The 7 Secrets of Mr. Magpie Ch. 07

Part Seven - A Secret Never To Be Told (finale)

I could open the last chapter of my story in a lot of different ways, but I chose this one. I'm so glad that Mrs. Magpie chose for my story to end with only seven secrets. There's a longer version of the rhyme that goes on like this: "Eight for a wish, / Nine for a kiss, / Ten a surprise you should be careful not to miss. / Eleven for health, / Twelve for wealth, / Thirteen beware it's the devil himself." The last thing I wanted to do was be dancing with the devil.

The nursery rhyme goes back several hundred years and is tied to the fact that magpies were considered an omen of bad luck. And for much of my life, I'd felt like all that bad luck was concentrated in one place - my own daily existence.

Things had gone wrong for me all over the place, but I'd tried never to just give up. Every day I'd get back up, pull on my pants and try to find a way to get through the next day, because there was always the chance of things getting better on the next one.

You ever hear people say that? "Never take a permanent solution for a temporary problem." It's meant to be truism that inspires people to avoid suicide and self-harm. And they're absolutely right. As long as you are still breathing, things can get better. They can also get worse, that's true also, and that's something you shouldn't forget either. Don't ever believe in the concept of 'rock bottom.' Bottoming out is just a lack of imagination on your part. You can always go lower.

You're wondering where I'm going with all of this. I get that. Be patient just a little bit longer; it'll all make sense in the end, I promise you.

See, back when I was scraping vomit out of the backseat of my car at the beginning of all of this, I'd thought that particular moment was my bottoming out. I'd lost my job, I'd lost my dignity, I was even starting to lose my sense of self-identity. The very notion of who Rafael Corvis is, that was beginning to come into question, because I was on the border of feeling like I had nothing to give to the world. What, I kept asking myself each and ever morning, was the point of it all?

I want to stress how pretty much everyone goes through this phase at some point in their lives. We all think we don't matter. We all think as soon as we die that we'll be forgotten and no one will speak our name ever again. We question why we can't change the world, why we can't do something that will live for centuries past our endpoint.

"Shakespeare's name still lives on," we think to ourselves, "so why can't mine?"

From there, it's just a short step to "I'm a failure because I can't change the world."

And that's where I want you to look a little further, to expand your horizons just a little wider.

Because it's not that you can't change the world - it's that you already have and you just didn't realize it yet. You may never realize just how much impact you've had on the world around you. Most of us don't get that chance, because the scope of it all is hard to understand.

Every day, you're affecting all the people around you. You're changing the lives of everyone around you simply by existing. You bring a perspective that none of them would ever have without you there, because your perspective isn't anything like theirs. That's important to remember.

The other thing I want to tell you about is that words don't just have one meaning, which is something that's very easy to forget in our modern day-to-day living. When Mrs. Choi told me she was giving me seven secrets, I thought I knew what that meant, but at this point, I'm suspecting I made the same mistake you've probably made.

Commonly, we think of "secret" to mean "kept from knowledge or view," i.e. hidden. But it's a word full of potential and has other interpretations. It can be taken as a method or process divulged only to one's own company or craft. But it can also be taken as a specific needed that's key to reaching a desired end, i.e. the secret of my success.

That's where I made my biggest mistake.

That, and in my conversation with the ghost.

Oh right! I totally didn't even tell you about the ghost!

In January of 2018, on a cold Sunday morning, I met one of the ghosts of the neighborhood, who'd come to file a complaint with me on behalf of all the other ghosts. It was about five in the morning, and I really should've been asleep, but there had been this constant tapping at the window just next to my bed, and it felt like it had been going on for an eternity, so I woke up just enough to peer out the window to see if it was a loose branch or a bird or something, and found myself staring directly into a semi-translucent face scowling at me.

I, naturally, fell out of bed, and that woke me up sharply. So I stood up in my boxers and my nightshirt, because I fully expected that I had been mostly still dreaming, and looked out my bedroom window into my back yard, seeing that same ethereal form floating there, looking annoyed at me.

