The Long Road Back From Hades

by Charles C. Cole

My parents, those of eroded principles, tired of hearing me whine about a car, allowed me to buy a pocket motorbike at 16. We lived less than a mile from school, so it was my commuting vehicle. I had an orange leather jacket and long sideburns. Based on the pictures, I was cool. There had been a TV movie about the great daredevil Evel Knievel a couple years before; it had apparently burrowed under my skin and thrived there. I thought I had a direction, a destiny, but then I had a serious accident involving a moving car and a parked car, where I was the sandwich meat between two slices of crumpled steel.

I was whisked away by ambulance to a dreamless land, this side of Hades, without a celebratory send-off, remembered less and less. I woke up in a long-term recovery room six years later, with a beard. My parents had video-recorded motocross racing and played it endlessly, hoping the revving and the cheering would inspire me to arise, like Lazarus. Ironically, they tell me the first thing I said when I came to was: “Can you please turn that noise down?” Either it called to me or taunted me.

Things changed. My father, always an anxious overworker, had died of a heart attack. My mother, a secretary for a small law firm, had downsized to an efficiency.

Lawsuits work in mysterious ways. The young man at the wheel of the automobile that struck me had only been driving a week, so it was easy to cast blame. I was given a monthly stipend for a furnished room in a boarding house. I got a job as a grocery bagger. The sad-faced manager remembered me from high school. I was supposed to get my GED and then attend community college, make something of myself, but I was more interested in smoking pot and cigarettes and drinking beer, things I had been experimenting with before my teen years were abruptly truncated.

I walked everywhere: the physical therapist, the library, the grocery store, to meet my mom for dinner at Friendly’s Restaurant on Wednesdays and Saturdays. (Her place was too small for two people.) Cars were loud, fast and smelled. My favorite activity was watching a couple of horses browse and play in a field beside the bowling alley. They were perfect just the way they were - and protected from the rest of society. Once I reached over the electrified fence to share an apple, and I got a jolt that made my teeth ache.

The library was a renovated former tavern from the days of George Washington. Late at night, when I got restless, having slept enough for three lifetimes, I walked by and imagined seeing the ghost of the tavern owner’s daughter watching me. She’d hanged herself in the basement when her father tattled on her British spy boyfriend, who was previously hanged within sight of the back door.

Sometimes I lay on my back in the off-hours parking lot and stared at the sky. I wasn’t afraid of the ghost, being half-ghost myself. Besides, I had it in my head that she couldn’t step outside. We were about the same age when our lives altered course. To a ghost girl without a social circle or physical body, I figured I was pretty interesting.

One Saturday night, after a very quiet dinner with Mom, I walked home. A light popped on in the library as I approached. A shadow moved within. I sat on the stoop by the mailbox and lit up. The light went out. She was being fickle tonight. A police cruiser drove by: they all knew my story and left me alone. I walked around back for privacy and sat on a cold stone bench. Someone had used light blue chalk to create a human outline on the pavement: Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man as drawn by a third grader. I finished my butt and decided to crawl inside the illustration. I fit, mostly, though my legs were a little longer. I grabbed a loose rock from along the curb and tried unsuccessfully to enlarge the image to fit me.

Someone snickered from the shadows. I jumped. Lila was about my age, shoulder-length purple hair, denim jacket and torn jeans, leaning against the backdoor with one knee bent, like a Marlboro lady.

“Hey.”

“You a ghost?” I asked, just to be sure this wasn’t in my head.

“Not yet, but eventually. I think that would be cool, haunt the bastards who broke my heart.”

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“Hanging around. Wanted some fresh air. Saw you smoking. Thought I’d bum one from you.”

“Because you wanted fresh air?” I teased.

She laughed, disarmingly. “We humans are an inconsistent bunch, aren’t we?”

I passed her a butt and lit it up for her. Something about the lighter’s flicker made her appear mysterious and desirable.

“Don’t get any ideas,” she said, reading my mind. “You wouldn’t know what to do anyway, if you’re the guy I think you are, Mr. Rip Van Winkle.”

“You could teach me.”

“It would take all night and, unlike you, some of us still need sleep,” she said. “Maybe in the day, when you’re not busy bagging food.” She smiled mischievously, because she’d been secretly watching me, and I had no idea.

“Why me?” I asked.

“Because you’re an outsider like me. Or, if you’re not, I’m pretty sure I can persuade you to join the dark side.”

We hung out. We walked a lot: to the park, along the train tracks, along the river. I introduced her to the horses. Somehow, my accident made me mysterious and desirable. She was my first girlfriend, quirky and observant. The relationship didn’t last; I never went to the dark side. But she and my yentl ghost girl brought me fully over to the land of the living. I got my GED and came close to finishing college, but that’s another story.