Bushtits swarmed the suet, a wren rasped in the hedge, a downy woodpecker crept up the birch. Sunlight filtered through the trees, giving the backyard a Maxfield Parrish look. The cat sprawled dreaming in the herb garden, his wife rustled in the kitchen preparing supper. He played Eric Satie in his head and nodded in time with nature.
Something moved. He turned his head and saw someone coming down the side path. A tall, thin, gray-faced man. A past resident of the house. The figure approached, and he was about to say something when the man turned into the bamboo and vanished.
A young man breezed in. “I’ll be your chief anesthesiologist,” he said, smiling, “how you both doin’ today?” He assured them that his wife’s knee surgery would be a routine procedure, “easy peasy.” The new breed, eager to share all the information at his disposal, so unlike their cold, closed predecessors who never offered “their” patients any more than the bare minimum. A few more pleasantries and the young tech swished away.
A man’s voice wafted in from the next bay: “Hey, remember that Twilight Zone where this demon is on the airplane wing messing with the engine, and William Shantner shoots right through the window at him?”
He exchanged glances with his wife and considered speaking up: “Shatner! It’s SHAT-ner!” And what did that have to do with anything, anyway? But he was done correcting people. Instead, he asked his wife, “Doing okay, honey?”
“Fine.” Good old F-word.
A woman’s voice came from the other side of the curtain: “I can’t watch shit like that. It’s too creepy. I need a cigarette.”
His wife cocked her head and smiled. That lovely smile. Life without her—he drove the thought from his mind. A nurse entered, asked how they were doin’ today, and readied her for the move to surgery. The nurse smiled tightly, held the curtain aside. They would text him when she was in recovery.
Up through the Stygian spiral of the garage, underworld to the gleaming edifice of modern medicine, a warren of godlike procedures wrought with a yawn, easy-peasy. He felt the weight of decades of researching and testing, blood-letting and puncturing, seizure and death bearing down on him. At the pyramid’s peak far above, she was probably just now slipping under. Amazing thing, anesthesiology. Still, some people had trouble: bad reaction, sepsis, sudden heart stoppage, grinning death—Hey, remember me? What would he do without her? Good luck, sweetie, I love you.
Emerging into the light, he saw the day unfold before him, a sunlit sea full of possibility. He could walk around Capitol Hill, visit his old neighborhood, Volunteer Park, downtown…He went home and sat down at his desk. His world, now. He shuffled some papers, checked his email, scrolled through Facebook, looked out on the garden, stood up, sat down, checked his email, glanced again into the garden, picked up a bill—“compare your electricity usage.” Why “usage” and not simply “use”? He peered down at a sheaf of receipts and forms on the floor. Taxes. He gathered them up and placed them on the side of his desk. Well, it was a start. He sighed and considered going back to bed.
The house was silent. He gazed fondly at the tabby sleeping on the sofa. Getting on, now—was that sadness in her eyes, the first chilly awareness of mortality? Poor thing. You and me both, baby. He walked into the kitchen, made himself a Tillamook cheddar sandwich, and took it outside to the bench.
The leaves wafted silently in the breeze, a replay from a silent film of the garden long ago—or a hint of things to come. The Bluebells were blooming along the side path, just as they had on the killing fields of Flanders, Auschwitz, Cambodia. Amid man’s atrocity, nature smiles, blissfully indifferent. He listened for his wife in the kitchen, then remembered: gone. No, only absent.
Two days earlier, he went into the kitchen and sat in the breakfast nook. “I think I just saw a ghost,” he said, staring at nothing. She turned and faced him, spatula in hand, eyebrows up. “Huh?”
“A tall gray man, walking down the side path. He went into the bushes and disappeared.”
“Disappeared? How?”
How in hell would he know? She was always asking questions he could not answer. “I don’t know. Just—poof! Goddamnedest thing.” He was mildly surprised to find himself shivering.
“You didn’t recognize him?”
