“Is it true,” she began, “that you used the word ‘narc’ in a puppet show recently?”
I thought for a moment. “I might have. As a verb.”
“And also the word ‘Hitler’?”
“It made sense in context. It was a joke.”
“And I hear there have been fart noises.”
“The kids love them.”
“Listen, Mark,” she said. “You do great work here. You’re reliable, you’re smart. The kids adore you. But we’ve had complaints from parents this week. Kids repeat things at home, you know. I was thinking of going away to Ecuador for a month next summer. There’s a herpetology summit there. It’s big. I’m trying to expand into turtles, and Ecuador is turtle heaven. Kismet. There are turtles there the size of my bathtub.”
She sighed. “I was thinking of putting you in charge of the summer program. Deputy director would be your new title—which comes with a raise, of course. But I have to say: not like this.”
“Oh,” I said. “Thanks, Cathy. I’ll try to tone it down.”
She stared at me with those squinty reptilian eyes. “Do,” she said.
When I arrived home, Rachel was there, waiting on the stoop.
“Your address was in our files,” she said.
I looked down at her: sitting up straight, spine primly erect, hands around her knees, eyes wide behind her thick glasses. Her presence here seemed somehow both uncanny and inevitable.
“So you’re here to check my proof of residence?” I said. “How thorough of you.”
“You haven’t been back to the library.”
“No. I haven’t.” I sat down next to her. “Aren’t you cold, sitting out here?”
“Not really. I’m wearing long underwear. I knew I might be waiting awhile.” She sighed. “I got worried. I started to think maybe I freaked you out.”
I looked down at my feet. “Well,” I said. “Maybe a little.”
“Sorry.”
“It’s okay. Are you mad at me?”
“Mad at you?” She frowned. “No. Of course not.”
“You seemed mad that day.”
“I wasn’t mad,” she said. “I was just a little scared.”
“Of what?”
“I just—” She shook her head. “It’s hard to explain.”
“Do you want to try?”
“I guess so. I mean, yes. But I don’t really know where to start.”
“Well, I have a question,” I said.
“Okay.”
“When I touched your arm, there in the bar—did you feel something…weird?”
At this, her face drained of all color.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
She slowly reached out to touch me, extending her arm toward my leg. As her touch approached, I felt it again: that tingly sensation I’d experienced when I’d touched her in the bar. This time it was even more pronounced, perhaps because she was moving so slowly. She let her hand linger about an inch from my knee, and the feeling grew so strong that I found myself staring at the space between her hand and my flesh, looking for some kind of visual explanation: a crackle of electricity? A carbonated fizzing of the air? A thousand hair-thin needles?
Then she made contact. Her hand grasped my knee, and the feeling grew even stronger. It was as if my knee had suddenly fallen asleep, except that it actually felt more awake. It was terrifying. It was also erotic. I could feel my body stirring to meet this mysterious sensation. It reminded me of the feeling I’d had in the dream, with the bats. Before I could respond, though, she quickly withdrew her hand. I turned to look at her. Her eyes were dark and serious.
“You mean that?” she said.
“Yes. That.”
“Well, remember how I told you I knew someone who had died?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Well. That feeling? That’s him.”
Thomas
* * *
At first, Rachel loved having an invisible boyfriend. She said it was what she’d always wanted: a togetherness that resembled the best kind of aloneness. Perfect consonance, zero conversation. A slow constant stretch of desire. A thoroughly weightless lover. A penetration by silence.
Nothing separated us. My “body” seeped into hers. We breathed each other. I couldn’t speak any words, but it didn’t matter: I communicated through a shifting of texture and pressure, through swarm and whisper and tease.
You may have fantasized before about becoming invisible—you’ve considered the high-dollar items you’d pilfer, keyholes you’d slip into, people you’d tickle or sucker punch, laughing your silent laugh while they swatted helplessly at the charged air around their bodies. You’d be the ultimate knower of secrets. You could insert yourself into any open space, no matter how tight or forbidden, and in this way your entire existence would become a kind of fucking.
As it turned out, I had no interest in stealing. But fucking, on the other hand? The fucking was fucking fantastic. No worries about getting soft or exhausted; I was no longer bound by the body’s laws. I entered Rachel in bed, in the shower, through her thin cotton leggings while she cooked dinner. She’d scold me half-heartedly, trying to suppress a smile.
In my previous life, I was never much of a cuddler. I’d spoon the girl for a few minutes like a gentleman, I’d put in my time—but then I’d roll away, staking my own blanketed terrain, trying to ignore the soft stink of her longings.
Now, though, I could touch Rachel everywhere and still not touch her at all. This paradox incited my keenest colonial impulses: every movement created new pockets of emptiness, calling out to be conquered and occupied. The horizon of her body was always receding, even as she submitted herself, over and over and over. It drove me crazy.
