Author: T. M. Wright
Date: 2006-03-01 08:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Horror
Description: Includes a new author's note about this book. A new novella from T.M. Wright! "T.M. Wright is a rare and blazing talent." --Stephen King "T.M. Wright is more than a master of quiet horror -- he is a one-man definition of the term." --Ramsey Campbell It is said that if ghosts were real, they'd be everywhere-at shopping malls, parking lots, in the parlor, the bathroom, on the sidewalks and boulevards (after all, how many people have lived and died throughout human history?). But maybe, just maybe, they are everywhere-on your lap at this very moment, in the walk-in closet, in the grand oak tree j
Publisher: Nyx Books

A SPIDER ON MY TONGUE

By T. M. Wright

First Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press & Macabre Ink Digital

Copyright 2011 by T. M. Wright

Cover Design by David Dodd – Copy-edited by Kurt Criscione

LICENSE NOTES:

This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only.  This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people.  If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with.  If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return the vendor of your choice and purchase your own copy.  Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

OTHER CROSSROAD TITLES BY T. M. Wright:

NOVELS:

STRANGE SEEDS

BOUNDARIES

THE CHANGING

THE DEVOURING

THE ASCENDING

GOODLOW'S GHOSTS

THE WAITING ROOM

NON FICTION:

THE INTELLIGENT MAN'S GUIDE TO U.F.O.s

UNABRIDGED AUDIOBOOKS:

A MANHATTAN GHOST STORY – NARRATED BY DICK HILL

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ABOUT "A SPIDER ON MY TONGUE"

A note from the author – T. M. Wright

~ * ~

The characters you will meet in this novella will be new to you if you haven't read the first two books in the "Manhattan Ghost Story" trilogy--"A Manhattan Ghost Story," and "The Waiting Room."

I have been told by people who know about such things, that this book, third in the trilogy, is "one weird little book."  It was designed that way, of course, because when a book talks about death and love and "otherlife" it's best, for me at least, that it's weird because, hell, what do we really know about death and love and "otherlife," after all?

Which, of course, begs the question--is it necessary to read the first two weird books in the trilogy in order to understand the weirdness of this one?  No.  But it might help.  Otherwise, it's a matter of deciphering the weirdnesss, of making it rational weirdness, I guess.  But if you're not averse to such a task, go ahead and read "Spider" as a stand-alone.

By the way, the main character here, Abner Cray--who's been pining for his lost love Phyllis Pellaprat since the end of "A Manhattan Ghost Story" is not up to always telling this story in a coherent manner.  Forgive him.  He has little idea what "otherlife" he's in, or what "the passing misery" beyond his door has in store for him.

--T.M. Wright.

With love for Chloe, Tara and Ella,

my grandchildren

I have learned this too: pettiness survives. And jealousy: And
pretension, fear, loneliness, depression. I have learned that the living
have not yet cornered the market on misery.

—Abner Cray, 1984,

"A Manhattan Ghost Story"

ONE

June 8, 2006, 3:30 PM

Here's something you desperately need to know: the world you live in is not the world you think you live in, and if you try to live in it believing you know it, one day you'll find yourself surprised way beyond the powers of your poor synapses to express surprise—as if a spider has suddenly climbed into your mouth and bitten you on the tongue and made you unable to move, or swallow, or spit..

That is what I live with constantly. A spider on my tongue.

My name is Abner W. Cray and, long ago, I knew lots of things—what time to get up in the morning, what to do after I got up, what to do after that, who to kiss and who to avoid and who to listen to, who to be afraid of, or joke with, what tasks to leave until later and what to accomplish within the moment that was upon me.

Now, this day (this beautiful, grotesque morning) I have only a spider on my tongue. Now I can not move, or swallow, or spit.

And here's something else you need to know: You can not trust me, or anyone, about anything. You can not even trust yourself because I can not trust myself—about my survival, about my death (whether it has happened or will happen or should happen), about those who crowd me constantly in this little house, about the places I can go to, about the places I can never go to again, even though I've been to those places ten thousand times in what surely has been one-hundred thousand years.

~ * ~

June 9, 8:00 AM

Beautiful morning, grotesque morning—like a cherubic face with a bleached skull beneath the skin. And that describes all of us—you and me, the UPS delivery man, the shapely woman in green (whose eye is easy to catch), the neighbor who stalks your cat because it kills songbirds, the sibling you foolishly thought you knew so well, the lover who leaves you with a godawful mess.

"Do you know what you are?" I say to some of those who crowd around me here, as if I am simply nonexistent, or as if my existence were no great matter, and I see them (certainly I do) cock their heads or shrug their shoulders or raise their eyebrows to tell me I'm being impossibly stupid or that the question simply doesn't pertain.

It is not their open mouths or their poor plastic smiles or their marbled eyes that so disturb, it is their foaming and enthusiastic ignorance which proclaims loudly that others in their universe (which is our universe, too) welcome that ignorance and want to share it. Perhaps in a kiss.

Phyllis Pellaprat is elsewhere. And everywhere. At last. She came to me (long ago) when it should have been impossible for her to come to me, and impossible for me to take her, and she gave me as much of herself as she was able to give, then dissipated, like smoke.

You know her, you knew her: she shared your bed and tickled you at all the right times, in all the right places; she made much and nothing of her nakedness and her mischievous predilections; she said you were her world made of skin and hair and cartilage; she saw you even when you were nowhere near, and, at last, she left you only after she shed many tears, as if leaving you were an impossible task, but she left you nonetheless.

She was as real as pain, and that was something she could no more avoid than she could have avoided her life, and her death.

I think I love her as much as God allows, and I say that as someone, now, who has every reason to believe in a God, but doesn't.

~ * ~

1:45 PM

If you want me to take you back to the beginning of this tale, I won't, I can't. And I can't because I don't want to. If you had written previously, and almost endlessly, about your stupidity and (some would say) your perversion, would you want to look backward at it, or even glance backward at it, for Christ's sake! That would smack of masochism, and I'm not a masochist. (Although you must remember what I wrote earlier. Trust me and I may disappoint you, because I can't trust myself. Existence, however, is a lot more interesting that way, don't you think?)

~ * ~

2:30 PM

The snot-nosed kid selling puppies on Fifth Avenue (little muttlies, of course, but fucking damned cute) was a real heartbreaker. But then, that's what he was supposed to be (a heartbreaker). Clichés are the stock in trade of these poor creatures.

Like the phantom taxi driver who drove as if the Manhattan streets were filled only with air:

And Kennedy Whelan, the rotund detective looking for murder:

And the cynical editor who was sure that "literature" could serve her only if it served the masses:

And Stacey, the gorgeous second cousin of the lead male in these poor stories, who tickled his sensibilities:

And Phyllis Pellaprat herself, who showed him what love could be, then showed him that she'd been lying all along, though she hadn't known it.

What a bag of clichés.

If I could, I'd spit.

~ * ~

5:15 PM

It's a neat little house I live in, now—as small as my ambitions, but airy and livable, at least when I arrived not too awfully long ago. My neighbors are far enough away that they might as well be invisible, which suits me fine, and there are ample woods to walk in, and a hundred narrow paths winding through them. In this place, at least at first, I had a never-ending late spring and enough sun and storms and gray skies to keep me from becoming bored or complacent.

It's rare that anyone comes to my door. It has happened only twice, in fact—middle-age men asking to hunt on my land: I said no each time, though, minutes later, I could hear the low, rumbling chatter of their shotguns. I didn't chase these hunters down in order to shoo them away: In the ordinary sense of the word, at least, I'm not stupid.

(You're wondering, of course, if you can trust what I just told you. I'd say yes, but then you'd ask if you could trust that, and when I said yes, again, you'd repeat your question, and we'd go round and round and round and this little narrative would never get written. And, good Lord, it needs to get written.)

We're talking about real time. What I put down on paper, here, has happened, or is happening, or will happen, or is continuing to happen. That's the sort of universe this is—where all things happen in all tenses, and in tenses you've never experienced, too. Such a fascinating place, this universe—a place where I can remember, and rest, and die (which I'll get around to sooner or later).

Please don't trust me. Not everything I say is a lie, as far as I know, but I'm a miserably unreliable narrator. It's not that I want to be unreliable, but I really know nothing about anything, so I attempt to interpret what I experience, and I have no way of knowing if my interpretations are correct because nothing is correct here, just as, for instance, people are never at a "correct" age, and rainfall is never a "correct" amount: we can not control age or rainfall, so the idea of the "correctness" of age or rainfall simply doesn't pertain.

~ * ~

June 10, 12:02 AM

Well, shit, let me get down to specifics.

When I think of a ghost story, I think about children shivering
around a campfire while an aging man with a long, austere face
summons up--in resonant, wonderfully spectral tones—the way
the misdeeds of the dead will soon be visited upon the living, and I
think about old gray houses that have somehow had Evil
implanted in them, and I think about rocking chairs that rock all
on their own, and about crying in empty rooms, about cold spots,
warm spots, hot spots, hounds out of hell, men who hang
themselves in attics and in cellars, again and again and again.
And it’s all true.
I know it's all true.
But there's a whole lot more going on over there, on The Other
Side, than any of us can imagine.

—A Manhattan Ghost Story

TWO

I like being precise about these things, don't you? "TWO." It gives weight and parameters to this narrative, and specificity, too. It seems to impose order where order—at least as we have come to define it—cannot actually exist.

So I'll begin, or continue, by telling you that I'm in my late forties, that my light brown hair is thinning, though not badly, that I'm not quite six feet tall, that my teeth are perfect, and I wear a size 11 E shoe; my fingers (some have said) are abnormally long (as are my toes) (I play piano, though badly), my nose is straight, narrow and unremarkable, and my heart has a murmur that's not a major problem. My cholesterol (when last checked, though I can't remember when that was) is around 140, and my sexual organs are of normal size (meaning only that none of my partners has ever exclaimed, "Oh, my God, how impressive you are!"); my legs are thin, and I walk with a nearly unnoticeable limp. Isn't that a stunningly uninteresting portrait? It says nothing about me, only that I could be any of a thousand men you might see anywhere on the planet. But there's this: were you to see me (were you able to see me, I should say, which isn't something I'm not absolutely certain is possible), you wouldn't realize it, but I'd know you instantly, and perfectly. No, not your life history. Not who you're fucking or hope to fuck, or how many degrees you've earned, your political alignment, your birth weight, your mother's maiden name, or the workings of your inner organs. I'd know you! That's the pickle I've gotten myself into, you see. That's the spider on my tongue. Whoever you are, beyond all the facts about your life (and death, if it pertained), would be as clear to me as the color of your eyes and the odor of your breath.

You exist beyond all the stuff that clogs your life and your history. You have been floating about for eons, and although you might refer to yourself as a soul, an entity, a cosmic thing you are as unnamable and indefinable as the reason for gravity. You assume an identity; for a time, you wear a flat stomach or a graceless rear end or a face that makes others look away (or look too long): and, for a time (which is called "a life") you sell motorcycles or write greeting cards or are appointed king of this place or that, and then all of it's gone, Poof!-- down to the last fleeting memory, and you continue, unnamable, indefinable, neither a soul, nor an entity, nor a cosmic thing.

You!

~ * ~

June 11, 1:30 AM

He told me:

"I was walking with the woman I loved and it was my last day on earth. I didn't know it was my last day, nor did the woman I loved, whose name is Karen. We had shared a tasty lunch at a place called "Sid's" (she ordered a bowl of clam chowder and I ordered a tuna rollup) and, as we walked, we talked about the lunch, about the morning that had preceded it, and the evening that had preceded the morning. God, we were happy together. We were inseparable and that's how we liked it. What a way to live!

"Here's the thing, Abner: We were walking on railroad tracks. That's almost always stupid, but we knew the schedules of the trains that used those tracks and we assumed we were okay. Turns out, our assumption was correct. There were no trains. Not that morning.

"Walking railroad tracks is a little like walking on thin ice: it's such great, childish fun to balance on the rails or skip from one tie to another that's two or three ties away, or to put an ear to the rail and proclaim that you can hear a train far, far in the distance: "It's the rail," you say in hushed tones, as if sharing some forbidden secret."It conducts the rumbling of the wheels like a telephone wire. You can hear a train from miles away." But you're aware, with every passing second, that a huge, powerful, and nearly unstoppable Goliath uses those rails and that, if it caught up with you, you'd be reduced to hamburger. There's a little bit of a thrill in that, of course. But, still, as I said, it's like walking on thin ice.

"That grim possibility turned us on big time—Karen and me. So we decided to have at it right there, on the tracks. There was, as well, the always-irresistible possibility that we'd get caught (though no one else appeared to be walking the tracks that day, there was a curve not far from where we were, and we knew that someone could round that curve at any time), of course, so we stripped down quite completely and, as usual, the lovely and buxom Karen took the upper berth so I could watch her flail about, her wondrous breasts cascading this way and that, and while this was going on, I was in some incredible world her marvelous body created for me, a world where the moment that was everything lasted an eternity, a world where pain was pleasure, and where I had no idea (nor did I care) what my arms and legs and head were doing, a place where I cared only what my cock was doing, and it was doing just fine, thank you, it was answering the siren call of Karen's tits and ass and pussy, and so I did not really see what she was doing, you understand, or feel it—I did not see or care that she had grabbed a great shock of my long hair and that her good, strong hands and arms were banging my head against that bright steel rail as she thrashed about in what must have been a continuous orgasm, did not see or really feel any of this until I saw it from above, from the height of a basketball hoop, perhaps, until I saw her stop thrashing about, suddenly, and look at me, and I heard her say, in one great outflow of breath, "Larry! Larry! Oh my God!" because, of course, she knew I'd gone the way of the dodo bird."

I told poor Larry that it was a sad and painful and awful story, but, at its core, outrageously funny, too, and he chuckled in his hollow non-corporeal way, then bleeped out, the way his kind always do, with a barely perceptible burping noise (a gerbil burp, I used to call it), leaving behind only all of himself, minus his history and the past workings of his inner organs, the color of his eyes, the length of his fingernails, the odor of his breath.

Don't ask me to define the all of himself he'd left behind. Such a definition is not something I do or have ever done. I'm not smart enough or articulate enough, and, besides, I simply don't have the fucking time.

