Softspoken

by Lucius Shepard

  Jackson comes in for coffee, compliments her on the French Roast-coffeemaker parley. He’s cheerful, all “what’s your day looking like?” as if last night never happened. He’s put the old blinders on again. The world lies straight ahead. Those dark barriers that delimit your vision, they’re there to remind you of your course, not to hide the truth. Sanie’s cheerful back at him. She can, by God, outcheerful his ass on her worst day. Today she goes for a Reese Witherspoon perkiness. Blissfully perky. Yesterday she expressed the cheerfulness of a bygone era, a cross between the Two Marys, Poppins and Tyler Moore. Will ducks his head in. He’s off for the shore and won’t return until evening. Can he bring them anything? Videos, Sanie says, insisting on no monsters, no demons, witches, or serial killers. That just-laid peppiness to which all men are prone manifests in him as a blithe good cheer, at odds with his typical somber mood. A tennis sweater knotted about his neck would be appropriate. Ta-ta, she expects him to say. She pictures him tooling away in an MG and not the thousand-dollar shitbox he drives. Jackson walks out with him, coffee in hand. The kitchen closes down around Sanie. Her normal level of depression settles in.

  She drinks three more cups of coffee. The house, its silence accentuated by the burst of chatter, seems mournful, an enclosure given over to a timeworn grief. Something’s missing, but she can’t think what. Then she realizes that she hasn’t heard the voice since the previous night. Maybe she’s chased it away. This depresses her further. Though irritating, it has been her most reliable companion. If it comes back, she decides, she’ll make a serious effort to grant its wish…which gives her an idea. A ridiculous idea, and yet it grows on her. After washing her coffee cup, she climbs the stairs and enters Will’s room and pulls the cardboard box in which he keeps his peyote from beneath the bed. The neatly made bed. He’s cleaned up, stacked his magazines and done some spotty dusting. Sitting on the bed, she contemplates the buttons. Little gray-green pincushions. Magic vegetables that allow one to see what no one else can. She debates the rationality of what she’s considering. There’s no debate, really. It’s completely irrational. But irrationality appeals to her. The worst that can happen, she’ll throw up.

  Cautiously, as if picking up a hand grenade, she selects one of the buttons and—how awful can it be?—takes a bite. The taste is almost indescribable. Bitter at first, then the bitterness swelling into a flavor of pure corruption. She gags, stares at the pulpy rotten thing. The peanut butter is resting atop the microwave. She gets the jar and—as Will demonstrated—spreads peanut butter over the button until she’s created a ball of peanut butter with a peyote center. The taste is manageable, albeit still vile. Over the course of the next fifteen minutes she succeeds in downing five buttons. That’s the limit of her tolerance. Given that she’s significantly lighter than Will, five should do the trick. The buttons are heavy in her stomach, like they’ve assembled into a sour revolting mass, and though she’s not yet nauseous, she senses a potential for nausea. She sits in the chair closest to the window and waits.

