Evel Knievel Days (13 page)

Sitting there in the pew, that’s when I realized:
The notecards
. The notecards with the addresses. In my haste to change into these new clothes, I’d lost track of them. I thought I’d tucked them under the waist of my new linen pants, but now that I looked, I could find only one. The singing ended, and in a strange moment for the interior of a church, the audience broke into applause. I used this cover to
scramble back over to the confessionals. I searched the one I’d used as a changing booth. Nothing.

I leaned against the little screen. I closed my eyes. This had gone badly, badly wrong. And then—then the strangest thing happened. There’s no other way to say it: Resting momentarily in the confessional, exhausted and hot and sweating, I looked up and saw a ghost. Or rather, I didn’t see a ghost, exactly. Something a little different than that. Actually, I heard a ghost.

“What are your sins, pardner?” said a deep voice with a western twang to it. It took me a moment to realize that the voice had spoken English and that—given my current circumstances—English was inappropriate. “Go ahead and tell me,” the voice added from the other side of the confessional wall. “I won’t bite.”

“I’m sorry?” I said, frowning in the half dark.

“I said: Let ’er rip. I’m all ears. Yes, sir. All ears.”

“How did you know I spoke English?” I whispered.

“I know all sorts of things, Khosi,” the voice said.

My name?
I panicked and reached for the door.

It’s embarrassing—embarrassing to admit to a hallucination, and not just any kind of hallucination but a ghost, and not a ghostly figure, not an insubstantial blur at the edge of your vision, not a glowing orb in some shoe-boxed black-and-white photograph, but a fully developed bodily apparition, a ghost with arms and legs and a substantial, solid essence—not to mention the wardrobe of an Old West cowboy and a broom-sized mustache. That’s exactly what I saw, what was suddenly wedged on the seat beside me in the confessional, the confessional which was truly not big enough for two full-sized adults. My hand fell back to my side.

“Scoot over, son,” the man said. “It’s tighter than a well-digger’s lunch-bucket in here.”

I squinted through the darkness. “You look,” I said, “just like a photograph from the place I used to work.”

The figure nodded and tipped its hat. “William Andrews Clark,” he said. “Damn glad to meet you.”

The William Andrews Clark I knew about became a U.S. senator. He circulated in Washington and died in his mansion on Fifth Avenue. This version of him, however, was more rough-and-tumble. This version looked like an extra from a Hollywood western.

“Well, you really fouled that one up, pardner,” he said.

“What are you?” I whispered. “I mean: Are you what I think you are?”

“Indeed, Khosi,” he said. “I was—”

“The original copper king. Anaconda Willie. Clark the Shark.”

“Ah,” he said. “My reputation precedes me. In that case: Maybe you’ve got a match for me to light my cigar?”

The Ghost of William Andrews Clark took out a silver monogrammed cigar case and popped it open. He selected a single thin cylinder.

“You can’t smoke in here,” I said. “Oh my God, I’m hallucinating. I’m hallucinating my great-great-grandfather in an Egyptian confessional.”

“Would you also like a cigar?” he said. “I could possibly spare a Nicaraguan. They’re a hundred years old.”

“Jesus Christ,” I said.

“Please don’t take the Lord’s name in vain,” he said. “That’s burro milk.”

“Burro milk?”

“Bunk. Hogswaddle. Claptrap.” He cleared his throat. “Inappropriate.”

Suddenly, he was puffing on the cigar, smoke billowing into the air.

“How’d you do that?” I said.

“It’s a little trick Saint Sebastian taught me,” said the Ghost of William Andrews Clark.

“Oh my God,” I said. “My tenuous grasp on sanity has been utterly destroyed.”

This only seemed to amuse the ghost. He laughed. “Nonsense,” he said. “I’m just here to warn you.”

“To warn me?” I said.

“Watch yourself today,” he said.

“What are you talking about?” I said.

“I’m telling you, Khosi: Sometimes life’s got a sting like bumblebee whiskey.”

“Am I going to be attacked by a swarm of bees?”

The Ghost of William Andrews Clark chuckled. “Of course not, son,” he said. “But remember this: Know what I do when I ride into trouble?”

He paused.

He waited.

Finally, I said, “What?”

