Half-Resurrection Blues

by Daniel José Older

  It’s pouring rain. I know the legions of hungry dead are rushing toward this soon-to-be wide-open hole to the living world. Riley is painstakingly recovering himself and climbing the stairs, his wounded hand hanging limply by his side.

  Pasternak is on the roof, floating just above the angel and her horses, and those ghostly ngk threads reach from him off into the surrounding buildings. He’s got that languid damn expression on his face again. He’s flickering, and with each spasm of light that flashes across his huge body, I catch a glimpse of the murky skies of the Underworld. It’s hypnotizing. I’m so transfixed I almost miss it when the giant’s huge arm reaches up onto the rooftop, followed by his big heaving head. I have just enough time to lift up the wood-enforced metal plank they use to cover the roof entrance. I wait for him to hoist himself into the most awkward possible position and bring it down on his head. There’s a horrible sound: splintering bone and the soft mushiness of flesh collapsing together. The giant lays still. That thick dead blood of his gushes languidly out from under the metal plank and gets speckled by falling rain.

  When I look back at Pasternak, all I see is Sasha looking at me from the other side. A red tear runs down her face, and then she falls to her knees. I burst forward and then stop short when Sarco’s towering shadow billows like a cloud of smoke out of Sasha’s body. For a terrible second, we just stare at each other. Then Sasha goes limp and falls facedown, halfway across the gateway that was once Pasternak. I see something small scramble along the edge of the rooftop out of the corner of my eye. It’s gone when I swing my head around to look, but I already know: the ngks are converging.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  Sarco steps forward into the world of the living. His hazy shadow arms stretch to either side and his head is thrown back with laughter. The sky explodes with rain, lightning, and swirling clouds. He picks up one of Sasha’s blades, watching me the whole time, and then walks over to Moishe’s crumpled body. I reach Sasha just as Sarco crouches down and disappears into the doubly dead giant.

  Her chest is moving up and down. Which means she’s breathing. Which means she’s alive. I exhale, finally, although I hadn’t even realized I was holding my breath. I lift her up into my arms and she looks at me. “Don’t get all cute,” she whispers. A little stream of blood trickles out of her left eye and I wipe it away. Then she hands me her blade. Sarco the giant trembles, convulses, and then tosses the metal plank off his head like it’s a piece of cardboard. He’s up, smashed, bloody head and all, and stumbling toward us. Ngks crawl along their threads from the edges of the roof. Then, as if on some secret cue, they all rush forward toward where I’m cradling Sasha.

  I rise onto one knee and lift my blade up just in time to parry Sarco’s downswing. The ngks are everywhere; their little gray-green bodies shimmy with sinister laughter as they scatter toward the center of the roof. It’s growing, the portal. Already it’s almost larger than Pasternak, and soon it’ll cover the whole archway. I can see the masses of hungry ghosts converging on the house, a slow-motion riot of death. Sarco slices at me again, and I fend him off. The giant’s strength is still overwhelming, but his body’s been through it recently; I can tell Sarco’s struggling to make it work. Still—I’m not sure how long I can hold him off.

  I advance, stabbing forward and forcing him toward the edge of the rooftop. With Sarco at least somewhat out of the picture, I just might be able to close the portal. The ngks close in on Sasha. I send a series of slices toward Sarco, all of which he blocks easily. The first line of hungry ghosts has made it to the rooftop in the Underworld. They stumble forward, collapsing on top of one another and sliding along, arms outstretched. Sasha struggles to her feet and throws herself out of the way just as the ngks reach the edge of the portal and begin pulling it open, snickering all the while.

  “Don’t you see how close we are?” Sarco yells. His voice sounds clipped and awkward coming from the giant’s shattered mouth. “Don’t you see?” He swings his blade with unchecked fury. “I will not be stopped, halfie! Or are you just worried about your pretty family?”

  “This is where you killed us.”

  “Mm.” He nods. “But I brought you back, didn’t I? You’re alive, aren’t you?”

