Dear Todd,
I am afraid I will not be able to join you tonight for the annual event at the library. The story is a bit involved, but I thought that you deserved the truth. Please do not share this message with anyone else.
I was just beginning to set down the harrowing tale of a visitation by two lively spirits, one the ghost of Lewis Carroll, the other of a little girl called Carol Lewis. She claimed to be the original Alice in Wonderland, and that the story really ought to have been called Carol in Crazyvania. It promised to be a most enchanting yarn.
But sadly, writing is hungry work for me, and shortly after setting hand to laptop, I was filled with a desire for a sandwich. I had some turkey left over from Thanksgiving and rather thought that I should finish it off before it went bad. Moreover, the coming of the Yuletide reminded me that one of my gifts from last year, a real deli meat slicer given to me by my sister, was still in the box. The two things suggested a sliced turkey sandwich and so off I went.
It seems mad in retrospect, but eager to return to my writing as quickly as possible, it occurred to me that I could expedite my snack by preparing the bread and mayonnaise by hand at the counter while simultaneously slicing the turkey with my feet. Those who know me are aware of the remarkable dexterity of my lower limbs, particularly when I have removed my socks, but as I say, I have come to regret this culinary hubris.
At the risk of slowing down my tale, and now realizing that you, a noted ham, are likely to ignore my wishes that this missive not be shared, please do extend this warning to those assembled: never try to slice meat with your bare feet. The deli slicer is an effective device but it has no powers of discernment whatsoever. As far at the slicer is concerned, the human foot is a piece of meat and it will have no qualms at all about dashing off several ounces of your big toe, cut so tender and thin you could almost see through it. This is a quality admired in pastrami, but not in one’s digit.
Todd, I confess to you here that, indeed, one of my little piggies went to market.
The rest of me went to the emergency room—once an open one was located—and after a rather embarrassing series of explanations (oh, why didn’t I just say the cat did it?) I was treated first for a bleeding toe, and then for an infection which had set in at record speed, for apparently the turkey, which seemed quite fine to me, was “as rancid as a ten-dollar gigolo.” These were the exact words of the attending physician.
Still, I returned home this morning, determined to finish writing down my tale of Lewis and Carol. My body and mind throbbed with pain, however, and my brain was so fogged by this agony, that I could not clearly read the label on the little bottle of painkillers I had been given. Uncertain, I decided to take the entire bottle at once, on the assumption that the pills would dissolve in my stomach gradually, one at a time.
Here you may give another warning to those assembled: pills taken en masse do not dissolve gradually in your stomach, one at a time. All those little devils dive right into your bloodstream simultaneously and they send you into a fevered sleep when you’re trying to write a very serious story about Carol Lewis on your laptop.
When I awoke, I found myself face-to-face with yet another spectre. This one, stranger than any I had seen or heard of before. He was a man of indeterminate age, indeed, of indeterminate everything. His face seemed to change its features even as I gazed at it. So, too, did all his characteristics. At times he seemed tall, then short, then minuscule. One moment his hands were empty, the next he seemed to hold a book. His whole being resembled nothing so much as a character on an old TV where the channel was not properly tuned, which faded into and out of view with occasional images from another station appearing—images we used to call, I now remember, ghosts.
I asked the figure who he was and he immediately began to wail.
“I know not who I am! This is my curse, foolish man! I know only my name, no other details of my life.”
I was about to ask his name, when something from his brief oration struck me.
“What do you mean, ‘foolish man’?” I asked indignantly. “I’ll have you know I am in some circles regarded rather as an intellectual. Why, this very night I will be appearing at the McConnell Library with two very distinguished members of the university faculty.”
If it is possible for a ghost to blanch, white and faded as they typically are, well, I tell you this ghost did indeed go pale.
“Wait. McConnell, did you say?”
“Yes, and the men I am reading with are also very handsome and well-dressed,” I said, though I don’t know why.
“But that’s my name!” the spirit shouted.
“Good Lord,” I said, and then realized that this crafty phantom was changing the subject again. “Why ‘foolish man’?” I insisted.
“Oh for God’s sake, you’ve taken a whole bottle of medicine after nearly cutting your foot off making a sandwich,” McConnell sneered. “The slicer is still on the floor covered in drumstick and a not inconsiderable amount of your blood. If you weren’t so close to shuffling off the mortal coil even now, you wouldn’t even be able to see me. Now tell me of this library.”
“Well, as it happens, it is the McConnell Memorial Library. Perhaps it is named after you.”
“It must be. The fates have brought me to you for this very purpose. I take it all back. You are just the man whose brain holds the answers that I have been seeking, lo, these many years. Tell me, who is this man McConnell after whom this great edifice of community learning is christened?”
“I have no idea,” I replied.
“What?” shouted the ghost, his changes in appearance seeming to quicken. In one, I thought I made out the shadow of a firearm.
“It’s just the name. I guess it’s ironic when you think of it.”
“Ironic?”
“Well sure. We always call things the So and So Memorial This and That, but then we don't actually remember who the person was. It’s just the name of the thing. I mean, who is the Lincoln Monument named for?”
“For Abraham Lincoln, obviously!”
