My son was a dissident, and to him there was no poison more bitter than the knowledge that his father used to work for NKVD, used to turn people in, used to sit on people’s tribunals that condemned enemies of the state. His shame for my sins forced his pointless flight into the place that offered none of the freedoms it had previously promised, the illusory comforts of the familiar language and the same conversations, of the slowly corrupting English words and the joys of capitalism as small and trivial as the cockroaches in a Brighton Beach kitchen. He still does not see the irony in that.
But he does manage to feel superior to me; he feels like he is better because he’s not the one with naked dead girls chasing him through dreams and working hours, crowding in his head during the precious few minutes of leisure. The bar ribbons of all my medals and orders are of no consequence, as if there had been no war after the slow stealthy drives through the streets. Seasons changed but not the girls, forever trapped in the precarious land between adolescence and maturity, and if there were no victories and marching through mud all the way to Germany and back, as if there was nothing else after these girls. Time stopped in 1938, I suspect, and now it just keeps replaying in the house in Malaya Nikitskaya. And I cannot look away and I cannot quit the job in the embassy—not until I either figure out why this is happening or decide that I do not care enough to find out.
I remember the last week I worked in the Tunisian Embassy. The dead girls infected everything, and even the diplomats and the security saw them out of the corners of their eyes—I saw them tossing up their heads on the way to the bathroom, their eyes wide and awake like those of spooked horses. The girls—long-limbed, bruised-pale—ran down every hallway, their faces looming up from every stairwell, every corner, every glass of sweet dark tea the Pakistani cook brewed for me in the mornings.
The diplomats whispered in their strange tongue, the tongue, I imagined, that remained unchanged since Hannibal and his elephants. I guessed that the girls were getting to them too, and for a brief while I was relating to these foreign dignitaries. Then they decided to deal with the problem, something I had not really considered, content in my unrelenting terror. They decided to take apart the fake partitions in the basement.
I was told to not come to work for a few days, and that damn near killed me. I could not sleep at night, thinking of the pale wraiths streaming in the dark paneled hallways of the sky-blue house. But the heart, the heart of it were all these dead girls, and I worried about them—I feared that they would exorcise them, would chase them away, leaving me no reason to ever go back, no reason to wake up every day, shave, leave the house. I could not know whether the semblance of life granted to them was torturous, and yet I hoped that they would survive.
They did not. When I came back, I found the basement devoid of its fake cement partitions, and the bricks in the basement walls were held together with fresh mortar. The corridors and the rooms were empty too—I often turned, having imagined a flick of movement on the periphery of my vision. I looked into the empty rooms, hoping to catch a glimpse of long legs shredding the air into long, sickle-shaped slivers.
I found them after morning came and the cook offered me the usual glass of tea, dark and sweet and fragrant.
“They found all these bones,” he told me, his voice regretful. “Even more than my bag, the one I told you about before.”
“Where did they take them?”
He shrugged and shook his head, opening his arms palms-out in a pantomime of sincere puzzlement. I already knew that they were not in the house, because of course I already looked everywhere I could look without disturbing any of the diplomats’ sleep.
Before I left for the day, I looked in the yard. It was so quiet there, so separate from the world outside. So peaceful. I found the skulls lined under the trees behind the building, where the graveled path traveled between the house and the wall.
I looked at the row of skulls, all of them with one hole through the base, and I regretted that I had never seen Ninochka’s face among the silent wraiths. I did not know which one of these skulls was hers; all of them looked at me with black holes of their sockets, and I thought I heard the faint rattling of the bullets inside them, the cluttering that grew louder like that of the tin cans dragging behind a running dog.
I turned away and walked toward the gates, trying to keep my steps slow and calm, trying to ignore the rattling of the skulls that had been dragging behind me for the last sixty years.
An old memory resurfaces. That often happens on a night when someone in the vicinity dies—death seems to awaken something . . .
