The Many Lives of Mary Mercator

Mary Mercator could remember the very exact moment at which she first fell in love. She was in senior English class, it was about 1:13 pm, unseasonably hot in the classroom, and Boyd Chilton had just begun to dramatically recite a poem. His recitation didn’t capture Mary’s attention until he spoke the following lines:

That corpse you planted last year in your garden,

Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?

Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?

Oh keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men,

Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again!

You! Hypocrite lecteur! — mon semblable, — mon frere!

And that was all it took. The world turned around her and she felt a great deepness expand in her chest. For a moment it was hard to breathe and her vision darkened. This boy, who she never found particularly handsome or charming or attractive in any way was now the absolute center of her desire. All it took was for him to read a single line from Charles Baudelaire referenced in a T.S. Eliot poem.

Mary, for most of her high school life was described in terms that she thought were mostly disagreeable. She did not think of herself as dour, mysterious, deep, beautiful, sultry, intelligent, borderline-heretical, depressive, mute, or witchy. She had, frankly, not yet decided how to describe herself and mostly resisted others describing her. Thus, she gained yet another description: standoffish.

Admittedly, she did not do the things that her peers obsessed over during 1960s Maine. She did not want to go necking with boys, she did not want to go to football or basketball games, she did not want to go to rock shows… If there was a large group of her peers crowded somewhere, well, she would end up walking the exact opposite way. She preferred to read books in the park and smoke her grandfather’s pipe, which she had found in his room after he died. She loved to read books by Poe, Baudelaire, Wilde and Shelley. She adored the unavoidable terror of Lovecraft and only ever watched movies that were directed by Roger Corman or that featured dancing skeletons or Death himself.

Her mother, a timid woman, once asked Mary why she was so obsessed with death.

“You don’t ever ask Father Callahan that,” Mary responded.

“How do you mean?” Mrs. Mercator rejoined, confused.

“Why, every Sunday he goes on and on about how Jesus died for our sins, how this saint or that martyr died, pray for the lost souls in purgatory, come to this wake or another. Seems to me that death is a pretty important thing if it’s happening every week on a set schedule!”

Mrs. Mercator screwed her face into a look that she often made at her daughter. It was a complicated face, which communicated the conflicting emotions of pride in her clever daughter and abject fear. She exited the room awkwardly, which was just as good for Mary, who was struggling through a passage of Paradise Lost.

Mary loved her parents for who they were, but she was also very aware that they weren’t going to understand her very well no matter how much they tried. Her father, a very reasonable and calm man, who worked as a physics professor at the university, struggled like his wife when dealing with their only daughter.

One day, Mary asked Professor Mercator if he would mind driving her into town so that she could buy a record. Overcome with excitement, he was half-way out of the door when he remembered that he forgot to put shoes on.

The car-ride into town was mostly silent as Professor Mercator mused at what his daughter might buy. Instead of other fathers at the time who worried about the negative effect that pop-music might have on their children, Professor Mercator thrilled to think of his daughter dancing in her socks in front of a mirror to Frankie Valli, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Beach Boys. Buddy Holly! At the record store, Professor Mercator stood at the front desk and spoke to the owner, George Harrison, who had been his friend since they were both young.

Soon enough, Mary walked up to the counter with a record sleeve. “What did you get, honey?” Mr. Mercator said, almost too excited.

“Here,” She passed the record to Mr. Harrison. “It’s called Die Walküre.”

Professor Mercator was crestfallen. However, he chastised himself for feeling that way. He knew his daughter well enough that she wouldn’t be listening to Help! No, he knew her well enough to know that she would choose an epic German opera that had been written almost a century before.

In the car ride home, blinded by disappointment and ground down into blunt honesty, he asked something that he’d wanted to ask for a long time: in his calm, professorial voice, he asked, “Mary? Are there any boys at school that you’re attracted to?”

“No. Those brutes?” Mary said, a little brutish herself.

Mr. Mercator felt like sighing, but didn’t. “Any girls?”

The question hung in the air like chlorine gas, filling their lungs with liquid. If they were lucky, they’d drown on dry ground and the conversation would be over.

“No,” Mary said suspiciously. “Why, that’s a strange question to ask.”

“You’re right,” Professor Mercator said as they came to a stop at a stop light. In the waiting seconds, he looked at his daughter sitting in the seat beside him. Her ears peeking out from her long, dark hair, her gently sloping nose above expressive lips set amongst a sea of freckles, which were starting to disappear. He could no longer think about what so bothered him this afternoon, what worried him so much. In that moment, he realized that he didn’t have to worry about his daughter.

While Professor Mercator came to this comforting epiphany, his daughter, on the other hand, was feeling anxious.

She expected that the excitement from the purchase of the second part of the Ring Cycle would overwhelm the warm, sick feeling of love she felt for Boyd Chilton. Instead, all she could think about was Boyd’s lips forming the words of the poem he recited in class earlier that afternoon. She wanted to throw the disk out of the window and for it to fly across town, spinning through the air and navigating the streets like a car, stopping at stop lights and eventually reaching the Chilton home where it would find Boyd’s record player and start to turn. The melody of Die Walküre captivating him as it captivated her.

The light changed and the car lurched forward as Professor Mercator—startled—fumbled the clutch. He tousled her hair and said, “You know I love you, right?”

“I love you too, daddy. But I would also love if you would stop doing that to my hair every time you feel like being affectionate.”

