Ghost stories
July 3rd, 2009 | by Ben Hoare |There’s a moving scene in Justin Cronin’s Mary and O’Neil. O’Neil has just witnessed the birth of his first child. Alone in the hospital in the middle of the night, he makes calls to his relatives. Then he remembers his parents:
His parents have been dead for sixteen years, but he still remembers their telephone number, and without thinking he dials it, surprised to be doing it, and by the way it feels and sounds: a sequence of bright tones that resonates inside him like an echo on a canyon wall, as strange and familiar as his own heartbeat. O’Neil intends to listen to the phone ring a couple of times and then hang up, but thern there is a click on the line.
“Hello?” It is a woman’s voice, groggy with sleep. “Honey?”
“I’m sorry,” O’Neil says. He thinks at first she is an older woman, then that she is young, then neither; old or young, he doesn’t know. “I didn’t mean–”
“Honey? What time is it?” He hears the woman turn over, and then the scratch of the alarm clock on her bedsie table as she pulls it toward her. “Is it midnight?” she asks. “Where are you?”
For a moment O’Neil does not answer. The phone is slick in his damp hand. “It’s late,” he says finally. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have woken you.”
The woman’s breathing in the receiver is deep and even, like sighing, and O’Neil thinks she may have fallen back asleep.
“Mmmm. I was having the strangest dream. Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” O’Neil says. He hesitates, then speaks again. “I think everything’s working out just the way I wanted it.”
“That’s nice to hear. It’s nice when everything works out like that.” The receiver rustles against her face as she pulls the covers close. “Honey? You sound … I don’t know. Far away.”
“I’m really okay,” O’Neil says. “A little tired. It’s been quite a day. I have some news too.”
“I know,” the woman says sleepily. “You love me.”
The answer is easy to give. “I do. Of course I do.”
I wish you were here, honey. Let everybody else handle things for a while. Can you? Just come home.”
“I will,” O’Neil says. “As soon as everything’s taken care of here, I’ll come straight home.”
“Come home, my darling. Say it: I’m coming home.”
“I’m coming home.”
“And you miss me.”
O’Neil thinks of his parents, gone so long, taken from him when he was just a boy in college, standing at the door with his key in his hand. “Yes, I miss you. It’s awful, missing you.”
“I miss you too,” the woman says, and then - so gently O’Neil doesn’t realize what has happened - she hangs up the phone.
The scene has a ghostly quality. It takes place in the middle of the night, the phone number is “strange and familiar”, and the woman is outside of time, neither old nor young - or perhaps both. O’Neil sounds far away, and the woman has just awoken from a strange dream.
O’Neil and the woman are not really talking to each other - they each use the other’s words to signify something that matters to them. But it seems important that neither of them denies the identity the other has imposed on them. O’Neil feels that he can say the words the woman presses him to say - it doesn’t matter that he is not the person she thinks he is.
And yet, there is another way of reading this passage - another interpretation, in which the woman is O’Neil’s mother, and both speakers’ words can be taken at face value. The scene gets its ghostly nature, in part, from the fact that this possibility is never entirely overruled.
Perhaps there is also something here about the inevitable distance involved in communication - particularly over the telephone, at midnight, when we are half-asleep. O’Neil never gets to tell his important news, because the woman has something else in mind. Perhaps there is a sense in which we always misinterpret one another’s words - in which there is always a more significant meaning, for the listener, than what was intended.
Related posts:
Sorry, comments for this entry are closed at this time.