Chapter 26

That night, Charles goes back to Piper’s apartment. He’s not sure why. Julian didn’t send him. He can’t really justify it. Piper lets him in when he presses the buzzer, and when he goes inside, up the narrow carpeted stairs, his heart is beating louder than it should.

Maybe he’s got a little bit of an inkling why he’s here. He has to admit this when he sees the 2B with the tiny 21 crammed in the middle. He needs to see it again, the replica of Sherlock Holmes’ apartment. The little slice of Lu and Piper’s life. The knife stuck into the mantelpiece, the threadbare carpet. Needs to sit where he sat when he was wearing Watson’s clothes. He feels as though in that little room he might be able to understand something about what—what’s happening to him.

Unsteady, like the deck of a ship: that’s how the floor feels to Charles when Piper opens the door and he steps into the living room. The rich velvet drapes keep the dark Pittsburgh night at bay, softly suspending the room in the golden glow of the lamps. For an overwhelming moment a jolt of small-child petulance shoots through Charles: It’s not fair, his mind screams. I want this.

Wants the details, the pipe on the table, the shine of candlelight on its worn surface. Wants the feel of it between his fingers. He doesn’t want to smoke, but he’d like to pretend to. He wants to sit in the moth-eaten armchair with his legs crossed. Wants to have ink on his fingertips. Wants to turn to the person next to him and call them by a name that isn’t theirs. Be called by a name that isn’t his. Wants to leave this fucking world behind and drift into another one.

He wants to sit in this room and kiss Julian Ellsworth.

Disturbed out of his internal tantrum, he jerks his head up to find Piper looking at him with a curious shine in their eyes.

“Charles?”

Their voice is quiet.

Charles tries to look normal. He needs to think of some question to ask about Lu. Something professional.

“Can I…”

He trails off.

Piper watches.

“I keep thinking, if I—maybe if I knew more about Lu, I’d have a better sense of…of what happened.”

It’s not true. Charles doesn’t know whether that will help. He just wants it. He wants more.

After a long moment, Piper nods. Just a slight tilt of the head. “Come with me.”

They leave the Victorianesque living room and Charles follows Piper through the gap in the stretched-taut curtain—that peculiar gauzy fabric that Piper said isn’t meant to resemble a vagina, except insofar as it is—over the door to Lu’s bedroom. Piper opens Lu’s closet door and stands on tiptoe to reach the top shelf. They pull out a box. Silently, Charles watches, skin prickling, all his nerve endings doing a sort of dance.

Piper pulls out a net. It’s made of thin rope, maybe a quarter-inch thick, and looks, not that Charles knows much about fishing, a little too wide-gapped to be a fishing net, but not by much. Piper sets the net down on the embroidered armchair and hands Charles a photograph, black and white and grainy and printed on regular printer paper. It’s of a woman in a long dress seated in a chair, a net falling over her body. Charles thinks it looks familiar; then he remembers that it’s the picture Lu has up on the department website in lieu of a photo of herself.

“Elizabeth D’Espérance,” Piper explains. “She was a nineteenth-century Spiritualist medium. Sometimes mediums would dress up as spirits and trick people into believing they were witnessing real manifestations. So investigators would tie their hands or lock them up or have them summon spirits while wrapped in a big net to prove they weren’t frauds.”

Charles nods. He’s vaguely familiar with nineteenth-century Spiritualism: séances and table rapping and automatic writing. In the image of the woman, the net is strung from the ceiling by two white cords. It pools around D’Espérance’s feet. “Does Lu believe in that stuff?” he asks.

Piper hesitates. They shake their head slowly. “I don’t know. No. I mean, she says she doesn’t. But…” They shrug. “There’s something mystical about the way Lu thinks. It’s complicated. She—she says it’s all aesthetic, her interest—or, like, narrative, in a way—”

Charles can tell that Piper is having trouble explaining not so much because the idea is hard to explain, but because they aren’t sure they want to share this part of Lu. He recognizes that particular kind of hesitation. But he wants to know. He thinks maybe he already understands: he doesn’t believe in ghosts, either. Not at all. But he believes in involuntary memory—Proust’s madeleine, the taste catapulting him back to his childhood. It’s as close to haunting, he thinks, as a skeptical person can get.

