American Ghost

by Paul Guernsey

  I never made it even as far as the fence. Each time I flew beyond a certain distance from the house, I would find myself back up in my corner among the cobwebs. On my last and most desperate attempt at getting away, the force that held me to the house sucked me right through the eye of the cobweb corner and hurled me into the dark river on the other side.

  On a later visitation to the house, while I hovered in the living room steeping in my regrets, a human hand suddenly took shape in the air before me. I almost yelled in fear as I fled to my bedroom—and the hand flew right along beside me as if it knew where I was headed. Back and forth it chased me between the front hallway and my room; finally I went out through the wall and into the yard. I traveled as far as I could go without getting dragged back to my spot among the cobwebs, and that was when the hand cornered me, its fingers drawn into a fist. After a moment, when it hadn’t tried to hit me, I realized that the ghostly hand was my own, and that I could make it open, close, and stick up its middle finger. I recovered from my surprise and took my “new” hand all around the inside of the house, swiping and grabbing at things—and was disappointed to find that it went through objects with only a crackle of seeming static, and without affecting them in any other way. Nor was I able to feel the texture or temperature of anything I tried to touch. The one, small breach in my otherwise seamless inability to affect the material world had to do with Tigre, who, when I passed that hand over him, stirred from his sleep with the hair standing stiff on the back of his neck. After a moment, he woke up, looked around, and whined.

  Before long the rest of my ghostly “body” took shape. My other hand appeared with a little imagination on my part, as did my arms, legs, head, and torso. Although my completed avatar produced no reflection in the bathroom mirror, I was nonetheless able to “see” all of myself including my face because my sense of “sight” now consisted of many more dimensions than when it had been restricted by the physical limitations of actual eyes. I could even change my appearance at will, or take another shape—a bird, say, or a flowerpot. But I was satisfied to look more or less the same as I had in life—though with two exceptions. The first exception had to do with my body art—a set of tropically colored tattoos that included:

  A jaguar clawing its way up the outside of my left arm, the spotted tail winding nearly to my wrist, and

  On my right shoulder, the head of a harpy eagle (Harpia harpyja) with its crest raised and its beak gaping as if frozen in mid-scream, and

  Over my heart, a life-size caribe, a ferocious little fish that the non-Venezuelan world knows as the red-bellied piranha, and

  A bright green marijuana leaf on my right calf, and

  A portrait of the Liberator, don Simón Bolívar, on my left calf, and

  Taking up most of my back, a bare-chested Maria Lionza—a Venezuelan Indian goddess—wearing a crown of jungle flowers and riding a tapir, and

  Finally, on the back of my neck, some inky blue Chinese calligraphy. (What that exotic and incongruous writing supposedly said, never mind; the message is meaningless now.)

  These tats did not automatically reappear with the reconstruction of my bodily form, and rather than recreating them, which I easily could have done, I was relieved to be rid of them. Their loss made me feel less desperate to cloak myself in an identity that could never entirely be my own.

  The second exception was that, as I am sure almost any man would do, I took advantage of the opportunity to make one part of myself a little larger than it had been in life. I momentarily got carried away with this enhancement before deciding I looked ridiculous, and dialing back a little from what had begun to resemble a baby elephant’s trunk. But just a little.

  Then, because I felt weird standing naked in the middle of the living room, I covered my invisible, illusory body with invisible, illusory clothing. I dreamed up a pair of jeans, along with work boots, a black t-shirt, and a blue-checked flannel shirt—all the things I would have worn in life. Only after that, and despite the fact that I could feel no actual clothes touching my nonexistent skin, did I feel complete.

  I was then as whole as a ghost could be. I was illuminated.

  *

  The next time the river spit me out into the front hallway of the house—it might have been hours later, or days, I have no clear idea—I was in full, disembodied, bodily form, clothing and all. I could see right away that things in the house had been moved around, even cleaned up a little more, since my last visitation, but that once again no one was home except for Tigre. I decided then to push through the closed front door for the first time since my death. Shoulder first, as if breaking the door down, I prickled my way between the molecules of the wooden panels and emerged into the autumn sunlight that fell on the cast-concrete stairway leading up to the door. Across the road stretched that familiar, lonesome lagoon of coastal wetland, alive with the hypnotic wind-dance of marsh grass. Looking out over those waving tassels toward the horizon, I wondered whether it might be possible, now that I once again had a more or less human form, for me just to walk away from the house; there were a few places I was eager to visit in order to get started on investigating my murder. To be specific, I thought I could learn a lot by eavesdropping in all of my housemates’ regular haunts. But I was not sure what my rules might be—if I were allowed to leave at all, where exactly could I go, and how long could I stay there? Too much about this ghostly new life was still a mystery to me.