“Okay, that was a bad example. Who was Mt. Rushmore named for?”
“American businessman, Charles E. Rushmore; it had previously been known as Slaughterhouse Rock.”
“How do you know all that, when you don’t know anything about yourself?”
“I told you. It’s a curse. Now please, is there no way you can find out anything about my history?”
“Oh, wait,” I said, “I have my laptop right here. I’ll bet the library site has a whole thing about you. Hold on...huh.”
“What is it?” he asked impatiently.
“I don’t actually see anything on the library site about the person it’s named after. But don’t worry, I’ll Google it. How many McConnells could there be?”
It turned out there were quite a few.
First up was James V. McConnell, a celebrated marine biologist. “Do you feel like you might have been a celebrated marine biologist?” I asked the ghost.
“Maybe. I quite like seahorses.”
“Wait. How is your hearing?”
“Fine.”
“Not you then. This guy lost his hearing after being a target of the Unabomber, Ted Kacinski.”
The spirit looked disappointed.
“Do you think you might have been pastor of the Whitewell Metropolitan Tabernacle?”
“Doesn’t ring a bell.”
“Doesn’t matter anyway. He’s still alive.”
And so it went for hours, searching and searching for the needle James McConnell in a haystack of James McConnells.
There was James McConnell, the psychic; James McConell, the American professor of Spanish. A scientist in Guam, a dentist in Indiana, and a British composer who owns the domain name, jamesmconel.com.
“It’s no use,” I cried at last. “We’ll never find the right James McConnell.”
“Well, you did your...wait did you say James McConnell.”
“Yes, I replied; it’s t
he James McConnell Memorial Library.”
“But my name is Richard McConnell!”
We both stood there in shocked silence for a moment and then he began to fade away. Whether it was because the pain killers in my system were finally wearing off, or that he had tired of me, or that he was being called back to whatever spectral realm he had escaped from, I shall never truly know.
But as he disappeared, I distinctly heard him call out, “You foolish maaaaaan!”
And so you see, Todd, there is simply no time left for me to relate a tale of ghosts despite my very best efforts.
Perhaps next year.
Your friend,
Ken
Author Notes
For a while I had entertained the idea of somehow using the ghost of James McConnell, after whom the library in Sydney is named, in a story. But I couldn’t find out anything about him and so had no basis for a tale. But when Ken Chisholm had to cancel his appearance one year, and we needed a quick story to fill up some time, I thought it might be amusing to watch a silly, unrealistic version of Ken struggle with the problem rather than struggling with it myself. Ken really did have an issue with his foot, though I may have taken some license as to how that difficulty arose.
The Great Geisel
Scott Sharplin
Permit me to begin this story with a quotation about stories. I know it runs the risk of laying the brickwork for one of those Moebius-loop narratives, the kind where pillows examine their dreamers, navels gaze back at their owners, and mirrors do that thing they do whenever they’re hanging out in groups of three or four, and they have a few drinks in them and someone brings up M.C. Escher. But bear with me.
The quote comes from Sir Terry Pratchett, a talented, prolific Brit whose ghost I should be delighted to receive on this or any Gaudy Night—but who, having passed only this year into the Discworld in the sky, is likely still deluged with fans’ requests for hauntings, visitations, or a cameo groan in the yuletide séance. And he’d probably prefer to spend his first Hereafter holiday season with dead family and friends—for, though Sir Terry was an avid atheist, he celebrated Christmas, at least in its modern, non-denominational form.
The quote! Forgive me. Thus: “There’s always a story. It’s all stories, really. The sun coming up every day is a story. Everything’s got a story in it. Change the story, change the world.”
As a semi-professional storyteller, I find this thought semi-inspiring. On the one hand, it makes my stock in trade more precious than diamonds—for if everything is a story, then we all need stories just to survive. But on the other hand, flood the market and demand will plummet. If stories are ubiquitous, then storytellers are extraneous. If the sun coming up every day is a story, then one hardly needs a bard outside one’s window to extol its solar virtues.
At the very least, this quote has helped me understand why the Yuletide season is so commonly associated with the spinning of tales. “The sun came up,” might be a story, but it’s an old one; we’ve all heard it, three hundred and sixty-five times a year. But when the days grow short, the story gets suspenseful—till finally, we reach the Solstice, the longest night. A nail-biter. “Once upon a time, the sun...wait for it...wait for it...”
Here’s another droll thing about stories. Even as a storyteller, I find them a great deal easier to talk about than to simply tell. Case in point: here I am, dragging my feet through a slushy, self-reflective prologue. You came for a tale of phantom wanderings, not my stale and random ponderings.
Yet, my story must commence at the same shameful point: my inability to tell a story. The night in question, three weeks past, was typical in that respect. I had an audience of one, impatient in his need for some soporific tale to aid his busy brain in winding down after a day of games, crafts, tantrums, mandatory mealtimes, and the thousand natural shocks that four-year-olds are heir to. Like most nights, the dialogue went thus:
“Papa, tell me a stowy.”
“I already read you two chapters of Le Petit Prince, and a chapter of The Secret World of Og.”
“I want one of your stowies.”
“It’s time to sleep, buddy.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I—I have to send an email.”
