Both the Living and the Dead

***

     Right now I'm doing some drywalling for a couple of professor-types in Happy Hollow--where the yuppies settled to become middle-aged urban professionals. She's medicine and he's law, I think. Not the sort that usually hire a shaman, and they're both a bit embarrassed about it. Probably why they hired a sha-woman. At least they can be progressive in their desperation. They've got a hallway full of degrees and framed kiddie art, and a music room with a baby grand topped with photos of big brother and little sister.

     Big brother answered the door when I arrived to do the evaluation. He looked me in the eye and shouted to Mom and Pop: "The witch is here." Just daring me to contradict him. Letter jacket, captain-of-the-football-team looks. But his eyes were terrified. I had lots of time to notice that as I looked at him. Just looked, you know--if they really think you're a witch, that�s all it takes. He didn't quite shove me aside to make his exit.

     Mom meets me at the gaping door. (You have to invite me in.) "Ms. Codrescu," she says, stumbling over it a little, "I'm sorry, Jer's been--he's very upset."

     I smile as graciously as I can. I do not say I understand. She doesn't hire me to understand. Anyway it's not big brother that's the problem--or my part of the problem. It's little sister.

     In most of the photos she's doing something--a baby picture of her playing in fall leaves. A chubby-legged girl in tap shoes. In the more recent pictures it's mostly horses. There's quite a striking one, actually, of her in riding gear--Brit style stuff, you know. She looks about thirteen. Her hair peeking out from under her little hat is golden, and her checks are like apples. She's got this huge grin. She's got everything in the world. She looks nothing like her ghost.

     The ghost is a bad one. It wavers between little sister's--her name was Beatrice, Bea--two self-images. The chubby-cheeked adolescent made somehow grotesque, like the elephant man, and the anorexic girl, death-camp skinny. Sometimes you can see both at once. And she's hollowed out inside, made a cave of hunger or fear or whatever psychopop thing in her belly. It's dark--you can see it in her eyes and mouth, like the darkness of a cave, a solid thing.

     She died in a hospital--feeding tubes, the lot--but apparently the focused experience of her death was here, in the little passage between the kitchen and the dining room, next to a cheval mirror and a hat stand. I have seen traces of her in every mirror in the house, actually, but the manifestation is localized here. Those are the words I use, sitting in the music room wearing white (I can't work in any other color) and drinking tea from the good china. The professor-types, Doctor and Doctor Wilkes, take comfort in my explanation. Localized manifestation. Focused experience. What kind of people put mirrors in the kitchen, anyway?

     "It's not that we don't honor Beatrice's memory," says Doctor Wilkes (her) eventually, painfully--and then Doctor Wilkes (him) launches into a painful explanation of why, though they honor Beatrice's memory, they would like to wall up the physical manifestation of it. This is not a revelation. That's why they hired me.

***

     We negotiate. Rates. Schedules. Guarantees. Mrs. Doctor Wilkes handles most of it; Mr. Doctor retreats early on. I get out my measuring tape and borrow a small step ladder. I stand with Bea in her little hallway and measure everything, making plans to make it her grave. She doesn't react to me, of course, but like the eyes of a painting those dark holes in her face followed me around the room. I call Menards and talk to Chet, arranging to have two-by-fours and drywall delivered tomorrow. I add a couple gallons of primer to the order--if I don't need them this job, I will next. Mrs. Wilkes puts it on her Visa. It is nearly dark by the time I leave. Big brother has not returned, I notice.

     It's twenty blocks, but I walk home from evaluating Beatrice. The houses stay grand, in ten blocks they are all divided into apartments with weird walls and bathrooms you have to go through closets to get to. By the time you get to my neighborhood, there are couches on the curbs and streets the city didn't bother to clear all winter. I live near the hospital and med school--already student apartments before the dead came back, and now entirely given up to ghosts. I walk fast, my coat open, letting the wind blow through me.

***

     Brian Downstairs is tapping at the door before I even get it closed behind me. He's barefoot, his hair rucked up on one side. "Hey, Jess. Saw you come in."

     You always see me come in." Since his apartment used to be the sunporch, Brian sees everything. "Do you even own a hairbrush?"

     He rakes a hand through his hair, worsening matters. "You--um--"

     There is a pause so long that I skip ahead, filling in a "busy" at the end of his sentence. I try to decide if I am.
Two, three, sometimes four nights a week we do this little dance. He sees me come in, and asks me if I'm busy. If I'm not, it's usually videos and popcorn. Brian watches too many movies, lives on popcorn, and must have the metabolism of a hamster, because he's skinny as a vampire. To mix a metaphor. I decide I want the company of the living and that Brian will do in a pinch.