  Between the shoulder of the road and the edge of the marsh a pair of wooden electric-power poles stood planted side by side. One pole was whole and the other was broken, consisting of little more than a tall stump as a result of having been cracked the previous winter by the sideways impact of an automobile that had spun out of control as it rounded the icy ribbon of road. Five feet to one side or the other, and the car would have vaulted the snow bank and gone off into the marsh, probably leaving the driver unhurt except for wet legs from breaking through the ice and a few bruises from the punch of his airbag. As it was, the pole had stopped him hard, snapping his head sideways against the top of the doorframe and clean through the closed window. Suspended in air by snow that had been mounded by the road plow, the car’s wheels were still spinning madly when I had arrived to look inside. I felt the driver’s throat; he had no pulse. I’d considered pulling him out, stretching him across the snow, and pounding on his chest. Perhaps it would have made a difference if I’d done that, and also shared a breath or two with him—but probably not. Anyway, I’d decided to go back into the house and call 911 instead. He had been a professor at the college—a man around sixty years of age. Afterward, rather than uprooting the cracked pole, the utility company had merely sawed it off at the point where it was broken—about six feet above the ground—and left the rest of it standing. They set the new one in right next to it. Shortly afterward, someone sneaked in under cover of darkness and, from a nail near the top of the truncated pole, had hung a heart-shaped wreath woven of grapevines and flowers.

  Although the remains of the wreath were still hanging, the flowers had long since withered and crumbled to dust, and the twisted vines were no longer recognizable as a heart; nearly a year’s worth of weather had unraveled them from the wire around which they were wrapped and eroded them to a ragged brown oval that now reminded me of a gaping mouth.

  I mention all of this because suddenly I saw the figure of a man standing by those two utility poles. There was an eerie, translucent luminosity to his appearance, and I could tell right away that, like me, he was not a physical person at all. In fact, he looked a lot like the professor of African-American literature whose compact and lifeless body I had watched the paramedics solemnly extract from that smashed vehicle. The man—or ghost, I guess I should call him—was looking not at me but at the hanging hoop of dried vines that had once made up a heart-shaped wreath. Round, gold-framed glasses shimmering on his face and dessicated marsh grass swaying behind and through him, he seemed to be shaking his stylishly hairless head at the waste of
it all. I remembered his name—Virgil Shallow—because he was the first and only freshly dead person I had ever seen.

  I was scared—I’d never seen a ghost before—and at first I just wanted to slip back into the house and hide. At the same time I was afraid of moving and drawing his attention, so I remained frozen in my place and watched him. Then, as he continued to ignore me and to stare at the ruined wreath, it occurred to me that there would be no barrier between the two of us the way there now was between my ghostly self and living beings. I might be able to talk to him. And maybe, as an older sprit, he would take me under his wing.

  Just as I had made up my mind to risk calling out to him, the dead professor snapped his head in my direction. He was frowning deeply, and at once I felt sure he knew the circumstances of our previous encounter and that he blamed me for his death. That he faulted me for not saving him and for his becoming a ghost. After a moment I lifted my palm to him; I wanted to explain that I would have dragged him from his car if I’d thought it would help. I wanted to apologize. But at my movement, his eyes began to glow behind his glasses like a pair of embers. His eyes grew and they glowed, and then as I stood watching in horrified fascination I saw odd waves of motion surging back and forth beneath his clothes. Those strange tides rippled across him until thousands of twitching white worms burst from his jacket sleeves and the collar of his shirt and spilled down from the cuffs of his pants. The worms poured from him and fell to the ground and soon strips of flesh began to peel from him as well. The worms and the flesh continued to fall and to vanish until there was nothing left of the professor but a clothed skeleton with fiery eyes. Then the bones themselves lost their hold on one another and collapsed to the pavement, their collective clatter muffled by his clothing, after which his horrifying time-lapse decay was complete save for that pair of monstrous eyes that remained hovering in space, afire with fury.

  I drew back into the house, turned to the cobweb corner, and retreated to the underground river. I hoped he couldn’t follow me there.

  CHAPTER 4

  The house was different the next time I returned. The kitchen table, covered with a respectable cloth for the first time since New Year’s Eve, was loaded with a spread that obviously had come from a caterer: platters of bread and rolled cold cuts, several salads, a steaming, glass-topped electric crock filled with what looked to be sausages and peppers, an array of condiments, a stack of disposable plates, a fan of plastic flatware neatly swaddled in paper napkins. At the center of it all stood a modest vase of white carnations, with a few wispy ferns mixed in. Also, Tigre was gone. I was immediately worried then about who might have him and what they might have done with him. I could not discount the possibility that someone had dragged him to a “shelter”—a fate which, for a business-minded, poker-faced, one-man monster like Mr. Tigger, would probably amount to a death sentence.

  I went to the front door when I heard vehicles rolling into the driveway, followed by the sound of slamming car doors and voices. Through the door and the wall I could see them all, including my mother, dressed almost entirely in black, who was being helped from the rear seat of a rental sedan by Cricket and Chef. Cricket, in a long dress and white sweater that hid every one of her pretty tattoos, looked exactly like the young dental hygienist she might have become if she’d made some different decisions. Chef, for his part, had on a clean pair of blue jeans, a white shirt with actual buttons and sleeves, and his “dress-up” leather biker vest. His hair was pulled back in a stubby blonde ponytail, and it looked to have recently been washed.

