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Visitations
I was talking to myself first and then later to my neighbor and crack consultant regarding things Rocheblave. The first conversation was a self loathing exercise meant to get to the bottom of things and the second conversation was part play acting, part truth by way of absurdity.
"Goofy boy seeing ghosts. Stupid sumbitch."
"l'm just reporting what I saw."
"A ghost?"
"Seems crazy I agree but either way the audience wins. Ghost stories are always fun or if not that then watching the step by step of a man losing his mind could be good too, that is, I mean, entertainment-wise. Reality-wise it wouldn't be fun or funny, it would be mostly tiresome. 'The day he saw the ghost in broad daylight would be a summary early in the chronology of things and later the summaries might read like--The day he started his church, and The day he recruited his first parishoner.'"
My neighbor said, "looks like a compound over here." The new six foot chain link fence does lend an institutional air to the project but whatayagonnado? Some securing of property within budget must occur.
"Yes," I said, I'm thinking of starting a church, how'd you like to join? May I offer some Kool-aid?"
"I should get some of that you're smoking."
"I am sober of mind and the body is free of foreign intoxicants."
"So you say."
"Doubt not the pastor of your new church but embrace his ideology with all your heart and let loose the purse strings into his coffers, for there is much need here in this my new church."
My neighbor pulled his pants legs up and walked about tippy toe.
Later
"But seriously," and then I prefaced and qualified the hell out of what I was trying to say as is my custom, "...and you know it's always nothing, just a shadow, or a moving reflection caused by a distant passing car or..."
"It's not always nothing," my neighbor said.
He's probably just being supportive until I give up the ice cold budweiser he asked for, is what I think at the time but go on to tell him "...anyway, I'm sitting there in the back and I have this sensation that someone is at the front door so I do what I do which is lean my head down low, I'm sitting on a bucket you see, and look under the house to spy legs or feet out front but what I see instead is a face, not black or white but more red, or just a white person with all the blood rushing to his or her head, It was hard to tell the sex of it, looking at me looking at it, both of us more or less with our heads upside down. We stared at each other like that for several moments until I decided to get up and rush the sixty feet to find, well, nothing, of course. There was no one there, and the front door was firmly shut. But not locked. I felt certain that if a person had existed they were now in the house, because it would have been hard to disappear, completely, if they had just run off when I got up. So I push the door open hard with a breezy but nervous 'hello,' and then enter the premises of a place temporarily not my home. I pick up a hammer and the heart is pounding away as I look in cubbly holes and behind sheets of plywood leaning against the wall. I get to the last possible hiding place which of course now is a place where all my cumulative fear can focus and I start hissing, or some bizarre emission of sound, maybe a little fricative thrown in, and I have to admit I was almost scaring myself, but also psyching up to bury a hammer into the ephemeral flesh of the intruder. I honestly never thought of the presence as flesh and blood. Anyway, I found nothing or no one in the house."
"What are you gonna do."
"Nothing."
My neighbor then told me about visitors from beyond over at his house and how it pisses him off and he wants to get a BB gun to scare them away. I offered that I was not so sure about the efficacy of BB guns for scaring ghosts but..."it's such an unknown area of study..." "...except for Ghostbusters," he cut in, ..." but you know, yeah, maybe a BB pistol would be good."
My neighbor and I might not know exactly where the other is coming from on any given issue but he plays along with me as well as anyone will so I have to give him his props for that, though I'm pretty sure we were both mostly serious for awhile during our ghost discussion.
"...and sometimes I look over here at night from across the street and see this guy standing here like this..." and he made his arms extend outward, like a limp crucifixion, with fingers toward the ground.