by William Lobb
She turned and walked to the end of the driveway. I moaned. I tried to reach out my hand to touch her one last time. I cried softly, “My friend, my one true and beautiful friend.” As she climbed into the car, I saw her wave, a slight, almost embarrassed wave goodbye—and then she was gone.
At that moment, it was as if someone had taken all the loneliness that ever existed in the world and gave it to me to feel, just a complete and devastating, screaming loneliness. I felt Artie say, “Now is when you need to come haunting. Now is your time.” I had no desire to go on his adventure. I only wanted to sit there in the loneliness, knowing this moment will never pass. I thought of Zara and Payton. I thought of New Orleans, Landry and the snakes, and the leather bar. I absorbed all these memories and I became sadder than I’d ever been before. We do feel when we are dead. We feel the unending agony of loss.
Days passed outside. The sun rose earlier and set later, every day a little more light. The trees grew full of leaves. The spring flowers gave way to summer flowers. Birds filled the sky. Looking over, past Artie, I saw the field that used to border Grandma’s house. It was coming alive with its growth of wild asparagus. Artie was gone more now. Spending more time away, haunting, scaring people, laughing when he returned, but I knew his nervous laughter revealed his pain. He’d been here longer than me. His need to connect was as strong as mine and I think each time he tried and failed that he wanted an ending even more than I did. Every attempt and failure to connect drove home to him that he would be here, imprisoned for eternity.
Days outside my world passed. One morning, early, as the sun was just beginning to shine over the beautiful Hudson Valley, I saw a car pull up by the garage. It was Pam. She took a guitar case out from the back seat and she walked over to the shale outcropping right next to the garage.
Pamela Ann was stunning. Simply dressed, but breathtaking. She wore a white cotton blouse and a robin’s egg blue skirt and sandals. Her mullet, long in the back, was pulled back into a ponytail. As I looked out at her, I remembered the first time I saw her, working as a checkout girl in a grocery store. She was beautiful then and more so now. Somehow in the blur of the years that made up our life together, she had grown into a perfectly stunning woman. She looked happy and healthy and clean. Sitting here now, looking at her, I cannot express how deeply I wished we could have shared the clarity and sanity of sobriety together. Our days and years were ruled by drugs and booze, raging fights, and revenge fucks.
She got out the guitar and started to strum some chords. She looked out at the abandoned lot, and across to the field of asparagus and wild flowers and she started to speak, “I wanted to come back in the winter, Frankie, but I was trying to convince myself that I was imagining these things I sense. Imagining that I feel you here, imagining I hear your voice trying to reach me. I sense your sadness, but I also sense a very dark force. I think that must be your grandfather. You are not him, Frankie. You’re a good man who did some bad things. You came to me in a dream again, you have done that about five different times since you died. I tried so hard to tell myself I’m crazy, I made it all up, but I know what I know, Frankie, and I know you are here somehow.”
She strummed the guitar again and began to sing in a voice that made me think this must be what an angel sounds like. I started to wonder if things like angels could really exist. Not in my world, but maybe in another. Her voice held a high tone, in a perfect pitch, and it was breathless and lilting. I could sit there and listen to her forever. I wanted to.
She sang a few songs for me. I tried to reach to her, to touch her just one last time, to touch her perfect skin. I called her name and she stopped singing. “I know you are here, Frankie. I feel you here. I feel you are trapped here. I’m never going to leave you, Frankie. I don’t feel any fear, just sadness and loss. We have to get you home, Frankie. I’ll be back”
With that, she stood up and brushed off her dress with her hands. She put away her guitar and walked back to her car. She looked at the garage. She bowed her head down and stood there for a few minutes. I yelled at her, “Don’t you dare pray for me!” She turned around and looked almost as if she could hear me and see me. She smiled at me and climbed into her car and drove off. I looked over to Artie. He growled and looked back at me in his rage.
