Spirits in the Wires

by Charles de Lint

  She left town before I could. One day she just wandered off and out of our lives the way street people do, but before she left, she introduced me to William.

  He was living on the street at the time, too. There was a whole family of them that got together at night around the oil drums. Jack, Casey, William, and just before Malicorne left, a slip of a girl named Staley Cross who played a blue fiddle.

  William was in his fifties, a genial alcoholic—as opposed to a mean drunk—with weather-beaten features and rheumy eyes. Something about Malicorne’s going motivated most of them to get off the street. In William’s case, he started attending AA meetings and got a job as a custodian in a Kelly Street tenement, just up from the Harp. He’s still there today, surviving on the money he gets from odd jobs and tips.

  I go to the AA meetings with him sometimes, to keep him company. He’s been off the wagon for a few years now, but he’s still addicted to one thing they don’t have meetings for: magic. I don’t mean that he’s a conjuror himself, or has this need to take in magic shows. Or even that he’s some kind of groupie of the supernatural and strange. He just knows a lot of what he calls “special people.”

  “I’m drawn to people like that,” he told me one afternoon when we were sitting on the steps of the Crowsea Public Library. “Don’t ask me why. I guess thinking about them, listening to them talk, just being with them, makes the world feel like a better place. Like it’s not all cement and steel and glass and the kind of people who pretty much only fit into that kind of environment.”

  “People like Malicorne,” I said.

  He nodded. “And like you. You’ve all got this shine. You and Malicorne and Staley with that blue spirit fiddle of hers. There’s lots of you, if you look around and pay attention. You remember Paperjack?”

  I shook my head.

  “He had it, too. Used to give you a glimpse of the future with these Chinese fortune-tellers of his that he made out of folded paper. He was the real thing—like Bones and Cassie are.”

  “So we’ve all got this shine,” I said, remembering how Marc had told me he could see mine that day I first met him.

  William gave me a smile. “I know it makes some people uncomfortable, but not me. I guess maybe I don’t have a whole lot else left in my life, but at least I’ve got that. At least I know there’s more to the world than what we see here.”

  “I suppose,” I said. “Still, I wouldn’t mind learning how to turn it down a notch or two.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know, exactly. So that I can fit in better when I want to fit in, I suppose. It’s hard walking into a room and after five minutes or so, pretty much everybody’s making it clear that it’d all be so much more pleasant if you’d just leave.”

  “That’s important to you?” he asked. “Fitting in?”

  “Maybe. Sometimes. I guess it’s mostly wanting to do it on my own terms.”

  “Well, I know a guy who might be able to help you.”

  We tracked Robert Lonnie down at the Dear Mouse Diner, just around the corner from the library. He was sitting in a back booth, a handsome young black man in a pinstripe suit with wavy hair brushed back from his forehead. There was a cup of coffee on the table in front of him, a small-bodied old Gibson guitar standing up on the bench beside him.

  “Hey, Robert,” William said as he slid into the other side of the booth. I sat down next to William.

  “Hey yourself, Sweet William,” Robert said. “You still keeping your devil at bay?”

  “I’m trying. I just take it day by day. How about you?”

  “I just keep out of his way.”

  “This is my friend, Saskia,” William said.

  Robert turned his gaze to me and I realized then that he was another of William’s special people. Those eyes of his were dark and old. When they looked at you, his gaze sank right under your skin, all the way down to where your bones held your spirit in place.

  “Saskia,” he repeated with a smile, then glanced at William. “If this isn’t proof positive we’re living in the modern world, I don’t know what is.”

  I gave him a puzzled look when his dark gaze returned to me.

  “Well, you see,” he said. “I know that machines have always had spirits, but I look at you and see that now they’re making babies, too.”

  I suppose that was one way of putting it.

  “That’s why we’re here,” William said. “We’re looking for some advice on how to turn down her shine.”

  Robert pulled his guitar down onto his lap and began to pluck a melody on its strings, playing so soft, you’d have to strain to hear it. But the odd thing was, while I couldn’t hear them clearly, I could feel those notes, resonating deep down inside me.

  “Turn down your shine,” he said.

  I nodded. “It makes it hard to fit in.”

  “You should try being black,” he said.

  He improvised softly around a minor chord, waking an eerie feeling in the nape of my neck.

  “I know it’s not the same thing,” I started, but his smile stopped me.

  “We all know that,” he said. “Don’t worry. I’m not about to go all Black Panther on you.”

  His fingers did a funny little crab-walk up the neck of the guitar that took away the strange feeling the minor chord had called up.

  “So can you help her?” William asked.

  Robert smiled. “Turn down a shine? Sure.” He looked at me. “That’s an easy one. You’ve just got to stop being so aware of it yourself, that’s all. Have you got any hard questions?”

  “But…that’s it?”

  “Pretty much. Oh, it won’t happen overnight, but if you can stop yourself from remembering, or believing, or what it is that you’re doing inside that head of yours, soon enough everybody else will be seeing it your way, too. It’ll be like you’ll all start to agree that this is the way things are. Or should be.”

