Ghosts I Have Been

Once I dreamed that I was to be cast in suspended animation for twenty years. I would be blind; frozen; comatose. I was in an auditorium, and the awareness hit me suddenly. I was watching Fellini's 8 1/2 at the campus theater. It had been mis-billed as a sex comedy, and some drunken fraternity guys had accordingly crashed the room, loudly snorting obscenities in the front row when they realized that they had been misled. The projectionist refused to intervene as the film ticked on, with the rapid tick tick tick of old-time celluloid. The punks were slouched in their seats, dressed in black. No one, in fact, moved. It was there that my paralysis began. Eventually, I was unable to move at all.

I had many nightmares while on that campus. Some attributed it to the proximity of the Stones River battlefield. I never could pinpoint the origin of my dis-ease. Only the ghosts moved. Some were mis-identified with Civil War reenactors, but their appearances were always off-season, like some comedic re-run in syndication.

I thought of the time that my brother and I had gone ghost-hunting. I had carried a camera and a tape recorder, and we drove to a local cemetery. Scared witless, I placed the tape recorder on a grave while I snapped a few frames. The ghosts must have chortled at me and figured that they would make it worth my while. I caught no sounds, but the photos that I subsequently developed showed lights, shadows, and strange apparitions.

When I finally awakened, the world was on fire. And the world's leaders had been replaced by screen guild actors, in comedic re-run, like some stupid sitcom whose script will never die.