Skinny black bones.
More mist.
I am still in the laboratory. It’s very quiet; Wilhelm isn’t here. Is he still with my earthly body, in my bedroom? The familiar white mist creeps into my vision, but I focus on my feet. I will not fade out again.
“He’s at my bedside,” I say, the sound of my voice bolstering my courage. I risk quick glances around the laboratory. The high windows, the heavy blinds drawn aside. The bare wooden floors. The large clock dominating the wall over the many tables crammed with scientific equipment. I try to resist the long table in the middle of the room, but I cannot ignore it.
The machine spreads across the table like mold: the wires, the huge cylindrical electricity generator, and the glass tube hanging from a metal rod. The rod is anchored by a metal box meant for holding photographic plates. A chair sits at the end of the table, close to the plate box and the dangling bulb—the Crookes tube, as Wilhelm calls it.
Despite the color leeching from my vision, I drift to the chair. My hand hovers over the plate box.
“Nothing to worry about, Bertha,” Wilhelm said calmly as he adjusted the tear drop-shaped glass tube hanging over her hand. “I’ve run the experiment several times.”
But not with a person, she thought, immediately feeling guilty for doubting him. They’d been married twenty-three years, and Wilhelm was attentive and devoted. They had a daughter. He would never harm her.
“Yes, Wilhelm,” she said aloud, her voice squeaking. Her right hand, her free hand, bunched the heavy fabric of her dress. The laboratory was dimly lit, the curtains drawn shut, so Wilhelm could run the experiment properly. She was certain he could not see the tightness of her clenched jaw. All he noticed was the relaxed hand resting on the photographic plate.
I retreat from the table and the equipment it holds. It is pointless to be near the machine and revisit disturbing memories—memories that make me ill. I shouldn’t be here. I should be with Wilhelm. He will have sent for Josephine, and I don’t want to miss what could be my last sight of my daughter. I turn from the machine and rush to the door. But at the door, I am stopped. My transparent hands cannot grasp the door knob. Yet they are too solid to pass through the door.
“No!” I shout, and pound at the door with my fists. It is utterly silent, the only sound my panicked gulps of air, not quite sobs. “I will not stay here!”
My pleas are unheeded, and after interminable moments, I sink to the floor.
I am trapped with the machine.
Awareness recedes and returns as I sob dryly into my hands. Eventually, my shoulders cease shaking and my sobs fade. With one last shuddering sigh, I raise my head and stare blankly at the door. I can hear faint sounds of household activity. The maids, no doubt, going about their routine.
The distant noise is comforting. I am not alone. Tentatively, I reach out to the door and once again meet with resistance. Alone, yet not alone.
I am here because of that cursed machine. I force myself to stand and glare at the contraption. A sudden flood of anger propels me forward, and I swing a hand at the glass tube.
Ting!
I flinch, startled. I had touched it! My hand falls to my side, and now I am ashamed. The machine is important to Wilhelm. Damaging it would hurt him.
Wilhelm had been so excited about the new discovery. Something unexpected had happened while he was running his cathode ray experiment. A new ray, he’d explained over supper. Invisible light.
He’d asked me to help, since he was testing which substances could and could not block the new rays. I sigh, as the rest of the memory comes back to me.
Wilhelm fiddled with the placement of the Crookes tube again, and she realized he was nervous.
Finally, he said, “I am ready, Bertha. Please keep still.”
He smiled a little as he returned to the table. A flip of a lever and the electricity generator hummed to life. A green glow emitted from several items in the laboratory.
After a few seconds, the light faded and the generator’s buzz quieted.
Wilhelm lifted her hand from the plate and she let it flop into her lap. He grinned and held up the photographic plate in front of her. “Look, Bertha!”
The glass clearly showed a hand, but not the plump pink appendage that she was familiar with. The glass showed bones. Skinny black bones.
She almost scoffed and teased Wilhelm for creating a fake photograph, but then she noticed the dark band circling one finger. Her wedding ring.
