Half-Resurrection Blues (3 page)

D
owntown Brooklyn in the middle of the day. No room for ghosts, too many damn living people clogging up all the inroads and walkabouts. There’s rowdy teenagers, little old ladies, cops, businesspeople. At the feet of the skyscrapers, old men beg for spare change and young dudes in baggy pants pass out party flyers. Other cats are hocking their goods, everything from Bibles to porn to wooden giraffes to children’s books.

I stand perfectly still and let the whole teeming masterpiece spin around me. I’m not sure why I’m here. The Council sent me. Sometimes they fuck up, and I’m pretty sure this is one of those times.
Go downtown
. Fine. They set me up in an apartment; they keep me doing what I do. I’ll go downtown, then. And I’ll pick a spot and be the frozen center of a messy human galaxy for an hour or two. Maybe some dead folks will show up. I don’t care.

Well.

The truth is, since New Year’s, there has been a growing murmur of discontent in the back of my mind. Used to be I could just say that I don’t care, and it’d be truly true. Now I wonder. The feeling of Trevor’s life slipping out of him, through my fingertips, it haunts me. It’s not
that I particularly cared for the guy; he was definitely about to unleash some nasty havoc. But he had a whole life I never knew about and then a half-life after that. We had something in common, and I’ve never been able to say that about another person. We could’ve, I don’t know, compared notes. Been . . . friends maybe, if he’d have gone a different route. Yes, he was just some jackass to me, a mark, and still, somehow, I felt like it was my own life slipping away along with his.

“Carlos.” Father Reginald’s gravelly voice breaks me out of my reverie and I’m glad for it.

“How are you, Padre?”

“Can’t complain. Another beautiful day.” Father Reginald has a bushy beard covering most of his dark brown face. He looks grumpy as fuck, eyes and brow always gnarled up into some unaccounted-for grimace, but when he opens his mouth, it’s always some “’nother beautiful day” type glory. They say he passed some tough years as a political prisoner in the Caribbean, but he never speaks of it. “People-watching?”

“Something like that.”

Father Reginald nods knowingly. “Back to it, then, young fellow. I won’t hold you up.”

“Agent Delacruz!”
some idiot ghost voice crackles through my head. The dead and their damn telepathy.
“Report immediately to Council Headquarters.”

Father Reginald regards my sudden flinching with some concern and then just smiles. “Take care of yourself, Carlos.”

I nod and doff my cap at the priest. “Enjoy your afternoon, Padre.”

*   *   *

I wonder briefly if I’m in some kind of trouble, and then I remember that I don’t give a fuck. There’s a bus up
Fourth Avenue that would get me there quicker, but I’m irritated these dipshits had me downtown for no apparent reason.

I walk.

I stop for coffee on the way, chat with some old guys sitting out on a stoop. Another cold front’s moving in from up north. What else? Old Reggie’s out of prison again, but probably just for a week or two, since he’s already back to his old ways. Life tumbles onward, and eventually, when I feel I’ve wasted enough time to legitimately vex my superiors, so do I.

The Council of the Dead occupies an abandoned warehouse nestled between a sweatshop and a strip club on one of the forgotten backstreets of Sunset Park. There’s a metal fire exit so desecrated by graffiti and trash you’d never notice it, but it’s unlocked for us non–fully dead types. Well, for me. Inside, it’s your traditional eerie empty warehouse: all rusted-out industrial skeletons and corroded pipes. Here there’s an overturned wheelie chair, there a sea of shattered glass. A corner stairwell winds up to a catwalk that disappears in shadows. An awful mist hangs over everything; if you didn’t know better, you’d assume it was the lingering fallout of some chemical disaster, but really it’s just spirit shit.

They barely notice me when I walk in, all these trembling shrouds. They just go about their business. I head up the metal stairwell, my clanking boots echoing into the vast hall, work my way along a filthy, cobwebbed corridor to an empty room. It must’ve been the office of some middle-management troll at one time; there’s a huge window overlooking the main floor and a corroded file cabinet.

“Agent Delacruz?”

“That’s me.”

Speaking of middle-management trolls: Bartholomew
Arsten. He appears in the doorway, a tall, translucent shroud. His shimmering, sallow face contorts with uncertainty. “You’re here.”

“You summoned me.”

“I did . . .” He puzzles for a few seconds. “I did!”

“I know.”

“We have a message for you.”

“I’m thrilled.”

“Riley wants you to meet him at the Burgundy.”

