Chapter Four
US slouches toward Martial Law, Conspiracy Nuts Everywhere Cream their JeansThe Att-Gen asking for extra powers, well, what else is new. But with the Army pretty much owning half of the Western US already and security inside the Beltway making every trip to Starbucks into a fun-filled lightning round of “name that gun” this is starting to look like the real deal. Brr.
[blog entry, wonkette.com, 4/9/05]
Nilla perched on the edge of a hand-made wicker chair, her hands on the table. The bald man twisted the can opener a final time and put a tin of potted meat down between them. It looked like cat food.
“I’m, uh, I’m Jason Singletary.” He showed her an expanse of brown and ugly teeth. She supposed it was a smile or something.
“Nilla,” she said.
“I know.” He stepped back from the table and moved his hands in front of him, touching his fingers together as if he was counting. “I know a lot of things about you. I know what your purpose is, I think. There’s a lot to discuss.”
Nilla frowned at him. This was nonsense. How could he know her name? She’d never seen him before in her death. If he’d known her during her life he still wouldn’t know the name she’d chosen for herself. He was lying.
He could see her when she was invisible, of course, which meant that maybe he had sources of information that weren’t readily available to her.
She ran a fingertip across the puce surface of the potted meat and touched it to her tongue. She couldn’t deny it was tasty. It had been flesh once, after all. She dug in with a much-dented spoon he provided and started eating. “Why do you live—” she began, intending to ask him why he lived in such a lonely place, but he reacted as if she were shouting right in his ear, wincing away from her words, clutching at his head with both hands. He dashed into the tiny house’s kitchenette and grabbed a roll of tin foil, which he wrapped around and around his head until it formed a tight, shiny skullcap.
“Sorry, what was that?” he asked.
“I… was going… to ask,” Nilla said, trying to keep her words soft and slow, “why you lived all the way out here. In the middle of the desert.”
He nodded happily. “Nevada has the lowest population of any of the fifty states,” he told her, reciting something he’d read in a book in school by the sound of it. “There’s a lot less chatter. I call it chatter, like the background transmissions they pick up on their radios, radio operators, they call that chatter.”
He stepped backward, colliding with the wooden wall of his shack.
“I’m, well, psychic,” he told her.
“No, really,” Nilla said, digging with her finger for the last shreds of meat in the bottom of the tin. She couldn’t remember eating it, frankly, it had gone so quickly and—
Yes, really, she thought, interrupting her own train of thought. Which should have been impossible, she pondered—after all, nobody could think of two things at once, and therefore, I really am psychic. This is me you’re hearing. It just sounds like your own inner voice.
Nilla stared up at him, trying not to think of anything. That’s impossible, I’m afraid. You’re always thinking about something, no matter how abstract or banal. The mind can’t just stand still. It has to keep moving or it dies. Like a shark. Sharks suffocate if they stop swimming.
“Don’t do that again,” she told him. “It’s very disconcerting.”
“Imagine how I feel,” he said out loud. “I have that—all of that, that noise in my head, except, it’s all the time, it’s, it’s, it’s… it’s very difficult having you here. I’m sorry but it has to be said. I thought, well, with your memory condition maybe, maybe just maybe you’d be less, oh God, less noisy, but but but but you’re just full. Full of questions. I’ve been living here a very long time. I get everything I need through the mail. You’re the first visitor I’ve had in twenty years.” As he spoke he kept scratching the skin around his eyes and the top of his nose as if something in his head was trying to get out. Nilla stared at his hands and he dropped them to his sides.
She looked around the one-room shack for the first time, really, actually studying how Singletary lived. She saw his bed in one corner, a utilitarian cot covered in old, tattered magazines and a box of tissues. She saw his stove, a rusted white box that sat well away from any of the walls, and the shelves above it filled with tin cans. She saw the orange bottles that pills come in everywhere, scattered underfoot, lined up neatly on the edge of the table, interspersed with the stored food. She picked one up and studied its label.
TEGRETOL (Carbamazepine), 1600 mg. Take three times daily with food.
“That’s for the, the, the seizures,” he sputtered, taking it away from her. “I have some canned tuna fish, would you like that?”
