The Haunting
Bus stop in a strange city. The very starkness of this space seems designed to generate introspection in the traveler — fantasies bright, fantasies dark. Spenser’s head and spine are cybercraning down toward his phone, tendons in the back of his neck gently straining. Hunch of the urban vulture.
He is standing alone at the stop when she walks up and sits down at the bench, opens a ragged paperback, shuffles to her page, and begins to read. The contours of her body are lost behind rumples of thick grey cotton, full sleeves and pants. Her red face glistens in the late afternoon heat radiating off of asphalt, brick, concrete. She reeks of sour sweat and the rancid grime of the city’s dark corners. Behind her, on the brick wall, a moldered sign reads TRANSIT. She looks away from the book only to drink deeply from a clear glass bottle of water. Spenser watches the cartilage in her throat chug up and down like a piston. He wonders where she keeps her cart of stuff, her hoard of treasured things, bedroll, expired medicines and winter boots, the cart with the desperate shimmy in its back wheel, and then he wonders if to presume this much about her is a function of empathy or ignorance.
He notices that the book she is reading is one that he has read many times before, studied for years and years, discussed with colleagues, introduced to hordes of undergraduates in an earnest attempt to reveal its strange, secret beauty to them. The woman’s book is a kaleidoscope of underlined passages and marginal scratchings, in pencil and ink — blue, black, red, green. He thinks about this fortuitous link between them and what he might say to her about her choice of reading material. Forge a human connection. Enlighten. Share a moment in time.
When their eyes meet, he gives her a thin, condescending smile that he regrets even as it begins to shape his face. The smile a proud parent might give to an illiterate child who confidently pages through a pictureless book, inventing words and narratives entire.
“Spare me,” she says. “Spare me that pitiful look.” And then he knows that the book has always been hers and that the furious annotations are all her own. There is a small rectangular piece of thin white plastic in her mouth, clacking around her molars as she speaks. Shard of a coffee lid or tine from a cafeteria fork.
“You don’t know anything about me.” She speaks in a dopefaded drawl. “You don’t know me. I read here every day. All day. You think I’m some degenerate. Begging money. Some thief. Fine. But at least I’m not a crook.” All of this directed right at him, calmly, coldly. This is not some mindless rant or brainfevered raving. A bit of spittle collects in the corners of her mouth. “I’ve probably read this book a hundred times. Can’t stop. It’s a book that reads you.”
On the bus he looks out the window at her. He half expects her to be staring at him and wearing the Mephistophelean smirk of the demon temptress or the nomadic sage. But she sits, reading, face so snug to the book it’s like she is licking the words off the page.
He steals this line from her, the one about a book that reads you. He isn’t entirely sure if he believes it, but he uses it in lectures anyway, to impress the impressionable. When he does, he feels something catch in his gut, the stabbing or hooking of a sharp, spectral edge.
What truly nags him though, is that this means he thinks of the woman on the bench quite often, and he knows that she has never thought about him again, that she forgot him as soon as he set foot on the bus. That she is out there, on that bench or somewhere, reading, and he never crosses her mind. Whenever he picks up the book — to reread it, to teach it, sometimes just to hold it — he thinks of her copy, and when he thinks of her copy, he thinks of the way her annotations made the book a secret archive beyond access. And he thinks of this line, which is his own: Only the powerful possess the privilege to truly forget. Spenser isn’t sure he believes this either. But he has never spoken this line aloud, to anyone, ever.
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