by Ellen Datlow
• • •
Kalpana is still sick at home; they think it’s malaria. Charu said she made sure the parents have the medicine for her, even as she calls me every day to remind me to take my own medications. So once again, I have the flat to myself, food brought by Charu in the dripping fridge, even though I told her I can still cook. Lovely Charu. I see her as a little child still, because I’m so much older than her, because I saw her fresh out of my sister’s womb, covered in blood and mucus. I held my sister’s wet hand as the baby found her nipple, and my vision dissolved in tears when she said to me then, voice hoarse from shouting and screaming through labour: “You will raise her with me, Lokhi.” Little baby Charu. But what a woman she is, singing on TV, raising her boys, taking care of her family, being such a good wife to Bijoy. She has already done everything I haven’t. I admit that I envy her, and not just because of her relative youth. The truth is I didn’t raise her with my sister. Pampi never needed that. She was a wonderful mother, and Charu a wonderful daughter. I was just any old mashi. Or maybe they were just any old mother and daughter, their perfection nothing but the gloss of envy in this mashi’s eyes.
I am alone in the darkness, the city with its eyes closed in the twilight, no electricity beyond the bars of the window, just the pall of dusk. The crows, cawing at the coming dark as always. Far away, the glimmer of light beyond the zone of the load shedding is like another reality in the distance, where the living are. In my neighborhood there is only silence, but a train far away, leaving forever. The mosquitoes are drawing what stale blood is left in my veins. There is an unbearable stench, as if the breeze through the window has caught a festering garbage heap. But I know it’s coming from inside. I can barely see Pampi in the dim living room. Her posture is worse than before, she is stooping, her back bent, her head cocked to one side. I cannot see her face under the cowl of her saree, the fabric of which glows a muted blue in the dim light from the windows. I can see that there are dark stains on the cotton, blooms of black. I want to tell her to think of tomorrow, when she will feel better, because no sickness lasts forever, like she used to tell me when I got sick as a little girl. Think of tomorrow, when you will feel better, she would say, touching my forehead, the leering bhoot that turned to me at night and spoke to me of how I would never get married vanished into my Pampi. But I don’t know if I should say anything, because this doesn’t feel quite like my Pampi. But it is her.
There is a warm gust running through the living room. The front door to the flat is open. Like a black mouth, open. The stairwell is a throat, a tunnel, a canal. I remember the jet black of the Suez Canal at night, beyond the rails of a ship taking me back home, the thrashing waves haunted by what dead sailors I didn’t know. Pouloma is waiting. She wants to leave this little flat we shared. Chandrasekhar called. Charu and Pratik don’t need her anymore. They don’t need me either. No one does, except Pampi, perhaps, now. She is waiting for me. Or is Chandrasekhar waiting for us? I can’t tell if Pampi is angry, or sad, or beckoning, because I can’t see her. We are sisters. I look into her featureless face as she looks at me through the black veil, and I cannot for the love of my god tell if I am afraid.
Icarus Rising
Richard Bowes
MY MASK
My mother screamed at the sight of the black mask that had become my face—I was peering into the kitchen window at dusk on the day I was buried. Mine had been a closed-casket funeral. But now I was a ghost and free. If I’d been able to remove the mask and show her the blood and broken bones, the screaming would have been worse.
This encounter helped destroy any remaining bridges between my Living family and me. Right then I was mad at the world for letting me die, and mad at myself for the stupidity that had left me dead.
Burial clothes rot away in no time. But the clothes in which a ghost has died become like a permanent tattoo. The mask I died in will be my face forever.
My family didn’t know how to deal with me when I was alive. So it followed that they didn’t know what to think about the shattered bones, busted organs, and clinging flesh that was sent home in a body bag from the Big Apple—the remains of me: Raphael Marks.
Things in New York hadn’t been going at all badly until I let my guard down and luck deserted me.
From my grave I raged against my parents for dumping me in the family plot in Bellwether, Pennsylvania. I’d fled this nothing town at age seventeen. I’m lucky nobody there believed in cremation.
Ironically, as a kid, I thought ghost stories and movies were stupid. Getting laid out under the grass changed my perspective. Remembering that I’d been killed by a Living being I trusted, fueled me with so much anger I couldn’t think straight at first.
Time moves slowly in a graveyard. I discovered that many of the dead lay huddled in the dirt, terrified by the aggressive specters that controlled the place. They endured a kind of death within death. Over the decades they’d lost all memory of having lived, and became no more alive than the dirt that held them.
Never once did I consider taking that road. I wanted my life back and vowed to regain every bit of the amazing future that had been stolen from me.
Angry specters, uneasy in their graves and not interested in turning to dust, dominated the cemetery. Cross them and you’d find yourself disintegrating and awaiting a second death. Once I saw how the graveyard was arranged, I worked my way into the aggressive specters’ ranks, hanging out with them and sharing their rage. Paying unwanted visits to families, friends, and total strangers was how specters proved to themselves that they still existed. Anger made me rise out of my rotted casket and frighten young couples screwing behind tombstones.
