SIXTY-SIX
666
After ages of bartering and seduction, the Devil had accumulated the souls of so many sinners that they were like pennies to him. He spent them by the thousands just to get rid of them. Two thousand souls for a porcelain serving bowl. Three thousand for a set of neoprene hand weights. Ten thousand five for a boar-bristle hairbrush. No matter how extortionate the price, or how chintzy the merchandise, he paid up without a second thought, declining to haggle even when he knew it would be perceived as an insult. What were they to him, these divine sparks, these eternal spirits? If he dropped a few while fishing for change, what difference did it make? In fact, with each soul he squandered, Hell became a little more agreeable. Sinner by sinner the difference might be inappreciable, but over time, the Devil noticed, his wastefulness was having an effect. The seas of fire were no longer so choked with the damned and, as a result, the miasma of yellowish smoke that assaulted his lungs was gradually thinning out. The chorus of screams that filled the air had turned more euphonious and less chaotic, the wails of the individual sinners slightly more distinct. Inside the roar of their sextillion voices the Devil could almost hear the bright song of pain they used to sing. He remembered the jubilation with which he had welcomed his first lost soul—that scrawny wet-eyed woman hobbling through the cavern in her wretchedness and confusion—and the feeling, as he watched her test her steps out on the coals, that in all his trials and misfortunes there had perhaps been some furtive meaning, since through them he had come into this, his inheritance. Now that soul was indistinguishable from all the others, no more precious or golden than a swarm of mites in a blotch of sunlight. Weeds, he thought. Pennies. He wasted a hundred thousand of them on a brushed-nickel hand blender, a million five on a waterbed with a walnut frame, a few million more on a three-piece sectional sofa with a tufted ottoman. Still his coffer of souls was bursting. Finally he hired the priciest architectural firm he could find, met with its top designers and engineers, and instructed them to build him a mansion with many rooms, large enough to hold his countless useless possessions. Spare no expense, he ordered, and indeed they did not, leaving the Devil cheerfully destitute. At night now he likes to sit on his veranda, reclining in his wicker love seat. Only a single sinner remains from the vast collection of souls he labored to accumulate. He listens to the fellow’s pleas for mercy; amid the crackling of the flames a kind of birdsong. He has his health, he has his privacy, and he has a quiet home away from the radiance of Creation. This, he has come to believe, was all he ever wanted in the first place.
SIXTY-SEVEN
LOST AND FOUND
The boy, eleven years old and growth-spurt thin, and wearing a hand-me-down jersey spattered with peroxide stains, was riding his bicycle around the block when his ghost deserted him. A giant white jellybean of a thing, it corkscrewed over the bike’s handlebars, vaulted into the air, and took a plunge through the wire basket where he carried his chips, gloves, and thermos. He had just enough time to think, Hey, that’s mine, before the ghost veered like a bird toward the side of the road. Quickly, before it could disappear into the Hennens’ manicured boxwoods, he snatched hold of it. At home he attempted to return the ghost to his body, but no matter what strategy he employed, it would not stay put. He stuffed it under his shirt, for instance, cradling its bulge in his hands. Within seconds, though, it had broken free, slithering out from beneath the hem. He gave it a second try, making a little prison cell for the ghost by tucking his shirt into his jeans. This time it escaped through one of his sleeves. He experimented with twine, glue, rubber cement, Scotch tape, Band-Aids, gauze, and carpenters’ putty. Nothing worked. He was going about this all wrong, he decided. How—from what opening—had the ghost escaped from inside him to begin with? That was the question. If his body possessed a secret hatchway, it would probably be somewhere in his chest, he reckoned, though he wasn’t sure why he thought so. It just made sense to him. So he climbed onto his bed, gripped the ghost in a wrestler’s X, and let himself plunge to the floor, hoping to powerslam it back through his skin. Instead, as usual, it went gassing off into the room. The boy was stumped. He had to admit it. The idea came to him to try swallowing the ghost, but while he managed to jam it into his mouth, he felt like he was working to eat a balloon, one that would not pop. It bulged against his cheeks and made his tongue taste the way spray paint smells. Finally, a few hours after the ghost had abandoned his body, the boy carried it into his front yard. He felt that he had no choice but to let it go. Immediately it fled toward the oak trees at the end of the block. He lost sight of it in the maze of their branches. With a sting of disappointment—the kind, at eleven, he was already learning to expect from life—he went back inside. The next morning, though, to his surprise, he opened his curtains to see the ghost swirling around the basketball post in his driveway. And late that afternoon, at the pool, he saw it hiding beneath the deck of the diving board. And that evening, when his parents took him out for hamburgers, he saw it pillowed in the recess of the towering yellow McDonald’s M. From that day forward, the ghost maintained a bashful independence, often nearby but never actually within his reach. It was like a stray animal who, though it might approach the boy with affection, would bolt immediately from his touch; not quite his, he felt, but his enough.
