Lost Among the Stars Read online

  He was right, of course, and I could only be grateful that he had undone my long solo streak.

  What brought Pim and me to our unfortunate interregnum, however, was a certain insufferable sense of superiority on his part, a kind of bossiness bred from his vaster experience.

  He began to contradict my choices, and insist on his. Always gently, I admit, but with lots of covert forcefulness. The ghosts I wanted to work with, the humans I picked for them—none seemed optimal, according to Pim. He always knew better, and tried to force my hand, quietly arguing that his choices were superior. And maybe they were—but they weren’t mine!

  After several months operating together, during which I found myself deferring more and more to Pim, chafing more and more, getting more and more irate, I eventually exploded. Argument, accusations, and a vow on my part not to see him until I had had time to reconsider our relationship and how it might work.

  A decisive moment arriving now, as Hannah and I entered the Starbucks on that April Friday afternoon.

  Pim in his invariant uniform, jeans, boots and jacket, smiling broadly. Was his face a trifle beefy? Did he privilege his own undeniable talents too much? I didn’t care. All I wanted to do was squeeze him and be with him and chase ghosts together.

  “Hello, Hannah,” said Pim in his old-fashioned manner of addressing the elderly first, be they alive or dead.

  Hannah stopped short. “Oh, glory! What are you doing here?”

  “Hannah, don’t be frightened. I should have mentioned that Pim would be helping us. He’s a friend.”

  The ghost sank down into a seat and fanned her face, plump insubstantial ectoplasmic hand stirring up only the ghost of a breeze. “Oh, glory!”

  I sat at the table too. “So, you’re looking good.”

  “You also, Ilona. I have missed you.”

  “Hell, I bet you say that to every living girl.”

  Pim looked disconcerted for a moment, one of the rare instances I had ever seen him nonplussed.

  “Now that you’ve met Hannah, any candidates on your radar?”

  “Not yet. Let us relax. I am sure someone will appear.”

  “Want something to drink?”

  “No, thank you, I’ve had several cups while waiting.”

  Returning with my Strawberries & Crème Frappuccino, I launched into a line of semi-nervous chatter, bringing Pim up to date on my life without him during the past month. He listened politely, but his mind seemed elsewhere. And then he said, simply, “Over there.”

  I glanced in the direction his gaze indicated and saw a middle-aged guy I pegged as a doctor on his day off. Nice, upright, comfortable.

  “For Hannah?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m not getting the vibe.”

  “Trust me. Please.”

  Pim’s big blue eyes did the trick. “Okay. But I reserve the right to pull Hannah back if I disagree.”

  “Of course.”

  When Respectable Doc got up to leave, the three of us followed circumspectly.

  The client indeed seemed to have no pressing duties to attend to, leading us in a sauntering fashion up and down the neighborhood, including an extensive survey of what I could swear was every single exhibit at the Met. Doc choose to eat alone in the Museum restaurant, and I grabbed a sandwich, while Pim claimed not to be hungry.

  “I focus only on the client, not myself, during the matchmaking.”

  “Well, excuse me for living!”

  Evening joined us, and we found ourselves at an unlikely place: the departure platform of the Aerial Tramway to Roosevelt Island.

  Respectable Doc swiped through the entrance, and Pim and I chose to follow. We would have to ride the same gondola as the client, or risk losing him. Awkwardly close quarters, but I could not see that we had been “made.” And I certainly did not want to abandon the hunt after all the hours invested, before being certain that Doc was or wasn’t right for Hannah.

  “What an out-of-the-way place to live,” I whispered to Pim while we were waiting to board.

  “But quiet and peaceful, I think.”

  Once the gondola was in motion, riding its catenary to the empurpled heavens, I was treated to the beautiful illuminated cityscape, below and on all sides, like some bejeweled Little Nemo wonderland. This was one of those too-infrequent times when I was struck anew by just how exotic and ornate and mysterious the city could be.

  Once all the passengers were discharged on the island, our client turned south, with us hanging discreetly back just far enough.

  “I thought most of the residential stuff was north of here,” I whispered.

