Smoke Ghost & Other Apparitions

by Fritz Leiber

  And I found it was pretty much the same when I tried to say something about other writers, past and contemporary, beyond a few obvious remarks and memorable quotations. I'd need to read their works again and study their lives in a lot more detail than I had ever done, before I'd be able to shape statements of any significance, things I really believed about them.

  And when I tried to write about my own life, I kept discovering that for the most part it was much like anyone else's. I didn't want to set down a lot of dreary dates and places, only the interesting things, but how tell about those honestly without bringing in the rest? Moreover, it began to seem to me that all the really interesting subjects, like sex and money, feelings of guilt, worries about one's courage, and concern about one's selfishness were things one wasn't supposed to write about, either because they were too personal, involving others, or because they were common to all men and women and so quite unexceptional.

  This state of frustration didn't grip me all the time, of course. It came in waves and gradually accumulated. I'd generally manage to start off each day feeling excited about the project (though it began to take more and more morning time to get my head into that place, I will admit), perhaps some part of my short statement would come alive for me again, like that bit about the universe being a grid on which minds are mysteriously arrayed, but by the end of the day I would have worried all the life out of it and my mind would be as blank as the face of my manikin in the fabric shop window downstairs. I remember once or twice in the course of one of our daily encounters shaking my head ruefully at her, almost as if seeking for sympathy. She seemed to have a lot more patience and poise than I had.

  I was beginning to spend more time on the roof, too, not only for the sake of the stars and astronomy, but just to get away from my desk with all its problems. In fact, my next little experience leading up to the ghostly one began shortly before sunset one day when I'd been working long, though fruitlessly. The sky, which was cloudless from my east window, began to glow with an unusual violet color and I hurried up to get a wider view.

  All day long a steady west wind had been streaming out the flags on the hotels and driving away east what smog there was, so that the sky was unusually clear. But the sun had sunk behind the great fog bank that generally rests on the Pacific just outside the Golden Gate. However, he had not yet set, for to the south, where there were no tall buildings to obstruct my vision, his beams were turning a few scattered clouds over San Jose (some thirty miles away) a delicate shade of lemon yellow that seemed to be the exact compliment of the violet in the sky (just as orange sunset clouds tend to go with a deep blue sky).

  And then as I watched, there suddenly appeared in the midst of that sunset, very close to the horizon in a cloudless stretch, a single yellow cloud like a tiny dash. It seemed to appear from nowhere, just like that. And then as I continued to watch, another cloud appeared close beside the first at the same altitude, beginning as a bright yellow point and then swiftly growing until it was as long as the first, very much as if a giant invisible hand had drawn another short dash.

  During the course of the next few minutes, as I watched with a growing sense of wonder and a feeling of giant release from the day's frustrations, eight more such mini-clouds (or whatever) appeared at fairly regular intervals, until there were ten of them glowing in line there, fluorescent yellow stitches in the sky.

  My mind raced, clutching at explanations. Kenneth Arnold's original flying saucers thirty years ago, which he'd glimpsed from his light plane over the American northwest, had been just such shining shapes in a row. True, his had been moving, while mine were hovering over a city, having appeared from nowhere. Could they conceivably have come from hyperspace? my fancy asked.

  And then, just as the lemon sunset began to fade from the higher clouds, an explanation struck me irresistibly. What I was seeing was skywriting (which usually we see above our heads) from way off to one side, viewed edgewise. My ten mystery clouds (or giant ships!) were the nine letters – and the hyphen – of Pepsi-Cola. (Next day I confirmed this by a telephone call to San Jose; there had been just such an advertising display.)

