The Man on the Ceiling

by Steve Rasnic Tem

  But then I saw him shoot up. Just like that, talking to me in the middle of the night while we both sat on the roof of our house, he injected something into a vein on the inside of his elbow. He made no sound when the needle went in. I thought I was going to be sick.

  After a long moment, he went on. “All of you. I heard you walking around and sliding chairs and flushing and taking showers and laughing and yelling at each other and answering the phone and leaving and coming home and feeding the dog and doing laundry and cooking. I heard what you said.”

  “What?” I breathed. “What did we say?”

  “Oh, just shit like how Veronica was never going to learn to make change and how some neighbor lady yelled at Anthony for singing.”

  My heart seized, the way it still does sometimes when an event is mentioned that occurred during that tiny but infinite period we had Anthony as our son. I said, “She makes change just fine now.”

  “And shit about writing. Lots of shit about writing.”

  “No doubt.”

  “And you and Mom were always saying you loved each other. Every day. All the time.”

  I was a little embarrassed. “Well, that’s true. We do love each other all the time.”

  He stood up precipitously. By then he must have been seriously high. I wondered if I could catch him when he fell. I’d never been able to catch him, but maybe, somehow, this time would be different. He was tall against the night sky. A plane passed behind him, too high to hear, red lights in formation. “You guys never said anything about me.”

  This angered me. Melanie’s always going on about respecting other people’s perspectives. To hell with that. “Chris, that is simply not true.”

  I saw something in his hand. A weapon? But it was a piece of the roof he’d pulled off or found already loose, and I imagined him tearing the house apart under us, shingle by shingle, brick by brick. Whatever it was, he flung it into the air, and it vanished; I didn’t hear it hit the ground. “Never once. Nobody mentioned my name. Like I didn’t exist in this—house.” I knew “family” was the word he’d intended but hadn’t been able to bring himself to say.

  My legs were cramping. I stood up, too, and swayed dangerously, flailed for something to hold onto, found a cable I hoped was the telephone line and not a hot wire. “We talked about you a lot while you were missing.” With silly fastidiousness, I corrected myself. “While we thought you were missing. Missing to us, anyway. In fact, we had to make a rule that we’d talk about something else. We just kept going over and over the same things. Maybe you were dead. Maybe you were going to be okay. Your mother was frantic, and you know how she is when she gets like that. She talks.”

  We both chuckled, and I was shocked to realize we were sharing a father-son moment of exasperated fondness for a woman we both loved. Then Chris slid on his heels down the peak, sending up sparkling debris, and I thought for sure he was about to fall or jump or otherwise take flight. He came to a stop at the very edge. “What about you? Dad?”

  “What about me?” I dissembled, knowing full well what he was getting at. He just snorted, and after a long pause with him on the edge of the roof, I felt compelled to tell the truth. “You’re never far from my thoughts, Chris. I don’t know how to think about you, but I think about you a lot. I always have, ever since you’ve been my son.” I swallowed, closed my eyes, held on tight to the cable as vertigo welled up, and made myself add, truthfully, “I always will.”

  “So how come I didn’t hear you?” he whispered.

  “I don’t know. But it’s true.”

  “How come I don’t know that?” he shrieked, and flew away.

  When the kids are all grown and gone, with luck to places of their own and not just away from this one, will we still live here? Will this old house be too big for just the two of us? Will there be too many stairs, too many rooms, too many stories or not enough?

  When one of us is left alone, will the widowed one hide in this house, in a smaller and smaller space, with only the man on the ceiling for company?

  Neighborhood kids, including our own, try to make this a haunted house. Generations of neighborhood kids, probably, so that it’s become the stuff of legend.

  It offends Melanie that people want to think of this house as haunted. But she also knows that her experience of it as friendly and warm is equally self-indulgent. It’s inherently none of those things. It can be any of them, whatever you need it to be. It takes what comes. It houses both life and death, as well it should. Anthony’s life and death here have hallowed it. It provides a place for whatever happens. We need places like this. It’s why we need places—for things to happen in.

