20th Century Ghosts (27 page)

"When did he tell you about his teeth?" I asked. My brother never got over being insecure about his face, his mouth especially, and he didn't like people to know about the teeth.

She shook her head. "I don't remember."

I turned on the windowsill and put my feet up on her dresser. "Do you want to see what it's like to fly?"

Her eyes were glassy with disbelief. Her mouth was open in a blank, dazed smile. Then she tilted her head to one side and narrowed her eyes.

"How are you doing it?" she asked. "Really."

"It's something about the cape. I don't know what. Magic, I guess. When I put it on, I can fly. That's all."

She touched the corner of one of my eyes, and I remembered the mask I had drawn with lipstick. "What about this stuff on your face? What's that do?"

"Makes me feel sexy."

"Holy shit, you're weird. And I lived with you for two years." She was laughing, though.

"Do you want to fly?"

I slid the rest of the way into the room, toward her, and hung my legs over the side of the dresser.

"Sit in my lap. I'll ride you around the room."

She looked from my lap to my face, her smile sly and distrustful now. A breeze trickled in through the window behind me, stirring the cape. She hugged herself and shivered, then glanced down at herself and noticed she was in her underwear. She shook her head, twisted the towel off her still-damp hair.

"Hold on a minute," she said.

She went to her closet and folded back the door and dug in a cubby for sweats. While she was looking, there came a pitiful shriek from the television, and my gaze shifted toward the screen. One seal was biting the neck of another, furiously, while his victim wailed. A narrator said dominant males would use all the natural weapons at their disposal to drive off any rival that might challenge them for access to the females of the herd. The blood looked like a splash of cranberry juice on the ice.

Angie had to clear her throat to get my attention again, and when I glanced at her, her mouth was, for a moment, thin and pinched, the corners crimped downward in a look of irritation. It only took a moment sometimes for me to drift away from myself and into some television program, even something I had no interest in at all. I couldn't help myself. It's like I'm a negative, and the TV is a positive. Together we make a circuit, and nothing outside the circuit matters. It was the same way when I read comics. It's a weakness, I admit, but it darkened my mood to catch her there, judging me.

She tucked a strand of wet hair behind one ear and showed me a quick, elfin grin, tried to pretend she hadn't just been giving me The Look. I leaned back, and she pulled herself up, awkwardly, onto my thighs.

"Why do I think this is some perverted prank to get me in your lap?" she asked. I leaned forward, made ready to push off. She said, "We're going to fall on our a—"

I slipped off the side of the dresser and into the air. I wobbled forward and back and forward again, and she wrapped her arms around my neck and cried out, a happy, laughing, frightened sort of cry.

I'm not particularly strong, but it wasn't like picking her up ... it was really as if she were sitting on my lap and we were together in an invisible rocking chair. All that had changed was my center of gravity, and now I felt tippy, a canoe with too many people in it.

I floated her around her bed, then up and over it. She screamed-laughed-screamed again.

"This is the craziest—" she said. "Oh my God no one will believe it," she said. "Do you know you're going to be the most famous person in human history?" Then she just stared into my face, her wide eyes shining, the way they used to when I talked about Alaska.

I made as if to fly back to my perch on the dresser, but when I got to it, I just kept going, ducked my head and carried us right out the open window.

"No! What are you doing? Holy Jesus it's cold!" She was squeezing me so tightly around the neck it was hard to breathe.

I rose toward the slash of silver moon.

"Be cold," I said. "Just for a minute. Isn't it worth it—for this? To fly like this? Like you do in dreams?"

"Yes," she said. "Isn't this the most incredible thing?"

"Yes."

She shivered furiously, which set off an interesting vibration in her breasts, under the thin shirt. I kept climbing, toward a flotilla of clouds, edged in mercury. I liked the way she clung to me, and I liked the way it felt when she trembled.

"I want to go back," she said.

"Not yet."

My shirt was open a little, and she snuggled into it, her icy nose touching my flesh.

