“You have salt?” Jenna asks. “I would prefer that over eating it fresh.”
“I don’t have any.”
Why does the child sound so happy about that? Jenna doesn’t have patience with gladness nowadays. She has stopped hanging out with her friends and them from since. They would probably just want to go to the club, to dress up nice, to lime. Jenna doesn’t want to do any of that any more. Dressing up leads to borrowing your sister’s shoes without permission. It leads to quarreling over the shoes in the car on the way to the club. It leads to your sister losing control of the steering wheel and driving the car off the road into the river.
Jenna’s eyes overflow. She has become used to the quick spurt of tears, as though someone has squeezed lime juice into her eyes.
Gently, the child says, “And look the salt right there so.” It nods approvingly and hands over a particularly big crab. Jenna snatches it. She pulls off a gundy claw. With her teeth, she cracks it open. Crab juice and moist meat fall into her mouth. She sucks the rest of the meat out of the claw. She’s so hungry that she barely chews before swallowing. As she eats, she cries salt tears onto the food, seasoning it. She fills her belly.
Jenna stops eating when she notices that the child is trying to reach for its own moccasined feet. Its arms are too short. The child says, softly, “I wish I could take these shoes off.” It turns its smooth face in Jenna’s direction, and smiles. “She had them with her in the car that night. She was going to give them to you, Mummy. As a present for me.”
Jenna’s mind goes still, like the space between one breath and the next. Somehow, she is out of the water and sitting on the rock beside the child. Gently, she touches one of the child’s infant-fat legs. The child doesn’t protest. Just leans back on its hands, its face upturned towards hers. Jenna lifts the child’s small, lumpy foot. She loosens the lace on the moccasin and eases it off. The tiny yellow shoe sits in her palm, an empty shell. The child’s foot is cold. Jenna cups the foot to warm it, and removes the other shoe. She looks at the two baby feet that fit easily in her hand. The child’s strange gait makes sense now. Its feet are turned backwards.
Jenna gasps and pulls the child onto her lap. She curls her arms around it and holds its cold body close to hers. The other life she’d lost that night. The one only she and her older sister had known about.
The child snuggles against her. It puts one hand to its mouth and contentedly sucks its thumb. Jenna rocks it. She says, “I didn’t even self tell Clarence yet, you know.” The child grunts and keeps sucking its thumb. Jenna continues, “I sixteen. He fifteen. I was trying to think whether I was ready to grow up so fast.”
The child sucks its thumb.
Jenna takes a breath that fills her lungs so deeply that it hurts. “Part of me was relieved to lose you.” Her breath catches. “Zuleika drowned. And part of me was glad!” Jenna rocks the child and bawls. “I sorry,” she says. “I so sorry.” After a while, she is quiet. Time passes, a peaceful space of forever.
The child takes its thumb out of its mouth. It says, “Is her own she need.”
Jenna is puzzled. “What?”
“Is that I was trying to tell you in the store. She don’t want new shoes. She have the right side shoe already. You have to give her back the left side one. The one you been wearing.”
Jenna surprises herself with a low yip of laughter. All this laughing tonight, like a language she’d forgotten. “I didn’t even self think of that.”
The child replies, “I have to go now.”
Jenna sighs. “Yes, I know.” She takes the child’s blank, unwritten face in her hands and kisses it.
The child stands and pulls off its t-shirt and jeans. Its body is as featureless as its face. Jenna puts its hat back on. The child says, “You could keep my shoes instead, if you want.” It eases itself down off the rock and toddles towards the water, away from life. But in the mud, the imprints of its feet are turned towards Jenna. The child enters the river. Knee deep, it stops and looks back at her. It calls out, “Auntie say she will look after me!”
Jenna waves. “Tell her thanks!”
Her child nods and waves back. It dives into the water, panama hat and all.
Jenna is still holding the tiny, wet moccasins. Gently, she squeezes the water from them. She slips them into the front pocket of her jeans. She goes and picks up the destroyed left pump from the rock. She kisses it. She yells, “Zuleika! Look your shoe here!” She raises her arm, meaning to fling the shoe into the river.
