Half-Resurrection Blues

by Daniel José Older

  “Right.”

  “Said he’d met this dude—no name or nothing, just this dude—and that he was going to take us to, you know, the other side.”

  I make an ambivalent half grunt and Michael frowns, like maybe he revealed too much. He quickens his pace to catch up with the others. Darkened Victorians peek out from behind swaying trees across the street.

  When we reach the wide-open roundabout at the entrance to Prospect Park, flickers of nervousness flare up from Trevor. Whatever it is he has planned, we’re getting dangerously close to it. I wonder if these frat boys are unknowingly lining up to be the main course of some ritual sacrifice. Trevor seems just erratic and volatile enough to try to pull off such a stunt. But then, a few flatheads and a hipster getting glazed wouldn’t warrant so much concern from the Council of the Dead—and they certainly wouldn’t waste my time with it. Trevor checks his watch and then looks into the misty night. It’s eight minutes to midnight. I try to tune in to the gathering storm of excitement that’s about to explode all over the city, but it’s just a faint glimmer to me.

  We enter the park, move quickly through the fresh-smelling darkness. The Brads and David fall into a nervous silence. Trevor is a fortress—he gives up nothing to me, so I let my thoughts chase the ridiculous minidramas and power plays between our companions. We’re moving toward the entrada, and of course, the timing is perfect: entradas are extra accessible to the non-dead at midnight, and this midnight in particular the air would be even more charged with culminating spiritual energy. The majority of Brooklyn’s ancestral souls are out and about tonight, enjoying their own morbid festivities. You can almost taste the bursting molecules in the air.

  As if to confirm my suspicions, we turn off the main road and duck down a narrow path through the trees. But what would an inbetweener be doing with a bunch of college kids at an entrance to the Underworld? This is only the beginning, the voice that knows things whispers. You who are neither here nor there keep the secrets of both worlds. And secrets are a valuable commodity. My man has fashioned himself into a traitorous tour guide of the afterlife. I close my eyes and imagine the Land of the Dead overrun by oversized, pasty tourists, thousands of bubbly Brads and Bradettes, snapping pictures and sipping frappuccino-whatevers.

  Crap.

  I really shoulda taken him when it was simple. Now we’ve arrived; the entrada is a gaping void beneath drooping tree branches. It’s not black; it’s just emptiness. The air is crisp with new rain and a murmuring breeze. If Trevor touches that void, it’s game over—he’ll disappear into a relentless, hazy maze of wandering souls. David and the frat boys would be shit outta luck, their magical romp through the Underworld canceled, but Trevor would be safe from my expert problem-solving hands.

  I push my way up through the crowd of Brads. With about ten feet to go before the entrada, Trevor makes a break for it. My elbows shoot out in either direction, crack into meaty midsections, splinter ribs. With a little added encouragement from my shoulders, the home team collapses to either side of me, and I sprint forward in a ferocious, lopsided lunge, unsheathing the blade from my cane as I go. It leaves my hand like a bullet. For a second, all anyone hears is that terrible whiz of steel cutting through air, and then the even more terrible renting of flesh. That sound means I win, but for once it doesn’t feel so good to win. Trevor collapses heavily, an arm’s length from the entrada.

  Without breaking stride, I pull my blade from Trevor’s flesh and launch back toward the college boys, cutting the air and hollering gibberish at the top of my lungs. They leave in a hurry, limping and carrying one another along like the good guys in war movies. I return to Trevor, who’s bleeding out quickly.

  If he can die, I can die.

  It’s a sobering thought. I have so many questions I don’t even know where to begin, and his life force is fading fast. He makes like he’s about to speak but just gurgles. All of his attention, all of his waning energy, is focused back on that little scrap of something in his pocket, but his eyes stare right into mine.

  He knows I can read him. He’s pointing it out to me.

  I gingerly reach into his pocket and retrieve what turns out to be a photograph of a girl.

