Adi Magazine

The ghosts have learned how to whistle. You can hear their lips pressed into the cracks of the floorboards. The sound reminds you of when you would pin a blade of grass between your baby thumbs and blow a quick current of air through the opening, competing with your brother for the loudest trill. The ghosts’ whistling follows a tune unknown to you, but you imagine the lyrics are long and moaning. A stereotype, you realize, as this is all the movies have taught you about ghosts. Their song muffles as the L passes by your apartment, which was built so close to the tracks that you could nearly touch the train cars by reaching out the window. You wonder how old the ghosts are in this apartment. Did they suffer from the Spanish flu? Did a lover sit at their bedside with a handkerchief? You have so many questions for the ghosts, but your back pain has rendered you incapable of speech. 

You’re laying on the ground in your studio apartment staring up at the popcorn ceiling. This is the only position that doesn’t cause hot, shooting pain to radiate down your back. The pain is so intense that you wonder how you’re still alive. The stamped pattern on the ceiling is beginning to look like stars, or maybe hands pressed against a foggy window. The window is open and a cool breeze whips through your hair every time the L passes by. The radiator hisses in the corner.

This is the first time you’ve heard the ghosts in your apartment, and you’re afraid that, somehow, you’ve opened the dark passage between life and death. Before today, the only ghost you could hear was your brother, who disappeared one summer when you were a child. He never came back and your family never found his body. The FBI ignored his case, never so much as answered the phone. Your family searched on their own for years: asking around, walking parched creek beds in patches of forest, looking until your mother started to see him in every young boy she passed on the rez. The only trace of him lived in the breeze that carried your mother’s hair back to the earth the day she cut it with her hunting knife.

But you could hear him whispering to you sometimes. Only to you. 

Your back pain began yesterday during your shift at a burger joint across the street from Wrigley Field, frequented mostly by suburbanites,frat boys, and finance bros. The restaurant is so close to the ballpark that the red light from its sign shines into through the windows at night. The walls are painted bright red and yellow, all bare except from a framed poster depicting a cityscape of Chicago during the Great Depression. The floors are perpetually sticky, oozing an unknown substance between the cracks in the linoleum. There are a total of six tables in the restaurant but the only people brave enough to eat in here are drunk college students and the occasional rat that you have to chase out with a broom. 

On the night that your back pain began, you made sixteen strawberry milkshakes. Your hands needed no instruction. They moved through the motions flawlessly, scooping vanilla ice cream into the metal tumbler, squeezing the bright red syrup on top, and watching the machine spin it  into a sickening bright pink. 

“Gross,” your brother whispered to you in his child voice.

“Shut up,” you responded quietly under your breath, fearing that the drunk lady at the counter might hear you and think you’re talking to yourself.

Your co-worker Cleo walked up behind you carrying a tub of diced onions. Her lips were dewy with lip balm and she had a pack of cigarettes rolled up into her stained white sleeve.

“Who are you talking to, Dawn?” Cleo asked. You don’t know each other well. Cleo’s been running the place for years while you’ve only been working there for a few months. But you and Cleo have been routinely hooking up in the alley after work. Nothing serious, just fun. Her words.

“No one. Just thinking out loud,” you responded while carrying the sixteenth strawberry milkshake to the register. 

After work, you and Cleo fucked in the alley. You lifted her up onto the stack of wooden pallets that came with today’s potato delivery. 

“These are gonna give me a splinter one day,” Cleo said while grabbing the back of your head and putting her tongue in your mouth. She pulled out her ponytail and shook her bright red hair until it spilled around her head and, in the alley lighting, looked like her face was being consumed by fire. A shock radiated down your spine. You pulled away to remove your brother’s baseball cap from your head and place it on top of the dumpster. After decades of wearing his hat, you were surprised that it still fit. Cleo’s legs wrapped around you and you let out a small sigh. 

After, you and Cleo passed a joint between each other as you walked Cleo home. The sky was clear; a bright moon hung above the Chicago brownstones. The trees were bare and the branches knocked against  one another, making the sound of hollow bones. Cleo took a puff and smoke rings pooled from her mouth. You reached to re-adjust your hat only to realize it wasn’t on your head. Your hand grabbed at the air like a phantom limb. Your mouth ran dry when you remembered the baseball cap sitting on top of the dumpster, the yellowed brim pushing out between the alley shadows. You turned around and ran, wordlessly, in the direction of the burger joint. You heard Cleo yell out at you,“Hey! Not even a goodnight kiss?”

