“Or God, maybe? A beneficent, intervening cosmic intelligence…”
“I thought you said you’re an atheist,” she said, scowling slightly.
“Oh, I am. Through and through. But I also don’t believe in the collective unconscious, so, for me, if you’re looking for potential causal agents for this hypothesis of yours, one’s just as good as the other. Anyway, it would make for a pretty fickle fucking god, don’t you think, since your thin spots seem picky about who they show up to save? Well, unless that’s the random part.”
Constance laughed then, and that was good, just knowing that my skepticism hadn’t pissed her off. She lay down again, and the talk moved on to other things. Nothing else was said about ghosts or Jung or holes in time, and that was good, too. Because, sooner or later, I might have done something stupid like tell her I do think it’s a crackpot idea. Or, I might have pointed out that her having discovered the account of this Anna Turner woman in a library book only works as evidence in favor of her proposal if I accept that she’s not lying about having found it after the supposed ghostly sighting, instead of having come across it first and then fabricated the story of that day at the Forty Steps to match what she’d read. If I had to bet green folding money, well, I fear that’s where I’d place my wager.
But, I will admit, hearing her “ghost story,” I couldn’t help but be reminded of what I thought I saw in a chert quarry in the sweltering summer of 1977.
Sitting here now, pecking at the typewriter of the late Dr. Charles Harvey and watching the clock hung above the kitchen sink, I’ve just remembered something Isak Dinesen wrote. Well, I’m sure I’m not recalling it exactly, so this is a paraphrase—God made the world round, so we wouldn’t ever be able to look too far ahead.Something like that. And I’m thinking, maybe it isn’t nearly round enough, and what would be the point of limiting how far ahead we can see, when we can see so far back the way we’ve come? It’s too late at night for thoughts like these, and the pads of my fingers are feeling tender. Sometimes, these days, that’s the only way I know that it’s time to give up and go to bed, when my fingertips get sore from slamming at these keys. Anyway, Constance and I have rescheduled our picnic at the “Red Tree” for tomorrow, assuming the weathermen are right and the day’s really going to be cooler, like they’re predicting. I hope so. I need to get out of this house for a few hours.
CHAPTER FOUR
No coffee yet, and only one cigarette, and it only half smoked. If I were any less awake, sitting upright wouldn’t be an option. There was a very minor absence seizure last night, late; Constance had come downstairs to bum a cigarette, and she had not yet gone back upstairs when it happened. No big deal. I faded out for a few seconds, but she made a huge fuss over it. Can’t wait until she’s unlucky enough to be around for one of the big ones, if that’s how she’s going to react to the petit mal episodes. She brewed a pot of tea, and kept asking if she could look at my pupils, and if maybe I smelled oranges — stuff like that — and sat with me a while, though, of course, it was entirely unnecessary. I told her it was unnecessary, but she insisted. It must have been almost four in the morning before she climbed back up into her garret and left me alone to try and sleep. And I really didn’t do much better than try. My head filled itself with all the sorts of unease that comes on nights like that, the unanswerable questions, the heavy thoughts to needle me and keep me awake. My health, the book, money, and also the story that Constance had told me about her ghost, the “ghost” she claims to have witnessed in Newport years ago. So, even though it’s probably not fair, I’m going to blame her for the nightmares that came when I finally did doze off. It was almost five a.m., and the sky was going gray. I’m still not accustomed to how early the sun rises here, compared to Atlanta, and I really hate when it catches me off my guard like that. But I was sleeping before genuine daylight came along, thank fuck, or I wouldn’t have gotten even the lousy couple of hours that I managed.
The house is so goddamn quiet. Mist over Ramswool Pond. Birds singing. Little sounds I can’t identify. And these noisy fucking typewriter keys. Constance said not to worry about it, that, after her time in LA, she could sleep through an earthquake (and, in fact, she has, she tells me), but I still find myself trying to strike the keys with less force, endeavoring to somehow muffle that clack-clack-fuckity-clack of die-cast iron consonants and vowels against the paper and the machine’s carriage.The intractable guilt of the insomniac typist—sounds a bit like a stray line Ezra Pound might have wisely persuaded Eliot to cut from The Waste Land.
But the reason that I’m sitting here at the kitchen table (if I need a reason), painfully uncaffeinated, squinting at Dr. Harvey’s accursed typewriter by the wan light of eight ayem, are those nightmares I’ve already blamed Constance for summoning. Just another set of bad dreams, sure, in a parade that’s never going to end until I’m dead and buried (and, oh, what a happy thought, that death may come with nightmares all its own: unending, possibly, an afterlife of perpetual nightmares). But I can’t shake the feeling that there was something new there, and I want to try and put down some of what I recall before I lose it. It’s already fading so goddamn fast, so quit stalling and get to it, woman!
I was walking by the sea, maybe one of the nearby stretches of Rhode Island coastline that I’ve visited — so, it’s no great stretch to understand why I’m blaming the tale of the “ghost” of the Forty Steps. I assume the tide was rising. It seemed to be rising, but I have spent far too little of my life by the sea to be sure. The surf was rough, the waves coming in and crashing against a beach that was more cobbles and pebbles than sand. The air was filled with spray. My feet kept getting wet. Well, I mean my shoes, as I wasn’t barefoot. My shoes kept getting wet, and my socks, because the foamy water was rushing so far up the beach towards the line of low dunes that stretched away behind me. The sky was the most amazing thing, though, and maybe if I weren’t so asleep I could find the language to do my memories of it justice. Maybe. Then again, maybe the demeanor of that sky is forever beyond my abilities to wordsmith. I know a storm was approaching, but no usual sort of storm. Something terrible, something magnificent rolling like a cumulus demon of wind and rain and lightning over the whitecaps, sweeping towards the land, and no power in the cosmos could have waylaid or detoured that storm.
At the library in Moosup, a while back, I read part of a book about the Great Hurricane of 1938, the fabled Long Island Express, and maybe that’s what was in back of my sleeping conjuration of this advancing line of towering thunderheads. The colors, they’re still so clear in my head, a range of blue and blacks, violets and sickly greens bleeding into even sicklier yellows, and that does not even begin to convey those clouds. This was an angry, bludgeoned sky. A bruised sky. A sky bearing the contusions of some unseen atmospheric cataclysm.
I stood there, the polished stones slipping about beneath my wet feet as though they were imbued with a life all their own (and I wish I could recollect that line from Machen about the horror of blossoming pebbles, but I can’t, and won’t do it a disservice by trying). The wind and the spray swirled about me, plastering my clothes and hair flat, filling my nostrils and mouth with all the salty, living flavors and aromas of a wrathful sea. And as the gusts blown out before that storm howled in my ears, I realized that I was not alone, that Constance had followed me down to the shore. She was saying something about her former roommates, the Silver Lake junkies, but I couldn’t make out most of it. I told her to speak up, and, instead, she grew silent, and, for a time, I thought I was alone again.