To Feel Stuff (25 page)

“I heard Elodie's voice down this hallway that's sort of to the left if you just keep walking straight from here away from the stairs.” He pointed. “So I went over there, and I looked around the corner to see if she was still on the phone or if she was talking to a nurse.”

David stopped like he was nervous about telling me what was next, but I told him to keep going.

“I could barely make her out because she was sitting in the dark, but she was just there in the corner. Talking to herself. I'm saying like, a full-on conversation, Chess, with manic gesticulating and everything. It was fucking weird. Really fucking weird, you understand? It went on for a long time. There was nobody else there and there was definitely no phone.”

I knew that there were people who talked to themselves, but I didn't know that you were one of them. I told David that I thought it was possible that you were working through personal issues with that technique, and if that's what you had to do, that's what you had to do.

When I was explaining this to him, you came through the door of the infirmary, looking like you were halfway to falling apart. You were all hunched over, and your hair was a big storm cloud. You looked really sick, almost shockingly, deathbed ill, and my first thought was that you had contracted something new and terrible. When you saw David and me awake, you said, “I fell asleep in the hallway.”

I regarded you. And I just didn't want to know. So I said, “Okay,” and that's why that was all I said.

The Journal of Parapsychology October 2004

 

In mid-February, I answered the doorbell early one morning and found E on my front step. She was slumped against the banister and looked as if she'd been beaten while walking to my house. Alarmed, I asked her if she'd walked here.

“Don't worry,” she said. “I took a cab.”

Once we were seated on the couch, E informed me that she was in serious pain because she'd fallen asleep leaning against a hallway wall. This had badly aggravated her fibromyalgia. When I asked her to describe the current degree of pain, E told me that she felt as if “someone gripped my neck and ankles and wrung me out.”

E rarely spoke to me about her fibromyalgia, even though I knew it was a constant presence in her life. The only two other moments on record that she discusses the illness are (1) in November, when she described the sensation it produces as similar to “being covered with bruises that run seven inches deep” and (2) in January, when she referred to it, interestingly, as “moss with teeth.”

I asked her why she hadn't phoned me and asked me to come to her, and she replied that after a night spent mostly awake in the infirmary, she'd wanted a morning outside of it.

“So what happened to prompt this visit?” I asked.

E reached into the pocket of her coat and produced the tape recorder that I'd purchased for her. She pressed “play.” I heard her voice saying, “Come on. You? Give me a break.”

For an instant, there was loud crackling on the tape. It did not sound like externally captured static, but instead like an internal default located within the recording.

Then E's voice returned, and the crackling ceased entirely. “I think you're dead, to begin with.” E stopped the tape and said to me, “That crackling you hear is him talking.”

“The apparition?”

“Yes.”

Initially, I misunderstood. “That's what he sounds like when he speaks to you? And you are able to translate?”

“No,” E said. “He doesn't sound like that when I'm next to him. He speaks good, normal English then. That crackling is what comes out when I record him.”

I asked E to play the beginning of the tape again, and this time I concentrated on the variations in the crackling sound. I wanted to determine if there were any patterns within the distortion, or if I could make out any traces of a human voice beneath the static. (In recent EVP [electronic voice phenomenon] research I'd been studying, observers had been able to detect faint voices beneath static on audio recordings.) However, I detected nothing.

“So what happened exactly?” I asked E again.

“We had a long conversation,” she replied.

E told me that earlier in the evening, she'd received a phone call from her father. Because it was her father on the line, she immediately knew that something was wrong, as it was always her mother who spoke first. Frantic, S told E, “Your mom is gone.”

“What do you mean?” E asked. She told me that she was concerned that “gone” might be her father's synonym for “dead.”

E's father proceeded to explain that her mother had encountered a man selling blue roses at a stoplight on a local street divider. Not only had A envisioned a field of blue roses, “growing like wheat,” on the day that their previous oven leaked gas into their home, but this man also happened to have A's name tattooed upon his arm.

E hadn't known that her mother had been in search of the meaning of the blue roses. A had not brought that up during any of their previous conversations.

A had told S that she believed she'd been placed at that particular stoplight for a reason, and that she and the man were “key and lock.” E had seen this behavior from her mother before. “Sometimes she comes across a person when she's trying to figure out a message, and she thinks she and that person are like two undercover agents. She thinks they're supposed to exchange information.”

Unfortunately, the man with the roses readily played into this suspicion and invited A back to his home to explore their connection further.

“She didn't go home with him, did she?” I asked, and E told me that that was the exact question she'd asked her father.

“She's there now,” S had answered. “That's where she called me from.”

E confessed that for most of her life she'd avoided her mother's premonitions and stories, and that everyone (mother and daughter included) had assumed this was because their dispositions were so opposite. Yet while on the phone with her father, E had become aware that what she'd feared most wasn't that A would derail E's life, but that A would destroy her own. She had long had the foresight, so to speak, that A's beliefs would lead A to an act of desperation. E felt that act was close at hand.

S begged E to call her mother on her (A's) cell phone. He said that because A was particularly sensitive to E's opinion, he believed that E could convince her to come home.

E wanted to know how long A planned on staying at the man's home, and S said that all he knew was that A had stated that she was not coming home until she and the man understood the sign.

E promised that she would phone A “as soon as I've figured out what to say.”

Troubled by the conversation with her father, E felt that she wasn't ready to return to the infirmary. C and an old friend were in there, and E did not want to explain her distracted state to a stranger.

