He Dies In The End

The office wasn't a usual office by any stretch of the imagination. Not some austere fourth floor thin-walled fluorescent-lit thing with windows which don't open that overlook a drab street with an ordinary name and nothing at all across or below but other people endeavoring to similar draconian buildings where they will get pasty and pudgy and slowly disappear, willingly into oblivion in exchange for a pension.

Albert had worked at buildings like those. There weren’t many different types of buildings he hadn't worked at in his twenty-some years as a reluctant taxpayer. Twenty two jobs in twenty years is quite a feat for anyone. If asked, he would say it was because of this or that, some extraordinary event that really wasn't. Or this other opportunity that presented itself. That sort of thing. But, in truth, it was simply because Albert had not in him whatever human inclination there is to settle. Or, contrariwise, one might more properly indicate that Albert was himself a very unsettled person who was maladjusted to living.

But this office, unlike those others, he enjoyed from day one and could find no obvious fault in it, try as he instinctively may. It was an old home on a wonderful, charming small city street. Its walls weren't concrete or whatever it is from which they make those downtown office monstrosities. It was brick and there was wood shingle siding around the upstairs windows. There is a term for that which he doesn't know. It was likely constructed in the 1920's, would be his guess, with arched doorways and beautiful woodwork. It reminded him of the woman he loved last year. Nicole Curtis. The DIY Queen of TV who haunted him in a pleasurable series of rhapsodic HD dreams.

Albert's desk, as the bookkeeper, a moniker he preferred to CPA, for the office of young tax attorneys in the firm of Pinkney Brothers, Inc., was on the first floor with a view of a barberry bush where a cardinal made its nest. And in this room, there he was, adding, subtracting, computing like an 180-pound machine of flesh and bone, filled with incidental blood and guts. Circuits, really, is all that those nerves and vessels were, with a heart like a battery, his bony fingers flying over a keyboard that several predecessors had tickled before him with far less enthusiasm for the opportunity that paid too little and worked him far too long. 

Albert stayed after work and marveled at the house, walking through and admiring the woodwork and the wood floors and the narrow halls. And as he did, there was a song on his lips, he often sang, "Beautiful Dreamer" by Stephen Foster. Beautiful Dreamer, wake unto me. Starlight and dewdrops are waiting for thee. And as he sang it, he felt an electric in the air which caused the hair on his neck to stand on end and which gave him gooseflesh. A charge of something unknown, yet very familiar. And as he sang more of the tune in the defeaning silence of that old house, the feeling persisted, augmenting more with each word. It was as though the house heard him and recognized the tune. As though he were speaking a common language.

Not lost on Albert in all his boyish pleasantness and airy congenial gaiety, was the fact that his desk sat in what was the former home's dining room. And so, needless to say, between computations and number crunching and emails and spreadsheets, he put on his old twenties music, and daydreamed of what the room once looked like before this modern intrusion, before his desk and computer and filing bins and cabinets invaded the holy historical space, when there was likely a cherry-wood table and chairs and a china hutch with all the fine china and walls that were wallpapered and adorned in framed photographs of those not seated at this very table of which he found himself, suddenly, an unexpected guest. It looked how it would look if Nicole Curtis had her way with it, the way she had her way with his heart in those silly dreams that were cancelled only by the reality of consciousness.   

It was when he played that song, "Beautiful Dreamer," that it suddenly came to life. It was Thanksgiving, this time. A turkey and all the festive dishes were being passed around carefully. Passed around to him, amid the jovial harmony of a family's voice and the pleasant clattering of good silverware on porcelain plates and dollops of potatoes from a green glass serving dish plain as day in front of him, offered to him, as the deviled eggs jiggled on a crystal plate on the table next to a dish of slightly congealed cranberry sauce. He could smell it, and it was as though he could reach out and touch it all as well, as though someone rolled back the clock, and he incidentally with it. Albert kept his hands to his side and that serving dish passed him by, yet there he remained.

