“Is this right?” Lil’ Jorge got it just right.
Mano walked down the hill through the woods back toward The Cure. A small crowd had already gathered on the edge of the river right where he had left Pepe’s body. Now that he was a ghost with two black birds on his head, Mano felt more alive than ever before. He felt good and bright, and he wanted to shine like an oracle for everyone in town. He knew this would be a perfect chance for him to announce his first revelations, he thought, to tell them a few things he had recently learned about death.
Mano thought he could save the people of Pie Time from their irrational fears of God’s Finger. He thought that his new job could become making revelations, and the people of Pie Time would write about his revelations instead of writing about God’s Finger. There is no Hell in death—this Mano could prove. The word would get out. Everyone would be freed from needing church, freed from their fear of death, from their fear of fear. And they would have Mano to thank for that.
During his walk toward the crowd, Mano was considering his first revelation. He decided he would start by addressing everyone as friends. “Friends, gather around. I am a new ghost. I am real and am in no way a threat to you. I am just a thing, not evil, but just a thing just like you, how you are just things. I love being dead. And you will soon love it, too,” he’d start. He’d kiss dead Pepe for the first time, and everyone would watch their kiss. Mano smiled.
“Pepe!” Mitzi Let screamed. It was a sound that pierced the constant rushing water noise of The Cure from inside the gathering crowd.
Pepe’s body was dead on the ground in the center of about a dozen people. Everyone there was examining Pepe’s dead body, and the strange thing that had become of it. Enid Pine was crying, and she seemed to be answering everyone’s questions.
“Pepe! My baby!” screamed Mitzi.
Mano, the ghost with his glasses over the eyeholes, standing inside his dead mother’s bed sheet, stood still on the opposite side of The Cure, near the footbridge, watching. He was too far away to hear Mitzi’s screams from the other side of the river. Still, he figured everyone would be able to hear him from where he stood. Everyone’s backs were to him while he started.
“Friends! Friends!” Mano yelled, and gestured his hands to bring the crowd over the footbridge toward him. But no one could hear Mano. “Friends! Gather around!” He tried again.
Instead, Mitzi shouted at the sky.
Mano persisted. “Friends! I am dead, but...” he started.
No one turned around.
Mano looked closer at the gathering and felt his heart go hollow. He saw through a few legs and arms that someone was holding Mitzi as she leaned forward on her hands and knees.
“I don’t know. I don’t know.” That’s all Enid could seem to say.
Mano quietly spoke only to himself inside the sheet in front of his mouth. “I am just a thing,” he mumbled. “I am not evil. I am just a thing—just like you...you and me are just things.” His breath got shorter. “I love...I love...” He couldn’t quite say it.
A few minutes earlier, Mary and Mimi Minutes had interrupted Mothers’ homily practice in the back chamber of Lady Blood, with the news of the most recent death. Mothers approached the crowd, trailed by Lil’ Jorge. He was adjusting his white collar, having just been summoned, and was dressing himself as he walked.
“I love Pepe,” Mano continued now as he watched the crowd swallow up Mothers and Lil’ Jorge from afar. He spoke almost silently, only to himself.
The chattering from the crowd grew as loud as the river until a few minutes later Mothers rose out of the middle of it on the shoulders of The Builder and The Baker. “Friends!” he yelled, “gather around!”
Mano’s ghost body felt reluctant to cross the footbridge to gather around.
“...We are all in the presence of Evil...” continued Mothers.
Mano tried to interrupt as loudly as he could from the other side of the river. “No, no, that’s just it, we are not!” He could no longer feel any warmth in his chest. “That’s what I was trying to tell you...”
Mothers continued uninterrupted, “...We’re being punished for our sins...” He was gesturing now with his index finger and fist, taking his finger out to point at everyone. “His finger is pointing out Evil!”
“No, no, see, look at me!” shouted Mano.
But no one looked at Mano. Everyone was crossing themselves while looking at Mothers.
