“Ghosts are who you fuck when you’re alone in your room.” I say this in an uptight Tiny Tim drawl, clearing the air for more laughter.
“Aw, Dig, you’re just on the make,” Judy Partygoer says. “Been hard up a while now?”
“You’re killing me, Judy,” I say as I leave the room. Still, I linger outside and keep my ear to the door, just in case someone says something about me. I’m not on the make, and Judy Partygoer hardly knows me. But I have a feeling she knows what’s eating me. It’s been almost a year, and I should be over Daphne by now.
Later, after all the guests have gone home, I end up walking around all night, looking for other parties to crash and for a place to crash myself, as I’m coming down off this helium cloud. I find neither. Nor do I shake off my desire to be with Daphne again.
Eyes closed and hands down my pants, I can still see Daphne as if it were yesterday. The way I remember it, we spent an autumn together in a basement flat, Daphne with her NEA grant and I with a far-flung notion of becoming a railroad worker. Her dreadlocks were so long, they almost reached the tops of her go-go boots. I remember the time we saw Patty Hearst walking alone on California Street and, after arguing the pros and cons, agreed not to kidnap her, which isn’t to say the desire wasn’t there.
I was fond of tracing with my finger each of the tattoo artists’ strokes on Daphne’s body. My fingers would lead the way for my hands, which would traipse along to other places. The sex was so high-flying and experimental that it would have made John Cage blush, but, looking back now, so many months since we broke up, what I remember most are the moments on the periphery: the bathroom-door confessionals and wine-soaked bedsheets, and how we pulled back the shower curtain to reveal the Wizard of Id hiding there.
And there was the time I stole her laundry. She had left me alone in the kitchen. The studs in the walls were exposed where the Sheetrock had come off. In the bathroom, her clothes dropped to her ankles as she climbed into the shower. The bathroom door left unlocked, I snuck in and took them. Later, when I meant to give them back, I couldn’t remember what I had done with them.
It never made sense to me why I did it. “Something’s not right in my head, I guess,” I explained to Daphne. Her look made it clear that she had suspected my guilt all along in any number of domestic larcenies—single socks vanished from the dryer, uncorked bottles of wine that tasted mysteriously like Welch’s, and the disappearance of her little red book from her personal drawer.
Yet when we broke up, it was not over her growing mistrust; it was over dolphins. I told her that I wanted us to go down to Mexico, where they have swimming tanks for tourists to swim with dolphins. I told her I wanted to have sex with her in one of those tanks.
“With dolphins?”
“Not with dolphins, with each other. We’d pretend we’re dolphins.”
“Where are the dolphins during this?”
“Just swimming around,” I said. I didn’t bother to look up to meet her eyes. I knew I’d lost her.
It was all too much for Daphne. It had become more erratic than erotic, our fun giving way to blue funk. She had other inclinations, and couldn’t have left me any faster if she’d been wearing rocket-powered roller skates.
Hard times fell on me after that. It was a colder-than-usual January in the months after Daphne left. Subzero gusts froze migrating seabirds midflight and dropped them from the sky like stones. Bundled-up children braved the elements and wandered the near-empty streets of San Francisco with baseball mitts, hoping to catch a falling bird. Every time I went out, I heard the deep, whistling buzz of one of them plummeting, on a crash course with my head. I would duck just in time.
Spring found me worse off than winter had. By April, the daphne bushes that survived the cold snap had stopped blooming, and I still had made no connection with Daphne herself. My mood in freefall, I took to only wearing clothes I found in the street. They were other people’s garbage and never washed all the way clean. I looked like Frankenstein’s monster, my body held together by the seedy clothing that used to rub against the skin of other people. Daphne wouldn’t have recognized me on the street.
My ability to cope gone, I turned to helium. Before I knew it, I developed a dependence. It didn’t affect my health, but my voice became so elflike and ridiculous that no one would take me seriously anymore. “C’mon people, it’s helium, not laughing gas,” I’d defend myself to the few friends I had left, but they’d laugh just the same.
