The Moon in the Windows

Three-quarter moon in the tall sky.  Streets full of yellow leaves and a left-over ghost with red eyes in the corner of a brownstone.  Marathon zombies everywhere.  Windows full of light, some cracked at the bottom to let out the steam heat and let in the autumn night.  A laugh, music, someone practicing the violin inside the French doors. 

More and more people fill the sidewalks, and the line outside the bakery is getting longer.  Dinner delayed.  I watched a car plow down the street, headlights bouncing off a street-level window, replaced seconds later by moonlight.  I walked past silhouettes of cats and someone at a kitchen sink.  How can all of them fit into that tiny room with the loft bed and the clutter of books?

The hazy jewels above the fanlight never come into focus.  Day and night make no difference; they suck up the light but don't reflect it.  Everything is spinning on toward midnight as the woman at the kitchen sink washes her dishes and feeds the cats. 

Tomorrow is Monday, back to work day.  What is next?

Noisy Night

The firecrackers from the Marathon pre-party stopped.  It's almost 7:30 on a night when anything is possible and I can be whatever I want.  Every kid makes me laugh, especially the tiny little boys dressed as Godzilla.  Parents dressed as Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum roll a two-foot-tall Alice between them.

On West 69th Street, the brownstones get fancier and spookier each year; tonight they've added smoke and the sound track from Ghostbusters.  Dogs yap at each other and little children start crying because they're tired and hungry and clamoring for more candy.

Many windows are lighted.  I see shadows of people moving in their dining rooms, making dinner or sitting down to eat with friends.  Someone is deep in a back kitchen with only one light on; the front rooms are dark.  Is she hiding from trick and treaters or just conserving electricity.  What is she having for dinner -- maybe eggs and toast?  Do I smell coffee?  How many people have lived in that apartment before her, and what are they doing tonight, this Halloween of 2014?

Old buildings line these streets and breathe in and out the air of decades ago.  There is little room for error.  Ghosts visit with each other before daylight, and then must go away until next year when their homes are open again.  The lights will be turned on, and old friends will drift through the air into the trees and nod and laugh and say hello.  Some will weep from loneliness, but not for long.  On this night, anything is possible.

I turn to go home.  Ghostbusters is still thumping and more people have arrived, laughing and eating bite-sized pieces of Twix and KitKat.  There is no rain, but the wispy clouds are turning heavy.  Yellow leaves finally drift down to the street and the smallest children have gone to bed.  Only adults and teenagers stroll along, waiting for something to happen.  The ghosts are ready, too, for what might become the night of their lives.

What will happen to the woman in the back kitchen?  Will she meet her lover at the service door and will he come in?  Next year, next year, next year ...

Bin #37

Asia on guard, Alexander Hamilton Custom House.  Sculptor: Daniel Chester French.  In the public domain; courtesy of www.wikipedia.com

Bin 37 does not have a ghost.  When I last went to the National Archives, bin #40 was taken.  So I put my things into the bin directly to its left, locked the door, and put the key into my pocket with my ID card, a pencil, and a folded-up piece of paper.

Nothing rustled.  Nothing chirped, glowed, flashed, made music out of static, or quivered in my bin.   The researcher using bin #40 was single-mindedly trolling through microfilm; the ghost probably got bored and fell asleep.

I ordered a document from off-site storage.  I would have to wait a week to retrieve it.  However, the Archives kindly emailed my document to me.  If bins 40 and 37 are taken on my next trip, perhaps the senior ghosts will convene in my bin after an intern fetches coffee. 

Bin #40

View of the upper facade with architectural sculptures — of the Alexander Hamilton U.S. Custom House — from an adjacent building, in Manhattan. Photo by Mimar 77.  This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

The Alexander Hamilton Custom House is haunted.  In the National Museum of the American Indian, which occupies the bottom two floors, Yupik masks trembled on the walls where they hung.  The first-floor women's room was full of singing, whooshing noises.  And now I've learned that the third floor, the National Archives, has its own ghost.

I put my belongings into bin #40 when I visited last week and locked the door.  I put the key into my pocket and carried my papers and pencil over to the microfilm reader.  I didn't stay long that morning.  On my way back to get my belongings, I heard a loud crackling sound, like the wind rattling through a deserted can on the street. 

