Case One: A Haunting In Silver Lake. Chapter Three
After a spirit channeling gone wrong, Santi and Iz are forced to confront their views on reality… and a ghost!
Vibes is a serialized supernatural comedy. New chapters come out every week. If you’d like to start with the previous chapter of this case, click here:
“Oh shit!” Kazem screamed. “She’s possessed! Everyone run!”
The house devolved into pandemonium. Bodies streaked past me, trailing the earthy and pleasant smells of expensive ‘all natural’ lotions. Kazam grabbed me by the shoulders. “You need to go, man. She’s possessed. There’s a ghost in her!”
“That’s my girlfriend. We have to help her. And, if I’m being honest, I don’t believe in spirit possessions. This could be any number of—”
“Aileen!” Luisa’s voice hurt my ears and shook my teeth. “There was a car, and then blackness. What happened, Aileen?”
“OK,” I said, “for argument’s sake, let’s say she is possessed. What do we do about that?”
“What do I look like?” Kazam laughed frantically, “a priest!” He ran by me out the door, leaving the sitting room bare save me, the hostess, my rage, and— for argument’s sake— ghost-filled girlfriend, and Santi standing in a corner, laughing deliriously and pumping his fists. The last time I’d seen him this happy was at Summer Smackdown at the Staples Center.
“Yes!” Santi cheered. “Real ghosts! Yes! Yes! Yes!”
Luisa locked eyes on him and roared. “What did you do to me!” She dropped her shoulder and barreled towards him. Luckily, being an actor required keeping fit, and so he was agile enough to leap out of the way and land, hard, onto the Mediterranean buffet, sending it crashing to the floor, spilling him and falafel all over the rug. Luisa stomped towards him and raised her foot.
“I’ve had nightmares about exactly this,” Santi said to himself and the empty room. “Baba ganoush and all.”
“I’m sorry!” I screamed as I slammed my shoulder into my five-foot girlfriend. She stumbled, but only a little, and it made me feel little. Before I could slip down a mental spiral of self-flagellation, Santi grabbed me by the hand and ran the both of us upstairs.
As we crossed from the staircase into the second story of the house, I was struck by how different the feeling was. Downstairs had been all hard lines. An imposing bit of architecture meant, surely, to project an image of the homeowner. Upstairs, however, was softer, homier. Family pictures and unimpressive art adorned the walls. I wanted to comment, even sprinting and terrified, that this new hallway made me feel much closer to Aileen and her home, but I didn’t have the breath. It became clear, very quickly, that I should have been more focused on my footwork and less focused on the emotional quality of the home, as I tripped over myself and slammed into Santi, who in turn slammed into the wall.
Luisa bellowed wordlessly as she stomped down the hall after us. Santi and I both cowered into one another, holding our ears as the wall shook with the force of her voice.
“Why is the spirit so angry?” Santi asked. “I thought spirit possession was supposed to be fun, or at least helpful?"
“It’s probably like waking up from anesthetic,” I offered, “only now, inexplicably, you’re a short Latin woman.”
“That would be disorienting.”
“WHAT DID YOU DO TO ME!” Luisa screamed.
“Nothing, Bruce.” Aileen appeared behind her and took Luisa by the shoulder. “They did nothing. You died.”
“What?” Luisa looked down at her hands as if for the first time and recoiled. “Why do my hands have a stick and poke tattoo of a cross with SG guitar pegs?”
I stood up, drawn to help my girlfriend, even in this dangerous moment, and it made me feel both heroic and embarrassed. Heroic that I should care enough about her— even though we’d only been together for three months— to put my safety at risk, and embarrassed that I should enjoy my own heroism. Still, I approached.
“Because you’re my girlfriend, Luisa,” I explained, “and you used to be in a Christian riot grrrl band, ‘The Saved Sisters’.”
Luisa wailed a tormented, “NOOOOO.”
I reached for her consolingly. “It’s okay! They were actually pretty good.”
I don’t know what I was expecting, but I certainly wasn’t expecting her to hit me. I equally was not expecting Aileen to hit her.
“Stop it, Bruce!” She smacked her across the face, and I leapt up and tried to get in the way.
“Please,” I said, trying to ask nicely. “Don’t hit my girlfriend.”
“She’s not,” Santi argued. “She’s hitting her husband through your girlfriend.”
“I’m not sure if that makes it better.”
Luisa’s hand closed around my throat in a way that, in another circumstance, I could have found sexy. She began to swing me by my neck and screamed, “I am not your girlfriend! I am a sixty-five-year-old man.”
