—Stan, I said, you are fucking my shit up.
And it did seem that gradually he removed the fist from his brow, uncurling, extending outward the slender appendages, and he, the oneeyed jack in profile, turned to face me, eyes not eyes but totally transparent, as if the windows of the soul were a mere residue thereof.
—You come in here, out of the blue, why out of the blue, we’ve had the house through four academic years, not so much as a peep out of you, and then you’re here, all of a sudden, scaring the shit out of me two or three times a week, my work suffers, because I can’t sit in my office downstairs without knowing if you’ll turn up or not, and then you start showing up more, you increase your range, like a rabid animal, and soon you’re scaring my kid. You don’t show up reliably so people doubt my word, and you make me look like I’m having psychotic symptoms, and then you scare my kid. You disrupt my card game, you pit us against one another, guys who have been friendly for years, and you get right in the middle of summer vacation, and frankly, pal, all I ask is that I have a nondramatic summer vacation. All I care about is the free and easy summer vacation. You think I don’t put enough into the school year? You try grading a hundred and ten final papers of community-college kids, some of whom are the first kids in their family to go to college. Have you done that, Stan? No I don’t think so.
You hear all the time about low-level hauntings involving irritating household pranks, things being misplaced. Stan didn’t pull any of that conventional poltergeist stuff. So I guess it’s just a coincidence that at this point the cheap compact fluorescent bulb, in the fixture on the third-floor landing, flared once and then burst as Stan gazed wearily at me. Now a barely perceptible glow illuminated us as we sized each other up.
—I don’t know if I should think that your lingering here is related to a specific bit of trouble, or if you just like the house and want to hang around, or is there some kind of indigenous burial ground onsite or nearby, or whether the fact that we aren’t that far from Lizzie Borden’s address is somehow related, but do you think it’s the best use of your time? Do you think it’s fair to us that you’re showing up at my son’s job? I mean, are you going to start coming to class this semester and interrupting the class discussion? Do you want to learn about scientific ethics? Maybe that would have an effect on you? Please tell me that you’re not going to be coming to class, OK?
It was as if hours had passed, so long were the fallow passages in our exchange. It was like night on the exoplanets. Had my family missed me at all? Or had they simply gotten used to the fact that I was still in the attic, working on a book about the ethics of assisted suicide, which I had left unfinished for more than a decade.
—You know we’re in the middle of a, of a, grief sort of a situation here, right? Do you remember what a grief situation is like, Stan? Can you remember back that far? And do you remember particular things, Stan, the habits of before, or are you condemned to just mime the feelings, like one of those kids’ programs where they show a face and then below it says angry! Or sad! Is that how much you know, Stan? Just the feeling of it?
He reared up from the table then, as though he were capable of being bigger in size than the life-sized scale of him before, and all at once he was above the table, the card table, and I could swear that it was he who knocked the bowl with its remaining corn chips aside, causing a racket, and with a strangulated cry, he tried to say something again, and it reminded me of my son’s first efforts to talk, the words stuck in Stan’s throat, as the words had done before, the most superficial layer of what it is to be human, one of the last things you learn to do, and the first thing you lose, and it reminded me again of our daughter Cassie, and the days we had with her, where all I wished for was a few sentences, to be understood in the days we had.
—Ppppppppppgggggggggggggghhhhhhhmmmmmmmmmmmm! said Stan. A long moan like the first burst of a young horn player on first picking up his instrument, massive and free and overpowering.
—Noooooooooooooooooooomnnnnn!
He smacked his forehead with his hand, and the hand, the incomplete hand, did, in fact, pass through, and he grabbed his temple, and looked up at some corner of the ceiling, a devotee in some Dark Ages devotional painting, and howled anew.
—Stan, I am so sorry, but I can’t understand. Do you think you could just enunciate a little better? I mean, I know you don’t have any—
And then he said the word.
—PREGNANT!
