Homesick

by Nino Cipri

  Clay hadn’t heard anyone use the word “faggot” since he’d ditched his hometown, ten years before. The sound of it now made something in his chest buckle, like it was in danger of collapsing. Keep driving, he told himself, even as his skin prickled.

  “Young man! There’s no need to feel down!” the cop sang. His voice boomed in the confines of the car.

  “Would you shut up? Let the guy fucking drive us in peace.”

  They turned down Magritte Avenue. The normally dressed guy tried to catch Clay’s gaze in the rearview mirror, in silent apology perhaps, but Clay kept his eyes forward.

  “You ever unwind one of them?” the dress-up cop asked. He tapped a finger against the window. A wraith was hunched over in a bus shelter, its hands resting on the sidewalk in puddles of violet light. “The purple stuff goes everywhere. Splashes up your arms like blood, stinks like sulfur. It dries, but you’ll smell it on your skin through a couple showers.”

  “No wonder you fucking stink,” the other guy said. Clay had noticed it too: the man smelled like someone had lit a match and set fire to a pile of dirty clothes.

  “It keeps the hauntings away,” the dress-up cop said.

  The other guy rolled his eyes, mostly for Clay’s benefit. “Nobody really believes that.”

  “I haven’t found any game pieces in my shoes for a week.” The cop looked at Clay. “You know they’re connected, right? They have to be.”

  Clay shrugged noncommittally. The man leaned forward, and the smell of sulfur thickened in the car. “You even speak English? I haven’t heard a damn word from you yet. What’s your name, anyway?

  “I speak English,” Clay said. “And I don’t know anything about the hauntings.”

  The other guy pulled the cop back against his seat. “That’s enough, man, he’s gonna crash if you don’t leave him the fuck alone.”

  The cop settled down, softly singing “YMCA” to himself. Clay let the two men off at Nineteenth and Stein. The dress-up cop got out first, slamming the door behind him. The other guy lingered. “Sorry,” he said. “He’s a good guy, normally. It’s just everything that’s going on.”

  “I get it,” Clay said. These kinds of assholes wanted empathy for their tough situation. Clay just wanted them out of the car.

  The guy pulled out his phone, signing off on the ride. “The weird thing is, he actually is a cop. I don’t know why he’s dressing like that. Why anybody is. It makes me sick.”

  ***

  Clay had earned a break. He got a coffee and a sandwich and treated himself to the luxury of rejecting a handful of ride requests and thinking of nothing much at all.

  He’d honed the latter to a skill. Dissociating made days go by easier. Maybe that’s why people still wore their Halloween costumes; one more step toward detachment. Clay didn’t believe the dress-up cop, though: nothing could keep the hauntings away. It was a conviction that dwelt on the back of his tongue, where the taste of brass burned. Everyone who was haunted (and everybody was) either needed or deserved it. They were all culpable. Smashing apart a wraith wouldn’t change that. Disguising yourself wouldn’t either.

  Clay paused at a ride request that was pinging from a block away: no picture, but the name Joe Palomar was attached to it.

  Joe was petite and compact, and Joe had soft brown skin, and Joe had given Clay a handjob that was almost transcendent back in the summer, when Clay was still cruising his passengers. Clay had wondered aloud how anyone could give a handjob that was inspiring rather than perfunctory, and Joe had smiled and said, “The only good thing I learned at Methodist summer camp.” Joe had told him to look him up, and Clay never had, because right after that he’d encountered the crying Republican wannabe porn star and realized that being alone was better. Easier, certainly. Detach and dissociate: a survival mechanism for the modern age.

  But what, exactly, had detaching gotten him?

  Clay accepted the ride, and the Flock app sang its tinny song of praise. “Yeah, yeah,” Clay said, and turned the car back on. Joe was only a block away, going to the university’s library, and he hadn’t seemed the type to try and drag Halloween past its expiration date. Clay was relieved to spot Joe wearing a green hoodie under a brown jacket; no costume in sight, unless it was an extremely subtle one.

  “Schiele Library?” Clay asked.

  Joe looked up from his phone. “I wondered if it would be you,” he said. He sounded pleased rather than annoyed, to Clay’s relief. He got in the passenger seat, next to Clay instead of in the backseat. “It’s good to see you,” he said.