  Pim said nothing, hot on the chase, leaving me to hurry up and follow, with Hannah drifting along.

  A road ran down the western shore of Roosevelt Island, and Respectable Doc followed it.

  We came to a sprawling, lighted, busy facility that proclaimed itself the Goldwater Memorial Hospital. Aha, I thought, that’s where he headed! Pulling a night shift.

  But no. Our client passed it and kept going.

  Illumination became non-existent. No one in the world existed except Respectable Doc and us. The pavement felt broken and gritty underfoot. I stumbled once, and Pim caught me. I could see a few of the brighter stars overhead, a Manhattan rarity. Across the neon-streaked river, the United Nations reared like a postmodern sphinx. A relative hush prevailed.

  We came now to a long stretch of weed-fringed chain-link fence on the inland border of the deserted road. Massive shattered structures hulked inside.

  My whisper emerged hoarse and clotted. “I know this place. I read about it once in the Times. The ruins of the old Smallpox Hospital …”

  Pim said nothing, but just steered me on.

  Respectable Doc lifted aside a loose portion of fencing with knowing ease and entered the grounds of the Renwick Ruins.

  I had to follow.

  It was my job.

  And Pim would not let me go.

  Through brick-strewn weedy wasteland, and into the amorphous gullet defined by rearing gap-toothed, empty-eyed walls.

  The dark courtyard, lit only by urban light pollution, was full of shadowy, waiting people, a crowd into which Respectable Doc merged unconcernedly.

  Not people, I realized, but ghosts. Scores of ghosts, of all sizes and types, shifting and milling silently like a field of grain under the wind.

  Hannah joined them too. Pim and I stopped.

  “Ilona, would you say hello to my people?”

  I, who had easily conversed one-on-one with spirits for the past five years, found myself silent at this mute massed congregation, my mouth dry as gravedust.

  “I—I—What are you, Pim?”

  “I am simply the oldest ghost here, Ilona. Maybe something of a leader by virtue of my age and experience, if you will. I sailed with Henry Hudson; I died when the settlement was only part of Nieuw Nederland. Now I help my younger brethren. My human tether and support is the sadness of the whole city.”

  “But you—you’re solid! You’re real!”

  “Some ghosts are. There is much you don’t know, Ilona. That’s why I was trying to protect you.”

  “Oh my god! We had sex! Am I gonna have a ghost baby?”

  “I do not believe so, Ilona.”

  That was some relief anyhow. “What do you intend to do with me?”

  “Nothing, Ilona. Nothing but what you wish. I just had to show you the truth of my life—my afterlife—if we were to continue on together.”

  I considered my startling new reality for a moment, before asking, “Are you hooked up with some human?”

  “No, Ilona, it is as I said. The whole city is my ally.”

  With both hands I gripped Pim’s bicep through his leather jacket. “Well, you’re hooked up now.”

  And then, no longer ghostless, I followed him home.

  The kindness and generosity of my Italian friends cannot be overstated. As a fellow who shares their ethnicity, I try to embody their giant hearts as
well in my own life. Thanks to one of my Italian editors, Giuseppe Granieri, who went to work for the government tourist agency APT Basilicata, I was endowed with a trip to the astonishing city of Matera, and commissioned to put my experiences into fictional form, the result to serve as a free “brochure” and inducement for other tourists to visit. Over the span of some twelve days, I absorbed the ancient aura of the city and the living presence of its friendly current inhabitants, and meditated on just what kind of narrative could encompass several thousand years of history. I think I hit on a good framework in this novella. But my question is, did I make the experiences of my hero too scary? I just hope I did not frighten visitors away from this World Heritage metropolis of antiquity and contemporary beauty.

  Chasing the Queen of Sassi

  As Rupert Geier fought valiantly for his life, seeking to stave off his death at the hands of a malign, jealous and brutal creature from legend, who sought to throttle and drown Rupert in the warm seas of the Mesozoic, some two hundred million years before Rupert’s birth, he wondered blindly, not for the first time, if falling in love with Daeira Bruno, the Queen of Sassi, had not been a most dangerous and wayward venture of his heart, however ineluctable and fated their time-tossed romance still appeared, even in the throes of his personal extinction.

