Ghost of a Flea

by James Sallis

  “Then at some point they changed?”

  “So slowly as to go unremarked.”

  From time to time her mother’s speech leapt to the surface in Alouette’s, word choice, cadence, attitude. Fishhooks in the heart.

  “After a while I began to have the feeling that the cards were getting selected rather than picked at random. A stunning photo of Alaska with ‘It never gets fully dark here’ written on the back, for instance. There’s some deeper message there, I’m sure. Was sure. Though I had and have absolutely not the barest ghost of an idea what it might be.”

  “Nothing directly threatening.”

  “Nothing overt. Nor ever, really. More the feel of it all. This presence forever refusing to announce itself but always palpably there.”

  Catching a thought on the wing, she pushed back up to the computer to type it in. I remembered LaVerne telling me, You’re never completely here, with me, when you’re working, are you, Lew?

  “Sounds like classic paranoia, doesn’t it?” Alouette said.

  “Exactly the response a stalker wants to elicit…. I’ve seen your GOK file, you know.”

  “I was wondering when you’d bring that up. If you’d bring it up.”

  “Everything about it—your taking pains to tuck it away, that it exists at all—suggests you must have taken the whole affair more seriously than you claim.”

  From within the dishpan on the floor alongside came the scuttling sound of small legs and arms. “Hungry again,” Alouette said. Fishing little Verne out, she bared a breast and put the baby to it.

  “I do have to wonder, though, Lew. How is it you manage to avoid seeing this as a violation of privacy? All those rights and principles you uphold so heartily—what, they just go by the way when it becomes personal? And you have no qualms about the dishonesties involved?”

  “Of course I do.”

  She shifted the child against her chest. “Of course you do. I’m sorry, Lew. I know it’s not that simple.”

  “What is?”

  “And I do appreciate your taking time to look into this. Though it’s probably nothing.”

  “Probably. But it’s okay with you if I keep poking around, right?”

  “Sure it is. But talk to me about it, all right?” The baby kept sliding down; with one arm under, Alouette kept shrugging her back up. “I need to give Deborah a call about getting you guys over here for dinner sometime soon, too. Been way too long. How’s Don, by the way?”

  “Doing good. Over the worst of it. Should be home in a day or two.” I told her about Derick, about Don’s latest notion. Then took leave of Alouette to wend my own way homeward—through the thickening hubbub, as Wordsworth has it. By the park to draw from its well, from Lester and his young charge, whatever solace I could, then over sidewalks heaving up like sculpted waves above the roots of ancient trees, Spanish moss overhead, buildings sharecropped into ruin all about. Everything and everyone I knew a casualty. Some of war, but most of us casualties instead of subtler things: ambition, expectation. Of sex, history, our families; of what is within us or therein lacking. Economic casualties, too. Washed away in the floods pushing downhill from America’s scripture of progress and spilling out over the banks of the gospel according to market economy, privilege and special interest, inundating us. Casualties of the system.

  Almost home, I passed my favorite statue in all of New Orleans, a Confederate officer astride his horse. Time had not been good to him. His name on the statue’s base was unreadable beneath a century’s mildew, and though protected by the historical society, here he was stuck on a tiny plot of land between a sandwich shop and low-end apartment house. Both front legs of his horse were in the air, signifying that he’d died in battle. One aloft would have meant he died of wounds sustained in battle; all four aground, that he’d died of natural causes. All our statues, all our horses, should have both front legs in the air. Casualties everywhere.

  It was, as I said, my day for casualty reports. I got home, found a starving cat and a message to call 528-1433, took care of the first though perhaps not (and never) to his satisfaction, dialed the second and after two rings had an uptown, quiet-spoken Yes? at the other end. Lew Griffin, I told her. Please hold. Moments later, a heavy breather.

  “Thank you for returning my call, Mr. Griffin. I was not at all certain you would do so.”

  I waited.

  “Perhaps apologies are in order? I had not intended to catch you unaware. I thought you would know to whom you were speaking. That Mrs. Molino had seen to that.”

  “I know.”