  Clay stole glances at Joe as he drove: noted the empty holes that dotted his ear, where Clay remembered delicate silver hoops; noted the stubble on his jaw, the overgrown curls of his hair, and that his skin looked rougher, paler than the ruddy brown of his memory. He looked softer in some places, harder in others.

  “How’ve you been?” Joe asked.

  “Can’t complain,” Clay said. “How are you?”

  “The world’s fucked,” Joe said, though he didn’t sound concerned. “Rent’s due. Paycheck’s late. I’ve been living off the candy at the receptionist’s desk at work. I’m considering selling plasma, but my sister’s got me paranoid about the nefarious magical shit that could be done with it. And a cute dude I fooled around with ghosted me.”

  “...Sorry,” Clay said. He actually was.

  Joe slouched down and propped his knee up on dashboard. “Don’t be. You just said you couldn’t complain, and I thought, really? You can’t find something to be mad about right now?”

  “I think if I let myself get mad,” Clay said, “I wouldn’t be able to feel anything else.”

  “My life in a nutshell for the last month or two,” Joe said. He blew on his hands to warm them. “I’m holding my shit together with masking tape and spite.”

  Clay turned up the heat and asked, “You want some of my coffee?”

  “Thank you for recognizing that I am actually that desperate,” Joe said. After a moment and several sips of coffee, he added, “And sorry if I made it weird.”

  “It was already a weird day.” He pondered telling Joe about the wraiths, the dress-up cop, Natasha, the keys in his throat, then settled on: “My neighbor asked me to talk to her boyfriend about getting pegged.”

  “Oh my god,” Joe said. “Do you mean Mari? She asked me the same goddamn thing.”

  “Are you serious?” Clay wasn’t sure if he should be insulted that he wasn’t even Mari’s first choice. “Wait, how do you know Mari?”

  “I started working at the suicide hotline with her,” Joe said. “Technically, it’s an internship, but it pays, so—what? Why are you laughing?”

  ***

  Clay considered calling it quits after dropping Joe off at Schiele Library, after finding out he’d be at Mari’s tonight, after Joe said, “I’m gonna take the rest of your coffee, but I sincerely promise to get you back sometime. Not like that. Unless you’re into it.”

  But Clay had promised that he’d pick up five rides, and he’d already skimped. He was driving back downtown when he saw the group standing in a rough semicircle. They wore costumes: a pirate with a flimsy tricorner hat, a vampire in a tight black dress and torn stockings, a young girl with the green toga and crown of the Statue of Liberty. Clay slowed down as the Statue of Liberty tore a piece of black fabric away and held it above her head, waving it joyfully. The black cloth was being unwound from a wraith, which lay on the ground, curled protectively around itself. Indigo and violet light bled from its eyes, nostrils, and fingertips and pooled on the sidewalk. Droplets caught on the black cloth and splashed onto the hands and clothes of the people surrounding it.

  Even from inside the car, Clay could smell sulfur. He could hear, like a ringing in his ears, the wraith’s voice as it screamed or cried or sang.

  The vampire turned and saw him watching. She had a scrap of the fabric in her hands, and as he watched she wound it around her neck, pulled up one end in an approximation of a noose. I
see you, she mouthed.

  Clay pulled back into traffic, nearly clipping an oncoming car. It was several minutes before the roaring in his ears died down enough for him to hear the chimes from his phone, the Flock app activating and ringing with pleas for rides. He killed the app and at the next red light turned the phone off entirely. His hands were shaking, and shivers ran from the nape of his neck to his gut.

  He was okay, he told himself. He hadn’t said anything or tried to stop them. They weren’t ashamed. They had torn into a wraith in broad daylight, so why did it matter? He had only watched.

  Jesus, he had watched.

  Clay was turning down Owen Avenue when he felt it coming on as a cold sweat, his guts going liquid and then cramping. He pulled over again, jerking the car to a stop and throwing it into park. He fumbled with the door handle and managed to get it open before he doubled over, gagging, choking on the cold metal in his throat. He was sure that he was about to die; he’d be found with stiff limbs and blue skin, or maybe black cloth would wind around his limbs and face, enshroud him. What color light would he bleed?

