The Breath of Suspension (32 page)

“Yes, Dexter. St. Mary’s, as usual.”

“Right. See ya.”

Harmon hung up. He’d searched and searched, down every avenue, but he was well and truly stuck. When it came to the precise and ticklish business of the exorcism and binding of the spirits of the uneasy dead, there was no better assistant alive than Dexter Warhoff.

❖

A train finally pulled into the station. It was lit up golden from inside, like a lantern. The doors slid open, puffing warm air. Stanley thought about getting up and going into the train. He could get home that way. But he remembered how uncomfortable the seats were on the train, and what a long cold walk he had from the station to his condo, so he just remained where he was, where the ground was soft and warm. After waiting for a long moment, the train shut its doors and whooshed off, up along the shining metal tracks as they arched into the sky, to vanish among the stars and the windows of the apartment buildings, which now floated free in the darkness, like balloons let loose by children.

Once he was alone again, Stanley found himself standing, not knowing how he had come to be so. The wind from Lake Michigan had cleared the sky, and a half moon lit the towers of the city. The city was alive; he could hear the soughing of its breath, the thrumming of its heart, and the murmuration of its countless vessels. Without thinking about it, he swung over the railing and slid down the girders of the El station to the waiting earth. The city spread out before him, Stanley Paterson ambled abroad.

After some time, the wind carried to him the aroma of roasting lamb, with cumin and garlic. He turned into it, like a salmon swimming upstream, and soon stood among the cracked plaster columns and fishing nets of a Greek restaurant. A blue flame burst up in the dimness, and Stanley moved toward it. A waiter in a white sailor’s shirt served a man and a woman saganaki, fried kasseri cheese flamed with brandy.

Stanley could taste the tartness of the cheese and the tang of the brandy as they both ate, and feel the crunch of the outside and the yielding softness of the inside. He could taste the wine too, the bitterly resinous heaviness of retsina.

They looked at each other. She was young, wearing a cotton dress with a bold colorful pattern, and made a face at the taste of the wine. The man, who had ordered it, was older, in gray tweed, and grinned back at her. Stanley hovered over the two of them like a freezing man over a fire. As he drew close, however, something changed between them. They had been friends for a long time, at the law office where they both worked, but this was their first romantic evening together. She had finally made the suggestion, and now, as she looked at him, instead of thoughts of romance, her mind wandered to the coy calculations already becoming old to her, of getting to his apartment, giggling, of excusing herself at just the right moment to insert her diaphragm, of her mock exuberant gesture of tossing her panties over the foot of the bed at the moment he finally succeeded in getting her completely undressed, of how to act innocent while letting him know that she wasn’t. The older man’s shoulders stiffened, and he wished, too late, that he had resisted her, resisted the urge to turn her from a friend into yet another prematurely sophisticated young woman, wished that he could stop for a moment to think and breathe, in the midst of his headlong pursuit of the Other. The saganaki grew cold as they examined, silently, the plastic grapes that dangled in the arbor above their heads. Stanley moved back, and found himself on the street again.

Music came to him from somewhere far above. He slid up the smooth walls of an apartment building until he reached it. The glass of the window pushed against his face like the yielding surface of a soap bubble, and then, suddenly, he was inside.

A woman with a mass of curly gray hair and an improbably long neck sat at the grand piano, her head cocked at the sheet music as she played, while a younger woman with lustrous black hair and kohl-darkened eyes sat straight-backed on a stool and held an oboe. The music, Stanley knew, though he had never heard it before, was Schumann’s
Romances for Oboe and Piano
, and they played it with the ease of long mutual familiarity. Their only audience was a fuzzy cat of uncertain breed that sat on a footstool and stared into the flames in the fireplace.

Stanley felt the notes dance through him and sensed the blissful self-forgetfulness of the musicians. He wanted desperately to share in it, and moved to join them. The oboist suddenly thought about the fact that, no matter how well she played and how much she practiced, she would never play well enough to perform with the Chicago Symphony, or any orchestra, ever, and the love of her life would always remain a hobby, a pastime. The pianist’s throat constricted, and suddenly she feared the complexity of the instrument before her, knowing that she was inadequate to the task, as she was to all tasks of any importance, that no one would ever approve of her, and that she was old. The instruments went completely out of sync, as if the performers were in separate rooms with soundproof walls between them, and the music crashed into cacophony. The cat stood up, bristling, stared right at Stanley, and hissed. The pianist tapped one note over and over with her forefinger. The oboist started to cut another reed, even though she had two already cut. Stanley passed back out through the window.