  I can’t remember the last time I said this. Maybe I’ve never said it. But this chick is fine as hell. Not just fine though—there’s something about her gaze, the way she holds her chin, the shadow of her collarbone, that makes me want to find her and tell her everything, everything. It’s just a silly snapshot. Her smile is genuine but grudging, like whoever took the picture insisted she do it. Her head’s cocked just a little to the side, and something in her eyes just says, I get it, Carlos. C’mere and talk to me and then let’s make love. Looks like she’s in a park, maybe even this one; a few trees are scattered in the scenery behind her.

  “Sister,” Trevor gurgles, and I quickly wipe the hungry glow off my face. “She is . . . caught up in this too . . .” When he says this, his head jerks toward the shimmering emptiness beside us.

  “This what, man? What is this?”

  “Closing the gap,” Trevor whispers. “The living and the dead . . . don’t have to be so far apart. Like . . .” He takes a deep, death-rattle breath.

  I manage to hide my impatience for about three seconds. “Like what?”

  “. . . like us. You and me and . . .” Another excruciating pause. “Sasha.”

  Sasha.

  The hand holding the picture feels like it’s on fire. I raise it up to his face. “Sasha,” I say, failing to disguise the hope in my voice. “She’s like us? She’s in between?”

  I almost break into a dance when Trevor nods his head. Suddenly, the park seems very luminous and beautiful at this hour. The night birds are singing, and somewhere, a few blocks away, Park Slope rocks to the New Year’s revelry of two thousand wealthy white kids.

  “Please,” Trevor is saying when I return from my reverie. “Find Sasha. Keep her safe . . .” Done. No problem. How else can I help you today, sir? “From the Council.”

  “Uh . . .” I say, trying to slow my thoughts. “City Council?” Did you know it’s possible to really irritate a dying person? Even an already mostly dead dying person. I don’t recommend it though. Trevor looks like he might use the last of his life force to make a grab for my cane-blade and cut some sense into me. “Right, right,” I say quickly. “The Council of the Dead.” He nods. “New York City chapter.” My bosses. Surely he must know this. But whatever Trevor does or doesn’t know quickly becomes a nonissue. He gurgles again, flinches, and then relaxes as death completes its finishing touches.

  At least he won’t have far to travel.

  * * *

  After gently placing Trevor’s body into the entrada, I wander aimlessly around the park and work my way through the whole pack of Malagueñas and all of my rum. There’s too many thoughts in my head right now. If I venture out into the city, it’ll mean instant input overload. The living and the dead don’t have to be so far apart, Trevor had said. Why are folks always so cryptic right before they croak?

  Like us.

  There’s an us.

  All I’ve ever known of the afterlife has been the rigid bureaucracy of the Council, and at first that had been relief from the cold disregard of the living. And then I just made friends with being the lone intermediary between the two, but now . . . When the Council’s icy fingers slide the photo of Sasha’s wry smile and sleepy eyes across the table, I will nod my head like I always do. Then I will find her. I will honor the dying wish of her brother, whom I murdered, and protect her from myself.

  And then I will ask her out.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Downtown Brooklyn in the middle of the day. No room for ghosts, too many damn living people clogging up all the inroads and walkabouts. There’s rowdy teenagers, little old ladies, cops, businesspeople. At the feet of the skyscrapers, old men beg for spare change and young dudes in baggy pants pass out party flyers. Other cats are hocking their goods, everything from Bibles to
porn to wooden giraffes to children’s books.

  I stand perfectly still and let the whole teeming masterpiece spin around me. I’m not sure why I’m here. The Council sent me. Sometimes they fuck up, and I’m pretty sure this is one of those times. Go downtown. Fine. They set me up in an apartment; they keep me doing what I do. I’ll go downtown, then. And I’ll pick a spot and be the frozen center of a messy human galaxy for an hour or two. Maybe some dead folks will show up. I don’t care.

  Well.

