Ghost Town

by Patrick Mcgrath

  All the furniture had been pushed up to one end so that she could scrub the floor and walls. At the other end, beyond the area cleared of furniture, a door stood open, and he saw an easel with a tall narrow canvas clamped to it. It too had a thick layer of ash. The windows over the street were open but the air in the loft was heavy with a fine-grained dust. White motes drifted through slanting beams of light in the warm evening sunshine. The smell from Ground Zero was foul, and Dan wondered what exactly he was inhaling. She stood by the door and stared at him, and he stared back, and there was, he said, a profound wordless connection; and then she was in his arms. He knew it was going to be all right. When finally they broke apart she set her hands on his shoulders and regarded him with fond amusement.

  —Do you want a drink?

  He asked her what she was having and she said gin and tonic. He asked for the same. He watched her at the counter as she sliced a lemon. The snick of the knife on the cutting board. Then all at once, as though she had heard her name being called, she lifted her head and put down the knife and stared at the window. Dan said that for some reason he thought of a body of water, a sudden gust of wind, clouds passing across the sun—she was always somehow elemental to him. She turned to him then. Her face was pale. She bit her knuckle. Her eyes filled with tears.

  —I’m so frightened.

  He held her gaze.

  —Will you help me?

  —I’ll try.

  He paused. Dan had a habit, when he gathered his thoughts, of making a steeple of his fingers and resting his forehead on it. I had begun to think this woman he claimed he loved was borderline schizoid, certainly there had been enough psychotic breaks to justify that tentative diagnosis. What she said to him now left me in no doubt at all.

  —You remember the morning the towers came down, you remember thinking, this is not real but I’m seeing it?

  —Yeah.

  —That’s what’s happening to me all the time now. He’s not real, but I’m seeing him.

  He is not real but I am seeing him: what a wealth of pathology lay buried in those nine words!

  —Dan, I said—and this was something I had been reluctant to press him on before, but now I felt I must—Dan, don’t you think I ought to see her?

  But he cut me off at once. It was out of the question. He had already suggested it to her, and she had said no. He was adamant. I had been afraid of this.

  —Then let me take a look at her at least. In a café or wherever. Some public place.

  —Why?

  —I need to see her face, Dan. We talk about her, I form impressions from what you tell me about her, but it’s hard to know what I’m dealing with.

  —I’m dealing with her, he said, and I could see how uneasy he was with the idea of secret surveillance; this was a man, after all, who had made a career out of civil rights abuses. But deeper even than that, I realized, there was something else: there was the fact that he was afraid of her.

  —She won’t find out, I said.

  —She might.

  —And then?

  But this was not to be contemplated. A shake of the head. Nothing more to be said. Very well, I would say nothing either. So, a stalemate. But we had known each other a long time. Now I did apply pressure.

  —Daniel, I said, employing a certain tone of voice with which he was familiar. A short pause ensued.

  —All right! Oh Christ. There’s a place on West Broadway, near the subway.

  He told me the name of the restaurant. He said he met her there for coffee in the morning if he could get away from the office.

  And so the next day I found myself once again within a few blocks of Ground Zero. The sky was clear, the air temperate, a lovely day—any other October. But again I smelled the foul acrid reek from the ruins, which now seemed to me less harmful to the lungs than it was to the soul, for it carried with it emanations of the evil which had created it in the first place. There were firemen in the streets of Tribeca and also in the restaurant, a trendy place with a zinc bar and a dining room in back, and a few tables up front under a mirrored wall where the specials were written up in what looked like lipstick. The firemen sat eating large breakfasts: workers from the site ate for free in all the downtown restaurants; there’d been a piece about it in the Times. They would have been out of place—any other October. I sat down and ordered a coffee. A few minutes later the firemen left. It was 10.40 and still no sign of them. I decided to wait until 11.

