by Laura Furman
OTHER TOWNS
When we visit other towns, which have no phantoms, often we feel that a burden has lifted. Some of us make plans to move to such a town, a place that reminds us of tall picture books from childhood. There, you can walk at peace along the streets and in the public parks, without having to wonder whether a ripple will course through the skin of your forearms. We think of our children playing happily in green backyards, where sunflowers and honeysuckle bloom against white fences. But soon a restlessness comes. A town without phantoms seems to us a town without history, a town without shadows. The yards are empty, the streets stretch bleakly away. Back in our town, we wait impatiently for the ripple in our arms; we fear that our phantoms may no longer be there. When, sometimes after many weeks, we encounter one of them at last, in a corner of the yard or at the side of the car wash, where a look is flung at us before the phantom turns away, we think: Now things are as they should be, now we can rest awhile. It’s a feeling almost like gratitude.
EXPLANATION #5
Some argue that all towns have phantoms, but that only we are able to see them. This way of thinking is especially attractive to those who cannot understand why our town should have phantoms and other towns none; why our town, in short, should be an exception. An objection to this explanation is that it accomplishes nothing but a shift of attention from the town itself to the people of our town: it’s our ability to perceive phantoms that is now the riddle, instead of the phantoms themselves. A second objection, which some find decisive, is that the explanation relies entirely on an assumed world of invisible beings, whose existence can be neither proved nor disproved.
CASE STUDY #5
Every afternoon after lunch, before I return to work in the upstairs study, I like to take a stroll along the familiar sidewalks of my neighborhood. Thoughts rise up in me, take odd turns, vanish like bits of smoke. At the same time I’m wide open to striking impressions—that ladder leaning against the side of a house, with its shadow hard and clean against the white shingles, which project a little, so that the shingle-bottoms break the straight shadow-lines into slight zigzags; that brilliant red umbrella lying at an angle in the recycling container on a front porch next to the door; that jogger with shaved head, black nylon shorts, and an orange sweatshirt that reads, in three lines of black capital letters: EAT WELL / KEEP FIT / DIE ANYWAY. A single blade of grass sticks up from a crack in a driveway. I come to a sprawling old house at the corner, not far from the sidewalk. Its dark red paint could use a little touching up. Under the high front porch, on both sides of the steps, are those crisscross lattice panels, painted white. Through the diamond-shaped openings come pricker branches and the tips of ferns. From the sidewalk I can see the handle of an old hand mower, back there among the dark weeds. I can see something else: a slight movement. I step up to the porch, bend to peer through the lattice: I see three of them, seated on the ground. They turn their heads toward me and look away, begin to rise. In an instant they’re gone. My arms are rippling as I return to the sidewalk and continue on my way. They interest me, these creatures who are always vanishing. This time I was able to glimpse a man of about fifty and two younger women. One woman wore her hair up; the other had a sprig of small blue wildflowers in her hair. The man had a long straight nose and a long mouth. They rose slowly but without hesitation and stepped back into the dark. Even as a child I accepted phantoms as part of things, like spiders and rainbows. I saw them in the vacant lot on the other side of the backyard hedge, or behind garages and toolsheds. Once I saw one in the kitchen. I observe them carefully whenever I can; I try to see their faces. I want nothing from them. It’s a sunny day in early September. As I continue my walk, I look about me with interest. At the side of a driveway, next to a stucco house, the yellow nozzle of a hose rests on top of a dark green garbage can. Farther back, I can see part of a swing set. A cushion is sitting on the grass beside a three-pronged weeder with a red handle.
