No doubt about it, death changes people.
The Ex
Steve Rasnic Tem
The old guy started taking his meals at the restaurant again, but his wife wasn’t with him. Janet figured she must have died; surely people that age didn’t divorce, did they? Later one of the other waitresses said the wife had passed away from a stroke. She figured the old man was at least sixty. Too bad—she thought they were pretty cute, the way they passed butter and salt to each other, and stuff like that, like they were just two normal people out on a date. She always tried to get them into her section—they left good tips.
But now she was wondering if the old guy should be out by himself. He just stared across the table all the time, chewing at his food and making these faces, little smiles, little frowns, widening his eyes, sometimes pressing his lips together like he was irritated. It was weird. She’d call somebody about him but it really wasn’t any of her business.
Lately she’d noticed his face changed color sometimes. A little redder, or a little paler. She knew what that meant—her sister had a brand new baby. How gross was that! Right there in public! She never smelled anything, but maybe he wore one of those big diapers? If she ever got that old she’d just stay at home.
You shouldn’t slump, Fred. It makes a poor first impression.
Fred sighed at his dead wife’s Sunday-school-teacher posture, so uncomfortably erect, as if an invisible hand were dragging her up by the hair. It was her I’m-so-good-I’m-sacrificing-my-own-needs-for-you pose. Bette, you don’t approve of this—now you’re pretending to be my romantic counselor?
Oh, I don’t think we’re likely to see any romance here tonight. I think the best you can hope for right now is a pitying civility, given that jacket you’re wearing.
What’s wrong with it? I wore it to my brother’s wedding. Everyone was very complimentary.
That was forty years ago. It looks like you shot and killed an old couch, and now you’re wearing it.
So it’s a classic. Why are you here, Bette?
I’m your wife.
Ex-wife, honey. Ex-wife.
We never divorced.
You died!
Oh, so that’s it, is it? And you’ve resented it all this time. I shouldn’t have to remind you that ‘til death do us part’ wasn’t in our vows.
We were young—we thought it was too morbid. Besides, I thought that part would just go without saying.
Your problem as a husband, Fred, was that you thought pretty much everything would ‘just go without saying’!
“Now that’s out of order!”
The young waitress appeared suddenly at his shoulder, dressed in white like some kind of apparition. “I’m sorry, sir. You say you’re ready to order?”
Fred looked up, embarrassed, smiling wanly. She seemed very tall, or else he was very short today. “Erm, just some tea for now. I’m still expecting someone.”
She smiled and put her hand on his shoulder. “She’s probably just so busy making herself pretty for you she’s lost track of the time. We ladies are all the same you know. I’ll be right back with that tea.” She left.
Silly bitch.
Bette! When did you start cursing?
Death changes you, Fred. Politeness doesn’t get you very far on the spiritual plane. You have to assert yourself. Do you know just how many dead people there are? It’s worse than that vacation we took to Miami Beach.
Fred shuddered involuntarily. She was just trying to be nice.
She had her hands all over you! Is this what you were always waiting for? Get me out of the way just so you can play ‘old man and the waitress’ with that piece of trash?
She opened her mouth then, much wider than Fred could have expected, and out of a rising hiss and hush of wind beginning somewhere so deep you’d hate to lose your keys there, developed a long and mournful howl that filled the restaurant. Fred looked around, expecting at least a few complaints or tossed condiments, but people went about their meals as if nothing had happened. Except here and there the glasses resting on tables vibrated, the water stirring in concentric ripples.
Fred stared at her, his thoughts on vacation. What in the world?
Banshee. My death counselor says it sometimes happens.
You have a counselor?
Dying is VERY stressful, Fred! Especially when your surviving spouse is making a fool out of himself.
I’m sorry. Anything I can do?
She stood up then, closed her eyes, and spun around like a shattered merry-go-round, threads of skin floating away from bony arms, bits of her dress disintegrating. She finally stopped and looked at him. Don’t mention the dangling eyeball, he cautioned himself.