A lot of the summer passed. Artie went to the cemetery often and scared away teenagers as they sat there drinking. I only could watch the days come and go and the cars on the road. My uncle came by with some real estate people and Artie put on a show. They left quickly. I don’t think our home will be sold anytime soon. The days began to shorten. I could see the grasses of August as they began to dry up and burn in the weeks and weeks without rain. The dry, crackling sound of late summer lawns, so dry they looked about to combust.
My home here was beginning to madden me and I started to feel the insanity creeping in again. I tried to hold onto the moments of Pam’s last visit, hold onto them like they were wisps of gold, but the songs faded, like the sweetness of her smile and I started to wonder if it was all real or just a dream.
Over in the fields across the road, big orange pumpkins began to appear. The summer was fading at an alarming rate. The darkness was coming back. My sadness grew deeper as I thought about my friends and what Artie had said. I felt he was right.
One afternoon, a hot late August afternoon, I looked down the road and I saw her car coming again. It was Pam. She turned and pulled into the driveway. My excitement exploded. I’d missed her so badly. She got out of the car and sat on the hood. She looked out at the dry and dying fields.
She said, “Frankie, a lot happened since I was last here to talk to you. I’m pregnant and alone. Another one of my great moves. I’ve wanted to come. This is insane, but I feel like you are here, even though I know you are dead. I come here to talk to myself, but I feel you are here. I wish I could know. If it’s a boy I want to name him Frankie. I want nothing to do with the father.”
As Pam sat on the hood of the car, I could see her belly had grown. I wanted to reach out and touch her. I felt a pain. That should be my child. We should be together, a family. I tried to speak to her. I tried to reach out to her. A look of fear crossed her face, then a smile. “I knew you were here, my old friend. The baby is due in October, Frankie. I’ll come back before then, I promise.
Pam turned and got back in the car. I watched as she drove away. My joy at the visit faded. My waiting began again. I wait. That is what I do. I wait.
The leaves started to turn colors and the entire Hudson Valley looked like the trees had caught fire: Oranges and reds, golds and yellows. The leaves fell and once again the world outside turned ugly and gray and brown. Dead. My world once again turned to the gray, unending nothingness. Artie told me I was now forgotten and I should come with him haunting. I angered him every day that I refused to haunt, to leave. I just existed here, one unchanging moment to the next.
The snows came and I realized I’d been dead a year. It seemed like eternity. Every moment lasted forever, until the next unending moment. I watched the world turn ice cold once again. The deep snows came, the air frozen, the gray upon gray upon gray.
My second spring as a dead man came. I knew Pam had forgotten me. Each day was longer and lighter. What sanity I had managed to maintain was now gone. All I felt was agonizing, screaming pain. I wanted to die, but that was not my option. I simply learned to exist. I started to feel I must go and follow Artie, learn to control the living through fear, to go haunting.
I went with Artie to the cemetery. I silently sat there as he ran through his act of terrors, screaming and screeching and moaning, chasing away people who wanted nothing more than to say goodbye to their past friends, lovers, or family. Artie was a malevolent spirit, as dark and angry and vicious as any who had ever existed. Artie was meant for this place. I never was. My existence was a cruel joke, a brutal mistake.
I went back to Cora’s property to wait. Another
spring was about to begin, and the gray and ugly winter once again began to fade. An unexpected warm spell was upon Orange County. Life began again outside my living Hell, this nowhere, this nothing.
She came again. I wasn’t looking. She pulled the car in the driveway and went around to the other side. She fumbled inside for a few minutes. She stood up and, looking skyward, she smiled and said, “Frankie, this is our girl. I wish you could have been her daddy. I tell her about you. I wanted you to see her.” I felt something inside I’d never known. I hate kids, babies. What the fuck was happening here? I looked out at the little baby girl. Her eyes were open and she was looking my way. She smiled and her eyes were bright as stars.
Pam looked up and said, “Its right here, Frankie. You just need to stop trying so hard. Stop overthinking this. It’s like when you couldn’t get a boner because all you thought about was getting a boner and not what was being presented to you.” She laughed and a part of me laughed too. “I know this is still your struggle. It’s always been your struggle; it’s not boners anymore, but God. It’s not that complicated.”
