The dead woman was drawn to cars.
She latched onto them like an unseen scrap-feeder on a marine giant, unsure why she was still here, earth-bound, in some form of consciousness. Cars offered exhilarating speed. Flight. A maybe if I keep moving whoever is supposed to notice me will not notice me and I can get my bearings and then—what?
She hadn’t figured that part out yet.
Sometimes she manifested a body and could sit like a living person in the back seat behind unsuspecting drivers. Pretending she was in a cab on the way to see her friends. Going to the movies. Going to have dinner, to eat, to drink. Sometimes—and this happened a lot now, as the weeks following her death ticked by—she had no physical form at all. Sometimes she was just a cooling of breath, or a thread of breeze serpentining through branches. Sometimes she was scent.
Today she was scent.
A young man pulled up to a stop light, and when he flipped down the sun visor to check his reflection she was there: thin zephyr in the space between plastic. She brought the notes of her favorite perfume: kiwi, red lychee, rose, and her presence made every hair on the man’s arms stand on end. She saw the intimacy of this reaction: the way his body remembered it was animal and let old instinct play sovereign. Just for a moment. Then she grew rageful at his having arms, at all. At his having a body. At his living while she was a waste of air, horribly conscious, powerless.
She registered his surprise—and he registered her, which was unusual, as most did not—but her anger pulled her out of his car and she tumbled bodiless onto asphalt and writhed there, invisible, as vehicles roared past. She pulsed murderous wishes: things she would never wish upon anyone while she was still alive. They followed the tail-lights of his white sedan as he drove off.
A careless truck drive will barrel through an intersection and smash into your passenger door and the passenger door will smash into you and leave you unrecognizable when they pull the pulp of you from the vehicle.
A little leak of gasoline from your engine will ignite at some sudden spark and it will be quick, like my death was not.
My death . . .
She sat in the middle of the road, just another unseen dead woman, and remembered.
It had been cancer. The most mindless thing. She was twenty-nine. Had been twenty-nine. No age to die. Worse than the initial diagnosis (given in a doctor’s office with walls so beige and featureless it had actually made her want to scream) was the quiet solemnity, the unwanted gravitas that it had afforded her around friends and family and colleagues. Words like ‘bravery’ were suddenly applied to her. Words like ‘grace.’ She was a ‘fighter.’ She would be a ‘survivor.’
Plot twist, she thought bitterly, on that busy road as people went about their lives about her airy corpse, I didn’t fight very hard, and I didn’t win. I didn’t survive anything.
She didn’t know why she still lingered. There was no God that she could see, no angels. No heaven, either: just sky, and the stomach-tumbling feeling of a vastness somewhere above that, and a new sensation: the singing of the deep earth. Stones and crystals making magic beneath the crust of the planet.
And her.
Another car drove through her and she was sucked into it. Flattened across the back seats, she lurked undetected by the two boys in the front. Men, really—nineteen? Twenty?—like the first man had been. The living looked so young, now.
They were following the young man in the white car.
“You have the rope?”
“I already fucking told you.”
“What about the—”
“Shut the fuck up, I got this. Not my first time dealing with a pussy.”
She rode the waves of their anger, literally buoyed half-out of the vehicle so that her upper half trailed in thin air, her legs (could she call them that still?) kicking breezes in the space between front and back seats. The driver wrenched up the heating in a quick, savage motion. Rancid-smelling air vented into the interior. The men were more than angry. Their pulses spiked like electric shocks; chemicals like syringes towered up from them, spearing her, spearing them in turn. A skewering of feeling. Euphoria. She remembered sleep—feeling rested—and whatever was coming from the men was the opposite of that as they turned right (the car wheeling perilously, turning almost too sharp) and left the busy street and followed the white car down a road lined with trees, her old friends. The men in the front were more than awake. They were livid with life.