  The fact that some people thought our house was haunted actually surprised me at first, and now I’m not sure why. When we moved in, it certainly looked the part. The vine covering about half the south wall was in one of its periods of aggressive growth, obscuring the roofline, hanging from the porch ceiling like a dead woman’s hair, invading the bay window casings, destroying portions of crown molding, fascia, Dutch gutters.

  Rotten patches of bead board allowed the vine access to the attic, and during rare but occasionally intense rainstorms, water poured in through the cracks. All this wood trim was painted a dirty gray. The screens in the high dormers were dark, torn, rusted.

  Scary enough for a house at street level, but this one crowned a ten-foot hill, so you had to look way up at it as you approached or passed by on your bike or glanced back over your shoulder. A veritable jungle had grown up around it, junipers and Siberian elms and ragweed and Canadian thistles over and around the wrought-iron fence.

  The first few Halloweens we’d open the front gates as far as they would go and light the house and porch with as much welcoming illumination as we could manage. Then I’d watch as costumed children large and small stopped at the front steps and peered up, considered, decided it wasn’t worth it, and scurried on. No doubt some of them had been told about the strange family with the unseen inhabitant in the black attic room. No doubt some of them feared the ghosts of the Dobermans who used to live here in the yard and leap out from the dark places. You could watch them making up legends if they didn’t know any: A lady in white with a knife and no voice stands by people’s beds at night. Or there was a corpse buried in the basement, blood stains under seven layers of old wallpaper.

  And, I finally realized, no doubt some of them knew our son had died here.

  A house like ours calls for stories. Maybe all houses do. We do our best to answer that call.

  The only time this “haunting” upset me was right after my son died. Anxiety then was like a horse I got on every night when I went to bed, riding me into dark and incomprehensible places I’d never imagined. When I’d finally fall asleep for two or three hours, it would be out of exhaustion from the trip. After eight years of this, a kindly doctor talked me out of my aversion to medicines and gave me the pills that would put a stop to these nightly rides. By then, however, I’d started losing people’s names, and I haven’t yet found all of them.

  I suppose some places and people, victimized by unfortunate beginnings or bad memories, are more likely than others to be thought of as haunted. It’s hard to change the reputation once it’s grabbed hold. Ask any ex-con. Ask Chris.

  For myself, I’ve always been skeptical. Not that I don’t believe there are things out there beyond our understanding—I’m convinced that’s always the case, part of the real world we must all contend with. But I don’t trust the conventional language for these experiences. It’s the words I doubt. I suspect the best way to describe a mystery is to let the imagination do its job—which is to say, make something up.

  And lately I’ve come to believe in something other than haunted places we visit out of curiosity, too much time on our hands, and a desire for a good story. I’ve come to believe there are places and spaces that haunt, that travel with us wherever we go.

  I know people who will live only in houses where no one else has ever li
ved. It’s like when your mother told you to take that spoon or pencil or blade of grass out of your mouth because you didn’t know where it had been. Or like the sects that counsel their members against garage sales because previous owners might have been in the service of the devil and the objects consequently possessed. I doubt I have the right words (or just the plain right) to convince them that everything we have has been someplace else, everything is borrowed, stolen, or inherited for our safekeeping and stewardship. Everything is possessed.

  I admit to having lots of fears for my wife, my children, my grandchildren. Not too many for myself anymore. Fear of embarrassment, so strong throughout my childhood and adolescence, certainly seems to have faded, or else I couldn’t say the things I’m saying to you now.

  I do fear I’m going to be one of those old men who’ll say damn near anything, which could be a bit of a burden for those who love me. Sometimes I fear it may go further than that, and they’ll have a certifiably crazy patriarch to manage (not that patriarchy is ever known for its sanity or manageability).

