Conejo Tortuga Fantasma

I must be dead, muerte, deceased, gonzo, belly-up, because Barabas Devine, the ghost hunting charlatan, has arrived. He leans against our antique hutch, taps at the piano no one has played in years, slides his fingers over the mahogany credenza which shows fingerprints very easily. He pauses over each item, filling his broad chest, eyes closed and eyelashes fluttering. His v-neck t-shirt is paper thin and fashionable, his beard trimmed and edged crisply.

This is his schtick, if I remember right: absorbing psychic echoes stuck in everyday objects, and using them to reach over to The Other Side. 

He is trying to coax me out for a ghostly moan or two. 

He ends up touching everything within reach of his tanned, gym-developed arms. I wonder if he can guess how big a fan Chantelle is, and that she has seen every episode twice, or that I once found her in bed, naked, watching his show, in what I took to be a suggestive—languorous even—pose. What is his program called? Spirit Journey? Ethereal Expose?

Chantelle is my wife. Shit, technically, she is my widow. 

She follows him too closely, nodding, eyes open so damn wide. He may bump into her with his thick and solid torso, may decide to feel her up for more of those psychic remnants. I should be boiling over with jealousy, but all I’m getting is mild apprehension. Apparently I’m losing the ability to muster living-being emotions.

How did I go? God please tell me I didn’t shit my pants. I remember reading that somewhere: most people empty their bladder and bowels when they kick the bucket. 

I don’t remember exactly how old I am—details like that apparently also leaking away—but sixty rings a bell. Which seems pretty young these days. Hopefully that means it was something abrupt, piss- and shit-free: sideswiped by a drunken driver, smacked on the head by a plummeting piece of scaffolding, sudden cardiac arrest.

You need an outlet, I remember someone—Chantelle, one of the kids, a well-meaning doctor?—saying, you are carrying a lot of stress. 

Heart attack? Stroke?

The possibility that I died young doesn’t hit particularly hard—no regret, anger, or sorrow—and I wonder if this is my new reality, if the spaces where those feelings once resided are empty now, and a neutral substance, air or dark matter or the gooey plasma Devine is always capturing on his special cameras, has filled my gaps.

I don’t inhabit space the way I used to. I’m watching Devine film the opener, the get-to-know-the-family scene, in the front room, but I’m also in the basement, and everywhere else, all at once. It’s like I’m rotating around a 3-D architectural rendering of my own house. With all these people inside. 

Chantelle, eyes red from the crying, leads Devine and his crew downstairs, and the cameras must be running, because he’s bossing them around in his milky Georgia drawl (“We ah at the scene of the most recent activity! Eyes open, mah boys!”) like he’s about to order a Confederate charge. Barabas Devine pauses at the bottom of the basement stairs, holds one hand up to his crew like he knows something revelatory is about to happen. I hover right in front of him, but of course the faker can’t see me. These ghost hunters, they are all bullshit. I had said something along these lines, several times, to Chantelle and the kids.

“Jose! Talk to us, Jose!” 

It’s Joe, asshole. I go by Joe. Only my parents and Tia Maria called me Jose, and they are long gone. Dammit, Chantelle, what did you tell him? 

“Jose Castillo—” He’s extra hard on the “H”, “Hose-Aaaay”, and rolls the Ls off his tongue like they taste good, like a hipster over-pronouncing “guacamole” at a Mexican restaurant. “—we are here to free your family . . . “

“Free them from what?” I shout in his face. I follow this up with “Get the fuck out of my house!” but all that comes out is a rush of hot wind. 

Chantelle scans the entire basement, and I can’t tell if she is looking for me or taking inventory. We had dreamed of installing a wet bar down here. There is the corner that seeped gray water off and on for twenty years, absorbing money and time. This is the mustard plaid, frayed-at-the-edges couch where we were caught by the kids, twice, in flagrante. 

