S
he’s here. Sasha. The missing piece. Looking sullen again, but she lights up when she sees me. Which causes pangs of fear and delight to supercharge through my veins. I sit at her table like that’s just what we always do, and then I put all the good things I think about her into a smile. I don’t smile much, so I try to make them count.
She blushes. “Happy to see me?”
“I am.” And so glad she wasn’t here last night to absorb my drunken truth-telling. “Always.”
She rolls her eyes. “No drinks this time?”
“I’m . . .”
Still hungover.
“Taking a break.”
“Ooh-la-la.” A mischievous smile.
“But you want one?” I make to get up, and she stops me, putting a chilly, perfect hand on mine.
“No, it’s fine. Stay.”
I sit, and she leaves her hand there for a blissful second before retrieving it. Her eyes are glued to my face though, probably trying to make sure I’m not suddenly repulsed by her coldness. That’s what I’d do anyway. Makes no sense, because obviously I’m cold too, but petty insecurities don’t politic with reason. I know as well as anyone.
Less than twelve hours earlier, I was sitting where she is and blathering back and forth with Amanda. I send up a little prayer of thanks to whoever’s listening that grieving and coolheadedness prevailed.
“You want to go somewhere?” I say. I realize that sounds like a complete come-on, which I hadn’t totally meant it as, so I add: “A walk or something?”
She relaxes a little and nods. “Sounds lovely.”
* * *
I don’t mean to, but we end up veering toward the park anyway. I swear the place has a gravitational pull to the less-than-living. Anyway, it’s a beautiful, fresh night; the air is crisp and perfect like some divine hand was feeling meticulous about putting each piece into place. Sasha’s wearing a black peacoat that adds a pleasing militant element to her otherwise debonair swagger. Sproingy black curls bounce out from under a knit cap and surround her face in an inky ocean of hair. I want to take that face in my hands and put my own face against it and let our connecting faces be the fulcrum that swings our two bodies together and let the winter night guide our combined life forces into an intimate tangle that obliterates all our fears and regrets, but instead I just smile and offer her my arm.
Riley says ladies like it when you go slow right up until this one particular moment in time—Point Zero, he calls it—when everything changes and you gotta switch into hunting mode. The idea being that there’s a diminishing series of digital numbers that speed toward Point Zero and from there they zoom back upward toward the Insertion Moment. “It’s all about the motherfucking timing.” Clearly time is one thing Riley has way too much of.
Regardless though, I’m pretty sure Point Zero has not arrived yet for Sasha and me, so we stroll along the avenue, chatting amiably.
“The only thing I remember,” she says without an overabundance of sadness, “is standing next to my brother, surrounded by strange faces. I’m glad he’s there, holding my hand, but I’m nervous about something. I see an oil-covered dead man with a mustache. And then we die.”
“Wait—what?”
“I know. It doesn’t really make sense. But that’s the best way I can describe it. He was frozen and shiny and all black like oil had been dumped over him and crying out into the night, silently. That’s the last thing I saw.”
“You don’t remember how you died?”
She shakes her head. “Must’ve been quick, whatever it was. Or I blotted it out.”
I like how matter-of-fact she is about death. Not devoid of emotion, but not ruled by it either. It’s a comfortable balance that most living people could never understand. “You?”
I shrug. “There’s not much there. I think you have more than I do. I was murdered. That I’m pretty sure about. I’m looking up at three faces, well, not faces: they’re wearing ski masks. I know it’s all over, but it’s been a real fight and I can see they’re winded and one’s bleeding, so at least I didn’t give up easy, I think to myself. Then one of them moves his arm and it’s over.”
“Damn.” She raises her eyebrows and looks up at me with an endearing blend of concern and curiosity.
We walk a while in silence along the edge of the park. Classy old buildings line one side of the street. The block we’re on is shadowed by the darkness of trees and undergrowth stretching toward Flatbush. I can almost feel it
breathing, beckoning me, but I don’t want to retrace the steps of Trevor’s murder. Who knows what thoughts and emotions would spill out and poison the night air?
