American Ghost

by Paul Guernsey

  “Yeah, Toto,” I said. “What the hell?” The dog howled again, then stood with his rump to me as he snarled and snapped at the air.

  “Toto!” the man called. “There ain’t nothing there!”

  “Listen to the man, Toto: They-ah ain’t nothin’ theyah.” This pushed Toto to the edge of foamy-mouthed insanity, which further infuriated his owner.

  “You jackass! Get over here!” In a rage of his own, the man threw open the door and stepped out, obviously intending to descend to the road and drag Toto back to the trailer by his collar. I didn’t stay to watch this drama unwind to its ugly end. Suddenly I remembered how badly I wanted to see the other ghosts, and I continued on my way as the sound of barking faded behind me.

  I found Gib and Virgil sitting in a pew, both of them staring down at what looked like a piece of paper that lay between them. They both said my name when I appeared, but otherwise ignored me.

  I said, “Does either of you find that you get a reaction from dogs? Like they seem to know you’re there?”

  Without looking up, Gib answered, “I do, sometimes. Not all of them, though. But some dogs do go a little crazy; for some reason, most of those damn pit bulls seem especially touchy.” Then, speaking to Virgil, he said, “I’m gonna move this pawn right here.”

  Virgil said, “That’s not a pawn, Gib; that’s your queen’s knight.” I saw then that the object of their attention was a wrinkled cocktail napkin, stained in a few spots with what looked to be barbecue sauce, which bore the printed image of a black and red chess or checker board.

  “Where did that come from?” I asked.

  “Lying right here the whole time, like a treasure in plain sight,” Gib answered. “Now we’ve got something to keep us busy. You can play the winner if you want.”

  “How can you play chess with no pieces?”

  “With great difficulty, apparently,” said Gib, still keeping his eyes on the napkin. “Terrific training for the memory, though.” He then placed his finger over one of the tiny red squares. “So, that’s the pawn right there, then?”

  “Yes, it is,” said Virgil. “I’m certain of it.”

  “Well, I ain’t moving that. I’d have to be crazy.”

  “Yes, you would. Take your time, we’ve got plenty of it.”

  “You got that right. We’re the fuckin’ King Midases of time.”

  I said, “I think I’ve figured out who killed me.” They lifted their faces to me.

  Virgil said, “You mean aside from the bad bikers—the fellow with the tattooed face?”

  “The man who actually pulled the trigger—the one that Gib, when he was my messenger, told me I had to find.”

  “Who?” they both asked at once.

  “One of my old housemates came by on his motorcycle earlier today. Mantis, his name is; he stopped to look at our house, and he was wearing the full patches of the Blood Eagles. They almost never patch a dude in that short a period of time, and yet, there he was. Not only that, he was wearing an ITCOB, which stands for, ‘I Took Care Of Business,’ which means he killed somebody for the club. I’m thinking that somebody was me—the puzzle pieces all seem to fall into place. I came this close to making myself visible to him, and screaming right in his face. That’s how furious—”

  Gib said, “ITC … what?”

  “ITCO—”

  “Jeez, Thumb,” Gib said, not waiting to hear the rest. “How did a smart cat like you get involved in such a bunch of extreme bullshit as that? What kind of a way was that to spend a life—especially one that ended up being as short as yours?”

  “Don’t think it doesn’t haunt me, Gib. You know, like I told Virgil before, I was sort of fooling myself into thinking I was doing research for a book, which is what I most wanted to do in the world … ”

  “It’s not him,” Virgil said.

  “What?”

  “The charmingly named Mantis. He’s not the guy.”

  “How would you know that?”

  Virgil laughed. “I’m omniscient,” he said. “This is my end-of-life hallucination, after all.”

  “Yeah,” I said with sarcasm. “I almost forgot about that.”

  “But, aside from that, it seems it’s a mystery novel you’re writing.”

  “I’m writing a mystery novel?”

  “Yes; you’ve mentioned several times now that you were writing a novel. And from what you just told us, it would seem to be a novel about solving a murder—your own, in this case—which would make it a mystery. An offbeat one, but a mystery, nonetheless.”