“What was in it?” Nana Pine whispered
The Banker answered her by pointing at a broken accordion. A few minutes earlier, The Butcher had thrown the accordion to the ground in a fit of rage that the people of Pie Time hadn’t seen publicly for many years.
The Butcher screamed at Pepe. His screams became a long slow whine. “My son, the sinner.” He kicked the accordion until it looked like a small bag of logs.
“What is it?” Nana asked him.
The Banker shrugged his shoulders.
No one but Mano seemed to know what an accordion was. “Your son loved polka music,” said Mano underneath his sheet, but still no one heard him. And still no one noticed his ghost body standing on the other side of The Cure. Mano felt like he couldn’t move. He could only watch Pepe’s body from a distance as it was wrapped up in a blanket. He watched as everyone eventually left. Mano had nowhere to go.
“Pepe? Where are you? We can kiss now. We’re dead together.”
Once the sun went down, Mano finally crossed The Cure over the footbridge. He pushed his arms out from beneath his mother’s bed sheet, and picked up the accordion. It felt heavier than he expected. He liked the weight in his arms. He smelled it, and hugged it, and as he hugged it to his chest, to his own surprise, he heard himself playing the instrument beautifully. He didn’t know that he knew how to play the accordion, but he did. He discovered that he already knew how to play three dirges. So he played all three. And when he tried to play a fourth, he noticed that he was just playing the first dirge again, so he played the first dirge again, in its entirety. And then the other two again, too. All night, his arms moved in and out, in and out, and out came the dirges.
16.
For three days and nights, inside his mother’s bed sheet, with his glasses over the eyeholes, two black birds perched atop his head, an accordion strapped to his back, and a black poodle following him, Mano haunted Pie Time. On that first morning, he set off from his barbershop, where he picked up the radio that Pepe found in the dumpster. He held it underneath his arm, underneath his bed sheet. If the people he loved were going to die, he thought, then he would learn to love things. If he was going to love things, and things only, then he would have to carry them. The only way that things can die is if you lose them. The only way you can lose things is if you set them down. He could hardly fit through the barbershop door with all of his things in tow.
Like a wagon beginning to pick up and haul things at the beginning of the day, Mano floated to the factory to haunt it. He floated in through the front doors, and then past the room where, in his younger living days, he used to clock in and change into his work clothes, and then past the steaming machines. He stood at the very spot where The Foreman liked to have him drop his trousers to get spankings in front of everyone, all of the girls at the factory, and sometimes The Goods, too. None of the girls working in the factory saw this ghost floating there. It was the first time, from that spot, where Mano didn’t feel watched. Instead, he was watching them. Enid Pine tucked two cigarettes into her socks and looked around for The Foreman, who was behind her, asleep in a chair. Mary lit a cigarette for Mimi.
Mano floated past the girls, past The Foreman, and into the back room where The Goods often spent their afternoons together while The Foreman kept a poor watch over the thieving fingers of the girls. The back room was much bigger than he had imagined—much much bigger. It was nearly half the size of the factory itself. Where did all this room come from, Mano wondered, and how could it possibly fit within the walls of the factory? What
he imagined to be a small room with concrete walls lined with metal shelves and folders, something that smelled like paper and metal and cigarette smoke, was more like the opposite of what he imagined. The back room looked more like a banquet hall, or the drawing room of a mansion. There were no metal shelves and no stacks of paper. There was, however, cigarette smoke, which filled the air in the room.
On the back wall, furthest away from the door where Mano entered, were three large portrait paintings. The one in the middle was a portrait of a woman wearing a hat that looked like a hot water bottle. The other two were of men, one of whom was holding trophies in his hands, and the other was cutting a giant piece of cake with a giant knife. Behind Mano was a fireplace, crackling with a new log.
