To Feel Stuff (21 page)

As she was entering the infimary proper, E's attention was diverted to an abnormality near the farthest infirmary window. At first she perceived it only as a “sliver of black.” Walking forward to get a better look, E realized that what she was seeing was the apparition (still wearing the robe), standing in the corner of the room. He was partially tucked behind the curtain. What E had seen was a piece of his hair. The apparition had his back to the room.

Stopping approximately ten feet from the window, E attempted to capture his attention. “Hey,” she beckoned as softly as she could manage. She “didn't want everybody to hear.”

Surprisingly, the apparition immediately turned around and said, “Hey.” Even though she had called to him, E told me that she hadn't been expecting a response. She had merely spoken to him because she could not think of a better tactic to take, and she “couldn't really tap him on the shoulder because my finger would go through it”

Because the apparition's response was unexpected, E did not have a follow-up statement prepared. “How's it going?” she asked.

“You know. It's going.” She described the smile the apparition gave her as being “very wistful.” Then he ran his hands through his hair, pulling the “long pieces back from his forehead like he was worn out.” He looked out of the window—or, as E clarified, the “direction of the window,” since we could not be sure that he was seeing what she was seeing. Although E and the apparition appeared to be sharing a moment in space and time, we still did not know from whence the apparition came. He might have been looking at an earlier version of the infirmary window; it was possible that he had been a patient in the past His terry-cloth robe let us know that he was most likely from the twentieth century. Additionally, judging from his chin-length hair, I told E that I believed he had probably come from the 1960s or 1970s.

When the apparition looked back at E, he asked, “How's it going for you?”

“I'm feeling a little bit melancholy. But it's New Year's. I think you're supposed to,” she answered.

I cut into her story. “Why were you feeling melancholy?”

“I could tell that C's parents thought I was weird. It was getting me down a little. I considered trying not to act weird.”

“Why didn't you?”

“If people already think you're weird and you try to cover it up with behavior that doesn't come naturally, it's been my experience that you come off even weirder than before,” E said.

“When you told the apparition you were melancholy, what did he say?” I asked.

“Nothing.” The apparition gave her a small nod, as if he understood and agreed with her assessment of the holiday, then returned to staring in the direction of the window.

E decided that she would administer a test herself to determine if another person would have any awareness of the apparition's presence in the room. She instructed him not to move. Giving her a look out of the corner of his eye, the apparition appeared to comply. Backing up while facing him, E, about twelve feet from the doorway, called out to a temporary nurse practitioner, asking her to bring a cup of water.

The nurse practitioner, clearly unenthusiastic about her job, asked E why she couldn't get herself some water from the tap in the bathroom. E lied, saying that she needed cold, bottled water from the outside refrigerator because it helped settle her stomach. She told the practitioner, Deondra, that “the medication makes me nauseous.”

At the mention of medication, the apparition chimed in again. “I'm going to stop taking my medication today,” he said. “What do you think of that?”

“Fine,” Deondra agreed from the hallway.

“I'll tell you what I think of it if you tell me if you're dead,” E bartered.

Before the apparition could respond to this offer, Deondra entered the infirmary. E, unwilling to turn her head, could hear the nurse's tennis shoes squeaking on the floor. E asked, without looking over her shoulder, “Quick, Deondra, do you see—?”

Before she could finish her question, the apparition began to disintegrate. E estimated that the time it took for him to disappear was the length of “five blinks.” Presently, the corner was blank.

“Do I see what?” asked Deondra. She handed E the bottle of water.

“When you walked in here, did you get a glimpse of anything over there in the far corner?”

“Like what?”

“Like anything,” E answered, wanting to remain vague so that if Deondra had seen something, E would know that she hadn't influenced her answer.

“What is it that you think you saw?” insisted the nurse.

“I'm not sure,” E said. “I don't know.”

“What do you mean, ‘You don't know'?”

E described the look that Deondra “shot her” as being “funny.” She meant funny in the strange, and not humorous, sense.

Before E could attempt to answer or lie, C entered the infirmary. He told her that his parents were leaving to return to their hotel, and that E should come and say goodbye to them.

E could not examine the corner again for over an hour, since C was present. After C fell asleep, E got out of bed and went to investigate the window, the curtain, and the floor where the apparition had stood. She saw no evidence of his having been there.

I suggested to her that we should try to locate an EMF
(for those readers outside the paranormal research community, this stands for “electromagnetic field”) meter in order to take a reading in the corner. Perhaps there were still remnants from the apparition's visit, and the meter might be able to detect residual activity. I had only learned of these meters after my initial research into the field of parapsychology and was eager to utilize some of the tools of the trade.

E, however, was interested in proceeding in a more decidedly low-tech fashion. “Forget the E-meter,” she said, and I corrected her.

“E-meters, I believe, are what Scientologists use to electronically evaluate a person's mental state. This is an
EMF
meter. Your mother never talked about them?”

“No. She doesn't use anything like that.”

“What does she use?” I asked.

“Sometimes she pulls out crystals. That's it.” E, examining a piece of waffle on her fork, remarked, “This is really, really good. I'm now a big fan of the waffle.”

“I'm happy if you're happy,” I said. On the tape we often sound like an old, married couple. Again, I say this not to imply any sort of inappropriate intimacy with E, but to indicate the close and honest doctor-patient relationship that we developed as a result of our shared time and interests.

“So how do you suggest we continue?” I asked.

“I want you to hire a sketch artist,” E said. “I want to sit down with someone and describe the ghost, and then I'm going to give you the drawing. And then you can use it to do research into who he is and maybe fnd out how he died.”

“This sounds like work for a detective.”

