American Ghost

by Paul Guernsey

  “I’m Thumb,” I said.

  “I know who you are,” the man said in Alice’s voice.

  Both Virgil and Gib were irritated by this latest transformation.

  “Please, Alice,” said Virgil at one point. “This gender switching. It’s just very disconcerting.”

  Alice said, “Aren’t you the one who’s always telling us we’re needlessly attached to mortal ways of doing things?”

  “Yes, but there are limits to everything.”

  Gib suggested, “Why don’t you just go back to being Marilyn Monroe?”

  “Fat chance, Fatso.”

  Then Alice changed her avatar yet again. One night a large, blue-and-white plastic beach ball bounced soundlessly through the front doors and hovered, slowly rotating, above Gib and Virgil as they played chess. The ball was complete in detail down to its little blue air valve.

  “Alice?” said Virgil, with dread in his voice.

  “Yes, it’s me,” she said.

  Virgil sat back in his pew. “Well, this, finally, is too much. I think we’ve got an agreement among us here at the church that we are to at least maintain a human form.”

  “I never entered into any such agreement.”

  “Come on, Alice,” said Gib. “Things are hard enough around here.”

  “But you keep saying we’re in heaven,” Alice reminded him. “So, just make believe this is what an angel looks like. In fact for all we know, it is.”

  Both Virgil and Gib continued to be disturbed and seemed ready to go on arguing with her, but I knew it wouldn’t do them any good. I decided I should try to mediate.

  “Why a beach ball, Alice?” I asked.

  “The last really good time I had with my grandchildren was when I took them to Popham Beach. We were playing in the water with a beach ball and having a wonderful time, when suddenly the wind took that ball out past where I could swim to get it back, ill as I was by then. The children were upset and I tried to distract them, but every time they looked up and saw that ball growing smaller and farther away, they knew that it would soon be gone for good, and they cried.”

  Alice added, “It’s probably still out there somewhere, riding across the ocean. Maybe it will ride forever.”

  I said, “That makes some sense. But, will you go back to being Alice again, sometime?”

  “I am Alice,” she said. “This is me, now. And it’s the most comfortable I’ve felt since I’ve been dead. As the young people say, deal with it.”

  Alice stayed a beach ball for the rest of the time we knew her, which was not for very long. One evening, not many days after she had gone spherical on us—it was by then late enough in summer that crickets chirped in the grass both morning and night—I arrived at the church to find the other three ghosts examining the high wall at the back of the chancel above the former choir box, where the entire space all the way to the ceiling had been turned into a mural of elaborate, multi-hued graffiti. As soon as I joined them, Virgil told me, “They pulled the plywood off of one of the back windows, and then smashed in the window. There is broken glass and splintered wood all over the floor of the minister’s office. After they left, they replaced the plywood so that no one from the outside would know they’d been here.”

  “Were any of you around when they came?”

  Gib and Virgil shook their heads, while round Alice wobbled. Gib said, “I guess it was bound to happen sooner or later. The building’s abandoned, after all.”

  “And, now that they’ve gotten in, they’re almost certain to come again,” said Virgil.

  When I looked more closely at the graffiti, I saw, at the center of those maze-like whorls of pigment, something that in life would have turned my blood to ice. “We’re screwed,” I said.

  “What is it?” the three of them asked at once.

  “Right there, you see—all the rest serves as camouflage for it—you can read the name ‘Ed.’”

  Virgil asked, “Is Ed one of your former associates? Some gang member?”

  “I’m pretty sure that’s the bastard who burned my house down. He and some other people broke in and tagged my walls with spray paint and marking pen. Then the next time they came around, they torched the place. I got home to find myself haunting a pile of ashes.”

  “Oh, no,” Virgil said.

  “Oh, shit,” said Gib. “So that means … ”

  Alice, now spinning so fast that she had become a baby-blue blur, interrupted him. “We shouldn’t have to stand for it. There must be something we can do.”

  “And what might that be?” Gib asked her. “We’re dead. Remember?” Then he turned to Virgil, and with sarcasm he said, “Here’s your chance, Professor. If all this really is your dream, I think you ought to change it. Make shithead Ed go away for good.”

  “The subconscious mind doesn’t work that way. In any case, we’ve already discussed this several times and I keep telling you, it’s not exactly a dream I’m having; it’s a hallucination, and within that hallucination, I am just as dead, and just as powerless, as you are. I control nothing but my own actions.

