The Ghost-Writer
by Ilene Raymond Rush

Amelia Warren had no interest in ghosts. 
	In her college writing classes -- beginner, advanced and advanced advanced -- she banned ghost stories, science fiction tales and anything from an animal’s point of view. After a young man sidestepped her rules to compose a sonnet from the vantage point of a Sunshine Cactus, cacti  joined the list. After 21 years of teaching, the number of Amelia’s verboten topics was long and legendary. You knew what you were getting into when you took her seminars. On occasion, a clueless student voiced objection, and Amelia got to explain that while other professors in the Department of Creative Writing might tolerate a wider view, if students wished to study with her – a two time O. Henry Prize winner and author of Lost Causes, a Book of the Month club selection and a best seller in three regional markets for over a year – the choice was theirs. Delivered over her red bifocals, this usually shut them up. At times, watching a student wither, she experienced a pang that she might be a bit too harsh, that it cost nothing to be a more encouraging. They were young people, after all. But the world of publishing was a desolate stretch and the sooner these would-be writers shaped up  or shipped off to greener endeavors such as nursing or computer science, the better for all.
	Twenty-one years ago, fresh with her own early success, having beaten several rivals for the tenure track job, she adored teaching. Her students were surrogate children whom she treasured . Twice a semester,  Amelia baked chocolate-chip cookies to accompany “reading nights”. Hosted in her living room, students presented their work, the passion of their readings filling in for poor grammar, flawed character descriptions, lousy metaphors. 
	But now, 15 weeks from retirement, her passion for teaching was a vague memory. She had lost patience. After semesters of slogging through the products of 19- and 20-year-old brains, pretending they were not thinly cloaked autobiographies, weariness reigned. Stories of dying grandmothers and sexed up boyfriends, liquor filled frat parties and pains of parental deceit had lost their charm. They had not lived. They had not risked. They had nothing to tell her, if they ever had. 
	All of this filled her thoughts as she started to the Allbright building for her final class: The Short Story, Section 5. She took the familiar steps three at a time, made a left turn and, without stopping for a breath, pushed into the room where  25 students -- the classes had grown over the years despite her best efforts to keep them at 15 -- waited. Without a glance in their direction (how different might they be from the last class and the class before that; she had long ago stopped worrying about matching faces to names or learning the names at all) she launched into her rules:  No stories about cats, spaceships or rodents. No ghosts.
	As she spoke, a hand shot up.  Must she acknowledge it? Her lecture was timed to 23 minutes, followed by another 20 to go through the syllabus and reading list. Why, oh why, did students get to speak at all? So little of what they said had  value; they appeared to grow dimmer every year. The early students of her teaching years waxed in memory as sophisticated, worldly, cunning. Even talented.  But year after year the residents of her classroom paled, as though they were copies of the originals.
	“Ms. Warren,” the voice said. “What if I my cat thinks more deeply than most human beings?”
	She looked up and caught sight of a boy in the back row. He was hard to see, a biracial young man in dreadlocks, wearing a dark Kanga beret.
	“No cats,” she answered.
	A young woman smiled and shook her head. 
	“Copies, not cats,” she said. “How many copies should we make for class?”
	“Oh.” Amelia blinked and removed her glasses. When she set them back on her nose after telling the girl 25, the original questioner appeared to have settled. Or so she thought until she turned and saw him seated cross-legged on the podium, his quilt of dreadlocks a breath from her nose. 
	“I published three books from my cat’s point of view,” he said. “Ten thousand copies, twenty in a second printing. They levitated from the shelves.”
	His voice had radio-ready quality, vibrating with authority. A shiver dropped down her arms. That Lucas Giordano should pop into her final course was ridiculous. She hadn’t seen him since 1985, the afternoon he had come to her office to collect his final manuscript, marked with a large red F.  The assignment had specifically required a story with a human protagonist, a story that  revealed internal conflict, the heart in conflict with itself. What Lucas had composed was drivel, a love affair between a mini-schnauzer and a blue Siamese cat barred from consummating their love on earth but able to at last, in heaven, unite in total bliss. “Schmaltzy, shows no growth,” she wrote. “Have you learned nothing from me?” 
	Lucas shuffled through the pack of papers, found his, registered the grade, then dropped it back on the pile.
	“Don’t you have anything to say?” she asked.
	He turned. He was dressed in a black raincoat with his ever-present black Kanga beret. From the first day of class he had started on the story, and though she had  urged him to stop, told him that the story had no future, that he needed to look inside, to find something else to write, he had kept on.  As though he had a mission, as though he had been sent from Hades to torment her. 
	“I signed a book contract,” he said. “Alfred A. Knopf.” He pronounced the publishers’ name incorrectly; she suspected he was lying. “Thanks for your help.” He smiled.