But even more sensational than all the rest, a beautiful woman, with a sparkle of inextinguishable life in her amber-colored eyes was smiling at him, humming the melody of that song, as though only she knew he was there. But she was smiling through a poorly concealed veil of grief, he could tell. She was a widow, Albert knew. At least, it was presumed when her husband hadn't returned from The War. His ghostly picture was in the oval frame above the phonograph that kept her from smiling too long or too freely. Loyalty, even such as she was, persevered. Albert began to wonder, captivated by her from the very moment he saw her, as to how he could know so much about her and feel so much for her if she simply was a hallucination or a reverie. But just as he was about to ask her something, his boss barged into the room, the weight of his sudden presence shaking the plates, dishes and glasses into nonexistence. It all vanished as though it never was at all, and the beautiful woman with it.

"Mr. Moss!" he grouched in his usual manner. "These figures are wrong on this Daugherty Account Summary. Double check the figures and resubmit by end of business." 

"Yes, sir," Albert replied faintly, still looking around, wondering where it all had gone. No one in the office called him Albert, as he asked them to several times before he got the hint that they didn’t care. He was "Mr. Moss," or more commonly just "Moss." It was against company policy to be so informal to fraternize with first names. They were patterned after IBM. Blue suits and black ties. Even the pretty female associate who looked more like a cat than a human-being wore only dark blue pant suits. Only the color of her blouses varied, and the variance was strictly a war between white and black. He didn't dare wonder as to the color of her panties for it was as though the associates had no sexual components and nothing beneath their clothes existed. They were robots. A bellicose Barbie and a steady line of pugnacious Kens.

There was very little eye contact that was ever made. If it could be avoided, it was, as though every one of them concealed something inside themselves that a long glance might steal. It was nowhere in the company handbook, which seemed in itself to be a lesson in frugality, but it was clearly understood. Smiling was also similarly discouraged and deemed as some sort of foible. Albert had learned all of which in the unpleasant way of having his greetings and smiles go blatantly unrequited, particularly when he said to an associate who was trailing out the door, "Have a good evening," only to get nothing in response but the rudeness of their indifference.

It was an unusual firm, he was getting to know, and the longer he worked there the more he doubted that this job would be any longer lasting than all the others. But still, it was the office that drew him, and he was so in love with that house and the feeling of it that he was almost always early and late to go home, especially with good reason. And when the glib-faced associates punched the clock, filed out the back door and got in their colorless sedans and headed back for the suburbs, there he was, exploring the old house like an archeologist in an Egyptian tomb, wide-eyed and giddy, turning his music back on, hoping to entertain the ghosts well enough so they would make themselves known to him. Inevitably singing that old parlor song that seemed to unlock a different world like a melodic key.

But it wasn't always a total immersion into the supernatural. At times, only a jar of pens would move, which he would watch with rapt interest as they trembled and then clumsily slid across his desk. Or a light might flicker. Or a floorboard might creak unprovoked. It was as though the house was trying to come to life but hadn't the energy to do so. But other times, slowly, the house morphed back to that which it was sometime in the 1920's. Always the twenties, it seemed. And she would come back with it, sometimes. He wouldn't ever know when or if she would appear and there would often be weeks when she didn't. But when she did, she was unmistakable, and it to him was pure heaven. 

It was while staying over working on the Hobart Account Summary in late January that he officially met her. When he, himself, sung that beautiful melody, terribly out of tune and hopelessly in the wrong key. "Sounds of the rude world, heard in the day,
Lull'd by the moonlight have all passed away!"

She was in the kitchen and doing phantom dishes that appeared more clearly the longer she remained in the room, humming the same tune. Dishes that softly clanged and clattered against each other as she put them in the strainer. And as they reappeared, so did she. As did the other contents of the house. The old stove. The icebox. The pendulous light in the kitchen with the green and gold stained-glass shade. There was a meatloaf in the oven that he could smell, and kids outside playing who he could hear through the thin-glass window panes.

"They're not my kids," she mentioned, looking outside. Albert nearly fell out of his chair hearing her speak to him, stunned at the pretty tenor of her voice which more than adequately matched her appearance. She stole his articulation and animation and he was rendered a useless sack of bones in her presence that seemed only to breath when she exhaled and to stare at her as though he was under some rapt mesmerism. He was caught off guard when she spoke and wasn't sure she was speaking to him until she turned to look at him directly, whereupon he froze as he was, the song dried and still upon his tongue. She was blurred, yet reappearing more with every moment and word, and out of the blurriness she became more and more radiant, but with her radiance, tragic.

