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“Bring the head for Theeb. Bring the head for Theeb.” The Squirrel People chanted.
From another passage an iguana-headed fellow in a tricorner hat and a squirrel girl in a pink ball gown emerged carrying a silver tray between them. On it was the raggedly severed head of a calico cat.
“Bring the head for Theeb,” they chanted.
Charlie backed into his chamber. How were they chanting? Sure, some of them were still making the clicking noises, the growls, the hisses he was used to, but some were chanting. They had voices.
He crouched and backed away until he was out of sight of the amphitheater, then he turned and scurried out of the city under the porch.
6
Ghosts of the Bridge
A great regret of ghosts lingered on the Golden Gate Bridge. Mad as bedbugs, they slid down the cables, swam in the roadway, hung
off the upright lines, whipped in the wind like tattered battle flags, dangled their feet off the anchor piers, and called into the dreams of sleeping sailors as their ships passed through the Gate. Mostly they napped, curled up in the heavy steel towers, entwined together in the cables like impassioned earthworms, tucked under an asphalt blanket snoring into the treads of a million tires a day. They drifted along the walkways, spun and buffeted by passersby, wafting along like tumbleweeds, rebounding at the shore to bounce back the other way, waves of spirits, a tide of sleeping souls, dozing until awakened by human anguish in their midst. They could sense a jumper on the bridge and gathered around to watch, to curse, to encourage, to haunt, taunt, and gibe, which is how the ghost of Concepción Argüello came to find Mike Sullivan, the bridge painter, that day.
“Oh, pardon me,” she’d said. “It appears I have upset you. Of course, you need time to adjust. We’ll talk another time.”
She disappeared back into the steel of the tower, leaving Mike breathless and deeply, deeply freaked out. Still, when his supervisor called him down to be debriefed by the highway patrol and the captain of the bridge, Mike didn’t mention the ghost, and he declined the counseling they offered. He’d done the best he could, they said, considering the circumstances. Most of the time, someone who was thinking about jumping just needed someone to say something—someone to notice them, pull them out of the vortex of despair forming in their own mind. The state patrolmen who worked the bridge on bicycles were all trained to look for and engage anyone who was alone, looking pensive, crying at the rail, and they had a great record for bringing people back from the edge, getting them to snap back into the world with just a word of kind concern. He’d done fine, he’d be fine, just take the rest of the day off, regroup, they’d told him.
Mike had taken the rest of the day off, and he had rested, but unfortunately, he had also shared his tale of the ghost in the beam with his girlfriend of fourteen months, Melody, who first suggested that he might have had a ministroke, because that had happened to a guy on the Internet. When he insisted that no, he had seen and heard what he had seen and heard, she responded that he needed to see a shrink, that he was emotionally unavailable, and furthermore, there were much hotter guys than him at the gym who wanted to sleep with her and she had known deep down that there was something wrong with him and that’s why she’d never given up her apartment. He agreed that she was probably right about those things and that she would probably be better off if she slept with the hotter guys at the gym. He’d lost a girlfriend, but he’d gained a drawer in his dresser, a third of the clothes rod in his closet, and all three shampoo shelves in his shower, so he really wasn’t all that broken up about the breakup. Once she was gone, he realized that he didn’t feel any more alone than he had when she had been in the room with him, and he was a little sad that he didn’t feel sadder. All in all, it had been a productive day off.
He’d been back at work for a week and was hanging in the framework under the roadway when the ghost came to him again.
“You know,” she said softly, her voice reaching him before she appeared, sitting on the beam above his head, “when they were building the bridge they strung a safety net under it.”
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Mike caught his safety lines and tugged them to make sure they were both secure before he reacted. “Holy shit,” he said.
“When a workman would fall, and he was caught by the net, he was said to have joined the ‘Halfway to Hell’ club. I think I am also in that club.”
She had an accent but not much of one, and this time she wore a black dress with a wide lace collar. Her hair was pinned back into a bun, and again, there was a flower in her hair. He didn’t know what to say, but he had been preparing himself for her to reappear, just so he wouldn’t be surprised in a bad spot and end up tumbling off the bridge to his death. Hallucination or not, he’d resolved to be prepared. He said, “There’s seagull shit all over these beams. You’re going to mess up your dress.”
“Ah, you are so gallant, but I am beyond the reach of huano de la gaviota.”
“You are Spanish, then?”
“I was born on Spanish soil, yes, right there at the Presidio, in 1792.” She pointed a delicate finger toward the San Francisco shore and the fort beyond it. “I beg your pardon, I am Concepción Argüella. My father was the governor of Alta California, commandante of the El Presidio Real de San Francisco.”
“Pleased to make your acquaintance,” Mike said. He didn’t reach out to shake her hand, or even to kiss it (that seemed like what he should do, her being so formal and everything), but he was hanging two hundred feet over the water, and she was a good twelve feet away, and if she floated over to him, he thought he might completely lose his mind, so he sort of bowed—nodded, really. “I’m Mike Sullivan, I paint the bridge.”
“Ah, I would have guessed that from your bucket of paint and your dashing coveralls,” said the ghost. “May I thank you for keeping our bridge looking beautiful? We all very much appreciate it, Señor Sullivan.”
“We?” Mike said. He was still trying on the idea of talking to a ghost; he wasn’t ready to be gang-haunted.
“There are many here on the bridge.”
“Why?” Mike asked.
“It is a place between places, and so are we, between places.”
“No,” said Mike. “Why are you here?”
She sighed, a light and ghostly sigh that was lost in the wind, and she told him.
Although I had never set foot in Spain, I was very much raised as an aristocratic Spanish lady—California was Spanish land then. I lived in the grand governor’s house in the Presidio, and my mother saw to it that I was dressed in the finest fabrics and latest fashions from Madrid. I was educated in letters by the friars and nuns of the Mission, and in the ways of the world by my mother, which is to say, despite our station in the wildest reaches of the Spanish empire, I was sheltered. I spent most of my life in our house and the gardens around it, surrounded by soldiers and priests, never venturing into the settlement of Yerba Buena. But then, when I was fifteen, there came through the Golden Gate a Russian ship, their chief officer, Count Nikolai Rezanov, seeking supplies for the Russian colony of Sitka far to the north, which was starving.
