Ghosts and Wraiths

It’s literally ‘daydreaming,’ sick, the kind of incomplete fugue you awaken from with a sort of psychic clunk, struggling up to sit upright, convinced there’s someone unauthorized in the dorm room with you.

the sudden intra-dream realization that the nightmares’ very essence and center has been with you all along, even awake: it’s just been… overlooked; and then that horrific interval between realizing what you’ve overlooked and turning your head to look back at what’s been right there all along, the whole time…. […] The dream is that you awaken from a deep sleep, wake up suddenly damp and panicked and are overwhelmed with the sudden feeling that there is a distillation of total evil in this dark strange subdorm room with you, that evil’s essence and center is right here, in this room, right now. And is for you alone. None of the other little boys in the room are awake; the bunk above yours sags dead, motionless; no one moves; no one else in the room feels the presence of something radically evil; none thrash or sit damply up; no one else cries out: whatever it is is not evil for them.

‘The new Discursive O.E.D. says the Ahts of Vancouver used to cut virgins’ throats and pour the blood very carefully into the orifices of the embalmed bodies of their ancestors.’ […] ‘Apparently the Ahts tried to fill up ancestors’ bodies completely with virgin-blood to preserve the privacy of their own mental states. The apposite Aht dictum here being quote “The sated ghost cannot see secret things.” The Discursive O.E.D. postulates that this is one of the earlier on-record prophylactics against schizophrenia.’

Partridge KS’s serve-and-volley prodigy Ortho (‘The Darkness’) Stice, 16-A’s very top man, whose sauna-fresh torso gleams the same color as the moonlight off the idle weights’ metal, is being driven right to the edge by the fact that he goes to sleep with his bed against one wall and then but wakes up with his bed against a whole nother wall. […] and but so the reason he’s here is this A.M. he wakes up with his bed moved over against the chair by the door at an angle he didn’t care for one bit and with all the ball-cans arranged in a neat pyramid in the dusty rectangle where his bed was supposed to normally be.

But it’s true. The Husky VI tripod of Mario’s near-fatal encounter with the U.S.S. Millicent Kent was only the beginning. Starting with the mysterious and continuing fall of acoustic ceiling-tiles from their places in the subdorms’ drop ceilings, inanimate objects have either been moved into or just out of nowhere appearing in wildly inappropriate places around E.T.A. for the past couple months in a steadily accelerating and troubling cycle. […] The inappropriate found objects have had a tektitic and sinister aspect: none of the cheery odor of regular pranksterism; they’re not funny. To varying degrees they’ve given everyone the fantods.

Stice doesn’t use a finger to move the tomato and check this. He’s using only his concentrated will. He’s trying to will the cherry tomato to roll of its own objectile power down the incline and into the bowl’s center. […] He’s trying to flex some kind of psychic muscle he’s not sure he even has. […] His cheeks are ballooned with food as he stares at the perched cherry tomato, trying to respect this object with all his might. Summoning the sort of coercive reverence he’d felt this P.M. as several balls’ sudden anomalous swerves against wind and their own vectors half convinced Stice they’d become sensitive to his inner will, at crucial times. He’d mishit one cross-court volley and seen the thing head for an area wide even of the doubles sideline and then curve like a drenched spitter back to land just inside the singles corner, and this at a time when the grounds’ pines behind Hal Incandenza were breeze-leaning in the exact opposite direction. Hal had given Stice a little bit of a look on that one. Stice couldn’t finally tell whether Hal noticed anything amiss in the mysterious curves and downdrafts that seemed to favor The Darkness alone

Plus hamster-incursions could be posited to account for the occult appearance of large and incongruous E.T.A. objects in inappropriate places, which started in August with the thousands of practice balls found scattered all over the blue lobby carpeting and the carefully arranged pyramid of AminoPal energy bars found on Court 6 at dawn drills in mid-September and has gained momentum in a way no one cares for one bit—feral hamsters being notorious draggers and rearrangers of stuff they can’t eat but feel compelled to fuck with anyway, somehow—and so ease the communal near-hysteria the objects have caused among aboriginal blue-collar staff and sub-16 E.T.A. alike.

Mrs. Clark had taken a Sick Morning off because when she came in this morning Pemulis at lunch said one of the breakfast girls had said there’d been brooms on the wall in an X of brooms, out of nowhere, on the wall, when she’d come in very early to fire up the Wheatina-cauldron, and nobody knowing how the brooms were there or why or who glued them on had upset Mrs. Clarke’s nerves, who’d been with the Incandenzas since long before E.T.A., and had nerves.

The room’s only light was what spilled in from the nighttime hall. Nurses glided down the hall and past the door in subsonic footwear. A tall and slumped ghostish figure appeared to Gately’s left, off past the blurred seated square-head boy’s bed, slumped and fluttering, appearing to rest its tailbone on the sill of the dark window. The ceiling rounded on down and then settled back flat.

In the dream it’s the figure of a very tall sunken-chested man in black-frame glasses and a sweatshirt with old stained chinos, leaning back sort of casually or else morosely slumped, resting its tailbone against the window sill’s ventilator’s whispering grille, with its long arms hanging at its sides and its ankles casually crossed so that Gately can even see the detail that the ghostly chinos aren’t long enough for its height, they’re the kind kids used to call ‘Highwaters’ in Gately’s childhood […] The ghostly figure shrugged its thin shoulders and said But no, it was nothing of the sort, it was just a plain old wraith, one without any sort of grudge or agenda, just a generic garden-variety wraith. Gately sarcastically in the dream thought that Oh well then if it was just a garden-variety wraith, is all, geez what a fucking relief.