“Maybe you're going to have to expand your job description,” said, clearly amused. It was as if she were imagining me smoking a pipe and sporting a deerstalker hat.

“And where am I supposed to find this expert?” I asked.

“The police station. I'm sure they can give you a good reference. I bet you can even hire an artist straight from them.”

I have to admit that I was curious to see the face of the apparition, as I had been having difficulty picturing him in my mind. Moreover, I realized that with a drawing in hand, I would have an encouraging point of origin while combing the school's newspaper archives. Because deaths on campus are not a common occurrence, the number of candidates would be finite.

“I'll find you a sketch artist,” I said, “if you'll do something for me in return.”

“What?” she asked.

“I'd like you to start carrying around a small tape recorder like the one I have.”

E did not understand what good that could possibly do, since she had already determined that those without paranormal abilities could not see the apparition. When the nurse practitioner had walked into the infirmary to bring E the bottle of water, there had been a very short window (no more than a couple of seconds) during which he should have been visible to her. E seriously doubted that it would be different with others being able to hear the apparition's voice.

I reminded her that a recorder works much differently than the human ear, and that if the apparition was comprised of electrical or magnetic energy, his presence might register on tape. “Even if the recording doesn't manage to pick up his words, there's the chance that it will register a disturbance in the room.” If we could match static or a defect on the tape to the time of one of the apparition's future appearances, then we would have a key piece of data.

After we finished our meal and checked E out of the hospital, we went to Radio Shack and bought her a recorder identical to mine. Then I returned her to Health Services.

The next day I inquired at the police station about hiring a sketch artist for a personal matter, and a desk sergeant put me in contact with their best, L. For a reasonable fee she would sit down with E and draw the apparition for us. Of course, we did not tell her that she would be drawing an apparition. Instead, E and I agreed that we would not tell L about any aspect of the study. If she asked any questions, we would insist that we were looking for a long-lost relative.

In order to prevent others at Health Services from asking questions as well, I borrowed a ground-floor office from a doctor friend of mine who was away speaking at Harvard.

When I went to pick up E from the second-floor waiting room, I caught a glimpse of C as we were walking toward the stairwell. The infirmary door was cracked, and I saw a male matching the description that E had provided during our previous conversations. He was watching us. I did not inform E about what I had seen, as I knew that she was determined to keep our meetings as secret as possible.

E and L collaborated for approximately two hours. I gave them their privacy and returned only when L called my cell phone. E presented the finished drawing to me, and there was my first glimpse of the apparition's face.

Even in the sketch, his black hair looked as if it were slightly greasy. It fell in straggly pieces to his jawline. He had deep recesses underneath his eyes, giving the impression that he had difficulty sleeping—a fitting physical characteristic, I thought, for a person who had failed to rest in peace. His forehead was a little longer than average, and his extensive eyebrows slanted toward his thin nose, giving him an air of deep concern. Even without the rest of his body in the drawing, I could tell that the apparition was underweight; this particularly showed in his cheekbones. His mouth was long and his upper lip crooked.

“Are you happy with the likeness?” I asked E.

“It's exactly him,” she said.

I thanked L for her help and compensated her. After she left, I used the copy machine in the main office to reproduce the image twice. I gave one of the copies to E, since she had requested it. I secured the original under protective plastic, then placed the second copy in my briefcase. This is the copy I referenced during my research.

During the next week, I not only searched for a matching likeness in the library's microfiches and local records, but also conducted informal questioning. I tracked down members of the university's staff knowledgeable about the school's history and lore. I heard many stories about deaths on campus, and those stories became the catalysts for auxiliary stories about the recent epidemic of near-deaths on campus. There had been a series of anonymous, violent acts committed against Brown students during the past year, and although no one was dead yet, my sources were sure that was “what was around the corner.”

I showed them the drawing of the apparition, asking if the young man was familiar in any way. I found no promising leads until I took the drawing to the university's official photographer.

Even though he had held the position for less than a decade, he was in charge of the greater photography library and so was familiar with campus images that dated back forty years. He also professed to have a “photographic memory.” Thus, when he saw the drawing and told me that he had seen the apparition “before somewhere,” I had high hopes.

When the photographer pulled a sheet of slides from the cabinet, I thought perhaps I should have brought E so that she could be present for the big moment. I began to study the slides on the light table.

While the young man in the photographs had many of the same characteristics as the apparition, I felt that there was something off about the mouth. The photographs had been taken because the subject (interestingly, having attended Brown in the late 1970s) had received a prestigious grant to study architecture in Europe. The
Brown Alumni Magazine
had written a feature on him, and one of the filed images had accompanied the piece.

As I was looking at the young man's mouth under a magnifying glass, the photographer said, “I remembered this guy because he died right before graduation.”

“Excuse me?”

“He was in a car accident over spring break. It was a real tragedy. I had to pull his pictures about a year ago because his niece came here and got the same grant, so
BAM
did another piece on the family.”

“He's dead?” I echoed.

“Yes. He's dead.”

I returned to examining the young man's mouth under the magnifying glass. I was still troubled by the shape of it, but the fact of his death gave me cause for optimism. Because library visitors were prohibited from removing slides and negatives, I asked the photographer to make prints. They were ready after lunch, and once I had them in my possession, I went straight to Health Services.

Vivian told me that E was napping. I said that I would wait.

Every fifteen minutes, Vivian went into the infirmary to check if E was still asleep. One time I volunteered to go check myself, and I saw E sleeping in a twin bed with C. They were wrapped in each other's arms; on such a small mattress, there was barely room for the two of them. I was hoping that E would wake first. Although I was curious to meet C officially, I knew that E did not want us to cross paths, and, as always, it was in my best interest to keep her comfortable.