Eventually I got tired of walking around Durham and feeling out of place and found the hotel where I was staying, an old mansion — or maybe it had once been a hospital? — just a five-minute walk from the centre of town. Staggered vines clung to its surface, rust stained the stone foundations, and old wood lined the hallways and stairs, giving the building a sense of history and place. I felt like I could feel the many lives that had passed through. Or perhaps not the lives themselves, but the traces of them, of so many passing in succession, as if they all left behind a particular residue that could only be detected when gathered together.
I felt like I was where I belonged: small, forgotten, appropriately dwarfed.
* * *
The next morning I was in a better mood, even though I hadn’t slept well. I’d left my windows open and the smell of perfume wafting indoors from the vines flowering outside had contributed to my bad sleep, waking me up throughout the night, as if it were the perfumed train of a long-dead relative come to give me a warning. Or just to haunt me. In my dream I saw Jeff lying with his back to me, but when I tried to rouse him or turn him over to see his face there was no response, not in him or from his body, just the back of his head no matter which way I looked, just the night and its stillness and a growing horror of his prone form.
As I was getting dressed I found the card the kids at the car wash had given me. I stared at it for a while, wondering if I should call, letting the absurdity of the previous day slowly percolate through me. It would be nice to have some answers. Or to have someone to talk to. I dialed the number and let it ring, over and over, but no one picked up and it didn’t go to an answering machine. I put the card on my night table and went downstairs. After a bad breakfast in the hotel dining room — I wasn’t that late, but the coffee was cold, the pastries picked over and forgotten — I went for another walk. The cemetery opened at nine, assuming the hours posted on the gates were correct, which I supposed I couldn’t, given how early it had closed the day before. I found a florist, but it opened at ten, so I grabbed a coffee across the street, from a small deli that also sold pizza and submarine sandwiches. It was awful coffee, but at least it was hot, which is the most important thing.
While I had been eating my breakfast at the hotel I overheard one of the staff telling a guest about a woman who had complained about a ghost when she was staying there. The woman had woken up in the middle of the night to a high-pitched wailing which she thought must have been the radiator. But it was August, probably the hottest night of the year, and the woman was sweating through her sheets. She was on the point of calling down to the front desk to complain when she heard a man whispering in her ear: “That’s not the radiator,” he said. “It’s my wife.” Of course, she didn’t sleep and the next morning she checked out as soon as she could. The man who was telling the story explained that they had checked the records afterward, and a woman had died during childbirth in that room, a long time ago.
I kept thinking about the story, about how strange it was that the two ghosts were sharing the same room. The woman who died giving birth and her husband, who might have lived to an old age, or at least probably didn’t die at the same time as his wife, unless he killed himself. Maybe, I thought, there wasn’t a man at all. Maybe the ghost of the woman who died had gone crazy from the solitude and was speaking to herself. Or the same thing had happened to the man. In any case I was glad I hadn’t heard either of them the night before.
I had forgotten my notebook, but I had a pencil in my pocket and to kill the time I scrawled the words “early morning … bad sleep … dreams of ghosts … fragrant night” on my receipt to remind myself of the breakfast and the night before. I didn’t have much room, but I couldn’t think of anything else to write. After sitting and drinking my coffee awhile, I saw Sarah, from the real estate office, crossing in front of the window.
I threw out my coffee and darted outside.
“Hi,” I said. Probably a bit too eagerly.
“Jesus Christ!” she said, jumping back from me and nearly stepping into the street. “Where the hell did you come from?”
“I was getting a coffee,” I explained, gesturing lamely to the deli behind me.
“Don’t fucking do that,” she said, catching her breath.
“Sorry,” I said. “I wasn’t thinking.”
“It’s okay. But I was going to work. I don’t have time to talk.”
“Can I walk you there?” I asked.
“Sure, okay. But it’s just down the street.”
“I know,” I said.