The wraith said Even a garden-variety wraith could move at the speed of quanta and be anywhere anytime and hear in symphonic toto the thoughts of animate men, but it couldn’t ordinarily affect anybody or anything solid, and it could never speak right to anybody, a wraith had no out-loud voice of its own, and had to use somebody’s like internal brain-voice if it wanted to try to communicate something, which was why thoughts and insights that were coming from some wraith always just sound like your own thoughts, from inside your own head, if a wraith’s trying to interface with you.

into Gately’s personal mind, in Gately’s own brain-voice but with roaring and unwilled force, comes the term PIROUETTE, in caps, which term Gately knows for a fact he doesn’t have any idea what it means and no reason to be thinking it with roaring force, so the sensation is not only creepy but somehow violating, a sort of lexical rape. […] Other terms and words Gately knows he doesn’t know from a divot in the sod now come crashing through his head with the same ghastly intrusive force, e.g. ACCIACCATURA and ALEMBIC, LATRODECTUS MACTANS and NEUTRAL DENSITY POINT, CHIAROSCURO and PROPRIOCEPTION and TESTUDO and ANNULATE and BRICOLAGE and CATALEPT and GERRYMANDER and SCOPOPHILIA and LAERTES—and all of a sudden it occurs to Gately the aforethought EXTRUDING, STRIGIL and LEXICAL themselves—and LORDOSIS and IMPOST and SINISTRAL and MENISCUS and CHRONAXY and POOR YORICK and LUCULUS and CERISE MONTCLAIR and then DE SICA NEO-REAL CRANE DOLLY and CIRCUMAMBIENTFOUNDDRAMALEVIRATEMARRIAGE and then more lexical terms and words speeding up to chipmunkish and then HELIATED and then all the way up to a sound like a mosquito on speed, and Gately tries to clutch both his temples with one hand and scream, but nothing comes out.

what a miserable fucking bottom-rung job that must be for an actor, to be sort of human furniture, figurants the wraith says they’re called, these surreally mute background presences whose presence really revealed that the camera, like any eye, has a perceptual corner, a triage of who’s important enough to be seen and heard v. just seen. A term from ballet, originally, figurant, the wraith explains.

The wraith pushes his glasses up in the vaguely snivelling way of a kid that’s just got slapped around on the playground and says he personally spent the vast bulk of his own former animate life as pretty much a figurant, furniture at the periphery of the very eyes closest to him, it turned out, and that it’s one heck of a crummy way to try to live.

The wraith blows its nose in a hankie that’s visibly seen better epochs and says he, the wraith, when alive in the world of animate men, had seen his own personal youngest offspring, a son, the one most like him, the one most marvelous and frightening to him, becoming a figurant, toward the end. His end, not the son’s end, the wraith clarifies. […] No horror on earth or elsewhere could equal watching your own offspring open his mouth and have nothing come out. The wraith says it mars the memory of the end of his animate life, this son’s retreat to the periphery of life’s frame.

the son had become a steadily more and more hidden boy, toward the wraith’s life’s end; and no one else in the wraith and boy’s nuclear family would see or acknowledge this, the fact that the graceful and marvelous boy was disappearing right before their eyes. They looked but did not see his invisibility. And they listened but did not hear the wraith’s warning.

The wraith feels along his long jaw and says he spent the whole sober last ninety days of his animate life working tirelessly to contrive a medium via which he and the muted son could simply converse. To concoct something the gifted boy couldn’t simply master and move on from to a new plateau. Something the boy would love enough to induce him to open his mouth and come out—even if it was only to ask for more. Games hadn’t done it, professionals hadn’t done it, impersonation of professionals hadn’t done it. His last resort: entertainment. Make something so bloody compelling it would reverse thrust on a young self’s fall into the womb of solipsism, anhedonia, death in life. A magically entertaining toy to dangle at the infant still somewhere alive in the boy, to make its eyes light and toothless mouth open unconsciously, to laugh. To bring him ‘out of himself,’ as they say. The womb could be used both ways. A way to say I AM SO VERY, VERY SORRY and have it heard. A life-long dream. The scholars and Foundations and disseminators never saw that his most serious wish was: to entertain.

his next, even more unpleasant Joelle van Dyne pain-and-fever dream takes place in what is, unmistakably and unavoidably, Mrs. Waite’s kitchen, in great detail, right down to the ceiling’s light-fixture full of dried bugs, the brimming ashtrays, the bar-graph of stacked Globes, the maddening arrhythmic drip of the kitchen sink and the bad smell—a mixture of mildew and putrid fruit. […] Mrs. Waite is played by veiled U.H.I.D. House resident Joelle van D., except without her veil, and what’s more without any clothes, as in starkers […] Because in this dream, Mrs. Waite, who is Joelle, is Death. As in the figure of Death, Death incarnate. Nobody comes right out and says so; it’s just understood: Gately’s sitting here in this depressing kitchen interfacing with Death.

Death is explaining that Death happens over and over, you have many lives, and at the end of each one (meaning life) is a woman who kills you and releases you into the next life. Gately can’t quite make out if it’s like a monologue or if he’s asking questions and she’s responding in a Q/A deal. Death says that this certain woman that kills you is always your next life’s mother. This is how it works: didn’t he know? In the dream everybody in the world seems to know this except Gately, like he’d missed that day in school when they covered it, and so Death’s having to sit here naked and angelic and explain it to him, very patiently, more or less like Remedial Reading at Beverly H.S. Death says the woman who either knowingly or involuntarily kills you is always someone you love, and she’s always your next life’s mother. This is why Moms are so obsessively loving, why they try so hard no matter what private troubles or issues or addictions they have of their own, why they seem to value your welfare above their own, and why there’s always a slight, like, twinge of selfishness about their obssessive mother-love: they’re trying to make amends for a murder neither of you quite remember, except maybe in dreams.

‘You believe in shit, Hal?’ ‘Shit?’ ‘I don’t know. Little-kid shit. Telekiniption. Ghosts. Parabnormal shit.’

‘Somebody did come by before,’ he said. ‘There was somebody standing back there about maybe an hour back. But he just stood there. Then he went away. Or… it.’ A full-body shiver.

‘And I’m not sure what you mean, paranormal. I believed in vampires when I was small. Himself allegedly used to see his father’s ghost on stairways sometimes, but then again toward the end he used to see black-widow spiders in his hair, too, and claimed I wasn’t speaking sometimes when I was sitting right there speaking to him. So we kind of wrote it all off. Orth, I guess I don’t know what to think about paranormal shit.’