"They were born in the fifties. Long after I - " she didn't complete the thought but the sentence finished itself in a lull of silence. Then she continued, almost listlessly. "There was a fire. They were trapped upstairs. Both their parents got out, somehow, and left them. So, I am sort of their mother now. This is where they choose to be. With me. I don't mind. It does gets lonely, and I so love them, as my own. This house is a random hodgepodge of people. Not all of them died here, but they're connected to this place in some meaningful way and so we all convene here. They come and they go. They're good kids – Tommy and Teddy. I think you'd like them. They're playing football out in the yard there with other boys from the neighborhood. That one died of cholera. That other one of poisoning, I think, or was it choking? That boy was beaten to death by his father. And he, that one snapping the ball, had the cancer. But look at him now."

Albert dropped his pen, which rolled at his feet. He was in disbelief of what he was seeing. A most stunning woman in the kitchen staring out the back window, dead for a hundred years. He was again at the dining table and there was no indication that any other world existed beyond that which he was now in, as though he was entirely emersed, drowning in the paranormal. And there before him was a cup of hot coffee, just as he liked it, in a white china cup that was missing from a nob in the hutch. 

"I didn't know you could go outside." By "you," of course, he meant any revenant, apparition, wraith, visitant, phantom, phantasma, illusion, spectre, mane, soul, bogle, haunt, or ghost, whichever was the appropriate term. Maybe it didn't matter because ghosts weren't ridiculous and they wouldn't get offended by a word, derogatory or otherwise. That was a weak human trait, left in the land of the living. But his mind sought to adequately define her. To label her. And soon, by the potency of its logic, it might seek to diminish her. Realism being the great killer of dreams. Yet, it was equally unsuccessful in each endeavor.

"Oh, sure," she said. "They all come and go. But not me. No. I stay here," she sighed. "I don't want to miss a telephone call or telegram, if it were to come." She smiled, but clearly it was a mournful smile. There was a reluctance in her expression and her demeanor was imbued in dismalness, contrary to the happiness she evoked just to look at her. To see her in passing, even. To recall her.

"Forgive me, my name is Claudia. We've not been properly introduced. Claudia Juliette Adams. No relation to the presidents, that I am aware. But I haven't seen them yet to ask, nor am I privy to the genealogy of my ancestors. And that is my married name, anyway. My name at birth was Claudia Juliette Morrissey." 

"I'm Albert Moss."

"I know. I've been watching you here. You work too hard. Much harder than the last lady they had in your position. Do you know she was fired for embezzling money? It was quite scandalous. And the one before that, well, he was fired because he didn't come to work. Sort of a lethargic old cod. Would you like a drink, Albert Moss?"

"If you please, call me Albert." 

“Albert,” she agreed as she poured two brandies and took off her apron, wadded it up and sat it on the stove. She wore a dark blue dress which complimented her fare completion nicely. She was a beautiful woman to say the least. He was fastly growing aware that he had never seen anyone so beautiful in his life. Then he was convinced and crowned her. He didn't believe in many certainties, but that one was clear. Every beautiful woman he ever saw paraded before him in a pageant of his memory. In all the offices he had ever worked, in all the towns he had lived, and there was no one that came close to her. It wasn't something he could put his finger on, though, but it was something he could not deny. The lines of her face. The supple contours of her body which was decorous by her style and modesty and not lewd in the least. She was uncorrupted, pristine.

Yet, despite her modesty she teemed with passion and elicited great desire to an extent he had before not known. She could starve a man who looked at her for she compelled such hunger. Such thirst. All with great privacy, revealing nothing bare nor provocative in the least. It was in the manner of her speech. The look in her eyes and the moral appropriateness of her every action and carefully chosen word. How she delicately enunciated each syllable. How she moved across a room. Albert was lost in her and he knew this more than he knew anything else in his life – love had struck him. A most unconventional sort of love that could, logically, bear no fruit at all. 

