Pale Ghosts
Fiction by Kristin Dunnion
Illustrations by Louis Netter
She banged Happiness whenever she could. It was rare enough. More often she’d gear up and discover a knock-off pretending to be Happy, a low-grade chemical insult that cost almost as much as the real thing. True Happiness, beautiful clear crystal chunks of it, rarely made it this far inland. She’d heard stories from friends on the coast. Happiness arrived in waves as heavy and frequent as the cargo ships that rolled into port, randy as sailors flooding the docks looking for a good time, looking for local currency to pay for that good time. West Coast Happiness cooked like a dream; it shot fast and hard and lasted for hours.
Inland, she could mostly just get Urgent. It was a cheap blend of pharmaceutical compounds and household cleaners. The buzz was intense, glorious, but faded quickly. It always left her wanting more. Conveniently, dealers hung around coffee shops, bars, corner stores. She could get it just about anywhere. Urgent made her walk faster, with more purpose—eyes darting around, lips licked to chapping. Urgent kept her waistline in check. It kept her from thinking about mortal concerns: food or water or money or love. As its effects wore off, everything the drug had hidden from her conscious mind surged back into focus, times twenty. She was left with the worries that drove her to get high in the first place, plus moderate to intense withdrawal symptoms, and an overwhelming compulsion to track down more of the stuff. Coming up with the cash, scamming more baggies, those dilemmas filled her time, her mind. At the Walk-In Clinic an outreach nurse patiently explained that even a few doses resulted in a “mild to critical dysfunction of the dopaminergic neurotransmission in the central nervous system”—temporary for some, not so for others. What does that even mean? she had asked. “That shit fucks you up in a bad way,” the nurse had replied. The city was full of trembling, brain-damaged stickmen who lurched from corner to corner looking for a fix. The girl blended right in.
“We should head west. Hop a train.” The boy was pale, had dark circles under his eyes. He weighed less than the full suitcase the girl would need in order to leave town.
She smoked and looked at him.
“Seriously,” he said. “We should. Everything’s better out west.”
She flicked her butt into the street. Heat radiated up from the sidewalk, down from the setting sun that still glared onto the pavement and the cars and the people. They were waiting in line to get into a gallery opening. They didn’t know the artists. They didn’t particularly like art. But it was free admittance with the flyer she found. They were broke and there was supposed to be an open bar. There might be cheese cubes or fruit platters, crackers. Her stomach growled.
“This city is dead,” he said unblinking. “Everyone here is so dead.”
The girl looked at the other people in line. They seemed larger and darker and more animated than the boy. It seemed as though they were alive.
She fanned herself with the art opening flyer. Its bubbly font smiled back. Happy Space: A free exhibition! Just seeing the word in print made her body ache for it. The line moved forward until they were at the front. A large red-faced man raised his hand. “Capacity,” he said.
Body heat and noise rolled out of the gallery. Behind the man she could see the small front room of the gallery. It was full of people talking loudly, drinking wine and beer from plastic cups. Above the people’s heads she could see bits of large shining rectangles on the white walls. Light refracted off those parts and shone into the space. It re- minded her of something she had seen when she was a little girl—a small painting in her grandmother’s cramped, dark house. A painting of the winged archangel Gabriel, bathed in that same golden light. The girl felt a tightness in her chest and looked away.
The boy shifted his weight from one foot to the other. His flip-flop fell off and he had a hard time getting it back on. He couldn’t put the little plastic thing back between his big toe and the next one, not without finally bending over and using his dirty fingers. Two girls in floral dresses left the gallery. Their cheeks were pink. Their lips were purple. When they opened their mouths to speak, their teeth were grey-blue from the wine. Sweat trickled down the sides of their faces. Sweat pooled in their cleavages. They smelled like dead flowers, like plug-in air fresheners.
The doorman frowned. The girl showed him the flyer, now a bit wrinkled where she had been holding it. He paused, then said they could go in. Inside was worse than it looked. People were frantic to have a good time and to be smart. They snarled from the effort. Voices competed to explain the art’s significance in today’s contemporary urban context. People drank quickly. They couldn’t walk around in the cramped space so their hands and faces moved for them, gestured wildly. Pretty young men sized each other up. Some whispered meanly to the girls they were with, some didn’t.
“This way,” pointed the boy. The bar was in the very back of the place. Everyone who already had a drink was walking away from that part of the room. The girl was breathing quickly. She didn’t like crowds. She grabbed a corner of the boy’s white T-shirt. She held tight as he weaved through people. “ . . . makes a bold value statement,” said a man in a good shirt with a silk tie, the collar loosened. He pointed into the air towards one of the rectangles.
