Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk (read e book TXT) 📗

Onstage, instead of a spotlight, a movie fragment:

Each lens of her glasses, it glares with the reflected image of electric chairs

and gallows. Grainy newsreel footage of prisoners sentenced to the gas chamber

or the firing squad.

Where her eyes should be,

no eyes.

That first day on jury duty, the next trial, a man tripped over a curb and sued

the luxury car he fell against.

Asking an award of fifty grand for being such a stupid butterfingers.

“All these people with no sense of physical coordination,” Sister Vigilante says.

They all had excellent blaming skills.

Another man wanted a hundred grand from a homeowner who left the garden hose

stretched across the backyard that tripped him,

breaking his ankle,

while he fled from the police in an otherwise totally unrelated case

of rape.

This crippled rapist, he wanted a fortune for his pain and suffering.

There, up onstage, the silver charms flashing against the lace of her cuff,

her Bible gripped between the fingers of both hands,

her fingernails painted the same yellow as her frills,

Sister Vigilante says she pays her taxes on time.

She never jaywalks. Recycles her plastic. Rides the bus to work.

“At that point,” says Sister Vigilante, her first day of jury duty, “I told the judge”

Some charm-bracelet version of:

“Fuck this shit.”

And the judge held her in contempt . . .

Civil Twilight

A Story by Sister Vigilante

It was the summer people quit complaining about the price of gasoline. The summer when they stopped bitching about what shows were on television.

On June 24, sunset was at 8:35. Civil twilight ended at 9:07. A woman was walking uphill on the steep stretch of Lewis Street. On the block between 19th and 20th Avenues, she heard a pounding sound. It was the sound a pile driver might make, a heavy stomping sound she could feel through her flat shoes on the concrete sidewalk. It came every few seconds, getting louder with each stomp, getting closer. The sidewalk was empty, and the woman stepped back against the brick wall of an apartment hotel. Across the street, an Asian man stood in the bright glass doorway to a delicatessen, drying his hands on a white towel. Somewhere in the dark between streetlights, something glass broke. The stomp came again and a car alarm wailed. The stomp came closer, something invisible against the night. A newspaper box blew over sideways, crashing into the street. The crash came again, she says, and the windows blew out of a glass telephone booth only three parked cars away from where she stood.

According to a small item in the next day's newspaper, her name was Teresa Wheeler. She was thirty years old. A clerk at a law firm.

By then the Asian man had stepped back into the deli. He turned the sign around to say: Closed. Still holding the hand towel, he ran to the back of the store, and the lights went out.

Then the street was dark. The car alarm wailing. The stomp came again, so heavy and close by, Wheeler's reflection shimmered as the glass in the dark deli windows shook. A mailbox, bolted to the curb, it boomed loud as a cannon, then stood shaking, vibrating, dented and leaning to one side. A wooden utility pole shuddered, the cables draped across it rattling against each other, the sparks sprinkling down, bright summer fireworks.

A block downhill from Wheeler, the Plexiglas side of a bus shelter, the backlighted photograph of a movie star wearing just his underpants, the Plexiglas exploded.

Wheeler stood, stuck there flat against the brick wall behind her, her fingers worked into the joints between each brick, her fingertips touching mortar, clinging tight as ivy. Her head held back so hard that when she showed the police, when she told them her story, the rough brick had worn a bald spot in her hair.

Then, she said, nothing.

Nothing happened. Nothing had gone by in the dark street.

Sister Vigilante, telling this, she's worming a knife under each of her fingernails and prying off the nail.

Civil twilight, she says, is the period of time between sunset and when the sun is more than six degrees below the horizon. That six degrees equals about half an hour. Civil twilight, Sister Vigilante says, is different from nautical twilight, which lasts until the sun is twelve degrees under the horizon. Astronomical twilight goes until the sun is eighteen degrees below the horizon.

The Sister says, that something no one ever saw, downhill from Teresa Wheeler, it crumpled the roof of a car, waiting at a red light near 16th Avenue. The same invisible nothing wiped out the neon sign for The Tropics Lounge, crushed the neon tubing and folded the steel sign in half where it hung near a third-floor window.

Still, there was nothing to describe. Effect without cause. An invisible riot run amok on Lewis Street, all the way from 20th Avenue to somewhere near the waterfront.

On June 29, Sister Vigilante says, sunset was at 8:36.

Civil twilight ended at 9:08.

According to a guy working the box office of the Olympia Adult Theater, something rushed past the glass front of his ticket booth. This was nothing he could see. It was more the sound of air, an invisible bus going past, or an enormous exhale, so close it fluttered the paper money he had stacking in front of him. Just a high-pitched sound. At the edge of his sight, the lights of the diner across the street, they fluttered, blinked, as if something blotted out the whole world for an instant.

In the next breath, the ticket taker, he described the pounding sound first reported by Teresa Wheeler. A dog barked, somewhere in the dark. It was a walking sound, the kid in the box office would tell police. The sound of something taking huge steps. Just one huge foot he never saw swing past, only as far as one breath away.

On July 1, people were complaining about the water shortage. They were griping about city budget cuts and all the police getting laid off. Car prowls were on the rise. Spray-paint tagging and armed