Watching me? Is this guy dangerous? Does he know why I walk my bike here? Does he see her too?
“You know there’s a ghost in that house, don’t you?”
Andrew feels his heart thudding in his chest.
There is a ghost and it scares the shit out of me.
I walk my bike because I’ve wrecked twice knowing it was looking at me.
“Yes, sir.”
“Don’t sir me.”
“Okay.”
Andrew scratches at one of the sideburns he has begun to grow in emulation of his older brother. Although Charles will soon shave his because they look too “hippy-dippy.”
But this dude.
Who is this dude?
“She swells up like a balloon when you ride your bike past it because she has a crush on you. She was seventeen when she died. Your age now, if I’m correct?”
“Yes s— Yes.”
Andrew peers into the car, which is closer now. He is relieved to see that the driver is wearing pants. Dungarees, to be precise.
“Do you know why you can see her?”
Andrew shakes his head.
A car horn blares because the older man has let his Impala wander into the other lane. He looks at the road again and corrects his path as a mud-colored flatbed pickup truck stacked with pumpkins goes by, losing a pumpkin, its driver half-unfurling an arthritic bird-finger.
“Do you want a ride past the house? I’ll take you the rest of the way to Enon.”
Andrew does want a ride.
He doesn’t want to see the floating girl in the window leering at him, her head as big as a head on a parade float.
And he doesn’t want to spend forty minutes pedaling when those forty minutes might be spent napping. He got almost no sleep last night and the girl he made love to in the cornfield got grounded.
It was worth it.
The lovemaking, quick and earnest, was after they tampered with the letters on the Xenia Baptist Church marquee so that REPENT, MY PEOPLE, YOUR TIME TO SIN GROWETH SHORT now said GO SIT ON PETERS HOT POLE.
Now a pale yellow station wagon underbellied with rust the color of Chef Boyardee spaghetti sauce swings around the Impala, the driver barking some hostile syllable through his open window.
The bald man’s eyes stay fixed on Andrew.
“And I’ll tell you why you and I can see the dead girl and that guy can’t.”
The boy stops.
A turkey buzzard kites lazily overhead.
“Is there room for my bike?”
“There is.”
Now the man who will teach Andrew his first spell pulls his car over in front of the boy. He opens the huge trunk so the Impala looks like a whale opening its mouth.
Its mouth is very black.
Its tongue a spare tire.
Andrew feeds the whale his Schwinn and prepares to go to Nineveh.
26
“Is he still living?”
“No.”
Silence.
“He taught you what you’re doing now? With me?”
“Yes,” Andrew says.
“I’m sure it occurred to you to try this with him.”
“He asked me not to.”
“Why’s that?”
“He didn’t say.”
And yet I do it to you.
Bill nods inscrutably. Then says, “There’s something else, isn’t there? You’re not just lonely. You’re scared.”
“Yes.”
“And this fear’s got you missing John Barleycorn.”
“More like Gilbert Grape for me, but yes.”
He won’t know that reference.
“I’m glad you sought me out.”
“Are you really?”
“I am.”
“Are you really you, Bill?”
“I don’t know how to answer that.”
Bill wipes his eyes again.
How many alcoholics would like to be able to do this? Would give anything for this chance? To talk to HIM. Thank HIM personally. Why is it fair that I get to have this to myself? And if I let Anneke see him, what is that? Showing off? I should let him go. Burn this tape.
“Andy.”
Only he gets to call me Andy.
“Yeah.”
“Don’t send me back yet.”
Andrew raises his eyebrows in place of asking Why?
Bill W. says, “The next time I’m awake . . . talking . . . I’ll be talking to you. I’m always the same, but you . . . I’m a little concerned about what you’ll have to tell me when I see you again. There’s a cloud over you.”
“A cloud?”
“I don’t know how else to put it. Just . . . sit with me here for a minute. Is there music there?”
“Music?”
“You know, a phonograph?”
“There’s music.”
“Play me something. Please.”
Andrew goes to his stereo.
Turns on satellite radio.
Turns on the forties channel, turns it up good and loud.
Betty Hutton’s “Blue Skies” pours from the speakers in no great hurry.
Bill W. closes his eyes, leans toward the screen.
Moves his head in time to the music, subtly, reminding Andrew of a cobra coming out of its basket for a snake charmer.
Now Andrew cries.
“There it comes,” Bill says, eyes still closed.
And then he says, opening his eyes suddenly, fiercely,
“You’re the one who needed the music. It’s a shoehorn for your feelings, like the booze used to be. Shut me down when you want to, son. Everything’s A-OK.”
27
Early evening.
The barn behind Andrew’s house.
Anneke belches and excuses herself, moves away from the warm pocket of garlicky air she has just made. The ghost of the penne, spicy sausage, and basil Andrew sautéed for them earlier can’t overpower the stronger odor of hot, raw walleye.
“How lonely and deranged do you have to be to want to blow-dry a fish, anyway?”