There were three people in the Archives:  the desk attendant, a volunteer, and I.  And there was a spirit in bin #40 desperate to communicate.  It turned on my cell phone -- set to "Outside" -- from inside the bin. 

I opened the bin, took out my shoulder bag and checked inside for the phone.  There it was, glowing at me, ready to go.  Laughing.  What did you want to say, spirit?

It hasn't happened since.  But I am going back on Thursday.

Ghost Door Graveyard - Revisited

It's market day today.  The ghosts who live behind these doors

returned before noon, stocked up with provisions for autumn.

I imagine the outer gates will be closed soon, as their parties are invitation-only.

Closed Doors

I wanted to photograph the ghost doors but the gates that keep them captive were closed today.  I will try again the next time the gates are open on recycling day.  What happens if a ghost is thrown out by mistake?  Does it get recycled, too?

Today's Ghosts: The Doors

"A ghost a day" is trucking along.  This cold afternoon, I found a graveyard of century-old doors, stacked up in the courtyard.  The doors were splintered, paint-stripped, white, brown, speckled, mottled.  The crystal doorknobs were stripped.

When they were young, the doors covered rooms full of stories but now they stand outside, memorials to workers who came and went, got married, moved, had children, and died, here in Harsenville, in this building, 120 units, generations over and over again, full of hope with New York City in their eyes.

The sounds have walls; the walls had doors but now the music evaporates into the early Spring night.  The bassoon player and the soprano are gone, replaced by a man who coughs his guts out every morning and a couple who scream at each other, go quiet and scream again.  The windows are old and porous.  The ceilings ping the sound back to the walls.

Every morning Mr. B. trudges up seven flights of stairs singing a song in his robust, bass voice.  You can set your clock by him.  He is not a ghost and his song does not linger.  But somewhere, in the depth of the building, are snatches of songs sung by boys who died too early of AIDS in the time when no drugs could prolong life.  They laughed and their voices hang in the air around the laundry room and their jokes stick to the walls like old glue.

The hall in the basement is long and dark and winding.  One door goes to the boiler room, one to the workroom, one to another corridor that I have never been down.  Silent footsteps go down the long hallway, past a door that guards the room that for 30 years I have never seen.  Quiet, quiet, all is quiet in this land of discovery without doors.

A Ghost a Day

Remember those square, stand-up "Word a Day" calendars?  I'm going to start a "Ghost a Day" calendar.  I'll stack up 365 ghosts, one on top of the other since they don't take up much space.  Then, as each day goes by, I'll peel one off.  The others will be dying for their turn.

Today, April 13, 2014:  Ghost of the Day is Eli.  Former neighbor.  Merchant Marine 40 years.  Favorite food:  Meat with garlic.  Cooking skills:  limited.  What remains?  Smell of meat with garlic on winter nights.  How long gone?  10 years.

Still cookin' somewhere, Eli?

The Menu

Over the past year, I read installments of my short story, "Life Magazine Turns Ten," at Open Mic Nights at the New-York Society Library.  I was looking at the menu that inspired the story, thinking about F.M. Howarth.  I wish I could figure out where he went when he came to Manhattan to drop off his work or to visit with publishers.  But I get no clues from the menu (except that he went to Sardi's once for the "Life" dinner).  I get no vibe, no jiggly waves.  It was so long ago; doesn't he want anyone to remember him?

That's the way with ghosts -- they hang around the high corners of the living room pretending to be anonymous. Then they get nervous and anxious because no one is paying attention.  They move around and stir the air, puff in my ear, play a radio in a distant apartment that the painters left yesterday.

Ever notice when you don't have cobwebs in those undusted corners?  And you thought it was your Swiffering.

You won't see their tracks through the dust on your dresser.  Ghosts are far too light and clever for that.  Just check the corners.  I have to go look for F.M.

Summer Ghosts

Whenever the weather gets warm, I think about ghosts in my neighborhood.  Most of the buildings on my block in Manhattan are old, dating back to the 1880s and early 20th century.  These buildings must have ghosts, but I have never seen them or sensed them.  Do they even exist?  Are they here in this neighborhood?

There have been tragedies on West 74th Street.  A teenager jumped to his death from a high rise building in the 1930s.  Fortunes came and went and those who were defeated ended their lives here.  In my own building, some sad characters started on their final decades in the 1970s and one of those last unfortunates died earlier this year.  And yet there are no spirits walking the hall, nothing vaporous, no sounds, nothing at night.  Where are they?

