“I’m not even kidding, T.”
“Oh, mum stop it.”
“After we used it there was a massive storm,” she said, wooden spoon in hand, stirring a bubbling cauldron of red sauce. “You wouldn’t believe it.”
“And I don’t!”
“The wind must have been blowing 50 miles an hour and there were waves, WAVES, crashing on the shore of the lake,” she claimed, eyes still mesmerized by the whirlpools of sauce. “Crashing right onto the little beach.”
“But –”
“And the lightening was unbelievable! It was right over us. We were in the eye of the storm, the literal eye, of the storm. Crashes of thunder, bolts of lightening. We didn’t even get to ‘one-Miss’ when we were counting ‘one-Mississippi, two-Mississippi’ to measure the distance between the thunder and lightening. It was right over our heads.”
“Yeah, but you really can’t believe –”
“I do, T,” she said. Her glasses had fogged over from the steam and were ornamented with specks of sauce. She held them to the dim light under the microwave and grabbed a ragged dishtowel to polish them passably clean. “We conjured up something. Something bad.”
I leaned against the door frame not knowing what to do with my hands. The story was too vague and she told it too nonchalantly as she completed a trivial task. Had she told this story in the dark with a flashlight under her chin and finished it with “now go to sleep” it would have been unsettling, but easy to brush off and nervously laugh at after a few minutes of mind-racing instability. This telling left me feeling hollow and uncomfortable, as if it were a cautionary tale meant to save me in the near future from some otherworldly fall from grace. A lesson to file in the back of my mind to be resurrected only when absolutely necessary to combat the forces of evil in their forever shape-shifting forms . What made me feel so hollow was that it wasn’t tangible advice like advising to physically fasten your seat belt or to not eat the blackberries in my grandmother’s backyard because they’ll make you vomit bricks. This was a spiritual lesson to protect me from something dark and foreboding that could have possibly set up residence in my furnace or closet or, most unhinging of all, my mind.
The phone rang, jolting me out of thoughts. “It must be your father,” she declared as she rested her smeared glasses back on her nose and wiped her hands on her pants leaving two streaks of gravy trailing from her fingertips. “Hello?”
“So, can I still get a Ouija board?” I whispered.
“No,” she mouthed.
******
If Jesus or Beelzebub or my parents or Santa Claus weren’t listening to my prayers for a talking board, then at least my Aunt was. For my thirteenth birthday she presented me with a Ouija board that we promptly ripped out of its packaging and placed on the coffee table in the parlor. My mother had apparently forgotten her eerie warnings and we all gathered around it like a bunch of boy scouts with a Playboy magazine.
“What do you want to ask it?” my aunt excitedly inquired.
What do I want to ask it? What a loaded question. Is this real? Do you really work? Is there something living inside of you? Will you kill me in my sleep or make lightening strike my house, or worse, me as I retrieve the mail on an otherwise sunny suburban afternoon? That’s not how I wanted to go out, Ouija board, not at all. Hardly a blaze of glory. Who will I marry? Will I have children? How many? Will I ever go to college? Will I be famous? Or will I be painfully mediocre? Will my teeth ever be straight and will I learn how to control my hair? Will I ever wear a pair of tight jeans or will I wear windpants and basketball shorts until I’m too fat to wear anything but dingy, bubblegum pink Walmart brand velour sweatpants? Will I be rich? Will I be poor? Will I be happy or will I be burdened with the feeling of being unfulfilled? When will I die?
“Uh, how about, well, I guess, how about we ask if I will ever meet Everclear?” I loved that band for about three years. No, I was obsessed with them. This was a perfectly safe question to ask. Whatever dead person (who seemingly became an augur in death — at least that’s how we treated it. Ohhh, Kurt Cobain, who will I marry? WHY AREN’T YOU ANSWERING?) we contacted would be so bored by my banal question that they wouldn’t waste their time tormenting me because it wouldn’t be cost-haunt-effective.
We all gingerly rested our fingertips on the shoddy, plastic planchette and waited patiently for about 50 seconds before it began inching its way toward “yes,” an act I still attribute to my aunt’s undying and enthusiastic optimism. We abandoned the board citing that pristine August afternoons were not conducive to spirit penetration, so we went outside and ate a soupy ice cream cake. Later that evening I put the Ouija board on a shelf in the cellar. My neighbor and I once sat on the floor under an old sheet with a blindingly bright camping lantern and tried in vain to contact a girl we went to school with who died when we were in 5th grade. That’s my only other recollection of using it. It sat quietly behind the Game of Life and some time-crisis avant-garde edition of Uno where you lined up your card tiles on a board that would eventually pop up launching game pieces in directions too far for us to retrieve out of sheer adolescent laziness.
In the Ouija’s defense, I did end up meeting Everclear. I was called on stage by them and some be-dreadlocked girl tried to take off my shirt. Then the lead singer rubbed up against me — all 40-plus years of him on my 17-year-old body. I wish the Ouija board had warned me instead of giving me a 50/50 no-crap answer. Everything is 50/50, you unreliable piece of laminated cardboard bullshit.