“My death!” she gasped, feeling lightheaded. “This is my death, Wilhelm.”
The reminder of what happens to all human beings had unnerved me. Death reduces us to bones and dust. But I’m not dead now, am I? Just . . . sundered. Adrift. My hands run over the machine. The generator. The plate box. I even try to touch the delicate Crookes tube, from which the mysterious x-rays emit, but there is no indication that I make physical contact.
The machine has been a source of terror, and I am now convinced it is the source of my grief. However, my hands can’t manipulate the generator, the source of the electricity needed to trigger the x-ray creation. Wilhelm can, though. I just need to make him understand.
I skim to the door again, filled with purpose and determination, and I pass through the door unimpeded.
Wilhelm sits by my bed, cradling one of my hands between his, head bowed.
I glide to his side. He had sensed my presence earlier, had felt the chill of my movements. He has to, again. Or my earthly body will die, and my spirit with it.
I stroke his head. I cannot feel his hair, but a few strands stir. His shoulders hunch, and he looks up.
I gasp. He can feel me, even if he can’t see me! I lean close to him and whisper, “Wilhelm,” directly into his ear.
He cries out and jumps to his feet. And then he asks, “Who’s there?”
I feel unbearably light with joy, and the world becomes tinged with white. I mustn’t fade, so I focus on my husband’s sturdy figure, his sunken, intense eyes, his bushy black beard streaked with gray.
He will understand! I laugh giddily and run my hand down his cheek and tug his beard. It is a familiar, affectionate gesture.
He shivers. “Bertha?” he asks. He glances to the bed, where my body lies, and frowns.
“I’m here, Wilhelm,” I say, and tug his beard again.
He raises one hand slowly, almost dreamily, and strokes his chin. “Bertha,” he says firmly. “I don’t understand. How . . . ?”
“I don’t know, my love,” I say. And I don’t, not the mechanics. I’m no scientist. But I know that the machine holds the solution to my terrible separation of selves. Always the machine.
Desperate, I push my body’s left hand. It twitches. Wilhelm, sharp-eyed as ever, grasps the hand and runs his fingers over my limp digits—and my wedding ring. His fingers pause on the simple gold band, and he takes a deep breath.
“The x-rays, Bertha? Are they what have stolen you from me?”
I tweak his beard again.
“I will fix this,” he declares, his gaze roving the room. “I promise.”
I caress his cheek one more time, before the fog overtakes me.
The repeated use of my name pulls me from the void. It takes several moments for the fog to clear, and I fear that whatever thin tether that ties me here will soon break and my body truly will die.
My bed and body have been moved to Wilhelm’s laboratory. My left hand rests on the photographic plate, and Wilhelm bustles around the machine, teasing the equipment into place. He explains the procedure while he works, a stream of words peppered with my name. I have difficulty hearing all the words, his voice very faint, and I become concerned that my time grows short. Wilhelm’s theory must prove correct.
The theory is simple enough that I follow the idea even though I don’t understand the underlying physics.
“So, Bertha, I will need both of your hands on the plate glass,” he says, while adjusting the
bulbs. “I have here your earthly hand, but I also need your… spectral hand. Here, like so.” He gently places his hand over the hand of my husk. “I will take the x-ray radiograph, and God willing, your two states will be fused once more.”
His gaze flits around the room, eyes a little wild. To reassure him of my presence, I wave my hand over his hair. His skin breaks into gooseflesh from the chill, but he smiles.
“Ah, good, you understand,” he says. “You stay here, and I will start the experiment.”
I place my left hand on top of my husk’s hand. The wedding bands should have clinked, my two hands line up so perfectly. I avoid looking at my husk. The waxy skin and slow, shallow breathing disturb me. My husk is more dead than alive.
“Bertha, I’m going to turn on the machine. Are you ready?”
“Yes,” I say, although my voice is nothing but a whisper on a breeze, but he senses my response. Wilhelm nods and flips the lever.
