light blinked out and the room fell dark except for the light from the closet, where she stood in the doorway, a shadowy figure.

  “You never listen,” she said, and these were her final words. In the dimly-lit room I couldn’t tell if she was laughing or sobbing. A surge of anger struck me. It stopped me cold, seeing her standing there. I noticed the gun in her hand. Beyond that, I remember hearing a slight hum that seemed to vibrate from somewhere in the room. The vibration moved across the floor and entered me, my body, my mind. The vibration was its own malicious presence, some isolated entity that existed only in that moment. I knew I was not myself, and it felt stimulating and good. I was someone furious, someone hurt, someone blighted by infectious rage. A split second later I could not contain myself and sprang from the bed and placed my empty hand on her gun-gripping hand, my hand on her hand, and we held on, both confronting ourselves, both relentless.

  A bright day with no wind, the sun reflecting in a blue sky, I took a nice walk alone down the side of the road, following the tracks of a coyote or large dog. I felt confused and yet strangely happy. I had a cryptic affinity for the unknown. The tracks held paw prints of some large beast I imagined wandering around at night, looking for smaller animals to devour. I heard the sounds of birds in the trees. In my pocket I kept a switchblade I’d swiped from a drawer in the downstairs cabinet, probably Harold’s, in case I needed protection from the wildlife. My head was buzzing, and I felt the need to break into a run, down the road and through the trees, to rid myself of excess energy. I expected to quickly become popular, part of the family with the dead girl. It would be on the local TV news, in the newspapers, talked about all over town. I was part of this family, this story.

  This would be historical, and my head buzzed from it. I felt dizzy.

  They found Rosemary’s suicide note, folded in thirds, on the dresser in her room. It was her handwriting, there was no question
. She was dead. Dead, dead, dead. Nobody even suspected murder. Nobody had a serious motive. She had attempted suicide before, everyone knew this, so it was only a matter of time. She wasn’t seeing her counselor despite telling her caseworker, Harold, and Agnes, that she was going every week. She was a liar.

  “Maybe we gave her too much freedom,” Agnes told the caseworker. “I don’t know. I don’t know. Maybe I could’ve been better.”

  “I can’t believe it happened,” the caseworker said.

  “I can’t describe anything I’m feeling,” Harold said.

  The night she died, long after the gunfire, after the police came and talked to me and everyone else, after Harold and Agnes went into their room and closed the door, I pulled off my shirt and crawled into George’s bed with him. He was facing away from me, but he was awake. He let me put my arm around him. It was six in the morning and my heart was racing.

  Those first couple of nights I kept feeling dizzy. Late at night I took aspirin and slept two, three hours at most. Nobody was talking to anyone in the house. Nobody was talking at all. George retreated to his room, I stayed in the attic, which now felt more menacing and occupied, as if ghosts visited in my sleep. I dreamed of an old dead woman sitting in the rocking chair. I dreamed of hideous-looking dwarfs carving the organs out of a dead animal. I dreamed of falling out of windows. This went on for a few days while Agnes and Harold kept to themselves. The house, once full of anticipation and wonder, now felt silent, dead. We kept distant from the newspaper, people who called from the school, strangers who knew Rosemary. Who were these people, I wondered. There were strange men and women calling to offer condolences. Adults, teenagers. People I’d never seen brought flowers. The doorbell rang and soon we quit answering it.

  I pretended to be sick on the day of her funeral. I forced myself to vomit in the kitchen so everyone at the table would hear me, rammed two fingers down my throat and choked myself. I gagged and eventually threw up on the floor. I’m not sure I tricked them, but it made me feel better, and I didn’t want to go to the funeral. Agnes walked in, upset. I loosened my tie and lay on the cold tile, clutching my stomach. They were all worried about me.

  While they were at the funeral I left the house and walked to an abandoned warehouse where homeless men slept. The place was full of broken bottles and trash. The windows were broken and tiny pieces of glass crunched under my feet. The walls were spray-painted with gang graffiti, giant swirly letters and weird designs. Strips of light slanted in from the cracks in the roof, and even though the homeless men sleeping there looked scary, none of them ever tried to touch me or harass me in any way. On the contrary, bored, I wanted to harass them. I was kicking around in the dirt and walked upstairs to the second or third floor of the warehouse, where it was empty. I stood at the window, watching an old guy march on the gravel below. He was crazy, thinking he was a general or something in the war. He had an unkempt beard and wore a green army cap. He wore an old army surplus jacket. He took a few steps and saluted. I tossed a crushed Dr Pepper can out the window so that it landed near where he was marching. He spun around quickly and raised his arms. He looked around, then took a few slow steps, observing his surroundings. He started marching again.

  I crushed another can and tossed it. This one landed in front of him, stopping him so abruptly that his arms flailed as if he were describing something enormously round. He knelt down to the can, edged closer to it as if it were a bomb. He tapped it with the toe of his boot. Then he stood upright and placed his hand on his heart. From where I was watching above, I thought I could see his mouth moving, and I imagined him giving orders to an invisible army down there. Once or twice he yelled out like he was in pain. He lifted a finger and pointed to the sky as if observing airplanes. He spun around and marched, stomping his boots. I watched him stop walking and pull up his pants.

  This went on for maybe twenty minutes. I kept throwing cans and he kept reacting, marching. I smoked a cigarette and sat by the window, watching him. Finally he walked away, through the weeds, and didn’t return. From the window, I could hear him yelling as he marched.

