Ghost, p.15
Ghost, page 15
“I’m not making fun of you. I want you to know that.” He looks into her eyes and she nods. “But I don’t think you should do this in the mortuary. Okay?”
“Okay,” says Ophelia. “I keep the box at home anyway. I was about to concentrate on Robert. He hasn’t written or called me once since he’s left. It really upsets me.”
“I know that he cares about you,” says David. “He’s probably just busy unpacking, don’t you think?”
“I don’t think he cares about me as much as I care about him.” She begins to fuss with a loose thread on her blouse, then looks up at him. “Tell me the truth. Do you think I’m fat?”
“No, of course you’re not fat. I think you’re very pretty.”
She sighs and wrinkles her mouth, as if she doesn’t believe him. “Thank you.”
At home, late, the telephone rings. It’s Harry.
“Sorry to call so late,” says Harry. “Knowing you, I figured you’d be up reading some book. What’s all this wild stuff in the press about you and that supernatural society? How in the world did you get mixed up with those people?”
David explains about Ms. Gaignard. “One thing led to another.”
“It’s outrageous, the position they’re putting you in,” says Harry.
“Yeah. I’m upset about it,” says David.
“You should be. Listen, if you need any legal representation on this thing, please call me. For you, it’ll be free. Okay? Call me.”
“Thanks, Harry.”
“I mean it. How are you doing otherwise? How’s your mother?”
“She’s getting old.”
“It’s a tough time of life, isn’t it. My dad can hardly hear anymore. We have to write down what we want to say to him.”
“I’m sorry about that, Harry.”
“We’re all headed there. Are you seeing anybody?”
David hesitates, not knowing what to say. “It’s a long story.”
Harry chuckles. “I guess I asked the wrong question. We’ll save that for another time. But listen. Please call me if you need any help with that society. That stuff is outrageous. They’re dragging you through the mud.”
“WHAT IS IT?” ASKS ELLEN.
“I don’t know,” says David, lying. Since coming to her apartment an hour ago, he’s found it difficult to touch her. When he kissed her at the front door, he imagined that he was kissing Bethany and pulled back with guilt. Everything has changed.
“Something has happened,” says Ellen. She stands by her bureau and gazes at the photograph of herself and her sisters. She wears only a gauzy slip and she looks fragile and beautiful and he can feel every part of her body with his eyes, but he cannot bring himself to touch her. “I know that something has happened,” she says. She turns and sits on her bed, legs crossed, looking at him with her dark Asian eyes, and it seems as if a mile separates them. “There’s another woman, isn’t there.”
“Yes.”
She puts her hands to her face. In the distance, a train passes by. He listens to the whistle grow fainter and fainter.
“Is she anyone I know?”
“Bethany.”
“Bethany! Is she here?”
“Yes.”
“Did you sleep with her?”
“No. We had coffee. That’s all.”
She lets out a long breath. “So Bethany is here. I don’t understand. Why would you want to be with that woman again, David? All she did was make you feel bad about yourself.”
David finds himself angry at Ellen. The anger feels good and softens his guilt. “Where do you get that?”
“From you. From you. You can’t see yourself. What is it about Bethany?”
David doesn’t know what to say. The more he talks about Bethany, the more it will hurt Ellen. All he can do is stare at the floor.
“I don’t think this is only about Bethany,” says Ellen. “There’s just too much going on. You’ve been rattled for months. You don’t know what’s real and what’s not. All this stuff in the newspapers. You’re being exploited. It hurts me to see you exploited. Why don’t you stop it, David? Why don’t you speak out? What are you afraid of? Show some integrity.”
“Integrity! Are you saying that I don’t have integrity?”
“I’m saying that you should stop letting yourself be used by those people. It’s not doing anybody any good. It’s not doing you any good. It’s not doing us any good.”
“You never believed that I saw anything at the mortuary.”
“It’s gone way beyond that and you know it.”
“No. That’s the core of it. You never believed me.”