There was a bit of a tornadoing to the essence of him now as if the concept required some terpsichorean moves.
—PREGNANT NOW!
And again.
—PREGNANT NOW!
The sense of joy, a joy that is only just longer than the anxiety that succeeds it, was much upon me, and I allowed myself to feel it for a moment, before a battery of further questions succeeded it.
—Are you sure? Are you just saying this to create trouble, or are you sure? And is there a heartbeat? Can you see that? And what about the genetic testing? Can you figure out what’s going to happen? Could we lose her again? Cassie?
He was breathing heavily now, though whether breathing is the right word or not I cannot say, whether the habit of breathing, of rising and falling in some constant but routine participation with the air around us, in which life is primarily a thing notable for the disturbance of air, is still a practicable activity for those in Stan’s condition. He gasped in the corner, and I would have said that he was a mere ghost outfit, hanging on a peg there, so still was he now, as though trying to be present, trying to haunt, and trying to be invisible at the same time. And yet rising and falling as if with each breath.
—Don’t go all quiet on me now. You can’t start like that and then not finish!
And then the ghost raised a hand—as if to say what? As if to say the conversation was over. And he gathered himself up and crossed for the door, which led to the corridor, which led to the stairwell down from the attic, which led to the rest of the humans who lived with me. I saw the nightshirt wafting behind, even in the deeper part of darkness, now everywhere about us, and he seemed to toss the cigarette holder such that it might have landed, corroded with nicotine and years of inflammatory habits, at the edge of the finished attic. He patted the top of his head, and called after himself,—I gotta go …
—Talk to your wife …
And I called after him,—No wait, no wait! Don’t do that! Don’t go talk to my wife! Keep it between us! Keep it a thing that happens between us! Or tell me first, tell me if the baby makes it, before you tell her! Tell me all that you have to tell, haunt me with all you have to haunt, foretell all that you have to foretell, tell me first! But in a gale of lukewarm silence he was away and down into the stairwell, and I was left to ponder the appearance of him in those weeks of summer, and to wonder if he would be back after the next academic year, and, if so, where we would be then.
All this in the time before I grew old myself.
A Nightmare
Bennett Sims
Behind the abandoned house I discovered a grassy field. Stretched across the length of the field was a row of shopping carts. They were not nested inside one another, as they would be in the return stable of a parking lot. Instead they had been welded end to end. Their front and rear panels had been removed, and their sides had been fused together, so that their wire-frame floors paved an uninterrupted pathway across the field, an elevated metallic catwalk leading to the forest at the field’s edge. It was dusk. The sky was tangerine. Above the forest, a blood-blister sun was hovering over the inky line of trees. Aside from the abandoned house, the only sign of human habitation in sight was this corridor of shopping carts. The monumentality of the design, combined with the enigma of its purpose, lent the structure a sense of ancientness and alterity. It evoked a distant civilization, whose rituals and symbolic orders were unknowable to me: as if it were a ruin that had been rusting in this field for thousands of years, enduring sun, rain, snow, and slow centuries, waiting for t
he day when some archaeologist would step into the clearing and uncover it. Even though I knew that this was impossible—even though I recognized, in my rational mind, my waking or my daylight mind, that the shopping carts had to have been gathered from a grocery store this century—I could not shake the impression of a far architect, or fathom any contemporary consciousness that could have constructed this. The monument had to have hailed from another time, or another place, for another purpose. Even if the materials were new, I thought, the design itself must be ancient or alien: whoever made this must have been working from an obscure blueprint, substituting shopping carts for whatever materials or technologies had been originally called for. I approached the first cart, the threshold of the corridor. Its floor was level with my waist, and I leaned onto the cool metal. Staring down the long line of carts—their sidewalls guiding my gaze toward the green vanishing point of the forest at their end—I felt as if I were peering into an abyss. The distance seemed steep, vertical, and the same dizziness gripped me as when I look down from a high