Spider on My Tongue

by Wright, T. M.

  A SPIDER ON MY TONGUE

  By T. M. Wright

  First Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press & Macabre Ink Digital

  Copyright 2011 by T. M. Wright

  Cover Design by David Dodd – Copy-edited by Kurt Criscione

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  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return the vendor of your choice and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  OTHER CROSSROAD TITLES BY T. M. Wright:

  NOVELS:

  STRANGE SEEDS

  BOUNDARIES

  THE CHANGING

  THE DEVOURING

  THE ASCENDING

  GOODLOW'S GHOSTS

  THE WAITING ROOM

  NON FICTION:

  THE INTELLIGENT MAN'S GUIDE TO U.F.O.s

  UNABRIDGED AUDIOBOOKS:

  A MANHATTAN GHOST STORY – NARRATED BY DICK HILL

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  ABOUT "A SPIDER ON MY TONGUE"

  A note from the author – T. M. Wright

  ~ * ~

  The characters you will meet in this novella will be new to you if you haven't read the first two books in the "Manhattan Ghost Story" trilogy--"A Manhattan Ghost Story," and "The Waiting Room."

  I have been told by people who know about such things, that this book, third in the trilogy, is "one weird little book." It was designed that way, of course, because when a book talks about death and love and "otherlife" it's best, for me at least, that it's weird because, hell, what do we really know about death and love and "otherlife," after all?

  Which, of course, begs the question--is it necessary to read the first two weird books in the trilogy in order to understand the weirdness of this one? No. But it might help. Otherwise, it's a matter of deciphering the weirdnesss, of making it rational weirdness, I guess. But if you're not averse to such a task, go ahead and read "Spider" as a stand-alone.

  By the way, the main character here, Abner Cray--who's been pining for his lost love Phyllis Pellaprat since the end of "A Manhattan Ghost Story" is not up to always telling this story in a coherent manner. Forgive him. He has little idea what "otherlife" he's in, or what "the passing misery" beyond his door has in store for him.

  --T.M. Wright.

  With love for Chloe, Tara and Ella,

  my grandchildren

  I have learned this too: pettiness survives. And jealousy: And

  pretension, fear, loneliness, depression. I have learned that the living

  have not yet cornered the market on misery.

  —Abner Cray, 1984,

  "A Manhattan Ghost Story"

  ONE

  June 8, 2006, 3:30 PM

  Here's something you desperately need to know: the world you live in is not the world you think you live in, and if you try to live in it believing you know it, one day you'll find yourself surprised way beyond the powers of your poor synapses to express surprise—as if a spider has suddenly climbed into your mouth and bitten you on the tongue and made you unable to move, or swallow, or spit..

  That is what I live with constantly. A spider on my tongue.

  My name is Abner W. Cray and, long ago, I knew lots of things—what time to get up in the morning, what to do after I got up, what to do after that, who to kiss and who to avoid and who to listen to, who to be afraid of, or joke with, what tasks to leave until later and what to accomplish within the moment that was upon me.

  Now, this day (this beautiful, grotesque morning) I have only a spider on my tongue. Now I can not move, or swallow, or spit.

  And here's something else you need to know: You can not trust me, or anyone, about anything. You can not even trust yourself because I can not trust myself—about my survival, about my death (whether it has happened or will happen or should happen), about those who crowd me constantly in this little house, about the places I can go to, about the places I can never go to again, even though I've been to those places ten thousand times in what surely has been one-hundred thousand years.

  ~ * ~

  June 9, 8:00 AM

  Beautiful morning, grotesque morning—like a cherubic face with a bleached skull beneath the skin. And that describes all of us—you and me, the UPS delivery man, the shapely woman in green (whose eye is easy to catch), the neighbor who stalks your cat because it kills songbirds, the sibling you foolishly thought you knew so well, the lover who leaves you with a godawful mess.

  "Do you know what you are?" I say to some of those who crowd around me here, as if I am simply nonexistent, or as if my existence were no great matter, and I see them (certainly I do) cock their heads or shrug their shoulders or raise their eyebrows to tell me I'm being impossibly stupid or that the question simply doesn't pertain.

  It is not their open mouths or their poor plastic smiles or their marbled eyes that so disturb, it is their foaming and enthusiastic ignorance which proclaims loudly that others in their universe (which is our universe, too) welcome that ignorance and want to share it. Perhaps in a kiss.

  Phyllis Pellaprat is elsewhere. And everywhere. At last. She came to me (long ago) when it should have been impossible for her to come to me, and impossible for me to take her, and she gave me as much of herself as she was able to give, then dissipated, like smoke.

  You know her, you knew her: she shared your bed and tickled you at all the right times, in all the right places; she made much and nothing of her nakedness and her mischievous predilections; she said you were her world made of skin and hair and cartilage; she saw you even when you were nowhere near, and, at last, she left you only after she shed many tears, as if leaving you were an impossible task, but she left you nonetheless.