He left the residential towers and wandered the streets of three-story brownstone apartment buildings. He felt warm soapy water on his skin, and drifted through the wide crack under an ill-fitting door.

The bathroom was warm and steamy, heated by the glow of a gas burner in one wall. A plump woman in a flower-print dress, with short dark hair, washed a child in that most marvelous of bathing devices, a large freestanding claw-foot bathtub. The little girl in the tub had just had her hair washed, and it was slicked to her head like a mannikin’s. She stared intently down into the soapy water like a cat catching fish.

“Point to your mouth, Sally. Your mouth.” Sally obediently put her finger in her mouth. “Point to your nose.” She put her finger in her nose. “Very good, Sally. Can you point to your ear? Your ear, Sally.” After a moment’s thought, the little girl put her finger in her ear. “Where is your chin?” Sally, tiring of the game, and having decided which she liked best, stuck her finger back up her nose and stared at her mother. Her mother laughed, delighted at this mutiny. “Silly goose.” She poured water over the girl’s head. Sally closed her eyes and made a “brrr” noise with her lips. “Time to get out, Sally.” The little girl stood up, and her mother pulled the plug. Sally waved as the water and soap bubbles swirled down the drain and said, “Ba-bye.
Ba-bye.
” Her mother pulled her from the tub and wrapped her in a huge towel, in which she vanished completely.

The feel of the terry cloth on his skin and the warm strawberry scent of the mother covered Stanley like a benediction. He stretched forward as the mother rubbed her daughter’s hair with the towel until it stood out in all directions. The mother’s happiness vanished, and she felt herself trapped, compelled, every moment of her life now given over to the care of a selfish and capricious creature, no time to even think about getting any work done on the one poem she’d been working on since she left high school to get married, her life predetermined now until she grew old and was left alone. She rubbed too vigorously with the towel, and Sally, smothered and manipulated by forces she could not control, or even understand, began to shriek. “Quiet, Sally. Quiet,
damn it.
” Stanley remembered the platform. What was he doing in here? He had a train to catch, he had to get home. He could not even imagine how he had managed to stray. He turned and hurried off to the El station.

❖

The two of them walked down the street together, Harmon with a long measured stride, and Dexter with the peculiar mincing waddle he was compelled to use because of the width of his thighs. Harmon wore a thick knee-length overcoat and a karakul hat, but the cold still struck deep into his bones. He wore a scarf to protect his throat, which was always the most sensitive. He remembered a time, surely not that long ago, when he had enjoyed the winter, when it had made him feel alive. He and Margaret had spent weekends in Wisconsin, cross-country skiing, and making grotesque snowmen. No longer. Dexter wore a red windbreaker that made him look like a tomato, and a Minnesota Vikings cap with horns on it. As he walked, he juggled little beanbags in an elaborate fountain. He had a number of similar skills—such as rolling a silver dollar across the back of his knuckles, like George Raft, and making origami animals—all of which annoyed Harmon because he had never learned to do things like that. He thought about the image the two of them presented, and snorted, amused at himself for feeling embarrassed.

“Father Toomey looked a little bummed out,” Dexter said. “I think we woke him up.”

“Dexter, it’s three-thirty in the morning. Not everyone sits up all night reading books on the Kabbalah.”

“Yeah, I guess. Anyway, he cheered up after we talked about the horoscope reading I’m doing for him. There’s a lot of real interesting stuff in it.”

“An ordained Catholic priest is having you do his
horoscope?
” Dexter looked surprised. “Sure. Why not?”

