Caligatha

by Matt Spire

  “Reuben,” she asks, “would you mind opening so we can run some errands?”

  “Anything you want, babe. I was gonna ask if you'd cover me an extra half hour at lunch.”

  “I'm staying here,” her father says.

  Lydia frowns. “You could use the sunlight.”

  He shakes his paper. “I'm not a plant.”

  “Yes, you are.”

  “Then my ass is rooted right here.”

  Fine. At least she knows the longer she's gone, the longer he'll be stuck downstairs, forced to socialize with Reuben and the odd customer or two. There was no way he'd break his stoicism to ask Reuben for help up the stairs.

  “Okay. I'll be back in time to cover you for an hour, Reuben, but could you try to find some missing stock while I'm gone?”

  “What is it?”

  “I left a list in the back last night. Just cheap stuff, but I can't find the receipts.”

  “Crazy,” Reuben says. “I'll check it out.”

  ***

  Watching colorful multitudes pass on the way to the pharmacy, she tries not to dwell on Eden's Vineyard or her father, but she can't help it.

  She's worn sunglasses even though she hates when people can't look in her eyes. There's a hard tightness in her throat and her sinuses swell.

  Dr. Garrick is always kind when she hands over the prescription, asks how she's doing by name.

  “Good,” she chokes. She'd like to give some humorous anecdote, her big claim to fame, but it's not happening. Not today.

  He adjusts his glasses and reads, though her father's prescription has only changed twice in three years.

  “Still kickin'?” He grins. She's not sure exactly what the joke is. “I guess I'll have to wait until the next wedding anniversary to see old Claudio.”

  Lydia catches herself looking puzzled, then realizes he means visiting Eden's Vineyard, since father hasn't come into the pharmacy in so long. She's zoning out, staring at his ashen mustache and coat, hating the way he resembles all other doctors.

  It always reminds her of the day she got the big sit-down. She was eighteen, but in memories she seems younger, and the doctor is huge, his white coat hanging above her like clouds of judgment. There were so many unfamiliar, heavy words, like being cursed at in a foreign language. Stage three. Carcinoma. Renal cell. Metastatic.

  Now she understands all of them far too well.

  The cancer spread through his body and into his bones like a tree endlessly thirsting for pain. It was the doctor, of course, who told her about pain. Since her father refused operation, he wanted to use another one of those words, what they called immunomodulating drugs, but her father wanted nothing to do with it, holding out even on painkillers at first.

  She leaves the counter. Everything in this place is a horrible reminder of the terrible things now or the terrible things she can't remember because she was too little. The baby monitors, the pregnancy tests.

  Cancer, childbirth, all this inside-out death.

  Outside, there are so many couples. If it wasn't for that nearly empty pill bottle, she'd beam back at them, at the kids feeding birds. But now she's souring, staring at what looks to be a foreign student in Caligatha for summer work. Her strapless top, short skirt. Her beyond-stylized hair. Later tonight this girl will probably go to the club, enjoy loud music, drinks, sex. Carefree. All like soaking in sunshine. No consequences.

  She goes back in to check on his prescription. It isn't ready, so she buys a pack of cigarettes, her first pack since the last time she came to the pharmacy.

  Outside, she walks away from the crowds, finds empty tables in the nearby park and sits to smoke.

  She feels ungrateful. She could've been just like that student. Her father worked hard, tried to save.

  “God chose you for a reason,” she used to hear when she was little. Greatness was to come from such tragedy.

  She watches the student walk by. She can't be much older than eighteen. And really, the way she dresses, her mannerisms–that was Lydia three years ago.

  There are so many just like this student. All those clones of the three-years-ago Lydia, now they're just the ebbing and flowing crowd. Back then, she could pick out a person here or there as a friend, but her friends moved away to study and she hadn't replaced them. There were acquaintances all across town, like Florence, but no one close, no confidants, no one she could bribe into taking her father to the theater. Unable to afford more employees, she was always at the shop or watching over her father or running errands for either of the two. She wasn't so sure she was the product of divine intervention, but whatever the intent, her reason for existing had become finding ways to pay rent. The glorious phoenix with clipped wings.

