Lost Among the Stars

by Paul Di Filippo

  —SaveBay.org

  Whew, that was some ride! After I rack my bike, we’ll go inside the Robert Ballard Building, where I’ll be fitted for a wetsuit and a Hollis Explorer Rebreather. We’re going to descend under the pristine waters of Narragansett Bay, where we’ll check in with students learning about the care and maintenance of undersea settlements. I understand we’ll meet one or two grad students who have committed to artificial gill implants …

  Thank Yemaja the Ballard building has showers and a sauna! Being underwater for hours, even in a heated Thermalution wetsuit, is no picnic. These students work hard, but they seem to love being on the cutting edge of mariculture. I certainly enjoyed learning how to telefactor those robots used out at sea to mine for manganese nodules.

  But the next part of our Providence experience, even though it takes place on the water, is pure luxury. You’ll note that we’re striding up the gangplank to board the M.V. Buddy Cianci, whose sleek lines, superhydrophobic hull coating and Wärtsilä natural-gas engines make the vessel totally green. It’s Rhode Island’s state-sponsored casino ship whose sizable profits are dedicated entirely to the benefit of the Bay. With stops in Warren, Bristol, Fall River, and Newport, the ship hosts a constantly rotating set of clients, who come for the gambling and entertainment. Tonight we’re going to enjoy the music of the Talking Kids, a group consisting of the children of the original Talking Heads, a famous Rhode Island-born band from the golden age of the 1980s. Malu Byrne, Robin and Egan Frantz, and the Harrison kids, Griffin, Aishlim and Dylan, have agreed to sit down to an exclusive pre-show interview.

  But right now I need to hoist a few caipirinhas!

  * * *

  March 14, 2014. Massachusetts’ decision to award a slot parlor license to Plainridge Racecourse, only 20 miles from RI’s Twin River Casino, means that many Massachusetts gamblers will soon no longer make the drive to Lincoln. The state expects to lose $422 million in revenue between 2015 and 2019 due to MA casino expansion.—Boston Globe

  Bom dia, viewers! It’s a bright, fresh morning here in Providence, and I am happy to report that your faithful correspondent, Lidia Carvalho, is showing no aftereffects of some strenuous cruise-ship partying, thanks to the product of one of our Brazilian sponsors, Bio-Manguinhos, the makers of Alkanull, the only hangover antagonist with over fifty percent DHM extract from the purest crops of Hovenia Dulcis.

  And mention of that economically important herb ties in nicely with today’s mission. We’re biking now to the site of the South Side Community Land Trust Biosphere in Providence. The SSCLT was founded in 1981, and celebrated its fiftieth anniversary just a couple of years ago. They’ve expanded in that time to rehab nearly one square mile of city land, which now is totally enclosed by a fourth-generation eco-structure derived from Amazon’s famous Seattle headquarters.…

  Let’s enter through the protective lock now. We’ll undergo a mild and swift decontamination process to make sure we aren’t bringing in any of the invasive pests that have plagued the region since climate change and global trade encouraged them.

  Ah, I wish you could smell that beautiful fragrance of living green things! Here scores of families grow produce for their own kitchens; small-scale commercial outfits raise food for local restaurants; and several test plots managed by the University of Rhode Island run trials on GMO vegetables that will withstand the changing climate conditions around the planet and help feed hungry millions.

  I don’t know about you, but I could use a snack. Let’s visit the Laotian temple located at the heart of the garden, where I believe the monks are getting a special version of their famous nime chow ready for us!

  * * *

  March 23, 2014. Following the surprise launch of a federal investigation into RI House Speaker Gordon Fox, political maneuvering at the state house has reached a high pitch over the question of choosing a new speaker. The favorite to win, House Majority Leader Nicholas Mattiello, is a conservative Democrat, like Fox and Murphy before him. Says progressive journalist Bob Plain, “it’s high time Rhode Islanders demand a change to the leadership team in the House of Representatives.”

