The Breath of Suspension (33 page)

As Harmon climbed the clattering metal stairs up to the deserted El platform, he remembered the first one. It was always that way with him. He was never able to see the Duomo of Florence without remembering the first time he and Margaret had seen it, from the window of their pensione. There were some words he could not read without remembering the classroom in which he learned them, and whether it had been sunny that day. It meant there were some things he never lost, that he always had Margaret with him in Florence. And it meant that he could never deal with a ghost without remembering the terror of the first one.

He had been working night duty, late, when they brought in a bloody stretcher. It had been quiet for about an hour, in that strange irregular rhythm that Emergency Rooms have, crowded most of the time, but sometimes almost empty. A pedestrian had been hit by a truck while crossing the street. There was a lot of bleeding, mostly internal, and a torn lung filled with blood, a hemothorax. His breathing was audible, a slow dragging gurgle, the sound a straw makes sucking at the bottom of a glass of Coke when the glass is almost empty. Harmon managed to stop much of the bleeding, but by that time the man was in shock. Then the heart went into ventricular fibrillation. Harmon put the paddles on and defibril-lated it. When the heart stopped altogether, he put the patient on a pacemaker and an external ventilator. The autopsy subsequently showed substantial damage to the brain stem, as well as complete kidney failure. Every measure Harmon took, as it turned out, was useless, but he managed to keep the patient alive an extra hour, before everything stopped at once, in the ICU.

A day or so later, the nurse on duty came to him with a problem. Rosemary was a redhead, cute, and reminded him of Margaret when she was young, so he was a little fonder of her than he should have been, particularly since Margaret had been sick. The nurse wasn’t flirting now, however. She was frightened. She kept hearing someone drinking out of a straw, she said, in a corner of the ER, only there wasn’t anyone there. She was afraid she was losing her mind, which can happen to you after too many gunshot wounds, suicides, and drug overdoses. Harmon assured her, in what he told himself was a fatherly way, that it was probably something like air in the pipes, which he called an “embolism,” a medical usage that delighted her. She teased him about it.

Harmon remembered being vaguely pleased about that, while he searched around and listened. He didn’t hear anything. It was late, and he finally climbed up on a gurney and went to sleep, as some of the other doctors did when things weren’t busy. He’d never done it before, and why he did it was something he could not remember, though everything about the incident, from the freckles around Rosemary’s nose to the scheduling roster for that night’s medical staff, was abnormally clear in his mind, the way memories of things that happened only yesterday never were. When he woke up, he heard it. A slow dragging gurgle. He listened with his eyes closed, heart pounding. Then it stopped.

“Hey, have you seen my car?” a voice said. “It’s a blue car, a Cutlass, though I guess it’s too dark here to see the color. I know I parked it near here, but I just can’t find it.”

Harmon slowly opened his eyes. Standing in front of him was a fat man in a business suit, holding a briefcase. He wasn’t bloody, and his face was not pasty white, but Harmon recognized him. It was the man who had died the night before.

“Look, I have to get home to Berwyn. My wife will be going nuts. She expected me home hours ago. Have you seen the damn car? It’s a Cutlass, blue. Not a good car, God knows, and it needs work, but I gotta get home.”

Harmon had met the wife when she identified the body. She had, indeed, expected him hours ago.

“Jeez, I don’t know what I could have done with it.”

Harmon was a logical man, and a practical man, and he hadn’t until that moment realized that those two characteristics could be in conflict. What he saw before him was indubitably a ghost, and as a practical man he had to accept that. He also knew, as a logical man, that ghosts did not, indeed could not, exist. This neat conundrum, however, did not occur to him until somewhat later, because the next time the dead man said, “Do you think you could help me find my car? I gotta get home,” he launched himself from the gurney, smashing it back into the wall, bolted from the ER, and did not stop running until he was sitting at the desk in his little office on the fifth floor, shaking desperately and trying not to scream.

