by Carter
For the living, the current population of this little ball of mud we call home is around seven billion. That’s no number to sneeze at, especially when you’re at the DMV and it seems as if half of them are in line ahead of you. But according to the last census performed by the Department of Souls, who are charged with keeping track of such things, over a hundred billion people have lived and died on planet Earth before anyone alive today was even born.
For me, they’re all still here.
The tables at Mama’s, both inside and on the covered patio, were occupied, but there was no Billie. I wove through a group of cell-phone-yakking yuppies decked out in REI, made the mistake of stepping in a puddle, and cursed as I slogged forward with one wet sock. No Billie at the bus depot, one of the places she liked to people-watch. No Billie at the newsstand on 26th, the one that had burned up in a fire fifty years go but was still operated by the same old codger.
I rounded the corner and stopped at our favorite neighborhood hot-dog stand. The heavyset man in the red and white sequined jumpsuit handed a little girl with pigtails a corn dog, then flashed me his famous smile. As usual, his full head of black hair was perfectly coiffed. Most mornings, he worked the street outside my window, but in the evenings he liked to rove around a bit.
“Hey Elvis,” I said, “you seen Billie?”
“No, sir,” Elvis said, rolling some of the franks on his grill. The way he flicked the dogs, it was like he was strumming a guitar. It was hard to believe none of it was real. I still didn’t quite understand why ghosts used real-world things at all—buses, buildings, bridges—when it was obvious they could just create something out of whole cloth, just as Elvis had done with his hot-dog stand. And if they saw it, then I saw it. Just one of those weird little rules that I lived by but couldn’t fully explain.
“You lost the little lady?” he said.
“Oh, she’ll turn up eventually. I just need to talk to her.”
“About a case?”
“Something like that.”
He nodded, not pressing, which was why I liked him. It was anyone’s guess whether he was the real deal, the later, heavier Elvis, or just an impersonator, but he was easy to talk to regardless. “Well, I hope you find her. Hungry?”
I looked at the glazed hot dogs, sizzling on the grill, the scent of grease in the air. Sight, sound, smell—their world was real to me in every way except touch and taste, which were unfortunately the ways it mattered most. “You know I can’t do that, Elvis, as much as I’d want to.”
“Oh, yeah, forgot. You’re still playing live, as they say in the biz. But you know you’re missing out, pal.”
“That’s what I hear. They say you make the best hot dogs that never were.”
“Thank ya very much,” he said, flashing me his winning smile.
It took a little more wandering, but I finally found Billie perched on a wrought-iron bench at the park next to the old Gothic-style church four blocks from my office. She was dressed all in black leather, her favorite style lately, her pale face nearly glowing in the hazy gloom. It was a tiny park, with a dilapidated metal play structure roughly the same color as algae, a basketball court with two backboards but only one rim, and a couple of wooden picnic tables under some leafless pin oaks. On the other side of the park, two goth girls leaned against the chain-link fence, eyeing me warily. Their cigarettes burned in the near-dark like distant jet engines.
Billie didn’t look up until I was right in front of her. Even at dusk, her blue eyes were so penetrating that even now, after all these years, my heart did a little jig when she looked right at me. Her hair, which changed more often than the Oregon weather, was short and spiky, black with platinum blond highlights. She gave me the faintest smile possible, hardly more than a twitch of her cheeks. It wasn’t much, but I’d come to appreciate any flicker of happiness from her when she was in one of her moods.
“Found new haunting grounds?” I said.
She rolled her eyes. My brand of gallows humor may not have been her cup of tea, but she knew it was the chief way I stayed sane.
That was true even before she’d died.
I took a seat next to her and immediately wished I’d wiped off the bench first—I felt the cool dampness seeping into my overcoat. The wide collar of Billie’s black leather coat was turned up, partially blocking the henna tattoo she’d put her neck last week. The way she was sitting, on the edge of the bench, it was as if she had somewhere to go but it wasn’t quite time to leave yet.
Across the way, the goth girls were giving me a funny look. Of course they would. To them, I’d just talked to an empty park bench.
“Did you buy the airplane ticket?” Billie asked softly.
“Yep.” Conscious that I was being watched, I tried not to move my lips much, a skill I’d picked up in the past few years.
“One or two?”
“Hmm?”
“You bought a ticket for me, didn’t you?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Myron,” she said, in that scolding tone of hers.
“I like it when you sit next to me on the plane,” I said.
“It’s a waste of money. I can sit anywhere, and there’s almost always empty seats anyway. You don’t need to buy a ticket for a ghost.”
Instead of answering, I pointed at her leather sandals. They had thick wooden soles—Billie was always trying to be taller—and the web of black leather revealed lots of her creamy skin. “Those new? I haven’t seen them before.”
“Got them at Macy’s,” she said, with a tone of someone who’d just come from a funeral. “They were having a sale.”
“Ah, so that’s where you’ve been. They’re nice. Aren’t they a little cold for this time of year?”
“Is it cold? I hadn’t noticed.”
