Spider on My Tongue (5 page)

You must have realized by now that I am not certain if I'm alive or dead.

~ * ~

All the things I did not shamelessly do before my departure. Not just the ordinarily shameless things—prancing naked on the boulevard, for instance—but other shameless things, too. Cheating at Monopoly, for instance, which I never did, or, alas,
could
do: where was the advantage, I wondered, then, before my departure? (Here I am! No, over here! I am one with the wall, the window, the fir tree, the cupboards, the smiling Labrador retriever, the grinning lover and the floor-standing lamp. I am one and I am many!) Monopoly is meant to be played straight, of course. Buy houses and railroads, send people to jail, become a slumlord, win the game the way it was meant to be won, with shame. But I would dearly love to go back and play it shamelessly—cheat at it naked and nakedly: But that's
my
house!" you'd shout, and I'd say calmly, with arrogance, shamelessly, "Sure it is, but its
mine
,
now, and you lose, sucker!"

I could have worn different sorts of shoes at the same time, too—a black oxford on the left foot and a penny loafer on the right, for instance. I could have walked around like that. Shamelessly. I could even have declared victory like that—“I
win!
I win!" Shamelessly.

We give up so much when we play the game simply as it was meant to be played. Because, too soon, the game is over—Splat!-- and we realize, upon only brief reflection, that it involved sixty or seventy or eighty goddamned years of
boredom
that gave us no time for real fun. Then we're off into the great slippery unknown, our private parts missing and our mouths agape.

Hell, we don't even need to pee, anymore.

~ * ~

I do know this: these people (things, entities, spooks, wraiths, ghosts, non-corporeal beings) keep pets. I can hear them. Strident little meows, small, petulant growls, random chirps and wee barks. And this tells me, of course, that they're the same kinds of pets these
things
might have kept before they became whatever the hell it is they've become (though, ontologically, it could be argued that these beings [things, entities, wraiths, et cetera] are
now
what they
always
were, which, by the way, applies to the rest of us, whatever realm we're currently dancing in, and we simply can't avoid it. But, for the moment, let's set aside that half-baked discussion. I have a mortal and confusing and frightening story to tell, and prattling on about philosophy that masquerades as fact can only obscure it).

I
feel
obscured, I realize, all at once, here in my comfortable chair in my dim house at my dim window in the dim forest, surrounded by shadows and their pretenders, smelling sweat and cloves, feeling the cold and nonexistent exhalations of the just barely visible on my neck and cheeks (as I experience the passing misery) .

If you lived here with me you'd be scared stiff.

I am.

I want Lillian, now, so very much. She masqueraded easily as a living thing—better than Phyllis did. At least Lillian didn't leave moist pieces of herself in the bed after lovemaking. Perhaps, after all, she was as alive as I, or, at least, as the dim woods.

~ * ~

Good Lord! I can't stand this not knowing...
anything
! Better to walk naked into a goddamned winter woods and take a long nap.

I have learned this, too, in the past six months. I have learned
that even the dead are ignorant!

—A Manhattan Ghost Story

Thank you.

~ * ~

Sam Feary wants to talk about the past, but I can't do it. He
is
the past filling in for the present. Seeing him here is like seeing the snapshot of a nightmare.

"I'm sorry, my friend," I told him, without words. "I can't talk about anything with you."

"Oh, but you can," he said, in his way (far less in words and volume than
intention),
"because you have no choice.
You
want to know what you believe
I
know."

He was right, of course. In the other realm he and I shared long ago, he was usually right, which annoyed the hell out of me.

"You need to talk out loud to me," he said (in his way). "If you don't, I can't understand you. In other words, Abner, I can't read your mind."

I chuckled. "But you just did," I said, and went on, "It would be useful to actually
see
you if I'm
going to talk with you, Sam." I looked about—at my comfortable red chair, the small pine table beside it, the window beyond. "Sometimes I do see you," I said. "I'm sure of it."

"No," he said, "you don't. You don't see me. How could you see me in this damned crowd?"

"Crowd?"

"Yes. You know all about it. You're aware of it. You call it 'the passing misery.' You see it, but you don't see it. And you don't see
me.
You
can't
see me."

"Perhaps I'm not actually talking with you, then," I said aloud. "Perhaps I don't see you and I'm not talking with you because you're not really here."

I heard nothing. I said again, "Maybe you're not here. Maybe I'm talking to no one." Still nothing.

I said, "Are you trying to make a point, Sam?"

"Abner," he said, "can you tell me what you think of faces?"

In that other realm we inhabited so long ago, he was older than I by five years. He claimed to be smarter; perhaps he was—it doesn't matter, and never did. He claimed to be stronger, too, in every way. And perhaps he was.

"Faces?" I said. "What faces?"

He said, "Don't be a dunce. Just answer my question."

