“I saw your add in the paper. This phantom you’re selling. Is he still available?”
“Yes he is,” I said. “You want him, you got him.”
“I live just north of the west side school. I’ll meet you there in a few minutes. Bring the guy. I’ll check him out, maybe make you an offer.”
“That ain’t the way it works. You want him, yes or no.”
“I’ll be in the playground by the swings. What do you call your phantom?”
“His name is Albert,” I said.
“Is he docile?”
“What do you want, a poodle/” I said, trying to hide the disgust in my voice as I hung up the phone, for the first time having misgivings about selling Albert.
My bicycle, a rusty old Schwinn caked in mud and draped in cobwebs, groaned as I wheeled it off the back porch, hopped on and headed up Mound Street. Surprisingly, traffic was exceedingly heavy. It had been months since I’d last seen a car on this street, but now I had to wait ten minutes to make a left turn while a steady stream of trucks, motorcycles and horseback riders paraded by.
While we were waiting for the traffic to clear Albert started complaining about the way I was treating him.
“How come you’re doing this to me?” he whined.
“Because I’m tired of all the trouble you’ve caused me.”
“Such as?”
“The shoplifting spree you authorized me to go on at the PX when I was at Fort Ord. My God, if the army had caught me they would have court-martialed me.”
“But they didn’t catch you,” Albert shot back, warming to his role as provocateur. ‘Don’t tell me you didn’t enjoy the thrill of swiping all of that stuff, especially the sport jacket.”
I had to admit he had a point, but he was a bad influence and I was determined to get rid of him. “And what about Phyllis?” I said. ‘I’m so ashamed of the way I treated her, the lies you told me to tell her.”
“Stop complaining, You got what you wanted.”
When we arrived at the playground I spotted Albert’s future owner nervously pacing back and forth by the swings. He was an old man----overweight, bald, slovenly. I got off my bike and walked towards him.
“Where’s Albert?” he asked.
“Where do you think?” I said. “He’s invisible. There’s no way in hell I can show him to you. That’s not the way phantoms operate. Where you gonna keep him?”
“In my garage.”
“I’ll need to take a look before I sign him over to you. The place better be warm. Albert likes it warm.”
“How much you want for him?”
This question bothered me because I hadn’t put a price on Albert. Ten dollars? A thousand dollars? I had no idea what he was worth, so I said nothing as we left the playground and walked towards the slob’s house. Now I was beginning to have serious misgivings about selling my soul’s identical twin. Sure, I needed the money, however much the guy would pay for him, but in a strange sort of way Albert and I had become friends over the years, even though he kept getting me in trouble. How could this guy take my place in his affection? True, we weren’t buddies or anything like that, but Albert and I understood each other. The time of the nightmarish battles we’d fought had long passed and now most of the time a sense of peaceful toleration between us prevailed.
However, as we entered the garage once again I heard Albert cry out, “You can’t do this to me!”
He’s right, I told myself as a crashing weight of guilt fell on me, as if from heaven. I can’t sell him to this freak.
Usually I forget my dreams when I wake up, but this one stuck in my thoughts for days begging me to decipher it. A week later I recalled a poem Wordsworth wrote about a phantom’s frightening, dreamlike specter:
“She was a phantom of delight
When first she glean’d upon my sight,
A lovely apparition sent
To be a moment’s ornament,
A dancing shape, an image gay,
To haunt, to startle, and waylay.”
Wordworth’s poem reminded me how elusive, mysterious and seductive phantoms are, how they hover in our imagination like the fading memory of a perfect kiss or a religious vision or a crime we’ve committed, forever inching their way towards the vanishing point of our recollection but never quite arriving there.
Perhaps that’s why my unconscious mind invented Albert. Because I needed a scapegoat to blame for every weird feeling or thought or desire I’d ever passionately felt. Why else would he make evil seem so attractive and attainable, and his betrayal so damned?
The most frightening movie I watched when I was a boy was “The Phantom of the Opera,” a film that introduced me to a very scary idea--that a villain, in this case a disfigured composer played by Claude Rains, could simultaneously create sympathy and horror in my heart. Perhaps that’s why Albert sleeps in my unconscious mind each day and then wakes up and roams around in my dreams at night, his persona calling attention to my fantasies, anxieties and desires so skillfully that I tried to sell him to a stranger.
***
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