It was a comment that could have literally been true, but it was probably just surliness on her part.
We sat in silence. I knew that what I was about to say was not going to make her happy, so I was procrastinating. I studied her profile, the elegant cheekbones, the full lips, the ever so slight overbite that she hated so much, and wondered for the hundredth time why someone so exquisite and beautiful and artistic had agreed to marry me. If not for a chance meeting at the Portland Museum of Art nine years ago—both of us there to see the traveling Monet exhibition, her having moved to town a week earlier after fleeing a poor life in rural Maine—I probably never would have even met her.
She cleared her throat. “What hotel were you—”
“I saw him,” I said.
I’d meant to sidle up to it, start with the girl in the lavender dress, talk about her story, eventually make my way to the picture. But the news was like a bad splinter, worming its way deeper into my skin, my anxiety growing with each passing second.
She looked at me, raising one neatly trimmed eyebrow. “Who?” she said.
I started to speak, but my throat had seized up, so I had to swallow before I could try again. “The guy who shot me. I saw him.”
Her eyes flashed like flares at a roadside accident, her cool detachment gone in an instant, panic and shock playing across her features.
“What?” she said.
“It was just a picture. Not the real thing.”
“Myron, if this is some kind of weird joke—”
“No, no, no joke,” I said, and then I went on to explain about Karen Thorne’s visit to my office. Billie interrupted me several times, pressing for details I didn’t have, and pursed her lips skeptically when I finished.
“Are you sure?” she said.
“I’m telling you, it was him.”
“Maybe you just wanted it to be him. You only saw him for a second, after all.”
“Billie, it was him. And anyway, you can see for yourself tomorrow morning. Karen’s coming in at eight.”
“Don’t tell me you agreed to take her case?”
“I didn’t agree to anything yet. I told her I wanted the night to think it over.”
> She shook her head. “We talked about this, Myron. We decided. Remember? Let bygones be bygones. Move on. Focus on the future.”
“But that’s before I knew he was still in Portland!”
“Shh!”
She flashed me a furious look, index finger pressed to her lips. I glanced at the goth girls, both of them standing there with their cigarettes half-raised to their lips, gawking at me, a silent film on freeze frame.
“Don’t you remember?” Billie said, and there was a level of hysteria in her voice I hadn’t anticipated. I’d expected her to be unhappy, maybe even angry, but not so panicked about the whole thing. “Don’t you remember how long it took to get your life together after the shooting? Do you really want to revisit all that? Won’t it just reopen all those old wounds?”
“But I’ve got a lead this time! A real one!”
“A lead to what?”
“The truth! Answers! Anything!” I knew I was yelling again, but I didn’t care if anyone heard. “Knowing something about him will be better than always wondering!”
“Will it?”
“Yes!”
“Maybe it will just lead to more questions. Maybe—maybe those questions will just … throw off your balance.”
“Things are different now.”
“Are they?”
“Damn it, Billie! Yes!”
“You can promise me?”
“Yes! Yes!”
“Because I don’t want to wonder where you are at two in the morning.”
“That won’t—”
“I don’t want to worry that you’ve drank yourself to death in some bar.”
“I’m telling you—”
“I don’t want have to pull you out of another asylum.”
“You won’t have—what?”
It wasn’t something I had expected her to say. The bars, yes, I could understand. There were more than a few times I’d woken up in an ally to the beeping of a garbage truck, the dawn light like needles in my eyes, no idea how I’d gotten on that pile of musty cardboard, those memories permanently blotted from my brain. I knew how close I’d come to losing it all, to joining Billie on the other side, but I was better now. Or at least better enough to get through the day.
But the asylum? That was a whole other level of mental instability, a level I’d been at only once in my life. It was a low blow.
“That’s what you think?” I said. “You think I’m that fragile?”
She looked at me a long time, a shadow among shadows, a ghost among ghosts. There was something there, something she wanted to say, I could feel her holding back, but I had no idea what it was. It had always been that way, both before and after death. There were worlds beyond her eyes I’d never visited and never would. She was a book written in braille, and I was a blind man who’d never been taught to read.
“I think we’re all that fragile, Myron,” she said.
Before I could offer a response, before I could even decipher what she’d meant, she rose and walked away. I reached for her arm, forgetting as I often did, then let my hand fall limply to my side. I watched her pass out of the bubble of lamplight, disappearing briefly into the darkness afforded by the overhanging oaks, then reappearing on the other side. I saw her footprints on the sidewalk. I saw her trailing shadow. I heard the splash of her boots in the puddles, and I wondered, as I had so many times before, how I could see and hear all these things and yet was never allowed to touch her.
At the gate into the park, she turned up the street. Going south. Headed to our home in Sellwood, most likely. It was a long walk, but long walks never seemed to bother her.
“What about the case?” I called after her.
“I think you’ve already decided,” she replied.
“But will you help me?”
Without answering, she passed beyond the stone wall of the church adjoining the park, out of my sight. I hesitated, unsure of whether to jog after her, then decided to let her go for now. To cool off and see that this was something I had to do. There was always later. We had plenty of later.