“Yes,” Nilla said. She studied him as he moved around the side of his house that might be considered his kitchen. “I guess that explains how you were able to see me, even without my aura. Were you born like this?” she asked.
His shoulders tightened as he worked a manual can opener. “Yes, I think so. I saw… saw ghosts, ghosts sometimes, when I was, little. Still do. It got so much worse during puberty. I couldn’t take it, just couldn’t… they sent me around to the hospitals but the drugs, they just… there’s something very wrong with my brain, I know that. I know that! It leaks. It leaks and it, it doesn’t always. It doesn’t always work, the tin foil doesn’t always… I’m so terribly sorry. I’m stuttering, aren’t I?”
“You saw ghosts,” Nilla said.
“Yes.” He set down the can of tuna in front of her and she knocked it back into her mouth as if she were drinking a shot of whiskey. It curbed her hunger for a few seconds but then it returned as strong as ever. “Dead people, the, the memories, the memories of dead people that get stuck here. In this world. Nothing ever gets forgotten, see, it, it’s like a vibration, a vibration in a kind of, well, a string, and it keeps vibrating forever, it gets fainter over time. You know. Like a violin string, if you pluck it. It’ll keep vibrating and even though you can’t hear it after a while it’s still… it’s still…”
She knew her eyes had gone very wide. She couldn’t help it.
He was saying that memories were never really lost. Her memories.
He wouldn’t look at her. He took down a can of spam from his shelf and peeled back the lid. He set it down on the table in front of her. When she didn’t touch it he shifted it toward her an inch or so. She lifted her spoon.
“No,” he said, answering the question she hadn’t asked.
“Why not, damnit? Why. The fuck. Not?”
“I can’t return your memory to you because I haven’t seen it. I haven’t seen your ghost, Nilla.” He had calmed down considerably. Maybe he was afraid of her and his fear was keeping him quiet. “I don’t… pick and choose. They just come to me. If you were still alive, maybe. But then you wouldn’t need your memory back. And you wouldn’t be here.”
The can before her was empty. She couldn’t even remember the taste of the spam.
He sat down on the edge of the table. “There are things you need to know. You didn’t come here by accident. I lead you here myself.”
Nilla placed her hands in her lap. “Maybe if you just. I mean you. If I stay here, for a while, maybe my ghost will come here. Maybe it will come looking for me.”
“It doesn’t work that way,” he told her, dismissing the notion in a way that made rage bubble inside of her. What could be more important than recovering her memories? “Please, we don’t have much time! I guided you here—the occasional thought I put in your head, telling you to head down this valley or to skirt that road. There’s something you need to know, Nilla. There’s a man up in the, the, the mountains east of here, I’ve touched his mind many times. He’s done something horrible. Something truly terrible, like, I see a fire, this fire that will burn up the world. He knows what he’s done. He’s consumed with guilt and—and—and—”
“Just answer me, alright?” she said. She stood up very fast—fast enough to have given herself a head rush if her blood could actually move anymore. “You know so much about me—my new name, the fact that I’m undead, what I like to eat. Why can’t you just look inside my head and find out who I really am?”
“I told you, it doesn’t… Nilla—Nilla, you need to, to…. This guilty man, he.” He shivered violently and she wondered if he was about to have a convulsion. A low, mooing sound rattled up and out of him. She could smell the fear on him—the adrenaline breaking down in his sweat, sour, acrid. “You, you you—”
“Just calm down!” She moved around the table and grabbed him by the shoulders. The hunger rolled through her innards and she really, really wanted to take a bite out of his neck, out of his golden energy. “Just—I know I’m scary right now, I know I must be monstrous to you but you have to calm down!”
She let go of him in disgust when he soiled himself. He slumped down to the floor. She felt a desire to help him, to move him over to his bed but it would probably just rile him up more. There were a lot of questions she needed answers to but she was just going to have to wait.
On the shelf above his stove she found a tin of sardines she thought she could open even with her numb fingers. She went back to the table and sat down, more than willing to give him the time he needed. On the floor near her feet, Jason Singletary moaned plaintively and wrapped his arms around himself as if he were very, very cold.