He touches the yellow pike’s side with the back of his hand, decides it wants another blast. He flicks the on switch and wands hot air back and forth over the fish. Wrinkles his nose as he detects her belch and aims the dryer at it, making her laugh.
“Better than hot fish. It smells like your dead mermaid friend in here,” she says, raising her voice over the dryer’s petulant whine.
Andrew smiles.
“It makes the skin thirsty so it drinks pigment,” he says.
“I’m not five. I know why you do it. I’m just saying it stinks.”
She sips her diet soda.
Now Andrew brushes a brownish, mustardy shade of yellow on the fish, which sits almost flush in the fish-shaped niche Andrew cut into a silvery panel of insulation foam.
“I thought you said you wanted to watch me do this.”
“I do. I’ll be good.”
Andrew grunts skeptically, begins swabbing rusty orange ink onto the fins he pinned in place against the foam. She looks up and around, taking in the twenty-odd fish prints he has framed and hung out here. Sturgeons, carp, black bass, coho salmon, in many colors, some naturalistic, some fantastical, all swimming north, as though toward the lake they were pulled from.
One Prussian blue octopus from a trip to Florida drifts amid the school as though lost.
“Gyotaku?”
“Gyotaku,” he corrects, but she can’t hear the difference.
Now he takes a piece of rice paper and lays it over the walleye, tucking it under and around the fish, massaging the color up into the paper. He details the fins with a plastic spoon.
“Okay, I like this. I’m not saying I want to learn. But I like it.”
He pulls the paper off.
“Nice!” she says.
“I’ll let this dry for a bit and then I’ll do the eyes. I’m not much of an artist, but I can handle fish eyes.”
He clothespins the paper to a line, then sits down on the moth-eaten Goodwill couch next to the dorm-sized fridge he used to keep stocked with German and British brown ales.
He pulls a fizzy water out instead.
They both just sit for a long while.
The sun goes down and moths wheel and flutter around the bare bulb overhead.
“Are you nervous?” she asks.
“No,” he lies.
28
Full dark.
The fireflies outside have largely given up.
Andrew has spread himself lengthwise on the couch, hands on chest like a pharaoh ready for the wrap. Feet bare. Blue jeans. No belt. No shirt. His hair a dark pillow under his head.
He asked her to watch him, so she sits opposite, on the rusty folding chair.
She bats a moth away from her eyes.
Another, larger moth crawls on his face, but she is afraid to touch him now, so the moth remains.
Andrew watches the moth, too.
He’s next to her, out of his body.
When he realizes this, his body gets goose bumps.
He sees his body get goose bumps.
29
He turns now—it feels like turning his body but he believes this is just how he explains it to himself—and looks at Anneke. He wants to put his nose in the hollow of her ear and smell her unadorned, slightly spicy scent, but the part of him that wants that has no nose. Her neck is tan and lovely, and her eyes shine with curiosity and concern as she looks down on his body. He sees
with what eyes?
the fine hairs on her cheeks, sees her pulse gently thrumming in her temples, feels the rhythm of her heart. He moves closer to her, almost mingling with her, begins to feel that he is putting off what he fears to do. But it’s so good to be this near her. Is this what it is to be a ghost? No . . . he is still connected with his body. He tries to breathe in her scent, hears
with what ears?
his lungs fill where he lies on the couch, thinks he can smell her now. Anneke. She smiles a little, looking down at him, turns down the corners of her mouth trying to suppress the smile, so he follows her gaze and sees why.
He’s getting an erection, bulging at the zipper of his faded jeans.
Oh, that’s great.
Just great.
He has the urge to cover himself, and now his hands obey the impulse, his face flushing red, a worry line on his half-sleeping forehead. Anneke bites her knuckle to keep from braying laughter, but the laughter wells up in her. Andrew-on-the-couch now half turns his body away from her, makes an involuntary growl like a frustrated bear.
Anneke turns away, too, laughter escaping in hitches around her fist. She fishes out a cigarette and puts it in her mouth, but she doesn’t light it.
“Say,” she stage-whispers between laughs, “I can light this even if you’re floating around, right? You’re not flammable or anything? Like methane?”
She’s laughing so hard she’s almost crying.
“Help! My friend turned himself into a fart and I burned him up!”
Now Andrew laughs next to her, his belly hitching where he lies on the couch. He reaches out
with what hand?
and tries to light her cigarette for her, his physical hand twitching.
She steps farther away from the couch now, moves through Andrew, who, almost against his will, allows himself to be dragged along in her.
He has never felt anything like this—it is electric, delicious . . . it feels like burnt caramel tastes. He senses that if he lingers, he will soon be the one feeling through her skin, moving her limbs,
and what will happen to Anneke?
but this is only for an instant—he pushes out of her.
