FORTY-SIX
PLAYTIME
One: Stay inside after dark. Two: In daylight, keep to the fields and the plazas. Three: If you see the shadow of a person without the body of a person, do not cross its borders, for it is a ghost. These were the rules the people of the village observed, though they might with more accuracy have been called alarms, admonitions, warnings, so grave were they, and so pregnant with consequence. Even the most gentle and loving of parents smacked, shook, and spanked them into their children. Accidents, nevertheless, happened. Take the girl trapped right now in the glade beyond the village border, who is waiting for the sun to go down. In her fourteen years, she must have seen the shadows of a thousand ghosts, scissory gray shapes that have appeared on the walls of buildings or the dirt between one house and another, vibrating with an expansive scorn. She was only three the day a neighbor of hers was seized by one of them, and she still remembers the horror of it: a man in blue overalls misstepping into a wandering shadow, then his shout as it transformed him, or consumed him, or whatever it was that ghosts did to leave a heap of clothing where a body had been. She knows how to evade the ghosts when the sun is shining. She knows how to flee indoors when the evening comes. The problem is her dog, a rambunctious black-and-white spaniel, all tail and skull and ears, who puffs and barks at the door whenever he judges himself deserving of a walk. He is a rattle-brained little thing and she loves him, which is why, earlier that afternoon, when he spurted off into the woods in pursuit of a squirrel, she let her instincts get the better of her. Without thinking, she went lunging in after him, grasping for his leash as it snaked through the undergrowth. The light fell here and there through the foliage. Ranks of black trunks rushed past her like fence posts. Before she knew it, he was gone with a startled yelp, taken by what had seemed to be the outline of a maple on the ground, and there she was, deep in the forest, holding his leash and collar. By luck, she had staggered to a stop in a patch of sunshine, but the trees around her laid down a maze of shadows, far too many for her eyes to disentangle, and the danger of venturing back into them sapped the strength from her legs. What could she do but stand at the center of the clearing, willing herself to take a few steps every ten minutes or so, as the patterns of darkness the branches made in the dirt slid slowly, excruciatingly, toward the east. Not far away, gathering at the edges of the glade, were dozens of holes in the likeness of bodies. At dusk, she knows, the sun will paint their shadows in long black stripes to the horizon. Eventually their borders will become impossible to distinguish. We call this night. The ghosts call it playtime.
FORTY-SEVEN
ALL HIS LIFE
Forget dinosaurs. Ghosts were the coolest. They could turn invisible. They could pass through walls. And best of all, they haunted people. Let the other kids stomp around the playground making claws and roaring like T. rexes. He would rather moan and rattle his chains. “What,” his teacher asked him one day, “is with that starey, ummy thing you’re always doing?” And he responded with a deep-down ghost’s creak: “I have returned for you, Ms. Kathleen, with a message from beyooond the graaaave.” His tone was so ominous that she backed away, shivering electrically. Yes, nothing could top a ghost.
He was in such a hurry to become one that before the year had passed he was ninety and lying on his deathbed. His throat was way past speech, his ears way past hearing, but as his breathing stopped, and then his heartbeat, something began to sway before him like the fumes from a charcoal grill. Gradually those fumes became a face. It smiled warmly at him, that face, a memory from some forgotten cradle dream. When a voice said, “Rejoice! For your drifting has come to an end. The next life is waiting to welcome you,” he understood every word. Clearly his ears had found their power again, and so, it turned out, had his mouth. He asked the question he had been preparing for as long as he could remember: “Is this the spirit world?” Then came the reply: “No, not the spirit world. The other world. Behold.” It was not a tunnel of light he saw but a thousand overlapping tissues of it, foam-white and silver. With the barest pressure of his mind, he knew, they would part for him and absorb his years, his pain, washing his life away as they had the lives of so many others. The light shimmered with peace and music, a strum of transcendent well-being, sighing rest in me, rest in me. But that wasn’t what he wanted. It never had been. And when the murmur in his ear said, “Come, my child, follow me,” the answer he returned was instantaneous: “No thank you.” The voice cautioned him, “Do not be hasty. Those who cling to this earth are doomed to linger here. It is a dreary, bitter, aimless existence, a ghost’s.” But “All the same…” he said, and turned his face away. Once the light had dimmed, he realized he was back in his hospital room, not inside his body but hovering over it. He slipped through the ceiling and then through the roof. Outside, all around him, were more lost souls, bobbing in the air like jellyfish. Since that time, he has floated through the gray limbo of the afterworld, filled with a vindictive joy, searching out the most timid and frightenable of children and appearing in the dark at their bedsides. It is so awesome.