❖

The El platform was windswept and utterly empty. Harmon walked slowly across its torn asphalt until he came to the spot where it had happened. The police had cleaned up the blood and erased the chalk outline, that curious symbol of the vanished soul used by police photographers as a record of the body, so morning commuters would not be unpleasantly surprised by the cold official evidence of violent death. He didn’t have to see it. He could feel it, like standing in the autopsy room and knowing that someone had left the door to the cold room where the bodies were kept open because you could feel the frigid formaldehyde-and-decay-scented air seeping along the floor.

He didn’t know why he had this particular sense, or ability, or whatever. To himself he compared it to someone with perfect pitch and rhythm who nevertheless dislikes music, someone who could play Bach’s
Goldberg Variations
through perfectly after hearing the piece only once, and yet hate every single note. It was a vicious curse. He set his black bag down, opened it, and began to remove his instruments.

To start, Harmon had cautiously, cautiously, sounded out his colleagues on the subject of ghosts. He’d read too many books where seemingly reasonable men lost all of their social graces when confronted by the inexplicable and started jabbering and making ridiculous accusations, frightening and embarrassing their friends. So, in a theoretical manner, he asked about ghosts. To his surprise, instead of being suspicious, people either calmly said they didn’t believe in them, or the majority had one or more anecdotes about things like the ghost of a child in an old house dropping a ball down the stairs or a hitchhiking girl in a white dress who would only appear to men driving alone and then would vanish from the car. Others had stories about candles being snuffed out in perfectly still rooms, or dreams about dying relatives, or any number of irrelevant mystical experiences. No one, when pressed, would admit to having actually seen anything like a real, demonstrably dead man walking and talking and looking for a blue Cutlass. A man who persisted, week after week, in trying to get Harmon to help him find the damn thing. Harmon transferred from the ER. Rosemary thought it was something personal, because she’d asked him to her house for dinner, and they rarely spoke after that.

He told Margaret, however, as much of it as he could. It gave her something to think about, as she lay there in bed and gasped, waiting for the end. She wondered, of course, if the strain of her illness had not made her husband lose what few marbles he had left, as she put it, but she only said this because both of them knew Harmon was coolly sane. It interested her that some people could hear ghosts, but that Harmon could see them and talk to them. She, like Dexter, used the word “gift.”

In good scholar’s style, Harmon did research in the dusty abandoned stacks of the witchcraft and folklore sections of Northwestern, the University of Chicago, and the University of Illinois, Circle Campus. He even had a friend let him into the private collections of the Field Museum of Natural History. He learned about lemures, the Roman spirits of the dead, about the hauntings of abandoned pavilions by sardonic Chinese ghosts, and about the Amityville Horror. It was all just... literature. Stories. Tales to tell at midnight. Not a single one of them had the ring of truth to it, and Harmon was by this time intimately familiar with the true behavior of ghosts.

Everyone was very good to him about Margaret, and about what he did to himself as a result, though no one understood the real reason for it. It got to be too much, in the apartment, in the hospital, and he finally started to say things that concerned people. They didn’t think he was crazy, just “under stress,” that ubiquitous modern disease, which excuses almost anything. Then, someone at the Field Museum mentioned, with the air of an ordinarily respectable man selling someone some particularly vile pornography, that Dexter Warhoff, of the Sphinx and Eye of Truth Bookstore, might have some materials not available in the museum collection. It was rumored that Dexter possessed a bizarrely variant scroll of the Egyptian
Book of the Dead
, as well as several Mayan codexes not collected in the
Popol Vuh
or the
Dresden Codex
, though no one was quite sure. Harmon had come to the conclusion that using ordinary reason in his new circumstances was using Occam’s razor while shaving in a fun-house mirror. Common sense was a normally useful instrument turned dangerous in the wrong situation. So he went to Dexter’s store, drank his sour tea, and talked with him. Dexter scratched his head with elaborate thoughtfulness, then took Harmon upstairs where he lived, to a mess with a kitchen full of dirty dishes, and brought him into a room piled with newspaper clippings, elaborately color coded, in five different languages, as well as sheets of articles transcribed from newspapers in forty languages more.

