Please Don't Go (10 page)

Rattup:
I can understand your hesitance, but I think the proof is in what you’ve seen and heard in this house, no? She grows agitated at the very thought of me even speaking to you on this subject. If I hadn’t figured out this written approach, I wouldn’t be putting you into this position at all. If you knew the amount of pleading I had to make with her to allow your entry, to simply sit next to me and talk on frivolous ineffectual subjects... you’d think I was braver than that look you’re giving me right now.

At this mention, Zephyr straightened his face back into its home position, free of judgment, though he wanted badly to judge. “You need a doctor,” Zephyr said aloud, to which Rattup replied with a pleading worried face, the tension stretched across his features as he looked around the room, presumably waiting for her to pounce upon him. If he was indeed mad, he had certainly convinced himself of her genuine presence. The seasoned whack-job was not lying to him, but even the maddest of madmen was an expert at self-deception. Sociopathic, even. It made the lying that much easier.

Rattup scribbled away on the paper.

Rattup:
PLEASE! ON THE PAPER! If she hears you, I’ll be ruined. Do you have any idea what she does to me? HAVE YOU ANY CLUE how cruel she is? The fury of a woman is boundless, my friend. She’ll do terrible things when you leave. TERRIBLE things. I dare not even detail what may come my way by your actions.

Zephyr:
You really need to see somebody. A professional. Can I call a doctor to come out and visit you? I know you don’t leave the house very often, but I know a guy in town who makes house calls. He took care of Jackie when she broke her ankle.

Rattup:
I don’t stay cloistered of my own choice!

Zephyr:
I’m not following.

Rattup:
I’m a fucking prisoner, my lad.

Zephyr stared at the words with a curious eye. He was unsure if the wording unnerved him, or more that Rattup had cussed openly, even if only in writing. It seemed to offer some heavier gravity to what he was saying. Charles Rattup, a classically trained writer and lover of the English language and literature, would not dare to swear unless absolutely called upon by mandate. Then again, this assumption was based on Zephyr’s previous perception of Rattup; the one that existed in his mind before the deranged coot had declared himself an invisible specter’s “prisoner.” There seemed to be two opposing Rattups. One was a cool calm and well-mannered intellectual with an eye for good art. The other was a red-faced lunatic who could have just as easily been in his mother’s basement reviewing the angles in the Zapruder film.

Reaching out with his pen, he underlined the statement about being a prisoner, madly scratching beneath it until the the paper became slightly tattered. His mania was accentuated by a sadness that filled his eyes, a sadness that Zephyr could not look away from. Charles continued on the paper:

Rattup:
I don’t need help from a doctor. I need help from YOU. She’s allowed you into our home. As a guest. A welcomed guest. Don’t storm off, it will only alter her mind on the matter. I need your help. She has made an exception for you and I can’t turn my back on that if I am to preserve my sanity. Help me, Zephyr. You’re my only hope.

He wanted to call out Rattup for his ham-handed Star Wars reference, but then realized that Rattup (if he was not a blatant liar) most likely would have never seen any of the Star Wars films. Zephyr wanted to laugh out loud, but resisted.

Zephyr:
What the fuck do you want from me, Charles?

He felt a festering guilt for swearing back at the old timer, but that bridge had already been crossed when The esteemed gentleman Rattup had engaged in cuss-dom himself in his previous writings. Once that line in the sand was crossed, any and all foul language was fair game. What worked at the bar with strangers, applied to meetings of the young and old, as well.

Rattup:
Somebody that I can tell my story to. Please listen to me. People will need to know. People will want to know. I haven’t much time left, and they need to know the dangers of careless love. Of the spirit world, and its vicious grasp upon us that we cannot detect with the human eye. This story will set both of us free.

Rattup’s eyes glazed over, and he suddenly seemed to have aged a dozen years in less than a nanosecond of actual linear time. He thought of the Vonnegut character Billie Pilgrim, unstuck in time. Zephyr looked to the man, feeling nothing but pity welling deep inside of his belly, overwhelming all other rational emotions, swallowing up his logic into a sea of gullibility.

