The landlord reacted to the latest break-ins by replacing the bulbs in most of the motion-activated lamps, by restoring the plywood barrier over the back door using even more eight-penny nails than before, and by installing a cheap, battery-powered alarm system which, if set off, would make a noise likely to be heard by no one but the vandals themselves, owing to the isolation of the house and the nighttime near-desertion of the road on which it sat.
*
Although the repeated invasions and ongoing deterioration of the house were upsetting, everything else in my afterlife continued to improve: Early spring had arrived, and the surge of green growth cheered me even though I could neither touch it, nor smell it, nor feel the warmth of the sun that drew it from the earth. Also, not only could I now leave the house whenever I wanted and follow Professor Shallow’s ghost path to the college but, as a result of a lot of blind, persistent thrashing around, I had blundered onto a couple of short ghost paths of my own. One of these routes dead-ended at a stretch of rocky, wave-pounded ocean beach, while another wound me through an adjacent town to Fred Muttkowski’s organic pig farm.
I first came upon Fred in his writing pen, the soles of his shit-caked rubber boots propped against the cinderblock wall and a black laptop computer balanced on his knees as he tapped away at the most recent of his many unpublished novels. Seemingly spellbound, an audience of porkers watched him through the horizontal bars of the latched gate. It was not long before I realized Fred would make the perfect ghostwriter for the story I wanted to tell—though I almost immediately gave up on the idea because I had no means to communicate with him and did not yet know I’d eventually find one, as my first meeting with Ben was still a long way off. During most of my early visits to the farm, Fred served me as little more than unsuspecting company and a source of scarce amusement. His life and frustrations were both my inspiration and my entertainment.
*
During this same stretch of time, I had begun visiting Riverside, unsuccessfully haunting the sidewalks for any sign of my former housemates and desperately searching for a path across the river to the Blood Eagles’ clubhouse. Then, a day or two after the graffiti attack on my home, I ran into Professor Shallow. By coincidence we met above our college among low clouds that streamed past like a herd of phantom buffalo—and he actually smiled when he saw me. It occurred to me then that I was not the only lonely ghost in the world; Professor Shallow just made more of an effort to hide his sense of isolation.
He said, “Thumb, come with me. There is someone who wants to meet you, though I really don’t why.”
“A ghost, you mean? Another ghost?”
“Of course a ghost. How could he be anything else?”
He led me on a long journey of many bends, twists, and changes of altitude. Sometimes we doubled back to circle a landmark we’d gone past once or even twice before; at other points the path took us directly to the ground, where we “walked” by swinging our legs even though we could have drifted along like fog if we’d wanted.
At last, we descended to a gravel road that wound through dense woods ten or so miles north of my house. This thoroughfare was badly rutted from the earlier spring rains and snowmelt runoff and its only dwellings were a scattering of forlorn trailers set among the permanent shadows of the forest. We glided on and soon, beside an ancient cemetery enclosed by a wrought-iron fence, we came upon a single-story church building set a short distance from the road among thigh-high dead thistle and the dry stalks of goldenrod. A heavy chain and padlock sealed the double front doors, while the lines of windows along both sides of the structure were shuttered with plywood. Hanging from the wall next to the entrance was a transparent box, which during better times would have displayed orders of worship and other important messages, but which now held only an inhospitable warning similar to the ones my landlord had nailed to my house.
“Oh, too bad,” I said.
“Good for us, though,” Professor Shallow said. “It makes for a peaceful haunt. Gib found it.”
“Is Gib the person I’m meeting?”
“He’ll be here soon I think. I first ran into him at the end of a wormhole a few weeks back; we began talking, and he brought me here. An older man. Owned and ran a small machine shop while he was alive. Let’s go in.”
Because of the boarded windows, the church was dark as dusk inside—though as ghosts, our ability to see was undiminished by the lack of light. After prickling our way through those thick front doors, we crossed a narrow foyer and entered a sanctuary divided by twin rows of a dozen wooden pews, all of them bolted to the green-and-white tile floor. The altar had been removed and the chancel was just a blank, stage-like space, save for an enclosure with some benches at the back that no doubt had served as the choir box.
Professor Shallow said, “This emptiness appeals to me. The silence. It feels like home. If I could, I’d move out of my office—did I tell you I can’t stand the woman who’s moved in since my departure?—and start haunting here for the remainder of my dreaming time.”
Just then a third voice joined our conversation. In a Maine accent the unseen spirit said, “Don’t forget who found this place, Virgil. If you’re planning on moving in I might have to charge you some rent.” A moment later a white-haired ghost materialized on the front steps of the church and coasted inside. My first impression was that there was something out of kilter with his appearance. Although the depth of the channels in his broad, ruddy face suggested that at the time of his death he’d been close to as old as a person can get, the rest of him seemed to date from an earlier era—one in which he’d been healthy and strong in spite of carrying nearly three-hundred pounds on a frame no more than an inch or two over six feet tall. It appeared that he had assembled his ghostly avatar from the bodies he’d inhabited during two separate periods of his life. He was clothed in the illusion of a yellow polo shirt, jeans, and the sort of navy-blue, canvas slip-on sneakers that old people buy in department stores. He gave me a wide smile.
