Just as Virgil had described to me about these experiences, sometimes my destinations made an echo of seeming sense. For example, when I kept ending up at the funerals of strangers, standing shoulder to unknowing shoulder with the bereaved at their gravesides, I imagined that “someone” was trying to teach me a lesson about death that I had not already learned. At first, I guessed that some ghostly duty might be expected of me; perhaps I had been sent to serve as a messenger to the flickering, emergent soul as it rose out of its diseased, broken, or worn-out body. But over the course of a dozen or more burials, and although I often stayed behind after the mourners had all driven away in order to continue my watch even as the cemetery workers lowered the coffin into the dark rectangle of its eternal hole, I never once encountered another ghost, nor even the vaguest hint of an afterlife other than my own.
I sometimes also ended up in graveyards without even a funeral to attend. A number of the cemeteries I visited lay upon abandoned and overgrown farmland hidden deep in the Maine woods, and were themselves buried in alders, burdocks, and wild raspberries; they seemed to have been entirely forgotten. Rather than prayers and quiet weeping, the sounds I would hear in these places were the calls of the crows (Corvus brachyrhynchos), and the laughter of woodpeckers. One of these lost resting places haunted me more than all the others because, on some Christmas during the previous several years, a living being had cared enough to make his or her way through the December snow in order to decorate each of two dozen ancient graves with a wreath. Yet, no one had ever come back to recover the wreaths once their greenery had gone brown; nor had they returned to replace them on any subsequent winter solstice. The result was a sad, tree-shaded still life of faded ribbons, bare, twisted wire, and skeletal fir branches that seemed far more suggestive of eternal darkness and hopelessness than ever did the leaning, barely legible, lichen-covered gravestones they had once adorned. It depressed me terribly to look at them.
Whenever I found myself in a cemetery of any sort, I would always call out in the not entirely unreasonable hope of getting an answer from another ghost. I would shout, “Yo,” or “Hey, dead people!”—and, not hearing a response, I would add, “Anybody home?” No one ever was.
Whenever I felt I had stayed long enough at one of these mournful destinations, it was usually fairly easy to find the entrance to the wormhole that had taken me there, and then jump through it to the place along my maze where I had first fallen in. But occasionally, the invisible tunnel would have shifted while I was out and about, and when I returned I would find no sign of it. This would force me to drift around for hours, and sometimes for as much as a day or more, searching either for that wormhole opening or for a ghost path that would allow me to return home. If I found neither, my only option was to wait until I grew so weak that the underground river sucked me back to send me for a tumbling swim. Then, the next time the river spit me out again, I’d find myself hanging in midair just above the gaping foundation to my former house, rested and ready for another dark adventure.
Eventually I began dropping into the scenes of other people’s final moments—in hospitals and hospices, and once in a maternity-ward delivery room. Another time I fell onto a battlefield where fresh blood soaked dirt that was already red, and I said to myself, I must be closing in on the climax of it all; something important is about to be revealed to me. But I was wrong, just as I had been wrong so many times before. In total, I saw perhaps two dozen people draw their final breath, and at no time was I any more aware of a newly freed spirit on the move than were the awe- and grief-struck mortals who often witnessed them with me. I might as well have been alive, for all the good death did me.
One night a wormhole spilled me out beside a steel-railed hospital bed, parked in the center of a suburban living room, in which a grievously thin and pale old man, wearing nothing but a diaper, and surrounded by his wife and three grown sons, gave a soft rattle, and passed away. The family, all of them dressed in sleeping-clothes, their hair in scribbles and their eyes sunken with sleeplessness, retreated from him after a minute or two—not out of fear, but as if to give him his privacy.
I felt like an intruder here but, as a helpless ghost, there was nowhere I could go. I was able to do nothing in the middle of that death-dark evening except stay and watch as the three unshaven men, the oldest of whom might have been in his late thirties, assembled a number of dusty liquor bottles and a case of warm beer and began to drink. Within a short while, they were laughing about something the dead man had once said to one of them.
