A Void Wrapped in a Smile

T.A. Pratt

I

 

Just before Naomi Kindler died, she told her younger brother Joshua, “It’s like you’re nothing but a void wrapped in a smile.” It was a terrible thing to say, though it was also true, at least some of the time.

In Naomi’s defense, she said many nicer things to her brother later, after she was dead.

 

 

II

 

Joshua Kindler came into his powers when he hit puberty. Before that, he was just a boy, though not quite an ordinary boy; an unusually beautiful boy. Beauty is no benefit in middle school, and his long lashes, high cheekbones, and large, expressive eyes made him a target for beatings and taunts rather than an object of desire.

When the change came, he was twelve years old, and he didn’t understand his own powers at first. One day, the teasing and taunting and bullying simply stopped — he was, for whatever reason, no longer perceived as a target, and was permitted to eat his lunch alone in a corner of the cafeteria without being bothered. A week later, when he walked down the hallways at school, heads turned to follow him as students and teachers alike watched his passage. After ascertaining that he didn’t have boogers wiped on his clothes or a sign reading “FAG” stuck to his back, he was unable to fathom why everyone was staring at him, and hurried to his next class.

That day at lunch, people — cheerleaders, jocks, band geeks, smokers, brains, drama kids, indefinable untouchables — drifted in his direction, some of them even sitting at his table, though they didn’t speak to him, and he caught boys and girls both stealing glances at him.

Paranoia was his reasonable reaction, especially since his family didn’t treat him any differently. His sister Naomi, from the rarefied heights of tenth grade, continued to tolerate him with an air of put-upon martyrdom, and his parents — both college professors so engaged in the life of the mind that they seemed to find bodily needs like sleep and eating inconveniences — were as absentmindedly fond as ever. Joshua assumed he was the victim of a plot: a vast school-wide conspiracy to humiliate him. But the humiliation never came. People who’d once ignored him, or, worse, paid vicious attention to him, now fought for the chance to sit beside him on the bus, but all they did was make awkward small talk or (if they were girls) tell him his hair looked really nice, or complimented his absolutely ordinary shoes or jacket. Even the teachers occasionally broke off in mid-sentence during their lessons to stare at him, either frowning or smiling dreamily; he couldn’t decide which expression was more disturbing.

The smartest kids in school offered to help him with his homework, by which they meant, do his home work, but it wasn’t necessary. By the last two months of school he was getting straight A’s, even when he deliberately put the wrong answers, and three of the most popular and prettiest girls at school had, at different times, pressed him against lockers or walls to kiss him, stare into his eyes for a moment, and then run away. (One of them, an eighth grader, had even pursued him into the boy’s bathroom and caught him there for a kiss — fortunately before he started peeing.)

Joshua decided he’d had a wish granted, and it wasn’t even a wish he remembered making. Everyone loved him — except his family. They loved him, he knew, but only as they always had, not with the same hunger, devotion, and eagerness to please exhibited by strangers. For the first time in his life, he dreaded the end of the school year, because it would mean spending summer home with his sister and his mom, who was on sabbatical researching her next book, a pop science title in which she would posthumously diagnose various figures from myth and history with mental illnesses. (Most of the really famous successful ones seemed to have something called Narcissistic Personality Disorder.)

The problem was: at home, Joshua was still expected to take out the trash, help clear the dishes, mow the lawn, and do a thousand other tedious chores, and when he attempted to let some of the eager-to-please neighborhood kids do the chores for him, his parents intervened, more puzzled than angry, and sent the children away. They told Joshua the work was good for him, and expressed doubt when he insisted that he hadn’t offered to pay the other children anything. Life had gone from magical to tedious, and he marveled at the fact that now school was the pleasure, and vacation the slog. Was this how popular people felt? Apparently so, since he was popular, and this was exactly how he felt.

One June day, Joshua sat under a tree in the front yard, surrounded by piles of pine straw he’d raked, trying to charm a squirrel down from the branches. No matter how he wheedled and flattered, it didn’t work. Animals seemed as immune to his new powers as his own family did. He’d spent the morning reading through the giant pile of comic books he’d received as his reward for getting straight A’s that year, trying to find some precedent for his ability among the four-color superheroes, but without success. There were people who could control minds, certainly, but he wasn’t doing that. People just… loved him. It wasn’t anything he did. It was something he was.

“Hey, dorko, want to go to the pool with me?” His sister Naomi stood before him, wearing a one-piece swimsuit and shorts, carrying a bag with sunscreen and towels and snacks and water bottles. She’d gotten her driver’s license the day after she turned sixteen, and had experienced moderate success with talking their mom into letting her borrow the car occasionally.

Joshua leapt up. “Sure!” He’d never been very close to his sister, because four years’ age difference was just a little too wide, but he loved spending time with her. Naomi was essentially the female version of him, pretty and slender, but she had both a foul mouth and a big outspoken personality, which made her less of a popular kid than she might have been based on looks alone. Not that she ever seemed to care, a state of indifference which had bewildered Joshua when he was unpopular and still bewildered him now that he was worshipped.

“Well go get your trunks,” she said. “You’ve got two minutes, or else you’re walking.”

She drove him to the community pool, which was, predictably, packed. Naomi’s chief interest was lounging in the grass on a blanket out of splash-range chatting with her friends — who kept stealing looks at Joshua — and getting a little sun. After acquiring ice cream sandwiches from the little snack kiosk (given to him free, naturally), Joshua sat down and offered her one.

