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Smells Like Almonds
By Garik Charneco
The soft crunch of the wind pant’s nylon shell comes in between my gasps for air. The old fleece sweater I have on wicks up my sweat and when my skin hits the wet fabric, I remember how alive I am. Someone once remarked about how depressing my job was and she was surprised I just didn’t crawl into a bottle after every client. A haze of alcohol could take the edge off work, but it didn’t get my adrenaline oozing or make my skin a gentle firelight red, like jogging. Alcohol would just lull me, dull my senses and make me feel like the ghosts I treat.
I take a gentle curve into the new cookie cutter home development that lines the old country road I jog. The cream-colored duplex houses break the former wood lots in neat square parcels. Trampolines, swimming pools, and blacktop dominate where there used to stand gnarled swamp white oaks. The only thing wild left in the area is the deer and the screaming children that tumble on manicured lawns. I run past house after identical house knowing there are no ghosts in them. They are too new and free of swallowed marbles, wine-painkiller cocktails, and faulty furnaces. I give it time and soon some guy will come back from the office early and find his wife with the neighbor’s Mexican gardener or some teen will freebase a little bit too much.
Running through the neighborhood I wonder if anyone will recognize me. My commercial ran this morning, right after the farm report and the early news. I hope I don’t get a prank call today. I get a lot of pranks from people who think wasting my time and my generous offer of a free estimate is funny. They call me for a ghost and when I open the attic, closet, or wherever they say creepy noises are coming from, I find an old dressmaking mannequin with a white sheet thrown over it. They listen, feigning interest, while I go on about Kirlian photography, time slips, and shamanistic shape shifting. Then the tape recorder they hid behind the couch skips.
I take another soft, gentle bend and look straight on, ignoring the bay windows, porch swings, and shingled roofs. At the edge of the neighborhood, my cell phone rings, breaking my stride. The adrenaline in me stops rushing and my legs begin to ache. On the phone, Mariela from Blue Iris screams at me, demanding I come downtown. I ask for an hour and then I hear a dish crash in the background. She says, “Thirty minutes, Fort.”
* * *
The cold blast of the Blue Iris Café’s air conditioner smacks me. My hair, still wet from a quick shower, feels icy and overexposed. The coffee shop appears busy and I wonder whether Mariela was just panicking. If Roger was really acting up, then the place would be abandoned, but this looks like the usual lazy Saturday lunch crowd. Patrons still curl up in the plush lounge chairs, reading paper backs and sipping at lattes. A couple slices off pieces of tiramisu and feeds it to each other in slow dainty dollops of espresso soaked cake. Over the speakers, chanting choral music plays, and while it seems out of character with Mariela’s intended Indie, up-scale, trendy atmosphere I dismiss the music choice as a phase.
Even over the choral music and hiss of the coffee machine I hear my name ring out from the back of the shop. “There you are! Fort!”
Mariela does not come over to me, but instead angrily waves me over to the back. Her overalls are stained brown and a patch of sweat expands out from the neck of her tank top. Her long, black, curly hair shines from a mix of sweat, steam and grease. I walk over to her and when I get close she grabs me by the hand and leads me into a corner, where she pins me against a stack of soda can flats and begins questioning me. Mariela speaks in hushed whispers, but her hazelnut eyes cut into me, and I droop my head. “Damn it, Fort,” she says. “I thought you said you got rid of that thing.” She points up at the ceiling and waves her hand, motioning to the entire space of the coffee shop. She pulls my head up and says, “Look at me, damn it! That thing is scaring away my customers!”
I look into her eyes and she reminds me of that roadside wraith I treated last week, angry and betrayed. “Mariela,” I start, with the soothing voice I use with ghosts. “I don’t get rid of them. I treat them, get them to cope, deal with their condition…”
She cuts me off. “Well, you failed because today he just starts moaning and moaning! He smashed a set of dishes and fired a jet of hot water at one of my employees; I lost all my morning regulars. They went to the gas station for coffee!” She rubs at her eyes and groans. “That kid has been too much of a pain. First he dies in the middle of the store and even when dead he steals money from the tip jar and moans on and on.”
I pry her fisted fingers from my chest and let her hand fall to the side. “It wasn’t his fault. He didn’t know he was allergic to the almonds in that biscotti. Both his parents are lawyers, you know? They could have sued and then…”
Mariela grabs both my hands and cups them inside her own sweaty hands. She holds them up so both hands stand in the air in a spidery grip. Her hands are strong and I feel uncomfortable. She swings our hands from side to side with every one of her words. “Fort, I have customers drinking gas station coffee and employees threatening to call OSHA because of this thing. Fucking OSHA! Deal with it.”