SIXTY-EIGHT
ANOTHER MAN IN A MIRROR
Eventually he recognized the truth: the reason his face no longer seemed to belong to him and he had taken like a cat to avoiding his gaze in mirrors, puddles, laptop screens, and display cases was that he was, if only metaphorically, a ghost. Months or years, maybe even decades ago, there had come some fleeting second when he wasn’t paying attention and he had died, but by then his habits had grown so instinctive that he simply carried on without realizing it, imitating the life he had long ago devised for himself. The more he thought about it, the more sense it made. Why else would keys, pens, and remote controls slip so regularly through his fingers? Why else would his days seem so unreal? When was the last time he had felt his emotions combusting inside him the way they did when he was fifteen, sitting alive in a darkened movie theater with his girlfriend’s hand on his thigh, so exotically aware of himself that afterward, when the two of them walked into the brightness of the afternoon, he was obliged to pretend that what left him staggering for balance was in fact the sunlight? When, for that matter, was the last time he had shut down the computer or turned off the TV at night knowing that the past fourteen or sixteen hours had actually demanded his participation? He had heard it said that even more intangible than the physical world to ghosts were their own inner natures. Gone along with their bodies were their desire, their vehemence, their misery, their glee. As such, they were never outraged or anguished by their condition, just mildly self-pitying. They understood what they were missing, but only dimly, as if death were a matter of negligence, some box on a form they had failed to check. All of this described him perfectly. And so, resigned to his circumstances, he filled his hours pretending to live in a body that was pretending to grow older. He shaved his stubble that was pretending to gray and kneaded his shoulders that were pretending to ache. He pretended to wake and pretended to sleep, pretended to eat and pretended to drink, and every so often he found a woman who failed to see him for who he was—or who was, herself, a ghost—and pretended to have sex with her, all the while waiting for the years to catch up with him so that he could stop pretending. Once, though, following an hour in the dark with such a woman, he was courageous enough to meet his own eyes in the mirror. His face, to his astonishment, no longer seemed like a ghost’s, like a mask from which all the selfhood had been removed. For those few seconds, he could have sworn he was real again. If only he could spend the next thirty or forty years making love, he thought, or having just finished making it, he might remain that way: alive.
