by Gemma Files
And Mary was the Unseen King.
She brought a book on Antarctica to school one day and spread it out excitedly beneath the jungle-gym. “The most inhospitable place on earth,” she called it. Faced with the facts, we had to agree.
Turning and turning at the world’s utter end, breaking apart only to reform again with a slowness which makes fossils seem hasty, Antarctica is an abstraction made real upon which nothing was ever meant to live for long. It is nothing, an inexhaustible waste stretching as far as the eye can see—numb, blind, and devouring.
It was the way we felt. We loved it for that, and made it our own.
In Yle’en, no clocks run. In Yle’en, the ice is made of glass. It freezes the breath solid in your lungs everywhere you touch, choking you, cutting you to the bone. Blood is its art, cruelty its highest form of compliment. Our horrid avatars move with ritual politesse across its blank, lidless eye. Their hunger is an incurable virus running rampant and unafraid across the crevasses, inexorable.
We exiled our parents to Yle’en daily, and tortured them without pity. We murdered countless generations there, and reanimated them to face the knives again, at a whim. We exterminated a slew of civilizations, just for fun. And, along the way, we instilled Yle’en’s citizens with our own values—the wit and wisdom of abused children, laid down as unbreakable law.
We took comfort in it, outgrew it, and forgot it.
But it never forgot us.
* * *
A week before she died, Mary called me up. I had just broken with Babs for once and for all, and was drowning my sorrows with crème de menthe in the kitchen. I let the phone ring ten times before I picked it up, more out of respect for the caller’s tenacity than curiosity.
“Hello, House of Pain.”
“Zara?”
I sat straight up when I heard the voice. Not just because it had been six or seven years since the last time, but because she sounded so desperate—as if her telephone box were underwater, and slowly springing a leak.
“Mary, where are you? Christ, it’s been—”
“Zara, it’s coming,” she said.
I absorbed that. “What is?” I asked, finally.
“Yle’en.”
There was a pause. She spoke across it, the words tumbling out without waiting for a response. Like a cry for help, or a confession.
“Trevor’s father is dead. They found him at home, all over the place—upstairs, downstairs, in my lady’s chamber. Blood everywhere—but it wasn’t liquid or dry. It was frozen.”
A bird tapped lightly at my window, making love to its own reflection. Probably deranged, as most city animals soon become.
“And Ray’s aunt, too. She suffocated in bed—her lungs were full of pollen. The cops said the whole house smelled like lilies. When they broke the door down, it was so cold they could all see their own breath. Zara, this was in August.”
I studied my right hand. My cuticles were speckled with what my father used to call gift spots, but which I later discovered to be the residue of slow-healing bruises on the flesh beneath. Apt.
Mary was still ticking off her mental list. “And then Bob Shand—you remember our uncle? It got the bastard in September. Dogs, the cops told Eunice. But she knows better, and so do I. Dogs don’t leave triangular bite-marks.”
“I would’ve thought you’d be glad to see him go,” I said. “All things considered.”
“I was, that’s not the point.” She paused. “I’ve been in therapy for a while. It helped a lot. I managed to forgive some people—my mother, for one. But they found her last night, in her car, in the river. Floating in a block of ice.”
The sun stood still and white in a pale grey sky. Beyond my garden, people were laughing.
“Have you called the others yet?”
“Of course.”
“And what did they say?”
She sighed. “Eunice didn’t want to be bothered. Ray told me to get professional help. Trevor’s line’s been disconnected. Zara, they’ve changed so much.”
“And I haven’t?” I felt like giggling, but my mouth wouldn’t move in the right direction.
Silence and hissing, across the miles. Then:
“I’ve been thinking about it. There’s one chance—slim, but I’ve got to take it.”
“Which is?”
“I was the one who started it all. I showed you guys the books, I sowed the seeds. I’m the Unseen King, right?” Her voice quavered. “If anyone can stop Yle’en—reason with it somehow—it should be me.”