Piper picks up the net. “Do you want to try?”

Charles looks at Piper and his stomach does a funny little flip. “You mean…”

As an answer, Piper takes more photos from the box. These have been printed in color on glossy photo paper. In them, Lu sits upright and stately in the chair Charles is standing in front of. The net Piper is holding is draped over her. She’s wearing a simple white dress. She looks, in the first photo, slightly self-conscious, but in the other two she seems to have sunk into her role. She looks grave, solemn, or maybe just neutral.

“Lu wanted to see how it felt,” Piper says. “Like the fabric over the door. She said she was making all these claims about the form of the net and the thread and she wanted to know if they worked not just conceptually, but practically.”

Piper is still holding out the net. Charles does not see how sitting in Lu’s chair and placing the net over his body can help him and Julian solve her disappearance.

“I’ll try it,” he says. He can hear the blood pumping in his ears. Gingerly, he sits in the stiff wooden-backed chair, settling himself against its embroidered bird and flowers. Piper slides the matching footstool closer and steps lightly onto it, brushing Charles’ leg as they do so. Charles looks up. Piper slips the ends of two ropes attached to the net into two hooks screwed into the ceiling, just like in the photograph of the spirit medium. The net rests awkwardly against Charles’ shoulders for a moment, a surprisingly heavy mass that Piper then lifts and maneuvers over his head. They arrange the net over Charles’ body. The extra material flops to the floor at his feet.

Piper steps back.

The net feels even heavier draped like this over Charles’ whole body, though it’s not really heavy rope. It’s just the volume of it, and the way gravity pulls at it. He shifts, feeling the rope stretch and tighten and slacken against his skin and clothes.

He feels caught. He could get out. It wouldn’t be difficult to lift the net over his shoulders and throw it on the floor. But that isn’t really the point. The point is to sit here, inert. The point is to sit here and speak with the dead.

Charles feels Piper’s eyes on him. He wants to relax into it, but he’s self-conscious.

“Here,” Piper says, and lifts a stapled packet of pages from the box. “This is what Lu says about the net.”

They settle back against Lu’s desk and start to read aloud.

A woman sits in the lower righthand corner of the frame, her hands on her lap. She is enveloped in a net, which pools at her feet and which is suspended by two long white threads extending upwards past the top right corner of the photograph. Under the net she appears composed or, maybe, simply posed. She stares just past the camera, her eyes—dark dots in the pale oval of her face—pointing at something that we, the viewers, cannot see. Or pointing at nothing.

The net makes D’Espérance ghostly: it falls over her body not unlike the way draped fabric swoops over the heads and bodies of the spirits who show up in photographs of séances. The grey-white crosshatching of the threads sinks into the grey-white background of her skin and blurs her facial features—her nose invisible, her mouth a smudge of darkness. And it obscures whatever scarf or shadow falls across her neck and torso, so that her head appears to float.

In a 2003 article in Art Journal,[1] Mark Alice Durant describes “the blur of the otherworldly”: the tendency to associate the smudge, the haze, the vague shape with the not-quite-of-this-world—the spookification of the partially visible. Citing Victorian spirit photography, UFO images, and a set of blurry photographs supposedly produced by a man simply staring into the camera lens, Durant writes that “it seems that the visual proofs of paranormal activity must be conveyed in styles analogous to their tenuous accessibility” (14). That is, images meant to function as proof of the supernatural are often frustratingly vague or difficult to make out, which Durant argues is a manifestation of the difficulty of obtaining solid evidence of the paranormal. According to Durant, photography is particularly likely to produce such ambiguous proofs because it seems to hover between reality and representation, the material and the immaterial—“Black cloths and safe lights, apertures and sensitivities, filters and latent images: the glossary of photographic terms is suggestive of an entire world of betweenness” (8).

Charles listens. He lets Piper’s voice, steady and quiet, wash through him. He closes his eyes. The blur of the otherworldly.

Charles lets himself float. He lets himself feel the net as a constraint. The ropes chafe slightly against his skin, but it’s oddly comfortable. Or comforting, maybe. A rustling of pages, a slight pause, and Piper picks up again.

