The Ghost in Love (37 page)

“I realized I found mine when I was a teenager with Dexter Lewis. I don't love anyone now. I haven't really loved anyone in years. That's why I couldn't do what you just did with them. And that's why I'm going back to Dexter: I want to live in that amazing zone again where you don't want to miss a single minute. That's what love does: it makes you so excited about whatever is coming.

“It also teaches you things about yourself that you never knew before—both good and bad. What you learn always makes your world bigger. Not always nicer, but definitely bigger.” She took hold of his arm again. “I don't know what's going to happen to either of us now, but I'm optimistic about it, Ben, I really am.” She leaned over and kissed his cheek. Then she walked off toward her home. He watched her go.

One of Pilot's dogs accompanied Danielle all the way there. Why not? It had nothing else to do. It was hungry but had not been chosen to go to Ben's place for the meal. The dog was hoping this woman would give it something to eat when they were in her place. Little did the black dachshund know that, by accompanying her now, it was about to walk into a Chinese restaurant named the Lotus Garden and never return.

When Danielle was gone, German walked over to Ben and stood face-to-face with him. She put her hands on his shoulders. “I think you won.”

He moved up closer to her. They could each feel the other's body heat. He put his hand gently against her cheek. “If I did, it was because of you and Pilot. Alone, I would have been eaten alive. I was a goner.”

She took his hand from her cheek and kissed the palm. “I don't know what to do now, Ben. I don't know what to say. All I want is to go home. I want to go home and eat doughnuts with you.”

He smiled. “Doughnuts?”

“Yes, in bed with you and Pilot; maybe under the covers. All of us together under the covers eating doughnuts from a peach-colored box. It has to be a peach box.”

“Okay.”

“Okay.” She kissed his hand again. He put his forehead against hers.

Music began playing. This time it was the cartoon-fast, lunatic Romanian Gypsy music of Fanfare Ciocărlia, one of Ben and German's favorite bands. Someone inside the blue car had switched the music on again. The auto bounced around as all the passengers inside did car-seat dancing to the song “Asfalt Tango.”

Ben said, “I just realized that I don't have much food at home. I'm going to have to go to the market first and do some shopping.” He said it to German and Stanley as they stood a few feet away from the jiggling car. He loved that music. He had purposely not listened to the CD since German moved out. It only reminded him of good times with her. He knew if he heard it when he was alone it would cut him off at the knees.

“We'll go with you to the market. We'll help,” Stanley offered, and then quickly looked at German to see if she agreed.

“
You're
coming to my place?”

“Of course I'm coming, if it's all right with you. This is the first time I've ever seen this happen: a person having a summit meeting with himself. I'm witnessing history.”

Ben appeared to listen to something. Then he said as tactfully as possible to the angel, “Ling says you're not invited. She says you're a lying skunk and she's not cooking for you.”

German asked, “What if I invited him as my guest? Would she let him come then?”

Ben and his ghost were once again touched by German's gentle diplomacy and typical kindness. It only made them love her more. Somewhere inside Ben, Ling rolled her eyes in exasperation and tightened her mouth before muttering, “Oh,
all right
. He can come.”

The town was always
pretty quiet at that time of day. So when the police dispatcher received the call about the disturbance in the supermarket, they were able to send a unit right over to investigate. The two veterans in the patrol car weren't expecting anything much. The dispatcher said something about people throwing food at one another inside the market. The two cops assumed that probably meant a bunch of drunken college kids were in there having a food fight. It wouldn't be the first time that had happened.

Arriving in the parking lot, the policemen saw a crowd of people standing outside the market looking into the building. What was odd was the large pack of dogs standing together right in front of the doors, almost as if they were guarding them. Even stranger was that scattered among these dogs were several bright white ones that appeared to have no ears.

One of the cops pointed at them. “Look at that, willya? What kind of dog is that?”

His partner said, “That's a verz. You've never seen one before?”

“Hell no. The damned thing doesn't have any
ears
, Bob. This is the first time in my life I have ever seen a dog without ears.”

