A line is building up at the register. I can hear the customers getting restless and annoyed. You can always tell a customer is getting impatient when they check their phone every few seconds. Then they’re upset when they look up and nothing has changed.
I’m folding clothes, watching Marlene. She doesn’t care about the line. She’s scanning the purchases, not smiling, forgetting to give the total, accidentally ripping receipts in half.
Hector didn’t let her take the day off. Now we have to watch this woman who hasn’t slept or eaten say, “Good day. Did you find everything ok?”
She called me last night from home. Her nine year old daughter Angela died. The girl was playing during recess, running around or whatever. She slipped and fell backwards and hit her head on the concrete. The school nurse patched her up to stop the bleeding. It seemed like it was nothing but a bump.
Angela started throwing up after she got home. She passed out. Marlene got scared and took her to the hospital, where the girl died from brain swelling.
Marlene is the closest friend I have. I’ve worked at Gap in the Palm Desert Shopping Mall for six years, she for five. We talk a lot. Once she switched the men and women’s clothes on the mannequins, to see if the customers would get confused. Then customers called in with complaints, and Hector was pissed. He took it out on Emad. The guy got yelled at for an hour.
I went to Marlene’s little house yesterday. She’d called me right after she got home from the hospital. I arrived in the evening. The house is a single story with two bedrooms in a filthy neighborhood; she has a dirt lawn and a chain link fence and a one-car garage. Inside it’s sparsely decorated, and she uses plastic furniture except for a pale soft couch. Marlene welcomed me and sat me at the plastic kitchen table and tried to pour me coffee. She spilled it on her arm and burned herself. She cursed and cleaned it off at the sink.
She asked me if I could raise her daughter from the dead. I had to break it to her that no, I can’t. I said it’s impossible to resurrect someone: once the heart stops, the brain loses oxygen and the organs fail. A dead body is dead forever. I know because I experimented on a lizard as a teen. I found the dead reptile in my yard and I tried to wrestle its spirit back into the body. I was able to do so, and the lizard’s eyes popped open, and its mouth went gape, and its chest heaved, and it died. I shoved the spirit in again, several times, and it kept dying.
Instead, I tried to put Marlene in touch with Angela. I closed my eyes, called Angela’s name, and heard her say, “I can’t see. Please help me, I can’t see.”
I told her that her mother wanted to speak with her.
She said, “I want to go home,” and she cried. I repeated and she didn’t answer.
Marlene said, “Can she hear you? What’d she say?”
I let Angela go and told Marlene, “I think it’s too early. Her spirit is confused.”
When people die, their souls walk around the world of Death. They’re lost. They don’t know where they are. They don’t know what’s going on. They make sorrowful whining but I don’t feel sorry for them. The howling of the dead is the sound of rebirth in the afterlife.
Marlene asked if she was all right and I said she was fine.
Marlene went to the couch and alternated between violent fits of crying and complete frozen silence. I drank four cups of coffee at the kitchen table.
I couldn’t think of what to do. The woman never married, has no boyfriend, and no family to help. Angela was all she had. Marlene would always tell me about her daughter’s milestones; she said she liked talking to me about her because I’m trustworthy. She was proud to tell me how Angela had started first base on her softball team after playing left field for a year, and then how she had started playing catcher. Angela has the most team spirit, she would tell me, and was the unspoken caption. Of course the coach’s daughter was the official captain, and that wasn’t fair Marlene said, but it was ok because the other girls looked up to her. She offered me to meet her but I never got the chance. That and kids don’t like me.
I stayed at Marlene’s house until she calmed down.
Darla switches with her at the register to un-choke the line. Marlene shuttles the go backs from the counter lifelessly.
I’m in the men’s section like usual. I don’t like my job. I help gay men pick their outfits. They like to try things on and ask my opinion and I play along, saying, “That looks so cute.” Some of the older, more insecure men like to give me looks and I feel no attraction for them whatsoever. They’re just fishing for compliments, flirts, and come-ons. They think that if the guy stocking the shelves finds them hot then they must be really sexy stuff. Maybe someone else will give that to them but I will not. I belong to Manuel, and I desire no other.