But there. In the very middle of the water; a rising, rolling semicircle, like a half-submerged truck tyre. Blacker than the blackness around. Swallowing light. The back of Jenna’s neck prickles. Muscles in her calves jump; her running muscles. She makes herself remain still, though.
The fat, rolling pipe of blackness extends into a snakelike tail that wriggles over to the shore. The tail is un-bifurcated, its tip as big around as her wrist. The tip is coiled around a red patent pump, the matching right side to the shoe that Jenna is holding. In a whisper, Jenna asks, “Zuleika?” The tail tip slaps up onto the bank, splashing Jenna with mud.
Zuleika rises godlike from the river. Jenna whimpers and runs behind the rock.
Zuleika’s upper half is still wearing the red sequined minidress, now in shreds, that she’d worn to go dancing the night of the accident. Moonlight makes the sequins twinkle, where they aren’t hidden by river weed that has become tangled in them. The weed dangles and drips. Zuleika’s lower half has become that snakelike tail. At her middle, the tail is as thick around as her waist. She floats upright. Her tail waves on the surface of the water. It extends as far upriver as Jenna can see in the moonlight.
Jenna’s douen child clambers from where she’d been hidden behind Zuleika’s back. The child climbs to sit on Zuleika’s shoulders. It knots its fingers into the snares of Zuleika’s hair. The water hasn’t damaged its hat. Is the child smiling, or baring its teeth? Jenna can’t tell.
Zuleika raises the whole length of her tail, and Jenna quails at the sheer mass of it, blacker than black against the night sky. Zuleika smashes her tail against the water’s surface. The vast wave of sound, echoing up the river, hurts Jenna’s ears. Jenna hears cars screeching to a halt on the highway, horns bleating. Jenna puts her hands against her ears and cowers. Not another crash. Please.
But there is no sound of collision. A couple of car doors slam. A couple of voices ask each other what the rass that sound was. Mama d’lo Zuleika hovers calmly in the water. The few trees must be hiding her from view, because soon, car doors slam again. Cars start up and drive off. Zuleika, Jenna, and the douen child are alone again.
Jenna finds that she’s still holding the left-side shoe. She gathers her courage. She comes out from behind the rock. She says to her sister, “This is yours.” She holds the shoe out to Zuleika.
Zuleika’s tail-tip comes flying out of the darkness and grabs the shoe from Jenna. She hugs both once-shiny red shoes—the dusty one and the waterlogged one—to her breast.
The wetness in Jenna’s own eyes makes the moon break up and shimmer like its own reflection on the water. “I miss you,” she says.
Zuleika smiles gently. Carrying her niece or nephew, Zuleika sinks back beneath the water.
Jenna’s hands are cold. She slides them into the front pockets of her jeans. One hand touches the child’s shoes. The other touches her cell phone. She brings it out. It’s wet, but for a wonder, it’s still working. She texts her mother, says she will be home soon. She calls another number. “Clarence, you busy? You could come and give me a lift home? I by the river. You know where. No, I’m all right. I love you, too. Have something I need to tell you. Don’t worry, I said!”
She still has her washekongs. She rinses her feet in the river and puts them on. She collects the empty shoe box and the plastic shopping bag. She climbs up the embankment to the roadside to wait for her boyfriend.
Old Habits
I was thinking about the notion of gho
sts being the souls of people whose physical lives are ended, but who for some reason remain stuck, unable to move on to the next plane of existence.
Ghost malls are sadder than living people malls, even though malls of the living are already pretty damned sad places to be. And let me get this out of the way right now, before we go any further: I’m dead, okay? I’m fucking dead. This is not going to be one of those stories where the surprise twist is and he was dead! I’m not a bloody surprise twist. I’m just a guy who wanted to buy a necktie to wear at his son’s high school graduation.
I wander through the Sears department store for a bit, past a pyramid of shiny boxes with action heroes peeking out of their cellophane windows, another one of hard-bodied girl dolls with permanently pointed toes and tight pink clothing, past a rack of identical women’s cashmere sweaters in different colours: purple, black, red and green. The sign on the rack reads, 30% off, today only! It’s Christmas season. Everywhere I wander, I’m followed by elevator music versions of the usual hoary Christmas classics. Funny, a ghost being haunted by music.