FORTY-EIGHT
TAKE IT WITH ME
He liked to say that the blue of the sky was so lovely he was going to take it with him when he died—and when the time came, he did. The ghosts whose numbers he joined had always dwelled in a world of flat grays and pallid whites. Noon to them was nothing but a whiter twilight, midnight a darker dawn, but now look: here and there, around and above them, in sheets, parcels, crisscrosses, and dashes, a fine and lustrous blue. It was in the breast feathers of the pigeons, the braiding on the surfaces of ponds, the glaze on certain pieces of pottery. Everywhere they turned there was another touch of blue in the gray, and with each glimpse of it, the ghosts felt a little more alive. Maybe their skin was only a memory of the skin they used to wear, but still it seemed to tingle. Maybe their hearts were only lace and fog, but still they seemed to beat. Was this what it had been like, their lives? Why hadn’t they noticed?
Hardly a week had passed before a woman died carrying the red she had always loved from the blooms on her daughter’s cheeks. Suddenly, alongside the blue, were the warm speckled petals of spray roses and the blush marks on apples and peaches. Next came the green of olives, then the softer green of grasshoppers and raw coffee beans, then the rich, almost black, brown of good soil and dark chocolate. A little boy brought the glossy yellow of the boots he liked to put on when it rained, an old man the ruby red of the dice at his favorite casino. A lepidopterist contributed the distinct theatrical purple of the boomerang shape—or at least that’s how it looked to her—that crested the wings of the luna moth. Soon only a few stray patches of white and gray remained in the hereafter, and death by death, as just the right ghosts arrived, these too were painted in: with the heathered blue of shirts and scarves, the jupitered orange of Easter eggs, the bright yet milky pink of the sunrise a man once saw on a clear April morning from the deck overlooking his backyard.
Meanwhile, in the world they had left behind, which is to say ours, the sky was no longer blue and the trees no longer green. Instead, where the colors used to be, was only a thick snow of toneless particles.
FORTY-NINE
A STORY SEEN IN GLIMPSES THROUGH THE MIST
Nothing much had happened in her life, but the little that had was more than enough, and though the landslide that flattened her car was the most of that little she had ever experienced, she was pleased to discover, upon emerging from the wreckage, that she had entered the afterworld, where the nothing that happened was even less. The country of the dead, her explorations revealed, was almost entirely empty. There was, of course, herself—or at least the ongoing chain of associations and impressions she chose to continue calling herself. And there was some element of being or half-being against which she was able to enact her identity. But no matter how far she wandered, she found no one else, only a sparse background of fogs and vapors with just enough detail to remain vaguely familiar: a mist of h
ouses and a haze of streets through which her spirit moved like a ripple of air. Eternity, it transpired, was desolate, unoccupied, a place where everything that was was barely anything at all—and, as such, as much of her as anything could be. She could hardly imagine a better fortune. She had always been a person of ticklish sensibilities, easily overcome by the ordinary frictions of life. The lighter the brush of experience, the more keenly she seemed to feel it, and now fate was offering her a world free of disruptions and vexations—free because there was so little world to it, and so little, therefore, to be vexed or disrupted: just a few scattered essences, as intangible as shadows. As a ghost, she was able to tuck herself into the spaces between these essences, and soon, with practice, into the absences between the spaces. The problem, she eventually ascertained, was that the less of everything there was, the greater the portion of it anything would occupy, as a result of which the most inappreciable movements were like bedlam to her. Every so often something in the nothing would lap or quiver or stir, and in her senses everything else would diminish, the way late at night, in an empty house, a cricket can sound like a symphony. So it was that the afterworld, which, if it had been like no Heaven she had ever been promised, had nevertheless been a kind of Heaven, became instead, though like no Hell with which she had ever been frightened, a kind of Hell. In her quiet little nook of the grave, even the least of something was the most of anything.
