Tilting the Void

"And I don't like to tell people that because I think it plants suggestions, you know. But on three separate occasions I've had renters break their leases to leave this place. One fellow tore off in the middle of the night and never answered my calls--I've still got the collectors after him. Owed me two months' rent."

I opened the Buick that was the fridge--also immaculate, inside and out. "I don't believe in ghosts," I said, picturing myself in a sweater with leather elbow patches, a whiskey glass in hand, cigarette in the other while the hi-fi played Brubeck. "I'll be fine."

"Okay," she said. "But you've been warned."

***

I easily could see myself returning to that lakeside cottage year after year. I loved it. I knew it was a cliche to end all cliches--the stressed, blocked, depressed writer (perhaps a budding alcoholic) takes to the country to write his masterpiece, the novel that would launch his career and face into the public's fickle attention--but, perhaps that was a pipe dream only, a faded vestige of the past century. Nobody was Hemingway, not even old Ernest himself. Writers these days achieved success through hard work, a good business sense, and timing--not drink, drugs, and despair. There were no Poes, no Jack Kerouacs, no Henry Millers, not any more. They were wild souls bucking against centuries of deadening conformity; what had I to complain about in this post-post modern society? There were no fifties-style, stifling social norms any more; free love, feminism, Communism, homosexuality, atheism, Satanism, just about any -ism you liked--as Cole Porter said, "Anything goes." And we'd even moved past our anomie regarding that--even moral outrage at society's supposed decline was passe, mere flailing at a long-dead horse. I had a belief that it wasn't the death of Western Civilization anyway, only a shift, a restructuring of thought. But in this rootless, feckless time, was there any room for introspection or malaise?

I sat back from my typewriter, took another sip of Jameson's, and watched the rain trail down the window. Ecologic destruction. Encroaching plagues. Social inequity and poverty. Racism. Genocide. War and the rumors of wars. There were a host of issues about which I could write, but how did any of them effect me, a middle-aged, out of work English teacher who was himself something of a living cliche? I belonged to last century; I was already dust. Millions of new souls swelled the staggering populations of the world, while I dwindled and grew old, plucking feebly at an obsolete implement--

A dish crashed in the kitchen, half startling me out of the chair. "The hell--?" Nothing was out of place, though. On inspection, a plate had slipped in the (now maculate) sink and shattered itself to pieces. Gravity, I thought. Gravity and poor housekeeping, the ghosts of our day. I shook my head and turned out the light, but my train of thought had shifted. I went to the creaky old record player in the living room and put on a vinyl LP by Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, something wacky and banal, and sat on the sofa with Henry James in my lap. The Turn of the Screw. Now there was a ghost story, I thought, and put my feet up.

***

I walked down to the lakeshore the next day in the fog and dripping orange leaves. The lake was flat, dead, the shore cobbled in slimy rocks. A dank smell drifted. I would not be deterred, and took my uncle's pipe out of my jacket pocket. In a moment I was strolling along in a cloud of cherry-scented tobacco smoke, blackening my lungs and undoubtedly shortening my already meager existence. Ahead, I spied a black and white dog flinging itself in the water after a stick. The girl who'd thrown it stood with her arms crossed, shivering in her black raincoat. She saw me and called to the dog.

"Good morning," I said.

"You're at the Granger's," she said, almost accusingly. She was young, maybe twenty, my students' age. I thought absurdly of Avril Lavigne, though I knew next to nothing about that singer. She was petite, with dyed-blond shoulder length hair, blue eyes raccooned with make up, and various facial piercings. Sinuous tattoos stained her neck and disappeared under her t-shirt as if caught in the act of escaping her skin, and her mouth was a wet, swollen pink blossom shattered in the rain. I was surprised at how her mascara bruised eyes affected me. On drawing closer, I saw it wasn't mascara after all.

"Yes--I've rented it for the season. Are you all right?"

"I'm fine. Angel, come here!" She shouted at the dog and jerked it by its studded collar. "You know it's haunted, right?"

"Mrs. Granger told me." I grinned. "I don't believe in ghosts, so I should be all right."

"Angel--sit!" She shoved the dog to the ground and stared at me. "I suppose that's tobacco," she said, as if disapproving my pipe. "Weird."

"It is. I shouldn't smoke, I know."

"Pot is better for you anyway." She snapped a lead to the dog's collar, stood on it, and proceeded to take a rolled joint out of an Altoids tin in her front pocket.

"You think so?" I said, trying not to guffaw as she flicked her lighter. So young, I thought. So damned young. When I was that age--I caught myself being an elderly ass, and shook my head at nostalgia. "I skipped rope," I said.

"Huh?" She blinked at me. "Whatever."

"Do you live around here? I was told all the summer people had gone."

She shrugged. "Yeah, I live here. Up the road, you know? But I wouldn't go around the Granger place. You know they had a kid who shot his brains out there."

"It happens." I don't know why, but we were walking along together like old friends, the dog panting at her heels. "I'm Jeff Harper, by the way."

"Charity Lee," she said.

to be continued...