The address on the envelope was typed. From Raleigh, North Carolina. Postmarked with the date May 17, 2004. It had been sent to George Washington University, but by then he was no longer teaching there, so it was forwarded to his home. He tore it open, read it. The writer’s name did not register at first. What puzzled him was that the writer had a Hungarian name. There was no connection to the name Davis, but she identified herself as the “family genealogist” for the extended Davis family, and she wanted to know what Geza could tell her about Ruth’s death. More specifically, the writer wanted to know why Ruth “jumped over the cliff.”
Why she jumped? The idea astonished him: to realize that this kind of thing was being talked about by God knows how many people. Suicide? Geza had never thought Ruth committed suicide. How wrong that was! How did this ridiculous rumor gain currency among her relatives? What pain the idea must have caused her parents! And yet the rumor of suicide, as he would later discover, led to other, sadder and more absurd fantasies. One was that Geza had jilted her, abandoned her in Africa, isolated and without the funds to leave. In addition, so one branch of the fantasy continued, she had been pregnant at the time. He had left her because of that. In desperation, she had taken a train across Tanzania all the way to Dar es Salaam to have a secret abortion before returning to the forest and the chimpanzees in order to jump off that cliff. It was a crudely melodramatic scenario, and it left Geza playing the role of villain. Other stories were in circulation, he eventually discovered, including the vaguely racist one that some “big black man” in the heat of nefarious pursuit pushed her off the cliff.
The letter was a shock. It really hurt. It was like being hit with something hard, only you’re not really hit. It was like being in an earthquake. You don’t see it. You hear it, but you hear it in your bones. When you’re struck by a message like that, everything goes dead silent. Your ears just stop, and your mind shuts down. That’s how it registered with Geza as he sat in his chair and read it for the first time.
The awful letter was folded up and put away. It got buried somewhere in the strata of papers on his desk, deliberately ignored. He couldn’t handle it. He hoped it, and the memories and feelings and questions it had touched and opened, would flatten down and disappear. That did not happen. Instead, and little by little, the letter began to provoke him, to bother him. In part because he felt there was a good chance he wouldn’t make it through another year, Geza decided to write a note in response. But that was all he would do. On September 22, 2006, nearly two and a half years after he had received the letter, he responded with a brief, impersonal email: “If you wish to pursue the matter, please respond, and I will do my best to clarify the rumors you mentioned.”
Once he sent the email, however, Geza realized that he had to do more. It was one of those domino things. He didn’t do it for the inquisitive genealogist. He did it because he could not bear the idea of those stories going on. He had been living in the shadowland of denial and amnesia, dropped into an oubliette of his own making, and now he began deliberately and methodically returning to those events of forty years ago: rummaging through old papers, examining old photographs and maps, writing to old friends and associates.
The vision or visitation or visit, or whatever you want to call it, happened during the night of September 27, five days after he had written that email and had begun to pry open the oubliette. He had been lying in bed, thinking about things. It’s difficult to sleep with the kinds of physical malfunctions he had acquired. Sleep was not reliable. Not a condition with any longevity. He was lucky to average four hours of torn, scattered sleep a night. That night, he had drifted asleep in his usual restless, haphazard way, but when he woke again, something was different. Something was wrong. Fully awake now, he opened his eyes and knew he was not alone. Someone was in the room. It was the dead of night. A glow from the streetlamp outside slipped in between gaps in the blinds and faintly illuminated the room with a barred twilight.
Geza saw a human figure standing in the murk of the far wall. It was a woman with long dark hair, but her face remained shadowed and indistinct. He said, “What’s wrong? What’s wrong?” As she moved toward the bed, he understood through her style of movement (in the way you recognize a chimpanzee passing far away at the horizon by the manner in which he or she moves) who the figure was. It was Ruth. She came to the edge of the bed. Then reality split, and he watched as her hand pulled back the covers, while, at the same time, he saw the covers remain unmoved. She began to climb into bed, while, at the same time, nothing of the sort was happening. He shivered with fear or shock, scrambled to get out of the way, but the instant he did that the hand and moving figure vanished.
It was no ordinary dream. Geza had been fully awake and aware the minute he came out of sleep and sensed Ruth’s presence in the room. He was awake the entire time, eyes open and seeing, and the experience was dreadful. Terrifying. He turned on the light, scratched down some notes about the event, and then lay awake for a long time.
They slept in separate rooms, Geza and Heather did, because he was such a restless sleeper. In the morning he went in to describe his experience, but before he had a chance, she told him she had been disturbed by a vision. Vision was the word she used, not dream. She had been waiting to fall asleep, passing into the relaxed twilight before sleep, when she saw a woman standing next to her bed, looking down and trying unsuccessfully to speak. Her face was pale, but the right side of her head was grievously injured. There was a dark, open crack on the right side of her head. When Heather sat up in astonishment, the vision faded. Neither Geza nor Heather had known that Ruth died with her skull crushed on the right side, nor had Heather ever seen a picture of Ruth. But when Geza showed her a photograph later that morning, Heather confirmed it: “Yes, that’s who I saw.”
A word to describe Geza’s experience? Was it a vision? A visitation? A ghost? He didn’t believe in any of that, although he was fascinated by the idea that people do feel as if they have seen such things. His father, who used to run séances in Budapest, was as much a scientist and a rationalist as anyone—and yet here he was calling out spirits. When it happened to Geza, he didn’t have any feeling of contact with the supernatural. He had the feeling that an actual person was there, and that the person was Ruth. Period. He thought she was real, and he was upset. He tried to get away. He was afraid of her getting in the bed, which is what he thought was going on. True, he would not have been afraid of the real person doing that, but there was something extremely odd about it. He felt not fear so much as a sense of withdrawal that was purely involuntary. He wanted to shrink into himself. It wasn’t a normal kind of fear, like in response to a dog coming at you. He thought it was real. There was no question in his mind that it was real.
But that was the first moment. After that, everything changed. After that, he began to realize that this could have been something he had dreamed up in his mind. It didn’t bother him after that—until he went to Heather’s room and spoke to her. That’s when it really bothered him.