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To Marcy Jarvis's previous pieceDeath
I met him at the Halloween Boogie, or so I like to tell it. Truth is, I did see the costumed figure of Death that it turns out he was inhabiting that evening, even spoke to it, notice I don't say him -- there is a reason for that. Did I mention he was playing the fiddle? Dance Macabre was the tune, though I didn't learn that, along with his true identity, until a while later. To say I met him on Halloween, that's stretching it a bit; I tried to, but he was silent, refusing to reveal himself to me. You'd think that would've tipped me off right there. Here he's got this dazzled coed, decked out as a bag of laundry, chasing him down the hallway in a Clorox bottle headdress, practically begging him to unmask for her. As if I haven't had enough experience with enigmatic types, make that bad experience. Beneath the handsculpted papier mache face of bone and gristle, he was swathed in black, with only the skeletal remains of anemic fingers emerging through the dark drape as he deftly whipped his violin into a frenzy, transforming the dorm hallways into gothic corridors .
The next day at lunch, a bunch of us pulled up another huge round oak table into a figure eight. We affectionately called this "docking"; it was good for accommodating big, raucous groups in the dining hall, but always had the effect of pinning two unlucky diners into an awkward spot where lunch trays rode uneasily over the divide, a surface netherland. We enthusiastically critiqued last night's festivities.
"Yeah, that's Ivan," David offered, once I launched into my description of Death. "I recognized him from my mask making workshop."
That piqued my interest. Ivan was the most withdrawn guy in the dorm, an engineering student with a penchant for the Gothic. He never "docked" with anyone - always ate alone - a face as white as milk fed veal on grocer's ice. Still, I'd always thought he was cute, just unapproachable.
"What a great costume that was," I said, secretly thrilled at the revelation of his identity.
"He's a weirdo," Shirl warned, "He lives way up in the Tower, across the hall from that other weirdo, Ellie, you know? The one who orders toads and left a batch in the mail room all weekend so they all dried up overnight in the cardboard box they were shipped in and died. Whew, what a stink!" Shirl was the student mailroom matron - she’d had the honors of opening up that morning.
"Oh my God! That reminds me of the time I was about three. I packed hundreds of newly de-tailed toads from our pond into a Mason caning jar, smothering them to death," I recalled with a shock. "At any rate, the fact that he lives across the hall from someone does not alone qualify him as a weirdo." Everyone here was weird; it’s a residential college for the fine and performing arts, nestled away within the confines of castle. But even weirdos have a hierarchy of weirdness.
"What does she order toads for anyway?" David wanted to know.
"I don't know, she's pre-vet or something," Shirl turned back to me, adding, "For all we know, she’s feeding him haggis."
"What's haggis?" David wanted to know.
"Standard witch fare. Minced sheep guts, you know, boiled up with spices, oatmeal and stuff."
"Jesus! What an idea, Shirl! I think I'd be more worried if he lived across the hall from you."
If Shirl thought she was quelling my interest, she was only cementing it further. Sure the Tower was kind of creepy. Last year, a girl had been found dead in the bathroom up there from a cyanide milkshake. The EMT almost made the fatal mistake of trying to revive her with mouth to mouth before noticing the purple stain on her lips. Turns out a moment’s contact would have been lethal. Tower people used to be considered the cool ones but now everyone avoided the Tower. As for Ellie, with her acorn colored tresses spanning the length of an elegant spine and flicking the waistline of velvet, gypsy skirts and multicolored eyes flecked golden, like antique millefleure paperweights - I was fascinated by her. If Ivan was in any way wrapped up with her, it only heightened his appeal.
In the month that followed, I bided my time carefully. I glimpsed him here and there: at the turn of the path leading down to the gorge and the great suspension bridge, steeped in University lore, where students sometimes jumped - gorging out, they called it, or on line for REM tickets, in the computer lab late one night. At each of these opportunities, I'd stayed mum, trying for a little enigma of my own, knowing the direct approach hadn't worked. I was going to have to treat this with subtlety, not my strongest suit.
