by Gemma Files
Because if the effect wore off, however eventually . . . well, hell; that would mean none of the above had really been worth the effort. At all.
I hissed through my suddenly half-clogged nose at the very idea, but nothing happened. The ache remained.
And grew.
But: Something will present itself, I forced myself to decide, more in certainty than conjecture. The way it always does.
And sure enough—soon enough—
—something did.
Just past Ryerson proper and into the shadow of St Mike’s, moving through that dead stretch of pawnbrokers’ shops and photographic supply warehouses. I glance-scanned the row of live DV hand-helds mounted in Henry’s window, and caught his lambent shade flickering fast from screen to screen to screen: Him from the theatre, from the Khyber. That particular guy. He Who Remained Nameless, for now.
But not, I promised myself, for much longer.
I was already turning, instinctively, even as I formed the concept—half-way ‘round where I stood before I even had a chance to recognize more than the line of his shoulder, the swing of his hair, the sidelong flash of what might be an eye: A mirror-image glance, an answering recognition. And stepping straight into the path of some ineptly tattooed young lout cocooned in a crowd of the same, Ry High jocks or proto-Engineers out for a beer before curfew, with gay-bashing one of the options passing vaguely through what they collectively called a brain. Who called out, equally automatic, as I elbowed by him:
“Hey, faggot!”
An insult I’d heard before, of course, far too many to count easily—not to mention one for which I currently had both no time and exactly zero interest, within context. So I tried to channel the old Jude, who’d always been so wonderfully diffident and accommodating in the face of fools, especially whenever violence threatened; dodge past with a half-ducked head and an apologetic, “no speakee Engarish, asshore” kind of half-smile, teeth grit and pride kept strictly quashed, as long as it got me finally face to face with my mystery man at last . . .
Except that Mr. Hetboy Supreme and his buddies didn’t actually move, which meant I couldn’t do much but hold my ground, still smiling. And when I took another look, the guy, my quarry, that ever-elusive, unimaginably attractive him—he was long gone, of course. Anyway.
And the ache was back.
“Faggot,” the doofus said again—like he’d always wanted a chance to really sound it out aloud, syllable by un-PC syllable. And I just nodded again, my fingers knitting fast behind me; weaving hidden sigils in that empty place where my shadow used to be, feeling them perfect themselves without even having to check that I was doing it right.
Immaculate. Effortless. Like signing your name in the dark.
“Something I can help you with?” I asked. Adding, for extra emphasis: “Gentlemen.”
One of them sniggered.
“Well, yes,” said the one with the big mouth, all mock-obsequious. “See, the guys and me were just thinkin’ . . . ”
Unlikely.
“ . . . about how just seein’ you come swishin’ along here made us wanna, kinda—y’know—fuck you—”
Before he could finish his little game of verbal connect-the-dots, I’d already upgraded my smile to a—wide, nasty—grin.
“Over?” I suggested, coolly. “Or was it . . . up? The ass?”
More sniggers, not all of them directed at me. “You wish,” my aspiring basher-to-be snapped back, a bit too quick for his own comfort.
I shrugged, bringing my hands forward. Rubbed my palms together, deliberately. Saw them all shiver and step back, as one, as the skin ignited—and winked, letting a spark of the same cheerless color flare in the pupil’s heart of either flat black eye. Allowing it to grow, to spread. To kiss both lids, and gild my lashes with purple flame.
And oh, but the ache was chest-high and higher now, jumping my neck to lodge behind my face: A hammer in my head, a hundred-watt bulb thrown mid-skull. Like a halo in reverse.
“Not particularly,” I replied.
Basher-boy’s buddies broke and ran as one, pack-minded to the last. But I had already crooked a burning finger at him, riveting him to the spot, a skewer of force run through every limb. Using them like strings, I walked him—a reluctant puppet—to the nearest alley. Paused behind a clutch of trash-cans, popped my fly to let it all hang out. And leaned back against the wall, waiting.
“Down,” I told him. “Now.”
He knelt, staring up. I stroked his jaw.
“Open up,” I said, sweetly.
And kept right on smiling, even after his formerly sneering lips hit the neatly-trimmed hair on my pubic ridge—right up until my sac swung free against his rigid, yet helplessly working, chin. I wasn’t thinking of him, of course, but at least I wasn’t thinking of that guy anymore—or myself, either. When I felt my orgasm at last, I came so hard I would have thought I was levitating, if I didn’t already know what that feels like: Off like a rocket, all in one choking gush. I held his head until I was done.
Then I stepped back, him still down on his knees in front of me, leaving him just enough room to pivot and puke everything I’d just given him back up on the asphalt beneath our feet.
My ache, conveniently enough, went along with it.
“You think you’re going to do something about this,” I told him, as I ordered my cuffs and tucked my shirt back in. “Not that you’d ever tell your buddies, of course. But you’re sitting there right now, thinking: ‘One day I’m gonna catch him in an alley, and he’ll have to eat through a straw for a month.’”
