The Ghost in Love (27 page)

“What's happening to her, Ling?”

“I don't know. I really don't.”

Throughout that apartment building, all of the tenants were fading: back to happier pasts, to days when things made solid sense and were so much more right. Where for a brief immaculate time, life had been faultless.

“Make a verz.” Pilot had said that before he faded too. Ben did not know how to do that. But he remembered Ling had recognized and named them as soon as she saw them at Gina Kyte's house. Ling knew what a verz was. Would she know how to make one?

He looked at her and in that fraught moment identified something for the first time that he had never seen before. Climbing down the stairs to her, he put both hands on Ling's shoulders. When she made to speak, he stopped her.

An instant later his hands on her bare skin began removing what she
did
know. Like a bee extracting nectar from a flower, Ben first took Ling's ghost knowledge, or what few traces there were of it left
in her. She wasn't aware of it because it lay inactive in her unconscious and in the most remote corners of her mind. But Ben found it all. He took everything he needed, knowing he was leaving her perilously little to build the rest of her life on. But he took it anyway because he knew that what he was doing was more important than any one life.

He emptied her first of her ghost knowledge and then of specific elements of her newly gained human knowledge. All of what she was and what was left of what she once had been entered Ben's hands, and he took whatever he needed of it. This took only seconds. When he was finished, he stood still and put one very warm palm against his stomach.

Ling reeled. As she was about to fall, he grabbed her and helped her sit down. She looked at him with empty eyes.

Ben walked back up the steps to where German was still standing and bit her.

He took her hand holding the doughnut and bit it high up on the wrist, hard enough to draw blood. More important, he bit German hard enough to make her shriek in pain, pain that brought her back to the present. She jerked her arm away, hitting him in the mouth as she did. Most of her mind was still so anchored in her past. The bite was like being shaken violently awake from the deepest sleep.

He watched until he was absolutely certain that German was back here, now, completely in the present. Then he hurried toward Danielle's apartment, not sure whether he would get there in time to save her.

Ling sat stunned on the stairs; German stood stunned a few feet away. Both women looked like boxers getting slowly and unsteadily up off the canvas after having been knocked out cold.

Ben stood in front of Danielle's door and tried turning the knob,
but it was locked. He knocked on the door but there was no answer. He banged on it but only silence followed. Stepping back, he brought both hands to his face. A moment later he took them away.

“All right.” He stepped back to the door and this time put his hands on the knob. He twisted one to the left, the other to the right. With both arms he pushed straight forward. The door swung open. He walked in.

To a garden: a restaurant in a garden. There were tables spread across a wide area. Colorful paper lanterns hung in the trees. Diners were sitting here and there; waiters in crisp white shirts and black trousers walked by carrying large metal trays stacked with food.

“You would like a table?” a smiling Oriental man came up and asked. Ben assumed he was the boss, because he was the only one with sleeves rolled up to his elbows.

“Actually, I'm looking for someone here. Do you mind if I try to find my friend?”

“Yes, okay,” the manager said and walked away. It was a busy night in the Lotus Garden and he had much to do.

Ben saw her after looking only a short time. She was one of those people whose face doesn't change much as they grow older. And Danielle was only, what, twenty-nine years old now? Danielle at eighteen did not look so different. He walked over to their table. Both kids looked up. She smiled but the boy didn't. Danielle knew who he was the second she saw him.

“Hi, Ben.”

“Hey, Danielle.”

“Dexter, this is my friend Ben Gould.”

“Nice to meetcha.” The two men shook hands. Dexter's handshake was ten times too strong. The boy was intent on demonstrating to whoever he met that he was all guy.

“How'd you find me?” Her voice was calm and quiet. She did not appear the least surprised to see him in her world.

Ben said only “I figured it out.”

She knew they could skip this conversation forward a few chapters. “I'm going to stay here, Ben. I've decided.”

“You can't.”

“I can. You know I can. That's part of this deal, right? People like us can go anyplace we want in our lives and stay there. It's our decision.”

“Danielle, you can't. There's too much at stake. You have to come back.”

She tightened her mouth and looked away. He was right, but her mind was made up. “I don't want it, Ben. I don't want that life anymore. I live alone in a pathetic little apartment and work at a loser job. I wake up every morning hoping it's Saturday. You know why? Not because I have anything special or great planned on the weekend, but so I can
sleep
longer. That says a lot about my life, huh? I don't want it anymore.

“This”—she waved an open hand at their surroundings—“this life is my bird in the hand. Do you understand what I'm saying? When I look back, Dexter here probably
was
the love of my life. So, now that I realize it, I can appreciate him much more than I did back then.”

The thin boy across the table loved hearing he was the love of her life and sat back in his chair a happy man. He had no clue to what was going on with Danielle and this older guy, but her last two sentences were enough to make him proud and hold his peace for a while.

Frustrated, Ben raised his voice. “But you've got it reversed. You're supposed to take what you've experienced in life and use it to try and improve yourself today and tomorrow.”

Danielle shook her head. “Nope, not anymore. I've had enough
todays and tomorrows to know one's basically going to be like the next. And way too many of them are worse.

“I'm only being honest, Ben. I know I'd be content with medium-level happiness: a five on a scale of ten. I want to be loved. That's all. That's it. But I wasn't happy or loved yesterday. I wasn't today, and chances are pretty slim that I will be tomorrow.

“So I'll just be realistic and choose my bird in the hand: I'll go back to where I
know
I was happy and really loved and just stay there. I'll settle; I accept that. Plus, I'll go back knowing it never got any better than that night, which means I can appreciate it ten times more than I did.”

