The Voices in Our Heads (21 page)

He shook it off and looked at his legs splayed out before him, knees up toward his nose like that old comedy sketch where the stooge got dumped in a fifty-gallon drum, butt first, legs over the lip, and he couldn’t free himself. He pushed up and out against the edges of the coffin, strained with it. Nothing—the pull was too strong. He tried to dig his hand under him to get to the Blackberry in his back pocket, but his fat ass hadn’t left much breathing space between himself and the old wood. He was sweating, working his right hand, shoving with everything he had, and he took the skin right off his knuckles, and screamed with it, and shoved his hand under, thinking suddenly that Betsy Taylor was right under him, and then cursing because the pocket band was far too tight to get his fingers in and he had no angle whatsoever.

Something looked different,and he stopped struggling. It was the hole around him, or at least it seemed that way at first, as if it had come alive somehow, swimming, waves, the close walls moving and breathing.

But it wasn’t the walls. It was the light from the laptop.

McFinn glanced up and saw the screen filled with shapes, no longer filled in skull silhouettes, but outlines, former “selves” come alive somehow, and the outlines had hair, and tatted collars, and stick pins, and top hats. And though they were just busts, there were facial features coming in, noses and beards, and pale lips and blank eyes, all in miniature, all in their places, and then on the screen they broke rank and came gathered around a plot space in the center, where the fourth row, fifth plot in from the left had been represented.

McFinn looked off and around at the perimeter up there, the after-image of the computer still on his eyes for a second. Nothing. Cold night. Stars.

“All right!” he shouted. “So what are you gonna do, huh? Rattle some chains? Knock over a flower pot? You’re no better than me! With all the hoopla, all ghosts do is spy on the helpless. You move loose change once in a while, leave footprints, slam a door or two, big fucking deal. It’s all movie crap. Go ahead, pick up a shotgun and kill someone, eh? Then there’ll be something to be scared of, you freaks!”

Something hit him in the face, right in the eye, and along the cheek. He blinked hard, rubbed the back of his free knuckle into the socket. Again, hard, right in the face, another speckle of dirt, not even enough to make half a handful.

He was being peppered now, dirt flying down into the grave, bits at a time but in rapid succession, and he looked on the screen between showers, hand before his face, and from between his fingers he saw the ghost images in a line curled in a vague S-shape, taking turns, flying in, each filling the screen for a moment, the closeup outline of a face blowing out hard, then retreating fast to the back of the line.

It was no more than a stiff wind to any outside observer, and McFinn struggled and screamed and begged and sobbed. He stopped when the fill had reached his chest, to conserve his breath, but when it rose over his mouth line he panicked, waving it off with his good hand, trying to snow-angel it to the side, and when it avalanched back he went quiet, and when it went past his nose holes he held his breath, held it till he was bursting, held it until his eyes nearly popped out of their sockets, then closed in surrender to that first huge draft of cold dirt.

When his heart beat its last, the computer winked off. And in rhythm with the flood of the night, there was a sound that nobody heard, across town, deep inside the dark halls of Whitman Heights Elementary School, first stall. It was a toilet flushing.

February

She first saw him on Friday, February 4th, right around 7:00
a.m.
He (or it) was part of the background really, odd at most, certainly not suspicious at least in terms of Becky’s perception of what could affect her routine. It was beautiful actually, yes, that was exactly the thought that crossed her mind, and while most of her freshmen would think her insane, Professor Becky Buckingham was just that kind of gal. She wore a Klondike Russian Trooper hat with rabbit fur earflaps in class, even in the warmer months. Skirts? Always. She thought that little square behind the knee was the most attractive part of a woman, and she didn’t mind showing. Boots? Certainly, but only those with buckles and heels. Most days her jewelry choices included silver and turquoise, sometimes sharks’ teeth, bone disk necklaces, Massai beaded chokers. Her nose was a tad long but she had nice skin. Her eyes were a bit crafty for a girl, and she had always played them up with the thickest mascara her lashes could possibly hold on to without beading together. No, not insane. Pleasantly odd. She couldn’t cook worth a shit, but she could dance. And she had but one last chapter to be accepted by the committee in order to complete her dissertation on Jonathan Swift and the language of birds, thank you very much. An odd choice of topic? Shit, she once even considered owning a lobster on a leash, just for effect, but she drew the line at eating her pets.

