Bushtits swarmed the suet, a wren rasped in the hedge, the cat sprawled dreaming in the herb garden. Sunlight filtered through the trees, giving the backyard a Maxfield Parrish look, 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 man in a gray overcoat. Elderly. A former 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 takes out a gun and 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 turned to his wife. “How ya feeling, 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.”
He and his wife exchanged eye-rolls. She 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 held the curtain aside, smiled tightly, and informed him they would text him when she was in recovery. He kissed his wife (trying not to think: Is this the last kiss?) and walked away. 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 research and blood-letting, poking and puncturing, stuttering death and miraculous life bearing down on him. At the pyramid’s peak, she was probably just now slipping under. Amazing thing, anesthesiology. Still, some people had trouble: bad reaction, sepsis, sudden heart stoppage. Good luck, sweetie, I love you. He emerged into the sunlight and a day of infinite possibility.
“I think I just saw a ghost.” Two days earlier they were in the kitchen. She turned and faced him, spatula raised like a flyswatter. “Huh?”
“A tall man, walking down the path. He went into the bamboo and disappeared.”
“Disappeared? How?”
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. “So what did he look like?”
“Like an old man in a gray overcoat…nebulous, like he wasn’t quite all there. Like somebody from another time.”
“Hm. What about the face?”
“It was kind of blurry.”
“Blurry.”
“I mean, I think he had a face, but I didn’t really get a good look. He just suddenly came down the walk, he turned, and…” He made a wry face, shrugged. “Didn’t come out the other side of the bushes. My skin prickled. Hell, it’s prickling now. Jesus—my first ghost!”
She followed him out to the side path and they stood staring into the thick stand of bamboo, hovering on the edge of disbelief. “He probably saw you and ran,” she said.
“Nope. He was here, then he wasn’t. It’s funny—I got the feeling he lived here before.”
They stood another moment then returned to the kitchen. “Well,” she said over salmon and greens, “you’ve thoroughly creeped me out.”
“He creeped me out!”
“Remember the guy next door, who played the banjo?” she said. “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—poof.”
“Kind of sad; you live next door to someone for so many years and never have a clue.”
“And live in a house for years—live in someone else’s space, space they may have lived in for years—and know nothing about them.”
“Maybe he was lost. Or one of your ancestors, checking up on you.”
“Well, we got ourselves a nice little mystery…”
“Here’s another mystery: What happened to the sparrows?”
“What, are they gone?”
“I guess you haven’t noticed.” She was a serious amateur birder. “They’ve been conspicuously absent for days, at least.”
“Maybe they’re off making babies.”
“Yeah, but they still have to eat. Only, I haven’t seen any.”
“I’ll keep my eyes peeled. One for sparrows, one for the gray man.”
He could walk around the neighborhood, visit his old haunts…he could hike up the Volunteer Park water tower, hadn’t been there in ages…he could go downtown, have lunch at the Market…He drove home and sat down at his desk, shuffled some papers, checked his email, scrolled through Facebook, looked out on the garden, stood up, sat down, checked his email, looked out on the garden, looked 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. 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 silent film of the garden long ago. The bluebells bobbed gaily along the side path, just as they had on the killing fields of Flanders, Auschwitz, Cambodia. Amid man’s atrocity, nature smiles. He listened for his wife in the kitchen, then remembered: gone. No, not gone: absent.
He ate slowly, savoring the sandwich of his youth. The cat emerged, mewling sadly. Getting on now, wilting to kidney disease. Was that sadness in her eyes, the first cold consciousness of mortality? Poor thing. You and me both, baby. The little brown tabby ambled down the side path, perhaps to see the gray man, perhaps others. Would the man (if it was a man) have appeared if he hadn’t been there to see it? If a tree falls in the forest…He surveyed the trees, the garden. So lovely, his little home. But in ten years—five?—it would be another apartment box. House, garden, he, she, cat: gone.
Even now, apparently, the sparrows. Finches, chickadees, juncos mobbed the feeders—but no sparrows. Weird. Something pinged. A banjo? No, a distant auto, an airplane, the earth rushing through space, a scalpel slicing a membrane. Stray sounds, stray ghosts, stranger and stranger. Or maybe not so strange, now that he had the time to sit and listen. A crow landed on the fence and strutted arrogantly, its jet-black raiment glistening evilly in the sun, an avian SS man. It dropped to the birdbath and dunked something in the water. It looked like a finger.
The cat bounded out of the bushes, tail puffy. “Something spook ya, Twig?” He rose and walked down the path, looked into the bamboo. “Are you here?” he said, softly. He studied the soil for footprints, depressions, marks, anything. Nothing. The old man was playing a deep game. Perhaps he was death, scouting him out. Or maybe death had shifted shape into the crow. Either way, it was keeping tabs on him. He grunted: Where did this damn morbid thing come from?
