20th Century Ghosts

by Joe Hill

  On reopening night, the place is crowded like it hasn’t been since Titanic. The local news is there to film people walking inside in their best suits. Of course, Steven is there, which is why all the excitement…although Alec thinks he would have a sell-out even without Steven, that people would have come just to see the results of the renovation. Alec and Steven pose for photographs, the two of them standing under the marquee in their tuxedoes, shaking hands. Steven’s tuxedo is Armani, bought for the occasion. Alec got married in his.

  Steven leans into him, pressing a shoulder against his chest. What are you going to do with yourself?

  Before Steven’s money, Alec would have sat behind the counter handing out tickets, and then gone up himself to start the projector. But Steven hired someone to sell tickets and run the projector. Alec says, Guess I’m going to sit and watch the movie.

  Save me a seat, Steven says. I might not get in until The Birds, though. I have some more press to do out here.

  Lois Weisel has a camera set up at the front of the theater, turned to point at the audience, and loaded with high-speed film for shooting in the dark. She films the crowd at different times, recording their reactions to The Wizard of Oz. This was to be the conclusion of her documentary—a packed house enjoying a twentieth-century classic in this lovingly restored old movie palace—but her movie wasn’t going to end like she thought it would.

  In the first shots on Lois’s reel it is possible to see Alec sitting in the back left of the theater, his face turned up towards the screen, his glasses flashing blue in the darkness. The seat to the left of him, on the aisle, is empty, the only empty seat in the house. Sometimes he can be seen eating popcorn. Other times he is just sitting there watching, his mouth open slightly, an almost worshipful look on his face.

  Then in one shot he has turned sideways to face the seat to his left. He has been joined by a woman in blue. He is leaning over her. They are unmistakably kissing. No one around them pays them any mind. The Wizard of Oz is ending. We know this because we can hear Judy Garland, reciting the same five words over and over in a soft, yearning voice, saying—well, you know what she is saying. They are only the loveliest five words ever said in all of film.

  In the shot immediately following this one, the house lights are up, and there is a crowd of people gathered around Alec’s body, slumped heavily in his seat. Steven Greenberg is in the aisle, yelping hysterically for someone to bring a doctor. A child is crying. The rest of the crowd generates a low rustling buzz of excited conversation. But never mind this shot. The footage that came just before it is much more interesting.

  It is only a few seconds long, this shot of Alec and his unidentified companion—a few hundred frames of film—but it is the shot that will make Lois Weisel’s reputation, not to mention a large sum of money. It will appear on television shows about unexplained phenomena, it will be watched and rewatched at gatherings of those fascinated with the supernatural. It will be studied, written about, debunked, confirmed, and celebrated. Let’s see it again.

  He leans over her. She turns her face up to his, and closes her eyes and she is very young and she is giving herself to him completely. Alec has removed his glasses. He is touching her lightly at the waist. This is the way people dream of being kissed, a movie star kiss. Watching them, one almost wishes the moment would never end. And over all this, Dorothy’s small, brave voice fills the darkened theater. She is saying something about home. She is saying something everyone knows.

  POP ART

  My best friend when I was twelve was inflatable. His name was Arthur Roth, which also made him an inflatable Hebrew, although in our now-and-then talks about the afterlife, I don’t remember that he took an especially Jewish perspective. Talk was mostly what we did—in his condition rough-house was out of the question—and the subject of death, and what might follow it, came up more than once. I think Arthur knew he would be lucky to survive high school. When I met him, he had already almost been killed a dozen times, once for every year he had been alive. The afterlife was always on his mind; also the possible lack of one.

  When I tell you we talked, I mean only to say we communicated, argued, put each other down, built each other up. To stick to facts, I talked—Art couldn’t. He didn’t have a mouth. When he had something to say, he wrote it down. He wore a pad around his neck on a loop of twine, and carried crayons in his pocket. He turned in school papers in crayon, took tests in crayon. You can imagine the dangers a sharpened pencil would present to a four-ounce boy made of plastic and filled with air.

