Smoke Ghost & Other Apparitions

by Fritz Leiber

  Perhaps those first weeks were simply too happy, perhaps I just got to spinning along too blissfully, for after finishing the third short story, I suddenly found myself tempted by the idea of writing something that would be more than fiction and also more than a communication addressed to just one person, but rather a general statement of what I thought about life and other people and history and the universe and all, the roots of it, something like Descartes began when he wrote down, "I think, therefore I am." Oh, it wouldn't be formally and certainly not stuffily philosophical, but it would contain a lot of insights just the same, the fruits of one man's lifetime experience. It would be critical yet autobiographical, honestly rooted in me. At the very least it would be a testimonial to the smooth running of my life at a new place, a way of honoring my move here.

  I'm ordinarily not much of a nonfiction writer. I've done a few articles about writing and about other writers I particularly admire, a lot of short book reviews, and for a dozen or so years before I took up full-time fiction, I edited a popular science magazine. And before that I'd worked on encyclopedias and books of knowledge.

  But everything was so clear to me at the new place, my sensations were so exact, my universe was spread out around me so orderly, that I knew that now was the time to write such a piece if ever, so I decided to take a chance on the new idea, give it a whirl.

  At the same time at a deeper level in my mind and feelings, I believe I was making a parallel decision running something like this: Follow this lead. Let all the other stuff go, ease up, and see what happens. Somewhere down there a control was being loosened.

  An hour or so before dawn the next day I had a little experience that proved to be the pattern for several subsequent ones, including the final unexpected event. (You see, I haven't forgotten those ten seconds I mentioned. I'm keeping them in mind.)

  I'd been on the roof in the cool predawn to observe a rather close conjunction (half a degree apart) of Mars and Jupiter in the east (they didn't rise until well after midnight), and while I was watching the reddish and golden planets without instrument (except for my glasses, of course) I twice thought I saw a shooting star out of the corner of my eye but didn't get my head around in time to be sure. I was intrigued because I hadn't noted in the handbook any particular meteor showers due at this time and also because most shooting stars are rather faint and the city's lights tend to dim down everything in the sky. The third time it happened I managed to catch the flash and for a long instant was astounded by the sight of what appeared to be three shooting stars traveling fast in triangular formation like three fighter planes before they whisked out of sight behind a building. Then I heard a faint bird-cry and realized they had been three gulls winging quite close and fast overhead, their white under-feathers illumined by the upward streaming streetlights. It was really a remarkable illusion, of the sort that has to be seen to be fully believed. You'd think your eye wouldn't make that sort of misidentification – three seabirds for three stars – but from the corner of your eye you don't see shape or color or even brightness much, only pale movement whipping past. And then you wouldn't think three birds would keep such a tight and exact triangular formation, very much like three planes performing at an air show.

  I walked quietly back to my apartment in my bathrobe and slippers. The stairway from the roof was carpeted. My mind was full of the strange triple apparition I'd just seen. I thought of how another mind with other anticipation might have seen three UFOs. I silently opened the door to my apartment, which I'd left on the latch, and stepped inside.

  I should explain here that I always switch off the lights when I leave my apartment and am careful about how I turn them on when I come back. It's partly thrift and citizenly thoughts about energy, the sort of thing you do to get gold stars at grown-ups' Sunday school. But it's also a care not to leave an outward-glaring light to disturb some sleeper who perhaps must keep his window open and unshuttered for the sake of air and coolth; there's a ten-story apartment building a quarter block away overlooking my east windows, and I've had my own sleep troubled by such unnecessary abominable beacons. On the other hand, I like to look out open windows myself; I hate to keep them wholly shaded, draped, or shuttered, but at the same time I don't want to become a target for a sniper – a simply realistic fear to many these days. As a result of all this I make it a rule never to turn on a light at night until I'm sure the windows of the room I'm in are fully obscured. I take a certain pride, I must admit, in being able to move around my place in the dark without bumping things – it's a test of courage too, going back to childhood, and also a proof that your sensory faculties haven't been dimmed by age. And I guess I just like the feeling of mysteriousness it gives me.

  So when I stepped inside I did not turn on the 200-watt light above the lowered ceiling of the entry. My intention was to move directly forward into the bedroom, assure myself that the venetian blinds were tilted shut, and then switch on the bedside lamp. But as I started to do that, I heard the beginning of a noise to my right and I glanced toward the living room, where the street lights striking upward through the open venetian blinds made pale stripes on the ceiling and wall and slightly curving ones on the celestial globe atop a bookcase, and into the dinette beyond, and I saw a thin dark figure slip along the wall. But then, just as a feeling of surprise and fear began, almost at the same moment but actually a moment later, there came the realization that the figure was the black frame of my glasses, either moving as I turned my head or becoming more distinct as I switched my eyes that way, more likely a little of both. It was an odd mixture of sensation and thought, especially coming right on top of the star-birds (or bird-stars), as if I were getting almost simultaneously the messages, My God, it's an intruder, or ghost, or whatever and, It isn't any of those, as you know very well from a lifetime's experience. You've just been had again by appearances.

