The Color Over Occam

by Jonathan Thomas

  Then Wil yanked the outboard motor into roaring life, and conversation was suspended. As we gained some distance from the anomaly, I relaxed and wondered if we’d let creepy ambience get the better of us, if we’d seriously overreacted. If we were further than we thought from being hotshot ghost hunters.

  2

  After we’d hauled the boat into the Parks Department shed and hit the road, I asked brooding Wil if he didn’t want to phone home for an update. Let Lucinda know he was coming. He shook his head, staring morosely out the windshield. “Whenever I get there, it won’t be soon enough. If I reach her now, that’ll just give her more time to get worked up. Trust me.” I was reduced from colleague to chauffeur for the rest of the drive. A barely perceptible shrug and faint grunt rewarded efforts to engage him on the evening’s findings. Quite a switch from the Wil who’d been dying to talk when we couldn’t.

  The Rices occupied one of several third-floor condos in Dyer Hall, named after some long-deceased teacher or benefactor of the former university. The name was all the developers had retained beyond the Eastlake masonry shell when they gutted the classrooms inside. A swath of lawn and a couple of uninspired petunia beds separated the hall from Ellery Avenue. Over the avenue, a quarter-mile back, arched the florid, grandiose gateway in what few sections remained of a wrought-iron spear-top fence that had surrounded the former main green. Dyer Hall would have been one of the historic jewels in a prospective gated community, but granite drums from the columns of a less fortunate building guaranteed the gates stayed wide open, because retailers and dentists and other leaseholders down the avenue raised hell about restricting public access to customers. Bad enough that the gate’s low clearance forced delivery trucks onto alternate routes. Most of these angry businesses also operated in rehabbed campus structures. At work I often processed applications from Wil’s neighbors in so-called “Dire Hall,” and in deference to their seasoned judgment I always addressed return correspondence with the same misspelling.

  I was all set to wish Wil luck and drop him off. Not so fast! He paused halfway out of the Taurus and fairly pleaded, “Can you come in a minute?”

  I was gearing up to demur, with legit excuse that cops were quick to ticket on-street parking after 1 A.M. But Wil had the drop on me, damn him. “Lucinda’s been having trouble getting around lately, even with my help. I might need a hand if we have to go to the hospital.”

  I heaved a sigh direct from my stricken conscience. Wil’s gratitude was effusive as I hid OGAM’s equipment in the trunk and locked the car, but he reverted to brown study as we entered the lobby. Behind classy Victorian façade lurked ’80s institutional bleakness, smelling of hard rubber and synthetic carpet fiber. Trudging upstairs I mused, not for the first time, how a stranger might have decided we’d each ended up in the other’s proper niche. Here was Wil the forest ranger and diehard outdoorsman, consigned to a tacky condo in the treeless middle of town, while I, a nerdy little clerk in City Hall, enjoyed a woodsy acre of elbow room around my cabin in the sticks. Well, each to his anti-stereotypical own, and to me, a condo was the hateful worst of college dormitory and mortgaged money pit. A hive culture. Wil and Lucinda had damn little freedom to alter home sweet home to their taste, but when the pipes froze they had no landlord to pester, and they might be stuck with any boors in adjacent units for life. Too late for my sage counsel, though! And here we were. With weary resolution, he scraped caked mud off his soles into the welcome mat and motioned me to do likewise, then twisted his key in the dull steel knob.

  “Right behind you, pal,” I whispered. Just don’t expect me to say anything.

  The developers, I had to admit, knew their soundproofing. Only when Wil’s index finger poked the door open did the uproar spill out. The wild-eyed Norwegian elkhound was yapping nonstop behind a baby gate across the kitchen doorway. From the bedroom barged Lucinda, getting around fine at the moment. She flung a cordless phone at the floor. It bounced across ersatz Persian rug and was still emitting a dial tone. She squalled, “Where the hell were you? I tried your cell two hours ago! I came this close to calling 911 for an ambulance!”

  She paused for breath, and her eyes homed in on me. “And what the hell is he doing here?” Reminded myself, don’t take this personally. It was the hormones talking. And the pain and the stress. Tonight, anyway.

  Wil had become well-versed at deflecting negativity. “You’re not due for a few days yet. What are your contractions down to? Every other minute?”

  “It fucking hurts all the time!” she wailed. “Why the hell did you have to go out with this idiot tonight?”

