THIRTY-NINE
THERE ARE PEOPLE, THEY HAD LIVES
Because the first afterlife had become too crowded, they built another. A team of laborers and engineers was dispatched to the marshes that lay beyond the celestial border to siphon the mud from the bogs, fill in the bottomlands, and stitch the earth up with green grass and brown sod. From the remaining marshwater, they created crystal-clear lakes with beds of white shingle. In no time at all, sightly new neighborhoods of houses, parks, and tennis courts were assembled on the shores. As a finishing touch, a pedestrian bridge, curved like a bass clef, was erected over the largest of the reservoirs. The mosquitoes still presented a problem, so the whole area was blanketed with insecticide, after which the problem was the ghosts of the mosquitoes, legions of wailing specks needling around on pure dumb instinct. But, as the chief engineer pointed out, even the finest developments had their headaches, and if phantom mosquitoes were the worst of theirs, they could count the project a transcendent success. The team packed up its equipment and returned to the main office. The afterlife job, they reported, was finished, under budget and ahead of schedule. All it lacked were its residents, and such a dilemma was hardly a dilemma at all, since the living, say what you would about them, kept dying. More ghosts arrived by the day, and from then on nearly all of them were assigned to the second afterlife, with its clusters of decorative bulrushes, its plazas paved with red and yellow bricks, and its smart new houses that smelled of paint and sawdust. In addition, to alleviate the congestion, it was decided that the population of the original afterlife would be reduced by roughly four percent. A lottery was conducted to select the several billion requisite emigrants from the first afterlife to the second. Some of the administrators worried that this would leave people thinking of themselves as either winners or losers—that those of them whose names were called would feel cheated of their rightful homes, or, conversely, that those of them whose names were not called would feel cheated of some grand adventure. Yet no one foresaw what has actually happened, which is that everyone feels cheated now, everyone like a loser. In all but the most trivial ways, the two afterlives are exactly the same: the trees bud, the breezes blow, there are people, they had lives. So perhaps it is just human nature that the ghosts in the first afterlife spend their time feeling neglected, obsolete, as if the world has outdistanced them, while the ghosts in the second spend their time swatting at insects that whine and that buzz but that cannot feed on them no matter how hard they try.
FORTY
THE SOLDIERS OF THE 115TH REGIMENT
Often, in their fear and excitement, the soldiers of the 115th Regiment saw the bullets flying as if in slow motion, all that metal as thick as rain in the air, yet coasting, gliding. How easy it was to imagine themselves strolling across the battlefield like tourists, brushing the tic tac of lead from their uniforms, lost in another world. Yet among the bullets was something else that came and went almost imperceptibly: discharges of light, both beautiful and horrifying, that cut blinding patterns into the air and then vanished with an incredible swiftness. These calligraphies of light were amazing to behold, yet also sickening somehow, abhorrent. They were only visible at all because of the way the world was barely moving, and even then for less than an instant. The soldiers were reluctant to discuss them. It seemed dangerous, sinful even; deranged. Surely only the most shameful Section 8 cases saw mazes, zigzags, and falling stars of light making formations of art inside a barrage of gunfire. One afternoon, though, after a few rounds of liquor, the men began confessing their visions to one another. “Have you ever noticed—?” “Yes, yes!” “By God, I’ve seen them, too.” The second rifleman was convinced that the patterns were angels watching over the front. The machine gunner suggested that they might be maps of a kind, forecasts, tracing the paths the bullets would follow. They reminded the mortar operator of those openings in time and space that decorated the cover of Amazing Stories; doorways, he said, to Mars, or to the deep past. Finally PFC Matthew Kostial muttered something about the scientific method, and then, in notes as round as a tuba’s, announced drunkenly, “Learn by doing, buddy boys. Learn by doing,” and set off into the bullets. No one who watched him stumbling over the field in slow motion could forget how, just before he fell, the air fractured around him like the glaze on an old painting.