She ducked her head back down into the car and looked directly into the rearview mirror, screaming soundlessly (notice me!) but they did not, despite the driver’s fat pupils and sodden brow on which dull brown hair stuck, uncared for. He ran a white paste of a tongue over his teeth. And did it again. And did it again.
Teeth are bones in the head, she said, trying to ground herself as she rattled around the accelerating car. A head is a thing that contains thoughts. If you don’t have a head you are just a thought flying around like a gnat—and that’s me.
That’s ME!
Her anger and theirs combined and flared her out, and she found herself back in the white car. The driver noticed her again immediately, his kind but frightened face opening in welcome as he glanced at her in the rearview mirror.
“Back again? You can ride with me for a while.”
Joy.
Recognition.
Lotus-like it opened for her. Opened her. She became radiant, in that instant. And he felt it too and became radiant, too. Living-seeing-dead. A feeling that crossed a barrier neither of them could define. A smile so wide, across his whole face.
I’m sorry I wished you violence, she whispered, and she caught his expression furrow as if straining to hear.
How to explain it wasn’t really me?
How to explain the many impossible things you feel after dying?
How to—
Lights flashed from behind: one-two. The following car’s headlights. It was a different kind of light to the fading sun; it was evening outside, the world was turning, and she was here, on a narrow country road, in a drama that was playing out whether she understood it or not.
I died weeks ago, she reminded herself. I am not supposed to be here.
Something told her to sit, quietly. Something told her to watch. So she did, making a little pearl of air behind the passenger seat to have a clear view of the young man.
The car juddered to a halt in the middle of a field, pulling off a road that was more dirt scratching than anything else. A battered wooden fence drew a brown line across the earth, its rungs looping wire. The second car parked, almost striking the bumper.
The woman in the back seat did not sit up to look.
She was afraid now.
She sensed something bad. Smelled it from the youth in front as he smoothed his hair and fixed a smile to his face and left his car, hugging his arms about him as the evening air seized him in its cold. He shut the door and she was alone in the vehicle. Alone and very small, and very quiet. Not angry now. Scentless. A held breath.
“How’s it going?” the first youth’s voice. Fear in it.
Sounds of car doors slamming; masculine mutterings she could not make out as the sweating driver and his companion approached, thick boots crunching chilled loam. “You alright guys? You—”
“Don’t touch me. Don’t you ever fucking touch me.”
The dead woman had never seen a fight in her life, nor been assaulted, nor groped, nor suffered any of the other countless ways in which the world could break a person in moments while she was still living. Just cancer. ‘Just’ cancer. There were sounds of a scuffle—inarticulate anger—and an impact that she immediately recognized to be a human skull struck. Then a cry for help, and blurs of movement past the windows. The driver of the vehicle she sat in ran past. Blood poured from an open cut on the side of his head, spattering over his eyes, half-masking him. He was crying. The two men followed him, and in the second before she shrank down further into a seat she caught unwanted snapshot-glimpses of the bloodied butt of a handgun and a snarl of rope wrapped around the forearms of one of the men.
She made herself very, very small. Looked at the faded upholstery of the driver’s seat. Counted the stitches as the cries outside grew higher, and louder, and then became something else: a begging. Begging like her mother and grandmother had begged to God at her bedside, fighting on behalf of her when she had been too sick to even think of words to move her tongue with. She knew that sound: that particular desperation that human voices take when there is nothing else left. She knew it. She knew what was about to happen.
Death knows death knows death.
Impacts: a succession of them, and a pinking fist, clutching a gun, rising and falling and rising and falling again, visible through the windshield. Violence had taken hold, and left intellect and utterance impossible; she expanded herself, daring to look, and saw three animals, struggling to live. A primal scene. Blood. Thrashing limbs forced against a fencepost, kicking out. Tears. Eyes. Muscles straining, teeth grinding. Butting. Pushing to get away, pushed back, pushed down. Wire shredding slender wrists, nipping at clothes. Taking scraps of flesh and fabric alike.
It had been a losing battle from the beginning. The man in the white car was slender, and there was only one of him.
