Edward Lee - Quest for Sex, Truth & Reality

At least the ghost seemed to understand. Smith caught frequent glimpses now, since the call-girl had arrived. He felt certain that the more effectively he strove to conquer the question — What is real? — the more real the ghost would become.

“I smell perfume,” the girl remarked.

“Yes,” Smith said but did not elaborate. “In other words, I merely need to see you, all of you.”

“Ah,” the girl said, stretching the word. “Now I get it. Now I know what you mean.” She smiled, a manufactured wickedness, and took off the short fuchsia dress. “You just want to watch. That’s okay. It’s your dime.”

Smith’s “dime,” in this case, had been a $150 escort fee on his charge card, plus “tip.” He’d given her several hundred in cash, all he had left in the apartment. What did he need money for? He’d never really needed it in life. What good would it do him now?

“Show me your beauty,” Smith said.

Off, then, came the garters, the stockings and frilly lace bra, all the same vibrant, bright fuchsia. She wore no panties. What stood before Smith now was her raw, physical reality. But— Not enough, he thought, squinting past his desk. He needed to see her beauty, and at first she did indeed strike him as beautiful…

Smith tipped up the desklamp. “Come closer. Please. Closer to the desk.”

She sauntered forward like a chic model on a runway, and assumed quick poses, turning before the light. Flesh flashed in cold glare. Glance by glance, the beauty collapsed.

The silken white-blond hair and bangs clashed with the waxed, black pubic patch. The rhinoplastied nose seemed too perfect on the elegant face. Smith’s eyes calculated up the supple physique, and snagged. Minute cannula marks pocked along her trim hips and waist, from liposuction, and when she raised her arms, the erect orbs of her breasts easily displayed the hairline implant scars.

She blinked at him, her smile freezing. Even the crystal-blue eyes were a lie, designer contacts.

“Thank you,” Smith said. “You may go now.”

Her nude, pretty shoulders shrugged. “It’s your dime.” Then she quickly put her clothes back on and left.

The ghost was laughing.

On the night he was to die, Smith awakened as if rising from a lime pit. The darkness swarmed. His eyes felt plucked open by fish hooks.

You should have more faith, the hiss whispered.

“Yes,” he muttered. He walked to his desk, wizened as a dried corpse in the moonlight. Faith? he wondered. Smith didn’t believe in God. Perhaps he should have. Nevertheless, he doubted that the ghost meant religious faith.

Faith in me. Faith in what is real.

He’d failed again, he’d misconstrued everything. He’d never know reality now, only the reality of death, of being embalmed and buried, of reverting to slime in a box. But what was he — a writer — really dying of? Cancer, or the failure to recognize what was real? Prevarications were killing him, not disease.

Deserts, he thought. Wastelands. All the lies of history.

Only two realities mattered now. His dying flesh, and the ghost.

He saw it more clearly now than ever, which made sense. It faced the window, naked in its oblivion, a razorline shape of inverted oddments of darkness and light. “You’re real, aren’t you?” Smith stated more than asked.

Only you can make me real, the hiss replied.

Smith felt adrift on the scent of her — or its — perfume. But how could he make it real? Did it mean that it was only half-real now? Did it mean there was something about Smith that could unloose the ghost’s full reality?

“Assimilation?” Smith lit a cigarette, his last. “No,” he felt. “Transposition.” Perhaps he’d been correct all-along, back when he’d been talking to the blonde call-girl. Correct, but on the wrong tangent. It was his trade that had summoned the ghost — he was a writer, a creator, or, more accurately, a re- creator. Writers re-created their own conceptions of images of reality and blended them with abstraction, transposing the images, and making both the conception and the abstraction, in a sense—

Real, he thought.

He’d only been partly right. Beauty reflected only a semantic; it was something created, not transposed. Smith stared at the shifting figure, and its ebon glint. It seemed to gaze back at him, over the shadow-boned shoulder…

“Too late, though, hmm?” Of course. His life was over. His face felt sucked in. The old heart began to skip within the sunken cage of his chest. But at least he would die pondering this; at least he would die trying.

Ghosts. Not Dickensian specters flailing chains and moaning amid graveyards. Not transparent apparitions and sheet-shapes. Ghosts would be entities of human backwash, of unfulfillment, of failure. Ghosts would be slivers of the real world. And what was the world, then? A realm, not a sphere of rock, a domain of…transposition — a mutable domain, one that squirmed with each new generation, and each new age.

The ghost turned. Its black-chasm eyes widened.

“Now I’ve got you going, eh?” Smith felt proud. “The old dying stick in the mud isn’t as dumb as you thought.”

Make me real, came the hushed reverberation.

“I don’t know how,” Smith testily replied.

But you do.

Was it weeping? It seemed to be, perhaps as Smith, secretly, had wept over his entire life. Behind him on the wall hung a de Kooning print, A Study of Woman Number One, which he regarded as the greatest painting of the 20th Century. The painting reminded him of a girl from his dim past, but he’d never told her his real feelings. Hence, it felt too fitting to be overlooked by an image of this most monumental failure. Smith breathed shallowly now in that total loss. At least pain reminded him he was still momentarily alive.

Next, he turned on the radio. Vivaldi seemed nice to die to, or a light nocturne by Field. Besides, Smith wanted beautiful music as he confronted the ghost. He knew something now: the ghost — this shadow-person — was his confessor.

He rose, joints clicking, as he crossed the nighted room, atrophied, shrivel-penised, and as pale as death already. He could feel the cancer percolating, and it was a surprisingly neutral sensation. Transposition, he considered. Each new generation, each new age. Yes, the world was a realm of emotion, of which this queer thing in his room had surely been born. Out of the dark, the radio squawked another day’s unholy news. A bomb had exploded on an airliner, scattering hundreds of bodies across the outskirts of Los Angeles. A Florida man who had raped a 15-year-old girl and severed her arms at the elbows was paroled, after eight years, for good behavior. A coterie of scientists convened in Washington, citing the benefits of using brain tissue from aborted fetuses for genetic research. Terrorists had thrown seven satchel charges into an Israeli maternity ward…

Look. The ghost indicated the window. Smith peered out. At first, what he saw seemed beautiful: a warm endless night chipped by stars, the high, resplendent moon, and man’s crisp, perfectly symmetrical monuments. The scape of buildings looked like an intricate carved mesa of flawless black, still with tiny lights.

“It’s beautiful,” Smith muttered.

But then its reality rose before the vision. Flashing red and blue lights of terror. Sirens. Gunshots. Distant screams. A cool breeze carried in the chaotic stench.

Smith blinked.

Revere me. Make me real.

The ghost shifted. Now he understood.

It’s time now, isn’t it? Time for a new realm? Your realm is done, isn’t it?