Being awakened at 3:00 am on Christmas Eve — Christmas Day, actually — by a friend and then hustled into a cab isn’t my idea of a traditional holiday activity. Being awoken by that friend’s ghost is even less traditional.
(Yes, even if you’re me. My name is Marc Lynx. I’m a detective... sort of. But I don’t get the cases you read about in the papers. I’m as likely to be hired to find a lost soul as a missing person.)
“Okay, Ron,” I told him. “What was so important that you had to drag me out of bed at this hour? I mean, you’re dead: what’s another hour or two, even another day or a month?”
“You’re needed, Marc,” he said, cryptically. “Another day or two, yeah, it could wait, Ah guess, but there’s no other day that would be as appropriate.”
“I don’t understand,” I started to say, but I got distracted as we drove through the theatre district. At 3:00 am, the streets were pretty deserted, but all the lights were aglow.
“A Chorus Line?” I said, reading a marquee. “When did they bring that one ba—
“ETHEL IS EVITA?”
“Saw her in it last week,” Ron said. “Masterful performance.”
“These are all ‘dead’ shows, aren’t they?”
“And jest what did you expect? Course, Sweeney Todd was kind of a shoe-in for the Maria.”
“Maria?”
“‘Tony’ was already taken.”
As we kept heading south through Manhattan, I realized what our destination was. But when we arrived, the streets were clean; there were no police barricades; there was no huge pile of rubble. As we exited the cab, I looked up, my view of the sky blocked by the tall, tall, twin towers. Sort of: as I peered closer, they seemed vague, insubstantial, even transparent.
“How...?”
“You’re the expert,” Ron said. “People ain’t the only things what have ghosts, y’know... Not that we don’t have plenty of people-type ghosts around here, too,” he added.
And suddenly there was with the towers a multitude of spirits, crowding around us, raucous in their silence.
“What... you want me to do what, exactly, Ron? Dismiss these spirits? You don’t need me, you need an exorcist... a priest, maybe.”
“We’ve got one or two o’ them,” he said, then he spoke to the crowd. “You out there, Father Mychal?”
“Aye,” came the response, and a pale arm waved in the back.
“So why me, Ron? Heck, why you?”
“Me?” he said. “I’ve got friends in New York, or ones who used to be here, anyway. And I guess, me because I know you. And you? Who else? Who better?”
“Okay, you’ve got me there. But you said this was the most appropriate day. Christmas? Wouldn’t December 11th have been better, and a heck of a lot less offensive to the Jews and Muslims and Wiccans and Buddhists and whatever among the spirits?”
“Hey, don’t blame me,” Ron said. “It’s the guy writing this thing—”, and he jabbed his thumb up and over his shoulder, “—who always does the end-of-December thing with these stories. He probably just let this slip until the afternoon of the 25th.”
Then he leaned close. “But let me tell you a bit about being dead: it don’t matter. Once you pass the veil, it’s too late. You can’t chose your religion after the fact — not even if your descendants convert and try to have you posthumously baptized. They run down the curtain, and whatever you’ve done in your life gets totalled up. No encores, no bouquets of roses. Don’t matter if you worshipped the Lamb of God or the Calf of Gold. They read your beads, and you hope there’s more good than bad. End of story.
“Christmas Day doesn’t really matter to this crowd. They’d rather just be on their way than stand on ritual and dates which they may or may not have once valued.”
I thought for a few minutes, pondering what needed to be done and what I could do. The World Trade Center complex was a bit large to ring with a circle of salt or to douse with holy water. But this wasn’t exactly a possession, so an exorcism wasn’t quite what was needed. These were spirits, trapped in the circumstances of their deaths, still with a goal to meet or something which needed finishing.
Why were they still here? What had they left undone? What did they feel they needed to accomplish or complete, not as individuals but en masse, people and buildings both? When I considered the after-effects of September 11th, I knew the answer.
“You don’t want war. You don’t want revenge. But neither do you want the nation, the way of life, to roll over and play dead. You don’t want patriotism, and you don’t want the ease of crossover into nationalism which that leads to, and thence to jingoism. You don’t want internment camps. You don’t want flags flying from car antennas, forgotten until they are tattered and desecrated. You don’t want to be sold and marketed. You don’t want people walking on tenterhooks, removing all mention of you from our culture lest someone, somewhere, somehow be offended. You don’t want to be idealized and iconified; you were victims, not heroes. You don’t want to become the flag used for wrapping the next wave of politicians, or the bat used to verbally strike opponents under the guise of ‘loving or leaving America.’”
I paused.
“You want to be remembered for what you were, not what we want you to be for our purposes.
“You will be remembered. If no one else does, I will remember. I can promise nothing more, but I can offer nothing less.”
Apparently it was enough. The towers began to glow, brighter and taller, reaching beyond the sky, surpassing light and becoming sound, taste, and more. And then — or perhaps it was after “then” — when I couldn’t possibly stand the sensation any longer, it was all gone: the towers, the spirits, the empty plaza. Returned were the streets, the rubble, the barricades.
Gone as well was our cab. I wondered if it was off ferrying another fare, or if it was yet another victim which I would remember.
