Ghost, page 14
“I read the articles,” she says, “and I knew that you were probably embarrassed as hell about all of it. I know how you are. I tried to imagine how it happened. I guess something must have happened to begin with.” She looks up at him, and he nods. “So, I was thinking, something really strange happened to you, and you could have kept your mouth shut about it, or you could have convinced yourself that nothing happened, or you could have jumped off a cliff. But you didn’t. I was impressed.”
“And that’s why you wanted to see me again?”
“Yes.”
“Well, that’s something. That’s the first good thing that’s come out of it. I hope it’s a good thing.”
“Maybe,” she says. “I just wanted to see you after I read the articles.” She picks up her spoon and then puts it back down on the table. “Are you married?”
“No. I never got married again.”
She nods and smiles faintly. Both of them are afraid to ask more questions.
“I think I’ll stay around for a few days,” she says.
Patrick McConoghy has left a message asking if David would please come see him, handwritten on an old shoe-repair invoice and left at the reception. It has been two months since Julia died.
Because the weather is fine, David decides to walk to Patrick’s shop, leaving from the rear exit of the mortuary. He’s told Martin that he’ll be away for a while, and he badly needs some time out in the air to mull over the extraordinary meeting with Bethany, Bethany married to someone she doesn’t love, and there, just moments ago, sitting across from him at the table. Against the vision of Bethany, his mother’s words you needn’t have still play over and over in a disturbing counterpoint. He vibrates with new possibilities and thoughts. But there is something else. What is it? What is this sensation? Is it the power he felt before? A child runs by on the sidewalk with chocolate on her mouth. Yes, he notices. At this moment, he feels as if he observes everything, as if his mind were a razor. He has the sensation that he can dissect a thousand sounds and images at once, slice each of those thousand into yet another thousand. He feels that he is connected to everything around him and, at the same time, separate, with a mind of his own, different from every other mind. Why does he have such intense feelings? Where do they come from? Perhaps this is part of the totality, the simultaneous merging and separateness. He is connected, as Mr. Chee said, and he is separate at the same time. Is this what it feels like to be alive? Do other people feel this way? So much has happened since he saw what he saw that dim afternoon. Everything new began at that moment. Could it be that his father’s early death, the tedious assignments in school, the drunken parties with Harry, his marriage to Bethany, his job at the bank and then the undeserved dismissal—could it be that all of it led to that moment in the mortuary? Could the world be created again after such moments? What does the Pythagorean theorem say about that? What does Professor Mickleweed say? The child with the chocolate on her mouth skips by. Now everything is new. The world teems and gyrates. Sounds, smells, tactile sensations, scream at him on the high wire. A bicyclist rides by carrying a block of ice, a long stream of water trailing behind. A seedling hung from its wispy parachute drifts by in the air. As he walks along the sidewalk to Patrick McConoghy’s shop, David’s legs float as if suspended by strings, the barkings of dogs down a side street crash like explosions, the white onions and yellow squash in front of a market flutter like colored shells tossed up on a beach, a child runs by with chocolate smeared on her mouth—oh yes, he remembers that—the hum of a sewing machine at a tailor’s shop, shards of broken pots on the floor of a pottery shop while an old woman sweeps them up with a broom back and forth and the smell of wet clay in the shop expands in his lungs and he feels that he could inflate like a balloon and become lighter than air and be carried up over the houses and shops, so high that everything appears like a toy, as Ms. Gaignard described. What are the limits of this power?
With the colors still shouting, he finds himself at Patrick’s shoe shop. The bell rings. He waits in front of the rough wooden counter carved with the initials of all the assistants who have labored there. T.S. S.N. L.B. Isn’t it odd, he thinks, that a life can be reduced to two letters. But, of course, it cannot. Two planets perhaps. A life is more than a planet. He has glimpsed…Harry never wondered about anything. That was always the difference between Harry and him. On the wall, spools of leather twine. Rough, smooth, mottled. In the back room, the harsh steady sound of a hammer splits through the odors of leather and shoe polish. Dozens of shoes occupy the racks, shoes that Patrick can match to a face. A customer arrives, the bell sings at the top of the door, an assistant fetches the shoes, and the customer leaves, the bell jangles again. See how precisely he observes each detail. Past and future, future and past. Taped to the side of an ancient cash register are pictures of a bloodied Jesus and the Virgin Mary.
