Spirits in the Wires (3 page)

He gave me a brusque goodbye when we reached the street and headed off in the direction I'd been planning to go. I stood there by the door of the building, letting some space build between us before I set off myself. While I waited, I went back over our conversation, trying to see what it was I'd said or done to make his initial attraction toward me cool off so quickly. I couldn't think of a thing. Whatever it was seemed to have happened on some purely instinctual level—almost a chemical imbalance between us. The longer he was in my presence, the stronger it had become.

I won't say I wasn't disturbed by it, because I was. But there was nothing I could do about it now. He'd finally reached the end of the block, so I started off myself, aiming for the Chinese grocery store on the other side of the street, across from where he was. By the time I reached the corner, he was long gone.

There was a scruffy little dog tied up outside the grocery store, one of those mixes of a half-dozen breeds, but the terrier seemed strongest. He watched me approach, tongue lolling, a happy dog look in his eyes.

“Hey, pooch,” I said, bending down to give him a pat.

He snapped at me and I only just pulled my hand back in time to avoid getting bitten. He was still growling at me as his owner came bustling out from the store.

“Rufy,” she said. “Don't do that.” She turned to me. “I don't know what's gotten into him,” she added. “Rufus is usually so sweet tempered.”

But I could see the same instinctive discomfort start up in her eyes as I'd already seen in her dog's, and in my neighbour's eyes earlier. Before it grew too strong, I slipped past her into the store where I picked up some milk, a bag of rice, and some vegetables for a stir fry. I completed the transaction as quickly as I could, not looking at the elderly Chinese man behind the counter. When I was outside the store again, the woman and her dog were already gone.

I stood there for a long moment, just watching the traffic at the intersection and not knowing what to do.

I was ready to retreat to my apartment, to stay there and stubbornly wait for them to show up—the people who had played around in my head and erased most of my memory, or the people who had created me and left me there to fend for myself. I didn't know which, but it had to be one or the other.

For a moment I had a shivering recollection of some invisible voodoo spirit in cyberspace, but that I firmly put out my mind. No, whatever the origins of my present condition, they weren't that improbable.

But maybe I'd been in an accident. Banged my head on something.

I felt through my hair, searching for bumps or a sore spot, but could find neither. That didn't really prove anything. It could have been a while ago. Or it could be some recurring medical problem. Perhaps there was someone coming to check up on me—I just couldn't remember who, or when they'd come.

Or I could be crazy.

I took the long way back to my apartment, circling the block that the grocery store was on. When I saw a homeless man sitting in the doorway of an abandoned store, I dug into my pocket for a dollar. I dropped it in his hat and smiled down at him, ready for a repeat of the reactions I'd already gotten from the other people I'd met so far today.

But he only returned my smile.

“Thanks, lady,” he said. “You have a good day.”

I couldn't tell his age—it could have been anywhere between thirty and sixty—but he had kind eyes. They were deep blue, clear and alert, which seemed a little at odds with his shabby clothes and weather-beaten skin. They were the eyes of someone at peace with the world, not someone living on the street and barely able to eke out a living.

“I'll try,” I told him. “So far it's sucked big-time.”

He nodded, eyeing me in a way that put me on edge again.

“Maybe you should try and turn down that shine of yours a watt or two,” he said before I could go. “My guess is that's what's making people so uncomfortable around you.”

I just stared at him, not really sure what I was hearing.

“What did you say?” I asked.

“Come on,” he said. “Don't tell me you don't know. You've been touched by something—call it whatever you want. A mystery, the spirits, some kind of otherness. It's left a shine on you that most people aren't going to see, but they'll feel it and it's going to make them feel edgy and weird. It's like the world's shifting under their feet and no one likes that feeling.”

“And it doesn't bother you?”

He shrugged. “I know what it is. I also know it's not going to hurt me. So why would I be bothered?”

“How do you know all this?” I asked.

“Hey,” he said. “I wasn't always a bum, you know. I used to run a New Age head shop and while we sold a lot of let's pretend, some of our customers were the real thing and I learned a thing or two from them. Reading auras is pretty basic stuff.”

“What happened?”

“I wasn't paying attention. That's the big lesson life teaches you: You always have to pay attention. Your marriage broke up? You weren't paying attention. Your partner cleans out your bank account and sells all your store's assets, leaving you bankrupt?”

He gave me an expectant look.

“You weren't paying attention,” I said.

He nodded approvingly. “Exactly. I lost everything when the creditors came calling.”

I crouched down, sitting on my haunches, so that our heads were level with each other.

“I'm sorry,” I said.

“Yeah, me, too. But it's all water under the bridge now. Life goes on and most of us, we're just along for the ride.”

A bus came by, making conversation impossible for a moment.

“So how do I turn down this … shine thing?” I asked when it was gone.

“Beats me. But the good news is, the longer you're away from the source of whatever put it on you, the weaker it'll get.”

“And if it doesn't go away?”

“Then you'll only be comfortable with people like me who already believe. Who accept that there's something else out there and it's just as much a part of this world as you or me. The only difference is, it's in some hidden part that most people don't get to see. Hell, that most people don't want to see.”

“Which is why I make them uncomfortable.”

He nodded. “What was it that you experienced?”

“I have no idea,” I told him.

I didn't really want to get into how weird my life had become in the past two days—not with a complete stranger, no matter how helpful he might be.

“Can I do anything for you?” I asked instead.

“Hey,” he said. “You gave me a dollar and treated me like a human being—that's more that ninety-nine percent of the people I run into would do. So no. I'm good.”

“But—”

“Just say hello the next time you see me,” he said. “Let me know how you're doing.”

“I will. What's your name?”