“No.”
“A street person.”
“I don’t think so. Didn’t look like a street person.”
She cocked her head in incipient incredulity. “So, what did he look like?”
“Like an old man in a gray overcoat…like somebody from another time. Only—nebulous. Like he wasn’t quite all there.”
“Hm.” Always, the bemused hm. “Did he have a face?”
“Yeah, but it was kind of, I don’t know–blurry.”
“Blurry.”
Yes, blurry. “Well—I think he had a face, but it was kind of indistinct. Shadowy, around the eyes, like a void. He came down the walk, then just after his face came into view and I almost had him in focus, he turned and was gone. Didn’t come out the other side of the bushes. My skin prickled. Hell, it’s prickling now. Shit…my first ghost!”
She followed him out to the side path and they both stood staring into the bamboo. It was not thick, the neighboring house was plainly visible, no concealment was possible. They both hovered on the edge of disbelief. “It’s so weird,” he said, softly, “I got the feeling he lived here, once.”
“That’s weird.”
He peered closely at the shrubbery, whispered, “Hello? Are you there?”
“Maybe he saw you and ran.”
“Nope. He was here, then he was not.”
They stood another moment then returned to the kitchen.
“Well,” she said over salmon and greens, “you’ve thoroughly creeped me out.”
“Hey, he creeped me out!”
“Remember the guy next door, who played the banjo? I sometimes think I still hear him, when it’s nice out like this. Probably just city noise.”
“He was kind of a mystery, wasn’t he? Said Hi to him a few times, that was it. Then he too went poof…”
“Sad…you live next door to someone for so many years and never have a clue.”
“And live in a house for years and never have a clue about former inhabitants. Living in someone else’s space—space they may have lived in for years.”
“Doesn’t seem right that there’s nothing left of them, does it.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Not so sure of that, now.”
“So, you think he lived here?”
“I got that distinct feeling. Don’t know why. Maybe he was—reaching out.”
“Or lost.”
“Mmm.”
“Or one of your ancestors checking up on you.”
“Hah!”
“Here’s another mystery: what happened to the sparrows?”
“What—aren’t there sparrows?”
“I guess you haven’t noticed.” She was a serious amateur birder. “They’ve been conspicuously absent for days. It’s weird.”
“Maybe they’re off making babies.”
“Yeah, but they still have to eat. Only, I haven’t seen any, not in days.”
“Hmm, that’s odd. I’ll keep an eye peeled.”
He nibbled his sandwich and stared down the side path. Had there been eyes? A mouth? Had he even been real? He could hear the doubt in her voice
Always the practical one
“Are you out there?” he said. “Hello!” No answer. How many others were lurking about, reliving their old lives in another dimension? Questions he never expected he would ask—and surprising how matter-of-factly they occurred.
“I know you’re here. I hope we’re treating your home okay. Glad to see you, whenever you care to drop by. ‘Course, you know we won’t be here forever.” He wondered if the gray man would have appeared if he hadn’t been there, watching. If a tree falls in the forest…He chuckled softly and surveyed the yard. In ten years—five, maybe—it would probably be another apartment box. Cat, garden, squirrels, he, she, house: gone.
And now, apparently, the sparrows. As long as they’d lived in the house, sparrows had been common as dust, lording it over the finches and chickadees, dominating the feeders, mobbing the bath.
Birds fed and bathed, but no sparrows. What was going on? Birds were unknowable. Still, he’d like to have an answer for her. He’d like to have more answers for her, now.
The maple covered all in its emerald umbrella
Branches merged into the trunk, which merged into the earth
As if holding it all together
Ground zero: home
A sound impinged. What was that—a banjo? No—an airplane, probably, far off in the stratosphere…the earth rushing through space, the slice of a scalpel.The Grecian handclap, the Chekov twang, a speed bump in time. Maybe silence would be his—silence indoors, in, out, in between, and evermore.