That night, Mary listened to Das Rheingold and then Die Walküre as she worked on her homework. She found it difficult to concentrate and on several occasions wrote “Boyd Chilton” instead of what she intended to write. (“Boyd Chilton, a hero of the Battle of New Orleans, later became president of the United States.”) She then promptly threw these sheets of paper in the trash, paranoid that her teacher might be able to decipher the erased tracks of his name, betraying her true feelings.

At dinner, the Mercators ate in silence for a while before Professor Mercator got a mischievous look on his face, “You’ll never believe what happened in class today.”

“Don’t tell me that it’s that goofball of a T.A. you have! What is his name again?” Mrs. Mercator said.

“Hiram Katz is what daddy calls him. Are you absolutely sure you didn’t invent poor old Hiram, daddy?”

“Mary! How could you think such a thing about your father! I swear he’s real, how could I make up such a consummate klutz?” Professor Mercator said with mock offense.

“Okay, so what did he do today?” Mary asked.

“Well, today was the mid-term exam and he was supposed to bring the exams from the reproduction office. About five minutes before class was to begin, Hiram walks in to see every seat in the auditorium filled. I could see the look of confusion on his face. There were at least 500 people looking at him. The whole class ever shows up for lecture, but they do for the tests. Realizing that the mid-term was today, he looked down at his hands and was startled to find that he did not have 500 copies of the exam, but only thin air to grip. He turned about to run out of the auditorium so fast that he slipped and had to bring himself up by a door handle. The entire exam was delayed 20 minutes while Hiram ran to the reproduction department.”

Mary and her mother laughed at the image of poor unlucky Hiram Katz.

Recovering from a laughing fit, Mrs. Mercator asked, “I hear that the school is putting together a production of The Crucible. Are you going to go, Mary? I know how much you love literature.”

Mary was well aware of the play and was about to tell her mother that she had no interest in going to that abortion. Some moron from her class had rewritten the story to remove the allusions to Joseph McCarthy’s communist witch hunt with a story of forbidden love between John Proctor and an invented person, Sarah Williams. She was about to voice her displeasure, when a thought occurred to her: John Proctor was to be played by Boyd Chilton. The part of Sarah Williams had not been selected yet...

“I’m going to try out for the part of the love-interest.”

The loud ping of utensils on porcelain rang out through the dining room at this announcement. Mrs. Mercator’s face oscillated between horror and joy. Professor Mercator’s eyebrows were so surprised that they looked like they were about to crawl off of his face.

“That’s great, honey!” Professor Mercator coughed.

“Oh, sweetie! I hope you get it, I really do! You know how I’m always telling you that you have those artistic sensitivities,” Mrs. Mercator cooed.

“It’s just for fun. No need to make a fuss,” Mary said. But she knew that this was no afternoon outing. This was a mission.

By the time of the play’s premiere in late October, Mary had accomplished two things: she had engendered the simultaneous ire and respect of the cast and crew and had won over Boyd Chilton.

The audition was a joke. Her emotional and adept performance of Sarah Williams had beaten all of the rest of the prospective actresses flatly. She then started to rewrite the dialogue of the play to be more, in her mind, literate and dramatic. She argued with the writer and director about every point and won often. They could not argue that the play that she had molded out of the original treatment was much better, but they resented it.

However, that didn’t stop them from pretending that the final revision was their invention.

The play was a great success. It ran for three days. On the first it was only parents and classmates, but on the second and third day other people in the town came to see Mary Mercator’s portrayal of the melancholic witch, Sarah Williams. The third night, the auditorium was standing room only. The crowd was silent during the final doomed kiss and then when the curtain came down the ovation was deafening.

Similarly, the enthusiasm increased backstage as well. On the first night, the cast and crew were cold towards each other, resentful that Mary had hijacked the production. On the third night there was much cheering and adulation. People handed Mary flowers and hugged her and kissed her and said that it was a night to remember.

Mary took this all with characteristic stoicism, but with gratitude. She was happy that everyone had come around to her ideas even though she practically had to hammer it into their heads. She was even happier that Boyd never left her side. She knew that the kiss on the third night was genuine and considered it their first even though she’d performed many others during rehearsals.

On the stage, before the curtain, the cast bowed to the standing audience and smiled widely. Parents were teary-eyed in the crowd and hooted over each other. Boyd leaned over to whisper something in Mary’s ear: “Why don’t we get out of here, go somewhere quiet? I can’t stand all this ruckus.”

Mary nodded a quiet assent, but inside she was exploding. It was overwhelming to think that Boyd was so close now. It was only two months ago that she had even thought of him romantically. Only a month ago had classmates stopped thinking of her as a dour lesbian. Now she had the boy, made a winning play and garnered the respect of all. She realized on this stage that life was hers for the taking. If she could accomplish this in the matter of two months, what could she do with a few years?

In Boyd’s car, the warm feeling of success thrummed throughout her body and she could barely tell it apart from the romantic anticipation of being close to Boyd.

On Monday, when she walked back into the school hallways, that rosy, warm feeling like flowers blooming in her guts were gone and the rumors that she was a lesbian returned. People stared at her and whispered. She saw Dolores St. Cloud daintily touching Boyd’s broken and bruised nose by his locker.

Yet another week passed and Mary heard that Dolores did not clock Boyd in the face when he got fresh out at the overlook. Supposedly, everyone agreed that this was a better outcome. Mary disagreed silently. She was not so smitten as to let him do that.

