by Doug Draa
Sighing, Murray leaned forward and signed both copies of the agreement. Daniel nodded, leaned forward, affixed his signature to both and offered one to Murray. “One for you and one for our files.” As Murray took the papers, Daniel stood and leaned over the desk with his hand extended. “Pleasure doing business with you, bro.”
Realizing this was his cue to leave, Murray stood, draining the remainder of scotch from his glass. He placed the glass on the desk top and took Daniel’s hand in his own. “Thank you.”
Daniel pointed a finger at him when Murray released his hand. “I expect to hear great things from you, Murr.”
The Golden Dragon was a little family-operated Chinese restaurant Murray had eaten in perhaps a dozen times. The people there knew him and always greeted him in a friendly manner. He’d often heard shrill cries issuing from the kitchen area as family members rebuked one another. Had the cries been Beijing Mandarin? He hoped so as he parked his car and entered the shadowy dining room. It was too early for the dinner crowd, too late for the lunch patrons. A young woman in her early twenties was seated behind the counter crunching numbers on a calculator. Her expression of mild irritation swiftly transitioned to a happy smile when she recognized him.
“Oh, you come very early today,” she said, rising from her stool.
“Are you serving?” Murray asked her, a bit uncomfortable with deviating from his norm and having the deviation noticed by the woman. He wasn’t hungry, but the matter simply would not wait until dinner time.
“Sure.” She grabbed a menu and led him to the same booth where he always sat. “You want Green Tea?”
“Yes, that would be fine,” he answered, sliding into the booth.
“You need a menu or will it be the usual? Egg Foo Young with shrimp, right?”
“Sounds good,” Murray said, smiling up at the woman, realizing for the first time that he always ordered the same thing and appreciating the fact that she remembered it.
“Okay.”
She turned and walked with child-like energy into the kitchen which lay behind a curtain of beads in a narrow doorway. He could hear her conversing in abrupt bursts of Chinese, sharp and seemingly aggressive with the older woman who worked there, probably her mother. Did he understand it? He wasn’t sure. It felt a bit like the old one was saying, ‘Who’s here at this hour?’ Then he felt like the young woman was saying, ‘The older man who likes shrimp Egg Foo Young. The one who’s nice, but not a great tipper.’
When the woman returned with his Green Tea, he mustered his courage and asked, “Do you speak Beijing Mandarin?”
“Mandarin?” The girl cocked her head, clearly puzzled as to why he would ask. “We speak Mandarin, yes.”
Murray nodded. “Good.” He wanted to say more, but he was feeling even more self-conscious than usual. Talking with women he found attractive was a bit of a challenge, even if it was a waitress in a humble Chinese restaurant. He coughed,
“Why do you ask about Mandarin? She asked him, staring in a sincere fashion and hugging the tray on which she’d transported the tea to her chest.
“Well, you see, I’m trying to learn Mandarin.” Murray managed to hold a steady eye contact with the woman.
Her head drew back in a way that said, ‘You’re shitting me,’ in any language.
“No. Really.”
“What made you decide to learn Mandarin?” She asked, but not in English.
Without hesitation, Murray spoke, feeling as the words came out of his mouth like someone was pouring warm water over the crown of his head and that the warmth was slowly transferring through every cell of his body until it reached his toes. “I am applying for a position with Gelco International as a plant liaison in their Beijing facility. I intend to live there, perhaps for many years, so I must master the language.”
The girl’s narrow eyes widened so suddenly that the effect was comical. Murray could not avoid laughing. “You speak Mandarin so good! Why you never let me know before now?”
“Just self-conscious I guess. I didn’t wish to appear foolish.”
“You played a trick on me!” The young woman wagged a finger at him in mock anger, laughed delightfully and returned to the kitchen. As the beads chinked together from her passage, he could hear her excitedly explaining to her mother that he could speak perfect Mandarin.
“Oh,” her mother answered cautiously. “We’d better not call him a cheap skate, then.”
“Mother!”
Murray laughed to himself and determined to leave a generous tip. It was a good long while before the girl returned with his meal, but when she did she brought her mother and two brothers to the table so that all could hear him speak Mandarin with such elegance. They visited with him for several minutes, before departing to allow him to enjoy his meal. It seemed to Murray it was the most pleasant conversation he’d experienced for many years. Maybe even the best ever.
That night after a couple of glasses of red wine, Murray overcame his reservations and dialed Daniel’s cell number. After several rings, he answered.
“Hello.”
“Daniel, it’s me, Murray Gebhardt.”
“Murr! How’s it hanging, mi compadre?” It seemed to Murray that Daniel had consumed more than a few alcoholic beverages himself. A woman said something in the background, to which Daniel responded, “Naw, it’s a just a new client. Won’t take a minute.”
“Sorry for the interruption.”
“No problem, bro. What can I do for you?”
“I just had to tell you, hell, I had to tell somebody, anybody that the operation was a success!” Murray’s voice carried an enthusiasm that was not just unusual, in reality it had never before manifested.
“The operation is always a success, Murr. But, glad to hear it!”
