by DM Sinclair
Rufus’s body slumped forward, and its forehead thudded into the dash.
It grunted again, eliminating Lowell’s doubts about whether it had actually grunted the first time.
Lowell stared at it, breathing fast and gripping the steering wheel. He ignored the honks of protest from behind him and studied the body. Its eyes were closed. Its mouth hung limply open. Its arms were pretzelled into the scant space between its torso and the dashboard. It looked, as he had assumed it was, dead.
Except that now, he saw it was breathing. Definitely breathing. A steady, shallow rhythm.
Lowell gingerly reached out and pressed his fingers to the body’s wrist. He had never had reason to check anyone’s pulse before, so it took him a few tries to find the spot. But there it was. A heartbeat.
So, not dead. Another deduction proved wrong. And one that seemed like it should really have been a gimme.
The honks from behind had reached an intensity that he couldn’t ignore any longer, so he accelerated into the hole he had made in traffic ahead and as soon as he could, pulled into the parking lot of a college administrative building. There were no empty spots, but he stopped in the lane between rows of cars to catch his breath and think.
The body breathed softly in the seat next to him. Aside from how bent its limbs were to fit into the seat, and how its face was pressed hard into the dashboard so that one eye was pulled open, it looked almost serene.
If he understood Margie’s science correctly—and that was far from a guarantee—the body had rejected Caldwell’s ghost because of a mismatch of pirate DNA or whatever. It was now a shell, alive but lifeless. What did that mean he had to do with it? How did it change his plan?
If he brought the body back to Rufus and Lucinda alive, what then? They had already accepted its death and begun to deal with it. Forcing them to actually be present for that death would just be cruel, wouldn’t it? At the very least, they’d have to keep the body somewhere, taking up space. That was likely a couch or a hammock that they wouldn’t be able to use for god-knows-how-long. Who was he to subject them to that kind of inconvenience?
Some small part of his mind also acknowledged the possibility that Rufus could be put back into his body. Yes, there was that. But really, again, they had already moved on. Rufus seemed to be adjusting to his ghostly life quite well. The pain and re-adjustment of going back might be too much for the big man’s heart to take. Maybe. Or something.
After a few moments’ consideration, Lowell thought he knew exactly how much his “keep the body as long as possible” plan would need to change.
Which was hardly at all. Except that now, he wouldn’t need to buy all that ice.
He was whistling as he pulled back out into traffic.
THIRTY-FIVE
“Why aren’t there any blue ones?” Ryan asked. He leaned with his elbows on the table so that he could be at eye level with the cereal bowl. Or rather, he approximated such a lean because he didn’t have any arms anymore. He could still pretend to have them, and found that his form behaved as if they were there, but they weren’t. The top half of his form, too, was mostly disconnected now. It floated a few inches above his hips, sometimes not quite keeping up with his walking pace and then bobbing forward like a helium balloon on a string. His shirt, however, remained as intact as ever. He wondered if, when there was nothing else left of him, the shirt would somehow remain as an eternal butter-stained Float Beer blight upon the Earth.
“They don’t make blue anymore,” Margie said. She stirred up the bowl with her spoon, making little Sugar Frootz rock slides. A pinkish nugget tumbled out of the bowl and she flicked it back in. “They decided, for the sake of PR, to replace the original artificial dyes with all-natural food coloring, which is harder than you think. Artificial dyes have no flavor, and are loaded with preservatives. Natural dyes are made from things like vegetables, which add their own flavor and tend to spoil. They couldn’t find a natural blue dye that worked so they stopped making blue.”
Ryan was dimly conscious of hearing all of that, but retained virtually none of it. He did know, though, that he didn’t like what it implied. Why would he want natural ingredients? Sugars manufactured in a lab for maximum flavor and minimal nutrition was the whole point. He didn’t want cereal to contain anything that could also be found in spinach.
He struggled to focus on the nuggets of cereal. For the past hour he had been finding it difficult to focus on anything at all. Just remaining conscious required most of his energy. With increasing frequency he found himself missing entire minutes, slipping through them without noticing their passing. Sometimes he would snap back to awareness in an explosive surge of panic like a driver waking up to the oncoming headlights of a dump truck.
“Put the milk on,” he said. His voice, like his vision and his thought, was losing coherence. He sounded like he was a mile away and inside a phone booth.
Margie gave him a concerned look. “Isn’t there something you’d rather be doing? Don’t you want to call your family? Your parents?”
He couldn’t blame her for asking. Of course, he really should have something else he would rather be doing. He was, after all, about to die. He definitely had to use that word about this. Because although leaving his body did not fit the traditional definition of dying, what was happening now came a lot closer. And people who know they are about to die usually have people they want to see for the last time to make amends with, to say goodbye to, or even just for comfort.
He didn’t. He just wanted to try Sugar Frootz.
All these years he could have been trying it, the new Sugar Frootz that he didn’t even know was a thing, and now here he was with maybe only minutes left of existence, staring at a bowl of it that he couldn’t touch, couldn’t smell, couldn’t taste. Maybe it was still terrible. Maybe it was worse than before. He would never know. Even the colors were becoming harder to make out as shadows intruded around the edges of his vision and a hazy filter went up between him and the world. He could tell there were no blue nuggets, but only because he thought they would be darker than all the others. They all looked gray.
