The Saturday Night Ghost Club

by Craig Davidson

  It so happened that a tow truck came along shortly thereafter. The driver saw the sheared rail, the gaping hole, the man lying unconscious beside it. Calvin was airlifted to the hospital. His cranial injuries were so severe that the surgeon put him into a medically induced coma. When Calvin woke weeks later, his hair had gone from brown to bone-white.

  The first thing he said was, “Jeez, I’m hungry. I’d kill for some scrambled eggs.”

  He did not remember a thing. None of it. His wife. Their unborn child. Nothing.

  It was difficult to pinpoint where Calvin’s memories ended, or identify the cause of that loss. Physically he’d sustained massive trauma. His scalp was gashed, leaving a scar above his hairline. His skull had cracked, a hairline fissure bisecting several plates of bone. He had been under the water a long time, so there was a strong possibility that he’d suffered significant brain damage from oxygen deprivation.

  The manner of his memory deficit was striking. My mother said that Calvin awoke not remembering Lydia. He could remember going to college and other events during the time when his life intersected with his wife’s, but nothing of her. He retained no memory of their marriage, or of owning that house on the hill. He didn’t remember the men who’d come during the storm or the car crashing through the ice. It was as if Calvin’s mind clipped those memories clean off the chain of his life. His brain had created an almost seamless overlay, draped over his past: a patchwork of incidents and places and moments, some of which bore a similarity to his actual lived experience whereas others were fabricated, fantasies his mind had created to account for the times in his life when Lydia had been present. This overlay was unquestionably embraced as truth by the only person who mattered: Calvin himself.

  So profound was his memory loss—was loss the right word?…memory re-engineering is more apt—that a clinical psychiatrist adjudged him unfit to testify at the trial of Bellweather and Lucas. The diagnosis held that it would be useless to make Calvin testify in light of the fact that he did not, and would not, admit to ever living in the house, being married to the deceased or to being terrorized by the defendants. This did not prevent the trial from going forward, where the judge handed down sentences that would see both men behind bars until they were old and frail.

  You might think my chosen career would lend me insight on my uncle’s condition. But while I can tell you about the brain as a physical object, such as how much it weighs (roughly three pounds), how many neurons it contains (25 billion), how large and thick it would be if it were unfolded (the size of a foam placemat), beyond that I am a glorified techie. I know the nuts and bolts and can diagnose flaws within the mainframe. While I can identify and sometimes fix structural maladies within that organ, I do not remotely understand it. That is an impossible task, like trying to guess the path rainwater will take down a windowpane. There is simply no way to know with any accuracy what is happening inside someone else’s head. I only faintly comprehend what is going on inside my own.

  It was my mother who made the decision. It did not come easily to her, but she decided to let Calvin live his lie. Who was it harming? My uncle’s mind had settled on this act of erasure as a coping mechanism. In the short term at least, why not allow him some peace?

  My uncle did not attend his wife’s funeral. Why would he go to a stranger’s burial? My mother and father arranged the service. Mom sold the house on the hill and had the money transferred into Calvin’s account. He accepted this phantom windfall blithely.

  After the incident, my uncle’s personality changed. Where before he was pragmatic and literal-minded, he became a wide-eyed believer. A mystic. Fascinated with the occult, phantasmic emanations, and what “they” weren’t telling us. He ditched his workmanlike wardrobe for tie-dyed shirts and Cthulhu-bead bracelets. He quit his job—though he did not “quit” per se; he didn’t recall working at the petrochemical company, so he just stopped showing up. He used the money from the house to buy the Occultorium, installed the Bat Phone and began taking down notes in spiral notebooks.

  This kind of personality shift can happen, under certain circumstances. I’ve witnessed it myself in some of my patients. And none of Cal’s changes were truly bad. As my father said, it was like the physicist Calvin had been swapped out for a bizarro-world Calvin—but he was still the same sweet, honest, loving person he’d always been.

  Everyone important bought into my mother’s plan. My father, if reluctantly. Lexington Galbraith, with the resigned devotion of a best friend. Their efforts became a clandestine community initiative: Operation Keep Cal in the Dark. To them, I guess it felt like mercy. Though perhaps it simply felt like love.