“I never introduced myself the last time you and I talked. I’m Gibbous Waxing; everybody calls me Gib.” His words confused me.
“The last time we talked?”
“Yes. And did you find out who murdered you yet?”
I stared at him until finally he laughed and, in the stony rasp of that first voice I’d heard at the bottom of the underground river, he said, Thumb Rivera. Did you find out who murdered you yet?
“Jesus!” I slid several steps back from him.
“It’s a simple question,” he said in his ordinary voice. He was no longer smiling. “And please don’t be taking the Lord’s name in vain.”
“You’re the … under the water, the … ”
“I was your messenger, yes. So, did you, or not? Find out?”
“No. And who gave you that message? To give to me?”
Gib shrugged. “The words just came to me at the bottom of the river—almost like I was reading them off the rocks—and I somehow knew I was meant to say them to you. That’s how it goes with messengers, I think; we don’t always know the why or what of the message.”
“Well it must have come from someone. The message must have.”
“Maybe,” he said. “Who do you suppose it was?” He was smiling again.
Professor Shallow said, “You were my messenger, Thumb. About my car crash. Do you know who put you up to it?”
“But that was different. I was just telling you what I already knew.”
Gib said, “I don’t think that’s so different.”
The professor said, “And we can’t expect anything that happens in a dream to make a lot of sense in any case.”
Gib smiled at him—I wondered if his teeth in real life had been that perfect—and to me he said, “Did Virgil tell you he doesn’t think he’s dead? That he believes he’s really in some kind of a brain-dead dream? That you and I and everything around us are just part of some hallucination he’s having?”
“He has.”
“I
am,” said the professor. “You are.”
“He’s coming around, though,” said Gib. “He’s nowhere near as certain about it as he was when I first met him a while back. I think it might have something to do with meeting you—but his certainty has been cracking lately; I can see it in his face whenever we talk about it. Good thing for him we’ll be around to help put him back together when he finally crumbles like a brown-shelled Humpty Dumpty.”
The professor gave him a humorless smile. “What will finally happen is that I’ll die. And when I do, you and Thumb will die with me along with everything else I’ve ever thought and never bothered to write down.”
Gib nodded at him. Then to me he said, “Anyway, you and I still haven’t met properly.” He extended a meaty-looking hand, which struck me as weird because ghosts are no more capable of touching than two beams of light. When he saw my hesitation, he said, “What’s wrong, friend? Put her there,” forcing me to play along by lifting my own illusory hand. He then waved his hand through and through mine several times, at the same time saying, “This is the way we do it here in heaven. It’s the angel’s handshake—get used to it.” My thoughts scattered once more in confusion; I looked at Virgil, who nodded but said nothing.
Gib said, “It’s polite if you wave your own hand, too; you and the other soul make a blur of your hands and it shows the good will you feel toward one another.”
Still looking at Professor Shallow, I finally asked, “Do you think we’re in heaven, Mr. Waxing?”
“Call me Gib. And absolutely that’s where I think we are. It’s just that heaven is a more complicated place than we ever thought when we were alive.”
“Even after that message you delivered to me at the bottom of the river? About falling through to a blacker death, and all? Not to mention … just take a look at your surroundings. We’re in a boarded-up building on a dirt road lined with trailers. Heaven? Seriously?”
Gib said, “Of course it’s heaven! You can fly, can’t you? That makes you a fucking angel. Sure, there’s a bunch of levels. This would no doubt be one of the lowest ones, and you probably wouldn’t want to fall any lower than you are right now. But still … ”
“Yeah, I can fly, sort of,” I argued. “But not to where I want, whenever I want. And in a heartbeat I’d trade flying for being able to see the people I care about, and have them see me. Do you get to see the people you want to see?”
“I haven’t managed that, no.”
“Well, what’s flying compared to that? And if we’re angels, like you say, where the hell is God? Or Jesus? Or anybody? Where is all the goddamn information?”
“God will come in his good time,” Gib said. “He will come when we truly need Him to come. And the ‘goddamn information’ is right under your nose, if you’re willing to accept it.” He was still smiling as he said this.
“Okay, maybe this is not actually hell, even though it feels like it to me. But if it’s not, it has to be purgatory.”
Gib said, “I don’t know anything about any purgatory. But in my life I think I’ve probably gotten a lot closer to hell than you have, and this ain’t it. Go through a war like I did over in Europe and hear your buddy lying with his leg blown off and screaming for his mother. See a child lying dead in a ditch. Or even without war—try moldering in a nursing home for a decade before you die. That’s what I went through. I’d had a stroke and nothing worked anymore. Next to any of those things, all of this is a fucking piece of cake.
