Criss Cross

by Jordan Castillo Price

  What I’d assumed was some kind of fancy computer font turned out to be extremely small, evenly-spaced, cramped handwriting. There was a diagram of a body with the chakras drawn in a row up the spine, starting with the tailbone and ending over the top of the head. That, I remembered from my Camp Hell textbooks. But they had different names than I remembered from my training, and each one had a bunch of other words written around it: wind, metal, water...stuff I’d never associated with chakras.

  If that wasn’t bad enough, the instructions were clear as mud. “Activate each crystal singly by placing in the receptive hand. Assume padmasanda. Avoid clavicular breathing.”

  Shit.

  I left the instructions and rocks on my table and decided to work on my calzone instead. At least I could understand that, even though it was cold and I was too lazy to throw it in the microwave. I tore a chunk out of the middle and threw out the crusts. Then I forced down the salad. It tasted okay, but I wanted to figure out the stupid rocks instead of nibbling on bunny food.

  One of my old textbooks was in the living room. Jacob had been reading it and we hadn’t gotten around to putting it back in the basement. Or, more accurately, I hadn’t been back to my storage closet in the basement since I’d seen the baby’s ghost there and so the textbook was gathering dust on my fake mantle.

  With the help of the old textbook I made some headway in figuring out how to “activate” the stones. It probably took me ten times longer than it would’ve if Crash’s instructions had been written in plain English.

  I muddled through to a point where I was supposed to place the hematite (aka the black stone) on my crotch and imagine a chakra spinning clockwise. I laid down on the floor, put the hematite in place, and then wondered how to determine clockwise. Was the clock facing me? Or was the clock laying on my crotch for the world to see?

  I should probably call Crash. And say what? “Hi, I’m Jacob’s new boyfriend, which nobody’s told you yet, just to make things as awkward as humanly possible. I’m too retarded to figure out this whole crystal cleanse thing and I’m hoping you’ll take pity on me.”

  Right.

  My jean jacket hung over one of my kitchen stools. I glanced at it from my spot on the floor and saw the edge of the white paper pharmacy bag sticking out of its pocket. Still on my back with a rock on my crotch, I reached over and pulled it out. No printed warnings on the bottle like regular people get from real pharmacies. My name, the name of the pill, and the dose. One tablet three times daily with or without food.

  I swallowed one of the new pills and settled in for a nice, long nap, after which everything would all be better.

  Sleeping didn’t seem to do the trick. It was mid-afternoon when I woke up, and if Jacob was working a case, I probably wouldn’t see him until early evening at best.

  I sat down in front of the TV and tuned into channel eight, figuring that it might help me concentrate on the textbook/cryptic instructions combo. I stared at the static, letting my mind wander. I’d have to talk with Jacob about Crash. I let it go. I should probably tell him about my liver. I let that go, too. It was just me and a speckled blue stone, unactivated, that I thumbed absently while I watched the soothing, gray snow swirl on the screen.

  And then a face appeared.

  I took it for some kind of ghosting from another frequency, like the jazz-hand guy I’d seen the night before. The face’s mouth opened and the figure reached toward the camera, and I wondered if it even had been a TV transmission, or a bunch of these dead, grasping fucks in my own living room?

  My living room.

  My personal space is my sanctuary.

  If I didn’t have a ghost-free zone to come home to, I’d go nuts. As it was, I could barely stop myself from putting my foot through the little TV. I reminded myself that it might feel good to kick it now but I’d only have to clean up the broken glass later.

  I called Lisa and got her voice mail. Again. I snapped my phone shut and ground my molars together for a while, but that didn’t provide any inspiration.

  I wanted answers, and Crash was the only person I could think of who might have any. I could have just called him, I guess, but thanks to Lisa I didn’t have much faith in my phone anymore. My meds didn’t have any warning about not driving -- not that they had any warnings on them at all -- so I set off for Crash’s neighborhood in person to see which way my clock was supposed to face.

  Jackie was sitting on the hood of my car when I went outside. She filed her nails, pointedly ignoring the bloody shank sticking out of the center of her tube top. She didn’t say anything as I got in, but she gave me a nasty look and shook her head as if she’d never seen anything so pathetic. She disappeared when I started the engine.

  I took the surface roads to Crash’s, not trusting myself on the highway at speeds over thirty miles per hour. The ghosts at the intersections were thick, not just the normal car crashes I was accustomed to, but new ones as well. Little howling kids in hospital gowns with sticklike arms reaching toward me. A screaming couple decked out in full wedding regalia, reaching toward me like they expected me to toss the bouquet. A bunch of moaning guys in uniform with riding boots and bandoleers who grasped at me like a dead army.

  They started wandering into the street as I passed. They weren’t particularly fast, but they weren’t slow like horror movie zombies, either. I swerved around a couple of them, but decided it would only get me killed. I started just driving through them, doing my best to make sure that I wasn’t plowing into any live pedestrians.