  —RI Future

  Our all-too-brief time here in Providence, Rhode Island, sister city to our own São Vicente, now concludes where we began: at the State Capitol building, where we rack our bike and prepare to catch one of the fast and frequent intermodal trains to T. F. Green airport, which sees thousands of international travelers pass through its gates each day. But before we leave we simply have to venture inside the Statehouse, where legislators are currently in session. One thing we’ll notice is the important role of legislators of Asian descent. Due to the influx of climate-change refugees from Southeast Asia all across America, that ethnic group now accounts for nearly fifteen percent of the state’s population—up from a mere four percent two decades ago—and they have assumed a commensurately important role in the political structure.

  One procedure the Asian politicians have managed to make mandatory is the “year of serving” required of all state representatives and senators. Based on the Theravadan Buddhist tradition of youngsters living a monastic life for a short period before returning to worldly affairs, this practice requires legislators to devote a year of community service to the state before assuming their seat in the legislature. At first reluctant, politicians now praise the experience as putting them in better touch with their constituencies at all economic levels.

  Let’s pass through security now … Oh, this is too good to be true! Visiting the Asian community here in Rhode Island is Thailand’s champion game of go player Krit Taechaamnuayvit, and he’s taking on the artificial intelligence Crazy Stone VI in a public game. I understand there’s free snacks too. Ka Noom Huer Lo—that’s Fried Sesame Balls to the uninitiated—and Thai Boba Tea.

  It should be muito louco!

  Can it really be twenty-four years since the birth of Nonstop Magazine in 1993? The brainchild of Luis Ortiz (no relation to Hernan Ortiz from Medellin), Nonstop was part of the pre-internet zine explosion, and offered me a vibrant home. I had a non-fiction piece due to run in the final unpublished issue in fact. Maybe someday I’ll dig it out of my files and see how it reads after all this time!

  But Luis’s career did not end with the zine, since he has gone on to publish many great books, including groundbreaking studies of the work of artists Ed Emshwiller and Jack Gaughan. His ghostly anthology, The Monkey’s Other Paw, for which he commissioned this story, had the great premise of asking authors to riff on a classic spooky tale. You’ll see the name of the one I picked just below the title here.

  I always figured that ghost stories in modern, urban settings could be more powerful than those placed in earlier, recreated eras, and so I chose modern Manhattan as my venue. I wish “urban fantasy” still meant the work of John Crowley and not the work of Stephenie Meyer, because then I would happily apply that term to this tale.

  Ghostless

  (In honor of Dylan Thomas’s “The Followers”)

  I think that every Starbucks in the world together constitutes the saddest place on earth. These ubiquitous shops form one big nexus of sorrow, grief, misery, pain, regret, and weltschmerz, packetized and distributed globally. Why do I say this?

  1) The staff doesn’t want to be there.

  2) Everything is overpriced.

  3) The customers know and resent 1) and 2).

  4) The furnishings represent your own parlor if it had been designed by a committee of dead faux beatniks, and the mermaid logo gets steadily less sexy with every iteration.

  5) The customers are all in a hurry, except for the ones who have no lives and nothing else to do.

  6) The customers are made to feel guilty if they patronize any other coffee shop.

  7) When they are not feeling guilty, they are inclined to feel superior.

  8) Everyone listens to everyone else’s private conversations.

  9) The befouled toilets are always occupied.

  10) Not one soul
less Starbucks ever sprang up spontaneously to meet a need or a dream; they are all calculated investments.

  These conditions breed and attract sadness like Russian prisons breed TB.

  That’s why I hang out there.

  It’s how I find the people who need my services.

  The name I use these days is Ilona Myfawny, and I’m a matchmaker.

  Today I had a wide selection of potential clients.

  It was six o’clock on a winter’s evening. Thin, dingy rain spat and drizzled past the lighted street lamps on the far side of the windows. The pavements shone long and sodium-white.

  My venue was the Starbucks at NYU, on the southeast corner of Washington Square. Talk about ironic, right? A Starbucks located smack dab in the original American birthplace of coffeehouse culture. I find that the implicit irony lures patrons who are even more despondent than the usual run of customers at other branches. Although the extra-high ceiling and ornate white columns of the interior here do offset the claustrophobic, harshly lit prison vibe a tad. But on the whole, the equation is in my favor. Plus, the place is close to my own apartment.

