Smith squinted. “I want to see you. I realize how obscure that must sound, but I’m on a quest of sorts, and I’m afraid I’ve become subject to a considerable time constraint. I’ve been made aware of a possibility, though, quite recently, that reality only arrives through an acknowledgment, or a reckoning, of human beauty. Not an objective acknowledgment, but a temporal one. I’m looking for something, the underside perhaps, of what makes something real in our minds and, more critically, our hearts. Use a sentence in fiction as an example. Objectively, the sentence is nothing more than configurations of ink on a piece of paper. But the mechanism of the words, and the
At least the ghost seemed to understand. Smith caught frequent glimpses now, since the call-girl had arrived. He felt certain that the more effectively he strove to conquer the question — What is real? — the more real the ghost would become.
“I smell perfume,” the girl remarked.
“Yes,” Smith said but did not elaborate. “In other words, I merely need to see you, all of you.”
“Ah,” the girl said, stretching the word. “Now I get it. Now I know what you mean.” She smiled, a manufactured wickedness, and took off the short fuchsia dress. “You just want to watch. That’s okay. It’s your dime.”
Smith’s “dime,” in this case, had been a $150 escort fee on his charge card, plus “tip.” He’d given her several hundred in cash, all he had left in the apartment. What did he need money for? He’d never really needed it in life. What good would it do him now?
“Show me your beauty,” Smith said.
Off, then, came the garters, the stockings and frilly lace bra, all the same vibrant, bright fuchsia. She wore no panties. What stood before Smith now was her raw, physical reality. But—
Smith tipped up the desklamp. “Come closer. Please. Closer to the desk.”
She sauntered forward like a chic model on a runway, and assumed quick poses, turning before the light. Flesh flashed in cold glare. Glance by glance, the beauty collapsed.
The silken white-blond hair and bangs clashed with the waxed, black pubic patch. The rhinoplastied nose seemed too perfect on the elegant face. Smith’s eyes calculated up the supple physique, and snagged. Minute cannula marks pocked along her trim hips and waist, from liposuction, and when she raised her arms, the erect orbs of her breasts easily displayed the hairline implant scars.
She blinked at him, her smile freezing. Even the crystal-blue eyes were a lie, designer contacts.
“Thank you,” Smith said. “You may go now.”
Her nude, pretty shoulders shrugged. “It’s your dime.” Then she quickly put her clothes back on and left.
The ghost was laughing.
On the night he was to die, Smith awakened as if rising from a lime pit. The darkness swarmed. His eyes felt plucked open by fish hooks.
“Yes,” he muttered. He walked to his desk, wizened as a dried corpse in the moonlight.
He’d failed again, he’d misconstrued everything. He’d never know reality now, only the reality of death, of being embalmed and buried, of reverting to slime in a box. But what was he — a writer — really dying of? Cancer, or the failure to recognize what was real? Prevarications were killing him, not disease.
Only two realities mattered now. His dying flesh, and the ghost.
He saw it more clearly now than ever, which made sense. It faced the window, naked in its oblivion, a razorline shape of inverted oddments of darkness and light. “You’re real, aren’t you?” Smith stated more than asked.
Smith felt adrift on the scent of her — or its — perfume. But how could he
“Assimilation?” Smith lit a cigarette, his last. “No,” he felt. “Transposition.” Perhaps he’d been correct all- along, back when he’d been talking to the blonde call-girl. Correct, but on the wrong tangent. It was his trade that had summoned the ghost — he was a writer, a creator, or, more accurately, a
He’d only been partly right. Beauty reflected only a semantic; it was something created, not transposed. Smith stared at the shifting figure, and its ebon glint. It seemed to gaze back at him, over the shadow-boned shoulder…
“Too late, though, hmm?” Of course. His life was over. His face felt sucked in. The old heart began to skip within the sunken cage of his chest. But at least he would die pondering this; at least he would die trying.
The ghost turned. Its black-chasm eyes widened.
“Now I’ve got you going, eh?” Smith felt proud. “The old dying stick in the mud isn’t as dumb as you thought.”
“I don’t know how,” Smith testily replied.
Was it weeping? It seemed to be, perhaps as Smith, secretly, had wept over his entire life. Behind him on the wall hung a de Kooning print,
Next, he turned on the radio. Vivaldi seemed nice to die to, or a light nocturne by Field. Besides, Smith wanted beautiful music as he confronted the ghost. He knew something now: the ghost — this shadow-person — was his confessor.
He rose, joints clicking, as he crossed the nighted room, atrophied, shrivel-penised, and as pale as death already. He could feel the cancer percolating, and it was a surprisingly neutral sensation.