As we approached the exit doors, Zach hesitated.
He hovered there a moment staring at those huge doors. He looked like a guy standing at the top of a really high diving board.
Then, taking a deep breath, he floated through the doors and outside.
Once outside his face exploded into a huge grin. He began to turn around in circles, staring at everything around him, his eyes as big as hubcaps.
“I’m out!” he crowed. “I’m really out! Hooo-eee would you look at that!”
He flitted around the courtyard outside the library like a pinball, howling and spinning and wahoo-ing. He was moving so fast that I couldn’t actually see him. It was more like watching this white blur race around the courtyard.
Finally, he came to a spinning stop, (that reminded me of that Tasmanian Devil guy in the Bugs Bunny cartoons), in front of me.
He wasn’t even winded. I suppose breathing isn’t that big an issue when you’re dead.
“Freedom!” he cried, stretching his arms skyward. “Thank you Marcus Aurelius, I’m free at last.”
Great God almighty.
“Jeez,” I said, “calm down.”
Zach grinned sheepishly. “Sorry ‘bout that,” he said. “Guess I’m pretty excited t’get out of there.”
“I guess,” I replied. “How long since you’ve been out of the library?”
“Hmm let’s see…I reckon it must nigh on a hundred years or so by now.”
“A hundred years!”
“’Bout that.”
“And you never left?”
“Oh I tried, but never had much success with it. Not since Henry Clay died anyway.”
“Whoa. A hundred years in a library…I guess you’ve got some catching up to do.”
Zach grinned. “Well, I reckon I do don’t I?”
We made our way across campus towards the married student housing complex.
Zach was still in a tizzy.
“Would you look at that! There’s one of them auty-mo-biles! Good heavens! Thing must be goin’ more’n thirty miles an hour!”
A small airplane flew overhead as Zach stood staring, transfixed.
I walked up to him. “I guess things have changed some since…”
“Truthfully spoken! I’ve read about these flying machines and what-not, but t’actually see one… Truly it’s a wondrous age you’re livin’ in Marcus Aurelius, a wondrous age.”
Needless to say it, took awhile to get across campus. There were so many “wondrous” things to see, and Zach had to check them all out.
It would be some weeks before he could pass by an “auty-mo-bile” without gaping at it in awe.
I was glad to have the moving truck in front of our apartment. The streets in the student housing complex all snaked around randomly in a kind of maze and all the buildings looked pretty much identical. I would have been hard put to find my new home without that big yellow clue.
“Look,” I said to Zach, “be cool. I’m going to have to deal with my parents here.”
“I’ll be a paragon of discretion,” he assured me.
I certainly hoped so. I took a deep breath and opened the front door.
“Hi honey I’m home!” I called. (This is how we come home in my family. I suppose it came from on old movie or T.V. show, but we’ve been doing this as long as I can remember.)
Mom and Dad were sprawled on the couch in the tiny living room.
“There you are,” Mom said, rising from the couch.
Dad added, “We were about to round up the hounds and call a search party.”
Mom took my coat and filed it in a closet by the front door. “There’s lukewarm pizza in the kitchen. We were starving; didn’t wait.”
Dad called out from the couch, “So where were you? Wandering, as some inmate of the skies?”
Inmate of the skies?
“Shakespeare?” I asked hopefully.
“Naw, Homer, the Odyssey,” put in Zach helpfully.
“Wait!” I spun around and pointed at Dad. “No, not Shakespeare. Homer, it’s from the Odyssey.”
Dad’s head popped up above the back to the couch. “Lad, I’m impressed. You keep it up and you’ll be rivaling your father as an endless fount of useless information.”
God no—not that.
I made my way to the kitchen. So far so good. A typical family night at the Swartz’s. No one had yet commented on the semi-transparent kid in an old military uniform floating in the hallway, and that was just fine by me.
Mom followed me into the kitchen. She took a pint of frozen yogurt out of the freezer and fished two spoons from a drawer. “You still haven’t said where you’ve been all this time.”
“Oh here, there, everywhere. It doesn’t take much to cover this burg from one end to the other. I got cold so I checked out the library.”
She seemed satisfied with that. Time to change the subject. “Whoa! Would you look at this! We have an actual kitchen! I’m impressed!”
Other than a couple boxes set against the back wall, the kitchen seemed to be completely unpacked and organized. Now, how long would it take me to figure out their system and find stuff?
I only had to go through three cupboards and two drawers to put together a dinner, pizza, carrot sticks and a glass of milk. Gourmet fare.
“I think I can figure out the microwave if you want that warmed up,” Mom offered.
“That’s okay; I think I’m going to work on my room for awhile. Kitchen looks great. You guys must be beat.”
“Yeah, it’s been a day all right. Well, if you’re okay with cold pizza, I’m going back to being horizontal.” Mom made her way back to the couch. Dad looked to be five minutes from dreamland.