Becky was just starting to marvel at the way her self-analysis (old habit) had somehow come full circle and connected with Swift’s satirical plea that the Irish eat their children, when the thing up there moved. The shape on the overpass, behind the barrier fence, between the top edges of the two green road signs rising ten to fifteen feet higher than the concrete they were fastened to, a few yards apart. She was at the red light before the jug handle, the right-hand sign up there announcing Route 1 and South Lima with two white arrows pointing at the proper lanes, and the latter with that cute little blue icon shaped like some French lieutenant’s chest medal—476, and beneath that, Chester Left Lane.

He was up there between the signs, standing dead still with the traffic rushing behind him, dark blue Alaskan parka that seemed to be heavy and fluttering in the wind at the same time, as if the sleeves and sides were tattered. Thick fur lined his hood, and the face was masked in black shadow. Becky had seen him standing up there on her approach, automatically placing him as the centerpiece in her ongoing mental mural, contrasting him with the gray sunken sky, the industrial green of the road signs, the pitted concrete of the overpass, and the hails of sleet slanting across in counterpoint from northeast. To the left, black gum and choke cherry trees were gathered inside the curve of a rusted knee-high guardrail making a sad little decorator cattycorner, and the massive support columns grinned and laughed at the affair from the cold shadows beneath the bridge. It was all the perfect statement somehow, lovely and harsh, flickering in and out of focus through the rhythmic pass of the windshield wipers. Isolation. Desolate Americana, symbolized by . . .

The thing raised its right arm, slowly, slowly, and pointed down. Becky gawked back up at him. Really? Was that at her? A Nixon truck passed behind him, and her mouth dropped open. That vehicle was at least ten feet high, possibly fifteen, and the thing in the parka was taller, or at least it seemed so. Could that be? Did she have the angle to properly judge the perspective?

Beeping. The light was green.

She hit the gas, spun the tires, and passed under the bridge. On the other side of it she left-turned on red, tore up the ramp, and merged into a space a bit too close for comfort. More beeps, and the blink of some high beams this time. She hunched over the wheel, a mad grin on her face, heart pounding. By the time she passed the Swarthmore/Media exit, however, she was settled back in the seat, relaxed once again, thinking mostly about the grammatical mini-lesson she wanted to start her proletariats with in Comp 101, all guilty of the same mistakes over and over again: run-ons, rambles, “you” as the generic individual, pronoun antecedent. By the time she passed the sign announcing Macdade Boulevard, she was toying with the idea of introducing her Swift/Franklin seniors to the etymology of augurium from “ex avium garritu,” the chattering of birds, practiced by Roman priests. Was
haruspex
a cognate, meaning divination from the guts of fowls? She’d have to look that one up.

By the time Becky Buckingham stood pigeon-toed, back to the wind in the parking lot outside of Vanderson Hall, struggling out her carry case, she had long dismissed the fact that she’d merged in front of a van on the Blue Route that almost rearended her at 67 miles an hour. And after her 8:00
a.m.
, when she entered room 329 for her office hour and began checking her e-mail, she had forgotten about the man on the bridge altogether.

The knock on the door startled her, loud, made with a fist, Christ, the thing was open for a reason!

“Hey, Bucky,” he said. It was Richardson, freshman, failed his 101 research paper last semester. Here to negotiate, no doubt. Wonderful. “Nice picture,” he said, looking at the large print tacked to the corkboard by the window. “What is it, Live Aid or something?”

“Yes,” she said with a smile and a slight sigh. “That’s exactly what it is, Tim. The original. Philadelphia, in the old JFK stadium, not the twin they did at Wembley.” It was actually a reproduction of a pilgrimage to The Mecca, Masjid al-Haram.

“Can we have a face-to-face, Bucky? You got a minute?”