He went inside and upstairs to the bedroom. Through the west-facing windows the crown of the maple glowed, the wind wafted in and stroked his arm. He lay down on the bed and splayed his arms and legs and let the earth pull him in. Ecce homo. As the world worked and classes were held and meetings were attended and papers were read, here he lay on his bed. 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, he assumed she did too, but they did not discuss it. That bird, it seemed, had flown.
It was some department function. She was a raven-haired young advisor with a handsome smile, they traded witty remarks and fell into an easy, passingly passionate relationship. “You’re an attractive man,” she once murmured, even thrust a finger up him, sending a lightning bolt through his body. Nasty things, women, when you got right down to it. Perhaps this colored her perceptions and sharpened her hallmark irony. Perhaps he wasn’t nasty enough. Still, they got on well.
But time has its own mandates. Gradually, he retired the jocular jejeunities of youth, the wry mimicries, the fake old man voice, with which he lightened their moments together, or so he thought—“You might have married someone choleric and dyspeptic, my little chicken, and not a soul of equanimity such as I.” Ha-ha. Her amusement subsided, along with passion. Well, he often thought, passion was like that. Even so, what remained wasn’t half bad.
Then he retired, and thirteen months on he had not found a new life. “You can’t cling to the past,” she said, “It’ll make you bitter.” Maybe. So what? He had left behind standing before generations of young faces and laying bare America’s greatness and America’s shames, writing, reading, researching, debating, conspiratorial lunches in the faculty club, the trans-generational magic of Friday. Admiring gazes of dewy young women.
Now, they bumped into each other in the kitchen and turned silently away in bed and ate in leaden silence pregnant with newfound resentments. Little niggles inflated into day-destroying bursts—“I thought we agreed we wouldn’t use the non-stick for meat…I know we did, but I thought I’d try it on low and it’s fine…That’s not the point…” Now, the chafings and chaffings of forced domesticity, the boredom and petulance of age. Maggie and Jiggs, the Bickersons. Really?
A beautiful day, he should have gone out, plunged into the swim of humanity, picked up some new energy, some new thoughts, for Christ’s sake. But no, back home like a goddamn yo-yo. “Home,” the great straitjacket. The grip was tightening.
Why not get in the car and get the hell out? No, leave her the car, catch a train somewhere, hadn’t been on a train in years. Pack a bag, feed the cat, lock the door, and disappear. Be his own man once more, create a new persona, be reborn. New clothes, new city! He felt his body tingle and almost float free.
Well, hell—wander the streets like poor Georgie Minifer in The Magnificent Ambersons, an aging specter in a city of strangers? Feh! What was the shelf-life of facial recognition? Once you’re out, you’re out. Now, you wandered alone through the ethernet, a galaxy of disembodied ectoplasm whirling around a cold and uncaring dwarf star, “liked” on Facebook by total strangers, 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 was a warning: love your home and stick close to it.
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.
Tonight he would have his little adventure. Take the bus to the hospital and spend the evening with her watching TV and sharing snide comments over a hospital dinner.After that… He massaged his chest, his man’s chest that she had kissed, once, in that other time now seemingly lost. (Not lost, absent.) Heart beating steadily away, old faithful, ready for the next adventure. Legs, good old legs, legs that had scaled the Alhambra, the Forum, Montmartre, a bit creaky now, but still strong. His hand moved to the warm mound in his slacks. Not a young scamp anymore, but still supple. Ready. Little monster, destroyer of worlds. The testy-stuff: they should make rocket fuel out of it.
A cloud drifted north, a giantGeorgie Minifer shaped like a boomerang or maybe a giant turd. Well, you were kind of a turd, George, sabotaging your mom’s love affair and all. He wondered if he had ever dinged his parents’ relationship in some way—kids did that. A crow flapped past, another followed, the earth held him gently. He slipped into darkness, things rustled outside the window, a plane carried him into white clouds, a grinning demon wagged a finger and poked him in the chest, then gripped him tight and began kissing him violently.
“Comfy, honey?”
“Comfy enough.” She smiled tightly. “It’s the meds. They say it won’t be bad—hah!” Even in a hospital bed she glowed. “So, what’ve you been up to? Seen old blurry face?”
“No. Called out to him, but he did not deign to respond.”
“Well, I guess ghosts are like that.”
They watched TV and nibbled at the hospital’s idea of supper and said little, each silently entertaining visions of their next time of life together. At ten he kissed her and walked into the warm night. He turned and looked up at the glowing hospital windows.
