A Distant Man

©2001 C. C. Parker
All rights reserved.

I am waiting for ghosts. I have always been waiting for ghosts. Even as I'm sitting here writing this, I am still waiting.

I wish to be as honest as I can.

I lost someone who was very close to me. She meant the world to me and now she is gone. Most times it seemed that everything was defined by her and now I just feel like I'm floating in space. But first I want to tell a story because that's what makes sense.

Last week a woman murdered her five daughters. This is also a true story, as morbid as it sounds. She lined them up in the bathroom and, one by one, she drowned them. She justified it in the way that most of these types do ... she claimed she was sending her daughters to a better place; she was doing them a favor.

Still, the story brings back a lot of memories. They could be anybody's memories. They could be mine, the woman's, or one of the girl's. They could even be your memories, lingering there in the near-dark of your brain.

Here there be ghosts, coiling and diving through space; membranous phantoms who absorb you.

I get so emotional about this that I can picture the whole thing. The woman inviting her daughters into the bathroom. They enter single file, their hair pulled back from their eyes (it is the hardest thing to continue describing this to you). The woman, a thin, dark-haired woman in her mid-thirties (maybe I'm adding these descriptions because they deter me from what comes next). The woman ... (where was I?). The woman ... yes, the woman bends down in front of each of them and says a prayer. She thinks of embracing them, but she doesn't want to get too close. The oldest girl looks into her mother's eyes and can see a faraway place there, perhaps the one their mother is always describing to them ... Heaven.

The woman, turning from her daughters, turns the bath water on. She makes sure the water is very warm and comfortable. The woman isn't cruel. She wants her daughters to sink slowly into the abyss of death so as not to be shocked by it.

The woman runs her long fingers through the water, says another prayer, and turns to her youngest. Touching her small hand, and wrapping her own, larger hand around it, the woman draws her daughter closer to the water. There are tears in the woman's eyes now, but nobody said this was going to be easy. It was never her intention to be free of despair, suffering, pain.

She places the youngest in the water. The little girl, confused by the ritual, looks at her mother's soaked expression.

Tears flow off the woman's nose, making ripples in the water.

The little girl laughs.

The woman says another prayer before forcing her daughter down into the dark; before....

I'm crying and shaking. My fingers ache from punching these keys. It is very late, but I'm a fool to think that I'll get any more sleep than I did yesterday, or...

...the day before that or...

I don't know why I obsess over stuff like this ... I just do. Everyone does, I think; I just think that some of us are looking for clues. What kind of clues? I guess the kind that lead us back down toward the womb and infant terrain. Didn't we crawl out of the darkness? Didn't we run out of the dawn? Aren't we still running?

I don't know. These things just make sense.

I saw my first ghost when I was just a boy. I believe there were many more before, but this is the first I can recall.

It moved through my room at night, stopping once to tuck me in (or at least that's what I thought). It came out of the darkness ... a human-sized mist that I had at first mistaken for one of my parents. It bent near, and I could feel it on me; a cool hand stroking my forehead.

My body froze when I realized that it had come from somewhere else. It had been consumed by a power greater than it, and it been returned to the world that it had once occupied. It was cold because it was alone, just like I was alone in the dark. It had followed my heat out of the chill of its existence, and it had found me; it had made contact with me.

The woman takes her youngest daughter's slack body from the tub and says another prayer. "You're with Him now," she finishes, turning to the remaining four, who are faint with fear.

"But I don't want to die, Mom," says the next. "I...."

"You understand," says their mother. "Don't you? Don't you understand what I have to do? I have to deliver you to Him. He will take care of you now." The woman grabs the second-to-youngest girl's shoulders and holds her. She looks into the girl's eyes, briefly, which nearly breaks her heart.

"Mom? Why can't you come with us?" asks the middle girl.

"Mommy will. Soon. I promise."

"When?"

"When God says it's all right ... you understand?"

"Yes, Mom," says the little girl.

I have seen many ghosts since the first one ... they have made contact many times. I even write stories about them, but only because I have to.

I have written hundreds of stories, and every single one of them is a ghost.

Still, they're forcing me further away from her. I see her from time to time, her shape and shadow moving through my world. Her face can be a beacon, but it isn't always so. My nightmares are riddled by her ... and my dreams. When they were born I planted a tree that blows in the wind every day; the sun hits it, as it is always stretching closer to the sky. It moves through life and death, and it is also alone.

