“I see. It is a spirit energy, a desire energy. Am I on the stage with you?” said the ghost.

“Yes. This is where we are talking. I write as if I am writing from the grave. Liberating. It’s part comedy and tragedy. Do we feel and cry, think and laugh? The rest is silence. The place is in an emerald city half way between an ocean and mountains and there’s this run down residential house where a woman lives. Her name is Clare. I needed a room and moved in. It was September. Bright sunny day and she was smiling. It was all cosmetic, blind surface stuff. Reality wasn’t apparent at that moment.”

“A play, a story about what, character or place? Take your pick, it’s all connected on various levels of desire, fear, anger, pain and suffering, isn’t it? People live or die with their insecurities,” said the ghost.

“I was blinded by ignorance. She had everything arranged, plastic fake Monet flower prints above a clean fireplace, cut glass, well dusted bookcases, orderly music and regimented kitchen spice jars in color coded formation - what would you call it - compulsive disorder?”

“Perhaps.”

“I accepted a small room with an eastern window. Views of pink and red sunrise, old trees, cut back raspberry bushes, wooden fence, sky. Simple storage space, room for a table and chair.”

“What did you learn? What did you see in your mirror?”

“My reflection was gradual. I asked her about a larger room at the south end with two windows in it.”

“That’s rented to a friend,” she said. “He’s moving in next week.”

“Clare needed someone to talk to and trusted me. Over time I learned she had a lot of baggage. It came out in pieces, a little here and a little there. Over time.”

“I am 32, divorced with 2 boys, 10 and 13. I am a convicted felon. Child abuse. I was convicted of assaulting a neighbor’s child,” Clare said one day.

“Really,” I said. “That’s tragic.”

“Yes,” she said, “then I lost custody of my two boys. They live with their father outside town. He convinced me to not fight the custody case because he wanted the boys. I listened to my stupid lawyer and got nailed for child support to the tune of a grand a month. My ex has a new girlfriend. I hate her. She’s a bitch. I stay away.”

“Did you ever meet her husband?” the ghost said.

“He brought the boys over one day. Clare stood around showing them all her new clothes. They sat there like stones in a river. They were drowning.”

“And her husband?”

“He looked like your average high school drop out, pudgy, soft around the middle. A case for social services. Down and desperate. Resigned to his fate.”

“Did they talk?”

“It was monosyllabic one way dialogue. They sat on Clare’s couch while she pulled clothing out of her closet, modeling the latest in goodwill fashions. It was a courtesy call. They were not the welcome wagon.”

“Did you engage them?”
“I tried, mostly with the boys - small talk, like, ‘what did you have for breakfast?’”

“Pancakes,” the younger one said giving his brother a hard look. “He wouldn’t let me make them the way I wanted.”

“I see,” I said, then what? “I played video games,” the young boy said.”

“Everyone was in shock,” I said to the ghost.

“Look,” said Clare pulling out a purple coat. “Do you like it.”

“I suppose so,” her husband mumbled.

“I got it on sale. Only $60.”

“You got a good deal.”

“They stayed maybe thirty minutes and I turned my hourglass over.”

“Heavy,” the ghost said.

“She has visitation rights, one day a week but she doesn’t care about them. Their birthdays were marked on a plastic refrigerator calendar. The day passed and they disappeared. Erased. Easy come and easy go.”

“Easily erased? It’s not as easy as that, now is it?”

“Of course not. She carries her emotional luggage pain. Her pain body is overweight. There will be surcharges. Problem is she carries the heavy, deep and real loss in her heart. She unleashes her anger on herself and her roommates. She needs medicine. Big medicine. She needs a sweat lodge, a purification ceremony. She needs wings.”

“Ah, wings,” said the ghost. “It appears somewhere in her history maybe the house is the key because it’s like her dream and it belongs to someone else with a history.”

“Yes, this quasi-ownership relegates her to a landlord status. It gives her power. At one time she lived with the owner’s son, Jack. He was a deadbeat and chopped down perfectly good trees in the backyard. He never paid his folks a cent. His family finally threw him out.”

