The Ghost Variations

by Kevin Brockmeier

  NINETEEN

  AN OSSUARY OF TREES

  The night it occurred to him he was living inside a corpse—or, to be more precise, inside the bones of a hundred corpses: the trees that constituted the timbers of his house—was the same night he stopped sleeping. His daylight troubles were the same as everyone else’s: the bills that needed paying; the work that needed doing; the sicknesses that needed nursing. But his nighttime troubles emanated from a different place altogether, the far-back marshland of his mind, dense with fevers and perseverations, offering up scenarios as fantastic as nightmares yet conscious, waking. Like God: What if God was not almighty, he thought, or even particularly effectual, but a loser, an underdog—kind and loving maybe, but outstrengthened by the forces of chaos and suffering? What if this world was simply the best He could do? Or the earthworms: so many of them that beneath the ground they must nestle together like the folds of a gigantic brain. And what would happen if that brain were suddenly to become conscious? And now the trees and their dry dead bodies. All his life, without thinking, he had allowed himself to be encased in their remains. Eaten at his wooden table. Walked across his wooden floor. Leafed absentmindedly through his books and his magazines. Blithely he had filled the hours with their boards all around him. In the daylight, the idea would never have bothered him, but now, as he lay in bed with the moonlight filtering through his blinds, his entire body hummed with apprehension. Suddenly he could feel the rafters looming above him, the walls bulking around him, and to his vision there came a swift progression of images: the ruinous machines that had severed the trees at their ankles, that had stripped them of their bark, drained them of their sap, and made a door of their ribs, and he, the dumb human specimen who had stepped unwittingly inside their corpses. What was the word for a house made of bones? A mausoleum. An ossuary. The cavemen had it right, he thought. You should find a hole in some cliffside and cower in it like an animal. That’s what you should do. And now a worse thought: What if the trees had ghosts? And what if those ghosts came back for their bodies? It wasn’t the first time, bundled under his covers with the lights out, he had sensed that he was not alone. Something in his groin tightened, and a pulse of ice ran through his veins, as the house settled with a creak against its foundations.

  TWENTY

  THINGS THAT FALL FROM THE SKY

  Following the rain of ghosts, the earth smelled of moss and black pepper, and buildings appeared to waver at their boundaries, but then the sun came out, drying the puddles and lifting the dimpling marks from the soil, and the world seemed like itself again: untransformed. For a few weeks the city maintained its routines. The school bells rang at nine and four. The cars stacked up at the stoplights. On Saturdays the produce market busied itself by the river. It was easy to forget that morning when, without so much as a thundercrack, the air had filled with the spinning forms of a million dead spirits. Somehow no one heard the change say, I’m coming. Spring was beginning to turn to summer when the first trees yielded their crop of ghost-fruit. All at once there they were, a sea of soft-specked blue globes that bobbed from the tips of the branches, nearly irresistible to pick and, once picked, to bite into. When pierced, the skin produced a tiny leap of smoke. The flesh was not smoky to the tongue, though, but flossy and succulent. Raw, it tasted like an oddly nectary cucumber; baked, not like grapes per se, but like the grape additive in sodas and lollipops. Delicious. The seeds were as hard as BBs and had to be enucleated from a milky green cleft in the center, but otherwise the fruit seemed to satisfy the exact hunger it generated—to satisfy it perfectly. Soon after you ate one, though, it would happen: a door would swing open inside you, and through it would come drifting the specter of another person. To have a second identity nestling alongside your own, clouding around inside you and making your fingertips tingle, was invigorating but also disconcerting. Homebodies who had never traveled farther than the state park surprised themselves by talking about the crowded subways of Tokyo or the cave tombs of Sulawesi. Children complained that their spouses didn’t love them anymore. A cashier at the ballpark recited a poem she insisted she had written in a language she said she didn’t recognize. These additional personalities rarely lasted longer than a day or two, but everyone, to the last man and woman, was sorry to see theirs go. A life felt so much bigger with two sets of memories inside it. By November, most of the harvest had been consumed, most of the ghosts digested. By January, there was hardly anybody who had not become resigned to possessing one and only one spirit. But by March it was discovered that the BBs had taken root in the soil; by summer, at the edges of certain fields, they were growing into dainty saplings; and by September, the first hard blue kernels could be seen budding between their leaves. From then on, in at least this one city, people lived out their days with a sense of expansiveness and reverent mystery, nourished by this world and also by some other.