  I'm pretty much a thorough-going skeptic, you see, when it comes to the paranormal, or the religious supernatural, or even such a today-commonplace as telepathy. My mental attitudes were formed in the period during and just after the first world war, when science was still a right thing, almost noble, and technology was forward-looking and labor-saving and progressive, and before folk wisdom became so big and was still pretty much equated with ignorance and superstition, no matter how picturesque. I've never seen or heard of a really convincing scrap of evidence for ancient or present-day astronauts from other worlds, for comets or moons that bumped the earth and changed history, or for the power of pyramids to prolong life or sharpen razor blades. As for immortality, it's my impression that most people do (or don't do) what's in them and then live out their lives in monotonous blind alleys, and what would be the point in cluttering up another world with all that worn-out junk? And as for God, it seems to me that the existence of one being who knew everything, future as well as past, would simply rob the universe of drama, excuse us all from doing anything. I'll admit that with telepathy the case is somewhat different, if only because so many sensible, well-educated, brilliant people seem to believe in some form of it. I only know I haven't experienced any as far as I can tell; it's almost made me jealous – I've sometimes thought I must be wrapped in some very special insulation against thought waves, if there be such. I will allow that the mind (and also mental suggestions from outside) can affect the body, even affect it greatly – the psychosomatic thing. But that's just about all I will allow.

  So much for that first little experience – no, wait, what did I mean when I wrote, "I heard the beginning of a noise?" Well, there are sounds so short and broken-off that you can't tell what they were going to be, or even for sure just how loud they were, so that you ask yourself if you imagined them. It was like that – a tick without a tock, a ding without the dong, a creak that went only halfway, never reaching that final kuh sound. Or like a single footstep that started rather loud and ended muted down to nothing – very much like the whole little experience itself, beginning with a gust of shock and terror and almo
st instantly reducing to the commonplace. Well, so much for that.

  The next few days were pleasant and exciting ones, as I got together materials for my new project, assembling the favorite books I knew I'd want to quote (Shakespeare and the King James Bible, Moby Dick and Wuthering Heights, Ibsen and Bertrand Russell, Stapledon and Heinlein), looking through the daybooks I've kept for literary and what I like to call metaphysical matters, and telling my mind (programming it, really) to look for similar insights whenever they happened to turn up during the course of the day – and then happily noting down those new insights in turn. There was only one little fly in the ointment: I knew I'd embarked on projects somewhat like this before – autobiographical and critical things – and failed to bring them to conclusions. But then I've had the same thing happen to me on stories. With everything, one needs a bit of luck.

  My next little experience began up on the roof. (They all did, for that matter.) It was a very clear evening without a moon, and I'd been memorizing the stars in Capricorn and faint Aquarius and the little constellations that lie between those and the Northern Cross: Sagitta, Delphinus, and dim Equuleus. You learn the stars rather like you learn countries and cities on a map, getting the big names first (the brightest stars and star groups) and then patiently filling in the areas between – and always on the watch for striking forms. At such times I almost forget the general dimming effect of San Francisco's lights since what I'm working on is so far above them.

  And then, as I was resting my eyes from the binoculars, shut off by the roof's walls and the boxlike structure housing the elevator's motor from the city's most dazzling glares (the big, whitely fluorescent streetlights are the worst, the ones that are supposed to keep late walkers safe), I saw a beam of bright silver light strike straight upward for about a second from the roof of a small hotel three blocks away. And after about a dozen seconds more it came again, equally brief. It really looked like a sort of laser-thing: a beam of definite length (about two stories) and solid-looking. It happened twice more, not at regular intervals, but always as far as I could judge in exactly the same place (and I'd had time to spin a fantasy about a secret enclave of extraterrestrials signaling to confederates poised just outside the stratosphere) when it occurred to me to use my binoculars on it. They solved the mystery almost at once: It wasn't a light beam at all, but a tall flagpole painted silver (no wonder it looked solid!) and at intervals washed by the roving beam of a big arc light shooting upward from the street beyond and swinging in slow circles – the sort of thing they use to signalize the opening of movie houses and new restaurants, even quite tiny ones.

  What had made the incident out of the ordinary was that most flagpoles are painted dull white, not silver, and that the clearness of the night had made the arc light's wide beam almost invisible. If there'd been just a few wisps of cloud or fog in the air above, I'd have spotted it at once for what it was. It was rather strange to think of all that light streaming invisibly up from the depths of the city's reticulated canyons and gorges.

  I wondered why I'd never noted that flagpole before. Probably they never flew a flag on it.

