A Glimmer of the Unknown

“I don’t believe in it.”

“It?”

“I don’t believe you can talk to the dead. Or ghosts, or whatever.” That was Isabella, with the carrot-orange hair who used pretzels as a cigarette substitute when at work. Pretzel sticks constantly dangling from the corner of her mouth. Isabella from accounting, pushing back on the entire concept. She’d seen the postcard on the fridge in the break room, and she was waving the pink card in the air to make her point.

“You can,” Steve had said. “I was there. I went last weekend.”

Not talking directly to Shanna, but Shanna, eating her cheesecake yogurt in the corner, had listened anyway. A way to call upon the dead and communicate, and yeah, Steve had admitted, it sounded a little crazy, but he thought it had worked.

Isabelle wasn’t sold. “Really? A SEANCE? Like cue the spooky music and the candlelight flickering?”

And Steve said, "No, it wasn’t like that at all. We held hands, the leader said a few words, and then each person had a chance to talk, to call out to their loved one. There were no promises. The matron said sometimes they come, sometimes they don’t, sometimes they come later on. When you’re not expecting. Sometimes they send a sign."

“Seems like there’s a lot of leeway,” Isabelle said skeptically. “Like they’ve covered their ass with all of the possible permutations.”

Steve shrugged. Shanna didn’t know him well, but he always carried a sadness about him. He didn’t look as if he wanted to fight Isabelle, though.

“Did your person come?” Isabelle seemed to be softening slightly. Shanna pretended to be super interested in a word game on her phone. Steve lowered his voice.

“I think so. I mean, I think I felt something. I’m sure I felt something. Afterwards, the group of us actually sat at a booth in the bar and discussed what we’d experienced, and we all sort of had the same shivery sensation.”

After the two cleared out, Shanna picked up the discarded flyer. It was glossy, pink and black, featuring the phone number and a little write-up about when the next few seances were scheduled.

She wanted to talk to her dad. She hadn’t really known him because he’d split when she was young, lived a life of a derelict but a kind derelict from what she’d been able to piece together. Was buried in a poor man’s plot across the country. News spread to her from an aunt she’d never met.

She thought maybe she could ask him why he had left, although she had known her mother, so maybe she already had the answer to that. She wanted to know if he was okay. That was mostly it. And maybe if he was happy with her. How she’d turned out.

Later that day, Shanna called the number on the card, and a voice on the phone had asked a few impertinent questions and then said, “There’s a spot on Friday. $300 in advance.”

This felt a little more scammy to Shanna, so she said she’d have to think about it… but then she did. She’d have a little less food for a few weeks to counterbalance. Forgo the coffees out. Make instant at home.

The seance was at the back of a restaurant that had been in the same family for three generations. Friday night, Shanna dressed in navy, because that’s what felt appropriate, showed up a little early, had a drink for courage at the bar. Then had another. Then trying to hide the fact that she, a lightweight, was tipsy, joined four other customers and the black-veiled matron in the wee room.

There were framed black-and-white photographs on the walls. Twisted ivory candles on the breakfront, not much else. Shanna listened as the tiny woman gave a little speech. The matron said that she understood, after all of her years, that there would always be skeptics. But for the seance to truly work, everyone had to believe. Shanna thought of Tinkerbell. But for the sake of trying anything once, she worked within herself to find as much faith as she could.

“You have to trussst,” the woman said, in an accent Shanna couldn’t place. “Trussst the processss.”

They all held hands for a minute, and Shanna tried not to giggle. What if she just burst out laughing? She bit the insides of her cheeks and shut her eyes so tight she saw stars on her lids before opening them again.

The host, who reminded Shanna of a grandma from a different era, gently told the person to Shanna’s left that he could start. He was older dude with sparse hair in a ponytail and round blue spectacles, and he said the name of the person he wanted to reach. Her name was Rose. Nothing flickered. No ghostly images appeared. The curtains didn’t move.

The next person spoke loudly, as if trying via volume to reach the hereafter. And still nothing.

But right when she thought this is crazy, Shanna was sure there were other presences in the room, other beings. It was as if the air got thicker. As if suddenly instead of five people in the room, there were forty.

When it was her turn, she very quietly said she was looking for her father and she gave his first name, last name, and middle initial, although she’d never learned what that stood for. Was it Raymond? Rocky? Richard?

Although the room still felt filled with spirits, nothing happened. She didn’t feel anything akin to a chill down her spine or fingers twisting in her hair. There was no shock of cold air blowing down her neck. The rest of the room chattered softly, was how it felt to her. But nobody was judging. They just moved on to the person to Shanna’s right, and she participated in the rest of the seance in a little bit of a daze.

