The Woman Who Walked Through Walls
STORY TEXT:
On the fifteenth and final day of moving Arsenio found himself flapping through a sea of empty boxes, stuffing their contents into innumerable cubbyholes each confirming that the house, by holding his possessions, was now his. It was his now. It had taken him a long, long time to leave home, and his newfound liberation was as alien as the house itself, but Arsenio laid claim to both. The more he thought about it, the more true it felt. He moved slowly through each room like a ship through still and mysterious waters, surveying his furniture as though each off-colour rug was a vein of glimmering gems. Unfortunately, his boat was soon thrown off-course by a draft from the living room. After closing the side door, which he did not leave open, he turned around to discover he had unknowingly come to harbour a homeless person.
Passed out on the living room floor (in a spot Arsenio remembered being very empty a moment ago) was a Native American woman covered in potato chips and chocolate wrappers. She wore beads and magic crystals, a deerskin tunic, and moccasins with holes so big the world could see her toes. To Arsenio this gave her the ignoble appearance of a bear gorging for winter, or perhaps a witch doctor unable to follow her own prescriptions. She was not a wise indigenous grandma, and she upset him for many other reasons, namely that she had infiltrated his cupboards and made an enormous mess of both herself and his living room. To Arsenio’s amazement however, when he returned to smack the homeless woman with a broom, it phased right through her belly and hit the floor. To ensure he was not hallucinating, he tried again, and the head of the broom disappeared beneath her incredible dirt-covered mound. She was a non-corporeal grandma. She was an indigenous ghost. He could not tell, and he did not like not being able to tell. His assault did seem to tickle her though, and the creature awoke laughing, swaying from side to side like a floundering turtle trapped on its back by the burden of gravity. There was no sound.
The following morning Arsenio crawled in an alcove and called the housing company to report his sudden infestation of spirits. The ghost woman, meanwhile, was busy opening windows and scattering dirt around the parlour. He had not slept. She spent that night in his room whittling small wooden figurines which were also made of ghost, kindly placing them on his nightstand to admire. After sitting on hold for many centuries Arsenio was finally able to speak to his realtor, who referred him to his supervisor, who referred him to their department for unreal-real estate, as in those days supernatural buildings were in high demand for séances and children’s parties. They were sorry to say there were no close encounters of any kind recorded on the property, although most of this sorry was because they would’ve given the home a higher valuation otherwise. If ghosts were present during the building’s construction, they said, maybe just nobody noticed. They were however sympathetic to the problem of his new roommate and promised to contact the appropriate paranormal authorities.
True to their word, the yard was soon filled with all manner of ghost hunters and environmentalists poking around the bushes and making arcane measurements. The chief spectre inspector interrogated Arsenio about the appearance of the apparition, and soon asked to enter his living room to investigate the possibility of a native burial ground beneath the house: he had seen something similar once on TV. Arsenio was apprehensive about this. The reality of one stranger loitering in his space was uncomfortable enough, but the thought of even more people poking around threatened to give him an ulcer. Looking out at his now muddy lawn, Arsenio felt out of place, like a passive observer in the alien wreck of his life. The environmentalists had begun a summoning circle, weaving dreamcatchers and muttering incantations, while the other men wore faces of sensual thrill, hunched over with magnifying glasses in search of the ghost. It was then that Arsenio saw her. The phantom walked unnoticed among them, having long ago finished her task of exiling flowers from the neighbour’s garden and planting them in Arsenio’s shoes, where they received no nutrients of any kind, forced to eat upon themselves. For some reason he had to point out the woman before anyone else would notice her, which he did by throwing a tennis ball, which popped out the other side of her chest.
The air of the occasion almost immediately turned sour. The ghost hunters crowded around her, dumbfounded, trying to confirm they were not trapped in some collective fantasy. The ghost was more than amicable in this effort, Arsenio thought, flashing a bemused if unsettling grin as miscellaneous instruments passed through her skull. Perhaps she was just happy to find people who could appreciate the novelty of her party trick. They did not, however. It was as though they had never expected to find a real ghost and were now unsure of what to do with themselves. The sad opaqueness of this astral figure had ruined the mystery of their profession, and there is much to be said for mystery. They wondered how many beings like her were present among the living at this moment and at all moments, retreating and resurfacing from the forgotten corners of the world. This was a troubling thought, and thus the men began to suggest she was not a ghost at all. She was far, far too human. All ghosts and especially indigenous ones should be unseen, elusive, and more than willing to play hide and seek. Perhaps she was just an native woman who could walk through walls. The natives were known to shapeshift. If she could turn herself into a bird, they said, she could just as easily spread apart her molecules and abandon the material plane. Presumably natives did it all the time.
With her ghostly status seemingly debunked, only the environmentalists remained. They were very much at home in the muddy mess they had made of Arsenio’s lawn and very honoured to receive the wisdom of a true Native American. They did not know what they were asking nor what they expected to receive, but they did know they were talking to the right person. They had seen something similar once on TV. Even the discovery that she was mute did little to hamper hopes that she might speak at their symposium; while it would make the event less a lecture and more a group meditation, this seemed like the Native thing to do. Alternatively, some learned men among them claimed that they could convince the ghost, that they alone could translate the being’s indiscernible gestures into civilized speech. These attempts at diplomacy were however for naught, as her abilities were far superior to those of the vanishing breed of academics. In what Arsenio saw as a ritual rain-dance of annoyance she dampened their optimism totally, frolicking between puddles and through people before a final flourish in which she sprayed them all down with a garden hose and sauntered away to water the neighbour’s pool. A phantom does what it pleases.
