Hitchers

by Will McIntosh

  “When I was in college, maybe, but now it’s mostly two or three max.” I wasn’t sure where he was going with this.

  “Harder stuff? Pills and powder?”

  “None of that. Why?”

  Mick waved it off. “I thought maybe it was from brain damage. You know, brain atrophy and that.”

  Mick’s cell phone rang. He checked it, then held up a finger. “Just a sec.”

  “My guardian angel! Yeah, I’m with him right now.” He nodded at me. “Nah, he ain’t angry. He says to say thanks.” Pause, then Mick laughed. “I bet, I bet.”

  The person on the other end—Mick’s mole receptionist in our doctor’s office, I assumed, said something that lit his face with surprise. “No kidding?”

  She went on; Mick fumbled in the pockets of his jacket, then covered the mouthpiece of his phone. “You got a pen?” I handed him the sketching pencil I always carried. He pressed it to the back of his menu. “Can you give me a name?” He rolled his eyes toward the hammered tin ceiling. “I promise, you won’t get in trouble. I’ll be very discreet.” A moment later he jotted a name and number on his napkin. “Thanks. You’re an angel from heaven! You’ve no idea how much this means to me, and Finn Darby too. He just said to give you a big wet kiss for him.” Mick winked at me, grinning, as I pressed my hands to my cheeks and shook my head. I’d have to face her again, whoever she was, next time I went to Dr. Purvis’s office.

  “Jesus flipping Christ,” Mick whispered as he closed the phone. “You ready for this?”

  “What?”

  “Dr. Purvis saw three more cases like ours in the past twenty-four hours.”

  I wasn’t sure if that was good news, but it felt like good news. Mick and I smiled grimly at each other.

  “You ever see Planet of the Apes?” Mick asked. “The original, not that shit remake.”

  “One of my favorites,” I said, pleased that Mick and I liked the same film.

  “‘Where there’s one, there’s another, and another, and another,’” Mick quoted.

  I recognized the line: Three stranded astronauts, crossing a lifeless desert, come upon a single scraggly weed in the rocky soil. I nodded understanding. We weren’t alone. We weren’t freaks. It was a relief, even if it didn’t explain what was wrong with us.

  The waitress was back with our food.

  “You ever see Planet of the Apes?” Mick asked her. “The original, not the shit remake.”

  “Take your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty ape,” she said.

  Mick and I burst out laughing, drawing curious looks from the other tables.

  “I bet that line comes in handy for a pretty bird like you, eh?” Mick said.

  The waitress just smiled, refilled our coffee cups.

  When she’d left, Mick asked, “How long were you, you know, dead?”

  “Ten or fifteen minutes, as well as I can figure.” Out of the corner of my eye I watched the waitress duck behind the counter, feeling a longing to get to know her, knowing that wasn’t going to happen as long as my inner zombie was with me.

  “It’s something, ain’t it? To know you were dead, that you weren’t in your body?” Mick said. He seemed to be watching my reaction, peering over his scotch.

  “I definitely wasn’t in my body,” I said.

  His eyebrows shot up. “When you were dead, you mean?” He paused, searching for words. “What was it like for you? Do you remember anything?”

  “Hell, yes.” He was prodding, and I thought I knew why. “It was like I was watching from behind someone else’s eyes, seeing what they were seeing.”

  Mick slapped the table, pointed at me, shouted, “That’s exactly what happened to me.” He didn’t seem to care that people were glancing his way. “Christ, I’m not off my head.”

  “What did you see?” I asked.

  Mick pressed his hands to his face. “I was inside my ex-wife, Blossom.” He lowered his voice. “She was, you know, having a romp with her latest beau.” He made a sour face. “So there I am, dead, inside my wife while this bloke Peter is also inside her, in a manner of speaking. It was a miserable four or five minutes. Absolute torture.”

  The pain in Mick’s expression made me grin.

  “Oh, sure, laugh. You didn’t have to go through it.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I wasn’t smiling at what happened, just your expression.”

