The Possessions

by Sara Flannery Murphy

  I close my fingers around the lipstick.

  For a crooked second, Sylvia is in the room with me. A drowned specter, white skin peeling away like fruit rind, eyelids eaten into filigree by the fish.

  And then the impression slips sideways and I become the drowned woman. My skin waterlogged and dripping, hanging in tatters around me.

  When the knock comes, I drop the lipstick as if I’ve been burned. It rolls beneath the end table, sucked into the shadows.

  “Ms. Mendoza,” I say, answering the door. I’m relieved that my voice is strong and cool. “Please, have a seat.”

  This client has worked with me for three years. Today, she wears pearls around her throat, her gray-streaked hair braided neatly. Most clients dress up for encounters. They don’t want their loved ones seeing them looking shabby or uncared for.

  Accepting the perfume bottle that Ms. Mendoza passes to me, I rub the fragrance on my wrists, quick and businesslike. The incense of roses fills the room.

  Ms. Mendoza inhales. “Oh, I’ve been so looking forward to this visit.”

  “It’s been a while since we’ve seen you,” I say. Ms. Mendoza is the type of client who craves socializing before encounters, and I let myself enjoy her plain warmth.

  “I’ve had a hard time making it out here to see Veronica lately,” Ms. Mendoza says. “Personal matters. Hopefully she understands.”

  “I’m sure she does.”

  Ms. Mendoza goes silent then, hands folded on her lap, watching me expectantly. I tip the capsule into my palm and pause, suddenly confused. My heart swells with a misplaced panic. “Could I have a moment, please?” I ask.

  “Of course, dear,” Ms. Mendoza says, but not before I see her flinch of impatience.

  I shut my eyes, take a deep breath. Will my stubborn brain into blankness. It takes a second, but then it comes: the slowed heartbeat, the weightiness of the body around me. The fear swirls out of my mind, the last dregs of water spinning and sliding down a drain.

  I open my eyes and reach for the cup, swallow the lotus. It barely takes any time before I’m gone.

  I open my eyes. Rough scrapes of sound and light move through my head. A woman talking low in my ear. The cold panels of light flashing by one by one as I’m pushed down a corridor, prone on my back.

  Ms. Mendoza busies herself in her purse. Her eyes have the vulnerable, rabbity look of recent tears. “That was lovely,” she says. “So good to reconnect.”

  Ms. Mendoza’s twin sister died three years ago. It was a slow death. Leukemia. At first, hope was interrupted by bad news, a lumbar puncture suggesting the cancer had metastasized. Near the end, according to Ms. Mendoza, it was the reverse: the progress of death stalled by pockets of hope. Experimental treatments became cruel in their suspension of the inevitable. A torturer’s techniques. Even so, Ms. Mendoza had barely let a week pass before she came to the Elysian Society.

  This isn’t unusual. I’ve seen people waste so little time that they’ve arrived at Room 12 with eyelids still swollen from the funeral. For some clients, working with me is like returning to a conversation after a brief interruption, scarcely noticing that anything has changed. A sentence started in one woman’s mouth and ended in mine.

  But I’ve also known people to wait for decades, letting everyone believe that they’d moved on. Completing the dutiful stages of mourning, crafting new lives in the space left behind. And then waking up with the simple, unignorable urge to talk to their wives, best friends, daughters. When this happens, the Elysian Society is waiting for them. Offering bodies aged in a perfect time lapse, the girl who died at eighteen finally granted the mercy of wrinkles and gray-dusted hair, or else bodies as young and untouched as beloved memories.

  I study Ms. Mendoza now. The fussy movements as she dabs beneath her nose, the way she folds the tissue into a bulging square. I don’t feel anything toward her. No curiosity, no familiarity. She’s just a woman. A paying customer.

  Before I leave the Elysian Society, I check the schedule Jane has prepared for me. The lineup of familiar names (Park, Brown, Loudermilk). There it is: Braddock, Patrick. He meets with me next Tuesday.

  It’s early for a second encounter. Most clients need a few weeks before the ragged ache of longing takes hold again. I press my finger down on his name. Deep inside, a stirring. Light and swift.