His partner, Bob, who had saved his life two years ago in a deadly gun battle and been shot in the chest doing it, recognized in an instant what was going on there. Fighting off a smile, he just had to keep cool now and handle this situation as though it were no big thing, no matter what was happening inside the market. More than anything Bob was excited because seeing the verzes meant that there would now be someone else to compare notes with. Their group was growing all the time, and that was awesome.

“
Verzes
, huh? Where do they come from?”

“Norway, one of those little islands in Norway. The breed is very popular now in Hollywood. It's a prestige thing to own one of them out there.”

“Really? Well, there must be six over there. Maybe we should catch a few and sell them.”

The two cops walked over to the market to check things out. As they approached, they could see people running around inside the building, throwing food at one another, grabbing stuff off the shelves, laughing. Most of the people seemed to be laughing.

The policemen saw Broomcorn, holding plastic-wrapped chickens in each hand, get hit square in the face with what looked like a whipped-cream cake by a very tall woman. They saw a man who one cop recognized as Stanley the angel skid across the slick floor on spilled papaya juice and crash head-on into high shelves full of snack food. Straightaway a cascade of multicolored bags of potato chips, popcorn, tortilla chips, Doritos, Cheetos, Tostitos, Fritos, and other tasty treats rained down over him.

The cops saw Ben Gould get shoved in the chest by a bald man
who looked angry as hell. Ben shoved the man right back while laughing in his face. Baldy came at him again and the two fell to the floor wrestling. The police saw other fights and even a dog—how did that get in there?—chasing a kid. People were laughing, shouting, or running full speed down the long market aisles with their hands or arms full of groceries, dropping stuff, dancing—was that music they heard in there too?—and everywhere food was being thrown. There was not a salesperson in sight. They'd probably all gone into hiding.

Watching this pandemonium, the cop who didn't know about verzes suddenly remembered something great from his youth for the first time in decades. When he was a boy, a local TV show for kids had a yearly contest at Christmastime. The contest winner was given ten minutes alone inside the biggest toy store in the city. Whatever the kid could get into a shopping cart in that time he or she could keep.

The boy and his three best buddies had engaged in long, heated discussions about just what they would take if they won. In the days leading up to the contest, it was just about all they talked about. One afternoon his gang even made a special trip together to that toy store to scope it out. They walked slowly through the entire place, discussing the fastest, most effective routes to get from the toys they wanted on aisle one to the rest of their hearts' desires. It took some time, but when they were finished they had drawn an actual map with carefully noted directional arrows to use in the event one of them won those glorious ten minutes. Each boy in the group then made his own copy of the map while they were in the store and kept it for a very long time. After leaving, they went to their favorite hamburger joint and treated themselves to the most delicious cheese-burgers on the planet.

The cop had forgotten all about that day and the meal, but now
the memories of both came flooding back to him. In retrospect it was one of the few outstanding days of his youth but, as is typical, over the years he had somehow misplaced it in the mundane clutter of the rest of his life. His chest tightened when he remembered the details and just how perfect that experience had been.

He had had a very rough time when he was a boy. But the day at Tom & Tim's toy store with his best friends, making plans and dreaming and then eating delectable cheeseburgers, was one of the shining exceptions. Wouldn't it be crazy and fine if somewhere in a drawer at home he still had that toy store map stashed away? It wasn't impossible. He would look for it when he got home that night. He would definitely look.

For an instant or a few seconds, maybe even longer, he saw the people racing around inside the supermarket as if they were him if he had been the winner of the toy store contest. Running everywhere as fast as he could go, grabbing everything that he had dreamed of owning, laughing the whole time at his great good luck. Swimming back up to the present, he smiled broadly with a treasured memory held tight in his hands that he had found at the bottom of his sea.

He knew that he must be a police officer now and restore order to this foolishness. But his attitude toward the drunks or nuts or whoever they were throwing food around inside the market changed. He was embarrassed to admit he kind of loved them.

Jonathan Carroll's novel
The Wooden Sea
was named a
New York Times
Notable Book of 2001. He is the author of such acclaimed novels as
White Apples, The Land of Laughs, The Marriage of Sticks
, and
Bones of the Moon
. He lives in Vienna, Austria.