  She was as real as pain, and that was something she could no more avoid than she could have avoided her life, and her death.

  I think I love her as much as God allows, and I say that as someone, now, who has every reason to believe in a God, but doesn't.

  ~ * ~

  1:45 PM

  If you want me to take you back to the beginning of this tale, I won't, I can't. And I can't because I don't want to. If you had written previously, and almost endlessly, about your stupidity and (some would say) your perversion, would you want to look backward at it, or even glance backward at it, for Christ's sake! That would smack of masochism, and I'm not a masochist. (Although you must remember what I wrote earlier. Trust me and I may disappoint you, because I can't trust myself. Existence, however, is a lot more interesting that way, don't you think?)

  ~ * ~

  2:30 PM

  The snot-nosed kid selling puppies on Fifth Avenue (little muttlies, of course, but fucking damned cute) was a real heartbreaker. But then, that's what he was supposed to be (a heartbreaker). Clichés are the stock in trade of these poor creatures.

  Like the phantom taxi driver who drove as if the Manhattan streets were filled only with air:

  And Kennedy Whelan, the rotund detective looking for murder:

  And the cynical editor who was sure that "literature" could serve her only if it served the masses:

  And Stacey, the gorgeous second cousin of the lead male in these poor stories, who tickled his sensibilities:

  And Phyllis Pellaprat herself, who showed him what love co
uld be, then showed him that she'd been lying all along, though she hadn't known it.

  What a bag of clichés.

  If I could, I'd spit.

  ~ * ~

  5:15 PM

  It's a neat little house I live in, now—as small as my ambitions, but airy and livable, at least when I arrived not too awfully long ago. My neighbors are far enough away that they might as well be invisible, which suits me fine, and there are ample woods to walk in, and a hundred narrow paths winding through them. In this place, at least at first, I had a never-ending late spring and enough sun and storms and gray skies to keep me from becoming bored or complacent.

  It's rare that anyone comes to my door. It has happened only twice, in fact—middle-age men asking to hunt on my land: I said no each time, though, minutes later, I could hear the low, rumbling chatter of their shotguns. I didn't chase these hunters down in order to shoo them away: In the ordinary sense of the word, at least, I'm not stupid.

  (You're wondering, of course, if you can trust what I just told you. I'd say yes, but then you'd ask if you could trust that, and when I said yes, again, you'd repeat your question, and we'd go round and round and round and this little narrative would never get written. And, good Lord, it needs to get written.)

  We're talking about real time. What I put down on paper, here, has happened, or is happening, or will happen, or is continuing to happen. That's the sort of universe this is—where all things happen in all tenses, and in tenses you've never experienced, too. Such a fascinating place, this universe—a place where I can remember, and rest, and die (which I'll get around to sooner or later).

  Please don't trust me. Not everything I say is a lie, as far as I know, but I'm a miserably unreliable narrator. It's not that I want to be unreliable, but I really know nothing about anything, so I attempt to interpret what I experience, and I have no way of knowing if my interpretations are correct because nothing is correct here, just as, for instance, people are never at a "correct" age, and rainfall is never a "correct" amount: we can not control age or rainfall, so the idea of the "correctness" of age or rainfall simply doesn't pertain.

  ~ * ~

  June 10, 12:02 AM

  Well, shit, let me get down to specifics.

  When I think of a ghost story, I think about children shivering

  around a campfire while an aging man with a long, austere face

  summons up--in resonant, wonderfully spectral tones—the way

  the misdeeds of the dead will soon be visited upon the living, and I

  think about old gray houses that have somehow had Evil

  implanted in them, and I think about rocking chairs that rock all

  on their own, and about crying in empty rooms, about cold spots,

  warm spots, hot spots, hounds out of hell, men who hang

  themselves in attics and in cellars, again and again and again.

  And it’s all true.

  I know it's all true.

  But there's a whole lot more going on over there, on The Other

  Side, than any of us can imagine.

  —A Manhattan Ghost Story

  TWO

  I like being precise about these things, don't you? "TWO." It gives weight and parameters to this narrative, and specificity, too. It seems to impose order where order—at least as we have come to define it—cannot actually exist.

