American Ghost

by Paul Guernsey

  Each organic Muttkowski Berkshire enjoyed six months, more or less, of indolent, oblivious pleasure at the farm, followed by a long, dark, anxious ride in the butcher’s truck, which itself was followed by … Fred, at least recently, could not help but view the entire process as a metaphor for human life. Many human lives, in any case. His, certainly. He imagined himself at the truck-ride stage….

  You could say that after twenty years, he was burned out on pigs. But beyond that, an even deeper source of torment for him was his chronic failure in an ongoing fight to once and forever bury his earlier writing ambition, a fruitless addiction that made him feel like a bankrupt gambling addict who continued to chase his losses. The urge to play with words—that sickening cocktail of compulsion and desire—was as irresistible as it was frustrating, even maddening, and he was often helpless against it.

  Fred’s barn “office” was an empty farrowing pen before which curious pigs, pining for the reassuring taste of his rubber boots, would gather to observe him through the horizontal bars of a closed steel gate, but could not enter. Inside the pen, Fred kept a laptop computer and an old, rolling office chair. Whenever the wretched writing itch became too powerful to resist, he would take up the computer, sit down in the dusty chair and, after a pause, begin to spread words across the screen. For the next hour, more or less, he would type, pause, then type again, and all the time he typed, he would mindlessly, furiously, twirl in his chair, first clockwise, then counter, while during each pause, he would propel the chair around the pen using his booted soles to frog-kick off the gate and the cinder-block walls. After a few seconds, or a minute, Fred would stop kicking, give the chair a violent twirl or two, and type again.

  Watching his performance, the audience of pigs would fall almost reverently silent, completely still save for the continual oscillations of their rubbery snouts. From time to time, there would come a mysterious outburst of muted grunting before a hush fell over them again. Mostly, Fred forgot the pigs. But occasionally, he would return to himself and remember them; he would look up, almost startled at the sight of so many expectant, twitching nose-disks with their nostrils like black eyes boring at him through the bars. Then, as a way of at once amusing and mocking himself, he would stop his twirling and kicking and writing and, with one hand gripping the laptop, the other gesturing in the air, he would read them a paragraph or two. When he had finished reading and, depending on his mood as well as on how he felt about the train of words he had excreted so far that day, he would either smile or chuckle, or just simply shake his head, or sometimes—rarely—burst into laughter. After that, he would resume his caroming and his keyboarding until he reached the point at which he felt completely emptied. Only then could he allow himself to set the computer aside and go back to doing useful work; slowly, feeling dazed and slightly displaced in time and space, he would release himself from the farrowing pen, work his way through the dispersing throng of swine, and return to the uncomplicated but exacting algebra of organic pork production.

  Every few years, after much revising, Fred would actually finish—maybe “abandon” is a better word—one of his lengthy writing projects. At that point, at an hour when Cici was not at home—most days, this was almost any hour at all—he would carry his laptop into the house, connect it to one of the several printers that Cici used for her real estate business, and run off a single, several-hundred-page copy of his work. Once complete, the loose, white sheets of the pristine manuscript would cool for time on the kitchen table while Fred sat with his stocking feet propped on the cushion of a second wooden seat, staring blankly out the window and bending his forearm with almost metronomic regularity as he drank a glass or three of bourbon. Once back in the barn, he would return the computer to its case atop the rolling chair and add the manuscript to the tall pile of older manuscripts that he stored in the corner of his “office,” with a flat rock from the river on top to keep the paper tower from collapsing. By the time I “met” him, the manuscript stack in the “creep,” or piglet crib, of Fred’s farrowing pen had grown higher than the steel rail beneath which the baby pigs would flee to avoid being crushed whenever their colossal mother crashed onto her side to feed them. The paper pile was enshrouded in pig dust and cobwebs, thereby all but ensuring that neither his wife nor his daughters would go snooping through it to find out what he had been up to.

  After a writing project had been printed, bourboned, stacked, and stoned, and its fossilization in a sediment of pig powder had begun, Fred would promise himself that he had written his last—that he was once and forever free and that, from here on out, he would be content to enjoy the play of words solely in his mind, without the obsessive mania and the compulsive agony of having to squeeze them out onto paper or a computer screen. After all, what did it matter if words were impermanent, when there was no one to hear them but pigs?

  But, of course, the computer and the chair would remain in the farrowing pen along with the dust-covered paper skyscraper—he would never quite get around to taking them away—and sooner or later, in a month, or a day, Frederick H. Muttkowski would find himself sitting down again as if out of nothing more than nostalgia. He would give the office chair an experimental twirl or two and, as rumor spread and pigs began gathering at the gate, he would kick himself playfully from wall to wall, the computer yawning on his lap. After a time, he would stop kicking long enough to type a glowing line, and then another—and then delete it all and replace it with something else. Twirl, write, ricochet, replace—and occasionally, recite; meanwhile, from beyond the metal bars, a periodic wave of grunted gossip seemed to relay and reconfirm the tragicomic news that Fred Muttkowski, recovering writer, had fallen off the wagon yet again.

