Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [208]
This is not a proud story that I am about to relate. It involved the betrayal of one or two people who loved and trusted me, and it involved embarrassing ruin. I met a woman—whom I’ll call Roxanne—during a vacation to Portland, while I was researching the Grateful Dead project. Actually, I’d known her casually for years. She was the younger sister of an old girlfriend. At the time, she was recently divorced and the mother of a four-year-old boy. She was looking for a change in her life, and of course I was too. It was an affair like many others. At first it was a secret, and as a result the passion that we brought to our meetings and couplings took on a special intensity—the sort of passion that makes love feel imperative. But there was more to it than that. I had told Roxanne a bit about my dream of having my own family, and she told me that she hoped someday to have more children. We talked about whether we could someday merge our dreams, and it seemed that maybe we could.
I moved up to Portland for a while to do some of the writing of my book, and also to see what might come of this love affair. I went there with the conviction that I’d finally won a real shot at happiness—that I could now build a family of my own. I even told myself that I was redeeming not only my own history, but perhaps my family’s as well, by building life back in the place where once so much had ended in death and loss.
Well, it didn’t work. Within two days of my arrival in Portland, I could tell something was dreadfully wrong between us. As it turned out, Roxanne had met somebody whom she had a stronger interest in. We fought, we parted, and she went on to marry the other person and have a child with him. These things happen. There was really nobody to blame but myself, and there was nobody to forgive but myself. But this time, self-forgiveness did not come easy.
It was not a pretty time. I sat around in my apartment in Portland and wept uncontrollably. I drank myself to sleep most nights, and I couldn’t concentrate on the work I had to do. Finally I gave up on the book.
I probably came as close to self-destruction as I have ever come, or at least as close as I knew how to come. And when I understood I didn’t have whatever it took to finish it all, or didn’t even have the ability to fall apart entirely, the realization didn’t make me feel any better. It made me feel like there was simply no relief, no deliverance for what my life had become, and that I would have to live with that awareness whether I wanted to or not.
THAT WAS WHEN I SAW THE GHOST.
It was late at night, about 3 A.M. I had fallen asleep drunk, but it was fitful sleep. I was living in a loft apartment near downtown, and lights from the street bounced off the walls throughout the night, making for a steady sense of motion in the place. I opened my eyes and saw something moving. Lights, I thought, and closed my eyes. Then I heard a floorboard creak. I opened my eyes, and across the room from me I saw a woman. She was lambent—she had an amber glow about her—and I could see that she was tall and blond, dressed in white. She walked back and forth at the foot of my bed, talking, saying things in a lulling, attractive voice. She moved onto the bed and straddled me, riding up to my chest. She gripped me by the wrists and twisted the upper part of my body, until she had forced my hands and arms against the wall in a painful arrangement. She bent over and kissed my ear, and said: “I know you. You’re the last one. I’ve taken everything from all of them, and now I’ve come for you.”
I woke up, my wrists pressed against the wall, hard enough to hurt. I looked around in the neon-lit dark. There was nobody there. I got up and made my way through the apartment. I was alone.
Had I seen a real ghost? No, of course not. It