Ghostwright

by Michael Cadnum

  He got in with an expression of gratitude, and waved to the cars behind them that, yes, they would all be moving soon, and that, yes, he knew they were all there smiling peacefully behind him, cursing them both. Bell, civilized and manly, ground the gears trying to get the car moving again, and killed the engine.

  He made an elaborate show of not talking. Whatever she had felt, whatever she felt now, was fine with him. He would concentrate on driving.

  Bell was frightened of his own passenger, his lover, the woman he thought he knew. He had the most peculiar sensation in his belly. She could have gotten run over. But it wasn’t only her safety that made him feel weak. You just don’t do that. She’d interrupted traffic. The outrage of standing outside the car, the breach of traffic decorum, making a rhetorical point by standing arms akimbo in the middle lane of the Bay Bridge approach, completely drained him of speech.

  And she had seemed so rational. She had intimidated him with her calm. She had become suddenly a new person. It was amazing. You just never know a person at all. You just never can tell.

  Don’t think—just drive the car, he told himself. Don’t try to understand, and no matter what, don’t start arguing with her. Don’t criticize her. Don’t question her. Don’t say a thing.

  The green sign said: Last SF Exit.

  It took, perhaps, a minute. They were lost. There was no other way to put it, although he worked to come up with another word. Misguided. Malrouted. And it was his fault. Bell got them lost in a district of warehouses, somewhere in a South-of-Market canyon of loading docks and piles of flattened cardboard and what looked like cubes of crushed houses, blocks of plaster bristling with wire and splinters. Water glittered in gutters. Morning glory snaked over and around a mountain of used tires.

  “Where are we going?” she asked, as though trying to regain some of her former cool. “If I may ask.”

  “I just took a wrong turn or something.”

  “We are wasting time.”

  “I never get lost,” said Bell.

  “You’re lost.”

  “But I mean, this is the first time. You do it to me. You make me nervous.”

  She had to feel a bit sorry for him, in the midst of her adamantine fury. She was making things worse even when she folded her arms and didn’t say anything more. He was preoccupied with making no mistakes, and in doing absolutely nothing at all to offend her further, and all he could do was turn left into a street that began wide and empty of traffic, and became at once a truncated avenue into a brick wall.

  At a Chevron station a burly figure stretched forth a long arm in the direction Sarah would have gone anyway, and Bell hopped into the driver’s seat, shaking out his dark glasses again and snapping the car into gear.

  Be kind to this nice man, said the Shadow Mom. The Mom Voice used a pet phrase, a phrase from years ago: don’t be such a pill. “I’m sorry I’m so tense,” she said. One of the reasons the light was brighter, and the clouds softer, was Chris. He had awakened her to life, after all. “You shouldn’t have tried to deceive me.”

  He licked his upper lip, choosing his words carefully. “I just wanted to track something down about Asquith. I don’t care about it,” he added quickly. “Not now.”

  “What was it,” she inquired, attempting to sound less-than-venomous, “that you wanted track down, exactly?” Her father, too, had used phrases like “track down.” For some minds life was a series of problems, of solvable problems the mind was equal to.

  “Some very early writing of his. A one-act play he wrote just before he met Speke, a work for two voices. Jessica said they had it at the library. I was curious to compare it—” He broke off as he maneuvered the car into the fast lane. He continued, “Compare it to the work we all considered Speke at his best.”

  “I know you want to help Ham, too.” She was attempting to reassemble some semblance of her ordinary manner. There was no purpose in riding in a car with a man she wanted to bite. And he had, perhaps, in a stubborn, deliberate, wrong-headed way, wanted to understand what was happening. In that sense, he wanted to help Ham. It was clear, though, that more than anything, Christopher Bell wanted to help his book. More than anything else, he was a journalist, a man whose profession was the crafting of contemporary histories. The biography was taking a fascinating turn, she knew, and he wanted to follow it.

  He cleared his throat. “He’s the most intriguing person I’ve ever met,” he said, plainly grateful to be able to hold a reasonable conversation with her once again.

