We’d talked about our finances, our most embarrassing bedroom encounters, petty crimes we had committed growing up. Guy stuff. Friend stuff. So when he didn’t speak for nearly a full minute, I knew. I knew right then that whatever was bothering him had something to do with me. With us.
‘It’s Blaine. Blaine’s in trouble.’
For a terrible moment I was relieved, and then felt like an asshole for being relieved. ‘What happened?’
‘That day we saw you at the Grove. You remember?’
‘Yeah, she seemed uncomfortable,’ I said.
He lowered his voice, as if not wanting colleagues outside his door to hear. ‘We were driving back to the hotel and she was in serious pain. I’m talkin’ . . . screaming pain. So, I take her to the emergency room. They’re short-staffed, of course, there’s a line of wailing people going out the door. She was in a state, and the blood, it wouldn’t stop. She almost bled out, James. Another five minutes and she would’ve fucking died.’
I closed my eyes. ‘I’m sorry, Travis. Is she okay now?’
‘She’s not okay, no.’
‘What—’
‘They still don’t know - that’s what’s so fucked up. Whatever started it, one of her ovaries collapsed. They think it was a cyst or something, a blockage that just blew up, but they don’t know. It went all the way into her fallopian tube.’ Trigger was on the verge of tears now. ‘It just - something inside her, it just wrecked her. She went into cardiac arrest from blood loss. She’s stable now but she’s been through two surgeries. I still don’t know if something went wrong during surgery or what. But when she came out she was worse. She had a stroke.’ He wasn’t on the verge any longer. He was crying. I had never heard Trigger cry and it was a terrible sound. ‘She can’t talk right, James. She’s fucked up. My baby’s all fucked up.’
He sobbed heavily for a moment. I was thinking about Annette. What exactly had transpired when the four of us met? I really didn’t know, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.
‘I’m so sorry, Travis. She’s going to be okay, man. You’ll be with her and you guys are going to get through this. She’s a strong girl.’
‘Look, I gotta go. You never know how much stuff there is to do, taking care of somebody. You don’t think about it.’
‘Is there anything I can do? Do you want me to come down and keep you company? Annette would understand. ’
That came out wrong. What did I even mean by that?
‘No. No. That’s not going to help. I just wanted you to know.’
Something in me hardened. I knew I wouldn’t go to Austin. We were buddies, but the relationship was business first. We had acted like old friends, but were we, really?
‘Annette, huh?’ Trigger said. ‘I don’t know about that woman, James. I don’t know about Annette. Where’d you meet her anyway?’
‘Hm? Oh, she’s my neighbor, believe it or not.’
‘Huh.’
‘She felt bad about things. That they were awkward,’ I added, wishing for the call to be over.
‘Right. Well, it was pretty fucking awkward, James,’ he said. He did not sound like he was making the same connections I was, but he was sifting through it, mulling something over. ‘I got to tell you, for your own good, I think. It was more than awkward. It was fucking weird, man. It was creepy and sort of sick, James.’
He’s distraught. Let it go. There’s nothing wrong with Annette. This is all just a coincidence. Blaine got sick. Annette surprised her. The two are not related. Trigger’s just jealous. Jealous that I’m moving on and happy with someone when he’s stuck. Stuck with a woman who’s never going to be normal again.
‘Sick?’ I felt sick to my stomach. ‘I don’t, I don’t know what to say—’
‘You know,’ Trigger said. ‘You know why. Jesus, man, you got yourself a real replacement there, huh?’
‘What? No, it’s not like that,’ I said. ‘The hair maybe, but—’
‘The hair, the dress, the make-up. For Christ’s sake, she nuzzled up to you, talking like Stacey. What is that? What kind of moves are you teaching her? It’s almost like she never fucking left.’
‘My wife is dead!’ I said. ‘Stacey’s been dead for over a year. I think I’m entitled to meet someone. You know nothing about her, so please, leave her out of it.’
The connection between us was silent, just dead quiet.
At last he said, ‘I know Stacey’s dead, James. I was there when they cremated her. The question is, do you know she’s dead?’
‘Fuck you, Travis.’ I slammed the phone down.
After finishing two beers in the kitchen, I went back to check the other messages.
They were worse.
17
I’ve only had one manager and, until that day, believed I would never have another. Trigger was the one with the vision, the one who had the faith that we could turn this lark into something bigger. He had saved my ass by convincing Ghost’s people to put me on a salary and benefits, back when I was working fifty then a hundred days a year for him, at his beck and call at any hour. You wouldn’t think there’d be much money in double work, and usually there isn’t. But when Ghost’s popularity - and thus his paranoia - was at its peak, I was sent on more deadbeat missions at opposite ends of the country than I can remember. My salary - before special events, bonuses, expenses, per diems, and countless other perks - was a hundred and seventy thousand.