The two had tied the first man to a post and were striking his head with a frenzy she had never seen before.
She ignited.
Sitting like a thunderbolt in the back seat—just for a moment—she was physically, electrically corporeal. She became banshee, shrieking and shrieking out into the car. Willing her voice to shatter windows, to puncture eardrums, to make the men leave him alone.
Nothing shattered. Nothing was punctured.
But one of the men, the man who had tied the youth to the post while his friend beat him with the gun, looked up, in the direction of the car. His face was sickly pale. His hands were shaking, making and unmaking fists—but there was nothing to fight.
“Did you hear that? I think we should go.”
His companion grunted, exerted almost to depletion. The gun and his hands and his forearms looked carved entirely of blood: a sanguine sculpture. “Come on! You got him. Come on.”
The man who had held the rope stumbled away, and as he fled past the windows the dead woman pushed her face up to the glass and shrieked again, livid. Putting all the hate that was left in her into it. Maybe it was that, on some invisible wavelength. Maybe it was just the rime-frosted mud. But the man slipped and knocked his head against the glass. Not hard, but enough to make him cry in horror. His face was inches from hers. She reached a hand through the passenger window and went to seize his hair; of course, her fingers passed through. But she saw something in his face that let her know.
He felt something.
The other man, the man with the bloody gun, was stone. Stood like a gargoyle in front of the bound youth, fixed on him. Glaring at him while they both breathed hard and ragged, as if the beaten man would yield the answer to some great mystery, if the other only looked long enough. “I said let’s go!”
The man raised the gun and brought it down one final time on the youth’s head. The blunt end of it struck the center of the skull—and the center of the skull moved in far too much.
That was it. That would do it.
The spell was broken, and the other man stalked away, looking back at the youth whose limbs were striated with wire and rope alike, lashed to the fence like a martyr she had seen in church once. She spat and screamed and threw phantom arms at the assailant as he passed.
He felt nothing.
The other car rumbled into life, reversed, drove off. She watched it go. No heart to join it; no heart to fly any more. The sun was going down. The sky made ribbons of light above: orange and purple and mauve. A pretty watercolor.
Whatever sense she had of herself was tremulous, uncertain now. She visualized her feet, and her legs (why did they shake so?), and, vaporous, stepped through the white car and out onto the field. A princess greeting her prince.
The man was still breathing. She did not know if he was conscious. His head sagged against his chest, bobbing up and down as if in liquid. Pink saliva oozed through chipped teeth where he had been struck.
She became scent again.
Rose, red lychee, kiwi. She unfurled her spirit about him. He spluttered blood, eyes barely able to open for the swelling, and he shrugged his shoulders forward, letting the weight of his body fall. The rope loosened—one of the assailants hadn’t had his heart in it, she saw—but the wire cut into his fingers, trapping him still. Half-lying, half-sitting on the frigid ground, the wire kept him from pulling free. His feet pushed feebly into the earth.
The car. The car was only feet away. The keys were still in his pocket; she could see them. If he could stand . . . if he could only stand and walk just a few steps, staying awake…
FIGHT.
An imperative as loud as an entire world rang through her.
FIGHT.
A movement of fingers. Beads of blood displaced by the twitching, flesh white where the wire dug in.
FIGHT.
Is it for me, or for him, she wailed, and the wail was tossed away by the cold wind and there was nothing else: only her, and him, and the night country reaching endless around them. I’m powerless. I can’t do anything. I died.
Darkness seemed to fall faster. Nature speeding up. Between the rivulets of blood she saw the man’s flesh grow even paler, saw his teeth begin to clatter against one another. If he didn’t free himself soon the cold would kill him—if his injuries didn’t kill him first.
FIGHT.
Could she do it? She looked at his fingers. Tried to manifest her own. Tried to remember what it felt like, but it was too hard to put together: skin encasing muscle encasing nerve encasing bone, and life was rendered an impossible puzzle, a nesting doll of so many things she couldn’t possibly touch anymore.
