Ghost of a Flea lg-4

by James Sallis

  Then one night it all turned to shit. I’d been listening to Mahler’s Ninth, reading a novel set in Washington by some guy with a Greek name, and watching a movie in which a thirty-year-old actor playing the part of a high-school student confronted his girlfriend at a drive-in. She’d died in a car crash in the first twenty minutes of the film while riding with another young man but refused to stay put, clawing her way up out of the grave to come and tell the thirty-year-old that she’ll love him forever, there by his locker at school when he swings the door shut, now showing up at the drive-in while he’s on a date and rapping at his car window. “Forever,” she tells him, rotted flesh and a few teeth falling away as she mouths the word. “How fuckin’ long can forever be to a thirty-year-old!” I remember yelling at the screen. I’d been drinking pretty hard, apparently, harder than I thought or kept track of. I surfaced half a week or so later in the hospital, not Baptist or Touro or Mercy that time, but the state hospital over in Mandeville, this hulking, gray, utterly silent beast set among green trees and lawn where time was dipped in half-spoonfuls from the heart of glaciers and fossils deep in the earth. I was still going on about the movie as though it were real, as though everything in it had actually taken place.

  The incidence of mental illness among Negroes is significantly higher than among the population at large, someone was telling me. This seemed to come from far away and from inside my head at the same time. I swam up, towards light. Away from the voice. Closer to the voice.

  We sat facing one another across the kind of table you find in church basements and high school lunchrooms. It looked as if it had just been unpacked from its carton.

  He looked the same way. Boy Doctor Ferguson, I thought, taking his name from the narrow slab of brass name tag above a pocket crammed with pens, rulers, tongue depressors, hemostats and, for all I knew, a dental drill. Ever alert to use of language when alert at all, I particularly admired that “population at large.” B. D. Ferguson had sparse hair the color of cotton candy and as insubstantial. He kept reaching up to brush it down, pretty much a losing proposition, since our own breaths bouncing back from the walls would be enough to dislodge it again. Whether from allergies, chronic lack of sleep or tears shed for patients, Ferguson’s eyes were shrimp-red. So, for quite different reasons, were mine. Men always have more in common than they think.

  I had no idea, I said.

  Few do. Why should you? Professionals who spend a lifetime studying it understand little enough. There’s no doubt the gauges we use are biased. We’ve known that for years. Culturally biased, as with IQ tests. Add in poor prenatal care if any at all, poverty, discrimination, lack of access to medical services-

  Think I read about that in Partisan Review. This to a man upon whom irony was wasted.

  — it’s a hopeless stew. Historically diagnosticians like myself-

  Diagnosticians. Nice. And the dinosaur track of a metaphor there in the limestone. Hope for the boy after all?

  — are far less reluctant, when confronted with minorities and those from lower socioeconomic levels, to attach such a potentially devastating diagnosis.

  Well, I didn’t tell him, that was not my experience of the thing, not at all. Nor did I patiently or otherwise explain that, being well outside our culture, he might have no idea how to read the codes our signals came wrapped in. That mistakenly he took our distrust at being delivered into his hands for paranoia, our dissembling as some innate inability to discern falsehood from truth, when in fact it’s a highly developed form of just such discretion.

  I’ve read the history your friend Don Walsh supplied the intake physician, B. D. went on. He’s been quite helpful.

  Afternoon sunlight stretched long fingers across the table. A phone rang in the next room. Two teenage boys with shaved heads walked past the window eating Eskimo Pies. Life goes on.

  Your mother shows clear signs of schizophrenia. Has no friends to speak of, avoids family contact-perhaps there’s been a rift of some sort? She lives alone, appears to have neither hobby nor outside interests nor, to all appearances, much of anything at all she enjoys or enjoys doing. I gather she leads a rigorously controlled life, every day exactly the same from hour to hour, growing upset at the slightest disturbance in her routine.

  I sat watching this privileged young man, keeping track of sunlight popping knuckles on the tabletop and wondering how long after our talk before B. D. noted inappropriate affect in my chart. His handwriting would be cramped, precise. I’d flashed back to another interview, years before, with a psychiatrist who sat rocking in his desk chair the whole time, staring at me out of tiny round eyes with folds of fat like bitesize omelettes at the corner, neither of us speaking. I learned from the best.

  The incidence of schizophrenia in the general population is approximately one in a hundred. As with so much else, we don’t understand why, but among children of schizophrenics, the incidence jumps to one in ten.

  Sometimes too, he went on when I remained silent, it skips a generation.

  Jumps. Skips. There was a poem there somewhere. A limerick or jingle. At very least a groaningly bad joke.

  Your son has a frank history of mood disorders, reclusiveness, abrupt life changes. All this giving way to intermittent periods of productive, purposeful behavior.

  Maybe you could tell me a little more about that.

  After a while he said: Or maybe not.

  After which (though his eyes continued to rise like twin red moons in my sky) my unsprightly self and B. D. Ferguson (certainly no son of the Fergus I knew from Joyce, O’Brien and the like) didn’t have much to say to one another. We went on not saying it for six sessions in as many days.