“Thanks,” she said, unwrapping it, and frowning at him. “Did you save somebody’s life and I didn’t hear about it? Or buy everybody in school a puppy? I keep hearing people talking about you — ‘Oh, look, Joshua’s here!’ What’s that about?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. I made a lot of new friends this year.” Ransacking his brain for a plausible explanation, he said, “You know, it’s like mom said — I just needed to come out of my shell?”

“My brother, Mr. Cool,” she said, shaking her head. She pointed her chin toward the pool. “Isn’t that your social studies teacher?”

Joshua shaded his eyes and looked across the pool. On the far side, Ms. Grove sat rubbing suntan lotion into her skin. She was wearing a relatively modest one-piece black swimsuit, but the sight of her was still enough to give Joshua a by-now-familiar tingle in his swim trunks. Melanie Grove was fresh out of teacher’s college, with honey-blonde hair and a body lovely enough to make the older male teachers stammer when they spoke to her and the older female teachers glare at her when she wasn’t looking. Her class had been a real highlight of Joshua’s sixth grade year, and not because he was interested in being a good citizen. “I guess so,” Joshua said.

“She keeps looking over here,” Naomi said. “Teachers are so weird. I guess they have to go somewhere in the summer.” She shook her head and went back to her book.

Joshua kept looking at Ms. Grove. She pulled her sunglasses down, winked at him, and smiled.

III

 

The major mistake Joshua made was referring to Ms. Grove as “Melanie.” He didn’t think anyone was suspicious before that, but Naomi jumped on it.

“Melanie, huh?” she said, pausing with her forkful of mashed potatoes halfway to her mouth. “Getting pretty friendly with your tutor, aren’t you?”

Joshua shrugged, pushing peas around on his plate with a fork. He knew there must be a way to deflect this, to keep it from becoming a big deal, but he’d always been a terrible liar, and didn’t have any particular skills at manipulation. He didn’t need them, usually, but Naomi was immune to his charms. “Uh, I mean, it’s different, going to her house and everything, it’s weird calling her Ms. Grove when we’re not in the classroom…”

“Why do you need summer tutoring anyway?” Naomi said. “You got all A’s in that class last year. Which is weird, since you think Jim Crow is a cartoon bird and the war of 1812 lasted one thousand, eight hundred and twelve years, but still.”

“I just… want to get a head start on next year,” he said.

“I think it’s nice that Joshua wants to take on extra studies at his age,” his father said, squinting at his children as if alarmed at how old they’d gotten. “Maybe he’ll be a historian like his dad.”

Naomi rolled her eyes and went back to eating, and Joshua thought the danger was past. He was wrong.

 

IV

 

When Joshua came out of Melanie’s front door, tucking in the front of his shirt and lost in a haze of memories of the immediate past, he found Naomi waiting in his mom’s car, parked right out front.

He stared, his mouth open, and Naomi beckoned to him. Joshua walked to the car, slowly. “Get in, kid,” she said.

Joshua numbly got into the passenger seat. No no no, he thought, but, of course, it was yes, yes, yes.

“I wasn’t sure,” Naomi said, putting the car in gear and driving, not toward home, but just on a meandering journey through their suburban streets. “I mean, I saw the way she looked at you at the pool that time, like you were a pork chop and she was a starving man, but I just couldn’t believe it…. Joshy, you just turned thirteen. I mean, sure, maybe you fumble around with a girl behind the gym, make it to second base, maybe even go farther, whatever. That’s fine. I was thirteen myself not so long ago, I know what it’s like — and it’s not as different for girls as you might think, those feelings. But this is a grown woman, Josh. The stuff you’re doing is illegal. For starters.”

“We didn’t do anything,” Joshua mumbled, looking down at his lap.

“She didn’t even close the blinds, bro,” Naomi said. “I saw… enough.”

Now he looked at her, a sharp lance of hate tearing through him: “Peeping in windows is against the law, too.”

“Great. Let’s both go turn ourselves in.” She sighed. “Joshua, I don’t want you to get in trouble, but she’s taking advantage of you.”

 “I like it!” he said.

“Of course you do. You’re a horny thirteen year old. But, okay, child abuse aside, she’s your teacher, so there’s a whole power imbalance there, that’s messed up, and she’s an adult, and you’re just a kid — you don’t know what you’re doing, what the consequences could be, but she does, she knows better. Joshua, I love you, and you’re usually pretty smart for a stupid kid, but you can’t consent to a sexual relationship, even if you think you can, you’re just not old enough, do you get that?”

“We’re in love,” Joshua said. Naomi stopped the car, did a three-point-turn, and started driving the other way.

“What are you doing?” he said.

“Driving to that bitch’s house,” Naomi said. “And telling her if she so much as looks at you in the hallway again, I’ll ruin her life.”

“Naomi!” Joshua wailed. “You can’t do that –”

“I have to. This has to stop, but I don’t want it to be public. You’d be… everyone would talk about you, Joshua. You don’t want that, do you?”

Of course I do, he thought.

“Or would you rather I tell Mom and Dad?” Naomi said, and just like that, Joshua started crying. It wasn’t fair, Melanie made him feel amazing things, and maybe they weren’t really in love, fine, but he was in love with the things she did for him, did to him, and for Naomi to destroy all that –

But it was better than Mom and Dad finding out.

Joshua stayed in the car while Naomi went and knocked on Melanie’s door. She went inside, and stayed there for twenty minutes. When she came back out, her face was expressionless, and she started driving home without a word.

“Well?” Joshua said. “What did she say?”

Naomi didn’t speak until the next stop light. Then said, “She told me she was planning to run away with you, Josh, and live with you in a cabin in the woods. She said you’d live on love alone. Josh… that woman is insane.”

“So what now?” Joshua said.

“What do you think?” Naomi said.

 

 

V

 

After the police got involved, Joshua’s parents pulled him out of school and started homeschooling him, “to spare him the embarrassment.” Joshua did all he could for Melanie, but while he was capable of charming individual members of the legal system, he couldn’t charm the system itself, and too many decisions were made by people who never laid eyes on Joshua. His mom destroyed all Melanie’s letters unread, and later tried to destroy the one informing them that Melanie had died, though he fished that one out of the trash, and tried to cry over it. He managed to squeeze out a few tears, but mostly, he felt hollow.

Insofar as possible, he didn’t speak to Naomi for months. One day she came to his room and sat on his bed, while he sat stiff at his desk and tried to ignore her. “I’m sorry, brother. I know you think I stole your girlfriend, but Ms. Grove was seriously disturbed. The cops found all these pictures of you in her room, not just the ones you, ah, posed for, but others she took in secret — she’d been stalking you.”

Joshua spun in his chair. “You don’t get it, do you?” he said. “Melanie didn’t choose me. I chose her. You think she’s the only person following me around, taking pictures of me? Ha. She’s the one I wanted. But now, because of you, because you told, I’m stuck here at home, I’m grounded forever, I don’t see people. At school I was a king, I was a superstar, but for some reason you and mom and dad… it doesn’t work on you.”

“What doesn’t work?”

“My powers,” Joshua said, spitting the word.

Naomi frowned. “What kind of stuff did Melanie fill your head with, Joshua? Powers? What are you talking about?”

“Everyone loves me, Naomi. They’ll do anything I’ll say. Except for my family, and they’re the ones I’m stuck with. This sucks.”

“Delusions of grandeur much?” Naomi said. “You sound like one of Mom’s research subjects.”

“I’ll prove it to you,” he said, suddenly seeing an advantage to Naomi’s immunity — she was someone he could brag to and impress in an entirely different way. “Take me to the mall. Tell Mom and Dad you want to bond with me, whatever. Take me, and I’ll show you.”

“I think you’re going stir-crazy in here, kid,” she said. “But, sure, I’ll run it by Mom and Dad.”

 

 

VI

 

At the mall, Joshua led Naomi to the best jewelry store in town. Normally people their age were glared at until the sheer force of salesperson disapproval drove them away, but an unctuous manager came over to Joshua and asked if there was anything he needed. “Pick something out, Naomi,” he said. “Your birthday’s coming up.”

She snorted. “What, you’ve been hoarding your allowance for the last five years? You still couldn’t afford this stuff.”

He shrugged. “Seriously, sis. Take your pick.”

“Okay, big spender, I’ll take the diamond-and-ruby bracelet there. It only costs as much as Mom’s car.”

Joshua smiled at the manager with the full force of his personality. He tapped the display case. “That’s a beautiful bracelet,” he said. “I’d love to have it. I’m not sure I have the money right now, but –”

“Oh, that’s all right,” the manager said, removing the bracelet from the case and putting it in a jewelry box before passing it to Joshua. “I’m sure you’re good for it.”

“Could I get a receipt though?” Joshua said. “Just in case the security guard stops us on the way out?”

“Of course, of course,” he said, hand-writing a receipt and passing it over with a flourish.

“Thank you,” Joshua said seriously. “It means a lot to me.”

The manager closed his eyes and smiled as if he’d just been blessed by the deity of his choice.

Joshua strolled out of the store, and Naomi followed him. “This is a gag, right?” she said. “It’s costume jewelry, and you planned that in advance…”

“Pick your store,” he said. “I can do this all day.” As Joshua walked, he picked up a sort of comet-trail of other shoppers, people of all ages, none pressing in too close, all respecting his space, but all obviously hoping he’d talk to them, or look at them, or even just breathe in their direction.

They hit a department store, two clothing stores, a book store, and an electronics boutique before Naomi said, “Enough!” and hustled him out to the car with their purchases… none of which had been purchased.

They got in the car. Naomi had to drive away from the parking lot, because a crowd had followed them out of the mall, but she pulled in at a nearby park and put her head on the steering wheel. “How?” she said at last. “Did you find a mystical jewel? Get bombarded by cosmic rays? How do you make people do what you want?”

“That’s the thing,” Joshua said, eager to explain. “I don’t. I don’t make them do anything. It’s not like mind control or being a puppet master or something. They just want to do nice things for me. Everybody loves me. And I don’t know how, or why. It just started happening.”

She shook her head. “You’re just a kid. This kind of power… it’s too much for you. And you’re using it to rip off people at the mall! Don’t you realize how many people are going to get fired because of what you did today? Those people stole for you, gave you stuff without paying, and I know you think you’re smart asking for receipts, but when their cash drawers come up short, they’re out of a job, or maybe even going to jail. Jesus. We have to return all this stuff, Joshua.”

“I never thought of that,” he said. “Next time, I’ll ask them to buy the stuff for me, and that way, they won’t go to jail, and nobody will notice anything.”

Naomi stared at him.

“What?” he said.

“Mom and Dad told me you’re not doing so well in home school. They’re afraid it’s their fault. But when you were in regular school, you just got A‘s for no reason, didn’t you?”

“Well, not no reason. Because the teachers love me.”

“You don’t see a problem with that?” She put the car in gear and started driving toward home. “Joshua, how are you going to learn anything if –”

“Why do I need to learn anything? I can get anything I need just by asking for it. I don’t need school anyway.”

“But you’re using people, don’t you get that? That poor teacher, Melanie, it really was your idea? I thought she was abusing you, but you were abusing her, and now she’s dead, don’t you even care?”

“That’s your fault!” he screamed. “You did that, don’t you dare blame me! If you’d just listen to me like everyone else does, none of this would ever have happened!”

“Joshua.” Naomi sped up, as if trying to get away from him, though he was right there in the car with her. “If your power worked on your family, Mom and I would want to have sex with you. Did you ever think about that? Maybe this power of yours doesn’t work on us for a good reason — it’s bad biology. I wonder if the onset of puberty has something to do with it? Mom might have some ideas, she’s good at this stuff, maybe it’s pheromones or you produce too much oxytocin or –”

“Mom?” he wailed. “You’re going to tell Mom? She’ll tell Dad! They’ll lock me up forever! I won’t have any fun!”

“Your fun is destroying lives!” she shouted back. “Maybe you deserve to be locked up in your room! What’s wrong with you, Joshua? I know kids can be selfish, but you… it’s like you’re nothing but a void wrapped in a smile. I have to tell Mom and Dad, it’s for your own good. I don’t want you to become some kind of monster.”

“No!” he yelled. “Stop, stop, stop, why can’t you listen, what’s wrong with you, why can’t you be like everyone else, stop!” He tried to pull her hands away from the steering wheel, not even thinking, his mind fixed on the future: Naomi would tell his mom and dad, they wouldn’t believe her at first but eventually they’d see the truth, they’d lock him up, maybe his mom would want to study him, and he’d never get to have sex again, he’d never get to have fun again, his life would be over –

She fought him, tried to slap his hands away, and that made him jerk on the wheel harder, and she lost control. The car swerved onto the shoulder and then off, into a ditch, tilted precariously, tipped all the way, and rolled over twice.

After a space of gray time, Joshua opened his eyes, looking up at ceiling of an ambulance.

“Kid’s amazingly lucky,” one of the paramedics, a man, was saying. “He’s a little banged up, but he’ll be okay. His sister, though… just an unlucky bounce, I guess. Broke her neck. At least she didn’t suffer.”

“As long as he didn’t suffer,” another paramedic said, this one a woman. “He’s too beautiful to suffer. If I had the chance to drive him around, I’d be a lot more careful than that stupid dead bitch. What if she’d killed him?”

“You’re right. She deserved to die for putting him in danger,” the male paramedic said. “She deserved to suffer. I’m sorry she didn’t, now that I think about it.”

Joshua closed his eyes, but that didn’t keep the tears from coming out.

 

 

VII

 

He ran away from home soon after the funeral. Not because his home life was intolerable, although it was — his parents were absolute wrecks over Naomi’s death. But he would have stayed with them, trusting that their distraction and grief would give him the freedom to live as he liked.

But he had to leave. Because of the ghost.

He first saw her during the wake, not that he actually attended the wake. Joshua was hiding in his room, claiming he couldn’t handle being around people, but really because he didn’t want his parents wondering why all the guests at the wake were staring and whispering about him.

His closet door opened, and Naomi strolled out. She was dressed in her field hockey uniform, holding a stick in her hand. “Hi, brother,” she said. “Guess I’m haunting you. This sucks. I wasn’t sure I believed in the afterlife, but I sure didn’t expect this.”

Joshua whimpered and scooted away up the length of his bed, pressing his body against his headboard.

She rolled her eyes. “Don’t be a baby. I can’t hurt you. I’m dead. I know that much. I don’t know much else, like how come I’m dressed like this, but — wait. What day is it?”

He told her.

“I died like three days ago?” she said. “Feels like it just happened. I had a game today.” She tapped the stick on the ground a couple of times. “If I hadn’t died, this is what I’d be wearing right now, I guess. Weird.”

“Are you real,” he said, “or am I going crazy?”

She sat down on the bed next to him, but the mattress didn’t move at all, as if she had no weight. “Why can’t the answer be ‘both’?” she said. She sat with him quietly for a minute, then went back into the closet.

Joshua didn’t sleep all night, and he took a backpack of his things the next morning and slipped out while his parents were still sleeping the sleep of the tranquilized. He walked downtown, stopping every time he saw someone at an ATM and asking them to give him some cash. He went to the bus station and bought a ticket to Philadelphia, because that was the next bus going any significant distance away.

Sitting in the rear of the bus with his backpack on his knees, he did his best to look inconspicuous, wearing a jacket with the hood pulled over his head. A few people turned and looked at him, but the bus wasn’t crowded, and no one tried to sit next to him.

Until they were humming down a boring stretch of the interstate. He heard the rustle of someone settling in beside him. “I’d like to be alone,” he muttered.

“I’d like to be alive,” his sister said.

Joshua turned his head and stared. Naomi was wearing her slop-around sweats, eating a bagel liberally smeared with cream cheese. She looked so real, right down to the crumbs at the corner of her mouth. “You came with me,” he said. “I thought, if I went away from where you died…”

“I think I’m haunting you, Joshua. I mean, look. You didn’t mean to kill me. I know that. But it’s your fault anyway, for being such a selfish brat. And you’re still a selfish brat. Mom and Dad are going to be heartbroken even worse with you leaving, you know that? Like losing me wasn’t enough?”

“I didn’t think about that.” He slouched lower in the seat. “But I need to get away. Start fresh. Go someplace no one knows me.”

“No one knows you back home, either, brother. They just… make up a version of you that lives in their heads. A super awesome guy who deserves their worship. But that’s not you. Nobody knows the real you, except me.” She stood up. “And I gotta say… I don’t like you much. I love you… but that’s different.” Naomi walked away down the aisle farther toward the back of the bus, which should have been impossible since he was in the last seat. But the world was different for ghosts, apparently.

He was freaked out, but he was more exhausted than freaked, and he slept all the way to Philadelphia.

 

 

VIII

 

Joshua didn’t live the life of your typical runaway. He stayed in fine hotels, ate in fine restaurants, picked out whatever clothes he wanted and walked out of the store wearing them, and generally lived the high life. The pitfalls he might have fallen into — drugs, mainly, and the odd STD — were avoided mostly because Naomi would appear, telling him not to be an idiot, at crucial moments. Having your spectral sister appear just as you were about to have unprotected sex with a lingerie model, yelling at you and calling you a moron, tended to make you take precautions.

Her ghost didn’t appear every day, but he seldom went more than a week without seeing her. She goaded him into going to the library and reading actual books, and bullied him into occasionally using his powers for good — making muggers turn themselves in, wandering down to the courthouse and talking to judges, things like that. He mostly wanted to skateboard, and sleep with gorgeous women, and make people give him cars — Naomi’s ghost taught him to drive when he was fourteen – but he always gave in eventually.

He left Philly for Minneapolis until the cold got to him, and went out West for a while, working his way down from Seattle to San Francisco to Los Angeles. L.A. was funny — everyone there wanted to make him a star, but he knew by then his powers only worked when he interacted with people in person. He was a lousy actor, and on video, he was just an ordinary, if attractive, kid. Acting on stage might have been different, but he didn’t really have the acting bug, so he fled to Las Vegas — you could live quite well in Vegas when people gave you anything you wanted — and eventually Chicago.

He traveled for six or seven years, and the strange things was, Naomi’s ghost grew older right along with him, keeping pace. She appeared in a prom dress once during what would have been her senior year, and went through a variety of styles during her would-be college years: preppy sorority girl, slutty club kid, full-on punk, and slouchy flannel-wearing alternative girl, among others. Her hair changed occasionally, and she gained a little weight, and then lost it, and she got pimples and pinkeye and hangovers and manicures, as if she had a whole life when she wasn’t with him.

One morning, when she appeared in his hotel room wearing a wrinkled blue cocktail dress and only one high-heeled shoe, complaining of a headache, he said, “What happened to you?”

They’d been getting along pretty well in recent years, though Naomi still thought he was a selfish jerk ninety percent of the time, but the look she shot him then was poisonous and full of rage. “I have no idea, Joshua. The only memories I have are of my life before I died and these conversations with you. I know it looks like I’m living a whole life, but I’m not. I think you’re seeing what life I would have had, if you hadn’t run us off the road. I assume I would have gone out dancing and gotten drunk last night, if I wasn’t busy rotting in the ground.” She threw her remaining shoe at him, and he ducked, even though it disappeared before it hit him. Naomi stomped off into the bathroom and didn’t show up again for two weeks.

Her absence was kind of a relief, but it was also kind of lonely. Fortunately, he could medicate the loneliness with champagne and threesomes.

When Naomi finally came back, dressed like she was out on an extended nature hike, she acted like their mini-fight hadn’t even happened, and mostly focused on telling him how stupid his new haircut looked, an opinion no one else had offered him.

 

IX

 

“We call your kind lovetalkers,” the sorcerer said, sipping from a glass of spring water. He wore a severe black suit and had a face so pale and angular it could have been carved from chalk.

“Great.” Joshua leaned across the table between them and offered his third-best smile. The guy was crazy, thought he was a wizard or something, but he had something Joshua wanted. “Look, like I said, if you could give me the keys to that beautiful Mercedes you drove up in, I’d be happy to –”

“Shut up,” the man said, and Joshua flinched. No one had talked to him like that, apart from Naomi’s ghost, in a long time. “Your powers don’t work on me. Your abilities are rooted in emotion, and I sliced away and sold all my emotions to a… certain entity… in exchange for particular powers and favors. I am a creature of pure intellect now, and intellectually… I can see what you are, and what you do, but it doesn’t have any impact on me.” He took another sip. They were in a secluded booth in an upscale hotel bar in Indianapolis, and Joshua had a vodka tonic in front of him. He considered just getting up and leaving — apparently he wasn’t going to get this guy’s car, and there were other prospects in the room — but the novelty of someone immune to his powers had him curious.

“You say you’re a sorcerer?” he said.

The man nodded. “My powers were won with difficulty, through effort and study. Yours… comes a bit more naturally.” The man sniffed. “You’re a lovetalker. Sometimes called a ganconer or cancanagh. They were elf-knights, in Irish mythology — they seduced country girls, then abandoned them, leaving the women to pine away and eventually commit suicide.”

Joshua shifted uncomfortably. Melanie had been the first of his lovers to die that way, hanging herself in prison, but he knew there’d been others. These days, he mostly just let women (and the occasional man) give him blowjobs — his partners, or victims, or whatever, didn’t seem to become truly inconsolable unless he actually slept with them. But once he did, no other lover could ever satisfy them, not even close, and a lot of them had trouble with that. It was one of the few downsides to his power. Finding out people he’d slept with had killed themselves always depressed him, even if it was also kind of flattering. (He didn’t feel guilty. The only death that made him feel guilty was Naomi’s, because he’d done it with his own hands — even if she had forgiven him. He assumed. More or less. Maybe not in so many words.)

Luckily, blowjobs were nice.

“So you’re saying I’m an elf?” he said.

The sorcerer shook his head. “No. Just a man, with a power. Some people can read minds, and some people have perfect pitch, and some people can dream the future. You make people love you. I’ve met four of your kind over the years. Three men, and only one woman, though the sample size is too small to draw any conclusions from that. My name is Carmichael. You should come work for me.”

Joshua raised his eyebrows. “Should I? Why’s that?”

“I will teach you about yourself, and I will pay you lavishly.”

“I can get anything I want just by asking.”

“Obviously not,” Carmichael said. “Or you would have the keys to my car. Besides, you might find earning money an interesting diversion. The lovetalkers I’ve known have shared a problem: boredom. Getting anything you want can be a trifle dull, can’t it?”

“I guess so. I can’t remember the last time I played a game of pool or a video game with someone who didn’t let me win.” Joshua mused. “Okay, Carmichael. It’s a deal.” He leaned forward. “Do you know anything about, ah… exorcism? Ghostbusting?”

“I do not,” he said. “But I have many contacts in the world of sorcerers. I may be able to find someone who can help you. Are you troubled by ghosts?”

“Sort of,” Joshua said. “It’s pretty complicated.”

“That’s all right,” Carmichael said gravely. “I am incredibly smart. Tell me.”

 

X

 

Turned out the world was full of sorcerers, a whole secret society living in the shadows of the regular world, doing inscrutable business and fighting private wars. There were all kinds of magic happening all around Joshua, and he’d never noticed. Made him wonder what else he’d missed in his life. Moreover, lovetalkers were rare, and pretty sought after — partly because they didn’t need to work unless they felt like it.

Joshua did various jobs for Carmichael, mostly just chatting with people and getting them to agree to sell his boss various things at steep discounts, or sitting in a room and smiling affably while Carmichael talked, lending the presence of his personality to the cadaverous old wizard’s words. Carmichael was some kind of combination crime boss and supervillain running the sorcerous underworld of Indianapolis, and Joshua came to enjoy helping him execute his complicated plots.

Carmichael’s immunity to his power made Joshua think, too, and he decided to become so charming that, if his powers suddenly evaporated, he’d still be able to make people do what he wanted. He didn’t need to, of course, and according to his boss most lovetalkers were slobs, but he’d always been vain about his appearance anyway, and it was interesting, the study of manipulation and social engineering. Sure, Joshua studying manipulation was a bit like a fish studying swimming — it just came naturally, and reducing it to theory was hard — but it provided an intellectual challenge. Carmichael was right, of course. Joshua had been getting bored.

There wasn’t really anyone to practice his skills on, because Carmichael’s total lack of emotion made him immune to even non-sorcerous charm… but there was Naomi. Sitting in his gorgeous penthouse apartment one night, he tried out pick-up lines and patter and subtle conversational deflections on her ghost, while she sat smoking cigarettes and critiquing his delivery. She was dressing more sedately by then, mostly in business casual, and she kept her hair pulled back, like she’d gotten an office job in the afterlife. She was older, too, pushing thirty, with laugh lines starting to appear on her face. “Nice tricks, bro,” she said, after he went through a whole bar pick-up routine. “But what good are they?”

“This power came to me unexpectedly. What if it disappears just as suddenly? Carmichael says it doesn’t work that way in his experience, but he also says there aren’t enough lovetalkers around to draw any definitive conclusions about us. I could become… ordinary. I mean, it’s possible.”

She rolled her eyes. That, at least, hadn’t changed as she’d aged. “Horrors. You might have to work for a living.”

“Oh, I’m working. For you. My boss has been asking around to see if anybody knows how to, ah… put you to rest,” Joshua said. “No luck yet. He’s never heard of a ghost aging in real-time. I’m pretty sure he thinks you’re a figment of my imagination.”

“Tough to prove one way or the other,” she said. “Do you want to get rid of me?”

“Every time I look at you, I think of the life you could have had. The life I cut short.”

She tapped ash off the end of her cigarette — the ashes vanished before they landed on the fabric of her armchair — and looked at him patiently.

“But I’d miss… having someone to talk to. Someone who actually talks to me. I mean, there’s Carmichael, but talking to him is like having conversation with an ant or a star or a waterfall or something. He’s not even human anymore. What do you want?”

Naomi smoked furiously, frowning. Joshua realized he couldn’t smell the smoke from her cigarette. “I feel like I’m not moving on,” she said finally. “I’ve got no awareness, except in these moments when I’m with you, but I’m getting older, somehow. I mean, what happens if I get so old I die? When I’m already dead?” She looked at the cigarette in her hand. “What if I get, like, lung cancer? Will I start appearing to you in a hospital bed? With an oxygen tank?”

Joshua stared at her. He’d never even considered… “Okay,” he said. “I don’t want that. I’ll try harder, I’ll make some calls… someone in the world must know how to help you move on.”

“I’d miss you, brother,” she said. “But yeah. You started killing me a long time ago. Probably a good idea if you finish the job, huh?”

 

 

XI

 

“The time for spying is over,” the man named Gregor said, steepling his fingers together behind his almost pathologically clean desk. “Tonight, you kill Marla Mason.” Gregor’s executive office was all right angles, utterly spotless, devoid of personality or life. Joshua thought his mother would have diagnosed Gregor with obsessive compulsive disorder, among other things.

