The Direction of Things from Here

Her husband came back, her husband’s ghost, anyway. He’s flat as a pillowcase, and light as a whisper. He’s got no expression. Never says anything. At first she thought he might float away, but she’s found he answers to a stronger gravity. He moves downwards, sinks low, like he’s on a long ride to the bottom.

Yes, he’s a downward kind of ghost. If he weren’t her husband, she might say he seems like a creep. He lingers underneath kitchen chairs, slides below her bed at night. Then she can’t sleep. She rises and sits in her window. She sits by that window day and night, watching the clockwork world move past.

Sometimes he disappears, but he’s never gone for good. She finds him down in the cellar, underneath shelves bowed by the weight of full jars. He rests in the drain that sits in a dip in the concrete floor. Going upstairs, she holds in one hand a jar of eggs pickled in beet juice. In the other, the ghost.

Before her husband died she had premonitions. Not of anything she could name or describe, but premonitions nonetheless. She lost her sense of smell. Her vision got dull, as though a fine grey membrane had been drawn over her eyes. Worry settled around her. Carried in by the wind and down onto her head. It gave her the jitters, bad. Sitting at her window calmed her, but even then, her gaze still darted to and fro, eyes pink as a rabbit’s. She told her husband, I don’t like it when you take those roads, Tony. She said it again and again, but she didn’t say it enough to keep him from it. He was looking for work. Looking in an active way, that meant going out.

He was driving when it happened, taking those roads she didn’t like. Taking her to the hospital. She’d been saying things he couldn’t make sense of for two days, so he tied her good and strapped her into the backseat. She writhed and howled and spat curses while he took the curves at speed. She went silent just before the car hit black ice and started to slide.

Her window comforts her, even now. It’s a good window. When she opens it to the winter sunshine, the chill breeze draws a silken sheet over her. The air brings signs of the outside world, the smell of pungent sap mixed with exhaust fumes. Jagged tiers of pines march down the mountainside, and far below the valley spreads, its toy houses laid in crooked rows. A haze of smog blurs the view. People keep saying, California needs rain. Something big to wash it all clean.

She tries to hold on to this thought, but it slips into the ether and disperses. Attention has become an impossible discipline, and she keeps slipping from one thing to the next. Her job slipped, a while back. Then the house started to slip, to un-neaten itself, the blankets unfolding in the linen cupboard, the nails coming up from the wooden floor. Tony unmade the kitchen, trying to to redo it so they could sell the place. The floor is still ripped up in there, a stack of tiles blocking the way to the sink, which is full of dirty dishes. She puts unopened letters from the bank in there and closes the door on the whole thing.

She’s still slipping down. Family and friends have slid away, back to their own plots and plans, to get upwards this way or upwards that way. Now the house, her house, is down the drain too. Okay.

The last time she leaves the house, she shuts her window and turns her back on the view. She folds Tony’s ghost and tucks him in her purse. She locks the front door one last time, even though who cares.

To get into the car she has to crawl through the passenger’s seat. The driver’s side door is shot to hell, crumpled in. The window stuck permanently open, but she doesn’t mind the fresh air. Cold is just another feeling.

She puts Tony’s ghost on the passenger seat. She doesn’t buckle her seatbelt. When she turns the key, the engine coughs and comes alive. The car sounds sick, but it rolls forward, and rolls smooth. She’s out. As the car picks up speed, the wind gets playful and bats Tony’s ghost around the backseat like a stray plastic bag. The wind makes the metal bangles on her wrists clang and sing, ting-ting. Her maiden name was Ting. She was the last one in her family to carry that name, and she killed it dead.

She drives south. The land is blistered and dry, scrubby trees bare and brittle as kindling. The sky is smeared with grime. She doesn’t have a map for where she’s going, but she doesn’t care about getting lost. Time is all she has. Other automobiles linger far behind. When a passing lane appears, they speed by, glancing at the bent roof above her, the spiderwebbed glass of the windshield.

She turns off at a brown metal sign for the national park. Before her, the blue of night is coming on. No one’s manning the ticket booth at the entrance, so she drives straight into the dirt lot and parks in a cloud of dust. As she wedges herself out the passenger’s side, a skinny white man slams the door of a nearby van. Two children’s faces peer through the van window at him, then at her. The man turns to her, says, “Better come back tomorrow.”

She says nothing. Watches the man get into the van and waits for the sound of the ignition and the crackling of tires over small stones before she lifts Tony’s ghost from the car. She walks into the desert. Her steps are stiff, her posture upright. She clutches Tony close as she moves due south. To the west, a red cliff-face scored with petroglyphs. To the east, rolling hills, sagging wooden housing for long-dead railroad workers. She ignores these directions. She’s seen history before.

The cave is a house-sized hole, and she comes on it abruptly. Wooden stairs lead down into a grey dark. It’s like walking into the cellar in her childhood home, except the stairs keep going and going. Rats nested under the cellar stairs, she remembers, and snakes. She should be afraid, but she isn’t, and never was.

At the footwell of the cave night is already upon her. As she moves into the dark she can just make out the long fringe of so many stalactites. Bats chatter around her, their wings fanning her with the cool, still air of the cave. She feels the vibration of their voices in her throat. They put a song in her and she holds it inside.

She carries Tony’s ghost far out in front of her with both hands, like an offering. The ghost begins to give off faint green luminescence. This doesn’t surprise her. Perhaps soon she will start to glow too.

The ground underneath her turns slippery. The bats go silent. She steps forward, and the stone beneath her gives way. She’s falling straight down, as upright as if she were still. She feels her ears pop, once, and again. When she hits the ground she lands with her legs still, and feels the reverberations travel up feet and through her whole skeleton. The bats’ song falls out of her mouth. She puts her hands out to catch the song, but drops Tony’s ghost. His light snuffs out. She calls his name. Her voice echoes softly back to her, and she knows the tunnel must be long, the ceiling fall and distant. She stumbles forward to catch the voice. The rock beneath her feet is smooth, and dry. A warm breeze tugs her forward with small hands. She calls out again, and this time her voice doesn’t return. The breeze tugs her again. She begins to run, though towards what she isn’t sure. She doesn’t know where she’s headed, only that for now she’s being led, and that the path leads up.