Zephyr:
If this gets too weird, I walk. And I walk very fast, you’ll never catch me.

Rattup:
Agreed. Please just give me a chance. You won’t regret this.

Charles Rattup projected a bold smile at his new biographer.

***

They jotted notes back and forth for more than forty minutes. Rattup had only begun to untangle the web of his life for Zephyr’s consumption. There seemed to be an air of comfort that surrounded Charles when he wrote with his frenzied ink. The fluidity that he spilled his words on to the page was a sort of wicked voodoo magic that Zephyr admired and hoped he would one day emulate. Though they were not engaging in the creation of flowery prose, their words were intermingling on the pages like co-authors of a sick and twisted story that spanned several decades. Rattup delivered his half of the conversation with such ease that Zephyr felt dwarfed in their comparative talents. There was so little hesitation in Rattup’s wording that it seemed as though he had already prepared all of the words within an isolated chamber inside of his expansive brain. He was simply regurgitating that fodder on to the page, as though steadily practiced in those words’ reproduction. Perhaps the story was there, and Rattup only needed to unleash it in proper sequence.

According to his story, which was far more believable than his supposed feminine phantom, Mr. Charles Rattup had not left his home in more than thirty years. The years passed without much demarcation, and his sense of order and history became muddled from this fact. Rattup churned for a moment as he tried to throw together a time line, but found he could not achieve this with ease, like he had with the rest of his writings. He could not recall the first day she had ensnared him, but that it was sometime in the year that followed his short gallivant in Ireland.

“
Like the story?” Zephyr had asked, scolding himself for not using the paper again. He would have to work better at remaining silent, if only for Rattup’s state of mind. Each time he spoke out, Rattup’s face became increasingly agitated.

He responded with a nod.
Yes, like the story.
There was no need to scold Zephyr for not using the paper again, for it was apparent to them both what he had done. They moved forward.

Rattup:
When I came back from my vacation, everything was just rosy for quite a while. Could have been a year, could have been two years. I did very little to mark time back then. Not much has changed, in that regard. But overall—very quiet, just the way I liked it. Lived my daily life. Lunch at the Rosewood Cafe every afternoon. Writing like a madman on stimulants. I could have been putting out forty novels a year at the rate I was going, because it simply consumed me at my very inner sanctum of being. Something about Ireland had inspired me in a way that I felt I had lost along the way, and I could barely keep up with the words on my page. I was quite literally on a hot streak. And then it all came crashing down. I had been fired from my job working with financial reporting, which I loathed anyway. Luckily, I had my home outright, inherited from my grandfather, Maxwell Rattup. Sure, I paid taxes on the land, but they were minimal. I was on easy street. No need to do anything but write, especially with my considerable savings, some of which I still have to this very day- not to gloat. So I lived the quiet life. Until she showed up, without herald, at my door with her invisible suitcases.

Zephyr:
She showed up out of nowhere?

Rattup:
Sort of. There was a slow transition that had occurred between loneliness and my devilish roommate. At first, there were noises. Thumps, bumps, and screeches. I attributed all of it to the settling of the house, like us humans tend to do when a strange noise captures our attention. These were soon followed by broken dishes, slamming doors, and the overbearing sense that I was not alone. It was when I started awakening in the night to feel hot breath over my face and neck that I realized something was going terribly askew. I considered taking to the wind, but felt that abandoning my home would shame my deceased grandfather. In fact, at one point I thought this looming ghost to be Maxwell Rattup himself, and there was something comforting in that which helped convince me to stay on a little bit longer, to keep at what I was doing with my writing and paying little attention to my vaporous witness. Escape would soon become an impossible option, I found.
One day I was a contented bachelor and the next I was strapped into my little hole by this monstrous whore, trapped in this six sided cube. I’ve seen nothing but this house since then. Sometime in 1975 or 1976 it had happened. I wish I had recorded the day though, as it may hold some significance. During the summer, that’s as much as I can scrape together. I remember it because that movie with the big shark was all the craze, All I read about in my daily newspaper, which I still receive to this very day. The big damn shark this. The big damn shark that. It was all I heard about on my occasional phone call with friends or relatives, most of whom are dead now. I had wanted to see it so terribly, but I never did. I imagine it was horrific, based on what I had been told by family and colleagues in our phone conversations.

