Saving Elijah

lot of the time if you want to know the truth—it doesn't matter what the doctors do. No matter how like little gods they think they are."
    I bowed my head. No, please, God. That couldn't be true.
    "So," the ghost said, "I see you've been praying."
    "Of course I have."
    "That's probably a good thing, that you're not the proverbial atheist in the foxhole."
    Was he reading my mind? I'd spent some of the day making mental lists of all the things I wanted to apologize to God for, and that was one of them: for never really having thought about whether I believed or not. For not praying enough, never truthfully. For not having devoted my life to God, or to selfless works or something. For not being Christian or Buddhist, or Muslim, if any of these are God's religion of choice. For marrying out of my faith. For not loving Elijah enough. For having ever questioned His sending me a child with some physical and mental disabilities. Even for having a sense of humor some might call irreverent. (Fine. I'll never crack another joke, never write another column, hang up my computer.)
    And I'd been humbling myself. (The nerve of me, to ask for God's help after questioning His existence.) And demanding. (How dare God do this to my innocent boy?) And promising, and bargaining, I admit it. (Anything, I'll do anything. My leg, my arm, my life! Take me, me, me.) Over and over, these lamentations, an obsessive on overload. Mania, hysteria, a psychosis composed of grief and terror.
    "Whoa," the ghost said now. "You really are off the wall, aren't you?"
    "What would you expect, with my son lying there?"
    He crossed his arms over his chest. "I didn't say all parents got weird. Some manage to keep it together."
    I decided not to even try to defend myself. "Why were you on a motorcycle if you think only loons ride them?"
    "I think that now. I didn't think it then. Being dead tends to alter one's ideas about things. In life, we really are 'foolish prating knaves,' you know." He made a gesture like a sneer. "You don't recognize the quotation?"
    Hamlet, who had his own ghost to contend with.
    "You don't look like any kind of ghost I've ever heard of," I said.
    "Hey. I've gone to a lot of trouble with this." He stood up and stretched out his arms, as if to demonstrate how handsome he was. "I made it out of bits of memory, and it was the best I could do." He turned around and showed me the back of his head, and I gasped. There wasn't much there; his skull was a smashed pumpkin. I could see gray matter and pink bone, the sheen of bone and blood, sticky clumps of hair clinging to it.
    He sat down again and reached for my hand. He was not made of solid matter, and I felt my hand pass through a speeding, stinging windstorm cold enough to instantly strip my skin off my bones. I yanked my hand back. My skin was still there.
    He sighed, positioned his hands on his guitar. "Do you want me to play for you again?"
    "I can't stay here. My baby, Elijah. He's in the PICU."
    "I like that name, Elijah," he said. "Do you know that Elijah is the name of the last prophet?"
    I knew very little about the etymology of the name. I knew I left a cup for the Prophet Elijah at our family's little Passover Seder every year, and I had named my son in the Jewish fashion, after my mother's father, Elijah Blake. I never got to know Grandpa Eli very well, since my mother was estranged from her family, but I knew he was an immigrant who'd managed to build a huge carpet business in Georgia. One of those restless, high-strung men, huge in size and spirit, possessing energy of awesome proportions, dominating the lives of everyone close to him.
    "Bet you didn't know that the Prophet Elijah will perform the last miracle before the coming of the Messiah," the ghost said. "Did you know? Pretty funny, don't you think? God has to enlist the services of a Messiah to fix things, like a common employer? The Almighty Master of the Universe needs help? Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain."
    "What in the world does the Messiah have to do with anything?"
    "I should think, given the situation, you'd make an effort to understand this God you're praying to. Take that little dream you had."
    "It was a vision of the future."
    "Ah, the future. One of my favorite subjects. So there you are in the future, on the Reef with your boy ..."
    I closed my eyes and tried to recall the great beauty of that place, and the peace I had felt. I suddenly remembered having read somewhere that the Great