It would be worth it to take the elevator up to the 9th floor late at night to see if the ghost of the woman who died recently is screaming (silently) down the hall in her sad state.  But do I really want to see her?  And what about that hapless sad man who is still staying in her apartment, squatting there and being abused by another man with a spray-on toupee?  Can the hapless man be helped?  And how long will it take to rid that apartment of the filth, detritus, and broken tiny pieces of these sad lives?

I expect that any ghost would be happier than the people still alive in that apartment on the 9th floor.

Being Human

I was watching a couple of back episodes in preparation for tonight's premiere of the new season of Being Human on BBC America. Initially, the show was intriguing in only a minor way, but as I watched it again, I was overcome with the deep and lyrical sense of longing that permeates it. Every character is waiting for something to happen.

I took a walk early this afternoon. On the way out, I looked down the corridor of my apartment building, so similar to Annie's trip to Purgatory -- old walls, tiled floors, dim lights, wrinkled voices behind sad doors. The March wind picked up and tossed poplar seeds along the traffic islands. Children and parents grabbed at hats that almost blew off their heads. Shoppers from Trader Joe's clutched the handles of their paper shopping bags relentlessly. March wind blowing in February. Strange brew. Lights came on as the day grew darker.

There is a feeling that something big is about to happen. For a flash, the hallway of my building seemed narrow, darker, ill-lit. The voices were silent for a moment. Then the elevator door opened and a tall blonde girl got out. She pounded on the door of an apartment, waited, pounded again. I could smell cooking smoke. I went down to the mailboxes and when I returned she stood there, still.

Three o'clock came and went. Clouds came and went. The streets are crowded but quiet. All seems like a ghostly prelude to something, the power of art, the power of music and these old ghosts stand in the wings. Waiting. Waiting. Waiting for something to change.

In the Courtyard

Spectral Street. Episode One.
Since the heat of last summer and the summer before, the population of the street has grown smaller and dimmer. The courtyard that used to be populated by ghosts of all kinds, all colors and shapes and fabrics and sizes has become emptier day by day. Some say there is a prison beneath the stones where ghosts of old dancers live among tunes old fashioned and out of date. In the high heat of summer, the flowers fade, like the marigold the king held fast in his hand. Why, on this urban street, would there be a king? Why marigolds except to keep the bad bugs away, the bugs that eat the flowers and kill the peonies?



But the king still had to rule this strange and diminishing kingdom and so he called upon his advisors one day in winter. "What shall we do this year? It has been too cold to walk out in the park and too warm for snow. The birds stopped singing in the fall, though the stone swallows with the green eyes are still there on the terrace. My kingdom is shrinking, and I don't know what to do."

In the kingdom of ghosts, there are no ghosts. They talk and walk and fly and yet cannot sit on the park benches and tie their shoelaces. They cannot pick up a newspaper left on a subway seat and read the baseball scores on this strangely warm day. Everything is changing here; everything is old. How would the king rule in a kingdom that shrank day by day. And yet he had to remain the king, for without even this little stability, the world would fly apart at the center and all would soon be lost, bathed in a scarlet light that was too, too hot to last for very long. Only the wind that ran through the courtyard every now and then kept the earth on its axis here on spectral street.

Spectral Street

Today I walked into a courtyard full of ghosts,

smelled their flowers,

sat at their table,

flew with them into their inner rooms.

Summer is their favorite time to travel. Look outside tonight.

Pale Night - Summer - & Coincidences

I am getting ready for my tour about Edwin Booth this Saturday. I just realized that the protagonist of my story "Tobacco" (which you can read here) and Booth lived within a few blocks of each other. The ghost frequented the Old Town Bar. Booth must have strolled past it many times. Funny I never realized that when writing the story. Funny that the man in the story might be Booth. Just never thought of it before, which leads me to believe that most good stories write themselves.

Outside my window are waves of night, pale and golden, riding on updrafts. They carry insects, dreams, ghosts, debris, soot, and ashes. This building is 100 years old. When I moved into my apartment, there were red light bulbs in the ceiling fixture -- remnants of the 1960s? a hooker's calling card? Changed them right away, changed the lock, cleaned the place, never saw a ghost here. I have to hang around the Old Town Bar for that.