After the call, E had followed the main hallway down to its end, then turned the corner. At the farthest examination room, she lowered herself against the locked door and rested on the floor. The hall was completely “dark, since it doesn't have any windows.” E said that she was glad for the darkness because the atmosphere was conducive to composing the talk she was going to have with A.

E had been sitting on the floor “no longer than five minutes” when the apparition in the robe came around the corner. As he had before, he was “glowing in the dark.” The apparition stopped and simply said, “Hey.”

At this point, E placed her recorder on my coffee table. “I'm going to let it run,” she said, “and I'll do my best to fill in what the ghost said to me. Are you ready?” Checking my own recorder to make sure I had enough tape, I told her, “Yes. Please proceed.”

On her tape, I recognized the same piece of speech that she'd played earlier. “Come on. You? Give me a break.”

“What's wrong with me?” the present E asked, filling in for the nonpresent apparition. To avoid confusion, I will simply attribute the speech E remembered to the apparition. While enacting the apparition's end of the conversation, E maintained her regular tone and expression, as though she was in conversation with herself.

On her tape, E said, “I think you're dead, to begin with. Why don't you tell me? Tell me what you're doing here.” She told me that the apparition looked thoughtful, as if he might concede to her request.

After a pause, E's voice continued. “I'd really like to know. But right now, I'm not going to help you solve whatever it is you're stuck here for. If you need me to contact someone, dig something up, I'm not going to be of much service to you. You should have taken care of it before tonight, when I wasn't feeling as distracted. Tonight, I'm the wrong girl for this. I don't have the mindset.”

The apparition walked toward E. She “didn't know if he was going to leap into my body and seize it. Or put a finger on my forehead and transmit images from his life into my brain. I really had no idea what he was capable of. According to my mom, ghosts are capable of a lot.” He surprised E by stopping about two feet from her and sliding down against the wall, just as she had done minutes ago. He bent his knees and hung his arms over them.

E was so close to the apparition that she could have reached out and put a hand through his chest.

“Why didn't you?” I asked later.

“Because I wanted to hear what he had to say.”

While in close proximity to the apparition, E remembered the hairs at the nape of her neck lifting, “which was a first. I thought of myself as generally hairless there. Toward the bottom.” She became “aware of every one of my body parts. Although it sounds strange now, I think I was the most aware of where each fingernail and each eyelash was in relation to his ‘body.'” She instructed me to put the word “body” in quotations.

I reached out and paused the tape. “Was this a fearful reaction?”

“It was more the feeling of sitting next to a crush,” she answered.

“You have romantic feelings for the apparition?”

“I'm not ready to say it was romantic. It was more romantic than fearful, if I have to choose one of those options.”

“How do you distinguish the two?”

“I was nervous around him. I wasn't scared.”

“Did you have butterflies?” I asked. I couldn't come up with a more scientific-sounding inquiry.

“I did. Yes. I did have butterflies.”

“All right, then. Let's continue.” I restarted the tape. There was a seventeen-second pause that had neither E's voice nor the crackling on it. Around second ten, I asked her, “What's occurring at this point?”

E told me that the apparition was looking at her, and she had held his gaze.

Then the crackling returned. E asked if she could hear her response to the apparition's speech, since during our pause, she had lost her place. Once she heard her “No,” she was ready to continue. She rewound.

“The reason I'm here is probably supposed to be embarrassing,” the apparition said, “but I don't feel embarrassed about it yet. You're not easily offended, are you?”

“No,” E said.

“While I was in the hospital I asked one of the nurses, ‘What are the odds?' and she didn't even want to guess.”

“I've found out that most people in the hospital really don't like to guess,” E said.

“You can tell me your opinion on the odds, okay?” the apparition suggested.

“Okay.”

“The other afternoon I was reading an Internet article on fetishes. Because I like to learn as much as I can about how other people live.”

“That's big of you. Sort of,” said E.

“Well, that makes me sound much more innocent than I am.” E remembers the apparition smiling here. “So to clear things up between you and me, I don't do all this learning because I'm a noble humanist. It's so I can find out if I share anything with anyone. Anything that maybe I didn't know about on my own.”

“Oh. I follow you,” said E.

“Cool. There was a section on autoerotic asphyxiation. The writer made it sound like one of those major interests that might define a person.”

“Did you feel like you had a responsibility to find out if you fell into this category?”

“Yeah.” Here again E remarked that the apparition smiled at her, and that he was “quick to break into a smile for someone who did not have a smiley face.” By this I presume that she was referring to the natural crookedness of his mouth and the deep, dark bags beneath his eyes.

“A responsibility,” he said. “That's good.”

“Thanks. How'd you do it?”

“With a sheet, some thick books to stand on, and the top hook in my closet. I thought the hook was securely embedded in the wall, but it turns out that I'm no engineer. Here's where it's supposed to get really embarrassing. Are you still with me?”

“I'm fine with hearing about you masturbate,” said E. “Even though I think you're dead, which is what makes it weird.”

“That's fair. Back to the story. I followed the technique described in the article, but I wasn't that impressed. I felt some lightheadedness, and I saw some stars, but I can get the same effects by hanging upside down off the edge of my bed and rubbing my eyes with my knuckles.” The apparition demonstrated this action to the best of his transparent ability. “So, as it turns out—I'm not a member of the club.”

“Sorry,” said E.

“And so was I, a little bit.”

“Are you going to keep looking for things in common? Or are you too discouraged now?”

“I hope I'm an open-minded person. I hope when I get out of here, I'll keep looking. But it seems like I keep returning to what I was in the first place,” the apparition said. “Can't help it. I'd bet that you keep returning, too.”

“Me?”