Phantom Page 5

  What people say now—it’s still the worst thing to have ever happened—what they say now is that they understand Nicky’s dad. That they would have done the same thing. That, once a person crosses the threshold into your house, where you family is, that he’s giving up every right to life he ever had.

  This is what you do if you’re a traitor and in the same break room with people saying that: nod.

  This is what you do if you hate yourself and can’t sleep and have your hands balled into fists under the sheets all night every night: agree with them for real. That, if anybody tries to come in your door one night, then all bets are off.

  And then you’re a traitor.

  Nevermind that, a few months before Nicky’s juvenile delinquency bloomed into a five-year stretch with no parole, you went to his apartment, to buy a bag. He was Mark all over, right down to how he narrowed his eyes as he pulled on his cigarette, right down to how he ducked his head into his shoulders like his neck was still remembering long hair. And you didn’t use anymore then, hadn’t since the night before your wedding, would even stop at the grocery store on the way home, to flush the bag over and over, until the assistant manager knocked on the door, asked if there was a problem.

  Yes, there was.

  It was a funny question, really.

  The problem was that one time while your friend’s head was floating across a lawn, a machete glinting real casual in the doorway behind it, a thing happened that you didn’t understand for years: the life meant for Nicky, you got. And he got yours.

  That’s not the funny part, though.

  The funny part, the reason the assistant manager finally has to get the police involved in removing you from the bathroom, is that you can still smell the pizza from that night. And that sometimes, driving home to your family after a normal day, you think it was all worth it. That things happen for a reason.

  It’s not the kind of thing Nicky would understand, though.

  Nevermind Tim.

  AFTER IMAGES

  Karen Heuler

  A survey I conducted on Water Street concludes that 58% of Americans think it is probably 58 degrees out, while 22% think it is probably 54, and the remainder aren’t sure.

  For the first time in weather history this month, the percentage of people thinking it is 58 degrees is exactly 58. This happens, we are told, on average of once every six months. You won’t see that happening again until probably late fall or early winter, although polls also show that a majority of people think there won’t be any winter next year at all.

  That was the gist of my segment on last night’s news. Today I got called into the office. “We’re getting complaints,” the news manager said. He’s a fat man and one ear is lower than the other, giving him a quizzical look. “People say your segments are insulting.”

  “How many people said that? Maybe they’re just the kind of people who complain. You have to ask the people who don’t complain what they think.”

  “No, I don’t,” the manager said. “I don’t have to do anything.”

  “Poor choice of words,” I conceded. “I merely meant: balance. We strive for balance.”

  “No, we don’t,” the manager said.

  “What do you want, sir?” I asked.

  “Relevance. Nobody wants a poll on what the temperature might be. They want to know what the temperature is, and move on to sports.”

  I bowed my head.

  And by the way, how accurate are the polls? We asked forty people and twenty said not accurate and twenty said accurate. Which means, according to our off-screen analyst, that any survey, tally, census, or sampling of the public would itself be only half-accurate, since the public is divided in the concept of accuracy itself and is therefore unreliable.

  But is this really so? We asked a former employee of Burton & Pudge Poll Company, which compiles statistics on the surveys themselves, how surveys are measured. This employee, who prefers to remain anonymous, says that polls in general get three different results if the interviewee is asked the same question in three different ways. In response, Burton & Pudge representatives stated that this points out the refinements of the polling process, which recognizes that only 30% of respondents hear all the words in a sentence, a figure that has been verified by having test subjects write down all the words in a sentence in reverse order so as to eliminate rote repetition. 10% do not write down the word “not” in a sentence that contains it.

  On the other hand, 13% put it in when it wasn’t there to begin with.

  This is how the polling industry comes up with the plus-or-minus 3% variance, since misunderstandings on either side of the scale are 3% away from canceling themselves out.

  I was invited to the office again. The manager said, “That was not what we had in mind. Polls should be fun. If they can’t be fun, what’s the point of it?”

  I considered that, and thought that was a very good observation.

  According to research by Wallup and Pye Interview Associates, facial expression is more accurate than verbal expression, at least when the face itself is aware it is lying. Most times it is not lying and then all we want to know is: does a flat face like what we’re saying or not? That’s simple enough.

  Sticking one’s tongue out is a no; smiling is a yes, unless the eyes are squinting, in which case it’s no again. A shake of the head, no; a nod, yes. But beyond that—what is the nose saying? (Flaring, sniffing, snorting?) We have also calibrated the ears, since some people, sociopaths especially, confine their telling expressions to the earlobe. They may pass all the tests checking the muscles of the lips, the eyebrows, the eyelids, the nostril, but the ear tightens and the lobe clenches. That is a lie.

  “The ear?” the co-anchor said, suspiciously.

  We can also track your voice, you know; we can tell the truth of what you’re saying.

  “The ear?” he repeated. “I don’t believe the ear even has muscles.”

  “I don’t care about that, really. Maybe it’s the cartilage that quivers.”

  Ha.

  He waved me off, also a telling gesture, but a little blunt. It takes no special education to understand that.