“What?”

“Riley.” He says it like I’m the incompetent one. “Wants.”

“I heard what you said. I’m trying to figure out why you sent me a message dragging my ass across town to tell me a message to go back across town.”

“Oh, it’s a new protocol. We can’t give locations for meeting points over telepathy.”

“But you did that when you asked me to come here.”

“Except for here.”

“Bart, bruh, you know you full of shit, right?”

Bartholomew circles in the doorway and begins fading into the haze of shadows.

“You’d better go, Agent. The message was from two hours ago, so you’re already late, technically.”

W
elp,” Riley says, “that’s basically what I told the dude.” He scrunches up his face real meanlike. “‘No
, you
back the fuck up.’ Then I sliced him.” He and Dro bust out into unchecked chuckles. Of course, it’s easy for them to laugh with reckless abandon: they’re just glimmering shadows to me and silent invisibilities to the drunks all around us. I have to be a little more conservative with my ruckus. As it is, the drunks see me speaking under my breath to empty seats on either side, occasionally smiling, swearing, or grunting. Anyway, we’re in the Burgundy Bar—a joint that is full of enough fuckups and generally blitzed-out patrons that one weirdo talking to himself at the bar is not really a big deal.

Sasha’s all-knowing smirk simmers across my mind for the eighty thousandth time today. I’m only barely here at all, just nodding, grinning, looking away.

“Carlos,” Riley says. He’s thick and translucent, bald headed and impeccably dressed, even in death. Riley and I share the common trait of having died so violently it shredded any memory of our lives, and in that we are brothers. When we’re bored, we make up highly unlikely stories about what may have been. “First you show up
later than your usual Puerto Rican late, and now you all sulky.
Kay tay pasa, hombre
?” I know he’s emphasizing that silent
h
just to annoy me, so I ignore it. Besides, all his stories end with
Then I sliced him.

I shrug. “Nada, man. Blame the Council. What we got for today?”

Riley leans over his Jameson and takes a sip. It looks stupid if you’re not used to it—grown-ass man dipping into his drink like one of those damn plastic birds—but even the don’t-give-a-fuck clientele at Burgundy would probably startle at a bunch of floating glasses. “Today’s adventure, my friends, is a very special one.”

Riley’s was the first face I saw when I came back around. He was standing over me, grinning that grin of his, looking all proud of himself like he was the one who brought me back. He wasn’t, but still, he found me, named me, brought me into the complicated fold of the Council, and has looked out for me ever since, in his own odd way.

Dro groans. “You say that every night, man.” Dro doesn’t drink. He’s tall and remarkably well built for a dead guy. We suspect he’s Filipino, but he keeps insisting on being Brazilian. Who can tell? Who cares even? Riley gets on him about it occasionally, but as far as I’m concerned, if Dro wants to be Brazilian, that’s his business. Either way, the three of us are about as much color as the Council will put up with, apparently.

“I do say that a lot,” Riley admits. “And I always lead you on a spectacular adventure.”

“Sometimes,” Dro says. “Sometimes no.”

Riley turns to me suddenly. “Hey, how’d the business with the inbetweener go on New Year’s?”

My pulse quickens to a slow-ass drag. I had just managed to push the whole thing out of my damn mind and
then Riley went ahead and busted it back in. “Fine,” I say. “Why?”

“I just heard it was quite a scenario: he was tryna bring a group of college kids into an entrada or something, no?”

I nod.

“Damn,” Dro says. “And he was . . . like you?”

I make a grunty-affirmative noise. When they send me after a normal ol’ fully dead ghost, it’s usually to toss their translucent asses back into Hell or, when they’re really acting out, slice ’em to the Deeper Death. That means they’re gone-for-good gone, not just kinda-sorta gone. It takes some getting used to, yeah, but you figure, hey—they were already dead once. Not everyone comes back even as a spook, so they had got that second chance and jacked it up by playing the fool. The final good-bye ain’t that big a deal in that sense. But this one . . . this strange, gray-like-me man with his wild schemes and last-gasp poetics . . . his death hasn’t left me since New Year’s.

Neither has his sister’s perfect smile.

Anyway, should be pretty clear I don’t want to talk about it, but my friends don’t take well to subtle clues.

“Was that weird?” Riley says. “You clipped him?”

“No and yes.” I really don’t want to talk about this. I’m not even sure why, but the whole mention of it makes me feel like shriveling up inside this long trench coat and being gone.