I make a right at the perfume counter. It’s kind of a relief to no longer be able to smell it before I see it, to no longer have to hold my breath to avoid inhaling the migraine-inducing esters cloying the air around it.
Black Anchor Ohsweygian is lying on the ground by the White Shoulders perfume display. Actually, she’s rolling around, her long grey hair in her eyes, her face contorted, yelling. I can’t hear her; she’s on the clock. Her hands slap ineffectually at the air, trying to fight off the invisible security guard who did her in. Her outer black skirt is up around her thighs, revealing underneath it a beige skirt, and under that a flower print one, and under that a baggy pair of jeans. She’s wearing down-at-heel construction boots. They’re too big for her; as I watch, she kicks out and one of the boots flies off, exposing layers of torn socks and a flash of puffy, bruised ankle. The boot wings right through me. I don’t even flinch when I see it coming. I’ve lost the habit.
Now Black Anchor’s face is being crushed down onto the hard tile floor, her features compressed. She’s told me that the security guard knelt on her head to hold her down. One arm is trapped under her, the other one flailing. It won’t be long now. I shouldn’t watch. It’s her private moment. We all have them, us ghosts. Once a day, we die all over again. You get used to it, but it’s not really polite to watch someone re-dying their last moments of true contact with the world. For some of us, that moment becomes precious, a treasured thing. Jimmy would go ballistic if he ever caught me watching him choke on a piece of steak in the Surf ’N’ Turf restaurant up on the third floor. Black doesn’t mind sharing her death with me, though. She’s told me I can watch as often as I like. I used to do it out of prurient curiosity, but now I watch because I just feel a person should have someone who cares about them with them when they die. I like Black. I can’t touch her to comfort her. Can’t even whisper to her. Not while she’s still alive, which she just barely is right now. In a few seconds she’ll be able to hear and see me, to know that I am here, bearing witness. But we still won’t be able to touch. If we try, it’ll be like two drifts of smoke melting into and through each other. That may be the true tragedy of being a ghost.
Black Anchor’s squinched face has flushed an unpleasant shade of red. Her arm flops to the ground. Her rusty shopping cart has tumbled over beside her, spilling overused white plastic shopping bags, knotted shut and stuffed so full the bags are torn in places. In the bags are Black Anchor’s worldly possessions. She pulls the darnedest things out of those bags to entertain Baby Boo with. I mean, why in the world did Black Anchor used to carry a pair of diving goggles with her as she trudged year in year out up and down the city streets, pushing her disintegrating shopping cart in front of her? She won’t tell me or Jimmy why she has the goggles. Says a lady has to have some secrets.
I go and sit by Black Anchor’s head. I hope, for the umpteenth time, that I’ve passed through the security guard that killed her. I hope he can feel me doing so, even just the tiniest bit, and it’s making him shudder. Goose walking on his grave. Maybe he’ll die in this mall too, someday, and become a ghost. Have to look Black Anchor in the eye.
A little “tuh” of exhaled breath puffs out of her. Every day, she breathes her last one more time. Her body relaxes. Her face stops looking squished against the floor. She opens her eyes, sees me sitting there. She smiles. “That was a good one,” she says. “I think the guard had had hummus for lunch. I think I smelled chick peas and parsley on his breath.” In her mouth, I can see the blackened stump that is all that was left of one rotted-out front tooth.
I return her smile. In those few seconds of pseudo-life she goes on the clock every day, Black Anchor tries to capture one more sensory detail from all she has left of the real world. “You are so fucking crazy,” I tell her. “Wanna go for a walk?”
“Sure. I’ve clocked out for the day.” The usual ghost joke. She sits up. By the time we get to our feet, her bundle buggy is upright again, her belongings crammed back into it. Her boot is back on her foot. It happens like that every time. I’ve never been able to catch the moment when it changes. Black pushes her creaky bundle buggy in front of her. We walk out of the south entrance of Sears, the one that leads right into the mall. Cheerful canned music follows us, exulting about the comforts of chestnuts and open fires.