Why not, indeed? Harmon hefted his ancient black leather bag. The instruments it contained had been blessed by Father Toomey and sprinkled with holy water from the font at St. Mary’s. Harmon, in the precisely rigorous theological way that devout atheists have, doubted the efficacy of a blessing from a priest so far sunk in superstition that he had his horoscope done, and performed holy offices for a purpose so blatantly demonic, but he had to admit that it always seemed to do the job. When he handed the sleepy, slightly inebriated priest the speculum, the wand, the silver nails, the censer, the compass, and the rest of the instruments of his new trade, they were nothing but dead metal, but when he took them in his hands after the blessing, they vibrated with suppressed energy. The touch of such half-living things was odious to him, essential though they were. It disturbed him that such things worked. As quickly as he could, he wrapped them in their coverings of virgin lamb hide, inscribed with Latin prayers and Babylonian symbols, and placed them, in correct order, into his bag. That bag had once held his stethoscope, patella reflex hammer, thermometer, hypodermics, laryngoscope, and the rest of his medical instruments, and though he had not touched any of them in years, it had pained him to remove them so that the bag could be used for its new purpose.

“You know, Professor, the other day I was reading an interesting book about the gods of ancient Atlantis—”

“Oh, Dexter,” Harmon said irritably. “You don’t really believe all these things, do you?”

Dexter grinned at him, yellow-toothed. “Why not? You believe in
ghosts
, don’t you?”

Dexter’s one unanswerable argument. “I believe in them, Dexter, only because I am forced to, not because I like it. That’s the difference between us. It would be terrible to
like
the idea that ghosts exist.”

“Boy, did you fight it,” Dexter said with a chuckle. “You sat with me for an hour, talking about Mary Baker Eddy. Then you shut up. I asked you what was wrong. ‘A ghost,’ you said. ‘I’ve got to get rid of a ghost.’ Took you three cups of tea to say that. You don’t even like camomile tea, do you?”

“It served.”

“It sure did. You remember that first time, don’t you? I’ll never forget it. We hardly knew what we were doing, like two kids playing with dynamite. I had pretended I knew more about it than I did, you know.”

“I know.” They often talked about the first ghost. They never talked about the second.

“I thought I could handle it, but it almost swallowed me and you had to save my ass. Quite a talent you have there. Strongest I’ve ever heard of. You should be proud.”

“I feel precisely as proud as I would if I discovered that I had an innate genius for chicken stealing.”

Dexter laughed, head thrown back. He had a lot of fillings in his back teeth. “Gee, that’s pretty funny. But anyway, this Kabbalah stuff is real interesting....”

Harmon suffered himself to be subjected to a rambling, overly detailed lecture on medieval Jewish mysticism until, much too soon, they were at the El station.

Dexter craned his head back and looked up at the dark girders of the station, his face suddenly serious. “I feel him up there. He’s a heavy one. Strong. He didn’t live enough, when he had the chance. Those are always the worst. Too many trapped desires. Good luck to you. Oh... wait. They lock these things when the trains stop running, and we’re not exactly authorized.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a little black pouch, which, when opened, revealed a line of shiny lock-picking tools.

“I used to pick locks at school,” Dexter said. “Just for fun. I never stole anything. Figuring out the locks was the good part. Schools don’t have very good locks. Most students just break in the windows.” He walked up to the heavy metal mesh door at the base of the stairs and had it opened about as quickly as he could have with a key. He sighed, disappointed. “The CTA doesn’t either. I don’t even know why they bother. Well, now it’s time. Good luck.” They paused and he shook Harmon’s hand, as he always did, with a simple solemnity.

Nothing to say, Harmon turned and started up toward the El station.

❖

They
were
always the worst. “The people who want to live forever are always the ones who can’t find anything to do on a rainy Sunday afternoon,” as Dr. Kaltenbrunner, the head of Radiology at Mount Tabor Hospital, had once said. Dr. K was never bored, and certainly never boring, enjoyed seventeenth-century English poetry, and died of an aneurism three months before Harmon encountered his first ghost. Died and stayed dead. Harmon always thought he could have used his help. Thomas Browne and John Donne would have understood ghosts better than Harmon could, which was funny, because there hadn’t been enough ghosts in the seventeenth century to be worth worrying about.

Some doctors managed to stay away from ER duty, and it was mostly the young ones—who needed to be taught, by having their noses rubbed in it, about the mixture of fragility and resilience that is the human body—who took the duty there, particularly at night. In his time, Harmon had seen a seventy-year-old lady some anonymous madman had pushed in front of an onrushing El train recover and live, with only a limp in her left leg to show for it, and a Northwestern University linebacker DOA from a fractured skull caused by a fall in the shower in the men’s locker room.