The ghost was a rotund man dressed in a very expensive looking suit, a flurry of disheveled hair hanging around his face, a cigar resting on his lips. He had a thick scruffy black beard and eyebrows that were thicker than some walrus mustaches I'd seen in my time. "You gonna invite me in or what, kid?" the ghost said to me from his hovering perch.

"You're... are you a ghost?"

The ghost scowled at me. "Are you an idiot?"

"I hope not."

"Then stop asking idiotic questions and invite me in."

I shrugged a little, stepping back as I waved a hand towards my room. "You wanna come in?"

The scowl disappeared and was replaced by a kind smile as he drifted through the wall and moved to levitate in the center of my bedroom. "Aaaahhhh. Much better. It's cold out there, y'know?"

"Do... can ghosts get cold?"

"No, but yes," the spirit said to me. "We don't actually get cold, but if it's cold out, and we think it looks cold, then we feel cold, even if we aren't. It's a whole thing. Anyways. You don't remember me, do ya, kid?"

"You... you look vaguely familiar, but no, I can't say I place you."

"I was a friend of your grandfather's. He introduced us once. Pizzacato. Alberto Pizzacato, at your service."

"Oh! I do remember you. Sorry, you don't smell like peppermint anymore, and the scent of it would've immediately connected the memory," I told him. We'd been introduced when I'd first moved out to the area, but he'd died within a couple of months of my arrival. He'd always smelled heavily of peppermint, and my grandfather had told me Mister Pizzacato absolutely loved to suck on peppermint hard candies constantly.

"Probably for the best ghosts don't smell of anything," Alberto said to me. "Otherwise I doubt I'd smell much of peppermint. Mio Dio, how I miss my peppermints. But enough about me. How've you been, kid?"

"The last few years have been a fucking mess," I said, sitting on the edge of the bed. "Every time I feel like I'm getting my shit together, something else comes along and messes it all up."

The ghost pulled the cigar from his lips and stabbed it my direction. "See, that right there is a bad reading of your actual situation, kid." He gestured around the room while he talked. "Why do you think it's a mess now?"

"This job I've got could fall apart at any moment."

"Who's your boss?"

"The big sister of my coworker. The coworker who's a goddamn time bomb I'm just waiting to blow up all over again."

"No. Wrong."

"Wrong?"

"She's not your boss, and we both know it. Try again. Who's your boss?"

I had to stop and think at that point. "I... I don't have one?"

"You do," the ghost insisted. "And it's you. You are your own boss. You set the schedule. You decide what people are working on. You may have joined the project as the artist, but you've also somehow become the producer, and that means you've got control of your fate. You can do whatever you want to keep the time bomb in check, and nobody's going to tell you otherwise. In fact, I'm pretty sure your team wants you to do what you can to keep everything running smoothly."

"Yeah, but..."

"No! No 'but,' kid! You are where the buck stops. So if you've got a problem with your boss, you've got a problem with you. So is your boss the problem?"

"Well, when you put it like that..." I said to him.

"How else could you put it?"

"Ok. Fair. But it could still go tits up at any moment."

"That's all of life for you. If you want stability, you're eternally going to be disappointed."

I had to consider those words for a long moment before I spoke again. He was right - there was no guarantee for anything in life, but, for now, I was in probably the best professional place I'd been in for over a decade. We had a good project. We had a good team. I just had to keep it all together until we were ready for the next stage.

"Work's not a complete disaster, okay, I'll grant you that, but look at the rest of my life."

"What about it?" the ghost asked, a smug look on his rotund face.

"It's still so... empty," I told him, gesturing to the house around me. "My grandfather had this big, giant, extensive house, and it's... it's still just me here. Mrs. Choi gave me this gift, and it's had women come and go from my life, but..."

"But nobody ever stays," the ghost finished for me.

"Exactly."

"You ever think of why?"

"What do you mean?"

"What do you think the point of her gifts to you were?"

"The point?"

The ghost laughed, shaking his head. "You think she did something so powerful with nothing planned? No greater concept beyond making your life a little bit lighter here and there?"

"I mean... I hadn't even considered that she might have had some sort of greater plan with what she did," I admitted. "I thought she was just trying to cheer me up."

