Hitchers

CHAPTER 22

Askinny, exhausted-looking kid handed me a white bag through the Wendy’s drive-through window.

“I still get the fever on a Saturday night,” Gilly sang from the passenger seat, his eyes closed, head lolling. He sounded terrible, trying to sing with that voice.

I unpacked my spicy chicken sandwich while I pulled out of the lot, burned the roof of my mouth on the first bite. I was eating too fast because I didn’t want to waste time eating. It had been almost sixteen hours; who knew how much longer I had before I’d be driven back inside?

“Sorry. Don’t mean to be rude,” Gilly said. “I’m working hard when I’m inside, but I can’t write anything down, and I forget stuff. It’s frustrating.” He plucked a few fries from their cardboard basket.

“Did you find the notes you mentioned?”

“Not yet. I need to make some calls. It’s hard when you only have half an hour, you know?” He licked his fingers like a dog cleaning his front paws. “I worked on this for eight years before I died. I was going to surprise Mick, give it to him as a peace offering, you know?” I nodded. I wondered if he was delusional, or if he was actually composing decent music. Mick said Gilly had lived with his mother for the last twenty-odd years of his life, in the same room he’d occupied as a child.

Gilly waggled his head, brayed sort of like a horse. “Man, wish I could clear my head. I’m not used to the pills and the booze.” He twisted the rear-view mirror so he could look into it. “Not that I’m criticizing, Mick. It’s your body; I’m just along for the ride, as long as it lasts.” He held two fingers up in a peace sign. “Back to the top, man. Me and you.”

My phone rang. It was Mom, but I wasn’t going to get to talk to her. The snakes were running free. Damn it. I was pulled back into cottony numbness.

Grandpa closed the phone, signaled, parked along the curb.

“Why are we stopping?” Gilly asked, peering out his window.

Grandpa got out without a word.

“Hey Finn?” Gilly had one foot on the pavement, his hand on the hood.

Grandpa crossed the street with its neon signs and honking cars. I had no doubt he was heading for a bar.

He turned into Cypress Street Pint and Plate on the corner of Fifth Street, stormed up to the bar and ordered a whiskey, his tone all business.

“Finn?” Gilly pulled up the stool next to Grandpa.

“I ain’t Finn,” Grandpa hissed, turning a shoulder to Gilly.

I tried to ignore their interchange; it was time to get to work, looking for Deadland. I couldn’t stomach Krishnapuma’s melodramatic and cumbersome “world of the dead,” so I had shortened it.

Summer had laid out a plan based on Krishnapuma’s book, and had practiced with me for two hours. I smiled inside, remembering how she would reach up and feign choking me when my natural skepticism came out. I didn’t expect to get anywhere. I wasn’t a mystic, and I wasn’t dead.

Despite my reservations, I took a few imaginary deep breaths, tried to bring my mind to a single-pointed focus on the back of my head. I felt ridiculous, like I was on the ultimate snipe hunt, sent by a mystic who’d been dead fifty years.

Turn around and peer out your third eye. And tremble. That’s what Krishnapuma had written.

My third eye. Right. How do you turn around when you don’t control your body? I tried to visualize the third eye in the back of my head, while Grandpa chewed out Gilly, who didn’t understand why Grandpa had to be like that.

Again, I imagined the breath I couldn’t actually take, willed myself to drift, to grow lighter. Those were Summer’s directions. When Mick heard the directions he waved a dismissive hand and went for a cigarette, and later refused to even consider trying it. I couldn’t tell if he truly thought it was dumb, or if it was a front because he was scared. In any case it seemed unfair that it was left to me.

It felt sort of good to drift, actually. Rather than feeling pinned beneath Grandpa I felt like I was floating free, even rising a little, toward the top of my head…

I returned to myself with a jolt. For a moment everything had gone dark. My eyes had stayed open, because Grandpa was the one controlling my eyelids, but the me floating around inside had closed off the connection. I had drifted away from the windows of the eyes. That’s what it felt like, anyway.

I relaxed, found that I could close my eyes again. I let myself drift. It was unsettling, as if I was in deep space, floating away from the mother ship. It felt as if I was rotating, moving slowly clockwise. Without knowing why, I felt certain I was now facing my right ear.

Breathe. Relax.

The darkness began to lift, like the first hint of dawn. Trying to stay calm, I continued rotating toward the back of my head.

A sliver of silver light broke through.

I jolted with surprise, and I was instantly pulled back behind Grandpa’s eyes.

There was something back there.

I didn’t want to see what it was. I desperately didn’t want to see what it was. Had I just glimpsed the place you go when you die? I’d never felt so utterly petrified. I had no choice, though. I had to look again. If we didn’t know where the ghosts had come from, how could we find out how to send them back?

Reluctantly I tried again, drifting, turning, until the darkness turned grey, then light broke through.

The bar drifted into view.

I panicked. I was seeing the same room, but not through my eyes, through the back of my head.

This bar was empty, or nearly so. There was a man sitting on the end stool, facing the bar. Something was very wrong with his head. It was flattened at the top, as if it had been worn down to just an inch above his eyes. His handless arms ended in smooth stumps; his feet and ankles were gone, too.

There should have been a great deal of blood, but there was none, and somehow that made it worse. I wanted to squeeze my eyes closed, but I had no sense of my eyes, no sense of my body. I looked at the man on the stool, trying to understand what I was seeing. It looked like he’d been sanded away at the extremities.

I wanted to get the hell out of there. Every fiber of my being screamed run, or spin, or whatever it would take to get away. Instead I noticed tiny flecks lifting off of the man at the bar, like dust brushed off a mirror, or ashes lifting out of a bonfire.

