Nocturnals

by Edited by Bradford Morrow

  Now he was gone, again, and without further answering. And so it was that Stan appeared to me and to no one else, at least until the day of the card game. I had a feeling, and I was right, that he would appear to Dave and Len.

  When I talked to Len about it later, one day when we were both on campus, and hitting the rancid American Studies coffee hard—Len was concerned. Did I think that Stan was of a different class, of the working class, perhaps, from a New England where the working class was particularly disenfranchised, where there was the dwindling of American manufacturing, the New England of our parents’ generation, for example, and the loss of self-respect that went with factory work in New England until it wasn’t there anymore? Was there a way that Stan was lingering around the house, slowly increasing in his exhibitionistic way because of the disaffection of the working class in the region where we plied our trade? Was Stan some kind of imago of an alienated working class? And what about the question of allegory? As Len put it, you could go blue in the face (a figure of speech) trying to figure out what Stan stood for, for which of the myths and legends of a colonial New England he was an emblem, the whaling community of New Bedford, and all of mariners lost at sea, the moneyed classes of Newport, the witches of Salem, the civil war of Rhode Island, the veiled parsons of Maine, and as Len made this perfectly reasonable and even nuanced argument about Stan, Stan as an incarnation of regional history, the shimmering guy in my garage, all I could think about was how Len had never rebounded from when his wife unhitched herself and took up with Mark’s wife, “ran off” being in this case sort of a very inexact reduction of a process that had taken many months to complete, a process that, at the outset, was visible to me, Len’s friend, primarily in the way she hectored him over the little things. There was one incident one night, involving a chicken burrito that was meant to be a burrito bowl, according to Len’s wife, Andrea, this during the course of a joint night out, You got me a what? What is this? What did you get? The problem of the flour tortilla could only be fully redressed with the kind of salty language that a married person sometimes seems to think is the right thing to fall into with a spouse; this salty language that Len’s wife employed lodged in my own consciousness, along with various other nearly legendary moments of unkindness that one sees and files away. Then there was the divorce, which involved bringing up Len’s addiction to painkillers in the nineties, and, before long, she had primary custody. Now his office looked like the FSB had gone on a vodka-inflected rampage through his personal effects.

  —He only appeared to me until recently, I said. That’s why it was such a relief when you guys were there. But Debby is trying to get the psychiatrist to go to the next level with the meds.

  —Maybe I can get him to appear to me alone, Len said.

  The view outside the window, beyond the piles, the empty cartons of Chinese on top of the book mounds and papers, was of a college green unspoiled by undergraduates. Len’s offer struck me as comically generous, maybe a little excessive.

  —You really want to do that?

  —Why not? Summer vacation.

  To Len, it was a sort of faculty research! Maybe he could get a departmental grant! Debby was a little surprised ten days later, it was a Friday night, when Len showed up with an overnight bag, and announced he was going to sleep over in the room on the third floor. It was possible that some of the particulars of what had happened to the guys, catching a glimpse of Stan the night of the card game, had gone unreported to any larger family constellation. I don’t know why, really. Why is it that a husband doesn’t tell a certain thing to his wife, when it would be just so easy to tell? I don’t know. Anyway, Len showed up, and he and my son, Calvin, sat around playing a certain video game that I knew nothing about, Len losing round after round, until around eleven, and then Len went upstairs with his copy of The Wretched of the Earth, which he was teaching at summer school that week in an underenrolled class on political uprisings, and prepared himself to wait for Stan. If the assumption was that a certain kind of drama, a certain kind of tension, caused Stan to turn up, well, then he couldn’t fail to appear, because Len was, as I say, a jittery mass of postdivorce vulnerability. If a certain kind of masculine disrepair caused Stan to turn up, a masculinity in extremis, then Len fit the bill.

  It all looked perfect. Len would stay the night, waiting up for Stan, and in this way we would perhaps answer some questions, such as, if there were one ghost, in our house, on Massasoit Street, would there not be other ghosts, at least in New England, where the housing stock was elderly, and there was much agony and ferment in the local historical files, going back several centuries, and witches, and religious humiliation. What was the statistical likelihood of ghosts in New England? Were they a contemporary phenomenon? Were they a phenomenon that stretched back centuries? Did they require an American literature to exist? Did a ghost require a witness? If we couldn’t get all of these questions answered, perhaps we could at least begin the process, we, the weary, middle-aged professoriat of the community college in town, with Len at the front of our battalion, publishing our research in one of the peer-reviewed journals.

  I put Len to bed, by which I mean that I trudged unsteadily up the creaky stairs with a shot glass and some inexpensive rye, thinking that it was akin to sending a heroic protagonist on his way into the underworld, it was like Jesus of Nazareth on his forty-day meditation retreat, or it was like the prophet Muhammad retiring to the cave at Hira awaiting, or it was like Joseph Smith out on the hillside digging for golden plates, and I asked Len what was the first thing he was going to ask Stan, and Len said, looking at first like he was going to laugh, and then, a moment later, as though he was going to weep:

  —I’m going to ask him about race. On the other side.

