Her Ghosts

“Dead Files, history can’t resuscitate them, so we organize their carcasses by binder color in the attic.”

Her boss sat opposite the notetaker and adjacent to the Chancery court deputy clerk, Midge, and reiterated endings under the state’s codex like the notetaker imagined his ancestors recited the King James, mild and Irish, filled with preacherly impulses for handling humanity’s limitations through small-tucked eliminations of personal responsibility. Wisdom, but on retainer.

“The county archives… where everyone’s afraid of their cobwebs,” Midge laughed, bringing the ballpoint pen back to her lips. “We’ve had that problem with commitments lately. The advocates come in asking for things from ‘69 and we’re embarrassed and scared. They found something once and my hair stood on end.”

“What do you do with a cause you can’t stand?” he said. The navy made him look like a rare, winter bird. “The money isn’t in asylums and the patient’s the deranged lapdog no one really wants to pet, but longs to fight for.”

“They act like taking madness to court’s a hobby.” Midge moved her waist, shifting with satisfaction in the chair. Coded gossip was Tuesday morning foreplay for these people.

“Passing fancies end up wives,” he said, “mental health can be a hobby if the glory’s bound by gavels. As long as there’s progress, intention’s open to debate.”

The notetaker looked at him again and remembered the inkstain on the inside of her father’s cuff sleeve. Years ago, but the blue blot felt like a little death. They’d found the 2000 Harry Potter video game quietly sitting on top of the unused ballots last week and she’d laughed, bestseller magic and circuit court proceedings were an unlikely mix, had said something about voting towards better timelines. Would Second Covid buffer us towards world narratives suited for comfortable childhoods once again? The attic held several deaths and the previous violences coated the walls like fingerpaints. Their guide made a big deal about the execution square painted in red outline on the third floor. She’d swiped her toe across the closest line. Old death and the baggy quality of misused air.

Later in the car, the notetaker thought about the ways she’d failed him that day, how he’d withdrawn from any further lunch intimacies with a blue stare. They’d found lunch after Chancery because it was a short travel day and their list of county officials was small like the city’s limits. Square footage mattered in government, and authority sat unfairly on wealth. She’d fawn-freeze and become a child in a blazer when he did this. Say something stupid, always, sip of Diet Coke and remain alive for the next fifteen minutes of blue plate lunch. The genius of this punishment felt like a miracle, and she studied him during his sessions with the entities for clues, making mental tracings like squamous trapezoids between the margin lines of her notepad, asking, only, where the power rested. Her cursive felt guilty, and the Adderall in her work bag sang to her during these moments of blurry inquiry. Circumlocutions, drawing listener nearer towards suicide mission of upsetting the fine balance of context-dependent ask-answer-anecdote? Hypnosis? The kind done in daylight. A hell of a pitch.

The dark draw of the job led to religious fervors on her lunch breaks, and between visits to the ladies room and checking Instagram compulsively, she watched the shadows of the old office blinds travel the blue walls and felt government’s heavy presence against the back of the computer chair. He was old-school and cut air between himself and his employees with sweet, respectful calculations. One afternoon when she’d finished sleeping with the Excel, she googled herself and vomited into her empty coffee mug. The job was making her sick.

Government took sips of Folgers against the law from 10 am until noon and thought of God on the interstate, and she was afraid of him as man and master.

She read about “The Devil’s Grip” on Wikipedia in the bathtub that evening and felt the lurch of illness in her left rib, wondering if her disease was genie. She imagined Aladdin’s and wondered if her pain was bright blue and felt helpless against the desire to conflate her condition with Disney metaphor. Cartooning the wound made things palatable. She was in her late twenties and memes made her trigger-happy for substituting nostalgic symbolism for semblances of the painful close analysis it took to integrate realism into her daily living conditions: Hell, but on a mostly quiet tier, maybe a fiery palm tree or two. The pain maintained a silky form that felt more like trickery than bonafide medical emergency. The thing could decamp from abdomen to back left lung on a moment’s notice and wind like electricity in the tight fissure of nerves cuddling her middle spine. It grew, sometimes, and she had the preternatural sense that it took form within her, had, if not proper consciousness, then instinct, paralleling her thoughts so adroitly that she felt a little trolled.

She’d missed a call from the universe that evening from her old college area code–stepping into the kitchen to pour more wine, and with uncertainty that she shouldn’t be moving, she went anyways, as all addicts do, towards sanctification of her sins via the blush red of gulping. The willow-fuzz of notification led her to believe she was participating in some tired hallucination brought on by the day’s grief and failure, that her eyes weren’t her own, borrowed, perhaps. She couldn’t see it straight. It was there under water and embedded shallowly beneath pixel.

There was a hole in her head. She’d gone looking for self-acceptance and it was silvery blue.

The notification disappeared upon swipe. Maybe she’d finally fallen asleep in the bathtub and she was viewing these from some separate spiritual entrance. Her alcoholic actions were playing adjacent to her resting body like a psychic phonograph, and she itched for another chance at the last five years. The day felt like a sudden nervous loss.

On the way to Best Buy and in light of the Sunday communion she’d forced on herself: baked fish, a shot of wine, the absolution of the small chapel email she used in lieu of physical church-going, she passed a man on the highway and saw something that scared her. She was nosy with her highway glances, and driver’s lives were attractive preludes for her unhealthy fantasies. The quality of the living body in the bent steel so harrowed by the weight of waking up. It hurt being so alone. Sitting straight or leaning left, the wheels blind as donkeys and the glass built around them established order in the arena of the close interior of consoles. She’d expected a family man when she looked over but saw white static only, no face, just a vaporwave rendition of artist’s profile, a blueprint of a humanoid form with the air around it shot through with wormy threads of light so unsayably crucial that it lanced the words off her tongue. Looked like little trillings, little, long dumps from something too ethereal to breathe properly on this prison planet.

God’s in a truck.

He directs ordinances and sits humble-proud on the sublime (leather, not cheap) and the only angel next to him is the lukewarm beauty of his wife with eyes like the elegant outdoor cat you wish you’d gotten to know better. She felt better about the TV after that and sped up, passing divinity at the mile-marker, MPH: 55. It made her nervous being this close to something better than her. Little trauma ghost twirling her gum and reading comics in the backseat of her Honda. She looked behind her out of respect for the college girl who’d stayed near the bathtub all evening. She was holding Zoloft in her cheeks. Eaten like jellybeans, the disease felt manageable. In Best Buy, she’d look for the Harry Potter deluxe edition and buy it in honor of being fired. The car was dark and she wished she was drunk.