  Before the end of his life, Melanie’s father lost her name. Veronica is afraid I’ll lose hers someday. I’m tempted to tell her I don’t entirely trust names anyway. Instead, I make the dishonest promise that I’ll always know her name.

  Perhaps when I’m old I won’t talk about anything but the places that visit me for brief moments at a time. Places I’ve been, and places I’ve never seen before. Another fear I’ll share: what if I decide to stay in one of those places forever?

  The first place I lived in was a small house in a small town a few miles from the even smaller Appalachian village I would come to know as my home town.

  I’ve seen three photographs from the first house: one of the front, one of the back with me in the strangest little walker/tricycle combo, and one of me standing in my crib beneath a picture of the White Rabbit from Alice in Wonderland—her guide, you may remember, into another place. Only three photos, and I was barely two when we left that house forever. Yet, on a visit home from college I amazed my mother by drawing an accurate floor plan of my first home, complete with placement of the furniture.

  Now, I’m a skeptic. Maybe my youthful conviction that my drawing was precisely accurate simply overpowered my mother’s uncertain memory. I do have both a vivid memory and a vivid imagination.

  But in the invisible house we live in, the house that overlaps and shares features with this physical structure sitting on this hill and then goes far beyond it, I know where the furniture goes even though its appearance changes every time I look at it. One room holds a cabinet-style phonograph and a box full of the shards of my mother’s records I’ve broken. In another room I find my first tricycle buried under huge black chunks of coal. One door is the door to what I dreamed last night, which I must never open again. Another is the door to nowhere.

  The invisible rooms of old furniture are not what really interest me. Sometimes in the middle of the night when I’m walking through them, I find myself muttering, “Been there, done that,” over and over like a protective chant. Truly interesting are the invisible rooms I’ve never been in, in whose tall crystalline mirrors I catch glimpses of myself doing things I’ve never done. I worry that I might not be able to visit all the rooms in the invisible house in whatever time I have left to me.

  I haven’t been back to my hometown in many years. For someone whose mind travels great distances in the average day—and whose relationship with daily practicalities no doubt suffers for it—I’m a fussy and reluctant traveler through the physical world. I just don’t want to go anywhere (England, for some reason, is a notable exception). I prefer to spend my time here, in this place which is home, the first place in my memory that has truly felt like home. I have children and grandchildren who came to life for me here. And a son who died in this house.

  Anyway, I don’t need to travel. Other places have a way of traveling to me. Particularly when Melanie is away, I find myself waking up in rooms other than the one I went to bed in. I wouldn’t want to overstate the phenomenon—it isn’t a sustained hallucination of any sort. The experience lasts only moments, but it is as vivid as the taste of today’s lunch in my mouth. I see the shadows made by an old mobile on a yellowed ceiling I haven’t slept under in thirty years. I smell the flowers and hear the buzzing of yellow jackets in a bush on the other side of a screen that rotted out during my teens. My first gaze of the morning is at a multi-colored horizon of book spines in that crowded twenty-five-dollar-a-month college apartment.

  A different but related experience happens to me late at night. Somehow the gravity of the world shifts around me in the darkness and I know the walls have changed to those of some other place even though I can’t see them. They’re closer to me than they should be, or much farther apart.

  I don’t find all this particularly strange. I just have a vivid imagination and a vivid memory and sometimes they’re the same thing. Certainly there’s room enough for both before breakfast.

  An uninhabited house offends the natural order. The whole point of a house, its reason for being, is to provide shelter to human beings, who can’t live long without it. A vacant house begs to be filled, with new owners, with squatters, with ghosts, with fictional characters (maybe even a man on the ceiling) who can be whatever the house needs them to be. Filled, inhabited, or razed.

  Sometimes I get lost.

  That’s not the most eloquent way I might have expressed it, but it’s the simple truth of it. Sometimes I get lost. Melanie tells me again and again how solid I am, how responsible, how adult. Much to my own surprise and certainly despite myself, I do seem somehow to have achieved those conditions. There’s not much choice, really, if you have children.

