The Haunting of James Hastings

by Christopher Ransom

  I walked to the carpet and my hand just reached down and pulled it off, easy as pulling a clean flat sheet from a mattress. I stared down at the broken body and the face with the eye looking at me, and the weeds and sludge layers of caked purple blood in her snow-blonde hair and it settled on me, a heavy black pair of stinking leather wings that embedded themselves, becoming a part of me.

  ‘Oh, sweetie.’ I fell to my knees beside her. I began to brush the road from her hair. ‘Oh, my sweet girl . . .’

  I was afraid to touch her and hurt her. Make her worse. But I couldn’t leave her. I pushed my hands under her back and legs and scooped her in my arms. I carried the woman I had known since fourth grade through the garage and over the yard. I held her until we were inside, where I rested her on the couch. The house was empty, ten thousand miles from civilization. I made a support of the pillow under her head and pulled a blanket up to her neck and I kissed her. We were sixteen the first time we kissed and never had made the decisions that brought us here. I lowered my face onto her stomach and it went through me like cold blades.

  There was a sound in the air, like a tea kettle reaching steam. For a minute I thought it was the sirens, but there were no sirens. It was just this awful high-pitched piping sound, a screaming coming through the walls, closer and closer until it was drilling into my ears. It made me sick and I ran from her, into the kitchen, where I bent over the sink and heaved until my legs gave out.

  Time was no longer slipping. At this point it was scattering like sheets of dirty newspaper in a high-velocity wind tunnel.

  I lost track of things. A lot of things.

  What I remember next is being in the upstairs bathroom. I was looking up at the paintings of the rabbits on the bathroom wall, Stacey’s rabbits, the morose paintings she loved, God knows why, and then I was reeling away and running into the hall, back down the stairs and I might have been screaming for somebody to help me. I needed to call somebody. The little red Motorola she had given me for my birthday was sitting on the dining-room table, not fifteen feet from the sun room where I had been working all afternoon. I rarely checked this phone. I was always busy checking The Leash. That’s what she called the BlackBerry phone Ghost, Inc. used to communicate with me. I opened my red cell and started to dial 9-1-1 and that’s when the little voicemail envelope popped up on the screen.

  You have one voice message.

  I stood there wondering if I could go back in time. I was afraid to turn around and see her on the couch. Everything in me slowed and I listened to the message she had left me at 9.12 a.m., almost ten hours earlier.

  I don’t know why she hadn’t called the home phone. Maybe she was in a panic. Maybe a darker thing inside her didn’t really want me to answer. But she left me the message, probably sitting in her car, right before she backed out of the garage. She had to have been sitting there, because she never got past the alley and if she had been in the house she would have talked to me face to face. I’d have heard her crying. She was crying so hard and I was sleeping on the couch, less than a hundred feet away from her. Did I hear it ring? I might have. I might have heard it and rolled over, pulling a pillow over my head and going back to sleep while she was begging.

  ‘Where are you? James, where are you? You’re never home and I’m so scared, I can’t, I can’t, I don’t understand what’s happening any more. I . . .’ Her crying faded for a few more seconds and then the message ended.

  She must have started to back out then. I don’t know who or what gave her pause. All I know is who didn’t stop her that morning, the night before, and all the nights when she was drifting toward oblivion - the man who had made a vow to protect her for the rest of her life.

  So, my wife didn’t really leave me, is the thing to remember. I left her, not the other way around.

  I left my little rabbit all alone.

  The detective who worked Stacey’s case, Tod Bergen, took me for a drink a couple weeks after. He was a burly guy with tight hair and a pink face behind clear-framed glasses, a near-albino you might find managing a Swedish furniture boutique. He was a good cop as far as I could tell, and a smart one. He’d been on the job for sixteen years, said this kind of thing happened in Los Angeles more often than anyone wanted to admit. Ten million people. Too many cars. Enough pedestrians and cyclists thrown in to keep things interesting. You’d think with so many people crammed into so few square miles, there’d always be a witness.

