20th Century Ghosts

by Joe Hill

  “What the hell is that?” I asked.

  “Family dog,” my father said. “Just like you always wanted.”

  “Not one that wants to eat my friends.”

  “Get off the fan, Artie. That isn’t built for you to hang off it.”

  “This isn’t a dog,” I said. “It’s a blender with fur.”

  “Listen, do you want to name it, or should I?” Dad asked.

  Art and I hid in my bedroom and talked names.

  “Snowflake,” I said. “Sugarpie. Sunshine.”

  How about Happy? That has a ring to it, doesn’t it?

  We were kidding, but Happy was no joke. In just a week, Art had at least three life-threatening encounters with my father’s ugly dog.

  If he gets his teeth in me, I’m done for. He’ll punch me full of holes.

  But Happy couldn’t be housebroken, left turds scattered around the living room, hard to see in the moss brown rug. My dad squelched through some fresh leavings once, in bare feet, and it sent him a little out of his head. He chased Happy all through the downstairs with a croquet mallet, smashed a hole in the wall, crushed some plates on the kitchen counter with a wild backswing.

  The very next day he built a chain-link pen in the sideyard. Happy went in, and that was where he stayed.

  By then, though, Art was nervous to come over, and preferred to meet at his house. I didn’t see the sense. It was a long walk to get to his place after school, and my house was right there, just around the corner.

  “What are you worried about?” I asked him. “He’s in a pen. It’s not like Happy is going to figure out how to open the door to his pen, you know.”

  Art knew…but he still didn’t like to come over, and when he did, he usually had a couple patches for bicycle tires on him, to guard against dark happenstance.

  ONCE WE STARTED going to Art’s every day, once it came to be a habit, I wondered why I had ever wanted us to go to my house instead. I got used to the walk—I walked the walk so many times I stopped noticing that it was long bordering on never-ending. I even looked forward to it, my afternoon stroll through coiled suburban streets, past houses done in Disney pastels: lemon, seashell, tangerine. As I crossed the distance between my house and Art’s house, it seemed to me that I was moving through zones of ever-deepening stillness and order, and at the walnut heart of all this peace was Art’s.

  Art couldn’t run, talk, or approach anything with a sharp edge on it, but at his house we managed to keep ourselves entertained. We watched TV. I wasn’t like other kids, and didn’t know anything about television. My father, I mentioned already, suffered from terrible migraines. He was home on disability, lived in the family room, and hogged our TV all day long, kept track of five different soaps. I tried not to bother him, and rarely sat down to watch with him—I sensed my presence was a distraction to him at a time when he wanted to concentrate.

  Art would have watched whatever I wanted to watch, but I didn’t know what to do with a remote control. I couldn’t make a choice, didn’t know how. Had lost the habit. Art was a NASA buff, and we watched anything to do with space, never missed a space shuttle launch. He wrote:

  I want to be an astronaut. I’d adapt really well to being weightless. I’m already mostly weightless.

  This was when they were putting up the International Space Station. They talked about how hard it was on people to spend too long in outer space. Your muscles atrophy. Your heart shrinks three sizes.

  The advantages of sending me into space keep piling up. I don’t have any muscles to atrophy. I don’t have any heart to shrink. I’m telling you. I’m the ideal spaceman. I belong in orbit.

  “I know a guy who can help you get there. Let me give Billy Spears a call. He’s got a rocket he wants to stick up your ass. I heard him talking about it.”

  Art gave me a dour look, and a scribbled two-word response.

  Lying around Art’s house in front of the tube wasn’t always an option, though. His father was a piano instructor, tutored small children on the baby grand, which was in the living room along with their television. If he had a lesson, we had to find something else to do. We’d go into Art’s room to play with his computer, but after twenty minutes of row-row-row-your-boat coming through the wall—a shrill, out-of-time plinking—we’d shoot each other sudden wild looks, and leave by way of the window, no need to talk it over.

