Saving Elijah

remember how the angels all are sitting around, and one of them suggests to God that this fellow Job who lives in the land of Uz so happily and prosperously really doesn't deserve such protection—"
    "Wait a minute. You're Satan?"
    He laughed, and his laugh bounced around the NAR, glass wall, floor, ceiling, Mylar balloons in the corner. "I can assure you that I'm not Satan. I'm just a poor misbegotten ghost. The spirit of your former paramour, Seth Lucien, to be sure. But you've already figured that out. Finally."
    Now he seemed to be contradicting himself again. Was he lying? Maybe he was both Seth's spirit and Satan, too. Maybe neither. Maybe everything he told me was a lie.
    "But I didn't love Seth. If he hadn't died in that crash, I never would have wanted to see him again."
    He clapped his blood-dark hand over his mouth. "Well, you really know how to hurt a ghost. Tee hee hee."
    "Go away. Why am I bothering with you?"
    "You are bothering with me, dear Dinah, because I am the only game in town." He gestured around the room. "You see anyone else around here telling you the truth? Anyway, Moore's the only doctor who's saying he's going to wake up, babe, but Moore's your basic eye-darter. Some doctors are like him, too bad for you. Haven't got a clue how to deal with patients, or with parents of patients, for that matter. Moore has trouble dealing with all women, you know. His own mother was cold, cold, cold. Poor L'il Abner, never got anything lower than an A in school, and never got a bit of praise. Here he is, the big-cheese doctor, national reputation, and he's still never been good enough for that woman. Never will—she's dead, of course."
    "Doesn't he have any children?"
    "Four, poor things. Nothing they ever do is good enough for cold cold Abner." He chuckled. "You, unfortunately, are stuck with him just as much as they are. And he's stuck with you. And he figures you don't want the truth, if it's bad news."
    He took up his guitar and plucked at the strings, picking out the beginning of a flamenco tune. He took a couple of steps toward Elijah's bed, stamping his feet in a fast, flamenco-type rhythm.
    "Stay away from him." I moved between the ghost and my son.
    He held up his hands. "Relax, I'm not going near him. Not until you want me to. Not until you beg. And you will, my Dinah, before this is over."
    "I do want the truth." The words seemed launched from my mind like a fired rocket.
    "Ah. The truth. I shall oblige." He began to dance, to twitch his hips, and I saw a new guitar, this one a white Fender electric, the wire plugged into a place in the air. He played and twanged: "You ain't nothin' but a hound dog," doing a fair imitation of Elvis. Then he stopped singing and put down the guitar.
    "Might as well untie those hands, Dinah," the ghost said. "He's finished dancing."
    "You are lying!"
    "You say you want the truth, and when I tell it to you, you accuse me of lying? Fine, no problem, I'll just leave right now." He started to shimmer like a mirage.
    "No. Wait. I have to know."
    He solidified again and settled into the air. "The truth is, on the twenty-second day, Elijah will open his eyes."
    "But that's good, isn't that good? That he opens his eyes?"
    "No. It's bad. Very bad." The ghost made a wounded sigh. "He'll open his eyes, Dinah, but there'll be no one there. Behold."
    I looked over at my baby, lying on the bed with his eyes closed, and had another vision then, a momentary ripple in sight and in time, an image.

    *    *    *

    Elijah's eyes flutter open before me. I see my son's blue eyes staring at nothing, at no one. Something else happens, too. His eyes begin to move.
    I watch the irises and pupils of my son's eyes revolving around and around in their sockets. They begin at the right side, and both eyes jerk left in tandem until they get to the other side of the eye socket, then they reappear and begin again back at the other side, as if they have gone all the way around the back. The movement isn't smooth like the natural movement of eyes focusing or tracking or really looking at something. It's a tick-tick-ticking; like the mindless ticking of the second hand of a clock, as if a machine is putting Elijah's eyes through paces.

    *    *    *

    He was doing this, my vicious ghost, he was making me see my son with his eyes rotating tick tick tick in his head.
    "The doctors have a medical name for it," the ghost said casually. "Nystagmus."
    The night nurse came in, a kind, gray-haired