Daniel Abraham - Unclean Spirits

It was a depressing exercise. When I’d gone to college, all bridges to my parents and church reduced to cinders and ash behind me, I’d thought I was starting my real life at last. I’d thought that everything I did, every person I met or hated or fell in love with, mattered. And now that I’d left that behind too, I could see that I’d been wrong. The drama and the experiments and the passionate lack of direction were all doing just fine without me. It was like pulling my finger out of water. My absence hadn’t left a hole.

I thought about leaving a comment. Inherited more money than God, fighting forces of darkness. Think I’m in love with my dead uncle’s not-boyfriend. L8R. I didn’t. For one thing, they wouldn’t have believed me, and for another, it turned out I didn’t care if they did. Or if that wasn’t true, at least I didn’t want to care. I told myself that they’d left as little mark on me as I’d left on them, and I was even able to convince myself a little.

I spent the rest of the evening Googling the terms that Ex and Aubrey and Chogyi Jake kept tossing around. Riders, possession, daughter organism. By the time I fell asleep, I was reading long essays about the difference between a therian and a werewolf, and I’d learned the term otherkin. Things that a month ago would have seemed like schizophrenic ravings were making sense to me now, and I didn’t know whether I found that reassuring or scary.

When the sunlight streaming through the windows woke me, I felt like crap. I made my way out to the main part of the house to find Ex and Aubrey had gone. Midian lay on the couch, hands folded corpselike on his chest. Only Chogyi Jake was there and awake, working on a crossword puzzle and drinking green tea.

“Hey,” I said.

“Good morning,” he said. His smile was one of the most genuine things I’d ever seen. “Ex is out getting the rifles. Aubrey said he had to see to his lab. He debated waking you before he went, but he wanted to let you rest.”

“Probably a good call,” I said, hiding a pang of disappointment. “So. What are you up to?”

“Nothing in particular. Why?” he asked. And then, with a conspiratorial lowered voice, “Getting stir-crazy?”

“I was thinking. We know that all the Invisible College guys are busy, right? It’s not like they’re going to send out any more hit squads to just wander the streets in case they bump into us.”

“That’s certainly the assumption, yes,” he said, folding the half-finished puzzle.

“So. There’s no real reason we couldn’t go shopping?”

Chogyi Jake’s van smelled like a mechanic’s shop: motor oil and WD-40 and the cold, subtle scent of steel tools. The windows all had a thin coating of old grease that made the world outside seem like a movie with the focus just barely off. The bucket seats were cracked, the foam stuffing peeking through. The back compartment was dark as a cave. Perfect for moving corpses. The dead woman’s face-the blue of her eyes, the black marks inscribed on her skin, the surprise on her face-flickered in my mind for a moment. I shook myself, hoping movement could dislodge the image.

“There used to be a really good bookstore just across the street,” Chogyi Jake said as he pulled into a parking space. A California Pizza Kitchen cowered under the looming weight of Saks Fifth Avenue and I felt something in my belly starting to uncoil. “It’s over on Colfax now. We can go there after this if you’d like.”

“Pretty clothes first,” I said. “Mind-improving literature later.”

“As you wish,” he said, with a smile. I had the feeling he was amused by me, and that he took some joy in my self-indulgence. I liked him for it.

I had another ten thousand dollars in my pocket, freshly drawn from the bank without a word or a whisper from anyone. We walked through the growing heat of the August morning and into the air-conditioned artificial cool of the mall, like walking into another world. I breathed in deeply and felt the smile come across my face.

Saks Fifth Avenue. Neiman Marcus. Abercrombie amp; Fitch. None of them was safe from me. Victoria’s Secret gave up a half dozen of the great-looking bras I had never been able to afford. I got blue jeans, I got suits, I got the little black evening dress that my mother had said every girl needs, but said quietly so my father couldn’t hear. I bought a black leather overcoat that I wouldn’t be able to wear for months and steel-toed work boots I didn’t need. I got a new swimsuit-a one-piece, because halfway through trying on the bikini, I got irrationally embarrassed about the stitches. I bought four hundred dollars’ worth of makeup even though I never wore any.

It was an orgy. It was a binge. It was glorious excess, my lowest consumerist impulses turned up to eleven. Chogyi Jake made two trips to the van without me, carrying away the bags and boxes rather than letting them build up to an unmanageable bulk. I saw it in the eyes of the clerks: the crazy rich girl was on a roll.

When it dawned on me that I hadn’t eaten breakfast and lunchtime was a couple hours past, I went from fine to ravenous in about twenty seconds. Chogyi Jake led me back toward the van and the pizza joint, a dozen more bags digging into our hands. My stomach growled, and in my low-blood-sugar condition, I was starting to feel a little light-headed and ill. I still had two thousand and change in my pocket, and I didn’t think I’d go back to the mall after we ate. Maybe we’d hit the bookstore he’d talked about. I wondered if there was something I could buy for Aubrey.

“Well,” I said after we’d taken our seats and placed our orders, “I think you’ve seen me at my worst.”

“Really?” Chogyi Jake said, scratching idly at the stubble on his scalp. “That wasn’t so terrible, then.”

“You don’t think so? I just spent over seven thousand dollars on a shopping spree. My father would lose his shit, wasting money like that.”

“We all have ways to distract ourselves from fear. You have this. Ex has his religion. Aubrey has his work,” Chogyi Jake said. “I don’t see that any of them is more or less a vice than another. Certainly, there are worse.”

“I’m not really like this,” I said. “I mean, I never do this kind of thing.”

“Well, almost never,” Chogyi Jake said, laughter in his eyes.

“Yeah,” I said. And then, “Why do you think it’s about fear, though? Why not just greed?”

“It would only be greed if you wanted more money. This would have been gluttony. But even if it is that, it is still about wrestling your anxiety. Addictions are the same. Drinking to excess. Sexual expression without love or joy. Abuse of cocaine or hash or heroin.”

“Drugs do the same thing as religion? Don’t let Ex hear you say that,” I said. I’d meant it as a joke, but it didn’t quite come out that way.

“He knows,” Chogyi Jake said. “He knows what he does and why he does it.”

“You knew Eric, right? You worked with him before. What did he do?”

Chogyi Jake smiled and leaned forward. The chrome and mirrors of the restaurant seemed too hard and bright for an expression as gentle and compassionate as that.

“Eric carried a heavy burden. Much of it he held to himself. I believe he sacrificed many things to the work he undertook, and I don’t know all of the prices he paid. He cultivated a kind of solitude that kept people away from him.”

“To protect them,” I said.

“Or himself.”

The waiter came by before I could follow up on that, two pizzas literally piping on his tray. The smell of hot cheese and tomatoes derailed any train of thought I’d had, and I descended into making yum-yum noises for the next fifteen minutes. When the calories started to cross into my blood, where I could use them, I began to turn what Chogyi Jake had said over in my mind. Something bothered me like a rock in my shoe. It was in the way he’d spoken, in the calm that seemed to come off him in waves. I was down to two slices and starting to feel a little bloated before I spoke again.