During the week, detached and somewhat depressed, Mary thought about the outcome of the fall semester. It had been decidedly mixed. She did a great deal for her social capital, but then it had all vanished the instant that she refused Boyd’s aggressive advances.

Eventually, she resolved that it wasn’t that bad. She was, effectively, in the same place that she was before. She was comfortable outside of this society. She had tasted it and felt that it wasn’t so important or attractive. However, her feelings were deeply hurt. Not only by Boyd and his prurience, but also with how quickly the others abandoned their adoration for her well-deserved success.

Wise enough to not allow herself to develop a grudge, she decided that she would play a prank on the new couple, Boyd and Dolores. Since everyone thought she was such a witch, she would play one.

Her fourth public performance this month!

The plan was to go up to the lookout on Saturday, dressed as a witch and with a few fireworks in her pocket, scare the living daylights out of Boyd and Dolores while they were half-undressed.

She sneaked up to the lookout looking absolutely frightful. Her face was painted a ghoulish white and black, her hair knotted and horrible with saplings tied up in it, she wore a black dress which she had tattered for effect.

With her grandfather’s flip-lighter, she set smoke bombs and cherry bombs alight three or four at a time and tossed them towards Boyd’s car. Instantly, he jumped out of the car and shouted, “Goddamnit, Billy, I’ll break your neck! Rusty, if you’re out there, you’re in for it!”

Mary had anticipated Boyd thinking that his friends were playing the prank, so she began to moan very gently while moving around in the forest beside the car. Rustling leaves. Breaking twigs. Then she was silent. Boyd looked uneasy since his friends hadn’t responded. He gave a last few invectives and then got back into the car.

Mary waited for a while to see what was happening. In the dim moonlight, it became apparent that the couple had moved into the back seat. This is when she sprung the truly frightening part of the prank. She began to toss smoke bombs under the car, they hissed as they created a cloud of smoke around the Bel Air, but the sound wasn’t enough to arouse the attention of the lovers. Once it looked like the smoke was all but covering the car, and that Boyd hadn’t yet gotten out of the car to check what was going on, Mary launched the attack.

She ran up to the back-passenger car door and slammed into the window. Pounding on the roof, she screamed and made terrible faces. The couple saw her and screamed at the black and white face framed in the window. Mary couldn’t see them very well because of the smoke, but then she heard the car door open on the other side. She hopped up a little to see over the roof and saw Boyd (shirtless) and Dolores (braless) running off into the woods.

Exhilarated by the success of the prank, Mary improvised and decided to chase them. This worked fantastically. Boyd and Dolores occasionally looked back in the poorly lit woods to see a horror from their own imaginations chasing after them and screamed louder. So amused by this sight, Mary began to laugh uncontrollably. The combination of hard running and laughing made her voice harsh and evil-sounding, like a real witch. This only heightened the terror of her victims. She laughed and laughed and continued to run even after she had lost sight of them. She was so giddy and pleased with her trick that she didn’t even see the ledge on the bluff.

Her laughter was interrupted mid-fall by a short and genuine scream…

She awoke in the morning with a terrible crick in her neck.

Consciously, she dragged her body to the edge of the boulder upon which she fell the night before.

Mary Mercator sat on the edge of that stone and watched the sunrise and thought about the events of the night before. They had gotten decidedly out of hand.

Facts being what they were, she was positive that she had died from the hundred-something foot fall from the top of the bluff. However, there was something distinctly undead about the way that she could appreciate the sunrise.

Unable to determine if this was a bad thing or an okay thing, she decided that the best course of action would be to get home and into bed before her father or mother awoke.

It was a long walk, but when she reached her home, she saw that the lights in the house were still off. It must have been before eight, before her mother woke to make her father breakfast. Sneaking into the house, she silently ascended the stairs to her bedroom to remove the makeup from her face and comb her hair for school.

The story of the Overlook Witch spread through the school and her remaining days there were fraught with times in which she wanted to admit that it was her, but didn’t want to reveal the fact that she’d died. In life, she was a witch. In afterlife she could be something else. Anything she wanted, really.

Mary floated through the year of high school and formed a habit of going to the cemetery to smoke her grandfather’s pipe. She became intimately familiar with the names in her town’s cemetery. She started to talk to them and felt like she knew their personalities even though she knew no more than what was etched on their tombstones.

Mary would perch herself on tombstones, enveloped in a cloud of smoke and fantasize about crawling into a grave of her own. Recognizing that this impulse was very depressing, she wondered why she didn’t feel depressed to think of the dirt falling on her face, lichen growing in her hair, worms sidling up next to her in her quiet pit.

In her freshman year of college, Mary accepted her fate as a revenant and also discovered that she had the faintest smell of death about her. She masked this with patchouli, which smells of earth and mint and was popular at the time.

In her music appreciation course she also found a girl who excited in her the feelings she felt for Boyd Chilton a few years before. The professor prepared an album for the class and asked all to try to guess who the composer was.

Gladys Morrison, who sat two rows ahead of Mary, instantly recognized the work, but only whispered, “Wagner’s Valkyrie.”

Even though Gladys was wrong (the piece was from Götterdämmerung, not Die Walküre) she was close enough to completely enamor Mary. The next lecture, Mary sat next to Gladys and they began to talk.

Mary was completely smitten with Gladys and followed her all over campus. They became the best of friends. They would sit up late in each others dorms and talk about their lives before college. They talked about the music that was coming up nowadays that wasn’t so stupid and more like Wagner. Gladys introduced Mary to John Cage, the 13th Floor Elevators, to the more subtle Beatles songs, to King Crimson.