  TWENTY-ONE

  A STORY WITH A DRUM BEATING INSIDE IT

  A man is mowing his lawn in a state of perfect contentment. To every life there is a rhythm, he thinks, and as he strides back and forth laying bands of lighter and darker green in the grass, he feels that he has found his own. He marches behind his lawn mower the same way he marches through time, pressing ahead step by step, tacking resolutely from one week to the next, generating a steady pattern of lulls and accentuations. This is what life is like for him, and the correspondence between the greater rhythm of his life and the lesser rhythm of his yardwork, temporary though it may be, makes him feel as if he is not only at home in the world, but at home in it doubly. Here is one variation of him: its principal activity is mowing the lawn. And here is another variation of him: its principal activity is continuing to exist. Inside him the two variations are moving as one. Thus, his perfect contentment.

  When he was little, as young as four or five, his father frequently permitted him to stand on the hipbones of the family’s gas mower while he pushed it. He remembers riding toward the red house on one side of their yard, then the brown house on the other, the machine spilling long ridges of cut zoysia onto the lawn, and how the noise and the smell and the locomotion invigorated him. The vibration of the motor caused an identical vibration in his body, and made his voice sound like a robot’s. After the engine cut out, he would hear a thump like the thump of blood, but not in his ears, he thought: in the air, the sunlight, the soil. After a few minutes it would always go away. Back then his days bucked this way and that. By the time he started school, though, they had settled firmly into their rhythm. And the older he has grown, the more powerful that rhythm has become. Now, as he trims the grass, it seems as faultless as a song’s. A car skims past. He waves at the driver. The sky is the color of an Easter egg dipped twice in blue dye. It is easy to believe that, behind or above it, the big empty spaces of the universe are as round and white and beautiful as an eggshell. At moments like this, plying between his driveway and his neighbor’s, with the breeze on his skin and the sweat in his hair, he feels so good he imagines he will live forever. Not until the mower’s engine stops does he hear the slow percussive thump he has heard ever since he was a child, so faint with distance and yet so tireless: the ghosts, in their multitudes, drumming at the walls of his life.

  TWENTY-TWO

  THE SANDBOX INITIATIVE

  Eventually, when the planet began to cool again, thousands upon thousands of square miles of sand were returned to the seashores. Only in the most remote technical sense of the word could they be called beaches. They had, it was true, been abandoned to the land by the ocean, but no one wanted to visit, much less live on them, and so, littered with kelp pods and baby clam shells, they slowly dried up and seeded out, growing stiff little punk haircuts of grass. So rank and gray were these brine-soaked wastelands that even the gulls avoided them. What might have been valuable seaside real estate was instead a wilderness of sand, with no sea in sight. The question arose what to do with it all. In due course the president, at the encouragement of the secretary of
the interior, signed Executive Order 58716, popularly known as the Sandbox Initiative. Until such time as the supply was depleted, it declared, every American family would be entitled to thirty-six complimentary cubic feet of ocean play sand, cleansed of bacteria and other impurities, with all its shells, bones, wrack, and pebbles carefully sifted out and discarded. A fleet of excavators was hired by the federal government to dredge the beaches, factories were built to dye and process the sand, and a vessel system of trains and flatbeds began distributing it to homes far and wide. Though the plan met with the usual hostility from the opposition party and was scoffed at by its pet editorialists, the property developers who were the real engine of the nation’s economy greeted it warmly, offering the only ovation they had ever needed: a great huzzah of money. Industrialists and entrepreneurs purchased long sections of shorefront along the Atlantic and the Pacific, and piece by piece, as the sand disappeared, the land was graded, paved, and fertilized. By the time a year had passed, the coasts were blossoming with street malls and condominiums. The oceans were still receding, but they had been cleansed of the worst of their beaches, and, as a result, millions of sandbox squares had been placed in backyards across the nation. Most of the children who played in them, making their hills and moats, had never owned a sandbox before. If invisible fish occasionally muscled past them as they burrowed their fingers in the sand, or if they sometimes felt the ghostly prickles of crab legs tipping across their skin, well, they supposed, that was simply what sandboxes did. They were too young to guess—and the situation too novel for their parents to have taught them—that the sand had retained its memories of the ocean. And so they grew up as they imagined children always had, haunted by the tang of salt air and the blood sound of waves, which hushed, rose up, came to life, and hushed again.