******
Years lapsed as years are wont to do. I led a Ouija-less existence and never thought of the board unless I saw one in someone’s closet or noticed that they had a Ouija mouse pad. It was little more than a referential piece of pop-culture and personal history drawn upon for nights that invariably shifted to drunk storytelling and nostalgia. That is, until I returned home for an extended-family summer vacation when I was 25.
All 34 of us were milling around the same lake where my mother’s Tell-Tale Ouija incident occurred. As the sun went down and supper was cleared off the red and white checked tablecloth, murmurs of, “Did anyone bring the Ouija?” began to float into the cooling air. I turned to my cousin, her red hair matted and eyes bloodshot after a day of trying to take Facebook-bound underwater pictures with a disposable camera. “They’re obsessed with it, T,” she said before I could even ask. “It’s really getting out of hand.”
I had hardly formed a follow up question when my mother’s sisters came into the kitchen, one with the Ouija under her arm, the other announcing that whoever wanted to participate should meet down in the screen-room in five minutes. They descended the damp cellar stairs and everyone looked at each other and began to confer their interest. I caught my father’s gaze as he rolled his eyes and headed in the opposite direction toward the fire pit where a cooler of Blue Moons and Bud Light Limes and a tray of crumpled Hershey wrappers and marshmallows seemingly rolled in sand sat amid a group of men immersed in the past.
“Hey, up there!” someone bellowed from the basement. The voice echoed up through the stairwell, “Someone bring down the picture.”
I watched as one of my cousins reached above the fireplace and carefully lifted my youngest uncle’s high school portrait off the wall. He had died 20 years ago at the age of 22, a cancer victim. I always felt guilty that I could no longer remember him. All my memories have been replaced with stills from photos or short scenes from home movies titled Christmas 1987 or Fall 1989. Gone are the full memories of diving into his bed when he was too sick to leave his room. Hidden in the folds of my mind are the afternoons of California Games or Bird vs. Jordan on Nintendo. They’re in there somewhere and they appear to me like dreams that I begin to forget halfway through the morning. Smokey apparitions from my five-year-old mind. I cry when I watch home videos or when I see his headstone. I cry because I can’t remember and I cry because I never knew him.
“And don’t forget the cross! Someone bring down a cross!” the voice continued.
I wasn’t sure what I expected of the scene in the screen-room that night and I wasn’t sure what I would feel. I took a seat at the picnic table in front of the board. My aunts had set their brother’s picture next to the board and had draped a gold cross over the frame. There were mason jars with layers of melted wax and the tin carcasses of tea-lights glimmering like steel fireflies. Crushed and dented beer cans were scattered across the floor and a solitary dim yellow light cast deep shadows over the fifteen pajama-donning, barefoot people in the room.
“I’ll be the scribe,” one of my uncles stated as he opened a notebook with curled edges.
“Ok, T, ready?”
“Yes,” I said, because there wasn’t any other answer.
“It’s really unbelievable, T,” my aunt said with just as much enthusiasm as she did twelve years earlier. “The pointer just flies across the board and the personalities of the people we contact just really come out. It works best with the picture and cross here. I think it wards off the… not so good spirits.”
“Right, of course.”
“Ok, let’s start, who should we contact?” she asked the room. The response was a resounding, “Carey,” my uncle whose picture sat at the end of the table as if another person in the room. Four of us placed our fingers on the planchette.
It began to move ever so slightly, a quivering beneath our fingertips. I thought it might have been me inadvertently pushing it as I had begun to shiver, but then it began to coast and I found I needed to press down harder on the planchette. It glided effortlessly across the board from left to right and right to left. I stared at the planchette, then stared at my two aunts and then at my cousin Michael who I assumed was moving the thing with a quiet confidence, but he looked too puzzled and I couldn’t trust my internal accusations.
“Is this Carey?” my Aunt Eileen whispered.
We waited. It glided to “No” and paused. Then it moved again.
“Ok, scribe, get ready, it’s starting to spell!” my enthusiastic Aunt Gemma quietly cried.
“O” pause.
“N” pause.
“L… Y” pause.
“Only,” the scribe confirmed.
It glided toward the numbers and hovered over “3.”
“Only three,” Eileen said.
“Who three? Which three?” I queried. It was the first time I had opened my mouth in 15 minutes. I was surprised that I cared.
At first it seemed to be pointing. It moved toward Michael. It moved toward Eileen. Then it moved toward Gemma. Then it continued to spell.
“Scribe!”
“N…O…S…E…”
“Nose!” my uncle yelled. We already knew I was the odd man out. The spirit didn’t need to get personal and offend my bothersome aquiline appendage. We all giggled.
“Wait, it’s still spelling!” Gemma yelled.
“O…U…L”
“What does it say?” Eileen asked.