  A petite blonde woman—dressed in H&M from head to toe and sitting alone with her back to the wall, crossed leg nervously jigging—compulsively tickled and stroked her smartphone, as if to cause it to jet out a desperate jackpot of hope like some tiny slot machine. Two male students hashed out their grim post-graduation prospects with the raw blind vigor of hyenas apportioning a carcass. A teaching assistant graded an infinite stack of exams like Sisyphus working his way up a vertical slope. An unshaven boho wannabe writer, hands poised over laptop keyboard, sought blank-eyed inspiration in a poster advertising the latest release from Putumayo. Like gas escaping from a fat dirigible, a Levi’d professor spouted off to a small coterie of smug ragged sycophants about how to fix the nation’s foreign policy. Two suits wearing the men inside them exchanged ticker-tape stock market factoids like robots on a car assembly line handing off unfinished engine blocks for reaming.

  I shook my head wearily, to snap out of my own funk. Sometimes the quiet desperation of my clients got to me. I couldn’t afford to grow callous or cynical. I had to keep my empathy fine-tuned and broadband. Otherwise, I’d never succeed in placing anyone with their perfect match.

  Across my own table I saw now a seated man. I knew him instantly as Captain Howard Updegrove, a former tugboat operator who had guided big liners into their docks on the Hudson, before his retirement. With his peacoated barrel torso, thick beard, and wild thatch roof of hair, he resembled a bear dressed up in human clothes.

  I ostentatiously put my phone on the table between me and the Captain, and adjusted my cordless headset. The phone registered no caller, but no one else needed to know that, so long as I seemed to be talking through it to someone.

  “Hello, Captain Updegrove. How are you feeling?”

  The Captain looked bemused. “Just fine—I suppose. Where are we?”

  “A coffee house in Greenwich Village.”

  “Where are all the flappers?”

  “Scant on the ground nowadays, Captain. I take it you’ve been dispossessed just recently.”

  “Yes, yes—Alex died this morning. Without him, there was no point in staying in the apartment.”

  “So you need a new home.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “See anyone here you fancy?”

  The Captain looked around critically. “Not really, no.”

  “Well, let’s just hang out a while then. I’m sure someone will turn up.”

  “‘Hang out?’”

  “Relax.”

  “Oh.”

  I stood up and pocketed my phone. “I’m just going to get myself a drink.”

  I didn’t offer to buy the Captain anything, and he seemed content.

  No one sat down at my table while I waited in line, although once or twice people hesitated over its availability. The Captain didn’t bother with them.

  I spent so much time at Starbucks, I had to go easy on the caffeine. Back at the table with a Peppermint Hot Chocolate, I kept my eye on the door.

  A dozen customers came and went before a likely candidate entered. Although I registered the man’s significance and suitability immediately, the Captain took no notice of him. But that was typical. The average person so seldom recognized who would make a good partner. That judgment took an expert such as myself.

  The guy wore unexceptional clothes: grey corduroy pants, a brown Eddie Bauer barncoat over a checked shirt. Rugged face. His salt-and-pepper hair was buzzed short. I watched him order a tall latte, then take a chair. While he sipped it, he looked ready to cry.

  Eventually Barncoat got up to leave. I waited three seconds after he got through the door, then said to the Captain, “Let’s go.”

  The Captain obligingly followed me outside.

  Barncoat was heading north. We lagged always a few yards behind him. The lousy weather had lessened the pedestrian traffic somewhat. I saw the sodden, blown scourings and street-wash of Manhattan, papers, rags, dregs, rinds, cigarette butts, sheets of bubblewrap, flap, float, and cringe along the gutters, hearing the sneeze and rattle of the bony subway through the sidewalk gratings.

  Barncoat stopped at a newsstand and bought a package of gum and a sports magazine. So far, so good. I had had him pegged for a candy bar purchase, but gum was close enough. He stopped outside a jewelry store and eyed the contents of the window as if seeing the bracelets and necklaces and rings worn by a numinous woman of his dreams. I had thought he’d zero in on a clothing store, so no bullseye, but good enough again.