Be honest. Does death make me look fat?
No, he said automatically. No, in fact I think your translucency is very flattering.
How about the blurriness? Help or hurt?
Oh, help, definitely. Very becoming.
“I’m so sorry I’m late!” A slightly plump, pleasant-looking woman plopped into the chair opposite, the one his dead wife had been sitting in moments before. Fred was startled, and so relieved (but not without considerable metaphysical confusion) that the two hadn’t attempted to occupy the same space that he yelped like a goosed Disney princess.
Both women, the living and the dead, stared at him. “Sorry,” he said. “Gas.”
He stood up to greet her. She looked up at him from the chair, confused, then started to get up as well. “Oh no,” he said, reddening, “don’t get up.” He sat down again.
Can I just say that a lady doesn’t plop at a strange man’s table? She waits, permits him to stand and invite her, and only then does she sit down.
You know, I don’t recall your being so concerned with manners before. “Hi. I’m Fred.” He reached across the table and gently took the woman’s hand. Don’t you have other things you should be doing?
You mean like mouldering?
“I’m, Mary. So pleased . . . ”
Is that what you think I do all day?
“ . . . to meet you, Fred.”
Lie around and moulder?
Scattered jigsaw puzzle pieces of Bette’s flesh dropped onto the table, including several into his tea: a nostril, what might have been a portion of earlobe, that little mole she worried was cancerous but he used to love.
Fred stalled with his hand holding Mary’s, grin frozen awkwardly, an electrocuted hyena. Mary looked at him nervously. “Something wrong?”
“Umm.” Bette was slowly picking up the random pieces of herself, actually managing to look embarrassed beneath her pallor, attempting to push the putty-like bits into more-or-less their correct position. “Could I have a moment, perhaps? Excuse me.” He headed for the men’s washroom, more quickly than he’d considered himself capable.
He grabbed both sides of the reassuringly solid sink and stared at himself appraisingly. He looked surprisingly normal, except for a certain wildness of hair and eyebrow. And the beginnings of a twitch at the left corner of his mouth, as if a moth were trapped beneath the skin. And his wife’s forefinger jammed into his right ear like a Bluetooth headset.
A bloodied hand came around from behind his head and retrieved the finger. Sorry, Bette said, as she stood beside him replanting the finger. I was afraid I might lose it when things began to, well, fall apart.
I have to move on, he said. I think we both do. Bette was staring at the floor. Bette?
This bathroom is disgusting! she said, shaking her head. Fearing another collapse, he watched nervously as her features slid about her skull. When they settled she locked eyes with him in the mirror. Do you men even bother to aim anymore, or is it just this shotgun approach?
Bette, are you crying?
I can’t tell. Am I?
I’m not sure. There’s something moving down your face, but it’s so transparent I can’t be sure what it is.
She straightened up a bit, patted her hair. I should have dyed it when I had the chance, remembe
r? That lady was going to do it for no extra charge.
That was the mortician’s make-up artist, sweetheart. I told her no. I wanted you to be exactly the way I remembered you.
At least you bought me a new dress. The color was awful, but the thought was nice.
You’re welcome.
No one in the restaurant appeared to be paying any attention as he made his way back toward his table. His glass of tea was still there, but his date was gone.
I guess I ruined things with your new friend.
That’s okay. Maybe she just wasn’t the sticking around kind. And I need something a little more permanent . . . sorry . . . I guess “committed” would be a better word.
Either one’s okay. That’s just not my neighborhood anymore.
If there’s ever anything . . .
The problem with you men, dear, is that you imagine an older woman has no options. I’ll have you know I’ve had my eye on someone for a few months now. He seems to be missing a few things, a few dozen vertebrae, about half his pelvis, but he never walks away when I’m speaking to him. And he’s right next door to my new place.
Like the Cheshire, her grin was the last thing to fade.
When Janet went back to check on the old guy, she was bothered that both he and his date were gone. Maybe things had really started clicking—but thankfully she stopped herself before imagining further.