  * * *

  Jessica had always been the sensible one. An engineer with a fine-honed sense of order and practicality that extended into her domestic routines, she worked for Observa-DOME, a Mississippi-based firm that specialized in constructing and installing the cunningly automated observatory domes with their clever mechanisms that allowed telescopes to peer slitwise through their sturdy turning roofs. Between Rupert and Jessica, she had earned the lion’s share of their income, allowing the maintenance of a modest yet spacious and gracious home in Jackson, Mississippi, with a large attached studio for Rupert’s work.

  After fifteen years of marriage, Rupert and his wife loved each other as only high-school sweethearts could, with a kind of easy and established intimacy which, while it seldom these days approached fever, always simmered at a comfortable heat.

  Life had seemed unchangeably solid and fine, rich and rewarding and inviolable, a banquet of small yet treasured pleasures, extending infinitely to some dim horizon—until just two years ago.

  Jessica had undertaken an assignment to one of Observa-DOME’s customers, the La Silla Observatory in Chile, to effect repairs in the dome’s inexplicably balky motors. Rupert had almost accompanied her. Given the nature of his work, he could pretty much drop his tools and go with her any time he wished, and had in fact been to many places around the globe with her. But this time he had had a commission, a rare honor for him, a piece for the Jackson–Evers International Airport. There was a deadline for the unveiling, his sculpture would be seen daily by thousands, and he wanted to do his best work. So he had stayed behind.

  The story of Jessica’s death had reached him in almost fairy-tale form. A dedicated and experienced hiker, she had set out after quitting work early one day to explore the adjacent Atacama Desert, and simply never returned. The deadly terrain, analogous to Mars in its parched and treacherous inhospitability, had simply swallowed her up. Search parties failed to find even her body for burial back home. Instead, an empty casket had held center place at a broadly attended, truly mournful wake, and been interred with what Rupert regarded as foolish ceremony in her family’s plot several states distant from the South.

  In the following days, Rupert had been contacted by an insurance company, with a very tangible reminder of Jessica’s practical nature. The insurance man bore a check for half a million dollars. Cudgeling his brain, a disbelieving Rupert summoned up vague memories of signing a joint policy a decade or more ago, but realized he had never thought once about it since. Jessica handled all the bills and payments in their domestic economy, and had faithfully kept the premiums current on this final legacy.

  Bereft of Jessica, their lovely home now seemed haunted and alien, and Rupert couldn’t stand to live there anymore. He resigned the airport commission, gave away or sold all his extant sculptures, including the unfinished one, to have been called “Homewending,” whose yet-untraced lineaments with their mortal associations he could not bear to contemplate, and then put the house on the market. Within a few weeks, his bank account had been increased by another two hundred thousand dollars. (Jessica had insisted on paying off their mortgage as fast as possible, and the title to the house was clear.)

  Rupert bid farewell to the house and all its contents with a welter of warring emotions. His material possessions now fit into a couple of suitcases. But of course, there was one token he would never surrender. Jessica had crafted it for him herself, using tools at her workplace. A small circular medallion, the piece was inscribed with a triangle whose vertices touched the circumference of the outer circle. Within the triangle was a square, and within that another circle. Rupert’s and Jessica’s names were engraved, along with their wedding date.

  “It’s made out of a titanium alloy, and should last forever. Those are the symbols of the four elements—all of ancient creation. That’s what we have together.”

  Rupert wore the coin on a leather thong around his neck, generally under his shirt. He touched it through the fabric now, and shed a few tardy tears.

  Healthy, only thirty-six years old, his talent, whatever its objective magnitude, in sad abeyance but theoretically intact, with three-quarters of a million dollars to his name, Rupert felt only like dying. But enervated and listless and vacant-souled as he now felt, some small portion of his heart still told him that someday he would recover his joie de vivre, and that to throw in the towel on life now would be to dishonor Jessica’s love and memory.