“So, she took it over. Financial troubles?”

“It’s hard for me to get a really good job when you put convicted felon down on the application,” Clare told me.

“What are your options?” I said.

“Stay with the housekeeping job for now, I suppose. Don’t have much choice. I dream of making a business,” she said.

“Yes,” I said, “go with capitalism. Make it grow. Look for a return on your investment. Pay yourself first. How are you going to make a business?”

“Bob and I have a plan.”

“Really?”

“Yes, it’s always been a dream of mine.”

“What happened to her dream?” the ghost asked.

“More like a nightmare. An accident looking for a place to happen. She took up with, Bob, Vietnam veteran, fifty-something. I never met him face to face but she told me about him.”

“He has a tumor in his shoulder and two dogs,” Clare said studying the carpet pile.

“She was an outcast with her eyes downcast. Forecast called for rain. Heavy showers, little chance of clearing. Snow at higher elevations. Written, directed, casting Clare in the femme fatale. She wrote her own dialogue. She had it down and out. She was lucky to get it down. She was beat. Pure,” I said. “She’s the girl. She’s the one.”

“Perfect,” said the ghost. “Where’s the fool?”

“He’s a chain smoker working as a property manager in a section 8 unit downtown. She slept on his couch when she was down and out then she slept with him. She needed someone to take care of - the old father figure need and he fit the bill at that moment.”

“Interesting. Give me substance, specifics.”

“Absolutely. It was a love-hate addiction. Therapists have a word for it, co-dependency. She does his laundry here, increases our utility bill, visits him once a week if he lets her and fixes him dinner. She’s trapped in her spin cycle. He’s told her to get a life, told her to figure it out for herself. He doesn’t want to get involved with her, or I should say only wants to see her when it’s convenient for him. He gets his clothes cleaned, fixes her a meal and screws her brains out. She’s his lap dog. It’s a mutual pain adoration society quick fix. This endless confusion and his lack of commitment really pisses her off and contributes to her deep depressions. I’d suggest she knows it’s a waste of time but it’s all she’s got. She’s chasing an illusion, a projection.”

“It’s one of those heavy deep and real complexes,” said the ghost. “How does she act around you?”

“Oh, she trusts me, you know, she’ll open up when she feels like it, when she feels like talking. She’s a basket case, a fatality without liability insurance. I learned, over time, to keep my questions neutral, didn’t say anything too provocative, too personal, being afraid it would set her off on some angry tangent. I respected trip wires leading to her heart. She’s vulnerable.”

“Serious malfunction of mental, spiritual and physical trembling, eh?”

“Her face is an open book. Unabridged version. Wrinkled in, sad or angry. Comes in, I say, “Hi,” and she mutters under her breath slouching toward her unhappiness. Wearing sadness.”

“I’ve always had a hard time making eye contact,” she told me one day.

“Why?”

“Nobody loves me, nobody seems to care.”

“Where are your parents?”

“In Glenwood Springs, Colorado. They never write.”

“There’s always the phone.”

“Doesn’t work. They won’t speak to me. We lost contact years ago. They love my sister and hate me.”

(An emergency siren screams down the street.)

“She spoke blues lyrics but I knew she didn’t listen to the blues. She lived them. Down deep, way down deep in her field hollers crying for water, crying for love, simple unconditional love, crying for thirty-two years. So, she’d stagger into the house, slam the door, wander past all her carefully arranged memorabilia with her neck bent over like some old decrepit bag lady, some down and out homeless soul and she’d let go.”

“I hate my job,” she ranted. She worked as a part-time housekeeper at a retirement home. “My supervisor keeps giving me shit. I hate the old people because they are losing their minds and report me for stuff I never did. It looks bad on my record. They leave rotten food in their rooms. It makes me sick.”

