Ghost of a Flea

make it slowly to my feet.

Chapter Twenty-Three

“Maybe you should call him.”

“Maybe you should stop giving people advice.”

Seven in the morning. Had I intentionally waited till I knew Larson would be gone, Alouette crowded for time?

“I’m sorry, Lew. That was uncalled for.”

I shrugged.

“But you’re right, these letters may be getting to me more than I admit, even to myself. Not that I understand why. There’s really not much there there. Nothing substantial, no real menace, all implication-if even that.” She paused. “Anyway, we’ve been out here on this train platform together before, Lewis. You can’t fix the lives of everyone you care for. You should be paying attention to your own.”

“I know.”

“Of course you know.” Her tone brought the word exasperation to mind. “David’s been gone how long now? What have you done about that?”

“He doesn’t want to be found.”

“Maybe not. But that begs the question, doesn’t it? You love David. You don’t want him out on the streets again.”

“What I want isn’t the important thing.”

“You know what it’s like, Lewis. You know.”

I nodded.

“So instead, you set yourself on a crusade to run down this guy who’s never done anything, who may just possibly be a stalker, but who might just as well be a good enough guy, maybe he’s only a little slow, a little backwards. Or you go galumphing out on your horse to try and Sam Spade some pigeon killers. Desperate men for sure.”

“I don’t know … sometimes it’s only when you don’t look on directly that you’re able to see a thing.”

“True enough. And birds who don’t find food for days at a time begin pecking up gravel and sand, preening themselves uncontrollably. It’s called displacement behavior.”

“Maybe you’ve been a social worker too long, dear.”

“And you-”

“-too long a fuck-up?”

“Well. As a longtime social worker, of course, I’d prefer troubled. Or conflicted.” She laughed. “Hold on a minute, the baby’s crying.” Not that shrill, fruit-bat cry you hear so often, but something at a lower pitch, human, authentic, that quickly subsided. Then Alouette was back. “For all of it, Lewis, you’re still far and away the truest person I’ve known, and the kindest.”

“I’d be flattered if it weren’t for the fact that the work you do tends to limit exposure to possible competitors.”

“There is that.” She laughed again, a full-bodied, rich, rolling laugh. Her mother’s laugh. “And while I’d love to go on discussing philosophy with you, absolutely one of my favorite pastimes at seven in the morning, God knows, looking out on a brick wall with the smell of soiled diapers lugging up behind me, I really do have to get to work.”

“We all have our burdens.”

“Ah, yes. The many responsibilities our freedom entails. As that brick wall-I’m sure Heidegger and Sartre must point out somewhere-demonstrates.”

I hung up the phone and carried mine (burdens, responsibilities) out to the kitchen like any good Southerner and, sitting at the table there, doused them with quantities of coffee. Times past, dans le temps as Vicky would put it, this is where we’d all gather, LaVerne and myself, Cherie, Clare, Don in the months he stayed with us, Alouette, David, half a dozen others over the years. Now I sat alone with haphazard hands of plates, cups and saucers dealt out across the Formica surface, brambles of cutlery, a jar of crystallized honey, plastic tumbler with half an inch of milk left at the bottom. Fanned beside them a week or two of mail. Pick a card. Electric, water and gas bills, lots of circulars, Visa, offers from video clubs, cable, Internet and other service providers, dues for the Authors Guild, plot rent for my parents’ graves. Another stack of Deborah’s working notes, which, though done with, would live here, I knew, until I found them new quarters. She’d left a note tacked to the fridge.

Up with the birds.

Sorry I was so late last night. Didn’t want to wake you.

Rehearsals are going well. Scarily well, actually. That feeling of what’s happened here, it’s got away from us all.

But in the best possible way. (Still scary.)

Any chance you can mind the store today, maybe the next couple of days, afternoons?

We open this weekend. Can you believe it? I’ll grab breakfast out, probably just swing by McDonald’s for a sausage biscuit. Not exactly Griffin fare, but hey.

Love you.

Hey.

Bat in his characteristic way suddenly appeared, leaping to the table, and sat watching me, tail sweeping slow, serpentine S’s. Nothing’s more important than the connections we make to others. It’s all we have, finally. We move towards one another and away, close again, all these half-planned, intricate steps and patterns. Stand there far too often holding our bagloads of good intentions, shifting them from hip to hip, looking foolish.

Bat leaned onto his front legs and stretched, rump pushed up, to show what he thought of my reveries. By way of thanks, I fed him.

I may not have hobbled down to the park, but it felt like it. According to doctors and therapists, there were no sequelae from the stroke, only a little residual weakness, which was to be expected. Neither Deborah nor Don admitted to being able to see any compromise or debility, any change in the way I got around. But I’d go to push up out of a chair and find myself grabbing at things-not so much that I couldn’t perform the physical act as that the world no longer represented itself to me as stable, dependable. I wondered if this was what Clare had felt, this pause, like a shield or a window, between intent and action, desire and spasm. Lester sat looking out over the park, a sheen of sweat, like varnish that hadn’t taken, on the mahogany of his forehead.

“Lewis,” he said as I sank onto the bench beside him. “How you doing?”

“Good enough, all things considered.”

“You’ve been poorly then? Know I’ve missed seeing you.”

I filled him in on my hospital stay.

He nodded. “Thing is, over the years you commence to spending so much time there, those hospital stays get to be like bus rides for you. Ain’t the way you’d choose to travel, but you know that’s the only way you’re ’bout to get from one place to another now.”

We were all but alone in the park. A scatter of unfamiliar faces. I asked Lester about this.

“People done got scared, I think, some of them anyway. Pondering if what killed them birds might not just come after them ’n’ their children next.”

“The deaths haven’t stopped, then?”

Lester nodded, not in agreement this time, indicating.

“Look at that sorry flock. What, ten or twelve birds? And most of them gimped up one way or another. You remember how it used to be, Lewis. They’d come in in swarms. Something startled them and they took off, all those wings, it was like this sudden great wind. They’d all but shut off the sun for a moment or two.” He sipped his drink, one or another of those horribly sweet concoctions, Zima or such, pitched to us blacks, and laughed. “’Course, this far along, remembering how things used to be starts looming large for us, doesn’t it? We