She was absolutely right, but that didn't make her right. He needed something now to convince Danielle to return to the present and not remain in her past. He needed something to bring Pilot back from whatever ominous otherworld he was in. He needed something to help himself recognize what he was supposed to do now with all this new knowledge and insight coming to him at impossible speeds. How can you learn what to do when you're given no time?

His father once said life was deeply unfair. At birth you're given a very complicated board game but no instructions on how to play it. You must try to work out all the rules yourself. At the same time, you must play the game. Once. If you lose, doom. No, oops, I'm just a beginner, can I try that wrong move again? No, you cannot. No second chances. Figure out the rules now from nothing while simultaneously playing the game of life. How could a person
not
fail?

And yet—

“Danielle, do you remember when you died? Do you remember the moment or anything else about it?”

“No. Only when I woke up from the operation.”

“Me too. The last thing I remember was hitting my head and how much it hurt. Nothing else till I woke up in the hospital.”

“What's he talking about, Danielle? What's this about dying?” Dexter Lewis was now getting frustrated. He wanted to know what was going on and when this older guy was going to get out of there and leave them alone.

She put a hand over her boyfriend's and said, “Ben's a friend of my father's from church. He came over to our house the other night and we got into a big discussion about deep things. You know, life and death and what's it all about. We were talking about it for a long time and we're kind of finishing up now. Just give me a minute, Dex.”

Ben waited till she finished calming the boy before continuing. “Maybe we're not
supposed
to remember everything, because it's not relevant. We don't remember night dreams the next morning because they're not relevant now—”

Danielle interrupted him. “Ben, how did you get
here
? How did you know where to find me?”

“I—I walked through your door. I opened the door to your apartment, walked in, and here I was.”

She looked at him, considering what he had said. Then she shook her head. “Impossible.”

“What do you mean? What are you saying?”

“There's no way you could have found me here. Eighteen-year-old me at the Lotus Garden with Dexter Lewis? No way. How could you know about this night? No one knows how important this memory is but me. No one.”

“Danielle, I'm telling you what happened: I opened the door to your apartment, walked in, and here I was.”

“I heard you but it's not possible. Choosing from my whole life, twenty-nine years of it, how could you know I would be exactly here?
Huh? How did you know that this night amongst all the others was the happiest I ever had? How did you know that? How
could
you?”

A small bewildered voice almost not his own asked, “Because I became you again?” All those times without warning that he had suddenly been inside Danielle's mind and body, inside her apartment watching dental procedure videotapes on her television, the taste of her Dr Pepper in his mouth. All those times he was both of them simultaneously. How frightening that had been when it happened. But what if this time his will had chosen to do it? What if he had opened the door to Danielle's apartment and purposely chosen to slip into her head to find out where she was? When he knew, he joined her here at the Lotus Garden.

They looked at each other. Ben also saw scrawny Dexter Lewis. The boy was angrily wondering, How old is this guy? Does she have the hots for him or something?

Dexter stood up. He had had enough. After shooting both of them long, dirty looks, he went off to find the toilet. He hoped his killer glares would make them feel bad about ignoring him. But neither paid attention to his leaving.

A waiter passed. By tilting his mind slightly in his direction, Ben knew the man was wondering if the woman at table six had just given him the eye while her husband paid the bill. Ben looked up at the waiter and saw him smiling. A woman nearby got up and walked toward the toilet. He knew she was hurrying to get there because she was sure from the feel of it that her period had just begun. Embarrassed and feeling like a voyeur, Ben turned his attention back to Danielle.

He asked her, “Can you do that too? Can you go into people's minds and know what they're thinking?”

Unsurprised by the question, she shook her head. “No, but I can
travel around anywhere in my own life that I want, backward and forward through time. Like being here at the restaurant with Dexter. Can you do that?”

“No. Not like you do.” He thought about Ling taking him back to Crane's View.

“Maybe it'll never happen to you, Ben. Maybe each of us has special things only we can do.”

He hadn't considered that possibility but it made sense. “Are you really going to stay here? You're not going back? Even if we need you?”

She crossed her arms over her chest. Bad body language. “Who's this ‘we' that needs me?”

“The other survivors like us. There have to be others, Danielle. Let's say you're right: What if each one of us
can
do different special things? That's even more reason why we need to stay together now.” The idea sounded ridiculous and the words dried in his throat as he tried to convince her. He could only think of the comic books he'd read as a kid in which superheroes always banded their various superpowers together to defeat whatever villains were threatening mankind in that month's exciting adventure.

Something new dawned on Ben and he straightened. His whole demeanor changed. “But who
is
it that's against us?”

“What do you mean?”

“Who doesn't want us around? Who keeps trying to stop us, Danielle? You met the man in the orange shirt—the bum. Who was
he
? Who sent him?”

“I don't know, Ben. He came for you, remember?”

“Yeah, but then, who was the little boy who came after you in my kitchen?”

She was surprised. “You know about that?”

“Of course. I've been in your mind, remember?”

“Well, then, you already know: it was you.
You
were the little boy.”

Ben shook his finger. “No. He only used that disguise to get past German into my apartment, and it worked. He came for you, Danielle, not me. He told you to go to the radio and search for that special song. You would have found it pretty soon and thought it was just a coincidence. But when you played it, he would have gotten you. That's what he said to the verz, remember? He was there to get you, not me.”

She asked, “Then who sent the verz that saved us in the kitchen?”

Ben pointed at her face. “
You
did. Something in you sensed trouble as soon as that kid entered my apartment. That's when you called the verz for help.”

“I did not.”

“Yes, you did. Or some part of you did.”

Not believing this, she pointed to her elbow. “Which part?” She pointed to her knee and then her nose. “This part, or this one? How do you know?”