Socks or no, I went forward into the really wet mopped area and tried to make out my face’s expression in the east window. It was now too light, though, outside, off all the snow. I looked sketchy and faint to myself, tentative and ghostly against all that blazing white.

Gately’s memories of ‘Cheers!’ ’s Nom now are clearer and vivider than any memory of the wraith-dream or the whirling wraith who said death was just everything outside you getting really slow. The implication that there might at any given time in any room be whole swarms of wraiths flitting around the hospital on errands that couldn’t affect anybody living, all way too fast to see and dropping by to watch Gately’s chest rise and fall at the rate of the sun, none of this has sunk in enough to give him the howlers, not in the wake of Joelle’s visit and the fantasies of romance and rescue, and the consequent shame.

The fact that he couldn’t even finish Ethan From in 10th-grade English and hasn’t got clue one about where ghostwords like SINISTRAL or LIEBESTOD mean or come from, much less OMMATOPHORIC, is just starting to percolate up to awareness when there’s a cold hand on his good shoulder and he opens his eyes. Not to mention ghostwords, which is a real and esoteric word.

—Because what if God is really the cruel and vengeful figurant Boston AA swears up and down He isn’t, and He gets you straight just so you can feel all the more keenly every bevel and edge of the special punishments He’s got lined up for you?—

Stice had asked whether I believed in ghosts. It’s always seemed a little preposterous that Hamlet, for all his paralyzing doubt about everything, never once doubts the reality of the ghost. Never questions whether his own madness might not in fact be unfeigned. Stice had promised something boggling to look at. That is, whether Hamlet might be only feigning feigning.

so that the white stockings’ rich violinish curves at the top of the insides of her legs in the white LISLE are visible in backlit silhouette, and an EMBRASURE of sad windowlight shines through her legs. […] It’d be CIRCUMAMBIENT sexual tension, would be the ghostword.

Without a pencil and notebook he couldn’t even seem to get across a request for a notebook and pencil; it was like he was trapped inside his huge chattering head. […] they were leaving him trapped in himself, a figurant, mute and unmoving and blank like the House’s catatonic lady slumped moist and pale in her chair […] silent and dead-faced even when touching a tree or propped up amid exploding front-lawn firecrackers. Or the wraith’s nonexistent kid.

Plus this dreadful time of weak gray late-day light is the time, was the time when the sad and nerdily dressed wraith appeared yesterday. Assuming that was yesterday. Assuming it was a real wraith. But the wraith, with its chinky Coke and theories of post-mortem speed, had been able to interface with Gately without aid of speech or gesture or Bic, was why even out of his mind Gately had had to admit to himself it must have been a delusion, a fever-dream. But he has to admit he’d kind of liked it. The dialogue. The give-and-take. The way the wraith could seem to get inside him. The way he said Gately’s best thoughts were really communiqués from the patient and Abiding dead. Gately wonders if his organic father the ironworker is not now maybe dead and dropping in and standing very still from time to time for a communiqué.

The wraith is back, right by the bed, dressed like before and blurred at the edges in the hat-shadowed spill of hallway-light, and except now with him is another, younger, way more physically fit wraith in kind of faggy biking shorts and a U.S. tank top who’s leaning way over Gately’s railing and… fucking licking Gately’s forehead with a rough little tongue, and as Gately reflexively strikes out at the guy’s map—no man put his tongue on D. W. Gately and lived—he has just enough time to realize the wraith’s breath has no warmth to it, or smell, before both wraiths vanish and a blue forked bolt of pain from his sudden striking-out sends him back against his hot pillow with an arched spine and a tube-impeded scream, his eyes rolling back into the dove-colored light of whatever isn’t quite sleep.

‘Ortho’s bed is up near the ceiling of their room. The frame has some way got lifted up and bolted to the ceiling sometime during the night without Kyle hearing it or waking up.’ […] ‘And his bed’s up on the ceiling now, still, and if it falls it’s going to go right through the floor and fall in Graham and Petropolis’s room.’

‘The Darkness thinks ghosts.’ […] ‘Stice’s explanation that he swore me to discretion but that was before the bed on the ceiling was he thinks he’s been somehow selected or chosen to get haunted or possessed by some kind of beneficiary or guardian ghost that resides in and/or manifests in ordinary physical objects, that wants to teach The Darkness how to not underestimate ordinary objects and raise his game to like a supernatural level, to help his game.’ […] ‘Or hurt somebody else’s,’ I said.

Traub and Whale, also on the wrap-bench, later said Hal was being weird. Like they said asking Loach if the pre-match locker room ever gave him a weird feeling, occluded, electric, as if all this had been done and said so many times before it made you feel it was recorded, they all in here existed basically as Fourier Transforms of postures and little routines, locked down and stored and call-uppable for rebroadcast at specified times. What Traub heard as Fourier Transforms Whale heard as Furrier Transforms. But also, as a consequence, erasable, Hal had said. By whom? […] Traub also says he also heard Hal use the word moribund, but Whale couldn’t confirm.

She was the kind of fatally pretty and nubile wraithlike figure who glides through the sweaty junior-high corridors of every nocturnal emitter’s dreamscape.

maple reglet border at seam of ceiling and walls north and south no floor has a face your flashlight showed but didn’t no never did see its eyes’ pupils set sideways and tapered like a cat’s its eyebrows’ \ / and horrid toothy smile leering right at your light all the time you’ve been scanning oh mother a face in the floor mother oh and your flashlight’s beam stabs jaggedly back for the overlooked face misses it overcorrects then centers on what you’d felt but had seen without seeing, just now, as you’d so carefully panned the light and looked, a face in the floor there all the time but unfelt by all others and unseen by you until you knew just as you felt it didn’t belong and was evil: Evil. And then its mouth opens at your light.

The awake floor is littered with gear and dirty clothes, blond hardwood with sealed seams, two throw-rugs, the bare waxed wood shiny in the windows’ snowlight, the floor neutral, faceless, you cannot see any face in the floor, awake, lying there, faceless, blank, dilated, playing beam over floor again and again, not sure all night forever unsure you’re not missing something that’s right there: you lie there, awake and almost twelve, believing with all your might.

