“I think so,” Maya said. “Well?”
Felix blew into his mug. “What kind of ghost is it?”
Vimbai finally found her voice. “It’s not really a ghost,” she said. “It’s a psychic energy baby.”
“Did you Google it?” Felix asked. “Don’t think I ever heard of one.”
Vimbai brought her laptop downstairs, but the results were disappointing. Psychic energy baby turned out to be one of the very few things Google had no insight on.
“All right,” Felix said. “It’s in the phone now? I guess I’d better take a look.”
It was the most words he had said since Vimbai moved in; in fact, he sounded remarkably coherent. It prompted Vimbai to blurt, “This is not really hair, is it?”
“No,” Felix admitted. “I’ll explain some other time.”
Maya and Vimbai followed Felix to the hallway where the phone huddled, forlorn, on its dusty shelf. Felix picked up the receiver and listened for a while, his bloodshot eyes rotating quietly in their sockets in opposite directions; Vimbai found that he looked thoughtful.
“Just static,” Felix said.
Vimbai sighed. “Just listen.”
Felix did. He listened for a long while, slouched against the wall, and the thoughtfulness started giving way to boredom, but then there was crackling in the receiver, and he startled upright. “That’s a Psychic Energy Baby all right,” he said, covering the mouthpiece with his hand.
“Will it ever grow up?” Maya asked, and bit her fingernails in excitement. “Will it be a Psychic Energy Adult?”
“How should I know?” Felix glared a little, both of his eyes managing to simultaneously focus on Maya. “The thing is unGoogleable.”
Vimbai cleared her throat. Her head swam, and she felt as if in a dream, able to do and say anything. “Seriously, what’s with the hair?” she said.
Felix shrugged. “Not now.” He grunted and picked up the phone, leaving the phone jack connected so as not to lose touch with the Psychic Energy Baby. Both Vimbai and Maya held their breath and each other’s hands; Vimbai imagined that participants in a spiritualist séance would feel the same mix of disbelief, giddiness and fear lurking just under the surface as they did right now, watching Felix work his magic surrounded by peeling wallpaper and creaking floorboards, a black rotary phone the focus of his attention.
Felix thrust the phone into his hair; Vimbai whimpered a bit as the entire squat plastic box plus its dangling cord and the receiver were swallowed by the darkness. There was no way for it to fit—there was no way Felix could thrust his arm into his hair almost all the way to his shoulder, as narrow tongues of emptiness licked it, trying to pull it in. For a moment, Vimbai imagined Felix being sucked into the black hole of his hair and disappearing in a recursive black dot, but he managed to pull away, his hand still gripping the phone.
“That ought to do it,” Felix said. “I hope.”
Maya reached for the receiver and listened to the recorded incantation that suggested dialing 0 for the operator. “It’s gone,” Maya announced. “Where is it?”
“It’s in my hair,” Felix answered, as if referring to a moth or some other harmless but annoying insect. “Hold on.”
Now both of his hands disappeared into his hair up to the elbows, and moved about energetically. Vimbai though that he looked like a man reaching for something slimy and nasty in the garbage disposal—his face acquired the same apprehensive expression as it did every time he had to touch his hair. Vimbai used to think that her own hair was unruly, but it didn’t even come close to the existential horror of Felix’s.
He finally grabbed a hold of something and pulled—judging from his wincing and the restless motion of his hands kneading some invisible dough, that something was either slippery or reluctant or both. A few times his arms were pulled back in and struggled out again, the resisting prize still hidden from view.
There was a shriek and a wail, and Felix grunted as he pulled out the wriggling shape.
“Yep,” Maya said. “It’s a Psychic Energy Baby all right.”
Vimbai had not visited Felix’s room before—in fact, she used to avoid thinking about Felix, because even after she had lived in the house for a while, she found that he didn’t quite fit into her usual thinking patterns. He was the oddly shaped piece of a jigsaw puzzle that didn’t seem to belong anywhere, and probably had tumbled here from some other, entirely different set, but there he was.
