More Ghost

Here is Chapter 2 of the Philip K. Dick/insomnia-inspired/perspired novel tentatively titled Living Ghost. Chapter 1 is here.

2.

“Was that Graves?” asked Marv after Cliff had hung up the phone.

“Yeah,” said Cliff, still not quite sure what to make of the conversation he just had.

Marv dropped a spiral-bound set of printouts on Cliff’s desk.

“Did he get the revised Section 6 tables I e-mailed him?”

Cliff was still a bit distracted. “The what? No, I don’t think so. He’s been having some…problems. Computer problems. He thinks the earthquake did some damage.”

“That earthquake? What, does he live in a house made out of tissue paper?”
Marv sat down on an old torn faux leather chair in front of Cliff’s desk. He was breathing heavily.

Cliff looked at him. “If you’re going to have a heart attack, could it wait until this project is done?”

“We need an elevator. I’m getting too old for those stairs.”

“Think of how bad a shape you’d be in if you haven’t had to go up and down those stairs for the past 12 years.” Marv had been the primary data processor for the company for 15 years. They’ve only been in their current location for 12 years.

“Carol is going to want to see at least a preliminary draft of Section 3 by this afternoon,” said Marv.

“That’s what Carol said?”

“Cliff, come on. You know only Sally passes in or out of The Cocoon. It’s what Sally said.”

Carol Hendricks was the president and owner of Data Pros Inc. Most of the people who started working for the company were at first puzzled, then increasingly bemused by the fact that she had absolutely no contact with anyone but her administrative assistant. Even the oldest veterans of the company—like Marv—had really only met her once. Cliff, who had been with the company only a scant four years, had never met her at all. Some 10 years earlier, Marv had coined the term “The Cocoon” to refer to Carol’s impenetrable office—a term which stuck. No one knows if Carol had ever heard and/or was amused by it. Of course, in less charitable moments, Marv has been known to refer to Carol herself as “The Larva.” “Someday, she’s going to emerge from her chrysalis as a beautiful butterfly,” he once said, to which Cliff immediately added, “Or Mothra, the giant mutant moth creature that destroyed Tokyo.” Then again, most of the staff was quick to admit that it was the generally hands- and eyes-off approach of Carol that made Data Pros such a satisfying place to work. No meetings, no micromanagement, no B.S. Just an environment where work can get done and get done well. It was not lost on the staff that the fact that The Larva was taking such an involved role in the current project (well, involved for her) meant that the project was of no small consequence.

“Well, Section 3 is not going to be done today,” said Cliff. “I can’t fix Tom’s computer problems. Tell Sally we’re keeping to the schedule we had agreed on six months ago when this whole thing began.”

“You tell me,” came a voice from the doorway.

“How do you do that” asked Cliff.

“Do what?” asked Sally, adjusting the massive sheaf of papers she was carrying.

“Just appear like that. I never hear or see you coming. I just look up and you’re there.”

“I’m stealthy,” she said with a smile.

“Is that what they teach at those Ivy League schools, how to slink around offices wraithlike?” asked Marv.

“Is that what they teach at two-year junior colleges, how to incorporate words like ‘wraithlike’ into normal conversation?”

“You bet your ass.”

“Anyway, getting back to the original point,” Sally said, “I completely agree that we should keep to the original schedule, but you know The Lar— Carol is not going to be happy.”

Marv and Cliff laughed. “Whoo! We got you doing it!” said Cliff, high-fiving Marv.

Sally smiled sheepishly. “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway, I’ll deal with Carol, but that means there can be absolutely no slippage whatsoever from the schedule. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you this is a big project. It can make or break us, and the clients are getting antsy. And when the clients get antsy, we get antsy.”

“We understand,” said Cliff.

“I’m surprised this is even an issue. Tom is always early with stuff. I’m shocked he’s not now.”

“He’s having…computer problems,” said Cliff.

Sally shrugged. “I remember when his entire hard drive got corrupted at the same time he had to replace the logic board in his computer and he still delivered a 200-page report a day early.”

“Sometimes even the mighty fall,” said Marv.

“So we should go easy on him right now,” said Cliff. “He’s always come through, and I have no doubt he will this time.”

Sally looked at him quizzically. “I never said he wouldn’t come through. I just said I was surprised, is all. Is everything all right with Tom?”

“Everything’s fine. The earthquake just freaked him out.”

“He’s from the East Coast—you know how they are,” added Marv. “He still hasn’t gotten his ‘earthquake legs’ yet.”

“I wouldn’t worry about Tom,” said Cliff.

***

“I’m worried about Tom,” said Cliff.