  *

  By now you must be wondering whether I am able to tap directly into Fred’s unedited thoughts. After all, I do appear to know him thoroughly, inside and out. Well, the answer is I can’t; more than that, no ghost, as far as I’m aware, is able to read anyone’s mind. Many ghosts, like most people, aren’t able even to read their own. In fact, I have never spoken to Fred and, not only has he never spoken to me, but he doesn’t believe I exist.

  One reason I know so much about him is that I’ve got the interest. Along with the fact that I don’t have access to many other living people—my spirit paths tend to lead me into bleak and abandoned places—Fred, as a writer, even a failed specimen of the genre, is something I’ve always aspired to emulate. In spite of Fred’s own ambivalent feelings about his often-excruciating writing compulsion, it heartens me, even strikes me as heroic, to watch him continuing his work in the face of almost certain rejection. I especially love it when he reads to us—to me, and to his pigs—his voice rich with poetry and quavering with defiance and wounded pride. In this doggedness, this angry insistence on doing and being with little hope of any payment beyond further discouragement and humiliation, I find comforting parallels in my own struggle to make a place for myself in the seeming senselessness of the afterlife.

  From a practical standpoint, since I’ve got nothing but time on my hands most days, during the brief months I’ve haunted Fred’s farm I’ve enjoyed more opportunities for undetected observation, and for overhearing private things, than Fred’s own daughters have had in their entire lives. In some ways I already know him better than they ever will. For just one example, I understand that when Fred stands behind his barn waving his arms and shouting to himself about being in hell, he is thinking about much more than a withered writing dream and a business he no longer cares for; these together constitute no more than a passable purgatory. He is distressed at least as much by the steady, unstoppable fade of his family life, which is nearly complete now that his daughters have moved out on their own. Though they still drop by occasionally, both twins—once enthusiast farm girls—are vegans now, as well as city women with a strong distaste for dirt, and an almost pathological intolerance for odors.

  Cici, for her part, about five years before I “met” her husband, had herself aband
oned farm work and taken up real estate not just as a way to pay some bills, but also to escape from the muck and the blood, of which she had finally gotten her fill. She was good at the new job, she enjoyed it, and it did not bother her a bit that it required her to buy, and to wear, fine clothes, a little jewelry, and to smell nice, as well. Hers was now a world of meetings and restaurant meals and socializing. Fred often was asleep by the time Cici returned home at night; she was usually still sleeping when he arose at first light. In order to avoid disturbing one another with their conflicting schedules, they now slept in separate beds, Fred, a few months before I knew him, finally having moved into one of the girls’ abandoned rooms. But that apparently had not been a complicated decision as, even prior to Fred’s relocation, it had been as least two years since he and Cici had last exchanged any touches more intimate than a dry kiss.

  I should clarify here that this last is a piece of information that I would rather have done without; it is something I can never look at Fred without thinking about, and if there were some way of unknowing it, I would. And it is also important for you to keep in mind that any highly personal facts about Fred that you read in this book are not just gossip on my part; they had to have been approved—or at least overlooked—by Fred himself. After all, he’s in control of the editing, a soul-crushing process that I, as a helpless creative spirit, have been altogether defenseless against. In fact, there is no guarantee that anything you read here was not put in by Fred, rather than by me. Passages that should especially inspire your suspicion at times are any of the ones containing rhymes, or a lot of alliteration.

  *

  Sometimes, in the morning, Fred would stand at the yawning rear entrance to the barn, his gaze traveling up and down that daunting length and, as an adoring mob of pigs gathered to gnaw his rubber boots and chew the legs of his jeans, he would feel like weeping. But then, a part of Fred’s mind would squirm loose, and fly free, and it would rise into the sky past the tops of the trees. His mind would make dizzying circles with the eyes of a bird, looking down on his life, grown so sublimely absurd.

  Rather than crying, Fred would begin to laugh. His laughter would start with a couple of gasping hiccups that took him by surprise and, as his shoulders shook with increasing rhythm, it would quickly build to a gusty, obscene gale, at the height of which Fred would throw back his head and yell, Boo fucking hoo!

  Often, his laughter would become convulsive and he would end up staggering about, dragging pigs from his legs as he went, sometimes even having to sit down on an overturned bucket—a risky thing to do, because on more than one occasion, while he was nearly helpless with self-mocking mirth, a scrum of swine had nudged and tugged him off his seat, and into the dirt.

  CHAPTER 7

  “What do you mean, you saw me die?” The edge on Professor Shallow’s voice suggested that he thought I was lying. Arms across his chest, his face twisted with an emotion that might have been anger or disgust or perhaps the onset of horror, he stood staring at me. But having been silent for so long, I suddenly found it hard to talk. It was as if I were so full of words struggling to escape, they had all tangled in a writhing, misfiring heap. As he waited for me to form a sentence, his upper lip curled back and his eyes began to glow like the cracks in a furnace. I was afraid he would try to repel me with another of his gruesome explosions, or worse yet fly off into the sky and abandon me again. But suddenly the flames in his eyes dimmed and his expression softened. He surprised me by saying, “All right. You’re new at this, I know. Let’s just take our time then, shall we? Let’s sit down somewhere.”