Ellen begins crying. “I care about you, David. I love you. I can give you love. And you need love. I need love. I really do. I thought you were it for me. I thought some luck was coming into my life.” She wipes the tears with the back of her hand. “I don’t know if Bethany ever loved you, but if she did it was a destructive kind of love. You’ve never been truly loved. Your father died when you were eight years old. I’ve never met your mother, but from what you’ve told me, you don’t get much from her either. You’re a lonely man, David.”
“Do you believe what I saw at the mortuary? Yes or no?” Ellen doesn’t say anything. “Yes or no?”
“I don’t believe in ghosts. Is that what you want me to say? I don’t believe in ghosts. But if you think that you saw a ghost, that’s okay with me. I can live with that.”
“But you don’t believe me. You don’t believe me.” David leans against the wall and slumps to the floor. “Why don’t you believe me?”
“I can’t make myself believe something I don’t believe.”
He stares at Ellen across the room, and she grows smaller and smaller, like a boat rowing away from the shore. He feels as if he never met her that morning in the library, never walked with her in the park, never went to the concerts with her, never slept in her bed. How has it all slipped away? And he has slipped away from himself as well. She mentioned his father. He closes his eyes and can still feel the embrace of his father after that first triumphant ride on the bicycle, so long ago. Ellen is right. He is alone.
For several minutes he remains sitting on the floor, listening to Ellen’s quiet sobbing. “I should go,” he says finally.
“Yes,” says Ellen. “You should go.”
A long time he walks by the lake, wondering if he will ever see Ellen again. Over the years, this lake has brought him comfort and peace. He knows its indentations like he knows the shape of his hand. He knows every grassy spot on the shore where he can sit. He knows the gum tree with its hiding branches. On the opposite bank, he can see waves of light rippling over the trees, sun reflected from the undulations of the water. The water gently laps at some rocks, and the wind and the sun make bright flowing stripes glide over the surface while the color changes from dark green to azure to pale blue. The pale face of Bethany. Finally, Bethany has come back to him.
Perhaps she’s been planning to come back for years, the pale of her skin, and there’s Ronald Mickleweed walking toward his table. He has far too much on his mind to argue with Ronald about zeroes and ones, but there Ronald is, and he looks unhappy. His colleague from the physics department looks more unhappy. They’ve come, Ronald says, to discuss their alarm at the increasing press coverage of David’s psychic abilities.
Even at this early hour, the heat from the kitchen stove combined with the summer weather have made the diner too warm, and the men begin sweating as soon as they sit down at the Formica table. Ronald takes off his jacket and rolls up the sleeves of his checked shirt.
With his bad lazy eye and his lopsided gait, Ronald is easily recognizable from years ago. But he’s now balding, with a face grown plump and soft like a ripe pear. Seeing him now, David cannot help remembering Ronald in school. As a boy, Ronald loved to build things. He made his own glue. He delighted in explosions. David once saw him pour sulfuric acid into a ceramic bowl with other chemicals, whereupon the mixture sizzled and seethed and produced a gush of steam and a mound of black carbon. Ronald’s bedroom was littered with coils of wire and electrical devices, test tubes, curved glass flasks, Bunsen burners, dangerous chemicals. On the high school math team, Ronald would get a faraway look in his eyes while the problem was still being read out and, before his opponents could begin to compute, write down a single number and draw a circle around it. Then he would let out a loud sigh and grin.
From an early age, Ronald knew that he wanted to be a scientist, and he made a straight beeline from high school to college to his doctorate in chemistry. Ronald wanted to change the world. David marveled at that kind of ambition, but he never had it himself. David didn’t care about changing the world. Instead, he wanted to understand the world. And he was growing more and more confused by the day.
Of course, life threw a few messy uncertainties into Ronald’s world of logic and precision. One of the uncertainties, Ronald says matter-of-factly as he squints at David, is that he’s discovered a retinal disease in his good eye. “There’s no cure for it,” Ronald says, and shrugs his shoulders. “In another few years, I’ll be blind. My wife tells me that now I won’t have to watch her grow old.” He laughs, but it is a sad laugh.
