Vance noticed that he was Vance and that he was particularly strong.
That was good, the ghost reassured himself.
It is generally not good to be Vance, but if one has to be Vance, then one might as well be a good Vance — and also a wayward one.
As opposed to what one usually is, and that, he suddenly noticed, seems to be a particular tree near his grave.
It was night in the New Jersey summer, past midnight but not yet three, the hour when the human body’s metabolic functions reach their lowest ebb and are most likely to unravel. The witching hour. And here he was, in the neighborhood body’s innate fear, a leftover pattern, self-aware, fragile, — and suddenly vital.
He understood what a grave is. It is a weird convergence . . . of beetles.
The dead are tender toward their graves but it is an addiction that causes Vance disharmony, for he is too expansive to be contained in a grave. He also has a house that is now a Club. A particular distinction that most of these poor sots known as Christian do not possess. The wider world does not care about graves anymore. They are an encumbrance upon the land. The dead should be allowed to defocus from all thoughts of materiality when it is a cruel and impossible tease.
Vance knew well enough in gathering himself that it is best to rest a bit after the momentary uprush of focus, but not to dally. It risks losing oneself then rejoining oneself in an inferior mechanism or procedure, especially one that doesn’t make sense.
He moved out onto the street, following the course of the electric lines, moving from light to light, a scarce humming of ambient life. Espying a man at a bus stop on Broadway, he paused.
Why is that fellow staring at an oblong multicolored glass with such gaity? Oh. It is a technological item that is now available and seems to be very engaging. It will probably be important if the strands of the afterlife have shown it him.
He has great faith in these forces and structures. They are, to him, the reality of God, though, as far as he can tell, this real God bears no resemblance to the statue in the Church.
There is always the temptation to pray to it, for it is how we all, living and dead, deal with stress, to ask for connection to the big benevolence that is not entirely on the level, and prayer would come, Vance knew, but it is best not to get stuck in the deductive delusions of the rectory when one can sleuth about and see what is this time.
So Jesus and his saints will have to wait, and, in a pinch, it is really better to call on Neptune and Amphitrite where he had safe passage and greater merriment with his old friends in a world that he suddenly remembered.
A slyly winking world that was difficult to slide into if one had not many years upon the sea, and Vance did not, but an uncle did, a sea captain at one time, and it was this uncle he felt now, and his lowly companions of the sea who are often more powerful than the gentlemen. Here he was now, at the Club, with the boats.
Neptune! Lord Neptune! cried Vance.
After a whorling moment of defocus, dangerous if undirected, he found himself standing on the deck of a Clipper ship, anchored in the Kill Van Kull not far from the old Lighthouse that no longer shines except in memory.
“Yer got yerself in quite a mess now,” said George.
“Did I?” asked Vance.
“She’s right odd, that one, and heading for a capsize known as madness,” concluded the old salt.
“Was I mad?” Vance rejoined.
The question caused George a bit of a flap, in that his face temporarily phased into that of a fish.
The Captain gave him an odd look and he bounced back.
“Most certainly or ye would not have caused yer own demise,” said George.
A commanding voice weighed in, “The overwrought romanticism of the era was partly responsible, and I imagine there were some regrets as the rope worked its grisly and inescapable physics, were there not, my boy?” said Uncle Leonard.
“For a time. I am now used to my reputation as a fright, and that was bought with the fell strike of taking my life,” Vance retorted, though not without a slight vertigo in the direction of an unsettled terror.
“Askance is me, for I am a Christian as well as a Son of Neptune,” piped in Archie. “It is not fine to end a life that should be lived and not celebrated in a dark fame and a snare to the passers-by.”
"This girl has nothing so special as the scent of living skin, delicate in the blush of youth, and it calls me,” said Vance in a rhapsody.
“We are at the ready,” said George.
“I, for one, hope she finds Christ and not the watery grave that is already beckoning, though I will avail me of the hunt,” said Archie.
“We thought you might,” concluded the Captain.
