While the guys were taking it all in, Knuckles ambled around the crowded side of the card table where Len and Dave were kind of crammed in, mumbled an apology that was both audible and not, and sat down in his chair, if, in fact, he could be said to sit, if it were not rather closer to hovering. He heaved a sigh of weariness as he did so, as if even in his semimaterial state he was bone-tired. And then he fell silent and, for the most part, motionless. Shimmering.
Dave said,—Uh, hello there, I’m Dave. Dave French.
It was an inspired approach, trying to engage the apparition in conversation, and soon Len followed suit, if you’ll excuse the pun.
—Len Spalding, Travis’s friend from the committee on promotions, and mandolin player, and … father of two.
Len, who had responded to the absconding of wife, and the mitigation of custody of his children by getting more affable, actually stuck out a hand. To the ghost in the attic.
The tubercular purring of the former lungs of Knuckles, and an uncomfortable tapping of a crusty penny loafer, nowhere visible, suggested that Knuckles had heard, but nothing more was said. In fact, he rarely said anything. This, apparently, was who he was, just not very talkative. So he looked up, in this fluid, sort of liquid way he had, and gazed at Len’s hand, smiled inscrutably, almost generously, and then crossed his arms. The effect was of keen disconsolation.
What was so frightening about it? In that silence, in that dusk? All those preconceptions you might have, or torn sheets, withering cries, or whatever, those were oversimplifications. A malevolent guest, an incubus coming in the night to make mischief in your affairs? I had experienced no such thing, there was no torn-down face, no sinews exposed, in a bathroom glass. There was just a heartbroken and silent guy, who didn’t belong in our house, wouldn’t say why he had come, and wouldn’t go away. And his comings and goings were impossible to predict, which meant he would brush by you at all hours, mumbling, in a whisper, Excuse me, heading for the family room. And that was scary enough.
—Guys, I said, this is our house guest. A vacuum of responses from my friends.
—And he’s been living with you how long? Dave said finally.
How long had he been living with us? And why hadn’t I mentioned him to the guys, like four days ago when I ran into Dave at the farmers market?
There was a sociologist I was acquainted with at school who’d written a manuscript about the sociology of hauntings, a book that was derisively treated by his colleagues, but which postdated his tenure, such that no one could do anything much about it. This fellow had asked me if I would read the manuscript upon completion, presuming, I guess, that my specialty (scientific ethics) made me a person who would react to the book with a useful set of tools, and, yes, I did let scientific method be my guide. I thought On the Paranormal was a doughy mass of delusion, a great sinkhole into which the empty calories of popularly understood superstition could be poured, without ever admitting to a critique of its nonsense, so that people in their delusion would not see the more potent kinds of ghosts ever massing around them, the meth addicts, the persons without homes, those with profound mental illness, evangelicals, and so on.
I read On the Paranormal while smoking the occasional blunt late at night, and I read it at first the way I would read supermarket tabs, and later with a kind of self-righteous condescension. The more Ed Pearlstein, of the sociology department, tied the hauntings to persistent kinds of social usage, to normative convention, across cultures, the more I thought the guy was a rube, perhaps with dissociative identity disorder. And when people said that Pearlstein had engaged in financial improprieties when he had been head of sociology, I believed them. I was sure he had done it, and worse.
My skepticism, as I told Len about it later on, was a kind of heartwarming certainty that I had come to reckon with in turn. Because it wasn’t long after I read the Pearlstein manuscript that I was in the basement of our place, which, I reminded Len, was one of those unfinished New England basements with a mud floor that glistened, and which also featured actual stone foundation, all of it shifting and vaporizing down to the level sands, according to the avenging of time, like clints of limestone in the Celtic wild, myself in the basement looking for a particular kite that I was going to attempt to fly with my son, when I heard the words Excuse me, sir, muttered with a distinctly Forest Hills locution, and I felt someone brush past, only to feel it two or three more times, like a repeatable experiment, and those words, Excuse me, excuse me, pardon me, as though he already knew me, whoever he was, in my cave of a basement.
—Who’s there? said I, with the kind of clipped brevity that one employs in poorly written films of the Halloween season. This was precisely the wrong question, as you can see, I said to Len, because Knuckles was not a who, because he was both who and not who and there and not there all at the same time, a participant and a nonparticipant, whose insubstantial self exerted a powerful effect on those who saw him, the answer to the question who was he was simply: he was. He came to rest by a spot in the mottled and foul basement where, if one were going to torture, one would have tortured, and he leaned up against the wall, and I wondered if I was seeing, or not seeing, or dreaming, or failing to dream, or hallucinating. Was it, in fact, the light? Some action of quanta, particles, and waves?
—And … what do you want?
To which there was a hiss, somewhere between a laugh and pejorative sniffle, or more like an emphysemiac cough, and then the little bits of light that emanated through and around him, some last bit of a bright sunshine that eddied in through a basement crevice, faded, and he was gone.
