The sky was turning red.
She Who Will Rise
James is there, the most important place, now.
He is not in the bathroom or at the rabbit farm or the lake house or in Sheltering Palms. He doesn’t know where he is. He is awakening as if from a dream, his vision returning before his eyes blink, because they are already open and staring up. The sky above is tinted red, and there are birds watching from telephone wires. The edges of the trees sway in a light breeze and he feels nothing. He hears nothing. He smells nothing. He remembers nothing. He doesn’t even know who he is. There is no James Hastings. There is no Stacey. There is no Ghost. There is no information. The hard drive has crashed and rebooted, starting from nothing but scattered zeros and ones. There is only the red sky, the telephone wires, the trees.
He is on his back and something heavy and rough covers him, scratches his bare chest. He is frightened by an undefined menace and now the questions come.
Where am I?
Who am I?
What happened to me?
The sense of evil that pervades him induces a crawling claustrophobia and he throw his arms up and wrestles to shove the dirty thing off, the layers of scratching, stiff blanket, until it flaps to one side. He sits forward as if controlled by another entity, as if someone stronger has entered his body to save it, and this force wants him to get up. He is cold all over, cold inside his bones. The red is everywhere, and blurred in places. He sees the fences now, and the long lane of dirt, a shopping cart on its side, and the tops of the houses beyond the fences. There are dirty weeds and dust particles and trash. Beside him is a broken hulk of furniture, sour and rotting, and his senses begin to fire, sending their messages, the sensory sum of which amounts to:
This is a bad place.
He doesn’t know how to move, but his body knows, it remembers, and though he is numb and cold all over, he is rising.
He staggers to his feet and the red world tilts and feels as though he is walking on a balance beam and will fall off any moment now. He walks until he is standing beside a small building with a car parked in its mouth. The car door is open. It’s a low, sleek thing, this car, and when he wipes his eyes and moves closer to it some of the color returns and he sees white through the red, the car is white. He stares at the car and though he does not recognize it, it gives him a warm feeling, encouraging him, yes, yes, come this way.
The keys are in it. This car belongs to someone else. He should not touch it. He walks past it, through the garage - yes, that’s it, this is the garage - and emerges into a yard of nice grass. Above the yard is a big white house that fills him with hope. He knows this place. He will be welcome here. He crosses the yard and enters the house through the door on the back patio.
In the kitchen the smells come alive, all of them familiar. This is his house, he is sure of it now. This is home, and every emotion and meaning that word contains fills him up. Happiness, relief, safety, food, warmth, love. He will be safe here. Whatever happened, this is where he belongs and he will find his way out of the nightmare, beginning here.
He is numb and things don’t work they way they should. His neck is stiff. Walking is hard, slow work. His balance is off. He looks down and his pants are scuffed and torn. He is dirty, covered with sticky trails, not wearing a shirt, cold. He wants to be warm, clean himself off. A hot shower makes everything better.
He moves on instinct to the front of the house, up the stairs, over the landing, and up more stairs. He makes it to the top and down the hall, to the bathroom. It is dark with evening light and tinted red. He peels off his clothes and they stick to him in places. He looks in the mirror and is shocked to see that he has the red dirt streaked in thick lines from his nose, around his neck, from his ears and on his chin.
Oh, mother of God help me, it’s blood—
He looks away and turns the water on very hot and steps into the tub and pulls the curtain around the hoop. The water feels so good, but most of all just because it feels, he feels it, it allows him to feel. He is increasingly sore and tired, bones throbbing, the him of him settling into his body again, his soul one hundred and sixty pounds of sand pouring back into its proper bag, returning, and he lets the water pound him, cascade over his head and drum against his neck and skull to stem the headache that has been growing stronger since he woke up, but it doesn’t help. His head hurts too much. He washes the dried dirt from his nose and ears and corners of his eyes and by the time the water has run all the way to cold, his head hurts too badly to stay in and he knows he won’t be able to stay on his feet much longer.
He steps out of the tub and looks into the mirror, wiping steam. He see colors now but the red lingers. One of his eyes, the left one, is red where it is supposed to be white, as if the eyeball is a bauble half full of blood. His hair is white and his head pounds and the bathroom spins. He turns away and moves to the medicine cabinet above the towels on the other side of the room and catches a glimpse of the rabbit paintings. They are in love. There is a boy rabbit and a girl rabbit. They are a couple and they live here and they are loved. The rabbits are black and white at first, but then the lower one begins to throb like a heart, like his swollen brain, bulging, turning red and fading, turning red and fading, and another spike of fear pierces him.
She is red because she is hurt.
Where is Stacey? Why isn’t Stacey home with me? She is supposed to be home.
