Rules for Being Human
by Stacey Richter

It's a boozy night, and the regulars are practically dry humping the bar--broken specimens convinced as usual they're engaged in something called fun. In life I was one of them, a sauced and angry son of a bitch. Pissed on. Forced to eviscerate cockroaches with my naked soles. Now I'm at peace, sort of, with all the other cats sort of at peace in this sticky barroom, not thoroughly mopped once in thirty-four years. Ghosts drink free here, and the place is infested with them. For the most part regulars, whole ones: a pair of coeds mashed in a car crash, pulpy but intact, dripping polyps of flesh onto the floor.

Same shredded party dresses all these years. A husband carrying his wife's bullet in his heart, leaking fluid from the wound. Gup Gup, a pale, bloated accountant dead of liver rot. An assortment of translucent extras. The night is yet young. I start with a wound like a ham steak at mid-thigh and end in a pair of blood-soaked engineer boots, severed when my body slipped trying to hop a boxcar. Misjudged. Three sheets. The arms grabbed a ladder, the body wrenched sideways, and the legs jackknifed under the wheels where I was liberated from the old trunk faster than you can slice the tip off a carrot. I lay twitching on the tracks while the head, torso and other leg floated off towards El Paso.

That was 1964. I don't know how these things get divided up. I don't know where the soul-a-ma-gig went. Maybe I've got it and the rest of my body is an emptied-out husk. Or maybe I'm just some freakish receptacle of consciousness--the sentient severed limb. Other body parts have been known to scramble in here: a hacked off hand, a couple of unaffiliated fingers. I avoid 'em. They're like dogs. Full of impulse but with no real intelligence. The hand trembles and raises a drink, over and over. The fingers scratch or tamp cigarettes. The same thing, over and over. Ghosts are obsessive-compulsive. Me, I like to hop over to the juke box and kick the shit out of it whenever that Hall and Oates song comes on--You Make Me Feel Brand New. I don't even think about it anymore. It's Pavlovian.

The living co-exist with the dead pretty smoothly around here. Yeah, we play our little tricks. The hinges on the bathroom doors have an unnatural squeak, but a tipsy audience misses the nuances. Tonight the place is packed; I've seen some of these faces almost every night for the last twenty some years, but no moralizing, okay? I don't know what a person needs to get through the night, or a life: an amber liquid, a bottle of pills, an anonymous roll in the hay. All I know is what it's like to be compelled. It's like I have to be here. I'm waiting for something.

In the meantime I watch, and when I feel like it, I kick some ankle under the table. I roll in spills to get the smell of liquor on me. I avoid the loose fingers and the sorority skirts. Ghosts don't like to talk to other ghosts. Ghosts are creepy. I don't like most of the corporeal patrons either. You'd think we'd be nuzzling up to the most lively specimens--the loudest talkers, the most audacious flirts, trying to suck up a little of that energy. No such spirit. We're just looking for the living who remind us of ourselves. We want to touch the sore spot. We're ghosts. By definition we want to do it again.

When I can, I hang with one particular cat with stringy black hair and an armful of tattoos who goes by the name of Vlad. The first time I saw him in here he was nine years old, gripping his mother's hand. She set him up with a Rob Roy and a handful of quarters for the pinball machine, then proceeded to work her way through a half-dozen jiggers of the very cheapest scotch. Vlad, back then, was known as Johnny. I even remember how when he finished with the quarters he stood by his mother's stool, tugging on her skirt while she let some character above paw her. From where we stood, you could see his tongue going in and out of her head.

He and I were about the same height then. Now he's a tall motherfucker with long, thin legs he likes to keep wrapped in the tightest of black jeans. They're like stems. I can't get enough of those bad boys; I kick 'em constantly. Gets him into fights but he's calmed down a bit now that he's in his thirties. Once an addict, now just a drunk.

