Ghost of a Flea

So we’d spent the night talking. About how rehearsals were going, latest reports from doctors, official confirmation that this was the coldest winter in a quarter century, when I was likely to get sprung.

“On that subject, I have a message for you from Don. He says if you try to walk out of here the way you usually do, he’ll personally come after you, rope and hog-tie you, and bring you back.”

I whistled a bar or so from Copland’s Rodeo.

“He’s serious, Lew. This is serious. You scared us.” She was stacking books and tapes neatly on the bedside table. “Rick Garces wants me to tell you to hurry up and get well because he’s got a new recipe he can’t talk anyone else into trying. Sea insects. ‘You know how picky them white boys is ’bout their food,’ he says, ‘’specially the straight ones.’ Dean Treadwell called from the school to see how you were and asked that I give you his best. The Washington Post said-I knew you had a piece due and gave them a call, hope you don’t mind-not to worry about the Fearing review, they’d wait. And your agent says call her when you get a chance. There’s a new publishing house in Scotland, run by a bunch of kids, Vicky says, but they seem to know what they’re doing, that wants to talk to you about reissuing your books.”

“Nothing from David?”

She shook her head. “I’m sorry, Lew.”

A bus pulled up below and all climbed aboard. I had to wonder if any of them even cared where the bus was headed. It was warm at least, and you could stay aboard indeterminately. The bus pulled away, leaving bus stop and street alike empty, windswept, barren. As though the whole world itself had emptied. No one left alive.

“You going to be okay?”

I nodded. A nurse’s head tilted in around the door. Red hair, full lips. “Mr. Griffin?” Then she came on in. Eyes green and alive, forever in motion, unbecomingly wide hips somehow still sexy, tattoo of barbed wire on one upper arm. “Physical therapy called, asked me to let you know they’re on their way.” Her name tag hung from a lanyard of multicolored beads, swaying as she walked: Erin. “Need anything before? Pain meds, new designer gown, box lunch?”

“Still no word, I take it, on my pardon from the governor?”

Sad face. “Sorry.”

“Just as well. I absolve you all, you know.”

“Of course you do.”

When she was gone, Deborah came and lay beside me on the bed. My right hand cradled her stomach, my left embraced her. “We’ve had good times, Lew. Lots of them.” Her hair was streaked with gray, strands of it. When had those shown up? Memory was so unreliable, such a liar. So self-serving. Only thing it did well was break your heart.

Down in the street a lowrider passed with speakers blaring so loudly that it set off alarms in parked cars as it passed. We lay there listening to them go off, one after another, as it cruised along.

Chapter Twenty

“It always escalates, Lew. You know that.”

“She didn’t want to bother me with it. Wanted to wait till I was out of the hospital at least, she said. I’m not sure she would have brought it up at all, if Larson hadn’t pushed.”

“So he’s concerned.”

“Larson’s the one who told me about it in the first place. Couldn’t have been easy for him, either. He and Alouette have a strong relationship, if not one we’d think of as ordinary. They have their own, quite independent lives. Distinct personalities. But they’re solidly together and respect one another’s opinions, beliefs, decisions. Seems to be plenty of space left in the relationship for that.”

“You’re saying he saw coming to you with this as a violation.”

I nodded.

Don stood, flexing back and shoulder muscles. He rolled his head forward and back, shoulder to shoulder. “Used to be I could sit for more than five minutes without everything stiffening up, you know?”

I knew.

“I don’t keep moving, body’s not the only thing’s gonna stiffen up,” Don went on. “So in past weeks there’ve been more of these messages.”

“More of them, and closer together.”

He glanced again at the one in his hand.

“Look, it’s not like there’s anything else I have to do, Lew. I can sit at home and spend my mornings worrying what’s for lunch, or I can get up off my butt and onto this. Still have favors I can call in. Forensics, for a start. I’ll have them take a look at this.” He held up the note. “And the file from her computer at work. You got any problem with my talking to Alouette, asking her about it?”

“Not if she doesn’t.”

We were silent then. I’ve been blessed with good friends.

“Where are you?” Don said finally.

“I was remembering the first time I saw you, slumped against a wall downtown with blood pooling under you and garlic on your breath.” The day he’d saved my life. “Then, later, how you showed up at my place with this yellow piece-of-shit BanLon shirt on. I mean, just how fucking white can you get?”

Don shrugged.

We’d been friends so long, been through so much together, that looking at him was a lot like looking in the mirror. And just as somewhere in your mind you stay twenty years old forever and are always slightly surprised when this old guy’s head pops up in there, I was never quite prepared to see my friend looking so tired and worn down.

“You miss him, Don?”

Something we’d rarely spoken of since it happened. We found him, half afloat, half submerged, in the bathtub, plastic bag secured about his head.

“Every day of my life. I just keep thinking, if only I’d had the chance to get to know him better. If I’d made the chance, found it somehow.”

“You did what you could.”

“I don’t know…. I know what he was, Lew. Like I told you then, it just doesn’t seem to make much difference.”

“He was right about one thing: Everything’s water if you look long enough.”

Don nodded. “From his note.”

“Maybe it doesn’t matter how much time you have. Maybe you’re still left with all these piles of unfinished business.”

Don sank back into his chair. “When did everything turn to past tense for us, Lew? You notice that happening?”

I shook my head.

He picked up the paper again. “You know what this is from?”

If I have now made up my mind to write it is only in order to reveal myself to my shadow, that shadow which at this moment is stretched across the wall in the attitude of one devouring with insatiable appetite each word I write. It is for his sake that I wish to make the attempt. Who knows? We may perhaps come to know each other better.

“A Persian novel, The Blind Owl.”

“Which of course you’d read.”

“Not a clue. But it took Rick about two minutes flat to track it down on the Internet.”

“And what is this? Drawn on?”

“Looks like someone did it on a computer, ran the typeface up to the point of blurring when he printed it out on an old dot matrix printer-not a well-maintained one, at that-then photocopied the printout. That’s Rick’s guess, anyhow.”

“Why go to all that trouble?”