Ghost of a Flea

by James Sallis

Listing right then left, a man with bandy legs approached us.

  “Sonny Payne,” he said. “How do you do. I’m homeless and I’m hungry. If you don’t have it, I understand, because I don’t have it either. But if you do, anything you might see fit to pass on, a sandwich, a few coins, a piece of fruit, will be appreciated. Thank you.”

  He stood there swaying, ticking it out. No response came, he’d move along, deliver the same speech verbatim just down the line. Greevy, however, pulled out his wallet and handed the man a ten.

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “My son was on the streets for years.” Greevy passed the quart of Corona to me. One of the NOPD cars slowed to check us out, then went on.

  “I think it’s against the law, our sitting out here drinking,” I told him.

  “Yeah. Probably is.” He took the bottle back and drained it. “You up for one more?”

  Chapter Fourteen

  AS I MAKE MY WAY HOME, traversing abandoned lots, shoulder-narrow alleys, car-beset stretches of St. Charles, Jackson and Prytania, darkness lays its hand on the city, gently at first, then ever more firmly. Portions of sunlight cling to the edges of buildings. Headlights and streetlights straggle on. In houses I pass, behind windows tall as a man, wood floors are held in place by antique dining tables, barrister’s bookcases and overpadded chairs. In there, too, light falls: white light like cool pure water from chandeliers, light yellow and warm from table and floor lamps.

  I turned onto Prytania, skirting a house that looked like any other save for a discreet metal sign hung from its eave: Anderssen Real Estate. I’ve probably walked past a hundred times without taking notice. A fortyish man wearing slacks and an open-neck white dress shirt still crisp from the morning’s iron emerged, locked up, mounted a silver BMW and rode away. Almost immediately another man stepped around the low wall of cinder block separating this house’s driveway from that of the next. He made for a niche tucked between house and wall beneath an overbite of roof and there unrolled his blanket, positioning himself on it and setting out with every aspect of ritual a well-used plastic bottle of water, cans of food, backpack, folded newspapers. Then began pulling off braces and supports. The crutch he’d had under his left arm. Neck brace padded with foam. Wrap-around knee support. Plastic form into which right foot and ankle had been strapped. Wrist splint with wide Velcro ties attached. Elastic elbow wrap. Some weird sympathetic magic—he wore these, none of it could happen to him? Or had he from whatever obscure motive—sympathy, instinct for salvage, pride of ownership—simply fished them from refuse bins at nearby Touro Infirmary, slowly accumulating, growing one might almost say, this exoskeleton within which he went about the world?

  My own house of wooden floors, high ceilings and windows tall as a man, when I arrived, stood empty. I could have held it to my ear and heard the sea. Deborah away at rehearsal, David simply away (what else could I say just now?), out in the world somewhere. Cars past those windows followed headlights leading them like faithful horses towards the Barcaloungers, big TVs, barbeque grills and backyard swingsets that defined their riders’ lives. Few surprises when these crews disembark.

  I brewed coffee, heated milk in a long-handled pan that looked to have been strip-mined at some point for its copper, poured them together into a mug the size of a soup bowl. Rocker and floor, old friends, spoke to one another as I settled. From half-toppled stacks on the table alongside and tucked beneath, guided by who knows what instinct, specific hunger, chance, I fingered out Gustav Meyrink’s The Golem, a book I’d had for years but never got around to.

  The moonlight is falling on to the foot of my bed. It lies there like a tremendous stone, flat and gleaming.

  As the shape of the full moon begins to dwindle, and its right side starts to wane—as age will treat a human face, leaving its trace of wrinkles first upon one hollowing cheek—my soul becomes a prey to vague unrest. It torments me.

  At such times of night I cannot sleep; I cannot wake; in its half dreaming state my mind forms a curious compound of things it has seen, things it has read, things it has heard—streams, each with its own degree of clarity and color, that intermingle, and penetrate my thought.