  It’s dusk when I leave. The air holds a chill that razes the evening sky into clarity. I nearly stumble over someone sitting at the bottom of the steps. She turns and looks at me, startled, as if I’m the one out of place.

  “Pandora,” I say, remembering her name with an effort. “What are you doing here?”

  Her cheeks are glazed from the cold, her posture tightly coiled. Her knee jitters up and down. “Hey,” she says. “You again.”

  “The bus stop is a few blocks from here,” I say.

  She wears a flimsy faux-leather jacket over her white dress, a pair of puffy boots that turn her legs weedy in comparison. “I was hoping someone would give me a ride,” she says.

  “I’m afraid I’m the last one leaving.”

  Pandora just nods at this, pulling her arms tighter around her body.

  “Do you need me to drop you off somewhere?” I ask, reluctant, and she’s rising to her feet before I’ve even finished speaking.

  I pull onto the main road. “Where are we headed?” My car is tidy but shabby, an older model. The gust from the heater is blazing hot against my hands and knees, leaving the rest of my body too cold.

  “Sycamore,” Pandora says. “I’ll tell you when we’re closer.”

  “Sycamore?” My fingers tighten automatically on the steering wheel; I keep gazing ahead at the soft discs of headlights from oncoming traffic. “Not 801 Sycamore?”

  She twists her upper body to get a better look at me.

  “I lived there myself once,” I explain. “Years ago.”

  I can almost hear her deciding whether or not to pursue this further, the sharp crackle of her curiosity. “Renard helped you out too?” she asks at last.

  “She did.” We pass the shell of a restaurant that burned down last month, stately black peaks and jagged crests. At night, the silhouette reminds me of treetops in a forest. “Years ago.”

  “How many years ago?”

  “A few,” I say, brusque. “I was new to the city.”

  “Well, I’m new here too,” Pandora says, as if we’ve stumbled across an amazing coincidence. “Where are you from?”

  My chest tightens. “You wouldn’t have heard of it,” I say.

  She doesn’t pick up on the sudden coolness in my voice. “Oh, like a small town, you mean?” she asks. “Because—”

  “I’d really rather not discuss it,” I interrupt. “It was a long time ago.”

  “Hey, sorry,” she says. “I was just going to say that I come from a small town too.”

  We don’t talk again for a few minutes. I’m preparing myself to see Sycamore again. Even the drive here, trailing my old bus route, holds an uncanny layer of déjà vu. After a moment, Pandora reaches over and turns on the radio. The newscaster’s voice enters the car, fuzzed with static, stray words cracking down the middle.

  . . . suspected foul play has left local homeowners concerned for their safety. Authorities are still trying to identify the victim. Dubbed Hopeful Doe, the young woman is estimated at between seventeen and twenty years old, and . . .

  I reach to turn the radio off again, leaving a ringing silence.

  “Hopeful Doe,” Pandora repeats. “Seriously? Where’d they come up with that?”

  “Like Jane Doe,” I say. “It’s a way to humanize her, I suppose.”

  She huffs. “There must be a less corny way to do that.”

  We’re getting closer. I recognize the church at the intersection, the boarded-up liquor store across the street, decorated with graffiti in an ornate floral pattern.

  “While we’re on the topic,” Pandora says, “do you have a nickname? Everyone seems to have nic
knames there. I’m using Dora.”

  “Most people call me Edie,” I concede.

  “That’s cute. Cuter than Eurydice.” She falls silent again, but I sense her watching me. Every time she talks, Dora’s a shade too eager, as if she’s been storing up words and has to pace herself. A clear symptom of loneliness—it took me a long time to outgrow it.

  “That’s real sad,” Dora ventures. “That girl they found.” She pauses. “Can you explain something to me?”

  The apartment complex is just ahead. A squat brick structure fringed with metal stairwells that remind me of barbed wire coils. In one window, the blue of a television screen lights up the blinds, flashing in a cryptic Morse code. “I’ll try,” I say.