~ * ~

8:13 AM

Often, I believe I see Phyllis Pellaprat at a distance in the dim woods beyond my windows, so she's nothing more than an imagining, the detritus of a ghost, as if she has shed her other-worldly skin and it has drifted back to earth.

Good God, all of us are seduced by phantoms. I'm not unique. I'm simply someone who has decided to tell the tale and, so, relive the events. But the tale has already been told, and this is a brand new tale that's as old as the sun itself. Just like you, and me, and poor Larry of the smashed head.

Let's make a pact: I'll continue to write as long as you continue to read. Deal?

I'm not going to try and make you believe this is a love story. It isn't. Not, at least, in the usual sense. When I hear
the words "love story" I think of Ali McGraw and Ryan
O'Neal, Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, Wooden Allen
and Diane Keaton, Taylor and Burton, Streisand and Redford.

I do not think of Abner E Cray and Phyllis Pellaprat.

—A Manhattan Ghost Story

THREE

June 15, 1006, 4:32 PM

Let me tell you something you need to believe: All things that have happened, all things that are happening, and all things that will happen, are one.

Bullshit! you say? You may be right, but I think you're wrong. I, and Larry-of-the-smashed-head, and Detective Kennedy Whelan, still looking through the ether for murder, and Phyllis Pellaprat, who sheds her clothes and her skin with equal enthusiasm and effect, and my teasingly seductive cousin, Stacey (who may or may not, at this point, be on one side or the other of this universe), and the billions who have come and gone, or will eventually come and go, think you're as wrong as a right-hand turn on a left-hand curve.

I had a dark beer once that made me sick. I'm still enjoying it, and I'm still getting sick from it. That's what existence is for, you know, and that's what it's all about, continuous enjoyment and regret. You didn't realize that? Where have you been all your corporeal life—dreaming of heaven?

Here's what Larry-of-the-smashed-head said about heaven:

"It's like expecting the Queen of England to wear a thong during a croquet match."

It's all I could get out of him on the subject.

And here's what another of the allegedly non-corporeal, a woman named Madge who used to tend tables at a restaurant in upstate New York, had to say:

"Heaven is a place set up to keep us from knowing very much at all."

"About what?" I asked.

"About heaven, of course," she answered, and then bleeped out. Burp!

And here's what my very, very late friend Art—who loaned me the upper West Side Manhattan apartment where I met Phyllis Pellaprat, had to say about it (before he became so very late): "Abner, you dream about heaven and you might as well be dreaming about your mucous membranes."

"I don't know what the hell that means, Art," I said.

"Of course you don't," he said. "That's the fucking point."

~ * ~

7:12 PM

I have no energy. They've sapped it It's all I can do to sleep, and I can't even do that. They've drained me, sapped me—they're vampires, wraiths, ghouls, viruses. They come and go, come and go, come and go: they bark questions, bark answers, become whole, then half.

I have a regular kitchen here, in this little house in the woods. I have a big, cream-colored Mixmaster mixer, which I use often for things like mashed potatoes and white sauce, and I also have a new Tappan electric stove, with two full-size burners and two medium-size burners. The stove was delivered by a tall, bearded man named Steve who drove a large green van with the words "Steve's Appliances/Only the Best" emblazoned on the sides in red. Steve was friendly and chatty, and his legs were quite short. I was going to ask him about this but I didn't want to be rude. When he left, I gave him a small tip, which he accepted with a smile and a nod of his big head.

"Do you believe in ghosts, Steve?" I asked as he was getting into his van.

He looked back at me: "Ghosts?" he said.

"Yes. Do you believe in them?"

"Sure," he said. "I've seen them, in fact."

"I have, too, I think," I said.

"It was my mother I saw," he said. "She was washing her feet in my living room. She always loved to wash her feet. She looked very happy when she washed her feet. She'd been dead for two days, and there she was, washing her feet in my living room, with a huge smile on her face. It was very white, her face I mean."

"I've never seen that," I said.

He looked oddly at me, as if I had an ear in the middle of my forehead, said, "Uh-huh," closed the van's door and drove away.

~ * ~

10:26 PM

These things all about me, in the house and in the countryside and in the woods, even insert themselves into my food. I used to enjoy eating (and obviously still do), but now I find unwanted entities in my squash.

~ * ~

June 16_1 2:01 AM

The trick is to keep moving, not just around the block, or from one side of the room to the other (though it helps), but mentally, too, intellectually, emotionally, too. Don't alight on one thought or memory for too long because that's when they insinuate themselves on you.

Of course, you're not aware of any of this. In reality, you have lived what I've lived, but you don't know it. I'm telling you, now.

~ * ~

7:11 AM

It looks like a trick, like an evasion—changing the subject. I'll write about tires, for instance. Stoves, too. And mortal lovemaking on a sunny afternoon. I'll flit about from one thing to another. I'll throw myself into the kitchen and then into the living room. These things are not very quick to react (and why not?).

If I slow down, I don't know what will happen.

I dream of friends and acquaintances who've become vapors, less shadow than shadow, and in these dreams, I recognize them and interact with them. On a particular evening not long ago, one of these acquaintances took me to an amusement park, then to a carnival, where we played games of chance. He was very good at these games and the carnival barker was full of loud and hearty talk about my acquaintance's luck and skill. My acquaintance, whom I once called Mitch, got puffed up by all this hearty talk. His face became red and his smile became huge and, at last, his luck ended all at once and I was alone at the carnival.

Do you like carnivals? I do. They're seamy. I like seamy. I think it gets appetizingly close to the what of us.

~ * ~

8:35 AM

About the skin of these things:

Go to a car graveyard. Make sure it's an ancient car graveyard, one that hasn't been used for decades, which would mean that it couldn't be sold because the owners would have to drag all those old cars out, first, and then reclaim the land by cleaning up oil spills, gasoline spills, anti-freeze spills.

In this ancient car graveyard, find the oldest car and touch it. Assumedly, that car is, by now, completely golden brown with rust. But it's beyond that, you see. It's beyond being simply "brown with rust." The rust has become so pervasive, so earnest, so destructive that the sheet metal of that car (a '57 Desoto, a '61 Falcon, who knows?) has been reduced to nothing more than a patina, no thicker, really, than the bright new paint that once covered it. So when you touch it (that skin, that patina), your finger goes through it at once. But that's not the whole story. Stake out the car, that Desoto, that Falcon, and return to it in ten years. And go there on a day when a good breeze has been forecast (Look for a cold and windy day today, folks!) then stand back from the car and watch as the wind blows the car's skin (its patina) into dust, leaving only the frame.

Now, as you watch that car disintegrate in the brisk wind, think of skin a thousand times as thin. That's the skin that covers these acquaintances who populate my dreams.

That's the skin of these things all around me, too—inside and outside my little house.

But there is, you see, no wind to blow that skin away, because no heat and cold exists in their world to produce wind, and, as well, no air (nitrogen, oxygen, argon). It is a world as still as a snapshot.

~ * ~

10:21 AM

How often do you (you, reading this) hear daily the chatter of neighbors? It's usually unintelligible; we hear it through walls and windows and floors (if the neighbors live below us), and, if we have animals (dogs especially), their ears perk up, and they look attentive, interested in this new set of untranslatable but surely human noises.

Through floors or walls, it's usually less human sounding than through windows. But, more often than not, it is quick and meaningless, except in pitch, and it is devoid of music or rhythm. It sounds as if it's not connected to our world at all.

~ * ~

12:02 AM

Before she left not too long ago, my wife began to sense what was going on here, in this house, and around it. One afternoon, she said, "I hear people talking."

"No you don't," I said, and she looked at me with great suspicion. "Abner," she said, "I know what I hear. How can you tell me I don't?"

"I'm not," I said. "I'm not doing that. I'm just saying that there's no way you can hear people talking because we're the only people in the house."

"Clearly, that's not true," she said. Her eyes were pale green, very expressive, and, at that moment, they were expressive of rebuke, which was not uncommon. She paused, looked slowly right, left. "My God!" She held her hand up, palm out, as if to stop me from speaking, though I wasn't about to speak. "My God," she repeated, "I can hear them even now. I can hear them talking."

"Lorraine," I said, "you have to be wrong because I can't hear anything."

She cocked her head at me. It was a pretty head and I enjoyed looking at it. "You're trying to infer that I'm going crazy, aren't you?"

"Not 'infer,’" I said. "Imply."

She looked silently at me a moment. "Don't do that, Abner. Don't correct my English. You always do that. Why?" Brief pause. "Never mind." She took a quick glance left, right, then her eyes were on me again. "Jesus, Abner, they're talking about us!”

I said nothing. I think I sighed. I wanted to say, "Of course they are."

She was gone from the house two days later.

I had a friend in Bangor who had a nice, dirty blond beard and a
round, gentle face, and whenever he went into a laundry near his
home, the proprietors—two aged Chinese men named Lu and
Yang—smiled at him when he came through the doorway and
shouted, “Hey, Jesus Christ, how are you doing?" My friend told
me that story quite a lot, and I always enjoyed it; it tickled me.
His name was Sam Feary. He was two years older than I, a bit
chunky, with a splash offreckles across the bridge of his nose. He
looked like one of the Campbell Soup kids grown up and a few
pounds lighter.

—A Manhattan Ghost Story

FOUR

July 19, 2006, 6:07 AM

Can't you see I'm trying to be logical about this! Can't you allow me at least that much! And if I can't be logical, then at least let me be orderly. Let me, at the very least, assign parameters—if only in the form of numbers, spacing, categorization. Certainly you understand that need.

When I was younger, and in a very different situation, and the world became too much for me, or I was sad because of a failed test, or the sickness of a pet, or a death, I went around polishing things—doorknobs, faucets, silverware. Then I looked at my face or my hand or the room in the surface of what I'd polished and it made me momentarily happy. I don't do that anymore. I don't run around polishing things. Now I put words down on paper—word after word after word—in order to tell my stories, in order to give you an idea of the life I've led and the life I'm leading, what may be in store for me, and what in the name of heaven I think it all means, as if it's supposed to mean anything at all.

Now I simply write.

~ * ~

6:09 AM

And so, "FOUR."

~ * ~

6:15 AM

Thank you.

~ * ~

7:45 AM

Yes, Lorraine left and hasn't returned. That was some weeks ago. She didn't say goodbye, didn't leave a note, didn't give me any warning whatever. Was I happy to see her go? Yes. She desired it, obviously. Desired to leave. Needed it. I can't leave, however. Where would I go? There's no place to go. It's all the same place; it's all this place.

~ * ~

8:23 AM

You don't need to sleep anymore. I do. Remember that. It's important. (Or maybe you do sleep. Maybe you need it as much as I, perhaps more. I have no real idea unless you tell me. I have no way to judge otherwise. There are people nearby, within a mile or two, in a little village whose name escapes me. I go to that village now and again for food. I walk there, with my little tote bags flung over my shoulder (both tote bags sport a graphic of beagle puppies; I had half a dozen beagles when I was a kid, and their pleasant, affectionate and intelligent faces still charm me), and, after doing my shopping, I talk with the man behind the counter for a minute—he's tall and bald and very thin, and he loves to talk, though his conversation is banal, which is okay, sometimes, almost comforting. But then I feel the tug of my little house, and when I leave the store, I often encounter people walking on the village's only street and I nod and smile, and they nod and smile back at me, but I don't know any of them, I don't live with them, I live with these others), I trudge back with my bread and eggs and cider and peanut butter, et cetera, et cetera, in my beagle puppy tote bags.

When I walk back from the village and I see this little stand of woods, I'm always ambivalent about it. These woods shelter my home, this little house, which gave me good shelter for a time, though, now, it shelters these others, too, the ones who follow me on my way out, down a narrow path that winds through the woods to a clearing, where I can see the village not far off (it's almost a picture-postcard; church steeple, red and green roofs, a farmer's windmill and two tall silos further off). And when I reach the edge of the woods, on my way to that village, I can feel them drop away. A few trudge after me for a while, yes, but, after a couple of minutes, I turn and see that they've dropped away, as well. I don't think it's sunlight or, beneath a sky filled with clouds, the daylight that draws them back. I can't say what draws them back. Perhaps they realize I have nowhere else to go, that, before long, I'll return to the little house in the dim woods and, so, to them.

~ * ~

8:29 AM

And thank you for the spacing, the asterisks and chapter numbers.

~ * ~

8:45 AM

I don't know whose story I'm telling, really—my own or theirs (yours). It would have to be both, of course, since there really is no difference between them (you) and me. How could there be? Is there any real difference between the soil in Montana and the soil in Palermo? Is there any real difference between time that's passed and time that's being measured?

~ * ~

8:48 AM

I do not thank the now-late (I assume) Barbara W. Barber for her gift, so long ago. A kiss, a curse, a legacy of nightmare. If only I hadn't boarded that train. If only I'd had the good sense to sit in a different car. If only I hadn't caught her eye. I would have remained blissfully ignorant and unaware. Now I exist at the center of chaos. Now I cannot say that I am one of the dead or one of the living because I can define neither, because it's become so abundantly and horrifyingly clear to me that no one can. Neither they (you), nor I.

I can not say that I am not a part of the passing misery.

I can only say that I really do shop for peanut butter and eggs in a tiny village whose name I forget, and that I talk there with a tall, thin, bald man whose conversation is meaningless.

I can only say that I wake every morning at precisely 5:45 with an oddly dull pain moving through my entire body (and sometimes it doesn't feel like physical pain at all but merely the memory of pain) which subsides, but never vanishes, as the morning progresses, and that these others around me in my little house, and in the dim woods beyond, are as present as air and as visible as darkness.

~ * ~

10:21 AM

And Barbara W. Barber wasn't even attractive.

~ * ~

12:45 PM

During those first awful years in Manhattan, after Phyllis Pellaprat dissipated, I ran. Of course. You get spooked, you feel threatened, you become paranoid, you run. Oldest human failing in the book. Because when you (they) run, they (you) follow. You run, they follow. They run,you follow.

And there they (you) are—at the corner, around the block, asleep on an awning, under a table, sitting at the table and enjoying a stiff drink, piloting yellow cabs, grinning vacantly, or rabidly, from behind windows and locked doors, begging for change, giving change, holding hands and kissing and playing hopscotch, screeching like owls selling puppies on busy streets, asking, endlessly, for an elevator to be held.

