Concert of Ghosts

by Campbell Armstrong

  His eye picked out the dog bowl in the corner. It contained the crusted remains of canned meat. A fly, disgustingly alive, hovered over the relics.

  “Consider your situation, Harry. Maybe McKay will come through for you and you’ll get probation. More likely he won’t. It’s a gamble no matter how you slice it. Look, I really wish I could help you in some way. I’m just not sure how. Can you think of anyone else you could turn to for advice?”

  He shook his head. Her question disturbed him. He was reminded of Rozak’s request for character witnesses. Anyone else? “Not really.”

  “What about old friends? You must have them somewhere. What about school? College?”

  He shut his eyes. He said nothing. Friends, he thought. Acquaintances. He was drawing one blank card after another. He remembered a few faces from high school, but they belonged in another time, strangers to him now. And he’d never gone to college. There was Delacroix, but he wasn’t a friend. “I can’t think of anybody.”

  “That’s about the saddest thing I’ve ever heard.” She sat down and took the newspaper photograph from the pocket of her jeans. She dropped it on the table in front of him. “Then who are these people? What role did they play in your life, Harry? Were they perfect strangers? Did you just happen to come together?”

  The mysterious picture: Tennant glanced at it. He felt defensive all at once: Who was this little girl with her difficult questions? “What’s your interest in this thing anyhow?”

  “A story.”

  “You write.”

  “Yeah, I write,” and she mentioned the name of a magazine only vaguely familiar to him. A journalist, sweet Christ. Who else would penetrate his isolation like this?

  She opened the refrigerator and took out a can of beer. “You mind if I help myself?”

  “Feel free.”

  She sipped the beer, then ran the back of one small hand across her lips. “When you looked at it before, I got the distinct impression you didn’t remember it,” she said. “Does San Francisco in 1968 jog your memory?”

  He didn’t speak. He looked out the window. Somebody turns up with an old photograph of you, and you don’t recall it ever having been taken. You don’t remember the people in the group, the day the picture was shot, the circumstances—everything gone. His head had begun to ache; his throat was parched. He found a fresh beer and popped it open and drank hastily.

  “Harry,” the girl said.

  He looked directly at her. The lapse in his memory humiliated him.

  “You really don’t remember, do you?”

  The girl touched the back of his hand in a sympathetic way, and he recalled how sweet she’d been when they’d dragged the dog out of the house, the way she’d helped. Death created tiny bonds. “How could you have forgotten?”

  “I didn’t say I’d forgotten.” He picked up the flimsy piece of creased paper. “I’ll look at it again.”

  The photograph depicts five young people. A girl, beautiful in a delicate, lacy way, dominates the center. Her long black hair hangs against her peasant blouse. She wears a big floppy hat and fancy hand-stitched moccasin boots. On her right, close to her, is a young man with a Mexican-style mustache and frizzy hair. The eyes are spirited, a bandit’s face. On this young man’s left stands a fat girl in a paisley shawl, big round granny glasses upon her eyes. Something about her suggests a healthy outdoor upbringing, clover meadows and milk pails. She looks as if she might never have heard of grass or acid, but her clothes betray that impression, and the small smile, when you study it, is more spaced-out than jolly. Beside her, big and bearded, dressed in Osh-Kosh B’Gosh dungarees and a plaid shirt, is a man with a congenial expression on his hairy face. Unflappable, good-hearted, that’s the impression he gives. Tennant himself, in bell-bottom jeans, denim stitched with tiny zodiac conceits, is standing at the edge of the group, as if he were the photographer’s afterthought, included only to balance the composition.

  Five hippies—the word sounded odd to Tennant; an extinct species. Each face strikes something of the same attitude. The expressions are those of people who have sensed, like some spore borne on the wind, freedom. But there is also fragility if you look for it, a spidery crack in the Day-Glo-painted eggshell. Explorers in a dream, they look as if they’ve been given passports to a fabulous place where liberty was anything you wanted it to be.

