FIFTY-THREE
A MATTER OF ACOUSTICS
Ghosts, like giraffes, are usually silent but sometimes hum. Solitary by custom, and famously melancholy, they cluster occasionally in groups of two or three, to all appearances by accident rather than design. Let the smallest gap remain between them and they will preserve their silence, but they are mist, not flesh, and move by flowing out of themselves. When the shapes they have adopted cross or intermingle, they produce a deep centrifugal thrumming tone, like high-tension wires resonating in the wind. To call such noises speech humbles the word. There is nothing organic, much less human, about them. Call them instead propagations of sound. These zingings and moanings seem to embarrass the ghosts, as if anything other than the most solemn hush, of the kind dust adopts, or stones, was a failure of manners. Given the least opportunity they will part, and their humming will cease. Along with it, however, will cease the only obvious evidence of their existence, for it is not ghosts themselves that the living perceive—not the spectacle of ghosts, the aura of ghosts. It is the acoustics of ghosts. And therein lies the problem. In an age such as ours, so hungry for the transcendental, most people desire more spiritual encounters rather than fewer. Out of this desire, and the ghosts’ reluctance to fulfill it, has arisen the profession of spectral engineering. The principle is simple: the isolation ghosts favor is gravely tranquil—not the wilderness seclusion of the ancient prophets, all tempests and proclamations, but organized, chosen, metaphysically suburban. The job of a spectral engineer is to coax the ghosts out of those suburbs, as it were, and into the city. Certain features have been found to channel them effectively together: curving walls, sunken exits, corners where wooden pendants clack. Others repel them: salted windowsills, rooms painted the color of blue water. A spectral engineer will lay such places out in careful succession so that the ghosts who cross them must, unavoidably, intersect and therefore hum. When this work is done well, a house may be described, with no misadvertising, as “haunted”—and haunted not as a result of occult forces or vague spiritual restlessness but traffic engineering. For the ghosts, it is true, such methods might produce some discomfort, but if so it is surely no worse than the mild vexations rush-hour commuters must endure. Moreover, any such distress is temporary, theoretical, and subject to interpretation, and should be measured against the happiness of the living—the homebuyers—whose desire for the immaterial and the supersensible lies beyond all doubt. The ghosts are free, having overlapped, to return afterward to their isolation, where they may think whatever ghosts think, sequestered from each other by the neat picket fences of death.
FIFTY-FOUR
BOUQUET
She knew that when he died his voice would die along with him, yet somehow she had failed to recognize that his scent would die, too. Oh, it lingered for a few months in the clothes he left behind, but then it shrank away and she had yet another extinction to mourn. One afternoon, though, as she stood in the kitchen unbagging the groceries, it reappeared: the unmistakable incense of his body, earthy and sweet, like the flat spice of modeling clay. It rose up powerfully around her—whoom: like that. For an instant, before the facts of her life overtook her, she expected to see him fossicking around in the cabinets again for a jar of peanuts or a bag of chips. Foolishness. So much foolishness. She turned back to the refrigerator, transferring the last of the eggs to the egg cradle. That night, though, as she lay drifting off to sleep, she detected his fragrance once again. In her delirium she was convinced that he was bending his limbs into their bed, trying to arrange himself under the covers without disturbing her, but her awareness was no more than the thinnest haze, and soon not even that, and when she woke the next day she remembered only a small tickle of scent in her nose and a brief feeling of familiar warmth. In the morning it happened twice more, first while she was checking the news on her laptop, and then while she was brushing her teeth. And then once more a couple of hours later, when she went to the door to sign for a package. Over the next few days, the same dense mixture of aromas found her again and again. Time after time, in one room or another, something in the air would shift and a great exhalation of fragrance would engulf her. She concluded that it was his ghost. He couldn’t talk to her, couldn’t make himself visible, but from the other side of death he could offer his bouquet of chemicals, that scent which had accompanied him through a hundred thousand doors, into a lifetime of business meetings and dinner parties, each burst of it a sign that he still existed, and not only existed but existed nearby. She began to resent the wool musk of the carpet, the sweet leather smell of the couch. To ignore them took the dedication of a penitent. Ignore them, though, she did. He had found a way to communicate with her, and she wanted to communicate with him in return. When he was alive, he used to tuck his face into the dip where her neck met her collarbone, breathing in the jasmine and vanilla of her perfume, the bergamot of her body lotion, the bell-pepper tang of her sweat. The solution seemed obvious. The next time she noticed his presence, she stood in front of the box fan and let it carry her aroma into the air. For the next eleven years, until she died and he took her away, that was how they spoke to each other, her scent and his scent making the scent of them together.
