We Will All Go Down Together (25 page)

Supposedly not. But that’s all that collects . . . 

All I could see collecting, anyroads, there or any other place. All I’ve
ever
seen.

Was our partner Ross who finally helped me figure out how I did what I did, in the end: broke it down into sections like a fourth-form science prof, all neat and clear and (mainly) understandable at last. Told us how most ghosts are a rag and a bone and a hank of hair at best—a memory fragment stuck on continual loop, just dust and PKE and water-vapour with no real “there” there. Leftover fragments of psychic energy deluded into believing in their own personality; an echo cobbled together from memory and pain, with no self-awareness as such ’cept what we give them. Survival instinct, with no survival.

I couldn’t argue his reasoning, in the main. All my life, ghosts
had
gotten stuck to me like dust on a TV’s screen . . . only worse, ’specially back when I didn’t know you could turn the damn thing off and clean it every once in a while. Just staggered ’round with great crowds of ’em trailing after me, caught in the evil headlight glare of my ghost-drawing soul: babbling, clutching, clawing. Never leaving me
alone
.

Prayer didn’t work, no more than did exorcism or a thousand other remedies, from hedge-witch charms to graveyard dirt to smack like my Mammy used to fiend for (bought, I’ve no doubt, from the grandchildren of the same dealers
she’d
owed). It took trips to the mental ward to peel ’em off, at least for a little while; a week or so in the quiet room and I’d feel a sudden jerk, almost a tearing, then blessed, blessed empty tenderness from top to toe. I’d walk out the morning after, free and aching as some lobster who’d shucked her shell, feeling for all the world like I’d just pulled a scab ran my whole body long.

Ross drew us both pictures, alone in his classroom—he was a teacher’s aide back then, desperate for anything paid more than forty dollars an hour. “This energy you carry around with you, the one you say ghosts are attracted to? We call that the aura; an energy byproduct, sort of like the corona ’round the sun, only far less visible. And what most people don’t know, Jo, is that a person’s aura has layers—”

“Like skin.”

“Skin, exactly. And what happens when skin gets old?”

So that was the trick, all this time: cast your outer layer whole like some spider’s carapace and start over every so often, or get caught in a web of psychic influences so tight and sticky you can’t even move. Which is where Davina’s decon chamber comes in; I walk around our latest contract with my inmost light pulsing like a beacon, then step back in and shed, trapping my payload there. And the saddest part is how the ghosts can’t even tell I’m gone, mostly—just keep on orbiting the husk ’til it disintegrates into what Ross calls “pure Yin energy,” and them along with it. What’s left behind still isn’t pretty, but at least it doesn’t try to think for itself.

Energy’s energy, after all . . . it can’t really be destroyed, just converted, moved around, modified. But a lingering sense of malaise never proves much to sue over, and Davina always made sure we did good business, even working strictly word-of-mouth. The unsatisfied clients we didn’t contest; just gave ’em their initial deposit back . . . along with their ghosts. Then stood back and see how exactly they propose to handle the situation. That put paid to most of ’em.

But as Davina herself taught me, there are exceptions to every rule.

When I first got to Toronto, the bars were full of fools found the way I talk irresistible. And each of ’em had a line to try, no matter how ridiculous.

“Wow, is that accent for real?”

“So what
do
they wear under their kilts, lassie?”

“Wanna have a little Highland fling?”

“Way you talk, y’know, it sorta reminds me of Sean Connery. But with better tits.”

“As compliments go, that’s truly shite,” I told this last pretty bastard; Hank, his name was. And thereby hangs a tale.

I knew Hank was a bad bet the minute I laid eyes on him, let alone spread my legs and moved into his apartment. Because with some cunts, it’s never a matter of will they, only ever a matter of when—and Hank wasn’t bright enough to disappoint anybody’s expectations, no matter how low they might have pitched ’em.

So I get Davina’s name from a scrap of loose paper crumpled up in that box Hank kept beside the phone, and I march off to kick her skinny arse for it only to find myself matching her drink for drink in the same bar we’d
both
made his acquaintance at.

“Ah, see, I
knew
it, didn’t I know it? Fuckin’ Hank, man. You deserve better than that motherfucker, Jodie—”

“Jodice.”