Then it happened. David running towards me in the hall one day. "You gotta see this." Waving a copy of Three Men and A Baby in his hand. "You're gonna love this!"
"What're you talking about? I saw that dumb movie when it came out."
Knowing my penchant for the supernatural, he persisted. "This! Ya gotta see it - there's a ghost in it, I'm saying there's an actual ghost that got caught on film in one of the apartment scenes!"
"I don't remember any ghost."
"Yeah, I mean, no. You wouldn’t have. It's real subliminal. No one noticed it was there 'til it came out on tape and people could go back and forth and pause and stuff. I mean even the editors didn't catch it."
And who happens to be standing here? Ellie! " Oh yeah, I heard about that. My friend down at Sarah Lawrence said she saw it last weekend and it was really creepy."
"Wow, that's wild. So you mean it's not even supposed to be in there?"
"No, it's a real ghost that's of this dead kid, this 12-year-old boy who died in the apartment where they were filming," David explains.
"Yeah, this 12-year-old kid who blew his brains out with this sawed off shotgun, " Ellie adds.
"In real life?" Sounds more like a hoax to me, maybe something to get more people to watch .
"Where can we get hold of a VCR at this hour? The A/V room’s locked up."
"You know..." Ellie offers, "Ivan’s got a VCR hooked up to his computer monitor."
Draped in Indian tapestries and cloaked tropical shadows, his room is a remote habitat. Yellow eyes peer out from velvet foliage and canvases painted in rich jungle hues transform the room into a rare ecosystem where wall hangings and draperies divide the octagonal space into a maze of caves and primal vistas. Huddled around the computer monitor, which bathes our faces in a blue glow, our body hair stands on end, as we self appointed ghost busters witness the undeniable specter of a boy clutching a firearm while Tom Selleck and Ted Danson cavort unwittingly in the fore, oblivious to the apparition. The figure is at once otherworldly and brash, making true believers out of three of us; Ivan maintaining it's a well enhanced computer image.
"I mean, come on, you guys," he offers with good natured skepticism, "Isn't this flick even directed by Leonard Nimoy, who used to produce that show In Search Of?"
We argue metaphysics until Ellie lures David across the hall with the promise of freshly brewed mead. Enveloped in darkness, I am alone with Ivan at last. Wild boars emerge out of the fabric morass. A ring-tailed lemur jeers down at me from its textile perch. Steadying myself against the velour tiger print bedspread, I am overcome with the primal urge to lie down. I spy the papier mache mask, Death, tacked high up over a window, leering down at me.
"So that was you," I say, gazing at the mask.
He nods knowingly.
"Been playing violin long? That was a pretty good Dance of Death."
"Dance Macabre," he corrects me, "And yes, since I could stand."
"Wow, so you weren't fooling around."
"No, I was deadly serious." He grins an apology for the pun but his eyes defy the joke.
He kneels at the bedside and brushes a strand of hair from my cheek. "Do you mind?" he queries, by now sure of my attraction to him. I am flattered but gripped with apprehension. An exotic frog crosses my palm leaving in its tracks a chemical potpourri inducing sleep. As his hand caresses my neck, a scarlet ibis swoops down; I am gripped with fever. He touches my earlobe with the finesse of a virtuoso as a tigress on the prowl pads silently past. My fascination slips into fear as I glimpse great herds advancing on a homeland foreign and strange. Now eyes narrow into catlike slits as he bends over my thrilled and racing heart, fear rising like iron filings to a magnet. Chilled, I huddle under the mosquito net; sweat and shiver. A dart like tongue parts lips and teeth, tipped with deadly venom, meeting mine. I taste toxic chromium, mordant industrial runoff, and flash on Ellie and her box of reeking toads. In death, I comprehend those weren't toads at all, more likely a batch of poison frogs, lurid and lethal, sent overnight express from an untamed interior.
As I drift down, he reaches for his violin, lifts it to his chin. His playing resonates, as if through an overturned canning jar, engulfing me on the dank forest floor. A requiem for dead toads.
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