Though their memories could not quite reproduce the cracks of lights that had encompassed Private Kostial, some trace of the pattern must nevertheless have incised itself in the soldiers’ minds, for occasionally, years later, the radio operator would see lights where they did not exist: on riverbeds, in the concrete he was pouring, in his sock drawer. Now and then the antitank gunner would detect something in his wife’s handwriting, or his secretary’s—a strange design that emerged like a fog from behind the letters, seeping briefly into view before the paper reinhaled it. And the artillery mechanic confounded generations of high-school orchestra students with the eccentricity of his baton-work, certain that with just the right sequence of gestures, he would summon the ghost of the private from the battlefield and he would step out of the light, whole again, bringing the scent of cordite and booze to the stage.
FORTY-ONE
ACTION!
That famous director standing at the edge of the railway concourse is determined to make a movie that is, as they say, literally unwatchable. Seventy-one, and garlanded with more honorary doctorates and lifetime achievement awards than he knows what to do with, he again feels like the wild-haired punk filmmaker of his enfant terrible days, whose work Cineforum so memorably dubbed “the wreck not only of the art world, but of art, and of the world.” Once again he has a purpose. The movie he is preparing to film will, he believes, constitute his single greatest achievement—if, that is, it is, as he hopes, literally unwatchable. By “literally unwatchable” he does not mean a movie that is bad or distasteful (or at least not per se; not unwatchable for those reasons). Nor does he mean a movie that is incompetent or maladroit; in fact, the very opposite. No, the movie he intends to make will be “unwatchable” in the strictest possible sense of the term: because it genuinely cannot be seen. Now, there are several ways in which a movie that cannot be seen might be said to be unseeable. (1) It might not exist, or might exist only notionally: as an idea or a thought experiment rather than a series of moving images. But the famous director considers such subterfuge beneath him. (2) It might be shot, processed, or shown in such a way as to prevent its own observation—for example, using film that records only ultraviolet or infrared light; or projected onto a small screen several miles distant, or a high screen several miles in the air. The famous director regards these options as one-offs, art installations, and not the kind of honorable proletarian filmmaking to which he has always aspired. (3) It might be unwatchable not because the medium itself forbids observation, but because no one remains to do the observing. Imagine, for instance, a movie documenting the release of a toxin that, over the course of six or seven weeks, while the footage is in postproduction, will cause the swift and cascading annihilation of all life on earth. Theoretically, the only gamble in such a case would be the classical one: that is, whether people are transfigured into souls, ghosts, upon dying—and therefore, at least ostensibly, capable of watching a movie—or whether they are discharged into the blackness of oblivion. The famous director is, as it happens, in possession of just such a toxin. He stands at the edge of the busy concourse, beneath the boom mic and the tungstens, and mops the sweat from his brow. The camera is rolling. He pries the top off a capped glass vial. It produces the tiny, almost humorous, champagne-bottle sound that children make when they pop their fingers from their mouths. In no more than seven weeks, if he has gambled correctly, the movie the famous director is shooting will be ready for viewing and yet unwatchable, the perfect capstone to his long and innovative career.