  The truth is, since New Year’s, there has been a growing murmur of discontent in the back of my mind. Used to be I could just say that I don’t care, and it’d be truly true. Now I wonder. The feeling of Trevor’s life slipping out of him, through my fingertips, it haunts me. It’s not that I particularly cared for the guy; he was definitely about to unleash some nasty havoc. But he had a whole life I never knew about and then a half-life after that. We had something in common, and I’ve never been able to say that about another person. We could’ve, I don’t know, compared notes. Been . . . friends maybe, if he’d have gone a different route. Yes, he was just some jackass to me, a mark, and still, somehow, I felt like it was my own life slipping away along with his.

  “Carlos.” Father Reginald’s gravelly voice breaks me out of my reverie and I’m glad for it.

  “How are you, Padre?”

  “Can’t complain. Another beautiful day.” Father Reginald has a bushy beard covering most of his dark brown face. He looks grumpy as fuck, eyes and brow always gnarled up into some unaccounted-for grimace, but when he opens his mouth, it’s always some “’nother beautiful day” type glory. They say he passed some tough years as a political prisoner in the Caribbean, but he never speaks of it. “People-watching?”

  “Something like that.”

  Father Reginald nods knowingly. “Back to it, then, young fellow. I won’t hold you up.”

  “Agent Delacruz!” some idiot ghost voice crackles through my head. The dead and their damn telepathy. “Report immediately to Council Headquarters.”

  Father Reginald regards my sudden flinching with some concern and then just smiles. “Take care of yourself, Carlos.”

  I nod and doff my cap at the priest. “Enjoy your afternoon, Padre.”

  * * *

  I wonder briefly if I’m in some kind of trouble, and then I remember that I don’t give a fuck. There’s a bus up Fourth Avenue that would get me there quicker, but I’m irritated these dipshits had me downtown for no apparent reason.

  I walk.

  I stop for coffee on the way, chat with some old guys sitting out on a stoop. Another cold front’s moving in from up north. What else? Old Reggie’s out of prison again, but probably just for a week or two, since he’s already back to his old ways. Life tumbles onward, and eventually, when I feel I’ve wasted enough time to legitimately vex my superiors, so do I.

  The Council of the Dead occupies an abandoned warehouse nestled between a sweatshop and a strip club on one of the forgotten backstreets of Sunset Park. There’s a metal fire exit so desecrated by graffiti and trash you’d never notice it, but it’s unlocked for us non–fully dead types. Well, for me. Inside, it’s your traditional eerie empty warehouse: all rusted-out industrial skeletons and corroded pipes. Here there’s an overturned wheelie chair, there a sea of shattered glass. A corner stairwell winds up to a catwalk that disappears in shadows. An awful mist hangs over everything; if you didn’t know better, you’d assume it was the lingering fallout of some chemical disaster, but really it’s just spirit shit.

  They barely notice me when I walk in, all these trembling shrouds. They just go about their business. I head up the metal stairwell, my clanking boots echoing into the vast hall, work my way along a filthy, cobwebbed corridor to an empty room. It must’ve been the office of some middle-management troll at one time; there’s a huge window overlooking the main floor and a corroded file cabinet.

  “Agent Delacruz?”

  “That’s me.”

  Speaking of middle-management trolls: Bartholomew Arsten. He appears in the doorway, a tall, translucent shroud. His shimmering, sallow face contorts with uncertainty. “You’re here.”

  “You summoned me.”

  “I did . . .” He puzzles for a few seconds. “I did!”

  “I know.”

  “We have a message for you.”

  “I’m thrilled.”

  “Riley wants you to meet him at the Burgundy.”

  “What?”

  “Riley.” He says it like I’m the incompetent one. “Wants.”

  “I heard what you said. I’m trying to figure out why you sent me a message dragging my ass across town to tell me a message to go back across town.”

  “Oh, it’s a new protocol. We can’t give locations for meeting points over telepathy.”

  “But you did that when you asked me to come here.”

  “Except for here.”

  “Bart, bruh, you know you full of shit, right?”

  Bartholomew circles in the doorway and begins fading into the haze of shadows.