FIFTY-FIVE
THE MUD ODOR OF THE SNOW MELTING IN THE FIELDS
The house is different this morning, of that he is certain, even if, by “different,” he is not sure what he means. Slightly too full: that is the best he can do. Everything seems to be brimming out of itself like beer foam. He himself, by comparison, feels flatter, filmier, less real. It is a sensation he associates with dreams, though he is confident he is not dreaming. You can’t smell in dreams, for one, and the house smells the same as ever: a shifting potpourri of grocery-store paperbacks, bath soap, cooking oil, and hamper must. No, he has to admit, to his usual senses the house is completely unchanged. It is only to his unusual senses that it is different. If pressed to describe the difference with a single word, he would say that it is ampler. The house is ampler. It possesses a supersaturated quality, a lavishness; an overdyeing, he would like to say, except that it is not the ink of things he is detecting, not the color or even the appearance, but—but what? Way back in the darkness of his mind he feels a little caper of intuition. He pauses. In his blundering, he must have gotten something right. Overdyeing. Supersaturated. Ampler. His unusual senses. Maybe that’s it, he thinks. Maybe the difference is not in the house but in himself. His senses. The logic seems sturdy to him, even impeccable: if everything looks the same to his eyes, and sounds the same to his ears, and smells the same to his nose, but is not the same, then he must be using something other than his eyes, his ears, and his nose to detect it. For reasons that are shadowed in obscurity, he possesses a new and mysterious sensory apparatus, one that can perceive, as if by nervous induction, the ampleness of things. There by his front door leans the ampleness of an umbrella. Here in the dining room stands the ampleness of a wine rack. There in his study sits the ampleness of his desk, and on that desk rests the ampleness of a lamp, and beneath that lamp spreads the ampleness of a magazine. Everything swells with the plenitude of its being. Only he, and he alone, does not. By the time he returns to his bedroom, he believes he has steeled himself for what he will find. He is convinced that he is prepared. And in fact it is not the sight of his body, still radiating warmth on the bed, that so disquiets him. It is the realization, gradually dawning, that he is capable of exhibiting a sense to which he does not register.
FIFTY-SIX
INSTRUMENTOLOGY
That gentleman in the fifth row of the auditorium, listening as the orchestra consonates its instruments, is only half himself—the spiritual half, to be exact. To call him disembodied would be, if not exactly false, then at least, he thinks, misleading. He is negligibly embodied, grazingly or obliquely embodied, reposed as he is within the intermediacies of his material half—a thin gentleman in an English suit who is, like him, waiting in the fifth row of the auditorium for the sym
phony to begin. Simultaneously, in precise soldierly concert, the two of them, one half material and the other half spiritual, cross their legs, twiddle with the loose button on their suit jacket, inspect their wristwatch and prod at the bridge of their eyeglasses. Each of these motions occurs at the will and instigation of the gentleman’s material half, as has every other motion in their long, pinched, snug and inseparable life. The truth is that the spiritual half of the gentleman feels that he is the material half’s prisoner, though he acknowledges that the material half can hardly be blamed for this situation, since he is only dimly conscious that his spiritual half exists, and, even if he realized otherwise, what, short of dying, could he do to emancipate him? Immediately next to the spiritual half of the gentleman, toying with the clasp on the spiritual half of her leather clutch, is the spiritual half of his girlfriend. Directly in front of them is the spiritual half of a tall adolescent with a stiff posture and a tumbleweed-like mass of hair, the material half of whose head is blocking the harp and a few of the violins. And two rows ahead of that boy and a few seats to the left is the spiritual half of the gentleman’s ex-wife, wearing the spiritual half of the good blue dress he bought her shortly before he announced he had fallen in love with someone else and was leaving. She has always been vindictive, his ex-wife: vindictive, exacting, and shrewd. The spiritual half of the gentleman in the fifth row knows all too well how much she would relish his discomfort. As such, he is hoping to go unnoticed by her. If he could will himself not to cough or raise his voice, he would. But, as always, his behavior is not his to choose. He is subject to the decisions of his material half, who often comports himself—and therefore him—in ways he finds embarrassing. Striking matches on his thumbnail. Sneezing with an actual “ah-choo.” That sort of thing. Tonight of all nights one might think he would know better, but the fellow is rather dense, and sure enough, as the conductor takes the stage, he begins applauding with a meaty clap, far too loud for the occasion, as though taking pleasure in the great boom his hands produce. Surreptitiously people turn to get a glimpse of him. It is just the latest of the many times the spiritual half of the gentleman has wished in his humiliation that he could smack his material half on the forehead. Oh, for the day when his spirit will be divided from his flesh. Oh, for the day when they can go their separate ways.