THE DISBELIEVERS
The disbelievers insist that every encounter is false. When I bend over and peer through the openings in the lattice, I see a slight movement, caused by a chipmunk or mouse in the dark weeds, and instantly my imagination is set in motion: I seem to see a man and two women, a long nose, the rising, the disappearance. The few details are suspiciously precise. How is it that the faces are difficult to remember, while the sprig of wildflowers stands out clearly? Such criticisms, even when delivered with a touch of disdain, never offend me. The reasoning is sound, the intention commendable: to establish the truth, to distinguish the real from the unreal. I try to experience it their way: the movement of a chipmunk behind the sunlit lattice, the dim figures conjured from the dark leaves. It isn’t impossible. I exercise my full powers of imagination: I take their side against me. There is nothing there, behind the lattice. It’s all an illusion. Excellent! I defeat myself. I abolish myself. I rejoice in such exercise.
YOU
You who have no phantoms in your town, you who mock or scorn our reports: are you not deluding yourselves? For say you are driving out to the mall, some pleasant afternoon. All of a sudden—it’s always sudden—you remember your dead father, sitting in the living room in the house of your childhood. He’s reading a newspaper in the armchair next to the lamp table. You can see his frown of concentration, the fold of the paper, the moccasin slipper half-hanging from his foot. The steering wheel is warm in the sun. Tomorrow you’re going to dinner at a friend’s house—you should bring a bottle of wine. You see your friend laughing at the table, his wife lifting something from the stove. The shadows of telephone wires lie in long curves on the street. Your mother lies in the nursing home, her eyes always closed. Her photograph on your bookcase: a young woman smiling under a tree. You are lying in bed with a cold, and she’s reading to you from a book you know by heart. Now she herself is a child and you read to her while she lies there. Your sister will be coming up for a visit in two weeks. Your daughter playing in the backyard, your wife at the window. Phantoms of memory, phantoms of desire. You pass through a world so thick with phantoms that there is barely enough room for anything else. The sun shines on a hydrant, casting a long shadow.
EXPLANATION #6
One explanation says that we ourselves are phantoms. Arguments drawn from cognitive science claim that our bodies are nothing but artificial constructs of our brains: we are the dream-creations of electrically charged neurons. The world itself is a great seeming. One virtue of this explanation is that it accounts for the behavior of our phantoms: they turn from us because they cannot bear to witness our self-delusion.
FORGETFULNESS
There are times when we forget our phantoms. On summer afternoons, the telephone wires glow in the sun like fire. Shadows of tree branches lie against our white shingles. Children shout in the street. The air is warm, the grass is green, we will never die. Then an uneasiness comes, in the blue air. Between shouts, we hear a silence. It’s as though something is about to happen, which we ought to know, if only we could remember.
HOW THINGS ARE
For most of us, the phantoms are simply there. We don’t think about them continually, at times we forget them entirely, but when we encounter them we feel that something momentous has taken place, before we drift back into forgetfulness. Someone once said that our phantoms are like thoughts of death: they are always there, but appear only now and then. It’s difficult to know exactly what we feel about our phantoms, but I think it is fair to say that in the moment we see them, before we’re seized by a familiar emotion like fear, or anger, or curiosity, we are struck by a sense of strangeness, as if we’ve suddenly entered a room we have never seen before, a room that nevertheless feels familiar. Then the world shifts back into place and we continue on our way. For though we have our phantoms, our town is like your town: sun shines on the house fronts, we wake in the night with troubled hearts, cars back out of driveways and turn up the street. It’s true that a question runs through our town, because of the phantoms, but we don’t bel
ieve we are the only ones who live with unanswered questions. Most of us would say we’re no different from anyone else. When you come to think about us, from time to time, you’ll see we really are just like you.
Jim Shepard
Boys Town
HERE’S THE STORY of my life: whatever I did wasn’t good enough, anything I figured out I figured out too late, and whenever I tried to help I made things worse. That’s what it’s been like for me as far back as I can remember. Whenever I was about to get somewhere, something would step in and block me. Whenever I was about to finally have something, something would happen to take it away.
“The story of your life is that you’re not to blame for anything,” my mother always said when I told her that. “Out of everybody on earth, you’re the only one who never did anything wrong. Whatever happens, it’s always somebody else’s fault.”
“It is always somebody else’s fault,” I told her.