Closing my coat, I squatted down beside him, continuing: “But the thing is . . . even now, even with me right in front of you, you can’t really remember what I look like. And it’s getting worse. An hour from now, any given gay guy you meet might have been the one that did this to you. Am I right?” I leant a little towards him, and felt him just stop himself from shying away; that little jerk in his breath, like a slaughterhouse calf just before the bolt slams home. “Can’t tell, can you?” I asked, quietly.
He didn’t answer.
“And do you know what that means?” I went on, sitting back on my heels. “It means that the next time you see somebody coming down Church Street, and you want to say hello—I think you’re going to modify your tone a little. Lower your eyes, maybe. Not make any snap judgements. And definitely . . . under any circumstances at all . . . not call this person by insulting names. Because you never know.” I paused. “And you never will, either.”
Leaning forward again, I let my voice go cold. And whispered, right in his ear:
“So be polite, little ghost. From now on, just be very—very—polite.”
* * *
By the time I got home, one quick whiff was enough to tell me my neighbors were not only back, but already smoking up a storm. No ’80’s nostalgia dance mix filtering up through the floorboards as yet, though—so between the relative earliness of the hour and the obvious intensity of their hash-induced stupor, I figured I had about an hour before their proximity made it difficult to give the ritual I had in mind my fullest possible attention.
Because, morally repulsive as my pre-emptive strike on the Engineer might have been—even from my own (admittedly prejudiced) point of view—the plain fact was, it had done the trick. Back in that alley, the emotional cramp temporarily hampering my ability to plan ahead had flowed out of me, borne on a blissful surge of bodily fluids. And inspiration had taken its place.
So I picked up the phone, and discovered—somewhat to my own amusement—that I really could remember Franz’s mother’s number, after all.
“You’re actually going to help?” He repeated, obviously amazed.
“Why not? Might be kicks.”
“Yeah, right. For who?”
“Does it matter?”
Planning it out, even as we fence
d: use a two-ring circle system, with Jen sequestered in the inner, Franz and I in the outer. Proceed from Franz’s assumption that Fleer was the demon in question, until otherwise proven; force him to vacate by offering him another rabbit-hole to jump down, one far more attractive to him than Jen’s could ever be . . .
Making the connection, then, mildly startled by the ruthless depths of my own deviousness. And observing, to myself: Now, that’s not nice.
But I knew I’d have to try it, anyway.
I gave Franz a detailed list of what I’d need, only to be utterly unsurprised when he immediately balked at both its length and its—fairly expensive—specificity.
“Why the hell don’t you ever practice straight-up Chinese magic, anyway?” He demanded. “Needles, herbs, all that good, cheap stuff . . . ”
“Same reason you don’t raise any Mennonite demons, I guess.”
He invited me to suck his dick. I gave an evil smile.
“Oh, Franz,” I said, gently. “How do you know I never did?”
Next step was getting all the appointment-book bullshit dealt with: Setting a time, date and place, with Jen’s address making the top of my list in terms of crucial missing information. According to Franz, she’d been living in some Annex hole in the ground for most of the last five years, vampire sex shows and all—though not an actual hole, mind you, or the actual ground. But only because that kind of logistical whimsy would have been way too interesting a concept, for either of them.
“And what are you planning on bringing to the party?” He asked, grumpily. To which I replied, airily:
“ . . . I’ll think of something.”
* * *
Which is how I came, a mere three hours later, to be sitting side by side with Carra in the Clarke’s inaccurately-labelled Green Room—her slump-shouldered and staring at her scars against the grey-painted wall, me trying (and failing) to stop my feet from tapping impatiently on the scuffed grey linoleum floor. We were virtually alone, aside from one nurse stationed on the door, whose eyes kept straying back to the static-spitting TV in the corner as though it exercised some sort of magnetic attraction on her, and a dusty prayer-plant whose leaves seemed permanently fused together by the utter lack of natural light.
“I need a reading,” I told Carra, briskly.
Toneless: “You know I can’t do that anymore, Jude.”
“I know you don’t.”
“Same difference.”
It seemed clear she probably sensed ulterior motives beneath my visit, even though she knew herself to be always my court of last resort, when faced with any inexplicable run of synchronicity. But she didn’t seem particularly interested in probing further, probably because this just happened to be one of those mornings when she wasn’t much into seeing people; not live ones, anyway.
“Look,” I said, “somebody’s been doing stuff, and taking my name in vain while they do it. Sleeping with Ed, even after I already kicked him to the curb. Volunteering my services to Franz, even after I already told him to take a hike.” I paused. “I even tried to do a spell, on that guy—the one from the movie?” As she nodded: “Well, that was all screwed up somehow, too. Like, just . . . weird.”
“Your magic was weird,” she repeated, evenly.
“Abnormally so.”
She looked up, brushing her bangs away. “Told you there was something about that guy,” she said, with just a sliver of her old, evilly detached, Ryerson-era grin.
I snapped my fingers. “Oh yeah, I remember now—you did, didn’t you? Just never told me what.”
“How should I know?”
“You read minds, Carra,” I reminded her.
“Not well. Not on short notice.”
“Also bullshit.”
She turned to her hands again, examining each finger’s gift-spotted quick in turn, each ragged edge of nail. Finally: “Well, anyways . . . it’s not like I’m the only one who’s told you that.”