As the lowering light from behind came at an angle more and more acute, Goethe’s well-known ‘Bröckengespenst’ phenomenon [n.38] enlarged and distended his seated shadow far out overland, so that the spokes of his chair’s rear wheels cast over two whole counties below gigantic asterisk-shadows, whose fine black radial lines he could cause to move by playing slightly with the wheels’ rubber rims; and his head’s shadow brought to much of the suburb West Tucson a premature dusk.

But what comes next? What North American hero can hope to succeed the placid Frank? We await, I predict, the hero of non-action, the catatonic hero, the one beyond calm, divorced from all stimulus, carried here and there across sets by burly extras whose blood sings with retrograde amines.

‘After a burial, rural Papineau-region Québecers purportedly drill a small hole down from ground level all the way down through the lid of the coffin, to let out the soul, if it wants out.’

‘The B.P.D. field pathologist who drew the chalk lines around Himself’s shoes on the floor said maybe ten seconds tops. He said the pressure buildup would have been almost instantaneous. Then he gestured at the kitchen walls. Then he threw up. The field pathologist.’

Schtitt calls Hal Incandenza his ‘revenant,’ now, and sometimes points his pointer at him in an affectionate way from his observation crow’s nest in the transom, during drills.

His play, like his manner in general, seems to Schacht less alive than undead. […] He figures Wayne figures it doesn’t much matter: he is destined for the Show; he will be an all-business entertainer, citizen of the world, everywhere undead, endorsing juice drinks and liniment ointment.

Ortho Stice can think of only three possible explanations for what’s going on, and he presents them to an attentive cheek-sucking Lyle in ascending order of grimness. One is that Stice is telekinetic, but only in his sleep. Two is that somebody else at E.T.A. is telekinetic and has it in for Stice and wants to drive him batsoid for some reason. Three is that Stice is like getting up in his sleep and rearranging the room without knowing it or remembering it, which means he’s a severe fucking somnambulist, which means Lord only knows what all else he could get up and wander around and do in his sleep.

Do not underestimate objects! Lyle says he finds it impossible to overstress this: do not underestimate objects. […] Do not underestimate objects, he advises Stice. Do not leave objects out of account. The world, after all, which is radically old, is made up mostly of objects.

In the cartridge it’s pretty clear from their milky-pixeled translucence and insubstantiality that they’re holograms, but it’s not clear what they’re supposed to be on the level of the playlet, whether the audience is supposed to see/(not)see them as ghosts or wraiths or ‘real’ mythic entities or what.

‘Simple,’ Schtitt shrugs, so that the upraised pointer seems to stab at the sky. ‘Hit,’ he suggests. ‘Move. Travel lightly. Occur. Be here. Not in bed or shower or over baconschteam, in the mind. Be here in total. Is nothing else. […] Gentlemen: hit tennis balls. Fire at your will. Use a head. You are not arms. Arm in the real tennis is like wheels of vehicles. Not engine. Legs: not either. Where is where you apply for citizenship in second world Mr. consciousness of ankle Incandenza, our revenant?’ Hal can lean out and spit in a way that isn’t insolent. ‘Head, sir.’

‘Frankly, when I think of it I’m as much terrified as I am intrigued. Hank Hoyne is an empty shell. The iron will, the analytic savvy. His love of a fine cigar. All gone. His world’s as if it has collapsed into one small bright point. Inner world. Lost to us. You look in his eyes and there’s nothing you can recognize in them. Poor Miriam.’ Steeply kneaded a bare shoulder. ‘Willis, on the I/O night-shift, came up with a phrase for their eyes. “Empty of intent.” This appeared in a memo.’

‘—nical assessment, after our work together on your fear of weights, would be that your presenting maladjustment, Ortho, like many males and athletes, is that you’re suffering from counterphobia.’ ‘Fear of linoleum?’ It was unmistakably the flat twang of The Darkness in there through the door’s wood. ‘On the level of objects and a projective infantile omnipotence where you experience magical thinking about your thoughts and the behavior of objects’ relation to your narcissistic wishes, the counterphobia presents as the delusion of some special agency or control to compensate for some repressed wounded inner trauma having to do with absence of control.’ ‘Over linoleum?’

‘So you’re saying I’m overestimating objects?’

‘I’m saying there’s a very young Ortho in there with some very real abandonment-issues who needs some nurturing and championing from the older Ortho instead of indulging in fantasies of omnipotence.’ ‘I ain’t omnipotent and I don’t want to X no Goddamn Barbiedoll.’ Then Dark’s voice went way up and cracked as he said something about his bed.

‘You can say that again, boy. I miss summer reruns. I miss reruns hastily inserted to fill the intervals of writers’ strikes, Actors’ Guild strikes. I miss Jeannie, Samantha, Sam and Diane, Gilligan, Hawkeye, Hazel, Jed, all the syndicated airwave-haunters. You know? I miss seeing the same things over and over again.’

and there’s dinette sets in the tunnels and acoustic tiles in the halls and lawn-mowers in the kitchen and tripods in the grass and squeegees on the wall and Stice’s bed moves around, and there’s a ball machine in the girls’ lockers, Longley reports, that for this kind of tuition none of this stuff the staff can get around to cleaning up bef—’ Stice’s head has jerked up, a trace of mashed potato on his nose. ‘Who says my bed moves? How’s it you know anything about any beds moving?’

And two black girls on the breakfast crew reportedly found a set of squeegees on the dining hall’s north wall, several meters up and hung crossed in a kind of saltire, placed there by parties unknown. […] Unmentioned is the fact that Schacht and Tall Paul Shaw at lunch went over the whole part of the north wall the black girls said they found the squeegees on and could find neither nails nor holes from nails, as in no visible means of attachment. The whole thing’s been studiously not talked about, adding to everybody’s discomfort at Troeltsch’s hoarse complaints about tuition, which vary in specifics but are otherwise routine.