  The high comes on gradually. Time slows. Surfaces begin to glisten, the walls to billow slightly, like dark brown curtains on which a design of boards has been printed. Her heart rate’s rapid, her neck muscles wired. Her stomach aches and feels bloated, causing her so much discomfort, she can’t sit still, and yet she thinks it should be bothering her more than it does—there seems to be a disconnect between her brain and her stomach, and she’s not getting the full effect. Her thoughts zoom erratically, spurts of perceptual acuity alternating with obsessive interludes. For a while she’s persuaded that the other mauve velvet chair is turning into a mauve-colored man with his head slumped onto his chest and she speculates on what the chair will say upon waking to its new form. Something more than “Howdy,” she reckons, and giggles. She has an impulse to switch on the TV, but its stored electricity tingles her fingertips, repelling her. A sweat breaks out all over her body. Shudders issue from some central place inside her. Her saliva production increases dramatically and the nausea intensifies. She’s afraid she’s going to throw up, then yearns to throw up, but she doesn’t want to chance leaving the room and having Jackson see her. She must look awful. Wondering how she looks distracts her from her stomach trouble. She digs around and unearths a hand mirror streaked with traces of white powder. The face that stares back at her from the glass is that of a plague victim. Blotches of redness. Enormous pupils. Pores the size of BBs. The reflection fascinates her. She continues staring at it until she has the thought that staring at it is holding her back, retarding the drug’s process. The mauve chair has evolved into an entity half man, half chair. The man’s head is a knob of grayish blue bone, its single feature a crimson gash of a mouth. He’s not real, or rather he’s an emblem of reality, shorn of its customary disguise. Crystalline glints might be tiny swimmers in the air with diamond skins. In an upper corner of the room, a spiderweb pulses, an ashen lace membrane, and the corner itself, suddenly vast to her eyes, a vault of gloomy stone that hums with many voices in unison, their solemn electric harmony, a cathedral-choired corner…Sick again, violently so, she rushes to the window and vomits into the back yard. Even after she’s emptied her stomach, she remains with her head hung out the window, eyes shut, too weak to move. Yellowjackets buzzing around their nest in the roofpeak sound like a squadron of approaching fighters. The warmth of the day is fractioned into dozens, hundreds of smells. Bitter grasses, fecal sweetnesses, the morose odor of the ancient wood, unnamable essences. The fields, formerly without pattern, now seem pattern’s source, an infinity of mosaics layered one atop the other. Flows of grass, maps of stones and dirt, ideograms of twigs, equations of crumpled cans and paper trash. Meaning lies everywhere, decryptified. But meaning is not relevant to the bright flash of being that signals her through the world. The sun’s godly heat soaks into her bones.

  The purge, she realizes, is the secret of the high. Perhaps the secret of life. Voiding oneself of the poisons that limit the freedom to see, to know. Though she’s foul with sweat, heart accelerated, stomach still not right, in a way she’s never felt better, never more sighted, more attuned to the vibrations that, without notice, have been passing through her. She’s not in complete control of her body. She tends to list when she walks. Every step tremulous and new. But it’s all good, an adventure. Tired of the room, its stale confine—Will’s smells, too, have grown myriad and distinct—she goes out into the hallway, its diminishing perspective as undulant and unstable as the rest of creation. It’s cooler here. Drier. Eddies in the air. Opaque disturbances. Gooseflesh spreads over her arms and legs. She tries to remember why she ate the peyote. Something she wanted. God, it’s really getting cold! She hugs herself, shivers. The cold, she imagines, is a function of the drug. One of Will’s shirts might help…if she can find one that’s clean. She turns back toward Will’s door and now she recalls why she did peyote. It’s barely visible against the sunlit window at the far end of the hall, a wisp of a thing, like a painting on glass that’s all but worn away, almost colorless: a young woman, portions of her jaw and cheek eroded, body erased below the knees, wearing a gown that retains a faint bluish tinge. And she’s not alone. In a large spiderweb that spans between the ceiling and the top of a door, part of a man’s bearded face has begun to accumulate, as if it’s using the strands of the web for structure, so decrepit that it needs the structure in order to become tangible. Sanie’s a little frightened, but only because what she’s seeing is so strange. There’s no inimical vibe attached to these apparitions. No grotesque displays, no ghastly sounds. The Bullard manse, it appears, is a warren for the sad and dissolute of the spirit world. Those are the colors of their haunting, the faded family colors. They materialize from every part of the hall, from old times not forgotten when Dixie wasn’t merely a laughable conceit, but a place of vivid, if foolhardy, aspiration. They jostle and drift, passing through each other, less ghosts than the remains of ghosts dressed in shreds of antebellum glory. Half-bodied ladies in evening wear mi
ngle and merge in pale, penetrating intimacy with eyeless gentlemen and soldiers with missing limbs that are not the result of battle. An unseemly dance of post-mortal transparencies. And there are actual dancers among them. An elderly couple, an unfinished sketch with traces of life—a rouge spot, a hint of melanin—clinging to their no-colored gauzy faces, faces that in their decrepitude have a rotted look, like lepers with ragged eyeholes and vacancies for mouths…they flicker into view and whirl, courtly, rickety, gliding away into the ghostly throng, becoming indistinguishable, elements of a gentle, insubstantial chaos, a tattered lace of being.