A man with enormous biceps asks me whether he should get the green or red pair of shorts, and I recommend the red. He holds it up, flexing, and says, “You think so?”
I say, “Yes, you’ll love it.” He smiles, thanks me, and takes it to the register. My shift ends so I clock out and go say bye to Marlene. I don’t hug her because her hands are full.
I hope her mood doesn’t hurt her chances at promotion. She interviewed for the open position and she’s honestly the best person for the job; even Hector says he wants her as a Customer Service Lead. “I like a winning attitude,” he says.
I’m not cut out for management. Darla and Emad and the other Sales Associates find me creepy; I can see it in their faces when I talk to them. Marlene says they’re closed-minded and judge too fast. I think it’s because I don’t have the gift of gab and my reservation scares them.
Marlene is the first person I’ve told about my communication with the dead. I’m thirty-two. She’s twenty-nine. She has big hips and fat thighs and a small torso. I assume she never lost the baby weight, or maybe she just likes to eat. We were taking break in the food court and I told her in passing that I can see and hear the afterlife. She took it very well. She didn’t call me psychotic, she just said, “Can you talk to my dad?”
My parents weren’t happy when I told them about the voices. They took me in for treatment. I was put on anti-hallucinogenic medicine. They worried a lot.
I told my parents I’m better, I don’t hear anything, I’m better, and after a while they listened and took me off the meds.
“No more voices?” they said.
“No more,” I said.
And my ears were filled with nonsense and mumbling. Crying and cries for help. They say, “Hello? Hello? Is anyone there? Please?” They say, There is no God but God; Honey, I can’t find my charger; this fellow is a thief; good morrow. They say things in languages I’ll never know. I think they all say pretty much the same things.
I have to ignore them. It’s the only way to get on with life.
The souls of the living exist in Death like flowers on endless fields. The unborn are like seeds in the earth, and those who die sprout legs and bodies and are free to wander. There’s no god, no great overseer, no great shepherd. There’s no devil, no great torturer or lord of suffering. The dead merely exist. They walk in silence, seemingly unaware of one another.
Manuel is out there somewhere, wandering with the billions on billions who have passed, while the billions of living souls like me are tethered in Death.
As I drive home I think that maybe I should have stuck around and waited for Marlene, in case she wanted to talk. I don’t know how to help her. I could buy a pie, or a bouquet of flowers.
Angela’s spirit is rambling. She says, “Ice cream, ice cream, cherry on top, how many boyfriends do you got? One. Two. Three…” She counts to a hundred. She starts over.
I put frozen fish sticks in the oven for dinner. I sit on a counter stool while they cook.
I say, “Angela. Can you hear me?” She stops chanting. “It’s a friend of Mommy’s,” I say. I wait. “Can you hear me Angela?”
I hear creaking, the sound of straining wood. The lights seem to darken, and there’s a silence. I look down the hallway and see her specter standing there. The walls sink toward the black figure, bending inward. She grows darker, sucking out the air and light, and I get off the stool. I hold my hand out and say, “Angela?” A vibration travels through the walls. Her specter trembles. Then she fades away and the light returns.
I don’t know what that was. It could’ve been her trying to find her mom, or trying to find me, or an attempt to get back into this world.
I don’t get good sleep and I go to work thinking of her restless soul. Maybe I tried to contact her too soon and now she’s angry with me. I’m not sure. I can’t think about it now because there are customers to deal with.
A teenage couple walks in. The boy follows his girl around, bumping his crotch into her ass. When that gets boring he comes to the men’s side of the store. He’s wearing a hat, sagging jeans, and big bright shoes. I ask if I can help him find anything and he says, “Where’s the good shit at?” He yawns. I ask him what kinds of things is he looking for. He says, “Men’s clothes.” Then he walks up and down my section, shakes his head, and his crotch finds his girlfriend’s ass again. She smiles and blushes when he puts a hand around her waist and waddles behind her.
It doesn’t bother me but I know Marlene would have had a riot. She would’ve impersonated his voice, saying, “Look at me, I’m so cool.” She used to do that all the time. She’d even do Hector. She’s no good at it but her silliness makes the game. Her smile could turn retail into a playground. It reminded you that it was better than food service and unemployment.