  “It’s all fixed, I’m telling ya. They vote for their friends, ” I added. The elderly woman who had been talking to Mick during his first outburst dropped her fork onto her plate. Struggling not to stare she scooped the napkin out of her lap and pressed it against her mouth.

  Mick ignored it completely. He gestured at me with his chin. “How about you, eh?”

  I described what I’d seen in Lyndsay’s apartment.

  “Do you suppose this is connected to the voices?” Mick asked when I’d finished. He waved to get the waitress’s attention, pointed to his empty drink.

  “I’ve thought about that. Maybe we’re somehow still connected to the people we were inside. The problem is, some of the things I say are about people I know, but this woman doesn’t. I just don’t see how she fits in.”

  “Right, right,” Mick said. “That doesn’t work.” His eyes took on an empty glaze, and he added, “I’ve got to get it perfect. It’s got to be perfect.” Ignoring the stares, Mick swirled his drink, gazed thoughtfully into the glass.

  His suggestion got me thinking. I had been focusing on mundane explanations for the voice—a physical illness that had screwed me up neurologically, or a psychological problem. But there were those few moments when I was dead, how I learned the attack originated in the subway. Maybe I was looking for answers in the wrong places. What happened when I was dead didn’t have a logical explanation, so why should the voices?

  Mick looked at his watch. “I’d best get going.”

  I felt a wash of disappointment.

  “Let’s keep in touch,” he added as he pulled a bill from his wallet, “compare notes on how this thing plays out, yeah?”

  I told him I thought that was a good idea.

  “I got this,” he said, pointing at our plates. “Good choice, by the way. Top-shelf pancakes.” Our waitress was behind the counter; Mick went right on back there without hesitation, put a hand on her shoulder as he fished a bill out of his wallet. She laughed at something he said, and that feeling washed over me again, a longing to talk to her. Once I figured out how to stop the vocalizations, I planned to return to the Blue Boy often.

  CHAPTER 12

  The granite steps outside Corinne’s building looked blurry from the tears I’d shed during our session. I wiped my eyes with my sleeve, hoping no one would notice.

  Digging up these memories is painful, Corinne had said at the end of the session, but it’s like digging up a splinter: you’ll feel better once it’s out. The thing was, I felt like I’d already dug up and reburied Kayleigh’s and Lorena’s deaths a thousand times.

  I tried not to set Kayleigh’s and Lorena’s deaths side-by-side and examine the similarities. One at a time was plenty. Sometimes it was hard to resist, though. They were the two most important people in my life, both died on water, and I carried legitimate blame—and terrible guilt—in both cases.

  You hear about people who are racked with guilt because they created some benign circumstance that led to the death of a loved one. A woman sends her husband to the store for eggs to finish a batch of brownies, and he’s crushed by a semi on the way home. She finds broken eggshells scattered in the car, and thinks, If only I hadn’t sent him to the store he’d still be alive. I wish I had to go through such a contorted string of logic to assign myself blame for Kayleigh’s and Lorena’s deaths.

  I don’t assign myself all the blame. Sometimes I think I’m more to blame for Kayleigh’s death than Lorena’s; at other times I give myself a partial pass on Kayleigh’s because I was only twelve, and then I think I’m more to blame for Lorena’s. Both had to tak
e some of the blame themselves, although they weren’t around to do so. It’s difficult to apportion blame. It’s not an exact science.

  Sometimes I wondered what my life would be like if I had backed down from Kayleigh’s dare to jump off that pier. If I hadn’t jumped, Kayleigh wouldn’t have had reason to stay behind on that awful night and try to prove she could do it, too. What would I have done with all of that mental space taken up by guilt?

  Lorena’s Toyota unlocked with a cheerful bleep-bleep and I hopped in.

  I was beginning to wonder how any of this was connected to the voice. I was blurting more than ever; maybe I was digging up all of these painful memories for nothing. Goodness knows I had enough, more recent painful shit to deal with without digging through my past for more.

  I turned on the radio to get an update on suffering that put my petty grievances to shame.