“Just keep ridin.”

“Are you really giving me advice?” I said. “A ghost is giving me advice?”

“Absolutely,” he said.

“Why are you sharing this lovely advice with me?” I asked.

“Well,” he said, “you’ve given me a lot.”

“I have?” I said.

“Sure,” he said. “My memory. You’ve helped preserve my memory in the minds and hearts of the masses. And for that, I’m grateful.” He leaned forward. His voice was low and confidential. “You know, that goes a long way up there.” He pointed upward. “It keeps you in the forefront of the Boss’s mind.”

“Ms. Vogel?” I said.

“Very funny,” said the Ghost of William Andrews Clark. “Although I will admit, they do share certain characteristics.”

“I’ve got to get out of here,” I said.

I opened the confessional door. And for the second time that day, I ran. My legs churned forward, I stumbled in my haste to get away from the church. I had clearly gotten out on the wrong side of the bed. I considered going back to my hotel. No, I decided, that was too reserved. I needed to take more extreme action. I needed to get a taxi back to the airport. I needed to find a yellow taxi (only a yellow taxi would do) and use my credit cards to buy myself a one-way ticket home. I needed to get to Montana. And fast.

We are full of molecules and enzymes and cells, tens of thousands of enzymes inside of each cell, binding to different molecular bodies and processing them to make the compounds of life. Molecular recognition, I learned in my online biology class, is the fundamental mechanism of living matter. Something was misfiring in my brain, something was being misrecognized and broken down in the wrong way and filed in the wrong filing cabinet. Metaphorical filing cabinets, of course, but filing cabinets nonetheless.

The ghost was relentless. He followed me. He appeared beside me on the street; his spurs jingled with every step. “Boo,” he said.

“I thought I left you back there,” I said. I put my hand to my ear. At least this way, people might think I was having a phone conversation. Or that I was an agent of the secret police. There were a lot of them, after all, on the Egyptian streets.

“I’m a ghost, Khosi. I can be everywhere at once and anywhere I want.”

“Anywhere?” I said. “Then what is Natasha doing right now?”

“Brushing her teeth,” he said. He cleared his throat again.

“Sure,” I said. I was inching along the wall of the building. Not far from me was a little park. The buildings separated, and a tiny lush garden appeared, with a single bench in the midst of a dozen palm trees. The bench was unoccupied. I sat down. I rested my head in my hands. I didn’t need to look to know that the Ghost of William Andrews Clark had settled in beside me. “Sure—brushing her teeth. I obviously can’t verify or disprove your statement.” I glanced over at the apparition. “You realize this means I should be committed,” I added.

“Nonsense, pardner. You know, Khosi, my first night in Butte, I had to pitch a tent. I was—really and truly—a pioneer. The mud was knee-deep. I didn’t dry off until the sun rose the next day.” He took one last drag on his cigar, then stubbed the cigar out on the heel of his boot. “I’m here to tell you, son: If you’re a pioneer, you’ve got to work harder. This ain’t easy, what you’re trying to do.”

“No,” I said. “But I’m not a pioneer.” I paused. “I can’t possibly do this.”

“Unacceptable,” he said.

“Why?” I said. “I lost one of my notecards. That’s half of my addresses.”

“You can’t get down, son, because of these little disasters.”

“Little disasters?” I said. “There were men screaming at me and chasing me and I had to buy a stranger’s clothes off his back.”

“Don’t worry,” said the Ghost of William Andrews Clark. “There will be more of that.”

“More?” I said. “No, thank you. This was poorly conceived. By me. I came here for the wrong reasons.”

“Son,” he said, “you lost one of your address cards? That’s what’s got you down? Here, let me see the other one.”

“Why?” I said.

“Just let me see it.”

I handed over the single most important piece of paper I possessed in the world—handed it over to a spectral image. I’m not sure what I expected might happen. Perhaps I thought that the notecard would fall dramatically to the ground, that I’d glance down at it and see it in the dirt and then I’d look up and be free of the hallucination. Instead, I felt a chill move through my hand as it neared the hand of the Ghost of William Andrews Clark. I felt a coldness spread up through my arm and into the center of my chest. The ghost clutched the card and held it aloft for just a moment.