Everyone did.
Chapter 4
The darkness could have lasted a second or a day or a year, it was all the same to me—an endless stretch of nothingness and no feeling and best of all, no pain. If time passed between when that bullet penetrated my brain and when I first groped toward consciousness, I didn’t know it. The first things I remembered later were the voices, lots of voices. Men, women, children, they were coming and going, some whispering, some shouting, me catching only a fragment here or a few words here, fading before my rattled brain could try to make sense of it all. The voices were all mixed together anyway, like a hundred records playing at once, each set at a different volume and a different speed.
After that, there was the pain, an excruciating, blinding hot pain in the middle of my head. It felt as if a recently forged sword was embedded in the middle of my skull. It was really the pain, more than the voices, that brought me fully back. The pain pulsed and throbbed and hammered and pounded, a ceaseless drumbeat of agony that pulled me out of the depths of my darkness one ache at a time.
When I finally managed to open my eyes, blinking through the gray murk that clouded my vision, the first thing I saw was a priest standing at the edge of my bed, a lanky old man with a full head of wavy white hair that gleamed like fresh snow in the light slanting though the blinds to my right. There were no voices, the silence broken by the steady beeping of a heart monitor. My head, pulsing still, felt as if it was encased in concrete. I would have touched it, but I was so weak that even the thought of lifting my hand was exhausting.
“It’ll be all right, son,” the priest said.
The obscenely large gold cross hanging around his neck glinted in the sunlight. Without turning my head, sliding my gaze left and right, I scanned the room. Plain taupe walls. An IV drip. Metal sidebars on the bed. Even this little movement brought on a spell of dizziness. Nobody else was in the room but me and the priest.
“I’m not Catholic,” I said.
He smiled kindly, his teeth yellowed as a smoker’s would be. “It doesn’t matter,” he said.
“I don’t even believe in God.”
“Lucky for you, that doesn’t seem to bother him.”
His voice was Charlton Heston deep but just as warm as his smile—a knowing smile, as if he knew a secret about me but he wasn’t saying.
Before I could ask him what that secret might be, the door burst open and a bevy of medical professionals swept into the room: a rotund doctor with more hair on his mustache than on top of his head, and that wasn’t saying much; an equally rotund nurse with far too much hair, a huge mound of platinum blond that put all other bobs in the long history of bobs to shame; plus two beefy male orderlies who looked like they worked nights as strongmen at the circus.
They made quite a fuss over me, checking my vitals, tending to my head bandages, asking me if I knew who I was, the name of the President, that sort of thing, at least a full minute of breathless excitement before they seemed convinced that I was truly awake and stable.
“It’s a miracle,” the nurse said.
“That’s what I was telling him,” the priest said. He stood behind them, hands behind his back, beaming.
“Of course, there will have to be lots of tests,” the doctor said. “A battery of tests. Physical, mental. A whole workup.”
“Um, Doctor,” I said, “how long have I been unconscious?”
The doctor and the nurse exchanged a glance.
“Doctor?” I said.
He swallowed. “Perhaps we should have the hospital psychiatrist on hand.”
“Doctor, just tell me.”
“It could be upsetting.”
“I’m getting upset now!”
“Six months.”
“Six months!”
He nodded glumly. I tried to process the number and couldn’t. When I woke up, I figured it might have been six days. If he had said six weeks, it would hav
e been shocking, but I probably could have dealt with it. But six months?
The pounding in my head became more pronounced, a brain-rattling thrumming as if my brain were trying to shake loose my skull. Instinctively, I tried to rub my forehead and found only bandages. The light slanting through the blinds suddenly seemed too bright, though the brightness made more sense now that I knew we were no longer in winter. It almost never shone like that in Portland in winter.
“So you’re saying it’s, what, August?” I asked.
“August 12, to be exact.”
“Jesus!”
“It’ll be all right, son,” the priest said.
“We must focus on the positive,” the doctor said. “This truly is a miracle. The first miracle was your survival of the shot itself. It was one in a million, the bullet traveling perfectly down the fissure between the two hemispheres without any significant damage to either one.” He reached as if to point out the place, then pulled his hand back hastily as if he thought it might be in poor taste. “Although more tests will have to determine the extent of the impairment to your neurological abilities, there’s a good chance there won’t be much. It’s not a split-brain situation, no damage to the corpus callosum. And the second miracle was you waking up from such a long coma. As much as television would have us believe otherwise, it’s quite rare.”
“Slow down a minute, Doc,” I said. “You’re saying there’s a bullet still in my head?”
“I’m afraid so. However—”
“There’s a bullet in my head.”
“It was too risky to remove when you first came in, I’m afraid. And your body seems oddly ambivalent about it, not rejecting it as a foreign presence at all. In fact, we had far greater trouble with some of the more superficial parts of your wound, which is why you are wearing those bandages again. We did a few skin grafts two weeks ago to your forehead. That seems to have gone well, however, and you should be able to get those off within a few days.”