  The six hundred thousandth victim had been counted. Anyone who hadn’t known the population of greater Atlanta before the attack certainly knew it by now. Five million. More than one in nine Atlantans had died. Entire families had been wiped out. Entire blocks, almost. With those six hundred thousand victims had gone all laughter, all joy. The people I passed looked grim, tired. All business. On the plus side the traffic was thinner, the other drivers less ruthless. There was the occasional honk, but it was nothing like the incessant hooting and bleating that had been the background Muzak of the city’s downtown both night and day.

  “Come here, ya monkey, ya, ” my unwanted voice opined. Jesus, that was vintage Grandpa. I could picture him saying that as he chased a six-year-old Kayleigh around the yard with hedge clippers, pretending he was going to cut off her toes while she giggled and screeched.

  There was no mention of the blurting illness on the news. If my neurologist had seen five cases, there must be thousands, but it would be hard for another story to break through when there was the anthrax story to cover 24/7.

  As I pulled onto West Marietta I turned off the news. Enough of this dreariness. I should pick up something cheerful for lunch and eat it while watching last night’s episode of The Big Bang Theory on DVR.

  Then I remembered that I’d agreed to visit Grandma this afternoon. I let my head slump until my forehead bumped the steering wheel. “Damn it. Damn it.” I needed time to acclimate to the idea of a visit to Grandma’s, and by forgetting, I’d missed my acclimation period.

  Moaning in pointless protest I took a left on Howell Mill and headed for Grandma’s house.

  It wasn’t that I didn’t like Grandma, she was just hard to talk to. Sitting on her couch, time crawled in super slow-mo. There were so many things she didn’t talk about: politics, religion, relatives’ private business, her childhood, sports, feelings, failures, anything bad. The list bordered on infinite. What she liked to discuss was the gruesome but impersonal goings-on depicted on the TV news. She liked to shake her head and tisk. She also liked to talk about how there was nothing on television any more, and about delicious meals from days gone by. I braced myself for two hours of pain.

  I’d warned her about the problem I was having with my voice. She suggested I might be coming down with the flu. It hadn’t happened while I was on the phone with her, and there was no way anyone could grasp how utterly freaky it was unless they heard it. And Grandma would hear it. The outbursts were getting worse—I was up to thirty since I’d waked that morning. So that was another concern—I didn’t want to give her a heart attack.

  I was even doing it in my sleep now. I’d wake up four or five times a night, jolted from sleep by that voice. I worried they would keep getting worse until my speech was one long nonsensical rant comprised of things my grandfather might say. I’d be forced to communicate like a deaf mute, writing down what I wanted to say, or using sign language while I blathered on about Toy Shop’s superiority over Beetle Bailey.

  Corinne suspected that the root of the problem was guilt. More guilt, like I didn’t have enough. I had defied the patriarch, and now the child in me was waiting on wobbly knees to be punished. Forgive me Grandfather, for I have sinned. Only I didn’t feel guilty. Not about that, anyway. Grandpa dragged Toy Shop into the grave with him out of spite; why should I feel bad for digging it up and breathing life back into it? Who did it harm? In a way he owed it to me after all the verbal abuse he’d piled on me when I was a kid. He owed me something; if not an apology, Toy Shop would do.

  Besides all that, this was happening to other people, including Mick. It wasn’t about my relationship with Grandpa, it was something in the air I’d inhaled. Or something else.

  Grandma greeted me in her singsong Irish warble, entreating me to come in, come in, as she led me into the living room of her spacious but unpretentious home, favoring her bad hip so severely it looked like her right leg was three inches shorter than her left.

  She wanted to hear about my accident again, and held her breath through much of my description of drowning as if to share some of my suffering, slapping her cheeks in horror until they were a ruddy pink.

  I left out the part about being in a woman’s body while I was dead.

  “Oh, Finn, that’s just terrible!” she said when I’d finished. “This whole business is just awful. All those bodies.” She shook her head in dismay as she related some of the more gruesome things she’d witnessed on the news.

