Going Up
The old mission rested on its bluff. Below, the bay breathed slow between headlands while the tidal marsh played its seasonal game: swelling into green mirrors each spring, then shrinking into black puzzle-cracks by summer.
The Spirit had always lived here. The Spirit could never leave.
Mornings, it drifted through the empty stone halls. Nights, it borrowed the shapes of bats and foxes and rode the Pacific wind that bent the scrub oak into graceful bows. Long ago it had slipped into a friar, just to taste a human life. It remembered the strange narrowness-cause and effect, and slipped out again, laughing softly into the dark.
Farther south, San Francisco kept burning and waking new, smelling of ash and fresh lumber. Ships became houses. Tents became hotels overnight. Red-white-and-blue banners fluttered like uncertain flags in a play with no ending.
One foggy March morning, G. Corte arrived by night train with a small bag and a light fever he carried like a secret. The sanatorium on the hill stood seven stories tall and white as clouds, it looo3d to him just like a wedding cake. They placed him on the seventh floor. The highest floors, they said, held the clearest air.
At first it was pleasant. Butterflies drifted past his window like slow thoughts. Distant water seemed to murmur somewhere beyond the hills. Then the polite knocks began.
A small change, they said. Better equipment on the sixth floor. Then the fifth.
Each descent made the world a little more unreal. His sleep filled with long green corridors that led nowhere in particular.
One thick evening on the second floor, the air in his room gathered into a warm mist and took shape. A figure stood before him. It wore no fixed face, yet it smiled with the gentle mischief of something that had watched centuries of human life.
‘I have been waiting on my own,’ it said, the words arriving from who knows where. ‘Something stirred me. This coast is my only home. I cannot leave it. But your blood is warm tonight, and your heart knocks so curiously against the world.’
It tilted its head, playful and ancient at once, offering the request as lightly as a dance.
Corte felt the invitation like cool fingers brushing his fevered skin.
‘Not yet,’ he said.But the words felt like careful decency, without insistence, as if they belonged less to him than to the habits he had not yet set aside.
The spirit exhaled, a sound like eucalyptus leaves turning. ‘Then I will keep waiting. I am very good at it. I have spent years at a time as a wood louse crawling among shaded vines.’
It slipped back into mist and passed through the window, leaving the faint scent of wet stone and salt.
The next morning the doctor arrived with his gentle smile.
‘The ground floor has prepared a very fine room for you.’
Corte looked once toward the north, where the peninsula narrowed and the old mission lay under its blanket of fog. Then he stepped into the elevator without protest, the doors closing like the soft end of a chapter.
Far to the north, in the roofless mission, the spirit paused in its drifting. It smiled to itself and became a night bird, gliding out over the dark bay on silent wings.
About the artist
C. Hightower is a writer and orchid grower in Hawaii. She serves as Essays Editor for Apocalypse Confidential.
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