“And if you can’t?”
No answer.
I absently wondered how she planned to whistle them all up. Long-dormant images sprang immediately to mind, but I held onto my stomach, and pushed them firmly back down.
“But it’s changed too, Zara,” she whispered at last. “I can feel it. It hates us now.”
“No, Mary,” I said softly. “It hasn’t changed. We have. And that’s why.”
For a moment, I almost thought that I could hear her heartbeat.
“Good luck,” I said.
“I’ll call back in two days,” she replied.
We both hung up at once.
Three days later, the police rang my bell.
* * *
It wasn’t much of a surprise, though. Because the same night, about 11:15 p.m., I was looking for a scar-tissueless patch of inner arm on which to test my theory that writing advertising copy makes you a zombie when the bathroom door opened. It was Babs, her face wrinkling in disgust.
“Shit, not this again,” she said.
“Apparently so,” I said. “Forget something?”
She’d used her key to get in, which I—in the heat of the moment—had forgotten all about. I leaned against the bedroom wall as she rifled through our drawers, stuffing odd articles of lingerie into a big plastic bag.
“There’s a name for that problem of yours, you know,” she told me. “It’s called Borderline Personality Syndrome, and all it takes to get rid of it is a little effort. I read about it in Cosmopolitan.”
“A little effort,” I repeated. “Boy, I never would have thought of that. Thanks, Babs.”
And the argument began afresh. I didn’t get to talk a lot after that, as she went over the usual complaints with new vigor—my lack of commitment, my lack of imagination, my lack of passion.
“You blame everything about how you’ve fucked up your life on this thing with your Dad! If I’d been abused, I’d at least be sad, be angry, be something! But you’re just cold, Zara! There’s nothing inside you, and that’s why you do that to yourself—because you know that if you couldn’t feel pain, you wouldn’t feel anything!”
The gospel according to Babs, drawn from a bevy of self-help gurus, each one devoured, considered, and discarded within a week to make room for the next.
“No one could love you, Zara! You don’t even love yourself!”
Cold.
I could see my own breath.
And an overpowering smell of lilies filled the room.
Babs’ hand was on the knob when I suddenly yelled: “Wait, don’t!”
She turned back. Just for a second. And her lips curled back, showing even teeth.
“You sad bitch,” she said, quietly. And pulled.
The door fell open. Beyond it were the Twins.
And they ate her alive.
I suppose I could have done something to stop them, done anything other than just watch. But I’m not sure. Because, as they left, they looked into my eyes. And I saw them smile. Their teeth were made of glass.
Why should they love us? I thought. We’re their parents, after all.
I might have been able to help her. But probably not. And, at least in that respect, she was right. I just didn’t love her enough to die with her.
* * *
I’ve told you that Mary’s dead, but I can’t actually say for sure. After all, the police never found her body. Just her skin.
And I’ve remembered since then that, in Yle’en, the most loving tortures of all are reserved for those guilty of treason.
I really hope she’s dead.
I watch the news whenever I can these days. They say that large clumps of ice have formed overnight in the Kansas cornfields. They say that Antarctic explorers were recently surprised to find lilies growing along the southernmost ice-ridges. They say that snow fell in Bombay this year. Only for a day, but even so.
But, as Babs used to tell the office gossips, they say a lot of things.
* * *
Sometimes I dream that I hear great machines grinding away slowly, deep under the ground. Sometimes I dream that my mouth is full of pins. Sometimes I dream of sheep. But mostly I dream of Yle’en, the Drowned Land, whose borders are growing wild as crabgrass and eating whatever they touch. Almost every night now, in fact. And that frightens me more than I can ever say.
Pretend That We’re Dead
THE FIRST TIME I cut myself, on the lid of a tin I’d been opening, it was inadvertent. I stumbled as I lifted it free, and the sharp, round edge slid deep into the fleshy underside of my arm, freeing a flap that swung wide with every movement. Blood broke from the wound in a full, black pulse; I had to hug it closed, the knuckles of my other hand white with effort.