“ . . . when the artist speaks so profoundly about our troubled times,” said a thin middle-aged woman with designer glasses. She opened her mouth again but was interrupted.
The boy pulled her through another knot of people and stopped. They were directly in front of one of the pieces. They were trapped, actually. People hemmed them in. The rectangle was as large as the mattress the girl slept on in the furnished room she rented. She tilted her head back in order to see the whole thing. It had a shiny, smooth surface. It looked silver, mainly, but when light hit it at certain angles, it shone gold; it bathed the air around it in a warm glow. When the girl raised her hand to shield her eyes, she noticed a girl in the rectangle also moving her hand to shield a set of eyes. She waved her hand and the girl in the reflection also waved.
“It’s me,” she said smiling. “Look.” Inside she felt warm. This heat grew until it filled the space between her ribs.
The boy was yawning beside her and a watered down vision of him was also yawning in the rectangle. “So what,” he said. “It’s a mirror. Come on.” He pulled her away from this marvelous thing.
The bar was in the farthest corner from them. They stood in another long line waiting for drinks, right beside the DJ table. There was no music playing. The turntable was not working. The DJ waved his arms angrily. Someone came and fiddled with the wires, with the extension cord. Someone else brought a new cord and the boy and the girl had to move out of the way so that the new cord could be plugged in. Upbeat dance music filled the room. Voices got even louder. No one spoke to the boy or the girl. The line kept moving forward until they were right in front of the bar. Finally, they were served warm beer in plastic cups. The boy drank his in one gulp and waited for a refill. The bartender pretended not to notice. When the bartender turned away for a moment, the boy reached over the bar and took two bottles for himself. He moved into the crowd and the girl had to push her way to follow.
He was just ahead of her. She could still make out the white of his shirt when people pressed in all around her. There were people coming down a narrow staircase, more people trying to go up the same set of stairs. She was caught in the current. Her heart thumped. The boy—where was the boy? She saw a white shirt ascending the stairs and let herself be pushed in that direction. Each step on the staircase brought her into contact with other people’s body parts. A shoe stepped on hers. A bare shoulder struck her chin. Long hair got flicked and filled her mouth. The metal staircase was steep and wound around a pillar. The outside edge had a handrail; the inside did not. The girl had to lean against the cool cement pillar to keep her balance as she climbed higher. At the top there were two more rooms filled with even more people. The plastic cup crumpled in her hand. She tripped into a small group of laughing girls. The boy was nowhere in sight.
The girl was pushed against a wall. She slid along it until she came to an open window. The air that came in through the window was much cooler than the temperature of the room. There was no screen on the window. She lifted the pane all the way up and climbed out. It was a short drop to the next door’s rooftop. She lowered herself as far as she could, then let go of the ledge. She landed sloppily on the roof but was not injured. The noise and confusion seemed far away now. She breathed deeply.
“Hey.”
The girl nearly fell off the edge she was so startled. “Nice entrance,” said a voice from the dark corner of the same piece of roof.
“Exit,” she said after a pause. “That was my exit.” The voice chuckled. “For me it was an entrance.” The girl walked cautiously toward the voice. The closer she got, the better her eyes adjusted to the darkness outside. There were no streetlights here, just some squares of brightness spilling out of the art gallery windows. In the darkest corner she saw a guy sitting on an upturned milk crate. He had a knapsack with beers in it. He offered her one. “It’s cold,” she said, surprised.
“Yeah. I took them right out of the back fridge.” He pointed at the gallery.
She smiled and opened the beer.
He gestured toward an upturned bucket.
She moved it a few inches away from him, then carefully sat.
“What did you think?” he said. “Of what?”
“Of the art?” The guy had an upscale Mohawk — the kind you pay for at a salon, not the kind you do yourself at home. He was wearing a Ramones T-shirt decorated with sequins. He looked fancy.
She stared into his face, into the bags under his eyes, the stubble coming up along his jaw. “Who cares what I think?”
“Maybe I do,” he said. After a moment he added, “You seem real.”
She took a swig of beer. “Who are you?”
“I’m the artist.” He looked self-conscious when he said that.
The girl closed her eyes and thought about the way the pieces shone, the way she could see a pale ghost of herself, of everyone, inside them. She remembered the way it made her feel. The way it reminded her of something beautiful, something better than she was. When she opened her eyes she looked at the artist. “It felt like Happy,” she said. “Just like it.” »