Hitchers

by Will McIntosh

  Summer had laid out a plan based on Krishnapuma’s book, and had practiced with me for two hours. I smiled inside, remembering how she would reach up and feign choking me when my natural skepticism came out. I didn’t expect to get anywhere. I wasn’t a mystic, and I wasn’t dead.

  Despite my reservations, I took a few imaginary deep breaths, tried to bring my mind to a single-pointed focus on the back of my head. I felt ridiculous, like I was on the ultimate snipe hunt, sent by a mystic who’d been dead fifty years.

  Turn around and peer out your third eye. And tremble. That’s what Krishnapuma had written.

  My third eye. Right. How do you turn around when you don’t control your body? I tried to visualize the third eye in the back of my head, while Grandpa chewed out Gilly, who didn’t understand why Grandpa had to be like that.

  Again, I imagined the breath I couldn’t actually take, willed myself to drift, to grow lighter. Those were Summer’s directions. When Mick heard the directions he waved a dismissive hand and went for a cigarette, and later refused to even consider trying it. I couldn’t tell if he truly thought it was dumb, or if it was a front because he was scared. In any case it seemed unfair that it was left to me.

  It felt sort of good to drift, actually. Rather than feeling pinned beneath Grandpa I felt like I was floating free, even rising a little, toward the top of my head...

  I returned to myself with a jolt. For a moment everything had gone dark. My eyes had stayed open, because Grandpa was the one controlling my eyelids, but the me floating around inside had closed off the connection. I had drifted away from the windows of the eyes. That’s what it felt like, anyway.

  I relaxed, found that I could close my eyes again. I let myself drift. It was unsettling, as if I was in deep space, floating away from the mother ship. It felt as if I was rotating, moving slowly clockwise. Without knowing why, I felt certain I was now facing my right ear.

  Breathe. Relax.

  The darkness began to lift, like the first hint of dawn. Trying to stay calm, I continued rotating toward the back of my head.

  A sliver of silver light broke through.

  I jolted with surprise, and I was instantly pulled back behind Grandpa’s eyes.

  There was something back there.

  I didn’t want to see what it was. I desperately didn’t want to see what it was. Had I just glimpsed the place you go when you die? I’d never felt so utterly petrified. I had no choice, though. I had to look again. If we didn’t know where the ghosts had come from, how could we find out how to send them back?

  Reluctantly I tried again, drifting, turning, until the darkness turned grey, then light broke through.

  The bar drifted into view.

  I panicked. I was seeing the same room, but not through my eyes, through the back of my head.

  This bar was empty, or nearly so. There was a man sitting on the end stool, facing the bar. Something was very wrong with his head. It was flattened at the top, as if it had been worn down to just an inch above his eyes. His handless arms ended in smooth stumps; his feet and ankles were gone, too.

  There should have been a great deal of blood, but there was none, and somehow that made it worse. I wanted to squeeze my eyes closed, but I had no sense of my eyes, no sense of my body. I looked at the man on the stool, trying to understand what I was seeing. It looked like he’d been sanded away at the extremities.

  I wanted to get the hell out of there. Every fiber of my being screamed run, or spin, or whatever it would take to get away. Instead I noticed tiny flecks lifting off of the man at the bar, like dust brushed off a mirror, or ashes lifting out of a bonfire.

  “Bunch of cheaters,” he muttered. Only his mouth moved—his cheeks remained perfectly still, his eyes stared dead at the mirrored bar, his pupils dilated to big black donuts.

  He chuckled as if he’d just thought of something funny, but managed this chuckle without the hint of a smile.

  “Forgot my pills,” he said. I could believe that. I had a hunch he had keeled over right there on that stool, dead of a heart attack. I was sure that was it; I was looking at the corpse, the soul, of a man who had died in that spot. That was the only explanation that made sense. He looked fused to that stool, as if he hadn’t moved in years.