  I send him backward with a barrage of swipes. “Who was I?” Blue police lights pulse below, but they’re not for us. An early-morning parade of partiers is swooping past and heading down Flatbush.

  “You’d love to know, wouldn’t you? Well . . . Nothing is simple my friend.”

  He’s getting tired. But even if the giant’s body gives out, who’s to say he won’t try to jump into mine? “Consider that you’re giving up a golden opportunity, Carlos, both to find out who you really were and to join me in changing the world. The world!”

  He tries to grin, but it loosens his already mutilated jaw that much more. His mouth becomes unhinged and drops open inhumanly wide. Blood pours out and then slows to a trickle.

  Enraged, Sarco renews his attacks with even more vigor. His blows come crashing again and again, and suddenly his huge foot is on my chest and then I’m skidding across the rooftop. Sasha’s blade clatters out of my hand. I’m rising to get it, but Sarco’s already bearing down on me, blade raised for the kill strike.

  “Carlos!” Sasha yells. I turn and see an ngk flying toward my head. And I understand. I grasp the cool squirming body. Sarco brings his blade down, all full of that pent-up righteous rage, and I raise the ngk to meet it. The one remaining eye in his smashed head gets wide, but it’s too late: the squealing ngk goes suddenly quiet as it splits into two pieces in my grasp.

  Everything stops.

  Sarco drops his sword and turns his broken face toward the cluster of ngks at the portal. They’ve all put down what they were doing and turned to look at him. It happens so fast: in seconds they’re across the rooftop and on him.

  Seeing the ngks’ vengeful feeding frenzy happen to a ghost was bad enough. When there’s live flesh involved, it’s really a whole other story. The little monsters dig their claws into the giant’s already dead skin, wrap their sharp little mouths around his arms and legs, tear out chunks and chew them up and keep going, burrowing like little humanoid rats as Sarco screams and writhes. There’s nothing he can do, of course, but scream and deal with it. I see one clamor onto his head and stick its whole upper body into the gaping hole of his mouth. More blood pours out, probably because the thing’s eating his tongue.

  Sasha stands in front of the portal. She’s recovered the blade I dropped and holds it out in front of her, pointed directly at the foremost ghost on the other side. They seem to recall exactly who she is and what she’s already done to their buddies—none of them moves a single inch. I pick up the blade Sarco dropped, careful not to disturb the massacre. Then I walk over and stand by her side. I’m not sure if there’s a point really. She obviously has this handled, but I simply don’t know what else to do with myself.

  Sarco finally drops to his knees and then falls onto the gravelly rooftop. The ngks are still feasting away mercilessly. What’s left of the giant body shivers and the shadow Sarco emerges. He’s heaving, barely alive from what I can tell, and the ngks are on him instantly, leaving behind the flayed carcass of what was once Moishe.

  Say what you like about ngks, but those little motherfuckers are efficient as hell. Sarco makes a pathetic attempt to swirl up into the sky but they drag him down quickly. He reaches a desperate hand out toward us, but one of them leaps on it, digs its claws in, and tears it off. He screams, a soul-shattering, last-gasp type of scream, and seconds later Sarco is no more.

  The ngks are done. They do their little tidying-up routine and begin to wander off into the night. Whatever arrangement they’d worked out with Sarco, it was clearly violated when he sliced one of them in half. The portal begins to shrink. One dilapidated old ghost makes a half-assed attempt to hurtle across before it closes and Sasha chops his arm off. And then the portal’s gone, and it’s raining, and Sasha’s beside me, as
radiant and mostly alive as ever, and, of course, pregnant. There’s dried blood on her face and a new trickle slips out of her ear. She smiles at me sadly, and then her eyes roll back in her head and she pitches forward, unconscious.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

  Williamsburg is almost deserted at four a.m. this Tuesday morning.

  Almost.