The cat’s face appeared on the stair, mewling peevishly. She was losing weight. Kidney disease. The little tabby ambled by and on up the path, and wandered into the bushes. Cats, too, were unknowable. But maybe she would find some answers.
A crow landed on the fence, feathers glowing a sinister black, dagger of a beak thrust insolently skyward. A regular visitor who used the birdbath to soften bits of pizza crust and other scavengings. The bird’s feathers glistened evilly in the sun, it looked impossibly large, even sinister. An avian SS man. It looked around and dropped something in the bath, something that looked like a finger. It dipped it and ate, dipping and raising, then thrust itself skyward.
The cat bounded out of the bushes, head down, tail puffy. “Something spook ya, Twig?” He went down the path and looked into the copse. Nobody and nothing inside. “Are you here, gray man?” he said, softly. The bamboo rustled indifferently.
He went inside, put his plate in the sink, and walked upstairs to the bedroom. Through the west-facing windows the sun was a pale disc in the graying sky. You could feel it warming, the polar ice shrinking, the glaciers melting, everything hotting up toward the next Great Extinction. This must be how it felt—the first inklings. A privilege, in a way. He opened the window. The crown of the maple glowed, the delicate new leaves wafted silently in the wind, the wind came in and stroked his hand, his arm. Was this what death felt like?
He lay down on the bed and let the earth pull him in. The top of the maple had reached halfway up the window, now, like the frigid Atlantic creeping up the Titanic’s hull, deck by deck. How many years until it covered the window? Would they be here to see it?
His eye wandered to the black and white Vans he had bought years before in a pique of youthful exuberance, thinking he would wear them to clubs, hip restaurants, parties, his smiling wife at his side. But they never really felt right, like trying to get into a skin that had grown too small. He still had a few of his old T-shirts and skinny jeans, his tank top—last time he put that on, she’d said, “Are you trying to be sexy or something?” He had not worn it since.
Now, as the world worked, while classes were held and meetings were attended and papers were being graded, he was at home, lying down on his bed. The marital bed, where they had once writhed and squirmed and screamed into each other’s mouths.How many years had it been? He missed it and assumed she did, too, but for reasons neither cared to bring up, it was never discussed. That bird, it seemed, had flown.
They had met at school, she worked as advisor and they met at some function or other, clicked, and settled in to a pleasant, affable, passingly passionate relationship. But age has its own mandates, and gradually, he lay to rest the wry mimicries, the fake old man voice, the jocular jejeunities of their first years together, last holdovers of youth with which he lightened their moments (or so he thought) with levity— “You might have married someone choleric and dyspeptic, and not a soul of equanimity such as I”…Ha-ha. Days and years, they held true, in a time when she’d laughed and looked into his eyes admiringly and moved to let him enter, patiently withstood his shrieking into her mouth, gazed fondly.
Before the smiles grew strained.
Eleven months’ “retirement” and he still had not found himself. He hated the cruel relegation, the sudden negation of decades spent entertaining class after class of eager and not-so-eager young faces, laying bare America’s greatness and America’s shame, writing, reading, researching, debating, conspiratorial lunches in the faculty club, the shared magic of Friday.
Now we come a-reckoning, and you will reckon where others have failed. The gauntlet thrown. Now, the hardest of all, the marital reckoning. A fraying membrane: bumping into each other in the kitchen and turning silently away in bed and enduring long, leaden silences pregnant with new resentments—snapping at him for for using the non-stick pan to fry sausage. “I thought we agreed we wouldn’t use the non-stick for meat.”
“I know we did, but I thought I’d try it, and it’s fine.”
“That’s not the point…”
Christ! This sudden anger—startling in its vehemence, and all because of him? More bluntly, because of lack of intercourse?
Possibly—even likely. Well, shit, wasn’t it a mutual thing?
It wasn’t all on him, was it?
No.
But no matter. Next stop, Bringing Up Father, the Fighting Bickersons.