“Poor you,” she always said back. “Screwed by the world.”
“Hey, Dr. Jägermeister’s calling,” I used to tell her. “Bottoms up.” And she’d just go back to whatever she was watching.
“So what’s the deal with dinner?” sometimes I’d say. “You have a busy day?”
“Go to Pizza Hunt,” she’d tell me.
“That’s Hut, you fucking idiot,” I’d tell her back. And then she’d say something else wrong the next time, just to frost my ass.
I was thirty-nine years old and living with my mother. I hadn’t had a good year.
“What was your last good year?” my friend Owen asked me. “1992?”
He wasn’t doing too well himself, but he managed to come over once or twice a week to eat whatever we had lying around.
I made some comment about whatever it was we were watching and he said, “What do you like? Do you like anything?”
“He likes to complain,” my mother told him. “He likes to make trouble.”
I liked to complain. I almost choked.
What did I like? I liked my dog. I liked hunting in the woods. I liked target shooting. I liked my kid, when I was first getting to know him. I liked women who weren’t all about money or what I planned to do with my future.
“It’d be different with you if you ever got laid,” Owen said during a commercial. My mother snorted.
“Hey, you’re the one with the hand in your pants,” I said.
“Now he’s going to tell us about Stacey,” my mother told him. But I didn’t say a word.
My kid was down there in Stacey’s house a thousand miles away. I was supposed to send checks but otherwise not come around more than once or twice a year. I mean, try to cram a whole year’s worth of family time into one week. Maybe it’d work for you, but it didn’t for me.
Stacey said the kid was asking where his dad was, and that if I wanted to see him I had to send money. It got so I let my mother answer when she called. They’d stay on the phone telling each other stories about me. “You think that’s bad,” my mother would say.
A guy in basic told me that girls who weren’t good-looking were the smart move because they were more grateful and weren’t as likely to run off with somebody, and that made sense to me. I met Stacey at Fort Sill and liked her family better than her. I was a 71 Golf, which is like a clerk, hospital stuff, administrative. She was, too. I’d be dropping off discharge batches and she kept her head down when I teased her, but I could see her smile.
We went out for a year and five months and then we got married and had a kid. She was always saying she was going to move out, but she finally did the deed when I pushed her down the stairs. She was all like “You coulda killed me,” and I was like “Hey, you shoved me first, and there was a railing, and there was carpet.” She said, “You don’t shove somebody at the top of the stairs,” and I said, “Well, what did you do to me?” And the cop who showed up was a guy who had had a crush on her in high school and he was all “You can’t be with this person. You want to press charges?”
He’s standing over her while she’s crying at the kitchen table and I’m in the den thinking, Why don’t you rub her fucking back. And she was all Miss Generous: “No, just get him out of here. I don’t feel safe.”
Out here in the fucking sticks, you don’t meet anybody. I went to this singles social in the basement rec room of the church. You had to fill out forms so they could match people up. These two women were running the thing. They asked if I could read and write. When they saw my face, they said it was just a question on the form.
But then I always reminded myself I didn’t have it so bad. Our next-door neighbor’s nineteen-year-old had some kind of thing, muscular dystrophy maybe, and they told her that kids like him only lived to be about twenty-one. When she came over for coffee with my mother, she told us to pray that his heart muscle stopped before his lungs, because that’d be a less horrible way to go.
I had all kinds of jobs. If it was some fucking thing no one else wanted to do, I did it. I worked in a hospital laundry. I washed pots and pans. I separated metals in a scrap yard. I drove a shuttle. That job had a little pin that came with it that said “Martin, for Comfort Inn.” Whenever I said stuff to my mother like I could see why my dad walked out, she’d go, “Where’s your pin? Don’t lose your pin.”
I started thinking I should just go off the grid. You know: if I wasn’t using anything or spending anything, I didn’t need to make anything. I’d grow my own garden and shit. In the winter there’d still be rabbits and deer. I’d work out. Read a book. Improve my mind, unlike the other fucking imbeciles around here.