The mother, meanwhile, sat at a kitchen table mounded over with piles of official-looking papers, with stacks of ragged envelopes containing still more papers, and with plastic tubs full of prescription medication containers. Following a long moment of perfect, unblinking stillness, she lit a cigarette. She took a few sharp puffs, practically spitting out the smoke, after which she shoved away some of the papers to make room on the table for an old-fashioned rotary telephone, which she slammed into place and began using to make calls, one after the other.
“Hello,” she would say, in her hoarse voice. “It’s Elizabeth. I’m sorry to tell you, but Tom’s gone. Just a few minutes ago.” There would be a pause, during which she listened and smoked with a trembling hand and a tormented expression that edged toward impatience, and then she would say, “Yes, thank you.” Another pause, and: “No, that’s all right. My boys are here, so I’m okay for now, but thank you anyway. All right. All right, then. I will. Goodbye.” Then she would take a puff of the cigarette, fire angry smoke from her nostrils, and climb the same steep hill all over again.
A heavyset nurse with a Slavic accent eventually arrived and spent a minute hovering over the corpse in the near-darkness of the living room. Her final ministration was to press his eyes closed and cover him to his neck with a sheet. After that, she moved to the harsh brightness of the kitchen where she hugged the mother, filled out some paperwork that she had pulled from a briefcase, and downed, in three gulps, a jelly glass half-full of vodka that one of the boys had handed her. She hugged the mother a second time before heading out into the night again.
An hour after the nurse had gone, two sleepy-looking men carrying a wheeled stretcher arrived at the front door. That was when the sons halted their laughter and their conversation and silently gathered in the living room to observe as the stretcher was telescoped into a rolling table, and their father, after being settled into the dark cocoon of a heavy vinyl bag, was lifted from the hospital bed and gently placed on top of it. The bag’s zipper, closing, was as final a sound as I had ever heard.
They wheeled him out into the night, and the front door thumped shut. The sons exchanged glances before turning their eyes in different directions.
Not long afterward, the mother, having finished her phone calls, stubbed out her final cigarette, hugged each one of her sons, and walked into her first-floor bedroom, where she closed herself inside. For a time after that, the three men tried to resume their party, but an edge of desperation had crept into their mood; much of the humor now seemed forced, and the laughter hollow. Then a sort of collapse—a sudden, palpable, and irresistible weariness—set in, and first the eldest brother excused himself and retired to an upstairs bedroom, then the middle brother, after first making a terse, choked telephone call to a wife or girlfriend, went upstairs as well.
That left the youngest son, a man of about my age who, carrying a glass of bourbon, began wandering the empty first floor of the house from room to room, his exhausted eyes blazing feverishly and his mouth slightly agape, as if he were astonished by all he had experienced during the past several days. His gaze traveled up and down the walls; he stared hard at everything, seemingly trying to fix this moment and this place in his mind forever. At one point, in the room where his father had died, he stopped before a framed watercolor of a wooded mountain landscape. After a second or two, he nodded, and his hand rose and rested against the side of his face.
“Yes. That’s just what it’s like,”
he whispered to himself. “It’s like watching … the tallest tree fall over in the forest.” Then, as if he’d scared himself with the sound of his own voice, he stepped quickly away, paused to take a deep gulp of his bourbon, and resumed his solemn march around the house.
A short time later he and I both began to notice the moths. He stopped to look at a white moth that clung to a hallway wall, and then we spotted several more moths circling the kitchen light fixture. There were many airborne moths in the bathroom and, when we returned to the living room, there were three or four of them fluttering on the sheets of the empty hospital bed, apparently having appeared from nowhere.
The son broke into a smile that was at once goofy and wise. He threw wide the front door, set down his glass of whiskey and, traveling the house, he started gathering moths in his cupped hands one by one and carrying them to the door, where he released them into the night. He stood in the doorway as each one flew off, watching wide-eyed until he could see it no longer, and then he would turn and hunt for another.