“Where do you live?”
Sasha gasps. “My good gentleman! How very forward of you.”
“Well, I meant it . . . What I mean is . . . Hm.” It takes a second to register that she isn’t really offended and then I just shut up.
“Flatbush.”
“May I escort you home?”
“You may escort me to my door and no further.” She eyes me to see how that settles in.
“It would be an honor.” Point Zero is many miles away, but it’s a beautiful night and I enjoy long walks.
* * *
The night ended like this: we stood outside Sasha’s huge prewar apartment building on Ocean Avenue, our faces so close together I could count the hairs in each swirl, and we let the conversation wind itself down. In the comfortable silence that followed, I went in to kiss her. She turned her face so I landed on her cheek instead of her lips and then held very still. For a few moments, we just stood there with my face barely touching the side of hers. Breathing in, breathing out, the winter night wrapping around us, the passing traffic. Breathing in, breathing out, trying to memorize the moment in case it never happened again.
And then she was gone.
An ecstatic stroll home, through the park, the once dark and foreboding park, now all illuminated with the sparkle of late-season snowfields and the glorious palpitations of
my motherfucking heart. Drunk on only the moment, I make it home, blissfully stumble out of my clothes, and immerse myself in the warmth of New York’s Puerto Rican poets before pleasuring myself and passing out at sunrise with a smile on my
face.
T
here’s a small ghost at my door.
It can’t be too important, so I fall back asleep.
There’s a small ghost at my door. Still. His irritating little telepathy twitters around my bedroom like a stupid fucking bird that I want to kill. Instead I fall back asleep.
And wake back up, semialert with the knowledge that there is a small ghost at my door.
And that all this has already happened. Once or twice. Ah yes, ten minutes ago. Shit. I stumble out of bed, open up, and then look down where the little guy is hovering just a few inches over the floor, looking up at me.
“Sorry to disturb you.”
“It’s fine.”
“No, I’m really sorry. I tried to be subtle with the telepathy. I didn’t know if you were sleeping or not, so I was really trying to be respectful of that.”
“It’s fine. What time is it?”
“Four fifteen.”
Ugh. “Four fifteen in the what?”
“Afternoon, sir.”
“Christ. What do you want?”
“Unfortunately, I was asked to interfere with your alone time to deliver a message.” The little guy is so deadpan I have no idea if he’s being sarcastic or not, but I don’t really care.
“Yes?”
“The message is from Agent Riley Washington with the New York Council of the Dead.”
“Thank you. What is the message?”
“Agent Washington asked me to deliver the message to Agent Carlos Delacruz at this residence.”
“You want a tip. Is that what this is about?”
“Gratuity is a privilege and not a right, sir. I am simply being thorough with the procedure and assuring that the message is delivered correctly and to the correct recipient.”
“What’s your name?”
“Elton Ellis.”
“Okay, Elton Ellis. Tell me the message. Now.” I say it sweetly, but there’s no doubt that I’m done playing.
“Dro went home.”
I like Riley because he doesn’t waste words. Probably because he knows the messengers will, so he keeps it right to the point. Dro went home.
“What do you think it means?”
I narrow my eyes at the little guy. He’s looking up at me, salivating for some gossip for the ghost world. I shake my head and shut the door.
* * *
Sometimes I’m glad that I don’t have more than that single snapshot of a memory from my life. It’s freeing, in a way. I couldn’t find anything out, so I don’t try. It’s a fool’s mission and I don’t have time for that. Instead I slide into the comfort of perpetual ignorance and go about the business of living. Or half living. Whatever.
Dro is not so fortunate.
He was a family man. Cut down by cancer just like that, in the prime of his life. He’s mostly moved on, he really has, but every once in a while something will trigger him and he’ll find his way back to the house his wife and teenage kids still live in.
And he’ll wallow.