The machine hums, and I imagine the tubes crackling with energy. The familiar green glow suffuses the room, the radiation reacting with Wilhelm’s fluorescent materials.
Skinny black bones.
I blanch and my hand twitches, but I don’t remove it. As the green glow diminishes and the buzzing generator quiets, the laboratory sinks into darkness. I wait for Wilhelm to turn on the lights, to remove my hand from the photographic plate, but he doesn’t appear.
“Wilhelm?” I call, but my voice isn’t working.
The additional radiation experiment has failed, and I am dying. I sob, or try, but nothing works. My phantasmal body no longer mimics my earthly one.
“Bertha?”
Wilhelm’s voice is muffled. Is he in a different room? I must reassure him that I am still here, even if his experiment failed. We must try again.
My eyes flutter open and Wilhelm’s dear face fills my field of vision. He smiles, but his eyes are glassy with tears.
I am hungry. I am exhausted. I am bewildered.
“Wilhelm?” I ask, my voice dry and dusty.
“Bertha.” He beams.
I am alive, I wonder, and raise my arms off the bed. I pinch my left hand, twirl my wedding ring around my finger. I am solid. It worked! The machine has made me whole once more.
“Wilhelm,” I cry again and embrace my husband, relishing the sturdiness of his body.
X is for X-ray
Joseph Halden
It’s dark and quiet, cars dead and street lights off. Dim candles alight in windows and roadside altars to mark the Lacuniter hour.
I should be at my sister Kate’s, at one of these shrines or even a temple, but I’m not. I’m keeping the ghost-like lacunitos that orbit and haunt me. I have to, for Mum, even if it means going blind by them.
Lacuniter is the daily hour when lacunitos must pass through the opened gate to hell, to pass through its levels and be cleansed before being re-injected into the world and continuing the karmic cycle in another life.
It’s surreal to miss the rituals, the chants I hear faintly through the walls of every home and from the small clusters burning incense at shrines.
Even as an angsty teenager I didn’t ever miss Lacuniter. There were things you just didn’t do. Places you just didn’t go.
Like this dump across the street. A piss-coloured sign for a thrift shop, barely an excuse for what this place really held.
People said errant lacunitos came to her. This blind witch everyone pretended didn’t exist, until they needed her.
It’s only been a day, and already I’ve got seven lacunitos milling around me. One is a lacunito of Brendan, a buddy who used to have more patience for my crap. He’d sounded mildly irritated when I joked about him not having time for drinks anymore. I didn’t realize so much of our friendship had died.
Then there’s a lacunita of my sister, Kate, laughing in the shoulder-rocking, whole-body way we used to together. That laughter’s gone now; she’s a single mother with Roland, her adorable little redhead toddler. I love the little guy, don’t get me wrong. Gave him a baby fedora just this afternoon, and he looked like a little Sam Spade.
The part that stings is that every time I talk to Kate, something new dies. It’s harder and harder to find evidence that we’re family.
Several other lacunitos cluster around me, shadows of short conversations with the grocery store clerk and Mum’s hotel nurses. They shuffle in silence, never straying so far I could mistake them for haunting anyone else.
Day one and I’m already the pied piper. It’s only going to get worse. If I go long enough, I’ll have too many lacunitos around me to even see, and I’ll end up as blind as the witch.
I want to pop in headphones and play some heavy thrash that’ll get me amped up to go into the thrift shop, but I’m already too weirded out for missing Lacuniter. The darkest death metal is nothing next to this stuff, man.
But dammit, I’m not going to let Mum go without a fight.
I jog across the street and yank the glass door open. A clot of antiques threatens to spill. A jade cat wobbles. A scratched panda bobble head vibrates atop a dresser. I put my hands out to catch both in case they fall, but they don’t.
Incense barely conceals a heavy musk. The place is overstuffed with junk and the memories all the junk’s burdened with, the air thick and suffocating.
