You, ghost?
Ghost of some former waitress?
Is that it? I said, a bit coldly. All done? Any more secrets?
No, he said. That’s it.
—
As if in response, the room suddenly throbbed with presence and began rapidly filling with individuals of our ilk: the collective dead from this part of Texas and adjacent areas of Louisiana, Arkansas, and Oklahoma, plus a few who’d died in the Gulf or drifted over from Mexico.
These were real.
That is, not being made by his mind.
I could tell by their transparency, their restlessness, their particularity:
Smocks, car-coats, rain-slickers made of oilcloth; crude boots, glowing loafers, tennis shoes both new and beat-up, sandals, jellies, shoes the poor had fashioned out of cardboard, bare feet callused with walking; skirts, dresses, shirts, and jeans; heads of dirty matted hair, heads of long flowing waist-length black hair, close-cropped scalps, hats covered with dirt, wild feathered headdresses, old Spanish helmets, veils pinned into the hair of demure Catholic ladies; scarred legs, heart-shaped calf muscles, clenching and unclenching fists; a confusion of umbrellas, ranging from crude nineteenth-century models to sleek new ones the likes of which I’d never seen, which folded up neatly to the size of a purse.
When the room was entirely full, the newcomers overflowed into the hallway, then into the stairwell, then down onto the ground floor and, when the whole house was full, into the yard, and even into the yard next door, where, as they stood unseenamong the wedding guests, their attention (despite the revelry going on all around them) stayed riveted, always, on my charge’s window.
Crowded, he said.
Normal, I said. Happens every time.
Every time what? he said.
Then, on something like a bier, or litter, or royal palanquin, a young man was passed up through the crowd until, somehow perceiving that he’d arrived at his intended destination, he stepped off the litter, moved to the bed, and, standing a bit unsteadily, gazed down at my charge.
Who recognized him immediately.
It was—good God. The curly-haired college kid. From Chicago. Who’d come up to him after one of his talks. At the U of. All those years ago. Smart kid, articulate young guy, nervously passing his watch from hand to hand as he politely asked a series of questions in the rapidly emptying—
All these years he’d never been able to get this brat out of his head.
And I think you know why, the kid said.
I’m making you with my mind, said my charge.
You’re not, the kid said.
You dead? said my charge.
Kid winced.
Sir, is it really the case that the earth iscooling? he said, ignoring the question, intent, it seemed, on resuming their previous conversation.
His eyes were, as before, positively piercing.
See, that makes zero sense to me, he said (said again, as he had all those years ago).
Also, he said, hadn’t there beenstudies?
Here it came, thought my charge.
Ah, Christ, here it came (again).
Studies your own company did? the kid said. And didn’t those studies indicate that the earth was, in fact, heating up, due to human activity? And didn’t you come to know about those studies? And didn’t your company, on the basis of those studies, redesign your offshore drilling rigs to accommodate the seas that you, from those studies, knew would be rising?
