Ghost of a Flea

Chapter Fourteen

As I make my way home, traversing abandoned lots, shoulder-narrow alleys, car-beset stretches of St. Charles, Jackson and Prytania, darkness lays its hand on the city, gently at first, then ever more firmly. Portions of sunlight cling to the edges of buildings. Headlights and streetlights straggle on. In houses I pass, behind windows tall as a man, wood floors are held in place by antique dining tables, barrister’s bookcases and overpadded chairs. In there, too, light falls: white light like cool pure water from chandeliers, light yellow and warm from table and floor lamps.

I turned onto Prytania, skirting a house that looked like any other save for a discreet metal sign hung from its eave: Anderssen Real Estate. I’ve probably walked past a hundred times without taking notice. A fortyish man wearing slacks and an open-neck white dress shirt still crisp from the morning’s iron emerged, locked up, mounted a silver BMW and rode away. Almost immediately another man stepped around the low wall of cinder block separating this house’s driveway from that of the next. He made for a niche tucked between house and wall beneath an overbite of roof and there unrolled his blanket, positioning himself on it and setting out with every aspect of ritual a well-used plastic bottle of water, cans of food, backpack, folded newspapers. Then began pulling off braces and supports. The crutch he’d had under his left arm. Neck brace padded with foam. Wrap-around knee support. Plastic form into which right foot and ankle had been strapped. Wrist splint with wide Velcro ties attached. Elastic elbow wrap. Some weird sympathetic magic-he wore these, none of it could happen to him? Or had he from whatever obscure motive-sympathy, instinct for salvage, pride of ownership-simply fished them from refuse bins at nearby Touro Infirmary, slowly accumulating, growing one might almost say, this exoskeleton within which he went about the world?

My own house of wooden floors, high ceilings and windows tall as a man, when I arrived, stood empty. I could have held it to my ear and heard the sea. Deborah away at rehearsal, David simply away (what else could I say just now?), out in the world somewhere. Cars past those windows followed headlights leading them like faithful horses towards the Barcaloungers, big TVs, barbeque grills and backyard swingsets that defined their riders’ lives. Few surprises when these crews disembark.

I brewed coffee, heated milk in a long-handled pan that looked to have been strip-mined at some point for its copper, poured them together into a mug the size of a soup bowl. Rocker and floor, old friends, spoke to one another as I settled. From half-toppled stacks on the table alongside and tucked beneath, guided by who knows what instinct, specific hunger, chance, I fingered out Gustav Meyrink’s The Golem, a book I’d had for years but never got around to.

The moonlight is falling on to the foot of my bed. It lies there like a tremendous stone, flat and gleaming.

As the shape of the full moon begins to dwindle, and its right side starts to wane-as age will treat a human face, leaving its trace of wrinkles first upon one hollowing cheek-my soul becomes a prey to vague unrest. It torments me.

At such times of night I cannot sleep; I cannot wake; in its half dreaming state my mind forms a curious compound of things it has seen, things it has read, things it has heard-streams, each with its own degree of clarity and color, that intermingle, and penetrate my thought.

There was moonlight now, like a blanket, a shawl, thrown across my lap, making me the very image of an old man at rest, idly musing. I recalled Lee Gardner writing to me of a friend’s death, a writer he’d edited for years, and of the article by some self-styled expert briefly praising Lee’s friend, then going on at length to complain how he’d been lured away from “legitimate” novels by the temptation of huge sums of money to be made in writing genre fiction. Huge sums of money? Lee had asked, incredulous, in his letter. Legitimate novels? And still more incredulously: Sour obituaries-is this what we all come down to?

Most of our lives come down to far less, of course.

Long ago I’d given up trying to keep count how many times my own had gone south, gone sour, gone dead still. I’d think I knew where I was headed, every station, every stop, two dollars for the box lunch that came aboard at Natchez or Jackson tucked in my shirt pocket, only to find myself waylaid to some unsuspected sidetrack, engine long gone, mournful call fading.