  “Okay,” I managed to say.

  He looked up into one of the bare maple trees that rose high above my back roof, and he pointed. “How about up there?” Before I could answer, he had sprung to the middle of the tree and settled his ass against one of the more horizontal branches. Without looking down at me he said, “Come up. There’s no reason to confine yourself to the ground anymore.” So I rose into the tree and took a spot facing him on another branch.

  “It’s odd,” Professor Shallow said, once we were sitting across from one another, “That even though we are absolutely weightless, with no need to sit, we still feel like sitting.”

  “That’s because we miss everything we did while we were alive.”

  He gave me a crooked smile. “Is that what you think? In any case, please finish the story you started to tell me.”

  I said, “I thought you remembered. Your accident, I mean. The way you acted, I thought you were blaming me. You died right there.” I pointed to the broken power pole. “Just about a year ago, in fact. That’s why there are two power poles together; your car cracked the first one just about in half—it was bent over your roof like a boomerang—and later they had to saw it off and set another one in right next to it. The road was icy and you were going fast; that’s why it happened.”

  After a moment he shook his head several times and in a near whisper he said, “I’m not dead.”

  “You don’t think you’re dead? What do you think that wreath is for? You stare at it every time you’re here. Someone who knew you came by and put it up there a few days after you were killed.”

  “It’s just a snarl of vines, and I don’t know what it was for. I have wondered, but I never thought it had anything to do with me. This is only one of a number of places I seem compelled to revisit in my dreams.”

  “You think you’re dreaming?”

  “Did you see the person who put it up? The wreath?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Well.” He looked across the road to the snow-mounded marsh grass. His face was troubled. “I can believe there was a car crash. Serious injury would explain this twilight world I find myself in. But I’m not dead; if I were, I would have no consciousness.” He looked at me. “I don’t believe in those sorts of things. Spirits and … ”

  “Look, like I said, I was the first to find you. I heard the crash and I came out of the house, and you were already gone. Your window was shattered, and I stepped up onto the snow bank to feel your throat and you didn’t have a pulse. I couldn’t bring myself to look at your face, but I never have forgotten the awkward way your arm was sticking through the steering wheel. The wheels of your car were still spinning in the air and I had to reach across your chest to turn off the engine.” I added, “I’m sorry. I wish there had been something, you know.”

  He seemed to shudder. Then, speaking more to himself than to me he said, “Other ghosts I’ve dreamed of might call you a ‘messenger.’ A spirit meant to tell me something I needed to hear. But I don’t buy into messengers anymore than I believe in ghosts of any kind. Of course, I’ve heard from a few, but I don’t necessarily swallow everything they tell me. Often, not anything. And I’ve got no reason to believe your story—or to think you’re any more real than any other ghost.”

  “I don’t know about being a messenger. No one’s told me to tell you anything. I haven’t even talked to any other ghosts except for a messenger of my own, one time. And I thought I needed your help, not the other way around. But I’m no dream—I can tell you that. I’m at least as real as you are, from where I sit. Listen, though; these other ghosts you’ve seen. Tell me about them.”

  The professor was looking down at the snow that swirled at the base of the maple tree.

  “A terrible car crash,” he said. “That would make sense. It’s likely I am dying.”

  “My name is Thumb Rivera.”

  “Your name is Thumb?”

  “It’s a nickname. I prefer it. My real name is Danny. I was murdered.”

  “You were murdered?”

  “I was hanging with some bad people. I always looked at it like I was doing research for a book I wanted to write but, in reality, I don’t think I was that good of a person to begin with. I guess I got carried away with the role I was playing.”

  “What kind of book?”

  “I don’t know. A novel, maybe. Anyway, I was shot in the back of the hea
d. I never saw who pulled the trigger, or even heard the shot; they told me it was one of my friends. My messenger said … ”

  “Who told you that you were shot in the back of the head? Your messenger?”

  “No, the guy who wanted me killed. Just before I was. He told me not to turn around to see who was going to kill me, but I should have done it anyway. My courage failed me, I guess. Now it’s eating me up, not knowing.”

  “Extraordinary,” Professor Shallow said after a moment.

  “So I was hoping you could help me, Professor, because I’ve got this thing my messenger told me I have to do, this investigation into my murder, but I can’t even get away from my own house to start working on it. I need to move around in the world. Like you can, apparently.”

  He said, “Do you want to know why I wouldn’t let you come near me, those other times you called to me? Even though this is all a dream in which I know nothing can do me any harm? It wasn’t because I blamed you for my ‘death.’ It was because I used to see you here sometimes—you and your sketchy-looking friends, going in and out of this house. It was clear you weren’t up to any good—that you were a gang of lowlifes and criminals. My guess was that you all were dealing drugs. And I certainly never pegged you as any kind of undercover novelist.”

  “My disguise must’ve been pretty good,” I said ruefully.

  “I always did feel bad for that young woman. She looked like she could have done better than a bunch of thugs like you.”