  Tennant looked away from the image. Rain had begun to fall quietly in the woods. The sky turned dark. The beer in his mouth had a stale taste. How was it possible to look at a likeness of your younger self and fail to locate it in place and circumstance? Who were these strangers standing around him? And yet—didn’t he also have a thin shiver going through him, something that was neither recognition nor familiarity, but spectral, indefinable? He was beset by a sense of loss he couldn’t explain to himself.

  “Admit it, Harry. You’re baffled. Why?”

  He shook his head, determined to cling to some little raft of obstinacy. It was only a matter of time and the memory would return and everything would be just fine, everything clear. But even as he looked at the five faces, they seemed to recede. He remembered San Francisco—how could he not?—in a series of cameos that were not always sharp. He remembered the drugs, the patchouli musk rising from the flesh of girls on warm afternoons, the street scene in the Haight-Ashbury, the music day and night, the bells and cymbals that rang with the consistency of a sound track. Faces came and went in these flickers, but none he could assign to this goddamn photograph. But why should he recall this one picture anyway, when for most of the time in San Francisco he’d been high, zonked, zoned, indifferent to his existence in the careless manner of the time? You lived to get stoned. You got stoned to live. It was wow time. Bring on the carnival. Uppers. Downers. Pot. Thai sticks. Cocaine. Acid. What was a mind if not for blowing? Hey-ho, those were the days. How could you recall every detail of those burnt-out times?

  He said, “Okay. I guess it escapes me. There’s something … slightly familiar about it, but I can’t get a handle on it. Sorry.”

  “You can do better than that,” she said. “Try. Try a little harder.”

  How could he try harder? He pushed the clipping across the table toward Alison. As he did so, he happened to glance at the lovely girl in the center of the photograph, and his head throbbed and he wondered if, in the neon clamor of his drug days, he’d been attracted to her, if he’d known her. The idea, the spark, slipped away. He’d remember anyone with those features, wouldn’t he?

  “Who took this shot?” he asked.

  “You don’t even remember that much? The photographer was called Sammy Obe.”

  “It doesn’t ring a bell.” He finished his beer. Sammy Obe. “What’s the big deal about the whole thing anyway?”

  “I’ll run it past you. Maybe you’ll understand why your failure of memory surprises me. The photograph was taken in June 1968. Chinatown, San Francisco, to be exact. It became one of those pictures that collect a certain amount of fame because it captured—I don’t want to sound pompous—the essence of a place and time. The hippie culture. The look. Some pictures do that accidentally. Capa took a shot of a soldier dying in the Spanish Civil War, John Filo photographed a woman called Mary Vecchio kneeling over a student shot by the National Guard at Kent State—these things take on a certain spirit. They become icons.”

  The girl paused and gazed at Tennant as if she felt a profound pity for him.

  “Obe’s photograph was like that. It was reprinted scores of times around the world. You’ll see it in histories of the sixties. It was even turned into a poster, but by that time the mood was beginning to change and the whole Haight thing was going down the tubes. The poster had a short shelf life, Harry. But for a moment that photograph was famous. And you say you don’t remember it?”

  Famous. Tennant, who found this hard to accept, walked to the window and looked out into the rain. Where was this girl leading? Didn’t she understand he had more pressing things in his life than what wa
s obviously a case of drug-induced amnesia? No, that didn’t quite cut it: He was evading his own failure of memory. He suddenly wanted to be graceful and weightless, to float like a hawk through the rain, free.

  Don’t flee from stuff, boyo. You cope by standing still.

  Boyo? Another upstart voice in his head, a bastard that didn’t belong in his mental apparatus. How did you get like this? Did the drugs really fuck you so royally?

  “It’s a blank,” he said. “You’ve got to keep in mind the way things were back then. Too many acid trips. Sometimes you took trips so goddamn intense you never quite made it back from the stratosphere. You left parts of yourself in orbit. Some things have been deleted from my tapes, that’s all. Black holes.” As some people are said to feel the presence of an amputated limb, so Tennant imagined just then that his dog was brushing against his leg. A strange illusion.

  Alison Seagrove picked up the clipping and held it in the palm of her hand. “They must be enormous black holes if you can’t remember anybody in this picture.”

