FIVE
AMNESIA
The luminous strangers offer their hands to her. With kindness and pity they say, “Do not be frightened,” and she is not frightened. They say, “You will not remember us,” and she does not remember them. “You’ve returned,” they assuage her. “That’s the important thing.”
Their faces are like sunlight on water, a thousand tumbling jacks of white and silver. They gather around her so closely, and in such shifting numbers, that she worries—or rather she ought to worry; she designates worry as a possibility—that they will crush her, but their bodies ride the air so weightlessly, and she feels so weightless among them, that she trusts they will not do so. By what turn she might have arrived here, what alleyway or open door, she cannot recollect. It occurs to her that she is not wearing the shoes she put on this morning. Nor, it would seem, the dress or the jacket. She took the subway to work. That she is sure of. The motor was out at the terminal, and she had to climb the escalator as though it were an ordinary staircase, but the cleated steps with their strange distribution of measurements, a little too deep and a little too tall, along with the curving metal fins of the risers, made her feel as if she was scaling the teeth of some enormous saw. For a moment she thought the tunnel’s exit had gone topsy-turvy and she was climbing down instead of up. A dizziness at the temples, a gust of warm air, and suddenly, all around her, the luminous strangers. They swaddle her now on every side, including, improbably, above and below. The sky, the ground, are bright with their faces: ablaze. Their features are so changeable that if they do not fuse together, she thinks, they will surely burn apart. But they do not fuse together. They do not burn apart. Instead they ripple.
The luminous strangers say, “We are your brothers and sisters.” And they are exactly that: her brothers and sisters. They say, “Soon you will feel at home here again.” And she does feel at home there—even, she is willing to believe, again. They say, “One day, presently, you will understand.” And one day, presently, she does. She was alive for a while, and before that she was not, and now she is not all over again. But the nonbeing from which she emerged and the post-being into which she has graduated are not quite the same. Nor is she the same privileged spirit she used to be, lulled by the comforts of home, so sure that, unlike the others, she would awaken one day and remember where she had come from.
SIX
A LONG CHAIN OF YESTERDAYS
Not for the first time, or even the hundredth, the bank president stands at his office window at 6:03 on the evening of Tuesday, March 3, 1987. Two birds square off on the other side of the glass, bickering over what looks like a raisin. The sky is as pink as cupcake frosting. Far below him a delivery truck triggers its horn, an agitated sound that the distance transforms into an adorable beep. The scene is so calming, so toylike, that originally, for one bare minute, smack in the middle of his life, it suffused the bank president with a sense of inexplicable peace, a bone-deep certainty that everything would be all right. But after the eighth repetition, or the nineteenth, he noticed that at this time of day, on this date, the horn always beeps adorably, the birds always nip at the raisin, the sky is always a cupcake pink. Thus the bank president feels overcome, despite the beauty and charm of it all, by the tedium, the invariability. He knows that his ennui is not March 3, 1987, at 6:03’s fault—not specifically. Every other moment is just as static. Take 11:24 on the morning of Friday, July 26, 1940. It is his older sister’s eighth birthday. He is drinking lemonade in the backyard. His elbows are reddening against the picnic table, and a coiled paper party horn is crimping to the left as he blows through it. Or 4:36 a.m. on Wednesday, December 6, 1972. He is watching the color bars on a hotel TV and crunching the ice from a gin and tonic. Idly he plucks at the hangnail on his thumb, then strips it loose with his front teeth. The cold of the ice on his lips deadens the sting. Or three in the afternoon on Thursday, August 10, 2006. He is trekking through the rough after a golf ball when his heart makes a fist around itself. Then he is lying on his back beneath a catalpa tree with a V-shaped trunk. The leaves vary their patterns of lighter and darker green as the wind bats them around in the sunlight. He remembers his pleasure upon discovering, after his heart stopped, that as a ghost he could revisit any moment of his life, as many times as he wanted to. Any minute, though, no matter how extraordinary, will harden into its form if it happens the same way often enough, he soon discovered. Eventually, the bank president worries, he will forget that he is a ghost. That this endless series of repetitions is not his life. Will forget how it felt when things could still happen for the first time. For now, though, he stands once more at his office window. It is 6:03 on the evening of Tuesday, March 3, 1987. Despite the pinkness of the sky, the streetlights have already been kindled, long rows of dots that, for reasons he does not understand, seem to grow brighter the farther away they are.