D’Espérance describes an early attempt to materialize a spirit in her memoir, Shadow Land.[2] In the cabinet in the dark, she felt “strange disturbances in the air,” and her “hair [was] blown and lifted by currents of air”; then, she writes, “began a strange sensation, which I had sometimes felt at séances. Frequently I have heard it described by others as of cobwebs being passed over the face, but to me, who watched it curiously, it seemed that I could feel fine threads being drawn out of the pores of my skin” (229).

D’Espérance was among those Spiritualists who believed that matter from the medium’s body was used to make up the form of the materialized spirit. She describes in the January 1897 edition of the Spiritualist journal Borderland a materialization séance during which she looked down to realize her legs had vanished: the spirit, who had no material substance on its own, was using them to become visible. So when she speaks of threads being drawn out of the pores of her skin, she is likely talking about a transfer of some sort—possibly at least partly a transfer of matter—between herself and the spirit attempting to materialize. This is mediumship as extrusion: not merely the ghost passing over the face, like a cobweb, but the ghost pulling from—or being pulled from—the medium herself. And because it feels as though this transfer is happening through the pores of the skin, there is no single location of its origin. The image she is evoking here is one of invisible threads moving outwards from her entire body, threads composed at least partially of her body—and if we imagine this happening in Fig. 1, those threads are moving though the gaps in the net. The net constrains D’Espérance, but it is too porous to contain her entirely, because her body itself is porous. The substance of her body spreads out in long fine lines, and in so doing, it becomes both itself and not itself, both body and pure matter used to constitute another form.

Piper’s voice fades out, but Charles doesn’t open his eyes. His mind has gone soft at the edges. His skin prickles as if his pores are opening up and releasing something—some substance—the matter of himself, slipping away.

Piper touches his hand: each gentle finger resting lightly in the gaps in the net, five gaps, five fingers on Charles’ skin. Charles feels the touch acutely, though still, somehow, dreamily, through a haze. Piper simply rests their fingers there.

“Lu had me tie her hands, too,” Piper says softly. “Outstretched on her lap, like the mediums’ would have been.”

Piper circles Charles’ wrist with their hand, through the net, skin-to-skin and skin-to-rope.

“What did she find out?” Charles asks, voice coming out hoarse and thin.

Piper is silent for a moment, still lightly holding Charles’ wrist. They squeeze for a second—still gentle—and then pull back.

“I don’t really know,” they say. “She said she couldn’t articulate the way it made her feel. She was still trying to put it into words.”

“Have you tried it?” Charles asks, still floating, eyes still closed.

“No,” Piper says. They stand up. “It’s her project, not mine.”

Charles flutters open his eyes. Piper is turned half away, arms crossed, chin jutting out, face suddenly guarded.

“I think I’m falling in love with Julian,” Charles says. The words flow out of him of their own accord. Piper looks at Charles, startled.

Charles’ skin is still strange and sensitive. He moves beneath the net. He is glad it is there, anchoring him to this conversation.

“Wow,” Piper says softly.

“I think I’ve been falling in love with Julian since I was ten.”

They both fall silent. Charles can hear his heart pounding. He had not known he was going to say that, nor that it was true. Is it true?

“At least, I’ve wanted something from him since I was ten.” He takes a breath. He lets the words slip out of his mouth, slip through the net. “I’ve wanted him since I was ten.”

That’s it. That’s right.

“He still doesn’t know you watched his TV show?”

Charles shakes his head and feels the net stretch against his neck. “He still doesn’t know.”

Piper bends down and gathers the bottom of the net in their hands. They raise it gently past Charles’ knees, waist, head. It lifts from Charles’ body, freeing him, and then drops down, limp, hanging from the two hooks on the ceiling.

Charles blinks. The world is blurry. Slowly, it comes back into focus, sharp lines, clear shapes. Piper is watching him, expression opaque.

“I didn’t, uh…” Charles says, suddenly awkward. “I’m sorry. This is maybe not…what I should have…”

Piper shrugs. “It’s okay.” They hesitate. “You’ve read Lu’s fic, right?”

“Some of it.”