  At five of they came in. She was smaller than I had imagined her, though otherwise she fitted Dan’s description. But he had never mentioned what I should have thought a rather significant characteristic of the woman: she was Chinese. Or Asian, anyway. Not beautiful, but certainly feline, the small heart-shaped face under a slick helmet of black hair, as if she’d just stepped out of the shower. She carried herself with a certain arrogance, and there was cruelty there too, something hard and dark; she was like a black stone, a little chunk of polished jet. She wore a black T-shirt under a denim jacket, and a short black skirt. She was slender, assured, flawless of feature and complexion, and as the waiter emerged from behind the bar with menus she flounced past him without even a flicker of acknowledgment. I realized I did not know her name.

  He followed her into the restaurant displaying great discomfort. He glanced at me and he seemed, in the company of that petite slinking creature, more bear than man. His hair was uncombed. His black leather jacket looked shapeless, almost sack-like over his humped shoulders, his rolling gait. I thought absurdly of a man unsteady on the deck of a ship in heavy seas. She glanced at herself in the mirror, and by means of the mirror on the opposite wall I saw her properly for the first time, and knew what she was. They went into the back, and I could still see her in the mirror. Dan was fingering the menu and talking to her, and she sat beside him on the banquette picking delicately among the contents of a small leather purse. Only once did I see her lift her face to his, and caught a gleam of animation in those black-cat eyes.

  It was when they were leaving that I got what I’d come for. She paused at my table.

  —So now you know what the crazy woman looks like, she said, or sneered, rather.

  I was cool. A small bewildered shrug.

  —I’m sorry?

  I tipped my spectacles down my nose as I gazed up into her vicious little face. I saw how very angry she was, close to hysteria.

  —Why can’t you just leave me alone!

  Then she turned to the hapless Daniel.

  —You stupid fuck, she cried.

  She swept on out of the restaurant, him scurrying after her without a single glance of reproach. No manifestation of anger at all.

  That came later. By god he was furious. How could I have done it? More to the point, how could he have let me do it? It was a total fiasco. A debacle. She was far too smart not to have known she was being scrutinized by a stranger, and having seen it to then realize that Dan was implicated—what an idiot he was! But I was not interested in his histrionics. What was the up-shot, I wanted to know. The upshot? Ha! Fierce, baleful glance from eyes hot with rage. The upshot. The upshot was, he’d spent practically the rest of the day attempting to make her listen to him.

  —Listen to what, exactly?

  He became all at once defensive. He said something inaudible.

  —Daniel?

  —To my apologies! he cried. My abject fucking groveling apologies! You didn’t come out of it so well either.

  This last he muttered darkly, as though it was at least some consolation to him that in his general debasement he had blackened my character in her eyes. I told him that didn’t matter.

  —It may not matter to you.

  —Dan, you didn’t tell me she was Chinese. What’s her name?

  —You realize you’ve never asked me her name until now? She’s called Kim Lee. And she’s as American as you or me though I shouldn’t have thought that needed saying!

  And I suddenly saw the extent to which he was in thrall t
o the woman, to this Kim Lee. He had crossed the line that separates pathological obsession from healthy sexual love, and her displeasure had cast him into a state of terror—terror of loss, of abandonment, of solitude—and I could only imagine the things he must have said and done to mollify her. Did he not see how deftly he was being manipulated? She had refused to allow him into her building. She would not pick up the phone when he’d called her from the street. He had hung about in Duane Square when he should have been at work, miserable, angry, jealous—ironic, this, given that she was already haunted by one lover who gazed up at her window from the sidewalk.

  I interrupted him here. I had had quite enough of his tantrum.

  —Who are you jealous of, Dan, her other clients?

  —Her other clients, he said bitterly. Then: She doesn’t do that anymore.

  —Oh she doesn’t. Who then?

  But he would give me no more, and his refusal was remarkable for its stridency—almost, I might have said, its passion. But what I did learn from his outburst was that something had happened before he’d met the woman, something to do with the guy who’d died in the attacks, this Jay, and that there was more to it than guilt.