When the son had allowed the final moth to flutter off his fingertips, I was at once struck by the anxious feeling, bordering on panic, that I was being left behind. They were on their way somewhere, all of them, and perhaps it was someplace that I also needed to go. This last moth ascended to the height of the rooftop; I was sure the dead man’s son could no longer see it even though he seemed to imagine that he could. I, in spite of my ghostly nighttime vision, was also in danger of losing sight of it.
Finally, as the moth continued toward the stars through the moonless sky, I could no longer hold myself back and I flew off in yearning pursuit. Up we went, the moth and I together. At one point, she paused and circled back for a moment, seeming to look me over, before continuing her spiraling rise. We moved ever higher above the lights and the streets and the endless clusters of buildings, and the moth began to look larger than she had in the house, at the same time taking on an almost magical luminosity whose intensity increased with altitude. I was certain she and I were headed somewhere important, and I was overflowing with excitement and awe. It was at that point that the air around us became filled with a delicate clicking that I imagined might be the wing-beats of angels.
I saw the first bat out ahead of us; it was a little brown bat (Myotis lucifugus), and it rapidly snapped its wings as it zig-zagged through the sky. Before I could react, a second bat sliced right through me, entering at the soles of my feet and passing through my nonexistent stomach, chest, and throat without even suspecting I was there. She emerged from my face—from the near dead-center of my gaping mouth—and, with an audible crunch, she crushed that glowing moth between her needlepoint teeth. Without a pause, she twisted, and quickly dove away.
*
After witnessing all that, I found that I no longer looked forward to wormholes and the places they took me to. I began to agree with Gib that a wormhole adventure rarely was worth the anxiety it caused and that for the most part it was best for a ghost to avoid them when he could. Eventually, after much trial and error, I learned how to detect a looming wormhole before it could grab me—but the skill came too late to spare me from an experience that added a new possibility to the story of my murder.
I was headed to Fred’s farm when I sensed a hungry wormhole lying just ahead—though by the time I realized it I’d gone a step too far and was already falling in. I flailed and fell and then I found myself in a tight, dust-choked attic room where my old housemate, Dirt, white as a ghost, lay unmoving with his back against the thin, bare mattress of a narrow cot. Close by I heard the thump of a door followed by the sound of boots descending a wooden staircase—someone was leaving the room just as I arrived—but Dirt looked so ghastly that I didn’t want to take my attention from him in order to investigate.
Wearing nothing but a pair of filthy jeans, he sprawled with one bare foot against the floor and one arm hanging stiffly over the edge of the cot, a wobbling syringe sticking from just below the inside bend of his elbow. He was gazing toward the ceiling with unfocused, unblinking, half-lidded eyes, and above his blue-tinged lips the hovering dust swirled with his breath, but just barely. In his mouth, half open and leaking a goatee of grayish foam, I could see the dark space from which I’d knocked out his tooth; I also could see that, true to his prediction when he’d bitched to my mother, his other front tooth had also died and darkened. On the floor not far from his foot lay a dirty spoon, a lighter, an empty glassine bag, a couple of tufts of grayish cotton—that sorry still life of loserdom.
Below the room somewhere, I heard a motorcycle roar to life, and it was then I realized it might be important to my own investigation to know who had been there. I concentrated and peered down through the wall—we were at the top of an old, three-story house that stood along some city street—and I saw a Harley pull away from the curb and go thundering up the road. The rider’s hair was hidden beneath a baseball cap turned backward, and rather than a cut with patches he wore a plain leather jacket; he could have been almost anyone. Then he zoomed over a hill and was gone. I returned my alarmed attention to Dirt, whose breathing now stirred the dust with even less force than before. I suddenly found myself pitying him almost as much as I’d disliked him when I was alive; it occurred to me that with some better friends—people who felt concern rather than contempt—he might have stood a chance. It was also possible I myself might not have died if I’d treated him with a little more respect.