Certain lost and pained young girls who pass the evening in taverns topple for Vlad; he's needy but plays it tough. They can see the hurt, vulnerable boy beneath the bluster. Women his own age won't have anything to do with him. The calcified edges that don't let anything in will eventually encase him—a lonely old boozer. A fate I was more or less divorced from. But for now he still radiates a romantic picture of himself that includes certain heroic deeds of misadventure and danger--driving all night hopped up on pills, playing the trumpet at 2 a.m., jumping a boxcar. I can't stay away from him. He has that promise for me, of wholeness.

This despite his knack for making spectacularly stupid pronouncements: "Pink is not a shade of red;" "No girl has ever faked it with me;" "Vegetables give you cancer;" "Cigarettes improve your endurance." This evening Vlad is wearing black suede boots, circa 1989. A very pointy toe. He's sitting with the verbs, Pat and Bob. Whenever I see Bob, his soft, fat body and his little German eyeglasses, I think of the joke: what do you call a fellow with no arms and no legs floating in a swimming pool? It replays in my head like a tired jukebox selection. These three boys are reformed honor students who've gotten stuck with their thug acts. It's like when a mother tells her kid not to roll his eyes back into his head or they'll stay that way. I went to Vlad's bar mitzvah. Bob was a National Merit Scholar in high school. Pat was an altar boy. Now they're manual laborers who wear black clothes at night and complain about not getting what they never tried to have.

Pat runs his finger through a puddle of beer on the table. He has a narrow, goat-like head that doesn't quite fit his muscular body. A hopefulness in his face that you often see in the living in the early hours of the night. He's the dumbest of the three. Workingman. Ladies man. Wearing Doc Martens, black with yellow stitching, very nice.

"What the fuck is that?" inquires Pat.

A baby is crying. In the center of the barroom the dead coeds are hanging all over a girl carrying an infant. The girl has dark circles under her eyes that take over her face. She balances the baby carrier on her hip like a bag of groceries.

"That's a human infant," Vlad explains.

"It would seem that you were one," Bob elaborates, "once."

The coeds coo and make kissy face over the bundle of pink. These two generally function in unison, like a pair of anamatronic elves repeating some joyless task on a Christmas display. They pass a ghost cigarette through the baby's body, then throw back their heads and cackle. The mother looks distracted and a little confused, as if she could sense the violation. The girls maneuver the cigarette so that ghost smoke crawls out of the kid's mouth. The living don't see this. Only ghosts get to see it, but I'm sure it would give all of us a chuckle. Forcing dogs to smoke, making babies smoke--dead or alive, drunks all have the same sense of humor.

"Look." It's the mother. She's tucked herself into the empty seat beside Vlad. She gazes at him with sad eyes. The baby, in its little carrier, goes on the table next to the pitcher of beer. She speaks in a high, little-girl voice. "It's not mine. It's my sister's. This is mine." She hefts an enormous handbag into the air. "I've got it all."

"Give me some," suggests Pat.

"Har de har," she snaps.

The girl is wearing leather sandals that reek of foot and patchouli oil. I would guess she's never had a pedicure. Up above the boys are gawking at the infant. Vlad dips a finger in his beer and touches it to the baby's lips. The kid wrinkles his nose and clutches his little fingers around a knot of empty air.

"Are you sure you should do that?" Pat asks.

"Infants are immune to alcohol," Vlad explains.

"Hey!" the girl protests, taking note of Vlad's shenanigans. But her voice has a flirtatious ring. Then she pops up and heads toward the bar.

I can hear her whining to the bartender: "Okay. Okay. I just came in to make a phone call..."

The boys continue to stare at the baby as though it were some high-tech electronic device.

"I'm not going to touch it," Pat says.

She returns with a tumbler full of whiskey. "What do you have to do around here?" She runs her tongue around the lip of the glass.

"I'm going to break into the zoo and set the animals free," replies Vlad.

"Oh yeah," she says, "I understand. I'm a vegetarian." She dips into her handbag and pulls out a Slim Jim. "This," she says, "is from before."