A year later, they were invited to a frat party and left promptly when it was obvious that the only point of the party was to lay the brothers who lived at the house. They went back to Gladys’ dorm.

For a while they talked about John Coltrane while sitting on Gladys’ bed and then Mary went to kiss Gladys. She was overcome with lust and pushed Gladys down on the bed while her tongue searched for Gladys’ tongue. Eventually, she came up for breath and Gladys shouted, “What the hell are you doing? Don’t do that!”

Mary was shocked into silence and she sat up straight on the bed. She remembered those were the same words she spoke to Boyd on that fateful night. “I’m so sorry.”

“You need to leave,” Gladys said coldly. She got up to open the door for Mary.

“I’m so sorry,” Mary said again.

Had Boyd said those words too?

“It doesn’t matter how sorry you are. I want you to leave,” Gladys said, tears forming in her eyes.

“Please…”

“No. Leave.”

Though Mary and Gladys would occasionally make eye contact on campus while walking to class or in the cafeteria, Gladys would from there on in turn away. Every time it happened, Mary’s heart would break.

Afterwards Mary was locked into a deep depression and could only be called out of bed for the sake of classes. Two weeks later, she happened to catch her image in her dorm bathroom’s mirror. It was strange, she hadn’t applied makeup in months, she’d been crying every night, but in the mirror was the most beautiful image of herself she’d ever seen. She stared intently at the mirror, but the image would not go away. Curious, she stared stared some more.

She stared so hard, she stared the freckles right off her face. This startled her away from the mirror and she grabbed her bag to walk to class.

In physics she spied a girl in the front row who she hadn’t seen before. Unwelcome feelings of arousal flushed her face and she walked to the back of the auditorium.

After class, she stopped in the hallway to tie her shoe. The girl she noticed from the front row caught up with her. Mary looked up at the girl’s face and thrilled. She wondered if she would have felt this way if she hadn’t died.

“How did you do on the last test?” the girl says.

“Okay,” Mary said, but then started at the sound of her own voice. It sounded deeper, very masculine.

“I did just awful! Will you help me study?” the girl flirted.

“Yeah, okay,” Mary said with the voice that she’d never heard before.

“Here’s my number,” the girl said before practically skipping off to her friends.

Mary stood alone in the hall, completely baffled at what happened.

Clearly, this girl was trying to pick her up, but then she ran off to her friends. How could that happen? How could this girl know? Maybe she had see Gladys and I… No, Gladys and I were friends. I only… Could Gladys spread the word that I like girls? But her friends didn’t act like it was…

Mary looked into her reflection in a window and stared at a man’s face with long, dark hair. She pinched her chin and saw the hairs bristle.

“I’m… a man!” she said in surprise.

“Amen!” said a passing male student. “And don’t you forget it! Hahaha!”

Later that night, she masturbated with her newly manifested penis.

Afterwards she found herself lost in lazy refractory daydreams. It was clear now. She was entering a new stage of her afterlife, one in which she could change her appearance at will. The possibilities stretched pleasantly into the future.

Over the course of the next two years, a constant stream of men and women would come and go from Mary’s (or Mark’s) dormitory room. A knowledgeable observer might have a hard time identifying Mary or Mark as he fell into that same crowd of people who came and went. Up the stairs to fuck or sleep and downstairs to go to class or drink. If we could speed up life and view her college dorm’s door at 100 times its actual rate, it would appear that Mary and Mark were roommates. Also, it might appear that anyone and everyone on campus had the key to their room.

One day Mary, trying to get rid of a clingy freshman boy, said, “My door’s busier than a stall door at the Student Union’s bathroom!” His reaction to this wasn’t good, he called her a slut and spent the rest of his semester speaking ill of her.

Mary was momentarily hurt by the accusation, but then it occurred to her: Seven months ago I was a walking corpse! Rotting and falling apart and craving to lay in the cool grass and be sucked into the earth. Now I’m living twice the life that these people are! Call me a slut, Earl. You haven’t got any idea what it’s like to live this life.

Mary began to change her tune in the last few months of school when the one night flings began to stay for multiple days. They would leave just as soon as she became attached. Unbeknownst to her, her heart was breaking underneath her manifested outer shell. Standing in line at the cafeteria, she would recall a cute detail about a former lover and winced as she thought about how she dumped him in front of his friends. In class, she’d remember a girl she had a thing for the past spring and almost have to leave for the tears welling up in her eyes.

School ended and like most college graduates, Mary was rudderless.

Drinking alone in a bar one afternoon, she watched the television and the newscaster read out the names of the dead men who would be coming home from Vietnam swaddled in flag-cloth. These men could no longer smoke their grandfathers’ pipes, nor could they attend music appreciation classes, or drink in the youthful wonder of a pretty face in dappled summer sunlight. Their afterlife was much different from hers.

She made up her mind to go to Vietnam.

It turned out that she just so happened to be eligible for an internship at CBS in Vietnam. However, she’d attended the interview as Mark and it would appear that there would not be an internship available for Mary.

Thinking this made her frustrated. Did she really have to live her life as a man in order to live it as she wanted? That was a raw deal and one that she wasn’t willing to commit to.

Looking up into the blue sky, she thought about how superficial her life had been lately. She suddenly craved something substantial. She was convinced that she would find the zeitgeist incarnate in the jungles of Vietnam. But what would it mean to go as Mark? She’d be just as superficial as she had been and miss out on really experiencing life and death.