  “You weren’t around in those days,” he said. “A lot of bad acid hit the streets toward the end. Organized crime moved into the Haight. Those gangsters didn’t give a shit what kids swallowed. People freaked out. I was unlucky enough to be one of them. I live with that. Some people live with a disability. I think of it that way.” If I think of it at all.

  “An incomplete life.”

  “I never really considered it like that.”

  “Exactly how did you consider it, Harry? Or did you just hibernate out here in the boondocks and grow your dope?”

  Tennant ignored her question. He wasn’t going to admit to the plodding, clockwork way he passed his time. Okay, so the failure of memory was disturbing, but he had an explanation for it, and if she didn’t like it, that was her problem.

  “I’m waiting for the rest of your story,” he said.

  She sighed, irked by his evasive manner. “It’s simple really. I started out doing one of those fluff pieces—‘Where Are They Now?’ That kind of thing. It’s filler, Harry. Faces from the past. How are they living these days. Blah blah blah. But when I started to dig, something happened. It began to get interesting.” She laid the cutting in front of him. “Two of the kids in the picture seem to have vanished. And the other two are dead.”

  “Dead?” Tennant wondered why his heart was wired with dread. If he couldn’t recollect his companions in the picture, why should he be troubled by the knowledge that a pair of them had died? “Which two?”

  She pointed to the photograph. “The kid with the Mexican mustache, Carlos Carlos, was killed in a motorcycle accident. December 1968.”

  Tennant looked at the boy’s slightly wasted smile. Carlos. Did the name mean anything to him? It was hard to tell.

  “Who else?” he asked. He couldn’t swallow. The kitchen felt like a clammy box in which he was suspended. Alison Seagrove’s index finger, in the manner of a pointer crossing a Ouija board, moved over the surface of the photograph for a second. “This one,” she said, and she touched the fat girl with the granny glasses and the fringed paisley shawl. “Kat. She jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge, March 1969.”

  Tennant felt a curious relief that Alison Seagrove hadn’t singled out the long-haired girl in the middle of the shot, although he wasn’t sure why. Dread, relief—he was being dragged through some odd mixture of emotions.

  “You said the other two have vanished.”

  “Gone. Disappeared.”

  “This girl in the middle … you haven’t found any trace of her at all? Absolutely nothing?”

  Alison Seagrove sat down at the kitchen table. She picked up the newspaper, and something in the way she touched it suggested an obsession she was beginning to resent. She’d been living with the story behind those five faces for some time now, and her quest was frustrating. She looked at Tennant with regret, as if she understood that by coming here she was disturbing ghosts that were not her own, but his, only his.

  “Absolutely nothing,” she said. “It’s like Maggie Silver never existed.”

  5

  He couldn’t comprehend the relief he felt when Alison had pointed to the plump girl and not to the one called Maggie Silver. It was as if some kind of thread attached him to a person he must have once known—but that knowledge was so incomplete as to be worthless. Yet there was no denying the emotion, which must have been lying in wait somewhere in his brain—that place of absences and silences.

  “There’s some easy explanation for people vanishing,” he said. He managed to sound eminently sensible. “They move and they don’t always leave forwarding addresses. You’re looking back a long way. The Haight was a transient society. Kids changed their names. They dropped acid and went off into psychedelic realms, and they came back with a new name, a whole new personality.”

  Tennant wasn’t exaggerating. After a couple of monumental acid trips, scenic routes through light shows and into the vortices of the cosmos, who would want to be called Clyde Bullington or George Kryzaminski or some such thing? People became Sunshine Halo and Plenty O’Trips, outlandish names that now seemed ludicrous. He had the mildewed scent in his nostrils of an extinct generation.

  “I managed to find you at least,” Alison Seagrove said.

  “Yeah, and I’ve been wondering how.”

  “Through your father. Indirectly.”

  Good old Rayland. He’d had no direct contact with his father for—how long? He couldn’t be sure. Years.

  “Indirectly?” he asked. “What does that mean?”

  “I got to know a young lawyer in your father’s firm,” Alison said. “I understood from him that you and your father have been estranged for a long time.”