“Bunch of cheaters,” he muttered. Only his mouth moved—his cheeks remained perfectly still, his eyes stared dead at the mirrored bar, his pupils dilated to big black donuts.

He chuckled as if he’d just thought of something funny, but managed this chuckle without the hint of a smile.

“Forgot my pills,” he said. I could believe that. I had a hunch he had keeled over right there on that stool, dead of a heart attack. I was sure that was it; I was looking at the corpse, the soul, of a man who had died in that spot. That was the only explanation that made sense. He looked fused to that stool, as if he hadn’t moved in years.

The bar was otherwise empty as far as I could see. I couldn’t see or hear the people I’d just left; instead I heard a softly howling wind, as if I was on an open plain. And, I realized, I could see the wind, or at least see the distortion it caused—horizontal static, like the imperfections you see in old unrestored film. The color of the room was off—everything was muted sepia tones—and everything seemed flat, lacking depth. The bottles behind the bar stacked up back-to-front like cardboard cutouts, the planks of the wood floor tapering too quickly to thin lines at the far end of the bar. I had the sense that if the strange man at the bar ever reached for the bowl of Chex Mix sitting there, they would taste like rubbery nothing, and he wouldn’t be able to swallow them.

My vantage point lifted higher, then began to recede, toward the door. Grandpa was leaving. That was fine with me. I didn’t want to talk to the man at the bar who was slowly wearing away to nothing, who spoke like a ventriloquist’s dummy and seemed to be nothing but an empty shell.

Outside, a woman lay spread-eagled on the pavement, her face a concave blank from the nose up, her arms and legs trailing away to nothing above the joints.

“Those cookies smell delicious,” she said just as Grandpa turned the corner onto Cypress Street.

The dead were scattered along the wind-blown street. An old man with a beard leaned up against the wall outside a parking garage. A baby wailed flatly from inside a dumpster. A man and woman, both young, lay entwined in the middle of the street, repeating snippets of non sequiturs to each other like Dada poets.

If these were all of the dead, there weren’t many for a city this size. Most, I assumed, were inside. I couldn’t imagine what it must be like inside a hospital; the dead must be piled twenty deep in each room.

No—there was more to it than that. If I visited Grandpa’s studio I was sure I wouldn’t find him hunched over the drawing table, wearing away. His spirit, or ghost, or whatever these things lying in the street were—was inside me, not in his studio where it should be.

None of the dead I passed were dressed in out-of-date clothes, no men sporting 1940s fedoras, no flapper women.

We passed an undifferentiated pile of something, bigger than a dog turd, smaller than a terrier. It was slowly, inexorably blowing away.

All at once I realized what that pile was: a person. I thought of the man in the bar, the woman lying on the sidewalk, how they were wearing down. They would keep wearing down until they became piles, then, one day, the last of them would disappear on the wind. That’s why there were no men in fedoras.

I tried to get a sense of myself in this place, of my eyes moving, where my mouth was, but I was nothing in this place, an invisible observer peering from behind a window.

The street stretched, swirled as if I was viewing it through a black and white kaleidoscope. I felt a tug that was almost physical, followed by the familiar tingling in my hands and feet that told me I was coming back

Now my heart was hammering. Images of the place I’d just escaped danced behind my eyes; I doubted they would ever leave.

Gilly was nowhere to be seen, probably driven off by Grandpa. Spinning from the four or five glasses of whiskey Grandpa had downed, I searched until I located the spot where Grandpa had parked, and headed home, haunted by images of the dead blowing away in that silent, empty world.

That was where Grandpa had come from. Or maybe more apt, had escaped from. One day I would go there. It might be a week, a year, or fifty years, but I would end up there in the end. The bald truth of it was like barbed wire pulled up my spine. It wasn’t an abstract, philosophical question any more—I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt what happened when we died. It scared the shit out of me.

I tried calling Mick’s phone, but he didn’t answer. That was okay, because I wanted to talk to Summer first, in person. I wanted her to help me make sense of what I’d seen.

How had dead people gotten out of that place? I couldn’t imagine. And the voices—they were in there doing just what they did at first on the living side, blurting out bits of unconnected conversation, almost like they were emptying it all out for the last time. It reminded me of how people often say their lives flash before their eyes in the moment just before they thought they were going to die.

I pulled into the parking lot of Summer’s apartment, called to her as I got out of the car. I kept calling as I stumbled up the steps. The apartment door burst open and Summer came out, eyes wide.

“I was there. Everything he wrote is true,” I said. “Oh, shit. It’s all true.”

Summer shook with excitement, or maybe fear. “You saw it?”

Huffing, out of breath, I nodded. “I saw it. It was awful. So strange. I can’t tell you—” I took a deep breath and let it out, trying to collect myself.

Summer put her arm across my back, helped me sit on the steps. There were tears in her eyes. “You’re back now. You’re safe.” She wiped under one eye. “My God, it’s like you just walked on the moon. Bigger. I can’t believe it.”

“I can’t either.”

“I’m so scared.”

“Yeah. Me too.”

She turned to look at me closely. “Are you okay?”

There was a slight delay between when Summer’s lips moved and when her voice reached me. Everything seemed very far away. “No. Not even close.”

She put the back of her hand on my forehead. A heartbeat later I felt her cool skin there. It felt nice—soft, and real. “I think you’re in shock.” She touched my shoulder. “Come on, let’s go inside and you can lie down.”

That sounded good. I knew she wanted to hear everything, but right now I wanted to stop thinking about it.