by Tom Crockett
“I’m still here,” it said, he said, it was a man’s voice. “Not for long though.” He laughed then, and the laugh became a long cough.
“Who . . . are you?” Marina asked softly, her voice barely a whisper, not sure she wanted an answer.
“Jus’ a ghost. Come for the dyin’. Who are you?” The question surprised Marina. Since coming to Turtle Island, no one had asked her so directly and immediately who she was. Usually they either seemed to know who she was or were content for her to tell them when she chose to. It was silly, she knew, but she wasn’t sure how to answer this ghost.
Who was she? Was she still Marina Hardt? Certainly she was not the same person she had been. She’d only recently come hesitantly to accept that perhaps she was still living, or living again. Could she still lay claim to the same name? Wasn’t there a different person dwelling in her body now?
“I’m . . . Marina . . . Marina Hardt.”
“The photographer?” Again the question surprised Marina. While she’d experienced some small degree of celebrity as a photographer, that was usually within the more limited community of artists, photographers, journalists, and editors. However, most of the people Marina met, while they might have remembered and, in fact, been deeply touched by her work, seldom attached a name to the photographer.
“Yes,” she answered, hearing the uncertainty even in her own voice. “I guess I am.”
“Hah! You’re good. Been aware of you since, oh . . . the late seventies, Beirut I think.”
“Yes.” Marina laughed in spite of herself. I have a reputation among the dead, she thought.
“Name’s Clarence, Clarence Mudder.” The name was familiar to her, but only in a distant and abstract sort of way. It was a name she’d heard somewhere. “Stinkwater Jack’s, the Burning Boys . . .” He was helping her, giving her clues. They sounded like titles. “Ginsburg, Burroughs, LeRoi Jones . . .” She made the connection.
“The poet?” There had been a Clarence Mudder that she’d read in college. She recalled him as being a minor black poet of the beat generation, famous more for his political writing in the early civil rights movement than for his poetry.
“That’s me.”
Marina was aware that what had seemed to be a shadow before was in fact just the dark skin of an old man. She could see him more clearly now. He was thin, but he looked as if he’d once been strong and barrel-chested. His skin hung about him like a damp sheet. He wore no shirt and his baggy black trousers were cinched up by a belt that he’d added holes to. A silver-gray fuzz dusted his dark chest and the top of his head.
“I didn’t know . . .” Marina stopped herself. She was going to say she didn’t know he was dead, but it seemed an awkward statement. She still did not understand the protocols of Turtle Island. They seemed to be constantly shifting, constantly appropriate for a different place.
“Yeah, Kiyoko loved this place. We used to come here once every year just to . . .” His thought trailed off. It seemed to Marina that he had begun to respond to a different question, something about Turtle Island, not about death.
“Kiyoko?” Marina decided to pursue this course. It took Clarence a moment to respond.
“My wife. She died last year. Nothin’’s been the same since. I shoulda’ been with her by now, but she made me promise to write a poem for her. I couldn’t ever refuse that woman.” Marina was confused, but Clarence seemed to have begun a story. She seemed to have accidentally triggered some need in him to tell it.
“I was stationed in Japan at the end of the war. I met Kiyoko there. She was a beauty, all of seventeen and so full of life. Her family had died in Hiroshima while she’d been away visiting relatives and she was pretty much on her own. I don’t know why she agreed to marry an American, much less a black man, but she did and I brought her back to New York with me, proud and on top of the world.
“I worked my way through City College and started writing poetry. Hung out with Ginsburg and Kerouac, all them cats. You know that line in ‘Howl,’ the one about Negro streets?” Marina nodded her head, aware only that she should know it. “That was my line. I gave it to him. It was late and we were at some party. Ginsburg looked out the window and said something about walking home on black streets. I said to him, ‘Those ain’t just black streets, they’re my streets, Negro streets.’ He laughed, but he also made a note of it. I could see his mind working. He never forgot a good line.” Clarence laughed to himself. “I don’t mind though. It was a great poem, much better than I ever wrote.