These are the things I knew about Phyllis Pellaprat after our first
week together, at Art DeGraff's apartment: I knew that she was
intelligent, that she was incredibly sensual, that she liked to play
Yahtzee—Christ, she liked to play Yahtzee—and I knew also
that she was not a romantic. This disappointed me because I am
a romantic; I have always been a romantic—the words I love
you fly easily from my lips. And when I said to her, for the very
first time, "Phyllis, I love you," her reaction was not what I had
hoped for.

—A Manhattan Ghost Story

FIVE

July 21, 2006, 5:56 AM

One clear spring morning a year before I left Manhattan, I came home from a quick run for groceries, opened my apartment door, and found the apartment pitch black. I usually left my curtains drawn (mostly because of what lurked beyond the windows, and what peered through them), so, even in daylight, the apartment was often dimly lighted (one sees blessedly little in the near darkness), but this darkness was total: I stopped with one foot in the apartment, the other in the hallway, and I listened. I heard nothing. I peered hard into the darkness. I saw nothing.

"Is someone here?" I whispered, realized my cowardice, and said it louder: "Is someone here?" Nothing. I stood very still for a few moments, then withdrew my foot, so I was standing in the hallway again, door open, darkness beyond.

Think of this: You're driving alone on a country lane. It isn't night, it's bright daylight, in fact; the country lane smells good through your open windows, and the sunlight on the tall grasses, the wild flowers and the occasional honeybee makes you believe, for one beautiful moment, that there must be a God, otherwise, a day such as this simply could not exist. So you smile, and you love the smile (you even glance briefly at it in your rearview mirror because you don't think you've smiled that way in a long, long time, maybe since you were a kid), and you love the day, too, the sunshine, the crisp and pleasant odors of the country lane--you wish that someone were there with you at that moment so you could tell them how really good you feel.

And all at once you realize you're being watched. It's more than simply a hunch—you know it with certainty, as if it's pain you're feeling. You have no earthly idea what's watching you, but you do know this—whatever it is, it wants to do you harm.

You glance in the rearview mirror again, see only a rectangle of sunlight, the back of the rear seat. You curse, glance left, then right, at the brightly sunlit fields. Nothing. You stare straight ahead a moment, feel your foot press harder and harder on the accelerator, look in the rearview mirror once more, then left, right, again, but you see only what your good sense tells you to see—the cheerful sunlight, the country lane, the tall grasses and wildflowers, but you believe you know better than your good sense which, you also believe, is protecting you from nightmare by denying that it exists.

And then you find yourself at home, find sunlight streaming in through the bay windows, the odors of a spring afternoon wafting through the house, and you shiver because, all at once, again, you know that the malevolent thing that watched you on the country lane is continuing to watch you here, in your house—it dogs your footsteps, follows you from the living room to the kitchen to the bathroom and then, much later, into the bedroom, where you lie quivering like a frightened child because you know with mortal certainty that the thing is standing by your bed in the darkness, and that it's still watching, that it's bending over you...

I learned this as I stood outside my apartment and peered through the open doorway, into darkness: I learned that invisible malevolence is everywhere, but that it isn't purposeful; none of these things intends to do harm, no more than a black widow spider does, or a tidal wave, or the tumor that sets itself up in our gray matter.

But then, perhaps, you should reread all that I've written here. Perhaps I should!

~ * ~

6:12 PM

Oddly, I always welcome sleep. It brings me dreams of places and people I once knew well, people I now love and trust (if only because they exist in my dreams, and nowhere else—my Aunt Pattie, for instance, who always read what I wrote and always proclaimed it brilliant, and my friend Sam Feary, who knew me well, and my fraternal grandfather, whose name was Sam, and who liked to be called "Sammy," even when he was in his nineties). It's my waking hours that constitute nightmare. I see too clearly during daylight. The shadows are harsh and animated, unpredictable and anonymous. They exist in places where shadows should not exist—beneath the wide canopy of the trees, for instance.

From time to time I walk in the dim woods. I usually walk at dusk, when the light is only good enough that I need to navigate mostly from memory, and I make my way down familiar, narrow paths with my eyes open completely only part of the time. I move quickly, too, so I can avoid the occasional touch or kiss and exhalation of breath.

Understand this: these things do breathe. It's a habit, I think, or a need (which is a part of habit and a part of hunger). I can hear them breathing in those few moments when my music (at the moment, Moby) changes from one piece to another, and when I need to hear them breathe in order to gauge their numbers, and when I wake in the night and my music has stopped after the power has gone out because the generator has used all its fuel (though, because there is no air in the world in which they exist, their exhalations are far more than stale or fetid, far more than nothing at all—they are as substantial as grief and orgasm). I hear them talking, then, too.

They talk about themselves, about their lives just passed and their new existence. They speak as slowly as a man waking from a coma, and as quickly as an auctioneer, and with all the dimensions and volume of wind: at times, they're even coherent (for instance, Larry-of-the-smashed head, and Madge, too, from upstate New York, who talked of heaven); often, they aren't: often, they seem to speak in riddles, though I believe that riddle-making is far behind them.

For instance:

“I have the bubble of the sky-blue sky. I don't have? I don't have? Going oft; leaving in separate cars, and only the blood to spare, giving coffee away cheap."

And:

‘Entering, now, the sand, the duplicate—disheveled, alert, nose out of whack. Leave me Irene of pipes, that replica, pining at the Gordon, at the level place."

And:

“I denounce you. I flow. Billeted in Charbonnes—growing accustomed to my skin in tatters. Memories alone cannot confirm the presence of life."

And:

"All the nodding flowers lining up to vote. On Tuesday, empty the last large lips lest Louise loses little. Free the small ones, make the large ones pay, bring home the cheering crowds, the crows, the pestilence of flight.

And:

‘Break the muscle at its deepest place, its widest part, secured at the hip and thighs—two places, pouring through the small spaces, through screens and lips parted as if in dying, leaving the last exhale foaming up, gaining ground on the past circling old wounds, old love and climaxes. Generating joy. Coming apart peacefully, believing in music."

And, quick and simple:

“I could go out naked to walk my little dog on the wide sidewalk and no one would grin."

And:

“As I grow older, my dreams—the ones I have when I sleep--grow older, too; they're all about loss and regret and pain."

I don't remember any of this verbatim, of course. It's in the air around me always—I focus on it now and again and come back breathless to write it down. As I've just done.

"Go and take an outbound train and believe in we who wait and do not deliver, we who open our mouths and fly in groups of threes and fours and always, always, always no one at all."

~ * ~

7:54

My very good friend Sam Feary is with me here, in this house. I smell him sometimes, his particular, inoffensive odor—musty, with the hint of sweat and cloves. I had no idea he was dead until I smelled those odors here. I think I sighed, and grinned, and said, "Welcome, Sam." Then I felt his breath on my cheek and I heard him say, in a voice I didn't recognize—it was neither male nor female; it was the voice of air—"And a welcome to you, my friend."

Sometimes I believe I see him. He's usually standing quietly at a south-facing window in late afternoon, where a break in the pines beyond lets in copious amounts of daylight. At other times, I realize I only wish I could see him. He was my friend. He is my friend. I was closer to no one but Lorraine, and she left me. Sam, for what it's worth, went off on his own after telling me to have a good life, to forget Phyllis Pellaprat and to live, at last, in a universe that recognized and wanted me—"The universe of the living, dammit!" he said. He had my best interests at heart, but his own interests were more important, and that was all right. Would any friend want anything different from a friend?

I want him to tell me how he died. I want him to tell me about the world he inhabits. I want to ask him how it feels in that world, and what he feels. But I'm afraid of asking him anything at all. I'm afraid what he tells me will simply confirm my greatest fears—about this world I inhabit, now, and about myself.

~ * ~

10:46 PM

I have so many fears. I have a fear that I'll lose my mind and be unaware of it: I have a fear that I'll simply drift away, into some vast meaningless unknown, and be unaware of it: I have a fear that Death dresses in various disguises—the disguise of love or happiness or benign illness or of life itself—and I'm unaware of it. I have a fear of being blissfully ignorant in a world (place, realm, universe) that's a billion times more complex (and therefore a billion times more unknowable) than galaxies or brains or mathematics.

I told Lorraine once about these fears. She sighed, touched my hand and said, "Oh, I know that, Abner. It's one of the very sad things about you. All those useless fears."

I loved her dearly, and still do. But she isn't Phyllis.

~ * ~

10:52 PM

She's here as well. Phyllis. Or could be. For so long, I believed without question that she simply moved further and further into the realm in which I had found her, until she was utterly unreachable, even if I were to follow her. (As if, understand this, someone you cannot live without leaves your home and you don't discover it until she's been gone for days or weeks, and has left no note, no clues or hints about where she's gone, and when you ask her friends and relatives, they tell you they know nothing either; they simply shrug and say, "Gee, I don't know. It's a mystery." And when you tell the authorities about it, they have you fill out papers and they interview you and the weeks come and go and come and go, and so you call the authorities and ask, "What have you found out?" And they say, "Nothing. But we're working on it." And, at last, you go into the great world outside your house and you drive a thousand miles north, and a thousand miles east, and another thousand miles in other directions, and you realize, at last, that the very world you and she share has swallowed her up, that she's simply and terribly unreachable—that she's a part of the world in which you exist, yes, but she's utterly unreachable, nonetheless.)

You must have realized by now that I am not certain if I'm alive or dead.

~ * ~

All the things I did not shamelessly do before my departure. Not just the ordinarily shameless things—prancing naked on the boulevard, for instance—but other shameless things, too. Cheating at Monopoly, for instance, which I never did, or, alas, could do: where was the advantage, I wondered, then, before my departure? (Here I am! No, over here! I am one with the wall, the window, the fir tree, the cupboards, the smiling Labrador retriever, the grinning lover and the floor-standing lamp. I am one and I am many!) Monopoly is meant to be played straight, of course. Buy houses and railroads, send people to jail, become a slumlord, win the game the way it was meant to be won, with shame. But I would dearly love to go back and play it shamelessly—cheat at it naked and nakedly: But that's my house!" you'd shout, and I'd say calmly, with arrogance, shamelessly, "Sure it is, but its mine, now, and you lose, sucker!"

I could have worn different sorts of shoes at the same time, too—a black oxford on the left foot and a penny loafer on the right, for instance. I could have walked around like that. Shamelessly. I could even have declared victory like that—“I win! I win!" Shamelessly.

We give up so much when we play the game simply as it was meant to be played. Because, too soon, the game is over—Splat!-- and we realize, upon only brief reflection, that it involved sixty or seventy or eighty goddamned years of boredom that gave us no time for real fun. Then we're off into the great slippery unknown, our private parts missing and our mouths agape.

Hell, we don't even need to pee, anymore.

~ * ~

July 22, 9:02 AM

I do know this: these people (things, entities, spooks, wraiths, ghosts, non-corporeal beings) keep pets. I can hear them. Strident little meows, small, petulant growls, random chirps and wee barks. And this tells me, of course, that they're the same kinds of pets these things might have kept before they became whatever the hell it is they've become (though, ontologically, it could be argued that these beings [things, entities, wraiths, et cetera] are now what they always were, which, by the way, applies to the rest of us, whatever realm we're currently dancing in, and we simply can't avoid it. But, for the moment, let's set aside that half-baked discussion. I have a mortal and confusing and frightening story to tell, and prattling on about philosophy that masquerades as fact can only obscure it).

I feel obscured, I realize, all at once, here in my comfortable chair in my dim house at my dim window in the dim forest, surrounded by shadows and their pretenders, smelling sweat and cloves, feeling the cold and nonexistent exhalations of the just barely visible on my neck and cheeks (as I experience the passing misery) .

If you lived here with me you'd be scared stiff.

I am.

I want Lillian, now, so very much. She masqueraded easily as a living thing—better than Phyllis did. At least Lillian didn't leave moist pieces of herself in the bed after lovemaking. Perhaps, after all, she was as alive as I, or, at least, as the dim woods.

~ * ~

9:04 AM

Good Lord! I can't stand this not knowing...anything! Better to walk naked into a goddamned winter woods and take a long nap.

I have learned this, too, in the past six months. I have learned
that even the dead are ignorant!

—A Manhattan Ghost Story

FIVE

July 24,2006,4:02 AM

Thank you.

~ * ~

4:03 AM

Sam Feary wants to talk about the past, but I can't do it. He is the past filling in for the present. Seeing him here is like seeing the snapshot of a nightmare.

"I'm sorry, my friend," I told him, without words. "I can't talk about anything with you."

"Oh, but you can," he said, in his way (far less in words and volume than intention), "because you have no choice. You want to know what you believe I know."

He was right, of course. In the other realm he and I shared long ago, he was usually right, which annoyed the hell out of me.

"You need to talk out loud to me," he said (in his way). "If you don't, I can't understand you. In other words, Abner, I can't read your mind."

I chuckled. "But you just did," I said, and went on, "It would be useful to actually see you if I'm going to talk with you, Sam." I looked about—at my comfortable red chair, the small pine table beside it, the window beyond. "Sometimes I do see you," I said. "I'm sure of it."

"No," he said, "you don't. You don't see me. How could you see me in this damned crowd?"

"Crowd?"

"Yes. You know all about it. You're aware of it. You call it 'the passing misery.' You see it, but you don't see it. And you don't see me. You can't see me."

"Perhaps I'm not actually talking with you, then," I said aloud. "Perhaps I don't see you and I'm not talking with you because you're not really here."

I heard nothing. I said again, "Maybe you're not here. Maybe I'm talking to no one." Still nothing.

I said, "Are you trying to make a point, Sam?"

"Abner," he said, "can you tell me what you think of faces?"

In that other realm we inhabited so long ago, he was older than I by five years. He claimed to be smarter; perhaps he was—it doesn't matter, and never did. He claimed to be stronger, too, in every way. And perhaps he was.

"Faces?" I said. "What faces?"

He said, "Don't be a dunce. Just answer my question."

"Are you actually talking to me, now, Sam? Are you actually here, in my house?"

He said at once, "Over here, in this…realm, this place, Abner, we're all as crazy as cancer cells. And we just adore non-sequiturs." He paused long enough that I could feel his cold breath on my face. Then he added, "Because that's really what we are. All of us. In this place that is many places. To a man, a woman, a thing, a wraith, an entity, a non-corporeal being, a spook--shit, to a nut-job's hard-on, we're non-sequiturs. We're the passing misery. We exist, my good and departed friend, where faces simply do not pertain."