We walked in silence until we reached the real estate office, where Sarah turned and said goodbye. I don’t know why I was so eager to say hello to her, especially given the events of the day before. I felt like I was testing my limits. Like I could become someone else and it was just a matter of training or association.
But I didn’t know who I wanted to become, who I was trying to be.
I walked alone for a while, then crossed the street and headed back to the florist across from the deli. I wasn’t sure what to get — I knew that lilies were often at funerals but I never liked the way they looked when they were closed. They always seemed unpleasantly fleshy to me, like weird pustules. And open they just reminded me of what they looked like closed. So instead I bought a dozen red roses. Then I walked back to the hotel and got in my car and drove to the cemetery and found Adler’s grave. With the plot number it wasn’t very hard. Only after I laid the flowers down did I notice there was a poem affixed to the stone.
Letter to the Occupant
Please, turn your
lights off, I
can’t breathe, it’s like
an airplane, forever
rising. I fear
death, white of
electricity, height.
Please, please
you don’t understand
my letters
the station master
whimpers
as we watch
lit house after lit house
recede into
the white
and only hope
keeps me at my desk
writing, please
writing.
I bent close to the poem. Lights? I thought. The paper was damp and it looked like it had been freshly pasted. I didn’t recognize it and it was otherwise unsigned. I stood up and looked around, but the cemetery was empty.
Lights? I thought again, as I crouched down to the stone.
I felt like I was going to faint.
Who had done this? Where had they gone?
I considered pulling the paper down, but instead I ran my hands over the headstone, where it read: “Kent Adler/April 23, 1952–August 21, 1976.”
The rest was blank.
* * *
I’d planned on reading aloud a poem from Alert, “Evie of the Deepthorn,” a poem about a warrior making her way through the woods on her horse. And about the death that comes with or precedes venture. Or at least that’s what I thought it was about. But for some reason seeing that someone had beaten me to him made that gesture seem redundant. As if my words were just echoes of another. As if I were just an echo of Adler. Insubstantial and incomplete. Whereas I was sure that the poem on the stone was original, perhaps even that it was addressed to me. As crazy as that seemed. I walked back to the hotel, leaving my car baking in front of the cemetery.
A few weeks before I’d left for Durham I’d received an email from Jeff, something about how I was disrespecting him by not returning his calls. That’s all I could see from the preview in my inbox. I knew it would move into a discussion of how rarefied our relationship had been and how much I had meant to him. I deleted it immediately and was proud of myself for doing that, like I’d responded successfully to a challenge from God. But I knew that it would stay in my deleted files for thirty days before being completely eliminated from my account. It had occasionally been a source of temptation. As I was walking back to the hotel I thought about the email again and wished that I had read it, regretting that I hadn’t brought my laptop or phone with me so that I could open up Gmail and pull it out. At least to start the clock again.
And then I was grateful because I didn’t have to be tested.
In the weeks and months immediately following our breakup he sent me hundreds of texts, accusing me of everything from using him to being interested in women or of cheating on him. “I don’t see how you could leave us unless there was someone else.” It was insane. He was practically the only other person in my life, him and Adler, no one else. “Now you finally have the chance to fuck a girl,” he wrote. I didn’t think I wanted to fuck a girl. Finally I stopped responding and the texts petered out or at least slowed down. Then I blocked his number. It was a relief to not have to anticipate him, to not have my breath catch in my throat whenever I heard the familiar ping of my phone.
Though of course it still did.
I told myself I wasn’t running from him, as if it mattered what I told myself about that. I am not running from him, I thought. It has been months since I have seen him and I am not running. And that was true. I was carrying him inside me. He went wherever I went. I still heard his voice telling me what he thought I was — too much, or nothing.
It would be a long time before I got his voice out of my head, a long time even after I left Durham. When I mounted the stairs to my hotel room I passed the ghosts of former occupants, owners, patients, doctors, photographs lining the stairs, men and women in their turn-of-the-century finery, standing in faded relief to a background foggy from time.
Time or silver.
Silver or aluminum. I don’t know much about old photographs.
I thought I was going to kill myself.