James Sallis - Ghost of a Flea

Dog Boy’s eyes when I introduced them were all I’d ever need as thanks. I’d stopped off at a pet shop on the way to pick up food, treats, cage-size avian equivalents of parallel bars and vaulting horses. You give someone a pigeon, you want it to be a fit pigeon. Mr. Blue looked every bit as pleased as the boy.

“Thank you, Lewis,” Lester said. I’d been doing my best to shuttle off unseen down the stairs, but Lester came hobbling after me. “Hope it makes a difference,” I told him.

I’d barely got home-to an empty house again, but no matter-when a call from Lester asserted that indeed it had made a difference. The boy’s up, moving around, he said, for the first time in weeks. “He and Mr. Blue are sitting by the window in his room, looking out. It’s a sight.”

The next call was from Don.

I’d managed to get out most of the first syllable, “Hel-” before he started in.

“How much you know about this Guidry character?”

“Don. Good to hear from you. I’ve been fine. And you? Jeeter fitting right in, Jeanette okay with it, they’re getting along?”

Silence at the other end.

Finally: “You through?”

“I guess.”

“So what do you know about Guidry?”

“Not a lot. Some kind of doctor, though I’m not sure he ever had much of a practice. He did have connections, though. Old money, I assumed. That whole underground Creole-society thing.”

“What I’m wondering about here is previous marriages-before LaVerne.”

“None that I know of. But you pretty much know what I know. He treasured Alouette.”

“So did LaVerne. Enough that, just to stay with her, she allowed her own life to be completely taken over by him.”

“True enough.”

“Guidry was well along in years when he and LaVerne hooked up. You think the wick stayed dry all those years?”

“Probably not, but-”

“No fucking way.”

For a moment I thought I heard steps on the porch. “Okay. So why do I get the feeling this conversation has suddenly gone multiple choice?” Key in the lock? Deborah? David? No. Just this old house breathing.

“Not that I have much of anything,” Don said. “Lots of blanks that need filling in. Like all our lives. Years of monthly payments stretching back to the Seventies, for instance-to Gladstone Hall, whatever that is. And something that looks suspiciously like a trust fund, though so far I haven’t been able to get in close enough for a good look. Administered by Guidry’s lawyers, at any rate. Firewalls thick all around. I’ll keep chipping away. Rick’s on it, too.”

He paused.

“You okay, Lew?”

“Tired. A little the worse for wear.” I filled him in on the party scene back at apartment 4-A.

“Getting kinda long in the tooth for that kind of action, my friend.”

“Tell me about it.”

“You need me to come over there?”

“What for? Party’s over.”

“You don’t sound real good.”

“Nothing a few hours’ sleep won’t help. Say twelve or fourteen? I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

“You sure?”

“I’m sure.”

We went back and forth a couple times more before hanging up. I snagged a Shiraz-cabernet blend from the kitchen pantry and sat by the front window, level of wine in the bottle and daylight outside falling at pretty much the same pace. I thought about Dog Boy and Mr. Blue sitting by their window watching this same night fall. Wondered if David might be looking out a window somewhere, where that might be if so, and what he might be thinking. Then, for whatever reason, I found myself struggling to recall ambition, wondering just why, year after year, I’d gone on pushing my way through all those cases, gone on fighting so hard for a handful of lost and damaged people, why I’d sunk myself and so much of my life into a handful of peripheral, forgotten books.

Light and wine both gone, I left those emptinesses behind and took my own upstairs to bed.

I was in a library and the library was on fire. I grabbed books at random off the shelves, stuffing them underarm. Had to save what I could, as many as I could. Down a corridor towards me strolled James Joyce, tip of a handsome malacca cane tapping the floor in front of him, shoes buffed to a high polish but severely down at the heels, eyes huge behind glasses. “Is there, sir, a problem?” The elevator door opened. Borges stood inside. His useless, boiled-egg eyes swept over me. He wore a well-appointed three-piece pinstripe suit, one black shoe, one brown. “Milton,” he said, “has anyone seen John Milton? He was just here. We were talking.” I scuttled towards the stairway, books spilling from my arms….

Whereupon the library’s fire alarm there in that fanciful land became my telephone here in this unregenerate one.

And whereupon, when my arm appeared to ignore the message sent it-simple enough directions, after all: reach out, pick up the phone-I panicked. I knew this lag, this recalcitrance. I’d had another stroke, and a worse one this time, no doubt about it. What should be currents pulsing down the wires of nerves had become a spray of welder’s sparks. Everything got worse. Always. The world’s single immutable law.

But in fact the arm had only fallen asleep. Seconds later (though at the time it seemed far longer) the arm responded. I watched as, pins and needles firing along its length, it followed through. Found the phone, fetched it to me. Still felt as though my shoulder had two or three pounds of dead meat strapped to it. Then tongue and palate repeated the misfire.

“Lew?” Deborah said in response to my gaugh ?

I tried again, coming up with, approximately, Yeg-guh .

“Lew, are you all right?” Alarm in her voice now.

Swallowing, clearing my throat. Trying out a few vowels and diphthongs offstage, then swinging the mouthpiece back towards me. Humming, I remembered reading somewhere, humming was supposed to relax your vocal cords.

“Lew, what are you doing? What the hell is that?”

“Humming.”

“Humming. As in bird.”

“Right: humming pigeon. Humming relaxes the vocal cords. Like doing warm-ups, stretches.”

“But you’re all right.”

“I’m fine. Sorry. It’s been a tough day. I was flat out, dreamless.” No way I’d tell her just how tough it had been, or why. “What time is it?”

Silence on the line. Finally: “We’ve been together what, four or five years now, Lew?”

“Something like that.”

“You have any idea how often, in all those years, you asked me the time?”

“No.”

“Never. Not once. Clocks, dates, time of day, none of that ever had much to do with the way you live your life.”

Which, upon reflection, was probably true, and I had to wonder, as she did, why now such things should matter. Hand meanwhile had distinguished itself from phone and begun its climb back up the phylogenetic slope. Switching the phone to the other, I shook the left heartily, worked it as though pumping the bulb of a sphygmomanometer that (I had little doubt) would reveal a dramatically elevated blood pressure. Like many things in life, alcohol for instance, relationships, or writing books, the meds had worked for a while, then stopped working.

“Still at rehearsal?”

“Not really-though there’s a chance we might go back. That’s why I’m calling.” She waited and, when I said no more, went on. “You sure you’re okay, I don’t need to come home?”

“I’m sure.”

“Okay.”

Crackles and pops in the wire.

“Things haven’t been going too well for us lately. That’s not exactly news, I guess. A lot of it’s my fault. I wanted so badly to find some way off the track. And now I’ve been so immersed in getting the play done. When I have coffee, whether or not I eat or sleep, deliveries at the store, sales there, regular hours-none of that seems to matter much anymore. I used to feel like this a lot, Lew. All the time. I wasn’t sure I ever would again.”