“—Jo—”

Before long, I was telling her what I saw at night and sometimes during the day, and she wasn’t any more surprised by that than she’d been by the other: had witches in her own family, after all—two kinds.

“How many ghosts you think you seen in Toronto so far, J.?” she asks me. “Double digits? Triple?”

“At least.”

“Huh.” And I can already see that rainbow cast to her eyes forming—green and blue-purple and pink, like Canadian money. That payday look.

Which is why, when I think back on it, I probably shouldn’t be too insulted that it was only then she slid close enough to park her knee between mine for the very first time. Put her thin little lips so tight to my own I could taste what she’d had with dinner, and murmured—

“Hank really is dumb, y’know.”

I felt my chest heave. Managed: “He’s that, yeah.”

“Yeah, well—guess we’re both pretty clear on the facts there. But what I mean is . . . he’s a real moron to ever cheat on somebody like you.” Then: “But you don’t even know what I’m talkin’ ’bout, do ya?”

I heaved again, gave a ragged little cough. Shrugged, like I was hauling stones with my shoulder. And replied, at last . . . 

“. . . um, eh. Well . . . I
hope
I do.”

Her little hand on mine, knee pressing even harder. And that
thing
in me opening wide at the heat of her, unstoppable—unspooling, cracking straight down to the core. This glorious weakness: an order, not a plea. Love me. Love
me
.

Never a word we used, in the end. But she made damn sure I felt its fingerprints all over me in the dark nevertheless, deep as bruises . . . so deep I’d always want her, no matter what. Because even now, my heart’s just not strong enough to stand the strain it takes to love, while knowing (all the while) there’s no earthly way you’ll ever be loved quite the same way in return. Or, perhaps—

—at all.

So tell me: were you maybe born broken just like me, born hungry? Are we all of us born with some part of us missing? Are we each of us born with a hole?

Is that why people do such terrible things to each other and leave people like Dav and Ross and me to clean up the mess?

Born with a hole and no earthly way of finding just the exact right plug to fill it, not ’til you’ve tried ’em from A to Z and back once more: booze, fags, work, candy, men, girls, heroin, methedrine, methadone, God. Tried having a baby. Tried killing yourself. A hundred religions, from Calvin to the Dalai Lama and back again; tried every damn thing you could think of and some you had to stumble over, ’til all that seemed to fit was Dav and this. Just this and Dav, and that’s all.

You stick a plug in your weakness like a finger in the proverbial dike and let pressure build up, let it swell and swell ’til there’s nothing left but tension, nothing left but what’s left
over
—the absence, not the presence. The wound you shape your soul around.

Can’t stay that way forever, though, can it? The pressure alone sees to that; edges thin and crack, warp and curl. And the hole opens wide once more—at last—like some bloody flower blooming, like some gaping, crying, permanently starving baby’s mouth.

I’ve gotten good at holding things together, these thirty years and more . . . at mending myself stitch by stitch from the inside so’s the scar’s well-nigh invisible to anyone doesn’t know me well enough to know where to look. At bracing myself, holding that pose so long and hard I can barely recall myself how I used to dream it’d feel if ever I got to where I could safely let any part of this whole bloody mess
go
.

But sometimes I do wonder if I’m love-blind the way some people are colour-blind, or most people are ghost-blind. If love (true or false, thick or thin, requited or un-) really
is
the only glue ever mortars our sad hearts’ bricks together, and me not swift enough to recognize the label any time I happened to pass it by.

Because: living is transience, after all—people aren’t really
permanent
’til they’re dead, no matter what you might’ve felt for ’em beforehand. Always changing . . . 

. . . and I just can’t keep up.

Once the decon chamber goes up on a job, it doesn’t come down ’til Ross’s meters tell him we’ve gone from a great rotating scrum of individual spectres to a melting mass of ectoplasm that can’t recall its own name. This is the rule we’ve kept to since we formed Glouwer-Cirocco-Puget, but I suppose I’d always thought it had less to do with rules than with regulations, if you get my meaning. That it wasn’t so much dangerous, in other words, as just another chance for Dav to enjoy telling clients what not to do.