Then—I understood at once—he was gone.

~ * ~

4:45 AM

So there you have it. Because I know these entities, these wraiths, spooks, ghosts, these things at all, if poorly, I will know you completely; not your occupation, your love life, your predilections, your past—you. Your true sum and substance. The greatest and biggest and most important part of you—the part that moves on when faces simply don't pertain anymore.

So, you—yes, you—that spider on my tongue. Stay away. Please.

I'm too busy.

I'm surrounded by anger and madness and stupid amusement.

I live on occasional soup and the cold exhalations of the dead.

I live in a world of non-sequiturs.

~ * ~

6:05 AM

About Phyllis —

She possessed me even more than the womb possessed me. She seduced me even more than I seduced myself.

She played Yahtzee like a champion.

"What do you think, Abner? Another roll?"

"Sure," I said.

I didn't know her from Eve. I found her in the apartment I was renting from my good friend, Art DeGraff, while, he had told me, he was vacationing in Europe. The apartment was supposed to be empty.

I was a bit unnerved that she was in it and that she knew my name

"What are you doing here?" I said.

She was sitting half-on and half-off the apartment's only bed; she wore white shorts and a pink tank top which fit her beautifully. She was throwing the five dice Yahtzee requires when I came into the bedroom.

"Good," she said, her gaze on the dice, "a full house," and gave me a smile I couldn't resist.

"The apartment's supposed to be empty," I said.

"It was empty," she said, gave me another smile, a different sort of smile—a smile I couldn't read—and added, "Until you showed up."

"Uh-huh," I said, "empty except for you."

She gave me another enigmatic smile.

“Want to play, Abner?"

I didn't know about Yahtzee, then. I said, "You mean that?" and nodded to indicate the dice and the score card. "What is it?"

"It's Yahtzee. A game for everyone." Another smile. "You like games, don't you?"

Her cleavage above her pink tank top was ample and delicious.

She caught me staring at it and said, "Some things never die."

I didn't understand what she meant.

She picked up the dice, threw them again, looked annoyed. "Shit, another full house. What do I need with that?"

I said again, my eyes on hers, now, "What are you doing here?" It was something I needed to say. After all, she was, as far as I was concerned, a trespasser in the little apartment.

She said, "I'm here because you're here."

"I don't know what the hell that means," I said. Despite her cleavage, her brief tank top, her even briefer white shorts, her perfect brown skin, her gorgeous and wonderfully expressive brown eyes, I knew I was becoming a bit churlish: "Sorry," I said.

She rolled the dice again. Her breasts moved invitingly with the movement of her arm. I think I grinned.

She saw me looking (again), saw me grin: "Like I said, Abner, some things"...

I held my hand up, palm out: "I know," I said. "Some things never die."

"You got it, sucker," she said.

I took a deep breath, forced myself to look uninterested in her cleavage, her white shorts, her perfect brown skin: "What are you doing here?" I repeated.

"I'm here because you're here, Abner," she said again, and cocked her head fetchingly. "I'm here because you're here. If you weren't here, I wouldn't be here. And if I weren't here, you wouldn't be here. If this apartment weren't here, hell, we might be somewhere else, and you'd be asking me the same lame-ass questions."

And so it went.

~ * ~

8:30 AM

She's here, too. She and Sam Feary. They're both here, in my little house in the dim woods. Both playing their little cosmic games.

All these beings, things, wraiths, ghosts, spooks —holding me hostage to their little cosmic games.

Yahtzee, hah!

"A full house," Phyllis said so long ago (yesterday, this morning, tomorrow evening, even as I write). It had nothing to do with the dice. She was seeing my future. Her future. Everyone's future.

And, my God, now you're here!

~ * ~

8:46 AM

Phyllis and I were walking east on 50th Street in Manhattan on a rainy night in August, late, and the sidewalk was all-but empty, though the lighted shop windows cast reflections on the black street—our side and the other side—and an occasional yellow cab zipped past.

We were holding hands. I wore jeans and a gray T-shirt with the words "Love Ain't No Trouble" emblazoned across it in yellow. Phyllis looked exceptional. She wore a bright green dress that covered her a bit less than well-enough and I felt ecstatic she was beside me and that I was holding her hand.

I held a large red umbrella over us which, because there was no wind, and the rain fell straight down, protected us.

I said to her, for the very first time, "Do you know that I love you, Phyllis?"

"My guess would be," she said, "that you love me a lot," and glanced my way with a small, open-mouthed smile.

"Quite a lot, indeed," I said.

"Indeed," she said.

A yellow cab zipped past and its driver laid on the horn for a couple of seconds, clearly for Phyllis's sake. "Asshole!" I yelled.

"He likes me," she said, as if in admonishment. "Everybody likes me. They like the way I look. They like the way I walk. They have nasty fantasies about me in the moment after they've seen me. They want me." She was very matter of fact about it, as if she were talking about her pies or shoes. "Abner, they want to get me down on my back and pump me up with their stuff."

I wanted to say, "Phyllis, why are you talking like this? I've just told you I love you, for God's sake!" but, instead, I said, "Yes, I understand."

She glanced at me again, with a wider smile, clearly amused. "No you don't. You can't."

"You're right," I said. "I don't understand."

"Yes, Abner, I know," she said.

~ * ~

Let me tell you about you!

First of all, you want only to survive. You'll do anything to survive. You'll even slit your wrists or gargle with Drano or play Russian roulette with all the chambers loaded (because "survival" means more, at last, than simply drawing breath, feeling hungry or being able to take a piss). You'll even withdraw into the small and corrupt universe that exists somewhere between your spleen and kidneys, or concoct fantastic and comforting otherlife out of ancient insinuation, fable and stories told by the very imaginative and intellectually suspect.

You want to see in color, have a full tummy, engage often in incredible sex, enjoy your bowel movements, live without pain.

You see your face only rarely (compared to those around you, who see it quite a lot), and that's okay because faces reveal too many secrets.

After all, you have secrets you're very afraid will outlive your gray matter, your cartilage, your mortal appetites.

~ * ~

July 28, 12:03 PM

I have many items in my little house whose origins escape me. For instance, a large gray herringbone couch with stains on the arms: I have no idea how it came to be here. When I arrived (I'm not sure how long ago) the house boasted only a bright red club chair, a 50's-era blue-linoleum-top dining table and chairs, and a copper alarm clock. But I arrived home one day from the little village where I buy my food and found the gray herringbone couch in the living room. It has to be some kind of gift, I told myself, but there was no note attached ("Happy Birthday, Abner," for instance, because it was my birthday, or, "Thought you could use this, Abner," or, "It looked like something you'd like," which it was, and is).

And the framed photographs in the hallway. Eight of them, four on each wall. They arrived anonymously and mysteriously about a year after I got here (which would be perhaps three years ago; perhaps more, though not less). Each is a portrait of someone I don't know. Three men, five women, all in their thirties and forties, all their poses different. One man is in front of what appears to be a theatre—I can see the bottom of what looks like a marquee above him as he stands before a set of wide double doors, each with a circular window: he wears a black tuxedo; his hands are on his hips and his legs are slightly apart. He wears a small moustache and he's grinning. His hair is dark and cut short. It's an exquisite photograph because the man, who appears to be no more than five and a half feet tall (judging by the double doors) looks strong, attractive and masculine. The crisp dark shadows—cast by his body—reveal that the sun was a bit past its apex when the picture was taken. I have named the man "Allway." I don't know why.

When I've eaten, and walked a bit in the dim woods (which gives me some blessed time away from the crowd of strangers with whom I share my house), I may show you the other photographs.

~ * ~

3:48 PM

I do not reread this narrative. Perhaps I should. It would allow me to correct mistakes, but I'm not at all sure that what I might see, in my rereading, as mistakes aren't simply mis-directions, or re-directions, or rethinking. Mistakes aren't important. We dwell on them, regret them, get maudlin about them, write long, overwrought letters to former lovers about them.

And, as I think about it, now, I'd say there are no mistakes, really, only facts that no longer fit what passes, in any given new moment, for reality, memories that have become obtuse, fuzzy, or uninteresting, dramas and melodramas that have run their course.

Her eyes popped open and rolled upward in their sockets.

I heard a long low rasping noise come from her, like air escaping.

But I loved her, you see. The truth is, I loved her as I have loved no one else.

And that's why I came forward again, put my hands around her waist—she was cold now—and held her close for what might have been hours, until I felt her skin begin to warm again and her muscles loosen. And I heard a low, ragged humming noise coming from her, which, over the space of a minute or so, became speech:

"You won't like it out there, Abner."

—“A Manhattan Ghost Story"

SIX

Otherlife

August 5, 8:00 AM

Wondrous Phyllis of the Otherlife always ate with nasty enthusiasm, as if she would never eat again. I said to her, once, over dinner at a restaurant in Soho called Tiny Thai, "Phyllis, I think you've got rice all over your face."

She grinned at me through a forkful of Moo Shu pork ("Chopsticks," she said once, "are for socialites and assholes!"): "Rice?" she said. "Abner, I can eat more than you." She cocked her head fetchingly. "Want to give me a try?"

Her milk-chocolate skin was without blemish (during our first months together), and it dressed an incredible body she displayed and used as well as any dancer, so she attracted stares from both men and women.

She enjoyed these stares.

"Look at them, Abner," she said more than once. "The fools want what they can't have." Then she laughed a little and added, "But we're all fools. You and me and the man in the moon—the living and the dead and everyone in between." I had little idea what she was talking about; I thought she was merely being poetic.

She also said, on more than one occasion, "Wouldn't he be fucking surprised if I jumped on his head and swallowed him whole?" which I thought was funny, though I didn't understand it, at the time, in those first unforgettable few months.

May, June, July, a little bit of August. So long ago. Decades ago, I think, though I'm not sure if I'd be right or wrong.

"I'd swallow him whole and he wouldn't even know it," she said. "What a life this is!" which I didn't understand, either. I understood so damned little, then, and she knew it.

Perhaps I understand even less, now, in this little house in the dim woods. But maybe that's stupid. How could I understand less after so long? I'd have to be a damned fool.

Maybe I am a damned fool. Of course I am. Phyllis said so, and she was never wrong (in those first few unforgettable months).

And this dense fog of departed humanity that surrounds me in this little house in the dim woods is made up of fools, too, because they tell themselves their stuck here, but they aren't, and they know it (I believe), and they won't do anything about it because, shit, they're in a place they recognize—not my little house in the dim woods (How could they recognize that?), but the Earth itself, where they spilled from their mothers, grew into confused adults, then had lives of pain and joy and disappointment, enjoyed too little sex, or not enough, growled at the neighborhood kids, pet their little dogs, made chicken soup when influenza struck.

Sometimes, in my little house, I scream at them, "You're not stuck here, Goddammit! So go away!" And they grumble and groan and moan and make their bizarre noises, burp, and devise non-sequiturs (“My knee is bleeding! Look at my knee!” and, "Maxwell has a silver hammer," and, "Get thee behind me, sputum!” and, "My asshole has legs in it!”) but mostly they seem, in their oddly intrusive way, to ignore me, as if I am not much more to them than elevator music.

~ * ~

August 6

Another portrait shows only the face—which hugs the frame—of a woman with wild red hair who's looking seductively at the camera, even though she's sticking her tongue out. The woman's cheeks are very thin and a thick blue vein is prominent in her forehead. Her tight skin is as lacking in color as the belly of a fish and her nose is straight and very narrow. I've named this woman Irene Chutter, which sounds, I know, like the name of a fat woman. I've named her Irene Chutter after a woman I knew in Bangor, when I was quite young—barely into my teens—who always looked out her window at me as I walked home from school. Sometimes she smiled, or smiled and waved, and I always smiled and waved back, because I'd been taught to be polite. Late in my thirteenth year, she appeared at her front door and invited me in, said she had pies; "I have good pies, young man. You like pies, don't you?"

"Yes, Ma'am, I do," I said.

And I went in.

~ * ~

6:07 PM

Not long ago, I said to the shadow I assumed to be Sam Feary, "Sam, do I have a face?" and I got no answer after a few moments, so I repeated the question; "Sam, do I have a face?" I waited a moment, and added, "I mean, to you. Do you see my face, or am I as nondescript to you as you are to me?" and still I got no answer, so I took a step forward, toward the shadow I assumed to be Sam Feary (which stood at the window it had stood at for days; beyond that window, the late afternoon sun cast shards of bright yellow light onto the forest floor), and I reached out for him, for the shadow I supposed was Sam Feary, and felt, from behind, a strong hand on my shoulder: I froze. A voice no more substantial than air said, "Be careful, my friend. That is not what you think it is."

I inhaled deeply, held it.

The voice said, "Breathe, you fool."

I breathed.

The strong hand tightened its grip. I winced.

The voice said, "I don't have a lot of time, so listen. Not long ago, you believed in something you called love. It's possible you still believe in it, more's the pity. And you believed in passion, too. You believed it was a part of love." I heard a quick, hollow chuckle, then: "What a wonderful thing--passion. So full of heat! And that's something we don't have much of over here, my friend. Heat, I mean. Just remember, though—remember this; it only requires a change in temperature to make steam into ice."

The strong hand lifted from my shoulder.

I wheeled about, screamed something stupid, saw ragged, bare arms reaching desperately for me.

And I stumbled backward, toward the window, toward the shadow there, stopped myself.

Dappled sunlight had flooded the room in those few moments, and a crowd of brightly lit faces stared at me from above the ragged, bare arms. A few mouths moved, as if to speak. A few eyes blinked, though as slowly as a toad.

Then the sunlight faded all at once and the faces were gone.

~ * ~

10:12 PM

But, dammit, goddamnit, that's not the way things happen here! It's not at all the way things happen here—sunlight on spectral faces, ragged bare arms reaching. That doesn't happen here—it can't happen here.

It didn't happen here.

It did happen here.

~ * ~

Past Midnight

I want so desperately to believe only in shadows.

~ * ~

1:00 AM

They, the shadows that exist here, have told me such things as this:

There are people who wear stripes with polka dots, but I am not one of them. And there are people who chew their thin soup and let their noses drip in public places—restaurants and barrooms, fields and wicker hammocks, but I am not one of them. And there are people who dream of the prefect lover and have orgasms on hand daily. But Jesus, lovely Jesus of the glowing hole, I am not one of them. And listen, listen--there are people, too, who count themselves unique because of deformation or impediment. But, shit, Dude and Dudess, I am not one of them. And people, as well, everywhere—like flies on a summer window--who whine interminably about the heat and proclaim that it's the humidity, really, and not the heat so much, that makes them fucking uncomfortable. (They should live here and wear my shoes.).