I can’t judge him for it. The very thought of a family is so foreign to me—I couldn’t even begin to imagine what emotions he’s having. But this is no time to wallow. There’s too much at stake right now, and Dro has been unsteadier than I’ve ever seen him. He seemed all right at the bar the other day, but this . . . this can’t be good.
The house sits on a pleasant residential block in Flushing. It’s a simple two-story type deal, pretty much identical to all the others around it. Dro’s hovering outside the kitchen window, and I can feel his poor dead heart disintegrating from across the street. Inside, his wife, Ginny, is taking dinner out of the oven, and Beatrice, now almost seventeen and finally leaving behind the gawky preteen look, sets the table. Delroy is in the living room doing homework. It’s so simple, and I’m pretty sure that’s what makes it so hard. In the thick of things, it’s easy to get caught up and ignore that somewhere there’s people having a normal life, day in day out, that you were once a part of. Then it slows down. Your mind has time to catch up and fuck with you and there you are, levitating outside the window of a house that once was yours, watching a family to whom you’re only a memory and a picture on the mantel.
I walk up next to Dro, careful not to make any noise whatsoever, and stand there with him for a few minutes, watching.
“Riley sent you.”
“Mm-hmm. Sent word with this slow-ass little courier ghost.”
“Oh, Elton?” A smile creeps over Dro’s face, but his eyes are oceans of sadness.
“That’s the guy. He’s a little procedure maven, that one.”
“He is.” Dro hasn’t taken his eyes off his family, and I wonder if he’s going to go easily or make a fuss. The last time this happened, he stayed for a full day, but it was a less drastic time and we didn’t really need him around, so Riley and I agreed to just wait it out.
“I’m coming,” he says. Probably wasn’t hard to guess what I was thinking. “I’m done here.”
It’s a little too easy, and I almost ask if he’s sure. But that would be counterproductive. “Okay.” When he doesn’t move for another full minute, I take the initiative and step backward, very quietly, away from the window. Dro’s shoulders hunch over, and for a second I think he’s sobbing. His glow flickers, then strengthens. Some invisible act of regeneration has just happened, and it was probably too personal to let me see, but part of me wishes I could’ve. It’s a whole other kind of sorcery—pulling the pieces of a shattered heart back together, and it’s one I know nothing about. When he turns around, Dro looks fine. Okay, his eyes are still sad, but his half smile is real. “Let’s go,” he says softly. “Now.”
There’s a little urgency in his voice, like if we don’t leave this very second he may be trapped there eternally, so I fast-walk out of the driveway and we head down the quiet block as the darkness grows around us.
R
iley greets me with a curt nod and hands me a blade, handle out.
My eyes widen. “Y’all got it back?”
“Recovery team went in after things calmed down, before PD and EMS swarmed the place. The ngk was still there, so they moved fast. Guess the dude just dropped it, but it’s clean.”
I nod. Sheathe it in my cane. It feels good in my hand, an old friend.
Riley looks at Dro. “You good, bro?”
Dro smiles, says he is, and we settle around the paper-strewn table. “All right, guys,” Riley says. “I’m sure it won’t come as a surprise that another ngk has shown up.” He points to a new dot on the map. “This one is closer to St. John’s and still fits within the overall pattern that Carlos and I were working out yesterday. Still wraps around the central location where we’re sitting right now, unfortunately. But I want to try something new.”
“You have a plan?” Dro asks.
“Of sorts. Well, something I want to try anyway. Was talking it over with some of the big heads upstairs. They want us to check into the possibility of disabling the ngks, since we can’t kill them.”
I immediately don’t like this idea. “You want us to break their little legs? ’Cause I don’t see them taking very well to that either.”
“Not their legs,” Riley says seriously. “Their machines.”
“The stationary bikes?”
“Yes. Whatever they are. No one’s too sure, but as far as we can tell, the machines are somehow integral to their ability to poison the air for ghosts. The idea being if we disable the bikes, it’ll stop them without us having killed them or tried to kill them.”