  “And, by the way, Gib—while we’re mocking one another’s beliefs—if this really is your heaven, why don’t you just ask God to intervene? It’d be a fairly small favor, as those things go. After all, it’s not just any abandoned building they’re vandalizing—it’s a church.”

  Gib answered, “Well, there’s certainly nothing to stop me from praying for help. But God doesn’t work that way, either.”

  As I studied Ed’s mural, I said, “It could be that we still have some time. Sure, my place burned right after Ed signed his name in a few spots. But by the time he started tagging there, every wall and most of the ceiling had been tagged by somebody else, and he had no more room left to work. This place still is almost untouched, though, and what he’s done here already may only be a start.”

  “There is a lot of wall space in here,” Gib said, hope creeping into his voice. “This place could end up being an entire Sistine Chapel for an asshole like that. It could take him months to fill it all—and, by then, maybe he’ll get caught and arrested. Or, at the least, we’ll have had time to find ourselves another building.”

  “We shouldn’t have to find another building,” said twirling Alice, in her low librarian’s growl. “This one is ours. We’ve made something of a home here.”

  “Nothing’s ours anymore,” said Virgil. “Our houses will always be haunted by the living.”

  At this, Alice stopped spinning and hovered for a moment, unmoving except for a silent and volatile-seeming vibration. Finally, she said, “Phooey!” and suddenly shot skyward, passing right through the ceiling.

  *

  After dark that night, Ed and company came around again. The four of us heard their car approaching on the rutted gravel road and watched the rise and fall of their headlights for a long time before they arrived. They parked toward the back of the cemetery where their vehicle would be difficult to spot from the road, and they pried the plywood from the broken window. Then, hauling knapsacks and shining flashlights, they came crawling into our sanctuary. There were three of them: A muscular, shirtless dude with a black beard and a ring in his nose like a bull, and two girls. One of the chicks was tall and slender, dressed all in black—black jeans, t-shirt, and high-top sneakers—with straight, dark hair cut and combed so that it covered her face like a lampshade. A narrow gap exposed a strip of pale skin, a single blue eye heavily underscored with eyeliner, and one side of her full lips, which gleamed with red gloss. The color of her fingernails matched her mouth. The other chick wore overalls and was shaped like a cinderblock. On her head perched a Red Sox baseball cap turned backward, and both of her bare forearms were sleeved in elaborate tattoos.

  Gib was standing by to greet them as one by one they squeezed through the window and thumped to the floor. “Boo,” he said to each of them in his best ghostly voice—but they only swept past him to set their knapsacks on a front pew. The woman in the baseball cap
began aiming a flashlight into one of the bags as she dug through it in search of marking pens and cans of paint, and I realized with a shock that this was Ed; somehow, it had never occurred to me that the person who had done me so much harm would turn out to be a girl. While Ed prepared for her night’s work, Cyclops Girl and the Minotaur dipped into their own knapsacks to produce a pair of powerful electric lanterns, which they switched on and set on the front corners of the chancel.

  “It’s like a stage!” Cyclops Girl cried out, her shrill voice echoing in the empty church. The other two shushed her, and she did not speak again. Working by the light of the nearest lantern, Ed attacked a strip of white wall between two plywood-covered windows with a set of marking pens.

  “Oh, yeah,” Gib said in a satisfied voice as he watched her. “She’s got plenty of space to cover. And I don’t see anything dangerous in those knapsacks, not even a lighter or a pack of matches. I don’t guess we’ve got much to worry about for a while. By the way, Thumb, I thought you said Ed was a fellow?”

  “Still,” said Alice, before I could answer. “They have no business here. They’re a bunch of nasty vandals.”

  “Some people would consider Ed to be an artist,” said Virgil. “She clearly is very serious about what she does. I actually find some merit in her work.”

  “Yes, a great artist,” Alice said with sarcasm. “A real Georgia O’Keefe. And I suppose you consider arson to be an art form, too.”

