Free Happiness Is a Chemical in the Brain: Stories by Lucia Perillo Page A

any kind of fucked-up, her manners too delicate to have ever allowed her to call attention to my glassy eyes or musty breath. What does it matter, she would argue, when that girl I was is all water under the bridge, a bridge that she has seen me dismantle piece by piece? After the flagging, there came a winter of waitressing that cured me. By the next fall I was enrolled in law school, which was what she’d been telling me to do all along.
    Still, she recited the number slowly: whenever circumstances force her to revisit my youth against her will, she likes to draw the details out to make me squirm. By the time she was finished, the line between us glowed red-hot, and I made sure she heard me crumpling my transcription, seconds after I wrote it down.
    “I didn’t think you’d want it,” she remarked offhandedly. “He was the one who kept insisting that I pass it on.”
    This is the kind of warfare waged by ghosts, these ghosts from whom there is no durable escape. Years later, even if you’ve gone to the trouble of covering your tracks, they will remember the name of your hometown and call your mother up. If they’re feeling especially vengeful in their oblivion, they might even try to describe for her what you looked like all those years ago when they had you tied to that bed. And while sometimes you can banish the physical vessels in which these ghosts travel, the psychic border skirmishes will continue on forever. To mark the boundary between you and them, there will always be a dotted, provisional line.
    And then there is also the matter of the border itself, the literal border across which we fled. The first crossing of it had made everything glitter, as if we were snakes with new clear eyes, having peeled off our old skins. But the drive back seemed only oppressive and dreary, the sea walled off by fog. And the surf that had aroused us with its persistent violent crash now sounded unbearably repetitious, like the person sitting next to you on the bus with a hacking cough.
    At the ferry dock, they steered us into a gated area where the tarmac was marked off into lanes. We waited there while the customs officers came through, asking the usual questions concerning fruit. The officer who approached the MG was a stout matron about his age, how funny that a woman his age turns into a matron, her breasts large in her white blouse. As soon as she took one look at him in his wraparound sunglasses, it was as if she knew. She knew , goddammit. And she waved our car over into the special parking strip, where our bags were taken from the trunk and searched. They found the last bit of pot wrapped in one of his dirty socks.
    My bag was clean, though, and the one last favor he did for me before we parted company forever and for good was to say that I didn’t really know him. I didn’t know him at all. I was a girl he’d just met in the bar of a Chinese restaurant; he was giving me a ride home because my boyfriend had left me stranded after we’d had a lover’s spat. And what with the age difference between us, the enormous volume of my tears, they let me cross.
    The whole trip back I stood outside on the deck, watching the birds that floated on the water, which was gray and still and dimpled by rain. I was supposed to call his sister as soon as I got back to the States, but instead, when I reached the ferry terminal on the other side, I hitchhiked home.
    And I didn’t see him again in town, even though, being the flagger, I saw everyone eventually. For weeks, whenever we started work at a new site the first thing I did was scope out some bushes into which I could dive should he come driving through. But he never did, and when I tried to make sense of it, the only explanation I could get anywhere with was that he had to be a ghost. He was like the phantom that appears in those hitchhiker/truck driver stories, where depending on the version either the hitcher or the trucker has died a long time ago and yet there’s this one