“And then what happens?”
“Then maybe...have a visitor. We’ll see.”
“And then what happens?”
“Then, I’ll—Wait. You tricked me. This is not a story. Sleep.”
“Is it Chwistmas yet?”
“It’s not even December, dude.”
“Have you decided what I get for Chwistmas yet?” This question, posed nightly since approximately Easter, was the drawback of raising a child free from the shackles of the Santa Claus myth.
And it was also a touchy subject for me, on this night in particular. “Please sleep.”
“Will you tell me a Chwistmas stowy?”
“I don’t know any Christmas stories.”
“But—”
“Once upon a time, the sun came up. The end.” If it was good enough for Sir Terry, I figured, it’s good enough for the boy.
“I can’t sweep. I’m scared.”
“Dude, you’re not scared.” This was a tactic he’d obtained from some book or show or friend, and I knew it was a ruse. “Now, close your eyes, and count the sheep that sneak in underneath your eyelids. I’ll be right next door. Sweet dreams.” I made my escape before any more objections could be raised.
It was chill black beyond the windows, and most of the lights were off inside the house. I trod lightly to my office, where I hastily composed the aforementioned e-missive. “Dear Chris, Apologies for the delay. I would be happy to contribute another story to this year’s Gaudy Night event. Although I have not, as yet, been visited by any authorial spooks, I’m confident that one will swoop down to inspire me as soon as I hit ‘Send.’ Gaudily Yours, Scott.”
Click. The zeroes and ones winged their way through the ether. I paused then, heavy with the twin weights of anticipation and responsibility. When at last the pause began to feel awkward, I folded shut my laptop—plunging my surroundings utterly into the dark—and started speaking, swiftly yet softly, so as not to interrupt the sheep-count in the room next door.
“Okay, ghosts, confession time. I need a haunting, stat, and not just for the sake of Gaudy Night. In fact, I only said yes to Chris because agreeing to Gaudy Night seems to guarantee I’ll wind up with some irritated spectre in my living room. But I need wisdom, and I think it’s the sort that only comes through long life—or afterlife.”
My feeble medium routine continued for a spell, and while I’ll happily recount the highlights in a moment...first, I need to seize on the prerogative set by my story-conscious prologue, and interrupt myself to comment on my own narrative. This is not a critique—I’m not so self-deprecating as to slam my own story before it’s even left the nest. In any case, compared to “Once upon a time, the sun came up,” I rather think I’m nailing it. So, not a critique—a trigger warning, as the Internet would say. This is where things get...political.
“Yo, ghosts? I know you’re not accustomed to coming on command, but some of you have proven eager to make house calls, so...shiver me timbers. Put me on your chain gang. I have to make a tough decision, and you seem to like popping up whenever I’m stuck, so...throw me a groan, here. No?
“It’s about the refugees. I’m sure you’ve heard about them, even if you died pre-Twitter. Thing is, my wife and I...we want to help, we’re looking to sponsor a family. And I know it’s the right thing to do, but with our bank account the way it is...well, Christmas is expensive. And after looking at the numbers, I see it’s going to come down to either one family or the other. And my son...this is the first year he really gets Christmas, and I’d hate to take all that away from him for some altruistic fancy. I need you to teach me! How can I pinch all his presents away without being a...Scrooge?”
Only silence answered me, and not even a promisingly eerie sil
ence, either. I was grasping at trees and barking up straws. I got more specific.
“Might there be any Buddhist authors listening? Is Basho bashing around up there? Or rather...Herman Hesse, I guess? Could you unattach yourself from the unknown and come teach me a thing or two about letting go? Preferably in terms a four-year-old would understand.
“No takers? No, Buddhist authors don’t become ghosts. They reincarnate—into editors, if they’ve been good, or critics, if they’re rotten. But I clearly can’t call on the usual clutch of Christian conjurations. They’d guilt me back into stuffing the stockings. But who, oh, who among the lifeless literati, would not jump to call a gift-less papa naughty? I have to find someone to give me an inch, or my son’s sad expression will brand me a...killjoy.
“I have it! A humanist, wiccan, or pagan! Some atheist author who sees the big picture. Louisa May Alcott? Ralph Waldo Emerson? Margaret Laurence? Herbert Melville? Kurt Vonnegut? No, no, not Vonnegut; he’s too contrarian. My kingdom for an undead Unitarian!”
I broke off here, as the absurdness of my desperation felt more palpable than even the darkness. I wanted to help some family I’d never even met, some abstract blur of victimhood, but I dreaded upsetting my own flesh and blood in the process. I envisioned an ironic sequel to my anti-Christmas story, wherein my disappointed son eventually grew up, embittered and cruel, to wreak his present-less vengeance on the world.
“Oh!” That thought made me think of one final option. “Oh! Yes, oh! O. Henry? Story Magi? D’you have a gift that could help steer me clear of this ironic twist?”
But O. was silent, like the rest of them. Perhaps he’d cancelled his service to the mortal world to buy some trinket for a lover, while his ghostly partner sold her own most precious thing to buy him an inter-planar iPhone. Or perhaps my dilemma just wasn’t worth picking up for.
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