locked with the eyes of this stranger. Perhaps here is the ghost hunter my nana tried to caution me about.
Gentle Tweeter, you may label me as a snotty elitist, but it still amazes me to see Americans in the United States. For most of my childhood I’ve trekked from Andorra to Antigua to Aruba, all of those glorious tax-haven states, in the constant migration of income tax exiles as they seek to shelter their gargantuan salaries in Belize and Bahrain and Barbados. My general impression was that the United States had shipped all of its citizens offshore and become largely operated and inhabited by illegal aliens.
Yes, you might occasionally see someone wearing a maid’s uniform or driving a Town Car, but the man I find in our penthouse foyer, he’s clearly no one’s servant. For starters, he’s glowing. Radiating a clear, blue light. It’s not as if he contains a lightbulb; it’s more as if he’s something faceted, a jewel, collecting the ambient light. His face is hazy and indistinct, I realize, because I’m seeing both the front and the back of his head, his eyes, and his hair simultaneously. It’s like holding the page of a book against sunshine so strong that the print on both sides is legible. It’s dazzling, the way every angle of a diamond is visible at one glance. Through him I can see the buildings outside the window, the gray view over Central Park. His hair hangs down his back in a braid as long and thick as a moldering baguette. Each strand looks as clear and iridescent as Asian glass noodles. His neck is stretched cellophane, the skin pleated with tendons and veins. His suit coat, his pant legs, even his soiled running shoes are translucent as spit.
Standing there, his arms hanging at his sides, he trembles like a column of smoke. When he opens his lips they’re as faint as the undulating form of a jellyfish swimming through some disgusting undersea documentary. His voice sounds muffled, as if I’m hearing a man whisper secrets in another room.
To CanuckAIDSemily, yes, before I died, this is how I’d imagined a ghost would appear.
Haggard and weary, he says, “You’re that dead kid.”
He sees me.
“Are you…?” I ask. I gag on my own question.
His form sways a little from side to side. Just as he starts to topple in one direction, he stiffens with a jerk as if jarred awake. He overcompensates and begins to collapse in the opposite direction. Not quite standing straight, his fragile stance is a sustained series of barely arrested falls.
Gentle Tweeter, I may not know the much-touted womanly pleasures of menstruation, but I can recognize a junkie when I meet one. Life with Camille and Antonio Spencer meant rubbing elbows with a wide variety of the chemically dependent.
Dumbfounded, I swallow. My throat dry, I ask, “Are you God?”
“Little dead girl…” he seems to whisper. He’s dissipating, and not in a metaphorical way. He’s evaporating. His hands, dissolving like milk mixed into water. His words less than an echo, soft as a thought, he says, “Look for me in room number sixty-three fourteen. Find me.” Only the trail of his voice remains as he says, “Come tell me a secret that only your mother would know….”
DECEMBER 21, 8:30 A.M. EST
My Parents Dispatch an Emissary
Gentle Tweeter,
Here and now in the Rhinelander hotel, I trace the electrical lines from my parents’ penthouse to room 6314. This, in response to the mysterious advice from the ghostly vision, the translucent man with his not-clean hair tortured into a hippie braid no less off-putting than the soiled tail of some incontinent upstate hay burner. My thanks to CanuckAIDSemily for asking, but yes, a ghost can be haunted by ghosts. My nana, case in point, she remains in my penthouse bedroom, smoking, loitering, by her very presence reminding me of our shared summer in the tedious Empire State, and the myriad horrors that were to occur there.
Skating along electrical circuits, past solderless connections and with a not-small number of wrong turns, I emerge from the slotted holes of an outlet in room 6314. The setting: a room in the back of the house, overlooking Barneys and the pond in Central Park South, two upholstered chairs near the window, a chest of drawers, a bed —every surface, no doubt, alive with blood-besotted bedbugs. Between the two chairs stands a small glass-topped table, and streaked across the glass are white trails of powder. A scale model of the Andes. The Apennines. The rugged Galapagos Islands, only rendered in peaks of crystalline white dust. A single-edged razor blade lies beside the heaps. Sprawled beneath the glass-topped table is my enigmatic visitor, chest down, his head twisted to one side. He lies there on the carpet, to all appearances dead. A tightly rolled tube of paper juts from one nostril. This tube is likewise dusted with the table’s white residue.
Gentle Tweeter, life with my former-stoner, former-crackhead, former-snow-blind parents has left me too acclimated to this tableau. Even as I situate my ghost self on the edge of the bed, the sprawled denizen moans. His eyelids flutter. You’d mistake his torso and limbs for a not-fresh pile of sweat-stained laundry save for the gentle rise and fall of his breathing. His trembling hands push against the room’s carpet, and the scarecrow ensemble of patched blue jeans, a plaid flannel shirt, a fringed suede jacket, it clutches at a chair and hauls itself to a standing position. No longer magically transparent, this not-appealing flesh-depleted person casts his gaze around the hotel room, asking, “Little dead girl?”
This, this must be the parapsychological private detective dispatched by my mom.
You’d be hard-pressed to guess his age. The skin of his face is pebbled and flushed as if it were a delicious creme caramel bombe frosted with a raspberry-ricotta streusel of festering boils. What at first I took to be a huge upper lip is merely a bushy lip-colored mustache. Creases web every trace of his exposed neck, his arms and hands, as if he’s been folded over and folded over, like strudel dough, and now he can never again be smoothed flat. His bloodshot eyes sweep back and forth across the room, and he says, “Little dead girl, are you here? Did you come like I told you?”
As with so many of the chemically dependent, the man looks older than any cadaver.
It would seem that he can’t see me. Yes, I could flick the lights or flash the television to confirm my attendance; instead I wait.
The rolled paper still protrudes from his nose and he plucks it out. “Send me a sign,” he says. His hands unroll the paper, stretching it flat. It’s a photograph of my mother hugging me, both of us smiling at the camera. It’s the cover of an old
Along its bottom edge the photo is darkened with damp from his nose. Fat as I am, my mom’s arms go all the way around me. I smell the memory of her perfume.
Intrigued, I relent, slowly drawing the window curtains closed against the view.
The hobo’s head swivels so fast, turning to stare at the moving curtains, that his loathsome pigtail swings in a wide arc. “Success!” he shouts, and pumps a stony fist in the air. “I found you!” As he stumbles in a circle, his eyes sweep the room. His fingers grope as if he could snatch my invisible form. “Your old lady is going to be so jazzed.” He’s not looking at me. He’s not looking at anything as his eyes scan every corner. He’s talking everywhere, saying, “This proves I am
“I call myself a ‘psychic bounty hunter,’” he says. “Little dead girl, your old lady is paying me big bucks to locate you.”
Yes, CanuckAIDSemily, you understood correctly. This much-eroded ragamuffin referred to himself as a
The man’s eyelids blink, open, blink, but they stay blinked too long each time, as if he keeps dozing off. Jerking awake, his eyes spring wide, and he says, “What was I saying?” He offers a handshake to thin air and says, “My name is Crescent City. Don’t laugh.” His outstretched fingers are palsied, trembling. “Before, my real