And:

I come and go daily, hourly through my nostrils and make a cozy red home in my scrotum and vagina, which I have several of; no, you may not borrow.

And:

Picnics and ants fill up my pants and oh the joys of joyful summers and mooing sarsaparilla and the dead white white legs that spread the rivers wide, like Moses, oh these hands, these hands, and these large hands!

And:

I yearn only for the yarning, which has gone, which is gone—I yarn to see the breasts, the pubes, the round firm ass and be, thus, moved, moved, moved to move.

And:

He is staring at my moist staff his open pants, his lips and eyes aglitter, and he takes, then, his stiff organ out to give me his food in one bitter mouthful and goes off slowly as a life—and I see, then, the shoes, his shoes, and I smell his smell, and then I smell nothing, and I see no shoes, and his big laugh is in some place that is other.

~ * ~

2:30 AM

I had so much more, dammit, with Phyllis long ago, in Manhattan, during those first few months, and I hardly knew it. I had a nasty and unpredictable and sometimes beautiful reality (or non-reality), with her—with whatever she was, then. When we walked together in the West Village, or made loud and untidy love in the little apartment I'd borrowed from my friend, Art DeGraff (who was also her murderer, which I did not know), or sat down to a meal, I had her unique odor, and her presence, too, her formidable sexuality, her eyes (everywhere), and I had my love for her, which I knew, then, would exist through all time, through any change or transition either of us would endure. But now, in my dim house in the dim woods, I have the suffocating claustrophobia of shadows that do not fade but which speak to me, and speak among themselves, and to themselves, as if they're a rare species of bird mouthing the desperate and short, meaningless sentences and atonal music of the dead, and there's nothing of reality or non-reality in any of it, nothing beautiful or challenging or fascinating (anymore). Only air without warmth, earth without substance.

And no love at all.

~ * ~

Morning

So, there it is—I have no idea if my friend Sam Feary is actually here. And I have no idea if Phyllis Pellaprat is here, either. Maybe I desperately want both of them to be here. Maybe I need them to be here because they could help me survive this...thing that's happening, because, after all, who in the name of God are these others who have crowded into my little house?

Not too long ago, after I tried, in vain, to enjoy a dinner of seared salmon and brown rice, I called out to them, by name. It was a stupid thing to do, yes—because I know none of their names, and none of their faces (which come and go as fleetingly from my field of view as the waking memory of a dream).

"Timothy!" I called out. "Robert! Joanna! Why are you here? Why have you come to this house?"

No one answered.

I was remembering, I think, two years of utter foolishness from decades ago, before I went to Manhattan to do my book, and, instead, met Phyllis and the others, which changed the course of my life.

~ * ~

Late Morning

That foolishness was a séance in a house that was allegedly haunted, where we—Sam Feary and my beautiful cousin Stacey, Art DeGraff, and several others our age—gathered, laid candles out, drew a pentagram in white chalk on the bare oak floors, set up our Ouija board, and then, after gathering into a ragged circle around it, and interlocking hands, made entreaties to the departed to speak with us.

We had the names of the departed; everyone in Bangor did—their deaths in a drowning accident a year earlier had been well-publicized: they were Reginald Pyle, his wife, Shirley, and their eleven-year-old twin daughters, Erin and Becky. A photograph of this sweet family stood on a Queen Anne table in the room we were using for our séance (the living room), and each of us had taken turns staring at it and muttering inanities about the tragic and untimely loss of such a beautiful family. We all felt (we decided before coming to the house) that we needed to appear sympathetic to them, even empathetic, friendly and caring, and, said Sam Feary, "Like we're there to help them move on."

"Yeah," said my beautiful cousin Stacey, "move on. I mean, it's obvious, right? If they're actually still in that house, then something's keeping them from moving on."

"Moving on?" asked Art DeGraff. "To where?"

"To another realm," I said, as if I actually knew what I was talking about. "Maybe not to heaven, or hell, or whatever. But another place like Earth. You know, another realm, another dimension, where they can all live again."

"Uh-huh," Art said, clearly unconvinced.

So we had our séance, and the curtains fluttered suggestively, the doors throughout the large house grumbled on their hinges, something on the second floor moved "stealthily" (Tom Quivers said), and Janice Redwig proclaimed, "My cheeks are cold! Something's touching my cheeks!" which we thought was very cool, so cool, in fact, that Stacey said something was touching her cheeks, too, and Tom Quivers said, "It's as cold as Pluto in here. Can't you feel it?" to which I and Art DeGraff said, almost in unison, "I think you're right."

And, later that night, someone spoke to us.

He or she said, through the Ouija board (and, thus, through our own forgers), “Be gone! You are not welcome here!"

We left the house five minutes later, at a run.

But we repeated the séance a half dozen times in the next eighteen months, until one of us was killed in a bicycling accident (Tom Quivers, who pulled out in front of a UPS truck in his cherry red Corvair) and another, an always-smiling, and very thin girl named Gwen, went off to live in the Midwest with her boyfriend (she was widely rumored to be pregnant), and another (Janice Redwig), confessed, at the Pyle house, after what turned out to be the final séance, that she had been moving the Ouija Board's pointer all along, for the past eighteen months, and that she and her friends had rigged the house. Then she laughed derisively, started for the door, looked back, and gave us a malodorous grin. "Gullible fools!" she said. "You're all just gullible fools! It was so entertaining to watch you fall for all of our fucking bullshit!"

When she was gone, we talked with great agitation and annoyance about how poorly we actually knew her, that we should have guessed—from rumors we'd heard, but had dismissed because she always seemed so sincere—that she was a liar, and finished with a consensus that even though she'd manufactured a nearly two-year-long hoax we'd all fallen for, it would still not explain some of the creepier goings-on at the Pyle house.

But we were wrong.

~ * ~

8:04 AM

I awoke in the small hours of the morning and saw that the passing misery crowded around my bed, and I watched as they reached for me, cocked their heads at me like small dogs, and I screamed—perhaps a word, perhaps something guttural, unintelligible; I can't remember—and they vanished at once, as if my scream gave them great pain. But I decided, then (and still believe, four or five sleepless hours later), that I had merely awakened from a dream into another dream. Because this, I told myself, is not the way these things behave. I knew it. I know it. I have, after all, experienced them for many months, now. I don't know them, but I know their movements in this house and in the dim woods beyond (though only as well, perhaps, as I can know the movements of underground rivers, or the movements of the atmosphere; I know their breathing, too, and sometimes I know even their dreams; I know their voices; and the detritus of the lives they've left behind.

But here it is: I don't know them.

I live among them. They surround me, suffocate me, bring me nightmares. But I don't know them.

They're strangers to me, and, perhaps, I am a stranger to them. My fear is that I'm not. My fear is that they know me very well.

~ * ~

11:03 AM

They are not merely what they appear to be. They're made of stone, shadow, sunlight. They lie and beguile, whisper, scream, chat, cajole, grin, persuade.

Wimbly go the dire jibble, into each minipont a little bare must fall.

And:

I see them pass within the crowds who pass we where I sit among the others all around me selling their precious pink collectibles, their comic books and flatulent toaster ovens, distressed gold and yellow furniture, their wildly curvaceous Barbie dolls old enough to vote, and I scream to them, "Oh look, please, at me! Oh look, please at ME!" And they look and see the chair I sit in. They look and see the grass the chair sits on. They look and see my startlingly rusted Desoto behind the chair, and the other cars, too, whose paint and metal, unlike my Desoto's, are thick enough to withstand a stiff breeze.

“Buy my soaps," I shout at them. Please look at me and buy my soaps!" And they dig into their pockets, come up with nothing, trudge forward, into the gathering heat, the sun—using the strength gained from repetition—and rise into the softy swaying honey locusts.

"Sniff them, then," I shout. “Sniff my soaps and buy them. Then look at ME, oh look at ME!"

But they merely trudge forward, some east, some west, some in other directions, all in their rural finery, breasts and bellies flopping, mouths agape, mouths closed softly,  eyes caught by bright colors and bouncy doo dads.

“Buy my soaps!" I shout at them.

I hear a door slam, the rasping noise of old hinges, a door slam, the rasping noise of old hinges.

I bend way over and sniff my soaps.

They smell of stagnant water and old pipes

It’s a smell I've grown to adore.

~ * ~

12:07 PM

I try to estimate them because I need to. Wouldn't you? If you lived here. If you lived in this place, if you lived among them. Wouldn't you?

Dammit! Wouldn't you?

~ * ~

1:13 AM

Darker than the space between stars tonight.

I was awakened minutes ago by this:

"AAABBBNNNEEERRRR!"

I opened my eyes, looked quickly right, left, thought I'd gone blind—there was no light anywhere and, so, no shadows. I sensed no presence nearby, either, something that might have said, "AAABBBNNNEEERRRR!"— nothing beyond the murky and intrusive presences in my little house, but these presences seemed, at any rate, to have retreated to some other place.

"AAABBBNNNEEERRRR!" I heard again, and I said, "Phyllis?" though the voice was neither male nor female. "Phyllis?" I said again, and glanced about desperately, and in vain, for some point of light. "Am I blind?" I said. "Have I gone blind?"

"AAABBBNNNEEERRRR!" the voice said again, and I tried to gauge the proximity of whatever was speaking—was it above me, was it to my right or left, at the foot of the bed, on the bed itself?

"AAABBBNNNEEERRRR!"

"For Christ's sake, who are you?" I screamed.

"AAABBBNNNEEERRRR!" the voice repeated.

"Who in the name of heaven are you?" I screamed.

"AAABBBNNNEEERRRR!" it repeated, but with greater insistence and urgency, as if making some point, though I had no idea what point it could be.

"Tell me your goddamned name!" I screamed.

"AAABBBNNNEEERRRR!" the voice repeated.

Silence followed.

And I became aware, once more, of the murky and intrusive presences, the shadows that exist with me in my little house in the dim woods.

~ * ~

Mid-morning

If you ask me about "evil," I'll tell you I don't know anything about it. I'll tell you, also, that I don't believe in it as a force in the universe (like gravity, or solar radiation).

But they talk about it sometimes, though they string their words together as if the links between their brains and tongues disintegrate and reintegrate second by second:

For instance:

He is an evil man, dunce at a word, completely unknown to his particulars and their benefactors, living that way by no one.

And:

Murdered therefore I was, brought up in grime and no matter, lies and resurrections gathered about me, evil creatures unadorned by sensitivities, slouching about from everywhere to everywhere, hands lowered.

And:

He, named Baldhawlin, big man, like his name, coming out that door as a bear would, impossible and tall and full of power, mouthing large annoyances and transgressions much as the small and weeping dead do.

You cannot tell them to be quiet. I've tried. They either don't hear, or they don't care (it can't be both; how could it be both?).

~ * ~

8:19

I awoke very early this morning from a dream of Phyllis, resplendent in blue chenille, and I knew at once that I had to leave my little house. I didn't want to leave it at night—the woods aren't beautiful at night, they're dense and unknowable.

But I had a great hunger for other places, some place other than this place, the quiet village, for instance, where I buy my food and have meaningless conversations with the tall bald man whose name, for the moment, I forget.

”I really like a clear blue sky, don't you, Mr. Cray? No clouds at all. Not even the hint of clouds."

"Yes, I like that, too, though I have no problem with an overcast sky."

"Overcast makes me sad. I think it makes everyone sad, don't you?"

“It doesn't make me sad"

“Perhaps, Mr. Cray, but you may not even realize your sadness."

“I doubt that."

"You prefer the extra large eggs, am I right, Mr. Cray?"

But how I could walk there at night? I don't even have a flashlight: I bought three of those large, gray ugly things that take huge batteries and cast copious amounts of light, but they disappeared one by one, and I know that these departed hid them somewhere.

I do have candles. I love candles. They cast a comforting glow. My grandmother used them instead of light bulbs because, she said, "They're so very comforting. A small flickering glow that shows us only what we need to see, so we can make our way in the darkness and know we're in darkness." But I have no matches. I could get them at the country store in the village, but these departed would simply hide them, too, just as they've hidden the luggable flashlights (they don't hide the candles. I know precisely where they are. They're in the second drawer in the kitchen, next to the sink. Tall blue candles that smell of raspberries).

But, minus candles or a flashlight, I left the house early this morning, well before the sunrise, made my way through the woods I could not see, and came upon a clearing I did not recall. I knew it was a clearing because, when I looked up, I found a spray of faint stars—the Milky Way.

The passing misery stood by in this clearing in great numbers, arms at their sides, mouths agape, eyes—mere dark ovals—open wide.

They spoke to me: "AAHHHHHBBBBNNNNEERRRR!" they said, as one. "AAHHHHHBBBBNNNNEERRRR!"

I said nothing to them.

I came back here at once, to my little house, climbed into my comfortable bed, and dreamt of Phyllis in blue chenille.

~ * ~

7:02

After Phyllis's departure in Manhattan, long ago, I took an apartment in Soho (this is history, so it exists). It was early autumn when I moved to the apartment, but the weather was still unbearably hot, so I set up a couple of fans around the place to cool it off.

One of those fans stood in the apartment's small living room, close to the chair I sat in to watch my 19" Sony television ("Murder, She Wrote," "Newhart," "Highway to Heaven" were my favorites): it was a floor-standing fan with large blades, and, because of the room's size, its upper right corner blocked my view of the TV screen by an inch or so. That was all right. Nothing much happens in that area of a screen anyway. Sky appears there, or clouds, or hair, but never anything important. So I kept the fan where it was.

One evening in late September, I was watching something like Benny Hill, I think (I remember there were lots of scantily clad, nicely built women running around with baseball bats and badminton rackets), and I saw that the small, upper section of the fan blades blocking the TV picture seemed to be moving at a snail's pace, while the rest of the blades—the parts not blocking the television screen—were simply a blur.

I was riveted by this: it seemed to be a physical parallel to my truly awful ability to see the dead (an ability I was certain had been bestowed upon me by the woman on the train, Barbara W. Barber), and I sought to explain it.