  Both Art’s parents were musical, his mother a cellist. They had wanted music for Art, but it had been let-down and disappointment from the start.

  I can’t even kazoo

  Art wrote me once. The piano was out. Art didn’t have any fingers, just a thumb, and a puffy pad where his fingers belonged. Hands like that, it had been years of work with a tutor just to learn to write legibly with a crayon. For obvious reasons, wind instruments were also out of the question; Art didn’t have lungs, and didn’t breathe. He tried to learn the drums, but couldn’t strike hard enough to be any good at it.

  His mother bought him a digital camera. “Make music with color,” she said. “Make melodies out of light.”

  Mrs. Roth was always hitting you with lines like that. She talked about oneness, about the natural decency of trees, and she said not enough people were thankful for the smell of cut grass. Art told me when I wasn’t around, she asked questions about me. She was worried I didn’t have a healthy outlet for my creative self. She said I needed something to feed the inner me. She bought me a book about origami and it wasn’t even my birthday.

  “I didn’t know the inner me was hungry,” I said to Art.

  That’s because it already starved to death

  Art wrote.

  She was alarmed to learn that I didn’t have any sort of religion. My father didn’t take me to church or send me to Sunday school. He said religion was a scam. Mrs. Roth was too polite to say anything to me about my father, but she said things about him to Art, and Art passed her comments on. She told Art that if my father neglected the care of my body like he neglected the care of my spirit, he’d be in jail, and I’d be in a foster home. She also told Art that if I was put in foster care, she’d adopt me, and I could stay in the guest room. I loved her, felt my heart surge whenever she asked me if I wanted a glass of lemonade. I would have done anything she asked.

  “Your mom’s an idiot,” I said to Art. “A total moron. I hope you know that. There isn’t any oneness. It’s every man for himself. Anyone who thinks we’re all brothers in the spirit winds up sitting under Cassius Delamitri’s fat ass during recess, smelling his jock.”

  Mrs. Roth wanted to take me to the synagogue—not to convert me, just as an educational experience, exposure to other cultures and all that—but Art’s father shot her down, said not a chance, not our business, and what are you crazy? She had a bumper sticker on her car that showed the Star of David and the word PRIDE with a jumping exclamation point next to it.

  “So, Art,” I said another time. “I got a Jewish question I want to ask you. Now you and your family, you’re a bunch of hardcore Jews, right?”

  I don’t know that I’d describe us as hardcore exactly. We’re actually pretty lax. But we go to synagogue, observe the holidays—things like that.

  “I thought Jews had to get their joints snipped,” I said, and grabbed my crotch. “For the faith. Tell me—”

  But Art was already writing.

  No not me. I got off. My parents were friends with a progressive Rabbi. They talked to him about it first thing after I was born. Just to find out what the official position was.

  “What’d he say?”

  He said it was the official position to make an exception for anyone who would actually explode during the circumcision. They thought he was joking, but later on my mom did some research on it. Based on what she found out, it looks like I’m in the clear—Talmudically speaking. Mom says the foreskin has to be skin. If it isn’t, it doesn’t need to be cut.

  “That’s funny,” I said. “I always thought your mom didn’t know dick. Now it tu
rns out your mom does know dick. She’s an expert even. Shows what I know. Hey, if she ever wants to do more research, I have an unusual specimen for her to examine.”

  And Art wrote how she would need to bring a microscope, and I said how she would need to stand back a few yards when I unzipped my pants, and back and forth, you don’t need me to tell you, you can imagine the rest of the conversation for yourself. I rode Art about his mother every chance I could get, couldn’t help myself. Started in on her the moment she left the room, whispering about how for an old broad she still had an okay can, and what would Art think if his father died and I married her. Art, on the other hand, never once made a punch line out of my dad. If Art ever wanted to give me a hard time, he’d make fun of how I licked my fingers after I ate, or how I didn’t always wear matching socks. It isn’t hard to understand why Art never stuck it to me about my father, like I stuck it to him about his mother. When your best friend is ugly—I mean bad ugly, deformed—you don’t kid them about shattering mirrors. In a friendship, especially in a friendship between two young boys, you are allowed to inflict a certain amount of pain. This is even expected. But you must cause no serious injury; you must never, under any circumstances, leave wounds that will result in permanent scars.

