The Breath of Suspension

by Jablokov, Alexander

  He left the residential towers and wandered the streets of three-story brownstone apartment buildings. He felt warm soapy water on his skin, and drifted through the wide crack under an ill-fitting door.

  The bathroom was warm and steamy, heated by the glow of a gas burner in one wall. A plump woman in a flower-print dress, with short dark hair, washed a child in that most marvelous of bathing devices, a large freestanding claw-foot bathtub. The little girl in the tub had just had her hair washed, and it was slicked to her head like a mannikin’s. She stared intently down into the soapy water like a cat catching fish.

  “Point to your mouth, Sally. Your mouth.” Sally obediently put her finger in her mouth. “Point to your nose.” She put her finger in her nose. “Very good, Sally. Can you point to your ear? Your ear, Sally.” After a moment’s thought, the little girl put her finger in her ear. “Where is your chin?” Sally, tiring of the game, and having decided which she liked best, stuck her finger back up her nose and stared at her mother. Her mother laughed, delighted at this mutiny. “Silly goose.” She poured water over the girl’s head. Sally closed her eyes and made a “brrr” noise with her lips. “Time to get out, Sally.” The little girl stood up, and her mother pulled the plug. Sally waved as the water and soap bubbles swirled down the drain and said, “Ba-bye. Ba-bye.” Her mother pulled her from the tub and wrapped her in a huge towel, in which she vanished completely.

  The feel of the terry cloth on his skin and the warm strawberry scent of the mother covered Stanley like a benediction. He stretched forward as the mother rubbed her daughter’s hair with the towel until it stood out in all directions. The mother’s happiness vanished, and she felt herself trapped, compelled, every moment of her life now given over to the care of a selfish and capricious creature, no time to even think about getting any work done on the one poem she’d been working on since she left high school to get married, her life predetermined now until she grew old and was left alone. She rubbed too vigorously with the towel, and Sally, smothered and manipulated by forces she could not control, or even understand, began to shriek. “Quiet, Sally. Quiet, damn it.” Stanley remembered the platform. What was he doing in here? He had a train to catch, he had to get home. He could not even imagine how he had managed to stray. He turned and hurried off to the El station.

  ❖

  The two of them walked down the street together, Harmon with a long measured stride, and Dexter with the peculiar mincing waddle he was compelled to use because of the width of his thighs. Harmon wore a thick knee-length overcoat and a karakul hat, but the cold still struck deep into his bones. He wore a scarf to protect his throat, which was always the most sensitive. He remembered a time, surely not that long ago, when he had enjoyed the winter, when it had made him feel alive. He and Margaret had spent weekends in Wisconsin, cross-country skiing, and making grotesque snowmen. No longer. Dexter wore a red windbreaker that made him look like a tomato, and a Minnesota Vikings cap with horns on it. As he walked, he juggled little beanbags in an elaborate fountain. He had a number of similar skills—such as rolling a silver dollar across the back of his knuckles, like George Raft, and making origami animals—all of which annoyed Harmon because he had never learned to do things like that. He thought about the image the two of them presented, and snorted, amused at himself for feeling embarrassed.

  “Father Toomey looked a little bummed out,” Dexter said. “I think we woke him up.”

  “Dexter, it’s three-thirty in the morning. Not everyone sits up all night reading books on the Kabbalah.”

  “Yeah, I guess. Anyway, he cheered up after we talked about the horoscope reading I’m doing for him. There’s a lot of real interesting stuff in it.”

  “An ordained Catholic priest is having you do his horoscope?” Dexter looked surprised. “Sure. Why not?”