  “Making a consensual reality,” William said. “Like the professor’s always talking about.”

  Robert nodded. “Of course, you’ve got to ask yourself,” he said to me, “why would you want to turn down a shine?”

  Now it was my turn to smile.

  “I’ve already been through that with William,” I said. “Like I told him, I want the option of fitting in if I want to.”

  “Curious, isn’t it?” Robert said. “All the magic people want to be normal, and all the normal people want magic. Nobody ever wants what they’ve already got and that’s the story of the world.”

  He started a twelve-bar blues, humming a soft accompaniment to the aching music his fingers pulled from the guitar.

  William and I sat there for a long time, just listening to him play before we finally left the diner.

  I don’t know if this happens to you, but it’s a funny thing. There’s this syn-chronicity with street people. Doesn’t matter how unusual they might be, like Tinfoil Annie making her animals with aluminum foil that she then sets free in the gutters, or talented, like Robert Lonnie and the way he can play a guitar. See them once and suddenly you’re seeing them all the time and you have to wonder, how was it that you never noticed them before?

  After that afternoon in the diner, I started seeing Robert everywhere, playing that old Gibson of his. He was so good that I asked William once why Robert wasn’t playing out, doing real gigs instead of sitting in the back of clubs, after-hours, or all the other places you might find him making music: on park benches, in diners, on street corners, in the subway.

  “The story is,” William said, “that he traded his soul to the devil to be able to make the kind of music he does. But it wasn’t a fair trade. Turned out, Robert had that music in him all along—he just hadn’t been patient enough to take the long way of getting it out. Anyway, he’s supposed to have figured out a way he can live forever—just to spite the devil, he says— but he likes to keep a low profile anyway. Seems the devil will let you get away with a thing or two, just so long as you don’t rub him i
n the face with it.”

  “Do you believe that?”

  William shrugged. “I’ve seen enough things in this world that I’ll keep an open mind about anything. And I like the idea of somebody putting one over on old Nick.” Then he smiled. “ ‘Course there’s others say Robert just ages well and has a natural talent.”

  Not everybody I met on the street actually lived on the street, even when, at first, it seemed as if they did. I guess some people were like I came to be— they just felt more comfortable carrying on their business on the edges of society.

  I thought Geordie was homeless when I first met him—busking with his fiddle for people’s spare change instead of panhandling. But once I got to know him, I realized that he just liked playing on the street. He played in clubs, too—had an apartment on Lee Street and all—but busking, he said, kept him honest. He was one of the first street musicians you’d hear in the spring—standing on some corner, all bundled up, fingerless gloves on his hands—and one of the last to give it up in the fall.

  Geordie and I hit it off right away. I suppose we could have become more than friends, but I could tell he was carrying a torch for someone else and that kind of thing always gets in the way of developing a meaningful relationship. One or the other of you ends up settling for what’s in front of you, but you’re always remembering the something you couldn’t have.

  At first I thought that something was Sam, this old girlfriend of Geordie’s who did this mysterious sidestep out of his life, but once I got to know him better, I realized he was really carrying the torch for his friend Jilly. I got the idea that neither of them was aware of it—or at least would admit it to themselves—though everyone else in their crowd seemed to be aware of it.

  It’s funny, considering how close he and Jilly are, that I must have known Geordie for almost half a year before I ever met Jilly and got pulled into her mad, swirling circle of friends. Geordie often talked about her and Sophie and Wendy and the rest of them, but somehow our paths never crossed. I know it’s a big city, but when we finally did meet, it turned out we knew so many people in common, you’d have thought we’d have run into each other a lot sooner than we did.

  Something similar happened with Christy, though in his case I’d actually seen him around before. I just hadn’t known who he was.

  The way we met, I was walking down Lee Street and saw Geordie at a table on the patio of the Rusty Lion with some fellow whose face I couldn’t see because his back was to me. By the time I realized who it was, it was too late to retreat because Geordie’d already seen me. I made myself go up to their table to say hello.

  You see, I’d already noticed Christy and been attracted to him long before we actually met. The first time was at a poetry reading. I spied him across the room and there was something about him that I liked enough to almost give up my promise of not trying to connect with people at those things. But then I saw that he was with Aaran and a woman—that I didn’t get along with either—who worked for another paper. If they were his friends, I didn’t want to be one myself.

  I noticed him from time to time in the neighbourhood after that, usually on his own, but never put it together that this brother Geordie often talked about was the same person as this attractive stranger with his bad taste in friends.

  Turns out I was wrong about the friends. Christy has impeccable taste in them, not least because he dislikes Aaran about as much as I do, though not for all the same reasons.

  Once we got that out of the way, one thing led to another and … well, that’s how I came to be where I am now, living with Christy.

  I’ve learned to turn down my shine enough to get along in a crowd when I want to, but the price I paid for that is losing the voice in my head. And when I lost it, I lost my connection to whatever that big voodoo spirit in cyberspace might have been. I don’t dream about flying over circuit boards anymore. I don’t dream about pixels and streaming bands of electricity or any of that. Most of the time all those ideas just seem like some crazy notion I once had.