He wrinkled his nose. No. He must not give in. He must do better, for both their sakes.
We can do this.
I can’t lose you.
He would not allow himself to think that they had grown tired of each other.
He did not think he was tired of her! Perhaps her attitude was more “complicated.”
Neither seemed able to find the words. But absence of words did not signify absence of longing. He took his penis in his hands. Not a young penis, now, but still full, firm, solid. Youthful.
Fading desire, like thinning hair, another one of nature’s cruel jokes.
What if he were to suddenly stop aging, and she kept on, carried further and further out of reach? Hadn’t there been a “Twilight Zone” about that? Ray Bradbury, probably, good old Ray, obsessed by eternal youth and dimming age and portentous dreams. Perhaps the gray man had been a portent.
There had been precognitions. Reading a word just before someone else spoke it…thinking of her on the stair, then hearing her creak…humming “Things We Said Today” and then it coming from someone’s car going by…“How ‘bout you, old blurry face?” he thought. “Are you a precog?” He listened closely for a moment, then spoke: “Are you here, gray man?”
The vision: perhaps it had been his imagination after all.
If one could have precognitions, why not visions, also?
Perhaps his mind was expanding, not shrinking. Shrinkage must be avoided.
He felt his body tingle, almost levitate. He should have spent the day out. Put on exotic clothes, plunged into the unknown, sought out excitement, stimulation. But no, he’d come right home, like a goddamn yo-yo.
The pull of home was too strong. “Home,” the great straitjacket. The grip only seemed to be tightening.
How many men succumbed, gave up their juice, their moxie, their mojo, their cojones.
Who was master here, the damn house or him?
He could pack a bag, feed the cat, lock the door, and disappear. Be his own man once more.
What would that prove—wandering the streets like poor Georgie Minifer in The Magnificent Ambersons, an aging specter in a city of strangers.
Why? Who would recognize him now when he walked through the University District? “His” students had mostly moved on, the campus was awash with new faces, strangers. A few profs and assistants would know him, sure, but now their faces would involuntarily register awkwardness—“Well, well! Uhh…so, stayin’ outa trouble?”—if not outright discomfort.
What was the shelf-life of facial recognition? Once you’re out, you’re out.
Anymore, you wandered alone through the ethernet, a galaxy of disembodied ectoplasm whirling around a cold and uncaring dwarf star
People—total strangers—“liked” you on Facebook, or not. And if not—what then?
Maybe the gray man had forsaken his home and gone wandering, and was now trying to get back.
Maybe he should just stay in bed, permanently.
Probably sewing her up by now. He hoped she wouldn’t have too much pain—“discomfort,” they liked to call it.
He would go and spend the evening with her in her room, watch TV, talk about the day, each turning over visions of their next time together.
He felt his chest. His heart beating steadily, old faithful, nary a skip nor squawk
He stretched his legs, good old legs, legs that had scaled the Alhambra, the Forum, Montmartre. So, maybe they weren’t quite what they used to be. So maybe he felt it when he tried to reach for something
He stroked his cock aimlessly. God, really, at this age? Yeah, really, get over it. No, this would never be gotten over. He wished she would come upstairs, lie down beside him, then let his thoughts drift to a brown-skinned girl in tall boots, kissing the spot where her raven-black hair touched her shoulders. It was a nice thought, even more, but just a thought and nothing more. He sighed and closed his eyes.
He must do better as a husband.
He must not let her hate him.
He must not stop loving.
His heart kicked. His doctor said it was “benign,” but how certain were we, really? Amazing, what the heart did. Couldn’t keep going forever. And the cholesterol—too much cheese, too many eggs, too much sitting in front of the goddamn computer
He took a deep breath, let himself breathe deeply, in—out, slow—down
The ping did not recur. Perhaps it was nothing at all—the mind, once more. Come on mind, get with the program. No time for slacking.