In the center of the room was a long shiny table made of black wood. The Goods were sitting together in the last two seats on one side at the far end of the table. Two men and one woman were sitting opposite from them. The three of them were identical to each other. They were even all dressed exactly alike, in grey suits and grey ties. Mano wasn’t able to tell the two men and one woman apart, and he didn’t recognize them either. Everything about them was grey, even their hair, and their ears. In fact, the closer Mano looked, and the longer he examined them, the less sure he was that they were actually three separate people at all.
At the very end of the table was The Banker, who on account of his shortness, sat upon a booster seat made of wooden Pie Time shipping boxes. The seat was so large that he became the tallest person at the table. On its side, the box read It’s High Time for a Pie Time.
“Go on,” goaded The Banker, lowering his half-glasses.
A few feet behind him sat The Lawyer, who was mostly obscured by shadows, and who said nothing. He wrote things in his notebook with a silver pen.
“They’re like exoskeletons,” said The Businessman, who was actually three people. Their voice was like a cat’s. The Goods and The Businessman were all smoking Pie Times. June was wearing pearls and a fur coat.
“Are they heavy?” Vera asked.
“No, not at all. They’re made out of something like iron. They’re light enough to wear all day long, and to sleep in, but strong enough...”
“So, they’re made out of iron?” Vera asked for clarification.
“It’s like iron, but lighter.”
“Like iron...?”
“Right.”
“So, it’s not iron?”
“It’s a lot like it.”
June had had enough of the discussion of materiality. “But do they look good?” she asked.
The Businessman opened a file on the table that held several sketches. The Goods and The Banker leaned in to look at them. They shuffled a few of the sketches between each other, and then they looked at each other and smiled.
“Can they come in different colors?”
“Any color under the sun,” answered The Businessman.
“What kind of price are we talking?” asked The Banker.
“They’ll be expensive...at first...”
June interrupted again. She had a knack for hearing what she wanted to hear in what goes unsaid in other people’s sentences. “It’s no matter. They’ll buy it. They’ll love it.” June was excited that her factory would be making something other than beer and cigarettes, something that could save people’s lives.
Vera was much more skeptical. “Are they safe?”
The Lawyer shuffled in his chair in the shadows, and wrote something down with his silver pen.
“Is living under God’s Finger safe?” argued The Businessman. “Yes, they’re safer than living that risk.”
Mano felt the room getting bigger, very slowly. The three portraits were retreating from him, and the fireplace was moving further away from behind him. But the people at the table didn’t notice. They kept talking.
“What do you suggest they be called?” asked Vera.
“We’re thinking about XO?” suggested The Businessman.
“Yes, perfect. XO”
“Yes, XO.”
“XO Skeletons.”
“No, that’ll just remind them of death. How about XO Cages?”
“XO Cages...” June was trying that name on for size. “X...O...Cages...” She was looking at the ceiling.
To Mano, as the room expanded, everyone’s voices began to echo in the expanse.
“Hmm...XO Cages...that feels like a trap, like you’re trapped in the thing,” said Vera.
“How about XO Life Cages?”
“Yes! Life Cages. Cages for Life.”
Everyone seemed pleased enough. The room was so big now, far bigger than the factory itself, and maybe as big as half of Pie Time. Mano could barely see the portraits, and the warmth of the fire was long gone. He even felt far away now from the people at the table, whom he could see were signing papers. Some were smoking. Some were laughing. Some were shaking hands.
Then, in the blackness to his right, he could hear Enid Pine’s voice, like a spider tangled in its own long web. Her voice was so clear that he could see its web glisten, and he followed it down, from the corner of a ceiling he was now floating in, into a kitchen with yellow walls. A white porcelain sink full of mounds of fresh strawberries. Nana Pine had just picked them from her patch, and was preparing them to sell at market. Black and white tile floor. From directly above them both, Mano could now see the top of Enid’s head, and the top of her mother’s head. A small bowl of strawberries in a bowl on the kitchen table. Nana was leaning back in a chair at the table, arms crossed.
“You have one last chance, Enid. Tell me where it came from.”