It’s a miracle the blind witch can find her way around without getting buried in an avalanche. I have to crab-walk my way through.
She sits behind a counter at the back, head cocked, milky eyes staring into nothing. She wears a floral dress that could be drapes. She’s an image of what I will become if I keep skipping Lacuniter.
“Hello.”
She hasn’t heard me. I get close enough to inhale a reek like someone’s smashed and scattered pickled eggs.
“Hello,” I repeat, louder, feeling stupid for thinking volume will help.
The blind witch lifts a finger.
“Keep your voice down,” she mutters. “What do you want?”
“I’m tracking a lacunita,” I say. The faster I speak, the faster I can get out of here.
“Whose?”
“My mother’s.”
“Why?”
“She’s lost a big part of herself. I want her to have it back.”
The witch considers, shifts to the right, never looking at me. “She still alive?”
“Yes.”
“You can’t make lacunitos go where you want.”
I bite my lip. She’s not the first person to say so. “I know. I just want to find her.”
Then coax her into returning to Mum, with some of the mementos in my backpack, like Mum’s wooden tea box and extremely large t-shirt she wore as pyjamas almost any time she was home.
“What’s she look like?”
Like I could distill Mum to a few notes in a pig’s case file. Still, I gotta try.
“Short curly hair, tall, big eyes, even bigger glasses. Moves kind of in bursts, like walking steady is too boring.”
“She fat?”
What the crap was I even doing here?
“Her face is a bit puffy, and she’s got a belly but I wouldn’t call her fat. She’s kinda got the same build as me.” I regret the words immediately. Of course the witch can’t see me, and I probably don’t want her to.
She turns as though she can see me, and the shop suddenly feels even more claustrophobic.
“She came here,” the witch says. “Buy something and I’ll tell you where she went.”
Earlier that day
I sat on Mum’s bleached hospital bedsheets, telling her about the new condo I was renting from Brendan.
“He sounds like a very nice boy.” She smiled.
“Mum, you know Brendan. He used to chug our cranberry juice after school, remember? He snuck in once when I wasn’t home and you towel-whipped him in the throat?”
“That sounds like something I’d do.”
I laughed, and she
joined. “It was, and you did.”
A nurse came in and set up a meal tray for Mum. She reminded Mum to eat everything, then scuttled out.
“How could I possibly leave any of this delectable food behind?” Mum said. “They’ve done wonders with sawdust, they really have.”
We laughed. Mum was sweet but sharp as a knife. These days it was rare to catch her in such lucid moments, probably rarer than she enjoyed her meals. I wanted to take her home, but my living situation was far from stable and Kate’s place wasn’t an option, because they fought too much. It was painful to keep her here but I visited daily.
“I brought you some contraband, Mum,” I said, opening my bag and bringing out two peanut-butter cookies, her favourite.
“What if someone has a nut allergy?” she asked.
“Nuts to them.”
“If you’re not careful, they’re going to cashew.”
“You mean these aren’t pecan your curiosity?”
She grabbed a cookie with a trembling hand. “You know, you’re working for peanuts.”
“Somebody’s gotta do it.”
Mum sighed. “You know, no one around here likes puns, can you believe it?”
She’d said so before, many times. “It’s astonishing. How can they get by?”
“And their tea is absolutely dreadful.”
Crap. I knew I’d forgotten something. “I’ll bring you some next time, Mum.”
“That’d be lovely. Thanks for coming by, honey. You have no idea how nice it is to talk to a human.”
“I feel the same, Mum.”
She broke off a piece. “Have some. I don’t need all of it.”
“It’s for you, Mum.”
“And I’m sharing it how I like. Have some with me.”
I took it. We munched in silence.
“Your business going well?” she asked.
I told her about some of the new clients I had, the accumulating referrals for tiling jobs, the new designs and ceramics that were easier to apply.
Her right, lazy eye drooped and I knew she was getting tired.
G is for Ghosts Page 29