Spider on My Tongue (4 page)

~ * ~

And Barbara W. Barber wasn't even attractive.

~ * ~

During those first awful years in Manhattan, after Phyllis Pellaprat dissipated, I ran. Of course. You get spooked, you feel threatened, you become paranoid, you run. Oldest human failing in the book. Because when you
(they)
run,
they
(you) follow. You run, they follow.
They
run,you follow.

And there they
(you)
are—at the corner, around the block, asleep on an awning, under a table, sitting
at
the table and enjoying a stiff drink, piloting yellow cabs, grinning vacantly, or rabidly, from behind windows and locked doors, begging for change, giving change, holding hands and kissing and playing hopscotch, screeching like owls selling puppies on busy streets, asking, endlessly, for an elevator to be held.

These are the things I knew about Phyllis Pellaprat after our first
week together, at Art DeGraff's apartment: I knew that she was
intelligent, that she was incredibly sensual, that she liked to play
Yahtzee—Christ, she liked to play Yahtzee—and I knew also
that she was not a romantic. This disappointed me because I am
a romantic; I have always been a romantic—the words
I love
you
fly
easily from my lips. And when I said to her, for the very
first time, "Phyllis, I love you," her reaction was not what I had
hoped for.

—A Manhattan Ghost Story

One clear spring morning a year before I left Manhattan, I came home from a quick run for groceries, opened my apartment door, and found the apartment pitch black. I usually left my curtains drawn (mostly because of what lurked beyond the windows, and what peered
through
them), so, even in daylight, the apartment was often dimly lighted (one sees blessedly little in the near darkness), but this darkness was total: I stopped with one foot in the apartment, the other in the hallway, and I listened. I heard nothing. I peered hard into the darkness. I saw nothing.

"Is someone here?" I whispered, realized my cowardice, and said it louder: "Is someone here?" Nothing. I stood very still for a few moments, then withdrew my foot, so I was standing in the hallway again, door open, darkness beyond.

Think of this: You're driving alone on a country lane. It isn't night, it's bright daylight, in fact; the country lane smells good through your open windows, and the sunlight on the tall grasses, the wild flowers and the occasional honeybee makes you believe, for one beautiful moment, that there must be a God, otherwise, a day such as this simply could not exist. So you smile, and you love the smile (you even glance briefly at it in your rearview mirror because you don't think you've
smiled that way in a long, long time, maybe since you
were
a kid), and you love the day, too, the sunshine, the
crisp and pleasant odors of the country lane--you wish that someone were there with you at that moment so you could tell them how really good you feel.

And all at once you realize you're being watched. It's more than simply a hunch—you know it with certainty, as if it's pain you're feeling. You have no earthly idea what's watching you, but you do know this—whatever it is, it wants to do you harm.

You glance in the rearview mirror again, see only a rectangle of sunlight, the back of the rear seat. You curse, glance left, then right, at the brightly sunlit fields. Nothing. You stare straight ahead a moment, feel your foot press harder and harder on the accelerator, look in the rearview mirror once more, then left, right, again, but you see only what your good sense tells you to see—the cheerful sunlight, the country lane, the tall grasses and wildflowers, but you believe you know better than your good sense which, you also believe, is protecting you from nightmare by denying that it exists.

And then you find yourself at home, find sunlight streaming in through the bay windows, the odors of a spring afternoon wafting through the house, and you shiver because, all at once, again, you know that the malevolent thing that watched you on the country lane is continuing to watch you here, in your house—it dogs your footsteps, follows you from the living room to the kitchen to the bathroom and then, much later, into the bedroom, where you lie quivering like a frightened child because you know with mortal certainty that the thing is standing by your bed in the darkness, and that it's still watching, that it's bending over you...

I learned this as I stood outside my apartment and peered through the open doorway, into darkness: I learned that invisible malevolence is everywhere, but that it isn't purposeful; none of these
things
intends to do harm, no more than a black widow spider does, or a tidal wave, or the tumor that sets itself up in our gray matter.

But then, perhaps, you should reread all that I've written here. Perhaps
I
should!

~ * ~

Oddly, I always welcome sleep. It brings me dreams of places and people I once knew well, people I now love and trust (if only because they exist in my dreams, and nowhere else—my Aunt Pattie, for instance, who always read what I wrote and always proclaimed it brilliant, and my friend Sam Feary, who knew me well, and my fraternal grandfather, whose name was Sam, and who liked to be called "Sammy," even when he was in his nineties). It's my waking hours that constitute nightmare. I see too clearly during daylight. The shadows are harsh and animated, unpredictable and anonymous. They exist in places where shadows should not exist—beneath the wide canopy of the trees, for instance.

From time to time I walk in the dim woods. I usually walk at dusk, when the light is only good enough that I need to navigate mostly from memory, and I make my way down familiar, narrow paths with my eyes open completely only part of the time. I move quickly, too, so I can avoid the occasional touch or kiss and exhalation of breath.

