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“The people that nobody paid for, he would put all of us, all our jars and boxes and dolls on the TV and make us change what the TV people said. We made them say bad prayers.”
The phone rang again, and Amelia’s voice out of the answering machine speaker said, “Sheesh” and broke right in. “What, what?”
“I’ve got a message for Terry Torrez,” said a woman’s voice, “make sure he gets it, write this number down!” The woman recited a number, which Torrez automatically memorized. “My husband is in an alarm clock, but he’s fading; I don’t hardly dream about him even with the clock under the pillow anymore, and the mint patties, it’s like a year he takes to even get halfway through one! He needs a booster shot, tell Terry Torrez that, and I’ll pay a thousand dollars for it.”
/> I’ll want more than a thousand, Torrez thought, and she’ll pay more, too. Booster shot! The only way to boost a fading ghost—and they all faded sooner or later—was to add to the container a second ghost, the ghost of a newly deceased infant, which would have vitality but no personality to interfere with the original ghost.
Torrez had done that a few times, and—though these were only ghosts, not souls, not actual people!—it had always felt like putting feeder mice into an aquarium with an old, blind snake.
“That’ll buy a lot of Sugar Babies,” remarked Amelia’s ghost.
“What? Just make sure he gets the message!”
The phone clicked off, and Amelia said, “I remember the number.”
“So do I.”
Midwives sold newborn ghosts. The thought of looking one of them up nauseated him.
“Mom’s dead,” said Amelia.
Torrez opened his mouth, then just exhaled. He took a sip of Amelia’s rum and said, “She is?”
“Sure. We all know, when someone is. I guess they figured you wouldn’t bleed for her, if you wouldn’t bleed for me. Sugar Babies are better than Reese’s Pieces.”
“Right, you said.”
“Can I have her rings? They’d fit on my head like crowns.”
“I don’t know what became of her,” he said. It’s true, he realized, I don’t. I don’t even know what there was of her.
He looked at the doll and wondered why anyone kept such things.
His own Bible, on the mantel in the living room workshop, was relatively intact, though of course it was warped from having been soaked in holy water. He had burned out half a dozen verses from the Old Testament that had to do with witchcraft and wizards; and he had thought about excising “thou shalt not kill” from Exodus, but decided that if the commandment was gone, his career might be too.
After he had refused to ransom Amelia’s ghost, he had cut out Ezekiel 44:25—”And they shall come at no dead person to defile themselves: but for father, or for mother, or for son, or for daughter, for brother, or for sister that hath had no husband, they may defile themselves.”
He had refused to defile himself—defile himself any further, at least—for his own dead daughter. And so she had wound up helping to voice “bad prayers” out of a TV set somewhere.
The phone rang again, and this time he snatched up the receiver before the answering machine could come on. “Yes?”
“Mr. Torrez,” said a man’s voice. “I have a beaker of silence here, she’s twelve years old and she’s not in any jar or bottle.”
“Her father has been here,” Torrez said.
“I’d rather have the beaker that’s you. For all her virtues, her soul’s a bit thin still, and noises would get through.”
Torrez remembered stories he’d heard about clairvoyants driven to insanity by the constant din of thoughts.
“My daddy doesn’t play that anymore,” said Amelia. “He has me back now.” Torrez remembered Humberto’s wave this morning. Torrez had waved back.
Torrez looked into the living room, at the current Bible in the burning rack, and at the books he still kept on a shelf over the cold fireplace—paperbacks, hardcovers with gold-stamped titles, books in battered dust-jackets. He had found—what?—a connection with other people’s lives, in them, which since the age of eighteen he had not been able to have in any other way. But these days their pages might as well all be blank. When he occasionally pulled one down and opened it, squinting through his magnifying glass to be able to see the print clearly, he could understand individual words but the sentences didn’t cohere anymore.
She’s like me.
I wonder if I could have found my way back, if I’d tried. I could tell her father to ask her to try.
“Bring the girl to where we meet,” Torrez said. He leaned against the kitchen counter. In spite of his resolve, he was dizzy. “I’ll have her parents with me to drive her away.”
