Spirit Wars

by Mon D Rea

  For someone who oversees the eternal punishment of tens of billions of souls, there are far too many battles waiting to be fought inside Sephtimus’ frame, too many inner demons needing to be faced; what he tries to cover up with bravado and a crabby personality. I never could have imagined I’d be playing psychologist to the Grim Reaper, but I guess if it wasn’t true in the beginning it’s true now, Death’s becoming more and more human.

  Now, from the little I know about the workings of the female heart, those gifts and show of wealth that some men are too quick to employ act like an invisible barrier that keep them from getting what they want. They’re magnets that have had their polarities switched. What we need is a sleight-of-hand – in and out fast, nick the girl’s heart with the left while her brain’s busy trying to figure out what the right is doing. The tall, dark, rich, and handsome type might as well be a neon-colored ninja in our limited timeframe.

  Out of the blue, like an answer from heaven or wherever else answers come from, I see a dark horse on the magic-mirror screens: Manchester Imagay, Filipino barista, dishwasher and loser. By some freakish stroke of luck, he’s the closest man to the dream girl.

  Although Sephtimus is forbidden from interfering with human affairs, nothing prevents him from having a bit of clean fun once in a while. Like the freedom of a naughty but harmless imp. Our con offers itself thus: We slip a mickey into the tool’s bedside water, he calls in sick the next day, but then Sephtimus shows up at work wearing a human costume to put the whole Mission Impossible franchise to shame.

  ****

  Every trouble starts with a girl. A quick browse through history will show you this: Eve, Delilah, Helen of Troy, Marie Antoinette, Monica Lewinsky… you’d suppose I know better but no. For my own personal hell I think the she-devil has never come in a sweeter name: Celestina Conti. Full-blooded Italian. Model. Love of my life.

  In my mind she’s always been that: my Evenstar, the unreachable, most amazing, 10-point girl ever to be featured in my dirty mind. That’s her sitting in her usual corner of the coffee shop, basking in her effortless luminosity. Completely independent of and oblivious to my existence.

  And this is me behind the counter. Yep, this guy. The meek, they-don’t-come-any-more-ordinary-than-him Joe whose face and name you’d forget just as soon as you’ve placed your order. Hi. As you can see here on the name tag, the name’s Chester. The full name, believe it or not, is Manchester Imagay. Ih-ma-gaι. Mind the pronunciation and don’t you start making jokes coz I’ve heard them all.

  I’m working part-time here at Brew Bear Cafe where Lessa’s a VIP customer; day just wouldn’t be complete without her. I don’t really know what to tell about myself and coz squeezing my way into the national workforce and making ends meet are hottest on my list right now, don’t be surprised if somewhere along this introduction I start to sound like I’m trying to get employed.

  Like I said, my face and body are the sort that never leave an impression. There’s a word my English-major friend has for this exact situation: nondescript. It’s the stuff security guards have and hate and the stuff the criminal element would love to have. Well, I’m looking to trade any time any day.

  Or not. Be careful what you wish for and all that. Sometimes I think it’d be nice if, to make up for what I’m lacking in the looks department, I had more brain cells or something. Alas, as God or the Fates would have it, no such luck. I’m what you see is what you get. Inside my skull and out of it.

  I don’t have a lot of talent either. But it’s true I can make a mean cup of joe if you belong to the crowd who gets a kick out of it. I don’t mean to brag but, I don’t know, I responded pretty well and fast to the training. It’s like I just take a look at people and – bam! – I just know, you know, what flavor coffee they’d be and what and how much of it I’m gonna put in the mix.

  My job here at the Bear has put me right in the middle of humanity, the pulsing, vibrant mess that it is; because a coffee shop’s one of the few places in this insanely competitive world where people, strangers among other perfect strangers, can actually sit back and take it easy. Women in particular are willing to put on their reading glasses and tuck their feet up under them to read their favorites – Paolo Coelho, John Green, Veronica Roth, Nicholas Sparks – I just read and memorize the names off the covers, I was never much of a book person. But here among many of the most heavenly beauties ever to grace the city, I feel truly blessed.