  She crushes her cigarette on the table, glad she wore the sunglasses, and returns to the pharmacy. This time the medicine is ready.

  She starts to ask if filling her father's next prescription early would be possible, but stops. She already knows the answer. They'll need to increase his dosage. Which means she needs her father to fess up to his increasing pain and go to the doctor.

  Maybe Reuben can cover the store next Friday or Saturday so they could attend a showing at the theater. That might open him up a bit.

  5

  Necromancy

  I should clarify that Jericho was never a monster. After all, he saved my life twice.

  We first met at UCLA when he was still a graduate student, I about to be a retired professor of literature.

  His was the rarest case of sheer brilliance, which following the shoeboxes full of glossy magazine cover articles scarcely needs further expounding. She was the most insightful, gifted student in our creative writing program, and his reason for living from the moment they met. Any of her tribulations became his own.

  Perhaps it could not have been any other way. Someone gifted with his brilliance is often lacking in guidance. He needed that balance. She was his intuition, writing the maps as he lit the way.

  Indeed, it was her parents that drove him toward immunology. She was, next to my own wife Emma, one of the strongest people I've had the gift of knowing, capable of channeling misery into superb memoirs reflecting a far greater scope of the human experience. Jericho, I'm afraid, in his limited capacity for the abstract arts and boundless desire to please her, saw only injustice and the lack of resolution.

  Where those experiences gave her incredible resolve, Jericho heard the trumpets of war, the war on disease. Despite what anyone believes, despite what happened, he truly had the best intentions. He told me he wanted to “kill death,” a statement no more foolish or brazen than that of any young genius with a new generation of technology at his fingertips.

  When I tell this to Emma, she reminds me that countless spiritual leaders and mythological gods found inspiration in the same directive. This savior complex has resulted in the deaths of hundreds of millions more in the relentless hunt for infidels, witches, and evil spirits than have ever been saved. Which is probably zero.

  But it was undeniable that Jericho had tipped those scales, I would tell her. Jericho has saved millions, and none have died in his own hands save the one he loved.

  I should clarify that Jericho was never a monster, but I don't tell her that anymore.

  No–anymore, I still believe in his heart and his brilliance, but I've awoken to Emma's consternation, catching off-handed remarks that rouse wonder about the hunt for invisible evils that Emma ascribed to saviors.

  Something inexplicable, like muttering about ghosts.

  ***

  Eric closes the book. It's impossible to remember. He knew the name, but–Jericho Amara–people hadn't really uttered it since he was a child.

  Empirical knowledge of the time is gone, obliterated. These stories are forgotten legends.

  Crane knows something he isn't willing to share.

  He listens to Crane and Mae shuffle through the downstairs. If something is hidden in the loft, what could it be?

  A small part of him
wonders if Crane thinks he'll discover the cure hidden in another footlocker, or under the floorboards; they'd unearth original blueprints for the virus, and work backwards from there.

  Hadn't they given up figuring out why everything went wrong?

  He steps over to the rotting bed, to the open footlocker. It's filled with nothing but magazine and newspaper clippings. Most of them are brief and sensationalist articles about Jericho, but there's a few from scientific journals.

  Immunology. Realm.

  He picks a sheet with the smallest print.

  Realm, Mental Health, and Safety Concerns in General Population Users, the heading declares, with a smaller note that reads Leviathan-funded study.

  It's all a joke now, like reading about the science of alchemy.

  ***

  Abstract:

  Episodic Dissociative Projection (EDP), or colloquially “Ghosting”, has been reported in a minority of users representing 0.02%. This figure is based on collected physician diagnoses and consumer reports in the controlled market of the State of California and may be higher.