This was, of course, before the days of the Internet and long before personal computers had become an integral part of most households; there were no books in the apartment—other than novels by dead existentialists, volumes of poetry by Whitman, Eliot, Plath, Galway Kinnell, and a few others—and the library wasn't open (I remembered a sign in the public library in Bangor: "Ask a librarian."), so I was baffled as to how to immediately address the phenomenon of the television and the slowly moving fan blades (and, in those years, I needed an immediate response to everything).

Then I thought of my friend, Beverly, from high school, whose ambition was to grow up and "be a scientist, someone who makes a difference." Christ, she could explain every phenomenon of the natural world, from why the sky was blue, to why eggs were almost impossible to break if held lengthwise in the hand, to sonic booms. I thought she was terrific, and we hung around together throughout high school. (There was never a romance. She wasn't my romantic ideal, and I wasn't hers. [She told me once: "Abner, I love the way you think, but if you believe this friendship is going anywhere beyond the dining room table, you're mistaken. Tall, gawky boys with large hands simply don't turn me on. You know this, Abner—my brothers are tall and have large hands. It would be too much like incest.] She went out with Sam Feary for a while, until he told her he planned on joining the army, and she told him it was a "shitass thing to do. Those assholes in Washington will simply send you to 'Nam and you'll die. Where's the future in that?" He didn't die there. He died somewhere else. I don't know where. But I know it wasn't 'Nam.)

Here's the thing: as stupid as it sounds—because, after all, we hung out together for nearly four years—I couldn't remember her last name. So if I wanted to telephone her and talk about the slowly- moving-fan-blades-against-the-TV-screen phenomenon, I couldn't. Also, it was very unlikely she'd still be in Bangor. The last time I'd heard from her, she was about to head off to college somewhere in downstate New York. But, shit, if I could telephone, I'd get one of her parents, or her younger brother, Marvin, and they'd tell me where she was, I'd call her directly, and the mystery of the fan blades would be solved.

But, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't remember her last name. I felt like an idiot.

I looked at the slowly spinning fan blades.

I looked at the TV.

The fan blades again.

The TV.

Her phone number, from years earlier, came back to me all at once, like someone knocking at the door.

I said this: "Shit, I'm a genius!"

I called her number and got her dad, whose name was Clifford, told him who I was, asked if he remembered me. “Bev's friend, right?" he said, and paused a moment. "The tall guy?"

"Uh-huh," I said. "I'm trying to locate her. I need to ask her a question."

Silence.

I added, "I need to ask her a question about fan blades."

"Fan blades'?" he said, as if he had no idea what fan blades were.

"It's a sort of a science question," I said, and went on, "So I thought..."

He cut in, “Bev died two years ago."

"Died?" I said.

"Yes. A boating accident," he said.

"Jesus, I didn't know. Jesus, I'm so sorry..."

He hung up.

~ * ~

7:24

They told me this not too long ago:

You do not see us or hear us or experience us or run from us or speak to us. You can not. Just as one current flowing in a river cannot embrace another.

I thought it was fucking lucid, though I had no idea what they were talking about.

I told them so.

They said nothing.

~ * ~

9:30 PM

I've learned about a phenomenon called resonance frequency, and it's the speed at which substances vibrate naturally. Speaker cones have a built-in natural resonance frequency. So does water. Air. Pine trees. Labrador retrievers. And, presumably, you and me and a keg of beer. Even reality itself. Or what passes for it
(reality). And them, too (the wraiths, things, spirits). These resonance frequencies vary from person to person and from object to object, and when they happen, naturally and unnaturally, between this reality and another (Their reality, the reality in which they exist), it's much like the fan blades and the TV screen (a phenomenon known as the "strobe effect": in a way, the TV picture "resonates" 30 times a second: the fan blade, moving at similar, but not exactly equal speeds, allows the light of the TV picture through at approximately the same rate, so the fan blades look as if they've slowed down: they become visible in front of the TV screen, although the other parts of the fan blades remain only a blur. I learned all this from my friend Bev herself (for whom I never lusted, although I loved her in that warm, friendly and incautious way we find ourselves loving bright, vivacious, good people who don't turn us on sexually), who died in a boating accident in her 29th year.

I'll never forget it," she said “I wouldn't even want to forget it. Do you mind if tell you about it, Abner?"

That was moments ago, here, in my little house in the dim woods.

I told her yes, I wanted her to tell me about the boating accident, I wanted to hear about her death.

She told me about the fan blades and the TV and the resonance frequencies instead. Then she added, “And that's sort of the reason you can see us, in the obtuse way that you see us, Abner, and how you can talk to us, and how we can communicate with you. Your resonance frequency approximates ours, just like the movement of the fan blades approximates the frequency of the TV. Capisce?"

So there you have it.

She has yet to tell me about her death.

She added this, too:

And, occasional, that stuff garbled and matted and full of red hair, for which there is no blame but the frequencies, there is this, in fact, there exists no blame but the frequencies, running into one the other, and making all the nonsense marvelous.

And she was gone.

~ * ~

ONE

I must congratulate myself, make a good pot of coffee, a nice raisin-nut cake, a casserole that pleases. Or maybe I'll open a good Merlot, toast with it to myself and my working brain, because, shit, I know so awfully much, now. I know why I see, and why I don't. I know who Phyllis was, and where she isn't, and Sam, as well. I even know, in oblique ways, who I really am (it's what we're all after, isn't it? Self knowledge), and why I'm here, in this dim house in the dim woods, and I know that Death wears many disguises and speaks in many voices. I know it believes itself immortal, too, and omniscient, even playful. And I know that all I know, everything I know (my name, my age, my place in the universe) is based, after all, on hunger, rationalization and ignorance (which is surely the beginning of wisdom).

It will be a good Merlot, then, and, to follow, a coconut cream pie, in congratulations.

I'll buy it at the village store, from the bald man whose name I can't remember and I'll urge him into a discussion of food.

I'll share the pie with the passing misery.

They'll be very pleased.

And so will I.

It will be like a party.

Perhaps we'll sing, and do some dancing, engage in heady conversation, solve the problems of the universe, nod and smile and know one another well.

Then, before they can flow away into one another (as they do), and make themselves scarce, I'll embrace them.

SEVEN

Illusion

I haven't learned to shield myself from them. I've been told there's a way to do it. But they insinuate themselves upon me almost continuously—if I'm eating my breakfast, usually shredded wheat and milk, no sugar, and I've just popped a spoonful of that crunchy stuff into my mouth, and I'm withdrawing the spoon, I see slow, dark movement reflected in the spoon: it isn't the movement of my mouth chewing or my eyes blinking, or the illusion of movement as I take the spoon away from my face, it's their movement, or his, or hers. And, even now—after I've experienced that movement five hundred times in the long months since I came here—I still whirl about in my chair and see them, or him, or her, fading into the ambient light that is the dim kitchen.

Or if I glance into the house's only mirror (it's small, oval, and sits on a wall in the short hallway leading from the living room to the kitchen), because a brief glance is all I can muster (a glance for reasons that might seem odd—to recall the contours of my face, to see if it still exists), and it's morning, just after sunrise, and the sun's light has filtered through the hallway, creating a kind of soft yellow haze, I see them gathering around me, as if I'm in an elevator and a crowd is boarding.

I hear them almost always. Their burps, their laughter, which, even when I believe it's right at my ear, sounds like laughter from another room. And I smell them, too—the biting odor of ionization, as if the air is painfully clean. And, quite often, I feel them breathing on my face, or my bare hands, or, when I've stepped out of the shower, on every part of my body, sometimes, though notably on my cock (Oh, God, I remember a time when it would have been impossible for me to make any reference to my cock, even in response to a doctor or nurse. I was raised to despise my cock, to fear it, and to "leave it alone." Phyllis went a long way toward giving me some love for it, though, because she loved it).

I seem to be repeating myself.

As I reread, I realize I'm repeating myself.

I wonder if I'm becoming a fool.

~ *~

30th

I'm thinking about the voice that called my name, "AAABBBNNNEEEERRRR." Phyllis drew it out like that at the end of our time together. "AAABBBNNNEEEERRRR." Perhaps it was a game she played—she had a great sense of humor; a lot of these people do. (Christ, is that the first time I've referred to them as "people"? I'll have to have a quick look backward.)

No, it isn't.

But that wasn't Phyllis saying "AAABBBNNEEERRRR." She isn't here. She's everywhere, sure, but she's not here. I'm here, they're here, but she's not here.

She could be here. That wouldn't be a problem for her. She's omnipotent and potentially omnipresent, I think. Her incredible sexuality makes her that way—omnipotent and omnipresent. She's the stuff that the march of generations is made of—lust and otherlife.

She as much as said so: "Look at me and ask yourself what you see and what the fuck you want, Abner." She is not alone in herself, ever—spread legs and a heaving chest; she is everywoman. And, sure, I am everyman. It fits, don't you think? I do.

If she is here, I want to see her and touch her. Maybe that's who I feel on me after I leave the shower. What an idea! The wondrous and lustful wraith gives a passing blowjob to the fool in his little house.

~ * ~

12

Has it been years, now?

~ * ~

14

They lumber past my windows and peer in, mutter something I can't hear and, because their faces are little more than an oval blur, I can't read their lips, either, and so, at times, I simply give them a brisk, one-fingered salute, or I sigh, or look away, or close my eyes and wish that Barbara W. Barber had never been born.

~ * ~

18

It has been too long since I've eaten, of course.

They know this and I know too well it makes them happy. I can hear them laughing.

~ * ~

Noon

This is what I have in the kitchen:

Some soup in a can.

Some bread going moldy.

Something that might once have been mayonnaise.

A small pear.

Eggs I will not touch.

And I'm within walking distance of the little store where I bought this stuff in the first place. Sure it's a long walk. Hours, at best. But that's no matter; walking is no better or worse than sitting, which, over prolonged periods, causes bedsores and atrophy of the muscles, too.

It's reasonable that I should go there. To that little store. I'll buy more foodstuffs. I'll talk for a few long minutes to the bald man. I'll nourish myself.

And I'll leave them here, of course. They'll never follow. Personalities don't much interest them. They have no ties to me. They'll amuse each other, diddle with themselves amongst themselves.

You see, this: I don't want to starve to death and leave an unappealing corpse.

~ * ~

19

I will set out soon for there, then. And see if they follow.

~ * ~

19, late morning

I have returned, bearing nothing but departed people I have no hope of knowing.

~ * ~

20, morning

Sam Feary is certainly here, in this house, or around it: he knocked on my front door—he used the knock we used when we were young and we visited the house of the other: it's a double knock, pause, a single knock, pause, a double knock, pause, a double knock. We used this knock because we were pretending to be spies. We spied on everyone. We even spied on each other, though neither of us knew it until we were well into our teens and Sam was only a few weeks from performing his great act of stupidity—joining the Army and getting shuffled off to `Nam.

We spied on my mother and his mother. We spied, of course, on our fathers, our brothers and sisters, some of our teachers (we each had a very grave crush on a tall, leggy, redheaded science teacher named Miss White who had a perfect body, a perfect smile, a perfect walk, a perfect voice and perfect bedroom eyes (though neither of us knew that's what they were called when she was practicing her perfection on us at Bangor Junior High School), and who, we were both convinced, flirted with one or the other of us almost nonstop, both in and out of class, though she hardly ever spoke to us (we knew why; it was taboo for teachers to become involved with students; taboos were quite a turn-on, of course)).

But he's here, and I know it, because he used our knock last night, on my front door. Knock, knock, pause, knock, pause, knock, knock, pause, knock, knock. It said so much. It helped me to overcome my hunger, which was beginning to grate on me and making me focus on it, which I decided was pointless. And when I went to the door and found nothing but shadows upon shadows, it was okay, because I realized it was Sam's way of telling me he was here, at my house, but that he was playing the spying game, again, that he was ready to play the game, again.

So, now, not much later, a few hours at most, three or four hours, perhaps five hours at most, possibly six or seven hours, I'm still smiling, and I need to play the game.

~ * ~

The Afternoon of This Day

You see, there's this: they lumber along behind me, I lug them along behind me: I had a puppy once who grew into a dog, and, when he was a puppy, though not when he was a dog (and had become independent), he followed me throughout my days, close enough, at times, that I felt his small puppy body against my ankles and calves, and I looked down at him, now and then, and said something affectionate ("I love you, Galway," or, "I love you very much, Galway."), or I said, "I don't want to step on you, Galway," which was his name, after a writer I liked, and he looked at me with his oversize puppy eyes and I knew he understood nothing I was saying, and, of course, everything I was saying. So it's the same with these departed. I feel them, too. I see their oversize departed-people eyes staring at me throughout my days, and, then, throughout my nights, and in whatever dreams I have (which I want to remember, but can't; it's a shortcoming of age, or it's one of the perks of age—you can't remember the details of your dreams, but you can remember their very basic structure, and if it was pleasant, that structure, you look forward to sleep. I never look forward to sleep).

But the oversize eyes of these departed don't stare as much as settle, as if the mind beyond them (or behind them) is gone or is concentrating on some other topic—the life just past, maybe, or lovers, or the taste of food, which may or may not be past.

Hunger high into the bones.

I read that phrase somewhere. And I'm repeating it because I'm a hungry plagiarist.

Have you noticed how well I punctuate?

What a miraculous thing the mind is Its what computers are
patterned after. And the mind can figure out many things (how to
get someone to the moon, how to bring someone back from
schizophrenia, how to take an old, tired heart out of someone’s
chest and put a new one in), but it has trouble with other things.
Like the things that Phyllis and Madeline and the boy on East
80th Street introduced me to. The mind turns inward. The mind
stiffens up and says that it would rather leave such things alone.
Go to bed, it says. Get some new shoes, it says. Turn on
the tube and watch Love Boat, it says.
But the mind cannot fool itself long. At last it has to admit
that it has learned some very frightening things, some very
confusing things, but that it is still ignorant, too, and needs to
learn a lot more.

—A Manhattan Ghost Story

July 22

Phyllis is buried in a small cemetery in Brooklyn. No one gets buried in Manhattan anymore, without special dispensation—though she lived there, and was murdered there—because there's simply not enough room.

I've often wondered about bodies and cemeteries and spirit longings. Hasn't everyone? And now, here, in this little house, I wonder again, and I wonder more, because a quaint country cemetery stands only half a mile east, at the edge of these woods. I think that many of the departed who visit me here may have come from that cemetery.

