Excerpt: Under Threat

I don't care who you are, or who you think you are – everyone has bad days, and some people have the distinction of being trapped in a bad lifetime. That's if you believe in that sort of thing, and personally I don't care whether you do or not, because the fact remains that I've had one of those lifetimes bordering on bad. It's not enough, it seems, for it to stop at being “weird.”

No, it has to be bad. Traumatic sometimes.

Like looking into the ugly eyes of an Aeolian hurricane whose maiden name was Minotaur, who grew up on a diet of malice and morphine... but what do myths know? It's like hearing scratchy sultry whispery New Orleans jazz from another room, knowing you should be able to extract meaning from melodic and spoken phrases that everyone else can understand at once, at a moment , thanks to some god or other keeping them out of confusion.

I'm trying to say that I've got an especially unusual birthright, and you can raise your eyebrows in skepticism if you want, having heard it before (or something like it), but the fact remains that it's true. I've got the ability to see spirits, ghosts, if you want to call them that. There are things beyond and behind the visible that are apparent to me, and which grateful people cannot see. It's just as well, I think. There are things restless that scream when they are seen.

It feels like there should be a big bright sign (yellow or red, some flashing neon, anything except “green for go”) suspended above my head warning people that a big silver screw has been turned a little too tightly into my head. From my point of view, it's everyone else who has a screw loose, being unable to see what I see; this screw has been tightened to a certain point where pressure, psychic or physical or imagined via schizophrenic adjustment, has allowed me to see things I shouldn't – things I don't really want to see.

What would you do if someone tightened your screws like that? Go crazy? See a shrink? Ignore it? Trust me, I've tried everything but going crazy. I don't want that.

But the fact remains, there are things out there that should make people run screaming, and instead they walk on by, cushioned in their comfortable versions of a world without hauntings and horror. As much as I wish I knew someone who could understand what I see and experience, I would never wish my own version of horror and hauntings upon anyone – no way, no how, no deal.

So I exist, sort of waiting, thinking maybe it's just a fluke and that some day I'm going to wake up and be as normal as anybody else who doesn't constantly check over their shoulder for ghosts, checking to see if that little prickle on the back of the neck isn't just a chill in the Gunford air blowing down the streets between skyscrapers or sweeping in subway tunnels after dark. I keep hoping maybe it's all been my imagination up to now, and that with a good deal of concentration I might be able to suppress my reactions and abolish the ability to see.

There is no need here whatsoever, no want, no desire other than to not be part of the inexplicable. Isn't life hard enough, after all, without stopping to think about the nameless people who might have dived onto the train tracks and left their mark in red instead of glowing letters on the inside of the mind where people understand people, and we all combine and comprehend in a common language that reads like nothing that could ever be laid out in letters?

It's good enough for me that people think they are who they are. I never ask questions about that. I take things as they come, and so I take people as they come as well. Nobody's asking me to go out on a limb, and I don't ask them to do so – we're just on this earth, asking each other the same questions, getting the same or, on occasion, unusual variations on the same answers.

But anyway.

There are days when you should know better than to answer the phone; you've already got the first call with bad news – the vet tells you your bird will need a few thousand dollars more in prescription pet meds and care in addition to a thousand-dollar general vet bill; then your airline informs you there's been a booking error and you've just lost your flight and your cash.
The flight you can reschedule... the cash? Where'd it go? What's going on?
The third call gracelessly informs you that your test results will cost an additional arm and leg: the next time you even think about asking your doctor for the time of day, vultures will claw your eyes out, flocking like a black cloud out of the billing office to purge your wallet and your soul.
It's just a Thursday, and I don't mean to make it sound like all my problems involve money (or lack thereof, though I guess half my problems do, though they did).
I have just had a bra strap break on the way to work, crossing 8th Avenue onto McClellan. I curse a blue streak, but that doesn't really help. I get on the 7 train and sit passively holding my bouncing tits and for awhile the the only sound is the big steel machine clacking over the tracks, and every lucid thought comes up like a passenger knocking on the glass and screaming for the train to wait up like it's a city bus you can just chase down – like the platform will never end.
I watch and look out and think, maybe I should have gone to law school. Not like it matters.
Someone at work had better have a fucking safety pin.
I feel like I'm walking down a new road, even though the street is familiar (Bud's Burgers, Granny's Pies, Mama's Italiano, and my personal favorite Uncle Reuben's Reubens and Gyros). It's like the spaces in front of me, spaced so evenly and paved over, are waiting on the sidelines for houses to be built, neo-colonial edifices faced with columns widely spaced in fruitless defenses of narrow, weedy front lawns – but they're already here. They're already part of the renovated apartment buildings that start getting taller and taller the closer I get to Gunford proper, where ambiguous civilization actually becomes a city.
Ghost buildings aside, I feel like I'm being followed. The feeling is nothing new, but there's a sense of impending doom behind it, like someone grew old and died while my back was turned, or maybe an idea I used to hold dear suddenly became extinct.
I get to my work place (Fleur's Fashions) on time and enter, propping a door open behind me because the building is always stifling, and the cold outside is welcome when we're all sitting over sewing machines pretending to know what we're doing.
“Hey Moira,” I say as I take my seat at the first cash register, throwing off my scarf and coat and stuffing them underneath, out of sight.
“Hey Bernie!” she shouts from way back wherever, putting up fake blackbirds and hanging hideous Halloween prints while arranging the display to the best of her abilities. It looks bad. It always looks bad when Moira tries. I know that when Patty comes in later this afternoon it will be my job to fix what went wrong with the display. Part of me looks forward to it, but part of me dreads it, thinking that it's just a miserable example of how people try too hard to care about things they don't really need to care about – isn't it hard enough to survive without worrying about blowing half your paycheck on decorations for contrived holidays? Oh god, who cares?
Sitting on my stool, I gaze around the store and then down at my own black pants, like I expect to see water lapping my ankles, rising to drown me where I sit. I can't help but remember times before when people randomly started talking to me on the train, but though I can remember how their faces looked, and how their mouths opened to say this or that, I can't remember anything they said. Part of me knows they talked about the weather, because that is what you talk about on the train when you're sitting next to strangers, but part of me remembers how sometimes and randomly people who, dressed in their typical suits and ties or in the stereotypical tatterdemalion ensembles of the otherwise un-classifiable home-and-or-homeless, start talking about things that relate to God or god; often it turns to Jesus, and they ask whether or not I believe. I don't have an answer, but I dislike being preached to, and for some reason that answer seems to offend people more than a staunch profession of atheism.
So who's God? What's God? What do I even fucking care about it/him/her/the unknowable supernatural force that should explain everything I experience yet cannot explain?
But hey, here's a young mom who wants a clown costume for her kid.
I point her in the right direction but I'm still a little distracted, thinking about distinctions I can't really name or properly phrase even though my not-brain not-spiritual self knows there's a difference.
What's the difference, then?
Maybe it's just in how you say it, rather than experience it?
Nah. I don't believe that.
I think it has to be a fundamental difference in how people listen to and accept and therefor understand the world. It's not too hard, yet it's still just difficult enough that it seems ridiculous if you're not ready to sit there and think about it like I'm sitting here and thinking about it, along with clown costumes, polka-dotted fabrics, and ways that maybe the alternately experienced things of this world would choose to clothe themselves.