The Ghost of Christmas Present

The bell tolled one, and Crane sat up in the dark, and nothing happened, and he lay back down and told himself the story was over, and then he remembered, and sat up again, and the bedroom was gone.

He stood in his own brownstone, but it was not his brownstone. It was a rented loft of green and red and gold, a room his house could never hold, piled with takeout boxes and party platters and turkeys with GPS tags still on them and pyramids of grocery deliveries and a wall of wine the color of church windows, and the air smelled like cinnamon and roasting and, underneath it, faintly, like a great kitchen in the sky. Seated on a mountain of delivered crates was a jolly giant in a green robe trimmed with white fur, holding a glowing heat lamp in one hand like a torch, its plastic housing still on, a creature of this world and entirely made of light, and its voice was open like a door.

"Come in, Silas Crane. Come in, and know me better, man."

"You are the Ghost of Christmas Present."

"I am. Look at me. Touch my robe. You have never seen the like of me before. I live in the present, and the present is a feast somebody cooked and a door somebody opened, and you have spent your whole life on the other side of both."

They went out over the city, and the spirit did not walk so much as waft, and everywhere they went, Crane saw the day as it was being made: deliveries on porches, cans shaken, batteries tested, a hundred kitchens running like little engines of forgiveness; and the spirit's heat lamp, wherever it swung, touched people, and wherever it touched them they grew kinder to each other, though none of them ever knew why, and Crane watched a bus driver wait eleven seconds for a running man, and a pawnbroker close his till early, and a line cook slide a full plate out the back door to a woman with a cart, and he began, horribly, to enjoy himself, and then hated himself for it, and the spirit laughed at him without malice, the way you laugh at a dog learning a trick it was born knowing.

But the robe was vast, and under its hem Crane saw something move. Two shapes, small, gray, folding themselves out from under the fur like smoke from a vent: a boy and a girl, wizened, wolfish, but of an old, old sadness rather than of any age, and no store had anything to sell them.

"Spirit, are they yours?"

"They are man's," the spirit said, and the jolliness went out of its voice like a circuit breaking. "This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased. Deny it if you can, Silas. Slander the people who tell you the truth. Use their children as your talking points, and make it worse. And then wait for the end."

"Have they no place to be?" Crane said, and heard, with horror, the exact shape of his own voice coming out of his own mouth in his own office, this afternoon, this very afternoon.

"Are there no shelters?" the spirit said, in Crane's own voice, pitched and polished and perfect. "Are there no work programs? Are there no jails? On what grounds do you ask the question of me, man, when you own the buildings where the question was invented?" And the light in the room guttered, and the two children looked at Crane with faces he would see again before this night was over, and he could not look away, and the spirit swept them back under the robe like a man hiding his children from a debt collector, and took him out into the snow.

They came to a walk-up in Ohio City, third floor, and the spirit brought him through the uncurtained window, and it gave way like a door, and Crane stood inside his own clerk's kitchen: two pots on one burner, a table with a plastic tablecloth, and Dale Teller, in a shirt that had been ironed for the occasion, carrying a bird on a sheet pan like a man carrying a sleeping child. The family: Kayla, the eldest, home from the hospital where she worked as a tech and did not get Christmas Day, hiding behind the door to shout "Boo!" when her father came in; Marcus, mashing potatoes with the concentration of a jeweler; Rosie and the little ones setting forks that did not all match; and at the end of the table, in a small wheelchair with a folded blanket over the legs, with two thin oxygen tubes taped to his cheeks and a hand-me-down tablet balanced on his tray, Gus Teller, who did not run, because he could not, but who had insisted, as he insisted every year, on being carried to the window to watch the street.

Dale came back from church with Gus on his shoulder — a maneuver, by now, with technique — and told the story of the man at church who had asked, kindly, about the tubes, and how Gus had answered him, and Dale, telling it, laughed until he had to wipe his eyes, and the mother said "your father's a storyteller," and then the dinner went down like a miracle: the bird small and heroic, the stuffing from a box made sacred by being argued over, the applesauce Marcus had made himself and everyone praised. And Gus raised his cup of juice, his small voice like the blown speaker at Wexler's, making everything sound remembered: "God bless us every one. God bless us every one."

The story was his, and he knew it; and he said it again anyway, holding the juice cup up like a toast he had practiced, and nobody at the table wanted the moment to end.

"A tiny man," Dale said to his wife, later, by the fire they ran on the cheap setting. "He grows thoughtful. He told me, coming home in church, that he hoped people saw him, because he was a cripple, and that it might be pleasant to them to remember upon Christmas Day who made lame beggars walk and blind men see."

Crane's hand went to his mouth. "Spirit," he said, "tell me if Gus Teller will live."

"I see a vacant seat," the spirit answered. "In that poor chimney corner, and a crutch without an owner, carefully preserved. If these shadows remain unaltered by the Future, the child will die."

"No. No, kind spirit, say he will be spared."

"If these shadows remain unaltered by the Future, none other of my race will find him here. What then? If he be like to die, he had better do it, and decrease the surplus population."

Crane hung his head. He heard himself — this afternoon, the tablet, the form timing out — and could not hold the sentence, and dropped it, and it broke, and the pieces were his.

They went on, over the city, through the homes of strangers who had less and gave more, and the last place was the tent on Prospect, where three men had pooled their soup and were saying grace over a burner flame: the tallest one ladling, the second holding a folding chair steady for the oldest, who thanked each of them by name before he tasted anything, and the spirit blessed every single one with the heat lamp, and Crane stood at the edge of the light and did not want to leave, and watched his city be generous without him and could not feel the cold of it, which frightened him more than Kline's chain had.

The spirit grew older as the night grew older, and Crane noticed, because the robe was fraying now, the fur graying, the lamp dimming at the edges of its beam. "Are spirits' lives so short?"

"My life upon this globe is very brief," the spirit said. "It ends tonight."

"Tonight?"

"At midnight. The present is a gift, Silas, and it is heavy, and I have carried it as far as I carry anyone." And the bell tolled eleven, and twelve, and in the last stroke the light went out of the heat lamp like a lease not renewed, and the loft, and the feast, and the giant, folded themselves up like packing material, and Crane stood alone in the dark with a single thought arriving at compound interest: that the third spirit was coming, and that he had one night left in which to learn to be worth the visit.