The ghost of Abe Lincoln and the ghost of Edgar Allan Poe were friends. They were thought of, at first, as an odd couple. You’d see them passing through the arbor of the kingdom of the dead to stroll along the river, which was wide and peaceful. Everyone knew ghost Lincoln as Abe and nothing more, and ghost Poe as EAP.
Abe was tall and lean, and walked with a hitch, which allowed EAP, who was short and bowlegged, to keep perfect pace. They were drawn to each other because they both had their deaths—or, in the language of this place, their First Deaths (FD)—before their time.
“Say, EAP,” Abe wondered aloud one day, as took their regular constitutional. “When was your FD again?”
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“At forty, you rotter. Before what should have been the midpoint of my life. Didn’t get to be no fucking hero. No big superhero like Abe. A few more years, a bit more time, hell, maybe a good publicist, and I wouldn’t have had to count on the whole posthumous glory thing. Because the thing that sucks about that…”
Abe would laugh and make a movement to pat his friend on the back, his ghost hand passing through the whole of EAP’s ghost chest. But it was the thought that counted. Also, smart ghosts like these tended to favor up-to-date vernacular from back in the land of the living. Keeps one young.
“Quite, quite,” Abe would remark. “Let us speak, then, of the works you planned to write. Had your time not been so cruelly curtailed.”
EAP enjoyed this to some degree. It was his favorite way to talk about himself. To get into the things he didn’t do, that he might have done. That he told himself he’d do, back before his First Death, but which he kept putting off. Often he had been very down and could do little else but put things off.
“Okay, right. So, you know ‘Cask of Amontillado’?”
“I know it with pleasure.”
“So what I was going to do, after the alcoholic juggler guy is sealed up in the wall, well, I was going to kick things up a notch. Like, it’s bad for him and scary that he’s going to die in there, but he’s drunk, there isn’t much air, he goes fast. Could have been way worse. So I was going to have this monster that was already inside, this big half rat, half man thing, and he was eternal, and could give eternal life to someone he might torment. The idea being that he’d give eternal life to the drunk who had been sealed up in there by his enemy. And then it’d be the two of them in that horrible, rank space, no room to move, sealed up forever, together, this dude and the rat monster.”
“Marrow-chilling.”
“Thank you.”
“You might experiment with that. When you write. When next you write.”
Abe was referring to what happens after you die if you write well, as EAP could, and believe in what you’ve written. You put your ghostly hand to your ghostly parchment, and whatever you set down came to pass as well, if you truly believed in its completeness. You could write it, or someone, right into your life. Your death-life.
“I don’t know,” EAP cautioned, though he was rarely the cautious type. “I don’t know if that’s something it’d be wise to play around with. I’ve already been playing around with some recreational interests. They are keeping me quite busy.”
“Are they assuaging any of your sorrows?”
Abe and EAP were also friends, it should be noted, on the basis of their respective depressions.
“Slightly. They’re a bit titillating.”
“Tell me more,” Abe requested, being a bit of a voyeur.
“Soon. When next we stroll. For we have come to the final embankment already. We seem to be walking faster these days, Abe.”
“That we are, EAP. A fist bump for you”—and their fists went through each other—“and we shall visit soon.”
EAP was missing for what came to be, more or less, three days, though time was difficult to measure. When he next joined his friend, outside the arbor, he was haggard. Heavy shadows of smoke lay under his eyes. They walked mostly in silence, and at the last embankment, EAP, in some desperation, invited Abe back to his home.
“For I dare not say what I have experienced where it might be overheard,” he declared. EAP was quite popular with his fellow ghosts, and when a group of them heard something particularly gruesome or ribald emanate from his lips, chants of “EAP EAP EAP!” would go up and down the vapory streets. He wasn’t in the mood today.
Once they had settled in at what the locals called chez EAP, the harried ghost began his tale.
“So, I’m back on the dating site, and I’m so fucking depressed at this point, and so horny, frankly, that I am just about done looking for anything real. Of substance. You meet one idiot after another, and if you can handle all of the ridiculous text speak, you still have to handle people who know nothing about anything and talk in the same six clichés. ‘I can stay in or I can go out.’ Wow. Massive fucking accomplishment. ‘I love to Netflix and chill.’ Do you know how many fucking idiots say that?”
“Um…a lot?”
“Yes, a fucking lot. So what is there for me? Learned, articulate, passionate, and craving—”
“Strange?”
“Hmmm. Yes, well, strange things I suppose, and also strange. At this point. So I just say shit like, ‘Oh, you seem so interesting, and you’re a bit submissive,’ which usually gets them to further compliment themselves, and then go into how submissive they are, or want to be. Pretty fail-proof. What are you doing?”
“Making notes.”
“Don’t write down this next part.”
“Okay…”
“So I’m talking to this one ghost woman. Smoking.”
“Ha.”