  I turned to address him, sharing my air time. “Did you know the way you dress also reveals a lot? And I don’t mean, do you have style, do you have money. I mean, this is a person who has no imagination, this is a person who fantasizes. Okay, you say, that’s easy. But I must add, when you lie, your clothes don’t fit as well. Unless you stay absolutely still, and that’s a dead giveaway. A person who doesn’t shift around during interrogation is a person hiding something.”

  “Interrogation?”

  “Well yes, what did you think I was talking about?”

  His eyes narrowed. He slowly put his hand in his pocket. As if he had something, yes. He thought he had an instrument that could deflect me. His nostrils flared. His ear twitched.

  I was getting into the hang of being called into the office. I hung my head immediately and said, “Boss, what should I do?”

  “You have to know what the public wants,” he said. “You have to have the knack for it. What is it that gets our goat? Scandal, crime, the all-chocolate diet. Death and taxes, they get everyone interested. Do something on taxes.”

  I’m not interested in taxes.

  The final test of any poll of course is what the dead say about dying. That’s the poll we want and never get. The dead, as far as polls are concerned, have nothing to say about death once the body freezes up, but right after death, especially that moment we like to call “instantaneous death,” we find it is still possible to get a few questions in.

  Shortly after a local criminal was guillotined, his head in a basket, a sharply observant reporter noticed that the eyes of the head were slowly closing. He rushed to the head with a microphone.

  “Excuse me, sir, how do you feel?” the reporter asked.

  The eyes flickered open and stared at the reporter. There was a slight movement of the tongue.

 
The reporter was excited. “If you feel pain, sir, blink your eyes! Blink on a scale of one to ten to tell us how much pain.” He stuck his microphone at the head’s lips. Very slowly the eyes looked at the reporter then closed halfway again and stayed there.

  The cameraman was standing by the dead criminal’s wife, conducting his own interview. “How do you feel now that your husband has been executed, ma’am?” he asked.

  But what if the head was lying? He was a criminal, after all. What if it was nothing more than a bunch of nerve endings firing off without meaning anything? Go back to the science of physiognomy (about which 40% of the population says there is no such science but 60% of the population knows someone or other who can “tell” when someone else is lying) and use its principles to decide whether the decapitated head was telling the truth when it fluttered its eyes.

  Physiognomy says a glance to the right means an imaginative thought process. A glance to the left means a recall of memory.

  The head glanced to the right. Now, if this were a poker game that would be considered a “tell” if the person did it autonomically in certain situations. Was this a “tell” from the dead head?

  In other words, do the dead realize that their opinions still matter?

  “Boss?” I asked politely. “Was that what you had in mind?”

  “From now on,” he said roughly. “No live segments. We’re going to review your tapes and decide if they air.”

  “You didn’t like it?” I was shocked.

  “There are no guillotine executions in New Jersey,” he said. “There never have been guillotine executions in New Jersey.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” I said. “The people still need to know.”

  According to a clairvoyant I consulted, the afterlife is just like this life, only without bodies. The poor are still poor, though this time they are also poor in spirit.

  “How does that work?” I asked. “I mean, how can you be poor if there’s no money?”

  “Oh, there’s money,” she said. “It just doesn’t weigh anything. Besides, we put the value on things. It’s not like gold has any particular absolute value. We just like it. That’s in this world,” she said. “There are ten thousand worlds, but not really that much variety. Some are physical, some are spiritual. And they all have rich and poor people.”

  “What’s the point?”

  “No point. It simply is. Of course, you’ll like it better if you’re rich in all the worlds.”

  “So we can bring it with us?” I asked. “How do we prepare to be rich in the next life? Is there some kind of investment opportunity?”

  I didn’t believe her, of course; I could feel it creeping out of my voice. She was offended.

  “You’ll learn that your attitude always goes with you,” she said stiffly.

  I rapped on my table just for the effect. “I think I hear some advice,” I said. “Do you know who it’s from? I want to do a background check.”

  And she shut up. That was the end of the segment.

  I wouldn’t be surprised if there are scams beyond the grave. Some people will believe anything; other people will take advantage of anything.

  So, beliefs. What are people willing to believe in? Some believe they have come from another planet; some believe they are going to one. Some believe they will gain their enemies’ strengths by eating their enemies’ heart. Others try to claim the soul by, say, sprinkling water on the head or cutting off a bit of skin.

  Almost everyone believes in some kind of conspiracy. Like my boss, I think he’s working against me.

  “You can make fun of the clairvoyants—hell, everyone makes fun of those. But what was that crack about stealing the soul? That was anti-religious. That kills ratings.”

  “Anti-religious?” I asked, aghast. “I just wanted to point out similarities, you know, parallels.”

  “Cannibalism and baptism?”

  “I’m interested in the metaphysics.”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “We’re not showing it.”

  We sat together in a companionable way. “Well, what can I cover that has to do with metaphysics?”

  “I don’t even know what metaphysics is in this day and age,” the boss muttered. “But you seem to like death. So I’m putting you in the morgue. Anytime someone dies, you write up the memorial and you find the clips.”