  He continued, “Now, I’m far from an authority on the conventions of genre fiction, but I do recall that, in the case of mysteries, the killer is almost never the first person the detective suspects. The detective, in this case, being you.”

  “That’s your reason? That Mantis is the first person I suspected? Because it’s not the way they do it in mystery novels?”

  “One of them, yes.”

  “But this is real life—or real afterlife, at least.”

  “Well, you already know we’ve got a difference of opinion about that.”

  “And what I said was I had been planning to write a novel while I was alive. Not a mystery novel. And not now. In fact, if I wrote something now, it would be biographical—my autobiography as a ghost.”

  “Oh,” said Virgil, his amused expression unchanged. “My mistake.”

  “I mean, how would I write it in the first place? We’re ghosts; we can’t even pick up a pencil; we can’t do anything at all.”

  “I suppose you’re right,” Virgil said, looking back down at the napkin. “Gib, while it’s true we’ve got eternity here, you don’t have to spend it all deciding on your move.”

  But Gib still had his eyes on me. Gib said, “We can fly, Thumb. We can walk and see through walls. We can think. That’s a lot to be able to do.”

  Again with sarcasm I answered, “Yeah, I forgot, Gib; we’re in heaven. Only you’d think that in heaven, they’d at least have a real chessboard for you guys to play on rather than a napkin that some kid used to wipe his mouth.”

  Gib laughed. “Thumb is taunting me,” he said, looking at Virgil. Then he gave me a broad smile. “You’re taunting me. But I like you, anyway. At the bottom of it, and in spite of all your errors, you’re a good soul, and you’ve got a good future ahead of you. I think you should go ahead and write a mystery novel if that’s what you want to do, and if you can find a way to get it done. Just don’t drive yourself too crazy with the real-life mystery—this ITCO-whatever business. Your idea about making yourself visible and screaming in his face—that would be a bad mistake.

  “Remember what they had me tell you in the river—that you’d have to come to terms with what you found? I not quite sure what that all meant, but I’m betting it wasn’t a suggestion for you to lose control of yourself if you discovered something you didn’t like. Find out what you need to know in order to move on in this afterlife, of course—and also to write your story. But don’t go getting yourself into deeper trouble over anything that happened while you were alive. Because none of it really matters now. You’re dead, Thumb; learn to live with it.”

  *

  Another night, another break-in at my haunted home. But this most recent crew of vandals was craftier in several senses of the word. For one thing, after gaining entrance by prying the plywood from the back door, they replaced the boards on their way back out in order to conceal the fact that they’d been there in the first place. They also had apparently disconnected and then reconnected my landlord’s sound alarms, because the contraptions all seemed to be working when I examined them. Inside the house, their creative destruction was of a higher caliber as well. Apparently among them was someone called “Ed,” who tagged every remaining bit of unmarked wall with an artistic and multi-colored rendering of his own name. This group left not a single obscene illustration or four-letter word anywhere in the place; instead, it was all Ed spray-painted and marker-penned with nearly a
s much detail and care as if it were destined for display in an art gallery. And painting walls wasn’t the end of what they did: I also found evidence that, while Ed was busy working toward fame as a graffiti artist, the others in his group—two of them, at least—had entertained themselves with a little weed, some halfway-decent red wine, and a couple of bouts of protected sex on the kitchen counter, after which they’d thrown their condoms in the sink. Rather than merely feeling resentment at this latest intrusion as I had with all the others, I found myself burning with envy over all the things they did that I could no longer do.

  Meanwhile, at around the same time I was suffering so greatly from both my impotence against the graffiti-tagging vandals and my deep grief over the loss of my own carnality, I found that Fred Muttkowski was going through a similar, almost parallel, period of internal torment. I arrived at his farm one afternoon to discover that he’d emptied out the farrowing pen he had used as an office. Gone were the rolling chair and the laptop computer, and in their place stood a huge, and hugely pregnant, Berkshire sow who chewed, shit upon, and stepped through the toppled tower of Fred’s old manuscript pages.

