Чарли Андерс - Six Months, Three Days, Five Others

The doorway to the Veterans Hall is open and the caterers are coming in through a ribbon of darkness, bearing weird canapes made of pure decay and fake crab, plus oblivion–in–a–blanket. They keep shoving the trays in my face and trying to make me take a bite, as the ghosts grow more and more vivid and everything else fades. The ghosts urge me: take one, just try it, don’t be ungrateful, don’t you know what this wedding cost? You think you’re too good to eat with us.

I look over at Raj, still talking to my ghost, and I feel a pure sour anger—why can’t he tell that’s not me? This proves he never really cared!—and I’m so pissed that I almost want to open my mouth and let the other ghosts push pieces of the dead wedding feast into my throat. Why the fuck not? And then I stop, and see Raj again, his face just a wall of tears. Whatever is going on with him and my ghost, from his perspective, he sees that I’m hurting and he is desperate to make it right. I look at Raj’s face and I see love, like actual honest–to–god, walk–naked–on–broken–glass love, and my mom is there too, weeping over the ghost and squeezing the ghost’s bony hand.

And I feel sorry for my ghost, because she doesn’t know how to cope with the two of them caring about her that much. She looks flustered and scared. I see my poor ghost, looking from Raj to my mom and back again, like she’s trapped with their love. I barely notice the spectres from the ghost wedding now, I’m so fixated on the two of them and my ill–equipped ghost. I am overcome by a mixture of pity and gratitude, two emotions I did not know could be mixed up. The feelings are too big to wrap my mind around, the longer I look at the three of them, and I feel like I am going to fly apart in a million pieces. Soul and mind, intermixing like matter and anti–matter. Unthinkable, terrible, amazing.

And then, I am vomiting ghost champagne from my eyes, in huge salty gouts.

I look up. Raj and my mother are looking down at me and I am laying on the floor. I laugh but it becomes a cough. Oh shit, I say, I’m back. I think I ate drank something that didn’t agree. My mom says an ambulance is coming, and I tell her that I’m sorry I jacked up her special day, but I don’t think anything could really ruin what she and Cassie have going. Because you guys are awesome and I’m proud of you, I say. My mom cries harder than ever, on Cassie’s shoulder, and Raj is supporting my head. I tell Raj that I love him—words I have never spoken—and I’m glad he’s Team Me. He says he loves me, but I get the impression he already told my ghost that.

I don’t see my ghost anywhere. She doesn’t show up at the hospital at all, where they find a tiny brain infarct thingy. Nor do I see her hanging around, after they finally send my ass home.

Raj looks at me funny when I try to ask him what my ghost said to him. Not that I phrase it like that—I just demand to know what I said after I collapsed at the wedding. He’s kind of embarrassed, like maybe it’s bad form to remind me of my drunken brain–attack rambling.

But I beg and cajole and emotionally blackmail, and he finally says: You told me you felt cursed, and that you blamed yourself, and that you were going to keep hating yourself more and more until you died, and then it would be too late to try and make peace with your past, because your past wouldn’t let you in. Honestly, it didn’t make a lot of sense to me, and the gist of it is that you need to try a different shrink, and maybe no more regression therapy or whatever. But I’m just a layperson, right?

I agree that regression therapy sucks and that Raj is indeed a person that I want to lay. I climb on top of him, even though he protests that my head is still like a Faberge egg, and I grind into him while telling him that if he’s going to be a kept man, he’d better put out the goods. Dry humping, we are alone together for maybe the first time. I laugh between kisses.

Teri Lewis was obsessing about her sister’s bad marriage and the president’s latest compromise, so she barely listened to Flo’s improvised song about pandas and dandelions, coming from the stroller in front of her. Maybe if she’d known this would be the last time she’d ever hear her baby sing, she’d have stopped to relish the moment: the sun perched between two clouds, her baby in a pink–dragon onesie and the birds and street noises harmonizing with Flo’s almost–nonsense chanting.

Teri pushed the stroller into the crosswalk at 18th and Guerrero, and just barely noticed a truck leaping through the intersection, on the memory of a yellow light. She pulled the stroller back towards the curb so fast she missed the ramp. The stroller’s wheels thump–thumped back onto the sidewalk, and it nearly tipped over, thanks to a rickety three–wheeled design. Teri leaned over Flo and make sure her fighter–pilot straps were still secure, and Flo gave Teri a Clara Bow smile.

Teri heard a whooshing sound, a tidal wave of white noise, and turned to see a bizarre trio descending from a VTOL jet on ropes. They landed on their feet just behind her, right by the organic grocery store’s fruit bins. Teri glanced to see if the traffic would let her cross the street and get away from these lunatics, but they were already advancing towards her. They were looking at her—no, not at her, at the stroller.

“There she is!” one of them shouted. They rushed over and surrounded the stroller before Teri could maneuver away.

“Stay away from my baby!” Teri shouted.

“Stand back, ma’am,” said the big lunkhead with the odd nozzles sticking out of his bald scalp. His arms bulged with unnatural muscles and knotted veins, and he had a huge belt that kept changing color. Teri tried to make a break for it, but the big bald man and the other man, the red pirate, grabbed an arm each and restrained her. She kicked and clawed, but they were both many times stronger than her. She started screaming. A crowd was gathering around the four adults and the baby in front of the organic grocery store, and all the people had their phones out. Teri hoped for a moment that the bystanders were phoning the cops, but then realized they were taking pictures and videos. This incident would make people YouTube famous. There was no point in struggling, and that knowledge just made Teri struggle harder. The third attacker, a girl with her head shaved except for a pink swoosh, squatted down in front of the wide–eyed Florence and put her pacifier in her mouth. The pink–haired girl, who had fishnets and giant black boots, looked through an assortment of high–tech hypodermic needles. “It’s the orange one, right? We don’t want her to remember all of them, just the most recent.”

“Don’t!” Teri screamed. “She’s never hurt you! Why would you—”

The girl injected her baby with the orange syringe, which made a kludgey burbling noise as it emptied into Florence.

“Welcome back, Captain Champion,” said the girl.

Teri’s baby blinked, confused but not crying. And then her expression changed to a snarl, a look Teri had never seen on Flo’s face. She bit down on her pacifier, as if expecting it to be a cigar, then spat it out.

“Zora Aster,” Florence said. “What are you doing here? Wait, what am I doing here? And why the hell are you so tall?” Then she glanced at her hands, and her eyes opened wider as something clicked into place. “Oh. I died, right? How long ago?”

“About six months,” the girl, Zora Aster, said. “Took us a while to find where you’d reincarnated. Seems like a nice neighborhood.”

“Yeah. Charming.” Florence looked around, still strapped into her stroller. “So what happened to me?”

“Demonico put a bomb in your Infinity Glider.”