And there she was, following him and Maya up the stairs to the small bedroom at the end of the corridor. A not very mature “Keep Out—High Voltage” sign guarded the door. This is where they carried the Psychic Energy Baby; it wailed, distraught, and struggled and seemed to resent the unfamiliar surroundings and the lack of the binding (yet directing) phone wires. Vimbai half-regretted ever bringing it to Maya’s attention.
Felix’s bedroom was surprisingly clean and tidy—the bed neatly made, books on the shelves, the desk amazingly free of piles of paper and stray objects such as found their way onto Vimbai’s. The only thing that was out of ordinary was the row of phantom limbs lined against the wall—there were hundreds of feet and legs and hands and arms, all cast in the same transparent substance as the Psychic Energy Baby, visible only by the curving of the reflected light stretched taut like a soap bubble.
“They are all . . . yours?” Vimbai said.
Felix nodded, his eyes rolling in rhythm with the bobbing of his head. “Well, they used to be somebody else’s. But once you detach a phantom leg or arm, the owners don’t want them. So I keep them—not like I can throw them away.”
“How do you . . . ” Vimbai posed, thinking of ways to better formulate the question. After some hemming, she gave up any hope of sophistication, and hoped only for coherence. “How do you do these things?” she pointed at the limbs and the baby that still lay transparent, cradled against Felix’s narrow chest.
Felix seemed to have only a tentative hold of the ways in which his hair—or a small universe that orbited the dome of his skull, whatever one wanted to call it—worked; he understood it only enough to exploit it. The universe which he explored like a blind man would, by touch alone, contained primarily clean socks, a few household objects, and a desiccated head or two (he promised to explain the heads later as well). Also, it seemed to work as a prism of sorts—except that if a prism could split a beam of light into its component wavelengths, Felix’s hair split any entangled objects into their components, be they material, spiritual, or both. Felix discovered it by accident, when he was quite young—a neighbor’s kitten crawled into his ’do, and got separated from its voice—the disembodied meowing haunted the house until they moved.
“So you could separate a person from their soul,” Vimbai said.
“If you believe in souls,” Felix answered. “I suppose. But then the person would be dead, wouldn’t it?”
“Oh for crying out loud,” Maya interrupted. “Yes, Felix, your hair is a deadly weapon. Now, do something about this baby.”
“Like what?” Felix said, and sat on his bed, the baby sniffling and waving its transparent limbs in his lap.
Vimbai reached for the apparition. To her surprise, the baby had some heft—not as heavy as a regular baby would be, but it felt as a being of substance. It cried some more.
“There there,” Vimbai said. “You can talk, can’t you? Tell us what you want now.”
The Psychic Energy Baby (or Peb, as Vimbai mentally abbreviated it) stopped crying. “It was a dark and terrible place,” it said in a blur of a voice, barely louder than a sigh.
“What, the phone or his hair?” Maya asked.
The baby pointed at Felix, and its lower lip, itself reminiscent of a bubble of spit, trembled. “Something held me there,” it said. “It is not a good place.”
“I bet,” Vimbai murmured. “Now that you’re here, what do you want to do?”
“I don’t know yet,” Peb said. “But I’m not going back into the dark, neither wires nor him.”
“Fine,” Vimbai said. “Can you move on your own?” It did look awfully tiny and insubstantial.
Peb could—it turned out, it could walk or float, and walls and floors did not baffle it or contain its movement. It started investigating Felix’s room by sinking into the floor halfway, so just the transparent torso moved about, looking under the bed, until it finally crossed through the wall and disappeared from view. Vimbai and Maya sighed simultaneously.
“I don’t suppose it will pay rent,” Maya said. “It probably has no money.”
“It doesn’t have any pockets,” Vimbai agreed. “We should tell it to keep away from the bathrooms when we’re using them.”
“Phantom limbs are so much easier,” Felix said. “At least they stay put.”
“And look creepy,” Maya added.
Felix huffed. “And the Psychic Energy Baby that wanders through the walls at all hours is not creepy?”