“Grandmother Yau did say she saw me twice,” I agreed, slowly.
A snort. “I’m surprised she could even see you once.”
“Why?”
“For the same reason I can hardly see you, Jude. You’re only half there. Got no shadow, remember?”
Hair back in her eyes, eyes back on her palms—scanning their creases like if she only studied them hard enough, she thought she could will herself a whole new history. Then wrinkling her forehead and sniffing, a kind of combined wince/flinch, before demanding—apropos of nothing much, far as I could tell—
“God. Can you smell that, or what?”
“What?”
“That, Jude.”
Ah, yes: that.
Guess not.
Yet—oh, what WAS that stupid knocking inside my chest, that soft, intermittent scratch building steadily at the back of my throat? Like I was sickening for something; a cold, a fever . . . some brief reflection of the Carra I’d once known, poking out—here and there—from under her hovering Haldol high.
I knew I could still remember exactly what it was, though, if only I let myself. That was the worst of it. Not the innate hurt of Carra’s ongoing tragedy—this doomed, hubristic sprawl from darkness to darkness, hospital to halfway house and back again. Carra’s endless struggle for the right to her own independent consciousness, pitted as she was against an equally endless, desperate procession of needy phantoms, to whom possession was so much more than nine tenths of the law.
“The biggest mistake you can ever make,” she told me, once, “is to ever let them know you see them at all. Because it gets around, Jude. It really gets around.”
(Really.)
Remembering how she’d once taught me almost everything I know, calmly and carefully—everything that matters, anyway. Everything that’s helped me learn everything I’ve learned since. How she broke all the rules of “traditional” mediumship and laid herself willingly open to anything her Talent brought her way, playing moth, then flame, then moth again. After which, one lost day—a day she’s never spoken of, even to me—she somehow decided that the best idea would be for her to burn on, unchecked, ‘till she burned herself out completely.
How she’d spent almost all her time since the Ryerson Graduation Ball struggling—however inefficiently—to get her humanity “back,” even though that particular impossible dream has always formed the real root of her insanity. And how I pitied her for it—pitied her, revered her, resented her. How I held her in increasingly black, bitter contempt, anger and resentment over it, all because she’d wasted five long years trying to commit the unforgivable sin of leaving me behind.
No, I knew the whole situation a little too well to mourn over, at this point; almost as well as Carra did, in fact, and you didn’t see her crying. She held her ground instead, with grace and strength, until the encroaching tide threatened to pull her under. And then she took a little Thorazine vacation, letting the Clarke’s free drugs tune the constant internal whisper of her disembodied suitors’ complaints down to a dull roar. Putting herself somewhere else, neatly and efficiently, so the dead could have their way with her awhile—and all on the off-chance that they might thus be satisfied enough, unlikely as it might seem, to finally leave her alone.
What I felt wasn’t empathy. It was annoyance. I had had things to talk about with Carra, business to attend to. And she had made herself—quite deliberately—unreachable.
Besides which: Feeling sorry for Carra, genuinely sorry . . . well, that’d be far too normal for me, wouldn’t it? To feel my chest squeeze hot and close over Carra’s insoluble pain, just because she was my oldest Canadian acquaintance, my mentor and my muse. My best, my truest, friend.
My one. And my only.
(A memory loop of Ed’s voice intervening here, thick and blurry: “Tell you what, Jude—why don’t you surprise me: Name the last time you felt anything. For somebody other than yourse
lf, I mean.”)
And when was it we had that conversation, exactly? Two hours ago? Two months?
Two years, maybe. Not that it mattered a single flying fuck.
Ai-yaaah. So inappropriate. So selfish. So, very—
“Still walking around out there, like any other ghost,” Carra continued, musingly. “Looking like you, acting . . . sort of like you . . . ”
—me.
“So,” I said, slowly. “What you’re telling me is—this guy I’ve been after, for the last couple of days—”
“He’s your shadow.”
And: Ohhhh.
Well, that explained a lot.
Rubbing a hand across my lips, then stroking it absently back over my hair. And thinking, all the while: Could be true; why not? I mean—who did that guy remind me of, anyway, if not myself? Certainly explained the attraction.
Running after myself, yearning after myself. Working magic on myself.
Man, I always knew I was a narcissist.
All the lesser parts of me: Weak where I was potent, slippery where I was direct, silent where I was vocal, acquiescent where I was anything but. Myself, reflected backwards and upside-down in a weirdly flattering Yin mirror, just like Grandmother Yau said.
Caught in a mesh of darkness.
“My ‘evil twin’,” I suggested, facetiously.
She shrugged. “Kind of depends on your definition.” Then: “Christ! What is that smell?”
In other words: If he’s the evil one—
—then what’s that supposed to make you?
I shook my head yet again, flicking the idea away—such a smooth-ass move, and one that really does get easier and easier, the more diligently you practice it. Then propelled myself upwards and outwards, briskly brushing the room’s dust from my clothes, like I was simultaneously scrubbing myself free of her aura’s leaking, purple-brown, depression-and-defeat-inflected stain. Saying:
