“No fucking,” he’d been told upon entering Emerald City for the first time. Keller had found that hilarious. Take away a man’s freedom, take years of his life (if not the whole thing), all his material possessions, and you expect him not to fuck the pain away? You had to be out of your mind.
So he fucked as much as he could get away with. And when he woke up after his trip over the railing to find himself still in Emerald City, he expected to continue.
But ghosts, as it turns out, can’t fuck. Can't touch each other at all. And it’s a fact both of them lament.
She sits in his old cell on death row (her old cell, originally, she likes to correct) and crochets endlessly. He doesn’t know where she gets the stuff. Most of them are limited to whatever was on them at the time of death. But Shirley has needles and yarn, enough to fill the whole prison with reams of color, and she seems determined to do exactly that.
“Going back out?” she asks cheerfully. She’s not restricted to the cell, but she never lived in Em City, so she’s got no reason to go.
“For awhile. You still gonna be here when I get back?”
“For awhile.” The script never changes. Nothing in Oz ever does. The routine is all they have.
---
He asked her once why she was still hanging around. “You gonna wait til everyone who convicted you keels over? The governor? Your husband?”
She shook her head. It rolled around unpleasantly where the bones in her neck are broken forever. “Honey, I don’t care about any of that. What’s done is done.”
“Then what?”
She smiled at him. Spread her hands. “Where else am I going to go?”
---
This time, though, the script does change. This time, she says, "Bring me something back."
He hovers in the doorway. "Sure. What do you want? Coffee? Cigarettes? A million bucks? One-way ticket to Thailand?" They have control over the physical world, but only a little bit, and only sometimes. Not enough to spirit anything away (so to speak).
She thinks for a minute. "Bring me back a story."
---
He drifts out into the hallway to meet the others. Not that he wants to – he just doesn’t have a choice. They're always there, waiting, no matter what.
“Chris,” Vern Schillinger greets him with a smug look. The Aryans from the mailroom fan out around him on either side like human wings, glaring at Keller. No reason for any of them to be here either, he thinks, if I’m dead too. “Mind if we join you?”
“Doesn’t seem to matter if I do, does it Vern?” Old habits die hard, he supposes. Without someone to follow, what are any of them, really?
“No,” Vern agrees. He brushes invisible lint off his Macbeth costume, smoothing over the never-drying wet patch of blood over his heart. “Well, come on. We don’t have all eternity.” He laughs.
They pass through the gates.