“What miserable luck,” says David. He always liked Ronald, always admired his spirit.
Without waiting for orders, Marie brings scrambled eggs and toast. For a few moments, she hovers near the table, eager to listen in on the conversation with the professors.
“We’ve done a little checking on Dr. Samuel Tettlebeim,” says Ronald. “Would you like to know what his doctorate is in? Psychology.”
Ronald’s colleague from the physics department, Professor William Grindlay, rolls his eyes. William is a tall man, dressed in blue jeans and sandals, with a wide brimmed sun hat and a set of keys jangling from his belt. He hasn’t touched his eggs and pushes his plate out into the middle of the table. “I don’t eat eggs,” he says in a voice so soft it can scarcely be heard.
“Tettlebeim was in academia twenty years ago,” continues Ronald, “but he couldn’t get tenure. The scuttlebutt is that he used to be an alcoholic. Apparently he was involved with a bad accident of some kind.”
“I’d bet he killed somebody drunk in a car,” says William.
“We don’t know exactly what happened,” says Ronald. “But he dropped out of academia and went into consulting and private practice. The main thing is that his Ph.D. is in psychology.”
“So what,” says David. “He seemed knowledgeable to me.”
Ronald nods and places his pen on the Formica table. This is a sign that he is preparing to do some calculations. “I’m sure that Dr. Tettlebeim is knowledgeable about some things,” says Ronald. “But he doesn’t know anything about the physical sciences. I’ve been corresponding with him. I asked him some basic questions, really basic stuff, and he doesn’t know anything. Believe me, he’s not equipped. But that’s not the point. The point is that the claims he’s been making are simply absurd.”
“The man is a nut,” says William.
Taking some papers out of his briefcase, Ronald explains that he’s gathered together a list of major earthquakes, hurricanes, and economic events that occurred somewhere in the world in the last six months. What number of them would be expected to occur by chance within three days of David’s “session” with the black box? he asks. With his pen, he scribbles some math on one of the napkins. “See,” he says, squinting at what he has written. “The number of phenomena that Dr. Tettlebeim has claimed to be correlated with your session are no more than what would be expected from random chance. You had no effect.”
No effect! David is willing to acknowledge that he had no effect on world events. But certainly he had some effect on the R box itself. And the R box definitely had an effect on him. There was an effect. “But what about the ones and zeroes?” “We went over that before,” says Ronald. “That was a rare occurrence. If you sat down with that black box again, it wouldn’t happen.”
For the third time, Marie comes to the table asking if anyone wants fresh coffee. William stares at her, and she hurries away.
“I’m afraid that Samuel Tettlebeim is beginning to get personal,” says Ronald. “In his last message, he said that I was ‘a narrow-minded elitist.’” Ronald smiles. “I guess anyone who believes that two plus two equals four is an elitist.”
“What concerns us,” says William in his paper-thin voice, “is that the public believes this crap. Our faculty is concerned. Even some of our students are asking us what this is all about.”
“David, we want you to denounce this stuff,” says Ronald.
“What do you say, David?” says William. “We can clear up some ignorance out there. It’s amazing how ignorant people are. People have no idea what’s possible and what’s not. We have an opportunity. Opportunities like this don’t come every day.”
A hundred thoughts are running through David’s head, all of them distressing. With a sigh, he turns and looks out the window, where the flashing EAT sign slowly revolves on its post. The nightmare continues. But he brought it all on himself. He wishes he had never said a word about April 23. He regrets that he ever spoke to Ms. Gaignard. He regrets that he allowed Dr. Tettlebeim to conduct his experiments. Now he’s paying for his mistakes. At the thought of making public denunciations, or any statements at all, his stomach turns over. He is not a public person. He is a person who likes to read and to learn and to quietly reflect on the world. “What would I have to say?”