  “Ah. Good, then. It’s been many years since we last spoke. A call much like this one, as I remember. I hope you’ve been well?”

  Silence slalomed down the wires.

  “I realize that you don’t like me, Mr. Griffin. This is as it should be: I’ve given you no reason to. Nor do I require or particularly desire your approbation.” His sentences fell into place, space and silence between, like bricks being set into a wall. “I do, however, ask that you hear me out now—if that much is possible?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Thank you. I am calling … Excuse me.” He turned away from the phone. Four coughs rang out like distant rifle shots. Then he was back. “There is an individual I have need to locate. Purely a personal matter. In the past, I’m told, such searches were a specialty of yours. I wonder if perhaps you might consider, if there were some way I might persuade you to undertake, locating this individual for me.”

  “Your sources were correct when they said ‘in the past,’ Dr. Guidry. I don’t do that work anymore.”

  “I see…. They told me that as well, of course. Nonetheless I felt it imperative to ask. In which case, perhaps you could recommend me someone else? Another … practitioner?”

  I gave him Boudleaux’s name, address, e-mail, phone and fax numbers.

  “A moment. Let me … Yes, I have it. Thank you.” Silence in the wires again, that vacuum, that pull.

  “I have become, I understand, a grandfather,” he said at length. “Alouette and the child, they are both well?”

  “They are.”

  “Very good. Then—” Again he turned away, into that chesty coughing. “Mr. Griffin, could you hold a moment, please?” the quiet, uptown voice asked. Moments later Guidry was back, apologizing. “Might you possibly prevail upon the girl to call me, Mr. Griffin? It would mean a great deal to me. I—”

  This time he didn’t come back, and after a moment the quiet voice said, “I’m afraid Dr. Guidry has become indisposed. He does appreciate your help, Mr. Griffin.” Voice still there at the other end, waiting.

  “I’m not at all sure the doctor would want me to tell you this, Mr. Griffin. Actually, I’m fairly certain that he wouldn’t. But nowadays, with no one else available to take these decisions, I’ve only my own counsel to fall back upon.”

  She paused.

  “The thing is, Dr. Guidry is dying. An advanced cancer of the prostate, that he seems to have known about for some time yet, whatever his reasons, chose to leave both unremarked and untreated. I have no way of judging whether this might affect your response to his request. I did feel you should know.”

  “Thank you—Mrs. Molino, is it?”

  “It is. Catherine. And Mr. Griffin?”

  “Yes.”

  “It is I who answers the phone, on this line, always … should you happen to call again.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  MORNING’S MINION. Dappled dawn-drawn falcon towing in its wake besides the new day, like a ragman’s cart, this wagonload of old. Breath a white plume above, Deborah’s pale body alongside. Both of them oddly insubstantial? Bellies of frost at the base of the window. Birds outside richly achitter as though seeking news of the tropics so soon and suddenly departed. Surely one of them’s heard something.

  Like a tired swimmer, I turned onto my side, skimming the surface of this day. Land behind, land ahead. Neither in sight.

  So many in my life fallen, gone
so quickly. My parents, LaVerne, Alouette’s first child. The man I killed up by Baton Rouge as oil rigs wheezed beside us, flat birds’ heads rocking and pecking on their tethers. Can that really have been almost forty years ago? Before long, before anyone notices, Raymond Carver wrote, I’ll be gone from here, and was. Or Rilke in “Portrait of My Father As a Young Man.” He sees the dreams in his father’s eyes, the prehensile brow like his own, all the rest so contained and unknowable that, even as Rilke looks on, the image of his father begins fading into the background: O quickly disappearing photograph in my more slowly disappearing hand. My own photograph would look much the same. Soon enough we all fade from whatever records, whatever impressions, there are of us. Fade like Rilke’s father into time itself, the gray batting forever at our backs. Might David one day, looking at a photograph of me, sense something of those same longings? I remembered the photo of my young parents sitting together, smiling and happy, on the hood of their Ford. A woman I did not recognize—where in the embittered, joyless mother I grew up alongside was this pretty young woman hiding?—and a man I knew but slightly better, a man who had faded into the background long before his time, at the very start of mine.