Mary screwed up her face and made up her mind. “Oh fuck it.”

From her shoulders she sprouted wings and rose into the sky, soaring through clouds with an impunity to turbulence, occasionally having to wipe condensation from her face. She flew all the way to Saigon.

Thus began Mary Mercator’s short, but substantial career as a Valkyrie.

When I met Mary Mercator, I was ten-years-old and living out an idyllic sort of life in central Illinois. It was the day after my birthday in August and my parents had gave me a toy M-16. Excited to show off my new toy, I went down to the creek and roamed around hunting aliens hoping to attract the attention of neighborhood kids. I don’t know where my friends were that day, but I didn’t see them. Instead I ran into Mary. She was sitting on a large rock eating a peach from a nearby tree.

“Hey, you ever see one of these?” I bragged.

“Mmm-hmm,” she said, her mouth full peach. She looked ten-years-old then too. A little girl with well-combed black hair and a floral dress. Her face was chubby with baby-fat and waning innocence. Her blue eyes were piercing and frightening.

I regretted saying anything almost immediately because when those eyes met mine, I was filled with fear. It was like I looked into a vast crevasse, an abyss. She said, “I’ve seen a real one!”

“No you haven’t! Quit lying!”

“Oh, no, but I have,” she said. She spoke like an adult and ate the peach with a deliberation that I’d only seen in adults.

“You want me to tell you about it?”

Of course I wanted to hear about how she had seen a real M-16, but I didn’t know that Mary was about to introduce me to the world of the supernatural. Sometimes I think that it would have been better not knowing Mary or hearing her story, but that would be as foolish as running down to the creek to show off a toy.

“I saw lots of M-16s in the Vietnam war. I saw lots of AK-47s and mortars and M-79s and M-14s and RPGs and grenades. I saw a lot of horrible things like that, but they were real. You’re very fortunate that you don’t have to carry a real one. I met a few little boys who breathed their last holding a real-live AK-47. I’m sure they’d trade anything to have your plastic one by this creek, uhh, what’s your name?” Mary asked.

“Declan,” I said. “How were you in the Vietnam war? You’re a little girl now and the war’s been over for years.”

“I didn’t look like this then, Declan. I was a Valkyrie. A collector of the valiant dead.

“You see,” she began to the accompaniment of tens of thousands of cicadas in the trees. “Valkyries are much more like the spectral death that people depict in movies. Instead of a scythe, I would fly down to a particularly brave marine or Viet Cong soldier who was breathing his last and sing a frighteningly powerful song. When it was all said and done, they were at peace, but when I showed up to take them away, they were afraid. Makes sense, really. You should be afraid of death. But the difference between the worthy brave and the cowardly is that the worthy do not turn away.

“There were plenty of soldiers that I left on the battlefield because they turned away and whimpered. Let them be taken away to some other afterlife, I was there to collect the ones for Odin’s army.”

“Odin? Like Thor’s dad?”

“That’s right. Him.” Mary kicked her feet to throw her ten-year-old body off of the rock she’d been sitting on and started walking down to the creek bed.

“Did you ever meet Odin?”

“No, it turned out that I, myself, was not worthy to travel to Valhalla. That takes more of a commitment than I was willing to give.” Her voice trailed off and she took another bite of her peach. After a few moments of chewing, she remembered that she was telling a story.

“The M-16s made a sound like ‘Pak! Pak! Pak!’ and the AK-47s made a sound like “Kak-kak-kak” really fast.”

Mary and I grew up together. Then entire time I was completely aware that she was a thirty year old woman in a child’s body, but I also knew that I could not tell any adults about this. I’m fairly sure I would have been doped up with antipsychotics if I told adults what I knew, but it was easy to keep the secret because there wasn’t often a time when it mattered that Mary possessed this little girl who lived down the street from me.

When we went to middle school, we would do homework together at my house. One night, as we watched Mary get picked up by her mother, my mom said, “Oh, that poor girl.” My mom used to say that about all sorts of people, but it was always because she wanted to tell me about something terrible about life.

“What do you mean, mom?” I asked, knowing the story would be salacious.

“Your friend Mary isn’t treated very well. Do you ever see the bruises she has?”

“Yeah, she says her parents hit her.”

This was just a fact that Mary told me. Much like the fact that she had told me that she once stared into the eyes of a dying VC soldier who said in his native pastoral dialect of Vietnamese, “Take me. I have questions for your boss.”

My mother shuddered. She tried desperately to shield me from the ills of the world and even though it bothered her deeply to find out that I had already learned of them, she couldn’t help herself from telling me. “She’s lucky to have a friend like you. She can come over any time.”

After school the next week I asked Mary why she put up with her father and mother beating on her all the time, “Just turn into a Valkyrie again! Or a zombie! You’ll scare them to death!”

“I’ll tell you when you’re older, Declan.” She said in her adult voice from a young mouth, “Did I ever tell you about what I did in the 80s?”

“No!” I forgot all about the abuse. I was excited to hear another supernatural story from my friend.

“I love horror movies and I watched every one that came out. I watched Poltergeist when it came out in ‘82 and decided, yep! I want to be a poltergeist! So I wafted about like ghosts do and made my home in old houses, movie theaters, run-down hotels, lonely roads,” Mary raised her arms menacingly as a joke. “For fun, I would scare the everloving daylights out of everyone that I came across for a while, but then I realized that it wasn’t fun if they were just normal folks out for a drive or on vacation. The real payout came from nasty people.