  On the other side of the car, Mantis and Dirt were removing their sunglasses and climbing off of their bikes. Mantis had on his old biker “cut” which, though stripped of all insignia that would have associated him with his former club, still bore the unfaded silhouettes of the missing patches, along with a few tatters of leftover stitching. Beneath the piebald denim, he wore not only a button-down shirt, but also a tie, which was a touch I found touching.

  Dirt, on the other hand, looked just like Dirt always did: unshaven, and dressed in generic-looking “unaffiliated” colors heavily stained with motor oil and shot with burn holes from splashes of battery acid. Under the open denim vest, he wore a t-shirt decorated with an advertisement for his latest favorite fad beverage, Twisted Tea, and on his head, a greasy black bandana from which his dreadlocks struggled to escape.

  Another car pulled in behind the one Chef had chauffeured my mother and Cricket in. Four nicely dressed younger people stepped out—three dudes and a girl, who after a moment I recognized as friends from the long-lost world of my two-and-a-half-year college career. One of the guys had been my roommate during our first two semesters, another had been our next-door neighbor in the dorm, and the third was a lonely Mexican kid from Des Moines, Iowa, whom I’d met in our first-semester composition class, and who used to insist on reading me his bilingual poetry. The chick was someone whose heart I’d broken, though not on purpose. She had been a passionate but serious girl, a reader of “important” books and, if she’d ever had the chance to meet her while I was alive, would have very much impressed my mother, a high school English teacher.

  My four college friends, all of whom would, or should, be graduating by the end of spring, looked bewildered and a little scared to be standing there at the bottom of the driveway to a bikers’ lair. Noticing this, Cricket, in as cheerful a voice as she could manage, called out, “Come on in, you guys! There’s food.” When they still hesitated, Chef walked back to them, gathered their shoulders in his huge arms and, speaking soothing words in his Alabama accent, gently herded them toward the front door. Cricket then wrapped an arm around my mother and the two of them followed the other five in, with Mantis and Dirt bringing up the rear.

  So this was it then: The wind-down from some sort of mumbling memorial service intended to close, formally and forever, the brief book of my life. I was certain Cricket had planned it all; there was no one else who would have taken the trouble. She had undoubtedly made all the arrangements and convinced my mother to book the flight from Florida, assuring her as she did so that she had nothing to fear from the rough men I’d shared my home with. She would have contacted my former roommate, whom she had met once before, and begged him to bring anyone else who had known me.

  To be honest, I was surprised at the extent of her efforts. Although I did not doubt she would miss me at least for a while, Cricket was one of the least sentimental women I’d ever known, and—especially in light of the way I’d seen her act around Mantis—I had imagined that she would move on directly with her life, never looking back. In addition, Cricket had never seen or spoken to my mother and so had no real reason to reach out to her in the wake of my passing. In any case, and regardless of whatever impulses had impelled her, I was grateful.

  The ceremony they’d all attended no doubt was the sort of thing I’d often heard referred to as a “celebration of life,” although no one here looked in the least bit celebratory. Certainly not my mother, who was walking with a noticeable bend to her upper back, and who, in spite of being not yet fifty, was suddenly seeming frail. Her mouth was set in a grim line, and behind the wire frames of her glasses her blue eyes snapped with what I recognized as anger. Despite the fact that I no longer had either a beating heart or a churning stomach to serve as vessels for my emotions, I still managed to feel awful for her, as well as terribly guilty.

  At the same time, in addition to my strong feelings about my mother, Cricket, and even the smart and broken-hearted college girl, I was on fire with the urgency of unanswered questions:

  Had they finally found my body in order to burn or bury it? (I doubted they had, because, as Mantis had told Cricket, with my corpse in hand as evidence, the cops would have torn our house apart.)

  Would anyone here today let slip a clue about who had killed me, and how it had been done?

  And, where was my damn dog?

  Inside the house, everyone at first congregated in the kitchen. Chef was describi
ng the catered food as if he’d cooked it himself, and urging everyone to eat some of it, while Mantis had opened the refrigerator and with both hands was handing out cans of beer and bottles of Twisted Tea. Dirt stood nearby muttering, “There’s hard stuff, there’s real booze, if anybody wants some, tequila and stuff,” but no one paid him any attention or gave any sign that they had even heard him. With wordless murmurs of thanks, my college friends all grabbed beverage containers and held them in front of their faces like masks at an old-fashioned costume ball.

  Cricket waved off the beer that Mantis pushed at her, merely shrugging when he gave her a questioning look. After a minute, she took my mother’s arm and guided her down the hall to my bedroom. Of course, I drifted along behind them.

  “This is Danny’s room,” Cricket told her, with emphasis on the name my mother knew me by. I was glad to see that someone had picked up all of my things that Mantis had thrown onto the floor. The drawers, looking worse for the wear, had at least been placed back into the dressers.