logic & essential organisms

LOGIC & ESSENTIAL ORGANISMS

…a ghost story

Jeff Percifield

I sensed the apartment was haunted that first day, as my boyfriend and I ate Chinese take-out among tottering helixes of boxes – mostly textbooks – some of which we never unpacked. It was a round studio in a spindle-towered Victorian thatched with blue shingles; despite the bank of windows, it managed to be dark all that dreary San Francisco winter of rain, rain, and rain. Whenever the precipitation stopped, the fog would reassemble itself, breathing against the leaded panes like a peeper.

My boyfriend was far too busy to notice the ghost. He’d come home from the ER reeking of blood and viscera, too exhausted to do anything but mount me, smear a kiss, pump desultorily, then expire. Mornings, I’d sit at the windows, struggling with oversize tomes on craniology, anthropometry, organology, as rain dribbled down the panes. Blood, semen, water.

On the second day, I brought home a newspaper-wrapped bouquet of lilies that spattered the table with blood and withered to black cilia overnight. Perhaps the ghost was disappointed when I simply wiped up the mess and pitched it out; perhaps he sensed that I was an eminently sensible and practical young woman. He began to leave me messages.

If we allow that feelings of the mind are produced by corporeal means, he wrote in the steamed bathroom mirror, do we not assail the spiritual nature and the immortality of the …

But he ran out of room.

I took an internship at a black-walled Institute for the Criminally Insane. For my interview, I wore a pencil skirt, black tights, and a wool sweater, and put my hair up, although it was already escaping in wisps and wires. Dr. Cantharis had a phlegmatic nature and always a bead of moisture on the tip of his nose. He asked me to remove my stitching of silver earrings, as some of the patients were sensitive to induction.

Things the ghost liked: marmalade – I couldn’t keep it in the house – radio – always popping on while I was studying – and origami, forever folding receipts or bills or shopping lists into tiny dragons, giraffes, flamingos. My boyfriend complained of freezing draughts, but if the ghost saw me shivering, my thin frame bundled against the cold, the radiator would hiss to life till the walls dripped moisture.

Case #1: H., 30 years old. Since puberty, attacks of syncope. Skull occiput straight. Right ear smaller than left by 3 centimeters. Hallucinations (entzückangen). Hydrophobic, says spores in body germinate in damp weather and develop as homunculi. Strangled mother, whom he accuses of poisoning. Rx: monobromate of camphor, argentum 30X, faradization 3x weekly.

I scrubbed the kitchen until the whitewash flaked away; underneath I found a glaze of yellowed newspapers in Chinese calligraphy. Our lives are built upon the past, accreted layer upon layer, like Rome or Troy.

I walked to the market, where I bought fresh eggs and chives for an omelet, and a bag of oranges. My boyfriend was amazed at a real meal, just like in a restaurant, but afterwards we quarreled and he wrapped himself up in bed without speaking. True love commands fear, the ghost wrote in salt on the breadboard. “He’s not so bad,” I said, but the room darkened.

One night we were startled by a rhythmic boom boom boom that shook the windowpanes and rattled the teacups. At first I thought it was the ghost but he was quiescent; I sensed him curled near the ceiling like an arachnid. “Fireworks,” my boyfriend said with surprise. We pushedthe window and climbed the iron fire escape to the roof. A thick batter of fog lay over the city. Below, we could hear people hurrying towards the Marina, but the miasma of cloudcover was so heavy, all we could see were pale auroras overhead – blue, red, yellow – like the cannonade of some cosmic battle.

I reached for my boyfriend’s hand as a distant, stately apocalypse painted watercolors on the sky.

At the Institute, I had an iron key ring with which I locked and unlocked the hammered doors until my wrist swelled. The hospital was built on a plan by Dr. Cantharis, a labyrinth of interlocking metal walls set one within another, each ring faced with zinc, so that the entire edifice thrummed with a beneficial electromagnetic influence that disrupted satellite transmissions and cell phones for a square mile.

“Logic is the best corrective,” said Dr. Cantharis.

Things the ghost didn’t like: my boyfriend, flowers (funereal?), garlic, and Jews; he went into an apoplexy of slamming! cabinets and banging! pipes whenever the landlord showed up.

I had a dyspepsia and went to the corner market, where I was seduced by a feathery sprig of parsley and ate it right there, like a rabbit. I was back the next morning, not just for the peppery crunch, but the incandescent spring green, and so I knew I was pregnant. My boyfriend and I quarreled, and he moved out. The first night he was gone, I felt the ghost curl up in bed beside me, and after a long time I went to sleep, lulled by his reassuring presence.

Case #2: T., 43, claims to be son of Minotaur. Craniological exam: head of the 10^th magnitude, pronounced amativeness (das organ des geschleschtstriebes). Fungal infection of nails. Complains of headaches, persecution. Will expatiate tediously and at length about medieval Vienna, where says he ruled an army of gargoyles. Rx: ergotine, psychrotherapy, antephialtics.

Fast learning Russian with skype

I strolled the fish markets of Chinatown, not for recipes – the amniotic vapours repelled me – but for the pleasant slip and splash of the fish in their wooden tubs, the fluid bolts of color. I bought a carp and kept it in a bucket of salted water for scientific observations. It slid about, neither content nor morose, to all appearances unaware of its captivity, an instinctual organism devoid of emotion, reason, consciousness. When I experimented with electrical impulses to the water, the carp began to grow at an alarming rate. I moved it to the deep, chipped kitchen sink, which meant I had to wash my dishes in the bathtub. At night, I liked to lie in bed and listen to the occasional lazy ripple as the carp described endless ellipses.

By what alchemy of desire does pregnancy assert itself? The embryo no bigger than a walnut, boys stood up for me on streetcars as though I were a bandy-legged zeppelin. I took a bottle of wine from the fridge and found it had turned to water. My mother announced she was coming to visit; the ghost hid my cigarettes. V., a neuropathic 19-year-old, told me I was colonized by space devils. What, after all, is a fetus, but a sort of virus?

Going to the corner market for cravings – mayonnaise, pimientos, sesame seeds – I began to practice physiognomic observations of the Arab shopkeeper. He gave me extra tabbouleh, and I asked if I could examine him. In the back room, he served me tea and dry cookies and I measured his head with a calipers. Pneumatic nature and bilious temperament, phyloprogenitiveness morbidly pronounced, and a disposition for color (das organ des farbersinns).

He lay a photograph on the table, an insouciant youth with dimples and hard black eyes. “You are not married?” he said. I shook my head. He said he had a nephew back home who needed a wife. I must have looked surprised. “You’ll need a father for the child,” he said, and gave me another cookie.

I sat at the window as blue electricity crackled and sizzled along the grid of streetcar cables below. Hormones surged through my bloodstream carrying coded messages like genetic carrier pigeons. My boyfriend was gone, but not entirely, he’d left an imprint that would always be with me, a negative presence, emotional homeopathy. I stirred my cold tea and thought about the grid of our lives, the choices presented and proscribed.

I strung some Christmas lights shaped like red peppers and burst into tears. I unpacked boxes until I found my winter coat and went for a walk. The sun blinked through the fog as if startled from slumber. I imagined myself pushing a pram through the hazy San Francisco summer with my new family: a baby, my mail-order husband, and the ghost.