  Later, when he’d gone, I found myself more troubled by his state of mind than I had been before the encounter in the restaurant. He’d told me that Kim Lee didn’t want him to talk to me about her, in fact she didn’t want him to have anything more to do with me. Apparently she thought me evil, and said that I wanted only to destroy their relationship. She had come as close to weeping as he’d ever seen her. Then she had pleaded with him, saying that if he abandoned her she would surely be lost. She needed him. Nor was it difficult to imagine the physical blandishments that would have accompanied this performance. I could see her in his broad lap, her fingers all over him, her face mere inches from his own, her black eyes gazing helplessly into his as she shifted her little Chinese hooker’s body about in his lap—no, not difficult to see where that conversation went!

  So it was to Dan’s credit that he did not obey her, but came to see me anyway. He made clear the risk he ran, for if she found out—and now I knew, he said, how little escaped her—she would never see him again, and about that she had apparently been adamant, and Daniel believed her; this time he knew she meant it.

  I didn’t believe she meant anything of the sort. It was not yet clear to me what she wanted of him, and perhaps it was not clear to her either, but of one thing I was now certain: she would not let him go, now that she’d got her claws in him. And something else disturbed me, which was my suspicion, or conviction, rather, that Dan was holding something back. It was connected to the remark he had let slip concerning his jealousy, and then the defensiveness with which he’d refused to elaborate. Who was he jealous of? Surely not the dead lover. That would be tantamount to feeling jealous of a ghost, and while this is well within the normal range of human sexuality I felt there was more to it than that. There was something obscure, just out of sight, somewhere in the recent past; and I felt I had to identify it.

  I stayed up late that night, and only got to sleep around five in the morning, with nothing resolved in my mind.

  The bombing continues in Afghanistan while in America we are under bioterrorist attack. Already eight people have been diagnosed with inhalation anthrax and three of them are dead. It comes in the mail, or so it was thought until a woman who did not handle mail professionally fell ill, and now fights for her life in the intensive care unit of a Manhattan hospital; the source of the anthrax deep in her lungs is unknown. The government warns us that another terrorist attack is anticipated and that we should be at a heightened state of alert. But alert to what? We are told no more than that.

  Episodes of peripheral insanity have erupted, random bits of evil apparently stimulated by the attacks, as for example the deaths aboard a Greyhound bus in Tennessee, when a knife-wielding Croatian slashed the driver’s throat and the bus careered across two lanes of oncoming traffic, then flipped over, killing six. There is an Arab man in custody who enlisted in a Minnesota flying school and aroused suspicion when he expressed a desire to learn to fly large commercial jets but apparently showed no interest in taking off or landing. This sort of thing we deal with every day now. I read my newspaper; New Yorkers speak out: “Nothing feels normal.” “My life is ruined.” “The world is over.” Dan tells me what John Ashcroft’s people are up to, the ethnic profiling, the rounding up of as many men as they can find of Near Eastern or North African descent. The suspension of due process, the wholesale pullback of traditional American freedoms—

  I do not tell him this but I am beginning to think that John Ashcroft is right.

  Daniel by this point was pathologically obsessed with his Chinese prostitute, and I saw how difficult it would be to get him to talk about what had happened before he met her; that is, before September 11, a date which was rapidly becoming a watershed in all our lives, a line of demarcation, or a point in time, rather, before which the world seemed to glow with a patina of innocence and clarity and health. And after which everything seemed dark and tortured and incomprehensible, bearing nothing but portents of a greater darkness to come. It was against this black and shifting backdrop that Dan’s affair with the woman was playing out, and I was forcibly reminded of an image that I had once seen of two actors engaged in a furiously complicated drama in front of a screen on which were projected enormous indistinct shadow-figures performing obscure destructive actions which mirrored and at the same time grotesquely distorted the drama going forward center stage. What I wanted from Dan was that larger perspective.

  I called him the day after his last visit but he wasn’t home. Nor was he in his office. I didn’t leave a message, but continued to call him every hour until at last I got him, by which time it was late in the evening.