"Kid, you're adorable," the ghost said, almost patting my cheek but not quite touching me. "All the ghosts of the neighborhood have always thought you were a good egg. You didn't get mad at the Sandersons when their sewage pipe busted and spewed all over your back yard. You didn't yell at anyone when old man McGillicutty backed into that power line and had the neighborhood without power for a few days. You've always been friendly and helpful, and the ghosts of the hills, we appreciate it."

"How many-"

"Let's stay on topic, kid," the ghost interrupted. "If you'd wanted to go through a phase where you were being sort of a bit of an asshole after your company laid you all off for doing too good a job documenting how you'd made a great game, none of the ghosts up here would've blamed you. But you didn't do that. Sure, you stayed up way too late more than a couple of times, and yeah, maybe once or twice you fell asleep in your clothes, maybe even with your t-shirt on backwards, but in terms of letting your anger out? Not even close. And that worried us all a little bit. We all thought, Mr. Choi especially, that you were something of a time bomb, just waiting to blow up on someone or something. And we wouldn't have been happy about it, but it would've at least gotten it out of your system," he sighed. "But you didn't. You kept it all inside, and we got worried about you."

"So, you'd have felt better if I'd gone through a week or so of just getting shitfaced drunk, watching Farscape reruns in my boxers or something?"

"Yes!" the ghost said, taking the cigar from his lips to stab in my direction once more. "It would've been a release! A catharsis! And you needed that! But you just kept putting up wall after wall after wall! You didn't even really vent when that guy threw up all over the back of your car! You just sucked it up and dealt with it. But sometimes, and this thing, this is the thing Mrs. Choi's first lesson was for you to learn, you have to have a release valve, to give way to that pressure, so you do not buckle down forever and just implode."

"That was years ago, though," I told the ghost.

"Well, it was just the first lesson. You had lots of things to learn to get you into a mindset where you'd be ready for a real relationship. You needed to learn how to compromise, how to stand up for yourself, how to listen and how to speak up. You needed to learn that despite the setbacks of being laid off, it wasn't the end of you. You'd sort of laid down to die, and that's not the state that anybody wants you in. You weren't... well, for lack of a better expression, you weren't you anymore. And until you'd incorporated the loss, Mrs. Choi's magic was trying to get you back to being you again."

"Did she?"

"Did she what?"

"Did she get me back to me?"

"Well, how do you feel?"

I sighed. "Still mostly alone. Isolated and frustrated. I mean, I get that I have control over the work life now, and you're right, I should take some comfort in that, but I still feel like I'm spending my nights trapped working all the time. I come home, crawl into bed and then sleep, a little, then sleep... a little. And then I get up and do it all over again. It's comforting in some ways, but frustrating in a lot of others. I want someone in my bed with me, y'know? So it was good having all sorts of cheap, easy, meaningless sex, but at the end of the day, it was unfulfilling."

"Sure, because that was all to get you ready. You'll be at the end of the line soon."

"End of the line?" I asked nervously. "You mean I'm dying?"

"You kids are so ridiculously dramatic," the ghost sighed. "No, you're not dying. But in just a little bit, you're going to get Mrs. Choi's last gift, and then your life's going to back to some kind of normal again. And you're going to have to learn to live with that."

"How do you mean?" I asked the ghost.

"After you've had a touch of what the life of magic can be, going back to a normal world might be difficult to take. You might find it all... rather dull."

I remember being quite taken aback. "You mean... it's all just... just going to stop? Like, after all of this, once it runs its course, it's just back to complete normality?"

The apparition of my departed neighbor shrugged and nodded in one muddied gesture. "You'll figure it out. At the end of the day, m'boy, we don't all get to have the wonder forever. Anyway, I just wanted you to know that we, the ghosts of the high hills of San Jose, we're all quite proud of you. Before it all wraps up, we felt we should tell you that we're rooting for you to win. And maybe... maybe at some point we'll peek in on you again, see how you're doing." The ghost drifted over towards the wall of my bedroom and started to phase through it. "Take care, kid."

He disappeared through the wall and I never saw him again.

Not yet, anyway.

I'm still alive.

Heh.