  Parking still wasn’t fantastic by Crash’s store, but I figured it probably never was. It was a neighborhood that’d been built before cars and had too many people crammed into it today. To claim my spot, I drove my car though a bag lady with a high-stacked shopping cart. I hesitated at first since she might just be panhandling, then pulled right through her when I saw her arm pass through a lamp post.

  A couple of women arguing in Spanish blocked the door to the palmist’s shop, and I barely stopped myself from trying to walk through them. One of the women flinched as I veered away from her at the last moment, then snapped, “What is your problem?”

  I could’ve pulled my badge on her and given her attitude, but my heart just wasn’t in it. I mumbled, “Excuse me,” and squeezed into the thumbprint-painted vestibule.

  The door closed behind me and something inside me quieted. No more dead. Just me. Crash’s building was a safe zone -- safer than my own apartment, evidently. I stood there in the vestibule for a second and enjoyed the stillness until I felt more like myself again, and then I took the stairs two at a time and let myself into Sticks and Stones.

  The black woman looked up from the counter and gave me an easy smile.

  “Hi,” I said. “Is Crash around?”

  “He in back,” she said, her African American accent thick and kind of soothing, with a little bit of a Southern twang to it. “He playin’ on that computer.” She shook her head, a little like the way Jackie had shaken hers about me. “He do that all day long.”

  “Maybe you can help me,” I said, thinking that I might not need to deal with Crash at all. I’d expected to be relieved about that, but it felt strangely like disappointment, instead. I swept that idea under the rug for the time being. “I tried to follow these instructions to the letter, but I feel like I’m screwing it all up.”

  I had Crash’s diagram in my hand, folded a bunch of times now and a little sweaty from the way I’d been clutching it.

  The woman waved it away. “Don’t you worry none ‘bout that, Chil’. It real simple.” She pointed to a hematite that Crash had left spilled out on the counter with a bunch of other rocks. “Take that in your left hand.”

  I picked it up.

  “Now close your eyes, and be still. See the sky, right through the roof of this building. And see the light come down from heaven. That God’s love, and it all around you, all the time.”

  I’m not exactly an atheist, but I can’t say I have a clear idea
of what “God’s love” would look like, if I could actually see it. Still, I dug the idea of something positive and pure around me for a change. I imagined white light surrounding me and the stone.

  “All right, now. Hold it. And breathe. And know that God loves you.”

  I kept my eyes shut for a moment and did my best not to overthink her statement. She probably lived in a world where God loved everyone. Must be nice.

  She smiled when I opened my eyes. “It ready now. You put it on your base for protection. Your pants pocket’ll do just fine.”

  I looked at the black stone in my palm. It looked the same, felt the same. But maybe belief was all I needed. “And I just do the same for the rest?” I asked, wondering why there was a need for such an elaborate set of instructions if that was all there was to it. Maybe the word “God” was just too loaded nowadays.

  The beads clacked open and Crash flew out of the back room, startling me. “Back for more?” he said.

  I looked to the black woman for moral support, but she wandered toward the far end of the counter, fanning herself.

  “I, uh....” Something told me that he’d think I was the biggest idiot in the world if I admitted that I couldn’t figure out his instructions. “This crystal thing is new to me.”

  “Carolyn said you were a Psych. I just assumed you’d gone through the whole certification deal so you could suck off the government’s teat.”

  If that was what I had done, I’d gotten the raw end of the bargain, for sure. “I’m certified, yeah.”

  “And you can’t do a simple crystal cleanse?”

  Could he make me feel like even more of an idiot? “They didn’t teach that where I trained.” Or maybe they did, and I’d been too doped up to notice from huffing spray paint to block out the visions.

  He sighed and lit a cigarette. “Okay, fine. I’ll go through it with you step by step.”

  “That’s all right,” I said, backing away from the counter and gesturing toward the end where I’d last seen the black lady. “Your assistant helped me figure it out.”

  “Assistant?”

  I heaved an inward sigh and wished it were politically correct to say “the great big black woman” without coming off as a jerk. “Your partner?” I tried.

  “Partner,” he repeated.

  “The lady who works here,” I said. “I didn’t catch her name.”

  Crash took a long pull off his smoke and crossed his arms. “Don’t fuck around.”

  My mouth worked stupidly in reply.

  He glared at me and took another long drag from his cigarette. And then he said, “I’m the only one who works here.”

  Chapter Nine

  “Whoever the woman in the flowered scarf is -- her. She explained how to activate the stones without all the counterclockwise spinning chakra crap.”

  Crash blinked at me a few times. “What woman? Where?” he asked, as if he was talking to a small, very stupid child.

  I pointed toward the end of the counter. “There. She was working over there.” I gestured at a narrow doorway beyond. “She’s probably in that room right now.”

  “That’s a closet.”

  I was starting to get annoyed with him. “Fine, I don’t know where she went. The woman who helped you pick out my crystals earlier today.”