It goes on the table next to the kid. Vlad lights a cigarette and unbends a knee. I envy those gams, long and sinewy and connected by veins and arteries to a pumping heart. I rock his boot gently.

"They say it's all humane and shit, but there isn't a creature alive that wants to spend its existence caged."

"I could survive. I have everything I need in here." She pats her purse.

"Fuck. You couldn't get me in a cage. They've tried."

Pat and Bob just watch Vlad when he's with the ladies--they can't compete. He's the one. I can see their brains chugging, trying to figure out what he's got.

The baby jerks its arms and legs like an upturned bug. "Huh!" it says. Bob touches it on the nose then rolls his eyes.

"Every little thing." The girl starts removing items from the purse: keys, tampons, band aids, breath mints, pills.

On the wall above the table, a hand crouches in a plastic floral arrangement. It's invisible to my friends in the booth, but they probably wouldn't notice anyway. Something on the table has attracted it. It's making a clutching motion, over and over--hungry, the way we get. Personally, I'm praying that Vlad and the girl will start playing footsie.

Vlad takes the tampon and pretends to put it up his nose.

"Don't be a moron," Bob warns. "It'll get stuck and we'll have to take you to the emergency room and explain."

"Explain what?" Vlad dangles the tampon string over the baby's head. It starts to cry. "These things work great for gunshot wounds."

"Now," says the mother. She picks up her empty glass and weaves over to the bar.

"How do we make it stop?" asks Pat.

"Insert something into its air passages," suggests Vlad.

"Give it a cigarette," adds Pat, letting one dangle from his mouth a la the dangerous.

The hand floats down the wall with its fingers curling and reaching. When I see its pasty fist closing around the girl's rabbit foot key chain, bright, yellow, and fluffy, I realize I want it too. Very badly.

Vlad watches the rabbit foot levitate above the tabletop with a disinterested expression, like he's used to this old conjuring trick. "I think there's something funny about this baby."

The kid is drowsing in its little plastic case, baby shaped the way a violin case is violin-shaped. Every now and then it opens its eyes and focuses on some phantom spot above the table. It could be that we are in the presence of ghosts even ghosts can't see. It burps weakly. It opens its mouth like a landed fish. The mother is nowhere to be seen. This infant doesn't seem so hardy. I am wondering what happens if it dies. Am I going to have to hop over a slobbering baby for eternity? Or until, God help me, the bar finally closes its doors for good?

I try not to think about unpleasant things. I try to pretend I'm drunk. Someone has slugged a quarter in the jukebox and selected the Patti Smith song I so dig. It's an epic rock song about a punk kid's dying moment, a brief peak of vitality that spikes up while his lifeblood drains onto the tiled hallway. It's the only song on that jukebox I can still stand. As he's bleeding out his last, the kid has a vision of running horses, a sexy, rhythmic mirage. It reminds me of my train. Pain, and then a last spurt of life.

I decide to work on swiping the rabbit foot from the disembodied hand. It's scampered off, dodging legs across the damp and coated linoleum. The floor is my arena! The thing darts between a pair of black pumps, through a forest of ankles, prancing like a Chihuahua with a slipper in its mouth. I step on some toes and corral it into a corner. The coeds join in, bending over the hand and chanting dramatically, "Go into the light, go into the light." Then they fall all over themselves giggling hysterically. Once a man drove his pickup up a pole outside the bar. We all crowded into the doorway and watched him floating above the damage. He was middle aged, Mexican, in cowboy boots. There were magnetized saints all over the cab of the truck. I wanted to sing to him, something, I didn't know what. That was before that song about the dying boy turned up on the jukebox. I would have sang that.

As it turned out, I didn't sing anything. A hot pink tunnel erupted in the air next to the crumpled front end, spilling the fine brightness of the heavens across the shattered glass.

"Wait!" screamed the coeds, tears streaming down their faces. "Don't!"