Marathe had turned the chair to a slight angle to be able to see his shadow, which appeared blunt and deformed by the topography of the steep hillside above the outcropping, and in general pathetic and small. There would be no titanic or menacing Bröckengespenstphänom with the sunrise of dawn.

All the E.T.A. players loved the Show Courts 6–9 because they loved to be watched, and also hated the Show Courts because the transom’s crow’s-nested shadow covered the north halves of the courts around noon and all through the P.M. wheeled around gradually east like some giant hooded shadowed moving presence, brooding. Sometimes just the sight of Schtitt’s little head’s shadow could make a younger kid on the Show Courts clutch and freeze. By Hal and Stice’s seventh game, the sky was cloudless, and the transom’s monolithic shadow, black as ink, gave everyone watching the fantods as it elongated along the nets, completely obscuring Stice when he followed a serve in. […] There was no indication Hal even saw it, the shadow, hunched and waiting for Stice.

Chu has Blott see whether he can lift a bulky old doorless microwave oven that’s lying on its side up next to one wall, and Blott tries and barely lifts it, and pules, and Chu marks the oven down for the adults to lift and tells Blott to drop it, which invitation Blott takes literally

Feral hamsters—bogey-wise right up there with mile-high toddlers, skull-deprived wraiths, carnivorous flora, and marsh-gas that melts your face off and leaves you with exposed gray-and-red facial musculature for the rest of your ghoulish-pariah life, in terms of late-night hair-raising Concavity narratives—are rarely sighted south of the Lucite walls and ATHSCME’d checkpoints that delimit the Great Concavity

Hal passed Stice off the backhand down the line and the ball looked sure to land fair, and then at the last possible second it veered out, an abrupt tight curve out of bounds as if some freak gust came out of nowhere and blew it out, and Stice looked more surprised than Hal did. The punter’s brother’s face registered nothing as he stood at the ad corner, adjusting something on his strings.

Poor Tony Krause looked godawful: sucked-out, hollow-eyed, past ill, grave-ready, his face’s skin the greenish white of extreme-depth marine life, looking less alive than undead, identifiable as poor old Poor Tony only by the boa and red leather coat and the certain way he held his hand to his throat’s hollow as he walked […] Krause never so much walking as making an infinite series of grand entrances into pocket after pocket of space, a queenly hauteur now both sickening and awesome given Krause’s spectral mien, passing across the Grille’s window

Foot-traffic is dense, and the undead and drunks who live in the streets around Inman Square also crowd the sidewalk’s edges, and if Kate G. looks at the images of passersby in the darkened shop windows they become (pedestrians and undead stem-artists) just heads that seem to float across each window unconnected to anything. As in disconnected floating heads.

One of the heads she does not see, floating in the windows with her own unrecognizable head and Ruth van Cleve’s cloud of hair, is the gaunt and spectral hollow-eyed head of Poor Tony Krause, who’s several steps behind them and matching their slightly serpentine course step for step, eyeing string purses he imagines contain more than just train-fare and NA Newcomers’ keychains.

The apparition receded, the red of its coat shrinking against the swinging view of Prospect St. and pavement and dumpsters and looming storefronts, Ruth van Cleve on its lurid tail and receding also, screaming bits of urban argot that became less faint than swallowed.

Ruth van Cleve had cried out as the apparition of just about the most unattractive woman Kate Gompert had ever seen crashed forward between them, knocking them apart. Ruth van Cleve’s vinyl purse’s strap gave right away, but Kate Gompert’s thin but densely macramé’d strap held around her shoulder and she was pulled wrenchingly forward by the womanly apparition’s momentum as it tried to sprint up Prospect St. […] The apparition spun itself violently around, trying to shake off Ruth van Cleve, and her/its spin with her purse took the strap-attached Kate Gompert (who didn’t weigh very much) out around in a wide circle

Tycoon is the term her commanding way of sitting suggests, grasping her chair, a pen clamped in her teeth like a businessman’s cigar. There were other carpet-prints in the heavy shag. […] Some of the prints in the deep shag he can see are shoes, and some are different, almost like knuckles. His lordotic posture makes him acute and observant about things like carpet-prints.

The ceiling was breathing. It bulged and receded. It swelled and settled. The room was in St. Elizabeth’s Hospital’s Trauma Wing. Whenever he looked at it, the ceiling bulged and then deflated, shiny as a lung. […] The polyurethane bulged and settled in the North Shore wind and seemed like some monstrous vacuole inhaling and exhaling directly over little Gately, lying there, wide-eyed. The breathing polyurethane vacuole had seemed like it developed a character and personality as winter deepened and the winds grew worse. Gately, age like four, had regarded the vacuole as a living thing, and had named it Herman, and had been afraid of it. […] The hospital room had that misty quality rooms in fevers have. Gately lay on his back. Ghostish figures materialized at the peripheries of his vision and hung around and then de-materialized. The ceiling bulged and receded.

The blinds were up, and the room was so bright-white in the sunlight everything looked bleached and boiled. The guy with either the square head or the box on his head had been taken off someplace, his bed unmade and one crib-railing down. There were no ghostish figures or figures in mist. The hallway was no brighter than the room, and Gately couldn’t see any shadows of anybody in a hat. He didn’t even know if last night had been real.

Almost certainly dreamed and unreal was the interval when Gately came up with a start and saw Mrs. Lopate, the objay dart from the Shed that they come and install next to the Ennet House viewer some days, sitting there in a gunmetal wheelchair, face contorted, head cocked, hair stringy, looking not at him but more like seemingly at whatever array of I.V. bottles and signifying monitors hung above and behind his big crib […] Even though there was no way she could have really been there, it was the first time Gately realized that the catatonic Mrs. L. had been the same lady he’d seen touching the tree in #5’s front lawn late at night, some nights, when he’d first come on Staff. That they were the same person. And that this realization was real even though the lady’s presence in the room was not

The ceiling’s behaving itself, but in the room’s gray Gately could still make out a tallly insubstantial ghostish figure appearing and disappearing in the mist of his vision’s periphery. There was some creepy relationship between the figure’s postures and the passing nurses’ noiseless glide. This figure pretty definitely seemed to prefer night to day

The wraith said Gately might as well stop trying to figure it out and just capitalize on its presence, the wraith’s presence in the room or dream, whatever, because Gately, if he’d bothered to notice and appreciate it, at least didn’t have to speak out loud to be able to interface with the wraith-figure; and also the wraith-figure said it was by the way requiring incredible patience and fortitude for him (the wraith) to stay in one position long enough for Gately to really see him and interface with him, and the wraith was making no promises about how many more months he (the wraith) could keep it up, since fortitude had never seemed to have been his long suit.

it occurred to Gately that you don’t normally think of wraiths or ghostish phantasms as being tall or short, or having bad posture, or wearing certain-colored socks. Much less having anything as specific as extrusive nostril-hair. There was a degree of, what, specificness about this figure in this dream that Gately found troubling.

