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= Ghosts and the City #1 =

a dark fantasy short story

by John Argo

(4)

It is true what they say. Those who die young don't age. Not always, but usually. Lolo is now as she was then, though a certain patina of maturity has crept in. Today we are alone together in her cafe. I had visited Loma Portal, where Tamsin lives with Marcus, and felt depressed.

"Went back for some more, eh?" she says in her slightly Quebecois accent. "Can't stay away." She pours me a coffee, Italian style, with a bit of orange peel and a sugar cube. She adds a block of dark chocolate, which she knows I like,. Then she pours in a shot of brandy. "On the house, my Ray."

"Thanks, Lolo. Open the curtain a bit, will you? It's like a tomb in here." I wait before touching my drink.

"Funny you should say that." She walks to the window of this small barroom of hers, and throws open the drapes. Icy menthe daylight floods in, hurting the eyes. It is still early morning out. People walk by, blur past, hurry on, going to work, going to the dentist, going to the bakery, a million things, and I draw from them the steam of life, the cream of life, the emanation of their purposefulness if not their joy. Funny how few of them are joyful. When I first came here, I was very clumsy and learned to enter people to absorb their halo. Now I can pick it up on the fly, from twenty or thirty feet away. We just have to be in the same scene together, in a defined sort of circle or orb or sphere of being. As the light floods in, and I see the streaks of their bodies moving in sunlight and breezy air, I feel myself flooded with intensity once again. I lift the heavy white ceramic mug to my lips and sip—hot coffee, black, framed within the sweetness of sugar, the muskiness of dark chocolate, and the alcoholic bite of brandy. It is kind of like chomping into one of those fragrant liquor chocolate cherries Tamsin buys in red shiny wrappers. "That's marvelous," I tell Lolo, meaning the coffee.

"I thought you'd say that." She stands by the bar, wearing the very tights, green blouse, and little skirt from the day she was murdered. She wipes the shiny bar surface with a wet, white towel held in busy fingers. "It's good, eh?"

"It's good, yes. Lolo, when do I find out my purpose?"

She shrugs. "It will let you know a bit in advance. That's how it usually works. "

I want to cry, for just a second. "So then it's like dying again?"

She keeps wiping, slowly. "It's all a matter of philosophy. The more you think about it, the more you get wrapped up in a big ball of yarn. You have to let go. Do you understand?"

I nod. "I lived my life that way. Tried not to think about the progression. The inevitable. Though you see older people dying, painfully, slowly, that sort of thing. Young people having their lives terminated suddenly. Children with cancer."

Lolo leans close and pokes a finger at my face. "So listen, Ray. In Tibet there is a mountain, the 'Imalaya, oui?" At moments like this, her Francophone comes to the forefront. Other times, her Canadian English is clear as a mountain stream. "Look, Ray, it's a pile of rocks. It's there, and you ar' 'ere. You can leave it there, or you can levitate it all in your imagination so it comes and rests on your back. Now what is the point of that?"

This is how Lolo is. You will tell her your grief, or your dropped ice cream cone, or whatever is oppressing your soul, and she knows how to say something very Zen that you never expect, and somehow, in the aura of her clarity, it instantly makes sense. Lights go on. Fireworks. Marching bands. "Ah," I say.

"Voila."

"Look at that."

"To 'Ell and Back."

I take another sip, savoring the explosively sweet and wonderful mixture of orange and brandy and sugar and chocolate in a matrix of robustly bitter coffee. "I don't know how you do it."

"You don't need to know. Leave that to me."

"I do."

"And then there is you. A man named Ray. A ray of light. There must be something special about you too."

I finger my cup, set it down, still half full. More delight to come. "Can you tell me what it is?"

She folds her arms and looks over them at me. "Something special."

"But you haven't figured it out."

She looks mischievous. "I don't know everything. What do you take me for?"

"A very special spirit."

"Not just a ghost?"

I shake my head. "Oh no, Lolo. People have always loved you. You have always been very special."

Her gaze clouds over, and I know she is suddenly seeing Meat's knife, as she looked over her shoulder, starting to smile, and then had just one more minute to live, life clouding over like a sunny day suddenly buried in rain clouds. The Daze of Craze. It comes upon us at odd, sudden moments. For all I know—I'm sorry I started this—she might levitate out of there at the speed of light, the speed of shadow, whoooosh, and be there yet once again, where she died. I hear the place is a bookstore now, and where she died is the cash register. People say she throws books off the shelves at odd moments. I believe anything. Why not? People say there is a shadow sometimes, in the Alcazar Gardens, in the maze of Mexican tiles and flowers, or in the darkness among the arches. That would be me.

I quickly say: "Come back here where we are, Lolo. Don't leave me now. I'm sorry. Don't leave me." I say it more for me than for her.

She turns her back abruptly, and from the shrug and hunch of her delicate shoulders I see that she is processing her dark thoughts the way a wine press crushes grapes, hard. She works her dish rag into the counter top. Hangs her face down over it. The wetness of the rag could be dishwater, could be tears. Turns burgundy like fresh blood, then bleaches back into translucent salt water.

I say: "I love this coffee you made for me. I can taste the beans and the chocolate liquor and the brandy and a hint of berries…"

"And the love." She turns, holding the coffee pot, with that smile. I hold out my cup, the way I hold out my soul, and she pours what she has into it. The light from her is warm and dazzling. I don't know that she has answered my question. Maybe there wasn't even a question—just the grapes I will process in my wine press, up in Loma Portal, in that white house with Tamsin and Marcus. Maybe there isn't an answer, maybe forgetfulness…which comes to us all, eventually. We never stop existing—we just forget, we lose who we were so we can move on with the river currents of what we become…

At this moment, I do drink in something warm… a light that she pours into me. Everything else goes dark around me, except her smile, and in it is this realization: Everything will be okay. Everything works out the way it is meant to. It doesn't matter what you believe in through your conscious, rational mind, or long for in your irrational, cloudy, animal faith-being—neither thinking nor believing have the slightest effect on the truth itself. Truth, with a capital T, has given us life, which is good, so we can trust Truth to continue doing what is good and natural. It must have been what the Emperor Justinian, in Constantinople in 537, was thinking when he picked a name for the chief cathedral church of the eastern empire, and chose an echo of Classical philosophy—Hagia Sofia, Holy Wisdom, formerly a goddess, later an abstraction built upon the two irreconcilable legs of the human anima or soul. And so the river flows on, and I in its embrace, controlled by it, exercising virtually no control upon it. I surrender to its great balmy power and, floating away in the rush of its currents, I am filled with the goodness that Lolo pours into my coffee cup from her wine press. Her smile irradiates my soul.

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Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.