But when my mother saw it, her eyes went wide as stars. She cooed encouragement to me all the way to the hospital.
It was the first time she had spoken directly to me in over two months.
Afterward, when her interest dimmed again—directly proportionate to my rate of healing—I realized that I had been once more consigned to the roster of the invisible: All those inconvenient living shadows who walk, and speak, and have the unmitigated gall to get between her and the endless current of the passing dead, whose faces she spends her days scanning for any sign of recognition. For the familiar features of my brother Ethan, born ten years before me, who joined the Parade when I was only five.
Because we are none of us so real to her as he has always been, haloed like we are in mundane and unwelcome skins of light. We’re chores, tying up her time, diverting her attention from the real task at hand.
Weekends, I walk the streets with my Ghoster friends, all white-face and caked mascara—cheekbones and noses colored out skull-style, conspicuous by their absence. We go cocooned in velvet and chiffon, in white and black and grey, shod in claw-toed boots with heels too high for comfort, our veils and trains left trailing. Strutting silent, our walkmen left ostentatiously blasting—a steady stream of noise-whisper from one-name bands, recognizable only in closest proximity: Curve, Coil, Hole, Tool, Lard.
And in and about and around us, always, the real ghosts glide—vivid phantoms that eddy like smoke, glitter like scales. A mist and a haze of constant motion, flashing by like spokes in some profane prayer-wheel: Bright slices of darkness, strobe-quick, trimmed in self-doused light.
A girl with jewels for teeth, eels for hands. An old man inching himself up the street, slithering belly-down, pulled along on an anchorless rope of shining hair. Shark-toothed grins. Silent, watch-face eyes.
The facts, then: It all started the year I was born; we post-Ghosties call it the Infestation. And what it means is Toronto remade, slipped through some cosmic crack and out again onto an “other side” that soon turned out to be the Other Side. Phenomena aplenty, both actively malign and strangely beneficial, measurably physical and apparently spiritual: Cold spots, words written on walls, knockings, mutterings, whisperings, ghost lights, radiant boys, warning shrieks; apports, transports, automatic writing, ectoplasm, mediumistic possession. Anything and everything “weird,” with only a sort of consistent inconsistency as the sole established rule.
Faith doesn’t seem to help, or hinder, for all the varieties of faith we have to spare—the multiculti mosaic at work, church to mosque to temple to bank to whatthefuckever. And sure, people naturally want to think there are rules to discover and follow—that if Torontonians only found out what it was that they “did” to “deserve” this happening to them, they’d be somehow able to defuse the situation; repent, atone, stop digging up the old Indian burial ground—no rules, or reasons, seem to apply.
Or, to put it another way: Clean, neat and boring as we’ve always been, we still might’ve done enough dirt to attract this, if it’s even the kind of thing needs “attracting.” But there’s not one damn thing from before or since to prove that anything we did is the reason it began . . . or the reason it continues.
So: Spirits, phantoms, specters, dopplegangers and harbingers erring always on the side of the surreal rather than the traditional; dog-headed men in tuxedos rather than werewolves, palely loitering belles dames sans merci rather than vampires. Monsters and witches and freaks floating ‘round on every corner, dead men—and women—dancing down every street.
But Cherry Street in particular, of course . . . home, weekly, to the Parade. Which Ethan watched, and followed, and—finally—
—joined.
Because much as Mom would never want to admit it, Ethan spent most of—my—life aping Toronto’s ghosts too, almost the exact same way my friends and I do now . . . aside from going farther with the imitation, of course, and for substantially different reasons. If the papers I found hidden behind a grate in his bedroom wall are any indication, Ethan was seeking some kind of shortcut away from mortality—a crack of his own to slip through, sideways. To fall and lodge forever between those sharp, sharp teeth that hide unseen beneath the “normal” world’s tight-shut lips.
