Nostalgia for ghosts

A young girlfriend, Debra, the person I spent most of my time with on the weekends and in the summer, lived three doors down in a brick one-story on a quarter-acre grass lot identical, almost, to my family's. She was adopted, as was her brother. Her father went jogging one day. He was forty, overweight. It was one of those heat waves you expect in the South -- steaming asphalt, a weight to the sunlight, midday silences, mirages of water receding on the highways where the smell of melting rubber lingered. He had a massive heart attack on the sidewalk near my home. People came out, tried to help; paramedics were called. But it was too late. In a neighborhood where he had lived for nearly 15 years, a neighborhood in which real estate values were plummeting because of enforced busing, racial unrest and spiking crime rates against person and property, his heart had clenched tight as a locked jaw and quit.

I saw it happen. Or I think I saw it happen. In my memory there is a space reserved for the image of his collapsing: he is tying his shoe, then putting his ear to the root-cracked concrete to listen closely to a faint rumbling underground, then lying down to rest, to sleep.

Weeks later, after the funeral and the still silence of mourning that engulfed their house, I told Debra not to worry, that death was a door. People were still around, and mostly fine, and sometimes, when I was sick, I could see them. I buttressed my story with talk of God and Jesus, of Mary Magdalene, of the giant stone rolled away, of the empty tomb, the triumphant light of holiness and salvation. I now knew a story that could make everything better. I believed that somehow made me powerful, impervious to life's ultimate tragedies.

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Getting off the bus one day -- I was seven -- I watched as a girl in a wheelchair, with a miniature body and a normal, adult-sized head, made as if to cross the busy highway just outside of our subdivision, where the bus dropped off the neighborhood kids on the wide sidewalks. The day was hazy, steamed up around the edges like a televised dream. The girl couldn't see around the bus -- a wall of yellow, the roar of cars. Probably she was mentally as well as physically impaired.

When the car hit her, she was thrown high into the air, coming down, lifeless, on the street's grass median. The bluntness of the moment was a shock, like a hammer to the face. There was something false about it. It lacked narrative, lacked the simple decency of making sense. It was nothing like TV. No swelling of triumphant or tragic music. No fog effects, or noirish shadows around the body, no commentators spouting irony or melodrama or some sophisticated mixture of both. No chalk lines to be drawn. No dissonant guitar chords, or quick cuts toward overly weighted symbols, or a darkening screen to pull it all together. I'd gotten used to death as it was presented by the experts, people who'd studied the science of human perceptions, who knew about narrative formulas and the mathematics of audience emotions. Now Debra's father and this -- what? midget? dwarf? -- Death happened in the blink of an eye; then it was over, a life expelled -- so simple as to seem degrading, the degradation so venal as to almost necessitate an afterlife.

The bus driver, a large woman with strange configurations of moles like stellar constellations on her face, sent all the kids away. Then there were cops, paramedics, a quickly forming crowd. Someone was shouting and shouting and shouting, but you couldn't understand any of it because the language was bent by panic, embroidered with loss, rising up and up and dissipating like factory smoke over our replicated homes.

At home, feeling numb and tingly, jarred and electrified, my spine fairly humming from adrenaline, still not quite believing what I saw to be real, I vomited. I couldn't tell my mother what happened. I couldn't find the breath, the right words. She heard about it from Debra's mother. She tried to cheer me up, to make me forget, with sweet talk and rubbing and promises of treats and cartoons.

I didn't go to school for the rest of the week, complaining, falsely, of an intense stomach ache, staring blankly at cartoons all morning (Wile E. Coyote dying and coming back, dying and coming back), running errands in the afternoon with my mother -- the beauty salon, the drugstore, the post office -- seeing, on the periphery of my vision, the dead girl rising up in shop windows. I noticed people in wheelchairs everywhere. I suddenly lived in a city of deformities -- something wrong with the air here, the water. I had a strange feeling that if I went back on the bus I would be sentenced to see something like that every day. I wondered if during the next fever the little girl -- or tiny adult -- would roll through my darkened doorway, the bent wheels of her chair squeaking and clanking.

Next page: He said that his dead-ass uncle wouldn't be let into my white-ass house anyway, dead or alive