	Lucas Giordano wasn’t lying. Mixed Signals – published the following spring --  received a glowing review in the Times. She rushed that week’s Review into the recycling pile. She ignored the book on the Barnes & Noble display bookshelf, turned off the radio when Lucas popped up  on NPR. She knew she was foolish, that because he had not listened to her directives and succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest dreams it didn’t mean that she had failed: there were lots of ways to be a good writer, and he had found  one that wasn’t hers. 
	But it irked her and she didn’t keep it to herself. How she acted made her a little ashamed: her friends knew to hide the book – and its sequels – when she arrived at their houses: S.O.S., then A Tangled Tale. In each book, the main characters were the same: mini-schnauzers and blue Siamese cats, with their not-so-deep thoughts of rutting and feverish longings. Turned into children’s cartoons, a movie with Danny DeVito and – unbelievably – an opera with a debut at the McCarter Theater in Princeton – the books were a hit with women’s book clubs: more than once they had been suggested for her own.  At the mention she had gone off on how literature was in deep trouble, how publishers grabbed onto the lowest common denominator to make a buck. 
	“If only it were well written,” she told her best friend Marta, a poet who taught at the University. Marta shrugged. She had her own envy issues but poets were different; poets didn’t have a brass ring.  Poets rarely got advances of twenty-five, let alone 100,000 dollars. 
	“But it is popular,” said Marta, carefully. “And the interior life of the cat is actually quite evocative.”
	“Cats have no interior thoughts!” Amelia protested.
	“Willing suspension of disbelief,” Marta opined.
	Amelia sent her a look that ended the conversation. Outside Marta’s two Chows, barked in their pen. 
	“They’re animals,” Amelia said, point closed. 
*
	Lucas materialized again in her fifth class. The second, third and fourth sessions, devoted to plot and time, contained subjects that had never interested him. The exercises he did on these topics long ago, apart from being sentimental and poorly composed, jumped all over the place, little vignettes of caterwauling cats in Venice mixed with real and fantastical cats – Krazy Kat, Tom of Tom and Jerry, the Cheshire Cat from Alice in Wonderland. Critics in the New Yorker --and no, her own book had not been reviewed in that magazine --  deemed it Post-Modern, but Amelia doubted Lucas, an indifferent student who spent most of his time when he was not writing playing Halo, might recognize a literary conceit in his sleep.
	The fifth class covered point of view. Amelia had it down to a science – the exercise was a simple one with students assigned to walk through a supermarket as though they had never seen it before. The point was to enter Flannery O’Connor’s willfully ignorant gaze. 
	“It’s not being ignorant,” she explained, thankful that she would never, ever have to repeat this phrase again. “It’s   seeing as though you were ignorant. Two different things.”
	“Not really.”
	Lucas’s voice bumped up from the side of the class,  behind the heating duct. She looked up and caught a quick glimpse of him.
	“Ignorance can lead to success,” he said. He spoke as though his mouth was filled with something sticky. “Not every artist plans his effects.”
	A Goth girl in the corner followed Amelia’s gaze and snickered. Amelia opened her mouth and told the class, “And forget adverbs. For every adverb your grade drops a point.” Then, “Class dismissed.”
	The classroom cleared, faster than she remembered. In the old days there had always been one or two hanger ons who stayed while she packed her battered briefcase, birds eager for crumbs. There had been a haggard junior who loved Othello, although Amelia never figured out if he’d ever bothered to read the play or only the Cliff’s Notes and an extremely melancholy sophomore who wanted her to repeat every assignment to her personally.  A shy unworldly hippie boy who longed for her to know that his was the anonymous submission that she had praised; a girl who argued endlessly about Amelia’s policy on using brand names in stories -- she was against it, s vehemently.  
	“Strange,” Lucas said now. He lingered on the edge of a desk, one hand in his coiled hair. “You haven’t changed. I suppose you’re going to drag out those old saws about the human heart in conflict with itself in class number nine?”
	She ignored him. She had learned, over the years, that persistent students, obstinate students, were best left to talk themselves out and eventually, they gave up and drifted away. Much the same as annoying boyfriends, when she had them, and even her annoying son, who had sponged off her for years, first pretending to be an artist, then a musician and now god save us, a writer. He lived in Hawaii with his girlfriend, Glitter. Every few months he sent her a poem. The last one had been three words spaced across the page:  
	Fie. On. You.
	“It’s not a criticism,” Lucas said now. “I do admire your consistency.”
	“Consistency is vital,” she said. At least on one thing they could agree. “If you aren’t consistent in your habits you might as well forget being a writer.”
	“Discipline,” Lucas said. He tapped his head. His finger appeared to go through his skull. “Writing isn’t fun. Drinking is fun. Dancing is fun. Writing is work.” He came closer. “Lesson thirteen.”
	“It’s all true,” she said.
	“I wrote every word on ecstasy,” he said. “How do you explain me?”
	She yanked her briefcase higher on her shoulder. “I don’t get paid to explain,” she says. “Besides,” she told him. “Last I heard you had,” she paused. “Passed away.”
	“Rule fifteen: no point of view from the dead.”
	“The dead don’t have a point of view! They’re dead.”
