David Nickle - The 'Geisters

“Stupid,” she hissed, as the door to the stall farthest from the door slammed shut and her eyes opened. “Sorry,” she said to the closed stall door. The woman who’d presumably gone inside didn’t answer, and suddenly Ann felt nothing but foolish—imagining how she must have appeared to the woman now sequestered in the stall, a moment earlier quietly passing the sinks, and wondering: what a strange young woman, leaning over the sink with her eyes shut tight. Some of us can’t hold our liquor . That’s what she would think.

“Ann?” said Eva, and Ann said, again: “Sorry.” She shut her eyes, and reassembled the tower room, re-inhabited it. “Got distracted.”

“All right,” said Eva, “now hush. I’m sending you energy.”

Indeed, as Eva said this, the tower room flooded with light—appearing through the mortar between the stones, and the narrow slit-like windows that gave a tantalizing view of the realm. Ann thought she’d have a look at that realm—cement some details in her mind—the bucolic roll of hills, a silver river that wended between them… that mysterious, snow-capped mountain range in the distance—and take in the energy that Eva insisted she was sending her.

Was she really? Sending energy? From Wal-Mart?

Questions such as those, Ann had long ago learned to suppress. And she did so now. After all, they did nothing to help her take control, to give her the strength she would need to wrestle the Insect.

A clank, as the door to the stall rattled. And a voice—echoing off the tile of the washroom. “Are you all right out there?”

“Fine,” said Ann, keeping her eyes shut this time, “thank you. I just need a moment.”

“Don’t we all.”

The hollow rumble of toilet paper unwinding now.

“You know what you really need?”

Still unwinding.

“I’m fine,” said Ann, while on the phone, from Wal-Mart, Eva said: “Shh.”

“That fine-looking young man out there. He’s a crackerjack!”

The door to the stall rattled fiercely. It slammed open, and closed again, and somehow Ann was turned around, the cell phone on the floor. Watching as the door to the stall slowly rebounded open. Showing nothing but an empty stall, with a long line of toilet paper, draped over the toilet bowl in a mandala form.

From the floor, Eva’s voice buzzed. Like a bug, Ann thought crazily ( like an insect ) and she watched, transfixed, as the silver button on the side of the tank depressed, and the toilet began to flush.

“ I am satisfied ,” said the Insect, as it settled back into its chair in the shadowy part of the tower room, crossing its hands on its lap, slender fingers twitching and intertwining. “ I approve .”

“Thank you,” said Ann when she’d collected her phone from the floor.

“Did that do the trick dear?” asked Eva, from Wal-Mart.

“That seemed to do it,” said Ann.

“You sure now?”

“Sure,” she said—not sure at all.

Eva sighed. “I’m glad, dear. Be at peace. Now you call, if—”

“I will.”

From one tower to another, Ann LeSage made her way back. She could find no evidence of mayhem en route. The glasses hanging over the bar gleamed in the afternoon sun, which shone through windows clean and clear. The traders gesticulated at their tables, hands unblemished, while their cutlery stayed safe in front of them. The waiter was cheerful and intact behind the bar, tapping lunch orders on a computer screen. And Michael sat back in his chair, ankles crossed, hands palm-down on the table, while the saltshaker sat unmoving between them. His face was strangely, beatifically calm.

When Ann recalled that July day—months later, outside Ian Rickhardt’s Niagara vineyard, while she cradled an unreleased Gewürztraminer on the south-facing veranda and looked down upon the rows of grapevines, with just a moment to herself before their other guests arrived… this moment, not any prior or subsequent, was the moment that defined it. She, folding her skirt beneath her as she resumed her seat; Michael, looking steadily at her, unblinking, as he lifted one hand, and lowered it on top of the saltshaker like a cage of fingers.

“Gotcha,” Michael said as he lifted the shaker off the table and studied it with real glee.

Was it terror she felt looking at him then?

Was it love?

Love, she guessed.

Yes. Love.

To say that Ian Rickhardt played a large role in the planning of their wedding was like saying the sun was a bit of a player in the solar system. The old man threw the wedding—planned it and drew up the guest list and staged it, taking things over and riding them all like a bride’s nightmare mother.

When Michael had told her about him, Ann thought Rickhardt might have been a father figure, standing in for the angry Afrikaner Voors. Michael had met Rickhardt in South Africa, over a rather complicated real estate deal. Rickhardt, who’d made his fortune in deals like this, saw something in Michael—clearly—and over the course of the years took an interest in the young South African. “He encouraged me to be my own man… eventually, to come here, and make my own life.”

Ann nodded to herself. Like a father, like a father should be .

When she eventually met Ian, for dinner one August Sunday at Michael’s condo, she scratched that idea too. He was more of an uncle.

He was near to sixty, but in fine shape for it. Had all his hair, which had gone white long ago and hung in neat bangs an inch above his eyebrows. He was lean without being gaunt, with a thin brush-cut of beard over a regular jawline. His eyes were pale blue and his skin a healthy pink.

Ian came to dinner in a pair of faded old Levis, and a motorcycle jacket over a black T-shirt. A wedding band, of plain gold, bound a thick-knuckled finger. His socks had holes in them, and he displayed them like hunting scars.

“The house at the winery is ancient,” he said. “Century house and then some. Very romantic, oh yes. Floors are the original oak, and they’re fucking stunning. But they spit up nails like land mines. The socks put up with a lot.”

Michael laughed at his joke and so did Ann—not because it was funny, but because it cut the tension that ran just beneath the surface of this casual little dinner party.

Because of course, it was barely a party, and anything but casual. Ann figured it out even as it began.

She was being interviewed.

So they sat down to a meal of lamb and collard that Ann and Michael had prepared together, with a bottle of Rickhardt’s cab franc, and as the sunlight climbed the bricks of Michael’s east wall, Ian genially put Ann through her paces.

“You are an orphan?” he asked as he poured wine into their glasses.

Deep breath: “My parents died when I was fourteen.”

“Car accident, I understand.”

“Yes. I was very lucky. But my mother and father didn’t survive.”

Rickhardt made a sympathetic noise as he sat back down. He gave her a look that said, Go on….

“My brother—”

“—Philip.”

“—it was Christmas.”

“Michael was telling me. You two were very close, I understand?”

“I don’t think of him in the past tense. Philip survived.”

Ian nodded. “But not whole.” He took a sip of his wine. “That’s very hard, Ann. I’m sorry. And you’ve really been on your own since then.”

She sipped at her own wine. It was really very good.

“No one’s really on their own,” she said.

“That’s not always true,” he said. “But it’s lucky you haven’t been. And now you’ve met Michael, and that’s fine. You two are getting married.”