You stumbled into the alley and the baseball cap was nowhere to be found. It hadn’t been more than an hour, and your brother’s cap was already swallowed up by the city. You bent over the dumpster and vomited into the corner. 

One question echoed through your head — how could you be so fucking careless? After years with the hat – with your brother – you left it to be stolen in a goddamn alley. 

You looked down in the crack between the dumpster and the brick building and saw four pairs of eyes staring back at you from behind the dumpster. Rats. Their eyes looked like glass marbles floating in liquid darkness. They reminded you of the Magic 8 Ball you had as a kid. You remembered all the questions you had then. All the curiosities that made the world seem larger. You and your brother used to take turns shaking the ball, your bodies prone on the living room rug. 

The rug smelled like wood smoke and the rosemary candles your auntie made. 

After your brother disappeared, sometimes you found yourself whispering wishes rather than questions. Every morning, you performed your ritual. You would shake the Magic 8 Ball and ask, Can you bring my brother back? 

Then one morning, you asked the Magic 8 Ball, Will my brother return? And it responded SIGNS POINT TO YES. That night, you put on your brother’s baseball cap and looked at yourself in the mirror, searching for physical similarities. That is when you heard his voice for the first time since his disappearance.

He said, “Dawn, is that you?”

You ran to tell your mother that he had returned, that she didn’t need her bed to soak up her grief any longer. You turned on her bedroom light and she sat up, rubbing her pink eyes. 

“Ma he’s back! Listen!”

You placed the baseball cap on her head, brushing her hair away from her face, like she had done for you countless times before. 

“Dawn, what’s this all about?”

“It’s him! Benny! He talked to me through the hat!” 

Your mother stared at you in silence for a while, then looked up toward the hat and sighed.

“I don’t hear anything, baby.”

That’s when you realized you were the only person that could hear him.

One morning, not too long after the first time you heard your brother’s voice, you were visiting your grandparents. You sat outside your pokni and mafo’s house, digging in the mud alone, as kids do sometimes, and you were talking to your brother. Maybe it was about your mother; or second grade; or Manny, your first crush long before you realized you were a lesbian; or maybe you were talking to your brother’s ghost about how your mafo took up whittling these little wooden figurines, and how he once chased a rez dog down the street with his whittling knife after the dog bit off the head of one of his chickens. You were your brother’s living informant who could pass information between the physical and spirit worlds, and not in the “Magical Indian” way that non-natives love to fantasize about, but in the way that  matter, everything on the electromagnetic spectrum, and all the stuff we think we can measure is only about five percent of the universe, and the other ninety-five percent of the universe is dark matter and dark energy, dark as in “we don’t know what it is,” so who’s to say your brother’s ghost wasn’t in there, too? 

On this day, digging in the dirt, talking to your brother, your mother walked up to you and asked who you were talking to.

“I’m talking to him! Benny! He lives in the baseball hat!”

Your mother sighed and wiped sweat from her forehead with the back of her hand. She bent down and met you at eye level.

“Dawn, baby, your brother is gone. He’s only in your head, not in the hat.”

“But ma—”

“No. No more talking about this.” Her eyes welled up with tears. “Someone’s gonna hear you talking crazy like this and lock you up somewhere. Don’tyou want to stay safe here with me?” 

From then on, you kept the contact with your brother’s ghost a secret. 

After you lost the cap, you went home and rolled another joint at the kitchen sink. You cracked open the window and watched folks waiting on the train platform. It was well past midnight and the only folks waiting for the train were a small bachelorette party in matching glittery cowboy hats and an old woman eating what looked like shrimp cocktail out of a grocery bag. The L rushed by, the windows winking at you until the train choked to a halt. 

You looked over at the photo of you and your brother on your  wall. In the photo, you’re sitting on pokni and mafo’s front porch ledge, your arms wrapped around one another. 

After all these years, you could still remember the nuances of his face, the mole in the middle of his right palm, the way his hair smelled like salt and cucumber Suave soap, the smirk he’d make across the dinner table to alert you to some inside joke the two of you had. With the baseball cap gone, you were afraid that you would finally forget his face. 

“Dawn, is that you?”

Your brother’s voice yelled, not a whisper any longer. The words echoed.  That’s when you realized that his voice was coming from inside your body. 

That night, you dreamt of your brother. You relived memories of his that you never knew. 

The next morning, you woke up with a pulsing headache. You staggered to the faucet and gulped down mouthfuls of water until you felt like puking. You splashed water onto your face and, when you looked up into the mirror, you momentarily saw your brother’s face. You blinked a couple of times and your own face returned. I am not okay, you think to yourself.