  And it worked, for a while at least. Calvin was outwardly happy. But something must have been ticking away in his head and heart. Voices in the static hungering for a moment’s silence to say: Remember this, Cal, ole buddy, ole pal? Did you really think you could outrun it?

  Six years after Lydia’s death—to the very day—Calvin set fire to their house on the hill. It was empty, its occupants having defaulted on the mortgage. Calvin was found on the scene with multiple stab wounds to his chest and abdomen. The house burnt to the ground and Calvin nearly died from blood loss. He’d stabbed himself. That was the most terrible part. A knife was found on the scene: the same one that had previously sat in his own kitchen cupboard.

  Calvin couldn’t recall doing any of it—not touching the flame to the house, not harming himself. What he did remember was being attacked by two men, who’d stabbed him with wicked knives. When questioned about where this had happened or who the men were, Calvin could not furnish a detailed reply.

  “It was dark,” was all he said. “This cold liquid darkness. I remember the knives flashing. They looked like darting fish.”

  Calvin was committed to psychiatric care. Doctors picked at the edges of the events that they realized must still exist in a recessed chamber of Calvin’s mind, but by then the rift had closed. Ultimately, they declared there was no way to fix Calvin. His mind was incapable of grasping the fact that it had been broken. He wasn’t a menace to the public. He might be a menace to himself, but that was no crime. Uncle C was released, and everyone hoped that would be the end of it.

  But the mind is a truth-seeking organ. To use that old cliché about our hearts, it wants what it wants.

  Mom drank off the dregs of her cocoa. She had poured in a few more belts of whisky while telling her story. Fatigued rings encircled her eyes.

  “We hoped after burning the house, that’d be it. Nothing left, right? No physical reminders of…Your uncle was out of the psychiatric clinic. He was spacey, sure, but that was your uncle after the incident. That’s the man you know, isn’t it—spacey Uncle C.”

  I could only vaguely recall my uncle’s absence, the time he must’ve spent in the psych ward. I had been three or four. My folks told me he’d gone on a long trip, “to find himself.” Which was true in its way. Everything they’d told me was vaguely true, in much the same way Uncle C’s understanding of his own history was true—true because they each needed it to be.

  “But the house was still there, right?” Mom wiped her eyes, staring into her mug. “Burnt, but there. The car, too. They tore the old bridge down but the damn car was still there, at the bottom of the lake. Nobody dredged the oxbow. Reminders all over this damn city.”

  A story I’d heard about honeybees popped into my mind. We’d learned about them in science class that fall. Bees secrete a “footprint pheromone”; when they find flowers packed with pollen, they leave an invisible marker on the petals so they can find their way back. Maybe that’s how it had been with my uncle: he’d returned to these spots without knowing why, compelled by a gnawing need. Could our summer Ghost Club have gradually turned into his footprint pheromone? The car in the lake, the house, the graveyard where his wife’s marker sat. Signposts marking his way back into the past.

  “Can you tell if Uncle C has remembered any of it?” I asked Mom.

  “I don�
�t think so. But it’s impossible to know for sure.”

  I wondered at the effort it must’ve taken my mother and father and Lex and others to keep this secret. Dancing inches from calamity, accepting Uncle C’s reworking of his own past as truth, never invoking names or events for fear they’d open some terrible door. But it was even harder to grapple with my uncle’s loss—not only of his wife and unborn child, but the fact he’d never grieved them. There were two warring entities inside Calvin: one part sharked relentlessly towards the truth while the other fled fearfully, stashing that truth in shadowed cubbies of his brain where some truths were best kept.

  “We couldn’t tell him what happened,” my father told me. “The idea of doing that went out of play the night the house went up and…your uncle stabbed himself, Jake. To try to end your life that way indicates an extreme level of self-hate. Your uncle has no reason to hate himself. He’s just a stranger to himself, that’s all.”

  The clock counted off the seconds in harsh ticks. Finally, Mom spoke again.