When you’ve been dead for a while, it’s easy to lose track of time. It becomes something that just flows past you.
Then, one night, I floated by my family’s house and saw that it was deserted, with a FOR SALE sign on the lawn. I realized it had been years since I’d been around the old place.
There was, I realized, no purpose to my haunts, no direction. They always ended with me back in what I feared was my final resting place.
So I began paying attention to the world of the Living and looked for a way I could make a life there. I saw specters flying through the dark, some naked or just skeletons. Others, like me, dressed in the clothes they had died in, some with cloaks and flowing ribbons in their hair.
I began to feel something like nostalgia for the city where I’d died. More and more over the years I found myself called to that place where once heads had turned when I walked by.
In addition to the mask I’d worn when making illegal graffiti art, the leather jacket, black jeans, and ankle boots in which I’d lived and died were also now part of me.
I taught myself to fly by practicing short excursions. I swam through the night air and began following the Living, who drove or walked in the dark. They shivered and peered around like they sensed my presence. During the day the Living would see no more of me than a ripple of sunlight, a momentary shadow, as I went among them.
One evening when I felt I was ready, I left my grave and floated out of Bellwether, Pennsylvania, to the great city. I imagined with relish, the idea of New York’s curiosity about me growing when word spread that I’d returned. I promised myself to not be the same naive graffiti artist I’d been before I died.
Thinking about getting a new graffiti tag, I chose “Living Death.” Then I realized that my ghostly hand would pass through any paintbrush or spray can. But I was sure I’d find some other way to publicize myself.
It was just before dawn when I floated into the outskirts of the great city. In the dark I saw the towers of light across the river, felt the presence of my kind (whom I had never noticed when I lived there) amid the millions of the Living.
By daylight the place seemed to have changed into a city of glass in the three decades I’d been gone. The crowds, even the kids, lacked the color and style that I remembered. East and West, the Villages were tame. And graffiti,
the little I saw, was tired and commercial.
For a few days I wandered among the Living, listened to their talk. Looking for someone familiar, I flicked through faces as if they were endless pages in a telephone book. This city needed a ghostly presence to make it alive, and I was the one who could provide that. I spoke my name in crowds and whispered my old graffiti tag “We Dis” even though it brought back bad memories. But my ghostly words attracted no attention.
I drifted into art galleries and bookstores. In one: a big color photograph on a wall riveted me. It showed a figure falling to earth from the roof of a tall building. The falling figure wore a black mask and black clothes. There were several shots of his descent.
The title was Icarus 1987. I realized that the figure was me falling to my death thirty years before. And the photographer was Denny Wright, a lover of mine.
Then I overheard a very pretentious couple behind me talking about going downtown to view the display of art in contention for the Double/Annual Awards.
Mention of that event caught my memory. Like the photo, the awards, held every two years, was a major event. One in which I’d once participated in my first time in New York. And I suspected it was one of the reasons my time here had ended.
Since I was still relearning the city, I followed the couple like they were a hunch. When they hailed a cab I got in with them. The driver, I could tell, sensed an invisible passenger. But on that sunny afternoon a ghost was invisible to the eye. And he was, after all, a New York cabbie who just shook his head as I floated in.
GWENDA
The museum we went to was not the dowdy uptown one I remembered. The lobby was vast. An almost-blinding sunlight poured through glass from three sides. I looked around and noticed someone who seemed to stare at me from afar through dark glasses.
And I knew her! I’d forgotten about Gwenda and couldn’t imagine how she saw me when nobody else could. But by accident I’d found what might be a useful Living person.
Gwenda Pinsky was an art critic a few decades older than I was. When I first hit town she did me some small favors, gave some attention to We Dis, the graffiti tag I shared with a guy named Graham Kreel. We Dis fought hypocrisy in art and the world.
Gwenda once did me the big but dangerous (as it turned out) favor of nominating me for the Double/Annual Award. Thirty years later, walking toward her, I realized she wasn’t looking my way and couldn’t have seen me if she had been. Her eyesight was gone.
I spoke her name as loudly as a ghost can. When I knew she’d heard me, I spoke my own name.
She reacted with surprise but also with disbelief and anger. So I told her a few things that only she and Raphael Marks would know.
Even then she said, “This is a perfectly assembled scam. I have no idea why anyone would assume the identity of a dead artist in order to fool a blind art critic. But your imitation of Raphael is so lovely that I can’t make myself shout out for you to stop.
“Your encountering me at this new museum in the fever pitch of the Double/Annual is a perfect choice for your game. Back when I was a curator and decided fates, Raphael Marks (whom you mimic so well) and his graffiti were a controversial choice of mine. One I have never regretted, though it haunts me.”