“You’re fine, I’m here. Don’t worry.”

You jumped at hearing your brother’s voice inside your head. He was able to hear your thoughts? 

Fuck, you thought to yourself.

That’s a bad word! Your brother’s voice echoed in your head.

“Stop listening to my thoughts. Oh god, this isn’t real. It can’t be.”

At the burger place, the fluorescent lights beamed down on you, and it felt like you were being poked and prodded by an intelligence agency.

Cleo was already at work listening to Rage Against The Machine and mopping the floors.

“Not sure why I even bother. These floors are always sticky,” Cleo muttered to herself. 

You tried to smile but it probably came off more as a grimace. You turned around and loaded potatoes into the metal slicer. As you lifted one of the forty pound bags, you felt tension in your back. A rigidity. Perhaps growing pains? you thought to yourself. You tried to twist it out and a huge popping sound came from your back, followed by a pain so intense you tasted iron in your mouth.

“Damn, I heard that from all the way over here!” Cleo yelled.

Cleo ran over and put your arm around her neck to steady you. You tried to stand on your own and your body bucked, folding into Cleo’s body, reliant on her stability.

She walked you to the urgent care and posted a sign on the front door of the restaurant that read COME BACK L8TER. 

Urgent care was deserted except a desk lady who looked you up and down as you limped up. She handed you a stack of forms and you filled them out in the corner. Cleo left you to return to work, but before she walked out the door, she turned around and blew you a kiss.

“Don’t die on me. You’re too good at making milkshakes.” She lingered for a second longer and looked back up at you.

“Hey, what happened to your baseball cap? Looked real cute on you.”

By the time the doctor brought you into the X-ray room and you slipped out of your clothes and into a hospital gown,  you felt like you might pass out from the pain. 

The doctor laid you onto a white table and its smooth  cold surface gave you goosebumps. He took countless photos, readjusting you into a new position each time with a foam triangle. Every time he moved you, you swore under your breath. The doctor seemed unconcerned with causing you more pain. Each time, he counted down from three and a blinding white light filled the room for a fraction of a second. You stared up at the machine, catching the moment of light,fractals pulsing behind your eyelids. You wondered if your brother had access to your eyes.

After the X-ray, you waited in a small cubicle for the doctor to return with your results. It hurt too much to sit so you laid on an exam table and looked up into the fluorescent light. Your eyes drifted until the fluorescent lights transformed into the sun peaking between the trees. You heard a melody in the back of your head. It was your brother humming the chorus from Redbone’s “We Were All Wounded at Wounded Knee.” 

You were eight, in your mother’s souped up red Pontiac, your arm hanging out the window and imitating the shapes of water. The air was balmy and a layer of sweat sat between your legs and the leather seats. Ma was turning the radio dial until Redbone’s song emerges from the static. 

There’s a whole new generation. Which will dream of veneration. Your brother, a couple years older, a few inches wiser, was in the seat next to you, humming along to the song, looking straight ahead. You looked with him, watching the lines in the road disappear. Were you yourself, in this remembering, or your brother? Perhaps you are both. Either way, this is the last memory you have of him.. 

You woke up to the doctor prodding you with the eraser tip of his pencil. You dozed off. 

“Your results are back. And you won’t believe them. I even got a second opinion. It’s not broken, your spine. Or, I should say spines. Plural. You have two!”

You rubbed one of your eyes and stared back at him.

“That’s gotta be a mistake, right? ” 

“No mistake. The two spines are growing around each other, like a DNA strand. Some of the discs are even beginning to merge together…I’m not sure how you’re alive, much less walking.”

He said this in a tone that seemed to be filled with equal parts confusion and fear.

You stood up slowly, still in pain, and limped towards the door. While standing, you caught sight of your brother in the mirror, only this time he only took up half your face. He winked at you.

“I’m leaving. I need to get a second opinion.”

“Wait, don’t go! We need to study you! You are a medical anomaly!”

You walked, tenderly through the office and into the street, stopping to look up at a group of pigeons hanging on the telephone wire, staring at you silently. You decided to walk home. Even if it would take an eternity, you thought, you must get home.

On the floor of your apartment, you listen to the ghosts, wondering what other dimensions you are able to access now. You wonder if your old spine will wither away or if the two spines will conjoin into something stronger. You wonder if one body will become a crowded home, that one day your brother might hunger for more and you will have nothing more to give him. All you will have is your grief, frozen in time. 

You whisper to your brother, “Why is this happening?”

You wait for a moment.

You can feel your brother thinking inside your own head.