  I think one of the reasons we were best friends was because he was such a great listener. I needed someone to listen. My mother was gone and my father I couldn’t talk to. My mother ran away when I was three, sent my dad a rambling and confused letter from Florida, about sunspots and gamma rays and the radiation that emanates from power lines, about how the birthmark on the back of her left hand had moved up her arm and onto her shoulder. After that, a couple postcards, then nothing.

  As for my father, he suffered from migraines. In the afternoons, he sat in front of soaps in the darkened living room, wet-eyed and miserable. He hated to be bothered. You couldn’t tell him anything. It was a mistake even to try.

  “Blah blah,” he would say, cutting me off in mid-sentence. “My head is splitting. You’re killing me here with blah blah this, blah blah that.”

  But Art liked to listen, and in trade, I offered him protection. Kids were scared of me. I had a bad reputation. I owned a switchblade, and sometimes I brought it to school and let other kids see; it kept them in fear. The only thing I ever stuck it into, though, was the wall of my bedroom. I’d lie on my bed and flip it at the corkboard wall, so that it hit, blade-first, thunk!

  One day when Art was visiting he saw the pockmarks in my wall. I explained, one thing led to another, and before I knew it he was begging to have a throw.

  “What’s wrong with you?” I asked him. “Is your head completely empty? Forget it. No way.”

  Out came a Crayola, burnt-sienna. He wrote:

  So at least let me look.

  I popped it open for him. He stared at it wide-eyed. Actually, he stared at everything wide-eyed. His eyes were made of glassy plastic, stuck to the surface of his face. He couldn’t blink or anything. But this was different than his usual bug-eyed stare. I could see he was really fixated.

  He wrote:

  I’ll be careful I totally promise please!

  I handed it to him. He pushed the point of the blade into the floor so it snicked into the handle. Then he hit the button and it snicked back out. He shuddered, stared at it in his hand. Then, without giving any warning, he chucked it at the wall. Of course it didn’t hit tip-first; that takes practice, which he hadn’t had, and coordination, which, speaking honestly, he wasn’t ever going to have. It bounced, came flying back at him. He sprang into the air so quickly it was like I was watching his ghost jump out of his body. The knife landed where he had been and clattered away under my bed.

  I yanked Art down off the ceiling. He wrote:

  You were right, that was dumb. I’m a loser—a jerk.

  “No question,” I said.

  But he wasn’t a loser or a jerk. My dad is a loser. The kids at school were jerks. Art was different. He was all heart. He just wanted to be liked by someone.

  Also, I can say truthfully, he was the most completely harmless person I’ve ever known. Not only would he not hurt a fly, he couldn’t hurt a fly. If he slapped one, and lifted his hand, it would buzz off undisturbed. He was like a holy person in a Bible story, someone who can heal the ripped and infected parts of you with a laying-on of hands. You know how Bible stories go. That kind of person, they’re never around long. Losers and jerks put nails in them and watch the air run out.

  THERE WAS SOMETHING special about Art, an invisible special something that just made other kids naturally want to kick his ass. He was new at our school. His parents had just moved to town. They were normal, filled with blood not air
. The condition Art suffered from is one of these genetic things that plays hopscotch with the generations, like Tay-Sachs (Art told me once that he had had a grand-uncle, also inflatable, who flopped one day into a pile of leaves and burst on the tine of a buried rake). On the first day of classes, Mrs. Gannon made Art stand at the front of the room, and told everyone all about him, while he hung his head out of shyness.

  He was white. Not Caucasian, white, like a marshmallow, or Casper. A seam ran around his head and down his sides. There was a plastic nipple under one arm, where he could be pumped with air.

  Mrs. Gannon told us we had to be extra careful not to run with scissors or pens. A puncture would probably kill him. He couldn’t talk; everyone had to try and be sensitive about that. His interests were astronauts, photography, and the novels of Bernard Malamud.