Anyway, I realized the arrival day of the last secret was Feb. 14^th, 2018. Valentine's Day. And it was a goddamn Wednesday.

I spent the day at work, and thankfully things had gotten back to some kind of normalcy. Marc was finally taking his cues from me, and seeing as we had the Game Developers Conference in a little more than a month, he was mostly just heads down with the rest of us, making sure everything we had in our playable demo was going to be in tip-top shape to show off to possible publishers. He knew the stakes now, and just wanted to put together the best possible product. That said, I was doing everything I could to ensure that nobody was working too much crunch time, and sending people home at a reasonable time on Valentine's Day was part of that. Marc had started dating someone, GG had a boyfriend and Astoria was going to be celebrating her first Valentine's Day with her husband. That meant I forbade anyone from being in the office past six. And despite the fact that I didn't have anywhere in particular to go, I included myself in that list.

I didn't want to go home, so I decided to head into downtown San Jose. Valentine's Day is usually the kind of night when single folk get crazy and connect with anyone anywhere. I didn't intend to get utterly drunk, but I figured being out with people might make whatever magic Mrs. Choi had cause less disruption in the world around me. So I headed for a bar.

There's a nice little neighborhood Irish tavern in downtown San Jose called Trials Pub. The place has got friendly bartenders, it's not too big and you always feel like you can have a spot of space that's your own. Dave, the bartender I know best, smiled at me as I came in. "You want your usual, Raf?"

"Yeah, but lemme get a plate of those excellent sausage rolls you guys make."

"You got it, brother."

And I settled in for what I thought would be a long night doing not a whole lot.

Jesus, I get a lot of shit wrong, don't I?

I figured since it was a Wednesday, there wouldn't be a lot of people swarming the bar, but apparently I underestimated the draw of people looking to find someone to fill their bed. And there were men and women by the droves trying to find someone to squish against. And I planned to just sit at the bar for the majority of the night. Sooner or later, either things would go right, or things would go wrong. I wasn't particularly invested in either option.

So imagine my surprise when I heard a familiar voice coming up behind me. "Rafael Corvis, why the fuck are you never home when I swing by your house?" I turned on my barstool to see Cori Choi, Mrs. Choi's oft-referenced granddaughter.

Cori was in her early 20s now, but the last time I'd seen her, she'd been a bubbly little high school senior, cute, but certainly not the gorgeous woman she had grown into. She was half-Korean and half-white, and she'd been into sports and athletics when she was in high school, but there had always been a very nervous energy around her, like she was terrified of getting too close to me, of spending time with me. I'd kind of always thought she didn't like me. She was dressed in a snug pair of jeans, a giant American Football t-shirt and a denim jacket that looked like it was so far out of fashion that it had come back into fashion again. She was short, peppy, curvy but also fit as all get out. Fuck, she was beautiful right from the start.

"Well, I'm always working my ass off these days, so that's why. Didn't your grandmother tell you that you should call and schedule something with me before you showed up?"

Cori's face fell just a little bit. "Oh. You haven't heard. Grandma passed away a couple of months ago."

"Oh god, no, I hadn't heard," I said, immediately moving to give her a hug. "I'm so sorry to hear that. She was an amazing woman."

"She really was, Raf," Cori said, a bittersweet smile spreading on her lips. "And she really liked you, you know. You were always her favorite neighbor. But now she's in heaven with Grandpa, and I'm sure they're having a blast causing trouble with every person they run into up there."

"You come up here to try and sell her old house?" I asked her as she moved to sit down on a barstool next to me. "I know it's been on the market for quite a while, but your grandmother set the asking price so damn high, you may have to lower it."

"Well, that's only one of the reasons I'm up here. I'm probably going to take it off the market for a little while at least while we try and get settled in."

"We?" I asked. "You get married while you were away at college?"

She laughed and blushed a little bit, slapping me on the shoulder. "No no. Picked up a girlfriend though. Here she comes now," Cori said to me as a scorching hot blonde walked down the bar towards us, holding two pints of Guiness, holding out one for Cori to take. "Raz, this is Rafael Corvis, the guy I was telling you about who lived next to my grandmother."