Piper nods again. Charles waits, but Piper doesn’t elaborate.

Charles stands because he feels like he should. There are no imprints on his skin, but he can feel the traces of the net, and the ghost of Piper’s hand clasping his wrist, holding him still.

Then the buzzer goes off. Piper sees Charles start. They move toward the control box, a bit caught off guard themself, but before they get there, there’s a knock on the door below.

“Hello?” a deep voice calls out, audible even from downstairs.

Piper frowns and looks instinctively at Charles—for backup, they suppose. They press the talk button and say, warily, “Who is it?”

“It’s the police.”

Piper freezes. Fear flows through them, liquid and cold, all at once. They swallow. “What—what is this about?”

“Is this the apartment of Lucretia Fairchild?”

A different, deeper kind of fear starts growing inside them now, tingling in the tips of their fingers and toes. Building slowly. “Yes.”

“Could you let us in, please?”

Piper glances back at Charles, who is standing in the doorway, a frown creasing his forehead. Reassured by the presence of a white man in the apartment (and annoyed by the reassurance), Piper presses the button and buzzes them in.

There are two of them, loud footsteps on the stairs. Piper opens the door for them. Two men. White. One on the upper end of middle age, one on the lower. They are wearing suits, not uniforms.

In the British mystery television that Piper watches with Lu, the police show up in suits when they are detectives. A detective inspector and his sergeant, or his constable, depending on how experienced the partner—the bagman—is. Piper has a thing for D.S. James Hathaway, the tall, lanky, Cambridge-educated copper who used to be in training for the priesthood in Inspector Lewis. Hathaway is charmingly awkward and just a bit sexually ambiguous. Piper doesn’t watch American police procedurals. They’re not sure what American detectives are called, rank-wise. But that can’t be right. They must know. They’ve seen Brooklyn 99. Captain. Sergeant. Detective. Just detective?

Somehow there is time for all this to flash through their head before the two men display their badges and introduce themselves. Detectives Nablock and Boehm.

“Is she—” Piper blurts out. “Lu, is she okay?”

“Why do you ask that?” says the older one, Detective Nablock, in a mildly curious tone.

Piper swallows. “I—haven’t seen her in awhile.”

Boehm is taking out a notepad. “We’re talking about Lucretia Fairchild, right? Your housemate? How long is awhile?”

Piper looks at them helplessly. “Please just tell me if she’s hurt. Or if you know where she is. Please, just…”

The detectives exchange glances. After a moment, Nablock says, “No. We don’t know where she is. We were hoping you could give us some insight on that. Can we sit, ask you some questions?”

Boehm is looking skeptically around the room, eyebrows raised at the Victorian-style furnishings. Piper hesitates. They don’t really know how to refuse. “I…yes, I guess so.”

The officers don’t wait for more. They sit in the armchairs—Lu’s and Piper’s. Piper glances quickly at Charles, hoping to communicate, Please don’t leave. To Piper’s relief, Charles looks firmly planted in the doorway of the bedroom, and he’s frowning at the officers.

“What made you come here?” he asks.

The officers look at him. “Now,” says Nablock, nodding at Piper, “I believe you’re Piper Awasthi, Lu’s housemate, is that right?” Piper nods. “Who are you, sir?” he asks Charles.

“Charles Shelley,” Charles answers. Piper notices a tiny hesitation before he adds, “A friend of Piper’s.”

“Do you know Lucretia Fairchild as well?”

“I haven’t met her,” says Charles.

“Lu,” Piper tells the detective. “She goes by Lu.”

“Right,” says Nablock.

“She hates Lucretia.”

“Right.”

Pipe’s pulse is racing. They press their right finger to their left wrist, feeling it jump.

“We’ve had a call about her,” says Nablock. Their mild, now isn’t this interesting? tone is grating on Piper. It feels obviously put on. Next to Nablock, Boehm scratches behind his ear, attempting, Piper thinks, to mimic his older partner’s falsely earnest facial expression. “The caller said that Lucretia Fairchild—Lu—has been reported missing since February 23. But that can’t be right, can it? Surely we’d have heard from her housemate sooner if she hadn’t seen Lu in three weeks.”

