Alicia Dreams the Sound of Footsteps in Her Wake
“Do you remember our ghost?” he asked.
They’d ducked into a hipster café with the logo of a sickle and a hammer above the door. It had seemed funny-ironic to sit at the long, stainless steel table drinking a tiny cup of coffee—the menu offered the Marxist Mix and the Mocha Lenin— but after a while, sneering at the décor and the clientele lost its appeal. They stared at each other in silence, neither one of them knowing what to say. Perhaps that’s why he brought the ghost up; to have something to say. Anything. Or else, a stray detail had sparked his memory.
“The illiterate ghost,” she said, nodding, and chuckled because half of the time when they brought out the Ouija board and asked, ‘Are you here?’ the ghost spelled things like XYHLNMA or QTSOALF.
“Bernal, we baptized it,” he said. “That was his name.”
“Yes. Such nonsense.”
“I don’t know. There was something sometimes, wasn’t there? Especially that last time.”
She frowned. Yeah, there had been something, but it was hard to say what. It was merely a feeling, the air going heavy, something pressing against you. Like a thumb against a plastic CD case, resting hard against it until the case cracks. Something about to snap . . . it was the moment right before the crack appears on the surface.
“I’m not sure. We were drunk when we did that shit,” she said and waved the memory away. A silence, like the dead space between song tracks, fell upon them once more. She was bored, and his face—hollowed out, the skin leathery and marked with sores—was painful to look at.
“The record store’s still standing,” he said.
“What? It’s open?”
“I didn’t say it’s open. But it’s there. We could go check it out, you know.”
“Oh, well, it’s getting late—”
“Come on,” he said, grabbing his backpack. “Come on, it’s only a few blocks away.”
They went. Each block they walked, the shiny, modern businesses and little restaurants grew sparser until they reached a block that looked almost untouched by the tsunami of gentrification which had swallowed their childhood neighbourhood.
There it was, at the corner, the two-storey building. The windows on the ground floor had gone blind, shielded by pieces of cardboard and old newspapers, and the front door was sprayed with graffiti. She placed her hands in her pockets and surveyed the ruin of their teenagehood.
“Let’s go to the back,” he said.
“What for?”
He didn’t reply. She followed him there and he took out a key. This is how they’d gotten into the building; he worked there and lifted a copy of the manager’s key so they could let themselves in any time they wanted. She assumed they’d changed the lock. She was wrong.
He opened the door and she used her cellphone to light the way inside until she stood in the middle of the ground floor. In a corner, there was an old cash register, and a couple of shelves that had been left by the front door. There was the scent of humidity, of a thousand rains which had fallen since she’d last been there.
“Come, let’s go up,” he said, and he hurried up the stairs before she could call the expedition into question.
The windows on the second floor had not been blinded with newspaper and the area was illuminated by the street lights outside, the green of a neon sign turning the wall in front of her emerald. There were boxes filled with empty CD cases piled around them, rolled-up posters for concerts from a previous decade, and a large, framed picture of Kurt Cobain that rested against the wall. It sure didn’t smell like teen spirit here anymore.
She stared at the black and white picture, the singer’s lips slightly parted, his eyes staring at her from across time.
Are you here? her thoughts echoed, and, like an echo too, in her memory she heard their giggling. Their jokes. The sound of the planchette sliding against the board. Her pulse quickening and that pact they’d made, even though she was squeamish about real blood.
“Hey, we should—”