  Captivated, growing accustomed to the cold, Sanie watches them come and go. They intersect each other’s paths, yet they seem to apprehend her presence and avoid touching her as she moves along the hall toward the stairs. She has no doubt they’re real, not hallucinations, except in the sense that everything is hallucination. The Bullard stamp is on their features, that soft bewildered fleshiness that on occasion veers into a sharper beauty, as with Jackson. This is how he spent his childhood, then. Walking with ghosts, his soul shaped by their ineffable touches. No wonder, she thinks. No wonder.

  In among the frail revenants are more substantial figures, and there appears at first to be some correspondence between their modern dress and style and their solidity, making it appear that these relics have degraded over time; but the sight of several Confederate-era spirits without any missing parts persuades her that, while this might be the general rule, some factor in addition to time must be involved. The stairwell, too, is occupied and the second floor. She pauses on the landing for a peek along the hall, but does not go sightseeing. Some of the phantoms at the far end look as tissuey and improbable as the deep-sea jellyfish and tubeworms she’s seen on the Discovery Channel.

  She doesn’t want Jackson to see her in this state (You mean, South Carolina? Heh, heh), but she wants to see him and thinks if she’s quiet, he won’t notice her spying. She needs to reassure herself about him, though she’s not sure what form of assurance she needs. She hovers beside the study door. The room radiates chilliness like an open freezer. She cranes her neck, takes a look. Jackson’s at the desk, poring over a book, his pencil poised above a legal pad. Behind him, facing a bookcase, stands a naked old man with withered flanks and unkempt gray hair falling to his shoulders. If it were not for a slight dullness of coloration, his pasty skin a shade too pallid, she might presume him to be alive. His profile and Jackson’s are nearly the same, as are their attitudes: entranced, fixed, unswerving. It’s apparent they’re father and son. Rayfield’s head twitches toward her. He’s aware of her, at least it seems he is. He stares, his expression grows fretful.

  …Sanie, can you see me? I wish you…

  Stronger than ever before, yet still softspoken, the voice draws her away from the door.

  …If you can’t see me, I don’t know what I’ll do…

  The grayed wallpaper billows like old sails decorated with fleurs-de-lis. The floor is a rippling woodgrain river, and the door glows faintly yellow, blurred, but the chest-high pad of rubberized stuff on its unhinged edge, where you’re supposed to push so the oils of your skin won’t stain the finish, it’s dead black, perfectly in focus—it looks as if a light is shining through the wood, yet can’t penetrate the pad.

  …Sanie…you have to look close if you want to see me…

  A weathered, frizzy-haired, middle-aged man and a younger guy with a mustache materialize up ahead. Poof, they just pop out of nowhere. They’re facing one another, their mouths are working, but she can’t hear a thing. Real as a silent film. They both are dressed in jeans and a pinstriped uniform shirt—like those worn by delivery men—with script names embroidered on the pockets. Ralph and Sonny.

  …You don’t take a chance, you’ll never see anything…

  She edges between the men and they wink out, as if they were a ghostly union and she’s severed their connection. It unsettles her to think they’re substantial enough for her to have an effect on them, but she keeps walking and puts a hand on the kitchen door, on the pad.

  …Hear what I’m telling you, Sanie? Look close, look deep. One glimpse is all you need…

  This articulation, more complex than any previous, unsettles her further. She thinks maybe she should leave the door unopened, but before she can give the idea due consideration, a burst of what-the-hell overrides caution and she pushes into the kitchen.

  His back to her, a well-muscled man with longish brown hair, naked from the waist up, is squatting beside the back door, partially blocking Sanie’s view of a woman, who appears to have fallen. The man’s skin gleams under the overhead light. Strands of hair are stuck to the sweat on his shoulders. He’s blocking her view of the woman’s face; she has on a pair of cut-offs. Squares of linoleum show scars and ridges, everything’s ultra-real, except there’s no depth to the scene and, unlike the remainder of the room, the figures don’t billow and haven’t acquired auras.

  …Sanie…

  And that’s it. What she’s been led to see lasts about a second. The man and the woman are gone, their images switched off, and Sanie’s equal parts perplexed and freaked out. If that was her on the floor, and she believes it might have been, and if the man was Frank Dean, and she’s half-persuaded it was because of his stature, his hair…if that’s true, she doesn’t understand anything. She’s not a ghost, Frank Dean’s not a ghost. The peyote’s the only explanation. She’s tripping, hallucinating. Yet Will hears the voice, too, though—as has been observed—he’s not the most reliable witness and it’s obvious that he hasn’t been forthcoming with her.