  Clay reached into his mouth, fingertips brushing the very tip of the key, an ecstasy of fumbling before he managed to grasp it. The metal teeth clawed at his throat as he extracted it, but he could breathe again. The cold air burned as he sucked it into his lungs and sobbed.

  Clay took one raspy breath and then another, until he could stand to open his eyes and look at the key. It was old, black, and made of iron. There was blood in the creases of his fingers. The taste of metal in his mouth wasn’t just from the key; its teeth must have broken the skin.

  ***

  The TV was still on in Mari’s apartment. Clay stood on the landing in front of her door, one foot on the stairs going up. He took another step, then turned around and knocked.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked, when she answered. “Are you okay?”

  Clay shook his head. “I’m fine,” he tried to say, but his throat rebelled, and the words were a whisper. He thought of Natasha and the tearing sound of her voice. “Water?” he mouthed.

  She pulled him into the apartment and filled up a glass of water from the faucet. The first swallow was too large, and the sharp, stabbing pain nearly made him spit it out. Mari’s voice seemed to have receded, though he could still hear the TV: a serious voice with a British accent describing flocks of birds that descended like locusts on farms in sub-Sahara Africa. The birds ate and ate, stripped crops down to barren fields, devouring every seed and plant. It did no good to shoot at them, since they would just rise up, circle around the sky like a dark, buzzing cloud, and land again. Mari turned the TV off. She wrapped a soft blanket around his shoulders and sat him down on the living room couch.

  “Can you tell me what happened?” Mari asked.

  He focused on her face: the dark-rimmed glasses, the wide, soft nose, the dark freckles that spattered her round cheeks. He opened his mouth to speak, but the pain got in the way. He pulled the metal key from his pocket instead and tapped it on his throat. He wondered if she would forgive him if he told her what he had witnessed, and that he had chosen to drive away from it. He was thankful that he’d lost his voice and wouldn’t have to find out.

  “I got three postcards yesterday. Four the day before. They’re coming more often. I can’t—” She closed her mouth. The emotions that were written so clearly on her face fell away, as if she were consciously pulling them off her skin.

  “You’re not going back outside, are you?” she asked.

  He shook his head.

  “Good. You should stay for dinner. Come help me cook,” Mari said, then suddenly sat up straight. “Fuck, I hope I didn’t burn the onions.”

  She had, in fact, burnt the crap out of the onions, and the kitchen was filled with greasy, acrid smoke. Mari swore while wiping tears out of her eyes, and Clay coughed and winced.

  “Fuck everything,” Mari shouted. She opened the back door and threw the pan, heedless of the oil that splattered on her arms. It flew end over end, and a few blackened onions came loose and arced out in their own orbits before hitting the ground.

  They opened every window and tried to wave the smoke outside, but the smell lingered. “Fuck,” Mari said again. “This doesn’t mean everything is ruined, right? It’s not a sign.”

  Clay shook his head, not sure if he believed himself. He could believe it for Mari’s sake, he thought. “It’s just a pan,” he tried to say, but he couldn’t speak around the smoke in his throat. He typed the words out on his phone instead: Just a pan.

  Mari sighed, then coughed and wiped her face. “It feels like everything is life or death these days. Even a shitty pan from IKEA.” Let’s just make food, he wrote. Then, because he knew it would make her smile, added some stupid emojis: ramen noodles, muscle arm, praise hands. Mari rolled her eyes, but she got out another pan. First onions, then ginger and garlic. Mung beans and shrimp stock, water, then the shrimp themselves, already cooked to a tender, pale pink. Mari put the fish in the oven—she’d planned to fry it, but said darkly that she no longer trusted the stove. Clay took care of the rice. The kitchen still smelled acrid, but it also now smelled like the sea, like something distant and comfortingly vast.

  Finn arrived first, bearing a six-pack of fancy beer and a salad whose lettuce was buried under small hills of nuts, seeds, dried fruits, and avocado slices. He opened a beer and offered another to Clay, who shook his head, gestured to his throat. One good thing: he wouldn’t have to talk to Finn about taking it up the butt for a day or two.