  Little chance that my girlfriend would love me forever, of course. With the taste of boiled meat, rice, iceberg lettuce and salty, limp vegetables in mouth and memory, slowly I came to realize this. She wasn’t about to come back from the grave, reemerge from history’s undiscovered country, float to the top of the lake, swim to shore and shamble, slaking away the whole time, towards wherever it was I’d gone on with my life. None of it had been a dream as, coming to, I’d first believed. Only another of society’s makeshift facsimiles of dream, rags and tatters of movies, media, popular literature, this new mythology, that my homeless soul had taken for its own and worn into the street. Precious little protection. And how much shame could a man bear?

  At the time I’m writing of, though, time of the storm and Alouette’s second baby rather than that of hospital walkways like cloisters and young men of power with piggish red eyes (I’ve just read back through the past dozen or so pages to see where we’ve got to in all this), Deborah and I remained in sight of one another though borne steadily apart, Don and Jeanette were content on their island, David soon would return from scouting out copses and caves. New lives for us all rattled doors in frames. And I, freshly become a museum diorama, New Age man in his natural habitat, hunched not over campfires but before computers, sat inert in a circle of light at 3 a.m.

  I had decided again, after an evening with Deborah, to get some work done. Write the Fearing review at least, since it was due or well past. Maybe start something else, who knows. Even pursue the notion for a novel I’d had a few weeks back in which the narrator would present himself to each of the other characters as a wholly different person. See which way, how far and how fast, that notion ran when chased full throttle. As always, the very idea of such work necessitated my removing to the slave quarters and sitting there staring out through windows so darkened with dust and grime that you could safely watch eclipses through them. Consisted, eventually, of turning on the computer. Its small dynamo whirred and began a rapidly accelerating dialog with itself as Bat minnowed through the half-open doorway to join me, lugging in his wake a contingent of winged insects. With age he’d become a semi-mobile solar battery. Besides food, only sunlight drew him, his days a progression from food bowl to sunshine spot and back. Sunlight was far and away best, but if that proved unavailable, if he had to,
he’d make do with artificial sources. One favorite spot was at the back of my desk about three inches below the desk lamp. Hoisting him up there, most of the insects he’d brought in coming along, I keyed in Microsoft Word and began reading my notes for the novel. Halfway down the second page, the ground gave way.

  I have no idea when you might find this-tonight, tomorrow, next week. I don’t even know, really, how to begin it. Dad? Lew? I’ve never known what to call you. Are we friends? peers? father and son? A bit of all those, I suppose. And a bit of none.

  I remember something you told me Dylan Thomas said, That he’d lived with it a long time and knew it horribly well and couldn’t explain it-whatever it was that drove him, beached him, bedeviled him. Much as I’d like to lay claim to something of that nature, my own situation, I’m afraid, is far less dramatic, far simpler: this simple, desperate need to be alone that comes up within and overtakes me. Whatever the reason, I seem to be unable to remain myself when around others for too long a time. I lose focus, take on those others’ properties and character, their presence, their values and ambitions, while my own, fought for so hard-not only the exercise of them, but the very recognition of them-begin to fade away.

  I do love you, Lew. Dad. And these four years (four years!) have been amazing. I never thought I’d ever know anything like this. And I guess I must understand what families are about, now, for the first (I won’t say the last) time. But I have to leave-as, once you’ve found this, I’ll have done. You’ll be sad, and will want to understand. We always have to understand, don’t we, the two of us? (That’s another thing I must get away from.) At some point Don Quixote, Alonso Quixano the Good, must die, and Cide Hamete Benengeli hang up his pen. Together and apart, they both had a good run. But it’s time.

  So it was that morning in its yellow hat came calling.

  Six or a little after, Deborah emerged in housecoat and slippers and found me sitting on the porch. The Penguin Classics edition of Cervantes’ masterpiece was open to page 240. A bottle of Scotch lay sideways on the warped floor.

  “Lew?” she said.

  And the dam of my eyes broke, and tears flooded the land.

  Chapter Ten

  As often transpires with organizations of a thoroughgoing liberal bent, it was difficult to find anyone at the community center who’d admit to being in charge. Simple caution, or some weird excess of democratic spirit? Winnowing my way from desk to desk, eventually I fetched up before that of a lady named Valerie LeBlanc, face so white it made the pale pink sweater she wore look like a burst of violent color, and stood there thinking both about her name and the fact that she’d claim responsibility. Cast of faces around us running, as they did, from coffee to jet.

  “Yes, ma’am, if that’s okay with you,” I said in answer to her nonquestion. And Alouette asked you to come by and pick up some work she could do at home. “Didn’t want to go rooting around her desk without saying something first.” If mankind cannot bear too much reality, neither does it need too much truth told it. Use in moderation. Apply to a small, inconspicuous area first to test its effect. “That is, assuming I could even find it in here.”

  “So you’re Lewis?” she said. “I don’t believe we’ve seen you here before.”

  “Well, from the look of things, you could have a couple of extended families living in here full-time and never know it.”

