Fragments Towards a Collected Ghost

1. A ghost whom we’ll call “The Thirsty Ghost” has a particular obsession with drinking water.  Like a cat weaned too young who’s forever trying to suckle on your coat sleeve — it’s a hopeless case.  Because your coat sleeve will never become a cat’s nipple.  Likewise, the ghost’s thirst and the water it seeks do not coexist in the same world, so they can never meet.

2. Speaking of meetings, there’s a ghost we call “Missing You,” who comes back to keep an appointment he missed a few hundreds of years ago. He stands at the crossroads, waiting for his lover. She also waits for him, in the same place, hundreds of years before. Where she waits are horses in muddy streets and ox carts full of vegetables. Wild children run past her, calling each other names. Then the road is empty and the mud hardens to ice.

Where he stands are lonely asphalt and neat sidewalks, occasional cars passing, then a bus with load motors and rattling windows, then silence.

The lovers do not meet.

We would like to believe in a concerned deity who conspires to let the one lover feel the other across the divide of hundreds of years, who lets them feel one other’s presence, and lets the first ghost drink his water.

But this concerned deity likewise does not arrive.

3. Were this deity to exist, he lives in a third place, a garden high on a plateau by a meadow on a mountain, somewhere the lovers visited once and then promptly forgot. There, he grows cucumbers and salad greens, and plays an endless back and forth war with the rabbits.

4. Let’s return to the first ghost, the thirsty one. We see him drinking the water.  He has trouble manipulating the glass.  When he seems to get a grip on it, the water runs through his empty gullet, the glass full of water is tipping into a void and splashing on the floor. He tries different water, tea, wine, spirits.

The spirits actually work for a while, because spirits and ghosts exist in neighboring realms. And then they stop working, and it is even worse than before.

Really it is quite hopeless! But how can you explain this to the ghost? Because he can plainly see others, the living, who can pick up the same glass and drink. And to his eyes they seem undeniably gratified! They pick up the glass with what seems like thirst. They grunt while drinking and then put down the empty glass with a glazed look of satisfaction in their eyes, and then they promptly go about their business and seem to pay no mind to the water until the next time they drink from it.

How can you tell the poor ghost that they do not feel the thirst he feels? How can you tell him that they do not enjoy the gratification he craves?

You can’t. He carries with him the bright shining light of his thirst and it illuminates heaven with its light. But if he ever figures this out, if our thirsty ghost ever stumbles on the truth, and opens his eyes, he will cherish his thirst, and follow its light to the garden by the high meadow, where he will commiserate with god on the difficulties of keeping a garden by a meadowful of rabbits.

Photo Credit: Antonis under Creative Commons license

Ovum

I was part of an entourage of young men and we were following a woman whom I could  see only occasionally far ahead of us in profile, her face beautiful and determined in a way I associate with movie stars or marble statues. We were in a line like ducks or grade school students and she was leading us through a wide palace room, alternating red and white tiles stretching to a wall as distant as the horizon.

And at the far end of that room was another line of people, parallel to us, moving in the opposite direction.  Iin that line were men and women, spinning and dancing and clapping sticks and chanting, all wearing grass skirts that swished in the air. The sound of their clapping and chanting reached us faintly, and with with a slight lag that dissociated the sounds from the movements.

“Next will come the cocktails with the miniature umbrellas in them” I whispered to the man ahead of me.  All I could see of him were the two lines of dark hair that ran on either side of his neck from the bottom of his hair line down below his collar.

Almost at the same time as I spoke it,  I could hear my joke repeated, as if over a loudspeaker system.  I was at first appalled by the crassness of it and the disrespect, and then appalled to realize that it was me who had said it.  I am that person.

I was immediately spun out of the line and became a perfectly round egg, which a neatly manicured giant handwas dropping gently down a clear plastic chute like a gumball in a clear plastic spiral dispenser.  I rolled down, gathering speed and then, as I half expected, I was in a complete void.

I may have been moving at infinite speed, I may have been suspended, perfectly still.

My last thought before entering this void, which lingered for “what seemed like an eternity,” was that my contrition had been genuine, my remorse full-hearted and quite complete, and that this must count for something.

Now I was reborn. I was a young man stepping out into an aircraft hangar or factory floor with the assurance of a pilot or an engineer.

I knew all at once that all the wishes I had ever wasted on some alternative circumstances of life or character had been granted.

If I had wished for a family rich in accomplishments and affection, that was my family.  To have discovered my vocation and passion early enough to devote myself to it: granted.  Complete love of a woman that she might reside in my heart and I in hers: that was my fiance.

I also knew that all these were all just consolation prizes, a slight lessening of the sentence of having been born again.

Photo Credit:beggs under Creative Commons Attribution license

Grace: a short story

Sandbar

It was a thin island of sand and sometimes the waves came crashing onto it from one side and sometimes from the other.  I believe it began as a bridge and then became an island which I was crossing.   I was coming from somewhere and it was reasonable to assume that I was still on my way to someplace else.

I put my coat and my computer bag down in the dry sand roughly midway on the island, where the waves coming from either side wouldn’t reach. I took stock of my surroundings.

The sand was mostly level with slight undulations. No landmarks I could discern except for a cinderblock hut at one end that was painted a dark green.  Parks Department, I presumed. The water was of a bright swimming pool blue that grew darker further out from the island, but somehow didn’t seem to get any deeper.  Wherever you looked you could see sand beneath the surface of the water.

There weren’t many people, just a few stragglers here and there randomly dressed, some for summer, some for winter, some wearing what seemed to be costumes or else the exotic clothing of wherever they were from.