“Which we’re not allowed to do under any circumstances,” I grumble.
“Right. So this is the next best thing.”
I raise my eyebrows. “The Council came up with this plan?”
“They did,” Riley says. “But I think it’s worth a try. We probably have about seven to ten minutes, if we fortify ourselves, before the ngk shit overtakes us. Carlos might have a little bit more on account of having a body or whatever, but you get the idea. The hardest part obviously will be getting the little bastard off his bike. Once we get it, we get out of there and figure out how to break it.”
“That’s not a plan,” I say. “That’s a let’s-try-this-and-hope-it-works fiasco.”
“It’s what we got right now,” Riley snarls. “And it’s what we’re gonna do. We leave in a half hour, so do what you gotta do to get happy with the idea till then. Class dismotherfuckingmissed.”
* * *
“Balance.”
I close the book I was reading and frown up at Mama Esther. “What?”
“Balance. Life and death is all about balance, Carlos.
We dead like to think we’re so independent of the living, that we got our own thing going and those flesh-and-bone folks just get in the way. But all of our actions, even the petty stupidities we participate in, have repercussions in both our world and theirs. The universe is an echo chamber, and the echoes have no regard for that boundary between who’s alive and who’s not. We help them out; we mess with their lives; we pretend to ignore them, but they’re a part of us. And they do the same.”
I don’t know where this sudden lecture came from, but I don’t want to mess up her flow, so I just nod to show I’m listening.
“The Council thinks they’re the regulators of that balance. That without their mighty soulcatchers, all would dissolve into chaos. And sure, there’s some truth in it, but the living and the dead have found their own odd harmony since the beginning of time. The Council doesn’t realize it’s just another one of the universe’s tools to maintain balance. One of many.”
“Sounds about right.”
“The ngks and whoever is working with them are trying to upset the balance.”
“How you figure?”
“That’s what the ngks do. That’s the only reason you’d bring something so drastic into the equation. The tour guide you sliced on New Year’s. The ngks. This character running around basements. I don’t claim to know the details . . .”
“No one does.”
“But if you ask me, someone’s trying to bring upheaval to the balance of life and death.”
“The balance of life and death, huh? Sounds like one of those existential novels about nothing.”
Mama Esther half laughs and then looks concerned. “You worried about tonight, Carlos?”
“A little.” Something’s picking away at my consciousness and I can’t put my finger on it.
“What’s wrong?”
It’s something she said. The Council’s just another of the universe’s tools . . . one of many. “Ah!” I yell. “It’s what I’ve been meaning to ask you since the other day. You said other people come here? Dead people. Non-Council dead people?”
Esther nods. “Of course. Loads of people, Carlos. You think the Council are the only . . . ?”
“No. I know there’s tons of ghosts around. But ever see anyone . . . like me?”
The big house ghost looks away. “Every once in a while.”
“Recently?”
“I think of myself like a priest or a lawyer, Carlos. I don’t like to—”
“I know, Esther. I know what people look up in your library is private, but this is about saving your house right now. Not to mention all the rest of us. I need to know.”
“I suppose since he’s deeper than dead now, it doesn’t matter.”
“Trevor!”
She nods sadly. “He was frantic.”
“Frantic? Over what?”
“Wouldn’t say. He was like you in that sense too.” That wry Mama Esther sense of humor. I fold my gut reaction away for some other time. “Just searching and searching like his life depended on it.”
I feel an involuntary twinge of guilt and then shake it off. “Any books in particular?”
“Old stuff. Sorcery. Forest people. Conjuring.” She taps the list off her big shining fingers. “Um . . . what else? Little people.”
“Shit. Like imps?”
“Imps, gnomes. All of that.” She gestures distastefully at the air like she’s flinging a little person off her hand. So Trevor was caught up with the naked cellar dweller. His research assistant, perhaps. A reluctant minion, as Baba Eddie put it.
“He ever mention who he was working with?”