  TWENTY-THREE

  RENEWABLE RESOURCES

  The vice president of marketing at the major multinational petrochemical corporation is a slim man, and pale yellow like a wax bean. His collars bag at the neck, and his glasses lend his face an air of earnest intelligence that he feels he does not deserve. The other vice president of marketing at the major multinational petrochemical corporation is a voluble fellow, big in the chest and shoulders. He possesses a somewhat splenetic smile that he considers, despite all evidence, his most winning feature. Their salaries are roughly commensurate, their authority roughly equal, and each of them boasts a small cadre of subordinates who attend to their every word, but the first of the two vice presidents is responsible for fuels and lubricants, the second for textiles and specialties, and this, along with the promotion for which the two of them are competing, has made steadfast foes of them. How else would it happen that, after a few too many cocktails, they are standing on a bluff of black shale overlooking a neglected pine swamp, arguing quietly, viperously, in irritable thrusts and hisses?

  It is nearly two in the morning, on the last night of the executive training retreat. All of the vice presidents’ colleagues are if not asleep, then at least indoors. In a moment, after the splash, several of them will wake and peer outside, but they will not notice anything awry. Not until the next workweek will the secretary of the first man and the landlord of the second file a missing-persons report. One of the vice presidents says nonrenewable resources; the other counters with energy density. The first parries with discretionary uses, and the second retorts with new frontiers of exploitation. Then the great chock of shale on which they are standing makes a sound like the wind clapping into a sail and drops away.

  At the bottom of the water, in a thick tomb of mud and seashells, beneath an eighteen-ton compress of rock, the two vice presidents will lie undiscovered for approximately seven million years. The first million they will spend waiting for their ghosts to depart from their bodies. By the second, however, they will have resigned themselves to the truth—that departing from bodies is not what ghosts do. From the third million through the seventh, the two vice presidents will slowly change. Their molecules will transform, their biota will vegetate, and they will feel themselves seeping crack by crack, sideways and upward, through a half-mile layer of sediment. For a time the swamp will have been an ocean of algae and plastic, but by the eight-millionth year it will be a meadow of giant reeds, growing high in the fernlands and mesas. From the micro-garbage of the world a new species will have emerged, capable, as humans were, of extracting oil from the earth. Only then, when the hydrocarbons that had once been their bodies are distilled, ignited, and consumed, will the ghosts of the two vice presidents be released, dispersing into the atmosphere and thus expiring.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  THIRTEEN VISITATIONS

  The boy’s irises were mismatched. That was what she noticed. One was a pale underwater blue, the other a brown so dark it commingled with his pupil. The woman had rounded the corner to find him sitting on her kitchen floor, playing with a small metal bulldozer. Probably she should have been frightened, or at least indignant, since she lived alone. He looked so vulnerable, though, with his legs spraddled out and his palm supporting his chin, that she leaned over and tousled his hair. “I think you picked the wrong door, buddy. What’s the matter, you lost?” At her touch he gasped. Then he lit out toward the foyer yelling, “Mom! Mom!” No more than a few seconds passed before she followed him, but already the front door was closed and he was gone. Funny little guy.