He leaned forward to put his nose over the bowl and inhaled deeply, keenly aware that he wasn’t actually inhaling. There was no sensation of his lungs filling up, no sense of warm or cool, and certainly no scent of Sugar Frootz, either natural or artificial. He was just miming the act of inhaling: expanding his chest, making a noise that resembled air moving into his nostrils, ballooning his lungs. He got nothing from it except a sharp stab of anger at how empty the experience was. Or was he just miming the anger too?
He noticed that Margie had her hand over her mouth and he thought he could see glistening in the corners of her eyes.
“What?” he asked, alarmed.
She kept her hand over her mouth and shook her head. “Nothing.” This was not the blunt, analytical Margie he was used to. Right now he needed the Margie that would, with dry enthusiasm and at very little prompting, explain how photosynthesis works. This wasn’t her.
“What is it?” he asked, more demanding.
She shook her head again. “You don’t have a nose,” she said. “You’re trying to smell it, and your nose is gone. Your face is… it’s…” She couldn’t finish.
He had no interest in checking a mirror. He fully expected that by now his head was a roundish bubble of steaming soup. There was nothing he could do about that. All he wanted to know was exactly what he had been missing.
Sugar Frootz.
“I’m going to make sure he hangs, you know,” she said. “Tomorrow. Lowell already said he has police friends and we’re going to tear that place down. He won’t get away with—”
“I know. Put the milk on.”
She composed herself, and there was the Margie he needed again. He marveled at how quickly the clinical mask came back onto her face. She had amazing control over her emotions, more than anyone he had ever met.
She upended a milk carton over the cereal and he watched
the little pebbles try to flee the dairy tsunami as the bowl filled. They bobbed and settled, reorganizing themselves. He recalled hazily how he had always thought cereal smelled best right after the milk went on. As though the milk released the scent like rain invisibly opening up little fructose-frosted flower buds.
“What does it smell like?” he asked. “Tell me.”
She leaned over the bowl and inhaled. “Sweet.”
“Duh. I know that. It’s like ninety percent sugar. What does it smell like?”
She inhaled again, this time with her eyes closed. She seemed to be swishing the aroma around in her nostrils. “Corn meal. Fruit. Some kind of citrus. Orange. Lemon. That must be the natural fruit flavor.”
Ryan concentrated hard, trying to remember what it felt like to smell these things. To smell at all. The memory, like everything he now consisted of, was indistinct.
She sniffed again. “And I think… calcium carbonate. Yes. I’m sorry, I have to…” She scooped up a heaping spoonful. He watched her chew it at a measured pace, again with her eyes closed. “It’s loaded with sugar but it’s the corn syrup that gives it the stickiness, that glaze on the outside before the corn meal crumbles and the tumeric extract mixes with the sugar. That’s when you get that little burst. There it is.”
“Just tell me what it tastes like.”
“I am telling you what it tastes like.” She took another spoonful. “The recipe is precisely calculated to activate all five elements of taste perception in a specific ratio. It’s genius, really. Years of lab work went into this. But I do miss blue.”
She opened her eyes and reached to scoop another spoonful. But her hand stopped halfway to the bowl. She was looking at him, and her professional cool fell away again. He saw something that looked like guilt flash across her face. She put the spoon down. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t…”
“Why not?” He had been enjoying listening to her. The rustle of the spoon digging into the nuggets, the crunch as she chewed, the little dribble of milk snaking down the side of the bowl and mounting a failed escape attempt across the table—all of it was stirring up fragments of memories. Bits of sensations that he couldn’t quite piece together into a whole experience. But he was still relishing the bits. All of them were mere instants, gone in a flicker, barely noticed at the time. And yet somehow now at the end, he wanted desperately to have them back. And to have more like them. New ones. He wanted to try the new Sugar Frootz, and he never would.
Margie pushed back from the table. “There must be something you want to do. Anything. It’s not right that we’re just sitting here.”
“Why not?”
“Because there has to be something more important that you want to do before…” She stopped herself from finishing the sentence.
Ryan had a sudden idea, and he wasn’t certain about it, but it came out even before he convinced himself it was good. “We could watch TV.”
She blinked at him. “That’s it?”
“What else do you suggest? Something bigger? Climb Mount Everest? I’ve done that. I want to watch TV.” He paused, considering, and decided that he needed to add something. “With you.”
He had a nebulous recollection of his feeling the previous night watching real estate shows. He knew that he had enjoyed it somehow, and not because of its surprising insights into the Boise real estate market. He had enjoyed it because she was there. He hated real estate shows, so what else could it be? But he couldn’t recall what specifically it was that had made him enjoy it. He studied her face, trying to find his way back to what he had felt the night before. The feeling was flitting around the edges of his mind but refusing to land.
But he had enjoyed it. He knew that much. And he really wanted to enjoy something right now. Because he was about to stop existing, and he felt like that would be hard to enjoy.
“Okay,” she said, utterly perplexed, as though he had just asked her to shave the word “bingo” into the back of her head.