  Estranged. Tennant thought that a mild word. “We don’t talk, if that’s what you mean. We don’t have contact. I don’t want to see him. I don’t even want to think about him.”

  “Am I allowed to ask why?”

  Tennant was agitated. He knew he didn’t have to answer this young woman’s questions: All he had to do was close the door on her, treat her as if she were no more than an unwelcome purveyor of encyclopedias or somebody conducting some useless statistical survey. But he wanted to talk, as if to set free something trapped too long inside him. He walked around the room, his hands plunged in his pockets. He rattled loose change as he moved, a sound reminiscent of a light chain that echoed with every step he took.

  “What can I tell you? We had a big-time disagreement. Call it a philosophical difference, if you fancy euphemism. Rayland defended a guy I considered indefensible. Worse than indefensible. A fucking monster.”

  “Did the monster have a name?”

  A name, Tennant thought. He couldn’t bring himself to utter it easily. Some sounds, innocuous in themselves, assumed pernicious meaning by connotation. He sat at the table. “Noel Harker. Colonel Noel Harker.”

  “Ah yes. The butcher,” Alison Seagrove said.

  “You got it. The butcher.” Tennant was silent a moment. He might have been listening to the house as though it were a temperamental clock he expected at any second to tick. “Any guy who gives the order to massacre innocent Vietnamese women and kids isn’t somebody you’d want to sit down with at Sunday lunch, never mind defend in a court of law. Which is what Rayland did. And he did it goddamn well, if you can appreciate that kind of performance. Poor Colonel Harker. The heart bleeds. Rayland got him off on the grounds of diminished responsibility caused by ‘battle fatigue.’ The jury had seen photographs of babies burning, for Christ’s sake. They’d seen pictures of bayonetted women lying in ditches. And Harker walks out free.”

  “That was—what?—1967,” Alison said. “You haven’t spoken to Rayland since?”

  “Sure. Once maybe. Twice. I don’t know. His defense humiliated me. I told him he was fucked up. He argued that the system gives any man the right to the best defense available. Christ, we fought bitterly. For the first time in my life I was ashamed of my own father. What was more a
gonizing was the way he began to appear on TV shows whenever there was any discussion about American brutality in Vietnam—voilà, there was Rayland on the box, defending the actions of men in war. He’d become an expert in the art of justifying atrocities. Jesus, he was smooth. He was good at it. By the time he finished you wanted to shake his hand and thank him for pointing out that sometimes brutality was more than justified, and God bless it.”

  Harry stood up, restless. Exhuming his relationship with Rayland was an exhausting business even now. It should have been a corpse, long interred, but it still came back to haunt him. “I didn’t want to see him after all that. I wanted absolutely nothing to do with him. He was a dead man where I was concerned. I went off to San Francisco. I threw myself into a life-style that was directly the opposite of Rayland’s. And that infuriated the hell out of him, which in turn delighted me. Sometimes …” He paused by the window and the girl looked at him.

  “Sometimes what?”

  “The thing is, he was terrific when I was a kid. My mother died when I was about eight, and Rayland—the only word I can find to describe him back then is devoted. He spent all his spare time with me. We went places together. Ball games. Movies. It was like he didn’t want me out of his sight. He was considerate. Generous. You couldn’t have asked for a better father. He could have shipped me off to some expensive school, but he didn’t. He kept me at home, he made himself constantly available, no matter what his schedule was like. That’s the Rayland I like to remember. The other Rayland’s a guy I don’t begin to know.”

  He stared out at the darkening woods. He had an image of his mother, the first in a long long time. Lily, who had died of kidney failure, had had an anarchist’s attitude to the society in which her husband was obliged by business to move. Addicted to five o’clock martinis, she’d dissect Rayland’s acquaintances, saying they were terrific arguments for the legalization of euthanasia. Thieves and villains, I swear. Every man jack of them. You want to watch out for them, Harry. Power’s all they think about. Lily, with her wide lipsticked mouth and overrouged cheeks and fanciful hairstyles, an eccentric who made her foibles attractive.