The Ghost Variations

by Kevin Brockmeier

  TWENTY-SIX

  AN OBITUARY

  The minute that elapsed between 9:05 and 9:06 on the morning of Sunday, December 20, 2015, did not simply recede into history, as was traditional. It died. Such a situation defied all precedent. Suddenly time, which had always been continuous, had a gap in it. For the next sixty seconds it seemed as if the whole giant edifice of chronology would crumble and fall. Its uppermost layers began shelving and swaying, and a disjointed crackling sound arose from their perimeter. But then 9:06 drew to a finish, tocking neatly into the cavity left by 9:05, and in the long succession of minutes that constituted the past, yet another assumed its place. After that, time proceeded as it always had, albeit with a short delay at the conclusion of each sixty seconds. An hour still lasted an hour, and a day a day, but along the way came an ongoing series of almost imperceptible lulls, briefly supervening whenever the past overtook the present. Now the flow of time had a subtle friction to it, as if a bead had gone missing somewhere along the link. The change was mild, just a tiny new inflection in the temperament of being, but gradually, to those of us who remembered the way things used to be, it became apparent that something in the fundamental character of existence had been altered, if only subtly. There was a wooziness to life, a pliability. Prior to 9:05 on the morning of Sunday, December 20, 2015, reality had been all spruceness, regularity, and order. Afterward it was looser, more yielding, lengthening and contracting as one by one the minutes filled their vacancies. It moved forward like a practiced drunk, disguising its fitfulness as grace. Again and again it settled into itself, again and again let down its guard. Once upon a time, time had preserved its balance. Now, instead, it achieved it—a speck of a difference but a difference nonetheless. Maybe that was what it was or maybe it was something else: the spirit that had sifted from 9:05 in the final instant of its final attosecond, taking with it everything that had just finished happening, and taking it not into the past, as time had always done before, but into the hereafter. At 9:05 and three seconds, a meteor had flashed in the skies over the mid-Pacific. At 9:05 and sixteen seconds, the lone flower of a species that held the cure for cancer in its petals had been crushed by the blades of a trencher. At 9:05 and twenty-four seconds, a landslide in eastern Turkey had revealed the bones of an ancient settlement, before, at 9:05 and thirty-eight seconds, a second landslide had reburied them. At 9:05 and fifty-nine seconds, the latest wave in an infinitude of waves slid serenely back into the ocean. Now all that was gone and no more. If the world had become a slipperier place since then, more wayward and less trustworthy, maybe it was just the ghost of that dead minute, rising up and attempting a possession.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  THE MIDPOINT

  That man in the rain-spotted peacoat, with the cigarette and the woolen cap, whose dockworkerly appearance is mitigated by his spruce goatee and his natty shoes, is growing older in both directions. From the fixed point of his birth he has been maturing not only into the future but also into the past. The first of these conditions he shares with most—perhaps all—of his contemporaries; the second, as far as he can tell, with few—perhaps none—of them. He was in kindergarten before he realized that the bidirectionality of his life was something out of the ordinary. One day, through carelessness, he shattered a porcelain vase that had been in his mother’s family for generations. Why, he wondered, was she so angry? After all, right there in the past, on the same walnut table into which he had just tossed his backpack, the vase was still intact, wasn’t it? But she spanked him anyway and sent him to his room. “A hundred and fifty years,” he heard her complaining to his father, “destroyed just like that.” She gave something less than a laugh: a snap of the voice, gone at once, like a firecracker; and instantly, with that something that was not quite a laugh, the man in the rain-spotted peacoat’s eyes were opened. His mother was not like him. His father was not like him. Not everyone performed their aging both forward and backward. As the years went by, he watched the people around him grow both older and grayer and younger and spryer. He was envious, sullen, haunted by a sense of misfortune. He himself was not growing younger in either direction, only older into the future and older into the past. Wave by wave, as he tuned in to the same TV shows they did, saw the same movies, endured the same elections, he felt his elders becoming his contemporaries. At ten he had twenty years of life to his credit—ten counting forward and ten counting backward. At twelve, he had twenty-four. At twenty-five, he caught up to his parents. At forty-eight, he overtook his grandparents. Now, he supposes, at fifty, he has a full century of existence to his credit. And this, the man thinks, taking a draw on his cigarette, is the signal fact of his life: the time he considers his, and that he understands directly, by having experienced it, is effectively double that of everyone else. Some nights he lies awake reflecting on the precipitousness of it all. Each year seems swifter than the one before. He finds the acceleration alarming. In the end, he imagines, his ghost will burst from his skin like a pair of rockets, racing forward and backward into the darkness. Once there was eternity in all its stillness. Then, with his birth, came a sort of fragmentation, through which time began to flow. And eventually, at his death, he thinks, there will once again be eternity, but eternity in a torrent, a gush, eternity picking up speed.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  THE WHIRL OF TIME