  But this was not so, Bergen explained while I sat beside him at the bar, numb and mute with contempt for everything that breathed. ‘Last year we worked a case up in Bel Air. Male jogger, fifty-eight, not the guy on top of the studio, but one of the big guys in line. He was run over by a Corolla, both the car and the jogger abandoned. Mr Mogul’d been lying under the Toyota for two days when someone finally called to have the car towed. They don’t like Corollas in Bel Air. The driver had it attached to his wrecker before he noticed the running shoe . . .’

  ‘She was accepting,’ I said. My head felt like the machine that turns cabbage into coleslaw. ‘I keep trying to find the right word to describe her. I should know by now. But accepting is the only one I can think of.’

  ‘Well, it happens,’ Bergen said. ‘That’s all I’m saying. You can’t look for a reason, or blame yourself. Don’t even start down that road, son.’

  ‘She accepted me. She accepted this life. The whole world.’

  ‘That’s a rare quality,’ Bergen said.

  The takeaway - she had stepped into the alley at the wrong time. Maybe she was saving a cat or picking up trash. Maybe a drunk behind the wheel, some working stiff coming off the third shift. The severity of the damage to her torso suggested a truck, but no one saw a truck, if that’s what it was. No one heard the brakes. No one saw a fucking thing.

  Maybe if we had leaked my connection with Ghost to the press, we would have come up with something. But his people and the police advised against this, suggesting it would only clutter the phone lines with bullshit tips, a bunch of loonies trying to get in on the excitement. Stacey’s parents blamed me, and left me out of their own investigations, if they pursued any. Her father, Roy, was just broken, reduced to a shard of dry chalk. Linda, her mother, told me I deserved to rot in hell, which I guess I did. My parents, both older, retired evangelicals back in Oklahoma City, had written me off years ago. My mother said I had sold my soul to Satan, which I guess I had. I didn’t want it to become a tabloid item, one of those forty-word snippets in US Weekly: Celeb Lookalike Loses Wife. I didn’t fight this advice to let it go. I wonder now if that was a mistake.

  I don’t wonder if it was more cowardice on my part - I know it was.

  Stacey was cremated, her ashes sifted into her garden behind our home. I emailed a letter of resignation to Trigger, which he forwarded to Ghost’s business manager. It went unchallenged. I stopped dyeing my hair platinum blond and let it grow. I visited a dermatologist in Hollywood for two hours of laser tattoo removal three times a week until the most visible copies (on my arms, my neck, stomach) were reduced to raw pink baby flesh (yes, it is just like going to bed on fire). I grew a short beard and saw an optometrist who would prescribe a new pair of tortoise-shell frames to further disguise me as plain old me, and learned that I actually needed a prescription.

  ‘You have astigmatism of the left eye,’ the rotund, white-smocked man told me, patting my thigh with a small plastic paddle. I think his name was Robert Bryans, or Brian Roberts. One of those two first-name names. ‘It’s not serious, but you should wear glasses at night, especially when driving. You will also enjoy going to the movies a lot more now. The screen won’t look so out of focus.’

  I didn’t respond. Her left eye was the one that had burst from her skull. It’s okay, darlin’. I’m with you in spirit, or maybe you are with me. With any luck I will go blind in sympathy.

  I boxed up my Vaporware threads and the pairs of signature Converse Ghost had given me for Christmas every year. I bought some regular clothes and
soon looked like every other nobody on the street. I went to the liquor store and spent eight hundred dollars. I shed his gestures, the strut, pose, tics. I dropped his speech patterns and twangs, minimized the gangsta slang. I kicked the Ghost habit once and for all, put him in a box six feet under and pissed on his proverbial grave. I dropped out of his world, and this one.

  Eleven and a half months passed before I saw her again.

  2

  The night death came back to West Adams I wasn’t spying, though it’s true that by then I had developed a habit of watching my neighbors. Sometimes with my naked eye, but more often through the 80mm Zhumell spotting scope I gave Stacey for her twenty-eighth birthday. She had been in a photography phase. I had hoped the Zhumell, which could be used as a telescope or digiscope attached to a camera, would encourage her to turn her gaze skyward when she inevitably tired of taking pictures. Upon presentation, she pretended to be thrilled with her gift. But after a few days of lugging her two Nikons, gear bag, the scope and its folding tripod around the backyard, trying to turn pigeons roosting under Whitey’s gables into urban art, she lost interest.