“Sixty-six today,” Aileen said.
“Happy birthday,” I choked. I started to see black as Luisa’s fingers cut off circulation to my brain.
“I’ve got you, Iz!” Santi said, grabbing me by the shoulder and trying to pull me free. He was unable to move me and instead only made the choking worse.
“I thought you were supposed to be strong,” I rasped.
“I keep telling you, Iz! I’m fit. It’s different.”
“Bruce,” Aileen begged. “You’re hurting him. Please stop.”
Luisa wailed again and released me towards Santi, sending us both tripping and stumbling towards the stairs. We dropped over the first landing, both of us cartwheeling our arms, terrified. We were both at that age, in our thirties, where one is first forced to deal with the fact that falling down isn’t just painful but a potentially life-altering event.
We spun around one another like ice skaters, me pulling him away from slamming his ribs into the banister, him catching me before I tumbled over and cracked my face into the stairs, but eventually, like all physical phenomena, we came to a rest, hard into a pile of Mediterranean food.
Once the room settled, Santi rolled over and looked at me. “Iz. I hate to say it, but I told you so.” He helped me on my feet and brushed dust and peta from my shoulders. “The supernatural is real.”
“I hate to live my own cliché, Santi, but we don’t know that that’s what’s happening. It could be a delusion—”
“What kind of delusion gives you super strength?”
“I’m a theoretical mathematician, not a psychologist.”
Santi made his way to the upset buffet table and rooted around for edible food. “You’re being obtuse, Iz.”
“I’m not being obtuse.” I joined him and picked up an enclosed container of pickled onions. Santi took it from my hands.
“Are you hungry or just picking?”
“This is a high anxiety situation. A nosh is called for.”
“Fine.” He gave me the plastic container and I set to trying to pry free the lid. “But you are being obtuse. You have an obtuse streak, and it’s getting in the way of you seeing what this is. Your girlfriend is possessed by a dead guy. Why can’t you just admit I’m right?”
“OK, let’s just say for the sake of argument that you are right.” I freed the lid. Santi and I both grabbed a sliver of purple, translucent pickle. “In that case I find it very hurtful that you would use this terrible situation as an ‘I told you so’.”
Santi looked reproached. “You’re right. I’m sorry. Whether or not this is spirit possession or some as of yet unheard-of psychological disorder that makes you think you’re an old dead guy with the power of one thousand exploding suns, this is bigger than you and I.”
“Thank you,” I said, and I meant it, putting the pickles down. The moment of emotional intimacy took care of my anxiety well enough to forego noshing for a moment. “That’s big of you. So, if it is possession— just for argument’s sake— what do we do about that?”
“What do I look like,” Santi asked through a mouthful of pickles, “a priest?”
“Didn’t you go to school for this?”
“I went to school for a lot, but no… although.” Santi cocked his head to the side as he thought, and then pumped his fist when he landed on an idea. “We should do mushrooms!”
“I don’t know, Santi. This is neither the set nor the setting for a good trip.”
“True, but if we’re trying to handle spirit realm stuff it might help us to be on the level.” Santi roamed the room with his eyes. “I’m almost there. I can see vague impressions.”
“Really?” I asked. “Are you microdosing?”
“Somewhere between a microdose and a macrodose. Trust me here, Iz. Just get on my level.”
“Fine.” He was right. I was being unnecessarily intractable. This situation was outside of my norm, so I had no reason to stick to my guns. Also, I had very much wanted to get high today. “Hand me the sacred brownie tray.”
Santi dug it out of the wreckage, and we both ate a mouthful of the mushroom brownies, which were dry and nearly flavorless, but better than being dry and tasting like mushrooms. “I figured we’ve got about thirty minutes until we feel any effect,” Santi said. “We—“
His next statement was cut off by a loud thump and Aileen screaming.
“Oh god,” I said. “He’s killing her.”
“Or they’re… you know.”
“That’s bad too.”
“That’s pretty close-minded of you,” Santi said, frowning.
I waved my hands, reproached. “Not at all. It’s only, Luisa and I are too new to each other to have had the conversation about whether or not our relationship is open or closed. I’m not sure how spirit possession—“
“For the sake of argument.”
“Thank you. Factors into things vis-a-vi non-monogamy.”
Then came another thump and another scream.
“Perhaps we go somewhere else for our come-up,” Santi offered, and I readily agreed.
