The Ghost of Christmas Past

When Crane woke, it was to the smell of a school hallway, floor wax and radiators, and a voice that said, "Silas. Wake. Walk with me."

The spirit stood at the foot of his bed — a small figure, old and young at once, its skin the color of a winter dawn, holding what looked like a dying flashlight, and light came out of the crown of its head like a lamp through a cracked shade, and it wore a hood drawn down over the light, and it was looking at him with a face made out of every age he had ever been.

"Who are you?"

"I am the Ghost of Christmas Past. Of your past long stored in files. Rise. Walk with me. Touch my sleeve."

Crane touched the sleeve, and the bedroom left, and he was standing in a school gymnasium in Chardon, Ohio, in December, and he was fifty-three years old and eight years old at once, and the wooden bleachers were folding back, and a teacher was saying his name in the voice that means the ride is not coming. Other children left in twos and threes with parents in pickups. Crane sat on the folded mats by the equipment cage with his mittens on and his lunch bag on his knee, and waited, and the radiators ticked, and outside the window the snow kept its one promise, which was to keep falling.

He knew it. He remembered the exact blue of the mats. He had forgotten the radiator sound, and now the sound of it went through him like a needle finding an old stitch. "I was there," he said. "I was on the mats. Spirit, why do you show me this? Take me back. This is cruel."

"They know this room," the spirit said gently, "who have sat in it. Come."

They walked, and the world rippled, and the gym became the front room of Wexler's, and the sign said WEXLER'S — DINER, GARAGE, RECORDS, and it was Christmas Eve again, and old Wexler — a fat, bald, magnificent man in a bow tie the size of a fish — was sliding a hand-cranked phonograph onto the counter between the pie case and the wrench drawer, and bellowing, "Hillman! Dev! Clear the floor! Si, my boy, help me move the ice cream cabinet, tonight we dance, tonight the whole block is invited, tonight my money buys the one thing money cannot buy in bulk, which is a Tuesday-sized joy on a Thursday's budget!"

And they came: the two apprentices, Hillman and Dev, and the hired girl with flour on her wrists, and Wexler's wife and her three fat daughters, and the man who fixed the trucks, and the man who swept the lot, and six customers who owed the store money and were not reminded of it, and a fiddler with a cheap electric fiddle and an amp with a blown speaker that made everything sound like it was being remembered instead of heard, and they danced, and the diner shook, and old Wexler cut the pies like a man who has decided there is enough, and there was enough.

Crane watched young Silas — himself, a gangly apprentice with his collar out and his ears red — dance with June, the dark-haired girl who worked at the pharmacy counter up the street, and he watched his own face, and his own face was young, and open, and laughing, and he felt his own eyes go hot. "Spirit," he said, "I should like to say a word or two to my clerk just now, that's all. My clerk, Dale Teller, who is at home tonight with his family, and who asked me for one day."

Wexler's voice came across thirty years like the fiddle through the blown speaker. "He has spent a few dollars of your mortal money — three or four, perhaps. Is that so much? He has the power to render us happy or unhappy; to make our service light or burdensome; a pleasure or a toil. Say that his power lies in words and looks; in things so slight and insignificant that it is impossible to add and count them up. What then? The happiness he gives is quite as great as if it cost a fortune." And the whole party cheered old Wexler on the counter, and Crane thought of the little USB campfire on Teller's desk, and covered his face with his hands, and then the room dimmed and the fiddle unwound itself like a tape run backward, and they were somewhere else, and somewhere else was worse.

It was a park in autumn, gold light through the buckeyes, and June was holding out her hand, and there was a ring in it, and then his eyes corrected: there was nothing in it, she had already taken the ring off; she was giving the empty hand.

"It matters so little to you now," June was saying, in the exact voice, the one the memory had kept at full fidelity, "that I wonder it never occurred to you to mention it. Another idol has displaced me. If it can cheer and comfort you in time to come, as I would have tried to do, I have no just cause to grieve."

"What idol has displaced you?" young Si said, and his voice was already the voice from the spreadsheets.

"A golden one."

"This is a world of money. Even I was poor once. You fear the world too much, June. All your hopes have merged into the hope of being beyond its reach, and I was poor, and I am not poor now, and I will be safer every year, and that is all I want, that is everything—"

"You weigh everything," she said. "You weigh our dinners. I have watched you weigh our dinners, Si. It is not that you have grown cold. It is that you have grown accurate. Everything in you has merged into some other hope, and the other hope is called security, and it eats everything that is not a number, and I am not a number." She put the empty hand down. "May you be happy in the life you have chosen."

"Spirit," Crane said, "show me no more. Take me home. I am already heavier than I was."

"One more," the spirit said. "You know there is one more."

And it was a living room, years on, June's living room, and June was at the window with a child on her hip and another one braiding her hair wrong, and her husband came in shaking snow off his coat with a small wrapped box behind his back, and the girl shrieked, and June laughed, and Crane stood in the middle of the room nobody could see, and he heard June's husband say, "I saw an old friend of yours today, June. Silas Crane. Quite alone in the world, they say. His partner — dead seven years now. Alone in that big office like the last light on in a building," and June said, quiet, to the child, not to the ghost, "Poor man. I am sorry for him," and she was, and that was the unbearable part, that she was.

"Take me back," Crane begged. "I cannot bear it. Leave me. Take me back." And he wrestled the hood of the spirit — got both hands on it, wrenching it down over the light the way you cap a well, you smother a fire, you shred a document — and the light went out all at once, and the room went with it, and Crane was in his own bed, in the dark, with his hands closed on nothing, breathing like a man who has been underwater.