When it was over, the lights came on too brightly, and she blinked and nodded her thanks to the small woman in the black veil, and she walked out into the night, happy that she only lived a few blocks away. She wanted the whisper of the breeze to clear her head.

The other participants seemed to have gotten more out of the experience than she had. She didn’t feel played, exactly, but she was a little letdown. She walked up the path to her apartment building, walked the stairs to her third-floor studio, and unlocked the door.

For a minute, all she knew was that someone else was in the room. Someone in front of her, on her second-hand sofa. She flipped on the light. There was no fear inside of her.

“Who are you?”

He said Shanna’s dad’s name.

But he wasn’t her dad.

Unless he was her dad young, and she had only seen the one blurry picture, the Polaroid she’d found tucked under her mother’s shelf liner in her underwear drawer when she was boxing up the belongings for Salvation Army. But no. This man was built differently, a little stockier, harder jaw. Eyes that were green not brown. She knew her dad’s eyes were the same as hers. That’s what her mom had always said when she’d been drunk. “Looking at me with those eyes. Criticizing me.”

“Why are you here?” she tried next. Shouldn’t she have felt afraid? What she did feel were the hairs on the back of her neck prickling, as people had described at the seance. She was reasonably sure there was a solid answer to the questions spiraling through her mind, and yet she was almost also reasonably sure there weren’t.

“You called me,” he said next.

“I called…”

“Me.”

Shanna thought of Isabelle. Of the skeptics who dissect whether seances are real or if the folks running them are charlatans making bank off other people’s grief.

But nobody talks about what happens when a seance goes wrong. If not horribly, terribly wrong, then completely out of left field. That’s what Shanna suddenly thought. She’d called the wrong number. Crossed wires. How was that possible?

She closed her front door and leaned against it. She had to think fast, but her thoughts were coming slow. She hadn’t called this man. She’d tried to summon her father, to ask him questions, to get what her therapist (she’d only seen for two months, couldn’t afford more) had called “closure.”

“I really don’t get it,” Shanna said. She wondered for an instant whether this was some type of scam. Whether he was related to the tiny woman in the black veil who had done the seance. But something inside her, viscerally, told her the answer.

“There’s not really a lot to get,” the man said. “At least, not from where you’re standing. You’ll understand more, but not yet.”

“Can you try?”

She would have thought he sighed, but he didn’t seem to be breathing. Instead, he seemed to sort of relax against the lemon-yellow pillows on her sofa, and he stared up at her ceiling, and he said, “There was a time when I did think I knew a lot. If not everything about everything, then more than most. More than average. And then after—”

“After—”

He shrugged. “After, I realized I’d known just about nothing about nothing. That what I thought I’d known was infinitesimal compared with what there is to know. What I could have known.”

“And now?”

“I know what I need to. I’ll know more, I guess, in the future. Although future is an odd way to look at things when time has no actual end.”

“I think I need a drink.”

“You only got me because you believe. You get that, right? There is a level of faith required to understand. And you had enough faith to work with Elena. To put out the call. You just didn’t have enough information about who you were trying to reach. Generally, there is this bond that crosses the divide. It’s not so much bureaucratic as it is like when you’re feeling your way through a dark room that you know so well you can see each obstacle even in the pitch. You put out a call, and I answered. And I knew you didn’t really want me, but I was curious, and a little lonely if we’re being honest. So why were you looking for Clark R.?”

“He’s my dad. I didn’t ever meet him. I only know he passed a few years ago. And I thought maybe, I could find out, I could let him know that I’m not angry. That I only wish we’d had the chance…”

“Not angry is good. Angry doesn’t work out well for people. You want to get that drink?”

She stood and made her way to the cabinet. She hardly ever drank whiskey, but there was a bottle in the back for emergencies. This counted, in her opinion. "What’s your name?” she asked.

“Same as your dad’s, but my R. stands for Richard. I always went by that. Not Clark.”

“What’s his stand for?”

He was quiet for a minute, as if he were looking something up. Then: “Roberto.”

She mouthed the name as she poured her shot.

Richard said, “You should treat yourself to the good stuff.”

“I don’t have a lot of money.”

“Just every so often. Skip a few of the cheap beers. Save up for something epic.”

“Did you?”

He shook his head.

“Can you have a drink with me?”

He shook his head again. “But I remember. I can remember what it tasted like. Good stuff. Bad stuff. Hard stuff.”

“Can I ask you what happened?”

“If I can ask you why you were trying to reach Roberto.”

“I told you.”

“Why now? Why did you reach out now?”

