I wouldn’t dance. If I started, I might not be able to stop. But that didn’t mean I couldn’t scope out the scene, even carouse a bit. As long as I kept it to just the one night—my last night—and didn’t get sucked in forever.
This time, I headed straight for Clementine’s. It must’ve been a weekend, because it teemed with more cramped bodies than before in the neon dark. I looked around at the drinkers, hoping to find somebody holding straight whiskey or an old-fashioned. Once again, I didn’t get to choose, jostled by somebody a few too many beers in. It made my skin flush hot.
“You there,” said an accented woman’s voice, exaggerated like an actress in an old black and white movie, one of the first talkies, rather than a real human soul. She came swishing toward me, her flapper dress champagne gold against her black skin. “There, she looked, one of us! She looks newly dead, but get a look at that skirt, hiding her knees!”
She knocked her own together for emphasis. I opened my mouth for a retort, but I couldn’t untie my tongue in time, because she reached right down and lifted my skirt, brushing my skin. Her memories made me reel even harder than the drink. My tongue burned with bad bathtub gin, but I found respite in kisses stolen in a dark corner of a discreet club, where women in suits drank and smoked like men, sweeping dames off their feet.
And then my body and mind were mine again, and I couldn’t tell if the touch had been too brief, or if the recollection itself was hazy, too tipsy to commit in the first place, because her lover’s face had blurred, and the flashes of the club were like photographs, with only the awful burn of bootleg liquor strong enough to last the years and years of looking back.
I recoiled, slapping my skirt back down. “Buy me a drink first.”
“Why so shy, little graveflower?” drawled a dark man in a slightly crumpled pinstriped suit, like a Southern gentleman whose Sunday best had seen better days, or just a bad last day. He had a guitar slung over his back like he’d died with it.
His hand on my waist showed me much the same picture. My nose filled with tobacco, sweat trickling down my spine in the smoky heat of a crowded juke joint, though he’d played so many, they all blurred together, too many counters and corners where there shouldn’t have been, and the faces even worse, like an out-of-focus picture.
Even after I lurched away from him, my fingers itched to dance. I’d picked up guitar as well as drums and piano long ago, a little of everything, idle hands making the devil’s music.
I might’ve come for a good time, but I hadn’t expected to get this kind of friendly. They’d gotten under my skin without the courtesy of even taking my clothes off first.
“You’re rather an antique, aren’t you?” said a pale lady in nothing but a corset and bloomers. I had to wonder if she’d kicked the bucket looking like that, or if she’d left a phantom gown lying abandoned somewhere in the ether.
For a moment, I hoped she’d be more reserved, but even she had to go and try poking me. I leaned away from her finger as she went to tuck in a strand of my hair, but she got me in the cheek. Unlike the others, she had no parties of her own to show me. If she’d ever gone to balls, or concerts, or whatever they held in her time, she didn’t have them in mind. Instead, I saw some flashes with no tastes or smells or touch, nothing but the swell of music and blur of dancing, swing and jive, twist and even disco. I couldn’t tell if she’d been there, still dancing in death, or if those memories had been shared secondhand.
That must’ve been why they couldn’t keep their damn hands to themselves. I wondered what I might’ve accidentally shared from all the bars and clubs and house parties where I’d danced, and worse, where I’d played. My memories would be fresher, like moving pictures compared to their stuck camera reels.
In any case, we had nothing to touch on this side but each other. I just wished it didn’t come with so much baggage.
“When are you from?” the flapper asked.
I tried not to bristle at her having to ask, like I didn’t blend into the crowd of living as well as I’d thought. “Now.”
“I thought kids these days didn’t know shame,” she said, miming a phone, badly, with her thumb and pinky out, not how they made them anymore, and definitely not the kind that could take the pictures she imitated. “You just tweet tweet, tick-tock, all the livelong day!”
I’d never once done either of those things in my entire life. I hardly socialized in the real world, let alone online.
“You never once phoned a friend, sent a telegram, wrote a letter?” said a familiar voice. We all turned to meet it.
Alastair emerged straight through somebody, still cool and articulate even after taking our equivalent of a shot, though his grin was bigger and sillier than usual. As if the rolled-up sleeves weren’t enough, even worse, he’d taken off his vest. Under the suspenders, his shirt buttons were half undone.
He threw his arms around the flapper and the guitar gent. “And you were boozing and sleazing the same, but nobody snapped any evidence.”
The flapper girl held a finger to her lips. “Hush up, you old devil.”
“Live fast, die young, leave a hot little corpse,” said the guitar gent, like his own remains were anything but cold and dry by now, nothing but bones, soon to be dust.
“I sure didn’t,” said the corseted lady, with a haughty swell of her chest, her generous tits nearly spilling right out. I couldn’t look anywhere else. It didn’t help to think that she must’ve been twice the age of my late grandparents. That must’ve been why I didn’t know how to talk to these old-timers.