The good thing about Marlene is that she knows how to be serious when you want her to be. She listens because she’s had hardship, too. She dropped out of college when she got pregnant. I put her in touch with her dad. She said “Hi Dad,” and he said, “Hi Hon,” and she cried. This was in the quiet of the evening after Angela had gone to sleep, at her tiny house. They went back and forth: I miss you, I miss you too, I’m doing well, I know, Angela is well, that’s good, say hi to Mom, I will. That type of thing. Then she touched my knee and said, “Thank you.” She hasn’t asked me to speak with him again. I don’t think she intends to ask.
I never talked to her about Manuel. I never saw the need to. The idea of “coming out” is laughable to me. Coming out as what? Revealing my “true” identity? Our entire lives are locked in boxes and safes and treasure chests and buried; we are torn apart and packaged separately and the containers are distributed far and wide and they have no keys. Is there supposed to be some triumph in revealing a trinket to a stranger? It makes no fucking sense to me. Our family, our friends, our lovers; they are all foreigners to a degree.
I was fifteen—a time when you think the world doesn’t understand you. For the most part it doesn’t. But I was a melancholy loser. I searched Google for others like me and found nothing but myths and phonies. At school I didn’t fit in the circles so I sat alone.
God, I was a whiny bitch. I can hear my sniveling voice: No one gets me, no one knows me. I can’t tell anyone about my talents, blah blah blah. I tried to make friends with the dead but most of the dead are perfectly happy being dead. I used to talk to the spirit of this man named Wayatt, who died in 1857 from dehydration working on a railroad, and he was well-spoken and friendly and thought I was odd. I talked to him regularly until he said, “Please leave me be.”
I had a crush on Manuel the entire freshman year. At first it made no sense to me but after some months of wet dreams I came to accept the fact that I was gay, at least for him.
Manuel had brown skin, glasses, some acne scars, and always spiked his hair. He was soft spoken and shorter than me. His special talent was piano. I’d had a class with him but the dreams started after I saw him perform at a pep rally in the school gym. The song wasn’t fast or slow, and it didn’t sound classical; it sounded like notes dumped on a page. I just watched him, and listened, and when he finished almost no one cheered, and he bowed. The music made me feel like going to sleep and having chaotic dreams, like they were sounds not meant to be heard while you’re awake. I didn’t cheer, either.
Marlene doesn’t work today. I call her on my break and ask if she’s hungry. After work I bring spicy chicken pad thai noodles and she eats it happily. She forks so much at once that noodles hang down her chin. I ask her how she’s feeling and she says, “I don’t know.” She says the house gets cold at night. She imagines noises from Angela’s room but nothing happens when she goes to look. She says she has Cocoa Puffs in the cupboard that she won’t eat herself because it tastes nasty. But throwing it out feels like a cruel thing to do. She says, “What am I going to do with all her things? I don’t want to give it away and I don’t want to keep it.” I want to tell her she should get rid of it so she doesn’t dwell. I change the subject by asking about the funeral.
I spot Marlene $300 and she covers the other $700 for the Discount Cremation and Memorial Package at the Peaceful Passing funeral home. Angela’s body is burned and buried and Marlene signs for the death certificate, and the memorial service is the next morning. It’s held in a small room with short pews, and Angela’s blue softball jersey hangs in front so we can see her last name, Kolesen, and her number, 39. A man, sharply dressed, sits with his wife. I presume he’s the optometrist Marlene always talks about. Another man has his head hung and he holds a cap in his hands; he must be the coach. Then there’s Darla from Gap, and then there’s me. The whole softball team was invited but the families don’t want their children to worry.
The optometrist goes to the podium to speak first. He says he’s been struck by the tragedy and he’s deeply sorry for Marlene, and that Angela had such perfect eyesight. Then the coach goes up and can’t stop looking down at his hat and rubbing it, and he says some choked up words about how Angela never stopped running. He says, “Even when the other kids get tired, she just—encourages them, says ‘Keep going.’ She was a real—real leader. She played hard.” Then Darla gets up and says sorry to Marlene. Then I get up to say my part, and I look at Marlene in her black dress sitting in the front row.