  The bar was otherwise empty as far as I could see. I couldn’t see or hear the people I’d just left; instead I heard a softly howling wind, as if I was on an open plain. And, I realized, I could see the wind, or at least see the distortion it caused—horizontal static, like the imperfections you see in old unrestored film. The color of the room was off—everything was muted sepia tones—and everything seemed flat, lacking depth. The bottles behind the bar stacked up back-to-front like cardboard cutouts, the planks of the wood floor tapering too quickly to thin lines at the far end of the bar. I had the sense that if the strange man at the bar ever reached for the bowl of Chex Mix sitting there, they would taste like rubbery nothing, and he wouldn’t be able to swallow them.

  My vantage point lifted higher, then began to recede, toward the door. Grandpa was leaving. That was fine with me. I didn’t want to talk to the man at the bar who was slowly wearing away to nothing, who spoke like a ventriloquist’s dummy and seemed to be nothing but an empty shell.

  Outside, a woman lay spread-eagled on the pavement, her face a concave blank from the nose up, her arms and legs trailing away to nothing above the joints.

  “Those cookies smell delicious,” she said just as Grandpa turned the corner onto Cypress Street.

  The dead were scattered along the wind-blown street. An old man with a beard leaned up against the wall outside a parking garage. A baby wailed flatly from inside a dumpster. A man and woman, both young, lay entwined in the middle of the street, repeating snippets of non sequiturs to each other like Dada poets.

  If these were all of the dead, there weren’t many for a city this size. Most, I assumed, were inside. I couldn’t imagine what it must be like inside a hospital; the dead must be piled twenty deep in each room.

  No—there was more to it than that. If I visited Grandpa’s studio I was sure I wouldn’t find him hunched over the drawing table, wearing away. His spirit, or ghost, or whatever these things lying in the street were—was inside me, not in his studio where it should be.

  None of the dead I passed were dressed in out-of-date clothes, no men sporting 1940s fedoras, no flapper women.

  We passed an undifferentiated pile of something, bigger than a dog turd, smaller than a terrier. It was slowly, inexorably blowing away.

  All at once I realized what that pile was: a person. I thought of the man in the bar, the woman lying on the sidewalk, how they were wearing down. They would keep wearing down until they became piles, then, one day, the last of them would disappear on the wind. That’s why there were no men in fedoras.

  I tried to get a sense of myself in this place, of my eyes moving, where my mouth was, but I was nothing in this place, an invisible observer peering from behind a window.

  The street stretched, swirled as if I was viewing it through a black and white kaleidoscope. I felt a tug that was almost physical, followed by the familiar tingling in my hands and feet that told me I was coming back

  Now my heart was hammering. Images of the place I’d just escaped danced behind my eyes; I doubted they would ever leave.

  Gilly was nowhere to be seen, probably driven off by Grandpa. Spinning from the four or five glasses of whiskey Grandpa had downed, I searched until I located the spot where Grandpa had parked, and headed home, haunted by images of the dead blowing away in that silent, empty world.

  That was where Grandpa had come from. Or maybe more apt, had escaped from. One day I would go there. It might be a week, a year, or fifty years, but I would end up there in the end. The bald truth of it was like barbed wire pulled up my spine. It wasn’t an abstract, philosophical question any more—I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt what happened when we died. It scared the shit out of me.

  I tried calling Mick
’s phone, but he didn’t answer. That was okay, because I wanted to talk to Summer first, in person. I wanted her to help me make sense of what I’d seen.

  How had dead people gotten out of that place? I couldn’t imagine. And the voices—they were in there doing just what they did at first on the living side, blurting out bits of unconnected conversation, almost like they were emptying it all out for the last time. It reminded me of how people often say their lives flash before their eyes in the moment just before they thought they were going to die.

  I pulled into the parking lot of Summer’s apartment, called to her as I got out of the car. I kept calling as I stumbled up the steps. The apartment door burst open and Summer came out, eyes wide.

  “I was there. Everything he wrote is true,” I said. “Oh, shit. It’s all true.”

  Summer shook with excitement, or maybe fear. “You saw it?”

  Huffing, out of breath, I nodded. “I saw it. It was awful. So strange. I can’t tell you—” I took a deep breath and let it out, trying to collect myself.

