The nurses found him elbow deep in the garbage can, sifting through the spent trash as if it were the soil of his native PEI. He was harvesting anything that felt like a potato to his hands, and then dropping whatever it was on the floor by his hospital bed for later use.
Whether it was a sleeping dream he was having or a waking one no longer mattered. Lost on the rolling seas of dementia, Marcel had passed into the timeless overlap of memory where reality is nothing more than an unbidden chemical spark from deep within the mystery of his receding brain.
Marcel was harmless and never given to rage, and the nurses seemed to love him, treating him more like a pet than a patient. You could see the gentleness within him, the shapes of the men he used to be who now pushed against the diseased exterior: the fair trader, the husband, the guy who was always the first to dive in off the dock, the grandfather who did corny magic tricks and loved fishing.
Now in his mid-nineties, he wandered the corridors half-dressed. Like a poltergeist given form, he drifted in and out of the rooms on the 14th floor as if living all the lives contained therein, with each visit subtly rearranging the small articles he came upon, always setting this new house in order. The expression on his face that must have once been so clear was now lost and uncertain. He seemed blinded, a subterranean creature guided through these alien and unnaturally smooth corridors not by sight but by scent, called to this strange transit by a timeless ocean that only he could discern.
The man looked like a retired astronaut 
and the woman like she gave up her career some years ago and had now dedicated herself to traveling the world and running a marathon to fight breast cancer in each city she visited. She spun away and covered her eyes when she saw me, “Sweet Jesus, Anderson,” she whispered.
I stood there blinking.
Giving them a “this better be good” look, I asked, “WHAT?”
The man stepped forward, one arm back to steady his traumatized wife, “We’d like to buy your house!”
He said this like I had just won a game show.
I don’t own the house he wanted to buy. Rachelle and I rent the bottom floor of it.
“It’s not for sale.”
“Everything is for sale,” he responded like an Alpha Male.
“That’s obnoxious, “ I said.
He laughed. He’d handled my type before. Hell, he’d been in space. What was I to him?
“You haven’t heard our offer, “ he said.
“Look, the place is haunted.”
He laughed. There were ghosts in space. He feared no ghosts.
His wife was turned half way away from me and half way toward me, her eyes fixed on the floor.
“I’ll pay you two million dollars for this house, which I think you’ll agree, is far above market value.”
“Do you like ghosts?” I asked.
The wife now sighed heavily through her mouth, “Come on Anderson, this man is clearly insane, let’s go!”
But Anderson liked a challenge. Where others saw a roadblock, Anderson saw an opportunity.
“Tell me about the ghosts, I’m interested,” he pressed.
“They’re unpredictable, sometimes the energy is poltergeist in nature and others times it feels like a human presence. It’s hard to explain. We could do a quick Ouija board and you could ask them yourself, if you like?”
“Maybe later,” he said, dialing it down a notch, “ we can see we’ve caught you at a bad time and I’m sorry for that, but here’s my card. If you want to talk about the supernatural or maybe selling your home, give me a call, I’m interested in both.”
And then they left, two people determined to buy themselves the life they wanted, regardless of what it might cost anyone else.
]]>