Jesus and Mary. Could it be that simple? Should he become a believer, after all? He is anxious about this visit with Patrick. Why did Patrick invite him to his shop? Most likely, he wants him to communicate with Julia. But he cannot. He couldn’t communicate with her at the funeral, and he can’t now, whatever this feeling of power. What does he know of the dead? He knows the prayer Martin says at the beginning of each embalming procedure. He knows the facial expressions of the dead as Martin moves their lips this way and that. He knows the stillness.
Then Patrick comes from the back room. He wears an apron stained with shoe polish, and his hair is a wild mass of red curls. “Please,” he says softly, and he motions for David to follow him. Back through the workroom they go, under a low beam and up a staircase to Patrick’s apartment over the shop. It is a simple apartment. Immediately, David smells onions and garlic and beer. Yes, he is here in this moment, he has steadied himself. He is in Patrick’s apartment. The small, cluttered living room glows with the light from a broad window looking over the street. On the floor, stacks of newspapers are piled here and there like steps to nowhere. A broken light fixture hangs from the ceiling. On the sofa sits Mille Halliburton, Patrick’s friend. The girls have been staying with her and her mother, she explains. She’s come to collect a few clothes they forgot.
“I don’t want my girls gone,” says Patrick, rubbing his knuckles into his eyes.
“Just until you’re back on your feet,” says Mille.
Patrick shakes his head miserably, but he seems to have accepted that he is unable to care for his daughters. He wants to show David around his apartment. This is the sewing room, he says. This is my daughters’ bedroom. This is Julia’s and my bedroom. All are tiny rooms with warped floorboards and low plaster ceilings, barely clearing Patrick’s head. Mille calls out from the kitchen that she’ll make some tea. “Don’t bore him, Patrick.”
“My father taught me shoes,” says Patrick, showing the gap between his two front teeth. “Julia was always saying that I should have done something else, so I could be a better provider. Maybe I should have.” He met Julia when he was twenty-five years old, he says. At first she wanted nothing to do with him. “She had her own people.” Then he asked her to go with him to an organ concert in an old church, and she went, and the sound of that organ in that church was heavenly. “It was God’s music,” he says. He was twenty-five years old and she was twenty-three. He has a picture of her from that time, he says, and he opens a chest and brings out the curling photograph. “Wasn’t she a beauty?” Yes, David says. “She was the prettiest girl I had ever met,” says Patrick, “and she loved me.” When he looks at the photo, David cannot help thinking of Bethany. Can he imagine Bethany gone now? “My girls look like her,” says Patrick, rubbing his face. “Especially little Mary. Susan has her eyes, but little Mary has got her spot on. I mistreated her, Mr. Kurzweil. I want you to ask her to forgive me.”
“Call me David.” David avoids Patrick’s eyes. Poor Patrick. What can he possibly do for him?
Mille brings out the tea, and the three of them sit in the little living room while the tea kettle wheezes in the kitchen. Patrick, a big man, has sat next to Mille on the sofa, while David lowers himself into one of the two chairs. It wobbles precariously.
“Julia wanted me to replace that chair,” says Patrick with a grim laugh. “But we never had the money.”