  What followed was one of the most trying conversations I ever had with him. At once I heard the resistance in his voice, his unwillingness even to speak to me on the phone, so seriously alarmed had he been by Kim Lee’s demand that he have nothing more to do with me. For some minutes he was curt and circumspect, and I had to become rather crisp with him. Did he or did he not need my help? Was I to assume he wanted me to break off the therapy and leave him to flounder unaided in the quagmire of delusion in which he now found himself? Did he want to go it alone?

  There was, I could hear it, an impulse in him to cry out—Yes! Yes! I want to go it alone—I don’t care what happens to me—I don’t care if I sink, let me just fling myself in, go under with no thought of consequences, careless of the damage I do to myself—but we both recognized the infantilism of the impulse. A kind of suicidal infantilism, a primal unthinking embrace of the death instinct, this is what I heard awoken in him as I spelled out the alternatives he faced, and the implicit ultimatum they contained. He did not give voice to the impulse. There is in the end this at least to be said for a training in the law, that a kind of professional filter effectively screens one’s drives, one’s emotions—one’s delusions—so that one does not become entirely the slave of pathological forces originating in the unconscious mind. I knew my man. I knew what those forces looked like as they manifested in him at the time, fuelled and propelled as they were by an intense sexual intoxication. He could not abandon me: to abandon me would be to cast himself adrift upon towering seas with no raft, no lifejacket even save his own confused and fragile psyche. He could not do it. Insanity even to contemplate it, though contemplate it he did.

  —What is it we have to talk about? he said wearily.

  I told him we had to talk about the man who died in the north tower, and in the same weary tone he said he supposed I was right. I told him we should do it now, and again he agreed, and I was surprised to discover there was no resistance left in him at all. But when I asked him would he come here, or should I come to him, he replied with more alacrity and affect than I’d had from him in a long time that good Christ no, he couldn’t have me in his apartment; he would come to me, of course he would.<
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  —Then I’ll see you in a while.

  I put down the phone with the feeling that I still had the situation under control. But there could be no relaxation of vigilance. I felt as though I was engaged in terminal conflict with the prostitute Kim Lee, and the prize was Danny Silver’s sanity.

  We were in my apartment and I had told him that I was sure he was withholding information from me, and I asked him how he expected me to help him if I did not know what was going on. I was quite severe with him. I saw his big hand smear across his face, smear the leathery folds of stubbled flesh—he had removed his spectacles—then rub his skull as his eyes drifted unseeing into some, to me, inaccessible place in his mind. He sat forward and stared at the floor, a big, blunt-fingered hand still rubbing at the crown of his skull, his elbows planted squarely on his knees, and his feet set wide apart on the carpet, the whole a monument to solidity although there was nothing solid there at all. With the compressed precision of a mind trained in the law he gave me the facts of the case.

  The affair with Jay began in June, he said. Summer of 2001, three months before he, Dan, had met her, so all he knew about it was what she had told him; and as to the reliability of that information I was naturally skeptical. But I did not say this, I told him to go on, for I felt I would be able to at least pick out the bare bones of the thing and superimpose my own interpretive construction. And I was confident that my interpretation would be closer by far to the reality of the events he described than whatever meaning that woman imputed to them.

  She’d described to Dan how she’d picked up this good-looking guy at a gallery opening in Chelsea. Jay Minkoff was his name, and he was apparently the son of a prominent New York banker and philanthropist. The details were scanty and it was not, I imagined, an episode Dan was anxious to know much about, given his own feelings for Kim Lee; but he surprised me. He began to grow animated, and I realized that so emotionally invested in the woman had he become that he spoke about her experience with the same intensity he might have employed to speak about her skin, or her breasts, or the sound of her voice; and the fact that it concerned her previous lover mattered not at all. What mattered was that it was hers. So it was giving him vicarious pleasure, this—what?—refracted nostalgia, speaking of the emotional life of the woman he loved even though they were the emotions she had felt for another man.