  As Ed’s markers squealed against the wall, the other two intruders uncorked a bottle of wine, kicked off their shoes, and began skipping around the church in their bare feet. By the time the wine was finished and they’d opened another bottle, they were giggling, snapping photos of each other with their cell phones, and chasing one another through the rows of pews like a couple of kids. Eventually they ended up on the chancel, laughing, tongue-wrestling, pulling off one another’s clothes, and tumbling to the floor in a sexual tangle. Both Virgil and Alice made exclamations of disgust and retreated to the front of the church. But Gib surprised me by sitting down next to their knapsacks to watch them. After I had settled in beside him, he glanced at me and said, “Young.” Then he returned his gaze to the chancel.

  I said, “This doesn’t bother you? The location of it, anyway? A church, and all?”

  Gib shrugged. “It’s really just a building, Thumb. Wood and nails like any other.”

  A few moments later I said, “She’s a little small. Up top. For my taste.” As I spoke, I was aware that, speaking with a younger dude—or a younger ghost—I would have chosen different words.

  Gib said, “They’re all beautiful to me. That set there—I’d cry right now, if I could.” At that, he blew Cyclops Girl a ghostly little kiss; afterward, his hand remained in the air. A moment later, the hand rose to his forehead.

  “Speaking of proportions, will you get a load of that! That widget’s about as large as they come—and as a former Army medic, I speak with some authority.”

  “Lengthwise, you mean? Because, for all that, it’s a fairly narrow utensil.”

  Gib looked at me and grinned. “You’re telling me you’re a bit more girthy?”

  I didn’t speak for a long moment. Finally, I said, “Like a beer can—and it has been ever since I died.” Gib laughed in appreciation.

  Hearing him, Alice called out, “Gib, you’re nothing but a filthy old man and a religious hypocrite!”

  But Gib continued to smile. Then he winked at me and yelled back, “Why pick on me? What about Thumb, here?”

  “Thumb is not always going on about religion the way you are. And he’s young; that’s almost to be expected of him. But then again, my son-in-law …”

  “God invented sex,” Gib informed her. “In all its remarkable variety. And Thumb is just as dead as I am. And, don’t kid yourself; if your son-in-law is a man, he would be sitting right up here with us.” Then, in a lower voice, he added, “Or at least, he would be unless Alice was haunting him from the other end of the room.”

  It was then that Ed stepped up onto the chancel and began tugging off her work boots and unsnapping her heavy overalls so that they collapsed to the floor. She sank down and joined the other two, with a seemingly powerful preference for the girl over the Minotaur. In fact, she eventually shoved him out of the way and forced him to wait, kneeling nearby, as she completed an excruciating crawl of Cyclops girl: Up between the pale legs that pedaled against her back, and slowly, lingeringly over the other girl’s arching, twisting torso, until finally she was thrusting herself through and through those full, chirping lips. Even after Ed was finished, the Minotaur acted at her direction as she commanded the couple in a hoarse voice, sometimes insisting that they stop altogether so that she could reposition them to her liking, or pose them for a cell phone shot.

  I joked, “Well, this removes any doubt about whether Ed really is an artist.”

  Gib said, “So, what we’re seeing here now … it would qualify as an orgy, would it not?”

  I laughed. “Well, I guess maybe it would. Technically … does your ancient vocabulary include the term ‘three-way?’”

  “In all the time I was alive, I never saw one. Nor participated.”

  “No?”

  “You mean you have? Young as you are?”

  “Once or twice.” He gave me a look of disbelief, so I added, “Gib, I led a weird life. I hung out with bikers and people like that.”

  “Well, you little son of a bitch!”

  At last, with a half-dozen squeaking barks and a limb-flailing fit from Cyclops Girl, followed by a bellow from the open throat of the Minotaur, their performance shuddered to a close. The Minotaur flung his open, leaking condom against the church wall opposite the one Ed was painting; it stuck there for a moment, slug-like, before rolling off and plopping to the floor.

  “Beasts!” cried Alice.

  “Well, maybe they’ll leave now,” said Virgil. “And, if we’re lucky, they won’t come back for a while.”

  Alice said, “Who is going to clean that up?”

  The lovers dressed and the Minotaur scrambled out through the broken window in the minister’s office, returning a minute later with a red, five-gallon gasoline can.

  “Uh-oh,” said Gib. By then, Virgil and Alice had rejoined us from the front of the church.

  “Thumb, you told us this wouldn’t happen!” Alice spun rapidly in her beach-ball shape.

  “It was a guess Alice, not a guarantee.”

