“Not me! Oh, surely not me. I can feel myself. I’m here. Why, look!” And she showed him the remainder of her tears brushed from her eyelids and held on her palms.
“Oh, that’s real, all right. Well, then, dear young woman, I must be the visitor. I come to tell you it will all go right. Do you believe in special ghosts?”
“Are you special?”
“One of us is. Or maybe both. The ghost of young love or the ghost of the unborn.”
“Is that what I am, you are?”
“Paradoxes aren’t easy to explain.”
“Then, depending on how you look at it, you’re impossible, and so am I.”
“If it makes it easier, just think I’m not really here. Do you believe in ghosts?”
“I think I do.”
“It comes to me to imagine, then, that there are special ghosts in the world. Not ghosts of dead people. But ghosts of want and need, or I guess you might say desire.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Well, have you ever lain in bed late afternoons, late nights and dreamed something so much, awake, you felt your soul jump out of your body as if something had yanked a long, pure white sheet straight out the window? You want something so much, your soul leaps out and follows, my God, fast?”
“Why . . . yes. Yes!”
“Boys do that, men do that. When I was twelve I read Burroughs’ Mars novels. John Carter used to stand under the stars, hold up his arms to Mars, and ask to be taken. And Mars grabbed his soul, yanked him like an aching tooth across space, and landed him in dead Martian seas. That’s boys, that’s men.”
“And girls, women?”
“They dream, yes. And their ghosts come out of their bodies. Living ghosts. Living wants. Living needs.”
“And go to stand on lawns in the middle of winter nights?”
“That’s about it.”
“Am I a ghost, then?”
“Yes, the ghost of wanting so much it kills but doesn’t kill you, shakes and almost breaks you.”
“And you?”
“I must be the answer-ghost.”
“The answer-ghost. What a funny name!”
“Yes. But you’ve asked and I know the answer.”
“Tell me!”
“All right, the answer is this, young girl, young woman. The time of waiting is almost over. Your time of despair will soon be through. Very soon, now, a voice will call and when you come out, both of you, your ghost of want and your body with it, there will be a man to go with the voice that calls.”
“Oh, please don’t tell me that if it isn’t true!” Her voice trembled. Tears flashed again in her eyes. She half raised her arms again in defense.
“I wouldn’t dream to hurt you. I only came to tell.”
The town clock struck again in the deep morning.
“It’s late,” she said.
“Very late. Get along, now.”
“Is that all you’re going to say?”
“You don’t need to know any more.”
The last echoes of the great clock faded.
“How strange,” she murmured. “The ghost of a question, the ghost of an answer.”
“What better ghosts can there be?”
“None that I ever heard of. We’re twins.”
“Far nearer than you think.”
She took a step, looked down, and gasped with delight. “Look, oh, look. I can move!”
“Yes.”
“What was it you said, boys walk all night, miles and miles?”
“Yes.”
“I could go back in, but I can’t sleep now. I must walk, too.”
“Do that,” he said gently.
“But where shall I go?”
“Why,” he said, and he suddenly knew. He knew where to send her and was suddenly angry with himself for knowing, angry with her for asking. A burst of jealousy welled in him. He wanted to race down the street to a certain house where a certain young man lived in another year and break the window, burn the roof. And yet, oh, yet, if he did that!?
“Yes?” she said, for he had kept her waiting.
Now, he thought, you must tell her. There’s no escape.
For if you don’t tell her, angry fool, you yourself will never be born.
A wild laugh burst from his mouth, a laugh that accepted the entire night and time and all his crazed thinking.
“So you want to know where to go?” he said at last.
“Oh, yes!”
He nodded his head. “Up to that corner, four blocks to the right, one block to the left.”
She repeated it quickly. “And the final number?!”
“Eleven Green Park.”
“Oh, thank you, thank you!” She ran a few steps, then stopped, bewildered. Her hands were helpless at her throat. Her mouth trembled. “Silly. I hate to leave.”
“Why?”
“Why, because . . . I’m afraid I’ll never see you again!”
“You will. Three years from now.”
“Are you sure?”
“I won’t look quite the same. But it’ll be me. And you’ll know me forever.”