“Well, times were good for a while, then, I don’t know, I guess I began to see America more and more through Kiyoko’s eyes. When you grow up black in America, least when I grew up, and people treat you like you ain’t there. Well, you sort of get used to it. But Kiyoko wasn’t used to it. She couldn’t understand it. Drove her crazy. Then it started to drive me crazy. We stuck it out for a while, but in the end we left, went back to Japan.” Marina remembered a little now. Clarence Mudder had been an expatriate poet and writer. Some of his books were published, a few collections of poems, but then he just dropped out of sight.
“I taught English and literature. We had a good life. We used to come here for a couple of weeks every year, just to remember who we were. Then last year she died. Cancer.” Marina wanted to say something like I’m sorry, but Clarence continued too quickly. “No, she was everything to me. There’s just not much point without her. We never could have children and I know that made her sad, but we loved each other about as much as two people can, I guess—maybe more.
“I’ve just been hangin’ around. But I’m tired now. I came here to write the poem I said I’d write and to be with Kiyoko again.”
They were both silent. There seemed to be nothing for Marina to say.
“Well, I wouldn’t have troubled you with all this if I hadn’t needed a favor.”
“What can I do?” She wanted to help and meant it when she said, “Anything.”
“Well, I wrote that poem for Kiyoko. I don’t know that it’s any good, but it took all the fire that’s left in me to write it. She made me promise I’d read it out loud for her on Turtle Island, that I’d come here one more time for the both of us. The problem is that I can’t read it. I can’t say it out loud. It’s like sayin’ good-bye and I can’t do it.” Marina could see moisture glinting in Clarence’s eyes through the fire.
“Then I was out walkin’ last night and I heard this beautiful voice telling this story and I listened. It was the story of a turtle. I heard you tell it to that little girl and I thought, well, maybe you could read it for me, for me and Kiyoko.”
“I’d be honored to read one of your poems, but how . . . ?”
“I’m an old man. I don’t have much time left. If you make a fire, I’ll come back tomorrow night, maybe the next night, just lie here, wait for death. I’ll know when the time is right for you to read the poem. Is that okay?”
“Yes. I’ll be here.”
* * *
When daylight woke her, Marina was again alone by the warm coals of the fire.
She now had a secret to share with Gracie and felt like a schoolgirl herself. She wanted to tell the child that she’d been right, that the circle really had called up a ghost, but when she finally saw Gracie, it was clear she had something else on her mind.
Around lunchtime Gracie showed up. This was late for her, but she offered no explanation. She went immediately to her little altar, rearranged some of her treasures and sat before it quietly.
At last she spoke. “We’re leaving the day after tomorrow. Mom says this isn’t working—only making things worse—and she wants to leave. We move into the big house tomorrow afternoon and take the early boat the next morning.”
“Will I see you tomorrow?” Marina asked, running her hand absentmindedly though Gracie’s hair.
“Sure. I have to pack in the morning, but they won’t care what I do in the afternoon. They could probably leave without me and not even notice.”
; “You know that’s not true.”
“Almost.”
“I’ll miss you, you know.”
Gracie was tearing up. She was about to cry but clearly didn’t want to, so Marina changed the subject.
“I saw a ghost last night,” she announced conspiratorially.
“A real ghost?” Gracie was clearly excited. She wanted to be distracted, but she was also genuinely interested in the phenomenon of ghosts.
“He seemed pretty real. He said his name was Clarence Mudder.”
“You mean old Mr. Mudder, the black man?”
“Yes, I guess. How do you know him?” Marina was surprised.
“I’ve seen him a couple of times. He lives in the next cabin up the beach. My dad says he’s pretty sick, and that I shouldn’t bother him. Did he die?”
“I don’t know.” Now Marina was confused. “He said he was a ghost.”