  It all didn't happen to make me recall my three star-birds, and so when after working over once more this night's chosen heavenly territory, including a veering aside to scan the rich starfields of Aquila and the diamond of Altair, one of Earth's closest stellar neighbors, I was completely taken by surprise again when on entering my apartment, the half noise was repeated and the same skinny dark shape glided along the wall across the narrow flaglike bands of light and dark. Only this time the skeptical, deflating reaction came a tiny bit sooner, followed at once by the almost peevish inner remark, Oh, yes, that again! And then as I turned on the bedside light, I wondered, as one will, how I would have reacted if the half step had been completed and if the footsteps had gone on, getting louder as they made their swift short trip and there peered around the side of the doorway at me ... what? It occurred to me that the nastiest and most frightening thing in the world must differ widely from person to person, and I smiled. Surely in man's inward lexicon, the phobias outnumber the philias a thousand to one!

  Oh, I'll admit that when I wandered into the living room and kitchen a bit later, shutting the blinds and turning on some lights, I did inspect things in a kind of perfunctory way, but noted nothing at all out of order. I told myself that all buildings make a variety of little noises at night, waterpipes especially can get downright loquacious, and then there are refrigerator motors sighing on and off and the faint little clicks and whines that come from electric clocks, all manner of babble – that half noise might be anything. At least I knew the identity of the black glider – the vaguely seen black frame always at the corner of my eye when I had on my glasses and most certainly there now.

  I went on assembling the primary materials for my new project and a week later I was able to set down, word by mulled-over word, the unembroidered, unexemplified, unproven gist of what I felt about life, or at least a first version of it. I still have it as I typed it from a penciled draft with many erasures, crossings out, and interlineations:

  There is this awareness that is I, this mind that's me, a little mortal world of space and time, which glows and aches, which purrs and darkens, haunted and quickened by the ghosts that are memory, imagination, and thought, forever changing under urgings from within and proddings from without, yet able to hold still by fits and starts (and now and then refreshed by sleep and dreams), forever seeking to extend its bounds, forever hunting for the mixture of reality and fantasy – the formula, the script, the scenario, the story to tell itself or others-which will enable it to do its work, savor its thrills, and keep on going. A baby tells itself the simplest story: that it is all that matters, it is God, commanding and constraining all the rest, all otherness. But then the script becomes more complicated. Stories take many forms: a scientific theory or a fairy tale, a world history or an anecdote, a call to action or a cry for help – all, all are stories. Sometimes they tell of our love for another, or they embody our illusioned and illusioning vision of the one we love – they are courtship. But every story must be interesting or it will not work, will not be heard, even the stories that we tell ourselves. And so it must contain illusion, fantasy. No matter how grim its facts, it must contain that saving note, be it only a surpassingly interesting bitter, dry taste. And then there are the other mortal minds I know are there, fellow awarenesses, companion consciousnesses, some close, a very few almost in touching space (but never quite), most farther off in almost unimaginable multitudes, each one like mine a little world of space and time moment by moment seeking its story, the combination of illusion and hard fact, of widest waking and of deepest dreaming, which will allow it to create, enjoy, survive. A company of loving, warring minds, a tender, rough companioning of tiny cosmoses forever telling stories to each other and themselves – that's what there is. And I know that I must stay aware of all the others, listening to their stories, trying to understand them, their sufferings, their joys, and their imaginings, respecting the thorny facts of both their inner and their outer lives, and nourishing the needful illusions at least of those who are closest to me, if I am to make progress in my quest. Finally there is the world, stranger than any mind or any story, the unknown universe, the shadowy scaffolding holding these minds together, the grid on which they are mysteriously arrayed, their container and their field, perhaps (but is there any question of it?) all-powerful yet quite unseen, it's form unsensed, known only to the companion minds by the sensations it showers upon them and pelts them with, by its cruel and delicious proddings and graspings, by its agonizing and ecstatic messages (but never a story), and by its curt summonses and sentences, including death. Yes, that is how it is, those are the fundamentals: There is the dark, eternally silent, unknown universe; there are the friend-enemy minds shouting and whispering their tales and always seeking the three miracles – that minds should really touch, or that the silent universe should speak, tell minds a story,
or (perhaps the same thing) that there should be a story that works that is all hard facts, all reality, with no illusions and no fantasy; and lastly there is lonely, story-telling, wonder-questing, mortal me.

  As I reread that short statement after typing it out clean, I found it a little more philosophical than I'd intended and also perhaps a little more overly glamorized with words like "ecstatic" and "agonizing," "mysteriously" and "stranger." But on the whole I was satisfied with it. Now to analyze it more deeply and flesh it out with insights and examples from my own life and from my own reflections on the work of others!

  But as the working days went on and became weeks (remember, I'd pretty much given up all other work for the duration of this project) I found it increasingly difficult to make any real progress. For one thing, I gradually became aware that in order to analyze that little statement much more deeply and describe my findings, I'd need to use one or more of the vocabularies of professional philosophy and psychology – which would mean months at least of reading and reviewing and of assimilating new advances, and I certainly didn't have the time for that. (The vocabularies of philosophies can be very special – Whitehead's, for instance, makes much use of the archaic verb "prehend," which for him means something very different from "comprehend" or "perceive.") Moreover, the whole idea had been to skim accumulated insights and wisdom (if any!) off my mind, not become a student again and start from the beginning.