  Bell was intelligent, and warm, but he was not the heroic intellect she had imagined him to be. He had an exciting story. That was all that mattered to him. She forgave him that, but Bell could not be loyal to Ham as she was. She asked, “Even now?”

  “Even more so now.” He worked the car into the right-hand lane for the 280 turnoff. He gave a self-deprecating laugh. “When I first saw Stripsearch I knew that I should be a playwright.”

  “The movie or—”

  “The play. The movie was great, too, but they had to add some scenes that could be shot outside. Like when they go to a playground, just so they could sit on the swings and have the same confession scene that in the play took place in the bedroom. The play made me more nervous, you felt so shut in with the characters.”

  Here they were, she realized, continuing to believe that Speke had written Stripsearch. He had to have written it. The feel of the play, the impatience of the characters, their insistence on getting more out of life than ordinary day-after-day existence, more than the television schedule and the financial page offered, was so much like Ham.

  “Ham used to drink, you know,” she reminisced out loud. “I don’t mean the way he does now. I mean very heavily. He used to start before breakfast. It got so that his liver began to swell. He was frightened. One day it looked as if a balloon were swelling up inside his body, like a weird pregnancy. I think we both thought of his body as made of iron.”

  “Iron can rust.”

  She ached to see Ham. To hear his voice. She forced herself to make conversation. Talking about him made him seem, somehow, closer. “He’s always taken an Elizabethan view of medicine, not quite taking it seriously, seeing his body as a metaphor for something else. ‘The organ of courage in me is sick,’ he said, but he cut back on the tequila sunrises before breakfast. It hurt me to watch him do that to himself. I nagged him quite a bit. Then he went on a marathon drunk in L.A.”

  There was no other way to put it, she supposed, but it was wrong to use such a coarse phrase regarding a man like Ham. It was like something her father would have said about one of his old friends. “They had him closeted with screenwriters trying to create a plot around ‘Big Bucks’—a movie based on the song. And he drank so much they didn’t know what was wrong with him. He had hallucinations, cockroaches made of glass. It was obvious by the time he got back here that he was going to drink himself to death, and I locked all the liquor up and kept the key.”

  “Did it work?”

  “No. What worked was when he realized how much I cared. That worked.” She gazed out the window for a moment. “And then Maria came. She cured him completely. Oh, there was always the triple scotch before dinner, and he still did odd things like celebrate the Greek Orthodox Easter with a bottle of ouzo. He drank, but it wasn’t going to kill him any more. But I thought for years that he was basically fun loving, and liked to drink because he liked to laugh. I misunderstood, or maybe I lied to myself. He drank because he remembered Asquith.” And I could have done more to help him, she thought. I could have done much more, and I will. I promise you, Ham. I’m going to help you.

  But it was all too late. Whatever could have been between Ham and herself was all in the past, a river unnavigated, a trail grown thick with jungle. The earth reclaims. A life with Ham was a possibility she had never considered. Had he, she wondered, once been in love with her? It was possible, on one of those nights clipping critical studies out of the Washington Post, “Random Notes” o
ut of Rolling Stone. Maybe he drank because he was so close to a woman who was determined that their relationship be unnaturally professional, a priest and a nun against the world. Even priests fall prey to love, she thought. Many priests drink.

  Bell was driving fast, she knew, but the car did not seem to be making any progress. Buildings floated by with a dreamlike sluggishness. Overpasses loomed majestically, deliberately.

  “Sometimes you spend years,” she said “and then one afternoon you find yourself looking out at the trees, thinking that you haven’t been awake for a single moment, that it has all been lost on you.” I should have been his lover, she thought. We should have been married. It was my austerity that put him off. The eyes so many men had described as “cool.” Cool, sure-handed Sarah, expert at every matter but herself.

  But Ham had mistaken her, too. Or perhaps he simply didn’t want her, sexually, the way he wanted Maria.