His head hurts too much to look at the rabbits. The room won’t stop spinning. He staggers in a circle and throws his arms out, catching himself on the sink where he vomits. He throws up again and again and the pain and pressure behind his eyes is unbearable. Rods of steel are pushing through his frontal lobes and exiting his eyes. He coughs and washes his mouth. His head is going to explode. It does not seem possible that a human head can hurt this much and still be attached. He drinks some water and staggers, sliding along the wall to the other end. He holds onto the cabinet door as he fumbles for the aspirin. He finds the bottle and pops the top and swallows four quickly, dryly. He needs to lie down. He needs to close his eyes.
I’ve suffered a head injury. A terrible, terrible head injury. Something bad has happened. Where is she? Where is Stacey? I need my wife. I need help. I miss her so much . . .
He tries to walk and the bathroom door floats before him and he becomes untethered as his head floats away.
Time slips.
He wakes on the couch with no memory of how he got there. His head still hurts but it is better. He thinks he is hungover. He must have thrown down too many beers last night wondering where she was. He must have slept for a long time. It is afternoon already, almost sunset. Where is Stacey? Why hasn’t she come home? He can’t remember the last time they spoke. The last time he looked into her eyes. He can’t remember why, but he is sure that she is mad at him. That she has been angry at him for a long time and he doesn’t know why.
He sits up and goes to the phone and opens the phone book she keeps in the drawer in the little stand, the one in which she has penciled all the numbers with her delicate script, like the hand of another woman from another age. Why does she bother when every cellphone comes with an address book?
It’s nicer this way.
He calls the Marina garden center and asks for her, but they say she is not scheduled today. He calls the art gallery in Culver City and a man reminds him that Stacey hasn’t worked there for almost six months. He calls two of her friends, Rowina first and then Jessica, but they don’t know where she is and he is left with the impression they do not much like him.
He sets the phone down and walks into the kitchen. He stands in front of the sink and drinks a glass of water. He is angry with her. She is always running away. She has been depressed and taking too many pills. She is so unhappy. Why hasn’t he paid more attention to her? How did he let it get so bad? He is never around, always working, on the road. But that is no excuse. It’s his fault, he knows. He has been avoiding his own wife.
The woman I love, and she need
s my help. She can’t do it alone. It is my job to help her. I will make it up to her. Next time I see her, I will hold her close and tell her we’re leaving, we’re going to start over, I quit, it’s time to have a baby.
Where is Stacey?
Something bad has happened to her. I can feel it in me. I can feel it in the house. It is like a poisoned shroud, a toxic bubble that surrounds the house and all of West Adams. This was always a dangerous neighborhood and we’ve been lucky so far, but now I know. It’s finally happened.
He looks across the yard and notices the garage door is open. It looks like a black mouth yawning. Deep inside, a pale white glare stares back. It is her car, he realizes. Her car is still in the garage. She left for work but her car never made it out of the garage. He is filled with a horrible premonition. He doesn’t want to go.
He must go.
He walks across the backyard and the urge to run is strong, but he won’t give in. For a moment the dizziness comes back and he feels weak, too weak to be on his feet, but he pushes past it. He walks into the garage and stands next to her car. The driver’s side door is open and there is a cup of milky brown liquid sitting in the console’s cup holder. Stacey’s morning coffee. The creamer is floating in clumps. She always liked her iced coffee in the morning. The ice has melted.
To his right is the second garage door, also open, and the car’s rear end is poking into the alley just a bit. Stacey must have gotten out to move something, something blocking her path.
But why didn’t she come back? Why did she leave her car? Maybe she ran away with another man. Maybe she doesn’t love me any more. Maybe he came to pick her up, to drive her off to a better life. Or maybe she has been kidnapped. Some sick fuck is driving her away in a van, on his way to Utah with her right now.
A fragment of an annoying pop song eddies through his head and he hums along, but the lyrics get away from him before he can carry the tune.
He walks through the garage and steps into the alley. The sun is low and the sound of the freeway on the other side of the sound wall is a growing hum. He turns and sees an orange couch. The savages have had at it, the cushions are destroyed. Next to the couch is a folded roll of scrap carpet, a dirty brown tortilla. There are weeds stuck to it, and drag marks in the dirt. Someone dragged this carpet in the alley, recently.
He follows the drag marks - and the other ones that look like skid marks from a car - back to the weeds where the carpet used to be. The weeds there are flat and bleached white from lack of sun. There are two sets of footprints. The ones made by the person who dragged the carpet - and another set. Clearer, made recently. This newer set is the set that begins at the carpet and walks away . . . into the garage.
Those belong to me. Oh, Jesus, those are mine.
He walks back to the carpet and rips the carpet away as easily as removing a clean, flat sheet from a bare mattress. In that split second before fear of the unknown becomes the assaultive horror of knowledge, he thinks, this is where it started today. This is where I woke up.
What really happened here?
Ghost or James.
There is only room for one of us in this vessel.
And now the rabbits help me see. Stacey’s rabbits help me see.