  “Why can’t we contact suicides?” Dora asks. The bluntness of the question, its childlike lack of apology, startles me. “Back in the office,” she continues. “Remember, I asked if someone had committed suicide, and Mrs. Renard—”

  “I remember.” As if I’m moving obediently through a recurring dream, I pull into the parking lot and shut off the engine. “It’s not what we offer at the Elysian Society,” I say. “It never has been.”

  “Right, but people go there to get answers,” she says. “After a suicide, that’s when people need answers the most, you know?” The stiff and shiny folds of her jacket, hunched around her shoulders, remind me of the wet, crumpled wings of a hatching bird.

  “Possibly,” I say. “But it’s a risk. It’s too dangerous.”

  Dora frowns like a child trying to understand an obscure parable or a boring sermon. “I thought this place was different from the others,” she says. “Safer.”

  There’s a testing press of challenge in her voice. I know she’s referring to the small, homegrown operations that spring up like toadstools in suburban basements, grandmotherly living rooms, the back rooms of struggling storefronts. Amateur channelings: inexperienced bodies swallowing down concoctions as limp as baby aspirin, or else pills so potent that they leave bodies froth-lipped, bug-eyed. The Elysian Society has purged these smaller attempts from the city and the surrounding suburbs, but they still thrive in certain pockets around the country.

  “The Elysian Society is safer,” I say. “But it’s safer because of the rules. Because of what we won’t do. The risks are still there, and the consequences are just as dangerous.”

  “Dangerous how?”

  With the heater off, the car is filling up with chill, rapidly as rushing water through a crack. I almost tell her. Tell her about what happened in Room 7; explain why we use paper cups for water, never glass. But I only learned these details through rumors, whispers gradually stitched together to create an ominous whole. The stories have always felt most powerful glimpsed in the shadows.

  “Listen, I have an early day tomorrow,” I say instead.

  At this, Dora springs into motion, opening the car door, slipping out into the night. “Thanks for the ride,” she calls, her voice trailing in before the door shuts behind her.

  With Dora gone, the memories squeeze in tighter and closer. When I started at the Elysian Society, I’d been living in a motel room. Mrs. Renard offered to let me stay in the furnished apartment she owned. Close to the Elysian Society and perfect for a temporary home. She skimmed a modest amount from my earnings each month. More than fair in exchange for a place where I didn’t have to sign my real name, where I didn’t have to worry about the barest essentials. It was a simple sketch of a life, sitting there waiting for me.

  But even as I recognized Mrs. Renard’s generosity, I grew to hate the space. Everything I held back during my workday, everything that vanished when I swallowed the lotus, collected in the cracks of my mind like condensation. It was only when I was back on Sycamore that I’d remember. I spent most of my time in bed. Desperate to distract myself, I’d look out the window at the road, the headlights of the cars going past, and imagine myself in each car. Each one taking me to a separate destination, alive with its own possibilities. I’d become one person in that sleekly feline luxury sedan, an entirely different person in a rust-streaked pickup.

  As I’m pulling back onto the street now, I glance back at the building just once. My eyes automatically land on the third window from the left, the top story. My bedroom window. It’s dark now. No glimmer of life.

  At home, waiting for sleep, I search for more details about the dead girl. Because nobody has claimed her, there are no photographs of Hopeful Doe during her lifetime. No school photos or birthday-party shots with friends’ faces blurred away. Instead, the sites and channels use a wistful police sketch. Rendered in pencil lines, Hopeful Doe’s face is easy to visualize hanging in a fluorescent-lit school hallway. It has an intimate quality, like an earnest self-portrait drawn by a future valedictorian.

  They found Hopeful Doe on the edges of an aspiring gated subdivision. Only a few families had settled there, carrying out their lives surrounded by grandly empty houses in various stages of completion. Haughty skeletons. The house that held Hopeful Doe was vestigial, built decades ago. Unoccupied for years, dowdily outdated and scheduled for teardown.

  The night before the demolition, a teenage girl from the subdivision went exploring. The corpse that would become Hopeful Doe was in a closet in the back room of the condemned house. She wore a blue sundress. A single diamond earring. According to the reports, when the teenager first saw Hopeful Doe’s legs tucked together, she thought they belonged to a discarded store mannequin. Whoever left the body must have hoped it would be overlooked entirely, the girl’s identity swept aside with the rubble and the wreckage.