He says Wraiths by and large exist (putting his arms out slowly and making little quotation-mark finger-wiggles as he said exist) in a totally different Heisenbergian dimension of rate-change and time-passage. As an example, he goes on, normal animate men’s actions and motions look, to a wraith, to be occurring at about the rate a clock’s hour-hand moves, and are just about as interesting to look at.

The wraith disappears again and again just as instantly reappears, now holding one of Gately’s Ennet House basement flea-baggy Staff bedroom’s cut-out-and-Scotch-taped celebrity photos, this one an old one of U.S. Head of State Johnny Gentle, Famous Crooner […] Again the wraith disappears and instantly reappears holding a can of Coke, with good old Coke’s distinctive interwoven red and white French curls on it but alien unfamiliar Oriental-type writing on it instead of the good old words Coca-Cola and Coke. The unfamiliar script on the Coke can is maybe the whole dream’s worst moment. […] The Oriental can of Coke now rests on Gately’s broad flat forehead.

Gately begins to conclude it’s not impossible that the garden-variety wraith on the heart monitor, though not conventionally real, could be a sort of epiphanyish visitation from Gately’s personally confused understanding of God, a Higher Power or something, maybe sort of like the legendary Pulsing Blue Light that AA founder Bill W. historically saw during his last detox, that turned out to be God telling him how to stay sober via starting AA and Carrying The Message. The wraith smiles sadly and says something like Don’t we both wish, young sir. […] of course there’s also the possibility that the tall slumped extremely fast wraith might represent the Sergeant at Arms, the Disease, exploiting the loose security of Gately’s fever-addled mind, getting ready to fuck with his motives and persuade him to accept Demerol just once, just one last time, for the totally legitimate medical pain.

Gately lets himself wonder what it would be like, able to quantum off anyplace instantly and stand on ceilings and probably burgle like no burglar’d ever dreamed of, but not able to really affect anything or interface with anybody, having nobody know you’re there, having people’s normal rushed daily lives look like the movements of planets and suns, having to sit patiently very still in one place for a long time even to have some poor addled son of a bitch even be willing to entertain your maybe being there. It’d be real free-seeming, but incredibly lonely, he imagines. Gately knows a thing or two about loneliness, he feels. Does wraith mean like a ghost, as in dead? Is this a message from a Higher Power about sobriety and death?

either the wraith is saying or Gately is realizing that you can’t appreciate the dramatic pathos of a figurant until you realize how completely trapped and encaged he is in his mute peripheral status […] all that would happen is that one of the audibilizing ‘name’ stars of the show would bolt over from stage-center and apply restraints or the Heineken Maneuver or CPR, figuring the silent gesturing figurant was choking on a beer-nut or something […] No way for a figurant to win. No possible voice or focus for the encaged figurant.

in the entertainments the wraith himself made, he says he goddamn bloody well made sure that either the whole entertainment was silent or else if it wasn’t silent that you could bloody well hear every single performer’s voice, no matter how far out on the cinematographic or narrative periphery they were; and that it wasn’t just the self-conscious overlapping dialogue of a poseur like Schwulst or Altman, i.e. it wasn’t just the crafted imitation of aural chaos: it was real life’s real egalitarian babble of figurantless crowds, of the animate world’s real agora, the babble [n.342] of crowds every member of which was the central and articulate protagonist of his own entertainment.

The wraith says Just to give Gately an idea, he, the wraith, in order to appear as visible and interface with him, Gately, he, the wraith, has been sitting, still as a root, in the chair by Gately’s bedside for the wraith-equivalent of three weeks, which Gately can’t even imagine.

The wraith says almost bitterly that when he’d stand up and wave his arms for them all to attend to the fact that his youngest and most promising son was disappearing, they’d thought all his agitation meant was that he had gone bats from Wild Turkey–intake and needed to try to get sober, again, one more time. […] ‘You tried to get sober?’ he thinks, rolling his eyes over to the wraith. ‘More than once, you tried? Was it White-Knuckle? [n.343] Did you ever Surrender and Come In?’

The wraith on the monitor now bends sharply at the waist, way over forward so his face is upside-down only cm. from Gately’s face—the wraith’s face is only about half the size of Gately’s face, and has no odor—and responds vehemently that No! No! Any conversation or interchange is better than none at all, to trust him on this, that the worst kind of gut-wrenching intergenerational interface is better than withdrawal or hiddenness on either side.

he simply concentrates on pretending to wonder to himself why the wraith is spending probably months of aggregate wraith-time flitting around a hospital room and making pirouetted demonstrations with crooner-photos and foreign tonic-cans on the ceiling of some drug addict he doesn’t know from a rock instead of just quantuming over to wherever this alleged youngest son is and holding very still for wraith-months and trying to have an interface with the fucking son. Though maybe thinking he was seeing his late organic dad as a ghost or wraith would drive the youngest son bats, though, might be the thing. The son didn’t exactly sound like the steadiest hand on the old mental joystick as it was, from what the wraith’s shared.