A cloud floated northward, a giantGeorgie Minifer shaped like a boomerang or maybe a giant turd. Well, you were kind of a turd, George. A crow flapped past, another followed. Harbingers of death. But he felt no twang in his chest, no sudden arrhythmia or aneurysm, only the tug of the earth’s core, six thousand miles down. He stared at the casements, imagined a wrecking ball smashing into the house, smashing the glass and the brittle siding, plunging the bed into the floor below.
He fell softly into a restless sleep. Things rustled outside the window, a plane sighed overhead, a grinning demon wagged a finger at him, he walked through overhanging branches and could not escape.
“Comfy, honey?”
She nodded, smiled. That smile. “Very. But it’s the pain meds. They tell me it won’t be bad, though.” Even in a hospital bed she looked radiant.
They passed over the miracle of her ordeal, easy-peasy. She raised her eyebrows at him. “So, seen old blurry face?”
He chuckled. “No. Called out to him, but he did not deign to respond.”
They watched TV and said little, each silently entertaining visions of their next time together, and at ten he kissed her and strode into the warm night. A block away, he turned and looked up at the glowing windows of the hospital, and was back 50 years, in the street outside home. He had told his mother he wanted to visit a neighbor kid. His mother let him go, even though it was after dark! With some model train cars in a paper sack, he walked four blocks to his friend’s home, but his friend’s mother told him he was out playing. He began trudging back up the hill toward home, then heard a distant cry from the playfield. He yelled his friend’s name and thought he heard someone answer. He called out the name again and listened for a response. Silence. He walked reluctantly toward home, and when he got within a block he thought he saw movement inside. “Mom!” he yelled—“Mom!” There was no response. The sack of trains was getting heavy. Why had she let him out at night?
He counted the floors but couldn’t be certain which room was hers. He considered yelling her name. “Good night, dear,” he whispered. “Sleep well.”
He walked down Broadway, letting his body relax and his legs take charge. The night beckoned, magical, mystical night. People walked past, young faces flush with vigor and purpose, and now, he was among them—one of them, once again. He felt himself moving from one life to another. He did not want to be disloyal—enjoying a brisk evening walk among strangers did not lessen his love for her. She would surely love him more for his burst of independence. Night walker.
Light and motion and the hum of youthful energy quickened his stride toward the busy Pike-Pine district. Maybe he would meet a former student! So many men and women over the years at school, so many he had liked, students with lively minds and open faces. He often thought of them, years later. Did they think of him?
On Pike Street and into the swirl, young bodies and white teeth and boozy grins. A band thumped loudly behind a frowning doorman, grinning youths congealed around a hot dog cart, chattering, all the pretty faces glowing in the heat of youth, new relationships bubbling, fermenting, stink of lust rising. God, he wanted to smile, to talk, to laugh. He crossed the street and caught his reflection in a window, glasses glinting like a Gestapo inquisitor’s, face a valley of shadows, jacket hanging not quite right, the posture of age. Stand up straight, dammit. Was this what she saw, every day?
Fuck it. He wanted a pub, talk, laughter, beer on an ancient bartop. His old place. The red neon Comet Tavern sign blazed defiantly into the Gen-Y night, yeah, still here, yobbos. The old-timers were long gone, of course, naïve to hope for finding anyone near his own age. But the yellow neon face of “Ed,” the tavern’s mysterious mascot, still beamed from the wall. “Hey, Ed,” he mused, “good to see you again.”
He squeezed onto a stool and ordered a Maritime. Same old bar, his DNA slithering around somewhere beneath the polish. A group of young women talked loudly at a table. One looked familiar, but what did it matter? He remembered an old movie about an aging Pterodactyl making one last flight amid a flock of young ones. Almost made him cry, and that was fuck-all years ago. Well, look at me now! He drank his beer drummed his fingers and studied the ancient bartop (You remember me, I know you do), and thought of her, blocks away, suspended in the night sky high above the city of his ancestors, his parents who had died years before he knew her, another plane of existence. Perhaps she was thinking about him, their marriage, totting up the emotional (and physical?) credits and demerits, and perhaps reaching some uncomfortable conclusions. Of course he gratified himself. He was a man, it was easy, still. Too easy. Men were spoiled brats. She must know—women did. Didn’t mean they liked it.