  There was moonlight now, like a blanket, a shawl, thrown across my lap, making me the very image of an old man at rest, idly musing. I recalled Lee Gardner writing to me of a friend’s death, a writer he’d edited for years, and of the article by some self-styled expert briefly praising Lee’s friend, then going on at length to complain how he’d been lured away from “legitimate” novels by the temptation of huge sums of money to be made in writing genre fiction. Huge sums of money? Lee had asked, incredulous, in his letter. Legitimate novels? And still more incredulously: Sour obituaries—is this what we all come down to?

  Most of our lives come down to far less, of course.

  Long ago I’d given up trying to keep count how many times my own had gone south, gone sour, gone dead still. I’d think I knew where I was headed, every station, every stop, two dollars for the box lunch that came aboard at Natchez or Jackson tucked in my shirt pocket, only to find myself waylaid to some unsuspected sidetrack, engine long gone, mournful call fading.

  That was the shape my son’s life took, too, whatever the explanation. Some errant braid in the genes, mother’s madness encoded, encysted and passed down the line; chaos dropping (we’d expected another caller) on a swing from above. As though all his life David had been scaling this huge mountain of sand. Some days, some years, he’d manage to kick in footholds and stay in place, maybe even hoist himself up a yard or two. But the sand always gave way.

  The phone, I realized, had been ringing for some time. As I stood, the manteau of moonlight fell away from my lap. I crossed to the hall table and picked up the receiver. Quiet enough itself, my “Yes?” tipped headfirst into silence.

  Someone there at the other end, though.

  After a moment I hung up. Almost at once the phone began ringing again. I ignored it. The ringing stopped, then restarted. Beating its jangly chest till I capitulated.

  “Lew? Were you sleeping?” Deborah.

  “Not really. You just call?”

  “Started to. Then someone needed something—right away, of course.”

  “Don’t they always? Makes you feel important, though.

  Needed. How many of us are given that?”

  “You’re saying this is a gift?”

  “Hey, you have to unwrap it, it’s a gift, right?”

  “Hmmmm.”

  “Wow. A polyester necktie with violins on it! An ant-farm picture frame! An electric hot dog grill!”

  “Hmmmm again. How’d your day go?”

  “Not bad. Stuck its head out of the water some earlier than I’d have liked. And now the tail keeps wagging.”

  “T-a-i-l? Or t-a-l-e?”

  “Either, I guess. Both.”

  “Think any more about your book—if it is a book?”

  “Haven’t had much chance to.” I told her about my visit to Don, what he was planning. Then about my expedition to the morgue with Santos.

  “I’m sorry, Lew. Listen …”

  Across the street, someone dressed all in gray, as though wearing tatters of the night itself, hove into view. He carried an old-fashioned red kerosene lantern, swinging it back and forth and shouting what well might have been (at this distance I saw only the motion of his lips) All aboard! Though he could as easily have been calling Bring out your dead, searching for an honest man, or just seeking warmth.

  Surprising how we subtropical folk got used to the cold. Coming to take it so much for granted that we’d stopped remarking it. An adaptable lot. I stood now, blanketless, chill, watching the plume of my breath stream out, balance for a moment before me, fade.

  “Rehearsal’s going … well … oddly, I guess might be the best description. But good. We’re onto something here, and reluctant to shut it down. I may not be home for a while.”

  “You get a chance to eat?” She’d gone directly from wo
rk to rehearsal, I knew, and rarely ate lunch. “I could bring you something.”

  “We ordered out. Soup, sandwiches, coffee, beer. Should be here any minute. We’ve all been hitting it pretty hard, and we were starving. Thought we’d take a break first, then tuck heads down and give a try to plowing on through, see where we get. Just a second, hang on.” Someone had spoken to her, and she turned away briefly to answer. “Lew …”

  “Still there?” I said after a moment.

  “Yeah. Yeah, still here. Guess I will be for some time too, from the look of it. Here, I mean. You be okay?”

  “Sure I will.”

  Enormous shadow accompanying him, the man came back along the sidewalk with his lantern.