I suppose it’s inevitable, something I’ve been waiting for but not actively seeking out. I bump into Daphne. As I’m waiting for my laundry to dry, she pulls up at the Laundromat in her Veg-o-Matic car, with its broken grille that makes it look like a hammerhead shark with dark lipstick.
“Hello, stranger!” I call out, all sotto voce, as I’m between helium fixes.
“Dig,” she says, like someone who doesn’t recognize me but says my name. I know from the way she says it that things are still over between us. For the umpteenth time it sets in: I am dead to her. This moment feels like the time I cut myself on the arm after a helium bender. I heard a hissing sound and felt like I was beginning to deflate.
Daphne says nothing more. Maybe it’s the sight of me in my suspenders and woolen duck trousers covered in holes from someone else’s cigarette burns, my hair a mop of black spaghetti, my shirtless torso, my shoeless and filthy feet. My degeneration may have startled her for an instant, but she recovers quickly. She leaves the car running while she heads inside to start a load. Back outside, she’s on her way without another word, revving away in her four-wheeled eggbeater.
After taking a moment to dry-heave, I walk back into the Laundromat. My load tumbles and tumbles without drying, but I don’t move it to a working dryer. A few feet away, Daphne’s clothes start their rinse cycle. The thought of stealing them won’t let go of me. I could steal them for old times’ sake. I could steal them and extract her essence from them. If I can’t have Daphne back, I can take this part of her with me. I could wear her clothes instead of my own. I could leave my garbage clothes here for the next clown who came along; that is, if they ever dry and stop tumbling. Night’s falling. I need to act now.
Fucking someone’s clothes when she’s not wearing them is the next best thing to fucking that person when she’s not wearing them. After dark, I take Daphne’s clothes to the only place where I can have any privacy: that poolside community recreation room where I was just yesterday. Rummaging around, I find coat hangers, a stash of birthday-cake candles, and, in a drawer full of games, a Ouija board. I put Daphne’s clothes on hangers and hang them from the rafters, alongside the streamers left over from another kid’s party. Following the directions in the little red book I stole from Daphne’s drawer a long time ago, I fold myself into the lotus position, holding a burning birthday candle in one hand and the Ouija planchette in the other. I call forth the spirit of Daphne to engage with me in the astral delights, the erotical erotic, all the sex positions from our heady past: the Heaven 360, the Ice Maker, the Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide, the Orange Julius, the Tin Pan Alley, the Triple Gainer, the Triple Sec, the Dust-Swept Windbag, the Winnebago Back Seater, the Buckminster Fuller, the Otis Birdsong, the Monaco Marriott, the Panky Curl, and many others with names less indicative of what the position involves.
Daphne’s ghost doesn’t come.
The only way to find her will be to go to her. I open the closet door, where the helium tank is stored. I hold my mouth to the nozzle of the tank and draw in a deep breath of the gas. I close my eyes. Then I’m off. I can feel my balloon-fueled soul loosening itself from my body and bobbing along the ceiling without clothing. Looking down, I see my body, still in the lotus position, with candle wax dripping down its fingers. It’s a pathetic sight.
Caught by a breeze, my soul whisks its way out an open window, slowing as it passes the window of a condominium resident. She is naked, posing in front of her window for no one other than herself. She is all arms and legs, and it’s
hard to see anything other than her red hair, which she wears up, as if to keep it off her skin. She’s not Daphne and nothing like Daphne. I remember her from somewhere, but her skin and limbs, every mole and freckle on her arms and shoulders, the dimple on her thigh that she is rubbing with her thumb, are new to me.
Suddenly I know who she is: She’s Judy Partygoer from yesterday. She opens the window and invites me in. I’m game, at least until the helium wears off.
“I’ve been thinking about what you said, and you were wrong,” she says.
“Wrong about what?”
“Masturbation is not like fucking ghosts,” she says.
“What is it, then?”
“It’s like fucking a placebo.”
I don’t get it.