  “I thought Tracy and Anne and what’s-her-name were supposed to stay with you.” Wil had turned to me with a doleful, apologetic grimace.

  “Those assholes went to a nine o’clock movie! And when I got your voicemail, I tried to talk but I could hardly breathe!” Her last couple of words wheezed out between sobs.

  “Okay, off to the hospital then. You all set?”

  “My suitcase is on the bed. I’m nauseous. Give me a minute.” She gripped the squeaky back of a brown leather sofa and leaned into it a little.

  I wanted to be helpful. And to speed my departure from this bedlam. And to get away from that barking! “I’ll go fetch the suitcase. Can I turn on a light?” Apart from a table lamp in the kitchen, these rooms were as dim as the moonlit reservoir.

  “Please don’t,” Wil implored. “Lucinda’s been photosensitive this trimester.”

  “What? Is that normal?” Maybe not the most tactful inquiry, but I was getting punchy from absorbing Lucinda’s bad vibes.

  “The doctor said it was rare.” Wil seemed to let slip a hint of defensiveness.

  “Okay.” I advanced three steps toward the bedroom, squinting floorward for any obstacles. Lucinda noticed and made a face that would have done a gorgon proud.

  “Stay the fuck out of our bedroom! There’s blood and gunk all over!”

  I threw up my hands and backed off. At least I understood why the poor dog was agitated, even if I couldn’t smell it myself.

  Lucinda sidled from behind the couch. She stalwartly waddled forward and bellowed, “Wilbur, get the goddamn suitcase!”

  A sound arrested us all, as of an awning full of rain giving way.

  Lucinda’s water had broken. A cascade struck the varnished hardwood floor, inches from the red carpet. Lucinda cried Wil’s name repeatedly. I fought the temptation to bolt. What steadied me was amazement at the puddle on the floor. It was luminous. Bluish, or silvery, I couldn’t say for sure.

  By now, Wil had stumbled into and out of the bedroom and had trodden on a squealing dog toy, and on banging his shin on a bedpost or bureau leg he yelled “Shit!”

  “Your water’s glowing,” I couldn’t help but tell Lucinda as Wil took gentle hold of her arm and asked if she could make it to the garage.

  At him she nodded, and at me she scowled. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  Wil supported her weight as best he could with her suitcase in one hand, as the dog yapped with the persistence of a tape loop, and I followed at the Rices’ heels, which left flickering prints after crossing the shiny pool.

  At the threshold, Wil half faced me and blurted something about the door locking if I slammed it after me, which completely muted the dog in midbark. From there, we forged on in opposite directions. Lucinda I couldn’t blame for spewing abuse under the excruciating circumstances. I was rather more miffed at Wil for conning me into the role of human buffer zone.

  3

  No telling how long Wil would be tied up at the maternity ward with Lucinda. Spent my Sunday in basement studio, reviewing reservoir data. This month’s OGAM Chronicles was due Friday, with or without Wil’s input, and if it wasn’t about corpse-lights, I’d again have to solicit ghost-chasing anecdotes, often pretty lame, from camera-shy OGAM members.

  The audio on my minidisk and camcorder duplicated one another. An abrasive hum, with sporadic piercing crackles. The soundtrack,
I hypothesized, of rogue magnetism. If these were recordings of equipment glitches, why would bursts of static spike at the same time in different devices?

  To Wil I e-mailed QuickTime clips of typical anomaly footage, for him to digest at leisure. Here, I wrote him, was textbook example of good evidence that looked bad. As long as I had aimed at the surface, the shot was in focus, but even then the streak of luster read as a blank, like a hole in the screen, devoid of color or brightness. And as the video progressed, the emptiness retained its stable, sharp outline, reprising none of its shifts in depth or angle, while the rest of the image grew grainier and grainier, till the end, when the surface snapped back into clarity. Whatever I’d been shooting, whether supernatural or mundanely electromagnetic, had excised itself from the record. Along with the fish it had frightened.

  The camcorder manual contained some fine print about limited color resolution, distortions resulting. Yeah, okay, but swamp gas couldn’t explain what I was seeing, or not seeing, in the frame. Here, in the guise of lousy videography, was footage whose apparent flaws were telltale signs of something esoteric. And there I had it. My preface to the “Eye on the Unknown” segment on the next Chronicles.