  “I’ll tell you one last story, Jake. When you were born, I lost a lot of blood. You had a big head. So much that they had to put blood back into me—a transfusion.” Seeing my alarm, she made a calming gesture. “The doctors gave me medicine to make me sleep. When I woke, your uncle was there in the recovery room…and he was pushing my blood back in. They’d put tubes in my arms. Your uncle was at the bedside with a tube in his hands, squeezing the blood back up it, like how you squeeze the toothpaste from the bottom of the tube. Trying to push it back into me.”

  She looked at me as if hoping that this story, a little picture-window into her brother’s heart, would explain her own actions. “I love my brother, Jake. I keep his secret because to do anything else might wreck him. Your father helps me keep it because he loves me.”

  “I love Cal, too,” my father said, sounding wounded.

  My mother squeezed my hand. “I’ve got a favour to ask, Jake. One day he may turn a corner. But until that day, I need you to promise to keep the secret too.”

  7.

  ALL HALLOWS’ EVE

  Many people believe our memories are unchanging. This belief even informs the way we talk about them: we say that our minds capture images like a camera snapshot before storing them in the vast filing cabinet of our brains. We use corporeal things—photographs, cabinets—to describe a mental process that is, in fact, in a constant state of flux. The biologist Gerald Edelman wrote that “memory is more like the melting and refreezing of a glacier than it is like an inscription on a rock.” Our memories change over time. Some of this change comes through aging. But a much greater part of the change has to do with how we want to remember. The more distant a memory becomes, the more our minds manipulate it. The reasons for this are multiple, but often render down to: I want to remember myself, my own history and the people I care for in this specific way. So, our brains oblige.

  Memory is a funny thing. People always say that.

  But is it? Funny, I mean?

  Think about this story. Consider its teller.

  What follows is an account, as I choose to remember it, of my twelfth year on this planet—the summer of the Saturday Night Ghost Club….

  You see, I love my uncle. Even more now than I did that summer. Everyone loves my uncle. And love is the great influencer, isn’t it? We will move mountains, shift space and time, for love.

  Everything I’ve told you is true. Every word of it.

  But you must know this, too: I want it to be true. Everything in me wants that.

  For my uncle. But also for the Yellowbirds. For Lexington. For my folks. For me. For the sake of who we were back then, and to make peace with who we’ve become now, with all our needful ghosts.

  Reality never changes. Only our recollections of it do. Whenever a moment passes, we pass along with it into the realm of memory. And in that realm, geometries change. Contours shift, shades lighten, objectivities dissolve. Memory becomes what we need it to be.

  i.

  “Jake Baker, come ooooon down! You’re the next contestant on The Price Is Right!”

  Halloween was Uncle C’s undisputed all-time favourite night, and that year he decided to go as Bob Barker. He’d shellacked himself with bronzing cream, bought an abrasively blue wide-lapelled suit at the Goodwill, dyed his hair platinum blond and, most crucially, he had somehow laid his hands on one of Barker’s signature skinny microphones. The funniest part was that the microphone wasn’t plugged in. The frayed cord hung down near my uncle’s ankles.

  A month had passed since he’d told me the legend of Black Agnes at the graveyard. My folks had been monitoring him—a lot of “I was in the area” pop-ins at his apartment and the Occultorium—but he appeared to be fine. Buoyant, even. The cycle, if that’s what it was, had ended. The pheromone trace had run cold for now.

  “Now, what do you do for a living?” he asked, sticking the microphone in my face.

  As I was dressed as a vampire, I answered as Dracula. “I suck zee blood of zee innocents. Uh, blah.”

  Uncle C gave my shoulder a conciliatory pat. “Rough gig rough gig.”

  We were at my house, getting ready to go trick-or-treating. Mom lit a tea candle and set it inside the jack-o’-lantern on the front step. I’d carved it, my first ever attempt, and it was fairly basic, with mismatched triangle eyes and a block for a mouth. My mother cooked some spaghetti and dyed it green, draping it over the pumpkin like hair for a suitably ghoulish effect.

  Dad came out of the kitchen and threw an arm around Mom’s shoulder. “You two ought to get out there,” he said to my uncle and me, “before all the top-shelf candy’s spoken for.”

  “Who are you dressed as tonight, Sam?” my uncle asked.

