Report from a Place of Burning

by George Looney

  I’d been in the water swimming for probably twenty minutes or so when I got a little dizzy. I stopped swimming and just kicked my legs and waved my arms enough to keep me afloat while I shook my head. I remember thinking it might be heat stroke, but it wasn’t that hot and I hadn’t been out that long, I knew. I shook my head again and started to swim.

  I was almost sure I heard it, a voice as the sound of many waters, just as St. John wrote. If it was a voice, it was not speaking English, of that I was certain. I could make out only two words, floating and shaking my head and listening there in the rancid waters of the gorge.

  Alpha and Omega.

  I did not know then the meaning of what it was I was being allowed to hear. It would be years before I would come to understand the significance of those two words. But they came to me, Alpha and Omega, that day through the green waters of the gorge, the green waters that held not only my body moving through that stillness but somewhere the handless but otherwise perfectly preserved body of the red diver.

  • • •

  And there arose a smoke out of the pit, St. John wrote, as the smoke of a great furnace; and the sun and the air were darkened by reason of the smoke of the pit.

  The gorge, I have come to understand, is a local manifestation of the pit. This is why it has been a place of signs for me. This is why I still duck through where the fence was cut long ago and never mended to climb down to the brackish water and slide my naked body in to swim. Why after swimming in that water the tattoo on my thigh burns and lifts from the flesh around it.

  Whether the children burned in their cribs are the offspring of the red diver, or whether they are signs in their own right I do not know. Signs, when we are too close to them, are often hard to read. But one thing is clear.

  This world is more and more one of fury, of rage. This world more and more is caught in so much motion it can’t even pretend to stop. And with such motion much is lost. With such motion, perspective becomes a blur. How can we say where we are when where we are is in constant motion? How can we say what is when all that is is ever in flux?

  Such is the dilemma of this modern world, and the curse of all of us who must live through these times. Whether we be prophets or blind men. There are some blindnesses we all must suffer with.

  Though I have had a vision, blurred though it may be. A vision of angels leaping from invisible bridges in the skies and diving into the pits that open under us every day, though we do not see them, the angels or the pits. In this vision, the angels are on fire as they head for the pits open below us.

  And the stars of heaven fell unto the earth, St. John wrote.

  In this vision, these angels of flame pass through those most recently come to flesh among us and leave the small bodies charred and still behind them, and the pits swallow up these falling fires.

  And in this vision the charred bodies left behind by the flaming dives of the angels begin to make a sound. A hum it is, but not as if a tune is being hummed. No, this hum is an insect hum, and with each charred body the hum grows louder.

  And there came out of the smoke, St. John wrote, locusts upon the earth.

  This insect hum is the whirring of a host of locusts, gathering and waiting to plunge into this world out of these charred remains. What the locusts will be hungry for is the flesh of those who don’t believe. A terrible consummation is coming.

  And no matter what horse I may sit upon and no matter what names I may read in white stones, I cannot stop what comes.

  The Widower and Dali’s Burning Giraffe

  Sometimes when the dead come to me, they’re coughing or seem to have other signs of some sort of illness. A sick ghost? was my thought the first time it happened. What in the world do you do for a sick ghost? Can you press a cold wash cloth to his or her head to break the fever? Without a body, how do you check a ghost for fever? Really all you can do is to try to make them comfortable. The dead have to heal themselves, and to hear them bitch about it you’d think nothing could be more unfair.

  Sometimes the dead can’t complain. Babies, for instance. When the dead died as babies they can’t bitch about it, since, in their bodies, they never learned language. The charred babies who have been put into the earth the last few months have nothing to say to me when they do show up, one or two waddling from the bathroom to the upstairs guest room, or all of them, gathered around my bed and holding hands and swaying to the sound of someone, maybe some Pope, chanting something in Latin. Sometimes I try to make out the expressions on what’s left of the tiny faces. Other times I look for some subtle gesture of body language to reveal why they’ve come to visit me. I want to hear what their bodies have to say to me. I want to be able to offer them something, but what?

  These babies, charred and voiceless, when they visit they break my heart.

  • • •

  Carol was by yesterday. I could see her sorrow more than she usually lets me see it, and when I asked her what was up she ignored the question and acted frustrated at the messes I hadn’t bothered to do anything about for days.

  Look at these flies, she said, swatting at the air. How do you live with all these flies, Dad? she asked me, as if that was what had brought her all the way home. One or two flies.

  Well, dear, I told her, I try not to judge them, lest I be judged.

  Carol rolled her eyes.

  Really, dear, I’ve found that if I don’t judge them and don’t speak harshly to them or speak ill of them to others, they pretty much leave me alone. Oh, I told her, it’s true occasionally one will alight on my arm or my nose and spend some time wringing whatever it has in lieu of hands, but that’s rare and I just grin and bare it and as soon as I move or even just twitch it’s gone.

  Carol gave me that look I’ve seen from her as well as her sister, that look which says, Why do you have to be so strange, old man? They’re filthy insects, Carol said, grimacing as she flicked a just-crushed one off her arm. They carry all sorts of diseases, and besides, she said, in that tone that let you know what was about to be said was the final word on the matter and not to be argued with, they’re ugly.