  “I was sitting outside the theater tonight waiting for everyone to show. Tired beyond belief, exhausted really, but at the same time excited, eager. There were these rings and loops around everything, like auras, street and sidewalks and the edges of buildings vibrating, trembling. I didn’t know if that was because of the light or just because I was so tired. Dark was coming on fast, and I remembered your telling me how, when you were a child back in Arkansas, you’d sit in your backyard trying to watch it get dark. After a while you’d look around and realize it had gone several degrees darker but that you hadn’t been able to see the change as it happened. We never do, do we?

  “Sorry, Lew,” she said. “I’m just fantastically, incredibly, unbelievably tired. When I’m this tired, my mind’s all over. Nothing connects and everything seems to. Listen, don’t wait up, okay? I’ll see you in the morning.”

  “Have a good rehearsal.”

  I put the phone down with the sure sense that I was letting go of something far more than a conversation; with the sense, too, that there was little enough I could do to change this.

  Or maybe it’s just my storywriter’s sense, all these years later, telling me that.

  Chapter Fifteen

  BOY’S BEEN SICK, Lester said. Took to his bed and won’t be budged, over a week now. Never done that before. I’d gone across for coffee and doughnuts from the Circle K. Lester held his plastic cup on one bony knee, vinelike fingers wrapped around. We’d both wisely foregone the doughnuts after tasting them. Pigeons strutted happily among their dismembered remains.

  Maybe I could go see him.

  Don’t know as how it would do any good. But if you could spare the time, the boy does seem to have taken to you, in his own way. Meaning only (I thought) that occasionally, in his own way, he acknowledged my existence.

  We walked four, maybe five blocks. A square, Federal-looking house set almost flush with the sidewalk, columns thick as pecan trees on the shallow gallery out front, two stories, peach with darker trim, faux gable stuck atop like a stubby birthday candle. We went up wooden external stairs painted industrial gray through a wrought-iron gate, multiple locks and frosted-glass front door into the entryway. Folks are away, Lester said. Table inset with lime-green tile there, vase of yellow, hopeful flowers on it. Mail stacked alongside. Floor itself tile, darker green, light blue. Up more stairs then to the boy’s room. Mattress in a corner, chair by the window. Cardboard box on its side, packed neatly with food: boxes of crackers, squares of cheese, cans of Vienna sausage, potted meat, bags of carrots, celery. Boy doesn’t take much to beds, Lester explains, just plain will not sleep in one. Won’t sit at table either, or eat like reg’lar folk—shaking his head.

  But I understood. This food was the boy’s own, forage, stockpile. He had no further need to go out into the world for it, no need to ask anything more of that world, anything at all, at least for a while. Here in his cave, on this pure, bare island, he’d become self-contained, self-sufficient, insular, hermetic, whole.

  All man’s problems, Pascal said, derive from the simple fact that he is unable to remain quietly alone in his room.

  The boy, just as Lester reported, lay on the mattress. On his right side, knees drawn up, so that he faced me when I sank to the floor just inside the door. My own knees stuck up like a cricket’s. I’d put my back to the wall and slid down it. God. I used to be able to do this, and it doesn’t seem so long ago, with ease. Now garden tools dig at my joints and I fight for breath. Cramps announce themselves: arriving on track four.

  The boy and I sat looking at one another. His eyes wide, unblinking. Does something, recognition, sympathy, identification, pass between us? Is there a message, is there feeling, even comprehension, in those eyes? How can I know? They’re like stone artifacts left behind, the menhirs of Carnac, unreadable.

  Then the boy worked his mouth a moment and made sounds.

  What was that?

  You got me, Lewis, Lester said from the doorway. Miracle, some might be inclined to say. Boy’s never spoken before. No one thought he could…. Big uns?

  Pigeons.

  You’re right. It could be.

  What about them? I asked the boy. What about the pigeons? What are you trying to tell me?

  His mouth worked silently for a time before producing again (at what unimaginable cost?) that same indecipherable sound.

  Here I squatted at cave’s mouth, a midwife attending language’s birth, witnessing urgencies that over hundreds of years, a thousand, would shape themselves into human speech. Lester shifted feet beside me in the doorway. Downstairs the phone rang. On the third ring, the answering machine picked up. Again, momentarily, I became a child: comforting voices from other rooms, grown-ups out there doing drinks and dinner parties, extending the ever-elastic day while I lie tucked away safe and warm in night-time’s folds.