I hadn’t realized until now that she actually thinks of me as a good friend. The other guests have probably never seen pictures of Angela on Marlene’s phone, like the one of her as a baby wrapped in a yellow blanket with a face of questioning and a body curled around her stuffed red parrot. Do they know about Marlene’s parents, about her dad who died of meningitis when Angela was two? She’d told me about Curtis, the boy in her dorm who to her was a college experiment, and he kept coming around with flowers and love poems to woo her and she wanted him to stay away. Then when she found out she was pregnant she dropped out and lived with her dad. She asked me if I thought it was right to keep the baby from the father, and I said, “It’s ok. It’s your baby more than his. It won’t do any good to have him around if you don’t like him.”
She’d said, “No it won’t. It’s not fair, but…this is how it has to be. It’s a little selfish, but it’s better for Angela this way.”
I’m standing at the podium and I glance at the jersey, which Marlene had chosen to display instead of an urn with Angela’s remains—she wanted the child to be laid to rest immediately. She didn’t look at the body. She didn’t see the paper box that carried her into the furnace. She just signed the papers. There’s no tombstone. She trusts the ashes were disposed of with dignity. I think about what the girl had looked like in the uniform, and I remember pictures. I think about how painful it must’ve been to have her head crash on the ground. I say, “I didn’t know her. I regret that I didn’t meet her. I know she was a special girl.”
Marlene looks up expectantly, and I want to say something cheery, to give her hope, to let her know she has a good life ahead, but all the rest is death, and I say, “I’m sorry.”
I step down and take a seat. I hear the coach sniffling and he puts the hat over his face. Marlene gets up and thanks everyone and we all go home.
Angela should have a tombstone. I think about what it would say and how much it would cost while I’m pumping gas at the station in the middle of the day. A tremor runs down the hose and the pump ejects itself from my tank, spilling gasoline on my shoes. I curse and I hang up the pump and I notice Angela. She looks like a black hole on the other side of the lot. I’m the only one who can see her, but people drive around as if sensing something there. She moves toward me, stops next to one of the pumps, and I watch. I want to say something but I don’t. She moves to me again, sinking into the ground below the asphalt at my feet. It scares me this time. I get the feeling that she wants to take it out on me, like she isn’t ready to be dead and I’m to blame.
Marlene stops coming to work. Hector tells me he’s going to have to let her go. I ask him to give her another chance. He says it’s been three days and no calls from her. I tell her she has mortgage payments. He says, “I’m sorry.” I tell him that I can work her shifts until she gets better. He says I can work her shifts until he hires someone else.
I drive to Marlene’s place to tell her the situation. The streets are empty and the sun is down. I hear spirits blabbering. They say, “Have you ever visited Hinesville? My son lives in Hinesville. I’ve been there many times.” They say, Go tell your brother before I smash your face; that’s not an excuse, don’t give me that shit; I’m going to the game; so replace the bloody wheel; are you an idiot? Then voices come flooding in so many languages, different speeds. They’re talking to themselves in the dark. I hear dead birds chirping, and dogs barking, and it makes my head spin. I pull the car over. This shouldn’t be happening. I slow my breathing. I plug my ears.
I wish Manuel was there among the voices. My quiet Manuel. I try to think about him. I can see him sitting at the piano in the band room, not practicing but pressing keys and hearing what they sound like. He’s listening for what he called ‘that old-time ring’ that gets produced when the piano is in an advanced state of decay. I can hear solitary plunks created by the motion of his fingers.
We were sixteen. Sometimes we took lunch together in the northeast quad, sitting in the shade. We’d talk about school and whatever. I’d complain to him about how everyone disgusts me. They get their parents to buy them clothes and cars and then they brag about it and think it makes them cool. Then they walk around judging everything from your nose shape to your speech patterns to the logos on your t-shirts.
He said there was no need to get so angry and bitter. He said, “Just do you. Don’t worry about what everyone else is doing. Don’t let it get to you.”
Manuel looked at me through his glasses and I wanted to take his hand but I was afraid he didn’t have those feelings for me. I couldn’t tell what he was thinking and it drove me crazy sometimes. Whenever his mom came to pick him up after school, he’d sit in the car and wave at me, smiling. There was never a handshake or a hug, not even a fist-bump. That wave was his departure, even on the last day of sophomore year.