  • • •

  The long life, I kept thinking later, this phrase Rosemary used. For several days after she was gone I thought of “long life.” I thought of the word “life” and tried to define it in my mind. I thought of “mind.” I repeated the phrase, “long life.”

  One afternoon there was a Native American man standing in his yard near the school. He stood with his arms crossed and his eyes closed. Who does this in their yard, standing there without moving? I watched him for a few minutes to see whether he was temporarily praying or what, maybe looking for some inward peace, an advanced form of meditation.

  I stood across the street, watching him. His hair was long and white and he wore a pale sweater and blue jeans. His arms remained crossed, maybe he was waiting on someone. He looked peaceful, though, standing there with his eyes closed, and I thought of a movie I once saw with a man standing at the edge of a cliff, about to jump off to commit suicide and fall to his death, and there he stood, like this man, standing there with his eyes closed.

  The bus arrived. I waited for the kids to get on and the driver to close the door. Nobody said anything to me as I stood there, waiting, and finally the bus droned away; and there was the man in the yard, still standing with his arms crossed and his eyes closed. I don’t know why more people weren’t paying attention to him. I wanted to be like him, to see something, to be able to draw inward, avoiding distraction.

  Later that night I stood in Rosemary’s room, looking at myself in the mirror. I pretended to stab myself in the neck, slicing my own throat, making dying faces. I did this nine times.

  Her death was final, this is what I soon started to realize. I found myself sleeping less each night. The loss was beginning to sink in. The initial shock, such a strange sensation that had left me so confused, was now fading, and though I had only known her a short time, I’d never watched anyone die in front of me. My room had lost its identity, or maybe I had lost my identity, or maybe it was the lost connection to the room, the house, and everything inside. I stood by my bed each night, looking into the mirror. The way I saw myself was different than before, my face and body thin and weak in the scant light of the room. At night, whenever I closed my eyes, I was able to see myself from above, like from a camera in the ceiling. I was both inside my body and outside of it, nearly inseparable from an unknown force trying to control me. I was neither sad nor content. I felt numb for a long time.

  It struck me that I had lost my mother to prison and had now lost Rosemary. The old house with its creaky floors and wood-burning fireplace, with its bookshelves and curtains and rugs and antique lamps, was marked with Rosemary’s presence. I feared someone else would leave me. I was surprised to feel so afraid. This fear came out of nowhere and left me wondering about life altogether. I feared if I lost control that anyone could leave, including my old friends, my relatives, even Harold and Agnes and George, who had now become a part of me. In a way Rosemary was a part of me. Parts of her are still inside me, and I can feel her there, urging me from time to time.

  Even after her death I heard her voice whenever I went to the woods. So each day I went there, where I placed branches and twigs around the spot in the clearing. I arranged them into the shape of a body, a skeleton lying in the dirt. I gathered all the twigs I could, especially the small ones. I twisted them, broke off small pieces, arranged them to create a visual, all bones. I began with a hand, five fingers the length of my own, crooked fingers I rounded at the end with the pocket knife I’d taken from the house. I constructed another hand. By the time it fell dark outside I had arranged an entire body made out of sticks and twigs lying in the dirt. I stepped back and observed it. I stepped to the side and knelt down to get a different angle. I kept looking at it to see what image I could draw from it, maybe the way a sculptor looks at the sculpture, the way a painter looks at
color on a canvas.

  I imagined with particular clarity how Rosemary sat on the rock with her sketchbook and pulled in one leg, how she let her dark hair fall to one side as she drew. I imagined her back in her bedroom in the house, with the door closed, putting on a black dress and standing in front of the mirror, patting perfume on her neck, glancing at herself. And I imagined myself standing beside her in the image, laughing into her sleeve and then crying and resting my head on her shoulder so that I could smell her fragrance, feel her hand touch my head in comfort. What I loved about the woods was the sense that such images came and went, a new one each day, as if her spirit were there flinging them into me.

  All around me were deciduous trees with rough brown trunks, speckled with shadows of strange shapes, the dying grass below almost as brown as the dirt, strewn with rocks and scraps of sunlight slanting in through interlaced branches. I descended the sloping bank toward a stream, where I saw three small deer drinking from the water nearby. They heard the crunching of leaves and looked up at me. I stopped. They watched me, all three of them, as I stood there still, afraid that any movement would cause them to run away in fear. We did this for what seemed like a long time, as I think back, we stared at each other. The moment felt important, as if the woods were trying to tell me something, but I didn’t know what was being said. The deer held a skepticism toward me, it was clear. And the moment I took a slow step forward, they turned and scampered away.

  George was having considerable trouble handling Rosemary’s death. Upstairs in bed, a desk fan whirring on the nightstand beside him, a cold wind howling outside and his body covered in blankets. Even with thunder in the middle of the night, or the windows rattling, or while everyone else was downstairs trying to get on with their lives, George would lie still in his bed. He told me he wanted to lie as still as possible, without blinking, for as long as he could. Time, he said, would move slower so that he wouldn’t lose sense of what it felt like to be in the house with Rosemary alive. Harold and Agnes started to worry. I woke up a few nights thinking I felt him touching my brow or kneeling at the foot of my bed. Sometimes he got out of bed and wandered through the house touching the doors, the walls, feeling his way to her.