Twenty minutes later, we had made our way back to the hill Luisa and I had hiked up only two hours ago, when my greatest worry had been whether or not she would like my friends. I had wanted to comment to Santi something about how quickly one’s priorities can shift, but I had a hard enough time catching my breath.
“You need to start doing cardio, Iz,” Santi admonished. “I send you all those HIIT videos. If you don’t start worrying about your heart health now, it will be too late. ”
“But I do yoga,” I protested.
“Oh, so that’s breath of fire and not your lungs falling out?”
“Maybe it’s just the mushrooms,” I argued.
“No way they’re starting to hit,” Santi said. “It’s only been…” he stared off down the street and blinked. “Wow.”
I followed his gaze down the hill to see Silver Lake illuminated below us, a solitary car streaking around the reservoir, the light from its headlights in turn streaking out through the darkness. The air seemed to warble and morph, the glow illuminated the leaves of the many trees like thousands of curious eyes.
“I know it’s been a few months since we tripped last,” I said.
“It’s only been two weeks,” Santi argued.
“Fair. I know it’s been two weeks, but I don’t remember psychedelics being this…”
“Psychedelic?” We both stared at the entrance to Aileen’s house, which now weighed heavy upon the darkness, as radiant and austere as any Aztec temple. “Kazam did say he was bringing the spirit realm and ours closer together.” Santi put his hand on the door knob and began to open it.
“True,” I said, “but don’t people like him always say that kind of thing? Maybe we’re just projecting our fears onto…oh…oh fuck.”
Santi and I stared inside into a house at once totally the same and completely changed. Across every surface twisted and every group of tiling symmetry. Colors sped through the air like the headlights of tiny cars. Eyes stared back at us from each piece of art.
“Math!” I gasped.
“Magic!” Santi cheered.
We hi-fived, and I was not so high that I failed to notice we did it perfectly. Santi grabbed my arm.
“Iz! Iz! Do you see anything in the middle of the room, above the singing bowls?” Santi asked.
I looked for a moment, and I, in fact, did see something out of the ordinary, a perfect mathematical object rotating in space, using the walls of the living room as a graphing software window. “Yes, it’s a perfect hyperboloid!”
“Which is what, exactly?”
“It’s sort of like a paraboloid, but instead of being governed by exponential relationships, the underlying equations are hyperbolic.” Santi looked at me and raised his eyebrows. “Nothing?”
“I tried to do those Khan Academy courses you sent me, but there’s just too much math.”
“That’s the unfortunate thing about mathematics, yes. So what do you see?”
“A spiny, swoopy, portal thing. Oh! Maybe that’s the portal where the spirit—“
“—For the sake of argument—”
“—Yes, for the sake of argument— got through. If we can get there, maybe we can send it back!”
Santi strode confidently into the room and shrieked as he began to fall into the psychedelic abyss that had replaced the floor. “Shit!” He screamed, and then grunted as I caught him by the hips and held him. “Wow, Iz… how are you so strong?”
“Because…” I said, panting, “I’m not fit.”
“Please don’t drop me!”
“What would happen if I did?”
“I don’t know, Iz! Psychedelic floor goofs weren’t covered at my acupuncture school.”
Grunting, I pulled him up and we collapsed down on the lip of the chasm that had once been Aileen’s sitting room. I stared ahead and, turning my gaze one way, everything looked normal— throw pillows and rugs atop hardwood— but turning it the other showed the floor to be nothing but a yawning, endless maw.
“Well,” Santi said, “we tried our best, and what more could we really do?”
“Wait! Logic!”
Santi stared at me then, expectant. “Just the idea or…”
I pulled off both my shoes and threw one at the floor. It disappeared, receding into the darkness. The other I threw at one of the throw rugs. It hit and sent the rug rippling, but stayed where it was.
“Yeah!” Santi cheered, and then added, “why are you looking at me like that?”
“Between the two of us, you’re obviously the jump one.”
“That’s fair,” said Santi. “Macho Man!” He sprang onto the floating rug. It caught his weight but then descended, for a brief heart-dropping moment. I saw terror flash in his eyes, and immediately I began composing his epitaph. I saw myself in front of his empty casket, a tear in my eyes, telling a crowd of hippies, Brazilians, and Brazilian hippies how important he was to me, and how, even in his last moments, he was a man filled with—
“Yeah!” Santi screamed, ebullient as the ru g launched back into the air like a trampoline.
“Yeah!” I screamed back, leaping to join him. We bounced then, cackling and whooping like we were back in the desert the night we first met. “This is the most fun I’ve had since Burning Man 2018.”