“I would stalk drug dealers and mean bosses and folks who drove like the road was built just for them. As a ghost, I could scare them and then follow them to wherever they ran off to to hear the stories they would tell. The explanations they gave to people about what they saw! God, they were hilarious sometimes.

“I never expected to get anything out of these hauntings except for a kick, but it turned out that some of them would turn their lives around. I found these people the most fascinating. I would follow them around for years and saw the things they did. You have to be patient as a ghost, and patient I was. I followed this one man around for several years. He was a burglar who robbed a house I was haunting and I gave him the scare of a lifetime. Years later, he had a family and had the habit of walking around neighborhoods. I guess it was a holdover from when he was casing houses to rob. Anyway, every once in awhile he would stop in front of a house for a long time. I could tell that he was thinking that it would be easy to rob, but then he would look up and then walk away. It was funny, but I also thought, ‘Good! He’s learned his lesson. And I’ll be there if he ever goes back on whatever promise he made to himself.’”

“Is that what you’re doing to your parents?” I asked.

“Hmm?” She said, startled from her memories. “No, no. Not like that at all. Like I said. I’ll tell you when you’re older. Those people aren’t my parents anyway. My parents are old folks who live in Maine.”

In high school, I became infatuated with music and in particular The Velvet Underground. One day, while listening to White Light / White Heat in my room, Mary looked up from our calculus papers and said, “I met Lou Reed.”

“Get the fuck out!” I shouted, “Jesus, you never tell me everything!”

“I’ve already lived an entire life before you! How am I supposed to tell you everything I’ve done? I also met Andy Warhol and Patti Smith and Sid Vicious, all of the Ramones (fucked half of them), and posed for Robert Mapplethorpe as a man.”

I laughed and said, “Alright, tell me what was that like.”

“The Factory was a very evil place full of well-meaning people and it morphed into places like Studio 54 late in the 70s. Fueled by cocaine and smack and lingering LSD, these people never really changed. Some would die, but they would be instantly replaced by someone else, just as depraved, just as misled, just as interesting.

“I purchased a club in Manhattan and lived there as a vampire. Beautiful, dead, lusting, I revisited my college days and had my fill of virgin blood in one way or another. The whole crowd of artists and poets and musicians would visit, but I placed a curse on it that would erase their memories of the place from their minds. Andy Warhol wandered into the club one day. Giddy and delirious from my curse, he walked up to me and said that he’d like to make me into a print. ‘Oh, Andy, that is just so thoughtful,’ I said. ‘But if you want to keep having thoughts, I would suggest that you not do something so stupid.’

“He tried to do it, but the curse turned my face into soup cans and he never had a clever thought again. He spent the rest of his life trying to hide that fact.

“David Bowie was a regular, but he was always too shy to come up and speak to me. For fun, I hypnotized him and made him dress up like Hitler for a while.”

“You’re kidding me. This is a joke, isn’t it?” I said.

“I wouldn’t lie to you, Declan. The truth is truly stranger than fiction, kid.”

I spend a lot of time with Mary throughout high school and when senior prom came I had no girlfriend to ask out. Of course, there was Mary, but she was no girl to me, she was something else entire.

Casually complaining one Saturday afternoon, I said, “I have no idea who I should ask to prom.”

“Why don’t we go together?”

“Really? You want to?” I was genuinely surprised. Mary never showed any interest for any sort of social event at school. She generally disparaged various events as date-rape fests or hitler youth rallies. “I figured you’d rather just go and see a movie.”

“Look, let’s just go. I never went to my prom, I don’t want you complaining that you never went to yours,” she said as she chucked an acorn at my head.

Prom was a blast and afterwards Mary and I drove to a park on the edge of town where we could drink the six-pack that I bought off of Jesus (not his real name, a long-haired college drop-out who made extra money selling high school kids booze). Under the misty lights of the park where I played with Mary as a kid, I made an involuntary confession:

“I love you, Mary.”

“I know you do, Declan,” she said with that voice that betrayed years of experience beneath the youthful exterior of her teenaged body.

“You do?” I blurted.

“Of course, but not the way that you’re talking about right now. You’ve had a few beers and you think that this is some sort of romance.”

“It isn’t?”

“No.”

“I think you’re wrong.”

“That’s fine, but in time you’ll see what I see.”

I sat on the hood of my dad’s car, dejected. My mind was awash in thoughts. I thought that this was so unfair, I felt taken-advantage-of, I felt unfulfilled, I was profoundly horny.

“I think it’s time that I told you why I look like this.

“In 1990, I got married to a beautiful looking man, I thought he was beautiful on the inside too, but… well.

“We both wanted to have children, desperately. But we soon discovered that I could not have children of my own. The doctors confirmed it, I was barren. One doctor was completely shocked at the fact. He was baffled that I had no prior illnesses that might make pregnancy impossible, but I knew. It was because I was different from everyone else. You know how.

“Shortly after this discovery, I found my husband in bed with another woman and I flew away. I was crushed, like so many times before. Life is full of heartache after heartache.”

“But you can’t lose hope.” Full of budweiser, I burped these words.

“You’re right, Declan, but I was so hurt at the time that I didn’t think that I could just go and find someone else. Adopt a child? That requires a sort of commitment I couldn’t give. I wanted a family, not just a child.

“When I realized that, I gave up on my dream of having children.

