“I don’t think he’s hungry.” Sun swings around, arms out like she can feel the wind ripple. Walks away yet again. This is how she’s flirting with me, now I am certain. By showing me she doesn’t even have to face me to get to me. Sun’s wearing a Wonder Woman T-shirt that drapes so far down you can barely see her shorts. And underneath that, hiking boots. Heavy, worn gray, mud-covered hiking boots.
“Can we ask you something?” she asks. “Did you really Tase her?”
“Yeah, did you do it? Tase Roslyn? Tase her with a Taser?” Spider wants to know, but I can see from the way both look at me that they already do. Roslyn told them. So I give them my version. Tell them the circumstances of said electrifying and its retribution, and finish with “I’m pretty sure she shocked me for longer than I did her.”
“Is that why you’re hiding? She scare you that bad?” Sun wants to know. Spider’s nodding at me slowly, still smiling, permitting me to say yes, to succumb to her patronizing conjecture.
“No. I saw a ghost,” I say to shut them up. To let them know I’m crazy, that they’re high, and to leave me alone. I even tell them what I saw, in detail. Not just Friday night, waking up in the car, but the time by the garage, and the first night I moved in there. Into their blank silence I add, “These crackheads, they’ve gotten into my head. They’ve got me seeing things. They got super crackhead powers.”
“But Warren,” Sun says. “You didn’t say, ‘I saw a crackhead.’ You said, ‘I saw a ghost.’ ”
“Okay, I’ve heard enough. Change the subject. I’m too stoned for this.” Spider goes to my desk, grabs some Tastykakes and starts walking toward the door. “I don’t mess with spirits. I draw the line at ghosts. Also, I’m against denigrating victims of substance abuse.”
Sunita Habersham’s not leaving. Even as Spider calls for her.
“Show me them. The ghosts,” Sun whispers, as if one might hear us.
—
Sunita Habersham’s got her window open, and her hand out. Her fingers are flat together, angled off her wrist and bent from her arm like the head of a swan. As I speed up, she tilts her hand forward, lets the weight of the wind push it up and back again. Slowly, Sun repeats, only pausing when I hit a light as we drive down Wissahickon Avenue.
“Spider says this street used to be a toll road. Two hundred years ago. Some old lady would sit on the side with a gun, make people pay to use it. That sounds like a great job.”
“That’s your dream career? Sitting on a road and shooting people who don’t pay you?”
Sunita turns, looks at me, seems to realize for the first time that I’m really there. That I’m not some animated character from her THC haze. She sits up and shakes her head a bit like this will make her lucid.
“Yes. Yes, that would be my dream job. It’s very simple, isn’t it? No politics. No people, really. Just, guardian. Plus, you get to work outdoors. I wouldn’t use a gun, though. I’d get something harmless, like your Taser.” She picks it up from where Roslyn left it. I forgot it was even there, between the seats. Sun aims it out the windshield. She’s turning it around to aim it at me.
“No.” I knock her hand so it’s pointing at the window again. Sun laughs at me. She puts the weapon down, but she’s still laughing.
“Oh, come on. It couldn’t have been that bad.”
I stare straight ahead. “That old lady Tased me.”
“Come on. I’m sure there was a larger, holistic reason. She doesn’t just do things like that for no reason.”
“She had a reason, she wanted revenge. She did that shit in cold blood.”
“No. Roslyn’s not like that. She’s like our…Professor X. And we’re her school of runaway mutants, training for the new world.”
I let that stoner logic soak in. “How do you know she’s not Magneto, taking those same runaways and warping them into The Brotherhood of Evil Mutants?”
“Come on, Warren, they didn’t call themselves that, only the X-Men did. They called themselves just ‘Brotherhood of Mutants.’ ”
“That’s my point.”
“You’re just mad because Roslyn zapped you back. You ever wonder if the state of not being in pain, if that is the true deviation?” Sunita asks me. “That the pain is how life really feels, and moments of trauma, they just make it so you can’t ignore the fact? That that’s…” Sun pauses, and she’s lost in the labyrinth of her own philosophy.
I pull onto Greene Street, past Manheim. I lived here with my mother until she passed. It hasn’t changed much. The same two-story homes, now further along in their decay. All the little semidetached row houses huddling together, covered in all the paint that’s failed to chip. Many of the solid wood pillars on the porches have been replaced with cheaper metal pylons. The streetlights have become stop signs because the city’s broke, and there’s another layer of trash, but basically it’s as miserable as it’s always been.
At my gate, I get out, undo the padlock then pull the twisted metal rails back. When I get back in the car, Sun says, “That’s why you feel so alive in those moments of suffering?”
“You’re stoned.”
“I think we established that fact. Take me ghost hunting.”
I should not be here. I’ve brought my crush to my house, at night, but I have no immediate plans for seduction. I have the desire, the pragmatic reasons too — they haven’t gone away — yet still I lack adequate motivation to risk getting out of this car and going in that damned house. I don’t even want to shut the engine off. I just wanted to be around her. Sunita Habersham. All this is because I must have wanted an excuse to be in her presence.
“Are we going to go in?”
“Look, you asked me where I saw the intruders. There. I saw them right there. Coming out of the garage. And right here, next to the car. We done, yo. We don’t have to go inside.”
Sun gets out of the car anyway. I don’t. I think she’s going to go look in the garage window, which is fine by me, but she comes to the driver’s-side door. I roll the window down.
“You’ve got cameras out here. All over.”
“Security.”
“It looks like you’re running a meth lab. Where do the recordings go?”
“I’ve got a hard drive set up with my laptop, in the house.”
“Then we have to see what’s on the tape.” Sun skips off into the darkness toward the front porch. I don’t even unlock my door. I look at the garage. For a second, I think I see movement in the window. I do see movement. It’s the reflection of a bus’s window as it pauses to let off a passenger on the street behind me.
Sun yells, “Come on, you can’t just burn the whole place down because you had one crazy vision.” And there it is, out loud. Exactly what I’m thinking. And that scares me. But Sun comes back to the car, reaches in for the handle then pulls my door open. Grabs my hand and pulls me out. She keeps holding my hand, even when I’m standing outside.
“Take me into your House of Mystery.” And that was one of my favorite comics when I was a kid, but still, I don’t want to go. “Look, my life is hard and boring too, just like everyone else’s. Entertain me, Warren. You want to get me in your house, this is your chance,” she says, and I believe her. And I remember how Sunita was, dancing in the air with my daughter, and how Tal talks about her. Like she needs her. So this time, I answer the call. Then we’re walking into an empty mansion at night while holding hands.
“In third grade, I watched every season of Scooby-Doo! Finally, my paranormal investigative training is coming in handy. Knew I’d grow up to be Velma.”
“Who in their right mind aspires to be dumpy Velma?” I ask her.