“With the giant puppet!?”
“The giant puppet!” I cheered. “I loved—“
I was shut up by a heavy thump from upstairs and a loud scream. Santi and I looked at one another, all business now. We looked over at the portal, and to my dismay, it seemed to be closing up.
“Bounce me to the portal,” Santi commanded, and I did so, only a bit bothered by how readily I did exactly as I was told. Jumping hard on the throw rug, I sent Santi flying towards the singing bowls, where he landed balletically in the middle of the half moon.
“Wow…” we both said.
“What do we need to do to keep the portal open?” Santi asked.
“Play one of the bowls,” I yelled. It seemed like a good idea, and also I liked when Santi played singing bowls. It brought him joy, and even if you factor out any metaphysical presumptions, it’s still pleasant.
Santi grabbed the hammer and began to draw tone from the large bowl in the center. The hyperboloid shimmered for a moment but continued to shrink.
“Try another one?” I offered. He played the smaller bowl, and as the tone warbled into the air— a strange thing that I felt in the moment I could see— the hyperboloid began to stabilize. “It’s working! OK, try another one. Hurry! Hurry!”
“Why hurry? Are we under some sort of time constraint?”
“Well, yes. I’m scared for Luisa, and also the mushrooms are really revving up. I’m not sure how much longer I’ll be cogent.”
Santi tried another bowl. The sound was discordant, and the portal began to shrink.
“Do something, Santi!”
“Why is it always me? Why don’t you do something?”
“I don’t know anything about this sort of stuff. I’m a mathematician!”
“YES!” Santi stood, buoyed by drug-fueled excitement. “You’re always saying everything is math, so do math on it.”
“Yes, it’s math, but it’s all far too complex—“ the shrinking quickened.
“What’s the equation for the hi-purple-boy?” Santi asked.
“The hyperboloid? X squared over a squared plus y squared over b squared equals z squared over c squared, but what could that have to… oh wait!”
“YES!” Santi yelled. I yelled back the same. “Math on it! We’re doing this!”
“We are! OK, so bonk one of them for me. We’re trying to expand the elliptic opening, and I’m just going to posit— now this is purely conjecture, Santi, so please don’t tell any of my colleagues about this—“
“When would I ever tell any of your colleagues about any of this? You’ve never introduced me to any of the people you work with.” Despite the terror all around us, I would have had to be a stone to miss the hurt that began to climb up to Santi’s face. “Wait. You are embarrassed of me, aren't you.”
“No, it’s not that,” I said, genuine in the way one only gets on certain drugs. “It’s just, I’m the best-looking guy at the math parties, and I don’t want to lose that small victory. Now, would you please just bonk a bowl?”
He hit one of the bowls, eliciting no response. He bonked another, and another until finally, he hit the smallest one. The shrinking stopped, and the opening of the portal began to stretch. “YES!”
“OK, good. Now I know which tone is mapped to which axis. Hit that one, silence the little one, and bonk the middle one HARD.”
Santi hit the last bowl, and I knew it to be the right one. The tones rang out, the coefficients grew, the portal enlarged. We both fell to the floor, delirious, looking up into a hyperbolic trip-scape.
“Shlom-Alechem. Vher bistu?”
“Santi,” I asked, “Did that portal just speak to you in Yiddish?”
He shook his head no, crying hushed tears. “Portuguese for me.” He reached out to the portal and spoke to it.
“What did you say,” I asked. “I just can’t understand Portuguese. Too many diphthongs.”
“I asked the hi-purple-boy if it would take the spirit back with it.”
“What did it say?”
A sweet sound began to emanate from the portal, pleasant, like the rare feeling of being high without an upset stomach.
“That.” Santi said, and I don’t know what happened next, because the mushrooms broke my brain like a dropped iPhone.
“Iz?” Luisa leaned over me. By the light on her face, I could tell it was morning. She looked disheveled but beautiful.
“Did we do it?” Santi asked from somewhere else on the floor.
“Do what? Pass out in a pile of Mediterranean food on my nice carpet?”
I pressed myself up to see Aileen in a robe, red-faced but smiling. She was holding hands with Luisa, which felt weird. I tried to get over it. I know sometimes women in our culture have an easier time with physical contact than men, but it still felt wrong to me. “Is the ghost gone?”
“The what?” Luisa asked.
“He means my husband,” Aileen sighed. A sad but beatific smile played across her face. “This wonderful woman gave us one last perfect night. I finally got to say goodbye.”