My sluggish-with-death brain puts it together: Devine is making an episode about me. My ghost. He fiddles with the lighting and directs the just-out-of-film-school cameraman to hold certain mood-establishing shots. They’re probably already in production, and I’ll be a Featured Specter next season. Chantelle and the kids have been known to marathon Barabas Devine for entire Friday nights. “Jose Navarre Castillo,” he’ll over-pronounce during the intro, relishing the prospect of an ethnic haunting, “will NOT. . . LET . . . GO!.” The audience will have no trouble filling in the blanks: unfulfilling life, unresolved issues, haunting his own home like the loser who doesn’t realize it’s closing time at the bar.

Here’s an emotion you get to keep when you pass on: shame. It burns like indigestion.

When Devine returns—I don’t know how much later, I have become unhinged from markers of time like eating or sleeping—he brings more people. Some of them are children. The wide set of their eyes and the familiar flat splay of their nostrils ding somewhere inside the cloud that is my spectral brain. These are my children, grown. The small creatures in tow are my grandchildren.

Of course our children have grown, and started their own families. I just don’t remember it. How long has it been since I died? Crossed over, as Devine calls it? 

“Talk to us, Dad, . . . ” 

This is Billy, who looks like he might go by William now. I must have watched him play shortstop a hundred times. He had glided effortlessly over the entire left side of the infield. His coaches had pulled me aside all the time to tell me about his natural instincts, his excellent soft hands. William has added serious girth. He has grown solid, immovable, like a monument, like a father. 

“Billy!” I call out. Sounds don’t come from my mouth anymore. They just emanate from my general direction. Still, it feels good to produce those two familiar syllables. He doesn’t hear me.

“When did you start wearing golf shirts?” I scream. If I am remembering our relationship correctly, this is the sort of jab we traded all the time. 

Something more than just wind comes out this time. Three lights on the dining room chandelier pop, spraying dust and glass slivers everywhere. 

Holy shit. I am doing this. I am haunting.

Billy’s child, a black-haired version of him, thus fairly reminiscent of good old Abuelo, begins to whimper. 

Devine is fucking ecstatic. He lets go of the furniture for a second and practically giggles into the camera. This is video gold; they won’t even have to fake this part. 

Chantelle and the kids are sharing knowing glances; losing his temper, busting shit up, classic Dad moves. They reassure the youngsters: there’s no demon or evil spirit in the house, just Grandpa Joe.

I’m not the only presence haunting our house. I catch glimpses out of the corner of my eyes, but whatever or whoever it is scurries away. They seem to be watching it all play out. I get the feeling they are judging me. Something about their spirit form, intersecting slurry whirlpools, indistinct at the edges, suggests that they are wearing a hood. They leave a moist subterranean odor in their wake. Is this what I will become eventually, a gooey, mysterious funk lingering in my own home?

Barabas Devine and his crew move in for the long haul, an overnight, what they call the Deep Investigation. They set up cameras and sensors that hiss and crackle at strange wavelengths in every room. He gathers Chantelle and all the kids at the dining room table, which is littered with objects I assume once belonged to me. Devine intones some supernatural babble, and even I can tell the family is supposed to start talking.

“Dad,” Lucy, who—I hope I remember right—is the youngest, begins. She twists something soft in her hands. I swoop in until I am laying on the table in front of her, and I recognize the fuzzy lump in her hands as a stuffed animal I brought back from a conference. A beetle or some other flying bug. 

“I’m sorry for quitting, ” she says, sighing with the release of this weight. “So many things. I know it hurt you when I quit Cross Country. And had to retake Algebra in Summer School. I remember you yelling.”

 Lucy has grown into her mother’s fragile, porcelain-skinned beauty. But a new confidence has rounded out her thin features. She looks like the sort of person who can look you in the eye while she talks.

Certain floodgates open and her siblings begin to chime in.

“Sorry for the mess, the constant mess.”

“I was never on time. That must have been very frustrating for you.”

“We regret accusing you. About killing the turtles, and Jeeves.”

Turtles, Jeeves? The references thud inside me, roughly where my head ought to be, without making meaning. 

Chantelle is gulping back tears, rubbing one of my shirts between her fingers. I’ll bet those bastards are zooming right in on her perfect egg-shaped face. 

