Half-Resurrection Blues Read online

  “She’s all right.” Riley reads the concern etched ’cross my face. “But a house a few doors down from her has an ngk.”

  I blink at him. “A what?”

  “An ngk.” It’s almost guttural, the way he says it. Like he’s trying to speak through a mouth gag and then closing it off with a soft click.

  “The fuck’s an ngk? How do you even spell that?”

  Riley nods at Dro, who’s obviously been preparing for this very moment. “An ngk, Carlos, spelled n-g-k, is a small, rarely seen implike creature that is thought to be capable of vast unknown feats of sorcery and mischief. They tend to show up directly before tragedies of immense proportions, but it’s still up for debate whether this is because of their ability to see the future or if they are the actual cause of the disaster.”

  “Damn.”

  “Yeah, they suck,” confirms Riley. “It’s very unusual that one’d show up at all, actually. They were thought to be extinct for a while, but have made sporadic appearances throughout the twentieth century. I dunno. I ain’t never messed with one myself, but you hear weird stories.”

  “Like what?”

  “Let’s go have a look for ourselves, shall we?”

  Sasha’s smile stays on its broken-record rotation through my mind. A little challenge may be just what I need, even if it’s in the form of some tiny unpronounceable freak from the other side.

  * * *

  It’s been three years, but walking down this block always reminds me of that slow crawl back to life. It was days and days I lay there, listening to the cycles of street life sway by outside the window. The walls became my friends, if nothing else for the fact that they were perfectly consistent. Everything was gone. I didn’t even have a name, so being able to wake up to the same sun-bleached floral pattern became a small comfort in those first hazy days. I would slide from another sickly coma, see that faded ornateness and smile softly. Still there. Then the sounds of the street would find me: cars and buses grumbling past, the odd clicks and clanks of the city, yes, but most of all, the voices. The voices of life-living people, going about the business of being alive, all those tiny eccentricities, bothersome little errands, gossip on the corner, transactions, rebukes, come-ons. It was music to me, an endless chugalug of ambient humanity seeping through my pores as I healed.

  When I finally got it together enough to make it outside, I felt like I already knew all the people on the block. I had learned to distinguish between the voices of my neighbors, imagined each one as a thread that’d reach up into the night sky and wrap around the other threads, their small dramas and schedules coalescing into a vast, chaotic quilt. And then I could put faces to the voices. I sat on that stoop for hours marveling at it all, surely appearing like some fallen-off crackhead, but content nonetheless. People nodded as they passed, and eventually nods turned to “all rights,” which became small conversations, and then my voice mingled in the chorus. Another thread.

  It’s almost February, and a brisk wind shushes through the trees, flaps my coat around, whips a frenzy of dead leaves and plastic bags into the air. The kids are getting home from school, all puffy jackets, colorful hats, and cartoon-character book bags. Winter has driven most of the stoop sitters inside, and once the little ones tuck themselves away in their respective houses, things look kind of bleak, quite frankly.

  Or maybe it’s the ngk.

  “Sweet, sweet memories?” Riley’s beside me; his translucent body flaps gently in the wind like some luminous laundry.

  “I suppose. Anything seem off to you? I mean it’s cold, but still, there’s usually more people out, no?”

  “I think it’s the ngk,” Dro says. It annoys me that he sounds so sure of it, but I suppose he’s already done his homework on this stuff.

  “Shall we?” Riley makes an exaggerated after-you gesture toward the block that I used to haunt.

  It’s a pretty unremarkable building really, one more four-story row house on Franklin Avenue just south of Atlantic, a few doors down from Mama Esther’s. There’s a bodega, a liquor store, and a tiny church on the block. Atlantic is all auto shops and gas stations, traffic hurrying off to East New York and Queens. Farther south from where we stand, Franklin Avenue starts getting trendy: a brand-new sushi restaurant and some chic, nondescript boutiquey spots.

  We walk in the front door, and immediately I know something’s wrong. Can feel it through my body like a dirty sheet has been thrown over my heart. I just . . . don’t even want to move. Also, there’s a noise. It’s barely noticeable, just an endless, irritating buzz and the sound of . . . I squint as if it will help me hear—little grunting gasps punctuated with . . . laughter.