“But you’ve more than made up for lost time, haven’t you?” said Alastair.
He let go of the others and went to sweep her up, dipping her like on the cover of a bodice-ripping romance before going in for a shameless kiss. I had to look away, trying like hell not to openly cross my legs. The other two were looking, without much interest, like they’d seen it a hundred times but it still beat looking anywhere else.
For a moment there, I nearly thought he’d forgotten all about me. He pulled her back up, set her down glowing and giggling, and turned to catch my eye, licking his lips.
“Mal,” he said. “I see you’ve met some of the band.”
They turned back to me, looking me up and down like they were hungry—but not ravenous. Just peckish, lacking anything better to do but to polish me off.
Right when I thought to give up, like I didn’t have it in me to party anymore, and I might as well be deader than dead, I jumped at the touch of yet another hand.
Alastair’s fingers were warm in mine. He didn’t force any memories on me, as if we were still alive. His walls were up, if a bit wobbly, like a carnival house. Mine were hopefully the same.
Did he hold back as a courtesy, or because he had something to hide?
He leaned in, and the memory of breath tickled my ear. “I won’t ask,” he said. “Just for tonight.”
With that, he swung me around, through a young woman shrieking with vodka-driven delight as she approached her friends. I let out a yelp of my own, a roller-coaster thrill in my stomach, like when I used to gaze over the ledge of my apartment rooftop. As soon as he let go of my hand, I wished he hadn’t. It felt so good, feeling again. I didn’t want to stop.
* * *
We went upstairs, past the red-lit hallway and the rooms still in use, and joined the others in the lounge. This time, we mingled. Ghosts of all ages broke off from their clusters to surround us, and I found myself being introduced.
“For how long have you wandered?” asked the lady with a parasol.
“I just got here.”
The man in the bowler hat clapped my shoulder in an ungentlemanly breach of personal space. If we could smell, he’d probably reek of brandy, or whatever they used to drink in his day. “Bully for you!”
“It’s so much better on this side,” said a middle-aged woman in a victory suit, with a smart hat and empty cigarette holder, which I didn’t blame her for keeping to wave for emphasis.
“You’re not gonna miss it,” said a kid in such brightly colored polyester and denim, he had to be an eighties mall rat. “I don’t even remember my life.”
“It’s a good thing you died young,” added a man whose nipples showed uncomfortably through his tight sweater, in a shade of orange best left back in the seventies along with his bell bottoms.
Alastair put his arm around me. “Why so shy?”
“I’m not.”
I hadn’t realized that I wasn’t saying anything in reply, letting everyone talk over me. It had been so long, I’d gotten rusty.
“Prove it,” he said.
“I need another drink.”
“Let me walk you,” the seventies guy offered, taking my elbow.
“I’ll do it,” said the mall rat, taking my other arm.
So that’s why they’d crowded around me, at least some of them. After however many decades they’d been here, they’d exhausted their pool of potential partners. If they hadn’t paired off for good, they could only hook up with their own leftovers.
As for everyone else, they must’ve been bored, looking for someone new to talk to, if they could only remember to shut up and listen.
“Have some goddamn manners,” snapped the flapper, shoving the seventies guy. On my other side, mall rat cowered away. “Go on, take a walk.” She turned to me and offered her palm. “I’d be obliged to escort you, miss.”
I flushed all over. Even with that lovely face of hers, those curves under the trembling tassels of her dress, I wasn’t ready for another taste of terrible gin.
“Leave her be,” Alastair said.
I left them behind and took off on my own, weaving through the milling bodies. On my way down the stairs, someone blocked me.
“Wait,” said a young guy from the tens, judging from the man bun and skinny jeans, the narrowest in the room. I cringed, thinking he recognized me.
“What time do you come from?” he asked.
I threw up my hands. “What do you think?”
Rather than answer, he looked me up and down again. I raced past him, grateful that at least nobody downstairs could see me in my forever outfit. After another shot, I unbuttoned my blouse to reveal my tank beneath it, but that didn’t do enough. So I took it off and left it on the floor, wondering if it would stay there.
My skirt couldn’t be helped. At least, not until after my next drink.
“Ready?” asked Alastair.
His eyes were hazier than before, like he’d come downstairs for the same reason. They swept over my bare shoulders and slightly lower neckline slowly.
I looked him right in the eye and lied. “I died ready.”
“That’s the spirit.”
* * *
When we got back, the crowd greeted me again with a cheer. This time, I took it like I deserved it. After all, I had earned it, back in the day. I held out my arms to gather up their attention.
“What’s up, you dead fucks?”
This used to be easy. I just had to smile, and with loud and tipsy showmanship, own my mess.
“It’s my last night on Earth,” I said. “I’m having a dry wake in the morning, so let’s get soaked enough to stay wet tomorrow!”