  The birds’ tropics would be back, of course. They had only to wait here, gossiping among themselves. But my mother’s happiness, the happiness I saw in that photo, once fled never returned. Would David?

  LaVerne was gone. Baby Boy McTell. Hosie Straughter. Harry, the man I killed up by Baton Rouge. Don’s son. All of us, eventually. Before long, before anyone notices.

  You’re always quoting other people, Verne told me once. Anytime something important happens or some thought logjams in your head, there you are, hopping up like a schoolboy, pick me! pick me! with what Dante or Camus or Thingamabob said. You think anyone gives half a damn, Lew? And half the time, anyway, you’re only using it to avoid digging in, avoid having to find out what you think. Or what you feel.

  Deborah’s arm came across my shoulder, pulling me up from the depths, back safely to land. (Did I struggle? Drowning men often do.) Spread of sunlight on every surface. Wall and curtain, bureau, nightstand, quilt, rib cage. Whole world become surfaces now: how long will they hold? I feel Deborah’s breath on my neck as she pushes into me. Warm the whole of her length, she smells faintly of sweat. Blankets and history, even this morning light, weigh us down.

  “You’re awake,” she said.

  “Oh yeah. Courtesy of our friends the birds.”

  “Who won’t have us missing a single moment of this exciting new day.”

  “Not to mention Bat, who’s been in here at least twice already, demanding to know why his food’s not been replenished.”

  “Or the pneumatic truck collecting curbside garbage.” Grunting and sucking air through pursed lips, slamming hands against wall and headboard, she did a great take on bad brakes, tailgates, whirring pickup motors.

  “Ah, civilization.”

  “Not just Twelfth Night and Faulkner, is it, Lew?”

  “Or Ricki Lake.”

  “Point taken.”

  Then: “Got some good points there yourself.”

  “Hard little buggers, aren’t they? Anytime I have my period I get horny—you know that, right?” Her free hand moved down, rested on my stomach. “Sleep okay?”

  “Mostly. I had this dream that seemed to go on and on all night, though I’m sure it didn’t. Couldn’t have. We were getting ready for a trip, fitting things into the car. Two friends (in the dream I knew who they were, even if I’m clueless now) had these old coins with distinctive dates, dates that jumped out at you, nickels I think. They kept putting them down in front of us, wherever we were. We’d be drinking coffee, one of them would come along and slap down a nickel there between cups. Standing on queue at a movie premiere—you looked quite wonderful, by the way, wearing one of your crinkle skirts, low heels, a sleeveless sweater, long earrings—there they were again with the nickels.”

  I turned towards her. We made necessary adjustments, tugged at covers.

  “Damn cold, isn’t it?”

  “Houses just aren’t built for it.”

  “Neither are we.”

  We lay there quietly for a time.

  “Play going okay?”

  “Way better than I have any right to expect. Turned into something of a marvel last night, actually. Everyone felt it at the same time. Suddenly the play wasn’t us: we were the play.”

  “That’s good.”

  “It’s what you work for. You never know if it’s going to happen.” Moments later she added: “Most of the time it doesn’t.”

  Doors slammed shut and dogs barked outside. A car alarm racketed on. Cans and bottles rang together as a neighbor emptied trash. From open windows in a third-floor apartment across the street, Mahler fought his way up through strings and brass to a deafening crescendo.

  “Time for us to put the nickel down, Lew?”

  Whatever the nickel was.

  Chapter Seventeen

  OBVIOUSLY this man has come to and found himself onstage. He looks about him, off to the wings, out at the audience. Then back to the wings, where a prompter reads him a line. He repeats it. The stage crew comes on and begins carrying off parts of the set, a chair, a screen, a table, as he speaks, looking back and forth from prompter to audience. Then a second person steps out and begins speaking. Their stories, we soon realize, interweave. And now there’s a third….

  Something familiar, too, in what they’re saying.

