The Worm in Every Heart

“You read minds, Carra,” I reminded her.

“Not well. Not on short notice.”

“Also bullshit.”

She turned to her hands again, examining each finger’s gift-spotted quick in turn, each ragged edge of nail. Finally: “Well, anyways . . . it’s not like I’m the only one who’s told you that.”

“Grandmother Yau did say she saw me twice,” I agreed, slowly.

A snort. “I’m surprised she could even see you once.”

“Why?”

“For the same reason I can hardly see you, Jude. You’re only half there. Got no shadow, remember?”

Hair back in her eyes, eyes back on her palms—scanning their creases like if she only studied them hard enough, she thought she could will herself a whole new history. Then wrinkling her forehead and sniffing, a kind of combined wince/flinch, before demanding—apropos of nothing much, far as I could tell—

“God. Can you smell that, or what?”

“What?”

“That, Jude.”

Ah, yes: that.

Guess not.

Yet—oh, what WAS that stupid knocking inside my chest, that soft, intermittent scratch building steadily at the back of my throat? Like I was sickening for something; a cold, a fever . . . some brief reflection of the Carra I’d once known, poking out—here and there—from under her hovering Haldol high.

I knew I could still remember exactly what it was, though, if only I let myself. That was the worst of it. Not the innate hurt of Carra’s ongoing tragedy—this doomed, hubristic sprawl from darkness to darkness, hospital to halfway house and back again. Carra’s endless struggle for the right to her own independent consciousness, pitted as she was against an equally endless, desperate procession of needy phantoms, to whom possession was so much more than nine tenths of the law.

“The biggest mistake you can ever make,” she told me, once, “is to ever let them know you see them at all. Because it gets around, Jude. It really gets around.”

(Really.)

Remembering how she’d once taught me almost everything I know, calmly and carefully—everything that matters, anyway. Everything that’s helped me learn everything I’ve learned since. How she broke all the rules of “traditional” mediumship and laid herself willingly open to anything her Talent brought her way, playing moth, then flame, then moth again. After which, one lost day—a day she’s never spoken of, even to me—she somehow decided that the best idea would be for her to burn on, unchecked, ‘till she burned herself out completely.

How she’d spent almost all her time since the Ryerson Graduation Ball struggling—however inefficiently—to get her humanity “back,” even though that particular impossible dream has always formed the real root of her insanity. And how I pitied her for it—pitied her, revered her, resented her. How I held her in increasingly black, bitter contempt, anger and resentment over it, all because she’d wasted five long years trying to commit the unforgivable sin of leaving me behind.

No, I knew the whole situation a little too well to mourn over, at this point; almost as well as Carra did, in fact, and you didn’t see her crying. She held her ground instead, with grace and strength, until the encroaching tide threatened to pull her under. And then she took a little Thorazine vacation, letting the Clarke’s free drugs tune the constant internal whisper of her disembodied suitors’ complaints down to a dull roar. Putting herself somewhere else, neatly and efficiently, so the dead could have their way with her awhile—and all on the off-chance that they might thus be satisfied enough, unlikely as it might seem, to finally leave her alone.

What I felt wasn’t empathy. It was annoyance. I had had things to talk about with Carra, business to attend to. And she had made herself—quite deliberately—unreachable.

Besides which: Feeling sorry for Carra, genuinely sorry . . . well, that’d be far too normal for me, wouldn’t it? To feel my chest squeeze hot and close over Carra’s insoluble pain, just because she was my oldest Canadian acquaintance, my mentor and my muse. My best, my truest, friend.

My one. And my only.

(A memory loop of Ed’s voice intervening here, thick and blurry: “Tell you what, Jude—why don’t you surprise me: Name the last time you felt anything. For somebody other than yourse

lf, I mean.”)

And when was it we had that conversation, exactly? Two hours ago? Two months?

Two years, maybe. Not that it mattered a single flying fuck.

Ai-yaaah. So inappropriate. So selfish. So, very—

“Still walking around out there, like any other ghost,” Carra continued, musingly. “Looking like you, acting . . . sort of like you . . . ”