They moved to the couch, and she propped herself in the corner, precisely perpendicular to the cushions as always, and folded her hands in her lap. He smiled, and then immediately wondered why he had done that.
It was too early for the real estate marathon, so they were stuck with decorating shows. He hated those even more than real estate shows. Margie wasn’t saying anything, so he found his mind sometimes fading out completely, and other times wandering of its own accord. Trying to make sense of what tomorrow would be like.
There wasn’t going to be a tomorrow. Or there was, but he probably wasn’t going to be here for it. The party was going to keep going, but he was leaving it early. And for the first time in any party ever, he wanted to stay.
“Don’t do that,” Margie said, in response to nothing he was aware of.
“Don’t do what?”
“I can tell what you’re thinking about. Don’t.”
“What should I be thinking about?”
She motioned towards the TV, which he hadn’t been paying attention to at all. “That guy thinks he can lay bathroom tile himself.”
“So?”
“So, have you ever tried to lay bathroom tile?”
“People do that? I always assumed the tiles were already there in nature, and they built the house around them.”
“In about ten minutes, you’re going to see this guy have a meltdown because he has no idea how grout works. Watch.”
The meltdown arrived in eight minutes after only four tiles. And in the next episode, the same thing happened because somebody else didn’t understand the intricacies of toilet installation. And they were disappointed in the next episode because the couple was actually pretty good at putting up wallpaper and it didn’t push them perilously close to divorce, as Margie had predicted. Although the wallpaper was ugly.
And in the fourth episode, as Margie was giggling with giddy delight at a man struggling to decode an arrangement of decorative pillows, Ryan realized in a blinding blast of clarity why he wanted so badly to watch TV with Margie again.
But before he could examine it, the feeling wafted away just as his arms had done. He couldn’t even remember what the feeling was but he knew he badly wanted it back.
“Ghosts can’t form new emotional attachments.” That’s what she had said. It hadn’t occurred to him at the time, but he was a ghost. So her statement included him.
As he tried to make sense of it, his mind felt like it sank far back into mud behind him and he had to yank it back into place. The shadows around his vision crowded in, and he fought against them, shouldering them back, forcing his way back through them to the man on TV and his pillows, and to Margie. But the shadows fought back, and his mind sank again.
This is it, he thought. I’m done. And it’s my fault. I did this. He wanted to stay with Margie just a little longer and see if he could trap the mysterious feeling even just for his last few seconds. But he was nearly certain he wouldn’t be able to. It was too elusive, too hazy. And, if what she said was true, as long as he was a ghost it always would be.
He had made a terrible mistake.
Just as the shadows seemed about to wash over his vision and overtake the light completely, Lowell came in with a bill in his hand.
THIRTY-SIX
“This is absurd,” Margie said. She had the full heat of her volcanic stare directed at Lowell. He had already asked her three times to stop looking at him that way.
Ryan tried the ATM again. “Ryan Matney,” he attempted to say into the voice-activation microphone. But he couldn’t move the air the way he used to. Fine detail in sound was impossible in his incoherent state, and he could hardly get any volume at all. So the sound he produced was like a swarm of mosquitoes that had figured out how to work as a team and move the pitch of their whine faintly up and down.
The ATM buzzed negatively, a sound much more cohesive than anything Ryan could manage. “Please try again,” it said, as though he just needed a little encouragement and everything would be fine.
It was late, and there was very little traffic on the street. Living pedestrians had long since abandoned the night to the ghosts, who now seemed mildly annoyed at having someone here invading the time when they did some of their best glowing and flitting around. Some scowling 18th century farm hands leaned on their hoes and kept looking over Margie and Lowell’s shoulders at what Ryan was doing. Lowell had to keep giving them “you want to make something out of it?” looks.
“Ryan Matney,” Ryan said again, leaning in close to the microphone. He didn’t like how his head disconnected from the rest of him when he leaned like that. For a moment he couldn’t even find the rest of him, and his head was on its own. He located his torso a few feet to his left and had to float his head over to it and then drag the whole thing back.
“Please try again,” the ATM replied with the exact same encouraging tone.
“Let me do it,” Lowell said, stepping forward.
“You’re an ass,” Margie spat bitterly. “He may only have a few minutes left and you want to bill him?”
Ryan appreciated that she was outraged on his behalf, but he wasn’t actually mad at Lowell. At this point, moments away from annihilation, it gave him some small sense of satisfaction to honor a commitment and do something nice for someone. “It’s okay,” he said to Margie gently, concentrating hard to make himself understood. “I hired him. He helped. He deserves to get paid.”
“He deserves to get kicked in the teeth,” she muttered.
“It’s okay,” Ryan said. He chose whatever part of himself was most well defined at the moment—somewhere around his hip, he suspected—and pushed it into the softly glowing SES scanner on the side of the ATM. It was designed for ghosts to put their fingers in, but it would have to take what he could manage. He nodded at Lowell.
“Ryan Matney,” Lowell said.
The SES scanner brightened for a moment as it confirmed Ryan’s identity. Then the ATM’s display lit up with a menu of options.