All the Hallmark metaphors? Now, physical facts. You’re my world. You complete me. I’m nothing without you. Whatever was left of me—a breezy sweep, a tingle of loose molecules—only became activated within a few inches of her body. She had to leave me, of course, for hours at a time—to go to work, to purchase necessities—and during these times I’d feel my existence diffusing, growing thinner. I could still move around if I wanted to, but I moved driftingly, like a cloud; my mind grew fuzzy, I lost proprioception, became just a vague woolly consciousness with no sense of space or time. Memories blended unevenly with the present. Time became palpable and viscous, a lumpy substance in which I could slowly flail for hours. Then I’d hear Rachel’s key in the lock and I’d snap back into the present; pressing up against her, I’d feel my nameable parts return like phantom limbs. Shoulder, thigh, cock.
She could not make such distinctions. For her there were no shapes, only two categories of space: Thomas and Not Thomas. “Surround me,” she’d say at night. “Let me feel you everywhere.” We fell asleep like that, her hot breath dissolving into the ghosts of my bones.
My world had been pleasurably reduced in scale. No outside forces to battle, no one to protect or to fail, only this one body, hers: the lush curving topography of it, the smooth shoulder, the seashell whorl of the ear, the inner thigh’s musky scoop. And her face! Staring into space, red lips slightly parted, eyes unfocused; or squinting into her computer screen while eating soba noodles in the kitchen at night; or lightly frowning in the middle of a dream—it changed like the surface of deep water, absorbing and reflecting different kinds of light, its ripples both predictable and deeply mysterious. I lived for what lapped to the surface, half revealed itself, receded. She was like the ocean. There was enough here to interest me for another whole lifetime.
If this sounds obsessive—well, it was. It was also an enormous relief. Finally, someone interested me enough that I could forget about myself. There was plenty worth forgetting.
* * *
So when I survived my own disappearance, I felt invincible. As long as I didn’t leave the sweet cocoon of my lover’s house, no one could get me. I hadn’t been back to my apartment in over a month; I’d never know whether the letter had ever come for me, the one from the Off
ice telling me how to return. For all I knew, I’d forfeited my chance anyway, by disobeying their instructions. I didn’t care: now I had no desire to return. As long as I didn’t go back to my old place, I could forget I’d ever died. I could pretend this was how I’d always intended to live; I could inhabit this two-person universe forever.
Truly, at first, it felt as though we’d won—and not only in my game of chicken with the Office. We’d won at love, in general. We’d found it, what everyone wants, the apotheosis of what all the love poets have yearned for: the wet dream of John Donne, the wild fantasy of Rumi. Chagall’s lovers floating up toward the ceiling and then past it, into some perfect ether.
But that feeling could only last so long. Because in the end, only one of us had achieved this transcendence; the other, for better or worse, still possessed a body.
Throughout my deterioration, I’d developed an almost erotic relationship to the apartment itself—to its furniture and blankets, its textures and smells. It had become an extension of my body—and then, as my body deteriorated, a replacement for it. To remain there, even on the long lonely days while she worked at the library, was to remain with myself, inside myself, which was to say with her.
Then one night, about two weeks after my “disappearance,” Rachel didn’t come home. At first I worried that there’d been some terrible accident—that she’d been caught in a subway derailment or sideswiped by a truck, that the library had burned down. But as the minutes ticked by I came to feel certain, deep down in my ghost bones, that she was staying away by choice. It hardly mattered why; what mattered was that she could inhabit a reality that did not include me.
Finally, around midnight, I heard her key in the door, watched her tiptoe inside. I swarmed her instantly, followed her into the bedroom, surrounding her like a cloud of gnats.
“I’m sorry,” she said, flopping down on the bed with all her clothes on. “I just went over to Jimmy’s. I had to talk to someone. I was going crazy. I mean, I didn’t tell him tell him, of course. I made something up.”
She raised her hands, put her palms over her eyes. “I don’t know what to do,” she whispered, her voice edged with held-back tears. “I feel like I’m dissolving from the outside in. It’s like I can’t tell the difference between you and me anymore. I can’t touch anything without touching you. I keep having these nightmares, and I don’t even think they’re mine. Just this deep, deep blackness, and then a scream.”
Your death is a terminal condition; while it is technically incommunicable, certain symptoms of it may be transferred to others. It was true that I’d heard her toss and turn and cry out in the grip of nightmares. But I hadn’t seen this as a “symptom”—not even when she awoke hollow-faced, with bruise-like circles under her eyes. It hadn’t occurred to me that as I inhaled the warm heat of her body, as I took in her moist breath and sweet sweaty scent, she was breathing me in too—that there was an economy of life force, an equal exchange. And no living human body had been designed to breathe in another’s ghost twenty-four hours a day, like a noxious gas. The more I pleasured and surrounded her, the more of her vitality I absorbed, the more I seeped into her: my memories, my darknesses, my regrets.
For the first time since disappearing, I wished I could speak. Words hadn’t seemed necessary before, in our contextless world. But now the lack of language was stifling, like a lack of oxygen.
She turned onto her side; I wrapped myself around her, spooning her from behind, nuzzling the nape of her neck, inhaling her scent. She closed her eyes and leaned into me, accepting the embrace—but for the first time since I’d disappeared, I felt something press against my happiness, dull and metallic, like a blade against the jugular; even this was a bubble, easily pierced.