  I don’t like this at all.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The old floorboards creak under my boots. Every step feels like a chore. All I want is for that buzzing to cease and that creepy little panting laughter to never trouble me again. I can’t even tell you why it’s so disturbing. Some otherworldly ngk magic, surely, that cuts right to the core of a man; my very soul is irritated.

  It gets worse when I round the corner. The big old room, gray in the late-afternoon shadows, is completely empty except for a tiny figure in the corner. I don’t want to get any closer, but I know I have to if I’m going to end this plague of hideousness. The buzzing, the grunting, the chuckle—it’s all coming from this sinister little thing, this ngk. It only reaches up to just above my ankle. Pale, greenish skin stretches in wrinkly folds across its bony little body. That face—an alarming grin reaches from one side of its head to the other. The frail lips are parted slightly, and its wormy tongue reaches out between tiny, uneven teeth. And, perhaps most unnerving of all, the ngk is riding what appears to be an exercise bike of some kind. It just cycles and cycles and cycles and pants and chuckles and grunts, not even registering that a tall half-dead Puerto Rican has entered the room.

  It irks me that the ngk doesn’t look up. I want to scream at it, but what good would it do? Riley and Dro float up beside me, and I don’t have to look at them to know they’re experiencing the same shriveling discomfort that I am. They’re both diminished, their iridescence reduced to a feeble, blinking glow.

  “The fuck?” I say. The words feel like they’re ricocheting through an echo chamber in my head.

  “The ngk,” Dro announces unnecessarily.

  “Esther must be miserable with this thing nearby,” I say. Each time I open my mouth is a new dimension of hangover. I decide to save nonurgent conversation till the ngk is safely disposed of. “How ’bout I just cut its head off and then we leave?”

  “Can’t,” Riley says.

  “Why not?”

  “You can’t kill an ngk,” Dro informs me through gritted ghost teeth.

  “Why . . . the fuck . . . not?”

  Dro shakes his head. “No one knows.”

  That’s not good enough. My hand’s on my blade and it’s taking all I got not to free it from its cane covering and make a quick end to this feverish little bastard. I just want it to stop. “What are we doing here, then?”

  “I needed you guys to see it,” Riley says, more somber than usual. “I don’t have an answer for how to get rid of it, but Esther’s saved all our asses in one way or another, and we owe it to her.” The thought of Riley needing his ass saved startles me; I’ve never even seen him ruffled.

  Then a horrible shrieking sound blasts through everything else. I cover my ears, but it’s useless. The shit’s tearing me up from the inside out.

  “What the hell?”

  “That’s the ngk call,” Dro says. We’re all backing quickly toward the door. “It’s lethal as fuck.”

  In seconds we’re out on the street, panting.

  “All right,” Riley says. “I wanna check in with Mama Esther.”

  * * *

  The feeling follows us down the block, even lingers as a dull whisper while we trudge up the creaking steps at Mama Esther’s. Then we enter the library, the only room in the entire house with any
furniture, and everything’s all right again. There aren’t even shelves, just stacks and stacks of books from floor to ceiling. You’d think it’d be a chaotic mess, all packed in there like that, but somehow there’s a harmony to it; the books seem almost suspended in midair. They’re everywhere, and the room is wide and tall enough that it doesn’t feel cluttered. If I don’t clean my little spot in more than a week, it starts to close in on me, so how Esther keeps this utterly full room spacious is beyond me. Some ghost shit, I suppose. Either way, it’s oddly comforting.

  Esther’s floating in her usual spot right in the center of the room. That’s where her head is anyway. Beneath that great girthy smile, her wide body stretches out into invisibility in a way that lets you know she’s got the whole house tucked within those fat ghostly folds. “Boys.” She nods at us; the warmth of that smile is a sunbath after the grimness of the ngk.

  * * *

  Mama Esther was the second face I saw after I woke up.