At least he had thought to leave a tip, then she discovered that instead of his usual thirty-plus percent he’d left her a buck and a quarter. Old bastard. She didn’t care that he only had a glass of tea—she had bills to pay.
Chalk it up as another life lesson. No doubt about it, death changes people.
He sees things in the swirling dust. Minute dancing ballerinas and crystalline cogs. And the faces appearing in the wall. Appearing, and vanishing . . .
Faces in Walls
John Shirley
I wake up in room 230, Wemberly Sanitarium, a fifteen by twenty-three foot room with peeling green walls. A dream of freedom and intimacy vanishes and the truth comes thudding back like a door slamming. I’m strapped loosely to a narrow bed, where I’ve lain, unmoving, for six years. I lie on my back, sharply aware that the overhead light has just switched on for the morning. It’s only later that the sunlight comes through the high window, to my right. I lay there waiting for the faces in the walls. And the one face that talks to me.
Mostly, nothing happens in this room, except waking, and waiting, and watching the light change; the nurse coming and going, thoughts coming and going. Enduring the pain of bedsores. The paralysis.
I can move my eyes to look around, and blink—and thank God I can close my eyes. I’m able to breathe without help. I’m unable to speak. I can move my tongue very slightly. There’s a little movement in the thumb of my right hand. That’s it, that’s all of it.
I mentioned being strapped in. The only reason they strap me down at all is just because maybe I might have a seizure, and that could make me fall off the bed. But I haven’t had a seizure in years. Some kind of virus got into my brain, years ago, and gave me some really ferocious seizures. The paralysis came after the last seizure, like the jaws of a bear trap closing on me. Anyway, despite the restraints, this is not a mental hospital, this is the Wemberly Geriatric Sanitarium. Geriatric home or not, I’m not old, I’m one of the fairly young patients, for all the good it does me. Thirty-two, by my count, now. Does it sound bad? It’s worse. Maybe the distinct feeling of my life burning away, second by second, like a very, very slow fuse that’s burning down to a dud firecracker—maybe that’s the worst part . . . that and Sam Sack.
I imagine a guy in a band saying, “Fellas, let’s play ‘Paralyzed’—and play it with feeling.” I can feel. I feel more than someone with a snapped spine could. Sometimes I’m glad I can feel things—and sometimes I wish I couldn’t. I can feel the straps over my chest, though they’re not on tightly. I can feel a new bedsore developing on my right shoulder blade. I can feel the thin blanket over my lower half. I can feel the warm air from the vent as the furnace comes on; it blows, left to right, across on my face. I hear the fan that drives the air from the vent; I hear sleety rain hit the window. I can taste a sourness in my mouth—the staff rarely cleans my teeth—and I can taste food, when they bring it, but they give me very little, mostly soups, and not enough. And the way they make the soup there’s nothing much to taste.
Now I hear voices. People talking. They take talking for granted and so did I. We waste so much of it . . .
There is something, lately, that gives me some murky sort of hope. Bethany. Though I’m not sure what exactly I’m hoping for . . .
Before Beth, I had my sad little ways of coping. Daydreaming of course. And writing in my mind—I tell stories, only I tell them in my mind. I think them out and try to memorize them, word for word, and tell them over again, to myself. Sometimes I make the stories up. Sometimes they’re things that really happened.
The story I’m telling now, and trying to etch into a little corner of my brain, is a true one. I know it’s true because I’m telling it even as it unfolds. I have an irrational belief that somehow, someone will hear this story. Maybe I’ll be able to transmit it to them with my mind. Because in a certain way, my mind has become the strongest part of me. I’ll transmit the story all in one piece, out into the ether, and it’ll bounce around like a radio signal. A random writer will just pick it up out of the air, maybe years from now, and write it down—and he’ll suppose it’s all his idea.