  I smacked him on the shoulder according to the rules of bonhomie, and then limped back down, and, having no appetite for sleep that night, I thrashed around, irritating Debby, until dawn, when I went up again for a look.

  And the third floor had been abandoned by my friend Len. There wasn’t a sign of him, nor did I see Stan anywhere. There was no sign of any disturbance up there, excepting a note from Len, on a lined yellow sheet, such as you might find on a legal pad, which said, I did finish making a syllabus …

  After belittling me for not telling her about Len’s ghost hunting, my wife said that if I was not simply batshit crazy I should try to make it possible that professionals in the field could interact with Stan, by which I think she meant that Len and Dave were not entirely reputable, partly by constitution, or by association with me, but also because they were in the humanities and economics, respectively, and as a result were not able to make empirically verifiable claims. She meant that we needed someone else from the hard sciences. Debby had studied business and international relations when she’d been younger, and now she worked for the state in an administrative capacity, and she routinely employed words like accountability and transparency and she was worried about insurance liability and resale value where the ghost ownership was concerned. But: there was a back stairway in our house, a sort of a wind tunnel of a thing, through which, I suppose, a cook or some other employee was able to make it from the kitchen up to the third floor, in the old days, and she said she no longer wanted to go up that staircase, it was unsettling to her, and she said that she didn’t really want to be in the garage very much anymore, and therefore there was a kind of dwindling of what was accessible to us, in our rundown turn-of-the-century residence, which we were only able to afford because of the opioid-saturated qualities of New England’s urban wastes.

  It was not only the physical latitudes of our residence where something was definitely wrong, but we were having a hard time getting over an event of some years prior, which is to say the death of our daughter by reason of trisomy 13. And I apologize if I have kept this fact from you, thus far, but my keeping it from this account is like the keeping it from any other, which is to say that certain silences are so critical to the ongoing functioning of a
certain group of human beings that the mere mention of what lies unspoken is enough to cause a real fissure to be opened up. We had been used to the idea, let me say, that we were just going to be parents of the one child, because long were the days of attempting to have the second, until Calvin was seven or eight. We tried and we tried, and we got all the help that you could get for such things, and nothing seemed to work, and then, incredibly, it was as if our luck turned, which is always such a risky way of thinking about an outcome, because there’s no answered prayer without a price somewhere else to be levied, but there we were, and I can remember the autumn of our contentment, when, with yellow leaves and the sound of wind in the copper beeches, the test came back positive. The rabbit died. I was trying to become a full professor at the time, and so there was change afoot, and we rejoiced in it, at least until the dread eighteenth week, when we had the first amnio, which we did even though we knew midwives in the community who said you didn’t need to. Debby, though exceedingly tough, took to bed after the amnio, and didn’t get out, nor was she much out of bed at twenty-one weeks, when we did the testing again, with the same result. We named our daughter Cassie, short for Cassandra, when we knew it wasn’t likely to work out, and we braced ourselves for the not being able to breathe, not without assistance, or the having the organs in the wrong spot, the heart disease, the digestive problems, all of these things that in no way made Cassie less of a baby, or a person, or our child, a complicated, and loved, and welcomed person; this was how we tried to think of her, during all the tests to which she herself was subjected later, as the night began its closing in, merciless in early snow and wind, coming in off the North Atlantic, easterly, Debby hanging on so as to know that she had been a mother to a second child, a daughter, because a mother was what she wanted to be, and what she had been to Calvin. We knew Cassie’s life wouldn’t be long, and that we could try to make it as free of suffering as we could, and I could write for you many lines about the weeks in the natal intensive-care unit, knowing already that her breathing was going to stop, and that we were not going to prolong unduly this breathing, though every breath she gave to us was a gift to me and her mother, as I got as much of myself as near to her as I could get, was allowed to get, in the NICU, and the days when we even encouraged Calvin to visit with us, knowing that she was his sibling, and wanting him to know something of her, wanting to etch her on the glass-plate negative of his memory, wanting her to be like the scarifications on granite, like statuary in an Abrahamic desert, until the moment when the weakest thing in her, weaker than her gaze, her own body, gave out, and then there was a rushing away of priorities, and a sense of having done the most a parent could do in such a brief time, having helped a child immediately off to the beyond, so that everything in your own miserable existence could go unmoored, swept from the deck of your craft to sit on the bottom of the trench, you grasping for what had been before, and coming only to recreate a life from some cut-rate idea of what a life is, some ultradiscounted, postholiday, made-in-China-from-inferior-plastics idea of life, the one after you lost your child.

  And was that not the space into which Stan now launched himself, when I saw him, with a ruined cable-knit sweater, a sweater as if set upon by moths, hovering, sometimes over the commode, as if deeply grinding out some glum thought while he shit there, as I brushed my teeth, ministered to my receding and bloody gums. Was it not the space of our grief?

  Was he there, like Cassie’s memory was there, a lingering of familial or ministerial feeling sundered in some untimely way? The two seemed so much alike, Stan and Cassie, so united in their inability to leave us alone, that it was only natural, after a point, that Debby started to ask if I thought Stan could have any possible contact with Cassandra. It really was a natural question to ask, though I didn’t want to ask any questions of him at all, because, when he spoke, he was the most unnerving that he ever was.