Mr. Aickman’s Air Rifle
Peter Straub
1
On the twenty-first, or “Concierge,” floor of New York’s Governor General Hospital, located just south of midtown on Seventh Avenue, a glow of recessed lighting and a rank of framed, eye-level graphics (Twombley, Shapiro, Marden, Warhol) escort visitors from a brace of express elevators to the reassuring spectacle of a graceful cherry wood desk occupied by a red-jacketed gatekeeper named Mr. Singh. Like a hand cupped beneath a waiting elbow, this gentleman’s enquiring yet deferential appraisal and his stupendous display of fresh flowers nudge the visitor over hushed beige carpeting and into the wood-paneled realm of Floor 21 itself.
First to appear is the nursing station, where in a flattering chiaroscuro efficient women occupy themselves with charts, telephones, and the ever-changing patterns traversing their computer monitors; directly ahead lies the first of the great, half-open doors of the residents’ rooms or suites, each with its brass numeral and discreet nameplate. The great hallway extends some sixty yards, passing seven named and numbered doors on its way to a bright window with an uptown view. To the left, the hallway passes the front of the nurses’ station and the four doors directly opposite, then divides. The shorter portion continues on to a large, south-facing window with a good prospect of the Hudson River, the longer defines the southern boundary of the station. Hung with an Elizabeth Murray lithograph and a Robert Mapplethorpe calla lily, an ochre wall then rises up to guide the hallway over another carpeted fifty feet to a long, narrow room. The small brass sign beside its wide, pebble-glass doors reads SALON.
The Salon is not a salon but a lounge, and a rather makeshift lounge at that. At one end sits a good-sized television set; at the other, a green fabric sofa with two matching chairs. Midpoint in the room, which was intended for the comfort of stricken relatives and other visitors but has always been patronized chiefly by Floor 21’s more ambulatory patients, stands a white-draped table equipped with coffee dispensers, stacks of cups and saucers, and cut-glass containers for sugar and artificial sweeteners. In the hours from four to six in the afternoon, platters laden with pastries and chocolates from the neighborhood’s gourmet specialty shops appear, as if delivered by unseen hands, upon the table.
On an afternoon early in April, when during the hours in question the long window behind the table of goodies registered swift, unpredictable alternations of light and dark, the male patients who constituted four-fifths of the residents of Floor 21, all of them recent victims of atrial fibrillation or atrial flutter, which is to say sufferers from that dire annoyance in the life of a busy American male, non-fatal heart failure, the youngest a man of fifty-eight and the most senior twenty-two years older, found themselves once again partaking of the cream cakes and petit fours and reminding themselves that they had not, after all, undergone heart attacks. Their recent adventures had aroused in them an indulgent fatalism. After all, should the worst happen, which of course it would not, they were already at the epicenter of a swarm of cardiologists!
To varying degrees, these were men of accomplishment and achievement in their common profession, that of letters.
In descending order of age, the four men enjoying the amenities of the Salon were Max Baccarat, the much respected former president of Gladstone Books, the acquisition of which by a German conglomerate had lately precipitated his retirement; Anthony Flax, a se
lf-described “critic” who had spent the past twenty years as a full-time book reviewer for a variety of periodicals and journals, a leisurely occupation he could afford due to his having been the husband, now for three years the widower, of a sugar-substitute heiress; William Messinger, a writer whose lengthy backlist of horror/mystery/suspense novels had been kept continuously in print for twenty-five years by the bi-annual appearance of yet another new astonishment; and Charles Chipp Traynor, child of a wealthy New England family, Harvard graduate, self-declared veteran of the Vietnam conflict, and author of four non-fiction books, also (alas) a notorious plagiarist.