I looked down at the baby again and then back to Pam. They sat there for a good long time in the hot, late August sun. I sat back and absorbed the beauty of the two of them. Finally, after a really long and silent time, she stood and picked up the baby and put her back in the car seat. She looked all around, smiled that smile, and got in the car herself and left. I felt it would be awhile before I’d see them again.
The world, my world, once again turned dark and cold. I sat and watched as another winter came upon the land. It seemed the only sounds I heard were those of weeping and moaning from far off. Artie is gone, presumably to the cemetery, for good. I just want to die. I cannot die. I simply exist here and wait. I hate this. I can’t even kill myself, because I’m already dead. This must be the end.
Chapter Forty-five:
Moving On—An Epilogue
Years pass, summers and winters and summers and winters, rolling on endlessly and always crashing headlong into the next. The changing seasons outside, the endless unchanging nothingness inside, the ebb and flow of daylight and darkness, the changing colors of the trees and the green and brown and white of the ground, these are my only references of time. I don’t even know why I care about time anymore. It just seems to be a barometer for my loneliness.
The more I ponder and consider time, the lonelier I become. I don’t think I can be any lonelier. Then Artie, back for a visit to make me more miserable, projects this thought, “Consider this: you have just begun this journey, and you and I will be here forever. Think of that, grandson—this unending existence will go on forever. You’ve been forgotten, Frankie. Your friends have moved on, many are dead, your bones are dust. All that exists for you now is this unending nothingness.” With that, Artie let out a blood-chilling and terrifying scream, like a screech owl in the night. Possibly, I saw his face as he wailed, completely absent of sound, but I felt it. That was worse, much worse.
I stayed there, feeling like I’m falling again, and remembering all those years ago, in New Orleans, with Zara. How old must she be now? How many years have passed? I’m losing track of everything. Everything blends into an unending nothingness, the absolute emptiness I had always sought. Pam, Alexandrine, Jack, Betty, Payton, David: are they still alive? How many years have passed as I lie in this stinking, rotting Hell? Fuck me, it’s not even Hell. It’s less than that. I look out at a home I can see, but can no longer touch.
I see and sense motion and movement in a world that has moved on without me. I miss my friends. I miss being alive. Now, with each passing shadow of the changing landscape, the desperation to leave this place and the anger deepens. The sadness has an unfathomable depth, a hole without a bottom. I’ve adopted some of Artie’s rage. What spirit I had turned dark and bitter and vengeful. I’d joined him in his haunting as the years have passed. In this joyless existence, it felt good to scare the living out of their minds, to give them a glimpse into my world. Fuck the living.
The joy I once felt here from the visits with Pam has long since faded. No one ever comes by here anymore. The property is abandoned and the stories fly. It is haunted by my ghost and Artie’s. We do our best to maintain and support the stories.
I’ve grown resentful of the living.
I sit and watch cars pass. I watch the old garage collapse from neglect. The roof finally fell in on the old Rambler as it sat there for decades where Alexandrine had parked it and walked away. I think of her often. She must be quite old now. I imagine her with snow-white hair against her dark skin, always beautiful to me. I never thought she would leave me. I always thought she’d stay here and keep me company until she died, too. Pam told me once, during a visit a long time ago, that Alex was living with Bianca and running the voodoo shop in New Orleans. That’s good. That made me happy, knowing she had found her place and was no longer alone and hiding from landlords and ex-husbands and drug dealers. Knowing this about Alex was one of the last moments of happiness and contentment for me.
No one ever comes by here anymore, as Artie and I have scared everyone away. The site of Cora’s home—my only home, my church, the only place where anything ever made any sense—is overgrown now with weeds. Large trees have taken root where her house used to be, where the kitchen was, where we used to sit and drink our coffee and eat our burnt sugar cookies. We would look out the old, dirty windows to the Hudson River to the east and the fields of wild asparagus to the west. The memory of this clan is now all that remains and that memory now is only held by a small few. It will soon fade into nothingness and we will all be gone and forgotten.