I’d done one sweep already and shucked off into that sad plastic box, but we all of us knew one was never enough with a place this choked. So we come in Thursday, only to find this fresh new suit waiting for us with a security guard at either elbow—out the same sort of pack as Gall, for sure, but even I could see (in and between that swirling halo of ghosts I carried, thick to the skin everywhere but my eyeballs) that that’s where the similarities ended.

“You’d be Glower and Circus,” he says, practically beaming.

“That’s Glouwer, like,” says I.

And: “Ci
rocco
,” Davina chimes in, at almost the same time. “Where’s Gall, buddy?”

“Fired, in no small part for authorizing this sort of foolishness.” Gives a cool, little nod to the bully-boys, who start hoisting equipment.

Ross comes running, clucking like a whole chicken farm set on fire. “Hey! I really wouldn’t touch that, sir, if I were you. . . .”

“What in particular, Mr. Puget? Were you talking about
this
rather expensive item—”

—the PKE machine, over and down in a spray of glass and tiny cogs, while Ross grabbed at his heart through the biohazard coverall’s chestpiece—

“—or was it maybe
this
?” A row of leaded bottles down in one sweeping gesture, followed by one of those little temperature-reading doohickeys Ross loved so much. “Yes, that
does
look hard to fix; oh well.” To us: “I’m sure the company funds you bilked my predecessor out of thus far will cover the extent of your ‘damages.’”

Ross groaned again, a kid in a burnt-down candy store. But Davina just gave Mr. Suit the old up-and-down, utterly unimpressed.

“Man,” she said, “you really do love to hear yourself talk, don’t’cha?”

A fake-hearty laugh, all teeth and righteous ire. “What, no warnings? Certain I’m not about to unleash anything apocalyptic on the unsuspecting city? I’d hate to have to close this site down on account of excessive CGI.”

“Do what you want, you happy motherfucker. The further you go, the sweeter it’s gonna sound when I see ya in court.”

“I doubt that.” To the guards: “Kick it down.”

Ross surged forward again; Davina grabbed his arm, hissing
cut it OUT, man
in his ear. But this other shirty bastard, he must’ve thought she was coming for
him
—so he strikes at her, hard, almost like a back-hand. Catches her on the point of the chin with his old school ring and knocks her down with poor Ross tangling in on top of her, two of ’em sprawling headsfirst into what’s left of machine, meters, bottles.

Meanwhile, the bully-boys had grabbed a decon chamber strut each and pulled; I heard something give inside or maybe out- or both. And then—

Remember the finger in the dike?

Ghosts already spinning ’round me one way, faster and faster, bulging up and out in every direction like some half-formed thunderhead. And from out the chamber, meanwhile, a rush of something yet still worse: bigger, badder, all rage and sorrow and misdirection. What you get when the chamber’s not quite cleared, when all those soul-husks you slung in have broken down far enough to lose themselves in each other, to form some kind of massive—ghost times fifty, times one hundred? Misery of miseries, raw and elemental, without even the hint of a catharsis powerful enough to make it whole again . . . 

Mr. Suit and his guards pausing, still as paint, eyes bugged to their bloody strings. ’Cause it’s far easier to see one huge ghost than it is to see a thousand small ones, I can only suppose, even if you don’t think you have anything near “the sight.”

And that in itself gave me time to hear Ross, behind me. Ross, whimpering: “Jo, oh please, oh Jesus, look. Jo, Christ,
Jo
!”

I turn, and the ghosts turn with me. Swirl and part like the Red Sea to show Dav on the floor, gasping, with a big shard of glass in her throat—or a
hole
in her throat, rather. With nothing but a big shard of glass, hard and sharp and red and shiny, to plug the damn thing closed.

A
hole
.

I could see sweat on Mr. Suit’s face as I turned back, moist and shiny. But it wasn’t
him
I was talking to when I said, all calm and level—

“You see me, yeah? Still. Want to be
with
me? Want
in
?”

The ghosts, one long collective sigh:
Oh yes, oh yes, oh yes.

“Then you’ll bloody well have to do what I tell you to, won’t ye?”

The suit and his boys were running, by that time, so’s all I really had to do was send the ghosts after. They streamed past us in a cloud, so close they whipped my hair up, and chased Dav’s murderers upstairs—right to that one room, the Munchausen’s by proxy room, if I’m not much mistaken. For at least one of them knew the way, after all.