  Why not, indeed? Harmon hefted his ancient black leather bag. The instruments it contained had been blessed by Father Toomey and sprinkled with holy water from the font at St. Mary’s. Harmon, in the precisely rigorous theological way that devout atheists have, doubted the efficacy of a blessing from a priest so far sunk in superstition that he had his horoscope done, and performed holy offices for a purpose so blatantly demonic, but he had to admit that it always seemed to do the job. When he handed the sleepy, slightly inebriated priest the speculum, the wand, the silver nails, the censer, the compass, and the rest of the instruments of his new trade, they were nothing but dead metal, but when he took them in his hands after the blessing, they vibrated with suppressed energy. The touch of such half-living things was odious to him, essential though they were. It disturbed him that such things worked. As quickly as he could, he wrapped them in their coverings of virgin lamb hide, inscribed with Latin prayers and Babylonian symbols, and placed them, in correct order, into his bag. That bag had once held his stethoscope, patella reflex hammer, thermometer, hypodermics, laryngoscope, and the rest of his medical instruments, and though he had not touched any of them in years, it had pained him to remove them so that the bag could be used for its new purpose.

  “You know, Professor, the other day I was reading an interesting book about the gods of ancient Atlantis—”

  “Oh, Dexter,” Harmon said irritably. “You don’t really believe all these things, do you?”

  Dexter grinned at him, yellow-toothed. “Why not? You believe in ghosts, don’t you?”

  Dexter’s one unanswerable argument. “I believe in them, Dexter, only because I am forced to, not because I like it. That’s the difference between us. It would be terrible to like the idea that ghosts exist.”

  “Boy, did you fight it,” Dexter said with a chuckle. “You sat with me for an hour, talking about Mary Baker Eddy. Then you shut up. I asked you what was wrong. ‘A ghost,’ you said. ‘I’ve got to get rid of a ghost.’ Took you three cups of tea to say that. You don’t even like camomile tea, do you?”

  “It served.”

  “It sure did. You remember that first time, don’t you? I’ll never forget it. We hardly knew what we were doing, like two kids playing with dynamite. I had pretended I knew more about it than I did, you know.”

  “I know.” They often talked about the first ghost. They never talked about the second.

  “I thought I could handle it, but it almost swallowed me and you had to save my ass. Quite a talent you have there. Strongest I’ve ever heard of. You should be proud.”

  “I feel precisely as proud as I would if I discovered that I had an innate genius for chicken stealing.”

  Dexter laughed, head thrown back. He had a lot of fillings in his back teeth. “Gee, that’s pretty funny. But anyway, this Kabbalah stuff is real interesting....”

  Harmon suffered himself to be subjected to a rambling, overly detailed lecture on medieval Jewish mysticism until, much too soon, they were at the El station.

  Dexter craned his head back and looked up at the dark girders of the station, his face suddenly serious. “I feel him up there. He’s a heavy one. Strong. He didn’t live enough, when he had the chance. Those are always the worst. Too many trapped desires. Good luck to you. Oh... wait. They lock these things when the trains stop running, and we’re not exactly authorized.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a little black pouch, which, when opened, revealed a line of shiny lock-picking tools.

  “I used to pick locks at school,” Dexter said. “Just for fun. I never stole anything. Figuring out the locks was the good part. Schools don’t have very good locks. Most students just break in the windows.” He walked up to the heavy metal mesh door at the base of the stairs and had it opened about as quickly as he could have with a key. He sighed, disappointed. “The CTA doesn’t either. I don’t even know why they bother. Well, now it’s time. Good luck.” They paused and he shook Harmon’s hand, as he always did, with a simple solemnity.

  Nothing to say, Harmon turned and started up toward the El station.

  ❖

  They were always the worst. “The people who want to live forever
are always the ones who can’t find anything to do on a rainy Sunday afternoon,” as Dr. Kaltenbrunner, the head of Radiology at Mount Tabor Hospital, had once said. Dr. K was never bored, and certainly never boring, enjoyed seventeenth-century English poetry, and died of an aneurism three months before Harmon encountered his first ghost. Died and stayed dead. Harmon always thought he could have used his help. Thomas Browne and John Donne would have understood ghosts better than Harmon could, which was funny, because there hadn’t been enough ghosts in the seventeenth century to be worth worrying about.

  Some doctors managed to stay away from ER duty, and it was mostly the young ones—who needed to be taught, by having their noses rubbed in it, about the mixture of fragility and resilience that is the human body—who took the duty there, particularly at night. In his time, Harmon had seen a seventy-year-old lady some anonymous madman had pushed in front of an onrushing El train recover and live, with only a limp in her left leg to show for it, and a Northwestern University linebacker DOA from a fractured skull caused by a fall in the shower in the men’s locker room.