  Once he figured out I was gonna make it, Riley chuckled and went on his way, promising to be back later. Next thing I knew, this large smile was looming over me like the moon. Esther. Scared the shit out of me at first. I thought I was dead anyway, so one more grinning shroud just added to the confusion. She didn’t speak that night, just let me know by her presence that I was safe, that I wasn’t alone, and it was true. Even when she was back up in her library, which was most of the time, the very walls radiated her smile, kept me from sinking back into the abyss of despair that death had shrouded me in.

  Today, though, I can tell the ngk is getting to her. The smile’s still shining with all that loving ferocity, but her old face seems creased; her glow is dampened like Riley’s and Dro’s. It makes me hate that little cycling minifreak even more. We trade pleasantries and banter, and then Riley gets all serious-looking.

  “Do you know where it came from?”

  Esther shakes her head. “The motherfucker just showed up one day. I could feel it like an itch, then a dull, pulsing ache, and finally, this festering disaster has taken over that whole building.” Esther looking like she’s about to break down is one of the worst things I can think of. I look away.

  “Ah, I’m all right, Carlos. Don’t worry about me. You know a stupid ngk isn’t going to fuck up Mama Esther’s day.”

  I look back at her and nod, trying to dig up a smile. “We’ll get rid of it for you, Mama. Don’t worry.”

  “I know you will, Carlos. I know you will.”

  Even if it kills me again, I think, cringing as we return downstairs.

  * * *

  “Where you going?” Riley wants to know.

  To hunt down that hipster kid and his frat boy fan club and see ’bout this fine lady. “I dunno,” I say. “A nap?”

  “Well, hang on, Carlos. We gotta chitchat on this a second. Damn.” The ngk left us all a little irritable, and Riley has the unfortunate ability to know me very, very well. I can’t even lie to the dude in any kind of satisfying way. Dro is looking at me with eyebrows raised, and he has a point. It’s not really a time to be running off. I walk back to the two hovering shades, and we settle into an easy saunter down Franklin Avenue.

  It gets dark so damn quickly these days. Night just drops out the sky with almost no warning, and suddenly the whole city is just those ugly streetlights and deli signs and flashes from passing cars. I see my breath congeal into a little cloud in front of my face and then dissipate. “So we can’t kill it,” I say. “What can we do?”

  “This is the thing,” Riley says. “There’s not much precedence for getting rid of ngks. They pretty much just show up and either become an infestation, the opening act to utter disaster, or it’s just one, and it does whatever sick little magic it has to do, then goes about its business. Maybe it’s a spy and whatever it found out was unsatisfactory; maybe it’s just a loner. Nobody knows.”

  “Therein lies the problem,” Dro points out.

  “Indeed,” says Riley.

  “So what? We wait?” I say, trying not to let my impatience out. “Hope it’s just a one-off and disappears?”

  Riley scowls. “That’s not the Riley Washington way.”

  “So you have an answer?”

  “I didn’t say that either. All I’m saying is, just because nobody’s ever figured out how to deal with an ngk in the past doesn’t mean it can’t be done. And I plan to do it. Or at least make life very unpleasant for the little guy.”

  “Well, that shouldn’t be too hard for you,” I say encouragingly.

  “Har-har. I gonna need both y’all’s help. Dro, research. Everything. Follow all leads in every which way possible. Interview experts, pore over texts and scrolls and whatever other bullshit you gotta do. You need to be my brainiac numero uno on all things ngk. Dig?”

  Dro nods. You can tell he’s excited about this. The dude loves nothing more than to hole up in some barely there biblioteca and disappear for hours, nerding out on an extreme obscurity. And now he’s been given a mission. He’s in Dro heaven.

  “And Carlos.”

  “Hm?”

  “There’s gonna be some living people angles of this, I surmise, that I’ll need your help with. See all these FOR RENT signs?”

  I hadn’t noticed it, but he’s right: an inordinate amount of apartments seem to be available in the couple blocks we’ve walked.