  “You’d better go, Agent. The message was from two hours ago, so you’re already late, technically.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Welp,” Riley says, “that’s basically what I told the dude.” He scrunches up his face real meanlike. “‘No, you back the fuck up.’ Then I sliced him.” He and Dro bust out into unchecked chuckles. Of course, it’s easy for them to laugh with reckless abandon: they’re just glimmering shadows to me and silent invisibilities to the drunks all around us. I have to be a little more conservative with my ruckus. As it is, the drunks see me speaking under my breath to empty seats on either side, occasionally smiling, swearing, or grunting. Anyway, we’re in the Burgundy Bar—a joint that is full of enough fuckups and generally blitzed-out patrons that one weirdo talking to himself at the bar is not really a big deal.

  Sasha’s all-knowing smirk simmers across my mind for the eighty thousandth time today. I’m only barely here at all, just nodding, grinning, looking away.

  “Carlos,” Riley says. He’s thick and translucent, bald headed and impeccably dressed, even in death. Riley and I share the common trait of having died so violently it shredded any memory of our lives, and in that we are brothers. When we’re bored, we make up highly unlikely stories about what may have been. “First you show up later than your usual Puerto Rican late, and now you all sulky. Kay tay pasa, hombre?” I know he’s emphasizing that silent h just to annoy me, so I ignore it. Besides, all his stories end with Then I sliced him.

  I shrug. “Nada, man. Blame the Council. What we got for today?”

  Riley leans over his Jameson and takes a sip. It looks stupid if you’re not used to it—grown-ass man dipping into his drink like one of those damn plastic birds—but even the don’t-give-a-fuck clientele at Burgundy would probably startle at a bunch of floating glasses. “Today’s adventure, my friends, is a very special one.”

  Riley’s was the first face I saw when I came back around. He was standing over me, grinning that grin of his, looking all proud of himself like he was the one who brought me back. He wasn’t, but still, he found me, named me, brought me into the complicated fold of the Council, and has looked out for me ever since, in his own odd way.

  Dro groans. “You say that every night, man.” Dro doesn’t drink. He’s tall and remarkably well built for a dead guy. We suspect he’s Filipino, but he keeps insisting on being Brazilian. Who can tell? Who cares even? Riley gets on him about it occasionally, but as far as I’m concerned, if Dro wants to be Brazilian, that’s his business. Either way, the three of us are about as much color as the Council will put up with, apparently.

  “I do say that a lot,” Riley admits. “And I always lead you on a spectacular adventure.”

  “Sometimes,” Dro says. “Sometimes no.”

  Riley turns to me suddenly. “Hey, how’d the business with the inbetweener go on New Year’s?”

  My pulse quickens to a slow-ass drag. I had jus
t managed to push the whole thing out of my damn mind and then Riley went ahead and busted it back in. “Fine,” I say. “Why?”

  “I just heard it was quite a scenario: he was tryna bring a group of college kids into an entrada or something, no?”

  I nod.

  “Damn,” Dro says. “And he was . . . like you?”

  I make a grunty-affirmative noise. When they send me after a normal ol’ fully dead ghost, it’s usually to toss their translucent asses back into Hell or, when they’re really acting out, slice ’em to the Deeper Death. That means they’re gone-for-good gone, not just kinda-sorta gone. It takes some getting used to, yeah, but you figure, hey—they were already dead once. Not everyone comes back even as a spook, so they had got that second chance and jacked it up by playing the fool. The final good-bye ain’t that big a deal in that sense. But this one . . . this strange, gray-like-me man with his wild schemes and last-gasp poetics . . . his death hasn’t left me since New Year’s.

  Neither has his sister’s perfect smile.

  Anyway, should be pretty clear I don’t want to talk about it, but my friends don’t take well to subtle clues.

  “Was that weird?” Riley says. “You clipped him?”

  “No and yes.” I really don’t want to talk about this. I’m not even sure why, but the whole mention of it makes me feel like shriveling up inside this long trench coat and being gone.

  Finally, Riley shrugs and rolls his eyes. “Anyway, as it so happens: today’s adventure, brought to you by the illustrious Council of the Dead, involves the very house and home in which Carlos and I first became acquainted.”

  “What?”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  “Mama Esther?”