There's Something I Want You to Do

He had been hoping that his friend Benny Takemitsu, the hack architect, might stop by the coffee shop on a break from his evening run, but there was no sign of him, so with great effort, Dr. Jones, who was a bit stout, at last found some resource of energy and rose from his chair and headed toward the Mississippi River, where lately he had been granted certain…visitations. The visitations were products of his exhaustion. He’d considered talking to his psychiatrist friend, Dr. Gloat — his actual name — about his hallucinatory visitors, but Gloat would probably prescribe an antipsychotic like clozapine or aripiprazole, part of that class of drugs that were chemically like a wrecker’s ball set loose in the brain. Or he could call on another pal, a gerontologist, who might diagnose him with Lewy body dementia, an affliction that included voices and full-scale hallucinations of the sort that Dr. Jones had been experiencing. With a diagnosis like that, they’d put you in the bin. Despite his visitations, he recognized inwardly, as the spirals of intuition turned gently and logically, that he wasn’t demented any more than he was psychotic. Nor was he delusional. He was just seeing things as the shamans once did, the holy men and women. He was becoming a holy man. Such a change was unprecedented in his professional experience. The prospect of going mad, or holy, did not seem to be that much of a catastrophe to him as long as he could keep calm while the specters appeared. Perhaps some bed rest would be indicated. The trouble with mad people was not the hallucinations or the garbled speech, but the panic they felt, which could be contagious and often created a vulgar effect among the villagers. Elijah Elliott Jones, M.D., considered himself a scientist. Scientists should remain calm, even if they become sanctified.

He ambled down Second Street past the Mill City Museum, facing Mill Ruins Park, where a grain mill had exploded a century ago and the rubble had been left more or less as it once was, for tourists to gawk at. The location was billed as the Cradle of Carbohydrates, and indeed the flour for American bread had been shipped out of here for decades: Gold Medal flour, Pillsbury’s Best, all of them, although not anymore, manufacturing having gone global in search of cheap uninsured labor. The light had a peculiar shellacked quality this evening, with a surface glitter and sheen, as if designed for a movie. He made his way to the Stone Arch Bridge, built of limestone and granite in 1883 for use by the Great Northern railway. The Empire Builder himself, James J. Hill, had seen to its construction. Grain from the farms of the upper Midwest had arrived here on his railroad, had been stored in his silos along the river, and had been milled with the power of the Mississippi River at St. Anthony Falls. The riffraff railroad workers, their jobs finished, would drift toward the whorehouses and bars on Washington Avenue, but the riffraff had disappeared decades ago, along with their jobs, and Washington Avenue, following urban renewal, had gone upscale and pricey and was now full of spoiled and contemptible young professionals. Dr. Jones had almost seen the ghosts of the old workers, those tough sooty characters. He was very close to that realm. Tonight, before crossing the river, he took out his cell and called his wife, Susan, to say that he would be late in arriving home, but she had already gone to bed, and the doctor ended up speaking to their antique answering machine, the one with the microcassette. The doctor loved spunky defunct technologies. After having decided to stay on this side of the river, he chose a park bench in shadow some distance away from a sleeping bum stretched out on a bench next to the bum’s cherished bag of discarded aluminum cans. The doctor sat and closed his eyes. He felt himself falling into the other world.

—

When he bothered to turn to his right, he noted that a silhouette had materialized next to him, the famous outline of the old filmmaker encased in layers of fat. The director’s sadness and loneliness drifted up from his bulk like a corpulent mist in the still air. In his right hand he held a ghost cigar that produced ghost smoke. He wore a spotless dinner jacket, although he gave the impression of having been in the park for years, sitting there exposed to the elements. “I was wondering who it would be this time,” Dr. Jones said. “But somehow I never expected to see you of all people here. Didn’t they let you in? To heaven, or whatever they’re calling it now…?”