“Dirt,” I said. “Snap out of it, dude.” There was nothing I could do for him, and within two minutes, though his eyes remained open, he disturbed the dust not at all. I waited without much hope to see if the spark of a ghost would come out of him, but his death was as ordinary and as seemingly final as all the others I’d seen.
Finally I said, “Well then, what the hell. Rest in peace.” But I had no idea whether he really would—or whether he deserved to.
*
Of course Ben—non-hero and the world’s worst detective—has a theory about Dirt’s death, which he insists on sharing with me. After scribbling down his version of my account he declares, “So this means we can rule out Dirt as the dude who killed you and is threatening your kid.”
NO IT DNT
“Don’t you get it, Thumb? He was murdered because he knew who your murderer was. The dude on the bike—that’s the dude you’re looking for. Too bad you weren’t smart enough to pay more attention when he was running down those stairs—use your x-ray vision to see who he was. I bet he killed Dirt to make sure he wouldn’t talk.”
HUGE LEAP NO PRF DRT WZ EVN MRDRD
(Huge leap no proof Dirt was even murdered)
“What do you mean, no proof? They shot Dirt up with some bad dope; they OD’d him on purpose. Why else would the dude run off and leave him there like that while he was still alive?”
BCS SCRD HPNS W DRUGGIES ALL T TME
(Because scared happens with druggies all the time)
Of course murder is a strong possibility—although even if someone did snuff Dirt, that wouldn’t necessarily mean there was a connection to me. After all, lots of people, for a lot of different reasons, might want to kill a dude like him. In any case, none of this is anything I feel like debating with Ben. I just need him to keep writing while I figure it all out.
CHAPTER 10
So, Mantis had risen rapidly in the Blood Eagles organization and been made a full-patch member—one whose cut advertised the fact that he had “taken care of business” for the club. Chef, for his part, had apparently turned his life on a dime to become a respectable car salesman and was engaged to my woman—a dentist’s daughter—and to all appearances was prepared to raise my unborn child as his own. Meanwhile, Dirt, who had real reason to hate me, in the wake of my death had tumbled deeper into drugs, and was himself now dead—possibly a victim of murder. I was sure that one of them had stood behind me on the day I died, and I believed there were clues, if not complete answers, at the scene of my death inside the Blood Eagles’ haunted mansion
on the south shore of the wide river-mouth that divided the City of Riverside. But hard as I tried, there seemed no way I could cross that tidal flow; in the sky above the college, each time I came across a new path through the spirit maze, it always led either to the North or to the East, with no openings to the South or West.
When I at last returned to the abandoned church, it was after being away for what must have been several weeks. In the meantime, summer had started and I often found myself thinking about Cricket and the baby to whom she had doubtlessly given birth. I wished I could know whether we’d had a boy or a girl, and what she had named it—and based on what Angelfish had told me, I desperately hoped it was safe. I came in upon Gib and Virgil playing imaginary chess as they hovered above their cocktail napkin; they seemed happy to see me, though not particularly surprised. In addition to my two friends, I noticed another ghost—a severe-looking gray-haired woman who was sitting quietly at the end of a pew a short distance away.
“Boo!” Gib boomed in greeting as soon as I appeared.
“Boo to you,” I said.
Professor Shallow looked up and said, “There’s the wandering soul. I bet you have some stories to tell.”
“Oh,” I told him. “Such sights I have seen.”
Gib drifted over and insisted on giving me one of his angel’s handshakes, which involved blending our illusory hands together. He then tried to hug me, which made a big, Gib-sized blur out of the two of us; it looked as if he had gulped me whole like a python with a pocket gopher.
“Thumb’s been pecker-trackin’ it,” Gib said, and laughed.
“That I have.”
“Well, we want to hear all about it, but first, I need to finish beating the professor’s pants off, here.”
“Be careful what you wish for,” Virgil warned him. Then he lifted his chin in the direction of the new ghost. “By the way, that’s Alice there. You two need to get acquainted. Alice, Thumb.” Following this surprisingly informal, almost rude, introduction, Virgil and Gib returned to their game.
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