     "You, um," he says again, "working?"

     Which is not the same as "busy."

     He sticks his hands into his pockets, shivering. "I'm sorry, Jess. But I've got this--I--anyway: who you gonna call?" He sees my face. "I'm sorry, Jess."

***

     There is Something forming in Brian's apartment.

     Brian picks his way through the piles of books and videos and floor cushions of his bedroom-livingroom to the open archway. Through it is a hallway with a galley kitchenette and a bathroom that you can stand in and touch all four walls. "It's here," he says, opening his hands towards the space, like a mystic calling on the Spirit. His thin body, though, flinches back as he brushes it. He stuffs his hands into the pockets of his jeans.

     I walk up to him. Shadows are gathering in the center of the arch, already so thick and that they would cling to the back of a spoon, like caramel. I don't touch it as Brian did. I don't need to.

     "Ah, Jess, I'm sorry," says Brian.

     "Would you stop apologizing?"

     "I'm--never mind. I walked through a spiderweb on my way back from the loo and got the screaming heebie-jeebies." All those movies have effected his vocabulary. "It's the neighborhood. Or maybe the beer."

     "You can't see it?" The shadows are clotting in front of my eyes. Even half-born it's the realest thing in the room. I can't believe he can't see it.

     He steps backward. "You mean there's something--" and steps back again.

***

     The jump from beer to chamomile tea is a big one, and Bri has landed badly. He sits at my kitchen table and shakes. He has two mugs before he asks a single question. "How long--I mean--"

     "I've never seen one forming before," I tell him. "People usually have to get pretty desperate to call me in. I miss the preliminaries."

     "So you don't know how long--till it--till it's really there?"

     I spread my fingers and guess. "Days. Weeks."

     Brian gulps tea. "What do I do?"

     "Come on, Brian. You know how this works."

     "Isn't there anything--"

     "You can learn to live with it. Or you find someplace else to live."

     "Oh, hell, Jess, you know I can't." I did not in fact know that, and still don't know why. But I don't ask him. There are many ways to be trapped, most of them in this neighborhood involve money--or lack thereof. "What does it look like?"

     I knew that we are friends only in places, but I hadn't thought the gaps between the places were big enough to hide a body. He has to have seen the original, of which this is but a pale shadow. He has to know what it looks like, whether he can see it now or not. But I tell him anyway, because one of us has to say it: "it's a hanged man."

     Brian goes the color of his tea. And then he asks the question that everyone asks me: "Isn't there anything you can do?"

     So I give him the business answer. "I can build an enclosure and place charms on the inside so that the manifestation remains local." The sentence is so polished it sounds nasty. It hasn't gotten dull with use, it's gotten sharp, like a blade.

     "Back off. I didn't ask for the sales pitch."

     "Yes, you did. And that's the answer. But even if I did wall it up, you'd have to move. Unless you wanted to get a hot plate and a chamberpot."

     He stands up and pours his half-drunk tea down the sink. "Right. Sorry I bothered you."

     He gets almost to the door and I don't know why I stop him. "You don't want to go back down there."

     "Damn straight, sister," he says, Brando-sullen.

     "Don't be an idiot." Nothing. "I've got a job tomorrow. I'll be out all day.�

     He takes a sudden left-turn into Vivien Leigh. "I have always depended on the kindness of neighbors."

     "Yeah, just don't finish my milk, Blanche."

***


     Brian is sleeping when I leave in the morning, curled up on the couch with one arm under his head and the other over his eyes. He might be dead for all the notice he takes of me. I grab my stuff and walk out to Dodge to catch the bus. The bus makes better time than it used to--there have been a lot of accidents on Dodge Street in the past two years. A lot of focused experiences. Traffic has dropped dramatically.

     The Wilkes' garage door is open, a heap of lumber and drywall on the oily concrete. Mrs. Wilkes looks twice at me--not quite a double take. I know why: gone the white knit turtleneck dress and the hanging charms. Instead, painter's pants, t-shirt, oxford--all white, all spattered with paint. Toolbox and thermos--I only need a hardhat.

     "Ms. Codrescu." She is both glad to see me and embarrassed to be glad. She settles into civil, but it is not a good fit. "You're prompt."

     "I'm a professional," I tell her.

     No one else is home. She makes a point of retiring to her office. I work in the back yard, cutting and hammering the two-by-fours into frames. The ground under the shadow of the big linden is damp and half-frozen, and my boots sink into it as if into flesh. I can see through the big windows into the dining room. I wonder what they'll do when I seal off its door. Cut a hole into the other wall? Open it to the lawn and make a sunporch? I think of Brian and the hanged man. Then I swing the hammer and think of nothing at all.

