Two of Pentacles

My Office—AFTERNOON

I am busy rushing around the office and occasionally peeking in on the training session the lab staff is in. Mary keeps hinting about pizza for lunch. I realize she misunderstood something I said as an offer to buy the crew’s lunch. I tell her that “I guess I owe them lunch sometime, for some reason, but I am busy today.”

She starts to question this as I fiddle with the photocopier trying to scan some historic maps. I get irritated, “Fine!” I throw some money at her and say “Just to eat at my expense.” Meanwhile, she has begun talking to some of the married staff as if she knows what they are talking about. She must be pretending to have a husband again.

I shrug and look at the scan as the machine finally spits it out. It, like all the other historic maps of the Mountains I was trying to scan, had come out distorted. But there is some repetition in the fractionalization of the image. I show it to Mary. I point out the repetition of the image and explain the weird feelings I get working over the map.

We both talk about the spirit rumors. Are the ghosts trying to keep us from our research?

I go for the Sailor for some advice. When we come back, Mary is on a table holding the scan over another map trying to pin point exactly what the angle of distortion is. It is pointless. I attempt to explain the situation to Sailor Lou.

“In short. Everyone thinks we’re haunted. That we brought something back. I guess a ghost is a great theory and all,” I say tossing hip the distorted images to examine, “But we don’t need ectoplasm sliming everything to explain all these events. I am sure there is a simpler explanation. Occam’s razor.”

This is lost on Mary and Lou who are sold on the paranormal story. I hedge.

“Okay. Okay. Let’s say it is a ghost.” I sigh, “But even if it is a spirit, spirits are energy and light. So is the scanner. It would only take some minor presence in the office. I mean, there isn’t a full-blown phantasm...”

But I am being ignored by this point.

The Sailor, waves away me and Occam and our razor. He picks up a nearby telephone thinking out loud that, “If this is ghost energy like an EVP, that is, an electronic voice phenomenon, then we could better contact the spirits through an electronic device. Like this one.”

Lou holds the phone to his ear. “Are you the spirit of someone who died in the In the Mountains?” he asks the supposed ghost.

“Perhaps in the hurricane?” Mary presses.

“Perhaps,” Sailor Lou agrees, then continues, “If you are. If you died in the hurricane, then I respect you. It was a horrible tragedy and if that causes you to stay around, it is Okay with me. I understand...”

Sailor Lou goes on and on chatting with the ghost who may or more likely may not be on the telephone. In the meantime, I am looking at some pictures of some old machinery that the crew has taken In The Mountains near the village. They tell me they are a bunch of tractors or something and I want to confirm exactly what they saw in the field. I haul out the old turn of the last century Sears and Roebuck catalog we use to identify old odd trinkets. I open to the section and point.

“Was it like this?” I ask Mary, “A slurry?”

“No,” Mary speaks up assuredly, “It was a trafalmodide.”

“Yes,” I muse over the term, “It is a hard word to say.”

But I am thinking now about the hurricane. I wonder if our Park Ranger friend got out of forest before the storm hit. I hadn’t seen him recently. We hadn’t even needed to radio in recently as we typically did whenever passing through park property. As I recall, he was manning a watchtower In The Mountains about the time of the hurricane.

Now in a panic I snatch the receiver from the Sailor and call into it: “Tower 170 dash 3! Have you evacuated? Repeat. Have you evacuated!?”