NINETY-THREE
ROUGHLY EIGHTY GRAMS
In a once fashionable but now neglected area of the city stood a Chinese restaurant known for the ghost who haunted it. Like many ghosts she was a creature of wild mood swings, all bitter inwardness and tortured amours. The daughter of the restaurant’s hostess and its chef, she had spent a short, jilted life crying in the upstairs apartment, making sad small-animal sounds that filtered down onto the tables and bamboo partitions, audible even over the burble of the aquarium. Her agonies, her histrionics—to her mother and father they were embarrassing. So disobedient. So American. And now, to their equal embarrassment, she was spending her afterlife inside the restaurant itself, romancing every handsome male diner between the ages of fifteen and forty. As an inducement she liked to replace the fortunes in their cookies with declarations of love. The men cracked the cookies open expecting, say, “A chance meeting opens new doors to success,” and instead, in blue type on white paper, got, “Your laugh makes me feel like the grass must feel when the wind blows through it,” or “You may think it’s been extinguished, but I can see the fire in your eyes,” or “When will you hold me in your strong, sunburned arms?” Worse, her parents thought, she was becoming less affectionate over time, less lyrical; more acrid, impatient, wounded, angry, envious. “If you don’t love me, why pretend?” she wrote, or “That girl of yours—her eye wanders,” or “Make up your mind, because I will not wait forever.”
When she began terrorizing the restaurant, and not just haunting it, was a matter of some debate among the customers. Everyone agreed, though, that after she fell in love with the man who coached peewee soccer in the weedy field behind the storage center, there was no turning back. Twice a week following practice, sometime around six o’clock, the man would come into the restaurant with his girlfriend and order the Crispy Fried Tofu with Spicy Pepper Salt. “I want to crawl inside your clothing with you,” his fortunes always said, or “I want to taste the ginger of your sweat on my tongue.” He found the blunt seductiveness of these messages amusing, even a little thrilling, and so, when it came to it, did his girlfriend. “Daffy” was the word she used. But for her, each meal in the restaurant swiftly degenerated into a series of lesser mishaps. The rooster sauce would not leave the bottle for her, and then left it all at once. Water glasses toppled and spilled onto her blouse. Her food reached the table sputtering with heat, except for the soups, which were cold as slush. And slowly the fortunes in the man’s cookies became more insulting. “She is not perfect, she only looks perfect.” “She is not good enough for you.” “You would not love her if her flesh were as ruined as her heart.” “Here. Watch. I will show you.” It was the night of their last meal in the restaurant, just after the check arrived, that the man’s girlfriend excused herself to use the restroom. Not a minute later her scream came. At first the man mistook it for a train braking, so shrill was the sound, and so ragged. He had already taken his cookie from the wrapper, but was reluctant to break it open. It weighed too much.
NINETY-FOUR
THE GHOST LETTER
In April, the U.S. secretary of philology held a press conference to announce the discovery of a twenty-seventh letter, dead for some centuries, that had been haunting the alphabet at least since the time of Cervantes. Formerly, the secretary said, the letter was located between k and l. While its shape and sound were lost to history, it was believed to have been a consonant rather than a vowel. There was no evidence that its current aims, unascertained though they may be, were pernicious or occult. One of the journalists present called it “the ghost letter,” as in “What does the president have to say about this ghost letter?” and the name quickly seized the public’s imagination. Within days, an effort began to determine which words housed the ghost letter and which did not, and whether, contrary to the official posture, those that did gave off an aura of ill will. The results were inconclusive. Fewer words contained the letter than didn’t—far fewer—but the same could be said of every letter, a and e included. Among the words that possessed it, in one hidden berth or another, were waistband, learning, potato, glandular, ask, inadvertent, and noggin. Maybe there was a common variable in this catalogue, but if so, it was elusive. And what of such similar words as ruddy, which sheltered the letter, and reddish, which did not; stripe, which did, and striping, which did not; even record (a list), which did, and record (to write down), which did not? An analysis of the most exalted authors of the last hundred years showed that a surprising number of them had inclined toward the ghostly, making of their books, as if by intuition, a veritable golgotha of haunted words, but it was hard to tell if the otherworldly quality people now attributed to their writing was genuine or an illusion. By what force did their work take its turn toward the uncanny? That was the question. Student novelists began seeding their manuscripts with the same phantom words the masters had used, believing that the right tumble of syllables might lend their prose a luster of greatness, while evangelists and conservative politicians scrubbed the same identical checklist of words from their sermons and speeches. To some the twenty-seventh letter whispered of the wondrous, to others of the monstrous. The great shared regret was that no one knew how it had died: violently or peacefully. Clearly what was needed—and absent a body could never be achieved—was a postmortem, one that might determine whether the letter had succumbed to old age or been murdered. And if it had been murdered, by whom? And which letter might be next?
