Ghost Town (6 page)

A hurricane was approaching the heavily populated South Florida coast. An unexpected blizzard stranded hundreds of motorists in the Rockies. On the other side of the world, entire villages floated away after days of heavy rains. Wars were raging in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia.

I was oblivious to all of this. My world was no longer the abandoned town of Paisley. It wasn't even my own room. By abusing the pain pills that had been allocated to me by people who otherwise had washed their hands of my situation, I had reduced my world to a few simple sensations in my brain.

I had finally succeeded in locating the macro within me.

What a shame I couldn't take its picture.

Something had to change.

Is it against the law to take a catalog with someone else's name on it even when you know that person couldn't care less whether he ever gets the catalog? Or is this one of those "technicalities"—that is, something that clearly is against the law but nobody gives a rat's patoot about it so why bring it up?

I wouldn't want my mother to lose her phony-baloney job over my possibly criminal actions, but most of this stuff was just going into the recycling bin anyway.

I began to help myself to the undeliverable catalogs that came in each day to the Paisley post office—i.e., my house. It was the only fresh reading material I had.

Among the subjects I was introduced to during my long convalescence were fishhooks, imported cigars, Japanese skin care products, Maine woolen outerwear, discount office supplies, and Dutch bulb gardens.

Some catalogs specialized in gift items, absolutely useless things that you could never use yourself but might be fun to palm off on others. My favorite was a miniature working catapult that fired diminutive farm animals across the room. If I'd had forty dollars to spare, I would have ordered it. As it was, I had no extra money. Every penny was earmarked for my photographic endeavors.

There is little difference between living in a ghost town and living in a dream world.

The pet care catalogs gave me real pause.

If only I had a dog,
I thought,
I wouldn't have to (depend on this imaginary Indian who comes and goes like a will-o'-the-wisp, dispensing dubious advice.

The weirdest catalog I came across was one for sex toys. It was so strange that it made me never want to grow up. I shuddered as I shoved it to the bottom of a trash bag.

If this is the future,
I thought,
what's the rush?

My bed, which is where I was spending ninety-nine percent of my time, was no longer a conventional human's bed. As my needs had changed, I'd converted it into something resembling a great blue heron's nest, piling up comforters and pillows into a concave, circular shape and positioning myself in the middle.

There was no cozier place to ride out a thunderstorm.

"I'm concerned about what's happening to you," my mother said one afternoon during a long commercial about plastic food storage devices that for some reason put me in mind of armadillos. "Don't you think you should try to walk around a little bit?"

"If I could, I would," I told her emphatically. "But I can't."

As fate had planned it, the very next day the catalog pile produced a curious little brochure printed in black-and-white on cheap newsprint called
Uncle Milton's Thousand Things You Thought You'd Never Find.

A manual chicken beak blunter was something I'd never thought about finding, but if I had thought about a manual chicken beak blunter, I bet I would have found one somewhere, so Uncle Milton may have been overpromising, but that's salesmanship. Anyway, it was an interesting collection and I skipped my next round of pills so I wouldn't fall asleep while reading it.

One device was a doorstop made to resemble a dead rat. It was quite realistic. Uncle Milton certainly had me on that one, because I couldn't possibly imagine there being a market for such a thing, especially at twenty-nine ninety-five, plus shipping.

Other novelties were truly one of a kind, such as the 3D glasses for dogs ("guaranteed to work or you should get a different dog") and the miracle spray solution that would repel mosquitoes, stop rust, and attract fish all at the same time ("a must for the serious fisherman").

There was an upside-down chair that I seriously considered ordering. You attach it to your ceiling with its supersuction feet and invite your guests to make themselves comfortable. ("A million laughs," Uncle Milton promised.)

But it was the item in the upper-right-hand corner on page thirty-two that really got my attention. Not the full-length whoopee cushion that fits under an entire row of outdoor bleachers such as you might find at a minor-league baseball game, but the one next to it:

"Ghost Camera Takes Pictures of the Past," Uncle Milton's caption read. "This is no ordinary time-lapse camera. This is a real, working time machine. Uses ordinary film to capture images from both the recent and the distant past. Non-programmable. Batteries not included. Use at your own risk."