SIXTY-NINE
THE APOSTROPHES
A ruinously shy bachelor had just mopped up after himself and was snapping his
boxers back into place when, out of the corner of his eye, he saw something swaying through the air like a dandelion seed. He turned to take a closer look. Suspended approximately three feet to his left, at roughly the height of the light switch, was the ghost of his latest ejaculation. It was small and meek, a mere apostrophe of a thing. Nonetheless, he felt that its presence constituted an offense, maybe even a deliberate mockery. He had, after all, finished with it. For it to float there, bobbing so nonchalantly about, seemed graceless, impertinent. Rude, he thought, and he said it out loud: “Rude.” The ruinously shy bachelor had been raised a Catholic, and he could not help but wonder if the apostrophe was a message from God, a curse, rebuking him for all the times he had given in to temptation and vacated himself into a Kleenex. He stepped forward, thinking either to grab the apostrophe or to swat it to the floor. With a tilting weightlessness, though, it sailed out of his reach. He feinted toward the radiator, then lunged at it again. Once more it eluded him. The nerve! All right, fine then, he thought, and adamantly, speaking as if to a pet, said, “You stay right there.” When he went to the bathroom to wash his hands, though, the apostrophe followed or rather escorted him, maintaining its customary three-foot distance, as if strung to him by an invisible wire. What might have seemed a polite gap in other circumstances was plainly, in these, a taunt. Moreover, now that he had addressed the apostrophe directly, it was, for some reason, chirping. The noise resonated against the porcelain tiles—an awful tuneless burlesque. Just imagine what it would be like to go to work in such a state, thought the ruinously shy bachelor. The embarrassment would practically obliterate him. He was standing at the sink when he had an idea. He pivoted, turning his left side to the shower stall so that the apostrophe orbited swiftly onto the shampoo rack. Then he shut the curtain and bolted from the bathroom, slamming the door behind him. There. He gave a proud bark of a laugh. No muss, no fuss. But when he rested his back against the wall, he found that the apostrophe was once again beside him, hovering the same three feet to his left. By certain measures, he supposed, he should call himself lucky. Think of the countless other ghosts he might have created over the years, ghosts he could quite easily, by the friction of his hand, have coaxed into being, but which, by the grace of God, he had not. The shame the idea provoked in him was powerful, and maybe that was all it took, for all at once, to every side, in a chorus of sound, thousands of apostrophes began activating themselves like crickets.
SEVENTY
A MAN IN A MIRROR
That woman in the owl-eye glasses leads a life of secrecy and ritual. In the morning before she leaves for work, and in the evening before she goes to sleep, she always spends two hours staring into the mirror by her front door: four hours total, each and every day, without fail. For years this has been her habit, though not, as you might suspect, because she loves her own reflection. Her nose roosts too low on her face, for one thing. Her chin is too broad and bony. And her freckles, once her best feature, have gone gray along with her hair. No, when she addresses the mirror, she does so at an angle, gazing not at herself but past herself. Some years ago, on her way out the door, she was adjusting the pendant on her necklace when a sudden glassiness of motion caught her eye. At first she mistook it for a flaw in the mirror’s silver. Then the flaw startled her by roping its arms over its head and opening its mouth in a helpless yawn, so recognizably human and yet so obviously immaterial that she knew at once that it—that he—was a ghost.
Every day since then, as if by appointment, she has watched the ghost’s comings and goings. Only in the small Venetian mirror by the front door does she see him, and even then only occasionally, when his activities happen to intersect with the living room, the hallway, or the outermost edge of her kitchen. Now and then he behaves with what seems to be affection toward what seem to be people, knitting his fingers around as if tying a ribbon in someone’s hair, for instance, or rocking back and forth as if embracing someone from behind. From this she has judged that he has a wife and daughter, though they have never, as he has, taken shape in the silver. Once, nearly a decade ago, upon a rainy April eight a.m., he approached the mirror to inspect his teeth. He was channeling a fingernail between his incisors when he accidentally met her eyes. For a few seconds, as his face did something curious, her knees locked and her toes began to tingle. Her heart seemed to beat at the same lazy pace as the world. She realized she was in love. Ever since then, she has been waiting for it to happen again.
On the first Saturday of each month, the woman in the owl-eye glasses puts on her best silk blouse and her pressed denim skirt and heads out for lunch with her friend the manicurist, who works in a little shop across the street. Last week, over burgers and fries, she almost told her about the ghost. Instead, though, she confessed a different secret altogether: how she fantasizes, and often, about erasing the past fifty years of her life and starting over again, awakening as she used to be, a skinny girl with red hair and freckles, whose decisions had not yet been made, whose rituals had not yet been established, and who could never imagine that fifty years later, in her loneliness and disappointment, she would long to trade her life away. “Are you,” her friend asked in a voice of almost unbearable sympathy, “seeing someone?”