  “Could be coincidence,” Riley continues, “or could be something to do with the ngk. Or ngks.” We all frown at that. “Tomorrow I want you to hit up the botánica, see if Baba Eddie got any info for us, and then go real estate hunting.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Little David the hipster lives in Clinton Hill with two beckys named Amanda. One of them has a . . . python. Or something. Hipness has taken this once-downtrodden neighborhood by storm; it became so suddenly swank that folks still walk around looking whiplashed from the sudden influx of wealthy whites.

  David leaves to get a pack of American Spirits at the grocery spot. He walks with a quiet urgency, whips his head around before crossing even the smaller streets. He’s got on those same ’nad-constricting jeans. He looks terrified and he keeps dabbing a wad of tissue against his eyes and nose. The terror that Trevor and I put him through a few weeks back still hangs there like an old jacket he can’t take off. I wonder, briefly, if he’ll ever recover.

  When he leaves the bodega, I’m circling behind him, cutting a wide enough berth to stay clear of his periphery. Really though, it’s all a little extra. He’s so caught up in his dark thoughts, this doesn’t even count as hunting. I’m just walking behind someone. His mind is so cluttered with boring roommate drama that it’s spilling out in waves. One of the Amandas fell in love with him, but he loved the other one; then they all switched, some frenzy of postadolescent musical sex chairs that I’d rather not know the details of, but there they are, suspended in the air around his head like a stupid halo.

  I ignore all that, try to keep focused, slide my cane into the front door of his apartment just before it slams and wait for his footsteps to disappear up the stairwell.

  * * *

  I’m a patient man. I don’t know a damn thing about my life before I died, but I suspect this ability to sit still for hours is a new quality. Maybe it’s because I get a little flush of pride every time I manage to do it, like a part of my old antsy self is echoing forward to approve of how calm I’ve become. Either way, it comes in handy at times like this. I don’t want the Amandas to be awake when I make my move. It’s too complicated, too much explaining, especially considering I’m not even on a real Council mission and can’t resort to their usual cleanup tactics. Tonight I’m a free agent, so I find an out-of-the-way spot at the top of the stairwell, just before the roof entrance, and settle in, taking occasional sips of my bodega coffee.

  Night turns into late night. The sounds from the street slow from steady stream to occasional passerby. Inside the apartment, where the heat is cranked up way too high, the three roommates have finished cooking an organi
c, tasteless meal and are settling in for the night. Some cranky folk music gargles up the stairwell at me, accompanied by the starchy smell of gluten-free pasta.

  I wait.

  The CD ends. Footsteps plod from one end of the apartment to the other, then back again. Some casual words are exchanged. I slide into a meditative trance and let another hour slip past. Then I put away the last sip of cold coffee and head down the stairwell, on fire with that calm confidence wrought from sitting still for hours on end.

  Inside the toasty warm apartment, the sounds of three slumbering souls intermingle with the clanking of old pipes and wall heaters. My feet barely touch the ground—that’s how smooth I am right now. I lurch silently down the hall, slide David’s bedroom door open without making one goddamn sound, and then stand there in the darkness. This is the tricky part: if David wakes up screaming, the Amandas will surely be here in a flash. If I play it too low-key, the boy’ll just be unpredictable, so I opt for the sudden menace that will gradually lead into the tell-me-everything-and-we-can-forget-all-this-happened.

  I put the edge of my cane a half inch away from David’s neck. His chest rises and falls in quiet snores. He’s dreaming of one of the Amandas, but she’s not naked or anything. It’s one of those emotional dreams. She keeps bringing him his slippers and yelling at him. I touch his neck gently with my cane, and when he opens his eyes and gasps, I say, real calm and slow: “Don’t say a single motherfucking word or I’ll cut your fucking head off.”

  Five minutes later, we’re on the roof. He’s shivering, still in his pajamas, and I’m doing the grim and menacing routine, even though he’s already so flustered it’s pretty much unnecessary.

  “I’m sorry, mister. I’m really, really sorry,” he blubbers. “We won’t be f-fucking around with the Underworld anymore. I p-promise.”

  “I’m not interested in your promises, David.” He shudders when I say his name. “Tell me how you linked with the inbetweener.”