They did.
We reached the river.
John said, wait here, swung the bag up over his shoulder and walked off into the gloom.
But instead of waiting for him, as our briefing note directed, by the crates of rotten carrots, beets, and yellow squash that lined the walls of the warehouses we were now behind, it occurred to me that without actually doing so, or at any rate seeming to, I might in fact follow him, or try. I took this decision in an attempt to consciously effect the phenomenon that had lately, and as recently as the turbine, afflicted me, in light of the considerable amount of advice my earlier visitor had imparted to me, and not just concerning my pulse.
It worked. I walked beside John, I walked behind him, I walked in front.
There are other things you can do, she had told me. And if, as you say, you are currently engaged in a potential homicide case, you will find some of the modalities of your condition quite useful.
This seemed useful. John, instead of taking the bag to the river and dropping it over the side, simply, in walking, leaned his shoulder into one of the ubiquitous crates by the water’s edge, causing it to fall into the dark water (a sound I would later remember having heard as I stood waiting by the warehouse for John), while he continued on a little farther, at which point he was met by a certain individual, difficult to make out in the half dark, until he smiled and showed his cracked incisor. There followed both an exchange of words and of knowing expressions, and also of the bag, which the individual hefted onto his own shoulder and set off with. Pushing my luck a little further, I followed along with this individual as he made his way back through the crates and into an alley not far from where I stood waiting and where John would momentarily rejoin me.
We walked through the same set of alleys John and I had negotiated in carrying the body to the docks and, before long (it was necessary to be impressed by this individual’s robustness) we were back at the green door, where, instead of following the individual into the machines and the dark, I began, light as one of the lesser elements, to float up the side of the building into the night sky.
One will be sure to think it possible, even necessary, to draw certain conclusions from this episode, and I was subsequently both willing and almost eager to do so.
1) Necessarily, for instance, something was afoot; 2) That something involved me; 3) As well as the case I was working on; 4) Possibly; 5) John had something to do with it; 6) The transactions firm had something to do with it; 7) I was a ghost.
This possibility had been presented to me by my earlier visitor, herself, she alleged, a ghost.
What do you mean you’re a ghost?
I’m a ghost, I’m dead, I do things.
And yet here you are.
But then she wasn’t.
Suddenly she was standing behind me.
She put her hands over my eyes.
It was possible to see through them a little.
All this means, I said, gesturing with my drink, is that I’ve been feeling a little unusual lately. I see through your hands because I’m so sleepy. I’ve been working two jobs and keeping some pretty strange hours and talking to some pretty strange customers and doing some pretty ugly things. Likely, you’re not even here.
I’m not, she said. Which is to say that I am and am not. I’m also elsewhere.
Where?
I don’t know.
But you’ve floated over here to inform me that I’m a ghost.
I didn’t float. I try not to. Voluntary use of such capacities tends to over determine them, makes it difficult to get back.
What do you mean by “get back”?
To my body.
So you do know where it is.
No, I don’t. All I know is it’s dark — or that my eyes don’t work. Which is a possibility. It happens in a pretty high percentage of cases.
And how did you learn all this?
There is literature available.
Literature?
Yes.
Listen, I said, I appreciate the scotch and you and your weird small hands and legs, but I have to get to work. I’ve just been having some mediocre out-of-body experiences, which a couple of pounds of food and some sleep will remedy.
You won’t sleep, she said.
I have to go, I said.
But we sat and drank and she said other things.
8) She said it was akin, at times, to a dream state, that at times I would like it, that at times I would not.
Can I walk through walls? I said.
Haven’t you already?
I thought about that.
And also, she said, barely there, you are divisible — can be barely there in more than one place, send off slivers of yourself. Then there are mirrors.
What about them?
A ghost sees many things in a mirror, but never him/herself.
So how come just after I got my bruise I could see myself in the mirror in my office?
It takes time for the condition to fully assert itself. Try it now.
I stood. In the mirror hanging behind the couch on the wall I saw a row of brightly colored computers, a mummified crocodile, a shotgun, a row of turnips, a display of ray guns.
What do you see? I said.
Two galaxies in the constellation Canis Major colliding, she said.
9) She also said that the visions or hallucinations I had been having could be both useful and dangerous — useful because any accurate edge on upcoming particularities was helpful; dangerous because as often as not what felt like an accurate edge was apocryphal or too vague to do anything but fuel confusion.
So how can I tell the difference?
You can’t. At least not until afterwards. Maybe not even then.
Well, that’s just great. Doesn’t the literature you mentioned have anything to say about it?
She nodded. It says what I just said.
Can you add anything — like maybe from your own experience?
I’m an optimist, she said.
Meaning what?
She shrugged. Meaning I think it’s all going to work out. Some way or other.
I took a sip of scotch and thought about it. I didn’t know what to think.
At any rate, before I knew it I was no longer floating up above the buildings and warehouses, but walking back to the firm with John and discussing all manner of first-rate subjects.
John was very interested, he told me as we walked along, in the subject of big cats in general, and of cheetahs specifically. He had been doing some research lately and had learned that cheetahs, while well deserving of the title “fastest land animal,” were at a considerable disadvantage when it came to weight and strength, and often lost prey. Lions, who were in many ways the scourge of the jungle, and also of the savannah, were always delighted to come across a cheetah working over a fresh kill, as there was nothing easier for a lion than to send a cheetah packing. John had never yet seen either a lion or a cheetah, but he had seen a jackal once. The little dog, as John described it, had snapped viciously at a stick John was carrying before running away.