Hell, you could only do what you could. He would do better. He smiled slyly and let his eyes roam. Around him kids blabbed and laughed and plotted, dirty little schemers all. He rode the wave of youth, a mote of frowning mystery. Yeah, kids, that’s for me to know.
Old faces waxed and waned before him, he missed them, their knowing eyes, their jaded laughter, Nixon’s out on his ass—you know who I feel sorry for? Pat. Hey, what night’s Grateful Dead night, anyway?
The path where a mysterious figure had appeared and vanished
The bedroom, their room. Two people: was there any stranger phrase?
He envied the young people their freedom, their absence of straitjackets, of strangling, suffocating roots, even as he loved the roots and wrapped himself in them. Did she feel this way? He would have to ask. There were many things they would have to talk about.
But no one knew Nixon. Ghosts, however, were always in season.
“I saw a ghost today.”
Half a nod from next stool, all of 25 and visibly hoping for something other than random psychobabble from some old fuck. “No shit?”
“My first ghost.”
The young man grimaced and looked away. Why was this old dude talking to him—why was he even here?
He would not give up so quickly. “Yep, clear as day, a tall old man in a gray overcoat, walking right toward me. Then—poof!”
“Poof?”
Was that mockery. He shrugged. “Just one of those things.”
“Yeah, I guess.” Whatever, old dude.
He shrugged, watched the unsmiling young bartender dispense unsmiling service, and grew suddenly fed up. What did these kids have upstairs, anymore? Cell phones, hip-hop, ugly haircuts. No, he would not go there, feed the bile of age versus youth.
There were secrets here, and maybe a ghost story or two, age has no monopoly.
“Just you and me now, Ed,” he thought, the beer roiling around and sending out nasty waves.
Home. He wanted home.
He drained his beer and looked at the neon face on the wall. “Thanks, Ed,” he thought, and went out into the night.
He flagged a taxi (and how many of them were around anymore?). The driver was a man of reassuring age.
“I saw a ghost today.”
“A ghost, you say?”
That East Indian accent, oddly comforting just now. “My first ghost…Don’t often get to say that, do we?”
“No, sir. I never did see ghost. Not good thing, I think.”
Oh, come on, India is rampant with ghosts and ghost stories! “I don’t know—I think this one might have lived in our house before.”
“That is possible! Houses have many ghosts.” All the accumulated wisdom of an ancient society—we hadn’t a clue.
“Have you ever seen one?” he asked, forgetting what the driver had just said and suddenly feeling sheepish, like he had discounted the man’s worth. “Oh, you said not…”
“No, never. Don’t want to see, either. I like to see living people, not dead!”
“Yes, a wise policy.”
They shared a laugh, and he let the silence resume. He was glad to leave the cab and disappear into his house—home. He ate a Fig Newton, sloshed his teeth, and went to bed, taking care not to wake the slumbering cat.
Phantom shapes glided and swirled. A distant voice cried out
He was awake.
What had he heard—something in a dream?
He slipped from bed, pulled his robe around him, and moved quietly downstairs. The kitchen clock was just past three. The pit of night. He felt a weird ichor well up inside, as if wanting to turn him inside-out
Absent, not lost—absent, not lost—She was sleeping far away on the other side of town in a strange lighted building in a strange room in a strange bed surrounded by strange noises and undead memories of strangers, sleeping he hoped, healing, her body knitting back together. Was she dreaming of him? Didn’t much matter, did it. We’ll be okay, you and I. I’ll never leave you.
He dropped to his knees and prayed. More an idea of prayer, but sincere.
Please, Lord, keep her well and let her come home safe and happy.