  Playing the role of optimist, I moved the scope and tripod to the second-story balcony and spent fifty bucks on astronomy books. Over the next month, we shut off the TV and pretended the balcony - with its little arched roof, recessed decking and short spindled railing almost hidden in the house’s façade - was our private observatory. We shared bottles of Beaujolais and discussed the possibility of alien life forms. But eventually our lives turned busy, the weather cooled and the entire rig was abandoned.

  Architecturally West Adams could be Anytown, USA, which is why so many scenes for movies and television shows are shot there. The banking- and commerce-heavy Koreatown lies north; South Central’s bludgeoned ghettos adjacent, you guessed it, south. The skyline of downtown Los Angeles lies east, the blur of afro-centric Crenshaw and industrial Culver City to the west.

  Situated in the middle of them all and cut in half by the ten lanes of infinite traffic that ride the Santa Monica Freeway, West Adams is a roughly ten- by twelve-block enclave of historic homes that varies wildly, a little pocket of a neighborhood where nine-hundred-thousand dollar Victorians were steps away from run-down apartment buildings with diapers on the lawns. The same seventy-foot-tall skinny palm trees swayed in front of squalid one-bedroom crack houses and restored Queen Anne mansions owned by clothing label upstarts. A five-color painted lady might sell for seven hundred and fifty thousand despite her crumbling brick foundation; a plain six-bedroom bungalow two blocks south might be had for three-fifty due to its proximity to the church/liquor store/porn video/fried chicken shack/nail salon strip mall.

  We were attracted to the neighborhood because it was on the way up, was being improved by the refinancing Hispanics and blacks who had never left, was being slowly gentrified by the young and upwardly mobile, those self-anointed artists and entrepreneurs like us, the ones who weren’t content with a condo or a ranch home in El Segundo; we wanted character and damn the risk, the gunshots, the gangs . . . those were just rumors.

  After the accident, I retreated to the balcony out of respect for Stacey, who didn’t like it when I smoked in the house. The tripod seemed to be waiting for me, beckoning my sozzled eye. After four hours of stargazing, Stacey’s scope had become my scope, and I had my first night of real sleep in months.

  I furnished my nest with a lawn chair, a small table for my ashtray and a green metal Coleman cooler my father handed down, to hold my beer. I kept a pair of flip-flops on deck, and mounted a hook under the eave to hold my black windbreaker and one of Stacey’s scarves (the thick purple one of cable-knit cotton), and thus my little self-pity station was complete.

  When I wasn’t dreaming of launching rocket-propelled grenades at SUVs on Arlington, I saw remarkable, sometimes unexplainable things in the sky: flashes of green too slow to be comets, a jetliner whose red and green flashers blanked out under a cloudless sky, a red eyeball which seemed to vibrate looking back at me from light years away (more likely I was tanked and that one was just a stop light on Venice).

  But like Stacey I soon lost interest in the stars. I learned to watch the people instead. Junkies staggering from fix to fix. Catholic schoolgirls walking home holding hands. Realtors hustling nervous newlyweds, like we had once been, into the latest remodel. Single mothers sorting credit card bills at dining-room tables. Upper-class fighting (silent candle-lit dinners which resembled aspirin commercials) and lower-class fucking (lights on, loud, dog-style). Up there on a balcony you see the life of your neighborhood, good and bad.

  It was not a total escape.

  Sometimes I stayed too late and drank too much, slewing dangerously close to the edge. It was a twenty-foot drop and our porch was surrounded by a concrete walk. Had I fallen, I probably would have spent the rest of my days drinking whiskey from a sippy cup. As dusk turned to true night (and my tipsy turned to true inebriation), often I would urinate off the side, into Stacey’s bougainvillea. Sometimes I would stand there naked and laughing and waving my arms, waiting for someone to call the police. They never did. Spend enough time twenty-five feet off the ground, you realize no one walking or driving by ever really looks up.