Each apology is a thinly-veiled indictment of my fatherhood, and at first they light tiny indignant fires in the depths of my new being. Eventually the burning sensation drops into a deep pit where my stomach ought to be. Not that I exactly feel body parts anymore. My ghostly digestive system is a bowl of mush with no bottom. Deep in the mush, the indignance mixes in and becomes dull acceptance. They are right, after all. It must have seemed, at times, that I would have preferred a less cluttered life. They must have wondered about my capacity for joy.

“Why am I here?” I scream. “Why am I stuck?”

This question shakes the hutch, takes out a few wine glasses and a plate or two. I’m getting better at the spirit-talk. 

“Dad?” This is gentle Nancy, middle-child, peacemaker. “Can you let us go?”

“I have let go! I am not holding these things against you!” I plead. I direct the hot syllables at Billy—I always felt closest to him—but they splat on the walls like ethereal vomit. He brushes at his ears, as if he has just stepped through a spiderweb. 

But I sense a lie in my own ghost-speech. I sucked when it came to Letting Go, Enjoying The Moment, Not Sweating The Small Stuff. I had assumed there would be time to tackle these concepts once the working, the earning, the worrying were over.

“He’s here,” OnceBillyNowWilliam breathes, scanning the high corners of the dining room. “I think he’s angry.”

No, goddammit, no, I am not angry, I want to scream. But I can’t produce any more ghosty-talk. I am exhausted. Some force is tugging me down towards the basement, quite possibly all the way down into the earth.

Devine and the crew disappear at some point, and the grandkids are put to sleep in their parents’ old bedrooms. Watching the tiny blanketed lump of Lucy’s boy sigh up and down with sleep warms my gasses, or my fluids, or whatever I am made of. I am coming to understand myself as something more substantial than a cloud and less solid than flesh-and-bone. I scrape my ghostly goo against doorways and the corners of tables as I navigate my home. I am all one thing, no particles.

The hooded creature, one of my spectral housemates, is float-lurking behind me while I watch Lucy’s boy drift off. For all I know it has been over my shoulder the whole time. It croaks, on purpose I assume, the ghostly equivalent of clearing its throat. I swivel for a good look and this time it doesn’t run away. It just stands there. I guess I’m in the Club now, with the dead things. Still, it is scaring the shit out of me.

 It’s a turtle. An upright turtle, propped back on its tail in a way I assume a turtle really ought not to do, a position that cannot be comfortable. The turtle’s head is pulled almost all the way into its shell, but I make out two spots of amber, bulbs threatening to flare out, where its eyes must be.

“Asesino,” whispers the turtle. Or maybe the sound is coming from the house itself.

Murder. This is how it is with my Spanish. I remember all the words—one or the other Mexican cable channel was on twenty-four hours a day growing up—but I can’t put a sentence together without sounding like an idiot.

“Fantasma.” This whisper comes from down the hallway. Another specter, Jeeves, the Flemish Giant rabbit, lumbers towards us. Jesus, I forgot how he grew to the size of a dog by the time he died. Here in the hallway in our afterlives, he sits back on his powerful haunches and looks me right in the eye. 

“Asesinato,” they say in unison. The slick, round head of the turtle emerges, extended like some obscene searching appendage. Out of the shadows of the shell, I make out that it wears a red bandana, Gypsy-style, and the facial features are maybe not what one would expect from a reptile.

Tia Maria. That frowning turtle head, hissing at me in Spanish, is Tia Maria. 

My parents returned to Mexico for good when I graduated from high school. For reasons none of us ever agreed upon, Tia Maria stayed. She had never married. She ran a small, relatively successful bodega and astrology clinic in a neighborhood that was constantly in danger of being gentrified. This left me as the closest relation. I could count on my brother flying her out once a year, Christmas or Easter, but I was expected to include her in everything else: Memorial Day picnics, birthdays, piano recitals, graduations. 

It was my mistake, I see that now, not inviting Tia Maria to Lucy’s 10th birthday. She hadn’t missed one of our kids’ birthdays yet, and the questions had grown tiresome: Who is that scowling woman in the bandana and the enormous dress? Is she part of the entertainment? Can we put a ki-bosh on the throaty clicks and grunts she is making, as she is scaring the children?

