The Ghost in Love (33 page)

Mr. Spilke took German by the elbow and started pulling her
toward the car. She resisted, not understanding. She did not want to go. Spilke wanted to say it nicely but there was no time to be nice. “You can't hear what they say to each other, German. They're different from you. What happened to them makes them different from everyone else.”

“Because they didn't die?”

“Yes.”

The passengers standing by the blue car moved over to make room for them. Spilke continued, “Those people down the street are different versions of Ben, too, like us. But they're Ben at his worst. Like he told you before about Gandersby—”

“And Tweekrat?”

“Yes, all of them.”

“Why are they coming? Why are they here?”

“To get him,” her dancing partner said.

“To stop him,” another said.

“To pay him back,” a third added.

German shook her head. She wasn't getting this. “Pay him back for
what
? What did he do?”

“Promises he made to himself that he broke.”

“Being a coward when he didn't need to be.”

“Deluding himself. Lies he made up and believed to get him through.”

This chorus would have continued if Spilke hadn't gestured to silence them. “Most people don't like themselves for a variety of reasons. It just happens that, in Ben's case, his reasons are actually coming to get him. Every one of the people in that group is a different reason why Ben doesn't like himself.”

German remembered Ben saying before that he was the bad guy in all of this;
he
was the villain.

“We constantly disappoint ourselves,” Spilke went on. “Over the years that stuff builds up and becomes a big part of who we are: the disappointed me. The bitter me, the failed me, the angry me—”

German pointed. “And that's who those people down there are? Bitter Bens?”

“Bitter Bens, bitter at Ben. Yes.”

“What's he going to do about them?”

Spilke shook his head. “I don't know, but we have to try and help no matter what he does. Thank you for bringing us here, German. Thank you for loving us. Thank you for loving
him
.”

The other passengers nodded, waved, and smiled their thanks at German. She didn't know what to say. She watched as they prepared to join Ben Gould, to protect him, to defend him. Seeing this remarkable event take place, she kept thinking, Those are my Bens. Those are the Bens I love going back to help him.

Neither Danielle nor Ben saw any of this. Neither of them appeared worried about the approaching crowd, although they were watching it closely. They talked, their heads dipping occasionally toward each other at different times, almost as if they were punctuating their sentences. From a distance German could hear little more than the stray word or sentence out of context. She was tremendously curious to know what the two of them were talking about, especially as the crowd got closer.

And then it was there.

“Hey!” a surly voice called out from the middle of the pack.

Ben and Danielle ignored it.

“Hey!”

Ben lifted his head but his face was impassive. From the months of living with him, German knew when he was calm and when he was upset. All signs now indicated that he was still calm.

He said, “Yes? What do you want?”

“Yo mama!” someone shouted out. Chuckles rilled across the crowd.

“Come on, what do you want? I've got other things to do.” Impatience and irritation rose in his voice. It impressed German that in this mind-boggling situation he could pull that tone off. If she were in his shoes now, she would have been scared stiff.

“Oooh, he's got other things to dooooooo. He's a big important man. A very busy guy.”

“Stop wasting time—what do you want?” Ben's voice sounded exactly the same: no nervousness in it, impatient but firm.

“One thing's certain, Ben boy: We don't want what you want.”

“That's right!”

“Yeah!”

“Uh-huh . . .” Clearly the crowd was of one mind on that issue. Ben spoke to Danielle, who was still standing beside him. She said something back and he nodded.

“Fine, then, what
do
you want?”

Many different voices called out at once but none was distinct. It was as if the whole group were thinking out loud and speaking its scattered thoughts.

“I can't hear you.”

A chubby nondescript man stepped forward. “Do you remember me?”

Ben said only “Broomcorn.”

“Excellent! That's right, Broomcorn. And I still hate your guts, in case you were wondering. Do you realize yet how much better your life would be now if you'd done what I told you to do when you were twenty?

“And just so you know, Ben, I was the one who came up with the idea of Stewart Parrish, in case you were wondering about him.”

Unlike when she'd faced her own past selves in the parking lot, Danielle was fascinated to see that most of the people in this crowd didn't look anything like Ben Gould. Yes, there were a few versions of him here and there. But the majority was not: unfamiliar men, women, children, baldheads, people with ponytails, black people, Asians, and old people of every age—as wide an assortment as possible. Danielle knew, though, that they were all Ben both because he had told her and because she could smell them. Every one of these people smelled exactly the same. What she did not know, because Ben hadn't admitted it to her, was they were only the worst aspects or versions of him down through his years, made flesh.

“And now I'll ask a third time:
What do you want from me?
”

Broomcorn turned back to the people behind him and conferred. It took a while, because the crowd was unruly and many of them wanted to be heard. In time he faced Ben again and spoke.

“It's not what we want—it's what we
don't
want. We don't want you to be happy, or whole, or at peace. Because we're the parts of Ben Gould that
like
being unhappy and scared and worried. So long as you live, we'll do everything we can to make you miserable. And there are many of us in you, so that won't be hard. It never has been till now,” Broomcorn sneered. He was on a roll, because he knew everything he'd said was the truth. “Whether you admit it or not, people want drama in their lives. They hope for it every single day. But there's no drama in happiness.”

“That's wrong!” Ben objected. “I don't
like
being miserable or scared—”

“Yes you do!” Broomcorn thundered and then laughed, as did
many of the people in the crowd. Several wore the smile of the vain victor after the race is finished and he's won. All of them had been expecting Ben to say something like that.

Broomcorn continued in a patronizing voice, “Face it, Ben, worry and fear make you feel truly alive. Just popping all over like popcorn. You're really awake only then: no screen saver, low volume, or cruise control, which is what your mind runs on most of the time.