  He resolved to travel. Travel was commonly regarded as a sovereign, perspective-restoring balm, wasn’t it? Although Rupert found the notion of any amelioration of his despair hard to credit. Still, there were places he had always wanted to see. And a few to revisit, where he and Jessica had once been happy.

  One of the latter venues was Matera, Italy.

  Jessica had helped with the installation of a dome not far from the city, at the facility of the Agenzia Spaziale Italiana. While Jessica worked, Rupert had been chaperoned around the Basilicata region not by a professional guide but by the unemployed nephew of one of the scientists, a young guy whose idea of the kind of things an American would like to see aligned more with Jersey Shore than Masterpiece Theater. Unprotesting but against his will, Rupert had seen a couple of the region’s larger cities, with an emphasis on bars, cafes, department stores and the rare disco, but nothing of the smaller towns. “Too boring!” said the kid. Nights had been taken up with socializing at the homes of the friendly staff of the ASI.

  And so Rupert had gotten only tantalizing glimpses of a strange, unique city plastered across a hill, looming mirage-like across the broad plateau known as the Murgia, eighty thousand hectares of rich yet stark parkland. (The ASI was situated just on the border of the reserve.) Matera loomed alluringly an apparition resembling some warm-colored sandy ziggurat, an ancient, almost organic, eccentric confection seemingly assembled by the individual hand of some Cyclopean sculptor, Rupert’s tutelary deity. Rupert flashed on the Tibetan Potala Palace as its nearest counterpart. But the conurbation was not merely plunked down, however esthetically, atop its eminence like so many beautiful Italian hill towns, but emergent from the earth at many levels, integrated into the hillside, extruded apparently by sheer desire for existence from the stony bosom of the fecund land, like a myriad-knuckled fist punched upward out of the soil.

  And when he arrived at Matera, some six months after Jessica’s death, he found himself miraculously ready to be amazed, and, even more consequentially, to call the place his new home.

  * * *

  After living in Matera for some eighteen months, Rupert had accumulated a list of favorite places to visit and revisit, along with an even longer list of sights still unseen. From the latter set of
destinations, the Neolithic remains in the Parco della Murgia Materana beckoned. So one hot July day, when even the relatively cool windowless space of his custom-designed laboratorio seemed stifling, he laid down his chisel and hammer, walked across town to where his toylike Fiat 500 was parked, and motored out to the park.

  Rich in flora and fauna in a subtle, minimalist, understated fashion, the rolling, craggy plateau, on a slightly higher elevation than remote yet visible Matera, was a study in greys and pastel greens, all low bushes full of numerous species of birds, with only an occasional scrawny tree. Possessing a commanding view of the surrounding countryside, good water sources, and a cooler climate in the hot months, it had naturally attracted many inhabitants over the millennia. Copious historical ruins dotted the park, fragments of arches and walls, and of course the omnipresent architecturally integrated caves that were a signature of the region. But the most ancient traces were harder to spot. But some help from the kindly staff at the visitors’ center—Rupert’s Italian-language skills, while improved and daily improving, were still laughably rudimentary—got him to the site.

  A double ring of small chalky boulders, mostly submerged, encircled paired gaping holes leading down to matched burial chambers, long emptied by looters of their contents. A narrow grassy moat and more stones, only partially excavated as yet, ran in a figure eight or infinity pattern to demarcate the outline of a sizable village and livestock pen.

  Rupert stood in contemplation of the chthonic traces of generations long dead. How must it have felt, living out here on the lonely plain, only the most rudimentary technology of stone and leather, bone and clay, fur and thatch to shield one from nature and its assaults? The mysterious stars by night, a thousand gradations of weather, the arc of the seasons, bringing the solstice sun into alignment with the tomb mouths, year after year after year—

  A party of noisy tourists came and went, leaving Rupert alone again. The friendly but effusive Lucanian sun pulsed heavily down. On impulse, Rupert, in shorts, got down at the graveled mouth of the chambers, grit biting palms and knees. Enough light penetrated to allow him to see their empty innermost reaches, actually quite tiny and claustrophobia-inducing. Fusty odors wafted out. Suddenly shivering, he skipped crawling inside. Once back on his feet, he made to leave.