Tia Maria had appeared at our doorstep as the last of the birthday guests filed out. She swept one of her short brown fingers over all of us, even Lucy, but held it in front of my face. Shook it. One wiry black hair sprouted just below her last knuckle.

“Maldigo!,” she spat, and I lost track of everything else that came out of her mouth.

“Come inside, Tia,” I begged. “There’s plenty of leftover cake. Lucy will show you her presents.”

But she had zipped up her lips tightly, accentuating the hang of her nose and the depth of her frown. Several times I’d caught my kids calling her a witch; every time I scolded them and shut it down. But at that moment it was hard to deny.

Tia Maria swiveled on a heel, a tight 180 you wouldn’t expect from such a compact mound of old woman, and worked her way down my driveway, see-sawing from the hip that acted up now and then. Her taxi had been waiting the whole time. I was able to shove forty dollars into the cabbie’s fist before they pulled away. Tia Maria slid to the other side of the cab and peered out that window the whole time, nose high like a bird, scouting our suburban lawns for worms. 

“That was a straight-up curse!” Chantelle said afterwards, laughing. “We better look around for a dead chicken or something.”

I remember that irritating me, her joking around, when she hadn’t been face-to-face with the pure malice burning in Tia Maria’s eyes. 

I didn’t do enough to make amends. I called Maria a couple of times, then gave up. Our kids were of an age, tournaments and performances every weekend, and I had extra hours at work to pay for it all. That was the last time we saw the live version of Tia Maria. 

“Nosotros morimos,” Turtle Maria intones.

“Yes, I know. You all died,” I say to it. Our ghost words gurgle towards each other like we are in a fish tank. “So did I. Me too, it turns out.”

“No, ju kill us,” she says in her broken English. Thirty years in the United States and she refused to speak the language properly. “Ju are asesinato.”

Memories are fading fast, but here is what I can still access regarding the turtles, and the rabbit named Jeeves. There were three of the turtles. Their names are lost to me, but they smelled like garbage cans left in the sun. They ate fruit and vegetable scraps, and it was healthy for them to eat meat on occasion. I remember them smudging their beaks stupidly against the glass of their aquarium.

Lizzy raised Jeeves, the rabbit, as part of a school project. There had been a misunderstanding about how permanent this arrangement would be. And regarding how large Jeeves might grow. And the amount of ammonia he might release into the atmosphere through his daily excretions. 

I never tried to kill any of these animals. I never took any direct action. But what hard lines exist between benign neglect, ignorance, and the taking of a life? It is true, I may have used the bleach cleaner, the only product guaranteed to eliminate insidious black mold, far too close to the turtle’s cage. Close to the time when they died. I had been warned, on several occasions, that they had the tiniest of lungs. But I had to stay on top of the black mold situation in our basement, a legitimate human health concern.

Jeeves died almost a month later, while Chantelle and the kids were visiting her parents. I admit to forgetting about him for most of that weekend. I found him dead on Monday morning, hours before they were all due back. He seemed more massive than ever, and hard to think of as a rabbit, stiff and locked up like that. I emptied the waste tray, quite full with his piss and shit, and cleaned the cage from top to bottom. It would take weeks for the smell of Jeeves’ urine to clear out of the house. I wrapped him in a festive beach towel. We buried Jeeves next to the turtles in the backyard.

“We have to say something, Daddy!” one of the kids had suggested, and then they’d taken it up together, chanted it.

“Here lies Jeeves,” I vaguely remember muttering. “Gentle giant, loved by all.” 

I find Chantelle in our room. For some reason the Ghost Rules won’t let me pass the threshold of my own bedroom. Small limitations like this are beginning to pop up. I am losing my freedom of movement. She sits at the edge of the bed with that same shirt from the seance, a shirt I now remember as the famed and often-derided Cowboy Shirt. It has bright white buttons and faded piping along most of the seams. It is maroon, with pink flowers embroidered above the pockets. 

The Cowboy Shirt, object of so many easy jokes, is twined around her torso like she had considered putting it on but changed her mind. The top buttons of her own shirt are undone, exposing most of her collarbone. I am just remembering how bright fucking white she is. She hates the sun. The only interruption to her flawless white is the shadow valley where her neck flows into her body. 