     It is two hours later when my mind presents me with a picture it's been putting together behind my back: the day I moved in, a godawful day when the heat hit 95 and the humidity rose to match, me in shorts and a t-shirt, drenched, trying to keep the oils from my MFA show--finished at the last minute, still tacky--from sticking to the walls, the carpet, the furniture in a heap. Brian at the door with ice tea, like a southern gentleman, introducing himself, "I saw you come in." And last night, Brian, panicky, surprised by the ghost, clinging to his tea and saying "what does it look like?" Because even though he had to know, he had to have been there when the death happened, he didn't know. He didn�t know. I hit my thumb with the hammer and don't feel it. My hunch is inescapable as a vision, as something learned in a dream. I run for the bus.

***

     By the time I get home I am panting. Brian looks up fuzzily from a phone book. "Back from Twelve Oaks? How was the barbecue?" He's been saving that one all day.

     "How long have you lived here?"

     "What?"

     Kate Bush is on my cheap stereo--too loud, tinny. I snap it off.

     "Two--no, three years." Which of course I knew--he was there when I moved in, just before the dead came back to the world.

     "And the hanged man--you don't know him?"

     "Mrs. Beal says you don't have to disclose the history of rental properties," he says, bitterly. Of course, he's been trying to break his lease.

     "When? When did it happen?"

     "I don't--" he starts. I snatch the phone off the wall and punch in our landlord's number. When she answers, I don't even let her get through her pleasant greeting. "The suicide in our house. When did it happen."

     "I beg your pardon?" Her tone suggested neither begging nor any possibility of pardon. "Who is this?"

     "Jessica Codrescu. At 4031 Lancaster. The suicide in this house. When did it happen."

     "As I just explained to Mr. Sullivan, the laws governing the rental of dwellings are substantially different from those governing the sale of houses. I had no obligation to disclose--"

     "You do now," I tell her. "When, curse you--" I take a deep breath and put on my witch's voice. "Curse you, when did it happen."

     There is a pause. A crackle on the phone line. It sounds like an old woman brushing her hair. "August, 1995."

     I hang up on her. I remember that August. My father died�the Forth of July weekend, 1995. There were fireworks for the funeral,
like in China. But they didn�t work. That winter, the first ghosts had appeared.

     I sit down. "Jess," said Brian. "You look like you've seen a ghost."

     "It's slipping back," I say. Saying it makes it true.

     "Slipping back?"

     "If he's been dead three years he can't be a ghost, Bri. Can't be. Because the dead didn't start appearing until after that."

     "Jesus," he says.

     We sit and let it sink in. "Jesus," says Brian, again, without a trace of any movie. "What if it doesn't stop? What if all the dead come back?"

     I try out a shrug. "It's Omaha, after all. Not Moscow. Poland."

     "We're gonna need a bigger boat," he mutters.

     Even if it does stop it will be too late.

***


     I make my living from people who can't live with their dead. But I won't be one of them. I go back to work.

     "Did you have a nice lunch?" Mrs. Wilkes asks me. I've been gone about two hours. She is not so crude as to glance at the clock.

     I smile pleasantly at her. "No. You?" There is a film of dust on the kitchen table. Matching her courtesy, I do not look at it.

     I haul frames into little sister's tomb. They are too big to go through the doorway upright, too wide to go through flat. I carry them sideways. Together the frame and I just squeeze through. Mrs. Wilkes down for tea glances in and makes no comment. I bang my knuckles.

     It would be easier, of course, to build the frames in place. But the less time in that narrow hall the better. Even for me. I get out the nail gun and start connecting frames to the existing studs. I nail the frames over the doors like bars. The percussive caps sound like rifle fire. Even Beatrice turns slowly, slowly, slowly, to look.

***

     I slip out between the studs, grab my sketchbook and head to Beatrice's room. They are keeping it as a shrine: common, ghoulish, handy for me. Her bed is made up neatly, the top of the comforter turned down as if they expected to tuck her in tonight. Yuck. A shelf at eye level holds those model horses, and riding trophies, ribbons. I run my fingers across the horses� backs. Curves like sex. A thin film of dust. Nothing catches my eye. The shelf goes all the way around the room and I follow it. In front of the mirror�

     Nothing. There is nothing in the mirror. Not Beatrice. Not me. A darkness and clots of shadows, stirring and stirring.

     I sit down on the bed, evicting stuffed animals. I take out my pencils.

     Eventually I pull the blanket off the bed and throw it over the mirror.

     It's hours later when the doorbell rings. At the sound I jump and come entirely out of my trance. It's a big jump and I land shaking, thinking of Brian, his hands making his tea slosh. Damn. I'm still shaking a moment later when Mrs. Wilkes comes the box from the hospital. She has walked straight through the tattered strands of my gathering spells. They burn away from her. Sticky fire falls through the air. "Did you send for this?" she asks. She does not offer it to me.