Quigley’s standing in front of the jewellery shop, peering in at the display. He does that a lot, especially at Christmas time and Valentine’s Day, when the fanciest diamond rings get displayed in the window. The day Quigley kicked it had been a February 13. He’d been in the mall shopping for an engagement ring for his girl. He was going to put it in a big box of fancy chocolates, surprise her with it on Valentine’s Day. But then he had that final asthma attack, right there in the mall’s west elevator. Quigley’s twenty-four years old. Was twenty-four years old. Will be twenty-four years old for a long, long time now. Perhaps forever. He still carries around that box of expensive chocolates he bought before he stopped breathing. It’s in one of those chi-chi little paper shopping bags, the kind with the flat bottom and the twisted paper handles.
Quigley waves sadly at us. He has pushed his waving hand through the handles of the gift bag. The bag bumps against his forearm. We wave back. Black murmurs, “He’s brooding. He doesn’t get over it, he’ll find himself stepping outside.”
There’s a rumour among the mall ghosts; kind of an urban legend or maybe spectral legend that we whisper amongst ourselves when we’re telling each other stories to keep the boredom at bay. There was this guy, apparently, this ghost guy before my time, who got so stir-crazy that he yanked open one of the big glass doors that leads to the outside. He stepped into the blackness that is all we can see beyond the mall doors. People say that once he was outside, they couldn’t see him any longer. They say he shouted, once. Some people say it was a shout of joy. Some of them think it was agony, or terror. Jimmy says the shout sounded more like surprise to him. Whatever it was, the guy never came back. Jimmy says we lose one like that every few years. Once it was an eight-year-old girl. Everyone felt bad about that one. They still get into arguments about which one of them failed to keep an eye on her.
What that story tells me; we can touch the doors to the outside. Not everything in this mall is intangible to us.
I’m with Black Anchor Ohsweygian and Jimmy Lee around one of the square vinyl-topped tables in the food court; the kind with rounded-off edges that seats four. Like everywhere else in the mall, the food court seems deserted except for the ghosts. But there’s food under the heat lamps and in the warming trays. Overcooked battered shrimp at the Cap’n Jack’s counter; floppy, grey beef slices in gravy at Meat ’n’ Taters; soggy broccoli florets at China Munch. The food levels go down and are replenished constantly during the day. To us, it’s like plastic dollhouse food. We see the steam curling up from the warming trays, but there’s no sound of cooking, no food smells. Kitty’s standing in front o
f Mega Burger. I think she’s staring at the shiny metal milk shake dispenser.
Jimmy and Black Anchor and I are sitting on those hard plastic seats that are bolted to food court tables. We’re playing “Things I Miss.” Kind of sitting, anyway. Sitting on surfaces is one of those habits that’s hard to break. We can’t feel the chairs under our butts, but we still try to sit on them. Jimmy Lee’s aim isn’t so good; he’s actually sunk about two inches into his chair. But then, he’s a tall guy; maybe it helps him not have to lean over to see eye to ghost eye with me and Black Anchor. Baby Boo has decided to join us today. He—I’ve decided to call him “he”—is lying on his back on the food court table, swaddled in his yellow blanket and onesie. He’s mumbling at his little fist and staring from one to the other of us as we speak. Baby Boo doesn’t quite have the hang of the laws of physics; he’d died too young to learn many of them. He’s suspended in mid-air, about a hand’s breadth above the table.
Things we miss, now that we’re ghosts:
Jimmy says, “Really good cigars. Drawing the smoke of them into my lungs, holding it there, letting it out through my nose.” All us mall ghosts, our chests rose and fell in their remembered rhythms, but no air went in and out.
Black Anchor Ohsweygian stares at her thin, wrinkled fingers on the table top. She says, “The sweet musk of beets, fragrant as blood-soaked earth.”
“Vanilla milk shakes,” I say, thinking of Kitty over there. “Cold, sweet, and creamy on your tongue.”
Jimmy nods. “And frothy.” He takes another turn: “Going up to the cottage for the first long weekend in spring.”
I nod. “Victoria Day weekend.”
“Yeah,” Jimmy replies. “Jumping from the deck into the lake for the first time since the fall before.” He laughs a little. It makes his big face crinkle up. “That water would be so frigging cold! It’d just about freeze my balls off, every time. And Barbara would roll her eyes and call me a fool, but she’d jump in right after.” His expression falls back into its usual sad grumpiness. Barbara was his wife of thirty years.
Falling in Love With Hominids Page 10
