Possession

I fixed the cat’s defiant stare with one of my own. “This is not a large snack,” I said. “So don’t get any ideas, because next time I’ll bring Chaos with me and the tube rat will kick your furry butt.”

Simba put on a haughty expression and turned his head away as if he couldn’t be bothered with peasants or ferrets. Phoebe snorted. I just sat down.

“Hi, Phoebe,” I said as I reached for the coffee cup. “Thank you for the coffee. And the books.”

“You haven’t even seen them yet. How are you so sure you need to thank me for them?”

“You have never given me a useless book. A few weird ones, but never useless.”

“What was so weird?”

“That Christopher Priest book was pretty strange.”

“Oh, you haven’t seen weird if you think Priest is it.”

“Please don’t attempt to prove that to me. At least not today.”

“I just try to broaden your horizons, girl. You always reading those mystery novels. Don’t you get tired of that? It’s like reading about work.”

“No it’s not. Real detective work is never that interesting or exciting.”

She snorted again. “So you say, Miss I-Talk-to-Ghosts.”

I glanced down, a little put off and still a bit worried about her reaction to what I was going to tell her. “Usually I’d say that’s not how it works—they come to me—but in this case I have been talking to ghosts. A couple of them, at least.”

I glanced at Phoebe sideways to see how she was taking it. She was staring at me and nibbling on her lip. “Do you truly?” she whispered. “The things that happened, they seemed like . . . just bad people doing bad things.”

“Do you remember when Mark died?”

“I’ll never forget that.”

“That experiment was all about creating a ghost. Which they did.”

“It was a fake ghost.”

This had become so ordinary to me over time that explaining it was hard. Getting my understanding of the what and why of the Grey, ghosts, and monsters into the air on a stream of words was like trying to sculpt smoke. “The ghost existed, even if it wasn’t the revenant of a human who’d really lived. What we call ghosts aren’t always the lingering spirits of people. Some of them are more like a memory that won’t fade or a habit that’s so much a part of a place that it keeps on repeating even when the people who performed it are gone. And some are things we make out of our own minds.”

“You mean they’re our imagination.”

“Not quite that. More like the animation of things we believe.”

“If that’s the truth, then why don’t we see angels and devils all the time?”

I looked her in the eye. “Do you really believe in imps from hell who cause all our misfortunes, who torment and tease us constantly? Or do you only want to? To have something to blame. Do you believe an angel stands watch over you night and day, to guide you through life, even when things go to hell in a handbasket?”

Phoebe bit her lip again. “I did when I was a child. I believed in all the spirits, devils, and angels Poppy told me about. I told you about the duppy, remember?”

“I do. But now . . . ?”

“I don’t.”

“Why not?”

“I never saw them. And why didn’t I? You say I just need to believe—”

“That’s not quite what I said. It’s not just the things you accept and it’s not just you. And even when the idea has form, it may not be revealed, or it may not come to us in a way we can see or understand. Some things that we believe are, when we face them, too horrible or too awesome or too large to take in. And so we just don’t see them. Most of us adults filter them out so we can keep on going ahead with our lives without losing our minds. Can you imagine the impact—the disorienting mental shock—of actually seeing God or an angel in our world full of science and machines and humans who believe bone-deep in self-determination? We may claim something is fate or destiny, but we almost never truly believe it—not Americans. If we did, how could we run around feeling so . . . guilty all the time? If we didn’t believe that we caused the worst things that happen to us and our world—that it’s all our fault—we couldn’t also believe that we could fix it. We’re so arrogant, so filled with hubris that if there were any gods still paying any attention to us, they’d have to wipe us out like so many fleas for our presumption. We have to believe that we are ultimately in control of the earth, of our destinies, of our lives, and that makes it very hard for any god to speak to us. It’s a little easier for ghosts—we only have to remember them or something of them.”

Phoebe sat still, watching me and thinking, the energy around her flaring and shifting. This idea I’d just planted in her mind made her mad and sad and thrilled and it made her curious and frightened all at once, to judge by the colors that burned and sparked around her. I wondered which emotion was going to win.

Simba screeched and whipped himself into a puff-furred arch, batting at something on the floor. Phoebe and I both jerked out of our fugue to stare at him.

One of the other cats was crouched on the carpet in front of the dictionary with a guilty paw in the air. Simba swiped at it, issuing a guttural, gurgling moan. Then he spun around and crouched to leap away, but the attempt was ruined by the sudden pounce of his adversary.

Simba shook the other cat off and turned back around to slap the miscreant on the head. Then he gave a snarky-sounding yawp and bounded away to the top of the fake fireplace, nudging a small gargoyle so it rocked for a moment on its chipped base. The other cat hopped onto the vacated dictionary and huddled into a self-satisfied loaf, with its tail wrapped around its feet and a tiny cat smile on its furry face.

Phoebe sighed. “Troublemaker.” Then she looked at me, quirking her head to the side and studying me as if I’d suddenly changed in front of her eyes.

“What’s that on your cheek?” she asked.

I was puzzled and frowned over her question. “My cheek . . . ?”

She pointed at the same bit of my face that the woman at the Chinese deli had. “You got a scratch or something. You been in a scrap?”

“No,” I said, shoving my hair back. “It’s something a ghost wrote on me today. Can you read it? I can’t.”

She was taken aback and gasped a little before she leaned in and stared at the curling letters on my skin. “It’s so fancy. . . . It looks like a tattoo, but I know you better than that.”

“You don’t think I’d get a tattoo?”

“I know you wouldn’t—you don’t like to be noticed. Don’t get a lot more noticeable than tattoos on the face.”

“Oh, I don’t know. I could pierce my nose. . . .”

She gave me a mocking slap on the arm. “Oh, girl! You would look like a skinny rhino!”

“Why? My nose isn’t big.”

“No, but on you a pierced nose would stand out like a big ol’ horn. You got that kind of face that says ‘You don’t really see me’ to everyone.”

“Bland.”

“White. You are so white, girl.”

I looked down at my hands, the marks of the dermographia fading to pale pink scratches. “White. Like bread. Like a mid-America, middle-class, WASP. Which I am.”

“That’s not what I meant at all.”

“But that’s what I mean. That’s what I want people to see. Most of the time. Someone nearly invisible—someone unremarkable.”

“Then it’s a good thing most of them never get to know you, because you are remarkable. I remark on you all the time!”

I tried on my Phoebe imitation—which is to say a terrible phony Jamaican accent. “Dat Harper, she nothing but trouble, dat girl!”

I got another smack on the arm for it, which I deserved, but it came with a smile and a laugh. “Stop that! We all be trouble—ain’t nobody in my family boring.”