"Are you actually talking to me, now, Sam? Are you actually here, in my house?"

He said at once, "Over here, in this…realm, this
place,
Abner, we're all as crazy as cancer cells. And we just adore non-sequiturs." He paused long enough that I could feel his cold breath on my face. Then he added, "Because that's really what we are. All of us. In this place that is many places. To a man, a woman, a thing, a wraith, an entity, a non-corporeal being, a spook--shit, to a nut-job's hard-on, we're
non-sequiturs.
We're
the passing misery.
We exist, my good and departed friend, where
faces
simply do not pertain."

Then—I understood at once—he was gone.

~ * ~

So there you have it. Because I know these entities, these wraiths, spooks, ghosts, these
things
at all, if poorly, I will know
you
completely; not your occupation, your love life, your predilections, your past—
you
. Your true sum and substance. The greatest and biggest and most important part of you—the part that moves on when
faces
simply don't pertain anymore.

So, you—yes, you—that spider on my tongue. Stay away. Please.

I'm too busy.

I'm surrounded by anger and madness and stupid amusement.

I live on occasional soup and the cold exhalations of the dead.

I live in a world of non-sequiturs.

~ * ~

About Phyllis —

She possessed me even more than the womb possessed me. She seduced me even more than I seduced myself.

She played Yahtzee like a champion.

"What do you think, Abner? Another roll?"

"Sure," I said.

I didn't know her from Eve. I found her in the apartment I was renting from my good friend, Art DeGraff, while, he had told me, he was vacationing in Europe. The apartment was supposed to be empty.

I was a bit unnerved that she was in it and that she knew my name

"What are you doing here?" I said.

She was sitting half-on and half-off the apartment's only bed; she wore white shorts and a pink tank top which fit her beautifully. She was throwing the five dice Yahtzee requires when I came into the bedroom.

"Good," she said, her gaze on the dice, "a full house," and gave me a smile I couldn't resist.

"The apartment's supposed to be empty," I said.

"It
was
empty," she said, gave me another smile, a different sort of smile—a smile I couldn't read—and added, "Until you showed up."

"Uh-huh," I said, "empty except for you."

She gave me another enigmatic smile.

“Want to play, Abner?"

I didn't know about Yahtzee, then. I said, "You mean that?" and nodded to indicate the dice and the score card. "What is it?"

"It's Yahtzee. A game for everyone." Another smile. "You like games, don't you?"

Her cleavage above her pink tank top was ample and delicious.

She caught me staring at it and said, "Some things never die."

I didn't understand what she meant.

She picked up the dice, threw them again, looked annoyed. "Shit, another full house. What do I need with that?"

I said again, my eyes on hers, now,
"What
are you doing here?" It was something I needed to say. After all, she was, as far as I was concerned, a trespasser in the little apartment.

She said,
"I'm
here because
you're
here."

"I don't know what the hell that means," I said. Despite her cleavage, her brief tank top, her even briefer white shorts, her perfect brown skin, her gorgeous and wonderfully expressive brown eyes, I knew I was becoming a bit churlish: "Sorry," I said.

She rolled the dice again. Her breasts moved invitingly with the movement of her arm. I think I grinned.

She saw me looking (again), saw me grin: "Like I said, Abner, some things"...

I held my hand up, palm out: "I know," I said. "Some things never die."

"You got it, sucker," she said.

I took a deep breath, forced myself to look uninterested in her cleavage, her white shorts, her perfect brown skin: "What are you doing here?" I repeated.

"I'm here because you're here, Abner," she said again, and cocked her head fetchingly. "I'm here because
you're
here. If you weren't here,
I
wouldn't be here. And if I weren't here,
you
wouldn't be here. If this apartment weren't here, hell, we might be somewhere else, and you'd be asking me the same lame-ass questions."

And so it went.

~ * ~

She's here, too. She and Sam Feary. They're both here, in my little house in the dim woods. Both playing their little cosmic games.

All these
beings, things, wraiths, ghosts,
spooks
—holding me hostage to their little cosmic games.

Yahtzee,
hah!

"A full house," Phyl
li
s said so long ago (yesterday, this morning, tomorrow evening, even as I w
ri
te). It had nothing to do with the dice. She was seeing my future. Her future. Everyone's future.

And, my God,
now
you're
here!

~ * ~

Phyllis and I were walking east on 50
^th
Street in Manhattan on a rainy night in August, late, and the sidewalk was all-but empty, though the
li
ghted shop windows cast reflections on the black street—our side and the other side—and an occasional yellow cab zipped past.

We were holding hands. I wore jeans and a gray T-shirt with the words "Love Ain't No Trouble" emblazoned across it in yellow. Phyllis looked exceptional. She wore a bright green dress that covered her a bit less than well-enough and I felt ecstatic she was beside me and that I was holding her hand.