Standing in the tendril-shadows of that tree's branches, I follow the ghosts back. I build rooms for them to live in and gardens for them to tend. They're supposed to show me the way back, but I'm not so sure.

The middle girl is the hardest. Her barely developed chest (perhaps another needless detail) is racked with constant sobbing. She breaths deep, deeper, deepest ... it's as if she can't get enough breath. She wants to live so badly ... there is nothing that she wants more than to live. She thinks about the few friends her strict mother has allowed her to make. She's only ten, but she knows that she likes being alive.

"Mommy, I can't," she pleads. She looks toward the bathroom door, before which her two younger sisters are slumped together. "Mommmmyyyyyyyy!"

The next youngest begins to cry.

"Stop that!" orders their mother. "Stop that now!" And for a moment the woman doesn't know if she can go on with this.

But she must.

Her head feels like it might explode, and she has had to fight back the urge to vomit more times than she can count. God has been talking to her for days now. All she wants to do is finish it ... just finish....

The woman, saying a prayer, lifts the middle girl off the cold tile. The middle girl kicks until the oldest girl says, "it'll all be over soon, and soon we'll be with Him."

The oldest daughter is most like their mother.

"That's right," says their mother. "Listen to your sister."

Finally the girl submits. Still, her body is wracked with sobs. She looks at her mother, her sisters, and tries to discern the sense in it. She wanted to be with God too, but not yet.

And the woman forces her head under.

I remember when my grandmother died as though it were yesterday. Her brain, riddled with sickness, sank to the bottom, at the end. I visualized her crawling back into the womb where the madness couldn't get her.

I never really thought she was mad, but there were plenty who would tell you she was certifiable.

I remember little about her, but I can recall her voice. It sounded like a broken dream, and I knew that it wanted to slip back down into her; down through her layered ocean delirium. Still, she was determined to find a way. Anything but this ... anything at all.

Perhaps Grandma wagered that being a ghost would be a more fruitful endeavor than anything that had come before; unless, of course, she believed in reincarnation. I'm not sure what Grandma believed in, if anything. What would be the point, anyway? If she believed in anything, then it was the core of her own existence.

After all, wasn't a ghost the first ingredient ... or the last?

The fourth says her own prayer before she lets her mother hold her under the water.

The water is colder now, and she asks her mother: "Could you turn on the hot for a moment?"

At first the woman is angered by her daughter's insolence, but only before she weighs this minor request against everything else.

God is not cruel, nor is He without compassion. He is a loving God.

The woman swallows hard. She turns the hot water on. "I'm sorry," she whispers.

Her two remaining daughters feel that she is telling the truth; that she always had been.

I can take the ghosts anywhere. I can take them into the house, and I can take them out of it. I can take them into my dreams, and out of them. I can take them into my head, or out. I can take them shopping. I can take them anywhere. But they are always present.

A little boy died in a car wreck because his dad was drunk.

A little girl was raped and murdered by a con who recently broke out of a low-security prison.

A woman was beaten to death by her husband because she'd been caught sleeping with another man.

An elderly woman was stabbed to death in a nearby park, her head caved in from severe blows to the ...

... four more bodies found in the case ...

... six-week-old infant burned to death with a ...

... walked into a school fully armed and ...

... terrorist attack on New Yor ...

Ghosts. All of them mine.

Painful. Violent. Cloying.

Necessary.

I wait because there is no other choice.

The fifth girl goes naturally. Supine, she lies at the bottom of the tub. She closes her eyes and imagines what it will be like ... a life without pain.

The woman says another prayer before placing pressure on her daughter's forehead.

And it is done.

The woman sits before the tangled heap of bodies and weeps ... and vomits.

God is cruel, she decides at the last minute.

I ask my wife if she can see the ghosts standing next to her. I show her the article in the paper about the woman and her five little girls ... and when my wife looks into my eyes, she can see the pain there.

I look through the window of our house at our tree and smile; and yet I feel alone ... distant and ghostly.

"I love you," I say, my voice echoing in space.

Someday I will get her back. I will stroke her forehead in the night. I will make contact.

Maybe I will even understand the ghosts for what they are, and I will not have to wait for so long.

"I love you, too," she says from somewhere.

I wait.

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