James Sallis - Ghost of a Flea

“Nothing like that on Maddox Bay, though. Nothing for tourists. Just a lot of thrown-together shacks, porches and patios tacked onto cheap aluminum trailers set up on blocks. Boats with outboard motors the size of oil drums coursed in and out from rough docks or slid directly down muddy banks into scummy water. I loved the way they’d slow, cut back to almost nothing, whenever they passed other boats with people fishing, then rev back up. Fishermen cleaned their catch on the bank, tossing scales, fins, heads and intestines back in the water.

“One late afternoon I came walking out of the woods, bank neither dull, dirt nor mud here but heaped with seashells, hundreds of them, thousands, that glinted powerfully in late sunlight, crunching as I walked into them. They appeared whole at first, but when I bent to pick one up and looked closely, not much was left: only the overall form, a patchwork of narrow bridges between round holes.

“Buttons, my father explained when I told him of my discovery. They’d punched out holes in all those shells to make buttons, then dumped them there, in mounds.”

His eyes strayed again to the window, back to us.

“There was a point to all this. Really there was.”

“You need to rest now,” Catherine said.

“You’re right, my dear. One of many things I need. Most of which I’ll never have.”

She took him off to bed and, twenty minutes later, returned, sinking down beside me on the steel-gray leather couch.

“I had to let him tell you, Lewis. It wasn’t my place to do so.”

“I understand.”

For a time then, we sat without speaking.

“I’m so tired. I can’t even begin to imagine how he must feel.”

“Someday you have to tell me how you came to be here, doing this,” I said.

“Does it really seem that strange to you?”

“Ever the more, as I get to know you.”

“Then someday I will.” Her head rested against my shoulder. “I’ve always been a sucker for men who say ever the more.”

Moments later, she was asleep.

“I’m faxing through a list of employees from that period. To Assistant Superintendent Santos at NOPD, right?”

“Right.” My own fax hadn’t worked in years. Don suggested Santos, who agreed over the phone with a verbal shrug.

“This is all … unorthodox, Mr. Griffin.”

“I appreciate that, Dr. Ball. And I thank you for your help.”

“I do have assurances from my colleague Richard Garces and from Captain Don Walsh-”

Captain Emeritus, I’d have to start calling him.

“-both of whom vouch for you personally, and for the legitimacy of your request. They explained what was going on here. God knows women in our society are prey to enough, without this sort of thing. I can only hope the information will help you.”

“Yes, sir. I’m sure it will.”

“The list should at any rate be with Officer Santos now. I’ve alerted my secretary, Miss Eddington-”

For a moment I thought he said Errington.

“-that you may call back. She should be able to help you with any further information or assistance you need.”

“Once again, doctor, thank you.”

The line stayed open.

“Is there anything else?”

“Look, I know this is a long shot. You couldn’t possibly be the same Lewis Griffin who wrote Skull Mea t and The Old Man, right?”

“Right.”

“Right you couldn’t?”

“Right I am.”

“My God. I have a first edition of Skull Meat .”

“Not many of those around these days.”

“Tell me about it. Took me years to find one. And I gave up a few dinners for it.”

“The thing sold for sixty cents.”

“Exactly. Look, there’s no reason you’d remember me …”

I waited.

“I did my psychiatric residency at Mandeville. Ears that stuck out like jug handles, and I was greener than green, only the vaguest idea what I was doing or even what I was supposed to be doing-not that I realized it at the time. That was, I don’t know, forty years ago? Some time well into the Sixties, anyway. I took care of you, Mr. Griffin. You were my patient.”

“Dr. Ball…. I remember. You looked like a kid on his paper route.”

“I was a kid.”

“You came to the ward, had to be past midnight. They came and got me out of the dorm. You’d been off for the weekend, and whoever covered for you had cut meds without telling me. I thought it was all coming back on me. You heard about it when the other doctor reported off and were worried.”

“I was trying to cover my ass.”

“That’s not what I saw in your face. What I saw there was kindness-something I didn’t see often around those parts.”

Hornets hung buzzing in the line as neither of us spoke.

“The parts haven’t changed.”

“Then maybe we have, at least.”

“We hope.”

Half an hour later I’d worked my way a few inches into a bottle of Scotch and had the TV on, clicking back and forth from news reports to the “reality shows” that had become so popular-middle-class men and women plucked from comfortable lives and inserted where they had no business being, prisons, ghettos, deserted islands, strolling about beneath the umbrella of hidden cameras-unable finally to see much difference, all of it a blur. The news as presented seemed to me no less fictive or contrived than the situations of these shows. I’d been cast into some latter-day vortex, Poe’s maelstrom.

In the storm of information around us, events are reported as they occur. Breathlessly we’re rushed from one crisis or catastrophe to another. Broom-straws of truth get driven, quivering like arrows, into the sides of houses, barns, telephone poles. Cows appear bellowing on roofs. Tension mounts and mounts but there’s never resolution. Cameras, reporters and commentators move on to the next big thing, the latest country invaded or fallen to military coup, the newest political scandal, this week’s hot actor or teenage music sensation. We’re caught in an endless loop, there’s no way out.

“I woke you.”

“Well … yes. It is the middle of the night.”

The phone was a dead, cold thing in my hand. Without sound the TV went on spilling errant light, images and icons into the room. I looked at the clock. Just past three. Time of night when ancients thought the soul drifted farthest from the body and might be harvested.

“I’m sorry, Catherine.”

I listened as her breathing changed.

“Is something wrong?”

“No. I came home, had a few drinks-”

“I can tell that.”

“-but couldn’t sleep.” Guidry’s Proustian fugues had taken root in me. My mind became a city dump, trucks pulling in every five minutes, barrels of refuse tumbling over one another, vermin swarming. “I started off thinking about apartments I’ve lived in. Next it was bits and pieces of books.”

“Yours?”

“And others’. Before long, I’d moved on to remembering old friends. And after that I was all over the place. Thinking about my first trumpet, of all things. My parents got it off some friend they said had played with the territory bands back in the Forties. Looked to be made out of pot metal and kept falling apart at the struts, it’d just come open like a book in the middle of songs. Or a yellow nylon shirt I had as a kid. You could see right through it, and the thing was light as a scarf, light as breath itself. For a week or two that was the coolest thing I’d ever seen, coolest thing I’d ever owned.

“Then I remembered a school project, seventh grade, maybe. We were reading Great Expectations and had to do something to ‘illustrate or dramatize’ Dickens’s imagination. But it wasn’t Dickens’s imagination that interested me, and I went right to the heart of what did. In my father’s workshop I built a small platform, like a stage set, divided in half. One side showed things the way Miss Havisham saw them: the wedding veil, the cake and so on. And the other half showed what it was all really like. Cobwebs, the rotted gown. At the time I couldn’t have had any idea that I was defining a vital space for myself, recognizing that a kind of zone or crawl space existed between those two worlds.”