“Marc—with a ‘C.' “

“I'm Saskia,” I said, offering him my hand.

He cocked his head as he shook.

“Saskia Madding?” he asked.

I nodded. “How would you know that?”

“I've read some of your pieces in
Street Times.
No wonder you took the time to talk to me.”

“Why—” I started, then stopped myself.

He'd already told me how he'd ended up on the street. It was none of my business what kept him there.

“Why do
I
live like I do?” he finished for me.

I shrugged. “I know it's not like you'd be doing it by choice.”

“I suppose. But the truth is, I'm damned if I know. I guess I just gave up. Got tired of trying to find a job. I'm forty-eight and my back's shot. So I can't do heavy work, and nobody wants to hire an old man when he can get some bright-eyed kid with twice the energy and all the office smarts.”

“Forty-eight's not old.”

“It is in the work force. It's ancient. And it doesn't help that I'm a little too familiar with the bottle.”

I paused for a moment, then asked, “Do you have someplace to stay?”

He smiled. “Come on now, Saskia. Don't go all caseworker on me. Let's just be friends.”

“I wasn't trying to …”

“I know. It's just that your heart's too big. I already got that out of those pieces you wrote. But you don't want to be bringing home strays— not unless you've got a mansion on a hill and more money than you know what to do with. If you're not careful, you could end up with a mob of street people taking advantage of your goodwill and …” He gave me a toothy grin. “They wouldn't all be as pretty as me.”

“But—”

“It's okay. I'm sharing a room with a guy in a boardinghouse off Palm. I make do. And who knows, one of these days I might actually get it together and try to rebuild my life. Next time I see you, maybe we'll go for a coffee and I'll share all these great plans I've got for fixing the world— starting with yours truly.”

“All right,” I said. “I'll hold you to that.”

“Thanks for stopping by,” he said.

I smiled and stood up. “No, thank you for helping me figure out my problems. Maybe you should consider becoming a counselor.”

He laughed. “Yeah, I'm just chock-full of good advice, even if I don't put it into practice for myself.”

“See you, Marc,” I said.

“You know something?” he said as I started to walk away.

I paused to look back at him.

“If it was me, I wouldn't be in such a hurry to get rid of that shine of yours.”

“Why not?”

“Well,” he said. “It seems to me that everything's got a spirit, a mystery that most of us can't see. But invisible or not, that doesn't stop these secret spirits from being the heart of the world—sort of what keeps it beating. Are you with me so far?”

I nodded.

“Then tell me this: Why would you want to hang around people that get uncomfortable, or even scared, about that kind of thing?”

“Maybe just to feel normal,” I said.

He laughed. “Normal's not all it's cracked up to be.”

“You think?”

“Hell, I know.”

I don't know if I could have taken Marc's advice even if I'd wanted to. So far as I could see, whatever was different about me came from inside. How do you avoid yourself?

But he made a good point about normalcy. Except I don't think it was so much that I wanted to be normal. It was more how nobody likes to be the brunt of other people's ill will—especially when you've done nothing to earn it.

I think the bigger question for me was that I needed to know
what
I was, and not even the voice in the back of my head seemed to have an answer to that.

In the weeks that followed I made a point of getting out and seeing people. It was hard. Most of the time I got the same kind of reaction as I had from my neighbour across the hall, or the woman with her dog outside the Chinese grocery store. I'd go to music shows, art openings, poetry readings— any place that a person could go by herself to meet other people. Invariably some guy would start to hit on me—especially in a club—only to back off as though he'd suddenly realized that I had a third eye, or a forked tongue, or who knows what? I'd stay for awhile, but eventually the general level of barbed comments and ill will directed toward me would get to be too much and I'd have to go.

Later, when I got to know Jilly and her crowd, I discovered that I'd been going to the wrong sorts of events—or the right events, only attended by the wrong sorts of people. But at the time, I didn't know and there were a lot of nights that I left hardly able to keep my tears in check until I was safe in my apartment with no one to see my despair.

I didn't have the same problem when people weren't actually in my presence. I was able to submit pieces to
Street Times, In the City, The Crowsea Times,
and some of the daily papers—soliciting commissions over the phone and submitting the finished pieces by e-mail. I developed a number of friendships that way, though I made sure to maintain them at a distance. The one time I didn't was a complete disaster.

Aaran Goldstein was the book editor for
The Daily Journal
at the time— still is, actually. I'd done a few reviews for him and we'd talked on the phone a number of times when he asked me if I wanted to get together for a drink before a book reading that he had to cover that night. Against my better judgment, because, logically, I knew it wouldn't work out—why should this be any different from all those openings and shows I'd attended?—I said yes.

We made plans to meet at Huxley's—not somewhere I'd have chosen on my own. It's that bar on Stanton across from Fitzhenry Park where the young execs on their way up congregate after work. Lots of chrome and leather and black glass. Lots of big exotic plants and various flavours of ambient techno music on the sound system. Lots of people who want nothing to do with mysteries or myths or magic, so you know how they'd react to me.

I started to tell him I was blonde, but he stopped me and assured me we'd have no trouble finding each other.

“Descriptions are for peons,” he said. “But you and I … fate has already decided that we should meet.”

The weird thing is, he was right. Not about fate—at least not so far as I know—but about our not needing descriptions. I stepped in through the front door of Huxley's at a little past seven that evening and immediately saw him standing at the bar. I've no idea why I recognized him. I guess he just looked like his voice.

He lifted his head and turned in my direction, smiled, and came to meet me.

“You see?” he said, taking my arm and steering me back to the bar where a pair of martinis were already waiting for us.

He clinked his glass against mine.

“To radiance,” he said. “By which I mean you.”