They had drinks and Albert stayed for dinner. When the office became a house again, or more fittingly, a boarding house, he was entertained by the personalities of five ghosts that evening. Tommy and Teddy, the rambunctious brothers who seemed to be in constant competition and in love with sports and their toy trains, who were somewhere lost between six or seven, or so he'd guess, being he would never talk about age with the ghosts, as it was rude, he felt. That is probably noted in some official ghost handbook somewhere, he was quite sure.

And then there were the Peters - George and Ellen - sweethearts who restored the house after the fire and died on a Friday night in the eighties as they tuned in to see who shot J.R. Ewing. Their curiosity was never satisfied and Albert was no help as he couldn't recall, though he said he was certain he watched the episode with his mother. George was a dentist and Ellen, a successful florist. They died only minutes apart of heart failure, they joked, just before the big secret was revealed. What a love story there was between them, and Albert listened to them talk so beautifully of and to each other as he glanced over now and then at Claudia who smiled at the romance of their stories, untainted by envy and with her grief momentarily pocketed. 

Albert sat on the sofa with Claudia after the boys went to bed and listened to George and Ellen reminisce. They all drank, and Albert played twenties music on the phonograph, which replaced his phone, and he became the bartender with the jokes, generously serving gin and brandy. It was as though he was one of them and they all danced, laughed, joked and shared memories and thoughts. It was a night Albert did not want to end because he knew it might be a while before he had another. Yet, all things end, particularly things so incongruous as an evening shared between the living and the deceased, if only to be so blunt for clarity.

At some point, Albert passed out on the sofa and when he woke there he was no longer engaged in clairvoyance and there was Mr. Davis in his formidable blue suit and black tie casting a dower early morning shadow over him and his bothersome hangover. There was an empty bottle of booze on the floor beside him, rolling around, and his shoes on their sides like dead dogs. His boss roared something about the Hobart Expense Report and something about being fired. But he didn't fire Albert. Rather, he said that he understood. He said he would give him a chance because he came highly-recommended from his wife as Albert knew her from another job where they had been cordial coworkers. And Albert did have the Hobart Expense Report completed, as requested. There it was on the corner of his desk and Mr. Davis was happy with the quality so much so that he grinned a grin which looked like cracking paint on a sun-bleached stucco face.

"But no more of the office booze!" he warned, wagging a finger. And so, Albert got up, straightened his clothes, and used the bathroom. He must have pissed for eight minutes straight. He put on his shoes and made some coffee and went to work as all the lawyers filed in one by one with the same generic and glibly insincere piss-off-sort-of "good morning" they offered the way they might offer change to a malodorous panhandler. His head was woozy and all he could think of was Claudia, who he knew was lingering somewhere in the office and who he looked for throughout the day as though she might stop in for lunch, but to no avail. And all day long he kept humming and singing bars of that song so much so that Stephen Foster himself might come to life and play along on a phantom piano in the parlor.

Albert recalled how they laughed and how they had a moment after the Peters went to bed. When it was just the two of them, the soft music, fire in the fireplace and snow out the window falling like stage confetti. How she curled her leg up under her and let a bare foot dangle from the sofa and how that blue dress seemed to reveal previously hidden abundances as the evening progressed, much to his favor. How he played music from the thirties that she had never heard before. And how he got her to dance, both of them on bare feet on the red and blue Persian rug that she said didn’t match the drapes. How feeling her in his arms felt so real to him. And how he dared, almost, to kiss her. 

And so every night, after the associates left, he played that song on his phone and waited. When one version didn't seem to work, he played another. And sometimes, he sung it himself. But for weeks there was nothing. He often stayed until 6 or 7 in the evening, longer when he was depressed, having nothing or no one to go home to. He learned to bring books and to read on the sofa, hoping she'd appear. He wore cologne and shaved. He dressed appropriately. He sometimes brought flowers. He brought a toothbrush and toothpaste in case she invited him to stay over.

But in the fireplace where there had been a fire the night they spent together, there were now only cold blocks and grout, as though an ominous metaphor for sealing a past life out. On the rug where they had danced, there was a coffee table and a pot of the kind of fake flowers they display at funeral homes. He waited and waited and waited. But nothing came. And he began to wonder if he had said or done something wrong, but regardless, there was nothing he could do to remedy that now.

