Ghost of a Flea by James Sallis Read Free Book Online Page B

if that’s not what my life, all our lives, finally, are about, that imperative and the misreadings to which it forces us.
    When I was a kid, parents would tell us not to cross our eyes because they’d get stuck and we’d never be able to uncross them, we’d have to walk around like that the rest of our lives. That’s what introspection can come down to. You keep on with it, sinking through level after level, after a while you can’t get back to the top. You just go on pounding out the same thoughts on the stone over and over, fitting your feet into old footprints. Alcohol’s the same way.
    Years ago, I’d known I was in trouble when I found myself weeping uncontrollably over commercials on TV. A beleaguered housewife would smile around at her clean- as-new house, a couple’s bitter arguments trickle away as they drove their car towards snow-capped mountains, a man meet his wife for dinner, horribly late, carrying flowers—and I’d sit there sobbing, shaking, ruined. I was supposed to connect with the world, not collide with it, I remember thinking. Back then I’d got on to the habit of reading, listening to music and watching TV all at the same time as I drank. I never failed to think of David Bowie as the alien sitting before his bank of TV screens all tuned to different programs in The Man Who Fell to Earth. But I’d discovered that, when I did this, something curious took place. That I was able to follow the TV show without difficulty wasn’t surprising. But I found, and this was surprising, that I was more intimately connected with the music than at any other time, that it became impressed upon me in ways and to a degree it otherwise would not have been. And whatever books I read or half-read those times, whether Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons , Vin Packer’s T he Twisted Ones or Himes’s The End of a Primitive, remained with me forever.
    Then one night it all turned to shit. I’d been listening to Mahler’s Ninth, reading a novel set in Washington by some guy with a Greek name, and watching a movie in which a thirty-year-old actor playing the part of a high-school student confronted his girlfriend at a drive-in. She’d died in a car crash in the first twenty minutes of the film while riding with another young man but refused to stay put, clawing her way up out of the grave to come and tell the thirty-year-old that she’ll love him forever, there by his locker at school when he swings the door shut, now showing up at the drive-in while he’s on a date and rapping at his car window. “Forever,” she tells him, rotted flesh and a few teeth falling away as she mouths the word. “How fuckin’ long can forever be to a thirty-year-old!” I remember yelling at the screen. I’d been drinking pretty hard, apparently, harder than I thought or kept track of. I surfaced half a week or so later in the hospital, not Baptist or Touro or Mercy that time, but the state hospital over in Mandeville, this hulking, gray, utterly silent beast set among green trees and lawn where time was dipped in half-spoonfuls from the heart of glaciers and fossils deep in the earth. I was still going on about the movie as though it were real, as though everything in it had actually taken place.
    The incidence of mental illness among Negroes is significantly higher than among the population at large, someone was telling me. This seemed to come from far away and from inside my head at the same time. I swam up, towards light. Away from the voice. Closer to the voice.
    We sat facing one another across the kind of table you find in church basements and high school lunchrooms. It looked as if it had just been unpacked from its carton.
    He looked the same way. Boy Doctor Ferguson, I thought, taking his name from the narrow slab of brass name tag above a pocket crammed with pens, rulers, tongue depressors, hemostats and, for all I knew, a dental drill. Ever alert to use of language when alert at all, I particularly admired that