I had expected there would be more people.  I looked down at the khaki pants that I was wearing and the fleece vest over a threadbare blue oxford shirt.  I felt a tinge of anxiety.  Where was my coat? My computer? Over there, on a rise of sand where I could see it. I didn’t need them now, but later I might.  It seemed like moments ago I was in crisp cold air and snow like dust suspended on sunbeams.  As I thought of those moments they became real:  snow, air, the smell of cold.  Except for the ache of knowing that there was not here and that then was perhaps better than now. Yet that ache was consoling in the same way as the suspended snow, that wasn’t there, was consoling.

Gradually I returned to sand and an empty blue sky above and ocean on all sides.  Sound of the surf as waves hit the island first on one side and then the other.

A man came towards me, wearing a barrel that was suspended from his shoulders with stout leather straps. This looked like the beginning to a bad joke.  I was going to ask him where he was from.  I was going to ask if he had stepped out of a cartoon from the 1930’s, make light of it in that way, but then thought better of it.  Wearing a barrel was such a cliched costume  he might be aware of this and feel self-conscious about it. If it even was a costume.

The man had a wide, open face and beefy arms and legs. He was blinking in the bright sunlight in a nearsighted way that made me think he might have lost his glasses.

– How’s it going?

He turned toward my voice with an eager smile.  I smiled back, a little more coolly.  I didn’t want to let on, but I too was secretly thrilled that we would be able to speak. Up to this point I hadn’t been sure if there would be any speaking.

– Hello, hello!  His accent sounded vaguely Irish.
– Hey.  Nice outfit.
– Thanks! He hooked his thumbs under each of the leather straps at his shoulders, rather proudly I thought, like he was waiting for me to admire the outfit in more detail.

I obliged, noting first the thickness of the fullgrain leather of the straps, nearly as thick as the sole of a shoe and dyed the bright red shade of pork strips in a bowl of Wonton soup.  These straps were affixed to the wood of the barrel with brass rivets, and as I was noting this I couldn’t help but note as well the clear, polished, fine-grained oak planks of the barrel itself beneath the hoops of bright copper that bound it.

– Wow, that is really some barrel you’ve got yourself there, I said, now with unfeigned admiration.

– Yes it is, he said simply, and for the first time he looked me level in the eyes.  As I met his gaze it seemed the sound of the surf had receded in the background.  He suddenly looked neither old nor harmless.

–You see, he continued, I was poor once.  Dirt poor.  And when I was no longer poor I promised myself I would never, ever have to walk around in a ragged, tattered, broken-down barrel ever again.

It began to dawn on me right around then— the consequences, I mean, the awful inevitability of consequence — and, I don’t know how else to phrase it — my heart sank.  And the pain of my heart sinking that way was still much too much to bear, so I summoned all the willpower I could summon — think of snow, of crisp air, maybe wood smoke this time, smoke held aloft as if pinned by narrow beams of cold sun coming through trees.

Soon I had forgotten whatever it was that had first made me feel bad. The man in the barrel was waddling away from me in the direction of another straggler. I felt sleepy and disoriented, but also a little anxious, like this was a cocktail party and I was suddenly bereft of drink or conversation partner.

–Here you go, a dark-skinned woman in a bright blue dress said as she handed me a coconut that had been opened at the top and filled with some frothy liquid.  What do you want to talk about?
–I’m Kevin, I said gratefully.  What’s your name?
– My name is Grace.
–Where are we? I asked
–Oh that, she said.  I can’t really say, since I’ve been here the whole time.
–You’ve been here the whole time? I repeated stupidly, hoping it would start to mean something.
–Yes.  Nice of the rest of you to join us, by the way.

There was something both sincere and cutting about how she said that.

And right at that moment two waves came crashing simultaneously from either side of the island and met in the middle, overlapped actually, obliterating my coat and the computer bag with my computer in it.  I ran toward the spot where my belongings had been and I was up to my knees in warm, swirling water that sucked the golden sand out from around my toes.  I was vaguely aware that it was a beautiful, pleasurable moment and at the same time I was in a panic about my computer.

It was all I had left, and it was gone.  Grace was gone as well. I ran toward the dark green hut at one end of the island.

There was no door, just an L shaped little corridor like the entrance to an outdoor bathroom.  Inside it was dark, there was a desk, and behind it stood an attractive woman in her forties with curly dark hair, wearing a light brown uniform shirt and a dark green skirt.  Behind her were lockers and storage bins, neatly arrayed.

My computer, I gasped, it got washed away.  The woman responded in Italian.  My computer, I said again, this time gesticulating with what I considered to be the universal hand gestures for “computer.”  Gradually it seemed she understood, and she informed me, via an elaborate pantomine of gestures performed to the tune of melodic syllables, that my work permit would have to be re-processed to allow for a change of profession.

– No, I insisted.  I can retrieve the computer! I just have to find the bag! I need a snorkel.  A diving mask.

These concepts I conveyed by speaking the words out loud accompanied by an increasingly fluent interpretive dance.

The woman sighed good naturedly.  Diving-a mask, she said in her accent.  Snor-kel.  She turned around and began rummaging through the neat lockers and storage bins to the rear.  Divinga mask.  Snorkel.

I knew it was only a matter of time before she would find these very items as if by magic and hand them to me with a patient smile.  I had a glimmer of realization that my computer was worthless, now that it had been underwater, and that anyway I had no need of it now, where I was.  Where we were.  But even as I realized all this, I felt again that queasy pain in the center of my chest.  It was as if I was squeezing a frog to death in my hand and at the same time I WAS the frog; so I stopped squeezing and promptly forgot.

The woman in uniform rummaged patiently through her equipment and started humming a pleasant melody with melancholic air.  Now it was as if I could hear her thoughts.  There is nothing he can do, she thought, thinking of me.

She had seen it all so many times before.

Photo Credit: Stella Hartmann under Creative Commons Attribution license