  I can see now that I craved human company. I had spent so much time playing the role of Ghost, a larger than life character to whom people flocked, I didn’t know how to be James Hastings. I certainly did not know how to be a grieving husband. I would have liked a manual. Most of our real friends were still back in Tulsa. I didn’t know how to make new connections in cafés or bars. So it wasn’t long before I learned the optimal night, hour and angle to view each of my neighbors in their natural habitat, and my attentions were particular to three: the Gomez’s handsome bungalow to the west, into Mr Ennis’s stucco eyesore to the east and Officer Lucy Arnold’s brown Victorian across the street and three houses west.

  Watching Euvaldo Gomez and his children, grandparents, cousins and their teenaged friends popping in and out was like watching a family sitcom with the sound off. There were patriarchal outbursts aimed at the calamitous dining-room table, and fits of playtime laughter on the living-room floor. Mrs Gomez was always cooking and serving food. The kids were always spilling fluorescent green or red punch. Euvaldo was an accountant with one of the firms downtown. At the end of each day, he would remove his jacket and collared shirt and tie, but not his pinstriped trousers or wingtips. He spent his evenings in his armchair while his children provoked him. I cast him as a Latino Archie Bunker, and learned to read his moods by the set of his eyebrows and the vigor with which he stabbed the remote control. They were a happy family - hardworking, celebratory, always in motion right up until bedtime, when the household would collapse into deserved peace.

  With a swivel of the wrist, it was onto the next house.

  Officer Lucy Arnold and I had history. She was a tall brunette, athletic with sinewy arms and almost imperceptible breasts, a bicycle fuzz prowling Venice Beach. Of all things for a cop to be, she was shy. She claimed to be the ugly duckling from high school, but she was all right. Proximity and professional courtesy opened the door for her, I welcomed her offer to help, and soon Officer Arnold became just Lucy. A casual friend and inside line to the department, my wallflower mole.

  As the updates on Stacey’s case lost any new wrinkles, Lucy and I entered a routine of twice- or thrice-weekly happy hours which consisted of drinks on my porch, banter about her day and tender inquiries into my ‘process’. Now and then, when the Friday margaritas were blended a little too strong, Lucy would make some sort of flush-faced overture, usually a hug, or the wiping of a tear (hers) in amazement at my stoicism (numb drunkenness) in the face of such loss. We fumbled our way through a couple of her sports bras and somehow, as we crossed paths one afternoon in the kitchen - me emerging from the bathroom, she turning from the fridge with two cold beers - she wound up giving me a handy in front of the stove. But she wouldn’t let me reciprocate just then, perhaps sensin
g I had nothing to offer. The clumsy tangle of our increasingly sad happy hours became too much for me to endure. She understood. She would be there if I needed someone to talk to.

  I didn’t believe she was being opportunistic, trying to land a vulnerable man now that his wife was out of the picture. She was just a nice woman with the misfortune to be on the receiving end of my mixed signals. Help, thank you for dinner, now leave me alone. We cooled off. Six months passed. Our exchanges on trash day or in the produce aisle at Ralph’s were still pleasant, but I seldom watched her any more.

  By the time the incident with Mr Ennis happened, I had stopped thinking about Lucy Arnold altogether.

  If the Gomezes were my sitcom, Mr Ennis was my still life. I never learned his real station in life, but my money was on lifelong bachelor or early widower, because I never saw anyone pay Mr Ennis a visit. No minivan arrived to spill grandkids onto his lawn, no old bag in her housedress ever vacuumed around his feet. He was like a grandpa silverback gorilla, the one you see at the zoo with half a dozen bananas lying around him because he no longer gives a shit and just wishes someone would shoot a dart into him. His living room was a diorama of mid-century couches, home-made lamps of cut-bottle glass, a vinyl ottoman and brandy snifter terrarium filled with peat moss and a tiny rubber turtle resting on a log. Sometimes Mr Ennis leaned over the terrarium and spoke to the turtle. I would have paid large sums to hear these conversations. I nicknamed the turtle Tiny Mr Ennis.