  But I don’t trust this flesh I’m wearing, either.

  I don’t trust the experiences that fill my head because they only date back to when I first appeared in this world. Like I said, I can follow a computer and paper trail tracing my background—where I was born, grew up, went to school—but I still can’t recall any of it.

  So, sometimes I still think that there used to be something else in my head, some vast world of information—or at least a connection to the spirit that people surfing on the Net can access as the Wordwood. Or perhaps it’s still there, but I’m cut off from it.

  I guess I’m not really sure of anything, except I know I’m in this world now. And I know I can count on Christy to stand by me.

  Most days that’s enough.

  Christiana

  It was different for me,

  The first time I opened my eyes I knew exactly what I was: all the excess baggage that Christy didn’t want. How does he put it in his journal?

  … at around the age of six or seven we separate and then hide away the parts of ourselves that don’t seem acceptable, that don’t fit in the world around us. Those unacceptable parts that we secret away become our shadow.

  I know. It sounds desperately grim. But it wasn’t all bad. Because the things that people think they don’t want aren’t necessarily negative. Remember, they’re just little kids at the time. Their personalities are still only beginning to form. And all of this is happening on an instinctive, almost cellular level. It’s not like they’re actually thinking any of it through.

  Anyway, in my case …

  Even as a little boy, Christy shut people out. That let me be open.

  He was often so bloody serious—because he didn’t trust people enough to relax around them, I suppose—and that let me be cheerful.

  He didn’t make friends easily. I could and did.

  But I got his dark baggage, too. A quick temper, because he held his in check. A recklessness, because he didn’t take chances—

  Well, you get the picture. I was the opposite parts of him. Elsewhere in his journals he describes our physical differences:

  She’s short, where I’m tall. Dark-skinned, where I’m light. Red-haired, where mine’s dark. A girl to my boy, and now a woman as I’m a man.

  Basically, I opened my eyes to find that I was this seven-year-old girl who knew everything about being a seven-year-old boy, but nothing about being herself.

  I suppose it could have been dangerous for me, trying to make my way through the big bad world all on my own at such a tender age, but it didn’t quite work out that way. For one thing, when a shadow is created … yes, she’s all the unwanted parts of the one who cast her, but she takes an equal amount of … I don’t know … spirit, perhaps, or experience … some kind of essence from the borderlands. So right away, I was this unwanted baggage and something more.

  What are the borderlands?

  Once we started talking to each other, Christy was always asking, “Where do you go when you’re not in this world?”

  I wouldn’t tell him for the longest time—as much because I like to hang on to the “woman of mystery” image he has of me as for any logical reason. But one night when he was going through one of his periodic bouts of self-questioning, I relented.

  “To the fields beyond the fields,” I finally told him, explaining how they lie all around us and inside us.

  What I didn’t explain is that they’re part of the border countries, the fields that lie between this world he knows so well and the otherworld— Fairyland, the spirit world, the dreamlands, call it what you will. That otherworld is what the mystics and poets are always reaching out for, few of them ever realizing that the borderlands in between are a realm all their own and just as magical. They lie thin as gauze in some places—that’s where it’s the easiest to slip through from one world into the other—and broad as the largest continent elsewhere.

  The beings that inhabit this place are sometimes
called the Eadar. Most of them were created out of imagination, existing only so long as someone believed in them, though it’s also the place where shadows like me usually go. The Eadar call it Meadhon. The Kickaha call it ÃbitawehÃakÃ,the halfway world. I just think of it as the middleworid. The borderlands. But I didn’t get into any of that with Christy.

  What I also didn’t explain is what I was just telling you about how a shadow takes as much of her initial substance from something in the borderlands as it does from the one casting her. I don’t know what it is. Maybe it’s just from the air itself. Maybe something in the borderland casts another shadow and people like me are born where the two shadows meet. What I do know is that I had an immediate connection to that place and when I first slipped over, I met my guide.

  I say “my guide,” like everybody gets one, but that’s not necessarily the case. I just know there was someone waiting for me when I crossed over.

  Being new to everything, I simply accepted Mumbo at face value. It was only in the years to follow, as I began to acquire a personal history of experience and values, that I thought, isn’t this typical? When other people get spirit guides or totems, they’re mysterious power animals, maybe wise old men or women, like the grandparents you maybe never had.

  I got Mumbo.

  She was basically a mushroom brown sphere the size of a large beach ball with spindly little arms and legs that were folded close to her body when she wasn’t using them to roll herself from one place to another. Much like those Balloon Men that Christy wrote about in his first book, How to Make the Wind Blow, I suppose. Today I can’t imagine anything less mystical or learned, but she had a kind face and I was a newborn seven-year-old when I first met her. No doubt she was an appropriate shape to capture the interest of that child I was, and the immediate affection I had for her carries on to this day, for all that she’s just so … so silly-looking.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself.