Hungry Ghosts
Andre
Bertolino
Late September 2001: Four people are
sitting in a dark basement; two of them are the people that this story
sketches. They are invoking a spirit into a wooden triangle. The triangle has
felt feet that rest upon a square glass tabletop. Through the glass they can
see the letters of the alphabet and the words “yes” and “no”
written on cardboard strips. They asked the spirit, “Do you have any messages
for us?” It said “yes, Bio-weapons, Miami, Stevens, 4 days.” The message was
cryptic as usual. Anyone who has messed around with a Ouija board knows that
there are malicious elementals floating around like radio waves, who would tell
you anything they think you might want to hear. Only an amateur medium would
take them seriously, but Gregor was a guided medium. He asked for more details
and waited for the planchette to make an answer. All it said was, “BIO WEAPON,
STEVENS, MIAMI.” Robert Stevens was a 63-year old photo editor for the Sun, a
supermarket tabloid specializing in sensationalism who was at that moment in a
hospital in Miami Florida dying of an unknown illness. He was feverish, nauseated,
and barely conscious.
Gregor asked the
spirit why this is important and the spirit told him, “ANTHRAX DEAD.” Bob
Stevens indeed had Anthrax and he was soon to become the first official
bioterrorism fatality in America. He had the misfortune of receiving and
opening an envelope dosed with Bacillus Anthracis, manufactured by a
microbiologist at Fort Detrick, Maryland. The envelope arrived at the offices
of the Sun via New Jersey.
(By the 4th of
October Bob Stevens’ diagnosis was beginning to hit the media, but the threat
of bioterrorism and the fact that agents from the F.B.I. were involved was
downplayed to the public until another case was diagnosed. In the end, five
people died of inhalation Anthrax and a dozen contracted the coetaneous version
resulting in lesions on the skin. Over 200 hoaxes were recorded that October
and everyone was taking Ciprofloxacin Y, or Cipro. Gas masks and protective
chemical suits were selling briskly.)
Within this
backdrop of panic Gregor fled to New Hampshire, with Moxie. It was beautiful
and quiet. While everyone else was concentrating on the dead and who was
responsible for their murder, they were concentrating on each other. Not that they
did so splendidly with those.
There is always
some disconnect in the affairs of men and women, some transfiguring
inebriation. They had met one month prior in the bookstore where Gregor was
working.
He first saw her
down the aisle reading a book about the Freemasons. She saw him watching her
and figured that he fancied her. Really he was trying to decide whether she was
a male or female. If she would go to the trouble of shaving her head and
dressing like a boy than maybe she also had liposuction, silicone implants, a
trachea & brow shave, scalp advance, forehead realignment, rhino contouring,
maxomilliary operations, electrolysis, hormones and antiandrogens.
He spoke to her
briefly while ringing her mother up, in the manner of retail clerks. He asked
her why she didn’t join the Freemasons and she said “because I’m a girl.” He
was intrigued. A lonely man takes the first hand that is offered him. They went
their separate ways. This meeting would have been of no consequence if he had
not met her again shortly after in another bookstore he worked at called Media
Play on September 10th 2001. She was alone this time, looking for “Fear and
Loathing in Las Vegas.” He had only been working there for a week and could not
find it, so he recommended another title and asked her name. “Moxie,” she told him.
Suddenly, a
predatory expression flashed across her face, a stubborn wish to snatch from
life more than it could give, she turned around and headed for the sliding
doors at nearly a run, leaving the book he had given her at the register. He
repeated her name over and over in his head and even out loud so that he would
not forget it.
When he left work
on 9/11/01 and approached his bike he saw an envelope attached to the
handlebars. His first impression was that he had received a ticket for
illegally locking onto a stop sign. However, upon closer examination, he
noticed it was addressed to “Gregor of the bookstores.” In the envelope was a
Halloween card inscribed with metallic silver ink. The inscription, placement
and timing were so offbeat that he was certain she was insane. He didn’t care,
what he needed was to fuck up so bad that he couldn’t save himself. He hoped
Moxie could help him. He figured that, since he was trained to do life the
right way, the bigger the mistake the better chance he would have to break out
and live a real life, and Moxie, with her resemblance to a German Sinead O’Connor,
looked like a big mistake, so he was attracted to her. He regarded her as a
symbol with a cryptic correspondence to himself. An alien creature who had
attached herself to him, with her secret locked within her. He could see that
real discoveries come from chaos, from that place that looks wrong, stupid and
foolish and the dog card was all of those things. He called her as soon as he
could find a payphone, and they met the next day. He thought she was pretty in
a skeletal sort of way, a slight girl imaginative and serious who smelled like
peppered ham, Nova lox and tobacco. When she showed up at the Middletown
library the front seat of her Subaru was strewn with empty Marlboro boxes and
coffee cups, her back seats were covered in old clothes and blankets and her
trunk was occupied by an old Car door. The odor of curdled milk predominated.
On the way to her place they listened to music and smiled like teenagers. When they
arrived at her pad he met her mother and scoped the place out. It was like her
car only shittier. She steered him to her room then left to take a quick
shower. There weren’t any chairs in her room so he just sat on her bed and tried
to stay calm.
From the start,
people are trained not to take off their clothes in front of complete
strangers. Keeping one’s clothes on is actually the number one rule of
civilization. Even rabbits and dogs look civilized when clothed. Moxie returned
from her shower and simply removed her towel. Since he had been conditioned to
approach sex as negotiation, he was surprised to discover that it could be as
perfunctory as brushing his teeth. When Moxie suddenly dropped her towel he
became aware of what she was doing slower than a twenty year old should have. He
looked over as she approached. That she saw him looking changed nothing.
She stood there
naked like a chicken or a cat for a moment before she began advancing toward him
leisurely. She stopped a couple feet away. There was something about her
persuasiveness at that poignant moment. She knew she was the life of the party.
Naked, she stepped closer to him and said, very simply, as if it were as
insignificant to her as it was significant to him, “Do you want to?” At twenty,
no expert but no virgin, he lived in a permanent state of want to. She tossed
herself on the bed, with legs
hanging off the side. He liked her after that, so well that he went back after
work the next day, to have another shot at it. Again her hidden spring worked
its radiant enchantment.
Moxie was promiscuous even in middle
school; she was thoroughly satisfied with her role, enjoyed it in fact, except
when her cigarettes ran out or her drugs, trivial exterior problems of no
account, nothing that ate into her soul, nothing that created torment. Most of
the time she enjoyed it—or gave the illusion of enjoying it. It made a
difference of course whom she went with—or came with. But the principal thing
was a man’s attention. That was all she craved. A man with something that could
give her a sense of connection, a sense of life.
Moxie was hollow
all the way through, to her vacant, flaccid, burnt out heart. It could be touched
for a moment but it had no reference to any fixed point. It could detach itself
for a moment from its true center. However depraved and constricting the world
which she created for herself was, she could function in it superbly. That in
itself was the refreshing thing about her.
Moxie was a
hustler. She didn’t wait for you to come to her—she went out and grabbed you.
Years later Gregor watched her practice her vocation with others. He observed
as she resorted to expressions and tricks that were identical to the ones she
had with him. The same Moonlit walk by the river, the same book recommendations,
the same table in the same restaurant. He watched her stand at the bar and with
blind defiance, throw back a gin or 10 to warm herself and to summon up
strength and courage. But the fire of it penetrated her.
Moxie could not
escape the world, and she was not responsible for the ugly way she looked. She
wasn’t responsible for how she felt or what she said or how she acted or
anything she did. Because she was obviously imbalanced, it was all out of her
hands and he liked that. Moxie was persistent and he liked that too, so they
did it in honor of man and woman, in honor of beast, in honor of god. They did
it because we had been released, because we were home free, alive, and (sort
of) private, because they couldn’t wait any longer, couldn’t wait for the right
time or place, couldn’t wait for the future, for peace in Palestine. They did
it because of the bomb, because of pollution, because of the four horsemen of
the apocalypse, because extinction might be a blink away. They did it because
it was Wednesday night and everyone who could was having terror sex.
She sent him home
that night with her diaries, a four-year log of every time her co-workers
sexually harassed her. Every botched relationship and suicide attempt, every
morsel that she consumed, and the feelings—mostly self-loathing that the
struggle with a disobedient appetite aroused. He found the cumulative tedium of
this diary revolting yet irresistible. He could not understand her motive for
giving him this. Was she trying to make her obsession formally explicit? Was it
a cry for help? A warning that she was not to be trifled with? Or an expression
of compulsion? Unable to answer any of these questions he put them out of his
mind and focused on what he could grasp from what he had read. It seemed she
found the present world offered too little in the way of satisfaction and too much
in the way of uncertainty. The media led her to believe that she lived in a
perpetually hostile world, and there is nothing anyone can do about it.
Apocalyptic scenarios assaulted her imagination so she began to issue warnings
about what was becoming imminent to anyone who would listen (which was no one).
He speculated that her bulimia was an expression of chronic, anticipatory
mourning for a world about to be lost. He noted that she described her
compulsion in the Catholic terms. It was a rite of exorcism, purification, or
redemption depending on what she ate.
The diaries
assisted him in knowing that she wasn’t any more accountable for how she
appeared than her car was. She was a creation of her parents and her teachers
and her church and her culture. A hard drive is not to blame for its testimony,
and neither was she. She was about as free to comport herself as an encoded
microchip. She could not imagine any way to escape the culture she was trapped
in.
She had to make a
lot more decisions than her parents did because her parents couldn’t tell her
what to do. They didn’t know what to do, they didn’t have the answers; they
just putzed along trying not to think. So she listened to the lyrics of rappers
and rock stars for answers but they had nothing to offer but Misogyny, Nihilism
and Hedonism. Moxie expected
something of herself that much was apparent from the journal. She wanted to do
right, to be good, and to sign up for something—the army, the track team, a
deli even. She wanted to be worthy, if someone could just tell her what worth
was.
It is difficult to
describe the form of dread an undiagnosed schizophrenic like Moxie lived in,
but it might resemble the excessive immediacy of everything, the unclean
proximity of all that touches, advances and infiltrates without resistance, and
no protection, not even from her own body. The schizoid is bereft of every
scene, open to everything in spite of herself, living in the greatest
confusion. She is herself obscene, the obscene prey of the world’s obscenity. What
characterizes her is less the loss of the real, the years of estrangement from
the real, but very much to the contrary, the absolute proximity, the total
instantaneity of things. The feeling of no defense, no retreat. It is the end
of interiority and intimacy, the overexposure and transparency of the world
which traverses her without obstacle. She can no longer produce the limits of
her own being, can no longer arrange or point at herself, can no longer
construct herself as mirror for anyone. She is only a pure screen, a switching
center for all the networks of influence.
Gregor had no
leisure to regret what he had lost; in Manhattan. He was so entirely concerned
with what he had obtained, Moxie asked him to move to New Hampshire with her
the next day. He accepted the invitation and followed her family’s three car
caravan shortly after.
Four hours of
scenery went by behind the safety glass. Some stony unkempt mountains. Pine
trees producing pine cones. Mammals spending all day trying to get laid.
Various native plants growing wherever they wanted, their flowers, the
genitalia of alien life forms, blowing in the wind. The kind of stuff you find
outside. At the second rest stop Moxie bought two dozen donuts. Shortly
thereafter we all arrived at the two-story pre-fab on Waldron hill. It wasn’t a
real house; it is a re-creation of a period revival house, patterned after a
copy of a copy of a copy of a New Englander/ mock Tudor manor.
Gregor began to
unload the cars, with Moxie’s brother Jeremiah. The senior Bellicose’s had a
lot of stuff because they were 70 years old and they spent all of their free
time participating in “collecting” rituals. The father collected manly things
like remote controls, lighters, belts, razors, screwdrivers, flashlights,
eyeglasses, hammers, glue, crosses and guns. While the mother collected
feminine things like dolls, children, pets, romance novels, aluminum foil,
Jell-O, napkins, toilet paper from around the world, worry beads and the cotton
balls from all the vitamins she ever took. They had so many religious artifacts
because they had been devout Catholics for most of their lives, that is until
they discovered father Papala had given their son Jeremiah Herpes at summer
bible camp. But they refused to acknowledge that.
After a couple
hours of carrying their crap Gregor went in to get a donut but they were all
gone. He asked Moxie’s Mom “Mrs. Bellicose, where are the donuts?” “Moxie ate
them.” She replied flatly.
“All of them?”
“Yes all of them
Andre, didn’t you know?” She was annoyed by his surprise and disgust, mostly
because she often did the same thing. Moxie had warned him about this but he
had either forgotten or simply wasn’t prepared for it. How could anyone prepare
you for something you had never known? He was unfamiliar with the ailment, its
physical difficulties and economic repercussions. Moxie was in the bathroom
vomiting into the toilet.
It is hard to
think of an addiction, sin, perversion, or taboo, that doesn’t in a shame- free
age have its bard. Bulimia however, is one of the most persistently unglamorous
of dirty secrets and bulimics do not transcend their own threshold of disgust.
They are a stealthy tribe, rotten teeth sometimes give them away, but Moxie
managed to conceal her daily ritual for a month before he caught on.
So they had
difficulties from the beginning but these were tolerable because he had a plan
for curing her, they would get their own place! See, he was a reasonable
fellow, but the more he drove himself into ways he believed to be sensible, the
screwier he became. They couldn’t help each other because they were both
drowning in troubles and too emotionally involved to be analytical. Love is an
animal that is called by different names in the literature and the descriptions
have gaps big enough to drive a truck through. One wishes for a symbol or
avatar. Love is inarticulate when it does appear. It’s just lazy speech-love
talk. It’s not specific and you can’t exchange it for much, so equivocation
will have to take the place of argument here. Love is lazy and she won’t come
to her name being called and called. She is a poor interlocutress. One
re-encounters the consequences of love again and again.
In October they
made their first excursion to Podunkville, the state capitol, because it was
the nearest city. Gregor liked cities because they held the promise/threat of
the future, but Podunkville was different.
For a Colonial
city to exist and thrive a hundred miles from its Homeland takes two essential
things: An unquestionable sense of rightness, and an unlimited supply of a raw
material of great value. Podunkville had Granite. Its sibling, Manchvegas, had
water. Podunkville was built on the edge of a quarry so it could feed on the
stone and process its raw magnificence into functional dimensions.
The Scottish,
German township with streets named after settlers who were killed by Native
Americans, would eat at the quarries forever. The settlers had dug deep
trenches into the heart of the earth. They might have come out the other side
if the quarries hadn’t fought back.
The Elite families
that made up the Granite Guild owned the city from roots to rooftops. Old
established, German rules of conduct and commerce made it efficient and
prosperous and watertight against the forces of Paganism that throbbed in every
lumen of sunlight in this Abenaki territory.
No
one could have foreseen
that the quarries had a malign influence at their very core. Or that the hungry
ghosts of the Abenaki Indians would seek their revenge on the astral plane.