He opened the back door. The night was warm, completely still
Down the path and out onto the sidewalk, far to the south lights glimmered, a figure flitted across the opening and vanished. A vast hush enveloped the city, the world slept, making dreams for the morrow. Back down into the shadows, I’m here, sweetie, keeping watch. All is calm.
Something moving toward him, slowly, like a dream. His skin prickled, his heart thumped. Some trick of light, the moving fronds cast eerie shadows, moving fingers
He stopped, breathed in the essence of night. Are you there? Hi. I’m here. A sigh, a flicker of movement. His skin prickled, his heart raced. Things hovered, watching. He felt them, spread his arms and sighed into the darkness, Ahhhhhh….He felt himself stiffen, grow taut, tingle with awareness, with life. He gazed into the night-struck garden and down the mysterious path—Ahhhh!
Now, you know me. I belong.
He went back to bed, sank into the holy deep, woke to bright sun. Ahhh.
The usual, yogurt and fruit, green tea. “Today,” he told the cat, “Today she’ll be home.”
Mr. Blurry Face—would he be watching? And if he was, why? A harbinger—death? Yes, one day they would all be gone, house, garden, birds, bees, man, wife: pulverized, scattered, flattened, reborn in some alien, inconceivable way. Ghosts, perhaps.
But not yet.
Life was the thing, yet: blessed, delirious, crazy life. Right now.
His desk, his place by the window, his computer, his notes for articles, a book were all waiting for him. She was waiting for him. He must be worthy.
He would plan his days rigorously, continue working on articles and his book outline. Not let his mind or body get flabby
He would cultivate independence, too. Women liked a man who stood on his own feet, sometimes aloof, cool. Familiarity: enemy of desire.
He would regain himself, stride the campus, watch the faces of the new crops of students, go clubbing now and then. Wear T-shirts and jeans, work out more often, let his youthful self loose.
He would keep himself fit, mentally, physically. A woman senses weakness, sees herself in it, reacts understandably, grows bitter, even hostile. A year she had lived with his bumbling around the house, his lack of direction, his—decline. Naturally, she would grow cool; vulnerability is all well and good—in your dewy youth. After that, strength is called for, in increasing amounts! He would need to be more assertive, more certain. More manly. No self-pity, no aimless futzing, no flabbiness. Enough of the “sensitive” academic, the times had shifted and now called for something new. A new him. He could do that. Easy-peasy.
And do try to fart less.
He would rekindle romance
They would rediscover the city together, he would take her up the Volunteer Park water tower, they would kiss in a high window…kiss at Golden Gardens beach…kiss at Palouse Falls…the Alhambra…
He would be with her, now, he would not let her down.
He would not be a gray man.
A chickadee called from the maple, four plaintive cheeps
Five distant cheeps answered
Like two boys calling back and forth across an unfathomable void, ineffable sadness of calling but never connecting
A shadow passed over, the crow flopped down on the fence, peered around, and hopped to the birdbath. It dipped something into the water, ate, flew away. He walked over to see. In the water was a small claw, some feathers. A fledgling. He felt sick—that something as common as a sparrow could be so easily vanquished. Nature was some cruel mother.
Gray man: figment of the imagination—vision–precognition? Or trick of light—a mirage, a reflection of someone a mile or a thousand miles away, glinting off an atmospheric inversion? So much we did not know, even now.
Or perhaps he had been a warning—from within. Perhaps his mind was expanding, not shrinking.
He must not be a gray man.
The cat crouched in the bamboo, eyes fixed on something
“Whatcha see, girl?”
The tabby snorted sharply and dashed away
He walked down to the path
He walked slowly up the side path
The ferns were perking up, the bluebells radiant
He stared into the bamboo. The gray man had gone in there.
Why? Why turn into the bushes—was he lost? Looking for something?
