The Bagging #4
But Aaron had not returned the way the rest of us had.
That much was clear now. Maybe it was not Aaron at all who came through the door that night, though his face was still arranged in the old familiar order.
Or maybe it was Aaron more completely than he had ever been before, stripped of hesitation, emptied of shame, finally and wholly given over to whatever had been waiting for him on the other side of his little candles and scraps of paper.
He sat among us like a man listening to instructions from a room none of us could enter.
So when he said he needed a volunteer, the air seemed to lean toward Melissa before she even moved.
Sometimes I thought she was brave. Other times, I thought she was simply tired of being afraid and had decided the cure was to run headlong into worse things before they could choose her first. I had seen bruises yellowing under the sleeves of her thrift-store sweaters back when she still bothered to hide them.
I had seen her stare into the broken bathroom mirror with a flat, cold expression, as if she were daring her muddy reflection to make the first move.
So when Aaron asked for a volunteer, of course, it was Melissa who spoke.
She offered herself the way some people raise a hand in class. Like she knew it all.
It began like any scene from a bad horror movie.
We sat in a circle around the flickering candlelight, silent.
Jeff giggled, I stared into the flame, and Aaron pulled Melissa a little away from the glow.
He started mumbling some nonsense, crumbling a black substance into the fire.
It crackled like a worn flint. The smell…
I can’t even describe it, because I had never encountered anything like that before. Nor since.
The black smoke rising from the candle seemed to coil into his hand.
The serpentine haze climbed straight up to his fingers, where it abruptly vanished, or so it appeared.
Then he approached Melissa, who was utterly focused on Aaron’s movements, and placed his free hand on her head, tangling his fingers in her faded red hair.
With his other hand – the one that had captured the black smoke – he covered her mouth.
The sound that followed was like the closing of an old stove’s little door. Jeff and I jumped.
“…the fuck, man?”, Jeff muttered.
A strange substance seeped from her nostrils.
The same kind of smoke, but white. Angelically white.
It did not rise the way smoke should. It unfolded.
Slowly, delicately, almost shyly, curling over her upper lip and trembling there as if testing the air of the room.
For one insane second, I could see shapes moving inside it: the suggestion of fingers, the pale bend of a shoulder, a face turning away before I could recognize it.
Then it thinned and drew itself toward Aaron’s closed fist.
Melissa remained motionless. Her famous eyes had lost their spark, as if her soul had slipped away into some abyss I could neither name nor imagine.
Her body was still sitting there in front of us, yes, but it had become only a body with terrible suddenness.
The difference was impossible to explain and impossible not to see.
A moment earlier, Melissa had been in the room.
Even in silence, even afraid, even pretending not to be afraid, she had filled space the way fire fills a stove.
Now the space around her felt vacant. Her face had not changed, not really, and yet it was no longer arranged around a person.
I felt helplessly drunk. Not drunk from wine or smoke or anything we had swallowed, but drunk from the collapse of ordinary things.
The floor seemed too far below me. The candle seemed too bright.
Jeff was breathing hard beside me, making a small wet sound in his throat, and I remember hating him for it because it proved he was alive and Melissa was not alive in the same way anymore.
“Mel?” I whispered.
She did not blink.
Aaron stood over her with his fist clenched, his knuckles pale, his face emptied of triumph.
That frightened me more than if he had smiled.
Whatever he had done, he had not done it for pleasure.
Or not only for pleasure. He looked like a man holding something fragile and listening to it breathe inside his hand.
Then someone knocked at the door.
Perfect timing. Perfect and obscene, as if the world had been waiting just outside for its cue.
The sound went through all of us. Three knocks, bright and ordinary, followed by muffled laughter from the porch.
We froze on the spot. I sat on the floor beside Jeff, trying to make sense of what was happening with Melissa, but I couldn’t utter a sound.
Even if I could, I wouldn’t have known what to say.
Help her? Stop him? Give it back? Those words belonged to a world where things could still be undone.
I loved her, and in that moment, she was gone. Her body remained, yes, pale and warm and terrible in its patience, but I knew she – her essence – was no longer in that flesh. The room seemed to understand before I did. The house went quiet around her. Even the pipes stopped ticking in the walls.
Another knock came, shorter this time.
A child’s voice called from the porch, sweet with impatience.
Aaron turned toward the door and walked, his fist clenched. He opened slowly.
“Trick or treat!”
Three kids stood on the threshold, wearing dumb masks.
He shoved his hand into the first one’s bag.
It was a lovely bag – khaki, with embroidered red stars.
You could tell the parents cared about their little one.
I expected the kids to start throwing a fit, demanding more because the trick had been shit.
They had been given one great, big nothing.
But that did not happen. They watched him in astonishment and did not say a word.
They simply stepped away from the door, and he – without so much as a goodbye – vanished into the unknown.
The silence lasted a long time. Longer than any silence I had ever known.
It did not feel like the absence of sound, but like a thing that had entered the house after Aaron left and settled over us with its full weight.
Jeff sat on the floor with both hands pressed to his mouth, staring at the door as if Aaron might come back through it laughing, explaining the trick, giving us permission to hate him in some simple, ordinary way.
I stayed beside Melissa, close enough to touch her knee but too afraid to do it.
She was breathing. That was the worst of it.
Her chest rose and fell with a patience that seemed almost insulting.
A dead person would have made sense. Not comfort, never that, but sense.
There are things the living know how to do around death, even if they do them badly.
You scream. You run. You call someone. You cover the body.
But Melissa was not dead. Her body had not received that mercy.
It sat among us with open eyes and a faint, damp warmth still coming from the skin, and everything that made her Melissa had been taken somewhere else.
“We should call somebody,” Jeff said at last.
His voice sounded small and raw, nothing like him.
“Who?” I asked.
He looked at me as if I had betrayed him by making him answer.
“I don’t know. An ambulance.”
“And say what?”
“That she’s sick.”
“She’s not sick.”
“Then the cops.”
I almost laughed. Not because it was funny, but because the idea was so impossible that my mind tried to reject it as a joke.
The cops would come into that house and find the bottles, the ash, the needles, the old candy wrappers, the razors, the stink of all our little crimes pressed into the walls.
They would find Melissa like that and ask us what we had given her, what she had taken, where Aaron had gone, and why none of us had called sooner.
And what would we tell them? That our friend had pulled something white and holy-looking out of her nose and stuffed it into a child’s Halloween bag?
That the child had walked away with the best part of her?
Jeff seemed to understand at the same moment I did. His face broke, but no tears came.
“She needs help,” he whispered.
“I know.”
“Then do something.”
I looked at Melissa. Her eyes were still open, fixed on nothing.
I waved my hand once in front of her face.
Nothing. I said her name. Nothing. I touched her shoulder then, finally, and nearly pulled my hand back because she was still warm.
Her head tilted a little from the pressure, slow and boneless, and I made a sound I hope I never make again.
Jeff stood up too quickly and kicked over the candle.
The flame died against the floorboards, leaving a thin black smear and a smell like burnt hair.
For a second, we were in darkness, and in that darkness I heard him crying.
Not loudly. Not dramatically. Just a broken, angry little rhythm in his throat.
“We can’t stay here,” he said.
“No.”
“We can’t leave her here.”
“No.”
“Then what the fuck do we do?”
I had no answer. Every possible action seemed to belong to people better than us, cleaner than us, people who had not spent years turning cruelty into games and calling it love when they got tired of calling it hunger.
We had wanted to live outside the rules, and now, when we needed them, the rules would not take us back.