  As Harmon climbed the clattering metal stairs up to the deserted El platform, he remembered the first one. It was always that way with him. He was never able to see the Duomo of Florence without remembering the first time he and Margaret had seen it, from the window of their pensione. There were some words he could not read without remembering the classroom in which he learned them, and whether it had been sunny that day. It meant there were some things he never lost, that he always had Margaret with him in Florence. And it meant that he could never deal with a ghost without remembering the terror of the first one.

  He had been working night duty, late, when they brought in a bloody stretcher. It had been quiet for about an hour, in that strange irregular rhythm that Emergency Rooms have, crowded most of the time, but sometimes almost empty. A pedestrian had been hit by a truck while crossing the street. There was a lot of bleeding, mostly internal, and a torn lung filled with blood, a hemothorax. His breathing was audible, a slow dragging gurgle, the sound a straw makes sucking at the bottom of a glass of Coke when the glass is almost empty. Harmon managed to stop much of the bleeding, but by that time the man was in shock. Then the heart went into ventricular fibrillation. Harmon put the paddles on and defibril-lated it. When the heart stopped altogether, he put the patient on a pacemaker and an external ventilator. The autopsy subsequently showed substantial damage to the brain stem, as well as complete kidney failure. Every measure Harmon took, as it turned out, was useless, but he managed to keep the patient alive an extra hour, before everything stopped at once, in the ICU.

  A day or so later, the nurse on duty came to him with a problem. Rosemary was a redhead, cute, and reminded him of Margaret when she was young, so he was a little fonder of her than he should have been, particularly since Margaret had been sick. The nurse wasn’t flirting now, however. She was frightened. She kept hearing someone drinking out of a straw, she said, in a corner of the ER, only there wasn’t anyone there. She was afraid she was losing her mind, which can happen to you after too many gunshot wounds, suicides, and drug overdoses. Harmon assured her, in what he told himself was a fatherly way, that it was probably something like air in the pipes, which he called an “embolism,” a medical usage that delighted her. She teased him about it.

  Harmon remembered being vaguely pleased about that, while he searched around and listened. He didn’t hear anything. It was late, and he finally climbed up on a gurney and went to sleep, as some of the other doctors did when things weren’t busy. He’d never done it before, and why he did it was something he could not remember, though everything about the incident, from the freckles around Rosemary’s nose to the scheduling roster for that night’s medical staff, was abnormally clear in his mind, the way memories of things that happened only yesterday never were. When he woke up, he heard it. A slow dragging gurgle. He listened with his eyes closed, heart pounding. Then it stopped.

  “Hey, have you seen my car?” a voice said. “It’s a blue car, a Cutlass, though I guess it’s too dark here to see the color. I know I parked it near here, but I just can’t find it.”

  Harmon slowly opened his eyes. Standing in front of him was a fat man in a business suit, holding a briefcase. He wasn’t bloody, and his face was not pasty white, but Harmon recognized him. It was the man who had died the night before.

  “Look, I have to get home to Berwyn. My wife will be going nuts. She expected me home hours ago. Have you seen the damn car? It’s a Cutlass, blue. Not a good car, God knows, and it needs work, but I gotta get home.”

  Harmon had met the wife when she identified the body. She had, indeed, expected him hours ago.

  “Jeez, I don’t know what I could have done with it.”

  Harmon was a logical man, and a practical man, and he hadn’t until that moment realized that those two characteristics could be in conflict. What he saw before him was indubitably a ghost, and as a practical man he had to accept that. He also knew, as a logical man, that ghosts did not, indeed could not, exist. This neat conundrum, however, did not occur to him until somewhat later, because the next time the dead man said, “Do you think you could help me find my car? I gotta get home,” he launched himself from the gurney, smashing it back into the wall, bolted from the ER, and did not stop running until he was sitting at the desk in his little office on the fifth floor, shaking desperately and trying not to scream.