It was this action – along with the plant-stealing and the lawn’s more general destruction – that attracted the ire of the homeowner’s association. They of course loved pristine nature more than anything else and began harassing their new ghostly neighbour out of purely altruistic concern for the environment. The native’s mischief had only grown in menace since her ghostly superiority was rebuked by the natives, and Arsenio, refusing to abandon his home, was driven to dark places he had never before fathomed. She had begun to rearrange his furniture, moving his study to the garage, his dining room to the front yard; he often found himself disoriented, unsure what room he was in or where the house began. One night he returned home to find her smashing potato chips with fine cutlery, holding mute conversations with muddy chairs that looked but did not feel empty. He was more than amicable to the association’s pleas that something be done. She should be somewhere else, they reasoned. Somewhere not here. With her own people. An indigenous ghost does not belong in the suburbs. At the end of their bi-weekly meeting the HOA president was struck blind, haunted by atrocious visions of the woman opening a casino.
They first consulted the council of a nearby reservation for advice on how to deal with Native American ghosts. The tribe claimed that they too were struggling with this problem, and had been for some time, and the most they could offer as to the ghost’s removal was twenty-four dollars in bus fare, plus some beads. Unwilling to accept such a meager concession (which they reasoned the natives would no doubt rescind) the association began to look for answers elsewhere. After much searching they found a young lady from the city who claimed to be two-fifths native; however, to everyone’s surprise she too offered little advice, saying only that the ghost reminded her of her great-aunt Muriel. When asked if she knew any myths that might lend context to their great suffering, perhaps a folksy trick to ward off the undead, the young lady suggested they try garlic or silver, as she had seen something similar once on TV. In a last effort to banish that terrible phantom, the neighbourhood held a potluck fundraiser toward the excavation of Arsenio’s living room. While the spectre inspector was not a fan of fake ghosts he still very much believed in real money and was itching to dig a hole. The living room was where the dead woman first appeared, he said. If there is a body, and we move the body somewhere else, perhaps the ghost will chase after it.
There was no body. Arsenio sat at the bottom of the hypothetical native burial ground cradling a chunk of wood like a dead baby. The inspector suggested it could be the remains of a coffin, prompting several fun theories that her body, like her self, had dispersed, bleeding out through all space and time. Or perhaps she had merely broken free and clawed back up to the surface, which he had also seen before except this time in a very terrific film. Arsenio was not sure the ancient natives even used coffins. He was not sure about a lot of things, these days. He climbed back up into the strange amalgam of trinkets and holes that was once his living room but now reminded him more of an abandoned construction site. Piles upon piles of dirt displaced and forgotten. It was a place he could recognise but no longer navigate; a memory clung to, for he had nowhere else to go. He had become the roommate now, a temporary lodger at Spook Hotel.
In the days following his landlord grew more and more reclusive, but her presence was still felt; reality had stopped working correctly. Arsenio would fall asleep in bed and awake fumbling into holes; he would approach one room and find himself in another; he would step into the shower and rematerialise in the long-flooded basement, murky water concealing his tears. One night he snuck into the kitchen for a midnight glass of milk and even found himself staring at the HOA president.
What are you doing in my kitchen, they both asked, though Arsenio had little legitimacy in doing so, for it was her home; she did not share his teleportation affliction.
It was this last time that was most heinous, for when Arsenio finished talking to the police he returned home to find the doors locked and the windows sealed. He spent half a millennium closing doors she’d opened and only now were their roles reversed. She stared at him through the glass, and Arsenio, now accustomed to her gaze after many sleepless nights, returned it. He traced the wrinkles on her face as her image and his reflection superimposed to create an oddly shaped creature that was both young and guilty, old and innocent, man, woman, many different things and all of them at once. She did not speak of course but Arsenio reasoned she had said enough. He was not certain when they should break eye contact but he did not want to be impolite, or let her win, so he waited. He waited a long time. He waited a short time. He waited so long that words like time made as much sense as reality and the night may have lasted one hundred years or maybe forever or maybe since last week. Finally his saviour arrived to deliver the mail and remarked that Arsenio had left the front door open. Then she was gone.
As to where, nobody knew, though there were many scandalous rumours. Someone said the reservation’s bus money had come through; another said she swam to Canada; others said she was harassing a family down the block; and as she was no longer causing mischief in the street, it was enough for the homeowners association to imagine she had disappeared. But Arsenio himself was somehow left with the impression she had not gone anywhere at all. True, the rugs and silverware were nowhere to be found, the basement swamp was drained, the furniture rearranged, and his attempts to procure a jacket from the closet were not answered by spatial transposition. But the house would never forget what had happened to it. Houses of course do not have memory and cannot hold pens, but the scars would be remembrance enough. A future occupant of the house might notice a waterline or a giant hole and wonder how it got there, and when, and why the realtor did not tell them about it, and while they might never know the details of the story their ignorance would not change the fact that it was real, and that it happened. In recollection, it is still happening.
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