Patrick, his eyes bloodshot, wants to tell a story. When he was in his twenties, he says, he had a buddy named Aidan. Aidan and he were both members of a pacifist club. They would get together with their friends and stick pins on a world globe marking all the places where wars were raging, and then they would write reprimanding letters to the leaders of those countries. They never heard back from anybody, except once they received a form letter from the presidential office of an African nation, declaring that inquiries would be made. Aidan was not a handsome man, says Patrick. His face was a blasted mess with pockmarks from childhood acne. But he had a heart of gold. He was always befriending the children from poor families in his neighborhood, taking them to the amusement park, and he sometimes convinced Patrick to go along. For some reason, Aidan took it into his head to swim the English Channel. What a wild, harebrained idea! He was only a mediocre swimmer, but he had a fierce endurance; he had once run a marathon, and he had a burning desire to do this thing. All of his friends tried to talk him out of it. His former sweetheart pleaded with him to abandon the idea. But Aidan would not be dissuaded. It was something in his head. He trained for months. He ate a diet of potatoes and beef. Then in late August, when the water was warmest, he was ready. There was nothing to be done but to accompany him to Dover. Patrick helped grease down Aidan’s body, said a prayer, and then rode beside him in a small boat as he swam, watching him constantly and ready to throw him a life ring the moment he tired. About twelve miles out, a wave came and Aidan disappeared beneath the water and drowned. “I was the distance from him that I am from you,” Patrick says to David. “One minute he was alive and the next he was dead. Just like that.”
For a few moments, no one can speak. “That’s a terrible story,” says David.
Patrick rubs his knuckles into his eyes. “I can’t take it anymore. It’s not right.”
“No, it’s not right,” says David.
“Aidan didn’t need to be any kind of fool hero,” says Patrick. “But he had this crazy idea.” He looks down at the floor, then back at David. “I’ve had enough of this. Now it’s my Julia. Forty years old. Do you think this is right?”
“No,” says David.
“What sense is there in it? Tell me that, David. I’m a Christian man. I was raised religious. But I want to know what sense there is in it. I blame God for this. God needs to tell me what meaning there is in it. Or maybe God can tell you. What did Julia do wrong?”
“Nothing to deserve this.”
“She didn’t do anything wrong,” says Patrick. “God strike me down this second if she did anything wrong. But I did. I want to tell you something.” Rocking back and forth on the couch, he glances at Mille and then back at David. “Guys were always staring at her. It made me crazy…. Sometimes, I beat her for it.” Patrick puts his face in his hands. “I want you to talk to my Julia. You see, my life is over.”
“Patrick, please stop,” says Mille.
Patrick goes to the kitchen sink and begins washing the shoe polish off his hands. He washes his hands, dries them, hesitates, and then washes them a second time. When he’s finished, he comes back to the living room and sits in the good chair next to the window. Mille looks at him silently, worry on her face.
“I don’t know how I can help you,” says David. “I’d like to help you. I don’t think I can talk to Julia.”
“Please talk to her,” says Patrick. “I know you can talk to her.” He bites his lip. “When Julia finished her bath at night, I used to rub lotion on her back. It kept her skin from getting dry.” He turns and gazes out of the window. “She had the most beautiful white back. Have you touched a woman’s bare back, David? You must have. It’s a lovely thing, isn’t it.”
“You seem to be forgetting that I’m here,” says Mille, forcing a smile. “You’re embarrassing me, and probably Mr. Kurzweil as well.”
“Come on now, Mille,” says Patrick. “I’m not saying anything risqué. All I’m saying is that I put lotion on my wife’s back. To keep her skin moist after her bath. It was…so smooth and soft. It was the smoothest thing I ever touched. She had a little birthmark on her left shoulder, like a horseshoe. A little brown horseshoe.” Patrick gets up from his chair, goes into his bedroom, and closes the door.
Mille sighs and places the girls’ clothes in her bag. “We’re going to a doctor next week,” she whispers to David. “To help him get back on his feet. He’s still in a state of shock.”
David nods, shaken. He feels a sense of helplessness, and guilt.
“It was good of you to come, Mr. Kurzweil.”
“I wish I could do something to help him,” says David.
“You are helping him.”
Martin could hardly spare David for a few hours, but he’s been concerned about those redheaded girls, and he’s relieved to hear that they’re staying with Mille Halliburton. “Jenny and I should have taken those girls,” Martin says to David. “But now Ms. Halliburton has them.”
