James Sallis - Ghost of a Flea

“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 don’t be careful, that can get to be all we think about.”

He took another sip. The container hovered in the hinterland between dumbbell-and vase-shaped, label bright red and blue. Some sort of dog on it? A naked woman? Could even be a truck. “You ever tried this shit?”

I shook my head.

“Don’t.”

The hand holding the abomination lifted, two ruler-long fingers unfurling.

“Walk over to the other side of those bushes, Lewis, and you’ll come across a fair stretch of grave sites. Lots of birds been laid to rest back there. We put them in the ground ourselves, the boy and me. Just a few at first, then sometimes, later on, as many as three or four a day. With whatever ceremony we could manage.”

He put the container, mostly empty, on the bench beside him. A group of Hispanic teens sat together atop a slide, stretch of dark midriff showing between the girl’s sweater and skirt, guys exhibiting their own brand of midriff: two inches or so of boxer shorts peeked out over low-slung denims. Thirty degrees out and they’ve got skin showing. Tough kids.

“Boy won’t come with me anymore,” Lester said. “Almost got him here a couple of times. Tell him we were going for a walk, maybe we’d stop off for doughnuts after. But then he’d see where we were going and commence to crying and shaking. You remember how much he loved being here, Lewis. It’s a sad thing, truly sad. Boy don’t have much. His room, the park. Now half that’s got taken from him.”

Lester sat shaking his head. “Maybe there really isn’t any more to it. Maybe it don’t make sense and ain’t meant to. Vanity and vexation of the spirit, just like it says in Ecclesiastes.”

He laid a hand on my knee and I found myself wondering if in all these years we’d ever before touched. Surely we’d at least shaken hands. Right: that single, pained handshake.

“Good seeing you again, Lewis. Good that you’re up and about again, too.”

“That’s a lot of goods for someone quoting Ecclesiastes, downer of all downers, just moments ago.”

“What can I say?” The hand came up off my leg; those impossibly long fingers unfolded in the space before us and moved there expressively, putting me in mind of branches in gentle wind, of Dante: Half into life’s journey I came to myself within a dark wood where the straight way was lost. “It’s a character flaw. Try as I will, no matter how I practice and worry over it, I simply can not stay glum for very long.” He pushed himself up off the bench. “I’d best be getting back to the boy now.”

I said good-bye, that I’d see him soon.

“Maybe, if you found time, you might even come see the boy again? I think, when you did, that was good for him. I noticed a difference just after.”

“I’ll plan on it, then.”