This is not to say money buys happiness, not when you spend a third of your days on the road, living in motels that smell like ghee and embalming fluid, walking aimlessly through public places where no one gives a fuck whether you are Ghost or Jesus Christ. And when you did accidentally get caught by a swarm of fans, you would be relieved, thinking, it’s about time, this ought to break up the monotony . . . until they realized you weren’t Ghost, just some freaky fan-employee-spin-off dude pretending to be him. And don’t bother explaining you work for him, it’s cool, you, like, party with him sometimes. For one they don’t believe you, and for two, if you get caught divulging the arrangement or in any way trying to profit from it, you will get fired. If you’re lucky. If you’re unlucky, you will be sued by a team of lawyers who eat platinum records and shit downloads for a living.
Nevertheless, the salary and benefits kept Stacey and me financially secure for those years. It also had a habit-forming effect on Ghost. I became his habit. Once he and his team had me on the bankroll, it only made sense to get their money’s worth. What could have been a six-month escapade turned into a three-year career with no end in sight. Until the accident, anyway. Until Ghost went into hiding. I wondered if Ghost had someone else to take my place now. Another James Hastings asking how high when Ghost said jump. If not for Trigger, who would I be now?
I realized I was on the verge of tears. The number of good people in my life had just decreased by one, and there weren’t many left. I pressed the NEXT button again.
Of the five remaining messages, two more were hang-ups, my caller ID reading PRIVATE above the time stamps. Wednesday at 9.12 a.m., and again Friday, also at 9.12 a.m. No message, just a dial tone by the time the greeting segued to the beep. Whatever. These were probably robo-calls from my bank. I was probably delinquent on a credit card or the DirecTV.
Next.
‘Hi, James, it’s Lucy,’ she began, upbeat. I braced myself. ‘I just wanted to thank you for dinner. I had a really nice time, and I’m so glad you’ve decided to move on with your life and start letting your friends help you . . .’
She didn’t pause, but at this point I was frightened, wondering if I actually had gone on that date instead of blowing her off again. I decided I had either lost my mind or had a doppelgänger roaming around (ha ha! Maybe Ghost was fucking Lucy Arnold now! ), keeping Lucy’s hopes alive while I moved onto the suicide blonde.
Then I heard the rest.
‘. . . oh wait, I must have dialed the wrong number,’ Lucy continued, shifting to an icy screed. ‘Sorry, dick-face, for a mi
nute there I had you mixed up with a real man. I forgot you are a little boy and a pretender and, we know this by now, a fucking alcoholic loser and a truly inconsiderate prick. I hope you find someone to rock you in her arms while you spend the rest of your life drinking yourself into the ground.’ And here she did pause, chuckling in a way that made my bowels twist before finishing in a controlled, delicate tone. ‘Don’t call back, don’t wave, and don’t peek into my house with your creepy fucking telescope again or I’ll have you Tazered until your dick glows like a Maglight.’
Slam.
‘Whoa,’ I said to the machine, deleting the rant. She must have spotted me going in and out of Annette’s house. Only jealousy and rejection would push Lucy to such extremes. After hanging up on Trigger, I didn’t think anything could make me feel worse, but this did.
Like the two that had come before Lucy’s, the final message was time-stamped 9.12 a.m. Three calls at 9.12 a.m. The last one did not list a numerical date. It read simply TODAY.
Today? But I was home, and hadn’t heard the phone ring. My head began to throb, the pain radiating all the way down the back of my neck.
There was the usual click, followed by a long silence. The line was clear but no one spoke. I glanced down at the phone’s digital clock. The green LCD now said 9.24 a.m., which meant this final call had come through minutes ago, most likely while I was talking with Trigger. Had I missed the call waiting signal? Call waiting doesn’t sound like it used to. It doesn’t make that loud ta-DOODO sound from the eighties, the one that was impossible to ignore. Now it just goes dun-dun very politely, meek as a kitten’s last two heartbeats. But I hadn’t even heard that.
The message should have begun by now. I stood in my living room listening to the silence. I don’t know how many minutes passed, but the line stayed open longer than it should have. What was it with these 9.12 a.m. calls? The rusted gears in my head began to grind, the effort of remembering physically painful. Yes, there had been more 9.12 calls, months ago. They had come once a month or so, I was sure now, just often enough to stick in my mind, not quite often enough for me to think they were anything other than a telemarketer.
The hissing silence extended into a white static abyss.
9.12
9.12
9.12
I arrowed back through the first five hang-ups.
9.12
9—
The handset slid from my grip and the living room went spotty as I began to faint. The sound of the phone clattering to the floor seemed to echo down a long metal corridor as it came to me:
9.12 was the exact time I had received the message, the one Stacey left me on the last day, minutes before she was run down in the alley.
My head bounced on the wood floor and I succumbed to darkness.
I once heard Ghost telling members of his entourage a disturbing story.
He was in eighth grade, he claimed, perusing the school library’s issues of National Geographic to find an archeology feature for the report his science teacher had assigned. The article he chose concerned a two-thousand-year-old clay pot unearthed somewhere in former Mesopotamia. Hidden in a straw-padded crate within a sealed room within a larger complex of small, apartment-like structures, the pot had been almost miraculously preserved, its finely grooved texture nearly pristine, like the grooves on a vinyl record that had never been removed from its sleeve.