Murray quickly ran down the events at the Chinese restaurant. Daniel was patient and generous with compliments. As the conversation was drawing to a close, Murray said, “I had just one more question. Something I’ve been wondering about.”
“Shoot, my man! What is it?”
“The passengers… are they always disincarnate?”
There was silence on the line. Finally, Daniel said, “Murray, you dog, I knew you were smarter than you let on!”
“Well, I try.”
“And you’re asking this question because of the Charlie connection?”
“Yeah.”
“No, they don’t have to be dead. This deal with Charlie, it’s harmless really. Hell, he’s known forever that he’ll never get out of prison. So, the thing I have going with him, just gives him a chance to get out and play once in a while.”
“Play?”
“Yeah. Like I told you…private parties, music videos. To some people he’s more of a celebrity than a criminal. Know what I mean?”
“I suppose.”
“All in all it’s a harmless thing. He plays, gets to feel free, have a little fun. You know, get drunk, high, whatever. It’s not like it gets out of hand. Well, I mean…hardly ever…”
BOXES OF DEAD CHILDREN, by Darrell Schweitzer
When the last of the workmen were done installing his “effects” into his new abode and the last of their trucks disappeared down the rough, gravel road, he really wished he could just blow up the little bridge that connected him with the rest of the world and become the most spectacular recluse since Howard Hughes. He pressed down, hard, on the imaginary plunger. Boom! The place was called Eagle’s Head for some obscure reason, a little knob of land off the Maine coast at the end of a peninsula, amid tiny, rocky islands. High tides had washed away just enough that where he stood was an island now, too, but for that bridge, and if he could blow it up, well, all the better, because a gazillionaire minus his gazillions still has some resources left and he was sure he could continue to pay the private security firm he employed to float baskets of groceries over to him o
nce a week and otherwise restrict access and leave him alone.
His was a name anyone would know, once a celebrity, the Boy Inventor (aged twenty-something), creator of _______, essential element in the daily lives of millions (who have to pay for it), the new Thomas Edison, who used to be in all the papers as an inspiration or perspiration of the American Dream, but was now, at sixty-something, if you believed hostile sources, the pirate entrepreneur who’d cheated his buddies out of _______, and was pursued by the slings and arrows of congressional investigations, not to mention a mysterious Woman in Red, several distraught ex-wives and former offspring—a.k.a. money-grubbing leeches—plus any number of lawyers, lawyers, lawyers, until he had made his way in abject retreat by swerve of shore and bend of bay to Eagle’s Head, Maine, and a curiously long-vacant but “fully furnished” property which a Martha’s Vineyard realtor who owed him a debt of discreet gratitude had managed to procure for him.
Boom.
He turned to regard his new acquisition, and the odd thought came to him that if aliens had beamed up bits and pieces of famous edifices from all over the world and glued them together at random, that would only begin to explain the architecture of this place, which had everything from Gothic towers to Romanesque windows to twirly Italianate pillars to a classic, wooden, late Victorian wooden porch on which one could enjoy the sea breeze.
It occurred to him a little later, as he sat on that porch in the evening, that he had so much privacy here that if he wanted to lounge about in a lion-skin loincloth while reading old Tarzan novels, he bloody well could, because amid his vast personal library he actually owned an expensive set of Edgar Rice Burroughs first editions he’d once picked up on a whim, and he did not doubt that the wardrobes inside contained a lion-skin or two; and besides, he was, despite his considerable falling-down in the world, still rich enough to be “eccentric” rather than merely mad, like that crazy DuPont before he’d finally shot somebody.
But a mosquito bit him, and then another, and another, something no amount of isolation or money could do anything about at this time of year, so he went inside. It was not loincloth weather.
Inside, the hallway, which the realtor had described to him as an “atrium,” was filled with stuff. He was very much into stuff, things, objects of art or curiosity, which became a kind of expression of his mind, like graffiti written on the fabric of reality, to an extent more than one of his ex-wives had described as pathological: stuff, his own and that of his rather mysterious “fully furnished” predecessor who had built this little hideaway back in the days of Newport mansions, when anything smaller than the palace of Versailles was accounted a “cottage.” He himself, the product of a simpler age, had grown up watching The Addams Family on TV and had always wanted to live in a house like that, and now, as nearly as possible, he did, complete with a stuffed bear, a samurai statue, and a two-headed concrete tortoise in the living room.
But there was something else here, too, something he couldn’t quite define, some sense of an Other, no doubt caused by the presence of a good deal of antique stuff which was not his—i.e. which had not accumulated through the remembrances and associations of his life. The theory of stuff held that whoever lived in a bare, pristine apartment with no stuff in it was probably not worth getting to know. His predecessor must have been interesting, at least.
So what he was doing here was intruding into the lingering mind of someone else, hoping to fuse his own with it. The bronze and lacquer dragon clock in the atrium, or the life-sized, age-darkened, papier mache’ bobble-head figure of a Chinese attendant had not been his, but they intrigued.
Concerning the former owner, who had left the place boarded up while his estate was left in suspended animation for decades, the realtor had said very little.