"I've wanted to talk to you," she said. "I wanted to call you tonight. I was thinking about you."

"Who did you call instead?"

"Nobody," she said, and then realized I had been outside the window listening. "Hannah. You know. From work."

"Is she studying for something? I heard you ask why she was studying on a Saturday."

"Let's go back."

"Sure."

She buried her face against my chest again. Her nose grazed my scar, a silver slash like the silver slash of the moon. I was still climbing toward the moon. It didn't seem so far away. She fingered the old scar.

"It's unbelievable," she whispered. "Think how lucky you were. A few inches lower and that branch might've gone right through your heart."

"Who said it didn't?" I said, and leaned forward and let her go.

She held onto my neck, kicking, and I had to peel her fingers off, one at a time, before she fell.
 

Whenever my brother and I played superheroes, he always made me be the bad guy. Someone has to be.
 

My brother has been telling me I ought to fly down to Boston one of these nights, so we can do some drinking together. I think he wants to share some big-brother advice, tell me I have to pick myself up, have to move on. Maybe he also wants to share some grief. I'm sure he's in grief too.

One of these nights, I think I will ... fly on down to see him. Show him the cape. See if he'll try it on. See if he wants to take a leap out his fifth-floor window.

He might not want to. Not after what happened last time. He might need some encouragement; a little nudge from little brother.

And who knows? Maybe if he goes out the window in my cape, he will rise instead of fall, float away into the cool, still embrace of the sky.

But I don't think so. It didn't work for him when we were children. Why would it now? Why would it ever?

It's my cape.

A family walked in for a look around, a little before noon, a man, a woman, and their son. They were the first visitors of the day—for all Alinger knew they would be the only visitors of the day, the museum was never busy—and he was free to give them the tour.

He met them in the coatroom. The woman still stood with one foot out on the front steps, hesitant to come in any further. She was staring over her son's head at her husband, giving him a doubting, uneasy look. The husband frowned back at her. His hands were on the lapels of his shearling overcoat, but he seemed undecided whether to take it off or not. Alinger had seen it a hundred times before. Once people were inside and had looked beyond the foyer into the funeral home gloom of the parlor, they had second thoughts, wondered if they had come to the right place, began to entertain ideas of backing out. Only the little boy seemed at ease, was already stripping off his jacket and hanging it over one of the child-level hooks on the wall.

Before they could get away from him, Alinger cleared his throat to draw their attention. No one ever left once they had been spotted; in the battle between anxiety and social custom, social custom almost always won. He folded his hands together and smiled at them, in a way he hoped was reassuring, grandfatherly. The effect, though, was rather the opposite. Alinger was cadaverous, ten inches over six feet, his temples sunk into shadowed hollows. His teeth (at eighty, still his own) were small and gray and gave the unpleasant impression of having been filed. The father shrank away a little. The woman unconsciously reached for her son's hand.

"Good morning. I'm Dr. Alinger. Please come in."

"Oh—hello," said the father. "Sorry to bother."

"No bother. We're open."

"You are. Good!" he said, with a not quite convincing enthusiasm. "So what do we—" And his voice trailed off and he fell quiet, either had forgotten what he was going to say, or wasn't sure how to put it, or lacked the nerve.

His wife took over. "We were told you have an exhibition here? That this is some kind of scientific museum?"

Alinger showed them the smile again, and the father's right eyelid began to twitch helplessly.

"Ah. You misheard," Alinger said. "You were expecting a museum of science. This is the museum of
silence
."

"Hmm?" the father said.

The mother frowned. "I think I'm still mishearing."

"Come on, Mom," said the boy, pulling his hand free from her grip. "Come on, Dad. I want to look around. I want to see."

"Please," Alinger said, stepping back from the coatroom, gesturing with one gaunt, long-fingered hand into the parlor. "I would be glad to offer you the guided tour."
 