“Sex between people is a powerful act, but when performed alone it can be just as powerful. The mind tricks the individual into feeling the erotic presence of someone else.”
“I guess I know what you mean.”
“The mind is so powerful that the placebo effect of masturbation can cause women to become pregnant.”
Whoa, baby. This is a new one to me: virgin births caused by an act of the hand. I have to wonder, then, if the progeny are ghost babies, and whether their mothers know they’ve had them, and hey, if it’s all in the mind, maybe men could have them, too. I wonder and concentrate, but can’t hold the thought as my soul becomes lighter and rises up and drifts back out the window. It floats high above the San Francisco skyline in search of Daphne.
I find her at last. She’s alone in her car, in an alley off Golden Gate Avenue. I hover high above. I know what to do. Tonight I will haunt her memory the way she’s been haunting mine. I will come to her as a ghost.
Other ghostly lovers are beating me to the punch. One and many, they come to her in her car as I watch. They open the Veg-o-Matic’s unlocked doors and climb inside. More pile in through the trunk. The heavy breathing of so many parked passengers fogs the windshield. A window rolls down, and feet and elbows spill out as cramped passengers try to make more room for themselves.
I’m not sure how I’ll squeeze myself in. Through the backseat window, I see a parting in the dogpile of bodies and I make my headfirst plunge. I find myself face-to-face with Daphne.
“Hiya, Digs,” she says.
It’s not really her. “Hiya” is not a word Daphne would ever say. She’s never said my name in the plural. This is not her fantasy; it’s mine. Suddenly it’s over. I quit. I want to be left alone. I want to go home.
My soul reels back to the recreation room, where it finds its way back into my body. Daphne’s clothes are still hanging above me, and I am still sitting. I am feeling all whatever, unresolved. My obsession is getting old. I won’t get Daphne back.
I turn on the light, pull down two of Daphne’s shirts, and tie them together, forming them into a rope. I run the shirts over the top of the rafter and stand on a kids’ stool. I tie the long sleeves of one shirt into a noose and slip it over my head. I undo the fly of my duck trousers and reach inside. I wait for just the right moment to kick the stool out from under myself.
Masturbation is like dying alone, teasing yourself into thinking you are not, pushing yourself to the edge and throwing yourself off, only to find in the end that you haven’t gone anywhere. The world is the same as it ever was, and so are you.
The balloon doesn’t pop in a single, startling burst. Rather, the air rushes out. The balloon flails all around the room until all the air is exhausted, and then lies limp and unnoticeable in a heap on the recreation room floor.
EARTHBOUND
Carolyn Turgeon
He led me outside to the water where the rigs rose up and cut across the sky.
“People get addicted to the feeling of being released from gravity,” he said.
The highway was to one side, the Hudson on the other. In the distance, you could see the George Washington Bridge stretching over the water. It’s so solid here in New York, each street like its own universe, pressing in. It is easy to forget that there is water on all sides of us.
I was doing research for a novel I was writing. “It’s about a girl who is saved by the trapeze,” I had explained when I called the school, asking to be shown around. The girl in my book is all wrong: At barely four feet tall, she is tiny for her age. She has hands as small as plums. She is invisible to her family, and the other kids call her a freak. Then a librarian comes to town and sees something in the girl that no one else sees. She teaches the girl to read, to love words and stories, and she teaches her the trapeze.
I have her standing up on the platform, covered in rhinestones, looking down at her two glittering-slippered feet, the sawdust-covered ground below. The girl is in the ring for the first time, clutching the bar in her hand, waiting for the lights to flare on and send her hurtling into space. But she is stuck there, suspended.
I needed details to send her on her way—the actual feel of ropes in her palms, the look of the net spreading out below her, the precise ways she’d have to twist her body to make those arcs and circles, what she’d feel and listen for in the air.
The president of the school had agreed to tell me everything I needed to know.
“Why don’t you try it?” he asked now.
“No,” I said. “I just want to see. It’s enough.”
“You’re not going to try it?”