“Having kids was a fantasy of mine. It was a sort of infection that I caught when I saw that burglar return to his family night after night.

“Terribly depressed, I roamed the deserts of the West as a rock golem for a few years. Vacationers camped on me sometimes. I would lay on the desert floor motionless for weeks at a time, weeping gypsum crystals. Only occasionally would I move, but then lost the energy to continue. In the Valley of Fire I made my home and came to rest. I expected to be subsumed by the earth. I started fantasizing about a final resting place again. I longed for the cool earth. For the peace of endless darkness.

“But then I found this little girl. Mary. She was sent to a children’s camp in the Valley of Fire by her parents and looked so desperately unhappy. She had the same name, conveniently. It was true that her parents treated her horribly. I decided to do something about it. I possessed her body. I took over her mind and body to protect her from the years of suffering that I saw that she would have to take.”

“But why? You could have just changed into anything and killed the parents!” I insisted, just as I had done when I was a child.

“Leave her without parents? Take their place? No, I would take the brunt of their abuse and try to preserve the good memories of her childhood for her. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like they are going to be better parents as she ages. In the past few years, I have laid a trap that will make it apparent to Mary that these people mean her harm, a trap that will keep her away from these people in her adulthood, which I hope will be a happy one.”

“Why, though? You have to experience all of their bullshit!”

“Penance? I feel like I have to pay penance every few years. I get out of control and become obsessed with myself and then have to spend a few years being selfless to cleanse my spirit. I don’t know why. I feel I need to do it.

“But you know what? Even though I’ve suffered, I feel that I’ve done a good job for Mary. She’ll go off to college knowing everything I’ve learned and with fond memories of a childhood friend. You, Declan.”

We kissed.

“I love you, Mary.”

“I love you too, Declan.”

We didn’t talk about that night for the rest of the semester. Nor did we talk about it during graduation.

Mary and I planned on taking a backpacking trip through Europe the summer before going to college. And on the morning of the trip I met her at the airport.

“Mary!” I called. She stopped and turned around startled, but then a look of recognition came across her face. “What? Didn’t you recognize me?”

“No, of course I did, Declan.” She spoke with her own voice, but there was something there that wasn’t right. It made me feel ill. Like my friend had become possessed, like the body-snatchers had gotten to her.

“Come on, we’ve got to get through security,” Mary said and smiled. It was in that smile that I realized that Mary Mercator was gone, my friend was not possessed, but actually freed. I followed Mary Freeman through airport security and into our adulthood.

It would be years until I saw Mary Mercator again.

“Hypocrite reader! My double, my brother!” Win Butler croons over the pub’s speakers. “Daddy really took it outta you.”

“Ah. He really did, didn’t he?” The words of the song overwhelm me with the sensation of something lost, that never was. Mary Freeman—the Mary that Mary Mercator saved from a childhood of pain—broke up with me two weeks before. She declined to take the vacation we had planned and so I found myself in a pub in Cornwall on a Tuesday at about 1:13 in the afternoon. The giddy excitement of the tourist group I was travelling with turned my stomach and I figured that a few pints of bitters might set me right.

Instead, I ended up feeling sorry for myself. Mary Freeman and I had started dating after college, after we had both moved to Chicago to work. The break-up was terribly tearful. Weeks now I had spent remembering what she said, her face swollen and red with sadness, “It’s like you don’t know me at all.”

That’s what she said. And you know what? She was right.

I didn’t know who she was. I don’t think she knew who she was. The more I thought about it while staring at the swirling foam of my beer, the more I questioned who the hell I was.

I knew the truth, but dated Mary Freeman anyway. I guess I thought that I was in love with her, but then after a while I thought that maybe I was in love with her demon. I thought all kinds of things that kept me from thinking about what was really going on. Perhaps we were together just because I thought that that was how it was supposed to be. Like prom night, I never cultivated any other relationships because, perhaps, I always assumed I would end up with Mary. God help me know which one.

A burp swelled in my stomach and I looked around somewhat startled. I was startled to remember that I was in England. I was no farther than a few miles away from the Porthcurno Telegraph Museum. Mary Freeman had read about this place and put it on our itinerary. Now, here I am, living out her itinerary, taking her vacation. Without her.

So strange, the song playing on the pub’s speakers. The same lines that made Mary Mercator fall in love all of those years ago are the soundtrack to my despair.

It was getting late and surely the telegraph enthusiasts had left and I was free to start walking to town to catch a train back to London. I’ve now decided to abandon the rest of the itinerary, which is scheduled out for another two weeks. Lord, Mary Freeman was anal about planning. Completely unlike the Mary I grew up with.

Walking along the dirt road of a little village in Cornwall, my neck is damp and steaming from the fine mist in the air. I can’t tell if the mist is from the sky or the violent breakers. Walking past an ancient looking stone cottage, I see a hunched and wretched old woman sweeping her stoop. Arrested by her hideousness I paused to stare for a moment. The woman looked up and revealed a rictus of rotting or missing teeth. I took this to be some sort of attempt to gross me out and decided to get going.

Then she cackled, “Declan! Can’t you recognize an old friend?”

“Mary?” I was awestruck. Who would have ever thought I’d see her again walking the unpaved streets of Cornwall...on a Tuesday? “You… You look awful!”

“Watch what you say to a old hag, young man! You can’t predict whether or not she’ll put a curse on you. Come on in! You look soaked,” I fumbled with the gate to her garden and eventually stumbled up to the door. “And apparently shit-faced as well! Come, come, you’ll need a cup of tea.”