A hypothesis emerging from the field of acoustic archeology had been making the rounds. Scientists had known for some time that certain chambers - medieval stone sanctuaries, primitive caves and the like - were built to enhance and preserve acoustics within. The team believed they had found such a chamber and that, along with the right texturing equipment and other tools the potter had used to shape the pot, it was the perfect candidate for their experiment. The experiment was to prove that some fragment of the sounds that had been present in the environment during the original throwing process might have been captured and essentially recorded into the clay.
To test this hypothesis, the archeologists partnered with a team of audiophiles who were expert at the then-nascent compact disc and laser technology. This second team constructed a very complicated version of a CD player with a self-correcting laser and together, applying their collective knowledge of the culture, climate, landscape, materials and pottery-making practices of the era, aimed the laser at their clay pot - spinning on a new table that had been constructed to imitate the original’s imperfections - and began the digital translations. If they were successful, they might hear the squeak of the spinning pottery wheel, the bang of a hammer or other tools from an adjacent workshop, the clomping of camel hooves outside the potter’s studio, and so forth.
They did not hear the clomping of camel hooves.
But after performing hundreds of tests at different throwing speeds, they were able to unlock, record and replay two-thousand-year-old sounds. The part Ghost loved was not that the scientists had been able to ‘listen’ through time, but what precisely they stumbled into. As they stood in silence, holding their collective breath, watching this aged pot spin in their cluttered laboratory of cables and glass partitions, their headphones filled with the soft but unmistakable coo of a woman crying in the potter’s work room - convincing them she was herself the potter. After eighteen seconds, her crying was overlaid with the quieter vocalizations of a second presence, a man who might have been sitting in the background or standing behind her. He was chuckling in a way that one member of the experiment described as ‘a low, menacing fashion’.
Due to size limitations and imperfections in the pot’s texture, the scientists were able to replay only a total of thirty-two seconds of the accidental recording. In the last seven seconds, immediately after the man began to chuckle, the woman stopped crying, as if surprised to learn she was not alone. There followed, another observer said, ‘a tearing sound, much like the ripping of fabric. And then a sort of wet patter or splashing.’ The recovered track elapsed, not fading out like a song, of course, but simply ceasing, as if someone had lifted the turntable’s needle. A forensic team was brought in to inspect the clay and surface finishing materials, and tests on the faded brown streaks of organic paint taken from the pot proved positive for human blood.
‘The research team might have traveled through the acoustics of time only to eavesdrop on a primitive domestic homicide,’ the article’s author concluded.
Knowing Ghost and how he liked to embellish the details, this was a true story right up until the woman’s throat was slit. The story haunted me regardless, even though giving me and the rest of his entourage the creeps was not really even the point of his sharing it with us.
‘That’s how they’re going to find my shit,’ Ghost said at the end, just before we broke up lunch to return to the sound check. ‘In another two thousand years, some space motherfucker gonna come to earth and dig up civilization we destroyed and hear one of my songs. And when he do, he gonna hear a whole lot more than a woman crying in the background. He will hear humanity from The Source’ (this was another of his self-applied monikers), ‘and then his fellow aliens gonna know what kind of world we made. He gonna know how Ghost’s America liked to roll.’
In the wake of all that happened in West Adams, I have wondered if there is an explanation of the underlying mechanics to be found in the realm of acoustic archeology or a similar field. Something hiding between science and the supernatural. When you consider that every CD or vinyl record or downloaded song contains a ghost of the performer, you begin to accept that the soul can embed itself in many more places, and in infinitely interesting ways, than in the human body.
But no performance exists without an audience. As the listener we become complicit, a willing participant, and our applause is the natural response to this transfer of energy, the power source that binds artist and fan, continuing the process of absorption. The rabbit was born in the painter’s imagination. He or she transferred the vision to canvas, touching something in Stacey’s hea
rt, until it existed in her imagination too. How many mornings had she toweled off in front of it, casting her warmth back into its surface, into the fibers of its canvas? Did she speak to it? Did she sing in the shower? Did the steam from her showers embed the canvas with molecules of her skin?
Paintings, cassette tapes, signatures on paper. The unused film, the eyepiece of her telescope, the worn grooves in the floorboards. Compact discs, portable hard drives, soot-smoked mirrors, the insoles of her shoes. These are vessels, waiting to capture projections. What is a house but a larger vessel, a blank platter of vinyl waiting to be pressed by the recording needle of a human perception? A hard drive waiting for the software? A marriage is an opera written over months, weeks, years, a lifetime if we are lucky. When one of the performers in that opera disappears and her understudy steps in to take her place, it is only natural that the next iteration, the aria or cover song delivered by the understudy, will become warped. The audience must sense something has gone afoul, lost, rearranging the sonic landscape of the mind and the terrain of the heart. What if it doesn’t require years to leave your mark on a house? What if, when the emotions running within reach a fever pitch or trauma is enacted, it can be accomplished in a year? A week? With a single act of violence?
The Haunting of James Hastings Page 13