 

“You should kill this other guy too,” Gregor’s assistant, Nicolette, said. She was pretty, in a birdlike, too-thin way, and he could tell she desperately wanted to sleep with him. But Joshua thought that would be approximately as wise as sleeping with a buzz saw. She had a multitude of braids and wore paint-stained white overalls, a strange contrast to Gregor’s sober corporate suit style. But sorcerers were strange people.

“Which other guy?” he said politely. He could have belched and scratched himself — they weren’t immune to his powers — but he was still practicing his charms.

“His name’s Ted,” Nicolette said. “He’s a nobody, Marla’s new assistant, but once the bitch is dead, we’ll need to deflect attention away from us. Assassinating the sitting chief sorcerer is a no-no, so we’re going to pin the job on Ted instead, say he died in his attempt to murder Marla, that he was an agent of another sorcerer, yadda yadda.”

“You think anyone will believe that?” Joshua said.

“We only need a reasonable amount of deniability,” Gregor said. “Enough to give the other sorcerers on the council an excuse to stop investigating. I know killing is beyond your usual skill-set, but no one else can get close enough to Marla. Are you unwilling?”

“I… After I do this, Naomi will be set free?”

“We have a necromancer standing by,” Gregor said. “He’s a… peculiar fellow… but very powerful, certainly capable of sending your sister to her just reward.”

Joshua nodded glumly. When Carmichael put him in touch with these ruthless sorcerers in the city of Felport, with the promise that they could help Joshua if he helped them, he’d tried to cheat the system — of course. During their first meeting Joshua tried to convince Gregor to set his sister free without making him work for it, but he’d been prepared for dealing with a lovetalker. Gregor had a complex system involving intermediaries who would never meet Joshua, and sealed letters that wouldn’t be mailed until Joshua had completed his work for him, and oaths of binding, and other safeguards to insure he couldn’t just charm the man into doing his bidding. Joshua didn’t have the kind of mind necessary to overcome Gregor’s fiendishly twisted sorcerous cunning; he just didn’t think around corners that way. He might have been able to overcome the obstacles in time, but it was easier just to do what Gregor wanted.

At first, anyway. They’d wanted him to spy on a woman named Marla Mason, who was to Felport pretty much what Carmichael was to Indianapolis: magical crime boss, sorcerer-in-chief, whatever. Acting on Gregor’s orders, he met with Marla, pretending she was the first sorcerer he’d ever encountered, letting her believe she was introducing him to the world of magic, and seducing her, of course. She wasn’t too hard on the eyes, even if she was a bit older than the usual women he went for, and he even slept with her — Gregor had made it clear she was going to die anyway, so what did it matter if sleeping with Joshua ruined her for all other men?

Marla was mean to him, too, which was a novelty. She was clearly overcompensating, putting on a harsh act because she knew he was a lovetalker and didn’t want to fall prey to his charms, but it was… interesting, to have someone disagree with him, argue with him, and show him the sharp side of her tongue instead of just the warm smooth side. Though she showed him that side, too.

When Gregor explained that the professional assassin he’d hired had failed to kill Marla, and that Joshua was going to have to take over that murderous chore, Joshua had considered walking out…. but there was Naomi to consider. Carmichael said Gregor was the real deal, a true power, and if he said he could put Naomi’s ghost to rest, he could. Joshua would do whatever he had to in order to make that happen.

The last few times he’d seen his sister, she’d seemed preoccupied, and this last time, she’d run into the bathroom and vomited — the vomit disappeared before it hit the toilet, which was almost more disturbing than normal puking. Joshua had asked her, somewhat nonsensically in retrospect, if she was sick.

Naomi had shaken her head, once, and said: “Worse. Pregnant.” Then she turned on her heel and walked away, vanishing from his hotel room, leaving him to ponder the increasingly disturbing implications of those two little words.

“All right,” Joshua said. “I’ll do it for Naomi.”

“Here’s a knife,” Nicolette said, grinning. “It’s enchanted, the forensic magicians won’t be able to trace it back to you.”

“One other thing,” Gregor said abruptly. “Marla Mason is in love with you. Before you kill her… break her heart. Be as vicious as you possibly can. Make her suffer. She deserves to suffer.”

The last words rang some faint and distant bell inside Joshua — he couldn’t have said why, but they made him feel twisted up inside. “Is that really necessary?” he said.

“No,” Gregor said. “It’s not. But I want it done anyway. So do it, please.”

Joshua shrugged. A deal was a deal. He left. Gregor and Nicolette made his skin crawl. They wanted Marla’s job, but as far as he could tell, she was the better choice to run Felport — tough, and competent, and she hadn’t asked him to take part in any assassinations.

Naomi appeared next to him in the back of the limo. He hadn’t seen her in a month, and she was now visibly pregnant, and visibly terrified. “Joshua, brother, if this baby is born… what will happen? Will I be carrying it around in my arms? Will it grow up, too, only aware of the world when it’s here with its uncle Joshua? Or will it just disappear? What if I stop being pregnant next time you see me? I’ll never know what happened to the baby. Joshua, brother, I’m scared –”

“I know,” he said. “I know.” He reached out to touch her hand, but, of course, couldn’t feel it at all: he might as well have been touching empty air. “I’m going to set you free, Naomi. You won’t be stuck to me anymore.”

She kissed his cheek — no sensation — and looked at him with tears in her eyes. “Please. I don’t know where I’m supposed to go from here… but it’s long past time I went there.”

 

He nodded, and then looked away, because Naomi didn’t like to vanish while he was watching her. The driver dropped him off at the club where Marla kept her private office, and Joshua stepped into the wintry air, touching the knife in his coat. Going to do murder. Two murders, and cruel ones, at that.