  Fred apparently had finally accomplished it, then: he’d rid himself of the compulsive writing habit that had caused him so much misery. I congratulated him and, although of course he could not hear me, I hoped aloud that he would find satisfaction in his life as it was, and not as he once wished it would be. He certainly seemed, on that day, to have made peace with his lowly, pig-producing position in the world. As he went about his work he was whistling; he was singing snatches of old rock tunes to the pigs; he was muttering to people whom I could not see, and who I therefore knew were not ghosts, but were merely the children of Fred’s own imagination. Apparently their mere companionship was sufficient for him now, these invisible friends at large in the air; he no longer felt the need to capture and imprison them in cages of words. I was happy for him then—but I also found something a little sad in his sudden and cheerful acceptance of defeat.

  I should have realized, however, that Fred’s newfound tranquility was not going to last. When I returned to the farm several days later, Fred, his bearded face tight as a fist, was no longer whistling, no longer singing. But he did continue to spit strings of half-pronounced words as if addressing an audience that was by turns hostile and infuriatingly stupid, and every so often this running dispute would draw him back to the paper-strewn, pig-fouled shambles of his former office, where he would stand gnawing his lip and staring not at the gravid, grunting sow the pen now housed, but at the spot on the floor beneath her bulging belly where the wheels of his rolling chair had once rested. He’d stare and he’d gnaw and he’d mutter, and then, before pivoting sharply away on the squealing rubber heels of his barn boots, he would suddenly shout, No!, or sometimes something more elaborate such as, “We’ve been through all this, you asshole! So, no, and no again!”

  This struggle was painful to watch, especially since I was dealing with so much unhappiness of my own, and finally I forced myself to abandon him to his anger and his misery. When I returned to check on him a few days later, the now deflated sow was in another farrowing pen, nursing a squirming litter of eleven, while Fred was back in his office with the gate closed and the laptop balanced on his knees. The thousands of manuscript pages, looking far worse for the wear, had been restored to their stone-weighted pile. But Fred’s battle was far from over.

  For a solid hour, he sat drumming his boots against the floor without writing a word, without giving so much as a single twirl or spin of his chair. Finally he gently closed the computer, placed it on the chair, and set about cleaning the barn. Things went the same way the next day, and the day after that—plenty of sitting and not a word written—and then finally one afternoon I arrived to find that the computer was gone again and in its place Fred sat holding a ballpoint pen and an open, spiral-bound notebook.

  And still no words came to him, though he stared so hard at that first blank sheet of blue-lined paper that it almost seemed possible he’d burn holes through it with the focused heat of his eyes. By the time he stood up from his chair, he’d gone pale and there was a look of real panic on his face; he was like a man in a wilderness without even the sun in the sky to guide him.

  “I believe I may have fucked myself,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper. After a moment, he dropped the notebook and pen onto his chair and shambled back to the house, returning a few minutes later with a bottle of bourbon and a coffee mug. Out in the pig run, he seated himself on an overturned bucket and proceeded to drink in silence for the rest of the afternoon.

  I worried about him then. When I made my way back to the farm after another two mornings had passed, I fully expected to find him a drunken wreck, crawling among pigs on hands and knees. Instead, I encountered him deep in study. Next to his rolling chair stood a pile of books, four hardcovers and three paperbacks, all of which dealt with the topics of hypnosis and self-hypnosis. As I kept him company, he leafed through those books one by one, dog-earring, as he did so, the first pages of some passages, completely skipping others, and then dropping each book back to the dusty floor once he’d extracted the information he was looking for. By noon, he’d been through them all at least twice, and after a quick lunch at the house he returned to the barn ready to put his newfound knowledge to work.

  He sat in the rolling chair, squirming until he was completely comfortable and, staring straight ahead, began concentrating intently on his breathing. After a couple of minutes, he slowly let his eyes fall closed, and for a while, as I watched his eyeballs tracking restlessly beneath those tired eyelids, I wondered what marvels he was beholding back there. But soon his eyes stopped their restless searching, and Fred’s head settled forward onto his chest. He began to snore.