“Being satisfied puts people to sleep. Life's nasty little secret is that contentment is boring. But a broken heart or scary results from a blood test get that old adrenaline and awareness pumping.
Boom boom boom
—feel your heart
hammering
! Great stuff! And then comes that charge of delicious electricity that runs down through you and feels so good inside! What's better than feeling one hundred percent in the moment? Only when you fall in love or fall down on the sidewalk do you feel truly alive.”

After a pause Broomcorn said in a quieter voice, “Stanley,
there
you are. Welcome to our quorum.”

The Angel of Death walked over but made sure to stay far away from Ben in case Ling decided to ambush him again. The angel no longer had any power over Benjamin Gould. That change had taken place the night in the pizzeria when Stewart Parrish stabbed him in the neck. Stanley understood now that it wasn't Parrish who did it but some part of Ben Gould. That was a revelation. People stabbing angels: the old rules and hierarchies were definitely gone. All of this was new territory for mortals, ghosts, and angels.

German watched the three men and Danielle talk together. But what really interested her was the large crowd nearby. If those people were different parts of Ben's psyche, then she was keen to talk to them. Maybe they'd tell her things that could help him now.
Or at least help her to understand Ben better. Maybe they'd even tell her secrets about him that he had never revealed when they were living together.

From the car she walked over to the crowd and said hello to the first person she bumped into. It was a teenage boy who was all shrugs and eyes that didn't move from her breasts. After asking a few questions that got only sullen shrugs and monosyllables from him, she said good-bye and moved on.

Sometimes she glanced at Ben and the others, but nothing over there had changed. The four were caught up in an intense conversation. Every one of them looked either upset or grim. She knew they were discussing epic, destiny-changing matters, but from afar it only looked like a bunch of sourpusses putting in their two cents about something dreary and mundane like local politics. Anyway, she wasn't permitted to hear what they were saying, so she continued her Ben Gould research among the crowd of Bens.

She spoke with anyone she could engage. None of them was friendly but a few were more talkative than others. German heard some things and learned some things. But what came across again and again was a wide variety of anxiety and bitterness: anxiety about the future, bitterness about the past. Happiness didn't live here. Everything good came at a price. Bad always had a return ticket. Contentment, peace of mind—
any
kind of peace—wasn't part of these peoples' vocabulary or experience.

A few minutes later she heard someone nearby say, “I loved you so much.”

German stopped talking at once and turned. The speaker was a woman in her thirties, nicely dressed and made up, arms crossed over her chest. She was tapping one foot rapidly on the ground. German had to remind herself again that this woman was only another
part of Ben made flesh. Otherwise such a provocative sentence coming from this complete stranger would have been disturbing.

And then the woman said it again: “I loved you so much, but you still left me.”

German shot right back. “I left because
you
were impossible to live with. You're blaming me for your own batty behavior? Have you ever tried living with a madman?”

“
Madman
? Nice word. Thanks for caring, German. Thanks for being so sensitive and understanding when I needed you most. I was scared to death! I was sure that I was going nuts and didn't want to drag you down with me. That's why I cut you off. But I shouldn't have worried, because right in the middle of that nightmare you left anyway.”

“Don't be ridiculous, Ben. We talked about every bit of this before and settled it.”

The woman made a bad-smell face and shook her head. “Speak for yourself. You just walked away. Showed your true colors.”

German crossed her arms and went right back at it. “I resent that! I went through fire with you—fire and lunacy. I stayed around much longer than most people would, especially after the crazy way you behaved at the end.”

“Say it however you want, you cut and ran.”

“Not true.” Irate, German glanced over again at the four people talking, hoping Ben would be looking at her. No luck: they were still talking and saw nothing else. When she turned back, the other woman slapped her face.

German was so amazed that her mind went fuzzy. When it came back into focus, she realized that two other people were standing next to the woman now—an old man and a young Asian woman.
German recognized the old man as the one who had wandered into Ben's apartment with Pilot and told her he had Alzheimer's disease.

The Asian woman threw a fist in the air and said in a tough voice, “Slap her again, girl. 'Cause if you don't, I will, and that's for
damn
sure.”

The old man said nothing but appeared to be enjoying the other's hostility.

The young woman cupped a hand to the side of her mouth and called out to someone in the crowd, “Hey, come on over here. Look who just came to visit us.”

A midtwenties Ben Gould walked over, stopped next to the old man, and said formally to German, “Miss Landis, you have real courage coming here.” He looked at the old man. “The lamb visiting the lions, eh?”

“What do you all want from me?”

None of the four spoke, but more people separated from the main crowd and drifted over to see what was going on here.

The Asian woman struck a tough-guy pose and snarled, “I'll tell you what we want: We want our life back. We want all the hours we wasted sitting in the kitchen staring at a
spoon
after you left. We want those spoon days back. And the other days we lost feeling gutted, walking like zombies down streets because we missed you so badly.

“We want back the self-respect that you took when you left. Bye-bye, self-respect. Bye-bye, those special days when I liked where I was in my life.

“Just that alone, German—give me that back: the I-like-where-I-am-in-my-life feeling. Can I have it back, please?”

German spat, “No, because it's not true! Feeling good about yourself? Nobody can take that away from you. Nobody but yourself.
Don't blame me.” She pointed to her chest with two fingers and shook her head. “Not guilty.”

The Asian woman made an angry downward slash with her hand that demonstrated everything German had said was nonsense. “Whatever you took when you left, it didn't only belong to you. We made it together—not two hands but four. You had no right taking it.” The woman looked as though she wanted to say more but held back a beat, two, and then added, “I wanted to smack you so hard when you left . . .”