38. And that was when I saw him...

The thirty-eighth instalment of 'Oh, That More Such Flowers May Come Tomorrow' in which our hero espies a curious phantom in Grand Central Station.

Welcome to 'Oh, That More Such Flowers May Come Tomorrow', a novel I’ve published as a serial. If you’re new here, you can start at the beginning, or use the links below to navigate to other chapters.

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And that was when I saw him. As clear as day, the ghost of my father, his cracked countenance threading its way through the crowd at Grand Central Station, looping in and out of a thousand other faces, lost and then found once more, as I tried to follow his movements across the main concourse, dazzled by the light and gold, the noise and hubbub of the morning rush hour...

Suddenly, his face was gone again, dropped down to waist height, as death mimicked life and he stooped to rest on his haunches, which was something he used to do in those last few months, when walking more than fifty feet had become impossible, and I’d stand and wait on street corners and think myself unjustly persecuted by fate at having to stop for him, an inconvenience of colossal proportions, a realisation of his growing weakness, and my own.

Now here he was again. No longer simply a voice, but a body, moving, as far as I could tell, in three-dimensional reality. My first reaction to this sudden appearance was not surprise or confusion or horror, but an unhesitating acceptance of the implausible sight I’d just witnessed. Of course, he was here, I thought. Here in New York, city of cities, de facto capital of the strange world we’ve built for ourselves. A place in which the deceased might easily pass unnoticed among the indifferent throngs of the living, most of whom were too busy to notice, too wrapped up in the trivial machinations of their flesh-bound existence to bother about the revenant dead.

I ducked down myself and peered through the legs of the shifting crowd. I could see him slumped against a wall. He looked tired and solemn, like a man emptied out. And I found myself thinking about those final days in the hospital, when he’d appeared much the same, but for those fierce blue eyes still confounding the world with their intensity, just as they did now.

But it was eight o’clock, rush hour, and suddenly a surge of people moved through the station, blocking my view; and when the crowd eventually thinned, and I could once again see the spot where he’d stopped, he was gone, slipped back into whatever invisible realm it was that had hitherto been his home. It was only then, as I pictured the hidden, unknowable parts of the universe, and felt the sudden tremors of a Lovecraftian terror stirring within me, that the air thickened and I found myself unable to breathe, a heavy weight pressing against my chest, thrown into shock by the impossibility of what I’d just seen; or at least what I thought I’d just seen.

Panicked, I walked hurriedly outside onto Lexington Avenue to get some air into my lungs. The sun was bright, the buildings aglow with its reflected light, sending everything around me into coruscated abstraction. The thousands of sounds that made up the noise of the city laid siege to my ears. I was suddenly conscious of skin and muscle and blood, and of the relative softness of my body compared to the hard materiality of everything that surrounded me, all steel and stone and strengthened concrete. I knew that I could be crushed, obliterated, swept aside, in a moment.

And yet, somehow, at the same time, I could smell the English countryside; the fields and woods and flowers from back home; which was like a great longing in my heart. Nothing made any sense. Instinctively, I looked upward, as if trying to furtively catch sight of my maker, but could only pick out the outlandish apex of the Chrysler Building, which ever since my arrival had spoken to me of a future we once thought we’d have, and in no time at all had come to play the role of cathedral spire, a sacred pivot around which I moved, navigating my way up, down and across the island.

Leaning against a wall, I threw my head fully backwards and concentrated on that point where its crowning needle seemed to prick the sky; an inconceivable conflation of human materiality and numinous eternity, which was somehow like looking at myself in a mirror, like the two sides of me, the surface and the depths, together in one vision, writ large upon the blue canvas that shrouded the world, the holy spire touching the sky. It was only after many minutes, staring heavenward like a madman, lost in recondite thought, that I regained my composure, my balance, and could at last tear my eyes from its tip, as the city slowly returned to something approaching comprehensibility.

Finally, I could breathe again. I could smell exhaust fumes and hot dogs. Suddenly, remembering what had happened moments before, recalling who I’d seen, I began rapidly scanning the faces of the people walking by, and looking again for his among them. But they were as unfamiliar as ever. Perhaps, I’d made a mistake, I thought; or seen something that simply wasn’t there; or had caught sight of some lonely street dweller with a passing resemblance to my old man. Perhaps there was a perfectly reasonable explanation after all.

Needing to move, and without a thought as to where I was going, I started walking downtown. An hour or so later, I found myself on the Lower East Side, which was where he’d gravitated years before, drawn by its louche reputation. There he’d wander indeterminately and drink alone in bars, concocting delirious narratives of art, sex, and sedition within his deliciously addled brain. To live freely and beyond convention was the point; and to him this felt like the place to do it, far removed from the quaint strictures of his old life.

But how it had changed, and how quickly. If things were ever really as he imagined them to be, they certainly weren’t by the time I found myself pacing those same streets. Yet, there I was thinking much the same thing. Like father, like son. A fantasist following in the footsteps of a fantasist, who’d come to think that perhaps he could, should, and would take those first baby steps toward being a writer after all, because through doing so might he begin to make sense of his suffering, he might begin to explain that essential part of him that was the spire touching the sky, and that seemed more suited to conversations with stones and trees and ghostly voices than it was with fellow humanity.

The question was how to trust in this new conviction and make it pay, for despite recent revelations there was still so much discord in my mind and so many strange confusions in my life, all of which had landed me in some trendy bar on Essex Street trying to spy phantoms through the bottom of a glass. It wasn’t even noon. I spent the rest of the day drinking like this and thinking about what had happened back at the station, which, as my mind bent this way and that, veered in my thoughts from being an entirely natural and obvious occurrence, to marking the first sign (the dead risen) of the terminal conflagration I was convinced would eventually consume the world.

Whatever it was, whatever it signalled, I decided I needed to see it again, if only to prove to myself that I hadn’t been mistaken, that I wasn’t totally off my head. I downed my last beer and headed back outside, where I walked and walked, oblivious to where my feet were taking me, casting about for his face once more, but turning up nothing. By this point the sun had dropped below the buildings, plunging parts of the street into shadow, as dusk began to ease itself over the city.

Then, all of a sudden, from behind, I felt a hand on my shoulder and it was as if I was back in the East Anglian woods all those years ago; that same cold terror surging through my body, that same momentary intimation of death. I turned around sharply, ready to confront whoever, or whatever, had come to claim me. There, looking somewhat sheepish, aware perhaps that he’d startled me, was a young homeless man on crutches. He asked me for a dollar. I stared at his prematurely withered face, his wispy beard, his sad eyes, but was unable to respond. He repeated his request. At last, I dug into my pocket, pulled out a fresh note, and handed it over. We exchanged timid smiles. I gave my usual British shrug of implied apology and walked away.

It dawned on me that I hadn’t spoken to another person all day, except perhaps the bartender. Instead, I’d spent the last seven hours seriously entertaining the fact that I’d seen the ghost of my dead father. I realised that the world would never make any sense, no matter how much science and rational explanation we tried to apply to it. I wondered if the years of solitude were finally wearing away my faculties. The voices were one thing, I thought; but this was something else entirely. Was it me? Was it this place? Was it some inexplicable combination of the two? All I knew was that it was cold and getting late. And so, as the city collapsed into darkness and its streets took on a more sinister flavour, like something out of The French Connection, I began looking about for another bar, for my next drink, and some human beings to be near, no matter how strange or disconcerting I found them.

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