* * *
When you’re a ghost, I learned, your human lover will eventually long for a human touch. When she thinks you’re not looking, she’ll close her eyes and wrap her arms around herself, imagining an embrace. Or she’ll walk so quickly from one room to another that you slip off her, unable to catch up: “I just need to feel the air on my skin,” she’ll say. “The regular air. The air that doesn’t want anything from me.”
Despite her feelings for you, however genuine and singular, your lover is a person, in a body. She’ll tell you it’s not lust that makes her yearn for other bodies, that she doesn’t want to replace you—but the difference won’t matter. All you will feel is the sting of betrayal as she struggles to affirm her membership in a world to which you no longer belong. You’ll feel wounded by her inability, or unwillingness, to fully disappear into you, the way you’ve disappeared into her.
You’ll learn, the hard way, that death is not a disease that others can catch from you. Instead, it makes you the disease. Once death has happened to you, it never stops happening. The more you resist it, the harder it rides you. This is how you become a haunt: skittish and terrified, you grasp after something that no longer belongs to you. You grasp after life. Like a vampire, or a cannibal, you attach to the life of another. You inhale, you swallow.
Fighting with your lover is difficult. You cannot speak. You can barely even displace objects; you can’t move a pen across paper with enough precision to make recognizable marks. When you’re mad you may resort to childish tactics, like hiding in corners or behind furniture, until she has no choice but to walk through her apartment, swiping the air for a tingly trace of you, begging you back.
When you both tire of such games, you’ll develop more sophisticated techniques. (You didn’t need these before, when you were happy.) You might try a system in which you squeeze her right hand for “yes,” her left for “no.” You’ll be surprised at how quickly this works, the first time you try it. She’ll understand immediately; she’ll be so relieved she’ll start squealing, then burst into tears. You’ll think of Helen Keller with her w-a-t-e-r. Understanding will flow over and between your hands like liquid. After that, inebriated by success, you may undertake some doomed experiments with Morse code.
But no matter what techniques you develop, the substance of the fight will remain the same. You have one irreconcilable difference: she exists, among other bodies, and you do not.
You’ll fight this fight so many times that, for all your supernatural tricks, you’ll become just like any other troubled couple, locked in that familiar rusted-out cycle: wound, sulk, supplicate, scream. Hate sex, love sex, fragile truce. Lather, rinse, repeat.
You’ll eventually have to accept that she has the freedom to go where she wants, to see whomever she desires. But wherever she goes, you’ll accompany her—to the grocery store, to her job, to the dentist. Wherever she goes, you follow. You’ve become more than her lover: you’ve become her double, her shadow, her ghost.
* * *
This is where he comes in: the other man.
There will be another man, there’s no avoiding it. Through him, you’ll discover it’s not only love that can strengthen your physical presence. Any strong emotion will do. Hatred, for example. Jealousy works just fine. Your possessive rage will whittle you down to a single purpose.
For a while, at least, this will work in your favor. You’ll willingly leave your lover for hours at a time now, not even missing her when you’re with the Other Man, because you have an interest in him too—a different kind, of course, but just as strong. You’ll discover that you can visibly affect the other man without even touching him—just hover next to him, whisper in his ear. Tell him all the sad parts of your story. Exhale the ambient sorrow of the bodiless. Remind him, your tongue full of venom, that he’ll die someday too.
He won’t be able to hear you. He’ll understand anyway. Your monstrous yearning will invade him till he crumples. He won’t be able to explain what has happened to him, so he’ll start to doubt himself—and then he’ll start to doubt everything.
Even better: while you’re off bothering the Other Man, your lover will miss you. She’ll worry that you have left her for good. This uncertainty will benefit you. Also, the m
an himself will come to associate his sadness and confusion with your lover. He will search for solace, for physical distraction, wherever it’s most handy—perhaps, if you’re lucky, with another lover, one who has her own reasons for maintaining and hoarding his attention.
But don’t get complacent. He may move away from your lover only to boomerang back with greater force. Nothing is sexier, after all, than a mystery.
* * *
I thought I knew this guy, “Mark.” For a while I thought of him like that, in quotes, as if he wasn’t real. In my mind he was less a person than a type of person—like a “Ted” or a “Bill” or even a “Chad,” he was a generic male, an outline: an actor in a commercial, a figure in a cartoon.
A “Mark” is a very particular, recognizable kind of man. Every elite American college is liberally populated with genial Marks, genially greeting each other at the lab or the gym or the frat party with genial fist bumps or slaps on the back. They are genial males whose lives have been prearranged for maximum ease, to give them the illusion that they’ve earned their success through their bland, genial competence.
Marks usually come from Westchester or the Waspier parts of New Jersey, or sometimes the Midwest; like the cheerful animals in Richard Scarry books, they aspire toward the most useful, legible professions (doctor, lawyer, owner of a business). They work hard but not too hard, date girls who are pretty but not too pretty, speak loudly and confidently but not too loudly and confidently. They aren’t assholes, Marks. They’re likable. If all the men you knew were Marks, you’d probably conclude that the world was a safe place, filled with good people.
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