balcony. That ledge-drunk urge to step over every precipice. I had to resist the temptation to climb onto the shopping cart and let myself—this was the word that came to me—plummet. If I set foot on the cart, I understood, I would be sucked into the forest in an instant. And in fact, it occurred to me, that could be the only purpose of the corridor, its original design. To draw people from one end to the other, from the house to the woods. This corridor had been engineered to direct the flow of human bodies, just as aqueducts were designed to channel water. I could picture it now. Linked together, what the shopping carts formed was a long metallic straw, for siphoning the libations or sacrifices that were offered to them. And at the end of this straw? Whatever is at the end of all straws, sucking. I squinted into the distance, where the farthest carts glinted in the sunset, disappearing into the forest. There was no way of telling how far they extended beyond the tree line. Maybe miles. It was possible that the corridor led straight through the woods and that then, emerging on the other side, it divaricated into an immense maze, the shopping carts bifurcating in gray angles and radiating chambers across a vast plain, coiling as tightly as intestines around a single point at their center. Cautiously, I crawled onto the first cart. Its sidewalls rose to my thighs. The wire flooring was strong, unyielding beneath my weight, and the structure was unexpectedly stable. The cart did not budge or roll, and I realized that the casters must have been removed. A breeze blew toward me from the end of the corridor, seeming to originate from deep within the forest. I stepped forward, advancing from the first shopping cart to the second, then to the third. I kept walking like this for minutes, though no matter how long I walked, the forest never seemed any closer. The trees remained the same size, at seemingly the same distance, as if I were merely walking in place, on a treadmill of metal. Eventually I began to jog, and the rattling of the carts grew loud, as shrill as cicadas’ chirring. Still the forest seemed fixed. I pushed myself to run faster, racing to reach the end of the corridor, to reach it before—but before what, I did not know. When I asked myself what it was I thought I was racing against, the only explanation I could summon was the sunset. The sinking sun had turned the air of the field bloodred, and I sensed that there were only minutes of daylight left. Soon the field would be plunged in darkness. And no matter what, I did not want to be caught in the shopping carts when darkness fell. I did not know what I thought would happen then, only that I could not risk it. Whatever it was, this machine had been built for darkness. I could sense this. The whole thing would hum to life at nightfall. While the sun was still visible, I had to reach the end of the corridor, with enough time to turn around and run back, and I had to be sure that my feet were on solid earth before the first shadows filled the trough of the shopping carts. Even as I thought this, the sun sank below the trees, and the sky darkened. Everything became black as during a storm. I could barely see the silver flooring beneath my feet. I’m disappearing, I thought crazily. I’m disappearing. Then the air was lit from behind by a crimson tint, as if by a stoplight in fog. When I turned back I saw, rising over the roof of the abandoned house, a blood moon. No sooner had the sun set in the west than this moon had risen in the east, drenching the field and the shopping carts in its red light. Though the moon filled me with dread, I was relieved to see how close I still was to the house. In all the time I had been running I had only managed to cover half the field. I returned to the house now, ignoring the forest behind me. Hurrying toward the corridor’s entrance, I kept my eyes fixed on the first cart, impatient to leap from its edge to the safety of the grass. So long as I did not turn around, I thought, so long as I did not look back, I still might be saved. Otherwise it was too late. The sun had set. Darkness had fallen. The moon had risen. And at the end of the corridor behind me, somewhere beyond the forest, at the center of the gray maze that the shopping carts made, a mouth would be opening. At that very moment, as if in response to this thought, there came from within the house a howling sound like a tornado siren: the terrified baying of bloodhounds.
Saving the Monster of Kowloon
Rita Chang-Eppig
Mouse told us he’d found a monster in the tunnels under the city. “A nice monster,” he clarified, when Rabbit began to cry, her snotty, globby tears full as moons. So we were headed there to save the monster, before the bulldozers came to destroy our walled city and the monster with it.