Luisa hugged her, holding eye contact as their foreheads pressed together like the couple in the mural on 4th Street in DTLA by the climbing gym I used to go to. “He loved you so much, duck. He always will.” They kissed then. I looked around for Santi and saw him equally confused.
Luisa broke off the kiss and turned to me. “Iz,” she said with an honest confidence I’d never seen in her before. “You’re a really great guy, but after you spend all night making love to a woman as her husband of 30 years— with all that entails— well, you kind of have to see where that’s going to take you.” She leaned over to me, kissed me on the forehead with achingly tender, aggressively platonic affection, and turned back to Aileen. “Breakfast, duck? At our favorite spot?”
They left then, leaving Santi and me alone. We stepped out to the balcony and enjoyed the last moments of sunrise over Silver Lake Reservoir.
“Santi,” I said sadly. “We took Luisa’s car here. Do you think you could drop me off?”
He placed a warm hand on my shoulder. “After food. I’m starving.”
He took us to the smoothie shop between Vermont and Hillhurst, Punchbowl, next to the stall where the older Korean woman sells succulents in twee little pots. I almost considered getting one to make me feel better, but ultimately opted out. Taking on an additional responsibility wasn’t truly what I needed in that moment.
“Can we talk about what happened now?” Santi asked through gulps of his cacao nib, date, and pea protein smoothie.
“I appreciate that you’re concerned for me, but I’m not sure I’m ready to talk about it. I mean, the break-up is still fresh. Not that I don’t understand, or even begrudge her her choice.” I suckled at my coffee, coconut, and fig smoothie with pea protein. The act of sucking thick liquid through a tight straw helped with the sadness.
“Intellectualizing your feelings isn’t going to help you get over the breakup, Iz. That’s a defense mechanism that’s never helped you.” Santi finished his first smoothie and moved his straw into his second; strawberry granola açaí with pea protein1. “Besides, that’s not what I’m talking about. Last night something truly spooky happened. Speak on that.”
“Yes, it was strange, but just because we don’t understand it doesn’t mean it’s supernatural.”
“Your five-foot girlfriend—“
“Ex-girlfriend, please, Santi.”
“Your five-foot girlfriend at the time punched you so hard you flew. Her voice was so loud it shook the curtains. Everyone saw it.”
I sucked around for the last chunk of coconut. “Everyone here being a group of people not only prone to see things but wanting to see them.”
“Then what about the super strength?” He yelled through a mouthful of açaí.
“Perhaps her emotional state let her access the depths of her body’s full potential, like being on PCP.” I gave up on the straw and pried off the lid of my smoothie, electing instead to reach in with my fingers. I did so quickly, before Santi could stop me. “And before you say I’m being obtuse, I’m not. I’m just not jumping to conclusions. What’s that thing Sagan said?”
“It’s surprisingly difficult to make an apple pie?”
“No, the other thing. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.”
“How much more extraordinary can you get than the hi-purple-boy?!”
“We were very much on mushrooms, you and I!”
“Iz? Santi?”
Tori stood at the door with her new girlfriend, a sight that elicited a pang of jealousy and guilt for what I’d said about her last night— about us not being friends and all. “We hid in the house after everyone ran last night. We saw what you two did, with the portal and all.”
“HA!” Santi yelled, pointing a smoothie-drenched straw in my face.
Tori pushed her girlfriend forward. She looked around timidly and then spoke in an accent I couldn’t quite place, maybe Russian or some sort of Canadian. “My family, they also have a problem. Maybe you could help?”
“Well…” I said.
“Absolutely,” Santi cheered. “Whatever you need.”
“Well, hang on. Santi, I understand that last night was very rewarding for you, but if— for the sake of argument— what happened last night was ‘spooky’, then it was also very dangerous. We almost got hurt four or five times last night, which far exceeded my monthly quota. If we do anything else like that, it very likely won’t be safe.”
Santi nodded. “Iz is right. It will be exciting. We’re in!”
That’s it for chapter one, but don’t worry, Santi and Iz will be back next week with a case that tests their friendship and their resolve by sending them to Culver City. If You’d like to read along, find the first chapter of Case Two right here:
Or, if you’d like to find every case, all in one place, click below:
Santi always did his best to use fewer straws, a strange emotional holdover from when everyone thought using less plastic straws would save the environment. He was as aware as anyone that that was a pernicious form of greenwashing, but hey, everyone has their unnecessary habits.
Hi-purple-boy
☠️