David Nickle - The 'Geisters

The first one was perfunctory:

“Dear Eva,

I spoke with your nephew earlier and he told me about your stroke. He said you were doing well but in no shape to talk, so I didn’t push him. Hopefully you can read this? Hopefully you’re feeling better? I’ll see you when I get back, but I don’t know when that will be. I’ve had Insect trouble here. There was a fire. No one got hurt. Well, not badly. But it was very strange. And I am having trouble getting the Insect back into its cage. Don’t worry though. I will keep at it and get it right before I come back.

Can’t wait to see you,

She wrote her again from Steve’s house in Port-of-Spain, on Sunday. It was more perfunctory.

Dear Eva

Pray for me please. Do your thing. I can’t find it—it could be anywhere.

And a third one, on Tuesday, the night before they left, before they went out for one final adventure in the city.

Dear Eva

I’m feeling much better. There’s nothing like letting your hair down to get a bit of perspective. I think everything’s all right. I think. Leaving tomorrow.

So you look after you. I’m fine. I’ll see you when we get back.

The air was still over Piarco as the taxi pulled up to the main terminal building in the pre-dawn. It felt like a blanket; a little suffocating, Ann thought. She didn’t want to think about what it would be like when the sun rose. She was not necessarily feeling better, she decided as Michael hopped out of his side of the taxicab and helped the driver pull their bags from the trunk.

Michael rolled the baggage to one side and paid the driver in U.S. dollars—something that went over well here—and Ann got to her feet. She smiled as Michael met her eye.

“Well, this time at least you’re awake!” he said. “Might be better asleep once we got on the plane, though. Take a nap once we’ve cleared security, maybe?”

Ann pulled a bottle of water from her purse and took a swig. “You should have stopped me last night,” she said, and Michael laughed.

“Nah,” he said. “You needed to unwind. Therapeutic.”

She swirled another mouthful of water and swallowed. “A lot of unwinding.” They had been out every night in Port-of-Spain. Last night was a club calling itself Zen that was anything but. It was dark, and purple, and throbbing, and Ann felt that way too. She had had rather a lot of rum. Michael had apparently had not so much rum as she had. He’d been up before her, had finished packing, and now he was loading the larger of their bags onto a luggage cart with what looked far too much like enthusiasm.

They were early for the flight; the Air Canada counter was just opening up when they arrived, and they were second in the queue. Security was nearly as quick; this wasn’t an American airport and neither Michael nor Ann set off a single alarm.

They didn’t, after all, have a scan for the thing that Ann might be carrying.

“Do you want coffee?” asked Michael as they found their way to their departure gate and settled down to wait.

Ann shook her head. “Another bottle of water would be fine,” she said.

“I’ll bring it with mine,” he said, and hurried off to a coffee shop—it was called Rituals, Ann noted.

Ha.

While he was gone, she sat down and closed her eyes, took a breath. Oh yes, she was hungover; maybe even still a little drunk. She listened for her mantra; she descended the spectrum of colour, from red down to violet.

A row ahead of her, a baby began to fuss. She cracked her eye open, looked over the mother lifting her child above her knee, at the gathering dawn over the tarmac. Their plane was stopped at the gate. A baggage truck approached out of the rising sun.

Damn.

She shut her eyes again and ran the sequence of the colours. Red and Orange and Yellow…

No good. It had been no good trying to do this for the past… how long? Three days? Four? Longer?

She recalled the architecture of the fortress, its sheer walls, latticed with capillaries of ivy crawling up from the base. Which of course made no sense; she’d just constructed it a week ago. Ivy grew quickly, but not that fast. She tried to imagine how that might happen; maybe with some amped-up engineered fertilizer from Home Depot….

Ann smiled and shook her head. Home Depot. There was the problem. She was imagining her fortress, the prison—trying to rationalize it—not seeing it. The baby, who had moved from fussing to a full-on wail, was easier to visualize; she didn’t have to open her eyes to know what was happening two rows over, the mother putting her child close up to her shoulder and patting its back as its little legs gyrated and pushed.

Or Ian Rickhardt, stretching naked, suspended in the air beyond flames, his face pulled taut in an expression of… what? Ecstasy?

“Here. Drink up.”

Ann opened her eyes. Michael sat down beside her, and handed her a bottle of water, slippery with condensation. The terminal air-conditioning wasn’t keeping up; Michael’s linen shirt was spotting with sweat.

His sunburn had cleared up a week ago, and he was left with the kind of deep tan that only the fair-haired could really pull off. He smiled, and his teeth flashed.

This—not the fortress, nor the beach house on fire—was the world she inhabited. In this world, she had a home.

“You’re a good-looking man,” said Ann.

“What?”

“I thought you should know.” She cracked the bottle open and took a swig. The water was icy on her throat.

“You had more to drink than I thought last night.”

“I had a lot to drink last night, but that’s neither here nor there,” said Ann. “I just wanted to make a note of it. I’ve been spending a lot of time in my own head these past few days. All stuck in myself.”

“It’s understandable.”

“Maybe. But it’s not good for us. You hauled me out of the fire. Got burned.”

“By the sun.”

“Details.”

He laughed. “Well thank you then.”

The boarding call came just a few minutes later, and when the attendant called their row, they queued up for the last time in Trinidad while outside, the morning sun burned off the last of the mist and the North mountain range resolved itself, a high wall of green between them, and home. Ann took another swig from her water bottle and slipped it into her purse as she handed over her boarding pass.

The in-flight movie was on a little LCD screen on the back of the seat in front of her, and there was a touch-screen choice. She scrolled around through the first run movies, Canadian cinema, “silver screen” classics and television, eventually settling on a John le Carré adaptation. Michael smirked a bit.

“You watch movies like an old man,” he said, and Ann mouthed “fuck off” at him and put in her earbuds.

She had the window seat, and after a few minutes pulled down the shade—the sun was too bright. The movie started up in a café in Eastern Europe somewhere, a couple of old men meeting over demitasses of coffee. Soon there would be a shooting.

Michael had put on a science fiction film. It might have been a Terminator movie; might have been a zombie movie. There were a lot of guns going off and some blurry CGI. The seatbelt light switched off. Michael touched her arm. He leaned over and said something in her ear, but she couldn’t quite make it out. She leaned back a little bit, watching through drooped eyelids as the action shifted to London, and a pair of British actors she vaguely recognized had another conversation as they stood in an elevator. And easily, happily, she felt herself doze off.

She started awake some time later with a lurch—as though she’d lost her breath. The seatbelt light was back on, and the movie had stopped. The time, according to the screen, was shortly after 11 a.m.—they’d been in the air two hours.