And oh, it must’ve taken such amazing concentration, such amazing effort, to seek out his own demise at the Infestation’s—hand? To engineer, single-handedly, his own transition from flesh to phantom.
But let’s face it: Effort like that never goes unrewarded for long . . . as Ethan, along with all his fellow Parade Day attendees, soon found out.
They went out in the morning, to the top of Cherry Street, and they waited for the Parade to begin. And then, when it did . . . they followed it, all the way down to that bleak brick wall at the bottom that the Parade walks through each and every Saturday afternoon. Followed it out of this world—
—and into another.
Twelve years on, meanwhile, my mother still drifts alone in the wake of Ethan’s disappearance. The fallout from his last gesture draws her like a tide, even now—especially what with him being no longer around to repeat it.
So I Ghost up, and go out, and stalk around the shadowy streets of my half-dead home-town, imperiously brushing elbows with the same things that took Ethan in: Ate him whole, washed him away, leaving nothing behind but the dry, picked bones of my mother’s love . . . nothing left for me to hold onto, aside from a dull pretense to the same spectral status.
Sun editorials aside, though, I don’t Ghost up because I want to die. I do it because I want my mother to see me—or want to see me, at the very, very least, at least as much . . .
. . . as I already know she wants to see him.
* * *
Which is why the second time I cut myself, it was intentional—and the third, and the fourth, each time a little deeper: A nail from my pinkie, shed to win a wan maternal smile; the top joint of my index finger, to extort one more sympathetic word. Each a sacrifice spent on the altar of Mom’s absent attention. Each gaining me just a hint of response, before she slips right back into the fog.
Lost and groping, over and over. And over.
But hey, I can wait. I still have both my eyes left to give, after all. My breath. My name.
“Ethan—”
“I’m Monica, Mom.”
“Yes, Ethan. I know.”
Well, she does talk to me, now; that’s got to count for something.
Or so I struggle, mountingly, to reassure myself.
* * *
Because: In a city full of real dead children, it’s me, my friends, the whole pathetic Ghoster subculture who’ve ceased to register—born on, around or after Parade Day, shoved aside under the shadow of a generation lost. Doomed, always, to make room for our parents’ grief, to step aside for one more gulp of a far more precious sibling’s enduring but elusive scent. To catch the waft of their hair—a passing, spectral caress—as they slip by.
We’re memory’s exiles, mere brief flesh. How can we possibly hope to compete?
Days like these, between dressing up and posing all weekend and working like a neutered dog all week (nose to the keyboard, bent almost double to peer blankly at the readout of my cubicle computer’s screen), I swear I start to feel as though I already am what I only try so hard to seem: An unlaid ghost, eternally left behind—
—and not even my ghost, either.
It’s on days like these that I feel the urge to cut myself rise up, and bite it back down so hard blood salts my mouth. Remember how good it once felt to be loved—me, for me alone—and then wonder, in turn, if what I think I remember is anything more than plain old wishful thinking.
At which point I cast my mind back even further, to my precocious high school days, reminding myself how—in Old English—the word “ghost” is the same as the word for “anger.”
I plan out my own final gesture, on days like these—something far too grand to ignore, far too big to overlook. Dream absently of how I’m going to make my mother watch as I act it through, and practice the speech I’ll make for the occasion—the one that goes, and I quote:
“Look, Mom, look. So—how you like me now? Better . . . ”
. . . or . . . worse?
Because—when I pretend that I’m dead, like the rest of my Ghoster friends, that’s when she likes me best; when I cut myself, scar myself, slash over my half-healed scars and let them form again, keloiding the wounds ‘til they puff like pastry. When I pepper my skin with fresh flesh flowers on her uninterested behalf, blood-blister-bruised and purple with relevance—always just one more, freely given, payment in pain for pain. One more for each of my mother’s ceaseless, careless tears . . . the current of her mourning, washing me away piece by piece by piece: Tide to my rock, wave to my sand . . .