  “Let me think about it.”

  “That’s really all there is,” he said. “And you may have to do some typing besides.”

  I thought about it. I would still be on-camera, I could talk about the deaths of people who were either admirable or famous; I could wear dark colors, which I like very much. I could roam through photo morgues on company time. I could quote from poems about death. I could insist these dead people held interesting beliefs. Hell, everyone believes in something interesting sometime in their lives.

  We need work, meaningful work, if we are to remake all ten thousand worlds. This is what I told the boss. “I’m yours,” I said. “But give me a little latitude here. Let me ask how people feel about the death, whether it was the right thing or not.”

  “The right thing?” his mouth dropped open.

  “Sometimes death is wrong,” I said sternly.

  He stared at me and sighed. “You can give me anything you want, as long as you cover their lifetimes. Do it that way: give me their lives, then give me their deaths.”

  I was very pleased. “I’ll tell you what I think about your death right now,” I said.

  “No,” he said. “I’d like to wait for that.”

  People once believed that the image of the murderer was etched on the retina of the victim’s eyes, like a photographic plate. Like a little camera snapping its own evidence. It must have come from all that “eyes are the mirror of the soul” business. The mirror caught the last reflection and saved it.

  No, wait. The eyes are the windows to the soul, I think. So what if it works the other way—the eyes record what the soul sees, it doesn’t record what the body sees? No one ever found the murderer’s image in the victim’s eyes, but did they find something else? Did they see bits and pieces of things that made no sense? A line here, a curve there, none of which added up to anything individually? We are always leaving hieroglyphics, aren’t we? Faery stiles, crop circles, Aztec ridges, Nazca lines. Little nicks on cave walls, rocks piled in patterns, dots and dashes. So why not messages for those left behind? It’s hard to break that human compulsion to say one more thing.

  What if there are imprints on the eyes of the dead after all, and they form a message when you put them all together? It’s very exciting, when you see a puzzle for the first time; when you sense its solution. Human instinct; human intelligence; the human need to organize information and pass it on. What are polls for but to find the patterns we’re secretly storing? What are books and films and TV shows and reports from all over the world except to find the pattern? Who says we would stop the trail, the interpretation, the insight, the comment, when all is said and done? Those who talk never stop talking. Those who reason never stop reasoning.

  So I took the job. The boss said Morgues and I went to the morgues—not the library of clippings that he meant but the actual morgues. I spoke to the attendants, who told me that they kept music on to counter their fear of hearing whispers. They don’t like the silence because it seems to be waiting. But then they laughed and they winked at each other.

  I interviewed them myself and I taped them and I took their pictures. They want to believe they might be famous someday, though we never discussed for what.

  “Boss, this is interesting,” I said. “They dress the dead and take their pictures. They pose them. The families request it. The families of the long-lost ask to see them in a natural pose.”

  “Disgusting,” he said. “Wait. Maybe an expose?”

  But I won’t expose them. The attendants let me in after hours. They don’t say a word as I open the eyes of the dead and take their picture. I zoom
in on the iris, on the retina, I snap them looking back at me on high-speed, on digital. I run home and I blow the photos up, looking for the shapes in the back of their eyes, the shapes that reflect something. Already I have pieced together, from selections of their eyes, the angle of a room, a white room with a doorway and a hall. The doorway has crystal doors, opened and not quite flat to the side. The hallway—I only see a little bit of the hallway and there is a shadow of a hand in it, just beyond the opened door. I can’t see who is throwing that shadow. But I will find it out.

  My walls are lined with rows and rows of these photos, the blown-up retinas of the dead. They all seem to be looking in the same direction. And in every one of them, there is a clue.

  THE LADDER OF ST. AUGUSTINE

  Seth Lindberg

  “I don’t think you get what ‘ghost town’ means,” I told Miguel.

  Our car rolled on cracked pavement along a road in a town just south of the Bay Area called San Agosto. The sign hanging over the Rotarian symbols called it THE TOWN OF FREEDOM AND PROSPERITY, something I imagined more of a bald-faced dare than anything else. There were still cars on the roads and in the driveways, the lights still worked, and no one had tore down any of the signs.

  “I think your uncle meant the town was haunted,” Miguel said, taking a drag off of one of those foul black cigarettes he smoked. “I really do.”

  He looked worn down from the drive, sunglasses hiding his eyes, his shirt stained from the rather eager way he had devoured the hamburger-and-pineapple-thing sandwich we’d gotten just outside of town, at this fast-food Filipino restaurant. The place did things with spaghetti that countries made treaties just to stop. Miguel goaded me to eat some meat-and-rice thing called a ‘Palabok Bandero,’ shouting down my Gringo nature with a vicious grin on his face. I was glad to be gone from there and back on the road, but these mazes of twenty-five mile-per-hour streets were getting on my already frayed nerves.

  “No,” I said, rubbing my temples. I needed more painkillers. I should have taken some at the fast food place, but Miguel was eyeing me, and I didn’t want to share. “It’s a ghost town meaning the town’s deserted.”