—
In my second year of high school I dyed my hair black with henna, a temporary and supposedly non-damaging dye that left my scalp stained while locks of my hair fell out like I was in chemo. In school no one said anything about it; they were used to girls going a little crazy, it’s what a girl that age does. The history teacher was particularly nice to me, even though I wasn’t a good student. One afternoon as we were leaving she asked me if I’d like to meet her daughter. She was shaking, I remember, and smoking: these days if a teacher smokes in front of a student it’s vaguely shameful, but twenty years ago it went unnoticed. Before I could answer her, she took out a binder with black covers and showed it to me. It had spiral-bound pages and they were covered with drawings and notes. The drawings were of a woman with black hair and a black dress, and she was sitting among autumn leaves, or graves, or entering a forest. A beautiful and tall witch, drawn in pencil. There was also a drawing of a girl covered in a veil, like for a wedding or an old-fashioned First Communion, who was carrying spiders in her hands. The writing was something between diary entries and poems. I remember one line clearly; it said, I want you to slice my gums.
“It’s my daughter’s,” the teacher said. “She doesn’t leave the house, and I think you two could be friends.”
I remember, I thought, that the girl drew very well. Also that a girl who drew like that wouldn’t have any interest in me. At first I didn’t answer the teacher. I didn’t know what to tell her, and then I muttered that my parents were waiting for me. It wasn’t true—I walked home alone. But when I got there, I told my mother. She didn’t say anything either, but later on she disappeared into her bedroom to talk on the phone.
The teacher never came back to school. My mother had talked to the principal. The teacher didn’t have any children; she didn’t have a daughter who drew witches, not alive or dead. She had lied. I found this out only years later. At the time, my mother told me that the teacher had taken a leave of absence to care for her sick daughter. She’d maintained the existence of the ghost daughter. The principal did too. I believed in the locked-in girl for years, and I even tried to reproduce those drawings of forests, graves, and black dresses, which had been drawn by the hand of a lonely adult.
I don’t remember that teacher’s last name. I know Marco could find her with his hacking skills, but I’d rather forget that sad woman who wanted to take me home with her one day after class, who knows what for.
—
Marco is green less and less; he prefers orange, the idle status. He’s connected but distant, the status closest to gray. Gray is silence and death. He hardly writes to me at all. His mother doesn’t know, or rather, I lie to her and say we talk as much as ever. My messages to him build up. Sometimes in the morning I find he’s replied to them.
When he turns green again one night, he’s the first to talk. “How do you know it’s me?” he says. He can’t see me, so I can cry without shame. These days there are programs, he tells me, that can reproduce someone who has died. They take all the person’s information that’s disseminated throughout the Internet, and they act according to that script. It’s not so different from when they show you personalized ads.
“If you were a machine you wouldn’t say this to me.”
“No,” he writes. “But, how will you know once I am a machine?”
“I’m not going to know,” I reply. “That program doesn’t exist yet; you got that idea from a movie.”
“It’s a beautiful idea,” he writes.
I agree and I wait. Now he has nothing more to say, nothing about red rooms or vengeful ghosts. When he stops talking to me for good I’m going to lie to his mother. I’ll invent fabulous conversations; I’ll give her hope. Last night he told me he wants to come out, I’ll tell her while we sip coffee. I hope he decides to run away while she’s sleeping her chemical sleep. I hope the food doesn’t start to accumulate in the hallway. I hope we don’t have to break down the door.
Things We Lost in the Fire
The subway girl was first. Some people would dispute that, or at least they would deny that she had the power or influence to instigate the bonfires all alone. And all alone she was: the subway girl preached on the city’s six underground train lines, and no one was ever with her. But she was unforgettable. Her face and arms had been completely disfigured by deep, extensive burns. She talked to the passengers about how long it had taken her to recover, about the months of infections, hospitals, and pain. Her mouth was lipless and her nose had been sloppily reconstructed. She had only one eye left—the other was a hollow of skin—and her whole face, head, and neck were a maroon mask crisscrossed by spiderwebs. On the nape of her neck she still had one lock of long hair left, which emphasized the masklike effect; it was the only part of her head the fire hadn’t touched. Nor had it reached her hands, which were dark and always a little dirty from handling the money she begged for.
Her method was audacious: she got on the train, and if there weren’t many passengers, if almost everyone had a seat, she greeted each of them with a kiss on the cheek. Some turned their faces away in disgust, even with a muffled shriek; others accepted the kiss and felt good about themselves; some just let the revulsion raise the hair on their arms, and if she saw this, in summer when people’s skin was bare, she’d caress the scared little hairs with her grubby fingers and smile with her mouth that was a slash. Some people even got off the train if they saw her get on. They already knew her routine and wanted to avoid the kiss from that horrible face.