  If you happened to be strolling down the darkened streets, you might see a crowd of surly-looking Hasidics blinking against the early-morning rain. They’re wearing long black coats and rimmed hats and one in particular is quite old and quite magnanimous. You can tell by how the others show a certain deference to him, keep their eyes always darting back to him. He might have a century under his belt, but he stands erect and proud, an ancient oak tree in the shadowy Brooklyn night.

  Victor parks his SUV in front of the Jews and shuts off the headlights. We glance back and forth to make sure no one’s around and then open the trunk and heave out the enormous bundle. The Jews have a stretcher waiting, probably borrowed from one of their volunteer ambulances, and two of them stand on either side, bracing it as we lower the great weight down.

  I hear a weeping sound over the falling rain and realize it’s coming from a small figure sitting on a park bench a few feet away. Traffic rushes past on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway beneath us. The trembling woman stands, escorted by a sturdy young man, and approaches the gurney. I don’t want to see this, but I steady myself and keep quiet. The man looks at us with an unspoken question, and Victor realizes it first and indicates the side of the bundle where the head would be. The Jew unwraps it gently. A flash of horror crosses his face, but he controls it, forces his expression back to neutral and steps aside so the widow can look. Her wail cuts through the night, runs circles through my brain, tears mercilessly down my spinal column, and shivers out in dim echoes down the block.

  Two more men escort the sobbing woman away, and then a short, stout fellow beside the old oak tree steps toward me. Could be Moishe’s brother or cousin, from the look of him. “It is as you say,” he says solemnly. “You must tell us . . .”

  “I can’t,” I say. “I told you I can’t. I know it’s not fair.”

  “We have other methods of compelling you to answer our questions.”

  “I’m sure you do, but you won’t find me. And it’s not necessary. Moishe saved my life. The . . . man who did this to him has been destroyed. That’s all I can tell you. It’s over.” I pause, searching for words. “I’m . . . sorry.”

  The guy looks like he’s about to say something rude when the elderly man steps forward and silences him with a glance. He regards the body with an unchanged face, and then he looks up at me. Those ancient, squinty eyes: his gaze is penetrating. I’m sure he instantly knows all my secrets, but the trivial inner life of a half-dead Puerto Rican is useless to this old sage. “There is no point, Herschel. Leave him be.” The voice is surprisingly robust for such a withered little body. “This being is like a diaspora unto himself, and he caused no harm to your brother.” He nods at me and with the tiniest of gestures sets the whole entourage into motion, wheeling the gurney away and folding back up into the night.

  “C’mon,” Victor says when we’re back in the SUV. “Let’s go see about your lady.”

  * * *

  Baba Eddie smiles at me. We’re sitting at my kitchen table. I’m trying to ignore the sounds of Dr. Tijou tinkering away in the other room. Baba Eddie’s smoking. Smiling. Smiling and smoking.

  “I know you’re feeling particularly like shit right now, Carlos.”

  “More or less.”

  “But you should know, you’ve done well.”

  “I don’t think I have.”

  “I don’t know the whole story, but I suspect you’re being too hard on yourself. I can see it on your face.”

  I shrug. And then I remember: “Riley told me that you named me.”

  Baba Eddie grinds out his cigarette. “I did.”

  “From the cross?”

  “Crosses have been spiritually important symbols long before Jesus died on one.”

  “Ah, yes, so I hear.”

  “Specifically, I had in mind the crossroads.”

  “Any in particular?”

  “Well, in your case, the ones between life and death. For the Lucumí, for many traditions really, the crossroads are a sacred place. We have our own spirit to watch over them. It’s about a turning point, the moment of crisis.”

  “I’d like a moment of noncrisis right about now though.”

  He’s still smiling. “Of course, Carlos, but it doesn’t mean you’re in constant crisis. It means you are born from a place where opposites converge and you always carry that with you. How you find harmony between them is your own business.”

  So simple, he makes it sound. Still, it makes sense.

  Dr. Tijou walks in suddenly and I stand up. She raises her hand and shakes her head. “I have nothing to report yet. We have some waiting to do.”

  I collapse back into my chair and try to harmonize life and death.

