An Honest Ghost by Rick Whitaker

that really mattered.
    We are drinking iced mint tea slightly flavored with absinthe. Intellectually we were unprepared—and I was perhaps less prepared than anyone—to come to grips with the tasks that confronted us. The tasks would be too complex.
    How to avoid suicide? Opting out of the system may have been one solution, like a brilliant friend of mine who’d suddenly decided, after a motorbike accident, to give up his social life, as though his head had cleared during his convalescence and he’d suddenly, joyfully, been set free, veering away from people forever, just as he’d skidded euphorically off the road, and he never looked back. Desire is the enemy of the ego, not its expression. It is a characteristic of our species, in evolutionary terms, that we are a species in despair, for a number of reasons. “Forget it, Joe. Let’s discuss you.” But that didn’t happen.
    “Efen if zey offered me millions, I voult not say von vort! Adultery’s more fun,” he said with attempted lightness. “So David tells me. May we now be permitted to enter slightly into this difficult and dark region?” Joe was not given to subtle maneuvering such as this, but who knows? This the way to the museyroom. It was already midnight. Full moon sends rapid clouds dashing past a cold sky. I wanted to go to sleep for ever. I groaned and closed my eyes to try to shut out my tormentor, but Joe was never one to give up easily. “I’ve got something to tell you, Dad. Love amazes, but it does not surprise. The most precious thing in life is its uncertainty.”
    “Not for long,” I said.
    Joe listed one reason. A dissatisfied mind, whatever else it may miss, is rarely in want of reasons; they bloom as thick as buttercups in June. He wished he had never learned who his father was. “So is this really Christmas?” he thought.
    “I’ve had my share of uncertainty and you cannot blame me if I do not want to see the worst side of it reproduced in you.” I don’t know whether I succeed in expressing myself, but I know that nothing else expresses me. “No, freedom is better! I think all theories are suspect, that the finest principles may have to be modified, or may even be pulverized by the demands of life, and that one must find, therefore, one’s own moral center and move through the world hoping that this center will guide one aright. I took my last ride on a motorcycle, believe me. Finally, in all your preparations, begin as you mean to go on.”
    “Oui, oui, c’est ça, c’est magnifique!” He chewed, and said: “I can’t remember what I wanted to say, but I know it was something malicious.”
    Nothing is easy until you do it every day.
    “Quietly, my son,” I whisper.
    At eighteen minutes to four we heard the rustle of David’s wings. “I am leaving you,” he said. “You must find someone else.”
    Nonsense. Non c’è peggior sordo di chi non vuol sentire. No one is so deaf as he who will not hear.
    I laughed in a certain way, because I could not speak. He was gone. There remains only the one consolation that nobody knows where he is.
    Will our shame never end?
    It was all offensive, but I found myself the most offensive of all.

31.
    But after all, the winter did end. The city and its parks became leafy, billowing green even while morning frost clung to the windows. On one of the handful of nights I’ve ventured out and away from the typewriter in the weeks of writing this book, I strolled through my favorite haunts in Central Park and met up with a fine, sensitive man who was into talking, as I was. The mating of minds is, surely, quite as fascinating a relationship as the mating of the sexes, yet how little attention novelists have paid to it. With fallen branches, as dry and brittle as chalk, and some dead leaves gathered from the crevices, I made us a bedding, where we half reclined and talked. The chords geese behind us honked tingled like seltzer. Of all the heavenly bodies only the moon, hanging almost full