  In the eye of the beholder, I whispered, just loud enough for her to hear, carrying dirty plates out to the kitchen and the sink where others were already soaking. I winked and Dali, painting a mural on the walls of my living room, winked back. Carol couldn’t see Dali or the mural. Too bad. She might like it. She’s in it, after all.

  Dali had been hanging out one day a few weeks ago when Carol had stopped by. When he saw her, the dead Dali literally fell to the ground, his Spanish knees collapsed under his body. Gala, he murmured from the carpet.

  No, I’d told him. That’s my oldest, Carol.

  But he shook his head, his moustache continuing to move back and forth after his head had finished, so that the motion continued a little while along those long strands of hair. That, my friend, he said with his deep, Spanish accent, is the reincarnation of Gala, my wife, my inspiration, my demon.

  Since then he’s been furiously working on this mural in my living room.

  Some nights he paints himself to exhaustion, which I imagine must be hard for a ghost to do. I wake up, having to go to the bathroom, and hear him snoring downstairs and sneak down to find him collapsed on the sofa with a brush still in his hand. In the mornings I hear him humming what must be Spanish ballads, feverishly at work on the mural.

  Carol is the focus of his passion, that much is obvious from what he’s painting. Her face appears in several different guises, on several different bodies. Only one of the bodies with Carol’s face is actually her body, and that figure is the only undistorted, unbroken image in the entire landscape Dali has taken over my living room with. It’s a beautiful likeness of Carol. It’s her idealized, by Dali. Too bad she can’t see it.

  Out in the kitchen I heard water running. Carol was washing the dishes I hadn’t gotten to in the last
week.

  So, Dad, she called to me from the kitchen, her hands, not the hands Dali was painting just then as if they were illuminated by some light from within but her real hands, picking up dishes and scrubbing at them with one of the green pads she found dried out on the counter. What do you think is the deal with all these babies being found burned in their cribs?

  I didn’t know what to say. Dali stopped painting, the hands unfinished, raw somehow. Dali turned from the mural to face me. There were tears moving down his face to drip from his moustache. His shoulders were shaking and he was sobbing, taking gulps of air in between sobs.

  I’m sorry, I said to him. I’m so sorry.

  Dali turned back to the mural and walked into it and kept walking. Soon he was just a speck in the distance in that dream-like landscape, so tiny he could have been mistaken for an egg. Then I couldn’t find his figure in the landscape at all, and then the mural was gone and the living room walls were just the living room walls again. And I still didn’t know what to say to my daughter washing dishes out in my kitchen. I didn’t know what to say to her at all.

  • • •

  In my bedroom I have a print of Dali’s The Burning Giraffe. It’s one of the things, Dali told me, that brought him by to visit in the first place. When I turn the lights out and get into bed, the light that comes through the blinds, from the street lamp across the street, lets me see the print, the aquamarine of the background a different hue than the bluish-gray tone of the dark room. I can just barely make out the figures of the women with their drawers opening, but the flames up the back of the giraffe in the distance reflect the street lamp’s light in a way that almost makes those flames real flames. And the ghostly, pale figure I’ve often thought is walking toward the giraffe, toward the flames on the back of the giraffe, walking towards that fire as though it could offer him more than either of the women with their drawers and their red slab of meat in the foreground, at night, in the gentle touch of the street lamp’s light, that ghost figure almost seems to be dancing. What, I sometimes wonder, falling asleep, just what is he dancing for? And who is he dancing with? And what is the music those flames are making on the back of that poor giraffe?

  • • •

  I don’t know if Dali will come back or not. I want him to come back. I miss his sad and badly sung Spanish ballads in the morning. I miss the way that moustache of his continues his gestures after the gestures are done. I want him to come back. I want him to come back to finish the mural inspired by my oldest, the mural I’d come to think of as being titled Apparition of Carol With Fruit Burning in Lorca’s Mouth. For some reason I believe that, were Dali to finish the mural, it would remain on the walls of my living room even after he leaves. It only disappeared when he walked off into it because it wasn’t finished. Why do I believe that? Hell, I don’t know. I mean, you have to be kind of foolish to believe anything at all, right? Besides, it makes sense. And, for the most part, the dead make sense. Certainly more sense than the living usually make.

  I was talking about that just this morning with Sarah. This was this morning, not the past. The Sarah who comes to visit now and again, to sit with me and play cards late at night or walk beside me on my walks, the dead Sarah, is not the Sarah I sometimes find myself in the past with. The dead Sarah is older, and dead. The Sarah I find in the past is still living. Believe me, it’s not possible to confuse them. Though they are the same woman, they couldn’t be more different.

  This morning I was talking with the dead Sarah about how it seems to me the dead have a better handle on things than the living do. She looked at me, when I said that, as if I had just pierced my tongue with a fork and had the fork hanging past my chin as I spoke.

  Honey, you couldn’t be more wrong, she said. She wanted to say more, I could tell, but instead she got up from the kitchen table and stood at the sink looking out the little window over the sink at some house sparrows that were flitting between the windowsill and the telephone lines sagging against what was a sky chock full of clouds.