Understand this: these
things
do breathe. It's a habit, I think, or a need (which is a part of habit and a part of hunger). I can hear them breathing in those few moments when my music (at the moment,
Moby)
changes from one piece to another, and when I need to hear them breathe in order to gauge their numbers, and when I wake in the night and my music has stopped after the power has gone out because the generator has used all its fuel (though, because there is no air in the world in which they exist, their exhalations are far more than stale or fetid, far more than nothing at all—they are as substantial as grief and orgasm). I hear them talking, then, too.

They talk about themselves, about their lives just passed and their new existence. They speak as slowly as a man waking from a coma, and as quickly as an auctioneer, and with all the dimensions and volume of wind: at times, they're even coherent (for instance, Larry-of-the-smashed head, and Madge, too, from upstate New York, who talked of heaven); often, they aren't: often, they seem to speak in riddles, though I
believe
that riddle-making is far behind them.

For instance:

“I have the bubble of the sky-blue sky. I don't have? I don't have? Going
oft;
leaving in separate cars, and only the blood to spare, giving coffee away cheap."

And:

‘Entering, now, the sand, the duplicate—disheveled, alert, nose out of whack. Leave me Irene of pipes, that replica, pining at the Gordon, at the level place."

And:

“I denounce you. I flow. Billeted in Charbonnes—growing accustomed to my skin in tatters. Memories alone cannot confirm the presence of life."

And:

"All the nodding flowers lining up to vote. On Tuesday, empty the last large lips lest Louise loses little. Free the small ones, make the large ones pay, bring home the cheering crowds, the crows, the pestilence of flight.

And:

‘Break the muscle at its deepest place, its widest part, secured at the hip and thighs—two places, pouring through the small spaces, through screens and lips parted as if in dying, leaving the last exhale foaming up, gaining ground on the past circling old wounds, old love and climaxes. Generating joy. Coming apart peacefully, believing in music."

And, quick and simple:

“I could go out naked to walk my little dog on the wide sidewalk and no one would grin."

And:

“As I grow older, my dreams—the ones I have when I sleep--grow older, too; they're all about loss and regret and pain."

I don't remember any of this verbatim, of course. It's in the air around me always—I focus on it now and again and come back breathless to write it down. As I've just done.

"Go and take an outbound train and believe in we who wait and do not deliver, we who open our mouths and fly in groups of threes and fours and always, always, always no one at all."

~ * ~

My very good friend Sam Feary is with me here, in this house. I smell him sometimes, his particular, inoffensive odor—musty, with the hint of sweat and cloves. I had no idea he was dead until I smelled those odors here. I think I sighed, and grinned, and said, "Welcome, Sam." Then I felt his breath on my cheek and I heard him say, in a voice I didn't recognize—it was neither male nor female; it was the voice of air—"And a welcome to you, my friend."

Sometimes I believe I see him. He's usually standing quietly at a south-facing window in late afternoon, where a break in the pines beyond lets in copious amounts of daylight. At other times, I realize I only wish I could see him. He was my friend. He
is
my friend. I was closer to no one but Lorraine, and she left me. Sam, for what it's worth, went off on his own after telling me to have a good life, to forget Phyllis Pellaprat and to live, at last, in a universe that recognized and wanted me—"The universe of the living, dammit!" he said. He had my best interests at heart, but his own interests were more important, and that was all right. Would any friend want anything different from a friend?

I want him to tell me how he died. I want him to tell me about the world he inhabits. I want to ask him how it feels in that world, and what
he
feels. But I'm afraid of asking him anything at all. I'm afraid what he tells me will simply confirm my greatest fears—about this world I inhabit, now, and about myself.

~ * ~

I have so many fears. I have a fear that I'll lose my mind and be unaware of it: I have a fear that I'll simply drift away, into some vast meaningless unknown, and be unaware of it: I have a fear that Death dresses in various disguises—the disguise of love or happiness or benign illness or of life itself—and I'm unaware of it. I have a fear of being blissfully ignorant in a world (place, realm, universe) that's a billion times more complex (and therefore a billion times more unknowable) than galaxies or brains or mathematics.

I told Lorraine once about these fears. She sighed, touched my hand and said, "Oh, I know that, Abner. It's one of the very sad things about you. All those useless fears."

I loved her dearly, and still do. But she isn't Phyllis.

~ * ~

She's here as well. Phyllis. Or could be. For so long, I believed without question that she simply moved further and further into the realm in which I had found her, until she was utterly unreachable, even if I were to follow her. (As if, understand this, someone you cannot live without leaves your home and you don't discover it until she's been gone for days or weeks, and has left no note, no clues or hints about where she's gone, and when you ask her friends and relatives, they tell you they know nothing either; they simply shrug and say, "Gee, I don't know. It's a mystery." And when you tell the authorities about it, they have you fill out papers and they interview you and the weeks come and go and come and go, and so you call the authorities and ask, "What have you found out?" And they say, "Nothing. But we're working on it." And, at last, you go into the great world outside your house and you drive a thousand miles north, and a thousand miles east, and another thousand miles in other directions, and you realize, at last, that the very world you and she share has swallowed her up, that she's simply and terribly unreachable—that she's a part of the world in which you exist, yes, but she's utterly unreachable, nonetheless.)