  There’s the hottie I and my shift buddy like to call Mocha because she’s always buried deep in her headphones and her skin’s the sexy brown color of those RNB singers at MTV. Then there’s Green Tea Frap because her figure’s the incredibly willowy yoga kind, which should be great for bed, my co-barista insists though I’m sure as hell he wouldn’t know a boob from a bag of sand if he were tested on both. There’s Raspberry, Vanilla, Strawberries and Cream, and then there’s Celestina – Lessa – a.k.a. venti triple shot, two pump vanilla, non-fat, extra-hot, light foam, light caramel Caramel Macchiato, the most high-maintenance chic of all. Comes and goes in a nice Bentley ride and an even nicer Gucci scent. Best catch ever, elegance through and through and just oozing with the X-factor.

  Every night I lie in bed I pray to God for the chance to spend one whole night alone with her. No sexual pun intended, just having the most interesting and intimate conversation till the break of day. A snowball’s chance in hell, I know.

  ****

  With a light, reverent touch, the man’s fingers catch the oscillating crucifix of the rosary dangling from the rear-view and rub it for protection. This cabbie should be both a religious and superstitious man; in other words, your typical Filipino. From the steadiness of his hands and the deftness with which they weave the cab in and out of traffic, I learn that he’s seen a lot of crazy accidents on the road but never once thought anything of them, or felt anything out of the ordinary because of them – at least nothing weird enough to mess up his driving instincts and freak him out of finishing a job.

  But years of driving a cab sharpens a man’s intuition of people, of the different strangers he picks up on the road. Plus he’s listened enough times to stories of the “sixth-sense” feeling that forebodes a really bad accident or a violent holdup, what the old-timer drivers are fond of telling.

  His own psychic moment comes with the most mundane sign: the car radio wavers to another station just as he picks up a fare. From mellow, cruising light rock, it’s now growling and disturbing death metal.

  The first thought that enters his mind as he lays eyes on Sephtimus is, quite ironically, that there’s been a death in the family. The mint-fresh Manchester Imagay mask is as smooth as a babe’s ass or a grown man’s face frozen in catatonia. More importantly, I can sense how little by little the cabbie’s giving in to irrationality, the way you’d be afraid that something bad has happened to you or a loved one a thousand miles away.

  My mind-reading abilities are working overtime again. From the backseat, I share the man’s nameless fear like what the veteran drivers describe: the feeling that he’s about to have a serious accident and he’s all at once inadequate for the task at hand. The only trouble is, he doesn’t have the heart to tell an otherwise normal passenger to get out and walk.

  “Carreon St. Downtown. Take Lourdes Boulevard.”

  As the cabbie mindlessly races up the street, he steals another glance in the rear-view and discovers that his fare’s young – in fact, they could’ve been on the same grades in elementary school, he guesses from the face looking all innocent, effeminate, and just a little blanched (Sephtimus has been sitting on the edge of his seat). And were it not for the palpable saturation of melancholy, Chester Imagay would be the type that young girls let in as their male confidant.

  Another curious thing is how the passenger has stood in the black mouth of no-man’s alley as though he had an offer that the devil himself prepared. Dressed in some khaki uniform, spotless and starched, he waited there as though he belonged to the place – or ow
ned it. The cabbie decides to keep an eye on the fellow, as much as he could take it off the road.

  If lone passengers at night are cautious, it follows that the guy at the other end is on guard too. A cabbie is perhaps even more cautious of who he carries. It’s a good thing there’s the panic button under the radio and working for a big taxi company has its upsides. Help could be as close as the next block.

  “Are the tips big at night?” Sephtimus asks out of the blue. Still uncomfortable with human speech and much too proud to make mistakes, he ingeniously picks out the moment when the driver isn’t looking to send forth bursts of telepathic signals that come across like words.