He called me on a summer morning. He said, “How’s it going?” I told him I was fine. I smiled like an idiot. I thought: maybe he likes me, maybe he likes me. He said, “Uhm, what are you up to today?” I said I wasn’t up to anything and he said, “I was thinking maybe, uhm. Maybe we could watch a movie or something.”
The phone slipped out of my hand and I juggled it until I had it firm and said, “Yeah, that’d be great. Would you like me to—like are you going to pick me up? Or…”
He said he’d pick me up, no problem. He said he’d come at five. I said, “Cool.”
“It’s a date, then,” he said.
“Yep,” I said.
I showered and got cleaned up and put on a nice shirt. He called me close to 5:00 saying he’d be late. I told him to hurry. I meant it as a joke but I was also sort of serious. I was anxious to see him. I just wanted to be around him again, and maybe tell him how I felt.
Thirty minutes later and he hadn’t arrived. I stood at the window. I called his house at 6:00 and no one answered. I panicked and kept calling until his dad picked up and said angrily, “Stop calling!”
I wondered if his parents had discovered his intentions and locked him in his room. I wondered if Manuel was on his way and I was overreacting (what if he just had his phone turned off?). I had no idea and my imagination ran wild with scenarios ranging from tame to severe.
I got no answers that night. I sat on the floor and beat my legs with my fists. I got through in the morning and his mom told me, “Please stop calling. Manuel is dead.”
I never told my parents about it. And I wasn’t invited to the funeral. The paper said he died behind the wheel. He was half a mile from my house.
Witnesses said he wasn’t going very fast. He merged onto the freeway exit very casually and slowed to about fifteen miles per hour. But the vehicle kept a straight-on path and rolled through the intersection. Then it cruised into a parking lot and bumped into the concrete base of a lamp and stopped. It was a gentle little ride and it was reported he was gone before the car was in the intersection. His heart gave out. The doctor said a bad electrical signal had caused an abnormal rhythm, making his ventricles quiver instead of pump.
I felt guilty anyways. I’m the one that told him to pick me up and I told him to hurry. If I hadn’t rushed him I’m sure his heart would’ve been ok. I feel less guilty now because I know these things happen, but I’d like him to know I’m sorry and I love him. Maybe when I’m dead.
The voices in my head die down. I go to Marlene. Her eyes are dark and she looks at me as if she’s glad to see me but also wants to be left alone. She says, “Come in.”
There are cardboard boxes stacked around and I pull the flap on one. It’s empty—they’re all empty. We sit on her couch in the living room in the light of one weak lamp.
“I’ve decided to burn her things,” says Marlene flatly.
“That seems best,” I say. It’s better than selling them. She would live wondering if the strangers on Ebay were taking good care of her daughter’s childhood dolls, her movie posters, her softball cleats.
I tell her Hector’s firing her. She says that’s ok and she expected it. I offer her to live at my place and she says no. I offer to help pack Angela’s things and she says she’s decided not to pack anything. I tell her not to hurt herself.
She chuckles and says, “I’m going down with the house and the boxes.” We’re quiet and she says, “She was going to do NCAA and get to college on a scholarship. That’s what she wanted. That’s what I wanted for her. I never got the chance, you know, to—to do that myself. I really wanted her to have the chance.” She stops. Her lips shake; her voice cracks. “I wish I’d never had her. I wish I never met Curtis. I could have said no to him. I didn’t even want it that badly. That was so stupid of me.”
I say, “You’re not going to burn the house.” I don’t fully believe she’d do that. She stares blankly ahead with images in her mind. I say, “I’ve seen her spirit. She can talk to you. You two can speak any time you want.”
“I don’t want to anymore,” she says. We listen to the wind against the window, and I think of how it might carry a fire on these towers of cardboard boxes, and how warm that would make the night. I can relate to her loss but I don’t fully get what she’s going through. And I may not be capable of getting it because I can’t know what a mother goes through in nine years. I think of opening up about Manuel but I keep it to myself. And I think of what I can do to bring Angela back so she can have another chance—a different chance. It won’t be a starting-over but it’ll be a shot at growing up before she has to face the eternal gray.