  Monday and Tuesday plodded by without word from Wil, and my enthusiasm for our blockbuster new episode was cooling. Two days steeped in numbingly inane data at City Hall were taking their toll, despite one blip of excitement when an ornery codger singled out my window along the counter, because I had soaked him for that fishing license in June. He’d hooked a nice fat trout in the reservoir, but it fried up rotten and stank him and the missus out of their RV all evening. I had the temerity to ask how long the filets had been sitting around raw. “They went straight in the pan the minute I got home!”

  A chill hit me then, as the trout with attached corpse-light leapt to mind. I further riled the red-faced pensioner by pursuing the irrelevant detail of when he’d gone fishing. “Last Friday, dammit!” Ah, relief. Not the same trout. “What the hell did I pay you good money for? The fish was rotten while it was still swimming, I tell you!”

  Diseased fish boded no good, but they weren’t, I didn’t mind informing the crotchety duffer, my department. If he’d saved any samples of tainted fish, he should bring them to the Bureau of Game and Fisheries or the Parks Department. Made a mental note to send Wil a heads-up about this customer. “Of course I didn’t save the fish! It was putrid! Stank to high heaven!” Assured him I was sorry, but that was the best I could do for him. And really, it was.

  I did recall how much he’d groused about the fee during our June run-in, when I mentioned that licenses might be cheaper in Houghton, Hoyle, Chapman, or Armitage, the other towns that drank from the reservoir. They all had the right to issue hunting and fishing licenses as they saw fit, which was how the state forestalled jurisdictional squabbles among the several towns (in different counties, yet) sharing one body of water. In June the curmudgeon had grumbled I wouldn’t be rid of him that easily: he wasn’t wasting more gasoline on comparison-shopping all over creation. So he knuckled under and paid up then, and today he was tromping out of the office, spewing omnidirectional vitriol. Definitely, let Wil know this character might come knocking!

  But still I shied from follow-up contact with my one day-to-day pal, during work hours and beyond. He must have had his hands full with newborn twins and didn’t need me pestering him. I was also loath to phone at a bad time and provoke Lucinda further. And when was a good time? Wil’s fatherhood amounted to another sticking point. How to acknowledge it? The standard, facile, mealy-mouthed course would involve feigning a hearty “Congratulations!” No, that felt doubly inappropriate, considering his long-standing indifference to “blessed events” versus everything else of interest to him. To be realistic, though, best I get used to hosting most of our Chronicles solo. Without holding a grudge against Wil, who had as little choice in childcare as he had in Lucinda’s pregnancy, a classic marital “deal-breaker” if ever there was one. If he could swing a change of scene from shitty diapers and hourly feedings, then he would, wouldn’t he?

  During my slow Wednesday at work, I had to shake a recurring sentiment that dusty varnish and yellowing paper and overheated PC monitors were, and would remain, the smells of real life for me. Tried rechanneling my thoughts into the mystery of why people, and Lucinda in particular, would prioritize parenthood above everything else they could be doing. And didn’t “women’s libbers” ask that too, in a less blinkered decade? As if childbearing rendered people unique and exalted, instead of lumping them among the fertile billions comprising the genus Homo for the last two million years? I entertained no delusion that the world was poorer without my contributions to the gene pool, or that those contributions would be doing the world a favor. As for the motivations of Wil or Lucinda, or anyone else for that matter? I once knew a junkie who was wont to say between rounds of detox, “You’ll never make sense of anything unless you know the he and she of it.” In which case, barring a far-fetched tête-à-tête with the prickly Lucinda, the motives of this he and she to start a family would remain a mystery forever.

  On the drive home, I outlined how to wing a half-hour of TV journalism without Wil. Open with a thumbnail history of Gorman County and the reservoir, cribbing online text and photos. Broach the topic of corpse-lights, likewise plundering the Internet, and play up local angle by paraphrasing my informants’ accounts. Recap our foray across haunted waters, with accompaniment of establishing shots from on shore and at intervals as we went. Roll footage of negative space where will-o’-the-wisp should have been and explain why it meant something. Do not harp on feeling nervous and insecure in the presence of anomaly. A responsible, professional, scientific quest for data had to disregard the subjective, or else we’d always travel with a psychic. Wrap up the show with “Occult Community Announcements,” mostly of OGAM members’ birthdays or church cake sales. Nearer Halloween, dramatic readings by a Poe impersonator at the library or a Haunted Occam tour might spice up the listings.