What risk?
I wondered.

HOW MUCH MONEY
something is worth depends largely on how much money you have.

At four hundred and ninety-five dollars and ninety-five cents plus insurance and shipping for a ghost camera, Uncle Milton might as well have been offering to sell an authentic orbiting space satellite. There was no way I could ever buy it. But since I already had a camera that seemed to possess some of the same characteristics as his camera, I wondered if a letter to Uncle Milton asking about his experience with such matters might be in order.

I skipped my next round of pain pills in order to compose a letter that struck just the right tone.

Perhaps,
I thought,
if I also enclose an unusual item as a gift, he'll be more inclined to cooperate.

But what?

A board from a tumbledown building in Paisley?

Who'd want it?

A baby pumpkin?

Not very hard to find.

My talisman! Definitely one of a kind, and just the sort of half-art, half-magic item that Uncle Milton seemed to delight in.

Surely Chief Leopard Frog would understand.

According to the fine print at the bottom of the inside front cover,
Uncle Milton's Thousand Things You Thought You'd Never Find
is not an American publication but is, in fact, the product of an enterprise headquartered in the Cayman Islands.

Off the top of my head I was unable to picture just where the Cayman Islands might be, but I sensed that it was a far cry from Paisley, Kansas—or Davenport, Iowa, for that matter.

Perhaps if I weren't being homeschooled, I would know. But maybe not, for as I recall, geography is a delicate subject for public school Kansans, who if they learn too many facts about the world might be tempted to leave.

Uncle Milton's Thousand Things You Thought You'd Never Find
was edited by Milton A. Swartzman, Jr., who gave as his address P.O. Box 1991 GT, Grand Cayman, the Cayman Islands. There was no Zip Code or even a hint of what country might be involved in overseeing Mr. Swartzman's activities.

Apparently in his search for things you'd never expect to find, he was as free as a bird.

Dear Mr. Swartzman,
I began.

I am a great admirer of your catalog of useful and unusual objects. It must have taken you a long time to assemble such a magnificent collection. As a token of my esteem, I enclose a hand-carved talisman from an authentic though admittedly imaginary Kansas Indian chief. It is reputed to bring luck to the bearer, and as I lie here in my nest of quilts with my broken collarbone and swollen leg and the back of my head lumped out like a Colorado boulder, I can certainly attest to its powers. It was my own medical doctor, a man named Dr. Appletree, who told me how lucky I was. Imagine how things might have turned out if I hadn't possessed the talisman!

And yet, I offer it to you in exchange for information.

Specifically, I refer to the ghost camera that you advertise on page
thirty-two of your most recent catalog, just opposite the grandstand whoopee cushion. I think I may possess a camera with similar features. I was hoping that you could explain how yours works and if you have sold many of them over the years and what your customers report about them.

Any information you can provide would be appreciated. Please note that I am a homeschooled, housebound Kansas teenager, many miles from the nearest living soul except my mother and becoming increasingly desperate about my plight. Thus, I must depend upon the kindness of people of achievement such as yourself in order to learn anything at all.

Thank you for your kind consideration.

Sincerely,

Spencer Adams Honesty

General Delivery

Paisley, Kansas 66085

P.S. If you don't want the talisman, feel free to send it back.

SAH

That night, instead of lying around my room, I hobbled into the kitchen and had dinner with my mother. While waiting for the entrée to be served, I took a close-up photo of a black-eyed pea.

A fortnight passed without incident. The pumpkins grew in size, variety, and number, as did the spiders that had appointed themselves to guard them.

One day, a letter arrived, not typically a noteworthy event at a post office, but this letter bore a stamp with a painting of a menacing-looking bearded pirate dressed in boots, pirate hat, leather breeches, and a gold-buttoned coat. In his right hand he was holding aloft a scimitar, raised toward a symbol of a crown and the official mark of the queen of England. In his left hand he pointed a blunderbuss toward the words
CAYMAN ISLANDS
.