  I laughed and said, “So much for that.”

  After his nap he gave it another try, however, and this time, for an impressively long while, he sat completely upright with his eyes closed—not sleeping, it seemed, but relaxed and breathing deeply, evenly, and intentionally. He remained, for the most part, entirely unmoving, although at one point his right arm lifted slowly and hesitantly into the air until it was even with his shoulder, his hand dangling limply from his wrist. Then the arm settled back and a minute later the other one rose in a similarly mysterious way, offering the illusion that it was under the control of some invisible force rather than that of Fred himself. Even to a ghost, this was eerie.

  When Fred finally awoke and looked around, rather than immediately attempting to write, he stood and let himself out of the farrowing pen. Moving slowly, as if he were still in a trance, he shuffled out the back of the barn and onto the pig run. At first he squinted against the brightness of the sun, but momentarily his eyes widened in an expression of astonishment.

  “Well now, look at you,” he said to absolutely no one. “I’d have thought you’d be skinnier, as much crap as you give me about my appearance.” Then he turned his head slightly to one side and said, “And you. You look ridiculous, although I assume you already know that. Is that beret ironic, or are you wearing it because you really think it’s cute?”

  He paused at that point, stopped smiling as he appeared to be listening, and then he said, “Fuck you. Bet against me if you want, but I’m pretty sure I’ve got the problem solved.”

  It was likely he was addressing the same people he normally muttered to as he went about his work. The difference was that, through his self-hypnosis, he seemed to have given himself the ability to see as well as hear them in his head. I found this at once fascinating and worrisome, because I suspected there was a fine line between vivid imagination and insanity, and I wasn’t sure either Fred or I could be certain when he’d finally stepped across it. Weirdly, as soon as this thought entered my mind, Fred reacted as if I’d just posed it to him in the form of a question.

  “Yes,” he said, with acid in his voice. “Of course I know you’re not real, any of you. You used to be nothing but auditory hall
ucinations. Now I can see you as well—big fucking deal. A bunch of nagging, translucent holograms. I just wish you all were better looking.”

  He couldn’t see me; of that I was certain. Because I was real, and therefore really invisible, while the ones he saw and talked to were merely figments of his mind. That he seemed to hear me, and answer me, just a moment before … that had to have been a coincidence.

  The next day Fred attempted to write while in a hypnotic trance. I arrived at the barn to find that he’d placed a card table in the farrowing pen. He was seated at the table, on which burned the twisted stub of a candle, and his spiral-bound notebook lay open to a blank page, a pen resting next to it. In one of his new hypnosis books, he was reviewing a chapter called “Automatic Writing”—which was illustrated, I noticed, with an ink drawing of a Ouija board planchette.

  When he reached the end of the chapter, Fred clapped shut the book and dropped it to the floor. He placed his hands on the table, concentrated on the candle and, breathing evenly, he eventually let his eyes slide closed. A few minutes later, he looked down at the table and picked up the pen. As his hand slid onto the notebook page, Fred observed it in curious expectation as if it were someone else’s appendage rather than his own. Soon—a minute or three later—his hand twitched and the pen tapped a dot of ink onto the paper. After a moment there came another spasmodic tap and then another, and then the pen was madly jabbing its way all up, down, and across the sheet. When the entire paper was almost completely darkened with dots, the pen and the fingers that held it seemed to freeze. Fred then used his left hand to nudge the right one onto the next blank page, where after a few seconds it pecked out a half-dozen more dots before starting to scribble. These scribbles were not words, but rather circular, swirling doodles such as a child might make with a fisted crayon, and in this way Fred filled up that second sheet, and then with his left hand he flipped the page so he could complete a third and a fourth. This went on until he’d used up half the notebook, then he set down his pen and carefully thumbed his way through the “work” he’d done. Neither he nor I could make out a single letter, much less a legible word.