  ARTHUR’S HOUSE WAS also where we usually settled to do our homework. In the early evening, we went into his room to study. His father was done with lessons by then, so there wasn’t any plink-plink from the next room to distract us. I enjoyed studying in Art’s room, responded well to the quiet, and liked working in a place where I was surrounded by books; Art had shelves and shelves of books. I liked our study time together, but mistrusted it as well. It was during our study sessions—surrounded by all that easy stillness—that Art was most likely to say something about dying.

  When we talked, I always tried to control the conversation, but Art was slippery, could work death into anything.

  “Some Arab invented the idea of the number zero,” I said. “Isn’t that weird? Someone had to think zero up.”

  Because it isn’t obvious—that nothing can be something. That something which can’t be measured or seen could still exist and have meaning. Same with the soul, when you think about it.

  “True or false,” I said another time, when we were studying for a science quiz. “Energy is never destroyed, it can only be changed from one form into another.”

  I hope it’s true—it would be a good argument that you continue to exist after you die, even if you’re transformed into something completely different than what you had been.

  He said a lot to me about death and what might follow it, but the thing I remember best was what he had to say about Mars. We were doing a presentation together, and Art had picked Mars as our subject, especially whether or not men would ever go there and try to colonize it. Art was all for colonizing Mars, cities under plastic tents, mining water from the icy poles. Art wanted to go himself.

  “It’s fun to imagine, maybe, fun to think about it,” I said. “But the actual thing would be bullshit. Dust. Freezing cold. Everything red. You’d go blind looking at so much red. You wouldn’t really want to do it—leave this world and never come back.”

  Art stared at me for a long moment, then bowed his head, and wrote a brief note in robin’s egg blue.

  But I’m going to have to do that anyway. Everyone has to do that.

  Then he wrote:

  You get an astronaut’s life whether you want it or not. Leave it all behind for a world you know nothing about. That’s just the deal.

  IN THE SPRING, Art invented a game called Spy Satellite. There was a place downtown, the Party Station, where you could buy a bushel of helium-filled balloons for a quarter. I’d get a bunch, meet Art somewhere with them. He’d have his digital camera.

  Soon as I handed him the balloons, he detached from the earth and lifted into the air. As he rose, the wind pushed him out and away. When he was satisfied he was high enough, he’d let go a couple balloons, level off, and start snapping pictures. When he was ready to come down, he’d just let go a few more. I’d meet him where he landed and we’d go over to his house to look at the pictures on his laptop. Photos of people swimming in their pools, men shingling their roofs; photos of me standing in empty streets, my upturned face a miniature brown blob, my features too distant to make out; photos that always had Art’s sneakers dangling into the frame at the bottom edge.

  Some of his best pictures were low-altitude affairs, things he snapped when he was only a few yards off the ground. Once he took three balloons and swam into the air over Happy’s chain-link enclosure, off at the side of our house. Happy spent all day in his fenced-off pen, barking frantically at women going by with strollers, the jingle of the ice cream truck, squirrels. Happy had trampled all the space in his penned-in plot of earth down to mud. Scattered about him were dozens of dried piles of dog crap. In the middle of this awful brown turdscape was Happy himself, and in every photo Art snapped of him, he was leaping up on his back legs, mouth open to show the pink cavity within, eyes fixed on Art’s dangling sneakers.

  I feel bad. What a horrible place to live.

  “Get your head out of your ass,” I said. “If creatures like Happy were allowed to run wild, they’d make the whole world look that way. He doesn’t want to live somewhere else. Turds and mud—that’s Happy’s idea of a total garden spot.”