“Oh, I’m glad for that. Your face is familiar. I somehow know you well.”
She began to walk slowly, looking over at him as he stood near the porch of the house.
“Thanks,” she said. “You’ve saved my life.”
“And my own along with it.”
The shadows of a tree fell across her face, touched her cheeks, moved in her eyes.
“Oh, Lord! Girls lie in bed nights listing the names for their future children. Silly. Joe. John. Christopher. Samuel. Stephen. And right now, Will.” She touched the gentle rise of her stomach, then lifted her hand out halfway to point to him in the night. “Is your name Will?”
“Yes.”
Tears absolutely burst from her eyes.
He wept with her.
“Oh, that’s fine, fine,” she said at last. “I can go now. I won’t be out here on the lawn anymore. Thank God, thank you. Good night.”
She went away into the shadows across the lawn and along the sidewalk down the street. At the far corner he saw her turn and wave and walk away.
“Good night,” he said quietly.
I am not born yet, he thought, or she has been dead many years, which is it? which?
The moon sailed into clouds.
The motion touched him to step, walk, go up the porch stairs, wait, look out at the lawn, go inside, shut the door.
A wind shook the trees.
The moon came out again and looked upon a lawn where two sets of footprints, one going one way, one going another in the dew, slowly, slowly, as the night continued, vanished.
By the time the moon had gone down the sky there was only an empty lawn and no sign, and much dew.
The great town clock struck six in the morning. Fire showed in the east. A cock crowed.
February 1999: Ylla
They had a house of crystal pillars on the planet Mars by the edge of an empty sea, and every morning you could see Mrs. K eating the golden fruits that grew from the crystal walls, or cleaning the house with handfuls of magnetic dust which, taking all dirt with it, blew away on the hot wind. Afternoons, when the fossil sea was warm and motionless, and the wine trees stood stiff in the yard, and the little distant Martian bone town was all enclosed, and no one drifted out their doors, you could see Mr. K himself in his room, reading from a metal book with raised hieroglyphs over which he brushed his hand, as one might play a harp. And from the book, as his fingers stroked, a voice sang, a soft ancient voice, which told tales of when the sea was red steam on the shore and ancient men had carried clouds of metal insects and electric spiders into battle.
Mr. and Mrs. K had lived by the dead sea for twenty years, and their ancestors had lived in the same house, which turned and followed the sun, flower-like, for ten centuries.
Mr. and Mrs. K were not old. They had the fair, brownish skin of the true Martian, the yellow coin eyes, the soft musical voices. Once they had liked painting pictures with chemical fire, swimming in the canals in the seasons when the wine trees filled them with green liquors, and talking into the dawn together by the blue phosphorous portraits in the speaking room.
They were not happy now.
This morning Mrs. K stood between the pillars, listening to the desert sands heat, melt into yellow wax, and seemingly run on the horizon.
Something was going to happen.
She waited.
She watched the blue sky of Mars as if it might at any moment grip in on itself, contract, and expel a shining miracle down upon the sand.
Nothing happened.
Tired of waiting, she walked through the misting pillars. A gentle rain sprang from the fluted pillar tops, cooling the scorched air, falling gently on her. On hot days it was like walking in a creek. The floors of the house glittered with cool streams. In the distance she heard her husband playing his book steadily, his fingers never tired of the old songs. Quietly she wished he might one day again spend as much time holding and touching her like a little harp as he did his incredible books.
But no. She shook her head, an imperceptible, forgiving shrug. Her eyelids closed softly down upon her golden eyes. Marriage made people old and familiar, while still young.
She lay back in a chair that moved to take her shape even as she moved. She closed her eyes tightly and nervously.
The dream occurred.
Her brown fingers trembled, came up, grasped at the air. A moment later she sat up, startled, gasping.
She glanced about swiftly, as if expecting someone there before her. She seemed disappointed; the space between the pillars was empty.
Her husband appeared in a triangular door. “Did you call?” he asked irritably.
“No!” she cried.
“I thought I heard you cry out.”
“Did I? I was almost asleep and had a dream!”
“In the daytime? You don’t often do that.”
She sat as if struck in the face by the dream. “How strange, how very strange,” she murmured.