Maybe once Naomi is free, Joshua thought, I’ll free myself, too.

He’d never really considered killing himself before, but after he did these things, would he be able to go on living with himself? And living without Naomi, forever? Truly alone, surrounded only by the adoring masses he so despised? Maybe he’d keep the knife when he was done with Marla and Ted. Maybe he could find a use for it.

It turned out he didn’t need to kill himself. Murdering Ted went easily enough — just a stab — and then he faced Marla, who stared at Ted’s corpse, and at him. She was confused, of course. She knew there was a mole in her organization, someone giving information to her enemies, and she said, “Why did you do that? Was Ted the spy?”

Make her suffer, Joshua thought, and took a deep breath. “No, you silly bitch,” he said. “I’m the spy.” He explained that he was working for Gregor, that he’d been using Marla all this time, and he twisted as many verbal knives as he could, mocking her, laughing at her. She actually admired him in that moment, his power was so vast — she was impressed by the depth of his treachery, impressed that he’d managed to fool a seasoned sorcerer like her, and Joshua — who had committed a thousand betrayals in his life before — felt lower than dogshit on a boot heel. Marla seemed to accept her fate: he was going to kill her, and it didn’t even look like she was going to resist.

“One last kiss?” Marla said. “Before I go?”

“Oh, why not?” Joshua said.  Marla leaned in close. She took his face in her hands. She kissed him.

Then she put one hand on his chin, one on his cheek, and jerked his head around, hard, snapping his neck. As all the lights went out for him, he saw Naomi standing in a corner of the office, staring at him, her hands pressed to her mouth in horror.

 

XII

“The woman you tried to kill,” Death said. “Marla. She is a friend of mine.”

Joshua, in Hell, closed his eyes. “Of course she is.” No surprise that a sorcerer like Marla would know people — beings — as powerful as this. Today Hell was a rather boring room, like any of a million hotel rooms he’d stayed in, except there were no doors leading to a hallway leading to a way out, and there were rather too many mirrors. Death was a smiling long-haired young man, wearing a suit of vaguely European cut, with rings on all ten of his fingers, and he was utterly immune to Joshua’s charms.

“So will you be tormenting me extra, then?” Joshua asked, without opening his eyes. “I thought I saw Marla recently. I was back in her office, and my neck was broken, and I tried to tell her I was sorry, that I loved her…” He frowned. “Wait. Did that really happen?”

Death crossed his legs and laced his fingers over one knee. “The afterlife is a strange place, Joshua. A thousand possible scenarios play out here. It’s a forest of regrets and missed chances. Well, sometimes it’s just a furnace full of chains and demons. It’s not even Hell, as you keep saying — it’s the underworld. Every afterlife is different, just as every life is different.”

Joshua nodded, trying to understand that. “How did Marla manage to kill me, anyway? I thought…”

Death shrugged. “She loved you, but she knew her death would doom her city, the place she’d sworn to protect. She loved her city more than you. That’s all. And she’s a sorcerer. They have strong wills. Your powers were great, but… you pushed things a bit too far that time.”

“Naomi always said I should know my limitations,” Joshua said. “I didn’t think I had any.”

“You didn’t live long enough to hit them, that’s all,” Death said. “Except for the one. As to your earlier question — will I torture you more, because Marla is a friend of mine? It’s tempting. Most people down here torture themselves, though, and, oddly enough, Marla herself taught me that I should mostly just let them get on with it, without adding my own embellishments. I came to see you for a different reason, though. I wanted to… get to know you a little better. Thank you for telling me the story of your life.”

“Did I do that?” Joshua blinked. It did seem like he’d been here a long time, talking, but he couldn’t remember exactly what he’d said.

Death patted him on the knee. “You did. You asked me about your sister, too — do you remember?”

“I remember screaming her name,” Joshua said slowly. “In the wreckage of the car, but this time, I wasn’t a kid, I was the age I am now, and it was my neck that was broken, not hers…”

“Yes. Like I said. The underworld is a land of possibilities. As your sister discovered, when she died.”

“Is she all right?” Joshua said. “Is she… free?”

“As free as anyone is, here,” Death said. “Which, actually, can be quite incredibly free. She’s no longer dragging herself back to Earth to haunt you periodically, and she’s no longer playacting the life she might have had.” He plucked a bit of lint from his trousers and stood up. “All right, Joshua. I’ll give you something you didn’t ask for, and possibly don’t deserve, and which Marla probably wouldn’t give you, either, because she holds a grudge, but: I forgive you.”

Joshua stared up at him. “What… what does that mean?”

“Not much, I suppose. You didn’t wrong me, after all. But practically speaking… it means I can take a little pity on you. I can show you a door.” He gestured, and there was a door now, a normal hotel room door with a chain and a deadbolt and a little diagram of the floor plan with the fire exits clearly marked.

Rising from the chair, Joshua said, “What’s on the other side of that door?”

“The afterlife,” Death said. “Which, like life, is more or less what you make it.” He took a step toward the glass doors that led to the room’s balcony. “By the way, Joshua. Your sister? She’s in the room next door. I thought you might like to see her.” He stepped outside, closed the glass doors after him, and shattered into a cloud of ravens, streaking off into the sky.

Joshua looked in one of the dozens of mirrors lining the walls. He looked pretty much like shit. Well. Fair enough.

He opened the door to the hallway, and went to say hello to his sister, wondering if she could forgive him, too.

That wouldn’t fix things. It wouldn’t make up for the life he’d led. But it might make a good start to his afterlife.