I'd never seen them so excited. You can bet weall shrank from the light. We retreated inside our barroom quick. You won't see us bowing to acceptance. You won't see us going gentle into one of those gaping pink things.

The hand trembles in the corner, pinching the rabbit foot. It's a left hand. Probably hacked off by the right.

"Pretty, pretty, pretty," the girls murmur, bending over charmingly. Their dresses are shredded here and there. Inside their wounds are fuzzy, like something glimpsed through a window screen.

The hand seems to hear them. It rocks back on its stump and relaxes a little. It tilts upward like it's hoping for a treat. Sensing opportunity, I kick. The rabbit's foot takes flight and lands at the toe of a patron, who picks it up and puts it in his pocket. "Lucky day," he says.

The living get everything I want.

I duck into the ladies room to scan for fresh reading material. The place is dirty and pink and has the fruity stink of industrial cleaning fluid. Nothing new has appeared, as usual, so I peruse the inside door of the left hand stall. I always read this part. In bubbling, teenage script:

Rules for Being Human!

1. There are no mistakes in life, only lessons!

2. The learning never stops!

There's more, but it's obscured by a snarl of black pen offering the advice: If you bitches could stay sober for one weekend, you might get a fucking life. I'm always cheered to find I'm not the only one without a life.

I hop back to Vlad and lean against his dusty pants leg. He and Bob are playing with the baby. The mother has not returned. Vlad has a shot glass of bourbon in front of him and he's dribbling it down a straw into the baby's sea anemone mouth.

"Yeeeee!" the baby says.

"I don't think it's into it," Vlad observes.

"You're such a fuckhead," Bob drones in his fat-boy monotone. "You're supposed to give it milk. Don't you know anything about caring for your own species?"

"Why don't youdo it?"

"I don't want to get involved."

"Hey, sweetheart," Vlad waves a girl over. They come right to him. "Get me a glass of milk, will you?"

"Holy shit," she says, coming closer, "what is that?" She touches its velvet forehead.

"Don't touch! This isn't a petting zoo!"

She looks offended, but softens when Vlad picks up the infant and cradles it in his arms.

"That is so cute," she beams.

Bob is pouting. "Babies obviously get chicks."

She gets him a glass of milk. Vlad mixes a little whiskey in and dribbles it down a straw.

The baby coos softly and waves its arms. "Just like his Uncle Vlad," Vlad says.

I nestle more tightly against his pants until he kicks me away.

Pat stops by the table, towing a big girl from Benson he's picked up. Her hair is in disarray. They had been making out by the aging Pac Man table. Both of them look abstracted and inward, as though they've been through an accident.

"We're outta here," comments Pat. He raps on the table once, then with a guilty slouch, heads for the door.

"Well well," Bob smirks, when they're barely out of range. "Another regret for the morrow."

"Yeah," agrees Vlad, punching an imaginary button on the table, "eject-a-bed."

The baby makes soft, sleepy noises. A train whistle builds in the distance, like an accordion being slowly crunched by a foot. The heat of Vlad's body washes through his pants and I push in closer. I imagine the three of us grouped together like a Madonna and child and cherub, an odd family, but a cozy one. Up above, drinks arrive with the chiming of ice against glass. This is my favorite time of the evening, the swell before last call, a moment of warmth and vitality that feels like it could last forever, like it's packed with meaning. We are all encased in that golden bubble; even the coeds, even Gup Gup, propped at the bar, drinking a shimmering glass of eldritch Scotch. We feel the promise that we will be whole, and alive, and satisfied.

Vlad sips his drink through a straw and watches the baby drowse in his arms. "Check this guy out," he says, "he's breathing." He watches its body expand and contract with a kind of rapture. Then he bends and kisses it tenderly, on the knee.

