Nostalgia for ghosts

Shadows in the shape of the dead walked through my bedroom door. They'd then vanish, each dark phantom becoming the next.

By Greg Bottoms

Aug. 22, 2001 | As a small boy, I suffered from extreme fevers. They came like phantoms, burning through me, blurring my vision. They covered me in cold sweat, ridding me of food and liquid and waste until I was aware -- without the reserves of language or the ability to name my fears and feelings -- of a new kind of existence, an emptiness and lightness of body.

The fevers always began accompanied by fear and anxiety -- the same dread that animates dreams of falling -- at times so forceful that I thought I would suffocate, dying on an old, worn-out couch or on the cold bathroom tile. Once my temperature settled, though, topping out at 103 or 104 degrees, there was a sickly ease holding me, as if I'd stepped into another world.

High temperatures came first from the croup: deep, painful coughs like lightning strikes at the solar plexus, threatening to split me in half. Later there were middle-ear infections: buzzings in my head, the outside world muffled through antihistamines and painkillers. Then came bronchitis: a tightening in the chest, a lack of oxygen, mucus rising like an organic sludge from the bottom of my lungs until every sound from me came wrapped in a bubbling wetness.

Some of my clearest memories, existing with a near-photographic clarity untrammeled by the erosive nature of time, are of my mother holding me through long winter nights over a hot-running sink or bathtub as I stared blankly, dreamily, crazily at the dirt- and mold-spotted mortar between the tiles of the room. She would drape a towel over both our heads so that I would breathe only steam. In a sonorous, calming voice she would sing and shush as we rocked, until, miraculously it seemed to me, she had saved me from dying again -- a 30-year-old heroine in a tattered robe and shaggy slippers, the purple half-moons of exhaustion, of complete parental depletion, weighing down her eyes -- opening up my bronchi so that I could breathe, maybe even sleep. In the morning we would be at the doctor's office again, where both the horror and the strange magic of sickness would be temporarily destroyed.

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I routinely saw ghosts during the heights of illness and fever. I stop on this memory. Surely it is false. But perhaps that is not the point -- truth or falsity. Whether the ghosts were figments or not, my visions of them, and my steadfast belief as a boy in the reality of these visions, were real, as truthful as anything I can think of, perhaps more so because of their force, the space they take up in my memory.

When the fevers came, I would lie nearly paralyzed by fatigue and a sort of slow-motion hysteria in my dark room in our small, brick house in Tidewater, Virginia. Crickets and frogs complained through the open windows. And I waited for shadows in the shape of the dead to walk through my bedroom door. Ghosts would stop, three paces in -- always three paces: one, two, three -- then vanish, each dark phantom becoming the next, like images bleeding together in a kaleidoscope.

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On Sundays, my family would go to the Methodist Church near our home, often walking there along the edges of cornfields, through a path in the woods, across vacant, overgrown lots. I didn't mind going to church then (though I stopped attending completely as a teenager, when I discovered alcohol and marijuana and what I thought of as the liberating sounds of the Sex Pistols and X, among others), because the stories of Christ and the apostles, of miracles and magic and the inexplicable, were usually interesting and well told.

One Sunday, after a long week of illness and fevers, during the season of Lent, when the church was filled with purple cloth and white flowers, I first heard, or first really listened to, the story of Christ rising from the dead. Though this was certainly the most intriguing story thus far at church, beating out even Job and his boils, or Moses parting the Red Sea or the burning bush, or Christ conjuring food and drink from virtually nothing to sate the hungry masses, what made it profound to me was that it explained the ghosts that I saw with every high fever. People, people who lived on the earth long ago or shortly ago, died and were buried; but then, because Christ made it so, they rose from the dead and continued living, many of them for some reason stopping by my room.

To my mother sitting beside me in the pew I said, "I can see people like Jesus."

She looked at me. "What?" she whispered.

"In my bedroom sometimes. There are people like Jesus."

"Sshh," she said, her hand resting heavily on my leg. "Don't say things like that."

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