Suspense Magazine July 2013

swimming when Elise was in the canal. They would pass by
the men, on the way to do laundry, and mutter some catty
trash about Elise that we all heard but never acknowledged.
I think some of the men, too, tasted bitterness after a
while. We didn’t talk about it, but I believe it was there. None
of us would win Elise. She wasn’t here for us. And even if
some buck got lucky, what good was that to the rest of us
Once in a while I’d take my gaze off Elise and look at one of
the older crows. He’d just shoot me back a familiar look of
resignation, as if to say, hey, what are we supposed to do
What were we supposed to do We were supposed to walk
away. We were supposed to have gone about our business,
gone after something that might actually yield some kind of
good in our lives. Maybe if we had, Elsie would still be alive.
But we didn’t. I didn’t. I just kept my nose in that book and
hoped for things I couldn’t admit to hoping.
The book. Maybe it was my boredom, my need to escape
my own addicted flesh, but I actually started to believe that
it was possible for a spirit to leave its body while the body
remained living. No, not just possible…natural. It was as if I
saw, within the riddled verses and the spidery lines of those
strange hand-drawn diagrams, directions to a place just on
the other side of town, a place I’d always known was there. I’d
seen the ads, read the reviews. I’d just never shelled out the
cab fare to check it out for myself. It was there, though. It had
always been there.
I began to practice, at night, before I went to bed. At first
my training was a half-hearted experiment, like an atheist
who prays just to make sure no one will respond. My attitude
changed pretty quickly in the weeks that followed. Before
long, I was doing the exercises, every night. I would close
my eyes and visualize the room that I occupied. The image
of the room was a tenuous thing, infirm, an ever-changing
phantom. Then, I began to see the golden light. The light
made everything solid, illuminating the room before my
closed eyes with a pale and bleary flickering. At first, the
illumination grew dimmer, the farther I traveled from my
body, and I couldn’t go more than few feet before I was
standing in an impenetrable murk. It was terrible, being in
that murk, without ground to stand on or feet to stand with.
I could never stay in the dark for more than few moments
before I fled back to my body, where the exercise would start
over again. By turns, I could drift farther and farther from
my body without losing my sight.
I realized that I could go farther when I was junk sick
and sweating with the chilling fever of withdrawals. I started
fixing earlier in the evening, so that I was good and sick by
bedtime. It was almost unbearable, feeling that sickness and
knowing that relief was just a few feet away on the coffee
table. But if I could hold it together long enough to see the
golden light, I would be freed from my sick flesh and leave
my shivering body behind for a while.
One night, I made it as far as the door, all the way across
the studio from where my body lay. I peered out through
the peephole and saw an old woman drop a cigarette, just a
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few feet from my door, and pass on without stepping on the
smoking butt. My eyes shot open, and I felt the unwelcome
but familiar sensation of my limbs, trembling in the sweatsoaked
sheets of my bed. Despite the realism of my visions,
I could never be certain that what I saw was not just in my
own head. But here was a way to prove that my nightly
journeys were more than a fever-dream. I struggled out of
bed as quickly as I could, draped the covers over my quaking
shoulders, and made for the door. I must have looked like a
mad man, poking my frantic head out the door in the middle
of the night, half-naked, shivering, searching the ground for
a cigarette butt. But I found it. It was still smoking. Suddenly,
I saw a way that I could get closer to Elise.
#
Three months after I began, I
was ready. On the chosen night, I left my body and
made for the canal. The golden light was shining brightly,
illuminating everything around me, as my ghost passed
through the grain of my studio’s door and floated above the
walkway. To fly. I cannot describe my surprise and elation
when I first discovered that I was no longer bound by gravity.
At first my flight was uncertain, not like a fledgling, who will
beats its wings in a frenzy to stay aloft, but like a balloon,
which might be blown too easily by the breezes that resulted
from my poor concentration. By turns, my flight grew more
certain. I was able to soar higher and faster without feeling
that my buoyancy was any less sure. And then I was free, a
holy ghost sailing through a cathedral to sound of blessed
hymns. The filthy doors and their brass numbers became as
stained glass and the canal was as a nave.
As I brought my vision down to the canal, to its dark
and watery mirror, I saw a sight that surely would’ve made
my heart leap, were my body nearby. I saw the source of the
golden light. It was me. My soul. My spirit. I appeared to
myself as a golden vapor, sleek and bright, free of scars, free
of used-up flesh and collapsed veins. I wished, then, that I
had eyes to weep. You must understand that to use, to poison
yourself everyday for years, knowing the same blood that
carries your life also carries the poison, with every breath,
with every single heartbeat—well, you can’t help but think
that maybe your spirit is rotting right alongside your flesh.
Yet here was golden light, pure and unsullied, lighting my
path like the wisdom of a saint. For the first time I felt that
perhaps I was as worthy as anyone to win Elise. Why not
And, if she didn’t want me, so what At least it would not be
due to a rotten soul.
When I came upon Elise, I instinctively stopped in my
flight and hovered above the canal, watching her. She snuck
out every night to wade alone, free of her entourage, their
insistent stares and their probing remarks, like eager hands
grasping at her wrists. Nobody knew she came out to bathe
at night. I knew. I had once gone to do laundry in the small
hours. When I approached her alcove, she had ducked
underwater, the darling. I couldn’t blame her, even then. It
hurt like hell, of course, to see her duck down like that. But
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