“You poor guy,” Dexter said sadly. “That’s a terrible way to find out about what’s hidden. I can see that it was terrible. But I must say, I’ve been wondering about a few things. You’ve got the key there, I think, with this life-support stuff. Look at this.” He showed Harmon a French translation of a photocopied Russian
samizdat
document from the Crimea. It described ghosts haunting a medical center at an exclusive Yalta sanatorium. The tone was slightly metaphorical, but for the first time, Harmon read things that confirmed his own experience. Dexter showed him an article from the house newspaper of a hospital in Bombay, an excerpt from the unpublished reminiscences of a surgeon in Denmark, and a study of night terrors in senile dementia cases in a Yorkshire nursing home, from
Lancet.
The accounts were similar. “There’s almost nothing before the 1930s, very few up to about 1960, and a fair number from the 70s and ’80s.”

“Life support,” Harmon said, when he was done reading. “Artificial life support is responsible.”

“Now, Professor, let’s not jump to conclusions....” But Harmon could see that Dexter agreed with him, and for some strange reason that pleased him.

“When the body is kept alive by artificial means, for however long, when it should be dead and starting to rot, the soul, which normally is swept away somewhere—Heaven, Hell, oblivion, the Elysian Fields, it doesn’t matter—is held back in this world, tied to its still-breathing body. And, being held back, it falls in love with life again.” Harmon found himself saying it again, alone on the platform. It had seemed immediately obvious to him, though it was not really an “explanation” of the sort a scientist would require. It was, however, more than sufficient for a doctor of medicine, whose standards are different. A doctor only cares about what works, without much attention to why.

None of his colleagues had understood, though. He had gotten a little cranky on the subject, ultimately, he had to admit that, but he felt like someone in the eighteenth century campaigning against bloodletting. He had always known that doctors were, by and large, merely skilled fools, so he quickly stopped, but not before acquiring a certain reputation.

He drew his chalk circle on the rough surface of the platform, using the brass compass. Using a knife with a triangular blade, he scraped some material from within the circle. No matter how well the police had cleaned, it would contain some substance, most likely the membranes of red blood cells, that had belonged to the dead man. He melted beeswax over a small alcohol lamp whose flame kept going out, then mixed in the scraped-up blood. He dropped a linen wick into a mold of cold worked bronze and poured the wax in. While he waited for the candle to harden, he arranged the speculum, the silver nails, and the brass hammer so that he could reach them quickly. It was strange that most of the techniques they used had their roots in earlier centuries, when ghosts were the extremely rare results of accidental comas or overdoses of toxic drugs. People had had more time then to worry about such things, and some of their methods were surprisingly effective, though Dexter and Harmon had refined them. He set the candle in the center of the circle, lit it, and called Stanley Paterson’s name.

❖

The train still had not come. What was wrong? Why had there been no notification by the CTA? Stanley stood on the platform and shivered, wondering why he had wandered away and why he had come back. Where was the damn train? Beneath his feet he could see a circle of chalk and a half-melted candle, but he didn’t think about them. Had he daydreamed right past the train, with those thoughts of musicians and mothers? Had the trains stopped for the night?

There was a rumble, and lights appeared down the tracks. They blinded him, for he had been long in darkness, and he stumbled forward with his eyes shut. He felt around for a seat. It seemed like he’d been waiting forever.

“It’s a cold night, isn’t it, Stanley?” a man’s voice said, close by.

“Wha—?” Stanley jerked his head around and examined the brightly lit train car. It was empty. Then he saw that the man was sitting next to him, a tall old man with sad brown eyes. He was wearing a furry hat. “What are you talking about? How do you know my name?” Not waiting for an answer, he turned and pressed his nose against the glass of the window. A form lay there on the platform, sprawled on its back. It wore a long black overcoat. A large pool of blood, black in the lights of the station, had gathered near it, looking like the mouth of a pit.

“Stanley,” the man said, his voice patient. “You have to understand a few things. I don’t suppose it’s strictly necessary, but it makes me feel less... cruel.”

The train pulled into the next station. Out on the platform lay a dead man with a black coat. Three white-clad men burst onto the platform and ran toward it with a stretcher. The train pulled out of the station. “I don’t care how you feel,” Stanley said.