In the background of this scene, a complex and colorful painting no bigger than a single exposure on a roll of film, two tough-looking brigands appeared to be burying (or digging up) a pirate chest, while near the horizon a pirate ship lay at anchor, above which was the designation 10c. Most surprising of all, the stamp was affixed to a letter addressed to me.

It's from Uncle Milton!
I thought immediately.

"
THIS IS SO COOL
!" I exclaimed. "I actually got a letter from Uncle Milton!"

"Who's Uncle Milton?" Chief Leopard Frog wanted to know.

"He's just this guy," I replied. "A publisher."

"Poetry?" Chief Leopard Frog inquired.

"What?" I asked.

"Does he publish poetry?" Chief Leopard Frog repeated.

"I don't know," I answered. "Maybe."

"Well, if he does, I have a few verses I'd like to send him," Chief Leopard Frog said.

"Do you mind?" I said, annoyed. "I'm kind of busy here."

"I'll go find those poems," Chief Leopard Frog said.

"Good idea," I replied as he left the room.

Dear Kid,
the letter began.

Please don't do me any more favors. I carried that so-called lucky talisman around for one day, which was all it took for me to fall into an open manhole and break my leg. And get this—the doctor who set it for me? He said, "You were really lucky this time. " What a putz! Anyway, I passed your talisman on to some schmuck who deserves it more than you and I do. Can you guess who? Right. The bone doctor.

About the camera. I don't know much about it, to tell the truth, something I'm not particularly comfortable doing. I bought it from the widow of a witch doctor in Haiti a few years ago, along with a bunch of other stuff, like loaded human bone dice, a chicken-bone reproduction of the Eiffel Tower, the combination flyswatter-spatula (the Flatula®), and bomber jackets made from bats' wing membrane—I'm sure you saw them in the catalog. Neat stuff. Anyway, back to the camera: All I can tell you is that she said, "Never use it to take a picture of yourself." If you really want it, I can let you have it for 10 percent off retail, but you still have to pay shipping, insurance, etc.

Adios,

Milton Swartzman

President and Publisher,
Uncle Milton's Thousand Things You Thought You'd Never Find.

Well!

You could have knocked me over with a spider!

This was the most interesting letter I had ever received. And so well written, too, with its disarmingly chatty style, cozy, informative, yet never losing sight of the need to sell. This Milton Swartzman had a gift, no doubt about it. Unfortunately, even with his generous discount, I still was in no position to purchase his camera, and neither was I ever likely to be, but the witch doctor's widow's warning he passed along about the operation of ghost cameras in general I would take to heart.

Why take chances?

Too bad about the talisman. I planned to ask Chief Leopard Frog to whittle me another one whenever he had time.

Meanwhile, I put the letter, the envelope, and, most important, the pirate postage stamp into the wooden cigar box where I'd begun to store my pictures.

I had some film left in the camera. I had run out of ideas about tiny things to photograph. The close-up perspective is interesting when you first see it, but art, I think, demands that the artist address grand themes.

For example, one spider, close up, may be a swell photo, but fifty different pictures of fifty different spiders, each composed with care and lit dramatically, and seen in its natural environment, well, that would be an artistic achievement.

Patience and effort.

You could do the same thing with, say, a dog's eyeballs, or out-of-state license plates, or the hair that grows from old men's ears and noses. You are limited only by your imagination. Unless, of course, you're stuck in an empty place called Paisley, Kansas, where there are no dogs, no old men, and no vehicles from anywhere, other than my mother's postal truck, which she drives with an expired license plate inasmuch as there is no law enforcement within miles.

That's when the idea returned to me. I'd photograph all the townspeople, every one, no matter how long it took. I'd stand in front of each house with the ghost camera, take a close-up or two of a doorknob or doorbell or house number, then stand back and shoot the whole house. Surely that would capture whatever essence the residents were percolating about.