“He had a sister, a halfie like him. Never met her though. And . . .”
“And?”
“Someone else.”
“Who?”
“He only said the name one time, and I’m sure it was by mistake, barely even mentioned him out loud, in fact.”
“Out loud . . .”
“It was all over him, Carlos. You couldn’t miss it. Fear. Well, fear mixed with something else: a certain admiration almost, or an eagerness to please, better put. Like the guy was a messiah of some kind, some great prophet.”
I control the urge to interrupt Mama Esther. When she’s finished, she just looks at me, a challenge.
“The name?”
She sighs. “Sarco.”
Sarco. It doesn’t mean anything to me. I shrug and shake my head.
“I don’t know either,” Mama Esther says. “The name pops up here and there in some old tomes, but nothing useful. One of these archaic old souls that vanishes and reappears throughout history.”
“Like an overgrown ngk. The research was for him?”
“Seemed like some of it was. But I couldn’t tell how much. He was definitely following his own intuition for part of it.”
For an uncomfortable moment, I see Trevor immersed in Mama Esther’s library, poring over ancient tomes,
scribbling notes. This man was more like me than I want to think about. A moment returns to me, unsolicited and obnoxious: Trevor out on that chilly Park Slope street; his eyes suddenly becoming sharp and focused, he looks at me and sees me exactly for who and what I am.
He recognized me.
It’s time. Let’s go.
He wanted to show me what was going on. Maybe wanted my advice. He knew what I was and he wanted to bring me in. The whole stupid setup with the Brads and David could’ve been a ruse to lure me in and then talk to me about whatever the hell they were working on.
Or kill me. Or worse . . .
I wonder again if in some other version of this universe, one where I didn’t take the Council so seriously, Trevor and I would’ve been friends.
“Carlos?”
I shake off the thought. It’s too awful. “Esther, why didn’t you tell us this before?”
Her shining bluish hue flashes toward crimson. “You think you and the Council the only ones out there, Carlos?”
“No! Of course not . . .”
“I know things are tight right now. I know things’ve spun out of control. But what I don’t know is who to trust.” I’ve never seen Mama Esther’s rage. Never known her to be anything but overflowing with affection. Nothing I can say makes any sense, so I stay quiet. “Mama Esther doesn’t take sides. Not for the Council, not for the free-swinging spirits out there. Not for halfies or fullies or nobody. The dead want to come take shelter in these stacks, revive their weary souls within the protection of my warmth, that’s what I can offer. But don’t demand of me that I pick sides . . . Don’t do that.”
“I wasn’t. I mean . . . I didn’t mean to.”
Her whole giant frame sags. “I know, Carlos. I know. There’s so much you don’t understand. You can’t. Hell, there’s plenty I don’t understand.”
“Do you . . . know what’s going to happen?” I’m kind of cringing while I say it, because I don’t want her to get all fiery again, but instead she just sighs.
“No. I wish I did. I really do. I knew there was trouble brewing, but quite honestly, sometimes trouble can be a good thing. The world needs a little trouble to keep moving forward. Seems this trouble may have gone a little above and beyond that though.”
“It does seem that way.”
“Carlos!” Riley calls from downstairs. “Getchyo shit together! We movin’ out!”
Fuck. I don’t like any of this. Too much swirling through my head to focus on this fool’s mission we’re about to go on.
“I suppose,” Mama Esther says wryly, “it just doesn’t make much sense keeping a dead man’s secrets anymore, and I know you’re doing everything you can to deal with those creatures.”
“We are, Mama Esther. We are.”
“Here.” The old ghost gestures to a pile of ancient books sitting on the floor. Post-it notes and scribbled-on scraps of paper stick out of the pages at unruly angles. “Trevor’s stack. You can take them if you want.” She’s frowning at this breach in her own rules about privacy.
I load the books into my satchel. “Thanks.” Doesn’t seem like quite the right word, but it’s all I got.
She gives me the saddest smile I’ve ever seen and then quickly turns
away.