  Her nails dug into her palms. This drive had never taken so long before. There was San Francisco Airport way off to their left, and the blur of eucalyptus, leaves glistening in the sunlight. And then the lumpish, awkward statue of Father Serra, pointing enigmatically westward, toward a ridge and a mass of trees. She kept feeling that they would be too late.

  Too late for what? she asked herself.

  Too late to help Ham. That’s why they kept talking about him, creating him with words because they could not actually see him.

  They left the freeway. Tree shadows flashed over the car. The highway to Live Oak had always seemed to Sarah to be a simple county road, two lanes that speared the hills. Now it was endless, twisting, writhing, more curves than she had remembered, a slow pickup truck, and then a horse cropping grass among the thistles, its rear jutting into the road. The highway stretched, elastic, surreal. They would never arrive.

  Sometimes she ran across an old friend at an airport, or in the rare luncheon in the City. “Do you really work for Hamilton Speke?” they would ask.

  It was easy to understand their respect for him, even their awe. Speke was one of those people who seem created by nature, or the gods, to be more alive than the people around them. For such a person fame was an easy garb, a comfortable clothing made of light. Fortune, joy, generosity—these had all come to him.

  Now the time had come for him to claim his life, wrest it away and become an artist again. She did not believe Asquith, whoever he might turn out to be, was half the creative man Hamilton Speke had been, and would be again.

  “What is he really like?” old girlfriends would ask. She had always murmured some pleasantry, unable to state simply what she really believed: that Speke was destined to be great.

  She clenched her hands together, tightly, like someone praying fervently, even desperately. Her fingertips were icy. Soon, she told herself. We’ll be there soon.

  There they were—the last familiar gnarled oaks, the outcropping of boulders.

  At last. But what she saw confused her, and her lungs tightened in her chest.

  No sense, she told herself. This makes no sense.

  She shut the car door behind her. The ugly clunk of the door was the only sound in the stillness. Numb, and unwilling to guess what was happening, she bit a knuckle, hard. Had Ham gotten security-conscious at last? It was possible. But this did not look like something he would do.

  But of course, it must be some whim. Something he had done to—to what? Ham would not do a thing like this.

  The black iron gates to Live Oak were shut, and chained, and the chain was locked.

  “Security guards?” Bell asked. “Maybe some sort of precaution …?”

  They both approached the chain as though it might be alive. The padlock was large, the chain old and made to tow dead trucks, or drag ships. The black links of iron looked strong, but they did not look like a professional security arrangement at all.

  She looked to Chris to say something but he simply fingered the padlock, as though its mechanism might be touch-operated. This was the way his mind worked, she saw yet again. He had to see and touch and consider every little detail.

  “We’ll have to get in,” he said at last, in a voice that apologized for stating the obvious, “some other way.”

  The chain shifted, just slightly, as though it writhed at the sound of his voice. Its subtle movement silenced both of them for a moment.

  “This is the only way in,” she said.

  “There has to be some other—”

  Her voice was shaking. “There really isn’t any other way at all. No roads, no trails. Nothing. There’s this iron fence, and then when you get off the road it’s all scrub, all undergrowth.” She could not add: virgin and thick, and full of poison oak.

  Even if she called out, Ham would not hear her voice from here.

  Bell shook the gate. It made a low, iron rattle, but did not appear to move. “I’ll have to lean on the horn—let them know we’re here.”

  “Chris, I don’t think you understand.”

  She was too cold to move, frozen in the heat of the sun.

  Trouble. She could not mouth the words.

  Ham was in trouble. She could see it in the color of the air, in the rise and fall of the oaks as they shrugged in the breeze.

  Something—an ugly, crushing blow, as unjust as the fury of a brutal god—was about to annihilate Hamilton Speke.

  36

  Asquith’s face was blistered and seared. The skin glistened, corroded with flesh-rust. He was a heretic rescued too late from the pyre. The body had been burned, it seemed, and released from the stake just as the flames began to digest the flesh.