FIFTY-SEVEN
WHEN THE ROOM IS QUIET, THE DAYLIGHT ALMOST GONE
A ghost, through no fault of his own, found himself trapped inside a living body: an infant’s, to be exact. Over the eons he had heard rafts of legends, parables, poems, bromides, stories, jokes, and songs about hapless spirits who, caught in the snare of a body, were yanked out of the herebefore and into the corporeal world. The moral was always the same: your task was to endure. Simply that: to endure. The infant you had become would ripen into an adult and waste away, and in a century or so you would be free. The ghost had traversed half an eternity’s worth of centuries already. Doing so had never presented him with any particular difficulty. To say so was not immodesty on his part, only frankness. He had a proven ability not only to exist but to continue existing. What, he told himself, was one century more? And with that thought, the ghost settled into the body as if into a sturdy hammock and prepared to while away the decades. Soon, though, to his dismay, he discovered that his situation obliged him not only to pass the time but to experience it, in full and without distraction, his attention fixed carefully on each fleeting moment. Otherwise his ghostliness, his selfhood, would slip away from him and his existence become irrecoverable. At first the life within which he had become enmeshed was all milk-drunk afternoons and curtains twirling in half-open windows. He believed he might survive it, if only barely. But one day, during his third year of captivity, when the body that had trapped him was crunching an ice cube made from orange soda between its back teeth, the strain of the ghost’s vigilance began to wear on him. Deep inside himself he felt a warning twinge. When, he worried, would this intimation of pain and inattention turn into the thing itself? The question so bothered him that he nearly lost his presence of mind. From then on the ghost was forced to be on constant guard against himself. In his fifth year, while the body that contained him was making whip noises with a stick it had found in the yard, a momentary daze swam over the ghost, an absentmindedness he corrected just in the nick of time. In his twelfth year, he developed a persistent ache that caused his senses to tremble. At twenty-five he began experiencing groundswells of intense fever and nausea; at thirty-two, a tireless ringing noise. The body that was imprisoning him went on aging. Never once, as far as he could tell, did it notice his distress. He found it hard not to trace his difficulties, setting off after them the way a cat does a butterfly. Sometimes it was not until the very last second that he reasserted his self-control. Midway through the forty-third year of his imprisonment, to his horror, as the body that had trapped him was racing across a racquetball court, the ghost noticed the wringing sensation of its muscles tightening around him. With barely an oh, no, his vision blurred and he felt himself falling unconscious. For all anyone knows, he is falling there still.
