Quibble heads to his apartment on the Upper East Side, which used to be his parents’ before they died. A penthouse. An impossibility for nearly every single human on the planet, let alone most trans folks. His parents were old money; the place has been in the family for, well, not generations. Nothing in the United States is truly that old. But yes, a couple generations, if one thinks about it that way. He greets the doorman, a guy named Alex not any older than he is, and grabs a package from him. Gets in the elevator, presses the button for the fourteenth floor. The building is old, but the system has been updated. A key fob swipe means the button is permitted to light.
The doors open directly into his apartment. Many such places are gaudy, but not this one. It is dark and quiet; its most defining interior feature: built-in bookshelves. The apartment is filled to the brim with pages, covers. It smells like a library. Its most defining exterior feature: a balcony, the rare private outdoor space afforded only to the richest in Manhattan. French doors. The lights perched on the sides of buildings from the city beyond; a view of trees on the road, bathed in streetlamp light. The purple city looms, beats like a heart. He steps out and looks over it, over all the people touching each other, brushed up against each other in bars and baking bread in their kitchen windows. It is too freezing to stay out there for long, but he braves as much as he can. Something to clear his head a little after the close, damp heat in the subway car. He’d had to take his coat off; he’d gotten so muzzy, so sweaty. And why hadn’t he just ripped apart the air to land here, on this balcony? Honestly, he considers if he made the right choice, struck the balance between energy and Energy. Both bodies get tired. He’d used a lot of Power, opening the world around the four of them as he had, and what if something happened, some emergency, and he had to use more? He always thinks about saving people; he always keeps some Power in the tank.
Inside, he pours himself a rye whiskey from a bar cart and collapses onto the tufted leather sofa. He’s made some choices—done a little redecorating so he’s not quite as haunted by the spirits of his parents, his past. Gone are the endless photos of him with long curls, his graduation photo with the lace halter top and gloss-finish lipstick, awkwardly looking into the middle distance and trying to smile with his eyes. He never could get the hang of it, not until after he transitioned. And his parents’ plane rocketed into the sea long before he’d put a finger on his squirming gender.
Often, Quibble plays a game with himself: would his parents have been fine with his coming out? This is not a healthy game, says the therapist. We can’t ask them from the great beyond, nor can we read their minds, says the therapist. The first time the therapist said that was, of course, when Quibble tried to actually talk to them postmortem. Because if there is Power in this world, then why not ghosts? Which, as he presently recalls it, gives him an idea. He heads for the closet, the one where he keeps everything. Boxes on boxes from before he changed it all, before he scrubbed their presence from home, too painful to stare at every day and too painful to throw out.
He doesn’t remember where he stuck what he’s looking for, so he brings every box out and tilts their lids back to inspect. Many spiders. The dust of neglect. Old photos, some pasted in albums and others kept in drugstore envelopes and still others in heartier folders with crinkling plastic windows. He lets his eyes blur into soft focus; he doesn’t linger on any one thing too long. Not the dresses his mother wore; not the dresses his mother bought him. Not the last pair of slippers into which his father’s feet wore comfortable grooves. Not the jewelry box with the second-best things—the first-best lay rusting in the sand wherever their bodies wound up. He tries not to think about that quite so vividly. He can’t decide whether it’s an intrusive thought to be gently sent on its merry way or something to be examined, worked on. What he is sure of is that right at this moment, he’s on a mission. Wilder told him they felt the urge to speak to the light—if it can speak, then why not try holding up a microphone specifically engineered for the disembodied?
He finds what he’s looking for after a few tries—a boxed-up toy from sleepovers past that he rediscovered in his nascent adulthood when he tried to get his parents on the spiritual line. A flimsy Ouija board with a plastic planchette. Two children printed on the box cover, excitedly looking at the board all laid out. Hasbro logo. What a laughable thing to encourage children to do. Baby’s first seance.
He sips his whiskey and props the box up by the door, to bring to the Adam and Steve Show, tell Artemis his plan. Who knows if Wilder will come, even—he did cock it all up at the end. If Wilder isn’t coming, then the remaining three of them will need a prop all the more. He breathes a couple deep breaths; he wants to know if bringing this object to the group will do much the same as what Wilder seems so scared of—give away something deeply personal about his past. He wonders yet again if he could speak to his parents if he had more fingers on the planchette than just his own; he is too embarrassed to ever ask anyone else to try.