“Listen, Thumb: We’re dead, yet we can move around; we fly. Best of all, we think, and we hope. And nothing on earth can hurt us anymore. Not for the rest of eternity. What a miracle that all is. How can you or Virgil or anyone say that God isn’t looking out for us?”
I said, “What about your family? In a real heaven, you’d get to look down on them somehow.”
“You think so? Why? Just so I could feel terrible about all their earthly sorrows, which I’d be helpless to do anything about? That would be cruel. No; I’ll see them sometime after their own days of suffering are over. All rivers run to the sea; all waters meet. You just need to have some faith, my young friend. I will help you with that, if you like. But of course, only if you’re interested. I’m not a preacher, or anything.”
I looked at Virgil. “Does he convince you?”
“You know he doesn’t. But I enjoy hearing what he has to say—which of course is only an expression of thoughts rattling around inside my own mind.” Then he added, “For now though, gentlemen, I’m starting to feel a bit weak; I think it’s time to head back home for a dip in the river.”
I felt exhausted myself. “You’re right, I think. It’s almost time to swim with the dark fish.”
Gib said, “Not me; not yet. I’m going to stay right here for as long as I can; I just can’t stand that nursing home. I live in an air-conditioning duct in my old room, and my place in bed has been replaced by a wheezing corpse a lot like I once was; I don’t care for his company. It does get lonely here, though, with no one around. Here in the church, I mean. When will I see you two gentlemen?”
“When I can,” said Virgil. “And if I can. But for now … ” Before he could finish, Virgil faded and disappeared.
I smiled at Gib. “When I can,” I said, echoing Virgil. I couldn’t resist adding, “I bet you never imagined paradise would be such a lonely place.” As soon as I had spoken, dusk descended, and I fell into the river.
*
One day not long after my first visit to the abandoned church, I was haunting my vandalized house when I heard the distant, flubbering roar of a Harley-Davison. I drifted through the front door to wait by the road and a couple of minutes later Mantis’s Softail rounded the curve. When he coasted to a stop at the mouth of my driveway, the raked front wheel of his machine was cutting through my right shin at an angle. Boots against the ground to balance the bike, Mantis sat staring at the house as the idling engine popped and grumbled, his whiskered lower lip bulging, ape-like, with a wad of chew. After a moment, he bent his head to the side and spat a brown puddle onto the blacktop. Then he returned his attention to the house.
Although my ghostly vision allowed me to see all sides of him at once from right where I stood, out of long human habit I felt the need to look him over from every physical angle. I drew my leg from his chrome spokes and began to circle him slowly, all the while resisting the urge to scream in his ear. The consequences, whatever they might be, would almost have been worth it. Not only had Mantis’s old cut been re-colored with the complete Blood Eagles insignia—they had made him a full-patch member in a shockingly short period of time—but there, almost hidden beneath the long braid in which he had tied his hair, was a tiny but significant black rectangle bearing the white initials ITCOB.
I Took Care Of Business. And, who had that business been?
Just as I came back around to face him again, he spat another stream of filth that passed through me on its trajectory to the ground. I placed my face so close to his that the tips of our noses intersected, and in my ghost voice I asked, “So who was it you killed, Mantis? Was it me, you bastard? Weren’t you the one standing behind me with that gun?”
He didn’t answer, of course. His blue eyes were a snowfield, and his face remained as blank as the moon. I saw not a clue as to what ghosts of feelings might be flickering inside of him; in all likelihood, there was nothing turning in there at all.
“Where’s Cricket, you son of a bitch? Is that why you did it? Or was it just so you could become a one-percenter again?”
Even though I knew he couldn’t hear me, I had by then worked myself into a rage, and his lack of a response only infuriated me even more. I was giving serious thought to actually speaking—sacrificing my afterlife to give him a scare he would never forget—when suddenly he twisted the throttle, popped the bike into gear, and rolled right through me as he roared off down the road. I stood watching after him until the rumble of his machine had completely faded away.
*
; After that I flew off to the abandoned church on the same twisting route the professor and I had taken the time before. When I reached the gravel road, I hurried along it as quickly as I could. As I was passing one of the battered trailers, a yellow mutt barreled toward me barking, the hair spiking from the nape of his neck. It was obvious the dog sensed my presence, and his attack scared me at first. But after he had run right through me, whirled, and passed through me again without stopping, it became clear he didn’t know exactly where I stood; it was likely I registered as nothing more than a vague but threatening vapor drifting past his yard. A shirtless, black-bearded man appeared at the screen door of the trailer as the dog continued to turn circles in the road, barking wildly. “Toto,” the man called. It was then that I got an idea.
“Toto,” I said in my ghost voice. “You yellow piece of shit.” At this, the dog lifted his head, backed up a pace or two and let out a frantic howl, proving that I had reached him with my tone if not my words. This made me wonder whether all dogs, throughout all of time, whenever they barked at “nothing,” might actually have been reacting to the invisible shadows and dog-whistle voices of ghosts.
“Toto!” yelled the man. “What’s the matter with you?”
American Ghost Page 11