“Did you touch him?”
Marina felt like a child who had overlooked something obvious. She was embarrassed to admit that she hadn’t, that she’d simply believed what he’d said.
“No,” she said sheepishly.
Gracie rolled her eyes and smacked her own forehead with the palm of her hand. It was another gesture, Marina noticed, that seemed adopted from someone older.
“You have to touch them to see if they’re a ghost. They’re very tricky.” The logic of this was somehow flawed. Marina wondered who Gracie was referring to—ghosts, or people pretending to be ghosts. And why would someone pretend to be a ghost?
“Oh.” Marina sighed. “I thought the circle had called a ghost.” She hung her head and Gracie comforted her.
“Don’t feel too bad. Just because Mr. Mudder isn’t a ghost doesn’t mean that the circle didn’t work.”
* * *
Later in the day, after Gracie had gone, Marina thought about her. She wished she could make sure that Gracie would be happy, that her parents would stay together, and that everything would work out, but she knew that the opposite was most likely. Things wouldn’t work out well, the parents wouldn’t stay together, and Gracie would be hurt.
She looked at Gracie’s little altar next to hers and a thought struck her. She realized that she wanted to give Gracie something for her altar. All along she had been gifted with things for her own altar. Now she wanted to give something to Gracie, but she wasn’t quite sure how to find something. She could give her something from her own altar, but that didn’t seem quite right. She needed something that represented their time together and their shared experience. So she went for a walk.
As she walked along the beach she looked hard for something, but she felt as if she was forcing the process. It didn’t feel right. When she had found things for her own altar, they had just sort of called to her, but now she wanted to call to them. She tried closing her eyes and walking slowly.
She walked as if she was stalking something. She walked deliberately, feeling the shift in balance that the Turtle Woman had taught her when she learned to walk again. She moved like a blind hunter. She found that she could tell where she was walking by the dampness of the sand. If it became too dry she corrected her course to the left. If too wet, she moved to the right. She had no idea how far she had walked in this blind, trusting meditation, but just when it seemed most absurd to her, she stepped on something hard.
She opened her eyes to find a round knot of driftwood half buried in the sand. It was about the size of her fist, and when she picked it up and rinsed the sand off the bottom, she knew she had found what she was looking for. Within the knot of wood, Marina could see a face, but not a human face, the face of a bear. It’s Gracie’s bear, she thought, and carried it back to her cabin.
She cleaned it again with fresh water and let it dry in the sun. When it was dry she took some of Gracie’s electric blue nail polish and accented the eyes of the bear. She considered painting in more of the face, but with the eyes highlighted, the face came alive on its own. It had a split beneath the snout that made the bear appear to be smiling and this pleased Marina. She touched the bear with a drop of the essential oil she always wore so that the bear would smell of both saltwater and herself. She wrapped the bear in a silk scarf and tied it with a piece of ribbon.
* * *
As the sun began to go down, Marina found herself carrying more wood to her circle and lighting another fire. She stayed awake for a long time, but Clarence did not appear. Finally she lay down on the carpet and closed her eyes.
When she awoke, sometime deep in the night, Clarence was there. He was lying on his back with his head near Marina’s. Still barefoot and shirtless in baggy black trousers, he now wore a yellow brocade vest, woven with tiny threads of gold that seemed to glint in the glow of the fire’s hot coals.
The fire had burned down, but there was a good bed of ruby red coals. Marina carefully placed several pieces of wood on the fire and turned on her stomach to watch Clarence.
His eyes were closed and he was very still. She looked for evidence of breathing. She held her own breath, waiting to see if his chest would rise and fall. If he was breathing, he made no sound and gave no sign.