I look up at the ceiling, my hands still in her vise. “I don’t hear anything.”
She breaks the hold and flings her arms upward. “Jesus,” she screams, and the tiramisu couple stares at her, odd and concerned. Mariela blushes and hunches down behind the soda flats. “You think I’m making this all up? I have this chamber music on because it drowns out his moans and groans. If I turn it off or switch to the usual music, we’ll hear him.”
Mariela pulls me to the center of the hallway and starts pushing me even further back. We pass the kitchen and a store room, until we’re at the grimy back door. She opens the door and light begins to creep in through the crack. “I’ll try to talk to him, Mariela, but you know my policy. Ghosts don’t work with guarantees.”
I feel my heel lean over the threshold and wiggle over the gap. Mariela begins to ease me down, into the alley. “And I don’t work with empty promises. I’m a business woman and I didn’t make this coffee shop out of broken promises and shoddy jobs! I paid good money for you and now he comes back! Unacceptable! I thought I stopped dealing with hustlers and liars when I left El Salvador.” The door is wide open and the heat from the outside feels strange with the icy air of the café. “Go out there, talk to him, and get rid of him. If he isn’t gone then I am going to call that psychic lady from daytime TV to blast him out!”
I step down and walk backwards, into the alley. Mariela shuts the door. Standing there, all alone, worrying about losing this job to Mystic Delvar, I cup my hands around my mouth and begin to call, “Roger! Roger!”
* * *
Roger is not a mean guy; he’s a simple guy. He didn’t deserve to die of anaphylactic shock, right in the middle of Blue Iris, with his throat doubling over and his face buried in his accounting textbook. When he was alive, Roger worked Thursday nights at the soup kitchen, said his prayers, and kept a 3.4 GPA. When he was alive, he just needed a nice Catholic girl to go to his parent’s house for dinner every Friday night. I keep calling out for him, alternating my calls between long coos and sharp pleas. I hear a clang, metal against metal, and the ladder of a fire escape slides down, slamming upright into the ground. I swivel around, and through the sun I see Roger drop down, swaying from side to side like a falling leaf
Ghosts like Roger, those that just never loved or were never loved, aren’t very tangible. Unlike angry wraiths or endless apparitions, Roger is just above a poltergeist in the visibility department. He comes through in wispy flickers, undulating as one unit, like a swarm of insects. His voice comes out in pieces, in a sort of ghost Morse code that starts with one word, pauses, and then says another. Roger touches the ground and tells me, in a broken slur, “Hello, Fort.”
I whip out my notepad, just to humor him. My head begins to ache, pain brought on by annoyance. Roger would not be in this situation if he ever had said, “I love you.” His post-partum depression and permanent residence on this astral plane stem from deep issues with his parents and with loneliness. I look at him and say, “Roger. How are you? I hear that you have been causing some trouble? What is up?”
He swirls up and hovers over me. “I saw McKenzie today!” His words trail off and his pauses are long and stifled. “Saw her wrapped around some huge meathead in the shop today.”
I look at some of my older notes, again to humor him, because I know who McKenzie is. We can’t have a talk without him mentioning her or her sea-foam green eyes, dirty red hair, Roman nose, or pout-perfect lips. “We have talked about this before, Roger. She wasn’t yours.” He never even talked to her.
“But I sat behind her in class for an entire semester. I know how many freckles are on the back of her neck. She smiled at me once.”
I have all of this in my notebook, written in smudged blue ink. My headache grows sharper and Roger complains about the guy McKenzie was with. If it weren’t for his speaking impediment, his words would machine guy across the alley in angry, whiny bits. I rub my pupils and try to block out Roger. He has no new developments and Mariela hasn’t done anything to anger him. Roger had a relapse and wants attention. I can see this even after just one question. Fuck, a sixteen-year-old girl reading Cosmo can recognize Roger’s wailing need for comfort. He complains about feeling unwanted and even betrayed. Even though Roger no longer has any senses, he says that he is in pain and his heart broken.