Gately supine with his side on fire while newcomer Joelle v.D. raises her veil slightly to lick the sweat off his lids and temples, whispering so the veil flutters around and fans him, promising him a P.M. of near-terminal pleasures

As Death’s explanation of Death goes on Gately understands really important vague stuff more and more, but the more he understands the sadder he gets, and the sadder he gets the more unfocused and wobbly becomes his vision of the Death’s Joelle sitting nude on the pink plastic ring, until near the end it’s as if he’s seeing her through a kind of cloud of light, a milky filter that’s the same as the wobbly blur through which a baby sees a parental face bending over its crib, and he begins to cry in a way that hurts his chest, and asks Death to set him free and be his mother, and Joelle either shakes or nods her lovely unfocused head and says: Wait.

he feels on top of the febrile pain and the creepiness of the amphetaminic-wraith- and Winston-Churchill-face-Joelle-and angelic-maternal-Death-Joelle-dreams an odd vividness in himself at being swabbed and maybe even generally admired by someone who’s an underground local intellectual-dash-art-type celebrity.

Gately nods studiously at each photo, trying to Abide. He hasn’t thought about the wraith or the wraith-dream once since he woke up from the dream where Joelle was Mrs. Waite as a maternal Death-figure. Next life’s Chet’s Mama. […] The open book she’s moving her hand around in gives Gately an idea he can’t believe he’s only having now. Except he worries because he isn’t left-handed. Which is to say SINISTRAL.

A figure was out there, not under the shelter of the pavilion but sitting in the bleachers behind the east Show Courts, leaning back with his elbows on one level and bottom on the next and feet stretched out below, not moving, wearing what seemed to be puffy and bright enough to be a coat, but getting buried by snow, just sitting there. It was impossible to tell the person’s age or sex. […] The whole scene had an indescribable pathos to it.

‘And good old Mario says he’s seen paranormal figures, and he’s not kidding, and Mario doesn’t lie,’ I said. ‘So belief-wise I don’t know what to think. Subhadronic particles behave ghostishly. I think I withhold all prejudgment on the whole thing.’

‘Pull my sorry ass off here, Inc, and I’ll take and show you some parabnormal shit that’ll shake your personal tree but good,’ Stice said, bracing. ‘ ’n’t said nothing to nobody but Lyle about it, and I’m sick of the secretness of it. You won’t pre-formulize any judgments, Inc, I know.’

Ferocious Francis is sitting in the chair that the wraith and Ewell and Calvin Thrust had all sat in […]

It also occurs to Gately that esoteric is another ghostword he’s got no rights to throw around, mentally.

The ceiling throbbed a little but did not breathe. The one visitor-chair was back over by the wall. He looked down. Either the stenographer’s notebook and pen had got knocked off his bed or the dream had made up that part, too. […] But the railing Joelle van D. had folded down to sit on the bunk in the fucking Erdedy kid’s sweats was still folded down, and the other railing was still up. So there was some like evidence of the one part, that she’d been really there, showing him the pictures.

the word embrasure had been surely another invasive-wraith ghostword, and then now also that nobody seems to exactly be falling all over themself to bring the paper and pen it had sure seemed like Joelle van D. had understood Gately’s mimed request for, and that thus maybe Joelle’s visit and show-and-tell with the snapshots had been just as much a febrile hallucination as the figuranted wraith

He dreams he’s with a very sad kid and they’re in a graveyard digging some dead guy’s head up and it’s really important, like Continental-Emergency important […] and Joelle van D. appears with wings and no underwear and asks if they knew him, the dead guy with the head, and Gately starts talking about knowing him even though deep down he feels panic because he’s got no idea who they’re talking about, while the sad kid holds something terrible up by the hair and makes the face of somebody shouting in panic: Too Late.

the sad kid is trying to scream at Gately that the important thing was buried in the guy’s head and to divert the Continental Emergency to start digging the guy’s head up before it’s too late, but the kid moves his mouth but nothing comes out

‘This is it,’ said Coyle. ‘The tin cans and accusations I’m moving his stuff around are one thing. I’m going to Lateral Alice for a switch like Troeltsch did. This is the straw.’

‘Stice is mentally buckling,’ Coyle said […] ‘He keeps staring at things with his temple-veins flexing, trying to exert will on them. He bet me 20 beans he could stand on his desk chair and lift it up at the same time, and then he wouldn’t let me cancel the bet when I got embarrassed for him after half an hour, standing up there flexing his temples.’ […] ‘What if it’s the mental buckling that’s raised his game?’ Coyle said. ‘Does it still count as buckling?’

Dressing and stretching, wrapping grips with Gauze-Tex or filling a pouch with fuller’s earth (Coyle, Freer, Stice, Traub) or sawdust (Wagenknecht, Chu), getting taped, those in puberty getting shaved and taped. A ritual. Even the conversation, usually, such as it is, has a timeless ceremonial aspect.

Ghostly light- and monster-shadow phenomenon particular to certain mountains; e.g. q.v. Part I of Goethe’s Faust, the Walpurgisnacht six-toed danceathon on the Harz-Bröcken, in which there’s described a classic ‘Bröckengespenstphänom.’ (Gespenst means specter or wraith.)

A couple of the Enfield Marine Public Health Hospital Security officers know E.T.A.’s Hal Incandenza from having met his brother Mario when James O. Incandenza had hired the officers as lineless figurant background-extra cops for both Dial C for Concupiscence and Three Cheers for Cause and Effect.

And whatever happens to the protagonist with the name you hit with the dart for like the next hour and a half is the Drama. […] I think he especially liked the idea that the star of the show might have already moved away or recently died and there was no way to know.

Eighteen in May, Mario Incandenza’s designated function around Enfield Tennis Academy is filmic: sometimes during A.M. drills or P.M. matches he’ll be assigned by Coach Schtitt et al. to set up an old camcorder or whatever video stuff’s to hand on a tripod and record a certain area of court, videotaping different kids’ strokes, footwork, certain tics and hitches in serves or running volleys, so the staff can show the tapes to the kids instructionally, letting the kids see on the screen exactly what a coach or prorector’s talking about.