“I only found out last month. Letter in the mail from an aunt I never met. Forwarded from one address to the next. No return. I didn’t know he was in California. I didn’t know he even knew I existed.” She sipped her drink. “My turn. What happened to you?”

“Accident.”

“Your fault?”

“You could say that.”

She looked at him, comfortable on her sofa, the light playing over his features. He was in jeans and a plaid shirt and work boots.

“On the job?” he shook his head but didn’t explain any further. “My turn.”

She waited.

“Why are you single?”

“What do you mean? How did you know?”

He gazed around the apartment. Studio. Definitely a solitary environment. He looked at her again.

“I just am.”

“When was your last relationship?”

Relationship. What a word. She didn’t think she’d ever really had one. She’d dated a few men here and there, for a few months, here and there, but she’d never felt anything that would resemble closeness. Comfort. stability. Trust. Trussst. You have to trussst. The process.

“I don’t really do relationships.” That was one way to say that she grew up surrounded by heartbreak. Watched what happened to a bitter woman become eaten up by her own failures. And then decided love wasn’t for her.

“What’s it like?” she asked him.

“It?”

“You know…”

“No way to explain so that your head wouldn’t explode. So you’ve never been in love?”

“Nope.”

“Lust?”

She felt her cheeks go hot. “Sometimes.”

“Is this one of those times?”

She wasn’t sure how to respond to that. How much could he tell about her simply from looking at her? Did he know the answers before she did? So she said, “You’re a ghost, right?”

He kind of shrugged, half shook his head, then said, “You know, it’s not really important what I am. Humans often name things they don’t understand. It helps them feel safe.”

“Them.”

“Well, I’m not one of you anymore, obviously. But I do remember what being corporeal was like.”

“Corp—“

“Having a body.”

And there it was again. The beat between them. She wondered for a moment if she were dreaming. Maybe she was still at the seance. Maybe she hadn’t gone yet and was having a catnap in her car, which she did sometimes when the world overwhelmed her, or the sadness. He moved over a little on the sofa. She went to sit closer to him.

“Are you real?” she asked. “I mean, can I touch you?”

He put out his hand. She put her hand in his. He wasn’t warm, but he wasn’t cold. There was something slightly odd about the way his skin felt, but not unpleasant. He seemed to understand what she was thinking, and he said, “It’s a little bit of a simulation. I don’t get to inhabit a real body, if that’s what you’re thinking. But all the parts work. If that’s what you’re thinking…”

She was. She was. She didn’t know why, but she was. She was drawn to this man, in a way she hadn’t been in a long time, if ever, and what she wanted most was to straddle him and kiss him and take away some of the pain she saw in his eyes.

“You know I’m going to have to go…”

“I know.”

She moved closer. He leaned in, and they kissed. It was slightly surreal the way his lips felt on hers, as if he were not only kissing her but giving her a taste of some other world. Giving her a flicker and a glimpse of what the rest of her fifty-plus years would feel like, and maybe a little tiny bit beyond that.

There was a hesitation when she could have gone one way or the other. She could have told him to leave, and she knew he would have. She could have asked him to share information about her father, and maybe he could have done that, too.

Instead, she slid onto his lap and wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him. She felt him tremble, and she tilted back to look into his eyes, ivy green, glistening. She said, “Accident?” and he said, “It’s not important.”

But it was. She held him to her, and then they kissed again, and then they were taking off clothes and connecting in a way that she hadn’t experienced before. On the sofa, then on the floor, then up against the wall. They were joining, joined, in tandem, tangled, and for flashes of time she could feel what he felt and could think like he thought, and her mind whirred and then was quiet again.

He was sad. That’s what she felt. He was sorrowful. But resigned. He was broken, shattered inside, but put back together. She kissed him, his lips, his eyelids, his cheeks. She touched his hair. She put her palm on his heart.

They were together still when the sun started to come up, when the room started to change colors. They were embracing on her sofa once more, but naked this time, when she felt a chill and felt the same type of sensation as if someone had breathed on the back of her neck. He was dressed quickly, as if he’d never been nude, and he was standing next to her, and she thought when she opened her eyes again, her brain would tell her the whole thing had been a dream.

But he bent down to her and he said, “You’re going to be okay.”

“Maybe…”

“You are…”

She felt a wash of loss mixed with a symphony of emotions she’d never experienced before. Joy? Was that Joy? Euphoria? He said, “This isn’t the end, though.”

“Do you promise?”

He kissed her one last time, and she could feel it. And then he started to slowly slip away. And she could feel that. And she knew that things were going to be different now. For her.

Trusst the processs, she thought, and then she thought, “I promise, too.”