  To change the subject I asked what she thought of this week’s check, her share of Toy Shop’s meteoric rise.

  “I wish we hadn’t waited so long,” she half-joked.

  The new Toy Shop kept getting more popular. Fan sites were springing up on the web; Steve was working out some new licensing agreements. People loved Wolfie. I guess it was no more surprising than the popularity of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in their time.

  “So you really don’t mind the changes to the strip?” I asked, for maybe the tenth time.

  Grandma threw her hands up. “What’s to mind? The point is to make money.”

  “Yes it is,” I said, though that wasn’t at all the point to me. “So, Grandma, what have you been up to?”

  “Oh, this and that.” She waved at the air as if her activities were nothing but a bad smell that needed to be dispersed. “Staying out of trouble.” She laughed her nervous laugh—a tight-lipped, high-pitched giggle.

  “You finding anything good to watch on TV?” I asked. “All I can find worth watching are reruns of Lost.”

  “There’s nothing on,” she said, sinking her teeth into the topic. “Half the time I watch the Weather Channel—”

  “I wasn’t there. Do you understand?” I blurted.

  Grandma started, the cheery smile melting. She pulled her feet under her as if something had just run by on the carpet.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you,” I said.

  She stared at me, her eyes big and round. Her jaw was trembling. I wasn’t sure what to do. I wanted to comfort her in some way, but I was afraid she’d recoil from me. Everyone was shocked when they first heard it, but no one had reacted like this. She was pale and shaking, like she had a terrible fever.

  I felt like a freak, like I’d pulled open my shirt and exposed a secret twin jutting from my chest. I hated this. I wanted it gone.

  “It’s me first drink today, Frenchie, ”I blurted.

  “Why are you trying to scare me?” Grandma cried out.

  “I’m not,” I said, holding out my hands in supplication. “I swear to you, I can’t help it. It just comes out.”

  “Things your Grandfather said just come out of you? You expect me to believe that?”

  It was a good thing I was seeing a psychiatrist—I was truly messed up.

  “What was that first thing you said? Where did you hear that?” Grandma asked.

  “Nowhere. Grandma, I know something is wrong with me, but I’m not in control of it. Do you hear how strange my voice is? Do you think I could make it sound like that even if I wanted to?”

  Grandma covered her eyes, struggled to stand. “I hav
e a terrible headache. I have to go lie down.” She staggered from the couch to the bedroom while I stood, weaving.

  I’d warned her about how strange the voice was. I should have warned her about the content. “Goodbye Grandma,” I called tentatively. “I’m sorry. I hope you feel better.” No answer.

  I let myself out, stunned by my last blurt. I’d said “Me first drink today,” not “My first drink today.” That’s how an Irishman would say it. And I’d swear there was a hint of accent in that croak. I was starting to talk like him.

  CHAPTER 13

  I thought that might make a good recurring joke, to have Dave repeatedly sell Wolfie, who has to go through all sorts of effort to get back to the toy shop.

  As I put the finishing touches on it I wished there was someone there to share it with. Comic strip fans were mostly a faceless abstraction that couldn’t replace having someone to turn to and say, “What do you think?”

  I’d never thought of myself as a recluse, or someone who has a hard time making friends, but the paltry list of contacts in my cell phone was hard to ignore.

  I decided to call it a day. The vocalizations were driving me nuts; they’d been coming fast and furious for the past half hour. Despite them I’d finished two strips; if I kept up that pace I could work four days a week and take long weekends. It was getting easier to draw the strip again. The characters didn’t seem like strangers the way they had a few weeks ago. Part of that may have been my confidence growing because of how people were reacting to Toy Shop. The Cartoon Network was talking about an animated series, for God’s sake.

  I flipped on the news and fixed myself a turkey sandwich.

  The financial markets were nearly back where they’d been before the attacks. As soon as it became clear the attack wasn’t connected to a foreign country or some specific terrorist group, the financial world had begun to relax. Life was returning to normal, at least as normal as it could after six hundred thousand people die in the course of three weeks.

  “whiskey! Whiskey!”