Ghost of a Flea

By ten that night, a few hours after Don walked aslant and slightly weaving out the door, I decided to head home myself. That wasn’t good enough for a record, the hell with it. Made it erect out the front door, surprising enough in light of all those hours of sitting and all the years stacked up behind me, and watched the storm go from dog paddle to channel swimmer as I walked home. Gentlemanly palms along St. Charles bowed deeply. In yards off Prytania, banana trees were bent almost horizontal, their fan-blade leaves spread in layers close to the ground, like canopies over tiny rain forests. Driven by wind, first at my ankles, then at midcalf, debris ran about me in a stream: Popeye’s containers, plastic cups resembling the half-crushed, emptied-out shells of insects, burrito wrappers, cigarette packets, bits of bird’s nest, chunks of foam insulation like weightless cheese, part of a yard flamingo, tennis balls, sheet after sheet of notebook paper and one of gold-foil gift wrap, half a loaf of French bread hollowed into a canoe.

A group of children rode by on a motley of bikes. They stood on pedals and leaned hard against the wind at each stroke, dipping deeply to one side then the other. Feral with both youth and the release of the storm, with a kind of permission it gave them, they shouted back and forth at the top of their voices. A police helicopter thwacked by overhead, spotlight a bright, impersonal finger prodding at houses, streets, trees and cars.

Pushed back into the narrow crawl space between two apartment buildings, a young man wrapped in plastic bags secured with spirals of heavy twine sat holding a small dog. Dog’s eyes and man’s eyes alike anxiously swept the sky.

I got as far as the bench inside the front door, having forgotten to lock the latter again, which was just as well since I’d also forgotten to bring keys, before collapsing. No one home by the look and sound of things. Light from streetlamps came through low-set windows tall as a man. As though in contrast to the fury building outside, light fell gently onto the floor, emphasizing the slope and roll of it, drawing attention to every warped board, every swollen joining. I sat thinking how wood long ago brought down, carved to dull lumber and laid in place, still remembered roundness as a tree and tried to find its way back.

Then I sat not thinking at all.

Hours later, still on the bench, I woke to a world transformed. Leaves and limbs had been stripped from trees, causing them to look skeletal, asymmetrical, incomplete, like some new species struggling through to existence. Strata of topsoil, too, had been peeled away, laying open alluvial years. Elsewhere drifts of sand, rubbish and silt, aleatory dunes, sat a foot or more in height. With bare hands you could dig down to 1990 or 1964, plot out the lives of those who lived then, dredge up flatware, trinkets, seamed nylons. Gutters and streetside had become harbors clogged with ships: colored glass bottles, hundreds of them, washed up from who knows what primal deposits, Log Cabin, Vicks VapoRub, Bromo-Seltzer, Hadacol, Dr. Tichenor’s, startling both in their colors and long- forgotten familiarity. Sea-washed, bright and smooth, they clanked and rang and cast off flares of blue, amber, green. I sat thrown into the past myself by the sight of all those bottles, by the flood of memory and sensation they brought on, wholly unaware for the moment of the message lying coiled like a serpent in my answering machine.

Chapter Three

I’d been here a year, year and a half, when I first came across him. The city was full of eccentrics and never shut them away like they did back home-actually took pride in them, in fact. Preacher, the Duck Lady, Doo- Wop.

Nineteen or so, strolling innocently along, I glanced into an alleyway as I passed and saw a man kneeling there. Elbows climbed into light and sank. “That’s it, you’re doing fine,” the man said. “Push, push. You’re almost there, Patrice …”

Intrigued, I walked closer. No one else in the alley with him, though arms and hands worked steadily as he dipped and straightened, smiled, frowned with concentration. Under his breath, a subterranean river, ran a steady murmur of numbers, Latin, self-interrogation, misgivings, encouragement.

“Are you okay, sir?”

His face came around quickly, like a cat’s.

“What, four years of college, four more of medical school, not to mention internship and residency, you think I can’t handle this?

“Push. Push, Patrice.

“Well, boy, don’t just stand there,” he told me. Sweat poured off him; he trembled. “Get over here and take this baby while I see to the mother.” The two of us alone in the alley.

Doc’s been around for years, a bartender told me later that day. He’d pop up, trek all over the city delivering make-believe babies in alleyways and vacant lots-duplicating the very scene I’d just witnessed-then drop out of sight. No one knew where he lived, or anything about him.

“Weird,” I said.

“I guess. You want another?” When he brought it, he said, “Guess you’re new in town, huh?”

Chapter Four

“No one knows anything about him,” Deborah said. I’d mentioned that it was one of those names we all recognized, even if we didn’t know much else; maybe the titles of a play or two, or some half-baked notion of Lysistrata’s plot. “He lived to be about sixty. As early as his twenties, he’d grown bald. He served as a councillor of some sort, had a couple of sons, won six first prizes for his plays and four seconds. That’s about it.”

“Not many playwrights have that long a career.”

Deborah laughed. “Most of us don’t have a career at all.”

I’d made a fresh pot of coffee, and put a cup on the table in front of her.

“Thanks, Lew. Smells wonderful.”

“Medicinal.”

“Always.”

A script of the play, blown up on a copier for easier reading and to make room for Deborah’s notes, sat there too. Alternate translations ran in green cursive above some lines. Stage directions and blocking were printed in red at the left margin, miscellaneous notes and self-queries penciled in a scrawl at the right. Highlighted in yellow on one page I saw:

At present I am not my own master; I am very young and am watched very closely. My dear son never lets me out of his sight; he’s an unbearable creature, who would quarter a thread and skin a flint; he is afraid I should get lost, for I am his only father.

In the margin Deborah had written son dresses father in fashionable new tunic- Persian, and I remembered Emerson, Beware of enterprises that require new clothes.

“The beginning should work great. One of the slaves watching over the old man tells us what the play will be like, but he’s lying the whole time. I just have to find a way to bring this out.”

“Well,” I said, “definitely time for a revival, at any rate.”

Revival was what she’d taken to calling her staging of the ancient play, grinning like some Hollywood shark given three minutes to pitch his spiel.

“Resuscitation is more like it,” I’d responded the first time she came up with that. Then: “The thing could do with a zippier title, too, while you’re at it. Return of the Wasps, maybe.”

“Son of Wasps.”

“Or jack it up a whole other notch, go for the grabber: Sting!”

“That’s it! With the exclamation point a stinger!”

“And a drop of blood at the tip.”

We laughed and poured more of the wine she brought home to celebrate. Lifting my glass in a toast, I said,