  So I'll begin, or continue, by telling you that I'm in my late forties, that my light brown hair is thinning, though not badly, that I'm not quite six feet tall, that my teeth are perfect, and I wear a size 11 E shoe; my fingers (some have said) are abnormally long (as are my toes) (I play piano, though badly), my nose is straight, narrow and unremarkable, and my heart has a murmur that's not a major problem. My cholesterol (when last checked, though I can't remember when that was) is around 140, and my sexual organs are of normal size (meaning only that none of my partners has ever exclaimed, "Oh, my God, how impressive you are!"); my legs are thin, and I walk with a nearly unnoticeable limp. Isn't that a stunningly uninteresting portrait? It says nothing about me, only that I could be any of a thousand men you might see anywhere on the planet. But there's this: were you to see me (were you able to see me, I should say, which isn't something I'm not absolutely certain is possible), you wouldn't realize it, but I'd know you instantly, and perfectly. No, not your life history. Not who you're fucking or hope to fuck, or how many degrees you've earned, your political alignment, your birth weight, your mother's maiden name, or the workings of your inner organs. I'd know you! That's the pickle I've gotten myself into, you see. That's the spider on my tongue. Whoever you are, beyond all the facts about your life (and death, if it pertained), would be as clear to me as the color of your eyes and the odor of your breath.

  You exist beyond all the stuff that clogs your life and your history. You have been floating about for eons, and although you might refer to yourself as a soul, an entity, a cosmic thing you are as unnamable and indefinable as the reason for gravity. You assume an identity; for a time, you wear a flat stomach or a graceless rear end or a face that makes others look away (or look too long): and, for a time (which is called "a life") you sell motorcycles or write greeting cards or are appointed king of this place or that, and then all of it's gone, Poof!-- down to the last fleeting memory, and you continue, unnamable, indefinable, neither a soul, nor an entity, nor a cosmic thing.

  You!

  ~ * ~

  June 11, 1:30 AM

  He told me:

  "I was walking with the woman I loved and it was my last day on earth. I didn't know it was my last day, nor did the woman I loved, whose name is Karen. We had shared a tasty lunch at a place called "Sid's" (she ordered a bowl of clam chowder and I ordered a tuna rollup) and, as we walked, we talked about the lunch, about the morning that had preceded it, and the evening that had preceded the morning. God, we were happy together. We were inseparable and that's how we liked it. What a way to live!

  "Here's the thing, Abner: We were walking on railroad tracks. That's almost always stupid, but we knew the schedules of the trains that used those tracks and we assumed we were okay. Turns out, our assumption was correct. There were no trains. Not that morning.

  "Walking railroad tracks is a little like walking on thin ice: it's such great, childish fun to balance on the rails or skip from one tie to another that's two or three ties away, or to put an ear to the rail and proclaim that you can hear a train far, far in the distance: "It's the rail," you say in hushed tones, as if sharing some forbidden secret."It conducts the rumbling of the wheels like a telephone wire. You can hear a train from miles away." But you're aware, with every passing second, that a huge, powerful, and nearly unstoppable Goliath uses those rails and that, if it caught up with you, you'd be reduced to hamburger. There's a little bit of a thrill in that, of course. But, still, as I said, it's like walking on thin ice.

  "That grim possibility turned us on big time—Karen and me. So we decided to have at it right there, on the tracks. There was, as well, the always-irresistible possibility that we'd get caught (though no one else appeared to be walking the tracks that day, there was a curve not far from where we were, and we knew that someone could round that curve at any time), of course, so we stripped down quite completely and, as usual, the lovely and buxom Karen took the upper berth so I could watch her flail about, her wondrous breasts cascading this way and that, and while this was going on, I was in some incredible world her marvelous body created for me, a world where the moment that was everything lasted an eternity, a world where pain was pleasure, and where I had no idea (nor did I care) what my arms and legs and head were doing, a place where I cared only what my cock was doing, and it was doing just fine, thank you, it was answering the siren call of Karen's tits and ass and pussy, and so I did not really see what she was doing, you understand, or feel it—I did not see or care that she had grabbed a great shock of my long hair and that her good, strong hands and arms were banging my head against that bright steel rail as she thras
hed about in what must have been a continuous orgasm, did not see or really feel any of this until I saw it from above, from the height of a basketball hoop, perhaps, until I saw her stop thrashing about, suddenly, and look at me, and I heard her say, in one great outflow of breath, "Larry! Larry! Oh my God!" because, of course, she knew I'd gone the way of the dodo bird."

  I told poor Larry that it was a sad and painful and awful story, but, at its core, outrageously funny, too, and he chuckled in his hollow non-corporeal way, then bleeped out, the way his kind always do, with a barely perceptible burping noise (a gerbil burp, I used to call it), leaving behind only all of himself, minus his history and the past workings of his inner organs, the color of his eyes, the length of his fingernails, the odor of his breath.

  Don't ask me to define the all of himself he'd left behind. Such a definition is not something I do or have ever done. I'm not smart enough or articulate enough, and, besides, I simply don't have the fucking time.

  ~ * ~

  8:13 AM

  Often, I believe I see Phyllis Pellaprat at a distance in the dim woods beyond my windows, so she's nothing more than an imagining, the detritus of a ghost, as if she has shed her other-worldly skin and it has drifted back to earth.