A day came. A car pulled in the driveway, or what remained of the driveway, since everything was wild and overgrown. A girl got out. I’m suddenly confused, completely confused. What I am seeing made no sense, it had no place. It was Pam, but decades have passed. How can she be unchanged? Slightly older, her hair is different, but as beautiful as that first day, so long ago, the day I met her and fell in love with her.
She carried a piece of paper as she fought her way through the brush, picker bushes and the brambles, until she stood up on top of the shale embankment. Seeing her finally there reminded me of that day, so long ago, when Pam sat there playing her guitar and singing her songs to me, wearing that cotton blouse and skirt.
She looked around as she sat down on the shale outcropping next to the crumbling garage. She looked across the overgrown, abandoned, and haunted property. She looked skyward and then down at her paper.
She began to speak. “Frankie, my name is Kimberly. I met you right here, at this place, about thirty-five years ago when I was a baby. My mom always talked about you. She loved you all her life, and she wrote this letter to you, just before she died last week. She died quietly, Frankie, peacefully and without pain. Her last wish was that I come and read this to you.”
Without hesitation, the pretty young girl started to read Pam’s letter to me:
“Frankie, I know you physically died a long time ago. I’ve visited you many times over the years, never at your gravesite, always here. Here, at Cora’s. I’ve always felt your presence here, your spirit here.
You are right, Frankie; there is no God. The church is a lie. Everything you’ve ever fought against is true.
The year is 2017 now, Frankie. You’ve been dead thirty-five years, and Kim is thirty-five now. The last time I brought her to you she was a newborn. I’ve told her stories of you all her life. There are seven billion people on this poor, overcrowded planet now. Each and every one of us has a slightly different concept of what God is.
My God doesn’t exist for you. Cora’s God didn’t exist for you. Alexandrine’s, Zara, all your friends and family, everyone you’ve ever known has a different connection to this God entity. You lived and died trying to find someone or something that didn’t exist for you. There is good in this world, Frankie, and in this universe. There is pu
re evil too. You have exposed yourself to both. You spent a lot of your life dancing in the Devil’s dirt, but you spent some time in the light too. You just always embraced the darkness.
Your connection to the Creator, to whoever your God is or will be, has always been in a place you’d never look, somewhere you were always afraid to touch. Frankie, it was always inside you. All your wars, the killings, the drugs, the rage, all of your running was simply running from you. Running from yourself, from the crazy bastard, from that maniac in the mirror, everything you ever did in your life was all just you running from you.
There is so much you refuse to see, Frankie. A whole world you’ll never acknowledge. You are like a baby in the womb, thinking that life is the only life, thinking that death is the end of life, when it is, well . . . birth! I wish you could just spend a moment, even now, long dead, wherever this place is where your spirit exists now, on some other plane. I wish just for one golden moment you could remove yourself from your ego and yourself and your notions and just be. Just be. Don’t think, don’t form an opinion, just be. Let the universe speak to you, for one moment, stop making the universe work your way. Let the universe unfold and expose itself to you.
You are not the center, Frankie. You’re not even a player. You are not even a speck of dust, Frankie. Just be. Let the energy of the universe show itself to you, Frankie, and you will find all you ever sought and needed. You stopped drinking and you stopped using drugs, you embraced clarity and gratitude. You grew so much, but you could just never accept the last and, I guess for many, the most perplexing step. Only you could and would have to go to such complex lengths to find something so simple.
I’ve grown old now. Not really old, just older than I ever imagined. I’m almost sixty. How did that happen? How did we become old people, Frankie? I wanted to live longer, to spend more time with my daughter, but that is not to be. The cancer is here and very real. It robs me of a little more life every day. It’s a liar and thief. I’m fading, but I know something else is waiting for me, another place.