The hand has made its way back to the plastic flowers. It crouches there like a flesh chrysanthemum, clutching its puttied fingers. I notice the other ghosts have started moving towards us, shambling from all corners of the bar, making their bitter, hulking way towards the baby and Vlad. It's like a zombie movie. The coeds crowd in first, leaning on their arms so their cleavage pops out. Then Gup Gup shuffles up, grinning through his yellowed eyeballs. In a second tier a ring of other assorted dead things push in, bandaged and bloody, like cheaply costumed movie extras. Of course I'm there, hopping under the table. Kicked and abused. We all nuzzle towards the unlikely pair, Vlad and the baby, curled together, the two of them sleepy and encrushed and content. Wanting to suck up some of that hope without crumbling our own sapless hearts.

He brushes a petal of hair off a temple and lets his palm linger on the warm spot. The baby squirms under his touch. We can't believe how lucky he is.

There have been a few times, over the years, when a one-legged man of about the right age has hobbled in here. I think I would know him immediately. I imagine the feeling would flare up like love at first sight. When I look at those gimps and don't feel anything, I still think maybe. I mean, you don't wait, do nothing but wait, for nothing. So I check. I fit myself up against the gap: am I the correct height, given the passage of years? What's his shoe size? Do I feel anything when I touch him? Do I hear some sort of music?

I haven't heard anything yet.

We all push in closer towards Vlad and the baby, excited and envious. Like I said, ghosts want to be close to the living who remind us of ourselves. Not the selves we had, not exactly, but the ones we wished for. The repaired and shiny versions. The ones who didn't die on carseats, or in hallways with pay phones bolted to the walls, but who instead went on to get jobs and get married to swell gals, and to barbecue meat on Sunday afternoons in the backyard. The versions who got rescued, by ourselves or someone else. Who stopped drinking, or only drank a little now. Who went to bed and ate lunch and woke up feeling good, as good as we felt before last call.

It's always possible. Even in this soiled barroom tacked down to a wind-swept desert, on this pathetic street filled with auto repair shops, there might enter the miraculous mirage of the everyda--that like the baby we might be loved, and abandoned, and then suddenly loved again, all in the seamless roll of an evening.

Even Gup Gup feels it. Gup Gup especially, because he leans his jaundiced, swollen head in close, full of appetite. From the drained expression on Vlad's face I would bet something has gone wrong. Something must have shifted inside Vlad that's enabled him to, well--this is horrible--but he can see Gup Gup. Possibly smell him, I'd say, from the way he shrinks, curling his body protectively around the kid.

"Ghosts don't exist... Bob," he says evenly, "Bob? Are you getting this?"

"No," Bob says, "I haven't been getting it for a long time."

Vlad's eyes water with horror. I'm going out on a limb here, but I'd say he can see everything, our cellophane flesh, all of us cooing and wishful and predatory. The grasping hand, the perforated husband, and with a peek under the table, the sliced and bloody crown of me. Whom he kicks away.

Something shifts in that boy, I can feel it. He's becoming something else, so fast. I hadn't known it could happen so fast.

"Holy shit," he says. Then: "Fuck."

He makes an odd bellow that doesn't involve opening his mouth, and looks at us with a sneer--a level of contempt Vlad usually reserves for people who drink Coors out of the can--so we all push closer, wanting to get the last of this, because it's obvious he's about to flee. He can't possibly come back. He has seen us, finally. He's seen the partial, broken versions of himself lurking in the future.

"Bob, are you with me?"

Bob is still immune. "I want to finish my drink..."

In general, ghosts don't feel much. What's the point? But Vlad is the one. The only boy I adore. I watch him stand on those long legs and pilot himself towards the exit. Fleet of foot. He doesn't even think about it: trunk and limbs, it's all a single thing to him. He's carrying the baby in his arms carefully, like a box of wineglasses. He opens the door. The two of them make one silhouette against the light from the street.

He steps out into it.

Stacey notes: "I wrote Rules For Being Human after I read a news item about a man who accidentally left a baby in bar. I was so floored by this lack of reverence for life that I ended up writing a story with a lot of characters who were already dead.