That was the shape my son’s life took, too, whatever the explanation. Some errant braid in the genes, mother’s madness encoded, encysted and passed down the line; chaos dropping (we’d expected another caller) on a swing from above. As though all his life David had been scaling this huge mountain of sand. Some days, some years, he’d manage to kick in footholds and stay in place, maybe even hoist himself up a yard or two. But the sand always gave way.

The phone, I realized, had been ringing for some time. As I stood, the manteau of moonlight fell away from my lap. I crossed to the hall table and picked up the receiver. Quiet enough itself, my “Yes?” tipped headfirst into silence.

Someone there at the other end, though.

After a moment I hung up. Almost at once the phone began ringing again. I ignored it. The ringing stopped, then restarted. Beating its jangly chest till I capitulated.

“Lew? Were you sleeping?” Deborah.

“Not really. You just call?”

“Started to. Then someone needed something-right away, of course.”

“Don’t they always? Makes you feel important, though.

Needed. How many of us are given that?”

“You’re saying this is a gift?”

“Hey, you have to unwrap it, it’s a gift, right?”

“Hmmmm.”

“Wow. A polyester necktie with violins on it! An ant-farm picture frame! An electric hot dog grill!”

“Hmmmm again. How’d your day go?”

“Not bad. Stuck its head out of the water some earlier than I’d have liked. And now the tail keeps wagging.”

“T-a-i-l? Or t-a-l-e?”

“Either, I guess. Both.”

“Think any more about your book-if it is a book?”

“Haven’t had much chance to.” I told her about my visit to Don, what he was planning. Then about my expedition to the morgue with Santos.

“I’m sorry, Lew. Listen …”

Across the street, someone dressed all in gray, as though wearing tatters of the night itself, hove into view. He carried an old-fashioned red kerosene lantern, swinging it back and forth and shouting what well might have been (at this distance I saw only the motion of his lips) All aboard! Though he could as easily have been calling Bring out your dead, searching for an honest man, or just seeking warmth.

Surprising how we subtropical folk got used to the cold. Coming to take it so much for granted that we’d stopped remarking it. An adaptable lot. I stood now, blanketless, chill, watching the plume of my breath stream out, balance for a moment before me, fade.

“Rehearsal’s going … well … oddly, I guess might be the best description. But good. We’re onto something here, and reluctant to shut it down. I may not be home for a while.”

“You get a chance to eat?” She’d gone directly from work to rehearsal, I knew, and rarely ate lunch. “I could bring you something.”

“We ordered out. Soup, sandwiches, coffee, beer. Should be here any minute. We’ve all been hitting it pretty hard, and we were starving. Thought we’d take a break first, then tuck heads down and give a try to plowing on through, see where we get. Just a second, hang on.” Someone had spoken to her, and she turned away briefly to answer. “Lew …”

“Still there?” I said after a moment.

“Yeah. Yeah, still here. Guess I will be for some time too, from the look of it. Here, I mean. You be okay?”

“Sure I will.”

Enormous shadow accompanying him, the man came back along the sidewalk with his lantern.

“I was sitting outside the theater tonight waiting for everyone to show. Tired beyond belief, exhausted really, but at the same time excited, eager. There were these rings and loops around everything, like auras, street and sidewalks and the edges of buildings vibrating, trembling. I didn’t know if that was because of the light or just because I was so tired. Dark was coming on fast, and I remembered your telling me how, when you were a child back in Arkansas, you’d sit in your backyard trying to watch it get dark. After a while you’d look around and realize it had gone several degrees darker but that you hadn’t been able to see the change as it happened. We never do, do we?

“Sorry, Lew,” she said. “I’m just fantastically, incredibly, unbelievably tired. When I’m this tired, my mind’s all over. Nothing connects and everything seems to. Listen, don’t wait up, okay? I’ll see you in the morning.”

“Have a good rehearsal.”

I put the phone down with the sure sense that I was letting go of something far more than a conversation; with the sense, too, that there was little enough I could do to change this.

Or maybe it’s just my storywriter’s sense, all these years later, telling me that.