  Before she nudged him towards his seat, she gave his shoulder an encouraging little squeeze and as she pressed her fingers into him, he whistled gently. That was the only way he ever made sound. By flexing his body he could emit little squeaks and whines. When other people squeezed him, he made a soft, musical hoot.

  He bobbed down the room and took an empty seat beside me. Billy Spears, who sat directly behind him, bounced thumbtacks off his head all morning long. The first couple times Art pretended not to notice. Then, when Mrs. Gannon wasn’t looking, he wrote Billy a note. It said:

  Please stop! I don’t want to say anything to Mrs. Gannon but it isn’t safe to throw thumbtacks at me. I’m not kidding.

  Billy wrote back:

  You make trouble, and there won’t be enough of you left to patch a tire. Think about it.

  It didn’t get any easier for Art from there. In biology lab, Art was paired with Cassius Delamitri, who was in sixth grade for the second time. Cassius was a fat kid, with a pudgy, sulky face, and a disagreeable film of black hair above his unhappy pucker of a mouth.

  The project was to distill wood, which involved the use of a gas flame—Cassius did the work, while Art watched and wrote notes of encouragement:

  I can’t believe you got a D–on this experiment when you did it last year—you totally know how to do this stuff!!

  and

  my parents bought me a lab kit for my birthday. You could come over and we could play mad scientist sometime—want to?

  After three or four notes like that, Cassius had read enough, got it in his head Art was some kind of homosexual…especially with Art’s talk about having him over to play doctor or whatever. When the teacher was distracted helping some other kids, Cassius shoved Art under the table and tied him around one of the table legs, in a squeaky granny knot, head, arms, body, and all. When Mr. Milton asked where Art had gone, Cassius said he thought he had run to the bathroom.

  “Did he?” Mr. Milton asked. “What a relief. I didn’t even know if that kid could go to the bathroom.”

  Another time, John Erikson held Art down during recess and wrote KOLLOSTIMY BAG on his stomach with indelible marker. It was spring before it faded away.

  The worst thing was my mom saw. Bad enough she has to know I get beat up on a daily basis. But she was really upset it was spelled wrong.

  He added:

  I don’t know what she expects—this is 6th grade. Doesn’t she remember 6th grade? I’m sorry, but realistically, what are the odds you’re going to get beat up by the grand champion of the spelling bee?

  “The way your year is going,” I said, “I figure them odds might be pretty good.”

  HERE IS HOW Art and I wound up friends:

  During recess periods, I always hung out at the top of the monkey bars by myself, reading sports magazines. I was cultivating my reputation as a delinquent and possible drug pusher. To help my image along, I wore a black denim jacket and didn’t talk to people or make friends.

  At the top of the monkey bars—a dome-shaped construction at one edge of the asphalt lot behind the school—I was a good nine feet off the ground, and had a view of the whole yard. One day I watched Billy Spears horsing around with Cassius Delamitri and John Erikson. Billy had a wiffle ball and a bat, and the three of them were trying to bat the ball in through an open second-floor window. After fifteen minutes of not even coming close, John Erikson got lucky, swatted it in.

  Cassius said, “Shit—there goes the ball. We need something else to bat around.”

  “Hey,” Billy shouted. “Look! There’s Art!”

  They caught up to Art, who was trying to keep away, and Billy started tossing him in the air and hitting him with the bat to see how far he could knock him. Every time he struck Art with the bat it made a hollow, springy whap! Art popped into the air, then floated along a little ways, sinking gently back to the ground. As soon as his heels touched earth he started to run, but swiftness of foot wasn’t one of Art’s qualities. John and Cassius got into the fun by grabbing Art and drop-kicking him, to see who could punt him highest.

  The three of them gradually pummeled Art down to my end of the lot. He struggled free long enough to run in under the monkey bars. Billy caught up, struck him a whap across the ass with the bat, and shot him high into the air.