  Trying to understand, it’s like ramming her head into a wall. She needs to get out of there, to loosen the knot the problem has tied in her brain, so she heads for the rear door and steps into the back yard. It’s as if she has emerged from a cave after years underground. The sun collects her, owns her. Buzzing, sighing heat and rippling weeds. The intricacy of nature, its shapes and colors newly particularized, washes over her. She feels simplified, absorbed into a unity. She wanders away from the house, revolted by its confining deadness now that she’s been exposed to the natural world, and finds a piece of ground where she can sit and be hidden from out-the-window-looking eyes among weeds and broken cornstalks. After sitting a while, she lies down. Things come to her. Oddly configured insights. She wants to remember them, but there’s too much to remember. She gives up and watches ants crawling over her arms and legs. The husk of a cricket lies beneath old silver-gray threads of cornsilk, its brittleness and delicacy the answer to a Mandarin riddle. A mummified ear of feed corn once was a glowing hive city. Slender green people peer from among the stalks. Androgynous corn spirits with sly uncomplicated faces. The day slides past, controlling her mood with light and shade. In early afternoon she sneaks back into the house, retrieves a bottle of water and two pears, and hurries back to her spot, oppressed by the humming refrigerator, the electricity in the walls. The pears taste like the essential pears. She’s so hungry she eats the cores. She imagines that she can see the translucent currents of wind circling the house.

  Near dusk, straightening out a little, she has an insight. Ghosts, according to Will’s magazines, are sad fractions left over from the past—that’s the consensus according to Will’s magazines. But maybe they’re actually shadows cast forward in time. And maybe they cast shadows backward in time as well, and some are shadows cast by events that haven’t yet happened, or have already happened in some other dimension. This could be the beginning of a larger theory, or, and she tends to go with this choice, she may be overly influenced by Will’s magazines and have a screw loose. Her mind is tired from being stretched. She’s starting to get shaky and the reek of drying peyote sweat is hard to bear. Wobbling to her feet, she glimpses Frank Dean’s black panel van beetling along the dirt road. Ugly and shiny, like a carapace of chitin. It slows passing the house, then picks up speed and vanishes in a wake of dust toward Snade’s Corners. The sight forces her to acknowledge tha
t a problem may exist. But at the moment she wants, sustenance, a hot shower, clean clothes. All else must wait. The kitchen lights are on. Rectangular yellow eyes with crosshair pupils. Jackson walks in front of one. The prospect of having to stand for inspection and answer questions is daunting. Where’ve you been? How’d you get so dirty? What are you looking at? Yet like a convict wise to the ways of prison, she knows how to manipulate the system.

  NINE

  In the bathroom Sanie goes to staring open-mouthed at the beautiful silver water pouring from the shower head and half-drowns herself. She’s still too stoned to deal with the outside world, but the situation demands that she deal with it. If she saw what she thought she saw in the kitchen, if she interpreted it correctly (big ifs), it might be beneficial to get a clearer read on Frank Dean. Looking at him through the lens of the drug may allow her to pick up something she missed. Once she’s dry, she puts on an ankle-length skirt and a camp shirt, husband-pleasing clothes, and heads downstairs to find Jackson. He’s lingering over an open book and an empty dinner plate in the kitchen. After a cursory glance at her, he refits his eyes to the book.

  “Going somewhere?” he asks.

  “The Boogie Shack.”

  He repeats the name as if it were a question, giving it a scornful presentation.

  “Frank Dean’s band’s playing. I thought I’d catch a set. You seen the car keys?”

  Jackson’s mouth firms. “Are you serious?”

  “Yup. Car keys?”

  Usually a disapproving “are-you-serious” is enough to make her back down. Jackson can’t seem to muster a response.

  “It’s no big thing,” she says. “I’ll only be gone an hour or so.”

  He shakes his head as if what she’s proposing is beyond his comprehension. “I can’t let you go to a place like that by yourself.”

  “A place like what? Have you been there?”