Ghosts and Other Lovers by Lisa Tuttle Page B

hands floated free, detached from the arms. One of the hands floated up toward the ceiling, becoming more insubstantial as it rose.
    Mr. Elphinstone could not speak to her, for Mr. Elphinstone was not here. She had created something that looked like Mr. Elphinstone -- or like her memory of Mr. Elphinstone -- and that was all. It did not live. It never had and never would. It was inhabited by no ghosts. There were no ghosts. She could not blame Mr. Elphinstone for that, nor for the fact that he could neither enslave nor save her.
    She was alone in her room as she watched her dream disintegrate. She was alone with her disease, her curse, her madness -- her strange, useless talent.

From Another Country
     
T hat summer Alida became aware of death in much the same way she had been aware of sex in her teens: it was everywhere around her, experienced by others; it was inevitable and terrifying and she could not stop thinking about it.
     
    She was a woman of thirty years, unmarried, childless. She had never lost anyone close to her. And in that summer the doctors found an inoperable, malignant tumor in her father's brain.
    Sitting with her father, Alida longed to ask him about the experience of dying, but she could not, any more than she had ever been able to ask him, when she was younger, about sex. There were certain mysteries parents would never reveal to their children. Even to ask him about pain seemed disrespectful. She saw him every weekend, and usually one evening during the week as well, and when she visited she tried to be cheerful and ordinary, and to anticipate his needs, giving him the pills before he asked for them. They said little to each other. Their closest moments, then as always, were in watching television, sharing the same vicarious experience, her laugh echoing his.
    And then she saw death, before her very eyes.
    She was in Holborn underground station, waiting for a train after a weary day at work. The platform was hot and crowded, and Alida stared at a particular man simply because he happened to be in her line of sight.
    Her thoughts were on other things -- her father, a new pair of shoes, an argument at work -- but she absorbed the fact that this dark-haired, dark-skinned man in early middle-age was wearing a suit which looked too heavy for the weather, and was fanning himself erratically with a folded Financial Times .
    She saw him hit himself in the face with the paper as he dropped it, and, as the paper fell, he fell too, heavily and clumsily, his arms and legs jerking stiffly, out of control. He was probably dead by the time he hit the ground. Alida didn't need a doctor's pronouncement to confirm her impression: she seemed to know it instinctively, with the same certainty that she knew she was alive.
    Although he was a stranger, his death made a powerful impression on her. That night she couldn't fall asleep: she kept seeing his death, as if the darkness of her room was a screen for the film of her memories. She noticed new details -- the pattern on his tie, the scuff marks on his shoes -- and saw all the other individuals who made up the crowd in which he died. There was a girl in a pink dress and white cloth boots reading The Clan of the Cave Bear ; two dirty, spiky-haired teenagers in black leather holding hands; a cluster of American women talking loudly about Cats ; a man with one gold earring; a couple of sober, dark-suited businessmen, one of whom carried a bright blue plastic briefcase; an Oriental woman with two doll-like children; a man in black --
    A man in black who had not been there before, and was no longer there after, the death.
    Alida sat up in bed, struggling to breathe, closing her eyes the better to see.
    A man in black.
    Close to the man who had died. She saw his hand come out; he had touched the man who died. When? Before or after the paper fell? Could it have been coincidence? Just a man in a black suit among so many others in gray or blue or brown --
    Except that she couldn't