FIFTY
A LIFETIME OF TOUCH
Visiting the cave temples of Ellora in the final year of his illness, the famous sculptor noticed that the breasts of the female statues gave off an aqueous sheen, as if dipped underwater. When he asked why, the tour guide explained to him that more than a dozen centuries of male caresses had anointed them with palm oil. “You understand a carving not only with the eyes,” he said, gesturing ecumenically. “You understand it also with the hands. Please, please, go ahead, my friend.” This exchange, which lasted only a few seconds, would determine the artistic trajectory of the rest of the sculptor’s life. Standing before that rock-cut basalt, he set himself the task of creating a statue so irresistible to the hands that, given a thousand years, every inch of it would be glossed by admiring touches. As soon as he returned to his studio, he began experimenting with blocks of soapstone. The statue would be a woman, he decided, and therefore, to him at least, innately enticing, but he wanted its desirability to be both more extravagant and less specific than that: an object that combined the carnal allure of a beautiful woman with the structural allure of a geometric solid. Two months into his work, as a test, he sprayed his half-dozen strongest attempts with a UV aerosol whose properties were activated by skin moisture. In the gallery where he displayed his sculptures to the public, he posted a sign that read please touch. That night, after the doors were locked and the lights dimmed, he examined his statues with a mercury wand. The bluing appeared in jellylike patches, concentrated mainly on the breasts and hips. The difficulty, he realized, lay in devising a female shape that was not only tempting, but so uniformly tempting that whatever contact it attracted would be distributed evenly over its entire surface—the breasts, yes, but also the elbows, the knuckles, the spine, the armpits. The vertical cleft between the nose and the lips. The bumps of cartilage along the superstratum of the ear. Following another few months of trial and error, he calculated that the ideal size for such a statue was eight to twelve percent larger than the average woman, the ideal posture the straight legs and slight upper acclivity of someone leaning in to smell a high-set flower. Most appealing of all to the hands were those statues he displayed not on a pedestal, or even at ground level, but in a shallow basin. The idea violated every supposition of what he had come to think of as his craft, but there it was, shining in blue, the irrefutable evidence. He was preparing to make the switch from soapstone to marble when his illness finally caught up with him. In an instant, rather than sharpening his chisels, he was la-de-daing through the afterworld, one ghost among millions of others. The ghosts had been nestled for so long inside their bodies, and held there so tightly, that they shone now like lanterns. For thirty or sixty or eighty years they had been embraced by their own skin. The famous sculptor was mildly piqued to realize that he would not complete his masterwork, but consoled to observe that he too was shining—polished, he now perceived, by a lifetime of touch.