“No Seoul,” I said. As I lifted up my sweatshirt, I began to shake a little. Everyone stared. I revealed an ADIDAS t-shirt with “Seoul” written across the front. No one had seen me wearing it all day. As much as I doubt the “truth” of the board, this, combined with the setting, unnerved me enough to pay attention for the next hour and a half as the planchette flitted around the board at remarkable speeds spelling out wisdom and summoning memories from the crowd. The “spirit” was always someone we knew, or at least knew of. Once it was someone’s father-in-law, another time it was my grandmother, and when my cousin Katie was helping to control the planchette, we found ourselves in the presence of Michael Jackson, who was a right bore as far as spirits go.
I could see outlines of people sitting around the fire pit and hear the faint crackling of the embers. The metronome pulsing of the small waves on the shore of the lake was punctuated with sudden bursts of booming and shrill laughter from the small crowd around the fire. Gemma and Eileen were still valiantly, yet patiently hammering the Ouija with questions. My uncle remained seated in a lawn chair, legs crossed, steno pad in his lap, a pen in his hand hovering over the curled paper, poised to write at a moments notice. One by one my cousins had filtered from the room in search of unattended coolers with abandoned beers floating in now lukewarm ice-water. I couldn’t pull myself away, but it wasn’t the forsaken hope of contacting someone from the great beyond that kept me frozen to the picnic table seat.
It was the sincerity and longing in my aunts and uncle’s eyes as they stared at the board.
“I used it by myself once,” my uncle said accompanied by nervous laughter. His 6’3″ frame embossed with a scruffy face and usually conservative demeanor didn’t match the words escaping his mouth.
“What happened?” I asked.
“Yeah, you don’t want to get into that stuff,” he said, shaking his head.
“Bad things go down. You really shouldn’t use it by yourself. Creepy stuff, kid.”
I didn’t ask anymore. His wife had died six years ago. I worried he was reliant on the board as an actual portal to wherever she was broadcasting from. I looked at Eileen and Gemma. They whispered, “Carey? Carey? Are you there?” I felt hollow. I over-exaggerated a yawn and announced that it was time for bed. It was 12:30. Lying restless in my bed that night, I heard them come upstairs at quarter past three.
******
I haven’t seen the Ouija board since that evening. When they make their post-dinner Ouija announcement, I find myself sneaking out the side door and walking down to the fire pit where three generations talk about college debauchery, farting, and why we buy Bud Light Limes despite the general consensus that they suck and leave a miserable aftertaste that haunts your mouth for at least 12 miserable taste-bud warping hours. We file off to our beds. The light in the screen room is still the last one burning.
My cousins and I have talked about it. Most don’t even think about it. A few love it, but some express concern about their parents dependence on it, citing that it used to be fun, but now it’s serious business. There are rules. Rules reminiscent of Fight Club, only scarier in context. The first rule of Ouija night is you don’t talk about Ouija night. The second rule about Ouija night is that you don’t talk about Ouija night. The third rule is that you can’t talk at all. They sit and they wait and they write. They pull out meaning from scattered letters. They create lists of the dead. They pick up conversations from where they left off last time. There is no mention of evil. There is no mention of the power of suggestion. There is no mention of the will of the subconscious. There is only absolute, nearly pious, blind faith. In the name of the father, the son, and the Holy Hasbro.
I don’t believe in it. At least I didn’t think I did and I’m still not sure that I do or not. I believe that the mind is a beautiful, brilliant, and terrifying thing and that certain regions weren’t meant to be tapped into without knowledge of what could happen with unharnessed thoughts. I cornered another uncle one evening as we split into our separate fire pit and screen room camps. “Uncle Jeff, what do you think?”
“What? About the Ouija?” he said, an arsenal of sweating Bud Light Limes stacked in his arms. “We need to get rid of these.”
“Yeah, that.”
“Listen, I think it’s stupid and your aunts are going batshit,” he turned towards the door and leaned against it to head into the night. Then he turned around. I could visibly see a second thought. “But I will tell you this. Last summer all the kids were up in the bunk house playing with the thing and the little white window pointer kept flying all over the board no matter what combination of kids touched it. So, it started pissing absolute buckets, and all the aunts and uncles went in and while we waited for the rain to pass, we started getting into the Ouija asking it embarrassing questions just to piss the kids off. That’s when we got your Uncle Carey.”
I waited.
“All the kid wanted was a truck. That’s it. And your grandfather always said to him, ‘Carey, when you’re better and ready to get out there again, the first thing we do is get you that truck.’ That was in, what, 1990? There were only four of you kids at the time and you were five and the oldest. You wouldn’t have remembered that, and why would you even know about that? Why would we even talk about him wanting a truck? We reminisce about funny things, right? The good and the bad? Not unfulfilled 22-year-old wants.”
“Where are you going with this?” I could feel my stomach sinking. I knew what was next, but not wanting to accept my thoughts as about to be said by someone else, I disguised it as impatience shining through the cracks.
“Your cousins had their hands on the thing and your mother was the recorder or scribe or whatever the hell they call it,” and then he stopped. He slightly juggled the stack of Buds in his arms, condensation dripping all over the front of his shirt. He looked straight at me, “Do you know what the thing spelled out? Just go and guess.”
“No, what?”
“I finally got my truck.”
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