The connections between these four men, no less complex and multi-layered than one would gather from their professional circumstances, had inspired some initial awkwardness on their first few encounters in the Salon, but a shared desire for the treats on offer had encouraged these gentlemen to reach the accommodation displayed on the afternoon in question. By silent agreement, Max Baccarat arrived first, a few minutes after opening, to avail himself of the greatest possible range of selection and the most comfortable seating position, which was on that end side of the sofa nearest the pebble-glass doors, where the cushion was a touch more yielding than its mate. Once the great publisher had installed himself to his satisfaction, Bill Messinger and Tony Flax happened in to browse over the day’s bounty before seating themselves at a comfortable distance from each other. Invariably the last to arrive, Traynor edged around the door sometime around 4:15, his manner suggesting that he had wandered in by accident, probably in search of another room altogether. The loose, patterned hospital gown he wore fastened at neck and backside added to his air of inoffensiveness, and his round glasses and stooped shoulders gave him a generic resemblance to a creature from The Wind in the Willows.
Of the four, the plagiarist alone had surrendered to the hospital’s tacit wishes concerning patients’ in-house mode of dress. Over silk pajamas of a glaring, Greek-village white, Max Baccarat wore a dark, dashing navy blue dressing gown, reputedly a Christmas present from Graham Greene, which fell nearly to the tops of his velvet fox-head slippers. Over his own pajamas, of fine-combed baby-blue cotton instead of white silk, Tony Flax had buttoned a lightweight tan trench coat, complete with epaulettes and grenade rings. Wth his extra chins and florid complexion, it made him look like a correspondent from a war conducted well within striking distance of hotel bars. Bill Messinger had taken one look at the flimsy shift offered him by the hospital staff and decided to stick, for as long as he could get away with it, to the pin-striped Armani suit and black loafers he had worn into the ER. His favorite men’s stores delivered fresh shirts, socks and underwear.
When Messinger’s early, less successful books had been published by Max’s firm, Tony Flax had given him consistently positive reviews; after Bill’s defection to a better house and larger advances for more ambitious books, Tony’s increasingly bored and dismissive reviews accused him of hubris, then ceased altogether. Messinger’s last three novels had not been reviewed anywhere in the Times, an insult he attributed to Tony’s malign influence over its current editors. Likewise, Max had published Chippie Traynor’s first two anecdotal histories of World War I, the second of which had been considered for a Pulitzer Prize, then lost him to a more prominent publisher whose shrewd publicists had placed him on NPR, the Today show, and—after the film deal for his third book—Charlie Rose. Bill had given blurbs to Traynor’s first two books, and Tony Flax had hailed him as a great vernacular historian. Then, two decades later, a stunned graduate student in Texas discovered lengthy, painstakingly altered parallels between Traynor’s books and the contents of several Ph.D. dissertations containing oral histories taken in the 1930s. Beyond that, the student found that perhaps a third of the personal histories had been invented, simply made up, like fiction.
Within days, the graduate student had detonated Chippie’s reputation. One week after the detonation, his university placed him “on leave,” a status assumed to be permanent. He had vanished into his family’s Lincoln Log compound in Maine, not to be seen or heard from until the moment when Bill Messinger and Tony Flax, who had left open the Salon’s doors the better to avoid conversation, had witnessed his sorry, supine figure being wheeled past. Max Baccarat was immediately informed of the scoundrel’s arrival, and before the end of the day the legendary dressing gown, the trench coat, and the pin-striped suit had overcome their mutual resentments to form an alliance against the disgraced newcomer. There was nothing, they found, like a common enemy to smooth over complicated, even difficult relationships.
Chippie Traynor had not found his way to the lounge until the following day, and he had been accompanied by a tremulous elderly woman who with equal plausibility could have passed for either his mother or his wife. Sidling around the door at 4:15, he had taken in the trio watching him from the green sofa and chairs, blinked in disbelief and recognition, ducked his head even closer to his chest, and permitted his companion to lead him to a chair located a few feet from the television set. It was clear that he was struggling with the impulse to scuttle out of the room, never to reappear. Once deposited in the chair, he tilted his head upward and whispered a few words into the woman’s ear. She moved toward the pastries, and at last he eyed his former compatriots.
“Well, well,” he said. “Max, Tony, and Bill. What are you in for, anyway? Me, I passed out on the street in Boothbay Harbor and had to be air-lifted in. Medevaced, like back in the day.”