Ghosts of the Bridewell

Memorial Day will soon be here. In preparation for a tour, I strolled through Lower Manhattan and wondered about the ghosts that are waiting for their turn to enjoy a summer night. Perhaps they will rise up from the Bridewell, which was used by the British from 1776-1783 to house their American prisoners of war. Perhaps those men fared a little better than the thousands who died on the prison ships. Perhaps not. But certainly their ghosts must be yearning for a nod, a good word, a crust of bread or sip of water on a hot day.

Here is part of the footprint of the Bridewell traced in City Hall Park:

Photo by Maria A. Dering

And here is part of the footprint of the northern wall:

Photo by Maria A. Dering

I have walked by this spot hundreds of times but rarely stopped to think about the prison. It all seems to far away as I look at the green, growing park. I wonder what I'd see if I went back at sunset?

The Door Plate

One morning, the door number had been polished and replaced, though I heard no one working in the hall. Perhaps someone else passed this way on the stairs,

leaving a crooked calling card.

What Remains

I took some photographs this afternoon of the night watchman's route. He would have walked down the cast iron staircase

(underneath it looks like this)

brushing the top of the banister in the half-darkness.

Perhaps he would have turned up the gas jet that sat in this fixture

and clocked in at the box on the landing.

When I took a picture of where the box had been, I caught this instead:

I checked the flash. I focused and re-focused, zoomed in and out.

Is someone still looking after us in the dark?

What Has Vanished

Our building is 100 years old this year. Much has remained the same but the night watchman is gone.

When I moved here in 1978, his ghost was still on duty. On our landing was the call box where he checked in. The heavy brass key turned and clunked as he logged his time. Next he turned off the gas jet on the second floor landing. He straightened the air raid shelter sign when he remembered. He walked down to the first floor, then the basement, making sure everything was secure.

Sometime in the mid 1980s, the ghost was gone. The gas jet was clipped off and capped. The call box was removed, and the banister shaved clean. The chain that held the key was gone. Some job security!

Pale Night

At 8 p.m., the snow started falling again. By 10 p.m., it was thick and heavy, coating the skylights on the roof below. At 1 a.m., I fell asleep, heavy and tired, and happy that I wouldn't wake up until it was light again.

At 2 a.m., the girl stormed into the apartment above us, slammed the heavy metal door. Screamed at the top of her lungs: "I can't believe you would do this to me! Who do you think you are!" No one answered back. She kept it up, louder and longer. I opened the door to our apartment, wondering if anyone else could hear her in the hall. The sound was muted, thanks to the brick and cement walls of our 1911 building.

Back and forth, clicking her heels she went, faster and louder. Into the bathroom -- more screaming. No carpets up there. Every now and then, I heard a low murmur from the man who is the tenant. No words, just a low sound. On she went until about 4:30. Then a metallic, loud, hard thud against the floor, just above our bed. Waiting for the next salvo. Quiet.

Around 10 a.m., the floor boards creaked. I was convinced there would be drops of blood seeping through the ceiling -- but, no, of course not. Not a sound all day. Not a sound now, 6 p.m. Tonight I have to get some sleep.

Darker than the Dark

As we approach the new year, I wonder where this ghost will ring in 2011.

Dark of winter, no lights on yet. The librarian wanders in, coffee in hand, and places his backpack on the wide wooden bench. Still early, very early -- had to leave home at 5:30 because of the storm clean up. No one else in yet and he is happy. Enough time to drink that nice hot coffee. He walks up to the circulation desk, sipping carefully, turning on the computer. The blue light glows; early morning creeps in.

Thinking about winter, cold, life, the librarian turns his head to catch a ray of sunlight. It bounces off against the back wall, near the globe, and in the weak white beam he sees a shape darker than the shadows in the unlit room, darker than the back wall. The shape moves toward the spiral staircase, pauses, continues. An optical illusion, says the librarian to himself, but looks again. The shape remains, deciding where to go.

It flutters past the portrait of Mrs. Van Dam Schuyler Stuyvesant. It stops near an old leather elephant perched on a card catalogue. It slides up the trunk and sits on the back. Hovering, hovering, now fading, now brightening, now darker in the shadows. Quietly, the librarian takes a step toward the back wall. The shape freezes. The elephant waits. A long, soft whoosh floats through the room, circling the walls, leaving through the glazed window. A child cries. The sun is up. The old elephant waits.