“Who says you’re not using anything or spending anything?” my mother said when I told her. “Somebody’s cleaning out the refrigerator every two days.”
“That’d be your friend Owen,” I said. “Your TV pal.”
“My friend Owen?” she said. “He doesn’t come over to see me.”
“Well, I never asked him to come over and see me,” I told her.
“So why’s he come?” my mother said.
“Because he’s a fucking bum, like me,” I told her. “ ’cause he’s got nothing else to do with himself.”
“All right, all right,” she said. “Don’t get excited.”
“Don’t get excited,” I said.
“Don’t get excited,” she said. “Put that down.”
The Comfort Inn was my last job. I took two days off to go to my grandmother’s funeral and they never let me forget it. The week I was back, even when I did a good job on something, all I heard was “You never told anybody you weren’t coming in, you didn’t let us know we were supposed to cover for you, you left us holding the bag.” I’m working and the supervisor’s just standing there running me down instead of doing his job. I finally told him that kind of horseshit was all well and good but, you know, it was pretty unprofessional.
You get lonely, is what it is. A person’s not supposed to go through life with absolutely nobody. It’s not normal. The longer you go by yourself the weirder you get, and the weirder you get the longer you go by yourself. It’s a loop and you gotta do something to get out of it.
There was this girl Janice who I saw a lot at the store. I started talking to her, because it seemed like she was always out, and I was always out. I’d go to the library, or the store, and I’d see her. She seemed like a good person, and when I was with her I found myself thinking maybe I could do this or maybe that. Sit down at a restaurant with someone and eat like a human being. Take her back to my place and maybe watch a movie or something, if my mother would ever leave the house.
Naturally, this Janice had an ex-husband who was a cop. But as far as I could tell she didn’t see too much of him.
I didn’t need to be near any cops. The last thing I needed was somebody running a check on me.
My mother and Owen didn’t know about Janice. They didn’t know that I had a plan all worked out, that asshole here hadn’t completely given up.
One of the times I saw her in the library, she
was taking out like three DVDs about Milo and Otis. I said to her, “So you like dogs, huh?” and she said she did. I asked if she had one and she said yes to that, too. I told her I had one and she asked what kind and I told her. She said when she was leaving that maybe she’d see me walking it and I told her that maybe she would.
I went over there twice with my dog and couldn’t get myself to go up to the front door either time. The second time, I was talking to myself and it still didn’t work. And while I was standing there my dog took a dump on her sidewalk.
I walked the woods for however many years and know the whole area better than anybody. Down the end of the logging road where people went to park, on the edge of the state forest, I hid a bag, a big duffel, that had a sleeping bag and two knives and one of my rifles in it. One of the knives was really more like a machete and ax combined. I had some bug spray in there, too. I thought it would be like a survival bag, if it came to that. I had it all in a big plastic garbage bag to keep it dry. Then somebody stole the whole thing.
I got everything in Wichita Falls at a gun-and-knife show after I got out of the military. I still had the .308 and a .357 Desert Eagle and a lot of ammo, so I started another bag. This one I made sure I hid better.
Fifth grade, we used to play this capture-the-flag game where anybody who got touched had to go stand on the base and there’d be fewer and fewer kids left after one side started winning. Fifth grade for some reason everybody decided it was boys against girls, and they’d pick out who they wanted to get caught by. You had to use two hands to touch and I would always tear free and so I’d be one of the last ones running around. This horrible cold day, the girls were looking at their first win if they could just get me. Four or five of them boxed me in and everybody on both sides was going crazy. This girl named Katie Kiely was right in front of me and all she had to do was step forward. I remember not being able to stop myself from grinning. And her expression changed when she saw my teeth, and she couldn’t make that last move. The other girls were shouting at her and then it was like they caught what she had and they couldn’t step forward, either. It was like I was a hair in their food. The teacher rang the recess bell and we all just stood there looking at each other. Then she rang it again and we all went inside.