“These days, a lot of things must remind you of Vietnam, Chippie,” Max said. “We’re heart failure. You?”
“Atrial fib. Shortness of breath. Weaker than a baby. Fell down right in the street, boom. As soon as I get regulated, I’m supposed to have some sort of echo scan.”
“Heart failure, all right,” Max said. “Go ahead, have a cream cake. You’re among friends.”
“Somehow, I doubt that,” Traynor said. He was breathing hard, and he gulped air as he waved the old woman further down the table, toward the chocolate slabs and puffs. He watched carefully as she selected a number of the little cakes. “Don’t forget the decaf, will you, sweetie?”
The others waited for him to introduce his companion, but he sat in silence as she placed a plate of cakes and a cup of coffee on a stand next to the television set, then faded backward into a chair that seemed to have materialized, just for her, from the ether. Traynor lifted a forkful of shiny brown goo to his mouth, sucked it off the fork, and gulped coffee. Because of his long, thick nose and recessed chin, first the fork, then the cup seemed to disappear into the lower half of his face. He twisted his head in the general direction of his companion and said, “Health food, yum yum.”
She smiled vaguely at the ceiling. Traynor turned back to face the other three men, who were staring open-eyed, as if at a performance of some kind.
“Thanks for all the cards and letters, guys. I loved getting your phone calls, too. Really meant a lot to me. Oh, sorry, I’m not being very polite, am I?”
“There’s no need to be sarcastic,” Max said.
“I suppose not. We were never friends, were we?”
“You were looking for a publisher, not a friend,” Max said. “And we did quite well together, or so I thought, before you decided you needed greener pastures. Bill did the same thing to me, come to think of it. Of course, Bill actually wrote the books that came out under his name. For a publisher, that’s quite a significant difference.” (Several descendants of the Ph.D.s from whom Traynor had stolen material had initiated suits against his publishing houses, Gladstone House among them.)
“Do we have to talk about this?’ asked Tony Flax. He rammed his hands in the pockets of his trench coat and glanced from side to side. “Ancient history, hmmm?”
“You’re just embarrassed by the reviews you gave him,” Bill said. “But everybody did the same thing, including me. What did I say about The Middle of the Trenches? ‘The . . . ’ The what? ‘The most truthful, in a way the most visionary book ever written
about trench warfare.’”
“Jesus, you remember your blurbs?” Tony asked. He laughed and tried to draw the others in.
“I remember everything,” said Bill Messinger. “Curse of being a novelist—great memory, lousy sense of direction.”
“You always remembered how to get to the bank,” Tony said.
“Lucky me, I didn’t have to marry it,” Bill said.
“Are you accusing me of marrying for money?” Tony said, defending himself by the usual tactic of pretending that what was commonly accepted was altogether unthinkable. “Not that I have any reason to defend myself against you, Messinger. As that famous memory of yours should recall, I was one of the first people to support your work.”
From nowhere, a reedy English female voice said, “I did enjoy reading your reviews of Mr. Messinger’s early novels, Mr. Flax. I’m sure that’s why I went round to our little book shop and purchased them. They weren’t at all my usual sort of thing, you know, but you made them sound . . . I think the word would be imperative.”
Max, Tony, and Bill peered past Charles Chipp Traynor to get a good look at his companion. For the first time, they took in that she was wearing a long, loose collection of elements that suggested feminine literary garb of the 1920s: a hazy, rather shimmery woolen cardigan over a white, high-buttoned blouse, pearls, an ankle-length heather skirt, and low-heeled black shoes with laces. Her long, sensitive nose pointed up, exposing the clean line of her jaw; her lips twitched in what might have been amusement. Two things struck the men staring at her: that this woman looked a bit familiar, and that in spite of her age and general oddness, she would have to be described as beautiful.
“Well, yes,” Tony said. “Thank you. I believe I was trying to express something of the sort. They were books . . . well. Bill, you never understood this, I think, but I felt they were books that deserved to be read. For their workmanship, their modesty, what I thought was their actual decency.”
Ghosts: Recent Hauntings Page 50