Inside was warm and cosy, a single room building that seemed to be centered around the fireplace, which took up the entire northern wall. In front of the fire was a woman who looked like she was carved out of talc. Gray and porous and coarse, she snored gently under her blankets.

“Who’s that?” I asked.

“That’s Old Lady Mercator,” she said.

“Who?”

“My wife for now,” Mary responded.

“But she’s so old!”

“I’m no spring chicken, Declan!” Mary said, spreading her arms wide to display her aged body hidden under calico rags.

“You aren’t as old as her,” I said and took a seat at the table by the oven. “And anyway, you could be young again if you wanted to.”

“Oh, I don’t feel so young. And I guess that’s why I look like this, something of a reflection of how I feel. Old and rough and witchy,” with a wave of her hand, a cup and saucer flew from the cabinet and arranged themselves to receive a stream of steaming tea from the floating kettle’s spout. The whole arrangement came to rest on the table in front of Declan with a gentle clink.

“Are you…” Declan was still feeling pretty drunk and sad, “Are you dying?”

Mary shrieked and howled with laughter. She was truly frightening when she laughed, the windows rattled and dust fell from the rafters. “Oh, no. Not me. I’m not sure I can! Unless I’m good and ready, of course. And I’m surely not ready to shuffle off quite yet.”

“God damn it, witch! Do you ever shut up?” The old woman made of stone grunted.

“Shaddap, you old bitch before I turn you into a newt and step on you!” Mary threatened with a long wooden spoon in her hand, she waved it like a wand a couple of times and then turned to Declan. “She really is a dear most of the time, it’s just that she’s getting over a cold right now… A cold that should have killed her!” she shouted, directing her voice towards the woman again.

“How long has it been, Declan? What have you been up to?”

“I guess it’s been something like a whole decade, ten years now. I went to college and got a job. Doing pretty well for myself… Mary and I were going to get married, but we just broke up two weeks ago.”

The sound of Mary Mercator’s whistle pierced the motes that floated through the calm afternoon air, “Well that was a bad idea, wasn’t it?”

“What?” Dumbfounded and somewhat hurt, I scowled at the hag, “What do you mean? What do you mean that was a bad idea? You practically groomed me to be Mary Freeman’s husband.”

“Whoa, now it’s my turn to say ‘What?!’” the hag shook her head and things fell from her hair and scurried away. “That was certainly not what I was doing do you. I wasn’t doing anything at all.” “What was the point of all that anyway?” Now it was Mary who looked hurt.

“We were friends, Declan. We are still friends. Now, you could argue that I did some quasi immoral things to Mary, but I think it was worth it. Things turned out for the better in the end.”

“What do you mean they turned out for the better? Our relationship is done!”

“Declan! Declan! Such a selfish little boy. You’re alright, but you could benefit from removing yourself from the center of the universe. None of this was about you.”

Something about this was profoundly comforting. Shackles fell away from my thoughts and I could see clearly how after Mary was exorcised, I shouldered the burden of protecting Mary Freeman, like Mary the Daemon had. Thinking back on the years we were together I saw it in my memories of Mary Freeman’s eyes: the pain of being held in my prison of protection, it was suffocating. I felt awash with shame and disillusionment.

I slumped down in my chair.

“I seem to have made a rather large mistake,” I mumbled.

“Don’t take it so hard, Declan. Won’t be the first time you make a mistake. Did I tell you about the years in the early aughts where I was working at the EPA? I was going through a rather poetical mood and took the form of a banshee. I flew about Superfund toxic waste sites and screamed and moaned, mourning the dying of the earth.

“One day, I forgot who I was talking to and screamed at a contractor. Blew his eardrums straight out of his head. That took a whole lot of creative explaining and bleach to get out of that one.”

“I don’t know how that’s supposed to make me feel better,” I grumbled.

“Eh. Well, you and Mary Freeman might be heartbroken right now, but—and trust me on this one—you’re both still intact.”

“I think I see what you mean,” I said quietly. I was having several hundred epiphanies a minute and needed some time to sort out my thoughts, “What’s your telephone number… Or an email? We should stay in touch,” I said as I stood up.

“Oh, don’t worry about that, Declan. We’ll meet again. Just like today, when your life’s on an upswing and you’re least expecting it, bang! We’ll meet again,” she took out her broom and began to sweep me out of her house. “An upswing. Sure. You know you’re obnoxiously optimistic for being undead,” I said as she pushed me out of the door.

“Indeed, little mortal! Now get going, you’ve got a life to live and I’ve got to get busy dying,” she cackled gleefully and shut the door behind me.

I walked down the garden path and onto the dirt road.

The rain had cleared up and a rainbow formed away from the setting sun. I was feeling fairly low and profoundly confused as I walked into my new life.

I kicked some rocks back and forth along the road figuring that I’d eventually come to an inn, or at least a pub, but it seemed that it might take a while. All that I could see were endless and ancient farming plots in all sorts of shapes delineated by equally ancient rock boundaries. The pastoral scene reminded me of my upbringing in Illinois, about meeting Mary. I thought about the decisions I’d made with my life, my mistakes, the events that shaped me and molded me into the quasi drunk sap stumbling along some road in Cornwall. It seemed apparent that I had a rather impressive outlay of experience and life events to pull from as I considered where my life should go now.

But really, I’d not learned a goddamn thing.