  But even with that, sometimes I get lost. I don’t really think I’m more delusional than your average human being, but sometimes I go walking in these rooms for hours, even days at a time, and I don’t always know which room I’ve settled in for this particular portion of the evening. I don’t really know who’ll be sitting in that armchair. There are moments I can’t remember who is alive and who is dead.

  When did we paint the walls that color? It may have been decades ago. It may have been tomorrow.

  How old are my granddaughters? Where is Chris? What did I miss? Do you know what hour is sunset this evening? And what about tomorrow’s sunrise? I don’t want to miss it. I don’t want to miss anything. But sometimes it takes so long to go through all these rooms. And the children who play here won’t always give me their names. Give me a call and we’ll have dinner together sometime. Just give me a call. Give me a call.

  Sometimes I think getting lost is my one true talent, the thing I’ve always been best at, the thing I will be remembered for. Getting lost and finding my way back. Finding my place. And knowing all along that eventually there will come a day when I won’t find my place, I won’t find my way through this ever-complicating home that has claimed me all these years. I won’t find my way out. And that’ll be. That’ll be. Lost in my place. Forever in my place.

  Chapter 5

  Naming Names

  “What’s that boy’s name?!”

  That’s our granddaughter Katy, four years old. Her favorite punctuation is the question mark combined with the exclamation point, whose name I’ve lately learned to my delight is “interrobang.”

  Katy likes to keep her characters straight. To do that, she requires names.

  “Baba?!” That’s her name for me, a linguistic example of phylogeny recapitulating ontogeny, the individual replication of the evolution of the species. “Baba” actually means “Grandmother” in many parts of Eastern Europe, including the region now once again called Slovakia where my not-very-distant ancestors came from. Not being Slovak, Katy wouldn’t have known that when in some way she decided the name for who I am to her would be Baba. When she slips and calls me Grandma, I object. Stubbornly, even petulantly, I won’t answer to that name from her, though it’s a precious and well-used name in
its own right.

  “Baba?! Baba?! What’s his name?!”

  I tell her again, but it obviously doesn’t satisfy her. Thumb in her mouth, eyes wide, she intently regards our friend, whom she’s met before. She wants to know about him. The name is a start, but it’s not enough. She wants to know who he is, and, of course, I can’t tell her that.

  But I understand what she’s asking. Once I’ve found the right name for a character, I can write his or her story. Every character in the world is waiting to be named, and every character resists naming.

  “Baba?! Baba?! Baba?!” Katy is nothing if not persistent. “What’s your friend’s name?! What’s his name?!”

  I remember the very moment Katy finally understood who Steve was. “Papa,” she said, and kissed his hand.

  Sometimes Steve has a harder time than Katy keeping his characters straight. His memory for other details—the location of our first dinner date, for example, including the exact table where we sat—is encyclopedic, but a while ago, after a decade’s lost sleep, he began losing names. Names of movie stars and politicians and writers. Names of people to whom he’d just been introduced and names of people he had known for years.

  I know it worries him. But so many names pass through our lives, and they change so often, who could be expected to remember them all?

  The round-faced five-year-old with the Prince Valiant haircut and huge green eyes was our daughter. Sometimes I could not fathom this miracle. Sometimes I still can’t. And yet, being my children’s mother, being Gabriella’s mother, has always seemed utterly natural.

  For one thing, I love her name. If I’d had naming rights I might well have chosen it. On her original birth certificate it was spelled wrong, “Gabrilla” without the “e,” not corresponding to the way she and, presumably, her birth parents pronounced it, sounding like the evil stepsister. This felt to me like another manifestation of how profoundly they neglected her. Hey, it’s reprehensible enough that you fractured your child’s—my child’s—skull and exposed her to sex at such an early age that she’ll never have the words to tell about it; for God’s sake, couldn’t you at least get her name right? The name you gave her? That beautiful name?