“Patrick is in a bad way,” says David.
“He’s had rotten luck,” says Martin. “One thing my father said to me. It’s a blessing to help the grieving families, but you see too many tragedies.”
“You take it so personally,” says Jenny, kissing her husband on the cheek. “You’re not really made for this. You think you are, but you aren’t. And you’re working too hard. You should retire. A man seventy-two years old, it’s time to retire.”
This is a conversation that David has heard many times before. Jenny knows that her husband will never retire. But Martin indeed appears haggard. He’s lost weight. His trousers bunch up around his waist, making him look even more ungathered than usual. Dark hollows form under his eyes. In the last few months, since the articles in the paper, the mortuary’s business has increased to the extent that the facility cannot manage the onslaught of new cases. And Martin, who has always labored long hours, is working even harder in a futile attempt to accommodate the demand—constantly hurrying from his office to the arrangement room to the sitting parlor to the basement, hardly stopping to sit down and talk to the families as he likes to do. And, of course, the gawkers on the sidewalk in front, the closed curtains, the screenings of families, have set things on edge.
That evening, David stays late to straighten up after a viewing. Martin and Jenny have gone to bed early, and the rest of the staff have left. As David puts away chairs in the slumber room, he cannot stop thinking of Bethany, the way that she looked at him, the paleness of her face. What did she mean when she said she would stay a few days? Was that an invitation? Does she want him to call her or not?
He walks down the hallways to lock up. There, in the dark corridor, he sees a faint light flickering under the door of the arrangement room. Opening the door, he is surprised to find Ophelia. Even though illuminated by only a single candle, her stubby silhouette is unmistakable. And she’s sitting in front of a little black box.
“Ophelia! What are you doing?”
Ophelia leaps up, startled. “I thought everyone was gone.”
“What are you doing?” David says again, turning on the overhead light.
“You know what I’m doing,” says Ophelia. “You did it. Now I’m doing it. Please don’t tell Martin. Please. I’ll do any favor you want.”
“Ophelia. What exactly are you doing? I don’t see any wires. I don’t see a computer. What are you doing?”
“You don’t need a computer,” says Ophelia. “All you need is the box. Isabelle Poole said I could make it float in the air just by concentrating on it.”
David sits down in a chair. He has no intention of mentioning any of this to Martin, but he’s worried about Ophelia.
“You’re not telling Martin, are you?” pleads Ophelia.
“No, of course not.”
“It hasn’t floated yet,” says Ophelia. “I haven’t been able to concentrate hard enough. Your mind has to be clear. That’s what people say. Well, you know.” Her eyes are shining.
“Where did you get the box?” David asks.
“From the bead shop,” says Ophelia. “They’ve read about your big experiment with Dr. Tettlebeim. It’s in the papers, you know. You are like…a god, or something. I can’t believe I know you.”
It seems a nightmare to David, becoming worse and worse and worse, spiraling downward. “Why are you doing this, Ophelia?”
“Because it feels awesome. What did it feel like to you?” David doesn’t answer; he’s transfixed by Ophelia’s excitement, and alarmed. “To me,” she continues, “it feels like my head is lifting off my shoulders, and my brain sits up in the air and can do anything it wants. Did you feel anything like that?”
What should he say to her? David wonders. She is so sincere. “Yes. I felt something like that,” he says.
Ophelia runs over and hugs him. “I know that I’m going to make it float,” she says. “All of my life, I’ve known there was something like this. There’s stuff that we have no idea about. We can’t be here without a reason, that’s what I think. There’s some force, and it goes through everything, and it can make anything happen. I don’t know where the force came from, maybe from God or from Buddha or whatever, but it caused the universe and it goes through people and rocks and it’s more powerful than anything. Isabelle Poole says that a lot of people can get in touch with the second world, but they just don’t know it.”
“That was beautifully put, Ophelia.”
“You’re just making fun of me,” says Ophelia, sweeping her blond hair out of her eyes. “I don’t have the education that you do.”
