Heart pounding, too weak to move, Issy muttered desperately to distract it the first thing that came to her mind: "Y… you like, um, chocolate fudge?"
The ghost turned towards her. Issy cried and kept talking, kept talking. The ghost wavered between Issy’s hot description of bubbling chocolate and Cleve’s cool silence, caught in the middle. Could it even understand words? Wetsuits located pleasurable sensation to augment it. Maybe it was just drawn to the sensuousness of her tone. Issy talked, urgently, carefully releasing the words from her mouth like caresses:
"So," she said to the suit-duppy, "I watching this cookie tin twist through the air like a Frisbee, and is like slow motion, ’cause I seeing gobs of chocolate goo spiraling from it as it flies, and they spreading out wider and wider. I swear I hear separate splats as chocolate hits the walls like slung shit and one line of it strafes the fridge door, and a gob somehow slimes the naked bulb hanging low from the kitchen ceiling. I hear it sizzle. The cookie tin lands on the floor, fudge side down, of course. I haven’t cleaned the fucking floor in ages. There’re spots everywhere on that floor that used to be gummy, but now they’re layered in dust and maybe flour and desiccated bodies of cockroaches that got trapped, reaching for sweetness. I know how they feel. I take a step towards the cookie tin, then I start to smell burning chocolate. I look up. I see a curl of black smoke rising from the glob of chocolate on the light bulb."
Cleve raised his head. There were tears in his eyes and the front of his jogging pants was damp and milky. "Issy," he interrupted in a whisper.
"Shut up, Cleve!"
"That thing," he said in a low, urgent voice. "People call it a ganger; doppel—"
The ganger was suddenly at his side. It leaned a loving head on his chest, like Issy would do. "No!" she yelled. Cleve’s body shook. The ganger frayed and tossed like a sheet in the wind. Cleve shrieked. He groaned like he was coming, but with an edge of terror and pain that Issy couldn’t bear to hear. Pissed, terrified, Issy swiped an arm through its field, then rolled her bucking body on the bathroom tiles, praying that she could absorb the ganger’s energy without it frying her synapses with sweet sensation.
Through spasms, she barely heard Cleve say to it, "Come to me, not her. Come. Listen, you know that song? ‘I got a weakness for sweetness…’ That’s my Issy."
The ganger dragged itself away from Issy. Released, her muscles melted. She was a gooey, warm puddle spreading on the floor. The ganger reached an ectoplasmic hand towards Cleve, fingers stretching long as arms. Cleve gasped and froze.
Issy croaked, "You think is that it is, Cleve? Weakness?"
The ganger turned its head her way, ran a long, slow arm down its body to the floor, back up to its crotch. It stroked itself.
Cleve spoke to it in a voice that cracked whispery on the notes: "Yeah, sweetness. That’s what my Issy wants most of all." The ganger moved towards him, rubbing its crotch. He continued, "If I’m not there, there’s always sugar, or food, or booze. I’m just one of her chosen stimulants."
Outraged tears filled Issy’s mouth, salty as butter, as flesh. She’d show him, she’d rescue him. She countered:
"The glob of burned sugar on the light? From the ruined fudge? Well, it goes black and starts to bubble." The ganger extruded a tongue the length of an arm from its mouth. The tongue wriggled towards Issy.
She rolled back, saying, "The light bulb explodes. I feel some shards land in my hair. I don’t try to brush them away. Is completely dark now; I only had the kitchen light on. I take another step to where I know the cookie tin is on the floor. A third step, and pain crazes my heel. Must have stepped on a piece of light bulb glass. Can’t do nothing about it now. I rise onto the toes of the hurting foot. I think I feel blood running down from heel to instep."
The ganger jittered towards her.
"You were always better than me at drama, Iss," Cleve said.
The sadness in his voice tore at her heart. But she said, "What that thing is?" Cleve replied softly, "Is kinda beautiful, ain’t?"
"It going to kill us."
"Beautiful. Just a lump of static charge, coated in the Kirlian energy thrown off from the suits."
"Why it show up now?"
"Is what happens when you leave the suits together too long."
The ganger drifted back and forth, pulled by one voice, then the other. A longish silence between them freed it to move. It floated closer to Cleve. Issy wouldn’t let it, she wouldn’t. She quavered:
"I take another step on the good foot, carefully. I bend down, sweep my hands around."
The ganger dropped to the floor, ran its long tongue over the tiles. A drop of water made it crackle and shrink in slightly on itself.
"There," Issy continued. "The cookie tin. I brush around me, getting a few more splinters in my hands. I get down to my knees, curl down as low to the ground as I can. I pry up the cookie tin, won’t have any glass splinters underneath it. A dark sweet wet chocolate smell rising from under there."
"Issy, Jesus," Cleve whispered. He started to bellow the words of the song he’d taunted her with, drawing the ganger. It touched him with a fingertip. A crackling noise. He gasped, jumped, kept singing.
Issy ignored him. Hissing under his booming voice she snarled at the ganger, "I run a finger through the fudge. I lick it off. Most of it on the ground, not on the tin. I bend over and run my tongue through it, reaching for sweetness. Butter and vanilla and oh, oh, the chocolate. And crunchy, gritty things I don’t think about. Cockroach parts, maybe. I swallow."
Cleve interrupted his song to wail, "That’s gross, Iss. Why you had to go and do that?"
"So Cleve come in, he see me there sitting on the floor surrounded by broken glass and limp chocolate, and you know what he say?" The ganger was reaching for her.
"Issy, stop talking, you only drawing it to you."
"Nothing." The ganger jerked. "Zip." The ganger twitched. "Dick." The ganger spasmed, once. It touched her hair. Issy breathed. That was safe. "The bastard just started cleaning up; not a word for me." The ganger hugged her. Issy felt her eyes roll back in her head. She thrashed in the energy of its embrace until Cleve yelled:
"And what you said! Ee? Tell me!"
The ganger pulled away. Issy lay still, waiting for her breathing to return to normal. Cleve said, "Started carrying on with some shit about how light bulbs are such poor quality nowadays. Sat in the filth and broken glass, pouting and watching me clean up your mess. Talking about anything but what really on your mind. I barely get all the glass out of your heel before you start pulling my pants down."
Issy ignored him. She kept talking to the ganger. "Cool, cool Cleve. No ‘What’s up?’; no ‘What the fuck is this crap on the floor?’; no heat, no passion."
"What was the point? I did the only thing that will sweet you every time."