She tried to take his hand.
It didn’t work.
FIGHT.
I can’t!
Was this what God was? A sadist-comedian, a transmuter of forms who took glee in their inadequacy?
She remembered what it had been like in those last days, when chemo had turned her into a living skeleton, hairless, a ghast’s babe unable to eat or swallow or sleep. Rotting alive on a hospital bed. She hadn’t any strength when alive and she hadn’t any strength now. No spectral voice had told her to FIGHT. Nobody and nothing had helped her. What the fuck am I supposed to do?
FIGHT.
She focused on the impulse. It was rhythmic, it came regularly. Like a heartbeat. The man’s face and torso were covered in blood but there was movement in him still. The hairs on his arms stood again. His fingers were swelling, still fastened to the fence.
She flew right up to his face (the smell of iron was overpowering) and screamed with all her might: FIGHT, joining the repetition, becoming an iteration of it.
Nothing happened. He groaned and spat more liquid and writhed, but his strength was fading. She could feel it. There was nothing she could do. There was nothing left of her except anger.
Anger at the indignity of it all. The not-choosing it: leukemia, murder, loss, the falling out of her hair, the wasting away of her flesh, the drug-strong blows rained down upon this man—and for what? Genocides—and for what? Greed and unhappiness and violence and rage and corruption and, and, and, the litany went on and on, an endless hymn. Children neglected to die. A dog beaten because its owner felt good doing it. Drones raining death upon an entire nation. She made whirlwind of it: all the horrors she’d seen on the news, online, everywhere. She was as powerless in death as she had been in life. I want to disappear, she howled, making a sail of herself and looping around him. Kinder than any rope or wire. If she could not know peace then she would know freedom, and if he would die, he would die with the injustice of his passing memorialized by her fury, a whirlwind that circled around and around and around his body.
The air warmed.
She didn’t notice.
He was the center of the vortex that was her, and as she screamed, and screamed, the imperative FIGHT reached his trying fingers. The cold wind avoided her, knowing to circumvent this rageful specter, driven away by something neither of them could understand. The living always thought that specters were cold; the dead did not know that they were not.
She wheeled, lost in anger, as the stars rose—and at the apex of her revolution the wire hissed away from his hands as he pushed free and a cry came from him: a cry that, with clarity of a rising sun, she knew meant something profound.
The man stood up.
She became small again, anger snuffed out. Drifting to earth to stand before him. She took him in: his thin body, bleeding head, eyes almost sealed shut, blood making crust of his face and shoulders and lips. Breath laboring in between them. He stepped through her—both gasped at the electricity of it—and he fumbled for his keys, hands making scarlet marks on the windows as he felt for the door and opened it. He sunk into the driver’s seat and shut the door.
She sat next to him. Quiet now.
Muscles straining, cringing at the effort, he turned his head to look to the passenger seat. She was there, like she had been in life: long, kinky hair, freckles, a posture that told of a love of dance. The body never forgot some things. Do not fall asleep, she said. She wondered if he could hear her. When she spoke it was quieter, now; where she sat, she felt lighter, oddly forgetful. As if taking the form of a human body was suddenly the silliest thing.
What had she been so angry about?
What was there to hate?
I’m sorry for what happened to you. And I’m sorry for all the things I said.
Blood coated his teeth, leaking down around his ears. His tongue moved, and she recognized words through his agony:
“I know.”
The car started. Rumbling warmth of earth, a sliding-by of stars, and the wondrous illusion of the world. It was the nicest thing, to be free.
The man, somehow, with multiple skull fractures, lacerations, hypoxia—but not hypothermia—drove himself five miles to the nearest emergency room. She rode with him until there was no ‘she’ left, until there was no person there, no consciousness, nothing at all, and when he pulled into the parking lot and stumbled out, collapsing into the bright and warming lobby of the building, his car sat empty.