He must have been seven or eight years old when he told his mother he wanted to visit a neighbor kid. Night had fallen but for some reason his mother let him go. He walked four blocks to his friend’s house, 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, standing in the dark street—“Mom!” There was no response. Why had she let him out at night? Must be weird, being a mother.
And a wife. He stared up at the windows, thought about yelling her name. “Good night, dear,” he whispered. “Sleep well.” He turned and strode down Broadway and at Pike Street plunged into a maelstrom of young bodies and boozy grins. A band thumped vociferously behind a frowning doorman, chattering kids congealed around a hot dog cart, faces glowing in the heat of fermenting lust. He ached to smile, to talk, to debate, to laugh. Maybe he would meet a former student. Crossing the street he caught his blurred 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?
What the hell. The red neon Comet Tavern sign blazed defiantly into the Gen-X-Y-Z night. His old place: Young heads lined the bar now, but the yellow neon face of “Ed,” the tavern’s mysterious mascot, still beamed down from the wall. Hey, Ed, remember me? He squeezed onto a stool and ordered a stout from an unsmiling bartender. Same old countertop, his DNA slithering around somewhere in the cracks. A group of young women talked loudly at a table. One looked familiar, but what did it matter? He remembered an old animated movie about an aging Pterodactyl making one last flight with a flock of young ones, still hoping for a mate, before finally lying down and dying. Almost made him cry, and that was fuck-all years ago. But this was a time for bravery, not tears.
He sipped his beer, drummed his fingers, 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 met 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, for a man it was easy, too easy, even now. She must know—women did. Didn’t mean they liked it.
“I love you,” he said one morning, feeling amorous.
“No you don’t.” Where did that come from? He had never been unfaithful, never wandered, never even considered it. Did she feel the absence of something?
I’ll do better. I promise. He let his eyes roam over the kids laughing and plotting, dirty little schemers, and he rode the wave with them, a mote of frowning mystery. Yeah, kids, that’s for me to know. Old faces bloomed and faded, he missed their their cheerful, beery cynicism, Nixon’s out on his ass! You know who I feel sorry for? Pat. Hey, for next Grateful Dead night you gotta play Terrapin!
He turned hopefully toward the young man next to him. “I saw a ghost today.”
A slow nod. “No shit?”
“My first ghost.”
The kid’s head was immobile.
“Yep, clear as day, a tall old man in a gray overcoat, walking right toward me. Then—poof!”
“Poof?”
Was that mockery? “Poof. Disappeared, like fog. Just one of those things.”
“I guess.” The young man looked away. Whatever, old dude.
Dead end. To hell with it, he hated them all, the heads all staring dumbly down at their phones, the unsmiling bartender staring at his phone, the inanely shrieking girls. Sure, there were secrets here, and maybe a ghost story or two. Age has no monopoly. But the beer roiled his gut and he felt irredeemably alien and he hated dead ends. He drained his beer and made for the door. Thanks, Ed, see ya next lifetime.
He leaned on the corner of the building and stared vacantly, feeling not quite real. Beneath the mocking moon, the dewy horde bulged and heaved, hot dogs and vapes and boy-girl stink rising in fetid spasms, humanity surging into the next chapter of its troubled evolution. He wanted a cigarette, a woman, suddenly, violently. The faces swam at him but did not see him. Hey, it’s me! American History 210!
Someone started a motorcycle in a deafening blast that made him jump. His blood roiled, hot words churned toward his mouth, he wondered how he would defend himself. A swift kick to the groin would probably work, though “swift kick” at this point was no sure thing. Probably end up on his ass, before getting the shit kicked out of him. He felt a wave of anger race up his arm, his hand twitch. He’d never been in a fight in his life. But the night is not altruistic.
The sidewalk slipped beneath him, the buildings moved backward, the lights and the crowds fell behind. Cooler air cleared his head and drew him on into the dark, primal instinct and unseen ones led him into a neighborhood where familiar trees stood etched blackly against the milky city night, the same slant of the sidewalk, the same pull of gravity under his feet, It could be fifty years ago, just same old little me.
He stopped before a dark mass squatting in thick foliage. An amber porch light revealed the same door, same fanlight, and he could make out the same leaded glass in whose tiny rainbow refractions he had tried to divine the future. Through the front room window he saw the staircase railing leading up to his old bedroom. Summer of ’72, Timms and James and his black cat Zoltan, and Arturo, sweet Arturo, from Barcelona. Almost…lingering regret even now. Too damn serious for his own good. He could still be in there, in that upstairs room, staring at the ceiling while the world slept, seat of his dreams, desires, adult life. The house was well kept, nicely painted—it looked happy. A nice family, maybe. A cat. A sudden breeze sighed through the trees, a wave of longing swept over him. Where had they all gone?