  We waited, but the boy failed to speak again. When at last I stood, hauling myself up with one hand on whatever I could reach, wincing at pain and stiffness, his eyes didn’t follow.

  I could have said many things as Lester and I trudged together down the stairs. That the boy had identified somehow with the park’s pigeons, taking their illness, their immobility—all he could understand of death?—for his own. That with the extreme posture of his stillness he’d found a way to speak, a way to express his grief. Instead I said that I was sorry and hoped the boy might soon get better. Lester thanked me for coming.

  It was my day for casualty reports. Earlier I’d gone to see Alouette. She’d been up and about and doing well for some time, but two days ago that bearable pain along the incision became something more; she woke with a fever and with (her words) maggoty white pus oozing from the site. A two-hour wait and five-minute visit at her OB/GYN confirmed the obvious diagnosis of infection. So now she was supposed to be back on bed rest, pushing fluids, cleaning the incision regularly with peroxide, gobbling dollar-a-capsule Keflex. I found her sitting at the kitchen table, laptop propped awobble on stacked books and phone cradled to one ear, little LaVerne asleep alongside in what looked like a dishpan lined with towels bearing pictures of teakettles, iron skillets, yellow squash, carrots.

  As usual, the backdoor stood open, screen unlatched.

  “Don’t blame me,” Alouette said, looking up from computer and phone, when I stepped through. “She likes it there, it’s the only place she’ll go to sleep. I laugh at your sixty-dollar cradle! your tapes of mother’s heartbeat!”

  “You really shouldn’t be sitting here with the door unlocked.”

  “So everyone says.” Back to the phone. “Look, I don’t mean to interrupt, but you’re telling me Judge Haslep isn’t in town? Even though he had a full docket today and has another scheduled tomorrow? Why am I supposed to believe this?”

  She motioned me to sit.

  “You’ll get back to me? Gee, I sure hope so.” Sweetest voice possible. “Within the hour? Before I start dialing up some other numbers here on my Rolodex, asking if they know what’s going on?”

  Thumbing the phone dead, she set it down.

  “Every bit of your mother’s charm.”

  “God, I hope so. Worked for her. Get you something?”

  “I’m good. You?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “I do have to s
ay it doesn’t look much like a bed in here. Which is where, according to my information, you’re supposed to be?”

  She shrugged. “Larson.” Word and shrug alike conveying this comic sense of the burden she had to carry, alas. “So why is it he talks to you when he never talks to anyone else?”

  “Must be the honest face. Maybe like any good tribesman he values my experience as an elder. Or at the other end of civilization, merely defers to my status as cult novelist.”

  “My God, you don’t think he can read, do you?”

  “Stranger things have happened.”

  “Besides, I thought you gave all that up.”

  “More like I was given up. Not that you’d be changing the subject….”

  A beat, as Deborah and her actors would say. “I feel fine, Lew. Little Verne’s fine.”

  “That’s good. We’d all like to keep it that way.”

  She pushed the phone to one side, a dinner plate she was done with. “I’m not going to get out of talking about this, am I?”

  I shook my head.

  She typed in several lines, hit the mouse, glanced at the screen and hit it again. Then in a gesture of capitulation raised her hands, fingers spread. Pushed back from the table.

  “The messages began about the time I learned I was pregnant. Just a sentence or two at first, scrawled on postcards. I didn’t think too much about them.”

  “Unsigned.”

  “Always. I’d wonder, but how far can you go with nothing to go on?”

  “You didn’t save them? Didn’t take any notice of postmarks?”

  “Why would I?”

  “And these were what—standard post-office issue? Picture postcards?”

  “Well … at first a lot of them were like those godawful slick cards from souvenir shops. Antelopes with jackrabbit ears, talking cactus wearing sunglasses, ‘Back to the grind soon’ with the drawing of an office coffeepot, that sort of thing. The messages were just as generic. Wish you were here. Hope you’re well. Missing you.”