  Long ago the place had begun life as a wine and liquor warehouse. Then for years it lay dormant until, during a brief period of progressive government (this oversight soon enough corrected), cascades of funds for “community improvement” became available. Delta Bottled Goods was reborn as Riverside Community Center and ever since, for some fourteen or fifteen years, it had been hanging out over the precipice with ropes afray, held aloft on half a broken wing, stupendous individual effort, all manner and forms of prayer. Now its cavernous spaces and bare, stained cement floor were strewn with desks and tables, some of them cobbled together from odd combinations of doors, squat filing cabinets or sawhorses, cinder blocks, planks, plastic milk crates, and studded with makeshift partitions formed of taller file cabinets, plywood and pegboard slabs lashed or nailed to the backs of desks, hastily constructed, slew-footed bulletin boards. The whole place still had much of the factory air about it and always would. Here, daily, dreams were refurbished, pills and loose threads cut from America’s shabby egalitarian overcoat before it was passed along to new wearers.

  Valerie LeBlanc removed her glasses: prolapsed teardrops, shell-gray, ruby rivets at apices. They swung on a gray cord about her neck, bare eyes springing forth with an unsuspected warmth, out of focus, vulnerable, immensely attractive.

  “Alouette’s fine, though,” she said. Another nonquestion. Had she checked, or did she simply assume, with the mulish optimism of uncompromising wellwishers, that all in her vicinity must go smoothly?

  “She is.”

  “And the child. A girl.”

  “LaVerne-after her mother.”

  She nodded. “LaVerne and I worked together at a women’s shelter downtown years ago, when I was just getting started at this. When we all were. And when there was a downtown. I thought a lot of her.”

  “Most people did.”

  “You among them, I hope.”

  She turned her head abruptly to meet my eyes. Glasses swung at the end of their cord as breasts swayed and came to rest inside a bone-colored silk jumper. One hand, veins close to the surface, crept into view atop the desk. Signals everywhere.

  “Here, I’ll show you.”

  I followed her through mazes that would put Charlie and Algernon at their collective best to shame, trying hard not to focus on skirt, buttocks and taut calves before me. We came to rest, like the head of Orpheus, in the snag of an L-shaped desk lodged north-by-northwest, smack against a coral reef of bookshelves. Desktop all but bare, memos tacked up in perfect rows, half an inch between them on the horizontal, two on the vertical. But when I pulled open the top drawer, there it was, barely contained: the world’s chaos.

  “Her mother’s daughter,” I said.

  I’d rummaged through half a dozen unmarked folders and envelopes stuffed with bits of inscribed paper when Ms. LeBlanc leaned against my shoulder to pose another nonquestion: “You’re looking for something specific.”

  I was, and, all things considered, didn’t mind her knowing, though I wasn’t sure how far onto that particular bridge I wanted to walk just yet. She forestalled my having to decide.

  “The job entails a bit more than answering phones and being able to plow one’s way through the morass of grant applications, Lewis. My degree is in law. When I found I was unable to practice, that I couldn’t in good conscience accommodate myself to the system-a child of the Sixties after all, though mostly I was absent from and oblivious of the era’s great events, being too busy with my studies to take much notice-I began casting about for alternatives. This is what I came up with.”

  “You’re lucky.”

  She nodded. “Most of us never find a place we fit. And I’m good at this. Good enough to suspect that Alouette has been receiving threats, for instance.”

  “Oh.”

  “And to assume that’s what you’re looking for.”

  “How did you know?”

  “I didn’t. Only suspected it.”

  “But you never talked to her about it.”

  “She never talked about it with me. It was her place to bring it up, not mine. Threats are a commonplace in our world, with what we do. We receive them all the time, in every kind of package-overt, implied, physical, psychological. Face to face in the heat of confrontations. Over phones at three in the morning. Downstream from bureaucrats in suits and cell phones and upstream from clients lugging their few precious worldy goods about in plastic bags or shopping carts.”

  “You thought the threats were routine, then. Not serious.”

  Now I was doing it. Nonquestions.

  “In their way they all are. I do think Alouette failed to take them
seriously.” Valerie LeBlanc leaned back onto the window ledge, which canted her hips forward, pushing belly and thighs tight against the front of her skirt. She did this with the air of someone wholly unaware of her body, the effects it engendered. “Part of it’s that she doesn’t take herself seriously, you know.”

  “She works hard.”

  “Harder than almost anyone else around here. But that also serves to direct her away from herself. Sound like anyone you know?”

  “Sounds like everyone I know. Pardon me, miss, but your Sixties are showing.”

  “They usually do, however careful I am to tuck them in. Nineteen-ninety-six, the year he died, my father was still ranting about murderous, inhuman Japs. Talk about holding grudges. And people say Americans have no sense of history! So maybe I’m doomed to the same? Stuck in place like all those people with lacquered hair and leisure suits on the religious channel, flat and lifeless as pressed flowers. History’s torpedoes streaming towards me in silence.” She pushed off the window ledge. “Come on, let’s peek.”

  I followed back through the maze to her desk. “Mind you,” she said, “peeking’s nowhere near as exciting as it used to be.”