But now, as I type, and think about it, that's foolish. And I realize I've always thought it was foolish. Cemeteries aren't places where people die, they're places where the dead are put after their resident souls have been liberated.

And it's an old cemetery, too. It dates to the late 18th century. Very old. And I see nothing about these departed to suggest they come from that time.

But that's neither here nor there, either.

Because most of these departed seem to be naked.

I have a theory: it just came to me (I'm very quick that way). It says this—these departed people appear naked, some of them, because, after a time, they begin to shed a lot of the artifice they carried with them from life, like the artifice that is clothing. They cling to it for a while (the artifice of clothing) because it represents an existence with which they had grown very familiar, so it's an existence they don't want to leave. But, before long (longer long in some, shorter long in others), they shed this artifice, find their nakedness more real, more honest, more comforting. But, after a while (I know this), they shed that, as well (How can souls be covered by naked skin?). And then they—the departed—are completely shed of artifice—old and new artifice (old; the skin—new; nakedness). And they exist as whispers. After a while, though, that whispering becomes inaudible, even to them, and they, the departed, depart, presumably forever.

Neat theory, huh? I think so.

Here's the thing: I believe that I'm naked as I sit at my kitchen table and type this rambling, sometimes incoherent, always unreliable narrative.

Here's the relevant thing, however: I feel cold. I even believe, as I type, that I'm shivering.

Hunger high into the bones.

It feels like song.

~ * ~

10

Fixed my nakedness (which was a surprise—that nakedness: "Am I really naked?" I said to myself, and looked down at my little round belly and my other parts, which seemed to be retreating into my lower belly, and I decided I was indeed naked) and left my little house again, intent on that country store and foodstuffs. I remember what I liked: I liked chili very much, though not the spicy kind, and I always ate it with macaroni salad because the two tastes and textures complemented one another. And I loved cider, too, though it didn't complement the various tastes of chili. And I loved whole wheat bread, and lemon-poppy-seed muffins—so good on the tongue, with a great aftertaste.

I wonder if life has an aftertaste.

I wish there were someone I could ask.

And, if so, if life does have an aftertaste, I wonder how long it lasts.

A chef wrote once, "There is no taste, only aftertaste."

I'm curious as to what these departed people would say about this. I wish they would speak directly to me. I feel, at last, that I have become one of them, or that I am, at least, in their universe, and approaching their particular planet. But maybe that feeling applies to everyone—not just to me, but to you, too, and infants and young teenagers and people very, very much alive climbing mountains or rolling around on a bedroom floor while locked in an orgasmic embrace.

I remember orgasmic embraces.

Phyllis had orgasms wherever we went.

At an opera once (Puccini, La Boheme) she had an orgasm. It wasn't loud (she cared about her privacy sometimes), but it was loud enough that the people seated nearby looked over, dismayed (most of them) and elevated (some of them), because Phyllis's orgasms were things of elegance and beauty and a touch of pain (because, she told me later, she knew that they, the orgasms, were going to be far behind her before long).

She had orgasms spontaneously. We rode in taxis a lot and she had very loud orgasms in them. She screamed the names of her past lovers, my name, the names of rivers, and the names of people in history ("Sir Isaac Newton, Sir Isaac Newton!" she screamed once), as if she were searching, in her orgasm, through the soul and history of the world.

I could not match her orgasms. Mine were simply grunts and wheezes and moans followed by silence, followed by exhaustion. But she didn't care. She always said, afterward, "Oh Abner, you're lovely!"

She made me feel lovely, and feeling lovely, with her, was a very manly thing, and, of course, I enjoyed feeling manly, no matter if it was lovely only in her eyes.

Her eyes saw much, much more than ours are allowed to see, and "lovely" fit me, in those eyes, her eyes.

Sometimes I say to myself, in memory of her, "I'm lovely." I haven't begun to feel foolish about it—when I do, I'll know she's gone forever.

~ * ~

SOMESUCH

That's a grand word, don't you think—"Somesuch." It's coy and wonderfully descriptive at the same time. "Somesuch." You could say "This and that" instead, but it wouldn't be as descriptive or useful. And it doesn't mean the same thing, anyway.

I asked Sam Feary, who stands at the window continuously, now, but who tries to convince me he's not who I think he is (through a nameless surrogate with a tight grip, as related earlier in this narrative), but I know so much better (hunger unclouds the mind) than these departed, than even him (Sam, who surely has lost track of identity). It happens to the departed. It's necessary. They lose their wheels and go flying.

I asked Sam, "Is she here?" and he should have said, "Phyllis? Why, of course, my friend." To which I would have answered, "Why?" And he would have answered, "Because you're here, of course, and she needs to be where you are, even if both of you are out of reach." But he didn't say any of that, except for the last part, "Both of you are out of reach."

I threw my hard-boiled egg at him. It hit the window and splattered around him; he turned and looked at me, and, though I didn't recognize him, he said, in a voice that was unintelligible, "Be careful who you intimidate, my friend."

I laughed.

He laughed.

We should have had a party.

~ * ~

2:14

When I visited Phyllis's grave in Brooklyn, and saw it for the first time, and her name on it, I was naturally disbelieving; after all, I'd been making love to her for a while, then, and she to me, and if there was ever anyone who seemed very much alive, it was Phyllis, especially when we made love, and when we ate, and when we walked together, or went to the opera (which she claimed to love) or when she slept, or woke.

"Good morning, lovely Abner."

"Good morning, beautiful Phyllis."

This exchange took place more than once. It took place half a dozen times, though she repeated herself, her "Good Morning, lovely Abner," several times, too, so that, in the morning, it would be, "Good morning, lovely Abner," to which I'd respond, "Good morning, beautiful Phyllis," and she, from the bed, on her back, heavy blanket down to her waist, repeated, her gaze on the ceiling, "Good morning, lovely Abner," and I'd repeat, "Good morning, beautiful Phyllis," which would continue for fifteen minutes or so, sometimes longer, sometimes for half an hour. I told myself, then, that it was all right, there was no problem, because it was a game for her, like Yahtzee: it was the How-many-times- can-I-repeat-myself-before-he-gets-annoyed game.

But it wasn't a game at all. I know that, now.

She was stuck.

All the stuff there, in what remained of her gray matter, could not decide, after sleep (which was simply eight hours in a place I could not yet go to), what she had just said, or what I'd said, or whether it was even morning.

Christ!

Hunger high into the bones.

Hunger high into the bones.

But I miss even that—the repetition, getting stuck, and getting stuck with her, repeating myself, too, because it drew me into her world.

And now there's you, getting stuck with me in this place, this world I've meandered into over the course of decades, which is partially your world, too.

And I do not know you, at all. Or any part of you, or any extension of you, or you (as I said a couple of thousand words ago-- reread it if you'd like; it's terribly poetic), and I realize I must have been lying to you, or lying to myself, or simply trying to understand something, which would, of course be anything and everything about you, which would be anything and everything about myself

That is the spider on my tongue. My mortal ignorance of you, and, so, my mortal ignorance of myself, which becomes my mortal ignorance of these departed, and my mortal ignorance of now, and tomorrow, and, of course, of yesterday.

~ * ~

July 29

My cupboards are as bare as Mother Hubbard's—except for a crowd of various insects—ants, for instance, and silverfish and black beetles. A half dozen other varieties, too. I don't know why they're here. I was taught that insects go after sugar, crumbs, water, vegetation. But the cupboards are only wood and air, now.

It's possible that these departed, in my little house and in the dim forest around it, draw insects to them. It's possible that insects are attracted to them. Possible that insects see them or smell them, or see and smell them, and find something appetizing about them.

Now and again, I found insects on Phyllis, especially when she slept. Some of them were like the insects in my cupboards. Some of them were ants and black beetles and an occasional silverfish (when I think about it, I recall that silverfish aren't actually insects [which, by definition, have three body segments and six legs], nor are spiders, which have two body segments and eight legs). I remember I swiped these creatures to the floor when I found them on her naked body (she slept naked always, and often with a smile), and then I squashed them with my foot. Some of the larger insects made quite a noise when they died.

God, I remember our meals together. She ate everything with gusto, even bread and Jell-O, cucumbers and peas. She ate everything, in fact. She loved sushi, which I detested, and preferred her meat deep red: "There's nothing like eating this, Abner!" she said. "Eating this meat!"

"I can see that!" I said (I didn't eat much meat, then: I eat none, now).

"Yes," she said. "It's lovely, eating this meat!" After a few minutes, sometimes ten or fifteen minutes, sometimes longer, she would usually drop the phrase "eating this meat!" and I'd miss it; sometimes, I'd even coax it from her when I hadn't heard it in a while, and she'd usually oblige ("It's lovely, eating this meat!"), though sometimes she'd simply give me a little frown and say, "The meat is done."

I miss her gusto. I miss her skin, her breasts and her eyes, too. I find that I even miss picking the insects off her sleeping body and killing them on the floor.

~ * ~

August 01

It's always like being in a tent in the dark at this dismal house in the dim woods. I've not known anything like it before. I was never a lover of sunlight. I found it obtrusive, even, in a way, maudlin—"A day without (whatever) is like a day without sunshine," people used to tell me. And I'd say, Shit on that! Give me rain and storms and an eternal night.

Now, this day, I would cheerfully embrace sunlight. I'd stare straight into it with a smile.

"Abner, you're a depressed person," Phyllis said once. "It's why you love me."

"No," I told her. "I love you because you're so goddamned lovable."

"You love me," she said, "because I'm just out of reach, now and always. Surely you know that."

"But you're not," I said. "I touch you every day."

And she smiled and said, "Oh Abner, you're not a fool, so why do you say such things?"

~ * ~

August 02, morning, early

Sam is here.

Phyllis is here.

They're the only ones that matter.

The others, these departed, don't matter at all. They move through me like hunger pangs. They come and go, come and go. Sooner or later, they'll be somewhere far beyond me.

Sam and Phyllis keep me company because they're my friends.

I've asked them to join me for dinner.

I have no idea what to make.

I have so little.

I have only cupboards as bare as Mother Hubbard's.

No. I believe I have eggs. I have always prepared eggs well. All kinds of eggs. Scrambled and over easy.

Though it occurs to me now, upon this moment, that I threw the eggs at a window.

But there is one. One egg.

I could walk to the little country store and buy more. I could buy bread, too. And butter. I could also buy coffee.

I could invite everyone here to a delicious breakfast.

~ * ~

August 4

I remember this: it is a great chore to bring a cup brimming with hot coffee from its saucer to the lips without spilling some, which is how I learned to bring the saucer to the area of my mouth with the cup, so it (the saucer) can catch the spillage.

~ * ~

August 5, in the sometime morning

Dark tonight.

Awakened just minutes ago by this: "AABBNNEERRR!"

I opened my eyes and thought I'd gone blind. I sensed no one nearby who might have said, "AABBNNEERRR!" —no one other than the murky presences in my house.

"AAABBBNNNEEERRRR!" I heard.

"Phyllis?" I said. "Phyllis?" I repeated, and glanced about for some point of light. "Am I blind?" I said. "Have I gone blind?"

"AAABBBNNNEEERRRR!" the voice said, and I tried to decide if whatever was speaking was above me, or to my right or left, or at the foot of the bed, or on the bed itself.

"AAABBBNNNEEERRRR!"

"Who are you?" I screamed.

"AAABBBNNNEEERRRR!"

"Who are you?" I screamed.

"AAABBBNNNEEERRRR!" the voice repeated, though with greater insistence and urgency, as if making some point.

"Tell me your name!" I screamed.

"AAABBBNNNEEERRRR!" the voice repeated.

And there was silence.

And I became aware, once more, of the murky and intrusive presences that exist with me in my little house in the dim woods.

~ * ~

Aug 5

Back from the country store with groceries.

I have whole wheat flour. I have butter. Margarine. Cooking oil. I have a quart of lard. Pound of bacon and same of hamburger. Same of eggs—a dozen. Gallon of milk. One percent. Crisco. Baking soda. As well as almonds as well.

It will be no small chore cleaning the cupboards out of the insects inside.

~ * ~

August 5

Lard is comfort food. Lard is the energy of protein. Lard has saving capabilities.

I have cooked the bacon and the hamburger.

I have sat at table.

Phyllis was at it to my left.

She covered my hand with hers and helped me eat.

I ate.

And slept.

I am a goddamned fool.

~ * ~

August 05 in the evening

It comes to me that Phyllis once had a jawbone which worked and that she thinks about that fact or has thought about it at some point in her time here, in this dimension, her new dimension, or that she has thought about her muscles, or her feet and arms and hands and realized that their very existence, her very need of them, and they of her, spoke eloquently of her mortality, which is the same with her lips and ankles, and her entire biology.

And mine. My entire biology.

For the first time in a long time I believe I need to use the bathroom. I had forgotten what a telling and wonderful part of life that is—using the bathroom, enjoying a good productive bowel movement and the enormous relief of urination.

~ * ~

Later evening

There and gone.

~ * ~

1:21

Took a dump and a pee.

I evacuate my bladder, therefore I am.

~ * ~

1:30

I smile into my mirror. It's not a bad smile, despite the overwhelming sadness behind it, which is profound and honest and makes the smile endearing.

Sam is there, in the mirror.

Phyllis is there, too, in the mirror, near him, behind him, near him.

Both of them smile, too, though their smiles are unknowable and invisible.

The passing misery is in the mirror, also. And each facet of it (each of its million facets) remembers its parts its jawbones and fingers, its musculature and its need of feet and genitalia. Each is locked in, set in, here, stuck here, stuck here.

In my little house in the dim woods.

I love my smile and the fact of my urination.

~ * ~

The Passing Misery

And that is what it is. It can be nothing else. It is the passing misery.

I've figured it out.

I've figured it out.

I'm the fool with a brain that works all right.

Food feeds the synapses. My mother told me that. So understand this—Listen to your mother! Eat your lard and your whole wheat.

My smile is as broad as Montana tonight.

Did I tell you that my little house in the dim woods is located in Montana?

I didn't?

It isn't.

It's in some other state.

I think Vermont.

I think New Hampshire.

I think New York.

But shit, nothing matters less than the state I'm in. Oh, I'm still laughing.

I hope you're laughing with me.