  * * *

  Dr. Tijou is ecstatic. I suspect it’s partially because she’s happy to be around our strange union of friends again, but also, she’s blabbering on about some crazy machete massacre she had to deal with outside of Port-au-Prince one time. “Once the bleeding stopped,” she explains, “we had a chance to try to replace the arm! Try, I said, because, of course—”

  “Dr. Tijou,” I say as calmly as possible. “Sasha.”

  “Ah, of course!”

  We’re sitting at my kitchen table. It’s raining again. I’m sipping a cold cup of coffee and Dr. Tijou is on her eighth cup of tea or something. She’s been in and out of the living room all day, checking things, adjusting other things, fussing about in all kinds of remarkable, trauma-surgeon ways. It’s been nerve-racking as hell, but I’ve managed not to get in the way and not to ask too many questions, as requested. But I’ve had it. No more Haitian war stories, no more pleasantries. I need to know what’s going on: The doctor seems to grasp my impatience. She smiles. “I’m not an obstetrician, but it seems the baby is going to be okay.”

  “And the mommy?”

  “The mommy . . . is another department. Physically, she is stable. I have stemmed the internal bleeding that we detected, as best I can tell. I cannot speak for the other end. That is Dr. Voudou’s department.” She allows herself a small chuckle and then looks somber. “She is very strong though, that one. A fighter.”

  I nod. Sasha had swayed in and out of consciousness during the whole desperate flight back to my place. Whispered a few mostly meaningless sentences and then lapsed into a daze where she seemed to be trying to pull her own skin off, as if Sarco were still in her somehow. I tried not to think too hard about it, the haunting image of that demon crawling all up inside of her, but it’s hard to shake. We made it here and I laid her on the couch and got Victor on the phone quick. When things started to slow down, I collapsed next to Sasha, after making sure she was still breathing, and didn’t wake till Victor rang my bell with Dr. Tijou in tow. Riley came a few minutes later. He was scratched up and winded but otherwise all right.

  “Dr. Voudou, he is on the way?”

  “Should be here any minute,” I say. Patience, Carlos, patience. Rushing things won’t help. It’s all out of my hands, but still, my insides squirm with desperation as another few minutes tick past with no Baba Eddie. Don’t think about the decaying corpses of David and the junky, but of course that’s all I can see. Shit. I sip at my coffee irritably even though it’s only grounds and a dark trickle.

  “¿Hola, mi gente?” Eddie. I jump up from the table, almost spilling Dr. Tijou’s tea, and rush to open the door. Eddie’s already halfway in. Apparently, I left it unlocked, and he’s carrying a big cardboard box. Two younger guys and Iya Tiomi, all dressed in white, come in behind him, followed by Kia and Victor. “Sorry it took so long. We had to make some runs to get supplies.”

  “It’s fine,” I say, tryi
ng not to sound rushed. “She’s in here.”

  Baba Eddie is all business. He sets down the box, takes a long hard look at Sasha, and starts giving orders. “Thomas, start boiling water. Chris, prepare the herbs. Kia . . .”

  “The animals?”

  “The animals.”

  “And, Iya Tiomi.”

  The older woman smiles.

  “See what you can see.”

  She nods and, after some groaning and maneuvering, sits on the couch beside Sasha.

  Baba Eddie turns to me. “Now, you, tell me exactly what happened.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

  The santeros work late into the night. At some point, Dr. Tijou politely asks if I wouldn’t mind changing the sheets for her so she can crash out on my bed. I don’t even think she has any reason to be here anymore except pure curiosity. And maybe a doomed crush on “Dr. Voudou.” She slips under the fresh covers and passes out with a smile on her face.

  “So that’s the magic stabbing lady that stole your heart,” Kia says as we have coffee at the kitchen table. It must be getting near dawn by now.

  “Indeed it is.”

  “You knocked her up.”

  I nod. “Indeed I did.”

  “Well, at least you got to sleep with her, then.”

  “Thanks, Kia. That’s comforting.”

  “I’m saying, it’s better to have loved and lost, right?”