  On Waverly Place he let himself into Number 122, a nice brownstone and brick multi-unit townhouse.

  The Captain and I waited outside in the light winter mist just long enough to give Barncoat a chance to get inside his apartment.

  “Do you see him, Captain Updegrove?”

  The Captain’s eyes had gone unfocused, like pools of opalescent smoke. “Yes, he’s sitting on a couch. He has a little box with buttons in his hand. He’s poking the buttons. There’s light and sound coming from some kind of radio device.”

  “Jesus, Captain, didn’t Alex have a TV?”

  “Alex only cared to read. I was with him for many years.”

  “Well, is TV a dealbreaker?”

  “No, I used to like the movies. Chaplin especially.”

  “Good. What can you sense about our man?”

  “His name is—is Bob. Bob Hazel. He works on a boat—the ferry to Liberty Island!”

  I hadn’t heard the Captain excited yet, and was gratified now to catch the tremor of tentative connection in his voice. That meant I was doing my job well.

  “Bob isn’t watching his TV anymore. He’s bending forward and hanging his head between his knees. I do believe he’s sobbing like a baby.”

  “Okay, Cap, that’s your cue. Go to him now. Happy harbors!”

  Captain Updegrove lightly ascended the stoop and passed through the door of 122 Waverly Place without opening it, and suffused with the sense of serenity and peace that always came with a match, I was alone.

  As alone as I ever get in a city full of ghosts.

  * * *

  Five years ago, I had been majoring in Computational Science at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, a nice boring young woman who had no aspirations other than maybe to optimize Amazon’s recommendation algorithms. The most exciting thing that had ever happened to me was when, as a teenager, I won a free trip to Disney World. Years later I would wryly recall how much I had enjoyed the Haunted Mansion.

  Then, in my senior year at Stevens, I turned twenty-one and began to hear sourceless voices. I knew schizophrenia often set in around that age, and I was convinced I had the disease.

  I was too scared to see a doctor or talk to my folks. So I read everything about schizophrenia that I could find online. That was when I noticed something odd and asymptomatic.

  The voices I heard weren’t threatening or paranoid
. Their talk didn’t even relate to me. No one was ordering me to do something self-destructive or dangerous. It was all mild persiflage about other people, people I didn’t even know. Almost like bland gossip in some celestial chatroom.

  And then I began to see the origin of the voices, waveringly at first, then with more and more solidity, and I gradually realized and admitted, after a long period of denial, that I had ghosts instead.

  I’m not sure I wouldn’t rather have gone with schizophrenia. At least science has a medicine for that, and people comprehend your condition.

  But rather, both reassuringly and dismayingly, I had suddenly become a sensitive, a medium, a channeler, a speaker to the dead.

  Looking as solid as you or me, but imperceptible to anyone else, the ghosts would manifest to me unpredictably, anywhere, at any time. I might be in the campus library, on the toilet, in the shower, in a theater, attending class, riding the subway in Manhattan—and suddenly, I’d have ghostly company, ectoplasmic presences tagging along like Mary’s little lamb.

  The ghosts all seemed to be idealized versions of their living selves, or sampled composites drawn from points along their timelines. There were no drowned or burned or starved or shot or stabbed or hanged or poisoned or partially eaten or nursing-home-attenuated men and women. The ghosts mostly presented themselves as mature and vital adults. Not to say they were without their eerie qualities.

  A flat, long girl, sniveling. A silent man and woman, dressed in black and carrying wreaths. A young man with a handsome, nasty face. A woman with gold hair and two gold teeth in front. A round, friendly owlish housewife in an apron and bearing a knife.

  But I can’t neglect the kids. There were lots of kids, of various ages. Dying young, they had no adult personas to display.

  I remember one baby in a phantom stroller, with such an ancient face …

  When the ghosts finally materialized to me, I immediately tried talking to them, asking them what they wanted, and why me? But they seemed unable to hear me. The communication was all one-way.