  The cabbie (Ray, as introduced by his ID hanging with the rosary) checks him out in the rear-view again before grunting an indefinite answer. Sephtimus has slightly improved from a throat-ulcerated, malnourished Mafioso to a wimpy undergrad with glasses and braces and whose only saving grace is perhaps his newfound voice, a rather pleasant blend of a gruff bark and the kid’s natural geeky whine; now deep and whole.

  “I think,” Sephtimus continues speaking in the local tongue, “people should make it a point to always tip the driver that takes them home at night.”

  Now in all his seven years as a cab driver out of his twenty-six as a human being, Ray has never heard anything make better sense. “You think so?” He joins in casually but with little expectation for a high-quality conversation, no different from the reckless way he switches lanes.

  “Has nothing to do with security,” the young passenger keeps on speaking in that absent-minded way of his, like he’s been living by himself a while. “Has everything to do with memory.”

  “With what?”

  “Memory. What guides all those pet pigeons back home. They’re actually very much like you, you know. They just follow signposts and landmarks. You’d be surprised.”

  “No kidding.” Ray is surprised. Especially because he was a pigeon-breeder himself once in his fleeting youth. Still.

  “What’s that got to do with my tip?”

  The young man’s gaze is vacant, but unlike the eyes of countless other passengers who have sat and gone, his seem to swallow all the city-lights outside and give none back.

  “I suppose,” Sephtimus replies after a long pause, “lone passengers on their way home are wounded one way or another. All these lights outside are tempting but fake. You’re always welcome and everyone laughs with you, but only for as long as you’re a paying customer or a dear friend. In the end, they all say goodbye and you’ve got to have that one place that you can call home. When all other doors close, there should be one door left that’ll open for you.

  “… A taxi offers an altogether different kind of companionship. Right from the start, it doesn’t promise what it can’t give. You can say it doesn’t deliver but it does deliver you. Provided you have the magic words. You just say them to the driver and they chase away all the coldness and strangeness outside. Little by little, everything starts to become familiar. It’s memory that’s leading you, that’s taking all the turns by itself. And you don’t need to trust that at the end of the road, someone’s waiting for you, that a bed or a warm meal’s made because these things are almost always there. Can you imagine what a luxury that is?”

  “Hmm. Never thought of it that way.”

  Ray has concluded early on that the man’s completely bonkers, but something also tells him his prattle is one of those things best left alone. To me though, the words reveal more of Death’s very human sentiments and suggest the mind-blowing possibility that he was once a regular mortal himself.

  Is it possible that the eternal consciousness and duties of the Death Angel are passed from one individual to the next?

  Sephtimus, still deep in thought, goes on to mumble that: “If one was stone-drunk or bleeding through his shirt or broken-hearted…”

  “What do you do?”

  “What?” the head reaper hisses, yanked out of his reverie.

  “Your job. I can usually tell at a glance, but with you, I can’t come up with anything.”

  “I’m a collector.”

  “Of what? You a bill-collector, a ticket-collector, or a garbage-collector?”

  “Of debts.”

  “Well, you’ll have to be more specific than that. I mean…”

  Because no car stays in its lane in this part of the world, a massive truck bears down alarmingly close from our left.

  “Watch out!” Sephtimus shrieks like chainsaw biting into timber, his deadpan mask now utterly contorted in fear.

  “God! Right in my eardrum! Lay off the caffeine, will you, pal?”

  But Sephtimus is far from calming down. Instead, his eyes take on the feverish gaze of a drug fiend or a rabid dog. And when he opens his mouth, the sound that comes out of it is the amalgamation of a hundred voices as deep as that of the possessed man in the Bible when he said, “My name is Legion.”

  Sephtimus growls: “Your ear’s the least of your problems.”

  So Ray swerves and pulls the cab over, earning one angry honk in that otherwise empty part of the road. He throws the door open, encounters resistance from his seatbelt, unfastens it, and then flees in the form of a pro sprinter; almost graceful.

  “Tell me you’re not gonna do that to her,” I speak out loud in my invisible fershee form as we watch the driver disappear in a matter of seconds.

  You don’t understand, Sephtimus answers telepathically. If I die here in your world, I die for real. I am weakened in my love-affected state. And the longer I stay in the human realm, the more permanent the consequences.