The engine revs and everything lurches into gear. Ghost is turning Stacey around with one arm and holding the gun at them with the hand of the other as the distance closes. The Glock goes off - POP-POP! - and Stacey shrinks into a ball, falling from his embrace. The windshield is cracked as two holes appear in it and Ghost screams and a third shot POPS and Annette screams and the collision is astounding. Stacey is just a dull sound and James - James, not Ghost, me - I jump forward, leaping head-first as if I am going to fly over the car like Superman, but I’m not Superman, my head bounces off the top of the windshield and I rock to a halt, then fold over the hood before flying off it and disappearing under the front of the car.
I see.
When the light returns, the camera is held steady, aimed at the ground of alley gravel and oil-stained dirt. Everything is quiet. It pans slowly. I am lying on my back - not Ghost, James. I am bleeding from my ears and mouth and nose. My chest is not rising or falling . . .
. . . not at first glance. But even as I continue to watch, it is almost imperceptible, the shallowest swell of the ribs, but it is real. It was there in the video, I just didn’t see it, and neither did they . . .
I am still breathing. My eyes are blank, unblinking, looking up toward the sky, and one of them is filled with red, a pool of blood in and around the eyeball. A large black ant crawls over my chin and down my neck.
‘Do you see that?’ Annette says. Her voice is dull, heavy, sexual.
No one answers her.
‘Look who’s a Ghost now.’
I see.
Stacey crying on the side of the road, crying over the dead rabbit. Trying to reach me, using my memories to show me.
He’s not dead! He’s not dead!
I see.
The man in the video, lying in the alley. Annette says, ‘Look who’s a Ghost now.’
But I’m not a ghost now. I should be, but I’m not.
I dove head-first into a speeding car. My head aches. It was my head. All this time it was not just in my head but literally my head. They put me with her. Dragged us to our deathbed together and whatever passed between us passed between us. And hours later, a lifetime later, I woke up. I went inside and cleaned up and lost consciousness again. Stacey didn’t wake up and she didn’t come home and I found her in the alley later without even remembering, all because of the damage to my brain.
There’s no such thing as ghosts and haunted houses, Detective Bergen said.
Only symptoms.
I lost track of time. I lost my car keys. The forgotten trips to the storage locker. Things out of place in the house. Her image in the window, in Mr Ennis’s house.
Symptoms.
The ability to remember what Stacey looked like, every lovely detail of her beautiful face erased from memory. The laundry I forgot I had folded. My damaged memory.
Symptoms.
Voices on the phone. Echoes from my grieving self. The gun Hermes gave me a year ago, not two months ago. Bergen caught on the gun discrepancy because time had become elastic, folded plastic.
The numbing. The gaps in memory. The constant headaches. The red rabbits.
Symptoms.
I’m not Ghost. There was no ghost in West Adams.
Only a damaged man. James Hastings reborn.
40
The screen door opened with a slow creaking and latched softly. When I looked up she was standing at the entrance, the afternoon sun from the broken window lighting strands of her white hair and dappling the soft, faded cotton of the violet and navy banded rugby shirt she stole from James in college. Seeing her caught so, my memory - his memory - dilated, inhaling her, devouring all we had forgotten before our anniversary.
Her small nose and low cheekbones and wide-set eyes of blue. The way her teeth set next to each other smooth and straight. Her thick lips pink over the clean line of her chin. The shape of her ears, so small, their lobes tight against her jaw. The hopeful tension in her small shoulders, the fullness of her hips. Her breasts pushing the fabric that contained them in correct proportion. The exact shade of her hair damp, clean and pulled back, her skin aglow. Her hands bunched at her sides and her eyes glassing over with tears, every part of her combining into the whole, filling the void in me better than a puzzle piece, as if my fingertips - the fingertips of his mind - were reading the Braille of her DNA.
Our Stacey.
‘I had to,’ she said, ignoring the corpse between us. ‘He was going to kill you.’
I wanted to smile but I couldn’t hold my head up or make my face work that way.
‘I couldn’t find you,’ she said. ‘He hid you from me and I was lost. I’m so sorry, my love. I came back for you. I won’t ever leave you again.’
She came closer and kneeled bes
ide me. His love for her inside me was like a flame feeding on every forest fire in California, and it engulfed me.
She kissed my neck, whispered in my ear. ‘Come with me, Jameson. Let’s go home.’
But here, up close, I could see the scars. Thread lines under her chin where another scalpel had been used, at her request. More healing lines behind her jaw and ears. The swollen, still faint blue-purple from her nose resetting, and the pink rawness around her eyes, the mask skin pulled tighter in every direction. The transparent ridges of her blue contact lenses.
Not our Stacey. The monster healing.
This was where she had been for the past few weeks while I was his prisoner. What had she told the doctor? Had she taken a photo of Stacey and said, this is the one? Make me look like her?
‘I had to,’ she said, seeing me wrestle with it. ‘I couldn’t stand the way you looked at her when you looked at me. I knew it wouldn’t be real for you unless I changed the outside, too. I did the best I could. It’s me, James. I’m in here. You know it’s true.’
The Haunting of James Hastings Page 32