“She really wanted to get fired,” I said. “She had no benefits, hated herself and was looking for excuses. She wanted to major in cleaning. She was really good with a vacuum. She knew how that worked. She moved that thing with a quiet furious determination. When she became angry around the house she cleaned. Unwrapped the chord, strung it out and turned on her sucking machine. When it came to people and the rest of her life, well, forget it.”

“Really alone?” said the ghost.

“Yes, a singularity. It became a pattern. She’d slouch around feeling sorry for herself, wander into the kitchen, grab cookies and sit at the dining room table hunched over like a beggar dribbling crumbs staring out the window into the back yard. If it wasn’t cookies, it was a well defined very clean plastic box of small color coded chocolate candies with a tight lid. Abject misery.”

“Misery loves itself,” the ghost said. “The snake eats it’s tail.”

“Ain’t that the truth. She loved to lie around on the sofa all afternoon into night’s comforting dark curled in a fetal position, especially after she lost her job along her long lonely road of a life, with no friends, waiting for Bob to call on her cell. Her cells were radically disturbed.”

”Yeah,” she said one day when we were out back looking at the sagging broken brown fence, rough rock path, and dying trees, “this is my house. Someday I’m going to buy this place.”

“The hard truth was she would never have enough capital to buy it in a depressed market and she was a depressed unit. She would never see this hard truth. Her mirror needed cleaning. An overhaul.

“The 34th Avenue place sat in what they called the lowlands, prone to flooding, an older 1950’s ranch tract home with an ancient heater, crap Scandinavian wood paneling, small rooms, tight kitchen, peeling blue paint on the trim and porch. You could see the rich owners weren’t sinking another dime into the place. I didn’t have the heart to tell Clare she was dreaming with her eyes open. It was her consolation, her illusion.”

“Sounds like dying is a living art form.”

“She was all process and no product. There were two trees in large black plastic pots on the porch.

“What about these?” I asked Clare one afternoon.

“I hate them,” she snapped.

“Her short red hair, fueled by her inner anger was on fire. I remembered the future. Why?”

“Because Jack gave them to me. Jack lived here with me. He is the son of the owner. He never paid rent and allowed a lot of strange people to live here. They ran up huge gas and water bills. He gave one of these stupid scrawny trees to me.”

“And the other one?” I asked.

“My sons gave me the other one. I want them to die. I hate them. I want to take them far away, dump all the soil out and chop them up. I want them off the property!”

“I just sat silent, listening - waiting for her to grab a sharp instrument and start hacking at the poor trees before she stabbed her heart and watered the trees with her blood, but that didn’t happen and we looked at scrawny brown branches with some buds showing through - it was September and the soil was dry. Indian summer.

“After I moved in and watered them religiously they grew. Green shoots blasted out slowly but surely and new fresh leaves at the base of one tree showed life. I took care of them. She never said anything more about them. I imagine they’re dead now.”

“Maybe the roots are alive,” the ghost said. “Maybe, because being a man she figures you have a tool box and can fix her life. Isn’t that what guys do, run around with their tool box screaming ‘I can fix it!’ when a woman, their woman, any woman comes to them with a problem? When all they want is someone to listen.”

“True. My tool box is down for maintenance. Later, before I wandered away to live in peaceful exile, I was sitting outside with Frank, the roommate with legal problems and his premonition of suicide watching leaves dance free when he said, “you know, she always told me, Sam kept them alive, I wanted them to die but he wouldn’t let them. That really made me mad.”

“Yeah, well as you know she’s mad about a lot of things,” I said.

“Yes,” Frank said, “she is one pissed off woman. It’s all about her. Always has been.”

“The house and yard needed work. She needed work. She needed a serious attitude adjustment,” I said to the ghost.

“Was she accused of being guilty? Did she dream her death?” asked the ghost.

“She was accused of guilt. She pleaded innocent. She was a willing victim. She loved that role, played it well shifting from passive aggressive to a casualty on the fifth floor suicide watch. Poor sorry me.”

“And her death? Her choices and consequences?” said the ghost.

“It remains to be seen where she will take it.”