  “Will you accept Haggard Businessman?”

  The sidewalks were awash with pirates and witches and werewolves, the very air infused with magic, mystery and the bleeding edge of menace. Anything was possible on the one night when ghosts walked amongst the living. We hit the corner of Harvard and Delisle. Billy waited for us against a lamppost. He had a fake walrus moustache affixed with spirit gum, a pair of thrift-store spectacles and an old worsted-wool suit.

  I had no clue who he was dressed as, but my uncle cried, “It’s Charles Fort, author of The Book of the Damned.” He clapped Billy on the back. “Good show, old sport. Positively topping!”

  We ramped into full-tilt trick-or-treat mode. After a few blocks, I was sweating and my sack was getting full. We had stopped to catch our breath when someone rode up with a pumpkin on their head.

  “Hey, bozos,” Dove said, pulling the jack-o’-lantern off.

  “Where’d you get that?” my uncle wanted to know.

  “Some loser’s house. I cut a hole in the bottom. Pretty cool, uh?”

  My uncle crossed his arms. “That’s theft, Dove.”

  She tucked the pumpkin under her arm the way spacemen do their helmets. “They had a bunch. They’ll never miss it.”

  She put the pumpkin in her bike basket and rode along beside us. There was a pumpkin seed in her hair. We turned down Sarah Court, not hurrying now, enjoying the night. Kids drifted in and out of pockets of shadow between the street lights. I spotted Percy Elkins, walking alone dressed as an executioner, dragging a plastic axe along the sidewalk.

  At Janet Templeton’s house, I was shocked when Lex answered the door. Jan came up behind him, hugging him round the waist. Evidently Janet had turfed gloomy Stan Rowe and taken Lex back. As the years wore on, I’d hear more about Lex through my uncle. He and Janet never had kids but their house was crammed with cats—calicos and Siameses and Maine Coons. And although he was romantically satisfied, Lex’s string of questionable business decisions continued. After letting the lease expire on So Beta! he opened a camera shop to serve Cataract City’s tourist clientele. That shop’s name? Polaroid Dreams.

  We waved goodbye to Lex and Janet and returned to the sidewalk. Dove plucked a Tootsie Roll out of my bag, unwrapped it and popped
it in her mouth.

  “Boys, it’s been a slice, but this is where I leave you.”

  “Go put that pumpkin back,” my uncle told her.

  Dove stuck her tongue out at him. “Who spayed or neutered you today?”

  She rode down the sidewalk, turned towards the shadow side of the street and melted into darkness. I didn’t know it then, but after that night, I’d see less and less of Dove. She began to dabble with things best left un-dabbled with. It was like Mrs. Yellowbird said: Dove lived as suns do. She seemed happiest in that heat. But lately things have been looking up for her. Billy tells me she’s down in San Francisco, still the last safe haven for a wild child. She’s got a new girlfriend. They live in a bohemian loft that works on a barter system. She’s a sculptor, a talent that had long lain dormant. Billy says the pieces just flow out of her. Her latest was called Never Wake the Dreamer, and was bought by a Silicon Valley entrepreneur. Dove is happy, and if she ever needs that hand to hold while slipping into the long dark, hey, of course I’ll be there.

  Billy and I hotfooted it for another block and a half. Once our bags were bulging we sat on a bus bench inventorying our hauls while Uncle C kept up the patter. “Looks like Dracula’s angling to swap a Mars bar for a pack of Skittles—would you like to keep that showcase, unlamented genius Charles Fort, or go for showcase number two?”

  Billy and I would continue to be thick as thieves, in high school, in university and to this day. Billy would be our high school’s star wide receiver. He shot up nearly half a foot in tenth grade, and our coach marvelled at his Krazy Glue fingertips. He earned a scholarship to play at a university up north and I went with him. We shared a dorm room, then a little two-bedroom apartment off-campus. Eventually I found my calling and moved south to pursue a medical degree. After graduating, Billy bounced around the CFL: Ottawa, Saskatchewan and finally Toronto, where I was then living. He blew out his knee on a slant route in his seventh season, retired, and moved back to Slave Lake to do outreach work. I miss the hell out of that guy.