FORTY-TWO
THE WAY THE RING OF A MOAT BECOMES COMFORTING TO A FISH
A particular man woke up one day a
nd, from then on, saw the same face on everyone he met. He was riding his co-op’s elevator when it began. Two women joined him on board, their features so precisely alike that though they entered at separate floors and did not greet each other, he supposed them to be twins. At the fifth floor the elevator collected a third woman, identical to the first two right down to the sand-colored mole on the knifeline of her left cheek. Triplets? But the cabbie whose taxi the man hailed wore the same face. As did the gentleman who ran the bagel cart at the corner, the bicycle courier who was balancing himself at the crosswalk, the mother who was tugging her child across the street, the child whose hand she was tugging, and everyone else the man saw, not only during his ride to work that morning but all that day and for the rest of his life. The face in question was feminine, lightly freckled, with a square chin, an elliptical hairline, lips that quirked naturally to the left, and eyebrows that were darker toward the nose than toward the temples, traits that lent it a misleadingly testy expression, as of someone who found even the happiest moments of life mildly disappointing; or someone happy, perhaps, to be disappointed: who had finally been disappointed in exactly the way she had always expected to be. The expression vanished instantly when the face went into motion, which was how the man knew that it was misleading, but since most faces, most of the time, are not in motion, he could not help perceiving the face he kept encountering as crabby—albeit proudly, almost delightedly, so. At first, in this new version of his life, the man found it hard to shake the feeling that everyone was irritated with him. Eventually, though, he grew used to the expression. Faces—all faces—greeted him with a look of ghostly pique. It was simply a fact. Once he accepted it, the ubiquity of the sight became almost comforting. The woman who peered out at him from other people’s faces seemed incapable of disguising her bitter amusement—and so, having been seen by her, he felt bitterly amusing. Knowing that salesclerks would invariably be bitterly amused to run his credit card, priests bitterly amused to offer him the sacrament, dentists bitterly amused to fill his teeth, gave him a sense of security. Sometimes he wondered about the face’s original owner—the prototype. Who was she? Would he recognize her if they met? Had they already met? Increasingly, as the years went by, he came to view her as a kind of wife, uniquely related to him, the one person in the world who might find her face less exotic than he did, or more, in either case because it was her own.
FORTY-THREE
SPECTRUM
A reclusive art lover, fond of Matisse and Cézanne but with a lifelong inability to distinguish his reds from his greens, purchased a pair of glasses that were said to remedy color blindness and discovered at once that the world was quivering with hues he had never seen before: a thousand amazements of color. The most pitiable thicket of roadside trees suddenly revealed a riot of emeralds and golds to him. Beneath the clay of their skin people flushed with pastels and peaches. He spent a spellbound Saturday at a traveling Monet exhibit, marveling at the pink petals of the blossoms in the paint, the mottled blues and greens of the lily pads. A week went by before, due to a software error, the manufacturer sent the reclusive gentleman a second pair of the same glasses. Rather than packaging them back up, he decided he would conduct an experiment. He went to the Museum of American Art, found an empty bench, and stacked the second glasses neatly on top of the first, adjusting the lenses carefully over his eyes. Was he foolish to be excited? Perhaps. For all he knew, though, an entire missing spectrum was waiting to be discovered. He readied himself for the strange new pigments he was imagining to erupt into being—silvorange, vermillow. Instead, what did were ghosts. In this spot or that, scattered around the room, a dozen configurations of light smudged the air. When one of the configurations opened her mouth as if to yawn, he realized what he was seeing. There beneath the Eakins a ghost stood scratching the side of her nose. There by the Beckwith another sat loosening his collar, prying it from his Adam’s apple with an impatient two-fingered tug. Standing in front of the Redmond, a ghost in a beaded gown was clasping her hands to her chest like a convert clasping a Bible. Around him the gentleman saw almost as many ghosts as non-ghosts. His optometrist had explained that the color-blindness-correcting glasses worked by modifying the wavelength of the colors that reached the eyes. Maybe the spirit world occupied such a wavelength, too, the man thought, and by wearing both sets of glasses at once, he had altered it just enough to make it visible. In any case, nearly every painting was adorned with some rapt spirit. He recognized in them an attitude very much like his own—the attitude, that is to say, of art lovers, holding their faces not with an inquisitorial tilt but perfectly upright, at ninety degrees, so that they could view the canvases dead-on. Their world was a gallery—this gallery. It was the kind of place that had been familiar to him ever since the third grade, when Miss Terrell took his class on a field trip to the Children’s Museum. Had there been ghosts surrounding them even then? Yes, he thought, probably so. And now, in their presence, it struck the reclusive gentleman that for all their furtiveness, all their detachment, they had been with him for most of his life—the only life he had, he thought, though not the only life there was.