FIFTY-ONE
THE RUNNER-UP
All his life he had maintained a distinct ambition: to be the second-greatest composer in Vienna, that minor talent whose flame would be first enfeebled and then subsumed by someone else’s genius. To achieve such a goal, he knew, would take a lifetime of labor. He was no older than nine when he set out to write a series of competent but indifferent melodies for the clavier and the violin. By adolescence he had graduated to unmemorable short sonatas for the organ and piano, and later, as he grew into his abilities, to humble keyboard concertos that, one of his teachers exalted, “had at best their modest charms.” He worked unflaggingly, and his standards were high. Now and again, dampening some stray line of inspiration from a score, he imagined he felt a phantom hand guiding his pen: a guardian, a muse, an angel. The music was so clear to him. He listened in as the strings extended their apologies to each other while the flutes and oboes offered their own little pardon-mes and the drums coughed spasmodically in the background. If only he could capture the sound he heard, he knew even the most indulgent listener would find the result vaguely but inevasibly disappointing. By the time Emperor Joseph II offered him his first commission, he was producing symphonies so consummately mediocre that they were forgotten by the public almost immediately, dirtying the air for a moment and then sinking away like the froth the waves deposit on the sand. The tepid applause they received never failed to delight him. Even the occasional bravo could not dismay him much, for nearly always, he had learned, given a performance or two, it would be balanced out by a countervailing jeer. He was confident that if he continued to exert himself, his compositions would gradually worsen. What he did not anticipate was that the genius whose magnificence shone so bright before him, that gentle conductor whom God had surely ordained to his work, would be outshone by a greater genius still. A pale young twig of a musician arrived from Salzburg, debuting his talents before the emperor, and all at once the Salieri whom the composer so revered was faced with a Salieri of his own, which meant that the minor composer who longed to be the second-greatest in Vienna was, at best, the third Salieri in the chain. Presently he understood how remote his ambitions had become. One day, he thought bitterly, when the history of composition was written, it would show only an infinite succession of diminishing Salieris, each one drearier than the Salieri that had come before.
FIFTY-TWO
SO MANY SONGS
It was bound to happen sooner or later: the world had run out of new songs. “I’m surprised it took this long,” the missus said. We had been around for the best of it, she and I, with Elvis shading over into the Beatles, and doo-wop into Stevie Wonder. Even back then, in the AM days, folks sensed that it was too good to last. Must have been a week or so ago the two of us were having one of our Monday evenings, cooking pasta as we listened to Hot 101—“Always the latest, always the hits”—when the DJ announced that it had finally arrived, the last possible song, and the station would now cease broadcasting. A few ticks of microphone noise, then nothing. Static whispered from the speakers like tires on a concrete highway. Hoosh-sha. Hoosh-sha. Hoosh-sha. It was long and straight, that road. Went stretching on for days. Well, the missus and I continued to tune in whenever we stood at the chopping board or the stove. Habit, I suppose. But still it was nothing but hoosh-sha, hoosh-sha. Washing lettuce one afternoon, she listed her head to the side and asked, “Do you hear that?” I humored her with my let’s-pretend nod, but there was nothing let’s-pretend about her expression. “Vexed” is the word I would use. She swatted my arm and impatiently, gesturing at the radio, said, “That,” and then “That” again. At first all I could mak
e out was the familiar road-hum of static, but something was swelling there, something that wanted to be heard. Gradually my ears became attuned to it. Ghost music: that’s what people are calling it. It’s music from somewhere else, no question. Music without the need for bodies, if that makes sense. No melody, no form, hardly any development, just a faded sense of time and how it burgeons and leaks away, as if all the songs that have ever been born and died have been born and died the way water transforms into steam. Alive, they expressed themselves in surges and sways, and now, dead, they express themselves in breaths and hisses. Occasionally you might detect the shimmer of some earlier tune through the mist, but never for very long. You can’t move to a sound like that, can’t dance, but you can relinquish yourself to it, and that’s what they’ve done, my missus and so many others, in dusty sofas or cars stalled out in driveways. All that first evening she stood in the kitchen listening to the radio, and again the next morning, and now, whenever I go looking for her, that’s where I’ll find her. Deaf to my voice. Deaf to damn near everything. Each day her stance is a little more peaceful, her eyes a little more colorless, her skin a little more translucent. Last night I dreamed she had gone floating out of her dress. A ghost of herself: that’s what she was. My plan is to reach my hand out and touch her. And soon enough—just you wait—I’m going to try it. The small of her back. That’s my idea.
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