  At the time, and as the giant yellow stitches faded to gray unsewn sky-cloth, I remember feeling very exhilarated and also slightly hysterical at the comic aspect of the event. I paced about the roof chortling, telling myself that the vision I'd just witnessed outdid even that of the Goodyear blimp acrawl with colored lights in abstract patterns that had welcomed me to this new roof the first night I'd climbed up here after moving in. I spent quite a while quieting myself, so that the streetlights had just come on when I went downstairs. But somehow I hadn't thought of it being very dark yet in my apartment, so that was perhaps why it wasn't until I was actually unlocking the door that, remembering the Star-birds and the Silver Laser ( and now the Mystery of the Ten Yellow Stitches!), I also remembered the events that had followed them. I had only time to think, Here we go again, as I pushed inside.

  Well, it was dark in there and the pale horizontal bands were on the wall and the skeleton black figure slipped along them and I felt almost instantly the choked-off gust of terror riding atop the remnants of my exhilaration, all of this instantly after hearing that indefinable sound which seemed to finish almost before it began. That was one thing characteristic of all these preliminary incidents – they ended so swiftly and so abruptly that it was hard to think about them afterwards, the mind had nothing to work with.

  And I know that in trying to describe them I must make them sound patterned, almost prearranged, yet at the time they just happened and somehow there was always an element of surprise.

  Unfortunately the exhilaration I'd feel on the roof never carried over to the next morning's work on my new project. This time, after sweating and straining for almost a week without any progress at all, I resolutely decided to shelve it, at least for a while, and get back to stories.

  But I found I couldn't do that. I'd committed myself too deeply to the new thing. Oh, I didn't find that out right away, of course. No, I spent more than a week before I came to that hateful and panic-making conclusion. I tried every trick I knew of to get myself going: long walks, fasting, starting to write immediately after waking up when my mind was hypnogogic and blurred with dream, listening to music which I'd always found suggestive, such as Holst's The Planets, especially the "Saturn" section, which seems to capture the essence of time – you hear the giant footsteps of time itself crashing to a halt -or Vaughan Williams' Sinfonia antartica with its lonely wind-machine finish, which does the same for space, or Berlioz's Funeral March for the Last Scene of Hamlet, which reaches similarly toward chaos. Nothing helped. The more I'd try to work up the notes for some story I had already three quarters planned, the less interesting it would become to me, until it seemed (and probably was) cliché. Some story ideas are as faint and as unsubstantial as ghosts. Well, all of those I had just got fainter as I worked on them.

  I hate to write about writer's block; it's such a terribly childish, yes, frivolous-seeming affliction. You'd think that anyone who was half a human being could shake it off or just slither away from it. But I couldn't. Morning after morning I'd wake with an instant pang of desperation at the thought of my predicament, so that I'd have to get up right away and pace, or rush out and walk the dawn-empty streets, or play through chess endings or count windows in big buildings to fill my mind with useless calculations -anything until I grew calm enough to read a newspaper or make a phone call and somehow get the day started. Sometimes my desk would get to jumping in the same way my mind did and I'd find myself compulsively straightening the objects on it over and over until I'd spring up from it in disgust. Now when the garbage trucks woke me at four (as they began to do again) I'd get up and follow their thunderous mechanical movements from one window or other vantage point to another, anxiously tracing the course of each can-lugging attendant – anything to occupy my mind.

  Just to be doing something, I turned to my correspondence, which had beg
un to pile up again, but after answering three or four notes (somehow I'd pick the least important ones) I'd feel worn out. You see, I didn't want to write my friends about the block I was having. It was such a bore (whining always is) and, besides, I was ashamed. At the same time I couldn't seem to write honestly about anything without bringing my damn block in.

  I felt the same thing about calling up or visiting my friends around me in the city. I'd have nothing to show them, nothing to talk about. I didn't want to see anyone. It was a very bad time for me.

  Of course I kept on going up to the roof, more than ever now, though even my binoculars were a burden to me and I couldn't bear to lug up my telescope – the weary business of setting it up and all the fussy adjustments I'd have to make made that unthinkable. I even had to make myself study the patterns of the lesser stars when the clear nights came which had formerly been such a joy to me.