I could not find the doorknob. I was in the room, in the dark in the room, and I could not find the doorknob. I looked for a light in the room, a light to turn on, and there wasn't one, and I could not find the doorknob. I found the door easily, but I could not find the knob on the door so I couldn't get out of the dark room. I reached for the place where the doorknob had to be, where it always had been, but no matter where I reached, I couldn't find it, and I could not get out of the room, though I searched for hours and hours, and then, eventually, for days, and, after a time, for weeks, but I couldn't find the knob, and I couldn't find a light in
the dark room. And I kept searching because what else was I going to do except search, what else was there to do but search for the knob, feel around the edges of the door in the dark for the knob, but I could not find it, and so I knew, at last, after a very, very long time, after months, I believe, after what could have passed for months in someone's universe, that I was dead.

And then I found the knob, and I got out of that room.

People in coats and hats, people carrying umbrellas, carrying
briefcases, carrying babies on their backs, and people lugging
groceries home; people arm-in-arm; people in polo shirts, in hand
me-down dresses, in gray suits, people laughing, sweating, people
carrying tennis rackets, showing off new shoes, coaxing youngsters
to come along, people looking in shop windows.

Old people who have trouble walking, old people jogging, old
couples smiling affectionately at one another, as lovers do.
Teenage couples with their hands on each others' rear ends; boys
on street corners learning about lust.

It was daytime.

And Manhattan's streets were crowded, as they always are, then.

—A Manhattan Ghost Story

TEN

They—these departed--tell me there is nothing quite as meaningless as death.

"Nothing," they say, "is quite as fucking meaningless and as fucking misunderstood as death."

"It's simply a passing away," they say.

"Just a passing away," they say.

"It amounts, after all, to no more than passing through a doorway that isn't a doorway into a room that isn't a room in a house that's an entire goddamned universe," they say, without apparent irony.

But then they laugh. After that line. The "goddamned universe" line.

"It's like giving up crayons for one's fingertips," they say. And they laugh at that, too, as I do.

Such humor.

"Is there pain in dying?" I ask.

"Oh yes, in dying," they say, "but not in death. It takes your breath away, and then you hear, and then you see."

Such humor.

"And what about hunger?" I say.

"Good God," they say, "we need it, hunger, every last one and all of us, else we wouldn't be!” which makes them laugh as well.

And I say, "But what of me?" and they fall silent.

~ * ~

8

It is this about hunger: it's neither underrated nor overrated. It is simply what it is—need, and they (these departed) are correct, of course; we wouldn't be without it.

And so they, these departed, come and go like hunger pangs, and I am left only with shadows I can count on one hand, on two fingers, and need, which is hunger, too, and hunger, which is hunger.

~ * ~

9:02

You see, understand this, I came upon them on a blue note on a bald table making hay in the sunrise, and so I shot them, and so.

And:

“Full House," she declared. “What do I need with a full house?" and spread her legs.

And:

These are my puppies. Take one. Take one. Give it your home. Take one. Take this puppy. Take this puppy. These are my puppies. Take one. Give it your home.

~ * ~

My clothes are becoming loose.

Perhaps I should get naked.

I have always enjoyed it. Naked. Ennjoyyed it. Ran around naked as a child. Young child. Verry very youngg child. Two years. That's the time for nakedness. Two years. That's the best time for nakedness.

~ * ~

August eleven

So many things in those other stories that were never told, and only because I didn't remember them or I didn't have the time to tell them, and I want so much to tell them here, but I don't have the time, of course (You can see that, can't you? You can feel that, can't you? That I don't have the time. I don't have the time.). This is like one very exquisitely long extended gasp I'm involved in, or a long and exquisite exhale—I can't tell the difference. Exhales, inhales, blue faces on blue tables.

But I want to tell you much, all, if that were possible, but it isn't. I want to tell you about Phyllis's sister, whose name was Janice, and who was alive at the time (at the time Phyllis and I were together, always together), and she was hooked on me, though I wasn't hooked on her (though she was as lush and charming as a summer meadow) because I was so hooked on Phyllis, and she, Janice, would take me aside a lot and tell me I was having "crazy notions," because she'd heard me talking to no one she could see (Phyllis) and she was "awfully concerned" about me.

So one day in the middle of her concern, she kissed me full and moist and ripe with herself, her good body, pushed hard against me, and I got an erection the size of a dirigible, and I tried like hell to chase it away (thought about Yogi Berra, thought about Richard Nixon, thought about rabbit stew, no luck getting rid of the dirigible-size, unwanted erection [which is an oxymoron, if you think about it, if you think about it—the body itself never doesn't want an erection; the body itself grants them and needs them; it's part of that hunger thing]). Oh, I am being so lucid in my hunger. I've read that's part of the process.

This process.

This need to tell my stories.

And there she was, Janice, Phyllis's lush-and-charming-as-a-summer-meadow sister (older sister, two years) pressing her ripe body against me, and there's my unwanted erection pushing back, and then Phyllis appears in the doorway, and smiles, and cocks her beautiful head, and comes over and strokes my erection through my jeans, and I cum all over myself and Janice stops kissing me and looks at the cum mess in my pants, and she smiles (very like Phyllis's smile, a little open-mouthed, a horizontal vagina on the face) and she cocks her head, as Phyllis did, and Phyllis leans over and shows me herself beneath her green dress

God, I'm exhausted!

~ * ~

August

I am so embarrassed. That paragraph was like an orgasm. Can you forgive me?

~ * ~

August l9thhh

I have never wanted to cum in anyone's face. It has been on my mind thatttt paraagraphh for days.

I have eaten.

I have eatnnn eggs.

Cholesterol is a huge componnnentn of eggssg.

The passingmiseryyrn is unconcnrned about cholesterol.

I ned sleikp.

~ * ~

August 20the

Awake andrested.

All the tails that ned to be told:

And so tolslepe.

~ * ~

August 20th

She was not my entire journey. Phyllis was not my entire. journey.

Mores.elp.

~ * ~

August 20

More food.

More eggs. I am not lucid withouttehm.

More slep.

~ * ~

August 19

Ten hours sleep while the passing misery watches and Phyllis strokes and Sam looks on merrily.

I remember the streets at night in another place which was not Manhattan. In that small place which was not Manhattan. Afafterr I had gone from Manhattan, afater I had run from Manhattnean.

It was Ithaca and its streets at night were serene. An occasional street lamp. Tall and turn of the century. No garish light. Only a soft light. Incandescent and yellow orange. A good soft yellow orange.

People smoked beneath the streetlamps. I saw fedoras and zoot suits there, and dresses that hung to mid calf, under thoese toall lamps, in the good soft glow of those tall almps.

People slept early in ithacai.

I saw few of them. Ithacans.

I became fixated on the night and the orange-yellow glow, the people in fedoras, zoot suits and long dresses, smoking. They were always there, though only at night, or maybe, like stars, they were there in the mornings and afternoons, but the sunlight washed them away.

I am feeling lucid again. I thank my eggs for it. And my muse. My Phyllis watching.

I'm playing Moby on some small piece of musical equipment.

I became fixated on the night streets in Ithaca, and the Zoot suits and the people smoking in the orange yellow glow of the tall streetlamps.

I feel so lucid again.

I'm very thankful for it.

I must tell you, some of them moved off, on the streets beneath those streetlamps, in the dark, in Ithaca. And I followed.

I lived with one of these people. His name was Galway and he was an Irishman who died under one of the lamps in a recent century.

He was smooth-faced and dark-eyed and spoke in a rich brogue that made me believe in him.

We shared meals.

I told him about Phyllis.

He lived in a tall, latter-century brick townhouse on Gibson Street that was slated for demolition. He had lived in it, he said, for "cup'la decades, I'm guessin'."

And I said, "It's been slated for demolition that long?"

"It was," he said with a grand smile, "and did, but it lives on, like us."

"And me?" I said.

He said nothing.

We shared many tasty meals.

~ * ~

My eggs are rotting.

The lard is nonexistent.

I tell tales, though I'm an unreliable narrator. The hunger pangs have begun once again.

~ * ~

August 27

I met the Beatles. It wasn't easy. It was 1966 and they were very big. They were in New York City, getting ready for the Sullivan Show and I was in the same hotel. I'd gotten to know a small red-head named Irene. She was as tiny as a Yorkshire terrier and she worked at the hotel, in their office, as a file clerk.

She was fun to talk to because she was lively and earnest, a combination I've always enjoyed (those characteristics also described Phyllis, from time to time).

She introduced me to The Beatles as they were leaving the hotel to have lunch at Sardi's. They were leaving one at a time, which, Irene said, was their tactic to avoid cameramen (she did not say "paparazzi").

She introduced me to Paul McCartney, first. She said, as he passed us quickly, on his way to the front doors of the hotel, "Paul, this is my friend, Abner," and Paul nodded at her and looked at me, nodded and said, "Howdy, Mate," and was on his way.

~ * ~

August 30

Oh, the stories I could tell, the stories I need to tell. It's like a hunger. It's like a need, which is hunger, which is need.

Did I tell you my eggs are rotting?

Yes, I see that I have.

~ * ~

August 30

Who can eat rotten eggs? They're lethal!

I believe there are shadows standing at my window.

~ * ~

August 29

I'm as sure of that date as I am of my own eyes. August 29. Soon, it will be autumn and I'll be happier.

It is only happiness in this life that I've been after all these years.

I'm so lucid.

~ * ~

August 28

I am willing to admit my mistakes.

I do not believe in Sasquatch, but I believe there's a large being standing at my window.

When I speak to it I get no reply, but I feel rebuked, nonetheless. I feel pain. It flows from my head to my limbs to my lower parts.

~ * ~

August 29

Phyllis and I and her parents drank tea one night. The tea was Earl Grey, though Phyllis's mother, sweet and attentive in a pleated pink skirt and matching, long-sleeved top, white pumps and gloves, liked Earl Greyer, which is slightly more robust.

"I prefer a more sobering tea," she explained from her folding metal chair, then nodded and smiled sweetly at me, first, then at Phyllis, who nodded back, but did not smile (because, I later learned, we were visiting her parents, in their East 89th street apartment, only because I had insisted we visit them: "They need to meet me, Phyllis," I said. And she said, "No they don't," which hurt my feelings, and I said so, and that—my hurt feelings—was what persuaded Phyllis about the visit).

There were insects in the apartment where we had our tea. They were like the very insects that inhabit my cupboards now. Very like the insects I used to find on Phyllis's naked body in the morning, or when I got up to pee in the middle of the night and saw her body exposed by lamplight from beyond my window.

I tried not to notice them, the ones in Phyllis's parents' apartment, but it was difficult, because they crawled on the floor around me by sixes and eights and twelves, and they crawled around her mother and father, too, and around her, and they even crawled on Mrs. Pellaprat's beautiful pink pleated skirt and Mr. Pellaprat's nice suit, and Phyllis's low cut, startlingly green dress, so it looked like it was alive, and, at last, I said, "You seem to have something of an insect problem," and Mr. Pellaprat guffawed, and Mrs. Pellaprat (her first name was Grace) guffawed, and Phyllis slapped the back of my head and whispered, "Asshole!"

Mrs. Pellaprat leaned forward so her pretty face was only a foot or so from mine, and explained, "Well, you know, my boy, it's part of the situation," and Mr. Pellaprat said, "Situation," and Phyllis repeated, "Asshole!" then slapped me again.

I turned toward her, gave her a look.

"Good God, Abner," she said, "they know about the fucking bugs!"

And Mrs. Pellaprat said, "Oh we do, my boy. They're only a part of the situation, you know. Only a part of the situation."

"We're thinking of training them," said Mr. Pellaprat. "They're highly intelligent. Especially the silverfish. They have a mind of their own. The silverfish." He was a tall man, exquisite looking, like a model for GQ, and I could see how he and his wife had produced a beauty like Phyllis.

I knew nothing about them, and I knew only a little about Phyllis, then. In that tiny apartment in Manhattan.

~ * ~

August 30

I have no eggs. Rotten or otherwise. I have been given some kind of reprieve.

I was told once, this: When it ends it does not end, you know. Life, that is I mean the life of the body, even. ire stick around for quite a while, searching through the gray matter that remains for bits of memory, something to grab onto, something to keep us here. Think of the gray matter, then think of how people eat Sushi. Think about it. There we are, we've drawn our last breath, but the gray matter remains...what's the word?—viable. There's stuff in it. Memories and ideas and thoughts and philosophies and places So we go in there, into that remaining bit of gray matter, or the gray matter goes into itself—who knows?— and hangs around for a while. A long while, sometimes. Years, sometimes, though who can say? We're caught in that place deep inside the body, which is dead, and we know nothing really beyond what we can get from the viable gray matter—memories of blue sky and quaint farmhouses, maybe, or memories of lakes or oceans or boys with sweet faces. We become a part of all that. It becomes our present. I think it’s no different at all from what we experience before we die. Unless the body is filled with formaldehyde, of course, which kills all the gray matter, all the little cells where memory is stored.

~ * ~

August 30

Phyllis is here. Sam is here. The passing misery, too.

Phyllis stands behind me and comforts me as I write. She leans over me now and again and kisses my cheek; I know this because my cheek feels cool for a moment. And she strokes my chest, my face, my cock, and I become aroused. She whispers to me at these times that she's pleased: "All of that just for me!" she says. And I tell her, though not in so many words, Yes, it's all for you! As ever.

Sam stands at the window that looks out on the dim woods and declares, in his way, that he's not who I think he is and that I should take heed from the words of those I do not know, meaning, I think, the passing misery, which speaks to me in warnings and allegories and nonsense, though it's all nonsense, of course, because, I've learned, there is nothing that isn't nonsense, anywhere.

All of these passages. All this passing. From zygote to birth to otherlife. Around and around.  Or straight ahead, afterward, to a place we can not define.

I believe that I'm very, very hungry. I don't know anymore. I can't be certain. Hunger is a need, you understand.

But, like all needs, it passes.

I look down at myself and I don't see much, either because there's not much to see or because hunger is affecting my vision, at last.

Or I could be living in my gray matter; making what I find there into a storyline to live in and be part of—a little house in the dim woods surrounded by ghosts and lust.

I am so lucid.

I am so lucid.

But there is, you see, nothing wrong with me that blissful ignorance and a meaningful roll in the hay can't fix.

That's why I keep breathing.