  Summer put her arm across my back, helped me sit on the steps. There were tears in her eyes. “You’re back now. You’re safe.” She wiped under one eye. “My God, it’s like you just walked on the moon. Bigger. I can’t believe it.”

  “I can’t either.”

  “I’m so scared.”

  “Yeah. Me too.”

  She turned to look at me closely. “Are you okay?”

  There was a slight delay between when Summer’s lips moved and when her voice reached me. Everything seemed very far away. “No. Not even close.”

  She put the back of her hand on my forehead. A heartbeat later I felt her cool skin there. It felt nice—soft, and real. “I think you’re in shock.” She touched my shoulder. “Come on, let’s go inside and you can lie down.”

  That sounded good. I knew she wanted to hear everything, but right now I wanted to stop thinking about it.

  CHAPTER 23

  “What do you think happens to those people over there?”

  Mick asked. He was still stunned, and sounded like a lost kid. When I told him what I’d seen he’d gone grey and begun to sweat. I thought he might be having another heart attack. Now he was working his way through a bottle of Drumquish single malt at his dining table.

  “I think they blow away,” I said.

  Summer was frantically flipping through Krishnapuma’s book. Now that we knew it was all true, his cryptic paragraphs were our map of the landscape. We’d gone round and round, piecing together what I’d seen, poring over Krishnapuma’s writings.

  “So what do we do now?” Mick asked.

  “I think we need to talk to some of the dead who are back. Try to figure out what happened to bring them here,” I said. “I doubt Grandpa is going to help, so that leaves Gilly.”

  Summer lifted her head from the book. “We could also contact some of the others posting online.” Summer had come across a website that was sort of a support group for people with the voice, and a few had posted accounts of full-body possession in the past few days. She glanced at her watch. “Hell. I have to get to work.”

  “Oh, hell no,” Mick said, rising from his chair. “Here.” He pulled his wallet from the back pocket of his jeans, extracted all the money in it. “I’ll pay you this to stay and help save our arses from eternal sanding.”

  “I can’t,” Summer said. “I called in sick two days in a row, and that screws everyone else, because they have to cover for me.” She looked at me. “Can you give me a ride?”

  I nodded. “Sure. But Mick’s right—we need you. Can you quit on short notice and let us pay you to help us? Our Eastern mysticism specialist.” I didn’t add that I also wanted to stay close to Lorena. Before too long she would be out.

  “I don’t know. Can we talk about it later? I really need to get going.” It looked like the topic was making her uncomfortable, and I guess I could see why. From her perspective it might seem like two guys with money offering a handout to their poor newfound friend. It wasn’t like that at all, at least not for me. To me it was a life or death situation, and she seemed to have a better handle on what was going on than anyone.

  We crossed the underground parking lot, my shoes clacking on the concrete, Summer’s worn sneakers silent.

  “Your grandfather seems like a complete jerk, if you don’t mind me saying,” Summer said. “Was he that bad when he was alive?”

  “Careful,” I laughed. “He can hear you. You don’t want to get on his bad side.”

  “Yeah. Seriously, that wasn’t his bad side?”

  I considered. How to sum up Grandpa? “He never hit us or anything, not even when my mom was at work, but he was mean. Cutting. Whenever he was around there was tension in the air. You’d be doing something innocuous—washing the dishes, turning the channels on the TV—and suddenly he was letting you have it, calling you lazy or stupid.”

  Or a sissy. How many times had he said that to me? You’re nothing but a sissy.

  “He did it to both of you? You and Kayleigh?”

  I shook my head. “Kayleigh always got a pass. She was the only one who could get a kind word to slip past that clenched jaw. He could be nice to my mom as well, but they argued a lot as well.”

  “What did he look like?” Summer asked. “Was he a big guy? I picture him as a big guy.”

  “I wish I had a picture with me—”

  “You don’t carry a picture of him in your wallet? I’m surprised.”

  I threw back my head and laughed. It felt good, especially because we were laughing about Grandpa. It made him seem less terrifying.