Zephyr:
You’re talking about Jaws. I love Jaws. One of my all-time favorites. 1976.

Rattup smiled at him blankly.

Rattup:
We will have to watch it one of these days. A day of film appreciation, perhaps.

Nodding his head, Zephyr grinned back at him. Was Rattup using him to siphon pop culture into his life from the outside world because he was too much of a shut-in to venture beyond his door? He considered this a possibility, but in very low probability. There were ulterior motives, but watching the Big Shark Movie was not one of them. The remainder of his motives were yet to be seen.

Rattup:
You need to finish my story.

Confused, Zephyr jotted madly.

Zephyr:
I’m not much of a biographer. I only work in fiction.

Rattup:
No, no, no. I mean READING my story. Breakfast In Galway. Finish the story and we can talk some more on this matter. You are still very uneducated on the subject of love and passion.

Zephyr was unsure if he should have taken offense to this comment. Soon after, Zephyr exited the house with a hearty handshake, promising that he would return to continue with their discussion on all matters ghostly, but there was a hint of unbelieving question still in his voice. He could detect a concern in Rattup’s eyes, that he would falter on their agreement, that this second visit had scared him off altogether. Zephyr had promised himself, Rattup included, that he would return next week, as much as Rattup’s mental state and apparition housemate disturbed him. It would not be easy for him to throw his life into such a busily frightening world of crashing dishes and floating candles, but he owed it to his new friend and possible mentor. Rattup deserved better than he had received from the world thus far, whether his confinement was truly at the hands of a finicky spirit or solely created inside of his own mind. But, were it in his head, how would he have gone about creating such strange occurrences? Perhaps the ghost was real, but the entrapment was not. Zephyr could not say for sure, but the curious half of him was determined to find out.
Yes
, he would return. It was a matter of principle.

He wondered what Jackie would have to say on the matter.

10.

“
He’s a nutbar. A total nutbar.
Can I meet him
?” she stated, subversively trying to toss herself into the mix of Zephyr’s little human research project. Her unfettered boldness always showed its ugly head when it came to the oddities of human beings and their quirky little bubble-worlds. On their weekends, she made her way through DVD after DVD of society’s strange shut-ins. Documentaries and featurettes such as: “The Baffling Life of Hoarders,” “Living In Trees,” “Hobo By Choice,” “Living Underground,” “Midgets In Love,” “Living In Bunkers,” and “I Fucked A Horse.” Zephyr found great humor in most of these rentals, but Jackie was nothing short of utterly absorbed in the subject matter. Her specialty, in casual conversation, was “the weirdness,” as she called it. “Please let me meet him,” she repeated, on the verge of begging, touching Zephyr’s hand to encourage an affirmative answer.

Zephyr shook his head, sipping from the soft green frozen margaritas she had whipped together in honor of their nine month (in the official sense—whatever that meant) dating anniversary. Though it was his first real relationship with a woman, he had never heard of anniversaries beyond the traditional annual variety. So he concluded that perhaps Jackie was more excited about their future than he was. There was a pang of guilt at thinking this, but Zephyr soon found himself more flattered than embarrassed. Maybe their living arrangement and relationship was working out better than he could have imagined, and so Zephyr instead felt a slight warming in his gut, a result of more than his potent alcoholic beverage. “He wouldn’t be too happy about that. If he’s as disturbed as I think he is, he’ll see your visiting with me as an act of aggression. If not him, then his whacky ghost. He claims that he had to plead with her to allow my visitation. Another woman in the home, especially one as beautiful as you...” Zephyr said with a sly compliment mixed in, which Jackie had grinned happily at, “Well, based on what I know about Rattup’s purported history, that could send her into a swirling shit storm of epic proportion, if you even believe in her. I’m not sure how he—how
they
—would handle your presence.”