  It’s more plangent, and more urgent, what happened with Debby, the way the thought of Cassie unspooled in her over some tuna casserole one night, while Calvin was sitting with us. I could see it happen, almost, a way that memory passed across her, a dusky light, a draining of daily rectitude, the way she didn’t say anything, the not saying as remarkable as if she had, waiting for Calvin to shrug up from the table in the contemporary teenaged manner, managing to rinse his bowl in a disdainful fashion, departed, after which Debby said:

  —Do you think the guy knows anything about Cassie?

  —Who?

  —The guy!

  Whispering in a fashion that was routine when speaking of Cassie.

  —What’s there to know about her?

  —I mean if it’s possible that there’s a guy living in our house who doesn’t really have a body, and who talks to you occasionally, is it not possible that there is a place where Cassie still lives and is a presence, to which he has access, where he goes when he’s not here?

  The first thing I did, of course, was to hold my wife, leaning around the table in the breakfast nook to do so, while she heaved into her sob. This is what one does. Debby doesn’t cry often, but when she does, she gets a rag-doll-like quality that you cannot help but want to comfort. However, it is worth pointing out my almost total refusal to ask anyone for help under any circumstances, a problem that extends much further than refusing to ask for directions when lost. I cannot hire a subcontractor, nor can I finish any repair, nor am I willing to ask my elderly parents for any financial assistance, nor can I ask my colleagues for a sabbatical, nor can I ask for relief from the everyday torments, for a holiday, or a break, I cannot ask, and this made it impossible, in my view, that I was going to ask Stan, our ghost, for help on the matter of Cassie, it seemed just outrageous. A total imposition. About the only time I was certain I was imagining the whole thing was when I came to see that my wife was more than serious.

  —Deb, I don’t want to—

  —Don’t say you’re not going to—

  —I don’t even know if he can really talk.

  —But you said he said his name, and also that the first time—

  —I don’t know if he said that. I don’t know, I might have been making it up. I was startled.

  —Don’t do this thing to me again, you always do this thing.

  —That’s not fair.

  —It’s definitely fair. You do this thing where you—

  —It’s who I am.

  —Well, this is a thing you are that I wish you weren’t. If only you’ll just ask him. The one thing. About Cassie.

  —How exactly would you put this thing to the, uh, the uh—

  —Just say. Well. Just say in the afterlife is it a community thing.

  —You want me to ask him if it’s a community thing in the afterlife?

  —Yep.

  —I don’t even know what that means.

  —It means is it like you could find a person. Can you put out some kind of bulletin and locate a person, or the essence of a person, or could you feel that person, or feel the essence of that person, and know that that person is still extant, is a part of this place, an energy in this place, a little spaghetti strand of materiality in this place, more than just our loss, wherever this place is, if it really is a place, and might a person know, for example, if she’s loved or esteemed there.

  —Can you formulate that in a way that’s a little bit less abstract, so I know what it is I’m supposed to ask?

  Her voice, edging into a not whisper, into a prickly irritation.

  —Why can’t you do this thing for me this one time?

  —Because it’s not just this one time—

  —Oh, fuck off, then. You married me, and this is the person you married, with whom you …

  And then a longish silence,

  —Lost a child.

  Well, when you put it that way, was what I thought, or perhaps I had a feeling and that was how it felt—well, when you put it that way—because our lost child was the full stop, the blunt declamatory period above all others.

&
nbsp; —So I will ask him then if he knows anything about our daughter, or can confirm our daughter is there, and that—

  A pause of my own.

  —Our daughter is at peace.

  Who was Calvin, our son, you might ask by now, that is the Calvin who was not simply upstairs on his phone, or playing video games, the revenant whom I still thought of as a small kid attempting to scooter around the house, and who in this way once broke a collarbone? A watercolorist, a silkscreener of T-shirts, a reader of speculative fictions, a socially phobic kid, with whom I tried, mightily, to talk, though the habit of his disinterest made this impossible. We both liked a certain kind of lo mein (with vegetables) from the Chinese hole-in-the-wall several blocks distant. I had through sheer determination passed on to him an esteem for the nearest professional baseball team. Beyond these two things, I could find few places where we could talk openly, though I loved him, even by telling him all the lore about the rock and roll bands of my youth. He was all hip-hop all the time. Sometimes I would listen from my office to him rattling around on the first floor eating dessert after dessert, before taking to the stairs, for more video, thinking: This is me loving my son. I awaited his enlightenment and my own.

  That summer, we had gotten Calvin his job teaching art to elementary-school kids, in a rented outdoor space, beneath a canopy, a sort of wedding tent, staked down on a baseball field that no one ever used. Out back of the school. Every day Calvin readied the finger paints and the papier-mâché and the clay, and the scrolls of paper, and the pens and inks, and waited for the kids to get dropped off. As far as I could tell, he appreciated the kids, but seemed to feel some duty not to let them know the degree of his appreciation. Their parents paid hundreds of dollars for this privilege, and then, at the end of the week or two weeks, these families were presented with a portfolio of artwork produced by each of the kids, suitable for framing. Soon the next group arrived.