He moved closer and looked into a pair of dark eyes. A small face, fawn-like, blurry behind the window: a girl, seven, maybe. She stared at him, open-mouthed, motionless, black-eyed. A house-sprite. He smiled, remained motionless another moment, then walked slowly away. A fragrance hung in the air, some hidden jewel of a flower, stinging the unwary with bittersweet memory. What would the girl tell her parents?
From the bus window streetlights whizzed by like years, bling-bling-bling, or imploding suns, flump-flump-flump, previews of Earth’s far-off end. How did one sum up a life’s work—study of bygone days, vanished people, ideas now discredited, fads now faded? Had the gray man ridden this bus once, dreamed of a dying sun taking everything with it, or perhaps nodded impassively at an inscrutable world. Who had he been—for he was certain that he had been—and why had he appeared to him?
It was warm down the side path, the bamboo stood at attention. Near midnight, the city was going to sleep. Distant lights burned far away down the sidewalk, a hint of towers where she slept and mended. Lucky bastard, so damn lucky. He spread his arms and growled, Ahhhhhh….He felt himself stiffen, grow taut, tingle with super-awareness, and turned slow circles—Ahhhh!
You know me. I’m here. And will be.
A lone seed floated overhead, a tiny white sunburst. The cat gazed at him. “Mama’s coming home today,” he told her, “best be on our mettle.”
Sure, 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. They were waiting for him, his desk, his place by the window, his computer, his notes for articles, a book, the birds, the cat. Her.
He would plan his days rigorously, exercise, work. Not let his mind or body get flabby. He would cultivate independence, not be so fucking omnipresent—women liked a man who stood on his own feet, sometimes aloof, cool. Familiarity: enemy of desire.
He would walk the world and smile at strangers, wear T-shirts and jeans, let loose his youthful impulses again. A new him. He could do that. Easy-peasy.
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.
And do try to fart less.
A shadow flashed over him. A crow hopped to the birdbath, dipped something into the water. It ate warily, dunking, watching, swallowing, and flew away. He walked over: in the water was a small claw, some feathers. A fledgling. He felt sick. Nature was some cruel mother.
He sat back down and stared at the sky. Gray Man: Vision? Figment? Perhaps a trick of light—a mirage, walking UFO, a reflection of someone a mile or a thousand miles away, glinting off an atmospheric inversion.
Or had it been him, in old age? There had been precognitions; only recently he had been humming “Things We Said Today” just before walking into the Safeway and there it was on the Muzak. How ‘bout it, old blurry face–are you a premonition?
What would he come back as—the wild-haired old man who chased rats off the suet? Or the dewy young assistant prof reading Babbiton the bench?
The cat skulked to the side path, head down, eyes locked. “Whatcha see, girl?” The little creature snorted daintily and dashed away. He walked up the path. The ferns were perking up, the bluebells radiant. Why turn into the bamboo—was the guy lost? Perhaps he was looking for something. Maybe there was something in there: a boundary, a portal to another dimension or time.
He stepped into the bamboo, a faint hum rang in his skull. Sitting too long, rising too fast. A thousand ways time reminded you. He tripped over a root, yelled “Goddamn!” and fell into the bushes. The sun glared, a bamboo shoot stabbed his side. The sun was hot and he tried to rise but could not, something held him in place, pulled him tight to the ground.
“Are you okay?”
Someone leaned over him, red plaid shirt, khaki pants, not young, not old. A not-quite smile. Kindly.
“I’m—okay.” He struggled to sit up, but something held him down. “Don’t fight it,” he heard the man say, “just sort of ease around it…easy does it…” He sat up. The man was gone.
Pinholes of sun shot into his retina, 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? The cat head-butted his face. “What is it, girl? 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, the miracle of regeneration.
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. Red shirt–plaid.”
Her gaze sharpened. “Jeez, 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?”
“Guess so. Could be he lived here, once. Or 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.”
“Sad…”
“Life is sad.”
“Oh, now, I don’t buy that. There’s more to life than just sadness—or happiness. Life is complicated.”
She gazed at him, eyebrows knit. “What’s happened to us?”
“The years, piling on, weighing us down. Complacency…”
She looked small, helpless. “So, what can we do?”
“This.” He leaned over and kissed her, sat down.
She smiled pertly, suddenly restored to the here and now. “So: how did you entertain yourself while I was gone.”
Not gone—absent. “Communed with household spirits—told them we’d be here awhile yet…We had a nice little tete-a-tete.” Their kisses met, 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 would fight obscurity, fight for humanity, his 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 cry would sound down what had once been an alley a century two centuries hence, when the house was long gone and the city unrecognizable.
He stood and walked inside. A blue dress and a pair of pigtails went into the forsythia bush and did not come out.