39. Some hours later, I caught myself staring at my reflection...
The thirty-ninth instalment of 'Oh, That More Such Flowers May Come Tomorrow' in which our hero briefly follows the phantom once more.
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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Some hours later, I caught myself staring at my reflection in the window of said bar, pallid and far older than the vision I carried about in my head (at the time I was the same age as Proust when he began his novel)...
Dark bags and dismal fissures beneath my eyes, a murder of crows’ feet, thinning lashes, a deep crevice carved through the centre of my brow, faint lines from the edge of my nostrils to the corners of my mouth, incipient jowls, everywhere the beginning of the skin’s inexorable descent, the loss of its bright porcelain sheen, which I could still recall from old photographs, and was a quality people had remarked upon when I was younger. That, along with my cerulean gaze.
And yet, there was still something of the child lurking beneath all these insinuations of decay, giving the whole thing an awkward incongruity and making my looks less palatable the older I became, without either the taut vigour of youth or the lived-in gravitas of middle age to provide any definition or weight. A face that belonged to neither man nor boy, sad, beardless, and inconclusive.
Shifting focus, I could make out the elegant shapes of people drinking and talking behind me and pick out the reflected shards of coloured glass and neon signage from the bar, while outside darker forms passed by on the street, fugitive shapes that reminded me of the shadows that haunted my infant dreams. It was then, on the opposite side of the road, that I saw one of these forms stop, turn toward where I was sitting, and give a weak wave to the light. I strained to see its face through the far larger translucent vision of my own. They weren’t dissimilar, I thought. It must be him. I was sure of it. He was back. Like me, he looked tired, but not quite as forlorn and helpless as earlier in the day, as if he’d somehow slipped backward in time, appearing now as something nearer to how I remembered him when he first came back to England, worn but present, still with a trace of hope in his eyes.
Again, I felt completely calm, even somewhat relieved, as I sat there and stared back at the spectre across the street. When the world cracks, it can be difficult to comprehend and so we blithely observe the rupture, like we’re watching a game of cricket. Only afterwards do we realise what has happened and collapse in terror. In the moment, it even made some sort of sense, as it had in the station hours before. Yes, there he was, a revenant of the Lower East Side, the place where he’d found at least some measure of fulfilment in his life, called into being by his son, who had no real idea of how all this was supposed to work. Perhaps ghosts could manifest themselves wherever they liked. One minute, New York, the next popping up in St Petersburg or Tokyo. Or were they were rooted to a single place, one city, or one town? Or one house? Forever constrained by geographical parameters. But that couldn’t be it, because I’d already seen him in two separate locations. No, they must surely haunt the person, and so appear wherever that person happens to be. That was it. And yet, it was only since being here in America that I’d seen him; before it had only been a voice, which despite its apparent veracity, I’d always been certain, somewhere deep down, I must have created myself. So why here and why now? Perhaps it had to be the right person in the right place; perhaps only then could the phantom manifest itself in the material world.
As these and other mad questions spiralled through my mind, I realised I’d taken my eyes off the pale figure across the street, and when I looked back up, he was gone again. I grabbed my coat, threw ten dollars on the bar, and rushed out of the door. Nothing. I ran to the end of the block, but the street, which must have been Houston, was now teeming with indeterminate bodies moving this way and that, among which anyone, living or dead, might easily conceal themselves. I carried on walking, glancing at the parade of dark and sombre faces that passed by. What did I expect? This was New York. Anything could happen here. If the universe can forge entire civilisations in the hearts of stars, what was conjuring up one meagre phantom in the Big Apple?
But still, I reasoned, surely it was just someone with a vague resemblance; a derelict sheltering in the station for warmth, and then the same man, or a different one, stood on the dark street, waiting to scrabble together enough money for a coffee or place to sleep for the night. New York was full of people like that. A second theory: perhaps it was simply the next evolution of the voices I’d been hearing, the next phase in my descent into insanity, which now spewed up fully formed visions of the dead, just to finish me off? One final idea: Proust had reportedly seen a fat woman dressed in black appear in his bed chamber on the day he died. Had my time come and the figure was just a common-or-garden harbinger of death?
By now the city was cold, the wind surging in off the water, barrelling through the streets, squeezing between the buildings. I thought of the great ocean to the east, of the shifting patterns of air pressure, the need that nature has to correct an imbalance, and took the weather as I sign to give up my search, convinced that certain universal forces were rallying against me. I made my way across town, shielding my face from the rain, which had started to fall just moments after my decision to quit. People pulled umbrellas from nowhere and quickened their pace. These dark human shapes surrounded me, guiding my body through the streets, like an insect fallen into a stream, carried by yet another force it couldn’t understand. For the entire journey back to the apartment, I felt like there was someone behind me, following, but every time I tried to single such a person out, the throng converged. Instead, I quickened my pace and focused on my feet, one then the other, moving steadily forward, listening for nothing but the wet smack of my sole against the pools of water on the sidewalk, calmed by its rhythmic repetition.
Still, I spent at least half an hour watching from the window after I’d made it back to Alistair’s, to see if anyone or anything was waiting around outside in the shadows, like Harry Lime, hidden in a doorway somewhere. But there was nothing or no one out of the ordinary. After a while, my eyelids heavy, my body exhausted, and with the day transmogrified into some sort of sinister fairy tale, I went to bed, desperate for the oblivion of sleep.
But the night was as uneasy as the day that had preceded it; interlaced dreams in which darkness seemed layered upon darkness; in which absence made itself felt, like a material force, dreams of that other New York while asleep in the heart of the real thing. Drifting in and out of consciousness, unaware what was real and what was not, until the first signs of cold blue light that signified the dawn; and eventually the shock of brightness and presence that came with morning proper; the world reasserting itself under the glare of the pale winter sun. Solid shapes with functional value; noises that carried meaning. Into my empty head exploded the strange experiences of the day before. For a moment, they seemed to fuse with the dreams, only to tear themselves away and stand alone. The invidious metaphysical mystery at their core was pressed to the front of my brain; and this sent me clambering back to the window in expectation of the phantom’s return.
What greeted me instead was the world turned white; a thick layer of snow covering the street, stacked on rooftops, perched on water towers, enveloping parked cars. Amid this postcard scene, a few dark figures trudged about, steam rising from their bodies, venting from their mouths, circling in the air above them; signs of life that no ghost could muster. Disappointed and relieved at the same time, I scampered back to the bed, stole under the covers, raised them over my head and lay still, unable to think of anything else to do. Suddenly, my being there in this strange city seemed utterly absurd and I wished those thousands of miles of ocean that separated me from my homeland might magically contract, so that getting back would require nothing more than stepping across a small puddle. Without being truly aware of it, drawn by some ineluctable hope, I’d come looking for him and that’s what I’d found.
Need to catch up on previous instalments? You can find links to all the previous chapters here.