“I don’t want to tell you exactly what words to use,” says Ronald. “This thing needs to come from you. You’re the man. You need to say, first, that you never saw anything supernatural in the mortuary. It could have been a daydream or a light effect or something like that. You need to say that you don’t subscribe to psychic phenomena. Dr. Tettlebeim has his data, of course, but we could give you some text about the nature of probability, et cetera. That kind of thing. What do you think?”
“It makes me nervous,” says David. “I need to think about it. I’m so tired of this whole thing.”
“But you do agree that this is a bunch of crap, don’t you?” murmurs William.
“Most of it,” says David.
“What do you mean by that?”
“You guys are really pressuring me,” says David.
“David, I want to tell you something,” says Ronald. “A couple of days ago, I came home and found my teenage son and his friends in our basement staring at a black box. I don’t know where they got it. I asked him what he was doing, and my son said he was planning to make the box spin. One of his friends had done it, he said. Made it spin with his mind. That’s my son, Alex. He’s been living with me for seventeen years. I’ve never seen him doing anything like that before. And he believes it. I don’t know what else he believes.”
“I need to think about this.”
“I understand,” says Ronald. “I know that you didn’t want all this to happen. But we’ve got a situation now. Please, David. Do the right thing.”
Ronald and William stand up from the table. David watches them as they drive off, a cloud of dust following their car until it becomes only a tiny dot in the distance and then disappears.
IN HIS APARTMENT, DAVID PACES THE KITCHEN. The clock on the wall says eight-thirty, time for him to leave for the mortuary. He continues to pace. What should he do? He’s being squeezed from all sides. When he imagines himself making a public pronouncement, he gets a panicked feeling in his gut. But Ronald is right. Dr. Tettlebeim’s claims are absurd. So cleverly the gentle doctor makes his insinuations, pretending to be cautious while suggesting the most outlandish results. World events! Yes, he’s being used. He’s being exploited. More than being exploited, he’s being made to look like a fool. Harry was too polite to say it, but he thought it. Make a public denunciation, whether frightening or not. Do it. He’s done other frightening things. The morning he dived off a ledge into the pond when he was fourteen, terrified and shaking. He can see the pond, distant and scary below. And only weeks ago, he confessed to his mother that he’d been lying to her for years. He can do it. He must do it. He’s not jumping just because Ronald told him to jump. He’s jumping because he knows he must jump. He must jump. He has integrity. Show some integrity, Ellen said. Well, he has integrity. He’s had integrity all of his life. He’ll make a denunciation. He’ll stop being used. But exactly what is he going to denounce? Certainly the most extravagant claims of the so-called Society. The world events. Those claims are irresponsible. Should he also denounce the result with the zeroes and ones? Should he denounce what he saw on April 23? Those things happened, whatever the explanation. He’ll figure out the explanation some other time. To denounce them would be a lie. That would also lack integrity. And what about Mr. Chee? The red splotches rising onto his forehead. The intelligent eyes, steady like a windless lake. Could Mr. Chee be deluding himself? Where is he at this moment? David wants to talk to Mr. Chee. Have they imagined it all? He certainly did not imagine the zeroes and ones. Dr. Tettlebeim has proof; he has the graph from his printer. And that feeling was so intense. But maybe it was a rare event, as Ronald said. Maybe it was simply random chance. What is the truth? Everything is so nebulous. They’re pressuring him. He kicks the refrigerator hard and the bottom panel falls off. Then he kicks the panel and it goes skidding across the floor and smashes into the wall and leaves a gash. Good. He paces. Now, it’s eight forty-seven. For sure he’ll be late.
Slow down. One step at a time. Start with the R box. Ronald says the preponderance of zeroes was a rare event. Okay. So repeat the experiment. Yes. That’s the logical thing to do. Repeat the experiment. Settle it once and for all. Get Tettlebeim’s telephone number.
David calls Dr. Tettlebeim’s office. A secretary says that Dr. Tettlebeim is not in yet. I’d like his home phone, says David. Dr. Tettlebeim does not give out his home phone. This is David Kurzweil. Oh yes, Mr. Kurzweil. I recognize your name. I need to speak to him immediately, says David.