There’s a very peculiar second in which Piper is confused by the detectives’ apparent belief that Lu has another housemate. It’s a more pleasant second than the one after it, though, when Piper realizes they’ve been misgendered. It’s been awhile since that’s happened. It takes them a few more seconds to get their thoughts back on track, and the detectives’ eyes both narrow as the silence continues.

Piper clears their throat. “Um. She, uh. Left a note.”

“A note! What kind of note?”

“She said she was going away.”

Nablock’s face clears. “Ah! So you do know where she is.”

“Well,” says Piper hesitantly. “No.” They make the briefest of glances in Charles’ direction, wishing they could ask for guidance.

“Who made this call?” Charles asks.

Nablock and Boehm look his way. “A friend of Lu’s,” says Nablock briefly. He turns back to Piper. “So do you know where she is or not?”

“No,” says Piper. “She said she was leaving, but not where she was going.”

Boehm jots something down in his notepad. “She left school,” he murmurs to Nablock.

Nablock nods. “You’re aware of that?” he asks Piper. “That she has unenrolled from her graduate program?”

“Yes.”

“Listen,” he says, “it seems to us like a case of a grown adult woman deciding she wants to leave town and doing it. There’s no law against that. People are allowed to disappear if they want to.”

“Unless there’s any reason you think we should be concerned,” Boehm adds. “Is there anything you know of to suggest that Lu didn’t leave of her own accord?”

Piper freezes. The five pips, the threatening letter in Jack’s locker, Jack’s murder, Lu’s book deal, the listening devices in the offices—but. If Piper says all that…

“No,” they say.

Boehm flips his notepad shut. Nablock stands. “Well,” he says, “listen, if there’s anything we can do, let us know.”

Piper nods.

The detectives head for the door.

“Who called you about this?” Charles asks again.

The men exchange glances. “We can’t disclose that information,” Nablock says. “Thank you for your time, sir, ma’am.”

They leave. Piper swallows down the ma’am like sour milk and is left with the miserable feeling that they know perfectly well who called the police.

“Well,” says Charles. “I guess I’d better tell Julian about this.”

Julian. Julian, the private detective. The private detective they’re trusting instead of the police, whom they just lied to, which feels like possibly a colossal mistake, but then again the men’s falsely curious faces reeked of condescension and the chairs where they sat feel tainted now, and anyway Lu wouldn’t have wanted the police involved, unless of course some serial killer has kidnapped her and she’s being held hostage and in that case wouldn’t a whole SWAT team be welcome despite the militarization of the police and its participation in racialized injustice, and it’s getting expensive to hire Julian and isn’t privatization bad too? And surely Tyler is the one who called the police, but he knew Piper didn’t want the police involved, and if he decided to do it anyway why didn’t he tell the police the whole story instead of leaving it up to Piper to explain everything, and Isabel will be so angry if the police invade the English department again and Piper really doesn’t want her to be mad at them, and Lu might be in danger and Piper might be entirely failing her—

“Whoa,” says Charles. He crosses to Piper and puts a hand on their arm. “Steady there. Are you okay?”

Piper shakes their head mutely, eyes wide.

“Okay,” says Charles. “Okay. Breathe. Sit, all right?”

Piper’s usual chair holds the ghost of Officer Nablock. They shake their head.

“Kitchen,” says Charles. “Come on. I’ll make you tea.”

Piper can manage that. They sit at the kitchen table and try to breathe normally. “Sorry,” they manage.

“It’s okay,” says Charles, putting on the kettle. “This is all pretty fucked up.”

Piper lets out a startled laugh. “Yeah,” they say. “Yeah, that is extremely true.”

[1]. Durant, Mark Alice. “The Blur of the Otherwordly.” Art Journal Vol. 62, No. 3 (Autumn, 2003): pp. 6-17. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3558517.

[2]. D’Espérance, Elizabeth. Shadow Land or Light from the Other Side. London: George Redway, 1897. Google Books, books.google.com/books?id=32UAAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA70&dq= shadow+land+D’Espérance&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwihvZ_a7eXQAhVMCMAKHS0mCzMQ6AEIHjAA#v=onepage&q=shadow%20land%20D’Espérance&f=false.