He must have sang and played that song a thousand times trying to coax her to come back. To please her. Then over the next two years, he sang and played it ten thousand times more so that he knew every word and note by heart. So much so that it was a part of him the way she was a part of him. Every line and word of it memorized. A little sadder each time it was recited. Sometimes he sat and read her poetry aloud. Other times he talked to her as plain and sweetly as one might talk to another person in the room. Had he been observed by someone, they would diagnosis him mad, expert or not, for even to a layman it would be quite clear that madness became Albert Moss as he drowned on his heartache. 

But regardless of his petitioning, she didn’t respond. And over those two years, Albert Moss, once the starry-eyed beautiful dreamer, became a sterile bookkeeper who fit right in at Pinkney Brothers, Inc. Drained of life, glib demeanor, no hint of a smile and rarely bothering to play music. He was sterile and disillusioned. Formal and practical. Graying, even, as time went on. He didn't say anything unnecessary or try to have a conversation about anything that didn't relate to making money or to the firm. If ever he said goodbye or hello it was reflexively, and he even stuck strictly to the blue suit black tie policy without any sort of variance. Where once he wore colorful socks that amused only himself, he now strictly wore black socks. Two long and dreadful years and practically all the life bled from him. Then, the coup de grace, he got on a dating app and settled for someone who he didn't love. Who he knew he didn't love and never would.

Yet, still, occasionally, after he punched out, he played that song and waited, usually with his head down on the desk. But when she didn't appear, he went home like those lifeless pasty people who eat pre-portioned dinners and watch TV. To a girlfriend named Tina who didn't understand why he liked that old music and "all those old things," as she called his collection of various antiques she longed to sell or to throw in the trash if she ever moved in or they were married. Yet, Albert delayed that inevitable outcome as long as he could for still there was hope, as faint as it was, that Claudia would return.

One night, when they had dinner and drinks with friends and someone brought up ghosts, Albert tried to tell them about the office, about Claudia, but they laughed, uncertain if he was only joking. And that night, Tina scolded him for embarrassing her, but then softened and tried to convince him that he must have imagined it from the stress of working so hard. And she forgave him with a kiss, and went to sleep believing he was simply mistaken and that nothing was amiss as much as it was. There was another woman, but Tina lived in emphatic denial. Albert knew it wasn't a delusion and he lied there with eyes wide-open in the dark and thought of Claudia. He was a broken man, and for the first time in two years he thought of putting in his resignation and breaking up with yet another girlfriend who came about as often as jobs. He thought of ending it all, but could not settle on how he would do it similar to the way he could never settle on a tattoo.

What kind of name is Tina anyway, he seethed in the waning moments of his lucidity the next day at work. How could he expect her to understand? Or maybe he had, in fact, imagined it all. And being an employee at Pinkney Brothers, Inc. had broken him of his grand delusions of life and he should settle and put his fanciful thoughts, all his daydreaming, to bed. Tina was beautiful after all. She was good in bed. She had attributes, he knew. He ought to just live like everyone else lives in drab servility. Go home. Eat dinner. Watch TV. Go to bed. See a beach once in a while. Some touristy hell. Consume and obey. Worship and submit. But when all thought lost as he was leaving the office and setting the alarm, there she suddenly appeared. Beautiful as ever. Two and half years from when she appeared last.

“Hello,” she whispered through the darkness of the kitchen, faint but evident and becoming clearer with each moment. He didn't turn the light back on but the street lights shined through the windows and lit her silhouette.

“Hello,” he said back weakly. Reserved.

“I, uh, might have felt disloyal had I came back after that night. Or so I thought. But not coming back only made me feel worse. I don’t – know what happened to my husband. But he isn’t coming back, I know. In truth, he wasn’t really all that good to me before he left so he deserves no sort of martyrdom in my memories. But I thought that The War as bad as it was would somehow change things. Change him. That he might come back a different person. A better person. A grateful and loving person. But that was foolish of me. I sometimes think of what became of him, had he died in The War, or, more than likely, had he stayed in France and met a woman. That would be more like him. I imagined all the different possibilities. Wrote them like stories in my head. But I don’t know. Nor have I any way of knowing. So here I am,” she grinned nervously. “Making a fool of myself in front of a living man.”

