There were ghosts everywhere, within and without, waxing and
waning in the basement especially, but also under my bed. The ghosts within
were better than the ghosts without, and so were much more to be feared. For a
ghost within can lurk in the hidden places of your body—in the grape-like sacs
of your lungs, the space between cuticle and nail bed, and more terrifyingly,
in the synapses of your neurons.
You know them when you see them, the ghost-possessed, the
ghost-afflicted, the ghost-ridden. Or perhaps the ghost-drenched, since they
had taken me and thrown me into a pit of ghosts, who caressed my face and
lulled death songs into my ears.
Yes, one day I would be one of them—I knew that. I too would
fade and flare into the minds of the living, sucking at the life sap that
surged through their veins, that sap that fueled the rage, excited the loins,
made men mad-blind with power and women quiver-faint with love.
Ghosts, so many ghosts in my childhood. There were the
basement ghosts: one put his hand on my chest as I was sleeping, in the
improvised room that was never finished. The carpet—a cheap remnant from a
seedy store. The fireplace—red brick. All very good for ghosts, but it was in
the back of the basement, where light was shunned, where the dust bunnies could strangle
cats, where every demon on earth came, on starless special nights, to mingle and
consort—the back of the basement was the very evilest. Mother, my mother—why
did you keep the food you had canned back there, on the scratched-together shelves
that, by themselves, would have been a magnet for ghosts? Didn’t you know that
that’s how they got into us? Infinitely tiny, they slitthered through the Mason
jars, moved through the stalactites of the glass and sand and water. Tiny, yes,
but then they grew engorged by sugar and water and all matter of nutrients.
The applesauce you made—it was laced with ghosts. The green
beans—not so much. The beets were irresistible, and so full of ghosts that they
even came out of our urine, the next day. And so we became ghost-filled.
Filled with ghosts, we moved like ghosts—from the green sofa
where my father lay after breakfast, trying to cast the ghosts within into the
ghosts without. Mother, in the kitchen, waiting for father to leave, so she
could sneak a forbidden cigarette on the porch outside. She crashes the cheap,
plastic dishes together, and scolds them into the drainer, the anger and the
power tidal-waving out of the kitchen, all the better to wake him. To get him
to leave, so she can expel the ghosts in smoke.
We were three, my brothers and I—and all of us had ghosts
that crept along the sinews of our muscles, and roller-coasted down our nerves,
exploding into the synapses.
Ah, a ghost in a synapse is fearfully bad, for the ghost
tears from one nerve ending to the next nerve beginning, and then back again. No other message will
get through—and none did. The feet moved, of course, and the mind worked well
enough, enough so that I can tell you: Lansing, state capital of Michigan.
Principal products of Idaho: potatoes, wheat, and livestock corn.
These facts were important, since they could occupy the
spaces not yet afflicted with ghosts. But each day, the ghosts grew more
numerous. They flitted through our brain and played Frisbee in our guts, nor
did they hide or flee when any ghost removal specialist, sent from the
Department of Ghost Affairs, came by. No, the ghosts stayed at the street
corners of our minds, leaning against lampposts and jeering.
It may have been that they, our parents, wanted us to have
the ghosts—and why shouldn’t they, since they themselves soldiered on with
ghosts, while the dreams of power and love slowly greyed—the color of
ghosts—and then faded, and then turned into a wisp, and at last ceased even to
be a memory. Yes, that can happen, I can tell you—I come from the land of
ghosts, and I know.
Miss Cairns
Kindergarten teacher
Died the summer after my Kindergarten year
Miss Warren—first grade teacher.
Room 148.
Room 148.
Referred to only as SHE.
The rest? Ah, the ghosts had gotten to me: the names and the
faces and the individual quirks all forgotten now. Shoved away by the ghosts,
who only got more numerous as the minutes dragged in those leaden days when the
holidays themselves refused to come, and summer was a place like Paris. A place
for other people, who would know how to order the café au lait and chat with the waiter. Yes, the holidays kept
receding even as you approached them, so that Christmas day was an
impossibility, a figment of the mind, something occurring—if at all—just after
the Second Coming.
The little desk with the chair attached, and the desk top
that comes up and reveals last week’s math homework which you were afraid to
hand in, so riddled with mistakes it would be, and now your name is on the
blackboard, under the heading of “Pending Homework” so that everybody can see.
And whose fault is it? The ghosts, of course, who have come up through the hole
in the desk and turned the sevens into threes, and have twisted subtraction
into division, and have rolled all the sixes down to the bottom of the page,
where they are learning how to invert and become nines.
I should have put tape over that hole, that stupid,
meaningless hole at the bottom of the desk—did you know that’s pupitre in French? That’s the kind of
fact we hurled against the ghosts, only to have them hurled back at us—why else
can I, age 59 and with a broken back (so heavy have the ghosts become), tell
you this silly fact, that even the French don’t know?
It was a conspiracy, that’s what it was: they knew that
Mindy Peckham (future Harvard alumna) had gotten to the desk first thing in the
morning of the very first day of classes, and she had PLUGGED that hole,
dammit, so that actually doing homework was unnecessary. All that was needed
was to lift the desktop, and poof! The homework assembled itself, and then the
grade appeared, and then was entered into the fearsome book (grey, of
course—though sometimes red, for failure) that the teacher alone could see.
Yes, the grade-book, filled with checks and marks and letters and numbers—all
the better for the divination of the calculation of the sum and subtraction of
the products of the square roots that would be you, on a June day that will
never come and that cannot be escaped. Well, by merely lifting her desktop, the
numbers in the grade-book are soaring, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir of Midvale
Elementary School hitting the highest notes of Joy To The World, which is what
Mindy is, and why John Harvard is salivating bronzely from his perch above the slab of marble in Harvard Yard.
But the ghosts had gotten to me already, and befuddled my
brain and fogged my vision—so I didn’t, like Mindy Peckham, who would become
the spiritual consort of John Harvard—I didn’t see the hole. And then, all the
papers and erasers and pencils and books and notebooks got all crammed
together, and then the pens exploded, and it became a SURGING MESS, and that’s
when the teacher announced—desk inspection!
I can’t open the desk because the ghosts will come out—you
can see that, can’t
you?—and Miss
Steensland will look at the ghosts and know: I am soiled and polluted and dirty
and filthy and ridden with ghosts. More ghosts than a dog has fleas. More
ghosts than a leper has sores. More ghosts than all the piranhas in the Amazon swimming siren songs to all the snakes in the steaming jungle.
Ghosts!
