LITMIR.BIZ

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He could feel them brush his shoulders like the tips of cold, damp fingers. The figure jerked in a horrible simulation of fear, trying to escape, dodging faster than flesh, like a bad film edit. But escape was impossible.

      Peter’s mouth went stone dry. He wanted to look away, block his vision with a hand. Instincts old and deep instructed him that he was about to bear witness to something private, a sight no living human should ever have to see; but he could not stop himself.

      He stared. Pity held him. And curiosity.

      The eel shadows swarmed and lanced and worried the image, snatching away scalloped bites and crumbling pieces. It lifted its hands in weak defense, shuddering with an astonishing, dry simulacrum of pain. Whatever it was, its time had come. As the likeness of Phil’s ex-wife diminished and deflated, its wailing turned tinny and desperate. It unraveled drastically, peeling and dissolving in shreds like a tissue-paper cutout dipped in a bowl of water. In a few seconds, the last of its murky outline disintegrated and fell away. Sated, the shadows fled, draining like water around his feet. The room seemed to shiver off the last of them, leaving just the bed, neatly made and undisturbed, and the threadbare carpet and empty shelves.

      The image, the delusion, the reflection or copy of Lydia – whatever it might have been – was gone. Peter leaned his shoulder against the door jamb. He could not move. For the moment, he could not even turn his head. Blood pounded in his ears. His calf cramped and he gritted his teeth. Even in his worse days of besotted grief, he had never seen anything remotely like this.

       Pitiful, something left behind, dropped like an old Kleenex.

      His heart slowed. The heat behind his eyes cooled. Finally, he had to blink. That instant with his eyes closed terrified him and he felt his neck tense and intestines curl.

      Nothing came. Nothing touched him. Quiet and still. The room was innocent.

      Nothing had actually happened.

      Nothing real.

      Peter was finally able to turn. He put out one foot as if rediscovering how to walk, then another, and slowly left the bedroom, reaching back with numb and inept fingers to close the door. The hangers caught. He could not close it all the way, so he angrily slammed it. The hangers jangled. One fell and bounced off the wood floor with a tinny resonance. The whine of the hanger wire made him grit his teeth, it sounded too much like the voice.

      He gave up and walked on what felt like tingling stumps to the couch in the living room. Sat on the couch with hands folded on his lap. Did not even try to relax. Watched the carnival of the city across the water, darker now in the wee hours. His neck knotted and stayed that way.

      He was still alive and wasn’t sure he wanted to be, not if he had to think about what he had just seen.

      Peter watched the dawn light gather slowly over San Francisco, then burst forth along the eastern hills, reflecting gold against skyscrapers and banks of fog, the most beautiful sight of all: day.

      He was making a big, grown-man decision. There was only one way to react – it must have been a bad dream – and two things to do. He walked into the kitchen and poured himself a bowl of Cheerios, chewing reflexively each milky mouthful. The milk had been in the fridge since Phil’s death and was on the edge of spoiling, but served well enough.

      He forced himself to take a shower in the big bathroom, removing his clothes with catlike caution, climbing into the claw-foot tub, and drawing the curtain around on its pipe, tucked inside just enough to keep water from spraying on the floor, but with a clear view of the open bathroom door. This took tremendous will but it had to be done, and just this way. The water was set hot and stung his back. Phil did not believe in wimpy showers; no water inhibitor valves for him.

       No Bergson valves.

      As Peter scrubbed using Phil’s rounded block of Ivory soap, he tried to recall what a Bergson valve was. Something he had picked up reading The Doors of Perception in the sixties.

       This is the end … beautiful friend.

      Aldous Huxley. Something about drugs opening doors, or was it spigots? Letting the taps of reality flow free. He’d look it up when he got home. Or maybe Phil had a copy.

      After toweling dry, he dressed in the living room, putting on his good wool slacks and a black long-sleeve shirt and the thrift-store suit coat to get ready for when they delivered Phil, or when – and he did not know how he would react to this – the real Lydia turned up again on the porch.

      Peter washed the bowl in the sink and suddenly started snorting with laughter. It didn’t last long; it wasn’t funny, really. It was sad. ‘I see live people,’ he said, and started snorting again until he had to take off his glasses to wipe his nose and his eyes.

      His best friend’s wake was today and he couldn’t keep his act together long enough to get a good night’s sleep. He had to start seeing things. Peter the screw-up, two nights running. Maybe he was hoping to draw attention to himself; poor Peter, maddened by loss once again.

      Really sad.

      The self-hatred built like bad clouds before a storm. Then it burst and went away. Peter’s ground state was a mellow kind of cheer, high energy at times, but usually slow to blame or anger. Sometimes he just reverted to the ground state when things got really bad, without explanation, but no solution either; the bad clouds inevitably returned. He would have to deal with them. Just not now.

      ‘It did not feel like a dream,’ he told himself. He was clean and well dressed, wearing his beige silk coat. He had become a figure of calm masculine dignity, grey-bearded, with wide-spaced and gentle eyes and glasses, lacking only a pipe.

       Bring it on.

      He sat on the porch swing, relishing the sun, the cool fresh air.

      ‘What a great house, Phil,’ he said. ‘Really.’

      A dark blue unmarked panel truck came up the road trailing a thin cloud of exhaust and dust. It parked on the gravel beside the Porsche and a man in a dark brown suit got out, carrying a square cardboard box.

      ‘Is that Phil?’ Peter called from the porch.

      ‘Delivery for Ms. Lydia Richards,’ the man said, holding out the box in both hands. He had thick, theatrically wavy grey hair and walked and spoke with a jaded but professional dignity. Peter had once known a stripper who had married an undertaker. It was all about flesh, after all.

      ‘I’ll take him,’ Peter said.

      ‘Are you authorized by the family to receive the mortal remains of Mr Philip Daley Richards?’ the dignified man asked. ‘I’m family,’ Peter said, and signed for Phil’s ashes.

       CHAPTER EIGHT

      Peter gingerly placed the box on the mantle of the fireplace. It barely fit.

      The morning’s explanations weren’t making much sense now.

      ‘“Lydia, where did Phil die?”’ he rehearsed out loud, standing before the fireplace. ‘“Lydia, I don’t think he died in the house. Did you die in the house, Lydia? Because it wasn’t Phil who showed up this morning, in the dark.”’

      He rubbed his lips as if to wipe away that potential conversation. Best to just let the wake roll on. Unlike Peter, Phil had not become a teetotaler. He would have appreciated a few drinks hoisted on his behalf. But solemn speeches and rows of furtive people dressed in black would have bummed him.

      Peter looked down at his hands. They were trembling. He was not cut out to lose people. He was not cut out to face the death of loved ones, and he had loved Phil. Maybe he was not meant to be a friend or a husband or a daddy or any kind of serious human being. He had been at his happiest, he thought with a real twinge, facing the softer truths of young flesh, bawdiness and bodies live, parties on sets

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