I sat in my small chair that came with the student desk in my room and dug into my dinner. Zach hovered near the corner. His eyes kept coming to rest on the boxes scattered around.
“So what’s in the boxes?” he asked.
“My worldly goods. Clothes, books, junk.”
He seemed to want to say something, but changed his mind. “You’ll just have t’get used t’my excessively curious nature. I just can’t help myself when there’s something I don’t know.”
“It’s pretty boring stuff,” I said, “mostly clothes. I don’t accumulate a lot of junk, what with us moving all the time. Most of the time I don’t even unpack; just take stuff out as I need it. I’ve got no problem with you looking into anything”
Zach laughed. “Well then I don’t mind if I do.” He strutted over to one of the boxes. He was moving in a goofy exaggerated way like he was a comic in some old movie.
“I reckon I’ll just open this one here.” He bent down and reached to open the box. His hand passed right through it leaving it undisturbed.
“Now would y’look at that!” he crowed. “That won’t do at all! I reckon I’ll try this’n over here.” He made his way around the room, trying each of the boxes and working to top himself at each one in a goofy comic frustration. “Dag-bustin’, frog-slogging thing-a-ma-doodle, if I can’t get anywhere with this whole sorry endeavor!”
I nearly peed myself laughing.
“Are you okay in there?” Mom!
“Uh, sure, Mom, just reading. This is a pretty funny book.” Fortunately she left without bothering to ask the title of the pretty funny book.
“Okay,” I said catching my breath, “you made your point.”
Zach had ended his slapstick comedy act and was floating over the boxes, grinning.
“Looks like there are a few limitations over what you can and can’t do”
“Truly spoken. I reckon manipulatin’ physical objects puts me at a distinct disadvantage. That’s why I spend so much time readin’ over folks’ shoulders; can’t turn the pages.”
I thought about that. “You’re pretty much limited to letting other people choose your reading material then.”
Zach agreed. “I reckon I just take what I can get. I’m pretty well limited to seeking out someone that’s researchin’ somethin’ I can get curious about and latchin’ on.”
“So what are you curious about?”
He grinned. “Well, your boxes for starters. Other’n that? Most everything in the universe, I suppose. See, I found out some while ago that every time a body learns somethin’ new, it just ends up raisin’ up a whole nother set of questions t’ take on.
“Was a time I thought that if I stayed at it long enough, I’d come to learn everything, but it turns out there’s a whole lot more everything out there than I figured.”
“I can’t do much to help you with that,” I said, “but I can open a couple of these boxes.”
I picked out one that was mostly just junk; some old toys I couldn’t bear to part with, a few baseball cards, comic books. I paged through a Superman comic for Zach. He had lots of questions about it, and I answered them as best as I could.
“Now that was right interesting,” he said. “I like how this Clark Kent fella has all these magical powers, but nobody can know about it. Makes life complicated don’t it?”
“You think I should be taking some notes?”
After about three boxes Zach’s curiosity about my worldly goods was pretty much satisfied.
Then he started in on me.
“So what’s your story?” he asked. “How is it you come to be able to see and hear ghosts? I can’t say as I’ve ever seen the like before. You always had the gift?”
“No, only since this summer.”
“What happened this summer?”
I told him my story; how I nearly drowned, my N.D.E., the hospital, Dave and Ernie. He was particularly interested in what happened with Grampa Nick in that strange tunnel. He had me go over that part a couple of times, asking more questions, seeing if I’d missed anything.
“I reckon that’s it,” he said. “Your grandfather somehow managed to pass these abilities on t’you, though I couldn’t tell you how or why.”
“I don’t know about how either, but Grampa Nick always was one for a good joke.”
“Well, seein’ spooks is a pretty good joke all right. Though I’ll not be complainin’ ‘bout it. Fact is from my perspective it’s downright fortuitous. A veritable boon. Today marks the first genuine conversation I’ve had with another human being since July 3, 1863.”
1863? That was a long time to go without talking to anyone. I tried to imagine it. I’m a keep-to-myself kind of guy, but still…
I shuddered to think about having to live for that long without being able to talk to anyone.
That is, if being a ghost still counted as living.
There was something about that date though. I asked, “July 3rd, is that when you…um… you know..”
“…met my demise? July 3rd of the year 1863; yes, that was the last day of my poor, sorry life.”
I had this feeling…like I knew something, but I just couldn’t get a handle on it. “There’s something about that date…”
“You know your American history?” Zach asked.
“Some.”
“Know anything about the Rebellion of 1860?”
“The Civil War?”
“Couldn’t say it was all that civil in my experience, but there y’go.”
Then I had it. “Gettysburg! 1863, right before the Fourth of July! One of the biggest battles in the Civil War. Yeah, I remember. I went there once with my family. We stopped there for a day on our way to…well now I don’t remember where we were headed. You were there? At the battle of Gettysburg?”
“That I was.”
“Holy crap! What happened? I mean you were really there, and…could you tell me about it?”
“That I can.”