FIFTY-EIGHT
A SORT OF FELLOW
That fellow working at his teeth with his tongue is hardly a fellow at all. He exhibits few of the necessary attributes, neither wholeness, nor dimension, nor materiality. In fact, he possesses only a single characteristic: the near certainty that on the lower left side of his mouth, embedded between his first and second molars, is a particle of food he cannot dislodge—a sesame seed, maybe, or a fragment of peanut. Until recently this characteristic of his belonged to an elderly reference librarian. Following a short illness the librarian passed away, whereupon his ghost, or rather the ghost of his conviction that some smithereen of food was stuck between his teeth, came into being. Where the rest of the librarian’s qualities have gone the ghost cannot say. To other ghosts, presumably. He has no idea. The fact that he himself is a ghost is not yet within his grasp, much less that he is one ghost among many. For now he is no more than that single aforementioned property: the impression that something is caught between his teeth, possibly a seed but most likely a nut, and impossible to expel without some dental floss or a toothpick, however rigorously he might employ his tongue to the purpose. This, for better or worse, is the essence of his personality. Around it, one grain at a time, a bit from this person and a bit from that, the rest of him will gradually accrue. Next to arrive, from a waitress killed in a highway accident, is the opinion that what they call country music these days is not country music at all but pop music with a twang and too much cologne. After that, from a tenured economics professor, comes a bold, almost defiant sentimentality about house pets, such that he can hardly bear to watch a movie in which a cat or dog is endangered, even a goldfish, without closing his eyes and covering his ears. From a successful real estate agent he inherits an awareness, somewhat pained, of the swiftness of time; from a skilled radiologist, a preference for swimming pools over lakes and rivers. One by one the qualities gather themselves to him. The dapperness of a fry cook in his off-hours. The pollen allergies of a young electrician. A tendency toward nervous soliloquy. A flair for bargain shopping. A fondness for the thousands of temporary hemispheres that bubbles of sea foam leave in the sand. An almost preadolescent slightness of frame: stringy arms and legs on a torso as slim as a grasshopper’s. Softheartedness. Ambidextrousness. Irritability. He is one among countless ghosts, he finally understands, all of them a miscellany of fragments, though how those fragments have made him precisely the spirit he is he will never understand: a ghost of frugal habits and impeccable hygiene, a lover of cats, bow ties, and the smell of chlorine, in the great mix-and-match game of the universe.
FIFTY-NINE
A LESSER FEELING
It is his lot in life to be not a person but a feeling, and one of the lesser feelings at that: not love, or malice, or lust or rage or delight, but indifference. He is not the only such lesser feeling in the world. Far from it. In h
is neighborhood alone live four others, each of them, like him, a particular variety of indifference. There is the lukewarm resignation who runs the TV repair shop; the cool disinterest he met once at a dinner party; the numbness toward the pleasures of life whose path he sometimes crosses at the drugstore; and the gray-weather listlessness—an ideal neighbor in his way—who occupies the apartment downstairs from him. All of them exist as the individuation of a particular mood, occupying a distinct coordinate within the sphere of some larger sentiment, one specific member of an expansive heredity of emotions, yet a unique member, unduplicated, filling a single affective point to its very furthest distensions. Even the most glorious feeling, the shade of indifference tries to remind himself, cannot stretch beyond its own boundaries. All of them have their limits. Which is to say that any love he might come across is only a kind of love, any awe only a kind of awe. For all he knows they feel just as tiny as he does. He himself belongs only broadly speaking to the family of indifference. More narrowly he is what one might call a half-hearted apathy; more narrowly still a bothersomely juvenile unconcern; and more narrowly than that a barely disguised obliviousness of the type that children between the ages of seven and nine display when failing to pay attention to what might one day turn out to be crucial lifesaving information. As long as someone, anyone, remains capable of experiencing such an emotion, he—that emotion—will continue to exist. Being such a lesser feeling, ordained to so long a life, has compelled him to a certain humility. He is aware that, in the eyes of the world, he is not terribly important. He often wishes that he had been fated to a more profound existence. He envies the feelings of kings and lovers, of heroes, the feelings exalted in story and song. If only, he commonly thinks, his own blood ran with that sort of passion. But while all of this is true, he is aware how much luckier he is than some. Take those others, the ones he sees every day, who are not feelings at all but people. They rush here and there, pouring themselves through one emotion after another, like dirt through a row of sieves. Their lives pass so quickly they might as well be ghosts. From any but the most sidelong angle they seem not to be there at all.
The Ghost Variations Page 9