All at once, I should say, my interpretation of the Pearlstein manuscript seemed inadequate. Or, maybe, I wanted my interpretation to be the right interpretation, but the thing that I had seen in the basement caused me to go back to my psychiatrist, whom I stopped seeing three years prior, and thus I came to a more nuanced reading.
That night, about the time that my son, who was into his contemptuous middle teen years, asked to put his dishes in the sink, so that he could go aloft, to the second floor, to pollute his brain with video games that I didn’t understand at all, I broached the subject with Debby. I was scrubbing some pots, containing the legacy of some fiery chili, and I said,—Honey, I’ve seen something in the basement.
Her thought was mouse, or rat, or raccoon, all of which, at various points, we had seen near, or maybe something really exotic, a fisher or a coyote.
—Can we trap it? Debby said, having pushed back from the kitchen table.
I said:—I don’t know if it can be trapped.
—Is it an animal?
—It has the traces of an animal.
—Will it knock over stuff? Will it knock over the skis?
—It might.
—A moose, she said. There’s a moose in the basement. How did a moose get the bulkhead open?
—It was a man.
—What? There’s someone downstairs in the basement and you didn’t tell me, and for how long? Is it a homeless guy?
—I think he might be dead.
—There’s a corpse in the basement?
—Not that kind of dead.
A long marriage, by the way, is a thing of routines. You think you can scam all the possible outcomes. You think you know exactly how the other party is going to respond, and that frees you up from having to improvise. You’re a piston rising and falling predictably in a modern factory interior, and you’re loving that. You have predictable responsibilities, and your downtime is immense. But at the first sign of unpredictable revelation, everyone is out of sorts and wants to resist. So it was for Debby.
—I’m going to have a look, she said, but in a way that suggested she wished I’d take care of it.
And then:—What do you take along for this kind of encounter? Should I have a flashlight?
I didn’t know. Because there just had been the one time, and it might have been about school, teaching, the exhaustion of it, the depleting of anything like a n
ormal ability to act upon the world, a depleting of surprise, until all that was left was syllabi, and grading, and fourteen-week increments. Was it the academic entanglements that made it necessary to see the ghost?
—Let’s have a look together. We’ll leave him upstairs.
I gestured to the probable resting spot above me, on the second floor, where Calvin was playing video games in his room, or swiping right on some indexer of love interests.
—Probably best. Until we know more.
Debby got the flashlight that was wall mounted in the pantry, the length and heft of a bludgeon, and we headed down the creaky stairs to the distant past of New England, rocky, colonial, or agrarian, whose loam and early bricklaying habits were still evident in our basement. And Debby cast the lamplight, with its flickering D-battery lumens, down the stairs, in a huff of disconcerted terror. Down we went. It occurred to me to wonder, if it was a haunting, if that was the right word, what exactly was the purpose thereof? Ontological crisis?
—In the back, by the canoe.
She found the wall switch, turned on the dim-watted fluorescents, and then trained the flashlight on the corner where I’d seen him.
—There, I said.
—And what did you see exactly?
—An older guy, like a guy or a portion of a guy, a shimmering of a guy, whom you might see at the assisted-living place, or at bingo night at the church. A down-at-his-heels sort of guy, shifty, unreliable.
—Just standing there?
The beam caught here an old painting that was no longer hung in the living portion of the house, an idealized landscape, now destined to mold, and then a metal shelf that had some old terra-cotta planters, and a couple of painted ones with annoyingly floral exteriors. It shone where the paint was detaching from the rock, and where the wiring was festooned on the wall, some cable from where the cable installer had just slung it around, as a sign of good cheer. It shone at the juncture of the ceiling, and down where stone met packed earth. What it did not show was Knuckles, or any sign of him.
And now my wife came in close to me, near upon my face, the flashlight pendular at the end of her arm,—Is there something you want to tell me?