“Sure. Let me clear you a place.” Part of her wanted to slap him straight across the face for calling her “Bucky,” twice now, but she’d brought it on herself, really. She loved making students feel at home through the vehicle of her oddities and a welcoming, sardonic familiarity, and therefore signed all e-mails “Buckingham,” rather than “Professor Buckingham.” So Richardson had made it into a nickname. Wasn’t the first time. Came with the territory. She leaned over to move the crap off the guest seat, grabbed an armful, and looked around, two sweeps. Her place was a cyclone of, well, stuff, all freak and geek and circus paraphernalia, collectibles Swift would have treasured. Her desk, the adjoining table, the tops of the two filing cabinets, and much of the floor was flooded with pictures of The Coney Island Freak Show, Joseph Merrick the Elephant Man, Eng and Chang, and Lionel the Lion-Faced Man. She had Ripley’s and Very Special People, all editions. There were pamphlets, and figurines, and posters and folders, all wild colors all over the place, Grady Stiles the Lobster Boy, Peter the Great, Lazarus Colloredo and his conjoined twin brother John Baptista, General Tom Thumb. Above her computer was a grainy blown-up photograph of Carl Unthang the armless fiddler, horn held in his toes and raised to the lips so effortlessly that the appendages really looked like hands, and the cherry on top of the tsunami was a bobblehead Lucia Zarate (the Puppet Woman), affixed to the top of the computer. Becky looked around hopelessly for another moment, and then just dumped the armful on the floor with the rest of the clutter.

Richardson took the seat, set down his backpack, and sat back, knees spread wide. He was wearing dirty white silk gym shorts. Designer hoodie. He had a square jaw, a bit of five-o’clock shadow, and those light blue eyes that made you know he thought himself beautiful and deep and altogether clever.

“So,” he said.

“So, the paper.”

“Yeah.”

“And the final grade, of course.”

He crossed an ankle up on his knee.

“Well yeah, Bucky. You gave me a C-minus. Didn’t I have an 89 counting up all the drafts of the summary, analysis, and synthesis papers? I thought the final research paper was only 20 percent.”

“30.”

“Whatever. I don’t know what you gave me on it because it wasn’t posted on campus cruiser, but I worked hard on that thing. This trashes my cumulative average.”

She blinked.

“What average? You’re a freshman. And forgive me for saying so, Tim, but you were late for seven or eight classes.”

“Really? What dates?”

She opened her mouth and closed it. His final paper was an atrocity, and here he had quickly manipulated her away from the main idea. And he’d caught her red-handed; the late issue was a bit of a bluff. She knew he had waltzed in tardy on many occasions, but she never really wrote that stuff down. She was always too involved in the moment of the given lecture, on her feet, making some animated point, leaps, bounds, and worlds away from her roll book, sitting in her carry case on the floor. Who was he to screw her pacing, anyway?

“I’ll have to look it up.”

He looked off toward the window. Took a deep breath of his own.

“You know, Bucky, your casual discussion about masturbation in the Hemingway story really made me kind of uncomfortable. Remember it?”

She closed her mouth again. She was about to talk about his final paper and the way it was unofficial university policy that you couldn’t pass 101 without passing the research component no matter what the points said. She was about to remind him that his “Works Cited” was improperly done, that there was no thesis, and he’d not even engaged all ten sources, one of them actually from Yahoo Answers, believe it or not, and all this was before revisiting with him, his nightmare of sentence-to-sentence mishmash clearly thrown together a night or two before the due date. The C-minus had been a gift, a way of avoiding this kind of meeting, and he was calling her on it like this? The Hemingway reference was from “The Dr. and the Dr.’s Wife” and had been noted in multiple sources of scholarly criticism as a sign of masculine regression, as the guy pumped shells out of his shotgun onto his bed. Did she have to bring it up in class? Of course not. She did it to stay edgy, to make them laugh, to keep them awake. She’d also cursed a number of times throughout the semester for dramatic effect, a risk mostly rewarded. But it also made her vulnerable, and he knew it. And considering that her condition of employment was not at all cemented, teetering on ABD status (all but dissertation), a formal complaint, especially framed in accusations of sexual misconduct, wouldn’t help nail down her position here no matter how distanced and irrelevant it actually was.

He was meeting her stare with hard, smiling eyes. She looked away and pulled her chair back in toward the computer. Shit. There was a message there from Dr. Laure, who seemingly disliked Becky with a passion, who stood as the third outside reader on the committee with her future in his wrinkled hands. She tabbed in, glanced at the message, and sucked in her lower lip. Fought back tears.