I say, “You know I can’t raise the dead. But there is something I can do.” She looks over at me. I say, “I can bring her back, but you will have to die.”
She nods. Some tears go down her cheeks. She wipes them. She says, “Ok.”
Marlene lays back on the couch and she takes my hand. Her head is gleaming with sweat. This is like the lizard from my younger days. I call Angela’s spirit and she appears like liquid black and the light goes out. I tell her to go to the body and get inside. Her amorphous shape hesitates, and Marlene squeezes my hand tighter. The body is already inhabited. So I whisper in Marlene’s ear and tell her what I’m going to do, and then I do it. I wrap my belt around her neck and tighten. At first Marlene is calm but then her instincts kick in and I press my foot against her to protect myself from her thrashing and to keep the belt tight. Marlene’s soul leaves the body invisibly, but I see it leave her eyes. Then Angela sinks onto the body, there’s a loud sound of wind and the shelves and desks and lamps in the room rattle and collapse, and boxes fly, and then it settles and all is quiet.
I blow air into the body’s mouth. Then Angela, in Marlene’s body, sits up and coughs and rubs her bruised neck. She whispers that she’s hungry and I give her a bowl of Cocoa Puffs. She eats it happily. When she finishes she hands me the bowl and blinks at me confusedly.
“Do you know who I am?” I say.
“I think so,” she whispers. I never met her in Life but she recognizes me from Death.
It doesn’t take her long to learn she’s in her mother’s body. I tell her that her mother’s gone and she says, “I’m not a baby, you know.” She remembers being dead.
I explain to her that she can’t go to school anymore. I have to call her Marlene because that’s how the world will see her. She understands the what but not the why.
I don’t have to say goodbye to Marlene: the living are just asleep in Death. Now she’s awake and she can watch her daughter live.
We clean out the house by throwing away everything she doesn’t need. I put the house up for sale and she moves into my apartment. She stays there while I’m at work. She gets lonely. She has trouble moving around in Marlene’s big hips, and she bumps into walls and chairs. She cries when she’s really frustrated. “This is stupid,” she says, “I can’t move at all.”
She’s bored at home and I buy her DVDs from the value bin at Wal-Mart. Among these are Grease, Air Bud, and Sandlot. I find a lesson plan online for homeschooling and try to teach her spelling and long division in the mornings before work. She picks up old hobbies, like beaded animals and cross stitching. I buy some of those as well.
Angela asks me to cook her roasted chicken like her mom used to make. I tell her I don’t know how to make that. She asks me to do her hair like her mom used to. She knows I can’t, but she says it to spite me for doing this to her. When she’s mad she calls me evil and threatens to run away. I tell her it’s fine by me.
On a Saturday I offer to take her to the park and she complies. She lugs herself to the SUV and manages to get in the seat.
In my dreams of Manuel’s death I imagine sitting with him in his sedan. As he pulls onto the freeway exit we turn to see each other. He looks at me and smiles—a face that says he loves me, and it makes me feel like we’ve lived in love for a long time. As if we’ve had years of adventures, of hours speaking and touching, and have kissed a thousand times. I smile back because I feel content and complete with a life fulfilled. Then he rests his head on the steering wheel, very slowly, and closes his eyes and sleeps. Our car drifts into the air and floats, wheels spinning, without motion and without gravity. He looks like a child resting. I don’t move or speak, and that’s the end—I just wake up and know he’s there.
Angela and I setup at a backstop in the park and she says, “Can you even pitch?”
I tell her I’ll try. And I do. I toss her a ball and she swings, misses, and giggles. “Out here,” she says, swinging the bat in front of her, “Not so close.”
I toss again and the tin bat clanks on the ball, and the ball rolls on the ground past my feet. I chase after it and she runs to the imaginary first base. She can’t stop laughing about how funny it feels to run in her mother’s body, swinging those thighs back and forth. I can’t stop laughing because of how her running looks like perpetual tripping, and how her laughing makes it worse.
I watch her round for second, thinking: I should get a second job at Macy’s and save up for a condo. We’ll visit the park every weekend and afterwards I’ll take her out to lunch wherever she wants. This is our gift to her—from me and Marlene—so she can find her own way in this strange place.
Chandler Thomsen 