James Sallis: Ghost of a Flea

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.

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?”

“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, “Happy you’re getting the chance to do this.” The grant came jointly through Tulane’s drama department and a loose association of several local arts foundations. She’d learned of it from one of her regular customers at the flower shop, a cardiologist on the board of a couple of those foundations, and had applied more or less on whim.

“Me too. I thought … well, I guess I thought the theatre thing was all over, that I’d had whatever chance I was likely to get.”

“No second acts in American lives?”

“Something like that.”

I sat down beside her now as I had then.

“Thanks, Lew.” She stared for a moment at the script. Commentary and notes had begun not to change the play in any elemental manner but subtly to reshape it, urging plot, surround, self and minions toward-what? She didn’t know. That’s what she was searching for. “Hellacious amount of work hiding in the woodpile.”

“And one hell of a woodpile. But it just so happens we’re running a special on homilies this week, Ms. O’Neil. Two for one.” Made as though to rummage in a bag, see what we had left. “Got Anything worth doing, If it was easy, Hang tough. Few more in there, looks like.” I leaned close. “Just between the two of us, marking them down’s the only way we’ve found to move this stuff off the shelves.”

“Like what Bierce said about good advice.”

“Right. Only thing you can do with it’s give it to someone else-fast.”

She was, as usual, wearing a long, full skirt, and when she leaned back, drawing legs under, the skirt took away not only her legs but the chair’s as well, along with a good few inches of floor.

A group of young people went by laughing and from the sound of it doing their version of dirty dozens on the street outside.

“That’s something else I never thought I’d have, Lew. Couldn’t imagine ever being close enough to someone long enough to have private jokes, places, thoughts that didn’t need to be completed, stories all our own. I love having that, Lew.”

“I do too.”

We sat there quietly a moment.

“I could fix more coffee,” I said.

“Two pots are enough-even for New Orleanians.”

She leaned forward to turn on the radio, found some small-combo jazz, Dolphyesque baritone sax weaving a floor for guitar and piano to walk on. Then a soprano sax sounding scarily like Sidney Bechet started up. Another New Orleans boy like Louis Armstrong and with him one of the truly great jazz soloists. They’d always said Bechet was so good you could put him in front of an army band and he’d even swing that . Bechet, who’d play great music anytime, anywhere, but would never consent to play nigger, and went off to Paris to live instead.