  But then one evening just after dark I went topside and immediately noticed near Cygnus, the Northern Cross, a star that shouldn't have been there. It was a big one, third magnitude at least. It made a slightly crooked extension of the top of the cross as it points toward Cassiopeia. At first I was sure it had to be an earth satellite (I've spotted a few of those) – a big one, like the orbiting silvered balloon they called Echo. Or else it was a light on some weird sort of plane that was hovering high up. But when I held my binoculars on it, I couldn't see it move at all – as a satellite would have done, of course. Then I got really excited, enough to make me bring up my telescope (and Norton's Star Atlas too) and set it up.

  In the much smaller and more magnified field of that instrument, it didn't move either, but glared there steadily among the lesser points of light, holding position as it inched with the other stars across the field. From the atlas I estimated and noted down its approximate coordinates (right ascension 21 hours and 10 minutes, north declination 48 degrees) and hurried downstairs to call up an astronomer friend of mine and tell him I'd spotted a nova.

  Naturally I wasn't thinking at all about the previous ghostly (or whatever) incidents, so perhaps this time the strange thing was that, yes, it did happen again, just as before though with even more brevity, and I sort of went through all the motions of reacting to it, but very unconcernedly, as if it had become a habit, part of the routine of existence, like a step in a stairway that always creaks when your foot hits it but nothing more ever comes of it. I recall saying to myself with a sort of absentminded lightheartedness Let's give the ghost E for effort; he keeps on trying.

  I got my astronomer friend and, yes, it was a real nova; it had been spotted in Asia and Europe hours earlier and all the astronomers were very busy, oh my, yes.

  The nova was a four days' wonder, taking that long to fade down to naked-eye invisibility. Unfortunately, my own excitement at it didn't last nearly that long. Next morning I was confronting my block again. Very much in the spirit of desperation, I decided to go back to my new project and make myself finish it off somehow, force myself to write no matter how bad the stuff seemed to be that I turned out, beginning with an expansion of my original short statement.

  But the more I tried to do that, the more I reread those two pages, the thinner and more dubious all the ideas in it seemed to me, the junkier and more hypocritical it got. Instead of adding to it, I wanted to take stuff away, trim it down to a nice big nothing.

  To begin with, it was so much a writer's view of things, reducing everything to stories. Of course! What could be more obvious! – or more banal? A military man would explain life in terms of battles, advances and retreats, defeats and victories, and all their metaphorical analogues, presumably with strong emphasis on courage and discipline. Just as a doctor might view history as the product of great men's ailments, whether they were constipated or indigestive, had syphilis or TB – or of subtle diseases that swept nations; the fall of Rome? – lead poisoning from the pipes they used to distribute their aqueducted water! Or a salesman see everything as buying and selling, literally or by analogy. I recalled a 1920s' book about Shakespeare by a salesman. The secret of the Bard's unequaled dramatic power? He was the world's greatest salesman! No, all that stuff about stories was just a figure of speech and not a very clever one.

  And then that business about illusion coming in everywhere – what were illusions and illusioning but euphemisms for lies and lying? We had to nourish the illusions of others, didn't we? That meant, in plain language, that we had to flatter them, tell them white lies, go along with all their ignorances and prejudices – very convenient rationalizations for a person who was afraid to speak the truth! Or for someone who was eager to fantasize everything. And granting all that, how had I ever hoped to write about it honestly in any detail? – strip away from myself and others, those at all close to me at least, all our pretenses and boasts, the roles we played, the ways we romanticized ourselves, the lies we agreed to agree on, the little unspoken deals we made ("You build me up, I'll build you up"), yes, strip away all that and show exactly what lay underneath: the infantile conceits, the suffocating selfishness, the utter unwillingness to look squarely at the facts of death, torture, disease, jealousy, hatred, and pain – how had I ever hoped to speak out about all that, I, an illusioner?