SEVEN
THE HITCHHIKER
The hitchhiker who asks her if she is going to Toledo is, of course, the Grim Reaper. He is not the first such hitchhiker she has encountered. Nor will he be the last. His appearance at the side of the road is a sign and a demonstration that she has died but does not yet know it. At least once a day, and usually more often, a man with thinning hair and a sun-blasted face, or baggy clothes and large O-shaped nostrils, or a wiry frame and eyes the color of creek moss, will walk up to her car while she is paused in traffic, and in a voice that reminds her of sand cascading over sand, soft and rustling but also bonelike, arthritic, he will ask her about Toledo. One memorable Tuesday she met twelve of them—a record.
She died, she is reasonably sure, some seventeen years ago. She was visiting a state park in Colorado, admiring the panorama from a cliffside observation deck, when all at once she landed, dazed, in the ankles of a fir tree. She tested her limbs and stood up. She was fine, she judged. Her head was clear and her bones were miraculously unbroken, though she could already feel a bruise rounding out on her hip.
But that afternoon a hitchhiker at the park’s entrance asked what so many thousands have asked her since: “Are you going to Toledo?” A few hitchhikers later and she suspected she was dead. Two or three more and she was certain of it. She was not an idiot. But as long as she feigns ignorance, she has determined, the hitchhikers will not collect, condemn, transform, exalt, or annihilate her. She can remain safely among the living, free to dine out or watch TV, garden or surf the web, in the light of this world rather than the murk of the next. To the hitchhikers’ question, therefore, she always answers no, she is not going to Toledo. If, that is, she answers at all. Sometimes, when she is tired or hurried, she finds it easier just to tap her ear as though hard of hearing. At first her simplemindedness seemed to aggravate the hitchhikers. By what appalling failure of deduction could this woman continue to believe she was alive? It made no sense, she could see them marveling. Experimentally, for a year or two, they began approaching her in supermarkets, fitness centers, movie theaters, yoga studios—places where she could not, by any conceivable logic, and no matter how pointedly they asked, have been going to Toledo. But eventually they returned to the medians and street corners that were their natural milieu, waiting for her to realize that she had taken a fall and not survived.
These days, it seems to her, they have secretly given up. Oh, they continue to ask her about Toledo, but by habit and without expectation. After all, she can pretend to misapprehend the truth of her situation indefinitely. It is not difficult. She is convinced that her intransigence has revealed a loophole in the cosmic order. All she has to do, she reasons, is maintain the ruse each time she is questioned, no matter how often, and she will survive not only to a lustrous old age but also, and as it must be, forever.
EIGHT
WISHES
By now everyone understood the importance of articulating your wishes with the utmost specificity. This was why the woman with the magic lamp had not spoken aloud—or even written anything down—in three months and nine
days, ever since the genie emerged in his perfume of rosemary and lit matches. One minuscule error of phrasing, she knew, and she would end up doomed, suffocating beneath an Everest of gold coins, or bound for life to a man whose love for her rendered him insipid, or ruling as queen over some muddy wasteland. No, it was better if she took her time, hiding herself away in the quiet little grammar laboratory of her mind. One day, when her wishes were unassailable, she would break her silence, but until then she would measure her words carefully, adding and removing parentheticals and fastidiously retailoring her syntax until every piece of every wish fit faultlessly together. What did it matter if she drained her savings along the way, or lost her friends, or weakened her health? After all, if she wished well enough, she could regain them in an instant.