Maybe there was something in there: a boundary, some kind of shift between dimensions. A “portal.” He liked the sound of it—gateway to another dimension. Or time. We needed portals. He stepped into the area he thought the figure had entered. A muffled hum rang in his skull—sitting too long, rising too fast. A thousand ways time reminded you.
“You hear me now?” he whispered. Hmmmm—the sound of ectoplasm
He tripped over a bamboo root—“Goddamn!”—and fell into the bushes.
The sun glared down, the root stabbed his leg. The sun was hot and he tried to rise but could not, something held him in place, pulled him tight to the ground.
“You okay?”
A man leaned over him, red plaid shirt, khaki pants, a kindly face, not young, not old, just a face. A not-quite smile.
“I’m—okay.” He struggled to sit up, but something held him down. “It’s the field, you see,” said the man. “Holds you. Don’t fight it, just sort of ease around it…Ease around it….” He sat up. The man was gone.
Blazing pinholes of sun shot through the leaves into his retina and making tiny holes in time, back to childhood, when he spent summer afternoons poking around the yard smelling the plants and studying the insects.
The eye of God—did anything else matter?
Damn sun, blinding—a stabbing light, intense heat. In the corner of his eye, something red.
Nothing.
The cat head-butted his face. “What is it, boy? Was that you?” Must have been. A cat in a red shirt. Well, it seemed he was making some new friends.
Her knee encased in plastic, she was radiant at the operation’s success, at the miracle of being regenerated.
She sipped her coffee and read the paper, two of her favorite morning activities. “I see another foot’s washed ashore in BC,” she said, her voice sounding ten years younger. “That makes thirteen, now.”
“Lord, I wonder what it means.”
“It means people are insane.”
“Well, yes, but that’s nothing new. This is something new. I mean, disembodied feet?”
He told her about the crow.
“Oh, shit, really?”
“Looks like.”
“What a world! Poor sparrows. Poor feet.” She shook her head. “So—seen Mister Blurry Face lately?”
“No, but I saw somebody else.”
She looked at him with something between amazement and pity. “Male? Female?”
“Male, I think.”
“But not the same guy.”
“Nope, looked different. Not gray, not old.”
“Jesus.”
“Not him, either—though one can’t be sure. I suppose it might’ve been.”
“This is getting weird.”
“True, but past sixty, so is life.”
She wrapped her arms around him. “If he is a ghost, he may be back. Don’t ghosts usually belong to a place?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe he lived here, once. But maybe he was just lost. Lost and looking for a way back.”
“He may be lost—to the world, at least our world—and to us. We’ll probably never see him again.”
“That’s sad!”
“Life is sad.”
“Oh, now, I don’t buy that. There’s more to life than just sadness—or happiness. Life is complicated.”
“Yeah, I guess.”
She gazed at him, eyebrows knit. “What’s happened to us?”
“The years, piling on, weighing us down. Complacency…”
“Yeah,” she said, moving toward him. “What can we do?”
“This.” He leaned over and kissed her, long and soft.
“So, how did you entertain yourself while I was gone.”
Not gone—absent. “I communed with our household spirits—told them we’d be here awhile yet…We had a nice little tete-a-tete.” He kissed her some more, the old dreamy look spread across her face, a blissful smile.
As evening settled, he sat on the bench and gazed at the azure air. Night coming, but not quite yet. Satie smiled and sat down beside him, whispered his old sweet tune. What was a gymnopedie, anyway?
An obscurity.
Like the coming twilight.
Like all humanity.
He must fight obscurity. Fight for earthiness, his own humanity and hers.
They would kiss on the bench, in the vestibule, in bed, then sleep happily as unseen figures danced around them.
A flicker lit on the suet. Funny creatures, flickers—ancient. They were here when this was primal forest.
They would be here with their little black bibs and their rasping skeer would sound down what had been an alley a century two centuries hence, when the house was long gone and the city unrecognizable.
He stood and entered the house. A blue dress and a pair of pigtails went into the forsythia bush and vanished.