  Art floated to the top of the dome. When his body touched the steel bars, he stuck, face-up—static electricity.

  “Hey,” Billy hollered. “Chuck him down here!”

  I had, up until that moment, never been face-to-face with Art. Although we shared classes, and even sat side-by-side in Mrs. Gannon’s homeroom, we had not had a single exchange. He looked at me with his enormous plastic eyes and sad blank face, and I looked right back. He found the pad around his neck, scribbled a note in spring green, ripped it off and held it up at me.

  I don’t care what they do, but could you go away? I hate to get the crap knocked out of me in front of spectators.

  “What’s he writin’?” Billy shouted.

  I looked from the note, past Art, and down at the gathering of boys below. I was struck by the sudden realization that I could smell them, all three of them, a damp, human smell, a sweaty-sour reek. It turned my stomach.

  “Why are you bothering him?” I asked.

  Billy said, “Just screwin’ with him.”

  “We’re trying to see how high we can make him go,” Cassius said. “You ought to come down here. You ought to give it a try. We’re going to kick him onto the roof of the friggin’ school!”

  “I got an even funner idea,” I said, funner being an excellent word to use if you want to impress on some other kids that you might be a mentally retarded psychopath. “How about we see if I can kick your lardy ass up on the roof of the school?”

  “What’s your problem?” Billy asked. “You on the rag?”

  I grabbed Art and jumped down. Cassius blanched. John Erikson tottered back. I held Art under one arm, feet sticking towards them, head pointed away.

  “You guys are dicks,” I said—some moments just aren’t right for a funny line.

  And I turned away from them. The back of my neck crawled at the thought of Billy’s wiffle ball bat clubbing me one across the skull, but he didn’t do a thing, let me walk.

  We went out on the baseball field, sat on the pitcher’s mound. Art wrote me a note that said thanks, and another that said I didn’t have to do what I had done but that he was glad I had done it, and another that said he owed me one. I shoved each note into my pocket after reading it, didn’t think why. That night, alone in my bedroom, I dug a wad of crushed notepaper out of my pocket, a lump the size of a lemon, peeled each note free and pressed it flat on my bed, read them all over again. There was no good reason not to throw them away, but I didn’t, started a collection instead. It was like some part of me knew, even then, I might want to have something to remember Art by after he was gone. I saved hundreds of his notes over the next year, some as short as a couple words, a few six-page-long manifestos. I have most of them still, from the first note he handed me, the one that begins, I don’t care what they do, to the last, the one that ends:

  I want to see if it’s true.
If the sky opens up at the top.

  AT FIRST MY father didn’t like Art, but after he got to know him better he really hated him.

  “How come he’s always mincing around?” my father asked. “Is he a fairy or something?”

  “No, Dad. He’s inflatable.”

  “Well, he acts like a fairy,” he said. “You better not be queering around with him up in your room.”

  Art tried to be liked—he tried to build a relationship with my father. But the things he did were misinterpreted; the statements he made were misunderstood. My dad said something once about a movie he liked. Art wrote him a message about how the book was even better.

  “He thinks I’m an illiterate,” my dad said, as soon as Art was gone.

  Another time, Art noticed the pile of worn tires heaped up behind our garage, and mentioned to my dad about a recycling program at Sears, bring in your rotten old ones, get twenty percent off on brand-new Goodyears.

  “He thinks we’re trailer trash,” my dad complained, before Art was hardly out of earshot. “Little snotnose.”

  One day Art and I got home from school, and found my father in front of the TV, with a pit bull at his feet. The bull erupted off the floor, yapping hysterically, and jumped up on Art. His paws made a slippery zipping sound sliding over Art’s plastic chest. Art grabbed one of my shoulders and vaulted into the air. He could really jump when he had to. He grabbed the ceiling fan—turned off—and held on to one of the blades while the pit bull barked and hopped beneath.