FORTY-FOUR
EVERY HOUSE KEY, EVERY FIRE HYDRANT, EVERY ELECTRICAL OUTLET
She was a difficult child to manage. Not difficult in the way of most two-year-olds: she slept soundly enough, enjoyed her baths, was careful with her toys, and kept her socks on her feet—and as for her appetite, it was almost indiscriminate. Even the meals she initially rebuffed she could be persuaded to reconsider. However, she cried inconsolably when she saw the headlights of certain cars approaching, refused to toddle past the tree in the yard without kissing the bare spot on its trunk, and seemed personally affronted by electrical outlets, swatting at them with her palm and demanding “No! Stop!” before backing distrustfully away. And about those rejected meals: sometimes she would clamp her lips closed when offered a plate of food, tucking her chin disdainfully into her bib, but if you stirred the ingredients, or even just rearranged them a little, she would wolf them down. What she was thinking it was hard to know, since she lacked the vocabulary to explain herself. No color was so bright and no noise so conspicuous as the submerged reality her senses seemed to present to her. The problem she perceived, but was incapable of expressing, was that, arranged just so, a hot dog, a lump of peas, and a dollop of creamed carrots made a face, and she couldn’t see a face without imagining it was inhabited. And, of course, she was right. The objects of the world pressed up against the barriers of their faces, staring out of them in dumb captivation. Every chest of drawers, every sneaker tread, every cigarette lighter—everything with the suggestion of two eyes and a mouth—hosted a secret visitor. Those visitors were the ghosts of the dead, who had no features of their own and therefore borrowed the faces of pot lids and wood knots to peer out at the living. They watched them argue and kiss, cook and bathe, read and exercise and sleep side by side. If only people understood how tedious the afterlife could be, the ghosts thought, how starved a spirit could become for motion, activity, fizz, transformation, maybe they would do something better with their lives. The faces never spoke to the child, never even varied their expressions, but she understood that they were there, awake, watching, and responsive. Some of them she tried to comfort, while others she hid from or spurned. How was she able to guess what lay inside that mute host of haunted objects? you might wonder. But that isn’t really the mystery. The mystery is how she decided which of them she was going to love.
FORTY-FIVE
THE WALLS
Once, in this very house, there lived a man who papered his walls with photographs. His object was to cover every available sliver of wall space, laying picture beside picture until the bare white plaster had become an ocean of faces. Each day he added a few more to the mosaic, using little strips of double-sided tape. Squaring them into place was not just an urge for the man but a mysterious imperative. The people in the photos were neither his friends nor his family members.
They were not even his acquaintances. They were, to the one, strangers. And maybe that was the point. The man who papered his walls with photographs did not want to be surrounded by the people who knew and loved him. He did not want to pretend he was precious—not to anyone. He wanted only this—for his little life to pass as if in a crowd of strangers. Accordingly, every Saturday, he made the rounds of the city’s flea markets and estate sales, exhuming handfuls of photos from shoeboxes, scrapbooks, and envelopes. The process he had adopted was leisurely, intuitive, and idiosyncratic, but also in its way inflexible and weirdly choosy. His preference, though he could not have explained why, was for old matte Kodachromes from the sixties and seventies, the kind that must have had some cream to their colors when they were first developed but that now, with age, were reddening, imperfecting. He rejected professional portraits, or even deliberately posed stills, in favor of candid snapshots. Accidents. Couples waiting accidentally for restaurant tables. Kids splashing accidentally in wading pools. Ordinary people who had been accidentally captured making accidental faces in accidental settings; thousands of them, tens of thousands, in an accidental reliquary of halides and light. How many of them were women; how many men? How many were smiling, how many frowning, and how many wearing some other, more equivocal, expression? The numbers kept changing. He had trouble keeping count. Every time he attempted a survey, it seemed that more of the strangers were staring directly into the room at him, their retinas returning the burst of some long-expired flash as though they had been startled out of their activity like animals. The man began to suspect that he was visible to them, and visible not only from the surface of the walls but from somewhere deep behind them. The strangers could see him. They could see him. He was the flash, he himself, a living, breathing discharge of light. Year by year his collection grew. The closer he came to completing it, the more he sensed that he was witnessing a consummation of some kind, a finishing touch. He wondered how many of the strangers had died in the years since their pictures were taken. Most of them? All? One day, he thought, he would be among them, another small astonished phantom from the accidental past, his red eyes shining through the walls at the living.
The Ghost Variations Page 7