Saving Elijah

you listen really hard. Jimmy. Jimmy."
    I listened but heard nothing and didn't want to hear. "Please don't tell me this."
    He made a shrugging motion. "Why not? Jimmy's not your son. What do you care?"
    "You think I shouldn't care just because he isn't my son? Don't you care?"
    "Not a bit. Why should I?" He strummed a few chords on his guitar, then stopped, sat back and regarded me. "Want to tell me you aren't glad the Angel is coming for Jimmy instead of your son? Just go ahead and try, and I'll call you a liar." He grinned and went back to his strumming. "You can't cheat that Master Angel, you know. When it's your time, it's your time."
    There was something disturbingly intimate about his warbled murmurings that reminded me of the way Sam and I had always talked to each other late at night, after we'd made love.
    "Unless you're very smart, very quick. You have to know certain secrets, too." I noticed that when he spoke or moved any part of him, his mouth, his arm, his head, the outline of him mingled with the air, as if it were dissolving, then rippled outward in concentric circles, like the surface of water when you skip a flat stone.
    "What secrets?"
    "Why should I tell you?"
    "You don't have to bother, because no Angel of Death is coming for my son. Dr. Moore told us it was just a little drug cocktail."
    "Ah, Moore. The big cheese at the big hospital." He drew his finger to his lips. I noticed then that his finger, his whole hand—both hands, in fact—were covered with dark gashes, like desiccated blood. Maybe this accounted for the pinkness of skin, or whatever he was made of. Like a watercolor wash, he was white mixed with red makes pink.
    "Sometimes doctors lie," he said. "And sometimes we are in denial, are we not?"
    Denial.'' "I'm not in denial. And Moore isn't lying. Anyway, I've had a vision of my son in his future."
    He stared at me with his lifeless eyes. "Oh, have you now?"
    "Yes. That proves my son will have a future."
    "Of course," said the guitar player, and strummed a few more chords.
    The elevator opened and two nurses came out. They walked right by us, chatting without so much as a glance.
    "Why don't they see you?"
    His laughter echoed from one end of the corridor to the other, bouncing off the ceiling, the soda machine, the linoleum floor, the walls. "Well, now. You are certainly not the brightest of bulbs, are you? For all your fancy degrees. They can't see me because I'm dead. I'm a ghost."
    One of the nurses was putting coins in the Coke machine.
    "Why do I see you and they don't?" I asked him.
    "Oh that. Molecular incompatibility."
    "What?"
    "They aren't configured to see me, my Dinah. I'm for you. I'm all for you."
    The two nurses took a left into another corridor. "Did they think I was talking to myself?"
    "Well, now, ho, hum, you're not actually talking. It's a trick, sort of like mental telepathy." He shrugged, a favorite gesture of his, and this time I noticed that whenever he did it the air around him seemed to blister. And sometimes, if I blinked, certain features and details of his seemed to fade out of focus, or disappear, apart of a shoulder, an ear, a finger. "Of course, there is also the possibility that I'm not really here and you're talking to yourself."
    Was he trying to confuse me?
    "On the other hand," the ghost said, "if they did see you talking to yourself, I doubt it would surprise them. Parents in the PICU can get pretty weird." He leaned forward, sotto voce. "One time, there was this father. Now this guy was loaded. Head of some big real estate company. Told Dr. Kay that if he would only save his son, Mr. Big Shot would build a wing on this hospital and name it after him."
    "Did his son live?"
    The ghost moved his mouth into a smirk. "Lived to disappoint his father, too bad. The kid's all grown up, in a detox unit at the moment. Fathers bribe and yell and demand and make phone calls. Not Sam, of course."
    I stared. How did he know about Sam?
    "And another time," the ghost said, "this Japanese lady got down on her knees and put her face at the feet of young Dr. Jonas, her face right to the floor. She actually licked his Reeboks and begged him to save her daughter."
    "That must have been awful for Dr. Jonas."
    The ghost cooed, "Oh no. Jonas loves the power of it all. It's a real rush for him."
    I hadn't heard the word "rush," used that way, in years. "Did her child make it?"
    The ghost sighed melodramatically, with a jerk of his shoulders. "Afraid not. Sometimes—a