  I recognize lines from Suddenly Last Summer just as Deborah leans towards me to whisper: Ionesco. The crew reappears, lugging yet another character in its wake, and goes back offstage bearing further bits and pieces of the set, a bookcase, a teapot, leaving this new character behind. Like the first, he looks about, disoriented. Then lines of Sartre spring from his lips, not The Flies, I think, something a bit more obscure.

  Molière, O’Neill, Ben Jonson and Vian soon follow.

  Gradually we come to realize that these are characters left over, as it were, from other plays, secondary characters, supporting roles—all those to whom, in whose stage lives, nothing much happened.

  Afterwards at a coffeehouse on Magazine, as I watched powdered sugar from beignets drift in a blizzard onto her dress and café au lait’s breath struggle up from the cup, Deborah was quiet.

  “I miss it, Lew.”

  “Theater, you mean.”

  “It’s as though something’s been torn from me. As though there’s this huge vacant lot in the middle of my life, buildings all around.”

  “So plant a garden. Take back the lot.”

  “It can’t be that easy, can it, Lew?”

  And of course it wasn’t. In the weeks following, Deborah began play after play, at length abandoning them all.

  “It’s gone,” she said, weeping against me in the deep of night. “How do people live without passion, without that one bright blue light? How do they go on without something central in their life?”

  We were agreed on the idiocy of good advice, that only a fool would give it, a greater fool accept it. That night, three in the morning with Deborah’s body shuddering against me and wind padding predatorily about outside, was no different.

  “That’s what people do,” I said. “They go on.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  I WASN’T LOOKING FOR HIM, you understand.

  Long since an adult, he was equally capable of making his own choices and declining to make them; he’d never hedged at accepting the fallout from either. Nor could I plead to having had much impression or influence on his life, not having been around to offer understanding, a sympathetic ear, least of all an example. I knew something, myself, about not making choices.

  So as I rummaged the city, touching down with beer-drinker fishermen at their ordained posts on the levee off Tchoupitoulas, benching myself to reminisce in a statue-guarded, pie-slice park on Magazine, prowling Decatur with its shoulder-narrow sidewalks and balconies like shrugs above, wading a
cross river-wide Canal down Esplanade to the Faubourg Marigny and rising back up through the Quarter past Simple Suzies, Eds and Professor Bills, past lean-to missions with tureens of watery soup and hope, past the library and City Hall, Leidenheimer Bakery, wooden stoops and swayback cement stairways, shipwreck islands of storm-tossed furniture, cable spools and milk crates on the neutral ground, I wasn’t looking for my son.

  For something within myself, rather. At some level that’s what all our searches are about, of course.

  “Can’t help you much, Lew,” his mother said that morning when I called. “Far as I knew, everything was going well. Last heard from him—I’d have to check to be sure—four, five weeks back? One of those trademark postcards of his, where the message starts off in regular script and becomes ever more crabbed, final sentences squeezed in sideways at the margins or asterisked in between lines.”

  “No sense of what was going on in his life?”

  “You’re kidding, right? You know what those cards are like. Sometimes he’d touch down, sure. Bring up some play or movie or concert he’d seen, string together bits of overheard conversation, remark that both of you’d taken to hanging around the house too much. Mostly, though, he just wrote about what he saw at his job. People he got to know there, their stories, where they lived, how. Hang on, I’ve got to pull something out of the oven.” Two, three minutes later she was back. “Been a long time since we’ve talked, Lew.”

  “True enough.”

  “No reason for that, you know. You have my address, you could write from time to time, even do something outrageous like send the occasional Christmas or birthday card. Scrawl a satirical line or two in there if it made you feel better, whatever space’s left. A quote, maybe, something appropriately snarly. Swift, Laurence Sterne, Thomas Bernhard, like that. It’s always Serious Friday somewhere.”

  Serious Fridays had begun as a joke when David and his friends were students, all of them casually bohemian. No television, parties, dumb movies or other mindless escapism allowed on Fridays, the screed read. Exalted conversation only. High-end jug wine. Smelly, mysterious cheese. Books tucked underarm, coolly they’d stroll towards bars and ethnic restaurants, skirling intellectual happy hours like bullfighter’s capes about them out there in a hot world.