Saving Elijah

thought that her hurt was justified. I was being mean. The ghost was wrong. I didn't despise her. I didn't really think she was looking for points for support like she often did, or complaining about the amount of time this was taking. But I couldn't take anyone else's puny little grief just then, least of all Charlotte's. I would have been much better able to handle Charlotte's Wrath.
    I left the cafeteria, but not alone. The ghost got on the elevator with me.
    "Push the stop button," he said.
    I backed into a corner.
    "Push it now." Arms crossed over his chest, he glared at me from across the elevator.
    I did as he said, and the elevator came to a screeching halt between the second and third floors.
    "I am really quite insulted that you don't remember, Dinah. I've gone to a lot of trouble so you would." His eyes bore into me, black and cold. "I thought surely the Julie business would do it, or Mother dearest, but possibly something else is needed to jog your hopeless little memory. Perhaps the name Jay might do it."
    "Jay Salisbury!"
    The elevator vanished. I found myself standing in an attic room full of shadows and slanted light, sunlit slices of dust, a sluice through time— this one backward instead of forward.

    *    *    *

    The attic is very long and narrow, with a high sloping roof that comes to a peak across the whole length of it and three sections cut by two large dormer windows. In the center section a curved arch cuts into the sloping roof; within the arch a small stained glass window refracts available light like a prism, bathing the room in a dreamlike brilliance. The furnishings are shabby, student furnishings, with a few notable exceptions. A small drawing of an odalisque hanging on a wall in a beautiful frame, the naked woman reclining on her back, one arm draped over the settee on which she's lying. A Tiffany lamp. A mirror, a carved gilt thing.

    *    *    *

    I was jolted out of the memory and back into the elevator, stalled between the second and third floors. I spent many hours in that attic room. It was home to my first lover. Seth Lucien.
    The elevator cabin now seemed unbearably hot and close, and I detected a pungent metallic smell that seemed briefly to overpower the other smells in the airless air. I tried to take a breath, but all I could manage was a series of little gasps. My God! All these years I'd barely thought of Seth, and now I realized that the ghost standing before me was in fact he—or more accurately, an approximation of him. I gripped the metal railing, my knees apparently about to give way. "Seth."
    "Well, sort of." The ghost picked up the guitar that had suddenly materialized and strummed a few chords.
    Shame rose in my face and my neck like a hot flash. My relationship with Seth Lucien was not a part of my life I cared to remember at any time and was the last thing I wanted to think about here, now. I was all the young things when I met Seth—vulnerable, confused, innocent, desperate for love and affirmation.
    "What are you doing here?"
    "I already told you," the ghost said. "I'm here to help you."
    "What happened to your dog?" The immaculately groomed black poodle he called Mephistopheles. His constant companion.
    "Not my dog, Seth's dog. In doggie heaven, I suppose."
    "Why don't you have him with you?"
    A bitter laugh. "You think a ghost gets a companion? Oh, no. I don't think so."
    My mind was spilling over with images: Seth's Harley; the click-click of a Smith-Corona typewriter late into the night, Seth at the keys; a back alley theater where the masks of comedy and tragedy are carved over the stage; a rowdy Georgetown bar. And hashish laced with opium, the sweet hot smoke in my lungs. And long nights in bed with Seth. Meeting Sam, whom I knew I loved the first time he smiled at me. And Julie, oh Julie, whose loss of friendship was my biggest regret. And poor Jay Salisbury, whose death I might have prevented, if I hadn't been so self-involved.
    The ghost had a kind of smirk on his mouth. I should have seen it right away. A ghost in black leather. A hippie ghost who quoted Shakespeare and Baudelaire. Could Goethe be far behind? Now my mind was suffused with images of riding on Seth's Harley, of mesmerizing speed, of danger. "You were a lunatic on that motorcycle. You always had a death wish."
    The ghost laughed. "Well, aren't we the little Freudian mama."
    "You almost killed me on that motorcycle."
    "Moi? I didn't do anything. He was the one who did