  Half an hour later she was fiddling with the coasters on her coffee table when the mushroomy smell of wet leather seeped suddenly into the room. A teenager came lumping past her in faded blue jeans and eroding tennis shoes. He switched on the TV, then caught sight of her and gave an electric leap. He flung the remote control at her. Her throat was so tight that the sound she produced came out in an alarming creak. That was when it happened—she could hardly have missed it—a little liquid detonation of a boy, erupting outward from himself like a bubble scattering apart. In the half-second before he vanished, she recognized something in his eyes: the left as brown as coffee beans, the right as blue as forget-me-nots.

  Eleven more times that day he appeared before her and then dematerialized. A moment was all it took and pop! Each time she saw him, he was half a decade older—sometimes thinner, sometimes fatter, but always with those haunting eyes, brown and blue, and so unmistakably his own. Twenty, twenty-five, thirty, thirty-five, and each time perfectly at home. When she went to water the holly fern, he was sitting in a chair with a washcloth on his forehead. When she finished boiling her afternoon tea, he was rummaging through the ice cream in the refrigerator. When she decided to brush her teeth, he was trimming his sideburns in the bathroom mirror. His entire life was passing, all caught in the maze of her day. She watched as he put on a wedding ring and removed it and grew old. After a time, she was no longer frightened to see him, and to judge from the smiles he wore, he not only accepted but welcomed her. Shortly before midnight, she found him heaped at the end of the hallway, an old man, his arms bent like a kangaroo’s. With a hard little kick of his breath he said, “You. I knew you’d come back. You’re the reason I stayed here—stayed here in this house—never left—all these years of waiting and—” She placed a palm on his cheek. Already his lines were dispersing, and hers along with them, and in an instant she understood which of them was truly haunted, and which of them doing the haunting.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  THE OFFICE OF HEREAFTERS AND DISSOLUTIONS

  A genial middle-aged man, beginning to be old but with the same breezy disposition he had possessed all his life, received a letter of congratulations indicating that he had been accepted into the afterworld as a ghost. Attached to the letter was a bill for twenty-five dollars, payable by check or money order, using the enclosed courtesy envelope, to the agency of record. If anyone deserved such an honor, the genial middle-aged man felt, he did, so immediately he cut a check and made his preparations. At first the next world was a pleasure to him. The climate was temperate and the housing spacious. The other ghosts were ideally w
elcoming, neither too remote for his liking nor too meddlesome. Some eight days after he had settled in, however, another letter arrived, from the same agency, again requesting payment of the twenty-five-dollar processing fee. The genial middle-aged man was nearly certain he had settled this bill before he died, but his life had taught him that not every battle was worth fighting—the phrase was practically his motto—and since twenty-five dollars was only twenty-five dollars, and a bargain all things considered, he went to the bank and made out a cashier’s check. Two months passed, during which he settled into his retirement routine of late-morning water aerobics and mid-afternoon hauntings. The third and fourth letters reached him simultaneously, bunched together in the same day’s mail. One of them was recent, on letterhead reading “Talbott and Warfield Collections and Recovery.” It warned that his admission to the afterlife would be revoked if the outstanding balance of his bill was not remitted promptly. The other was blighted with brown creases and bore a postmark nearly six weeks prior. It contained another invoice for twenty-five dollars, this time stamped past due and embossed and initialed by a notary. In red ink at the bottom of the page was a note instructing the genial middle-aged man to call a particular number as soon as possible. The woman who answered the phone seemed genuinely sympathetic. She blamed the confusion on a recent systems upgrade. In all likelihood, she reassured him, she would be able to clear his account with just a swift review of his vital information. And indeed, as soon as he offered his birth date, she stopped him with a proclamatory a-ha! “I see the issue. Someone mistranscribed the first digit of your birth year. Here, let me fix that for you.” Inadvertently she tapped a three rather than a one, so that the official record of his birth suddenly postdated the official record of his death by almost a full millennium. At that moment, and for the next thousand years, the genial middle-aged man ceased not only to be but ever yet to have been.