“It was just there, in the tree, on my way home from the factory,” swore Enid.
“I know you didn’t find this finger in the tree.” Nana stood up and held a bluish finger by the top knuckle, like holding a tiny plucked chicken by the neck. She shook it in front of Enid’s face.
“I did, I did.” Enid was crying.
“And why would you bring a finger into this house? A finger, Enid!”
“I wanted to keep it.”
“What would you possibly do with a finger?”
“I think it’s beautiful.”
“Whose is it? Look at me and tell me the truth.” Nana waited for her daughter to look up and into her eyes. “Whose... finger...is this?”
Enid paused, then answered by copying her mother’s cadence. “I...don’t...know.”
“Did Mary put you up to this?”
“Put me up to what? We didn’t do anything wrong.” Enid was growing tired of the inquisition, so she lowered her shoulders as if to make a confession. “It’s Pepe’s.”
“Pepe Let?”
From his place on the ceiling above them, Mano became angry. He felt protective of Pepe.
Enid started in on a story to satisfy her mother’s insistence. “Pepe was dragging a body to the river, and we were out late...”
“Who?” Nana was afraid if she broke eye contact with Enid, that Enid would stop giving up information.
“Me and Mary. And Mimi, too. After you went to sleep. I’m sorry. I’m sorry! But it was just us girls. And we were smoking Pie Times at The Cure, and Pepe came with the body. He was laughing and he gave us all a piece of it. He gave me a finger, and he gave Mimi an arm, which he thought was pretty funny, and then he gave Mary the head. It was like he was just handing out slices of cake. I didn’t want it, but he made me take it.” Enid worked herself into a real cry, even though she wasn’t telling the real truth. She couldn’t bear her involvement in the real truth, for Mano’s sake. She couldn’t bear to confess that truth to herself. “I don’t know any more than that. I shouldn’t have taken it. I’m sorry, I’m...”
Nana calmed her daughter down by putting a hand on her thigh. “Enid, it’s ok. It’s ok. It’s only important that you tell me the truth.”
Like the universe, the room Mano was in didn’t stop expanding. The kitchen ceiling above where Mano floated was spilling into the blackness. Enid and her m
other were still barely in focus, but they were beginning to blur. “It’s the truth,” Enid said. Sisi’s finger was on a cutting board on the table.
Mano felt so hurt by Enid’s half truth, how his mother was missing from it. He remembered how he was missing her now, too. He wanted to find her somewhere in this new ever-expanding system of death, orbiting in the blackness and warmth around some new star. As Mano tumbled through the void, he heard Inez Roar’s voice moaning in the distance behind him.
Mano found himself standing behind a lamp in the dark. He could feel the lamp with his hand, and he felt for the chain. He pulled down the chain, and when the lamp lit the room, Inez was in the center of her own very large bed, wearing nothing. She was on her back, resting on both elbows. Her head was back, and her chin, pointing upward as she moaned, was the highest peak of the mountain range of her body. Her square shoulders were the second highest peak. And her breasts—full, round and red from nursing Baby Zuzu—were the third. Her nipples were hard. Her knees bent toward Mano.
“I know it’s you.” Inez lowered herself all the way onto her back and felt the back of her own thighs with her hands.
“Me?” Mano hid behind the light of the lamp, the only light in the room.
“Mano, come.”
“Can you see me?” he asked. Mano looked down at his body in the sheet, and the things he held, and questioned his death for the first time.
“Yes. Of course. And I know you can see me, too, because I gave you those glasses you’re wearing.”
Mano put his hand up to his glasses, which he was wearing on the outside of the sheet. He took them off for just a second, and wiped them clean with his ghost sheet. Then he put them back on. He wanted to see Inez’s body, all of it, everything all at once. Other than his mother, Mano had never seen a woman’s naked body before. But Inez’s body was different. The sight of it—how her knees slid back and forth in her sweat waiting for him to say something—filled Mano up with an ache, an insatiable new hunger.
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