The two men sent together a strange Bröckengespenst-shadow out toward the city Tucson, a shadow round and radial at the base and jagged at the top, from Steeply’s wig becoming un-combed in his descent.

descends creaky back wooden stairs from the Massa Intermedia’s Reading Room down to about the Infundibular Recess […] down three more levels to the ghostly-clean and lithium-lit studios of FM 109–WYYY FM, broadcasting for the M.I.T. community and selected points beyond.

‘The leukodermatic. The xanthodantic. The maxillofacially swollen. Those with distorted orbits of all kinds. Get out from under the sun’s cove-lighting is what this says. Come in from the spectral rain.’ Madame Psychosis’s broadcast accent is not Boston. […] Her voice itself is sparely modulated and strangely empty, as if she were speaking from inside a small box.

It is heavily digital, but with something of a choral bouquet. But unhuman. Mario thinks of the word haunting, like in ‘a haunting echo of thus-and-such.’

‘—so-called phantom, but real. And mobile. First the spine. Then not the spine but the right eye-socket. Then the old socket’s fit as a fiddle but the thumb, the thumb doubles me over. It won’t stay put.’ […] ‘It has a mobile cunning, a kind of wraith- or phantom-like—’

Overhead, Schtitt uses an unamplified bullhorn and careful enunciation to call out for everyone to hear that Mr. revenant Hal Incandenza was letting the ball get the little much behind him on overheads, fears of the ankle maybe. Hal raises his stick in acknowledgment without looking up.

Latin music drifting through the Spur’s Projects, twined around some 5/4 ’shine stuff from a boombox over off Feeny Park, and in between these a haunting plasm of Hawaiian-type music that sounds at once top-volume and far far away. The zithery drifting Polynesian strains make Bruce Green’s face spread in a flat mask of psychic pain he doesn’t even feel is there, and then the music’s gone.

The distinctive sound of Gately’s meatloaf getting chewed plus the ghastly music’s zithery warbling roar. Lenz now rises and his movements in the yard have a melting and wraithlike quality in the different shades of shadow.

The ruckus has aroused the old nurse in #4 who Asks For Help, and her spectral figure is splayed in a nightie against an upstairs #4 window yelling ‘Eeeeeeeyelp!’

Ortho (‘The Darkness’) Stice is still staring into his salad. If you could open Stice’s head you’d see a wheel inside another wheel, gears and cogs being widgeted into place. Stice has a secret suspicion about a secret that has more to do with the actual table than with the people at the table. A lot of the guys interpret his intense distraction as Stice’s still being in the magic can’t-miss Zone from this P.M.’s match.

‘Orin was OK. […] Now his little brother’s got a future in tennis if he wants. And Ortho. Wayne for sure. A couple of the girls—Kent, Caryn and Sharyn here,’ indicating the Vaught-apparition below them.

Dr. James Incandenza’s old optics and editing facilities are down here off one of the main tunnels and get used for Leith/Ogilvie classes in entertainment production and for optical science tutorials etc.

The children along the bottom tier were leaning left and then right in tandem, amusing themselves. The apparition with the lens and metal pole was gone, overhead.

it’s now after 2215h., meaning Kate Gompert has 75 minutes to get herself and this hideous, despair-producing, slutty and yammering newcomer beside her back for Curfew.

A couple odd long crinkly paper strips of bright red hung over the side of the wastebasket, which was normally totally empty and clean.

Tiny Ewell and the ceiling kept receding and then looming in, bulging roundly. Figures Gately didn’t know from Adam kept popping in and out of fluttery view in different corners of the room. The space between his bed and the other bed seemed to distend and then contract with a slow sort of boinging motion.

The sun was starting to go down over the West Newton hills through the double-sealed windows, now, trembling slightly, and the windowlight against the far wall was ruddled and bloody. The heater vents kept making a sound like a distant parent gently shushing. When it starts to get dark out is when the ceiling breathes. And everything like that.

The wraith disappears and instantly reappears in a far corner of the room, waving Hi at him. It was slightly reminiscent of ‘Bewitched’ reruns from Gately’s toddlerhood.

It’s not like the light passes through the wraith or anything dramatic—the wraith simply disappears the instant the light hits the heart monitor and reappears the instant it moves away.

The wraith says he’d just paid a small quantumish call to the old spotless Brighton two-decker of one Ferocious Francis Gehaney, and from the way the old Crocodile’s shaving and putting on a clean white T-shirt, the wraith says, he predicts F.F. will be visiting the Trauma Wing soon to offer Gately unconditional empathy and fellowship and acerbic Crocodilian counsel. Unless this was just Gately himself thinking this up to keep a stiff upper attitude, Gately thinks.

He wonders what something as brief as a car-horn-honk sounds like to a figurant that has to sit still for three weeks to be seen. Wraith, not figurant, Gately meant, he corrects himself. He’s lying here correcting his thoughts like he was talking.

For a second, blinking and red with A.M. fever, he thinks he sees Ferocious Francis G. in the bedside chair, chin freshly shaved and dotted with bits of Kleenex, posture stolid, his old man’s saggy little tits rising slowly under a clean white T-, smiling grimly around blue tubes and an unlit cigar between his teeth and saying ‘Well kid at least you’re still on this side of the fuckin’ sod, I guess there’s something to be said for that there. And are you as yet sober, then?’ the Crocodile says coolly, disappearing and then not reappearing after several blinks.

‘Something’s real wrong, I can tell,’ The Darkness said.

‘Then plus I think something bit me. On the back of the head here, some bug that knew I was helpless and couldn’t see.’ Stice dug again at the red area behind his ear. There was a kind of weltish bump there. It wasn’t in a vampire-related area of the neck.

The old man probes a nostril and then examines the hankie with interest, just like the dream-wraith did.

He’s halfway to the door, moving with maddening slow care like always, as if walking on ice […]

He dreams he looks in a mirror and sees nothing and keeps trying to clean the mirror with his sleeve. […] He dreams there’s people in his room but he’s not one of them.

The cartridge was Himself’s Accomplice!, a short melodrama with Cosgrove Watt and a boy no one had ever seen before or since.

I tried briefly to picture Ortho Stice hoisting his bunk up and bolting it to the ceiling without waking Coyle.