Finally, Riley shrugs and rolls his eyes. “Anyway, as it so happens: today’s adventure, brought to you by the illustrious Council of the Dead, involves the very house and home in which Carlos and I first became acquainted.”

“What?”

“Mm-hmm.”

“Mama Esther?”

“She’s all right.” Riley reads the concern etched ’cross my face. “But a house a few doors down from her has an ngk.”

I blink at him. “A what?”

“An ngk.” It’s almost guttural, the way he says it. Like he’s trying to speak through a mouth gag and then closing it off with a soft click.

“The fuck’s an ngk? How do you even spell that?”

Riley nods at Dro, who’s obviously been preparing for this very moment. “An ngk, Carlos, spelled
n-g-k
, is a small, rarely seen implike creature that is thought to be capable of vast unknown feats of sorcery and mischief. They tend to show up directly before tragedies of immense proportions, but it’s still up for debate whether this is because of their ability to see the future or if they are the actual cause of the disaster.”

“Damn.”

“Yeah, they suck,” confirms Riley. “It’s very unusual that one’d show up at all, actually. They were thought to be extinct for a while, but have made sporadic appearances throughout the twentieth century. I dunno. I ain’t never messed with one myself, but you hear weird stories.”

“Like what?”

“Let’s go have a look for ourselves, shall we?”

Sasha’s smile stays on its broken-record rotation through my mind. A little challenge may be just what I need, even if it’s in the form of some tiny unpronounceable freak from the other side.

*   *   *

It’s been three years, but walking down this block always reminds me of that slow crawl back to life. It was days and days I lay there, listening to the cycles of street life sway by outside the window. The walls became my friends, if nothing else for the fact that they were perfectly consistent.
Everything was gone. I didn’t even have a name, so being able to wake up to the same sun-bleached floral pattern became a small comfort in those first hazy days. I would slide from another sickly coma, see that faded ornateness and smile softly. Still there. Then the sounds of the street would find me: cars and buses grumbling past, the odd clicks and clanks of the city, yes, but most of all, the voices. The voices of life-living people, going about the business of being alive, all those tiny eccentricities, bothersome little errands, gossip on the corner, transactions, rebukes, come-ons. It was music to me, an endless chugalug of ambient humanity seeping through my pores as I healed.

When I finally got it together enough to make it outside, I felt like I already knew all the people on the block. I had learned to distinguish between the voices of my neighbors, imagined each one as a thread that’d reach up into the night sky and wrap around the other threads, their small dramas and schedules coalescing into a vast, chaotic quilt. And then I could put faces to the voices. I sat on that stoop for hours marveling at it all, surely appearing like some fallen-off crackhead, but content nonetheless. People nodded as they passed, and eventually nods turned to “all rights,” which became small conversations, and then my voice mingled in the chorus. Another thread.

It’s almost February, and a brisk wind shushes through the trees, flaps my coat around, whips a frenzy of dead leaves and plastic bags into the air. The kids are getting home from school, all puffy jackets, colorful hats, and cartoon-character book bags. Winter has driven most of the stoop sitters inside, and once the little ones tuck themselves away in their respective houses, things look kind of bleak, quite frankly.

Or maybe it’s the ngk.

“Sweet, sweet memories?” Riley’s beside me; his translucent body flaps gently in the wind like some luminous laundry.

“I suppose. Anything seem off to you? I mean it’s cold, but still, there’s usually more people out, no?”

“I think it’s the ngk,” Dro says. It annoys me that he sounds so sure of it, but I suppose he’s already done his homework on this stuff.

“Shall we?” Riley makes an exaggerated after-you gesture toward the block that I used to haunt.

It’s a pretty unremarkable building really, one more four-story row house on Franklin Avenue just south of Atlantic, a few doors down from Mama Esther’s. There’s a bodega, a liquor store, and a tiny church on the block. Atlantic is all auto shops and gas stations, traffic hurrying off to East New York and Queens. Farther south from where we stand, Franklin Avenue starts getting trendy: a brand-new sushi restaurant and some chic, nondescript boutiquey spots.

We walk in the front door, and immediately I know something’s wrong. Can feel it through my body like a dirty sheet has been thrown over my heart. I just . . . don’t even want to move. Also, there’s a noise. It’s barely noticeable, just an endless, irritating buzz and the sound of . . . I squint as if it will help me hear—little grunting gasps punctuated with . . . laughter.

I don’t like this at all.