  EDP is characterized by infrequent feelings of disconnect from one's own body; not feeling in control of one's moods, thoughts, or actions; equilibrium disturbance; and rapid fluctuations in environmental perception. In extremely rare cases (two to date), vivid hallucinations and short-term memory loss and/or potential psychogenic fugue have been reported.

  No evidence exists of symptoms persisting separate from or beyond cessation of Realm.

  Because of the nature of Realm and relatively low incidence of EDP, it is difficult to discern whether these episodes are symptomatic of rare and idiosyncratic flaws in the consumer's unique adaptation to the experience; pre-existing and undiagnosed mental disorders independent of Realm; unadvised concurrent administration of psychoactive drugs; or as-yet undocumented flaws in the design architecture.

  Given the low incidence rate, seemingly transitory nature of EPD, and lack of FDA interest to date, authors recommend uninterrupted operation and continued, long-term study.

  6

  Ghosts

  Jericho sits at the receptionist’s desk of Blue Coral Inn, watching a gull make its way up the stairs to the front balcony outside. A departing group sits on the benches, amazed, whispering to each other. He imagines it will continue up to the window, hop up and in, and peck at his skin. He itches at the thought.

  By noon, all but four guests have checked out, and three of them are staying the weekend. One appears to be a glitch in the computer. He scans the monitor's long list of rooms, too anxious to focus. It's a jumbled grid of codes, NORES, OCCUP, CRLRM, TMBRT. His head begins to hurt.

  No ghosts. Please.

  He focuses on one occupied room. Room 114. The checkout date reads 00/00.

  He stares and stares at the numbers.

  00/00.

  He’s out of touch with everything at Blue Coral.

  He prints yesterday's records, restarts the computer and tells housekeeping to keep an eye on the front desk. His irritability is returning, and not wanting to hear a word from anyone else, he rushes past the idle bodies on the porch, stirring away the gull, and leaves.

  Reuben is already at Paseka's, two beers in, chatting it up with a bartender Jericho’s never seen. Her blonde hair is pulled back in a ponytail, her pink short shorts and legs crossed as she leans on the bar. Otherwise, it's dead empty.

  Already he doesn't want to be here.

  “My man,” Reuben says. What a grating voice. A dumb bellow with a cocky inflection. “Grab this fine man a cider, babe.”

  “It's noon,” he protests, but she brings him one anyway and tells Reuben she's going to smoke. Jericho wonders why she feels a need to tell the only patron where the fuck she's going. In fact, he doesn't understand how Reuben can even sit in this bar without a shred of humility less than half a year after being fired.

  He watches the pink short shorts cross the bar.

  Oh wait. I do.

  After the door closes, Reuben sneers. “All right, Sober McGee, here's your drugs,” and he throws a bag of twenty pills on the bar.

  “Fuck you,” he says, but pockets the item and tosses a wad of bills on the bar. “I'm not the one with problems.”

  “Don't make me laugh. Maybe you oughta take one now,” Reuben fires back, unphased.

  Jericho fondles the perspiring bottle in his hands, wondering what sound it would make hitting Reuben's thick skull.

  Chill out.

  He does want one now, but resists the urge.

  “Sorry,” he says, “didn't get much sleep last night.”

  “Surprise. Isn't Maggie outta town?”

  “Yeah. Until Monday or Tuesday. I called her before you last night to break it off.”

  “That's a shame.”

  Jericho wonders what that means, or why he's even sitting here. He's got the drugs. He should just get up and go.

  “Well, I didn't, I don't think. I don't know.” Before Reuben can respond, “When do you have to go back?”

  “Whenever,” Reuben says. “But I'll be damned, was three accidents gettin' here.”

  “Weird.” He goes to say something about Reuben being careful, with the drunken driving charge, but stops himself. Maybe it's because Reuben would get upset, or maybe he doesn't care anymore.

  “Yeah, some guy–you know that one French cafe or whatever?–drove his car right through the goddam window. Be glad you're port-side, man, someone'll probably plow through the storefront and into my ass before the day's over.”