The shades were drawn, so the room, with its mahogany paneling, was as dim as a theater in the moment before the curtain is pulled back on the show. The display stands, though, were lit from above by tightly focused spotlights, recessed in the ceiling. On tables and pedestals stood what appeared to be empty glass beakers, polished to a high shine, bulbs glowing so brilliantly they made the darkness around them that much darker.

Each beaker had what appeared to be a stethoscope attached to it, the diaphragm stuck right to the glass, sealed there with a clear adhesive. The earpieces waited for someone to pick them up and listen. The boy led the way, followed by his parents, and then Alinger. They stopped before the first display, a jar on a marble pedestal, located just beyond the parlor entrance, set right in their path.

"There's nothing in it," the boy said. He peered all around, surveying the entire room, the other sealed beakers. "There's nothing in any of them. They're just empty like."

"Ha," said the father, humorlessly.

"Not quite empty," Alinger said. "Each jar is airtight, hermetically sealed. Each one contains someone's dying breath. I have the largest collection of last breaths in the world, over a hundred. Some of these bottles contain the final exhalations of some very famous people."

Now the woman began to laugh; real laughter, not laughter for show. She clapped a hand over her mouth and shivered, but couldn't manage to completely stifle herself. Alinger smiled. He had been showing his collection for years. He was used to every kind of reaction.

The boy, however, had turned back to the beaker directly before him, his eyes rapt. He picked up the earpieces of the device that looked like but was not a stethoscope.

"What's this?" he asked.

"The deathoscope," Alinger said. "Very sensitive. Put it on if you like, and you can hear the last breath of William R. Sied."

"Is he someone famous?" the boy said.

Alinger nodded. "For a while he was a celebrity ... in the way criminals sometimes become celebrities. A source of public outrage and fascination. Forty-two years ago he took a seat in the electric chair. I issued his death certificate myself. He has a place of honor in my museum. His was the first last breath I ever captured."

By now the woman had recovered herself, although she held a wadded-up handkerchief to her lips and looked as if she were only containing a fresh outburst of mirth with great effort.

"What did he do?" the boy asked.

"Strangled children," Alinger said. "He preserved them in a freezer, and took them out now and then to look at them. People will collect anything, I always say." He crouched to the boy's level, and looked into the jar with him. "Go ahead and listen if you want."

The boy lifted the earpieces and put them on, his gaze fixed and unblinking on the vessel brimming with light. He listened intently for a while, and then his brow knotted and he frowned.

"I can't hear anything." He started to reach up to remove the earpieces.

Alinger stopped his hand. "Wait. There are all different kinds of silence. The silence in a seashell. The silence after a gunshot. His last breath is still in there. Your ears need time to acclimate. In a while you'll be able to make it out. His own particular final silence."

The boy bent his head and shut his eyes. The adults watched him together.

Then his eyes sprang open and he looked up, his plump face shining a little with eagerness.

"Did you hear?" Alinger asked him.

The boy pulled off the earphones. "Like a hiccup, only inside-out! You know? Like—" He stopped and sucked in a short, soundless little gasp.

Alinger tousled his hair and stood.

The mother dabbed at her eyes with her kerchief. "And you're a doctor?"

"Retired."

"Don't you think this is a little unscientific? Even if you really did manage to capture the last tiny bit of carbon monoxide someone exhaled—"

"Dioxide," he said.

"It wouldn't make a sound. You can't bottle the sound of someone's last breath."

"No," he agreed. "But it isn't a sound being bottled. Only a certain silence. We all have our different silences. Does your husband have one silence when he's happy and another when he's angry with you, missus? Your ears can discern even between specific kinds of nothing."

She didn't like being called
missus
, narrowed her eyes at him, and opened her mouth to say something disagreeable, but her husband spoke first, giving Alinger a reason to turn away from her. Her husband had drifted to a jar on a table against the wall, next to a dark, padded loveseat.

"How do you collect these breaths?"

"With an aspirator. A small pump that draws a person's exhalations into a vacuum container. I keep it in my doctor's bag at all times, just in case. It's a device of my own design, although similar equipment has been around since the beginning of the nineteenth century."