  “He wasn’t particularly tall, but he was built like a laborer—Popeye arms, a thick middle, a ruddy red face. He’d been a laborer before the accident.”

  Summer frowned, turned in her seat to face me. “The accident?”

  “I haven’t told you about the accident?” I asked. We paused as we climbed into the car. “Yeah, he was in a wheelchair. It happened sixty years ago, but we were reminded of it constantly. No one in the family could skin a knee without being told how sometimes what seems bad at the time was actually a blessing in disguise, as if we should raise our hands and thank God for every bout of diarrhea.”

  Summer laughed.

  “Of course only physical bad fortune counted. No one in the family would dare suggest that Grandpa’s bankruptcy after Toy Shop Village failed might be a blessing in disguise. Only accidents counted, because if Grandpa hadn’t been burned and crippled he wouldn’t have needed to find a way to make a living sitting down. And, as the twisted logic goes, if it wasn’t for Grandpa’s release from a life of manual labor, the rest of us would now probably be working as laborers, fast food workers, or whores—”

  As soon as it was out, I tried to gulp it back, realizing how snooty that sounded to someone who waitressed for a living. “Not that—”

  Summer waved me off. “I know what you mean. Go ahead.”

  Embarrassed, I tried to pick up the thread. “So we all lived in the shadow of Grandpa’s semi-fame. That was another insufferable thing about him—he was always, always telling people who he was. In the time it took for the movie attendant to tear his ticket and point him toward the correct theater, Grandpa would find a way to let the ticket-tearer know that he was the creator of Toy Shop. He managed to do this without being friendly for a second—no smile, no ‘So glad you’re a fan,’ just a simple declaration that he was someone important.”

  “Did you at least get to hang out with other cartoonists? Did he know Charles Schulz?”

  I laughed again. “Oh, now you’re really going to get on his bad side. He despised Schulz. He also hated Mort Walker, Hank Ketcham, Chic Young, Dik Browne, all of them. He hated the newcomers even more. As far as he was concerned Gary Larson was lazy; that’s why Far Side was only one panel, and why Larson quit after ‘only’ fifteen years. Same with Bill Watterson and Berke Breathed. Neither of them had the fortitude to stick it out for fifty years the wa
y Grandpa had. Of course both earned a lot more than Grandpa, so they could afford to retire early.”

  “It’s ironic that the changes you made to the strip moved it into their league.” She put her red Keds sneaker on the dash, retied a loose lace. “It’s amazing that he’s angry at that. You’re doing just what he supposedly valued. Initiative. Business prowess.”

  I threw my head back. “Oh, now he hates your guts.”

  “What?” Summer laughed.

  “You’re giving me credit for something.” Inside, I was glowing from Summer’s praise. “Hasn’t Grandpa told you? I’m a no good slacker who lets women take care of him. First Kayleigh—when we were little she used to talk for me half the time. Then Lorena, who supported me while I tried to make it as an artist.”

  Summer leaned back in her seat. “It sounds like he resents your success more than he resents you resurrecting the strip, or the changes you made.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know. Maybe. It’s hard to know what goes on in his mind. I barely know what goes on in mine. Sometimes I think I made all those changes to the strip as a way to get back at him.”

  CHAPTER 24

  “Can you at least tell me why you’re leaving?” croaked a woman buying lottery tickets at the register. I gave her an understanding smile.

  The voices of the dead seemed to be everywhere.

  A trickle of cases had become a steady flow, and now a torrent. Some tipping point had been reached. On the streets people reacted to the vocal epidemic with hollow-eyed shock. You could smell the panic on people as they passed, acrid and foul. Thousands of people were fleeing the city, rushing for the exits as the horror show got really scary.

  I set my coffee on the counter, feeling like the veteran soldier welcoming raw recruits to the front line. You think the voices are hard? I wanted to tell them, Wait till you see what comes next.

  Back in my car I checked the news. NPR’s Lakshmi Singh was discussing the epidemic with someone from the Center for Disease Control.