Another cheer, and more touching, less unwelcome this time around. Now that I expected the flashes, they weren’t so disorienting. Or maybe they just matched the drunken spins.
“How did you die?” asked the tens guy.
That slowed my roll. If I’d had a better story, I wouldn’t have minded the question so much.
“On this side, it’s an icebreaker,” said Alastair.
“I’ll go first,” the flapper interrupted. “I crashed and burned in a car race.” She spoke so casually, as if relaying something she’d seen in a movie, not something that really happened, let alone to herself. “It happened so fast I thought I’d flown out of the car and landed on my feet somehow, right up until I saw the car smoking like blazes with my body still in it. They had to have a closed casket.”
“I guess mine’s not so interesting anymore,” said the corseted lady, a bit miffed. “My horses got spooked and ran my carriage over a bridge. I surely broke my neck at the bottom, but I’m not sure. I watched from the railing.”
That answered my question about the corset. She must’ve taken her dress off every morning.
“I dropped dead,” the guitar gent cut in. “And I didn’t even notice, so I kept walking, right on to the next town, leaving my own self behind in the dust. It weren’t till none of the townsfolk would talk to me that I noticed anything funny. I’d got to thinking my reputation preceded me. Then I tried to open some saloon doors, and I went right through them.”
After that, we went around in a circle. Most were similarly violent and mundane: thrown off a horse, crushed by an overturned buggy, hit by a bus. We didn’t die young for nothing.
My turn came up. They all leaned in for a story they hadn’t heard already. I knew now what to say, inspired by the last few narratives. I told the truth—only not the whole truth, or the chronological one, for that matter.
“I drank,” I said. “Just drank, and drank, and didn’t stop, so I could fly to the sun, crash and burn in a blaze of glory, and nobody would forget what a legendary night we had, or bring themselves to regret it.”
But, as hard as I’d tried, it hadn’t killed me. Somebody had called an ambulance, and I’d lived to have to detox, and after that, I hadn’t had the heart to try again. Especially not once I ended up crashing in my sister’s apartment. After coming back into her life, and trying so hard to put my own back together, I couldn’t just leave again.
If I’d died a stranger to her, all this would’ve been so much easier. I might’ve been able to dance.
“Hear, hear!”
“Amen!”
“What a way to go!”
“I’ll say,” said Alastair.
From the way he tilted his head, staring with his lips pursed, he didn’t believe me.
* * *
“There’s no call to feel so guilty,” Alastair said. We were downstairs after another round of drinks. Somehow, we’d lost our following, now alone in the neon shadows, probably around last call.
“Hmm?” I asked, playing dumb.
“It’s too late to change however you came to be here,” he said. “So you may as well settle in and enjoy yourself.”
Long ago, in place of a pretty smile or curvy body, I’d learned to dust off a secret and flourish it. It would make strangers laugh, as if I’d palmed my honesty like a quarter from behind their ear. For a while there, my sleight of hand had gotten rusty. But now it felt good, flashing my old coin-trick smile.
“I’m the bastard child of a Catholic mother,” I said. “Guilt is my birthright.”
His teeth glinted in the red light as he laughed. “Let’s send you off the way you came.”
He leaned in, shadows chasing the light across his perfect distraction of a face. It wouldn’t be a party if I didn’t do something I’d regret—or someone. I couldn’t help but glance down at his lips, biting my own. My mouth had gotten sick of its own taste, terribly empty for too long. It nearly watered, as if he were a meal, not a bad decision.
His eyes drifted shut as he kept leaning closer and closer. I wavered, thinking of how terribly smug he’d look in the morning, because I never settled for just a kiss. I need only make my usual escape, and after that, I wouldn’t have to see him ever again.
Suddenly he pulled back, just enough to look at me.
“Wait,” he said. “What makes you think this is your last night on earth?”
I fumbled drunkenly for a lie. Not fast enough.
He clapped his palm to his brow. “Your dry wake! I nearly forgot. Now, why the everliving fuck are you going?”
I shook my head in near disbelief. “It’s been so long, you don’t even remember how it feels, do you?”
“If you want to last as long as I have, you’ll stay the hell away.”
“I’m not sure I want to be here that long.”
He blinked at me in disbelief. “You’re not meant to stick so closely to the ones you leave behind. It’s not pretty to watch.”
“I’ll be fine,” I said. “It’s not like there’ll be much grieving, anyway.”
“What about me?” His voice went nearly soft. “You don’t think I’d grieve for you?”
I couldn’t help but throw my hands up in a big shrug. “Umm… why?”
“I want to hear you play.”
My blood ran hot and then cold, flushing and shuddering at once. “You said you wouldn’t ask.”
“Well, it wasn’t a question,” he said. “But I don’t have musicians falling in my lap every day—let alone good ones.”
So he hadn’t just checked my obit. He’d listened.
I got to my feet. “I can’t wait to never see you again.”
With that, I spirited off.