And that sensation of pushing makes him remember something from the text . . . the push can be turned around so it happens entering the body. If you push while entering, snapping your own tether, you can knock the other soul completely free and into death. If you try and you’re weak at it, if you don’t believe, you’ll be the dead one.
But Andrew did not push.
He melted into her like liquid caramel, and it was hard to leave.
• • •
All Anneke has time to feel is a flash of numbness, as though her heart has skipped two beats, and she understands what has happened. Her laughter dies like a caught breeze. She shivers. Fear winks in her eye, then turns, as it always does with her, into curiosity. She turns to where she thinks he is and says, as if she has dared herself to speak before she can take it back, “Do it again.”
She heels a tear of laughter from under the corner of her eye.
“Do it again, I want you to,” she says, and looks down at his body. His head is gently shaking no.
She lights the cigarette.
30
Andrew-out-of-Andrew rushes away from the barn, at the speed of a sprint, faster than a sprint, now at a gallop, and he takes off. He looks back at the barn below him, only it isn’t precisely like looking behind him, as he has no neck to swivel; it feels a bit like he’s a nautilus, jetting backward through inky water, tentacles trailing behind it. Nothing trails behind Andrew. He is nothing, has nothing.
The barn recedes, light bleeding through the pineboard walls, etching the high grass and short trees around it in faint gold. Anneke is in there, smoking her Winston down to the filter, mantling her consciousness over his half-vacant body while his consciousness soars over Cayuga County. He turns now, the nautilus transforming to owl, attention cast forward. Trees loom at him and he pushes through them, feeling their slower, muted rhythms, rustling their leaves as if he himself has become a breeze.
No drug can do this.
Now he follows the coast south and west, away from Dog Neck Harbor, skimming low over the water, watching the lights in the windows, the bluish glow of televisions anesthetizing tired fishermen and waitresses and one winks out—there!—where young parents begin to caress each other in earnest now that their children have gone to sleep.
Don’t look in that window, you pervert.
He knows his body chuckles in the barn behind him, miles behind him now, but he can’t think about that or his tether, stretched like a rubber band, might snap him back into himself.
He sees something over the water.
Reddish light collected in a form that moves on the lake, its nucleus a ball of white. It is the size of an oil tanker. He moves away from it.
What is that?
Don’t let it see you.
No, really, what the fuck IS that?
This is not the first strange thing he’s seen while traveling out-of-body. Nor is it the scariest. But it might be the biggest.
It roils and rolls in on itself, moving slowly, flashing as if with internal lightning. He thinks that he will probably never know just what it is. He senses it, senses neither malevolence nor goodwill, just power. Indifference. A god? A devil? An alien? None of the above?
If you sense it, maybe it can sense you.
His tether spasms, nearly whips him back into his body, then nearly . . . what? Breaks?
Not out here.
Not with that.
It stops.
It starts to drift toward him now.
He thinks of the Titanic steering away from its iceberg, slowly, too late.
Only I’m the Titanic and that’s the iceberg.
Oh, fuck that.
He flies lower, skimming the water like a pelican.
He knows he is moaning in the barn.
The tether
pulls at him, but he resists.
Not yet, I haven’t learned enough yet, and I’m not going to let that thing scare me off; even if I’m what it’s looking for, even if it eats souls, I defy it to find me.
(Careful!)
He moves over the shore, up a small bluff, into the woods.
He moves now as if on legs, down a fire trail.
A bat flutters near him, through him, reaping mosquitoes and moths. He flinches, his body jerking on the couch, but then it flies through him again, then again; it knows he’s there, it likes the feeling like Anneke did. He relaxes, lets it. Feels the purr of its tiny heart beating hundreds of beats per minute, feels the craving for moth in its mouth, the dusty, gritty joy that moth flesh is, and then he wants the bat to go away and it does, careening off into the night.
Behind him, a reddish glow on the water, still far away, but he moves faster now. The fire trail becomes a paved road and he moves along its side. A cabin looms on his left, light pouring from its front window. Inside, a sixtyish bald man with a beard and small glasses hunches over a chessboard, his legs crossed at the knees European-style, but he senses that the man is American, has trained himself to do that. He moves a white pawn, consults a book, then moves a black pawn. He lifts a glass of wine to his lips, a rubyish droplet spilling down his beard, then disappearing within it.
Now the glow is over land, but farther away, heading toward Rochester. It moved fast when he wasn’t watching.
Or there are more than one of them.
That’s your fear talking. There’s only one. It doesn’t see you, doesn’t want you.
He flies again, moving left, back toward the water.
To his right, a dark cabin, wooden stairs leading sharply down from its back deck.
Beneath him dry sand becomes wet sand becomes rocks, here and there punctuated with driftwood or seaweed. He pelicans over the water again, and then he sees it.
It sees him.
A ghost.
Under the water.
A bloated older man’s ghost floats under the surface of the lake, its form luminous gray-green, like algae, its eyes two holes of starlight, locked on Andrew.
It surfaces.
The Necromancer's House Page 8