  His carriage, however, was easy, his body relaxed, one hand falling lightly upon the back of the desk chair, a man ready to return to his studies, an executive poised to interview yet another underling. His eyes were alight, the same old Asquith eyes, the eyes that had watched him from outside. The eyes of a dead man who was without doubt very much alive.

  He did not move. He did not speak. Presence, his body seemed to say. I have presence, and you—what are you? You are a mere man, a clumsy, artless member of the audience. You have life, but I have magic.

  If nothing happens, Speke found himself thinking, if nothing happens, then all will be well. If we both stay like this, eternally.

  “It doesn’t really make me feel uncomfortable,” Asquith said. His elegant enunciation contrasted with the scathed mask of his face.

  Speke reminded himself to keep silent. Trading words with this apparition would evolve quickly into a losing contest.

  “I have been, if you will forgive me, taking codeine and other ameliorative drugs from your own medicine cabinet. They are most soothing, really. But there is one thing we must understand from the outset.”

  Speke did not take a single step, and he did not glance away for even an instant. As long as I do not move or speak, he reminded himself, he has no power over me.

  “The knife,” said Asquith.

  Speke tightened his grip on the wooden handle of the kitchen implement. But even this much of a response was a weakening, a giving-in. Stillness and silence are my shield, he told himself. This is not the old Asquith. This is something new, something beyond all experience.

  “You don’t really think it’s necessary, do you?”

  Speke did not move, although his spirit shrank within his body. Asquith was feeling his way into the room, and into Speke’s soul.

  The blistered mask of Asquith’s face creased for a moment in something like a smile. “Surely you don’t believe that I’ll do anything to hurt you.”

  Do nothing, Speke cautioned himself. Don’t answer him.

  And yet, he had to marvel at the thespian clarity of Asquith’s speech, the precise diction, the strong, clear voice of the most well-trained actor.

  “I am a bit like Giselle, awakened from the dead to dance the night through. I do wish I had a weapon, too,” said Asquith, almost dreamily. “I could never tell when you would lose your temper.”

  Neither of them
spoke, Asquith gathering the silence about himself as if a counter-ploy. Then he lifted a hand to his face and fought the desire to scratch. “It got this bad within the last few hours. It’s like being simmered alive when the drugs wear off. It turns out I was building my lean-to with it, and I didn’t even know it.” A quick laugh. “I was probably building my cooking fires with it. And I thought I knew the outdoors.”

  Speke said nothing.

  Asquith trembled. “Put the knife down, Hamilton.” His voice was sharp.

  Put on a show, Speke reminded himself. Put on a demonstration of calm. “Where,” he said, “is Maria?”

  “She is quite happy.”

  “Where?”

  “You want to know all my secrets at once, don’t you?”

  “Where’s my wife?”

  “She’s safe, Hamilton. I promise you. She’s perfectly all right. She is, actually, quite fortunate.”

  And the blood, Speke thought.

  Asquith must have read his eyes. “I’ve tricked you before with a little gore. I tricked you again.”

  “I want to see her.”

  “You will, very soon.”

  “What is it you have to say to me?”

  “I’m afraid of you, Hamilton. I know how angry you must be.”

  Why, even now, did he feel compassion for Asquith? “You should see the kind of people who can help you.”

  Asquith leaned forward, transfixed by an idea. “Let’s start off our conversation by being on an equal footing.” Asquith smiled through the reddened mask of his face. “Throw down your knife.”

  He’s going to kill me, Speke said to himself, with the same dull clarity with which he would think: it’s raining.

  Asquith continued, “Walk back to the door, and throw it away, or I won’t talk. I’ll just turn around and walk out these windows. It’s not fair, you with a butcher knife, and me—nothing but a wrecked body.”

  Speke was horrified at what his own hand did just then. He was appalled at the action of his own limbs. He stepped to the brilliant brass and iron poker, unhooked it from its stand, and set it on the desk, within easy reach of where Asquith stood. The glittering instrument seemed to hum, like the single prong of a tuning fork.