Boom. If only he could blow up every connection to the outside world and merely disappear into this place, into the woodwork and accumulations of the house itself. He had to admit to himself, when he had such thoughts, that he was tired, not young anymore, and there were so many things in the world he no longer cared about, most of which had lawyers attached.
But it wasn’t as simple as that of course. No isolation can be perfect, particularly if you want modern conveniences. The electricity worked. It worked well enough when he found the electric train layout and followed an antique steam engine as it rattled across table-tops and over the lintel of a door, then through a hole cut in the wall, along a ceiling on a high ledge, up a spiraling staircase, one, two, three storeys, until it came to an attic room which had been laid out with an immense tabletop display of a rolling prairie, a station in the middle of it where the train came to a stop, and, stretching in all directions, hundreds of tiny gravestones, most of them with names written on them, but some still blank.
Then the power went out, and he was drawn naturally to the fading light of a window. He could see, across Penobscot Bay, a lighthouse in the distance, two or three sailboats beneath a darkening sky, and, below him, on what must be the back lawn, a single grave, a real one, in the back yard, surrounded by a fence.
He spared himself such clichés as Well, that’s weird, and he didn’t feel particularly afraid. He wasn’t quite sure what he felt.
The oddest thing that came to him just then was the temptation, not to blow up his last bridge to the outside world, but to reconnect. So he pulled up a chair and sat down by the window, in the fading light, and got out his cell phone and turned it on. Yes, there was a signal here. He was online, before long fingering his way up and down the screen, reading news, wandering over the Facebook, and then he found a mention of himself in the form of a crudely Photoshopped image of his face on a devil’s body with a wriggling boy and girl spitted on his pitchfork and a caption: IS IT TRUE THAT THE RICH EAT BABIES?
Before he could even turn the phone off a voice behind him in the room distinctly said, “That is not a good idea,” and somehow the phone was snatched out of his hand.
He turned around in alarm and said, “Who’s there?” but of course there was no one there, just the shadow-filled room with the strange train layout and the tiny graveyard.
That the place should be haunted only seemed appropriate. If it were not, he should call the realtor and ask for a discount.
Call him with what? His phone was gone.
He must have dropped it. He could come up here in daylight, with a flashlight if necessary, and search for it.
Then he’d have a long talk with the ghost. Maybe the two of them could become friends, and commiserate without fear of wiretaps and lawsuits.
He realized this was not a normal reaction, but then, he was not here to be normal.
This was well beyond the level of lion-skin loincloths, something deeper than mere eccentricity.
He tried to open himself to the influence of the house, as he explored room after room, some filled with old furniture, shelves crammed with newspapers, another crammed with plaster, life-sized figures of clowns, yet another with every inch of wall space covered with very old, dusty, mounted heads of birds and animals, including what might have been a pterodactyl. Often it was hard to see, because the power was off. Sometimes he just groped. Once he thought he was running his hands over a mummy case. It smelled of wood and exotic spices. Splinters came off on his fingertips. But he could see nothing until he finally found yet another winding staircase which took him down to the kitchen.
Just then the lights came on.
It was quite a modern kitchen, refurnished and stocked as he had instructed. He opened the freezer, got out a frozen entrée and popped it in the microwave, which cheerfully chirped at him as he pressed the bottoms.
He resisted the temptation to actually turn the television on.
As he ate his meager dinner in silence, his hand drifted over to a large book that lay on the table, an album of some kind. He opened it, and saw that it was indeed a late 19th century photo album, each of the pictures
in a stiff cardboard setting hinged with cloth, all black & whites of course, some of them badly faded, a couple of them tintypes and one on glass.
They were all pictures of children, the boys in stiff suits or even sailor suits, and short pants, their socks neatly drawn up to their knees, the girls in frilly dresses and bonnets. It took him a while as he turned the pages, from photo to photo, to figure out what was wrong with their faces, their blank expressions. A couple of them seemed to be wearing round, smoked glasses, or else they had pennies on their eyes.
They were dead, all of them. He knew that it had once been the custom to photograph the dearly departed one last time, and so such pictures did exist, and a whole album of them like this was a fascinating, if decidedly morbid—and no doubt very valuable—collector’s item; but, still, as he came to this conclusion, he snapped the book shut. He laid his fork down gently. He reached for the TV remote.
And then the power went out again.
“You have your little hobbies. I have mine.”
Now he actually was alarmed, but at something more mundane than a ghost.
“Who the hell’s there? Who’s there?”
He groped around in a drawer. He found a steak knife. Armed with this, he turned to face the darkness threateningly.
“I said, who the hell’s there?”
There was no answer. He heard only faint creating and snapping. Old houses “settled,” he knew. Maybe it was windy out. Maybe there were branches scraping against windows.
Knife in hand, he made his way around the kitchen, tapping things with the tip of the knife the way a blind man would with a cane.
There actually was a small flashlight in one of the drawers.
“I said, who—”
He flicked on the flashlight then jumped back as the beam revealed a face, right in front of him, but then he realized it wasn’t a face at all, but a framed oval-shaped photo on the wall, of a man in a stiff collar and a suit, but whose face was somehow indistinct, and becoming even more indistinct by the moment, fading away as he watched.