Rabbit couldn’t help being a crybaby. At nine, she was the youngest of us five. We wouldn’t even have started bringing her along on our nightly adventures if Ox hadn’t been designated her babysitter when their mother got sick a couple of years ago. Their father said her health would improve after they moved into the government housing at the other end of Hong Kong, where the air was fresher, but we knew better than to trust anything the government said. They didn’t do anything when Puppy’s aunt got killed in the triads’ crossfire. And it wasn’t as if any of us had ever spent much time outside this city and could verify the air quality where they planned to stick us.
“Monkey,” Puppy said from behind me, her hand lightly tugging the hem of my shirt. “Maybe we should take a break. We’ve been walking for a long time, and Rabbit isn’t used to being out this late.”
“I’m OK,” Rabbit said so quietly we could hardly hear her.
“It’s huge!” Mouse chimed in, picking at the scabs up and down his shins that he’d gotten crawling around the tunnels by himself. You could always tell he was near from the antiseptic ointment he gooped on them, an earthy, stingy smell like rusty barbed wire. “But really, really calm, like a giant tree.” He raised his arms high in the air and made a whooshing sound like a wind through the leaves. “You guys’ll like him.”
“The police are coming tomorrow to start kicking us out of the city. This might be our last chance,” I said. They usually let me make the decisions because I was the oldest. “Rabbit, tell your brother if you’re really not feeling well, OK?”
It was true we’d been out for a while, but even for adults, getting from point A to B in our city was sometimes an adventure. The tiny alleys that veined certain areas often got clogged by crates and sudden dice games. Levels jointed at odd angles like badly set elbows and knees. We needed to avoid the people who stood between us and the monster, like the police, who would make us go home if they saw us, or the missionaries who searched the hollows of this place, trying to find souls to save the way my mother searched between couch cushions for loose socks that needed washing.
We pried deeper into the soggy darkness as if into a succulent oyster, marking our path with chalk as we went, our shoes slipping on decades’ worth of discarded plastic bags and orange peels, fallen flyers advertising showgirls and mah-jongg dens, babies’ bibs lost from clotheslines way up above. “This way, this way!” Mouse exclaimed after another few minutes or so. He painted circles with his flashlight on a tunnel barely wider than our shoulders, and we all went in.
None of us believed Mouse at first, of course. He
often made things up, and what he didn’t make up, he misunderstood, like that time he saw a fortune-telling slip on top of a pile of rags and became convinced it was a de-reanimated corpse. He dragged us all the way there and poked at the supposed jiangshi with a stick, only to reveal a nest of rats under the rags. “So that’s why it was moving,” he muttered to himself, nodding like an old-timey sage. If he’d had a long beard he would have stroked it. Puppy, who read a lot, even books too difficult for fourteen-year-olds, said that Mouse had something called hyperkinesis, which meant that he was too impatient to think things through. Mouse hated this label and called her “book idiot” behind her back, but I kind of liked that side of Puppy, how she often paused before she answered questions, as if triple-checking her words. Once I accidentally said this out loud and Mouse started laughing. “You looooove Puppy,” he said. “You wanna maaaaarry her.”
Puppy and her family—minus her brother—were moving to Macao. They had some relatives there who could find her father a job as a dockhand. As for my family, well, my mother hadn’t decided yet where we were going to go. There was always the government housing, but she balked at the idea. She liked to say, swearing and spitting all the while, that the Hong Kong government was about as useful as a life preserver in a desert. At the peak of the triads’ power, the politicians had pretended they couldn’t see us, this blind spot the size of a square city block. And now that things were finally better through community efforts, they wanted to improve our “living conditions” by tearing us down and putting up a park.
“We should go home,” Ox said to Rabbit after another twenty minutes or so. “You just got over a cold.”
“Rabbit will tell us if she’s not OK,” I said. “You OK, Rabbit?”
“I’m OK,” she said.
“See?” I said.
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