It's like Dusk 'Til Dawn, only good: "Spectral Evidence" by Victor Lavalle

Remember that old Richard Rodriguez/Quentin Tarantino movie where about halfway through, it stops being a movie about bank robbers and becomes a vampire movie? That's what Victor Lavalle's "Spectral Evidence" reminded me of, except that unlike that movie, all the parts of Lavalle's story work, both in part and as a whole.

It starts off like an unsuspecting, regular-old literary fiction story. We've got a woman who runs a psychic business. She knows she's a fraud. She prepares for each customer by telling herself they all know she's a fraud, too. That's her life as it's introduced to us, but then we get the plot-moving complication: a girl comes in and wants to know if her mother, now a few years dead, is still alive somewhere. The girl, Abby, wants to know a little more than that, actually. The form her question takes is the question we'd all like to know: "Is there something...after all this?" The psychic is especially affected by this, because the girl makes her think of her own daughter, Sonia, and what it would have been like for her daughter if the psychic had died when Sonia was a girl.

That's a good start, but then it gets weird and better. The psychic goes home, flashes back to thoughts of her daughter, during which we learn that Sonia killed herself not too long ago. The psychic had been estranged from Sonia for four years prior to Sonia jumping off a building. That's an interesting story development, and one that helps explain why the psychic connected with Abby so much. But there's a much bigger twist coming. Turns out the psychic actually does hear from her dead daughter Sonia. The woman who knows she is a fraud when she talks to customers about communications from beyond death actually hears from dead people.

But the funny thing about it is that her daughter only says one thing to her psychic mother. It's the same thing, over and over: It's too dark in here.

In the third act, Abby's father comes to the psychic's business. He is distraught, and there is a hint of violence brewing. It turns out Abby killed herself not long after leaving the psychic's business. When the psychic answered Abby's question about "is there something after this" with a simple yes, that seems to have maybe been the impetus for Abby committing suicide. Having been reassured that she wouldn't end with killing herself, Abby decided to go ahead with something she'd been considering a long time. Maybe Abby hoped to be reunited with her mother.

It's not long after this that the psychic starts to hear from Abby, too. The message is no different from the one from Sonia: It's too dark in here. As with Sonia, the psychic can hear the message, but she doesn't know what it means.

The psychic resolves to quit lying to people, but this doesn't mean what we'd expect it to mean. For the psychic, it doesn't mean she's going to stop telling people about the messages from the dead. Rather, she's going to tell people exactly what those messages say. The story thus becomes the first step in her resolution to tell the truth, no matter how disturbing that truth may be.

We, the reader, can try to puzzle out along with the narrator what "it's too dark in here" means, but I think the point is that if there is a message for the living from the dead, the living either are too daft to understand it or it's too frightening to be fit for our ears. So it's best to ignore it. It's a rather life-affirming message, in the "there's nothing but this life, so you'd better pay attention" kind of way. In this sense, this quick-hitting little story with two suicides and messages from the dead turns out to be all about how important life is.