“I thought you’d like that. And she wants to film herself for me, showing me how she gets off. I’d been jerking myself for almost three days at that point, trying to stave off the sadness—”
“You must have coated the place.”
“No. No release. I wanted to look forward to something. It can be very hard to have something to look forward to. Anyway, she says her fantasy is to have this daughter and Daddy thing going on. And I was a good writer, could I give her some ideas, and then she’d use them and film herself. I gave her the ideas, and she went with it.
“Let me tell you, it was so wrong and hot. She’s there working herself, index finger on her ghost clit, but never really on it, more like she’s itching something super fast. But she’s saying things like, ‘I know you and Mommy aren’t getting along very well lately, Daddy. When I put my head up outside your door at night, I never hear those sounds I like to hear when I listen and touch myself in the hallway. I want to make you feel good if Mommy won’t. Is that wrong? Can I give you this video as a test to see if you’d like me this way? We don’t have to tell anyone if you come into my room at night. In a way, I’ve been in your penis before—”
“Fucking hell.”
“I know, right? ‘And being on it and having it in me does seem kind of right.’ And so forth. This was so hot that I busted out the EAPer.”
“No!”
“I did. Truly.”
EAP had written a story about a man obsessed with masturbation whose problem manifests itself in the form of a three-foot member—called the EAPer, in the story of the same name—that emanates from his person and ultimately kills him. Thus was the EAPer made real, and EAP would sometimes affix it to himself for maximum pleasure, when he was at his most depressed and it took that much for him to feel anything, which, in that context, wasn’t that pleasurable after all.
“Can I borrow it again?” Abe asked.
“Sure. Next time you have your truck, we’ll load it in the back.”
“But why not say this on the streets? You’d get many EAP-tastic chants over this one.”
“True. But it’s because of what happened after. After the conclusion of my edge-fest, which left me suicidal—irony—I decided to write. And I wrote a story in which there was a woman this foul, but also brilliant, and kind, and funny, and stable. It’s tough to get all of that in one person. And because I wrote it, and I believed in her fully, she came out into the world. But I also didn’t write enough. So there were other things, too. Which I hadn’t counted on. And I was already struggling with the memories.”
That was almost always a problem with these writing efforts. What one created sprang into being and was actual, but along with that came everything from before that person had been written. Prior memories, joys, hurts, hopes, dreams, dashed dreams.
“Where is she?” Abe asked. “Is she here now? Can I have a go?”
He was trying to be funny and inject some lightness into the situation, but his joke missed the mark. He put his ghost hand through EAP’s ghost knee.
“No, she’s not. She was all of those things, but, of course, there was the problem of what she had told me long ago, which I now knew, that she would leave at some point, probably with no warning, because as I am sad, she was sadder still, and while there is much I can face, if I drink enough, there is less she could face. I didn’t really know how to end the story, so I picked it up later, and I hung myself from a bridge. So that’s on my to-do list now.”
“Well, that’s easy enough. We can get that out of the way no problem.”
EAP and Abe went down to the river again. Atop the bridge, a smoke-vine was passed over EAP’s head. He saluted Abe and jumped toward the water. The smoke wouldn’t hold, and thus he didn’t jerk back up and start to bounce, as with a standard gibbeting.
He stood up, and shrugged his shoulders.
“Well, that didn’t work.”
Abe had some experience in these matters, having successfully hanged himself from the bridge many times, something he’d never shared even with EAP, so great was his own sadness that the idea of moving his vaporous lips on the subject had him contemplating the next leap riverward.
Abe had a can of vapor. When you sprayed vapor with vapor, the new vapor made the first vapor hard, solid, unbreakable. Some spray was applied to the mist-vine around EAP’s neck, a salute was made, EAP jumped, and this time he died again. It was agonizing, but only in a physical way, which was, he thought, as his neck snapped, more preferable than other ways.
A few days later, Abe came by EAP’s place to return the EAPer.
“Hey, Abe.”
“What’s up, EAP?”
“You all EAPed out?”
“You might say that. Doing all right since the latest death?”
“Guess so.”
“How many is that now?”
“Don’t know. Everything blends.”
“Too much rain outside to walk, probably. We could try our hands at writing a story together until it clears. Didn’t you wish to add onto ‘The Raven’ and have a part two, where Satan emerges from hell to protest the copyright over the poem, saying that he wrote it himself one evening in his Fiery Kingdom? That could be good.”
“I don’t know if we want to bring another devil into things.”
“True, my friend. We could just sit and work the EAPer. It’s out in the truck.”
“I really should clean it.”
“Well, let’s take it to the car wash. You we can grab a bite after. You up for a bite?”
“Yeah, I could eat.”
“Okay. Cool.”
Excerpted from Colin Fleming’s eighth book and sixth volume of fiction, If You [ ]: Fabula, Fantasy, F**kery, Hope, published by Dzanc, all rights reserved.