NINETY-FIVE
A MATTER OF LINGUISTICS
A feeling of déjà vu has been gaining on him all morning, but only now, waiting in the hotel’s lobby for the thunderstorm to pass, does he succumb to it. The couch on which he is sitting—he is certain he has sat there before. The upholstery button beneath his trousers, hard and bulbous like a walnut shell—the word, he believes, is “goosed.” It has goosed him before. Each fat raindrop that strikes the skylight makes an amoeba-like shadow on the floor, trembling little off-round ghosts that come and go in spatters. He imagines the shadows are pinned beneath the slide of a microscope, and he along with them, flat. He has heard these raindrops before. He has imagined himself beneath that microscope. Along with his déjà vu comes a curious tightening sensation, like a charley horse, except intellectual rather than physical. A charley horse of the brain. He is disappointed in something, and that something, he realizes, is language. The man in the hotel’s lobby is, as it happens, a linguist of some accomplishment, on the board of Semios and Metalinguistics and the founding editor of Verb Studies. He has devoted his career to words, to their codes and systems. Yet he is—he ceaselessly at this moment has been—disillusioned with language. Yes, yes, it is a dazzling spectacle, he can’t disagree, he has said it many times himself. But it lacks the malleability of real experience. The most ordinary prose might be a great sequence of parse trees combusting from brochures and assembly instructions, shopping circulars and term papers, like a display of fireworks—but so what? Where, he thinks, is the verb tense that could convey his feeling of déjà vu, the conviction that everything that is happening to him has happened before, and happened to its completion? Call it the present super-perfect. He decides here and now, never before but not for the first time, that he will concoct such a tense. He will start with the present singular, sand the difficulties away, then move on to the plural, the past, and the future. He will make it his professional mission to introduce the tense into the vernacular. Despite his institutional prominence, his frequent public radio appearances, his lengthy CV of grants and residencies, what he longs for most of all is to make a true creative contribution to his field. He wants to change the language, to improve it. Not analysis, not heraldry. Invention. Someday, he thinks, everyone will be capable of speaking in the most casual way of living their life as though they are remembering it, and philologists the world over will celebrate the moment when the linguist sat listening to the rain detonate against the asphalt and began to understand what he has just now come always
to have suspected.
NINETY-SIX
DUSK AND OTHER STORIES
When the poltergeist realized he could communicate only through telekinesis, he succumbed to a period of humiliation. He, a man of eloquence and culture, whose first pleasure had always been good conversation, and now look at him, dickering with the lights and the faucets. It was degrading! For several decades he lay as quiet as paint inside the house. Once or twice a year he would flow through the carpet to feel its fibers dance and reassure himself that he still existed, but otherwise he held his peace. Better to remain silent, he judged, than resort to hiding keys, flinging crockery, and all that nonsense. Then, however, the house was sold to a widower, recently retired from publishing, who bricked its walls over with his ten thousand books, and the poltergeist perceived an opportunity. One afternoon, while the widower was sitting in his armchair, the poltergeist withdrew a book partway from the nearest case. Listen to Me was the title. The widower shifted slightly inside his posture, then got up and squared the book away, carefully neatening it with both his thumbs. Again the poltergeist gave it a tug: Listen to Me. From two shelves down he chose a second book: Look at Me. Next to it was a novel called The Household Spirit, and for good measure the poltergeist loosened that one too. This was how their dialogue began, and the medium through which it developed. Gradually the edges of certain books became soft from use. The poltergeist had studied the widower’s library, memorizing every title until their positions shone like stars on a star chart. It was easy for him to say good night to the widower with After Dark, good morning with Greetings from Earth. But he was also adept at combining titles when he wanted to speak more complexly, or more elliptically. The widower noticed that the philodendron near his science fiction collection was browning, and The Dazzle of Day, the poltergeist suggested. Summerlong. Dying Inside. Patting his hair into place, the widower complained about his bald spot. The poltergeist answered, Boy Erased, then slid another title teasingly out of plumb: Calamities. “I wish I had someone who would outlast me,” the widower said. “Other than you, I mean. No offense.” The Beautiful Indifference. “A daughter, a son. Even a pet.” Beasts and Children. “But as usual I’m all wrapped up in my own problems. What about you? How are you doing this morning?” All the Days and Nights. Everything We Miss. “Is that so?” the widower said. “Well, I’m sorry to hear it.” One summer, some five years into their friendship, the widower began to feel firm in places where he had always been soft. When eventually the diagnosis came, he confessed that he was afraid. The poltergeist followed him as he perambulated through the house. No one who is dying ever really asks for the consolations of the spirit, but as the widower paused for breath in his study the poltergeist told him The Sweet Hereafter and A Reunion of Ghosts. By the front door he continued What the Living Do, The Other Side of the Mountain, and Death as a Side Effect. In the nook beside the kitchen he reassured him I Will Not Leave You Comfortless. And in the guest room, with the firmest of tugs, he said Drag the Darkness Down.