  Crash jabbed his cigarette into the sand and leaned on the counter with both palms flat, his eyes narrowed. “Look. I’m not some Stiff you have to wow with the whole psychic routine, got it? I’m a legitimate businessman selling legitimate products. You came to me for help. At least give me the courtesy of dropping this ‘Ooh, I’m such a powerful medium’ shit.”

  “What do you mean, shit?”

  Crash rolled his eyes and whispered, “I see dead people.” He threw his arms wide and his voice went loud. “Come on, man. You get impressions and you know how to read them. So do two to three people out of every hundred if you believe the pabulum that good old Uncle Sam’s trying to stuff down your throat. My guess is it’s more like seven to ten.”

  I tried to figure out a defense while Crash ranted at me, but I couldn’t quite find one. He wasn’t saying I was crazy, and he wasn’t exactly saying I was fake, both of which I’d heard too many times to count.

  “Look. I do see dead people.”

  “Okay, you have a perception, I get that. But you’ve got this terminology that’s just designed to feed into the whole ‘us and them’ mentality that’s gonna come back and bite you in the ass the second the right-wing fundamentalists get a chance to burn you at the stake. Instead of ‘see’ you could call it ‘sense,’ or ‘perceive.’”

  “No. I see them.”

  Crash smirked dismissively and tapped another smoke out of his pack. “Okay, pal. Whatever pays the bills. But don’t keep up your act for my benefit. I know how these things work and I don’t buy it.”

  “Christ Almighty,” I said, banging my fist on the counter. “Dead people are fucking swarming me and you’re trying to tell me I don’t see them?”

  The black woman appeared again at the end of the counter. I’d been so wrapped up in Crash that I hadn’t seen her come in. “No need to be takin’ the Lord’s name in vain, Chil’.”

  “I’m sorry,” I told her. “But he won’t listen.”

  Crash blew smoke in my face. “What – you want me to believe you’re seeing ghosts right now?”

  I looked at him, and then back at the black woman. She clucked her tongue at my swearing. I wondered why she was so solid and so real it hadn’t even occurred to me that she might not be corporeal. And she wasn’t grasping at me like the ghosts outside, or telling me over and over how she’d died. “What’s your name?” I whispered.

  “Miss Mattie,” she said, fanning herself. “Short for Matilda.”

  “Hi. I’m Victor.”

  “I know,” she said, smiling a little sadly. “Be nice to Curtis, all right? He a good boy at heart.”

  “What’s next?” Crash asked me. “Are you gonna tell me I was Cleopatra in a previous life?”

  “Who’s Curtis?” I asked him.

  His eyes narrowed. “So Carolyn told you what my driver’s license says. Big fucking deal.”

  “Oh,” I said. I’d stopped yelling back at Crash as soon as Miss Mattie spoke. I guessed she’d had a civilizing influence on me. “Um, who’s Miss Mattie, then?”

  Crash stared at me, his pale eyebrows knit together in the middle. “Who told you that name?”

  “The...um...full-figured African American woman told me. The one in the flowered scarf.”

  “In my day it was all right to say ‘Negro,’” Miss Mattie said. She turned and walked slowly toward the narrow closet door, wide hips swaying beneath her big blue caftan. She disappeared through the door.

  My phone vibrated in my pocket.

  “What color is her scarf?” Crash asked me.

  “I don’t know,” I said, debating whether or not to take the call. “Lots of colors. She went into your closet and I can’t see it anymore.”

  “So you don’t actually see her,” he said.

  I decided I’d better check just in case Doctor Morganstern was back in town. I flipped open the phone and found a text message from Lisa.

  “Someone told you about her -- who, Carolyn? Jacob? You’re all in this PsyCop bullshit together, aren’t you?”

  “You could say that,” I said absently, scrolling down Lisa’s message.

  DANGER – YOUNG BLOND MAN NOT WHAT HE SEEMS. SORRY CAN’T TALK.

  Shit.

  Heart thudding, I turned on my heel and headed toward the door, which was only a few steps away.

  “Where are you going?” Crash demanded.

  “Police business. Gotta go.”

  “Oh, shit, you’re a cop, too? You don’t act like a cop -- I thought you were just a consultant or something. Get the hell out here and leave me alone; I’ve had enough bacon to last me a lifetime. And tell Carolyn I don’t want to meet any more of her pig friends.”


  I briefly considered telling him I was also sleeping with his ex-boyfriend, but decided it might make him mad enough to come after me and deck me. I went back to my car, pretending that the people full of bullet holes and tire tracks weren’t swarming all around me, and pulled out my phone. I dialed Lisa’s cell.

  “Lisa Gutierrez speaking. I won’t be available for the next couple of weeks due to my coursework, but leave me a message and I’ll get back in touch with you soon.”

  Damn.

  Chapter Ten

  As I unlocked my front door, I heard someone on TV murmuring in a low, reassuring voice punctuated by sporadic bouts of refined applause. Good thing I hadn’t drop kicked the set. I would’ve had to explain about it to Jacob.