“This is what I like to call,” he said, “the Subterranean Switcheroo.”

“Subterranean?” I said. Before I could say anything more, the
notecard sparked and flared and exploded in flames. “No!” I called, but it burned and burned and then rose like a rice-paper lantern, a tiny flame pulled into the air by the desiccated wind. “What have you done?” I said.

The Ghost of William Andrews Clark just leaned back and smiled. “Do you trust me?” he said.

“Hell, no, I don’t trust you,” I said.

“You can trust me, Khosi,” he said, “because this is the only address you’re going to need.”

The same bony, faded, chalk-colored hand reached out and, from nothing, from nowhere, produced a replica of the card I’d just seen rise into the sky. I looked down, and there, written in my handwriting, in a perfect replica of my careful numerals, was a single centered address: 20 A
BDEL
R
EHIM
S
ABRI
S
TREET
. I tried to understand, to make quick sense of what had happened, but before I could, I heard a rustle nearby and felt the faintest puff of air, the faintest breath of camphor, and then the clatter of receding horse hooves. I looked up. The Ghost of William Andrews Clark had disappeared. After some time, I realized he wasn’t coming back.

“Nice talking to you,” I said quietly to the empty street.

I wandered a bit, walking the streets of that part of the city. My knees were shaking. Once, in high school, I’d sat up with Natasha all night while she came down from an acid trip. I’d kept reassuring her that the floor of my bedroom was indeed the floor of my bedroom, that the carpet was indeed just the carpet, that nothing was bending or floating or melting away. That was the closest I’d ever
come to any sort of hallucinogen. What had he said?
Keep ridin?
And then I realized: He’d been quoting Evel Knievel.

As I walked, I saw a giant billboard painted onto the side of a brick building, its size comparable to the billboards in Times Square. A man in a business suit was smiling into the camera and holding his cell phone aloft in triumph. He had perfect luminous teeth. His Oxford shirt was starched and white, and he’d been carefully manicured. The text behind him said:

The word
Google
was transliterated. Arabic characters spelled it out phonetically. As I stood there staring at the sign, a mosquito landed on my arm and, before I could even feel it, drank its fill. I looked down and saw the beginning of an itchy welt.

Maybe the ghost was the answer to my prayers? Or maybe the answer was this:
The Life and Times of Akram Saqr and Amy Clark, My One and Only Parents, as Told by Me, My Mother’s One and Only Son, Fruit of Her Womb, 100 Percent Maculate Conception, Part Two
. It was an image that I couldn’t shake, an image from the end of my parents’ marriage. It had to be a lie. It wasn’t possible that I remembered this. Except that I did. I was three years old when my father left. But still,
I had this memory: the memory of him standing above my bed in the dim light of a morning, his hand reaching down to brush the hair back from my forehead.

His face, in my memory, is missing. It’s a blur, a smear, an indistinct set of features above me. It is, more than anything else, a feeling. His face is a feeling. In my version of that memory, I tell him not to leave. I stand on the mattress, unsteady, stubby-legged, wearing pajamas. I tell him not to leave, and he sits down at my bedside. Please, please forgive me this embarrassing, imagined memory; in this embarrassing, imagined memory, my father starts singing. It is a lullaby. It’s not a song in English or in Arabic. Instead, it’s a French lullaby about the nativity myth: “
Il Est Né, le Divine Enfant
.” My father finishes, and he gets up and kisses my forehead again. And then he starts to leave. I tell him: “Please don’t leave me.” And he says: “I have to leave.” And I tell him again: “Please don’t leave us.” And he says: “I’m leaving.” And I can’t tell if he’s angry or sad or if he even hears me.

Tante Wada once told me something about the night of their wedding: Later that night my mother joined my father at the blackjack table, and together, they won five hundred dollars. Then they went to the bar attached to the casino and bought everyone a round of drinks. And there, at three
A.M
. in Caesar’s Palace, my father leaped up on the bar in his bright white tuxedo and white leather shoes. “For my beautiful new wife,” he called, and a discordant cheer rose up from the inebriated patrons. When he tried to climb down off the bar, he spilled a shrimp cocktail on my mother’s off-the-rack, ill-fitting gown.