  Sephtimus snaps his fingers and all at once the whole taxi’s transfigured into a carriage drawn by a pair of splendid horses. As proof of his waning powers, each animal appears to flicker like weak transmission. It’s like the two sides of a fan – one with the real horse, the other with the gaunt, no, skeletal and horrifying imitation of a horse – and the fan’s twirling nonstop so the two images meld. At least this is how I see the phantasmal creatures. To the living, I hope only the normal is visible.

  Then from the back of my hand I notice the same half-stable, half-bogus spell taking hold. I keep switching – in sync with the rhythmic, centrifugal pulsing of blood from my heart – between skin and scales, skin and scales. I’m both a fershee and my old human self in a top hat and suit, sitting in the coachman’s box of the fancy carriage that screams in bronze and gilt-lined crimson. So much for travelling incognito.

  It occurs to me that this is like a no-curfew, less-airy-fairy-more-pedophilic twist of Cinderella. And I say a confused prayer to whoever god cares to listen (my moral compass is so effed up now) that no policeman impound the horses and book us before we can carry out what we came here to do. But I’d be lying if I didn’t confess the stolen moments when I sit back and appreciate the ride from the coachman’s vantage.

  By a generous or cruel twist of fate, we’re now in the same city where Sam and I met. And, with warm and welcome human blood rushing back to my veins, I’m like a kid after a long and deathly bout of cabin fever in winter, now let loose into the sounds and smells of springtime.

  Chapter XIV: Picking Up Lessa

  At closing time, after 1 botched Blended Crème Frap, 1 weak espresso, 1 forgotten order, 5 irate customers and countless pleas from his shift buddies to go home and rest, Chester – that is, Sephtimus – finally takes off his green apron with the Brew Bear logo now stained with coffee from the malfunctioning ICB-Twin Infusion Brewer. He’s been demoted to dishwashing duties for most of the night, not that it helped because as soon as he was he promptly broke a stack of saucers and one really fancy, incredibly expensive cup.

  It’s strange but watching Sephtimus go through the whole thing I start to see him in a different light. He’s like someone raised apart from other people all his life so he has ideas of how things should be but they’re a little off from how they are in the real world. One time the head reaper looks at my fershee form floating by like many tiny part
icles in the air (just like our otherworldly carriage which is parked at the back), and his Chester eyes behind the coke-bottle glasses say more than his telepathic words do: Don’t leave me.

  I intend to do no such thing, but it’s time for the bold to dare destiny. Lessa’s sitting in her usual corner and the coffee shop’s now empty except for her in a backdrop of bright orange and Day-Glo green Halloween decorations. Septimus can’t delay it any longer.

  It’s now or never, I communicate to him.

  So Sephtimus, in an unconscious, perfectly human habit, checks the smell of his breath by cupping one hand under his nose and then runs the same hand over Chester’s wire-stiff hair as if he could budge it. He musters all the courage in Chester’s wispy frame then walks up to her spot, followed by the bulging eyes of the rest of the Brew Bear crew.

  Sephtimus can’t understand himself. He oversees the infliction of unspeakable horrors on a gazillion souls day in and day out, and Death is feared by everyone and everything so it follows that Death is afraid of no one and nothing. But as he undertakes the ten-yard walk towards Lessa, the decorative jack-o’-lanterns and tarantulas hanging along the coffee shop walls appear to hover like vultures over his execution. He’s surprised to find Chester’s knobby knees rattling inside his pant legs. Every step he takes, it’s getting harder and harder to lift those human appendages as though he was Lot’s wife who had looked back over her shoulder at the burning of Sodom. He begins to experience that age-old moment of the human male: the body becoming paralyzed as the heart beats wildly and panic quickly spreads. He feels giddy and short of breath.

  “Excuse me, Lessa. I am sorry to say. Time to close.”

  She gives him a momentary look of incomprehension, a sure sign that the paperback she’s been reading is a good one. Sephtimus has rehearsed this part with me a hundred times.