  This talking with the dead isn’t as easy as you might think. There are times the dead clam up, and trying to drag more out of them just gets them angry. Though I wanted desperately to ask Sarah why she said that, about my being so wrong, this was one of those times, I knew, and I knew if I didn’t change the subject Sarah would end up walking out the door and wouldn’t come back for longer than I care to think about her not coming back.

  So, did you see the mural Dali was working on in the living room? I asked her.

  The one with Carol? she said, and nodded. Too bad he didn’t finish it.

  Maybe he’ll come back and finish it. Maybe the next time Carol is over to clean up for me, I said.

  Sarah, the dead Sarah remember, just shook her head, standing there looking out the window at the sparrows that still couldn’t seem to settle on either the window sill or the telephone lines. Some things, she said, you don’t get more than one chance with. Some things, she said, can’t be finished.

  Sarah never sounded sadder, dead or alive.

  The Widow and the Magician’s Ghost

  Haunting is never constant. The dead, it seems, have the attention span of six-month-olds. They flit around us like befuddled insects. I wonder, do we do damage to the dead who are drawn to us? If the dead are fluttering insects, are we, the living, flames? Do we cause them pain they can feel but not understand?

  Do we, the living, haunt the dead every bit as much as the dead haunt us? When we speak to them in our bedrooms late at night, do they have any choice or must they come to us and listen? Do the dead resent us interrupting whatever it is they do to come and sit or stand beside us and listen to us talk to them, those of us who can’t seem to get past our needing to talk to them?

  Maybe, and more and more I think this is the case, the dead can let the living go more easily than the living can let go of the dead. Maybe Ray, whose fingerprints might still haunt much of his handiwork around this house, maybe he’s not so much with me as I am holding him back from being where he’d rather be. Is it possible, I wonder, for the living to be unfair to the dead?

  How much does Ray, now that he’s dead, know about me that I never let him know when he was alive and here with me and struggling to please me, to make me happy and keep me that way? Can the living keep secrets from the dead? Will the fear we can’t keep secrets from the dead overcome my need to talk with Ray and let me sleep through the night finally? Should I ask Ray for some kind of forgiveness? What was it I put him through when he was alive and didn’t know all there was to know about me? Is forgiveness something I need? Is it something Ray would grant me, if he could?

  Maybe it’s like the story of that magician, dead in his trunk under the stagnant water in the park in the center of town. No one thinks of the dead magician because the story is he got out of the trunk. Everyone who was there remembers to this day seeing him standing beside the tank, the trunk still submerged and bubbling in the water. Everyone remembers him taking the pale, delicate hand of his assistant and raising her arm with his and swinging it down in a final bow before walking off the makeshift stage. No one’s sure what the magician did then, though some say they think they saw him get into a dark, late model Plymouth driven by a woman dressed in a dark fur, maybe sable. They say he kissed the woman before he snapped his fingers in front of her face and the car sped off, throwing gravel and dust behind it that floated in the air like the remnants of some magic act.

  Others say the magician must have walked to the nearest liquor store, bought a bottle of twelve-year-old Tullamor Dew and found a motel room where he polished off the bottle and collapsed on the bed and was never seen again. The maid the next morning swears she felt like she was being watched as she changed the sheets on the bed and took the empty bottle out of the tiny waste can and put it in her trash bin. Once, she swears, as she bent down to work on one of the bottom corners of the top sheet, tucking it under, ou
t of the corner of her eye, on the ceiling, she swears she saw the magician. The maid swears the magician winked at her and when she stood and looked up to see how he was clinging to the ceiling he was gone. Since that morning, the maid says, every time she goes in to clean that room, no matter who has stayed in it the night before, there is a single rose lying on the pillow of the unmade bed. It is the magician, she says. He leaves the flower for me.

  That’s a story Ray would love. A dead magician leaving a rose on a pillow for a maid. With a story like that, no one’s ever going to bother to look in the submerged trunk. Who would want to ruin such a story by finding the decayed remains of the magician in the trunk? Not Ray, that’s for sure. And not me either, I guess. The dead magician, both confined and not confined within the rotting, submerged trunk, is a fair analogy for the forgiveness I don’t want to have to ask Ray for if I don’t have to. Secrets are messy things, it turns out. Especially ones that remain secrets till death do us part.

  • • •

  Has Ray been on the ceiling of Sam and Gloria’s bedroom watching Gloria and I? And if he has, did it get him hard? Can ghosts get hard, and what would that mean for a ghost? Could a hard ghost be felt by someone alive?

  What is it about men, that they get aroused by the idea of watching two women touch each other? Of course, alive, Ray never told me two women making love would excite him. Maybe Ray, if he has been on Gloria’s bedroom ceiling one of the times we were together, maybe he wasn’t turned on by watching us. Maybe he was just sad. Maybe he felt betrayed. Can the living hurt the dead?

  Or is the thought of Ray on Gloria’s ceiling nothing more than a representation of my guilt for never having been able to be honest with myself or with Ray while he was alive? Is it forgiveness I want from the dead, or simply acceptance? How much can the dead accept? I mean, they already have to accept being dead.