  I STRONGLY disagree

  Arthur wrote me, but time has not softened my opinions on this matter. It is my belief that, as a rule, creatures of Happy’s ilk—I am thinking here of canines and men both—more often run free than live caged, and it is in fact a world of mud and feces they desire, a world with no Art in it, or anyone like him, a place where there is no talk of books or God or the worlds beyond this world, a place where the only communication is the hysterical barking of starving and hate-filled dogs.

  ONE SATURDAY MORNING, mid-April, my dad pushed the bedroom door open, and woke me up by throwing my sneakers on my bed. “You have to be at the dentist’s in half an hour. Put your rear in gear.”

  I walked—it was only a few blocks—and I had been sitting in the waiting room for twenty minutes, dazed with boredom, when I remembered I had told Art that I’d be coming by his house as soon as I got up. The receptionist let me use the phone to call him.

  His mom answered. “He just left to see if he could find you at your house,” she told me.

  I called my dad.

  “He hasn’t been by,” he said. “I haven’t seen him.”

  “Keep an eye out.”

  “Yeah, well. I’ve got a headache. Art knows how to use the doorbell.”

  I sat in the dentist’s chair, my mouth stretched open and tasting of blood and mint, and struggled with unease and an impatience to be going. Did not perhaps trust my father to be decent to Art without myself present. The dentist’s assistant kept touching my shoulder and telling me to relax.

  When I was all through and got outside, the deep and vivid blueness of the sky was a little disorientating. The sunshine was headache-bright, bothered my eyes. I had been up for two hours, still felt cotton-headed and dull-edged, not all the way awake. I jogged.

  The first thing I saw as I approached my house was Happy, free from his pen. He didn’t so much as bark at me. He was on his belly in the grass, head between his paws. He lifted sleepy eyelids to watch me approach, then let them sag shut again. His pen door stood open in the side yard.

  I was looking to see if he was lying on a heap of tattered plastic when I heard the first feeble tapping sound. I turned my head and saw Art in the back of my father’s station wagon, smacking his hands on the window. I walked over and opened the door. At that instant, Happy exploded from the grass with a peal of mindless barking. I grabbed Art in both arms, spun and fled. Happy’s teeth closed on a piece of my flapping pant leg. I heard a tacky ripping sound, stumbled, kept going.

  I ran until there was a stitch in my side and no dog in sight—six blocks, at least. Toppled over in some
one’s yard. My pant leg was sliced open from the back of my knee to the ankle. I took my first good look at Art. It was a jarring sight. I was so out of breath, I could only produce a thin, dismayed little squeak—the sort of sound Art was always making.

  His body had lost its marshmallow whiteness. It had a gold-brown duskiness to it now, so it resembled a marshmallow lightly toasted. He seemed to have deflated to about half his usual size. His chin sagged into his body. He couldn’t hold his head up.

  Art had been crossing our front lawn when Happy burst from his hiding place under one of the hedges. In that first crucial moment, Art saw he would never be able to outrun our family dog on foot. All such an effort would get him would be an ass full of fatal puncture wounds. So instead, he jumped into the station wagon, and slammed the door.

  The windows were automatic—there was no way to roll them down. Any door he opened, Happy tried to jam his snout in at him. It was seventy degrees outside the car, over a hundred inside. Art watched in dismay as Happy flopped in the grass beside the wagon to wait.

  Art sat. Happy didn’t move. Lawn mowers droned in the distance. The morning passed. In time Art began to wilt in the heat. He became ill and groggy. His plastic skin started sticking to the seats.

  Then you showed up. Just in time. You saved my life.

  But my eyes blurred and tears dripped off my face onto his note. I hadn’t come just in time—not at all.

  Art was never the same. His skin stayed a filmy yellow, and he developed a deflation problem. His parents would pump him up, and for a while he’d be all right, his body swollen with oxygen, but eventually he’d go saggy and limp again. His doctor took one look and told his parents not to put off the trip to Disney World another year.