The genie was sympathetic to her predicament. Over his many centuries of transforming wishes into curses, their inexactitudes and ambiguities had become all too conspicuous to him. Sometimes he imagined what it would be like to take a curry and brush to the things, grooming each and every wish until what people desired and what they asked for were actually identical. He had his role to play, though, and he was obligated to play it. The sequence of events hardly ever varied: someone would free him from his lamp and invoke the ritual words: first an “I” and then a “wish.” Each time, with the pronunciation of that second syllable, a great roar of hope and affection would rise up inside him. Maybe, he would say to himself. Maybe this will be the one. The one who finally outwits me. The one who gets it right. Then, in an instant, the roar would come to a stop, overthrown by the hush of yet another person making yet another mistake, the awful empty death sound of good luck going bad. They were all the same, human beings, or at least the ones who summoned him from his vessel were. They wanted so much and brought such terrible misfortune on themselves.
The woman sat with her lips pressed tight in concentration, paging through her dictionary and her thesaurus. The genie stared down at her from atop the roiling cloud of his lower body. Three months or three days, three years or three seconds: time made no difference to him. Soon enough, he knew, she would squander her wishes and return him to his lamp, that verdigrised bronze prison where he was haunted by a thousand ghosts, all those clumsy wishers who blamed him for escorting their lives into disaster.
NINE
HOW TO PLAY
One: Select a Ghost Token. Two: Draw a coin from the Specter Stack to determine which room you will haunt. Three: Find the body-shaped pegs that match your Ghost in color. These are your Humans. Each of them is marked with two numbers, the first measuring their skepticism, the second their bravery. Hidden on the underside of each Human is a third number: their value in Ghost Points. Distribute your Humans across the board however you wish—but think strategically! Four: Take turns moving your Ghosts through the house by rolling the Spirit Dice. You may wander along the halls in any direction you choose, but you cannot double back until you reach one of the arrows on the board. Five: Each time you enter a room, draw a card from the Spook Stack. You may use these cards to switch squares with another Ghost, to pass through the walls of a room rather than the door, or to exorcise an opponent’s Ghost from the Human of your choice—any one of thirty-six exciting possibilities! Six: If you land on a square with a Human who does not belong to you, you must attempt to possess him. Roll the Spirit Dice. If the number you throw is lower than the Human’s skepticism, he fails to notice you and your turn is at an end. Otherwise, you should roll the dice again. If your second throw produces a number lower than the Human’s bravery, you hide from him; equal to, you terrify him, and may send him fleeing to the square of your choice; higher than, you possess him, and may add his Ghost Points to your tally. Seven: If you land on a square occupied by another Ghost, you must attempt to expel it. Roll the Spirit Dice, and add the resulting number to your Ghost Points. If this sum is lower than your opponent’s Ghost Points, the attempt has failed and your turn is over; higher than, and you should roll the dice to see how many of your opponent’s Ghost Points you may absorb; equal to, and you may banish the Ghost you have attacked from the board entirely. Eight: The first Player either to haunt the entire House or possess every Human wins! Congratulations! Nine: The winner’s Ghost may travel beyond the confines of the game. Ten: Select one of your fellow Players to haunt and follow him home. Eleven: Cause his electricity to flicker. Disrupt his sleep. Lower the temperature around his left hand by twenty degrees. Make his phone ring, exactly once, every night at precisely 2:15. Rot any food he brings to his mouth. Repel anyone who might otherwise have loved him. Magnify his sorrows. Vitiate his joy. Twelve: A month later, when the next game night—Yahtzee—rolls around, listen as the Players wonder what has happened to your opponent, has anyone heard from him lately, it’s like he just up and vanished, and by the way, they will whisper when you leave the room, has anyone noticed how you’ve been lifting your glass to your lips without actually taking a sip, and how you laugh at every joke maybe, but artificially, and a beat too late? You seem so wan, they agree, so distant, as if you are somewhere else altogether.