I half whispered, “Every two years that award sorts out the winners and losers. In that sense I was a winner.”
She then said, “My own fate is of a kind not much in evidence at art shows. Quite possibly I am the only ‘visually impaired’ individual in the building.
“Voices connect me to the world. I sit and listen to middle-aged failures whose careers took wrong turns and the disgruntled young, probably doomed to be unrecognized, all bitching about the politics of art.
“Now I am not interesting or important or new enough to make anyone but you stop and listen to what I have to say.”
We talked briefly about Denny Wright and his photograph Icarus 1987. I probed her for news about Graham Keel, my partner in We Dis (also my murderer, but neither of us mentioned that). She claimed to know little about Graham.
Then, Gwenda listened to her phone. Everyone seemed to have one in his or her pocket. She said, “The person who helps me get around will be here soon.”
I saw someone heading toward us, said good-bye, and floated back into the crowd.
When Gwenda was younger and sighted, her understanding of art was nothing compared to her command of gossip and intrigue. Watching her talk excitedly into her phone, I knew that she was spreading word of my return.
ICARUS 1987
That night, I stopped by Denny Wright’s loft for a surprise visit. Gwenda, when I’d asked, gave me the same Soho address that I remembered from back when he and I were broke and in love.
My plan was to arrive close on the heels of Gwenda’s phone calls. Soho had changed from the empty streets and artist/landlord turmoil I remembered. In those days, Denny and I had lived and worked in a tiny sliver of a studio. Now, according to his name on the doorbells, Denny owned the third and fourth floors.
At midnight the street level boutique windows displayed slim, wide-eyed figures in low blue lighting. Across the street a woman walked a pair of large dogs.
Denny wasn’t home. But being a ghost is all about waiting. I slipped through the building’s door and into the foyer. Within an hour a taxi pulled up before the building. Denny, nicely aged and nicely dressed, got out and glanced around.
I wondered if he was expecting me. Denny came in the door but I stayed in shadow. He walked right through me. I whispered his name. He jumped back and cried out.
“Don’t be afraid,” I whispered. “I thought of you all the time I was gone,” I lied. “When I came back here, I discovered you had caught the attention of the world the day I died. Those shots of me falling may have kept my name alive. No, don’t cry. I still love you in my own way.”
We sat upstairs in his wonderful loft. In shadowy light, Denny stared at me with wide eyes and shaking hands. He put away quite a lot of wine.
“The New York art world is talking about Gwenda’s calls,” he told me. “Tonight at dinner, everyone remembered you.”
He asked if I wanted to hear her on his cell phone and I nodded. She said, “This is Gwenda Pinsky and I know my communication has been spotty over the last decade or two. But I am either the first person to encounter Raphael Marks thirty years after his death, or I’m a blind fool.
“He asked after you, Denny, and I told him what I knew. Then he asked about Graham Keel and I remembered not including Keel’s name with Raphael’s when I placed We Dis in the 1987 Double/Annual Award. Keel seemed more like an assistant than an artist. And given what happened, I thought it best not to dwell on that with Raphael.”
I gestured and Denny shut her off.
“Everyone in downtown New York knew you back then,” he said. “You took me to the Mudd Club in that abandoned part of Manhattan. We walked down deserted streets and climbed corroded stairs. David Bowie was at the club that night. Political graffiti was all the rage. Even he was happy to have met the better half of We Dis.
“Most of what I have I owe to knowing you. Thirty years back, my business card should have read, ‘Gay photographer with an unbreakable crush on Raphael Marks,’ ” he said.
I knew this living person was totally mine and quite useful. So I told him, “You screamed when I got knocked off the roof of the Levanal Building. But you went on shooting.”
Denny flinched and looked away.
“I want to do a variation on that day. I hope you’ll be moved by what I intend. Because I’ll need your help to make it work.”
Then, I said, “As part of this I want to talk with Graham Keel, maybe come to understand him and his motives.”
Denny was amazed that I would ever speak to Graham. He said it showed my great heart. The Living love things like this.
Denny told me about Keel’s new art gallery and where he hung out and where he lived.
KEEL
The gallery was downtown on
an old block that had suddenly become all wine bars and antique stores. It was evening when I arrived. A kid hell-bound on a bike came out of a side street and rode past me. I could see right through him.
I’d known nothing about ghosts when I was first in this city and had little to do with them on my return. Only when I thought about the ghost kid later, did I wonder if he’d been following me.
I knew the gallery would be closed. But I saw a light in an office and floated through the front door. The art on the walls was all black and white angles.
“Symmetry, making a comeback?” I murmured. “Thought that died a couple of years before I did.”
Graham looked up. He wore gold-framed reading glasses and had lost most of his hair. My old partner squinted in my direction but he never showed surprise or fear. I had to give him that.