NINETY-SEVEN
TELEPHONE
They were friends by proximity rather than choice: she almost nine, a self-proclaimed tomboy and motormouth, he ten and a half, soft-spoken and bookish, with the dawdliness of a born daydreamer. Their bedroom windows faced each other over a chain-link fence and an old steel air conditioner so that at night, or on certain rainy days, their lives were spent side by side at a distance of approximately eight feet. This alone was enough to make them friends. Add to that the scarcity of other children on the block—aside from the two of them there was only one sausage-like baby in the duplex across the street—and they became almost inseparable. The two of them fashioned a telephone out of yogurt cups and kite string, a makeshift apparatus that worked surprisingly well. Often, at bedtime, in the twenty minutes or so before they dozed off, they would chat idly along the line—or rather she would chat and he would throw in an occasional mm-hm or uh-huh to keep her going. Eventually one of two things would always happen: either he would fall asleep and she would keep talking for a while, her speech culminating in a few hellos? and a prodigious yawn; or she would fall asleep and he would freeze suddenly beneath his covers, becoming so still, so quiet, that his body prickled with quills of nervous concentration, and lying there in the darkness, caught in the net of his muscles, he would listen for the voice of the ghost. It was languorous and heavy, that voice, almost expressionless, and unlike the girl’s in every way. That it was a ghost’s was merely his guess, since it never replied when he asked it a question, only shrank into silence, emerging hesitantly, in flickers, after many minutes if at all. He could feel its syllables landing one by one against the wall of his skull. They were like ocean waves from some planet where the water was as thick as syrup. Where–is–the–noise–of–you–com–ing–from? The–air–is–like–salt–in–side–me. One night, frightened but worried, the boy summoned up enough courage to approach his window and peer across the gap. The girl had not drawn her curtains. He saw her sleeping beneath her favorite puppy sheets, nuzzling a strand of brown hair in her lips, safe in her ordinary room, with its ordinary toybox, its ordinary bookcase, its ordinary dresser. Her end of the telephone lay in a little dell between her pillow and her shoulder. Plain sight told him that no one was using it. Yet still the ghost murmured in his ear, Are–you–out–there? There–are–bells–in–the–ice. They–ring–so–loud–and–you–are–pain–full–y–qui–et. Years later, grown up, the boy would come to believe that in a fever of boredom or abnormality he had simply dreamed the voice into being, but standing there at the window he had no doubt that it was real. The ghost was his friend, too, he supposed, not by proximity but by the vicissitudes of death, connected to him by some infinitely long kite string, some preternatural yogurt cup.
NINETY-EIGHT
NUMBERS
Six billion four thousand and forty-one. Six billion four thousand and forty-two. Six billion four thousand and forty-three. The boy was still in the cradle when he began hearing the numbers, far too young to recognize them for what they were. To his ears they were just one of the many sounds the world produced, an almost subaudible buzz of enumeration that came and went with the hours, like the hello-calls of the birds and the insects, or the bending noises the trees made in the wind. Nature creaked, nature rustled, nature chirped, and nature counted. It was a fact, as ordinary as any other. He was halfway through elementary school before it occurred to him that the numbers he was multiplying and dividing in his workbook were like the numbers that helped him fall asleep at night. He was not stupid, or at least he did not think he was, but until then the similarity had never crossed his mind. The original numbers—the world’s numbers, as he thought of them—were simply too familiar. All his life he had been conscious of their background presence, their whisperiness, the way they stopped and started and stopped again. For a while they would proceed sequentially. Then softly, unassumingly, they would break off. After a while they would recommence, but always at a different point in the series, either much later or much earlier, swooping from the high billions to the low thousands and back again. Not until college did the boy realize that not everyone could hear them. One day, in the dorm’s cafeteria, he noticed that the digits were swiftly approaching a million. Nine hundred ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-four. Nine hundred ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-five. He hushed his friends, said, “Hold on, are you ready?” and then, after a few seconds, made a presto motion with his finger. From their expressions, as flat as doors, he understood that they were deaf to the recitation. It was like discovering that he and he alone was aware of the seasons. A million and six. A million and seven. A million and eight. As the boy grew older, he began to sense that each act of counting belonged to a different voice—that he was listening to many distinct and ongoing monologues rather than a single sporadic one. Each voice had its own personality, each personality its own numbers. Maybe he was overhearing the lifetime tally of people’s footsteps.
Maybe some strange cellular background calculation. There were so many possibilities. He always believed he would solve the puzzle before he died. Then he did die, and at first he was none the wiser. He found himself standing in a great landscape of ghosts, epochs and epochs of them, stretching in all directions. They were locked like pillars into their stances, the ghosts, frozen exactly where they had expired. Between their teeth they were mumbling something. What was he supposed to do? he wondered. What did it mean? He was preparing to ask the question when his lips began moving, and quietly, fixed in his eternal place, he heard himself take up his obligation. One. Two. Three. Four.
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