  Yes, how to speak out the truth of my real desires? that were so miserably small, so modest. No vast soul-shaking passions and heaven-daunting ambitions at all, only the little joy of watching a shadow's revealing creep along an old brick wall or the infinitely blue sky of evening, the excitement of little discoveries in big dictionaries, the small thrill of seeing and saying, "That's not the dark underside of a distant low narrow cloudbank between those two buildings, it's a TV antenna," or "That's not a nova, you wishful thinker, it's Procyon," the fondling and fondlings of slender, friendly, cool fingers, the hues and textures of an iris seen up close – how to admit to such minuscule longings and delights?

  And getting still deeper into this stories business, what was it all but a justification for always talking about things and never doing anything? It's been said, "Those who can, do; those who can't, teach." Yes, and those who can't even teach, what do they do? Why, they tell stories! Yes, always talking, never acting, never being willing to dirty your fingers with the world. Why, at times you had to drive yourself to pursue even the little pleasures, were satisfied with fictional or with imagined proxies.

  And while we were on that subject, what was all this business about minds never touching, never being quite able to? What was it but an indirect, mealy-mouthed way of confessing my own invariable impulse to flinch away from life, to avoid contact at any cost – the reason I lived alone with fantasies, never made a friend (though occasionally letting others, if they were forceful enough, make friends with me), preferred a typewriter to a wife, talked, talked, and never did? Yes, for minds, read bodies, and then the truth was out, the secret of the watcher from the sidelines.

  I tell you, it got so I wanted to take those thumbed-over two grandiose pages of my "original short statement" and crumple them together in a ball and put that in a brown paper sack along with a lot of coffee grounds and grapefruit rinds and grease, and then repeat the process with larger and larger sacks until I had a Chinese-boxes set of them big around as a large garbage can and lug that downstairs at four o'clock in the morning and when the dark truck stopped in front personally hurl it into that truck's big ass-end mouth and hear it all being chewed up and ground to filthy scraps, the whole thing ten times louder than it ever sounded from the sixth floor, knowing that my "wisdom" – acorn or crumpled paper with all its idiot notions was in the very midst and getting more masticated and befouled, more thoroughly destroyed than anything else (while my manikin watched from her window, inscrutable but, I felt sure, approving) – only in that way, I told myself would I be able to tear myself loose from this whole damn minuscule humiliating project, kill it inside my head.

  I remember the day my mind generated that rather pitiful grotesque vision (which, incidentally, I half seriously contemplate
d carrying into reality the next morning). The garbage trucks had wakened me before dawn and I'd been flitting in and out most of the day, unable to get down to anything or even to sit still, and once I'd paused on the sidewalk outside my apartment building, visualizing the truck drawing up in the dark next morning and myself hurling my great brown wad at it, and I'd shot to my manikin in the window the thought, Well, what do you think of it? Isn't it a good idea? They had her seated cross-legged in a sort of Lotus position on a great sweep of violet sheeting that wound up behind her to a high shelf holding the bolt. She seemed to receive my suggestion and brood upon it enigmatically.

  Predictably, I gravitated to the roof soon after dark, but without my binoculars and not to study the stars above (although it was a cold evening) or peer with weary curiosity at the window-worlds beyond that so rarely held human figures, or even to hold still and let the lonely roof-calm take hold of me. No, I moved about restlessly from one of my observation stations to another, rather mechanically scanning along the jagged and crenellated skyline, between the upper skyline areas and the lower building-bound ones, that passed for a horizon in the city (though there actually were a couple of narrow gaps to the east through which I could glimpse, from the right places on my roof, very short stretches of the hills behind smoky transbay Oakland). In fact, my mind was so little on what I was doing and so much on my writing troubles that I tripped over a TV-antenna cable I'd known was there and should have avoided. I didn't fall, but it took me three plunging steps to recover my balance, and I realized that if I'd been going in the opposite direction I might well have pitched over the edge, the roof being rather low at that point.