1
Henri
The 1980s were a grim decade for my territory and a busy one for me, with death a beggar on every street corner.
I was stationed in the southernmost reaches of what is currently known as the United States of America. Miami, my home base, was experiencing record population growth while at the same time receiving an influx of political refugees from nearby Cuba. They were sent to my shores starving, desperate, and knocking on death’s door. This event coincided with a steady stream of cocaine flowing through my territory’s ports like oxygenated blood through the arteries of a heart. And the start of the AIDS epidemic.
It was a hard time, indeed.
Perhaps you don’t recall when we met—you were so very young—but I remember it well. I had just come from a difficult job and the echo of it was still upon me. A young mother had succumbed to death from a drug overdose. It was the second time I had been summoned to the small domicile, and only a few hours after she’d found her newborn daughter prone in her crib, no longer breathing. In light of that, I doubt her overdose was accidental.
I found the mother’s soul to be frantic and chaotic, like a cat trying to claw its way out of a burlap sack, which made it difficult to wrangle. After much persuasion, I succeeded in shepherding her soul out of the material world and into the charge of those waiting to receive it. Had I failed, her spirit would have been trapped in the earthen realm, thus ending its journey in the human life cycle.
Death eternal.
It was on that particularly bleak day, in the summer of 1986, when I encountered you on an empty playground in the middle of a housing project known as Imperial Palms.
I drifted to this park between jobs for a moment of respite and perched myself upon a vacant swing. I could draw energy from the echoes of children who had used the equipment—their joy and exhilaration at being propelled upward into the sky. Because of their lingering resonance, I presented as a child, though in fact I was much older, if one bothered to measure my age in human years.
“I could push you if you want,” you said, interrupting my reverie. Your whiskey brown eyes were slotted and suspicious, your tone not altogether friendly. You were testing the waters, as if your offers in the past had been met with a swift and biting rejection. Or worse.
It wasn’t unheard of, especially for young children, to see my specter. The ability usually faded in adolescence when worldly concerns crept in. It was rare when an adult could sense my presence. Mostly it was a chill in the air that raised goosebumps on their flesh or a shift in the light that caused their heads to turn in my direction. Nothing more.
“Can you see me?” I was curious as to whether you mighthearme as well.
Your eyes narrowed, your head jutted backward, and a wrinkle appeared between your eyebrows. You looked positively offended by my question.
“Duh,” you said with all the brass of your five or six years. It was an expression that really took off in that decade, one I detest to this day. But somehow, when you said it, I was charmed.
I was skeptical the swing idea would work, but it had been so long since I’d felt the thrill of kinetic motion that I was willing to give it a try.
“I could use a push.”
“You’re going to have to hold on,” you said, and I was a bit unsettled. A human child who could both see my specter and hear my voice? You were a marvel.
You pointed to the thick chains that anchored the swing to its set. I made my ghostly hands into fists which appeared to wrap around the metal. I had some control over how corporeal I could appear. Not wanting to scare you away, I drew from the ambient energy of the playground to give my childlike form as much density as I could muster and bound it to the elemental properties of the chain.
Still, it wasn’t enough to give your little hands purchase, so when you tried to push me from behind, you stumbled onto the swing and landed flat on your belly against the plastic seat. Your body lay sprawled across my phantom lap, and the rich, brown curls that crowned your head bounced like springs.
You scrambled up so quickly I thought you had fallen, though I didn’t laugh at your folly. Some might find it amusing to use their parlor tricks to scare humans, but for me, there was nothing funny about frightening a child.
I expected you to dash off like a scared rabbit, but instead you circled back around to face me. Fear was written on your face, in your saucer-like eyes and your gaping mouth. Your racing heart drummed a frantic rhythm in your chest as I waited patiently for you to speak. Even at your young age, you understood that my countenance defied the natural law, even if it wasn’t something you could articulate.
I thought you might ask if I were a ghost or dead or any number of questions posed to me over the years by the rare human who could see me. Instead you said, “What’s your name?”
My birth name didn’t feel appropriate to share. I’d struggled for so long to shed who I once was, and your open curiosity suggested that, at least for this moment in time, I could be someone different. Good, even. So, for you, I rechristened myself with a name I borrowed from a deceased philosopher I was studying at the time.
“Henri,” I said.
“Ornery?”
“No. On-ree.”
“Onnn reeee,” you mimicked, exaggerating each syllable. It was French in origin, and your delivery was not at all delicate. We went back and forth until you had a solid grasp on the sound.
When I think back now on why I took the time to teach you the proper pronunciation of a name I’d just selected on a whim, I cannot rationalize it. Except to say that I must have had some precognition we might encounter one another again. Or that you might have cause one day to call upon me. And I would answer.
“My name is Orlando,” you said and, without waiting for me to respond, took the time to properly pronounce it for me. “Orrrr-laaaan-doh.” Then you smiled, showing off a gap in your two front teeth and a bright and shining sense of humor that made you seem wise beyond your years.