TEN
THE SCALES OF FORTUNE
Here in the sidewalk café sits a man whose fortunes are in perfect balance. In him the good and the bad of life, the yin and the yang, equal each other exactly—and not just suppositionally, in a sooner-or-later sort of way, but immediately and down to the smallest grain. Right now, for instance, he is eating a sandwich so slippery with mayonnaise that three-quarters of the lettuce glissaded into his mouth on the very first bite: bad. The tomato, on the other hand, is uncommonly fresh and hearty, with the kind of delectably tart sweetness that must have belonged to the very first tomato—the tomato, he thinks, that gave tomatoes their name: good. Or a more material example: Last week, the man received a letter containing the news that he had been awarded a prestigious fellowship, complete with a two-year monthly cash stipend. He had just reached the “congratulations again” portion of the letter when a call came from his bank informing him that someone had drained his checking account. His life has been abundant with such episodes. More than abundant, glutted. He met his teenage girlfriend when she stopped to help him after he was clipped by a car walking home from school. Last spring he woke from root canal surgery to find that he had won a hard-fought election to his condo board. The day his grandfather died, his dog gave birth to four puppies. He was in first grade at the time, and had not even lost his baby teeth, but already he understood how the formula worked. The world was showing him his grandfather’s worth in puppies—apparently, four. So you see, the interdependency of adversity and well-being is not a matter of philosophy for the man, much less religious belief, but a matter of direct and ongoing experience. He has never faced a moment when his luck was not keeping measure with itself, the good counterchecking the bad and vice versa. As a result he views his life not as a series of highs and lows but as a single continuous high-low, sometimes more expansive and sometimes less, but always averaging out at precisely the same level. He welcomes each difficulty with a leap of nervous excitement. With each stroke of luck he feels a twinge of anticipatory fear. He lives in dread of landing his dream job, falling in love, winning the lottery. Though he does not know it, the perfect balance of his fortunes necessitates the existence of another man, or rather two—one whose life has been only blessings, and another, complementary, whose life has been only catastrophe. The perfect imbalance of their fortunes balances out the perfect balance of the man’s own. On one side of the planet, here in the sidewalk café, he sits finishing his sandwich, carelessly dabbing the sauce from his lips, while on the other, in all their excess, live those two contrary men, the first strong and wealthy, radiant with sensual pleasures, and the other unloved, overintelligent, swollen with pathogens, haunted by ghosts.
ELEVEN
A MOMENT, HOWEVER SMALL
A ghost with a poor sense of direction, distinguished among the company of ghosts for her amiability and her absentmindedness,
took a wrong turn inside the house she was haunting, weaving left between the broom closet and the pretersensual ether, and found herself hundreds of miles away, on a busy street corner, where a light snow was dusting the air. Bewildered by the bustle and noise, she attempted to double back and return to the quiet rooms she considered home, but it was too late, for in the pandemonium of the crowd, she had forgotten the way. Such moments of disorientation were relatively familiar to her—if not exactly commonplace, then not exactly rare either—but always before, when her course led her astray, she would find herself within sight of another ghost, some kind soul who might point her to the door she was overlooking or the lane she had missed. Here among the living, barrowing themselves around inside their big heavy bodies, asking for help was not so easy. She waited for someone to notice her. When no one did, she selected an old woman with an alarmed-looking dog cinched into her purse. “Excuse me,” the ghost with a poor sense of direction began, “I—” but though the dog barked and barked, the woman hobbled past her without so much as a glance. Next she tried a man in a business suit popping a breath mint into his mouth, then a skinny teenager with the rigid smile of someone trying to enthuse the chill from his body, and then a disheveled woman wearing a blue surgical mask. “You look like just the person to—” the ghost said, and, “I wonder if you might—” but they all ignored her, hurrying over the curb to wade into the torrent of cars. Not ten feet away, observing her efforts with a strange feeling of sleepy wonder, as if gazing into a fire, was a hot dog vendor. He had witnessed her appearance a few minutes earlier. Instantly he had known, from the way her pieces sifted together, that she was a ghost, though he had never seen a ghost before, nor indeed believed in them. Nervously he called her over to his cart. As soon as he understood her dilemma, he pointed out the orange utility numbers that were painted on the sidewalk. “You see that plus sign? You came out of the air a few feet above it, and maybe an inch or so to the left. I was watching.” The ghost thanked him with her usual aura of distracted kindness. Then, just like that, she was gone. The man stood watching the spot where she had been. Not long ago he had turned sixty, an age when people hunger for a moment, however small, that will justify the years they have spent and those that still remain to them. In his bones he felt that his had just happened, on an ordinary street corner, in a snow so faint that it vanished before it touched the pavement.
The Ghost Variations Page 2