Cliff carefully lifted a ring of onion with his fork and shifted it to the perimeter of his salad bowl, adding it to the collection of other onion slices he had been building.

“Why?” asked Ally, watching her husband's careful dissection of his salad.

Given both of their wacky work schedules, they very rarely got to have lunch in real restaurants—let alone with each other—and she was hoping they wouldn’t spend the whole time talking about Tom Graves.

“He called me this morning. He said he was in Syracuse.” He added a cherry tomato to the ring of onions.

“That’s a bit strange,” said Ally, “but nothing to worry about. Tom is a strange guy. We’ve known him for eight years and I still don’t know anything about him. Now, you: After we had been dating a week I felt like I knew everything there was to know about you.”

“Well, you kind of did.”

“That’s true. There’s not much to you. There’s the penis and the schoolboy insouciance, and that’s about it.”

“Hey!” He said, mock-insulted. “‘Insouciance.” I like that.”

“You have no idea what it means, do you?”

“Nope. And I like that I don’t. I can have it mean whatever I want it to mean and I don’t have to care if it was meant as an insult or not.”

She watched as he moved an olive to the outer edge of the salad bowl.

“Why don’t you just tell the waiter that you don’t like onions, tomatoes, or olives?” said Ally.

“I don’t like to seem picky.”

Cliff and Ally had been married for six-and-a-half years and his pickiness about food never ceased to amuse her. Ally would eat just about anything that was put in front of her, while Cliff was very particular, and every meal that he didn’t cook (which was damn nearly every meal he ate) involved the near-surgical removal of any or all of the following: mushrooms, tomatoes, onions, peppers, olives, chives, celery, and carrots. To him, the perfect salad was lettuce and chickpeas. “Even dressing is optional,” he once told Ally. “In fact, I’d prefer it if you didn’t dress for dinner, either,” he once said with a leer.

So for his 40th birthday, she had the owner of the local bakery (and a friend of hers) bake him a cake in the shape of a mushroom, covered with bits of colored frosting shaped into tomatoes, onions, peppers, etc. He laughed hysterically, but out of habit had picked them all off anyway.

“Getting back to Tom…”

“Do we have to?” she asked.

“You should hear the story he told me. Do you know how he said he got to Syracuse?”

“Stagecoach? Mule barge? Strapped to the wing of a Cessna?”

“Even stranger. He says he ‘appeared’ there.”

“Appeared there?”

“Yeah. He says he fell asleep in Redondo and woke up in some girl’s dorm room at SU.”

“Wow. That’s bizarre.”

“That’s what I’ve been saying,” said Cliff.

“I mean, to think that Tom would be in any girl’s room at all is pretty weird.”

“Ally, now cut that out. I’m sure he dates...or something.”

“Are you sure it’s women, though?”

“I am 99.999 percent sure that Tom is not gay. I even had my brother check him out and he insists he not, too.”

“Oh, like your brother could tell. His ‘gaydar’ is always picking up interference from weather balloons.”

Cliff scowled. “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway, about Tom’s ‘teleportation’ story…”

“I think he’s pulling your leg. Besides, he was in town yesterday. Why would he fly to Syracuse overnight—and then turn right around and come back? It’s not exactly a short hop. Even if it is some kind of romantic dalliance, he’d probably be too jetlagged to actually do anything.”

“Oh, you’d be surprised what the male body is capable of.”

“Yes, I frequently am. And often horrified, too. But are you sure he’s not just having a midlife crisis or a nervous breakdown or something?”

“I hadn’t thought about that, but it’s entirely possible. But I would have thought you’d have to have a life to have a mid-life crisis.”

“Jeez, Cliff. And you say I rag on Tom. He’s your best friend.

“He is, but he doesn’t always make it easy. It’s like Pink Floyd The Wall with him sometimes.”

“He doesn’t have copulating flowers in his garden, I hope.”

“I would seriously doubt that. I mean, he’s smart, he’s fun to hang out with, he’s always there when I need anything…like when my wife is driving me up the wall—”

“Bite me.”

“But you try to get close to him and you get to this point where it’s like he’s barricaded himself in his own head and there’s some kind of standoff with the FBI, who are about to start lobbing in tear gas.”

“That’s a pretty creative analogy for you,” she said.

“Actually, I stole it from Marv.”

He finished the last of what he had intended to eat of his salad.

“Maybe it’s just this camera project,” said Ally. “Wait till it’s over and you all can relax. Then sit down with Tom and make sure everything is OK.”

“Yeah, you’re right.”

Ally looked down at his still mostly-full salad bowl. “You done with that?”

He handed it to her. “All yours.”

She started eating what he left behind. “What did you order for lunch?”

“Chicken cacciatore,” he said.

“That should take a while.”