My mother abandoned me here, but I guess it’s not like abandoning a child. I was an adult, after all, in my mid-twenties, when it happened. I’d been staying with her while I was recovering from a drug relapse.
My mother and I were never close. That’s an understatement—we had a simmering mutual aversion, muffled by a truce. It got worse after I grew up and went to college. You’re supposed to understand your parents better when you’re grown up.
I did understand her—I just couldn’t respect her. And she knew it.
I won’t say she was a whore, because she didn’t take money from her lovers. (I could almost respect her if she’d done it for money.) No, not a whore—but I do think she drove my dad away with her casual adultery, when I was a teenager, and I know she discouraged him from being in touch with me later. And I know she is an alcoholic and a woman who sleeps with the random men she meets in bars. Or that’s how she was—I don’t even know if she’s still alive.
I don’t know why Mom invited me to stay with her, after I got fired, and lost my apartment. Maybe she wanted me there to take revenge on me—she didn’t have my dad to take revenge on, so she took it out on me. It felt like she wanted me to always be saying, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” Sorry for something I didn’t do.
“You’re just like him, Douglas, that’s the awful thing,” she’d say. Not that my dad was ever a drug addict. And not that I was always one either.
I got into speedballs in the early ’70s, when a lot of us went from Summer of Love thinking, to the whole ’70s glam decadence thing. I would get off work and go right out and score. Always a speedball—heroin and cocaine; heroin and methedrine. I got sick and tired of being sick and tired—so I got clean. I had five years clean, and a good job—before I relapsed. I started using again—and it got me fired. That was another wake-up call. I needed a place to get clean. Spoke to my mom, in a fit of familial yearning, she said, “You may as well come here.”
Six months with my mom. Staying clean, partly because she was staying drunk. She inspired me to sobriety in a backward kind of way. I was just about to move out into a clean-and-sober hostel—anywhere, to get away from her—when the virus hit me. The seizures, the paralysis. The doctors said it was incubating in me, all that time—that I’d gotten it from a needle, fixing drugs, maybe a year or two before.
My mom said it was my comeuppance, it was God’s way to say, “No more, Douglas!” She took care of me for a month—when she was sober enough. Th
ought I’d get over the virus, in time. But finally she put me here. And here I am still. Six years later.
Because I’m going to talk about Bethany, I should say that this place wasn’t always a Geriatric Sanitarium. It was, for years, a TB Sanitarium. Tuberculosis, consumption. The White Death. In the mid-sixties, when they had TB mostly licked in this country, Mr. Wemberly, the owner, changed it over to a Geriatrics Sanitarium—only, from what I hear, listening to the nurses, it’s only about seventy percent old-age dementia cases. The rest are just odds and ends of damaged people, all ages, who end up here because it’s cheap. Very cheap indeed.
Mom left me here, in 1976. So here it is, 1982.
Punishment. Punishment, punishment. Here I am. I’m sorry. Does that help, to say I’m sorry? If I say it again, does it help? I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Now can I get up and walk out of here?
No. The tired gray sunlight coming through the windows says no.
Not much happened to me, for almost six years.
I ingest, I eliminate waste, I breathe. A few minutes of physical therapy, once a month; some electrical therapy; Sister Maria for a brief time. The day nurse and the visits of Sam Sack. That’s all. Anything really new that happens is profoundly exciting—makes my breath come faster, my heart pound. Anything new that has nothing to do with Sam Sack, I mean. I get some stimulation from Sack, sure, but that’s not excitement; that’s nausea in the shape of a man . . .
About four years ago, for almost seven months, I was visited once a week by a nun, a chubby little Hispanic lady named Sister Maria. She used to sit with me for almost an hour. She’d bring one of those cheap one-speaker cassette tape recorders along, play canticles and the like for me, and read to me. Not always from the Bible. She read from Quo Vadis? That was pretty exciting. She had a soft Mexican accent and she used to smile at me and wag her finger and say, “Are you laughing at my accent, Douglas? I think you are!”
Ghosts: Recent Hauntings Page 56