Is he dead? Gracie had been convinced that he wasn’t a ghost when Marina had seen him the previous night. But is he a ghost now? she wondered. What was it Gracie had said, that she had to touch him to know for sure? While she accepted this bit of wisdom from Gracie on the surface, it did not seem to correspond to her experiences as a ghost. Touch had been as real as anything she could remember. Sometimes it had been more real. The only thing like the kind of ghost Gracie talked about that Marina had encountered had been Rafael’s wraiths. They had been insubstantial to Marina’s touch. Her hand had passed right through them. But had this been because Marina herself was a ghost? It all seemed too confusing.
And still she felt the urge to reach out and touch Clarence.
She reached a finger out to touch him gently. She did it slowly, ready to pull her hand quickly back if she did not meet solid flesh. But her finger did touch something solid. It was thin skin, easy to push around, eerily disconnected from underlying tissue like the skin of a cat or dog. But it was skin. She recalled her grandmother’s skin being like this, pale, translucent, and loose over her muscles and bones. She knew that her own skin might one day grow loose like this; that she might come to old age, ready to throw off her skin for the return to Turtle Island or someplace like it.
“I’m not dead yet.” Clarence whispered, his eyes still closed. This startled Marina, and she jerked back her hand.
“But last night you said you were a ghost.”
“Oh, I’m a ghost. Been a ghost for nearly a year now. I’m just not full dead yet.” His voice was weak and breathy with a bit of a rattle to it. He started to speak again but coughed instead—a long, deliberate wheezing.
Both Marina and Clarence were silent for a while, then he opened his eyes. They were the eyes of a blind man, dull and unfocused. He didn’t seem to be taking in any more information by having them open than by having them closed, but opening them meant something to him. He gestured for her to come close to him by twitching his head. He wanted to say something and had not much strength with which to say it.
“Tell me,” he gasped. “What’s it like?”
Marina could have pretended she didn’t know what he meant. She did not understand how or what he knew about her. Was it a scent? Was it the way she looked? Did her voice have the peculiar ring of the recently dead? But it seemed like an honest question, a question from the heart.
“It isn’t what I thought it would be like.” It was all she could think to say. There was no simple answer to this question. She wasn’t even sure that her experience had not been totally unique and totally constructed out of her own life experiences and expectations. “I’m sorry. It’s hard for me to describe.”
“Is there pain?”
Marina thought about this. “I think there’s pain if you bring it with you. I think there’s pleasure, too, though, at least
the possibility of pleasure.”
“What about answers? What about the big questions?”
“I found some answers, but I still have a lot of questions. Maybe I wasn’t there long enough. Maybe I wasn’t paying attention. Maybe it’s because I chose to come back so soon. I don’t know.”
“So no real answers, then, no big reason for it all.” He seemed disappointed.
“Listen, I’m not an expert. I still don’t really know what happened to me. But I seemed to have a choice at one point, and I chose to come back here. I think if I had made the other choice, well, this is just my intuition, but I think it would have been such a new game that none of my big questions would have mattered any more. If I’d chosen to really enter death, I think I would have remembered that I already knew the answer to those questions. I knew them before I was born, I had a chance to remember and act upon some or even all of them while I was alive, and I would remember them all after death. Only then it wouldn’t matter. They would be like quiz-question answers after the quiz is over—so important one moment, trivial in the next.”
Clarence lay still for a long time mulling this over. “One more question . . .” He hesitated. “Will I see her again?” There was such love, such heart in this question that Marina didn’t know how to tell him that she didn’t know. She too hesitated before speaking, but in that hesitation, Clarence interrupted her. “No, don’t tell me. I promised her that we would see each other again, and we will. I don’t need anyone to tell me if it’s so or not. I believe it. I have to believe it.”
Marina put her hand on Clarence’s head. “I think believing is about the most powerful thing there is. So, if you believe it, it will happen.”
Clarence closed his eyes again and seemed content.
“What about that poem?” Marina asked. “Are you ready for me to read it.”
“Don’t rush me, girl. That poem goin’ be the last thing I hear.”
“Anytime,” Marina offered, a little embarrassed.