He looked at me like I was crazy. But I couldn’t imagine being up there and exposed like that. I’m wedded to the ground. I’m terrified of birds. I hate airplanes. Once, a rich guy flew me to Connecticut for lunch in his Cessna, and I threw up on the seat. But that doesn’t mean I can’t love all of those things from afar: birds, flight, wings, the air.
“Maybe some other time,” I said, self-conscious. “For now, I just want to take notes.”
He shrugged. “You know, there’s another writer here today,” he said.
“Yeah?”
“A poet.”
“A poet?”
“Taking a lesson.” He pointed. “She’s a friend of a friend.”
The sun was bright behind her. It took me a second to focus in.
“What’s her name?”
“Daphne.”
Daphne. I stared up at her. I knew who she was, I realized. I’d seen her a few years before at a reading she gave at my friend’s bar in Brooklyn. I don’t usually like readings. I like to feel words in my hands, under my fingers, but my friend had convinced me to make an exception that night. I’d sat back as this woman stalked to the stage and made every word an arrow, a knife she flung out at us. There is much I can do with words on a page, but I can’t do that. I use them like rain and mist, to cloak things; this girl used them to shed her own blood.
After, I’d read her poetry: My body became a secret handshake all the boys knew and i didn’t, she wrote. i only remember my own skin when i am touched, find the edges of my body through your eyes or under your hands. I wanted to be that raw but I also wanted to be invisible, to write in fine layers that concealed any resemblance to my own heart. I wanted to be like her, to fold myself into a tiny flying girl despite standing almost six feet tall in boots.
Of course, I had never seen Daphne like this: standing on the platform with her arms stretched out in front of her, her face lit up, smiling, her hair swaying down her back. Hooked in, harnessed, ready to jump. She looked like a girl who was always ready to jump. She was tall, broad, ferocious. Her left arm decorated in vines and flowers; her skin smooth and sinewy; her muscled body already belonging to the air. She leapt then, laughing, and I could hear her laughter, feel it move inside of me, as she hurled herself through space, her dark hair streaming out behind her.
“She’s not afraid,” I said.
“No,” he said, and I could see that he, too, admired her. I felt judged, inadequate, earthbound.
Above us, she was laughing as she swung through the air, and as she twisted her legs up over the bar so that she hung from her knees. She let go of the bar, he
ld out her arms toward the net, then swung up to the catcher, who caught her hands in his. He pulled her to the platform opposite the one she’d jumped from, the one right next to where I was standing.
The look on my face must have given me away. The president smiled at me. “You have to talk about how people react when they see someone on the trapeze,” he said. “It does something to people. They’re undone. I’ve seen it over and over again. It’s primal, almost. You have to write about that in your novel.”
I blushed. “I’m sure that’s true,” I said.
Daphne was climbing down the long ladder that stretched from the platform to the ground. I watched the muscles in her shoulders, the flowers scrolling along her arm, her hair hanging down like snakes.
She jumped off the ladder to the ground.
“How was it?” the president asked.
She stopped. “Pure fucking bliss,” she said, laughing. Radiant.
I had never seen anyone as beautiful, alive, as she was then. I was sure she could jump in the air and soar above us all if she wanted to.
She looked from him to me. Cocked her head, as if she’d just been given a gift and was trying to figure out what it was.
“You’re going to become addicted,” he said.
“I already am.” She smiled at him, then looked back at me as she walked past.
I couldn’t understand the feeling moving through me. Usually, in me, desire rises up slowly, like a body to the surface of the water. I have to decipher it like some hidden code. For a moment I was without words; it felt like I could string them together only on pages, in whispers, in the dark. I imagined myself breaking open, becoming wild, jumping.
The girl in my story is saved by another woman, one who teaches her the trapeze, who tells her about the circus, who spreads glitter across her face and sees a self in her that no one had thought to see before. I thought about the air. I thought about how much we pattern our lives on our own fictions.
Daphne was bent over, leaning against the fence, slipping on her boots. Looking up at me.
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