It became clear, pretty quickly, that the ghost only appeared to human beings of the masculine persuasion. There’s no easy way to put this. I was only beginning to adjust to the fact that every three or four days I would see him, for a moment or two, mostly in the basement, but also eventually in the garage too, and so I don’t know whether the only-visible-to-men- (or masculine-presenting-) individuals thing was happenstance, or whether there was some kind of hard-and-fast theological rule there. But I considered it, as a theory, when in the garage. Most of the time the garage is terrain you pass through, but I found that occasionally I stood, disconsolately, in the garage, thinking about the yard work that I might have been doing were I a person who had enough time to do yard work. I knew that when people walked by our house on Massasoit Street they saw the house of someone who couldn’t be bothered to bag up the leaves, or cut the lawn in a timely fashion, and who was not flush enough to pay someone else to do these things. I looked at the wall of tools, nailed up in the garage, the bulb digger, the wire cutters, the hoe, as judgments against a certain kind of masculinity that was no longer to be had, in the midst of a four-and-three course load, with more than a hundred students per semester, many of them complete with narratives like: that they were living in a motel with their grandmother at the time of the midterm and had no pen, or their father had just died of an overdose, and the police had seized their homework along with all their possessions. I stood in the garage for long enough to grasp that I personally was a drag on real estate values in my neighborhood, as ever with the specters of my students in my head. By the way, it’s true I did go back to the therapist, per my wife’s request, and the therapist got out the DSM and diagnosed sensed presence and referred to an overstimulation of the agent detection mechanism, through which, she pointed out, we also get excessive religiosity and fanatical political beliefs, and she suggested that I did in fact have an anxiety disorder, for which she prescribed one of the new antianxiety meds (but not the backstop of antipsychotics), which I took for a while, only to find that in the morning, when I first took the pill, my hands shook, I couldn’t talk, and I had a desire to go facedown on the breakfast table.
Now here he was in the garage with me, in his meditative stillness, looking slightly more threadbare than last time, when he didn’t look so great. It seemed like he’d stopped shaving, and now had a sort of glowing and ethereal three-day fuzz growing on his chin, and one of the lenses in his sunglasses was cracked. I could not get used to the uncanny feeling of time stilled, the feeling of something deeply wrong, in the encounter. Him sitting on a piece of Walmart porch furniture in the garage (the screws were loose in the back), on a cushionless chair, as if stopping to catch his breath, looking like a group of street toughs had it in for him, or had just subjected him to a mild roughing up.
I said,—You could at least tell me your name.
He who was turned in profile, a grayish nose or its vestigial outline, turned now full to look at me, the empty eyes of some life after life, and said his name with such an elongated vowel that it was as if the wind itself made that avowal:—Staaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan!
The sound reverberated in my sense of what was right and reliable in the world like drone weaponry, and what I wanted to ask was: what business have you left undone, and did you do a thing you so regretted that you can’t let go of it, was there a person you cut off, when sympathy would have been the better gesture, was there a person you trod on to get ahead in your sales job, speaking ill of them, so that they were forever harmed, did you say something awful about a friend in school, did you call a friend the worst of names in middle school, because it was a thing they said then, the boys did that, only to find, later on, that you loved that boy in a way, or did you lie about your friends behind their backs, did you envy your friends, the boys who were your friends, the advantages they had, the boy who had an electric guitar, or the boy whose family had season tickets, or did you neglect to understand that the advantages were all yours, did you fail to see, Stan, your every day involved a sun rising and setting on a kind of promise that other people didn’t have, or did you take what wasn’t yours, Stan, were the moments when you stole because your deprivation was such that only stealing would cause you to feel better, did you steal from friends and the parents of friends, when you were visiting, or did you steal from your school, or from the state, or did you steal and otherwise commit fraud, perhaps of the sort the Securities and Exchange Commission would look into, and what about your dealings with the women of the world, Stan, did you do such numerous things with the women of your acquaintance that your unfinished business involves a desire to repent that can never be completed, or could not be completed during the time before your congestive heart failure, Stan, were you short with women of your acquaintance, as though that were your right, or were you inconstant with the women of your acquaintance, did you take up with one woman before the next was dispensed with in some peremptory fashion, or did you come on to some woman, even though you were in no way available, and dissemble in conversation, did you treat some woman as though she were a woman instead of a person, was she just the appearance of a woman, did you fail to think of a person as a person first of all, with the comprehensive set of human emotions and attributes, and instead did you treat this woman as though she were reducible to a set of ready-made components for a certain kind of Neanderthal engagement, and/or were you a prehumanist in the sense of failing to have the most elevated of ideals about women of your acquaintance, only, that is, to be a humanist of the failing sort, a human being of consistent and flagrant suboptimal performance in the matter of treating women, in particular, Stan, and did you, for example, hate other men simply for being, for being men, and for being rivals, did you hate them, did you walk into a room and imagine which were the men who could be beaten into
submission and which were the men for whom you would need some sort of blunt instrument to subdue, maybe a golf club, to subdue them, were you constantly imagining ways that you could thwart other men, and did you have thoughts like these in environments in which you were supposedly doing more civilized things, Stan, is your burden that you had uncivilized thoughts in civilized environments, did you think about violence and coercion in libraries, churches, synagogues, hospitals, when you most should have been doing otherwise, Stan, or did you think about how unfortunate it was to be a father, or a husband, or a pillar of the community, because you wished you were doing other things, things that you would not talk about, were these things your burden, Stan, such that while living you found yourself balling yourself up in private moments, such that now, in your afterlife, you were stuck in this house from 1912 with warped floors and mice, in a woebegone midsized New England city, shimmering into being and then out again, and scaring the daylights out of people—
Nocturnals Page 18