  The apartment began to fill with people, not uncomfortably so, just bodies occupying places that had seemed empty before. The house warmed up, and the smell of burnt onions was overlaid with the smell of people, beer, wine, cheese, bread, casseroles.

  Joe arrived last, bearing cookies still steaming with heat and the scent of almonds and cardamom. “Sorry I’m so late. It took longer than I thought to bake them,” he said.

  Clay smiled and managed a whispered “Hey.”

  “Are you okay?” Joe said. “Did something happen?”

  Long story, he mouthed.

  “I can’t promise this’ll make it better, but...” Joe handed him one of the cookies. Clay broke off a piece and held it in his mouth, surprised at its softness—sweet and buttery with the tang of ginger. Clay imagined that taste on Joe’s tongue, should he kiss him, and felt something like lust, something like affection.

  They all ate in the living room, since Mari only had a shaky card table with a janky leg. The only thing Clay could eat was Mari’s soup, which stung his throat in a soothing way, salty as tears. He sat on the couch, and Joe sat on the ground next to him, his shoulder resting gently against one of Clay’s legs, warm and solid.

  Inevitably, Mari’s coworkers started talking about the suicide hotline. They’d fielded more than two hundred calls in the last week, and nearly as many text messages. Mari had talked to a couple of teens and repeated the stories they told her: that kids at their schools still wore Halloween costumes, even though they were stained and smelled like sweat; some of the teachers had started to dress up too, or wear plastic masks. Wraiths were filling up the bleachers and the back rows of classrooms.

  After a while, there was nothing more to say about it. The conversation broke up, fracturing into smaller discussions around the room.

  Joe was a warm weight on his leg. What was he haunted by, Clay wondered? Joe turned to look at him and gave him a soft smile, then whispered, “I think one of Mari’s dildos is going to get its wings tonight.”

  Clay snorted a laugh, and then winced. Mari and Finn were engaged in a close, whispered conversation, spoken mostly into each other’s ears. Finn was flushed, and Mari looked smug. Maybe Finn had gotten over his ass-related anxieties on his own.

  Guests started drifting out. Mari put Finn and Joe on dish duty while Clay gathered up empty beer bottles and took out the garbage. Night had fallen, crisp and clear, and a fat, generous moon hung in the sky. As Clay c
limbed back up the stairs to Mari’s balcony, something caught his eye: lights moving through the fields beyond their backyard.

  He’d never noticed that the lights that dripped and seeped from the wraiths were different colors, as unique as bruises: indigo, pale violet, hints of green or blue. Dozens of wraiths were gathering around the old construction site, alighting on the frozen machines. The lights fell like water as the wraiths moved across the field.

  “Clay. Get back in the house.”

  Clay turned. Joe was standing on the balcony, one hand urgently beckoning him, the other holding his phone to his ear.

  “I am telling him,” Joe said, and Clay realized that he was talking into the phone. “Clay, come inside now.”

  Clay looked again: beyond the field of swaying, sloshing lights, groups of costumed people were walking down the road that led to town. He could hear the murmur of their voices, the jagged edges of laughter. Was the cop down there? What about the monkey girl from last night, or the group of kids that had tortured the wraith? Joe grabbed Clay by the hand and pulled him back inside, locking the door behind them. Mari had turned off all the lights.

  “Should we shut the blinds?” Finn asked.

  Mari said, “What if they see the movement?”

  They sat on the floor, pulling blankets and pillows off the couch to make it comfortable. Joe was still talking urgently into the phone. “It’s okay,” he said. “We’re safe. Safe enough for now. I know, it’s all right. You’ll find it someday. It’s—you what?”

  He looked at Clay, then back at the ground. “Why?” he asked. “I don’t think that’s a good idea. Look, just tell me—damn it.”

  He put his phone in his pocket and told the rest of them, “Third time she’s called today. Has it been happening to the rest of you more often?”

  Joe was haunted by phone calls. It seemed so pedestrian, not to mention easy to ignore. But you ignored the hauntings at your peril. As Joe leaned against the couch, he pulled his phone back out, staring at it, waiting for it to ring. At least Clay’s keys didn’t demand answers from him. He tried to imagine the other side of Joe’s conversation: Are you safe? How safe? For how long? How can you be sure?