  ❖

  The El platform was windswept and utterly empty. Harmon walked slowly across its torn asphalt until he came to the spot where it had happened. The police had cleaned up the blood and erased the chalk outline, that curious symbol of the vanished soul used by police photographers as a record of the body, so morning commuters would not be unpleasantly surprised by the cold official evidence of violent death. He didn’t have to see it. He could feel it, like standing in the autopsy room and knowing that someone had left the door to the cold room where the bodies were kept open because you could feel the frigid formaldehyde-and-decay-scented air seeping along the floor.

  He didn’t know why he had this particular sense, or ability, or whatever. To himself he compared it to someone with perfect pitch and rhythm who nevertheless dislikes music, someone who could play Bach’s Goldberg Variations through perfectly after hearing the piece only once, and yet hate every single note. It was a vicious curse. He set his black bag down, opened it, and began to remove his instruments.

  To start, Harmon had cautiously, cautiously, sounded out his colleagues on the subject of ghosts. He’d read too many books where seemingly reasonable men lost all of their social graces when confronted by the inexplicable and started jabbering and making ridiculous accusations, frightening and embarrassing their friends. So, in a theoretical manner, he asked about ghosts. To his surprise, instead of being suspicious, people either calmly said they didn’t believe in them, or the majority had one or more anecdotes about things like the ghost of a child in an old house dropping a ball down the stairs or a hitchhiking girl in a white dress who would only appear to men driving alone and then would vanish from the car. Others had stories about candles being snuffed out in perfectly still rooms, or dreams about dying relatives, or any number of irrelevant mystical experiences. No one, when pressed, would admit to having actually seen anything like a real, demonstrably dead man walking and talking and looking for a blue Cutlass. A man who persisted, week after week, in trying to get Harmon to help him find the damn thing. Harmon transferred from the ER. Rosemary thought it was something personal, because she’d asked him to her house for dinner, and they rarely spoke after that.

  He told Margaret, however, as much of it as he could. It gave her something to think about, as she lay there in bed and gasped, waiting for the end. She wondered, of course, if the strain of her illness had not made her husband lose what few marbles he had left, as she put it, but she only said this because both of them knew Harmon was coolly sane. It interested her that some people could hear ghosts, but
that Harmon could see them and talk to them. She, like Dexter, used the word “gift.”

  In good scholar’s style, Harmon did research in the dusty abandoned stacks of the witchcraft and folklore sections of Northwestern, the University of Chicago, and the University of Illinois, Circle Campus. He even had a friend let him into the private collections of the Field Museum of Natural History. He learned about lemures, the Roman spirits of the dead, about the hauntings of abandoned pavilions by sardonic Chinese ghosts, and about the Amityville Horror. It was all just... literature. Stories. Tales to tell at midnight. Not a single one of them had the ring of truth to it, and Harmon was by this time intimately familiar with the true behavior of ghosts.

  Everyone was very good to him about Margaret, and about what he did to himself as a result, though no one understood the real reason for it. It got to be too much, in the apartment, in the hospital, and he finally started to say things that concerned people. They didn’t think he was crazy, just “under stress,” that ubiquitous modern disease, which excuses almost anything. Then, someone at the Field Museum mentioned, with the air of an ordinarily respectable man selling someone some particularly vile pornography, that Dexter Warhoff, of the Sphinx and Eye of Truth Bookstore, might have some materials not available in the museum collection. It was rumored that Dexter possessed a bizarrely variant scroll of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, as well as several Mayan codexes not collected in the Popol Vuh or the Dresden Codex, though no one was quite sure. Harmon had come to the conclusion that using ordinary reason in his new circumstances was using Occam’s razor while shaving in a fun-house mirror. Common sense was a normally useful instrument turned dangerous in the wrong situation. So he went to Dexter’s store, drank his sour tea, and talked with him. Dexter scratched his head with elaborate thoughtfulness, then took Harmon upstairs where he lived, to a mess with a kitchen full of dirty dishes, and brought him into a room piled with newspaper clippings, elaborately color coded, in five different languages, as well as sheets of articles transcribed from newspapers in forty languages more.