This I can’t Ctrl+Alt+Fathom.
Sitting here, looking at my nana’s face, it strikes me that I can’t see her thoughts. Thoughts… thinking… the very proof which Rene Descartes cites for our existence is as equally invisible as ghosts. As our souls. It seems that if science is going to dismiss the possibility of a soul for lack of physical proof, scientists should also deny that thinking occurs. With this observation I glance at my sturdy, functional wristwatch and observe that only a minute has passed.
My nana catches me with my elbow cocked, my wristwatch twisted for me to look at the time, and she says, “Did you miss your old grandma, kitty-kins?” She exhales another plume of smoke toward the ceiling.
“Yes,” I lie, “I did. I missed you,” but I keep keyboarding to the contrary.
It doesn’t escape me that this is the central conflict of my life: I love and adore all of my family, except when I’m with them. No sooner do I enjoy a reunion with my long-dead Nana Minnie than I yearn to have my chain- smoking, half-blind beloved granny euthanized.
The unhappy reality is that medical euthanasia is at best a onetime solution.
Then it happens: a sound.
From the PH foyer it comes: a laugh.
I ask, “Is that your long-haired paranormal private detective?”
Nana Minnie points her cigarette in the direction of the ruckus, a man’s laugh, and she says, “That’s how come you ought not be here, duckling.” She taps the ghost ash off her ghost cigarette and brings the butt back to her mouth. “Myself, I’m conducting a little covert investigation,” she says, taking another puff. “You think I enjoys laying here surrounded by your lousy kiddy toys? Maddy, honey,” she says, “you done walked into a stakeout.”
DECEMBER 21, 8:12 A.M. EST
A Tryst Revealed!
Gentle Tweeter,
From elsewhere in the hotel suite comes the sound of a door, the dead bolt snapping open with a heavy clunk. No knock heralds it. No polite announcement of “Housekeeping!” or “Room service!” It’s the door which opens from the hotel hallway into the living room. The latch clicks. The hinges give a little sigh, and muffled footsteps sound against the marble tile of the suite’s foyer.
Sad to say, the dead can still suffer excruciating bouts of self-consciousness. Like you, the predecomposed, the postalive can feel utterly mortified by their own sordid confessions.
Take, for example, the following admission: I spent the fondest hours of my childhood with my ear pressed to the outside of my parents’ bedroom door. On the not-infrequent occasion when sleep eluded me in Athens or Abu Dhabi or Akron, I took great pleasure in eavesdropping on my parents’ carnal panting. Their coital groaning acted upon me as the sweetest lullaby. To my childhood ear those grunts and snorts were assurance of continued familial bliss. My parents’ bestial ejaculations guaranteed that my home wouldn’t crack up as had all those of my wealthy playmates. Not that I had playmates.
Rapping. Tapping. The culture of spiritualists is rife with ghosts knocking loudly. For souls stranded in a physical world it’s only common courtesy. Plainly put, no one wants to enter a room and witness a predead person pooing or vigorously engaged in performing the Hot Nasty.
Thus, ghosts always knock before they enter a room. Including me. Especially me. In the PH of the Rhinelander hotel, as I follow the sound of my father’s laugh, the unmistakable Thoroughbred stallion
The voice, my father’s voice, arrests my entry. What’s there to say concerning the renowned Antonio Spencer? The shape of his head is like that of a very handsome boulder. A landmark. Usually he speaks with a phony NPR intonation, but today his voice sounds naked and hairy.
In lieu of dissolving through the door and possibly witnessing a primal scene, I pace the foyer, enervated with guilt.
In the PH foyer, an electrical outlet catches my eye. We’ll revisit this practice in greater detail soon, but for the present please accept the fact that I pour my ghost ectoplasm into the tiny holes of a three-pronged outlet and worm along the copper wires buried within the hotel walls. Picture Charles Darwin navigating the steamy Amazonian river system. Arriving at a junction box, I guess the next wire and follow it to a new outlet. Soon I encounter the prongs of an extension cord. Shimmying along copper, I jump the gap of an open switch. Tunneling upward, I reach a dead end, lodged within a lightbulb. Not a roomy Thomas Edison incandescent bulb, mind you; this is a convoluted compact fluorescent lightbulb installed in a bedside lamp. Surrounding me, a vellum shade screens my view of the hotel room. I’m twisted inside a dark bulb, exactly the energy-efficient, eco-friendly option that my parents would choose, and the mercury tastes Ctrl+Alt+Foul. Surrounded by the lamp shade, I can only gaze down onto the wood-grain surface of a bedside table. There, like the elements of some torrid modern still life, my cramped view includes a PDA, a room key attached to a brass fob, an alarm clock, and the torn packaging leftover from a not-present condom.
Hark, the comforting slurp-some din of my parents frantically taxing their aged pleasure centers.
Please note, you future dead persons, whenever you shut off a fluorescent bulb or a cathode ray tube and see a residual photon-green glow, that glow is trapped human ectoplasm. Ghosts are forever being snared in lightbulbs.
Even now, coiled within a dark bulb, I indulge my ghost self by covert eavesdropping. Screened as I am, I can’t see them, but I can detect my father’s hoarse endearments. “Oh,” he says, “slow down.” My dad says, “I love what you’re doing, baby, but wait.” He says, “You’re going to send me right over the edge….”
At that, a hand snakes under the bottom edge of the lampshade. It’s a bony spider of a hand. Plaited with smooth muscle, it’s a serpent of an arm, its skin as smooth as a lizard’s scales. The fingernails are painted with chipped white polish, and pink stripes run from the base of the palm down the inside of the forearm, like a few furrows plowed in a fallow upstate field. These parallel pink lines run almost to the elbow. Ragged, they suggest the scant few inches of sodbusting accomplished by some old dirt farmer before he dropped dead of a lonely heart attack.
These scars, so rudely cut and freshly healed, they brand the bearer as a would-be suicide. Gentle Tweeters, I recognize these scars. I know this arm.
I know the desolate visuals of a hardscrabble upstate lifestyle.
A thin crescent of brown shows under each nail. It’s chocolate, the brown. To an expert eater, it’s clearly milk chocolate smudged from the outer layer of a Baby Ruth. Her touch is slippery with sweat and sticky with caramel. Her fingers fumble against the glass sides of the bulb, effectively fondling my face, soiling my hair. Caressing and molesting the ghost me contained here. These fingers smell like my father’s undershorts fermenting in the bottom of an overly heated Tunis laundry hamper. They smell the way my mother smelled when she’d giggle and stay belted in her bathrobe all morning. Those mornings, my mother would serenely pour organic wheatgrass juice, her cheeks ruddy and raw from my father’s morning stubble.
Not wearing my mother’s canary yellow engagement ring, this groping hand is not my mother’s hand.
Attached to the spidery fingers is the snake arm, a skinny shoulder, a slender neck. A face cranes from the bed, and two eyes peer under the lower edge of the lamp shade, looking directly at me as the fingers locate the switch and twist it. A face no older than that of a pretty high-schooler, in the new sixty-watt glare, it’s not my mother’s face.
Lipstick is smudged around this stranger’s mouth. Her cheeks are livid from whiskers which ought to be abrading my mother’s face. She’s looking up the bottom of the lamp shade as if she’s peering up a skirt. This strange lecher smiles into the glow of my hiding place, and she whispers, “What time is it?”