  The Minotaur splashed the entire five gallons of fuel onto the chancel, from where it immediately began cascading and running across the church floor in snaking streams that gleamed in the light of the electric lanterns.

  “Stop that, you bastard!” Alice shouted.

  The Minotaur tossed away the empty can. “I got some on my pants. Right near my junk. Somebody else better light it.”

  “Shall we leave?” said Virgil. “A childhood filled with infernal imagery makes its mark, even on an atheist.”

  Ed said, “I’ll do it. First, though, I want a few pics in front of my new piece. A little video.” Cyclops Girl and the Minotaur obediently took out their phones and began recording Ed as she stood beside her newly tagged patch of wall.

  Ed said, “This is Ed, of Ed’s Posse, bringing you the conclusion of Defiance Art, Work Number Seven. As you can see … ”

  Meanwhile, Alice was yelling, “Do something! Somebody do something to stop them.”

  “Alice, it’s sad, but there’s nothing we can do,” said Gib. “We’ll just need to find another haunt.”

  “We could do something,” Alice said. “All of us, or any one of us. If we really wanted to, at least for a few seconds, we could make them hear us, or even see us. Tell them to get the hell out.”

  The Minotaur complained, “Edna, the fumes are getting my eyes. I think we should spark her up, and leave.”

  I said, “Yeah, but something happens to us if we do that, and we don’t know exactly what. All we know is that we probably won
’t come back from it.”

  “We’re forbidden,” Gib added. “As far as we know, it’s like another death. Maybe a darker one, at that.”

  “What do you care, Gib?” said Alice. “God will protect you, won’t he? Maybe that’s how you’ll finally get to heaven.”

  Gib shook his head. “I don’t tempt the Lord, Alice. Not in life, and not now.”

  “One minute,” said Ed. “I’m almost done. Keep recording.”

  Spherical Alice spun toward Virgil. “Virgil! You don’t even believe you’re a ghost. What have you got to lose? Make yourself visible; say something to them!”

  Virgil looked miserable. He said, “I am still alive, yes. And, it’s irrational, I know. But I get the sense that if I did that I really would die. Eternal blackness … I just can’t.”

  “Thumb?”

  “Come on, Edna!” said the Minotaur. “We could get trapped in here, the way the gas is running everywhere.”

  “Alice, if I already knew who killed me, I’d be ready … ”

  “Cowards!” Alice yelled, not waiting for me to finish. “You men are all complete cowards! I can’t believe you’re willing to let this human sewage have their way!” At once, she launched herself at Ed and passed herself through and through Ed’s oblivious, nattering, backwards-baseball-capped head. Then, twirling madly, she settled just off of Ed’s left shoulder and seemed to gather herself for a moment before bursting into earthly visibility as a roaring, spinning ball of flames. Ed glanced at her, dropped her jaw to let out a wordless sound I’d never heard from a person, and threw herself against her doomed mural, her eyes wide and her fingers scrambling at the painted wall behind her. A dark stain bloomed in the crotch of her overalls. At the same time, Cyclops Girl and the Minotaur gaped and cringed as they stared at Alice; their bodies were shaking. The Minotaur seemed oddly detached from his own arm, which was still holding up his cell phone.

  When Alice’s flaming face took shape in the center of her fireball, I felt like cringing myself; I was terrified. Virgil and Gib had moved away, their ghostly hands stretched before them as if to shield them from the heat of her fury. Alice screamed, “So you kids want to burn?” When none of them was able to answer her—their white lips twitched, but no words emerged—she said, “Well all right, then, I’ll burn you. I’ll burn you till your souls are cinders. I will burn … ” Alice was cut off in mid-sentence as she suddenly and silently disintegrated, her fireball imploding to a pinpoint of darkness. But by then Ed was splashing her way across rivers of gasoline as she ran for the broken window, Cyclops Girl and the Minotaur following close behind. They hurled themselves through the window, one of them scoring some skin on the way out and leaving a dash of blood on the window frame. They thrashed their way through tall weeds to dive into their car. The car started and immediately backed into the iron fence surrounding the cemetery, crunching the bumper and springing the trunk. With their yawning trunk lid flapping, they scattered gravel as they fled toward the nearest blacktop, their headlights against the tops of the trees growing increasingly faint until they vanished altogether.