SEVENTY-ONE
TURNSTILES
In the house at the top of the cul-de-sac live a fickle couple in their mid-forties: she a vacillating woman with a watercolory pink complexion, he a temperamental man with a broom-bristle haircut. The two of them are sometimes happily, sometimes miserably, but on the whole rather volatilely married. At the heart of their relationship is the problem of inconstancy—a changeability so profound that it does not seem improper to call it spiritual. Both the husband and the wife flit from job to job and hobby to hobby. Both display the most extreme vicissitudes of taste and style. And neither of them can ever be sure, from one instant to the next, whether their natures will impel them toward insecurity or self-confidence, pensiveness or conviviality, tidiness or dishevelment. Some mornings they wake up inexplicably despising each other, others just as inexplicably idolizing each other, and if occasionally, in their daily gyrations, they achieve a propitious moment of understanding, no sooner does it happen than one or the other of them will perform an about-face and they will become strangers again. The only real personal continuity either of them has ever experienced is material, corporeal, physiognomic. That pink face: to him, it is his wife. And that shock of yellow hair: it is her husband. To the two of them, the saying “You are who you are” has the quality not of a truism but of a koan. Their predicament, though they do not realize it, is that inside each of them, where their souls should be, is an empty room with a clattering turnstile. They are not individuals but way stations. Every day thousands of departing spirits pass through them on their journey between life and death. The spinning that both of them think of as their personhood, that swerving quality of the heart, is just the coming and going of those spirits: old men and women who can’t believe how swiftly the years have spiraled away, car crash victims spruced up for the prom or the nightclub, battered children clutching silk blankets and teddy bears, cancer patients with scarves where their hairlines should be. If she, the vacillating woman, has always felt a deep inner restlessness, and if he, the temperamental man, often fails to recognize himself, how could it be otherwise? For the two of them, in lieu of enduring souls, there has been only a lifetime of other people’s ghosts, along with a faint awareness of how violable it is to be a human being, and how difficult to remain just one.
SEVENTY-TWO
A TRUE STORY
He was in love with her and, for that reason, wanted to end it. She was in love with him and, in spite of it, wanted to stay together. They spent the last evening of their holiday in the heat and stillness of the hotel room, she on the sofa, he on the wing chair, trying to decide whether what they felt for each other was impossible to resist or impossible to bear; a consolation, as she thought, or a punishment, as he did. Every so often t
hey leaned forward to mouse at each other’s faces with their noses. Crowd noises floated up from the avenue beside the Arno—laughter, and then a saxophone. Finally, exhausted, they queued up a relaxation video on her laptop and, in the enfolding static of a prerecorded rain shower, went to bed. He was not prone to hallucinations, and did not believe in ghosts, but deep in the night he came awake and saw her apparition. She was striding toward the window that opened out onto the spalletta and the river, dressed in a black kimono with a pattern of white vines and small flexed leaves on the fabric, a garment he knew without question was hers, even though he had never seen it before. The loose skirt was jellyfishing around her waist, flourishing slowly in and out, which made it look like she was swimming. At first he presumed she had waited for him to fall asleep before she got up, as she so often did, to pace the room. He could hear her feet brushing the hardwood with a swish-swish-swish, like the wind making patterns out of the rain. Then he reached for her side of the bed, felt the top of her hand, and saw that she was still lying there. The woman in the kimono was not her then. Or at least not her body. She was something else—something drained, heedless; not her but something that wore the costume of her. He might have been frightened, but no, he realized: he too was something else. A child could have named the feeling. It was still there the next morning as they locked their door with the cumbersome iron key and rolled their luggage to the curb. And there on the plane as they watched the terrible in-flight movie. And there twelve hours later, on the other side of the Atlantic, as she pressed her palm to his stomach and said, with what he wished he could hear as incredulity, “You didn’t change your mind.” They examined each other’s faces, tenderly but as if from a great distance. What, it occurred to him, if the ghost had not been hers but his: a specter who had manifested itself to usher him out of his life? What if this airport terminal with the customs agent repeating “Exits are to the left, connecting flights are to the right” was only a death-dream? What if his heart had given out in the bed of that old Italian hotel? Well then, he thought. So much the better. Years from now she could tell herself that he had never left her, not for good, that there had still been time for him to change his mind. How his faith in her had weakened but not beyond repair. How his heart had loved her and then it stopped.
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