Chapter 2. Ray
(5)
 It is not only difficult to write a coherent memoir when you're dead, but especially hard when you live in San Diego. I'll tell you about the dead part shortly, but right now I am sitting in a third-story window with my sketch pad on my lap. This is the moment I would talk about later with Lolo in her café, in the previous section, since time has little meaning here. If you were seeing me through the eyes of my memory of myself, you'd see a slim, dark-haired thirtyish man in a light blue shirt and wheat twill slacks, folded inside a window frame. Then again, if you were looking up the hill at Loma Portal, you'd only see an empty window. Trust me—I'm there, drawing upon the energy of those in the house as a kind of living lens to allow me to experience brief snatches of life in full scent and color. The sensory life of a ghost is not much to write home about.
I hear their voices, indistinct, murmurs in the house, his and hers, and the piping of the two girls being gotten ready for school. The children she went on to have with Marcus. There is disturbance in the discordant notes of the man and woman. I try to brush my unease away so I can enjoy the house of my love just another minute or two. I really should not be here. It is forbidden for the dead to haunt their loved ones—but it is the duty of the dead to revisit the pieces of their present, in the moment when they died, until something happens and they are liberated. When the shadows with gloves come out of the walls to take your soul away, only then is it truly over, once and for all. We are stuck here, in the between, for a reason. There is a purpose, and sometimes it is many purposes. When we have fulfilled our tasks, we can go home. This is the place where I lived with Tamsin, and thought she loved me as I loved her.
This window is high up in a white-washed house, set over a broad balcony of Mexican pavers the color of brick, and a balustrade of white wooden posts. The house is in the heights of Loma Portal about six hundred feet above sea level—a desirable neighborhood with especially mild coastal sunlight and perky sea breezes that shake hanging willow and pepper tree boughs. Spread below me is a breathtaking view of rooftops and narrow streets descending to the beach half a mile west, where long, lazy white breakers roll in. I have a bird's eye view, almost level with the few wispy cirrus clouds over the sea in a Delft-blue sky. If I lean forward to peer into the antique brass refracting telescope, I can make out surfers leaning with their waves. I can follow excited college-age girls playing beach volleyball—I can almost see the hip-ties of their bikini bottoms, and the pale parallel dots of their bikini tops, and I need not describe the calculus of perfection in their speed-blurred curves.
It is difficult to write or to concentrate in such an atmosphere. It is much more engaging to slowly sip tea (a greenish-black, sweet, moody tea of the dead with hints of violet and licorice in a matrix of chamomile) than to hunt and peck at a keyboard. Actually, I do not use a keyboard. I tend to sit with a broad artist-pad of thick, light, recycled paper, and a pair of graphite pencils—a harder, thinner 2H lead, and a darker, softer 3B. I also keep a few colored fine-line pens and soft-points to one side. Later, I'll ink in outlines and shadings as needed. Or I might finish with a watercolor wash. Then, at odd moments, I'll grab a black fine-point sketcher and use it to write a poem, or a bit of prose like now. There is a lot of room—a great need—for self-expression in this ghost gig. We do this stuff for love of it. That's our pure and only motive.
I hear them now on the stairs. Outside, car doors slam. The van pool has arrived from St. Vit to take the girls to school. It is Tamsin (Thomasina, formally) and Marcus now, coming up the stairs. "I can't help it," she says with a faint wail in her voice. "I can still feel him around me in this house." It is the house where she and I lived for nearly two years, and were in love and made love, and planned to marry.
"Then we'll move," he declares manfully.
"No," she says, "I'm not ready to leave here." Score for me.
"You think he had no idea about us?" Marcus asks. Score for him.
His hand wrenches the door knob. They are coming into the bedroom to make love. What's the point? Whom am I kidding? Point for me—a joke. She's alive, and I'm dead. We can never connect again. I'm only here out of pain and nostalgia.
I shove off. I will myself away, a flying blur, in a second a mile distant, down at the beach. I walk heavily, leadenly, down the ghost corridor of my fate, hands in my pockets, shoulders down, suddenly hooded and depressed. I barely hear the shouts of the bikini-clad girls and their blurry moves. They are alive. I'm an invisible ghost. I don't attach myself to anyone. I don't share in their joy. I am outside their moment. I am in the world beyond life and I am moving on the quadrille of raw energy in the unfathomable soul of this dead place. For every street of the living, there are ten more of the dead. Nearly a hundred billion souls have come and gone through the Neitherworld since the first two-legged tool wielders walked upright and hunted mammoths among glaciers.
I had the miserable fortune to be murdered as I went to meet my fiancée, who at that moment was standing me up for a date and sex with my best friend at work.
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Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
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