  Through my back door, in the benign chaos of my kitchen, the red light on the answering machine was blinking. I brightened at hearing Wil’s voice, but then he said, “We had the funeral today, finally. Just for immediate family. You hate that kind of emotional overkill, so please don’t feel slighted that I didn’t let you know. Anyway, listen, can you come meet me at the Aviator at 7:30? Thanks.” End of message.

  Funeral? How could I beg off after hearing that? And requesting my company at a bar? Almost as troubling. Splitting a six-pack on home turf was our usual modus operandi. A cornerstone of our friendship. In preference to paying double for drinks out in noisy, crowded public. But I understood the need for a space apart sometimes in which to deal with the worst, away from the influence of everyday associations. Like “going walkabout” without going anywhere. The sign of a desperate hour. Back to the Taurus, and back to damned Occam after eight grueling hours there.

  Thank God it was the Aviator. Courteous Wil was in the booth nearest the door, to save me from scouting up and down the dusky length of the premises. I was early. He’d been earlier to the tune of two empty glasses plus the half a beer in his hand. Ten-ounce drafts for a dollar, including a half-decent local IPA, made for the basic draw here.

  For the sake of catching up, I went over and ordered two IPAs at once from the strapping old barkeep, sailorlike in tight striped T-shirt and scarlet do-rag, but rumored to be the Vietnam-era ace who lent the place its name. Threw culinary standards to the wind and got a microwave burrito as well, to cushion the alcohol. Offered via sign language to treat Wil, but he shook his dour head. Set my two ales on the black walnut table, rife with whittled names and initials from enough generations ago to be “quaint.” Sat across from Wil on a high-backed blond maple bench, with Art Nouveau carvings of curly vines and foliage and perching finches.

  Thanks purely to its location in a terrain vague between downtown and the tool-and-die quarter, the Aviator had evaded the urban renewals and civic improvem
ents and redevelopments that would have blithely steamrollered a turn-of-the-century bierstube. In essence, the one vintage neighborhood bar in Occam had survived to make the Historic Register because it wasn’t in a neighborhood.

  Took a sip and cast about for tactful opening sentence. What to avoid was pretty obvious. Since Saturday night, my thoughts had often drifted to Lucinda’s glittering water on the floor. But alluding to that could serve no constructive end. Nor was it an observation I could make anything of, or do anything with. Not yet, anyway. “Four days to learn the autopsy results,” Wil intruded on my thoughts. A good start, insofar as maybe he just wanted a sounding board. “Four days. And you know what they figured out? Nothing.”

  “Wil, I’m really sorry, but I don’t know whose autopsy you mean.” Half afraid to admit it. Unsure of how fragile, how close to meltdown, Wil was.

  “No, of course not.” Was his expression clouded with grieving or brooding? “It stinks of malpractice anyhow. If those slippery schmucks at the hospital weren’t so good at giving us the runaround, we could sue. Lucinda wants to, regardless. I need to regroup first.”

  “Uh-huh.” The barkeep plopped a paper plate an inch from my elbow on the table. Ah, my burrito, with plastic knife and fork. “You got any hot sauce? And a napkin, please?” Had to ask fast, or supper would be cold before I could catch his attention again. He grunted noncommittally and barreled off. Wil was staring at my burrito as if it might move. And not with understandable mockery. Nothing at all humorous in his demeanor. I was glad when he went back to studying his glass, as if his words were in there.

  “They struck me as completely ill-prepared in the delivery room. And it was something like a ten-hour labor, so they had plenty of time to think ahead. I kept my mouth shut and let the alleged experts do their jobs. Now I wish I’d stuck my neck out and fuck ’em if they didn’t like it. Both twins were breech birth. We’d agreed on naming the older twin Warren. It was plain from what I saw of him coming out feet-first that he was blue, but they didn’t give him oxygen, and I was too distracted to speak up because Morgan was born a minute later. The nurse wouldn’t let Lucinda touch Warren and only let her look at him a few seconds, probably to stop her squawking.” Our bartender plunked a bottle of Tabasco between us like a centerpiece. No napkin. Wil asked for another beer. I had to snatch a bunch of cocktail napkins from the bar. Wil pursed his lips and found more words inside his glass.