	“Amelia?”
	Marta stood at the corner of the door, looking in. They had arranged to go for a drink to discuss Marta’s latest submission to Smallest Press.
	“I’m coming,” she said. “Just thinking out loud.”
	“Sounds morbid,” she said.
	Amelia scanned the room and sighed. “What isn’t?” she asked.
	Lucas had fled.
*
	
	After Amelia had a glass of red at the Corner Grill and hashed over Marta’s poem, an over-wrought rendition on the power of butterflies, Marta was pushing nature poetry a bit too far these days, she walked into the central quad. Spring had arrived and the place resembled a beach. Girls in tank tops aired their midriffs; boys lounged at tables, smoking cigarettes. The confidence of the young that they would never face death or wear wrinkles ceased to amaze her; no matter how many times they were told not to smoke, or to binge drink, or to rely on clichés they did it because they believed that a) they would never die and b) no one over the age of 30 had experienced anything of importance. Not until around age 35 or so might some of them wake up to what they had done. And then it was too late. That was what her son Randy was all about, a heavy smoker and drinker now gone completely in the other direction, unable to eat anything unless it was raw . He was the sort of person that other people laughed at and wrote satires about, the kosher raw food macrobiotic diet nut who refused to compromise. She tried to write a little satire about him herself, something for the New Yorker humor column called, Swallow Not, but it had never quite come off. Since her novel had been published in 1982, she had tried several times to replicate her success, but though she sat at her desk most days, hurrying home from class to arrange her pencils by her computer, accompanied by the strings of the classical musical station, she had not actually published anything. A critical paper here and there, but as far as new work, it had not materialized. Students on occasion asked her what she was working on, and she told them a story or sometimes a novel, but the truth was that nothing caught fire.
								*
	 
	By the fifteenth and final class, she was more than ready to leave.  Talk flew around the campus: Ms. Warren, formerly tack sharp, now appeared to talk to herself and stare fixedly at pipes or walls; she was widely believed to be losing it. At the final workshop, her students – possibly as relieved as she to be done -- surprised her with punch and cookies; she hurried through their well-wishes and last set of papers in hand, exited the classroom.	
	At home, she opened the door and walked inside. Her cat, Red Herring, rubbed against her leg.  She leafed through the mail and the cat said, “For God’s sake feed me, I’m starving to death.” 
	Amelia froze. They were alone. She dropped the mail and walked into her office. There, in the third desk door she found a single sheet of newsprint, yellow at the edges.
	“Young writer jumps to early death,” she read. The obituary talked about Lucas’s success, his clever prose. How, despite his empathy for the internal musing of four legged creatures, he never actually owned a dog. Or a cat. The entire thing had been imagined; he had been terrifically allergic to pets. “Not even a gold fish,” his mother said.
	Across the room, her cat scratched at the post; “Damn selfish bitch,” he said.  At her elbow, her desk lamp bent its bulbous head towards her computer as though seeking warmth. Ivy  crawled down the bookshelf. A sneeze ripped across the air.
	She jerked around to see Lucas perched on the overstuffed sofa.
	He nodded at the cat. “A little trick I learned. Throwing voices.”
	Quickly, she shoved the obit back and slammed the drawer.
	“Why are you here?” she asked. “What do you want?” 
	A dirty handkerchief materialized in his hand; he blew his nose.
	“Change your mind,” he said. “Admit you were wrong.”
	“I’m not your analyst, I’m your teacher,” she said. But even as she said that, she      thought of Randy in Hawaii, living on mango juice. Had she been the same way with him? Setting him up for the disappointment of defeat before he had experienced the joy of creative life? His music, his  art, and now his poetry was awful and she told him so. Would things have changed if she had lied?	
	“I meant well,” she said. “I tried to protect you.”
	“From success?”
	“I want every student to succeed,” she said, primly.
	“Do you now?” 
	Lucas slipped off the couch in an odd manner, as though he went through the stuffing and landed in a lump on the floor. “Are you sure?”
	The cat had stopped clawing. Lucas slid forward; the article she had been reading sat in his hand. He skimmed it, amused. 
	“Why did you kill yourself?” she asked.
	“Changing the subject,” he said. “Always ready to deflect attention from yourself and your writers’ block.”
	“I’m not blocked,” she said. “I write every day from three to five, whether I feel like it or not.”
	He didn’t reply, only walked through the sofa to the living room window where with a hop, he sailed halfway up and hung in the air. She wanted him to disappear, and yet she did not. She wanted to ask him one last question, and yet it scared her.
	From his fluttering position he said,	“Yes.”
	“What?”
	“You want to ask me if I learned anything from you. I did.”
	“And?”
	“Rule minus one,” he intoned. “Anything you say, do the precise opposite.” A watery smile crossed his face. “I owe you everything.”
	Amelia balled her hands into fists. 
	“Why did you come back if you hated me?”
	For the first time he hesitated. Then, he said, “To give you something to write about.” And poof, he disappeared.
##