     "It's closely associated with her death." I've put on my bedside manner-- automatically: it's not the one I would pick if I were picking. I sound concerned but distant. "It may have power as a holding charm."

     "How did you know about it." It is an accusation, not a question.

     "It's common. Food diary." The sentence won't come together.

     "Are you Jewish?" She's looking at the mirror. She pulls the cover off, holding it to her body.

     "It was dark." I cover my eyes. She keeps talking.

     "This is the last one we uncovered. I wanted to smash them all."

     And then I've struck out with the heel of my hand. The mirror shatters, crackling like embers dying. "Home," says someone.

***

     Home. My hand lies on the table in front of me, bandaged up with more gauze than King Tut. "You learn this from a mummy movie?"

     "Sorry," Brian's voice answers. I haven't found Brian yet. "Doctor Wilkes stitched it up. She said she took you to the hospital, but she had to bring you here." He pauses. "She said you wouldn't stop screaming."

     I have no memory of the hospital. I haven't been in one since my father died. These days, even nonsensitives with all the psychic acuity of tulips avoid them--well, like death. "It looked better before I changed the gauze-it's really okay." I find Brian sitting across from me. "You okay, Jess?"

     "I'm overworked," I tell him. My sketchbook, my first-aide kit spewing more gauze and the box from the hospital are on the table in front of me. The sketchbook is smeared with blood. I flip through the most recent sketches. Contes of the horse statues, various poses, details. The style is pretty pedestrian-realist, but without background to scale them they look huge, like Leonardo's horse, wild and uncontrollable. The cluttered bowl of jewelry on the bureau. Even my entranced muse can putter meaninglessly. Bea herself, eyes and brim of riding helmet only. Her eyes look like the horse's, actually, all dark. The scribble of heavy charcoal which is the mirror. Another of those. Another. Page after page. In the middle is a sketch a man hanging upside down from a cross of living wood, his face radiant and his hair a nimbus of gold. The Hanged Man--I've even drawn in the edges of the card.

     Which means revelation. Resurrection. Life in death.

     Okay.

     I give the revelation ten minutes. It does not
come. I let Brian fuss over me, and then I go to bed.

***

     When I give up on sleep, the clock says three. The witching hour. Hnh. The moonlight through the bathroom window is grey and unmagical. So am I. In the mirror I catch a glimpse of a figure in white gown--but it's only me, in my modest company's-here pajamas. A woman in white, with long dark hair--the graveyard ghost, the dead woman who was buried alive. Down to the damaged hands, it's me.

     I go to the kitchen. I slice tiny slivers of salty cheese and eat them from the sharp knife. I go back to bed.

***

     I have no professional credibility with Doctor Wilkes. I go back anyway.

     "Ms. Codrescu," she says when she sees me. "I was not expecting you today. Are you certain you're up for-" She stumbles. Laughs. "I clearly have very little idea what you do. Up for work." That is whole cloth, no weakness in it, no room for even my needle-sharp offense. She's even got the Rumanian swallowed vowel right.

     "Once the walls are up I have to work. The
apparition will manifest through an uncharmed wall." Which does not answer her question. I don't know what I will say if she presses. I don't know why I'm here. But she doesn't ask again.

     "How can I help you?" she asks.

     "Do you have a card table?"

     We set it up together in Beatrice's room. There is still glass and blood spilling across the dresser. "I'll sweep that up."

     "Don't," I say.

     She pauses, doesn't ask. "May I stay?"

     Best not."

     Another pause. She looks as if she can see the spells gathering around her, her eyes tracing their lines through the air. "Alright."

     The sketches for the charm finish themselves. At the end of the day, I find that someone has nailed up the drywall and put on two coats of primer. Did I? I don't remember, one way or the other. Could I have told someone to? Who but me could have born it?

     I take a conte crayon and cover the walls with the suggestion of horses running. A wild river runs from one corner of the ceiling across two walls with no regard for the corner, and over the floor, right through the ghost. The foam leaps up over the stones. Like the manes of horses.

     I tear up the pathetic food diary. (Monday: hot water/lemon: 5 cal, broth: 75 cal, 1/4 apple, 35 cal.) I put the shreds in an old ice-cream bucket and dump my plaster power over them. I stir it with my hands until it blushes pink.

     I run cold water my hand until the bleeding stops and the pain changes. The stitches, bare, are black snarls. Seven little spiders. I go home.

     "Your mother called six times," says Brian. "She wouldn't say--I think there's something wrong."