The headache begins to chip away at my temples. I want to grab on to Roger and somehow give him this headache, make him remember how it really feels to be alive. I bury my face in my hands and he notices me, trying to ignore him. Roger clicks his lips and the words come out slow enough that he sounds pretentious. “Are you even listening to me, Fort? Did Mariela get you out here just to distract me?” The clouds around what would be his head thicken like a thunder head and flicker in rapid saccades of light. For the first time in this conversation he is thinking, but I worry about what. “Is McKenzie in there? Did you just get rid of me so she can come back with that meathead and get some spanakopita or mochacinno? Are you here so Mariela can make a sale!?” His body twirls around and wisps of clouds slither like tethered rags. I have seen blood pouring from showerheads, computers type out phantom messages, and a rag doll in Key West scurry across a room. Roger does not scare me, but he exacerbates my headache till it pounds like the souls trapped in the scraped metal of the Kursk. For the first time ever in the presence of a ghost, I scream. The noise sounds loud, but angry enough that it carries no fear.
Roger stops his fit and he hovers in the air, straight up like a pillar of air. He says, “Woah.”
I’m not sorry and I go off on Roger. “God! We have been though this a dozen times! McKenzie was never yours and she never knew you. She can date anyone she wants because she has that right, she’s alive!” I push my eyeballs deep into their sockets, trying to shoo away the pressure on my head. “And you need to leave this coffee shop. You’re not a specific haunting, so any attachment is entirely in your head.” I lean up against the wall and slide down the hot bricks. I use my free hand to wave at Roger, telling him, “If you stay, then Mariela is going to bring in Mystic Delvar and then you’re gone. She’ll blast you with psychic energy, and then who knows?” I shrug my shoulders. “She is the real deal, but whether you just dissipate or end up in limbo, I can’t say.”
I still have my eyes closed, but my head feels better. A tiny breeze of hits my side and Roger hovers over to my side. “You mean that psychic lady on TV? She is real?”
I nod, laughing. “Of course. Come on, I am talking to you, a ghost. How can Mystic Delvar be any different?”
“What would I do, Fort? Like you just said, I’m a ghost.”
I think I have a moment with Roger and he snatches it away with his whining. I take my hand away from my face and look up at the sky. The view is blocked by the grates of fire escapes and the verdant leaves of the plants on the terraces. “Roger,” I tell him. “You’re a spirit. You can fly. Go somewhere. Get a map and just find some isolated island and live there. Go haunt a theme park or something. Go back to the college and haunt your old dorm room for all I care, but not this place.”
The air around me rises up and I lay eyes on Roger. The vapor around him no longer undulates, but wafts in the alley. “Psychic blasts? Maybe I will leave then. Go see McKenzie”
I look away from him and stare at the pavement on the alley. “Good. Just leave and try to stay calm.” I reach my hand over, but Roger is above me. All my previous experience with him and I still struggle to find his eyes.
Roger keeps floating up and begins to meld into the broken sky. “Thanks for the help,” he says, when he is just wisp. He completely disappears, but his presence still lingers, like a hangover on a Sunday morning. “I still feel like shit,” he announces and then the presence is gone.
I’m alone in the alley and then Mariela comes through the back door. Her arrival feels all too convenient and I bet she was listening in, hearing me and Roger. She carries an empty cardboard box with its sides adorned with dancing bananas and smiling Clementine oranges.
“You done,” she asks, her finger nails gripping into the wax-covered sides of the box.
I pull myself from off the alley floor. Dusting my self off I tell her, “We talked and I think he is gone for good. Decided to go on a vacation.”
Mariela curls her lip and twitches her nose, getting ready for a question. “The ghost? A vacation?” She chucks the box into the dumpster and starts laughing a deep and hot Salvadorian laugh, filled with life. “That is crazy, but is he really gone?”
I nod and raise my hand, flicking my wrist and twirling my fingers, so that they make this starburst motion. “Gone,” I point at the sky. “Poof! Gone for good.”
Mariela pulls a rag out from the front pocket of her overalls. She starts to wipe her fingers clean, shucking off brown coffee dust from her fingers. “Well, I guess thanks are in order.” She comes over to me and grabs my hands again, but this time puts them up to my chest. She pushes the hunk of flesh into my chest, rubbing the flat of my sternum. Mariela brings her face to mine and we are inches away from each other. For a second I think she is going to kiss me. Her breath comes across steamy and smelling of Arabica. “But only if he never comes back. I’ll call you in a few days.” Then she breaks the hold and pushes me away. I slide back a bit and watch her laugh, booming with delight. Her business is saved, but my headache remains.
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*Except for that godforsake Chucky doll in the Child's Play movies. Hate the little bastard and all his sequels. Dolls and any sort of toy that comes to life for the sole purpose of killing eqauls terrifying.