“You are not. You are making a living man wish that he wasn’t.”

“Wasn’t what?” she replied.

“Living,” he answered.

“You're making me blush. And that is quite extraordinary being that I am a ghost,” she joked.

“I don’t know what happened to your husband. But I do know that I am in love with you. I have loved you from the moment we met. And in your absence, all I’ve done is to think of you. I would give my life to be with you.”

Claudia smiled then began to cry. She turned away from him and he took her in his arms, if only to hold her for a little while, to keep her from turning to a mist and fleeing him for another two years. Two years he didn't have. But she did not intend to flee. Not anymore. There was, in truth, no where for her to go for she felt no less for him than he did for her. And she had tortured herself the past few years watching him from the shadows of the room, trying not to look at all. Hearing that beautiful song.

His feelings were her feelings, but the impossibility of it was overwhelming. It simply would not last, she knew, and she would suffer even worse than before because Albert was without question her intended, yet admitting that meant admitting her husband was not. By God, Albert was. And though she knew not why God had offered her this unnatural pairing, so it was. Maybe in mercy simply so she could know at last how it felt. So she wept in his arms and he tried to console her, expecting her to vanish.

Then he realized he saw headlights in the back parking lot just as the back door crashed open and startled them both. And through the gape of the door with all the darkness of night behind her was Tina. Her face contorted and consumed in the conflagration of rage and her eyes bloodshot from drinking, a secret that looked as though it ate itself out of her soul and she was now the hostile product of its contemptuous supression. He could see nothing else but the rage in her eyes and fury on her face, and he was blinded to the gun that she brandished, that twitched at her side. He did not know that kind of anger or jealousy. Nor that sort of pain. And as she stood there only five feet away, he shielded Claudia from her as though he could prevent her from being harmed, as though the anger in that gun might somehow someway strike her dead. But then he realized that Tina would not be able to see her and that Claudia would simply vanish as she has always vanished when they were interrupted by someone else. But she didn't go anywhere and it was evident that Tina could see her clearly.

"You sonofabitch!" Tina cried leveling the gun. "I knew there another woman! I knew! Is this your fucking ghost, Albert?"

"Yes, Tina, put the gun down. This is her. This is Claudia."

"Bullshit! I can see her! You have an affair and say it is all okay because she's a ghost? A ghost?! Do I look fucking stupid to you?"

"I don't love you, Tina. I love Claudia. I can't change that. I am sorry."

Tina stood with the gun pointed at him and her hand trembling. She was a sympathetic creature in her anguish. Distraught. Her mind bent. Tears cascading down her face. In a fit of rage she cried, "Well, let's see how dead this bitch is."

It was all over in a heartbeat. As soon as the shot rang out, instinctively Albert shouted, "No!" and shielded Claudia who never needed his protection at all. He crumpled to the ground, struck by the bullet. There wasn't anything left for him in the mortal world and so he slipped away as he bled out there on the tiles of the kitchen floor. His blood flowing in steady rivulets in the passages of the grout as though it knew where to go. As though it were running from him. And in the reality of the percussion, Tina dropped the gun and wailed, as Claudia fell to her knees and held Albert who looked up at her and smiled, knowing his life was ending. And she was softly signing to him, playing with his hair, smiling, very much, at last, in love. Albert had never heard nor seen anything so beautiful in his life as he lied there, murdered and reborn on that cold kitchen floor, dying, happily every after. 

Beautiful dreamer, wake unto me,
Starlight and dewdrops are waiting for thee;
Sounds of the rude world, heard in the day,
Lull'd by the moonlight have all passed away!
Beautiful dreamer, queen of my song,
List while I woo thee with soft melody;
Gone are the cares of life's busy throng,
Beautiful dreamer, awake unto me!
Beautiful dreamer, awake unto me!

Beautiful dreamer, out on the sea, 

Mermaids are chanting the wild lorelei;

Over the streamlet vapors are borne,
Waiting to fade at the bright coming morn.
Beautiful dreamer, beam on my heart,
E'en as the morn on the streamlet and sea;
Then will all clouds of sorrow depart,
Beautiful dreamer, awake unto me!
Beautiful dreamer, awake unto me!