  Clicking back to the police sketch, I lean in closer to the screen. The dead girl looks familiar. It’s a quick, intuitive connection, a recognition that makes sense for just a moment before the sensation fades again. Every time I attempt to place her, Hopeful Doe slips a little further, disintegrating under my gaze, until her face is a complete stranger’s again.

  FOUR

  I can feel it. Little flashes of strangeness, stepping outside myself. It happens when I’m waking or falling into sleep, when I’m performing a mindless task that doesn’t require my attention. A disorientation that renders all my surroundings suddenly too vivid, as if I’m looking around at a new landscape. All the soft, well-worn familiarity has been stripped off to reveal a place that’s unnervingly foreign, every angle bristling and razor sharp.

  Each time, right after I come back, I think her name: Sylvia. Sylvia. I remember in Room 12 when her husband’s knee touched mine, and how that moment tugged at the center of the neat knot of my life. Unraveling something.

  Sylvia.

  When I was a new body, there was one topic that always caught my attention as I sat alone in the waiting room. It was the only thing that sharpened my dreamlike listening into actual eavesdropping. Possession was a rare topic, always hushed: one person laughing, one chiding, another dismissive. The stories were less specific anecdotes than hints and suggestions. But it was enough to grip my imagination. These bodies who opened themselves up to loved ones and then never came back. Their homes stolen out from under them by sly houseguests.

  I’d lie in bed at night and picture it. My body no longer mine. My hands not mine, my mouth closing around another woman’s words. I’d wonder: Did it happen all at once? Would I close my eyes as the lotus slipped down my throat and then never open them again? Or was it a slow process, a wearing away? The gradual invasion of impulses and dreams and instincts, of preferences and thoughts?

  Five years ago, the idea of this happening didn’t inspire any particular fear. Just a numb curiosity. As the years passed and I stayed myself, I forgot to worry about it; no matter how many lotuses I swallowed, I’d blink awake each morning in my own bed, firmly tied to my own flesh. I let go of that fear, relegating it to the same place as all the other things I ignored and overlooked.

  On Tuesday, I’m sick. It strikes without warning. My jaw closes in on itself. I’m light-headed, my body rolling out from under me. I rush fro
m Room 12, barely making it to the restroom before I’m gagging.

  Afterward, I reapply Sylvia’s lipstick in the mirror. My face is so pale and damp that it has a strange newness to it, like the skin that grows back over a wound. In contrast, Sylvia’s lipstick is darker than ever. Draining me to sustain its color.

  The restroom door clatters open. A body with short black hair enters, stopping short when she catches sight of me. Her face reflects my surprise.

  “Ana,” I say. “I didn’t know you were working again.”

  “Good morning to you too, Edie,” Ana says. Other than Lee, she’s one of the few bodies I talk with regularly. We’re friendly in an accidental way. Ana comes and goes, working for a few months and then disappearing, her patterns secretive and erratic.

  “No offense,” Ana says now, “but I don’t think that’s your color.”

  It takes me a moment to catch on. “It’s for a client,” I say. “His wife’s.”

  She laughs. “His wife had shit taste.” Ana hovers behind me in the mirror for a moment. Her fingers flash over her inky hair. “Oh, come on. Don’t give me that look. The color is a little much for someone as pasty as you, that’s all.”

  “It’s not about me.”

  “No, of course not,” Ana says. “Of course not.” She plucks a hairpin from near her temple and sticks it between her lips. The pin juts like a snake tongue. “You know how they say blush makes you look like you just orgasmed?” Ana says, muffled. She plucks the pin from her mouth. “I was reading in a magazine that women wear lipstick to remind men of their labia.” She emphasizes the last word, popping her lips around it like she’s working over a lollipop.

  My lips are suddenly leering and obscene. I drop my eyes. Beneath the embarrassment, there’s a rush of excitement. “That’s not appropriate,” I say.

  “I don’t see why not.”

  “You know why not.” Clutching Sylvia’s lipstick, I feel foolish and uncovered. As if a stranger just slid an exploring hand up my skirt.