  “How is the wine store?”

  Reuben laughs. “Easy money, just not enough of it. But you oughta come in sometime and check it out.”

  “Oh?”

  “The owner, this old man, he's days from–” Reuben stops. “Eh, he's just really old. But the girl, his daughter, goddam. She's odd. Like, perky, all that fake smiling and in-charge stuff. And attached to the old guy. They live on the top floor. But damn, she'd be a hot little piece if she wasn't so weird.”

  “Oh.” Jericho stares at the bar, waiting for Reuben to finish describing the girl's body.

  As boorish as Reuben is, his one-sided conversation stirs something between envy and longing in Jericho, which makes him feel worse about Maggie. Watching Reuben wave around and shape his hands, he envisions her, but he isn't filled with lust.

  Then he talks about his job, but Jericho's mind wanders to how annoyed Reuben is making him.

  It's his own fault. Those self-pitying sleepless walks spent in miserable nostalgia, walking the great white topographic nothing in his head.

  He begins to feel that pounding, weighing down his skull.

  We're just our relationships with other people.

  He thinks of the sign on the pier. Get Lost. The moth in the bottle.

  Past futures and future pasts.

  Something is awake and churns in his stomach.

  God damned fucking chemicals.

  The gray wash of the radio's lost reception.

  The melting faces in his dream.

  00/00.

  The nausea swells. He stumbles off the barstool and hurriedly makes his way to the back of the bar through a blurred maze of stools, collapses on the bathroom door, catching his balance before hitting the tile.

  Where are the pills?

  He hoists himself up with shaking legs.

  No, no, not the pills.

  Leaning over the sink, he watches his face vibrate and expand. His fingers slide into the porcelain. The mirror shakes until he sees double, then an endless string of mirrors, an endless string of faces.

  Don't go. Don't go.

  He's being tossed around, turned inside out.

  Then everything is black and weightless.

  “Jericho?”

  He jumps, grips the bar hard. It's not porcelain. It's not a sink. It's wood.

  “What the fuck man?”

  A cold sweat covers his body.

  “What the fuck?”

  �
�I'm okay,” he manages.

  “What's wrong with you?”

  He looks around, unsteady. He's at the bar. The door is opening, and the bartender reenters, tossing a cigarette butt into the street behind her. Reuben is staring him dead in the face.

  “You be goddam careful with that shit.”

  “With what?” he says, weak, and realizes Reuben is talking about the pills.

  He pulls them out, counting in his shaking palm. There's eighteen.

  “Yeah, that. Put those away. Did you just take some?”

  He hears himself make an unintelligible noise.

  “In the bathroom just now,” Reuben says, firm, eyes wide and red.

  “I have to go to work,” he struggles to say. Forming the words is as clumsy and difficult as swallowing his own tongue.

  He gets up, legs still shaking, and rushes past the bartender at the front door, holding himself and shivering. A block away, he darts into an alley between two buildings and vomits before he can reach the ground.

  He rests his palms on the dirt and grass, spitting. His head pulses and rattles like a broken drum.

  After a moment passes, a cool wave rests over his skin, and he notices the painful little pebbles digging into cramped hands, the rotten taste in his mouth, the burning of his lungs.

  “Unnhhh,” and he spits again.

  His whole body shaking, he stands, leans against the brick wall, staring without thought at dead weeds under his shoe.

  Afraid Reuben will turn down the alley any moment, worried and yelling, Jericho hides his face against the rough brick, gasping for air.

  The ghosts have never been so violent.

  ***

  In his apartment, Jericho stares at his laptop, hand on his chest, monitoring a steady heart-rate.

  Depression. Insomnia. Anxiety.

  It's been less than sixteen hours.

  Dizziness. Nausea. Paranoia.

  He knows all this, looking it up was pointless. This isn't just withdrawal. He's nearly died before, been to the other side and only half returned. But nothing like this.