I need to end this thing before Devine opens his eyes and sees how beautiful Chantelle is. He’ll want to make a spectacle of her on the show, or maybe he’ll try to take her for himself.

On his next visit, Devine produces a new device that can translate waves from “The Other Side,” into words. He has a fancy name for it, but it is basically a ghost translator. He explains into the camera how the device works, that it can reproduce words from spirits, string them together, three words at a time. 

This may be my last chance.

Devine, the crew, and my family, grandkids included, have gathered in front of the downstairs television. Did I really spend that much time down here? 

I am dreaming up short revelatory sentences when I catch sight of Jeeves and Tia Maria Turtle lurking behind the couches. Our basement is as full as it has ever been. It’s a regular party: people and animals, live and dead. 

The turtle’s face is hard to pin down in the basement light. It may be Tia or I may be hallucinating. She did have significant, arguably reptilian, wrinkles. A small fluorescent pair of lungs beats frantically inside the turtle. They glow right through its fleshy underside.

I imagine what I want to say, visualizing it written on a chalkboard like I am re-learning English. My ghost cognition, so imprecise, isn’t good for anything anymore but unfortunate memories, and is getting worse all the time. I just need three perfect words to end this curse, this haunting, release my family, or me, whoever is being held captive.

The device is picking up screeches, howls, not what I am after. William, Lucy, and Nancy hook their arms around their little ones.

“CONEJO . . . ” squawks from the device’s speaker. It’s one of those computer voices, half-HAL 9000 and half-voice message lady. 

One of the crew speaks Spanish. “It means rabbit,” he translates. Devine sighs. This sort of gibberish won’t be useful.

No, that is not what I meant to say! That is not a word I was thinking about! 

I catch Jeeves out of the corner of my eyes. He is laid out to his full length, lounging sensually, sort of a come-run-your-hands-through-this-pelt look. He is smiling, which on a rabbit face looks positively demonic.

It had to have been some sort of heart attack. Rabbits are susceptible to these, they get spooked and just die. One weekend of neglect could not kill such a thick beast.

The turtle has his head retracted back in his shell, but I can still pick up the glow of one eye.

“TORTUGA” is the second word from the device.

Again, no! For fuck’s sake, this is not me speaking!

This word is easier to translate, they only have to explain to the kids. Devine has his head cocked to the side like that might make him hear me better.

The vet tech had been very clear, all three of the turtles dying like that, together, practically stacked on top of each other, mostly likely indicated a fungal infection, so common with reptiles in captivity. “Most likely,” he had termed it, making no mention whatsoever of cleaning products. 

Murder, that is what the turtle and rabbit want to say in that box next. They have been sitting in this basement all these years and now they have their chance. Jeeves is beginning to look like a character from Alice in Wonderland. Pleasure oozes from his self-satisfied smile.

“Asesinato,” the rabbit and the turtle mouth together. Even the turtle, hardly any Tia left in his face, manages a smile. 

No fucking way. I leap onto the entertainment center, which rattles the television. That gets their attention. I produce a cytoplasmic stump that I think may be a hand and brush at Chantelle’s hair. She doesn’t seem to notice, but electricity or some other sort of agitation courses through me. It’s like an intense shot of memory, our life together compressed into one tiny bit. 

“LOVE,” the box croaks.

Jeeves and Tortuga Maria disappear. 

Great, wonderful, my last words to my family might be interpreted as an expression of love for the damn animals. But the weight that has been holding me here lets up the slightest bit. 

The kids check in with Chantelle, then each other, smile cautiously. Their adult faces melt into childlike shapes I recognize.

I am slipping away. I am not going to get any more words into that damn box.

They hug their babies and explain it all. How Dad had always seemed to be on edge, how he had been a hard man to get to know, but they had always sensed that, underneath, he had a soft heart. Was full of love. The grandkids, my grandkids, nod thoughtfully.

As I fly away, not exactly upwards, but wherever I am going next, I see Barabas Devine cross his arms, grin, surveying the feel-good ending. This will sell.