  The ghost resided in a country full of clocks. Some of the clocks were trees, methodically adding rings to their trunks. Some of the clocks were breezes, marking out a moment or two by ruffling the grass or churning the curtains. And some of the clocks were people, their hearts pumping out the seconds. Behind the entire living world was the drum of time passing, and silently, from his gap in the air, the ghost listened as it rushed along. He had been a ghost for as long as he could remember, ever since an enormous pain he could barely recollect had ended his life in the mud and the rain. Since then, from his perspective, the years had gone by in a ceaseless barrage, replacing the generations just as swiftly as it created them. Children became parents and grew old and took to their beds, and then the beds were empty. Streets, fences, buildings, and monuments crumbled and melted back into the earth. Who could possibly keep track of it all? Who would try? Ghosts are meant to fix themselves to one particular house, meadow, or street corner—to select a place and haunt it. It is this tenacity of attention that keeps them from coasting through the centuries like herons over water. But this particular ghost had never developed the knack for standing still, so the material world meant less and less to him. Eventually, when the clocks of everything became too loud in his ears, he resolved to bring his flight to a stop.

  First he chose a dwelling to haunt, a small post-and-beam house on a hill beside a market square. The whirl of time took it down, though, before he could steady himself there. Next he chose a person to haunt: a young teacher instructing her first geometry students. He had hardly shown her his countenance, though, before she retired and was bones in a graveyard. Houses were too ephemeral, he decided. And people were like raindrops. Finally he chose a stone to haunt, one of the oldest and most immovable in the city. Gradually, through an effort of will, he was able to move beneath its surface. A stone keeps its own time, and soon enough, haunting it, the ghost did, too. To his relief and surprise, the time he found himself sharing with the stone was less precipitate, more measured. From the crack in its side he watched the flicker of the seasons slow. The fields stopped boiling with flowers. The clouds began to cotton the sky. It was cool and quiet inside the stone. After a while, he ceased to hear the ticking of the trees, grass, breezes, and hearts. Whole days and nights went by when he forgot he was a ghost at all. He imagined he was only the large brown mass of granite resting imperturbably in the city park. The stone where the bugs no longer landed. The stone that the children no longer climbed.

  TWENTY-NINE

  MINNOWS

  At first he failed to understand his predicament. To become a ghost upon dying was one thing, but to
become a ghost centuries before you were born was something else entirely: a fate for which his imagination had simply not prepared him. There was the present, and on one side of it was the past, and on the other side of it was the future. Overhead was the sky, the sun, and a tissuey curve of moon. At the horizon a cliff peak stood ringed in white clouds. Time and space, he thought. What a hodgepodge. Luckily, the ghost was resourceful, with an intelligence that was, if not swift, then at least tenacious, digging and poking away at whatever questions the world offered up to him. So, by a kind of intuitive census, he took stock of his situation. This was how he saw it: the body to which he would one day belong was, for the moment, separated into billions of distantly arrayed molecules. Some of those molecules were enlisted in other animals, while some were jacketed inside fruits, grains, flowers, herbs, or vegetables. Most were washing around in various far-flung belts of the ocean. A few, of course, by the law of percentages, were somewhere nearby, but from what the ghost could tell, they added up to no more than a freckle-on-an-arm’s-worth—not a body, or at least not much of one. Gathering them together, the ghost decided, would be futile. His only real option was to rally his patience and wait. Eventually the man who was destined to yield him up would be born and then die and the ghost could take his place. Very well then, he thought. He would set off into the centuries. Not far away a stream was trickling over a bed of shale and yellow clay. The sunlight was drawing bright tangles on the surface of the water, and a shoal of minnows was drawing bright tangles beneath it. From the long grass on the bank, the ghost extended the part of him that was practicing to be a hand. He wondered, as it pierced the surface, if the minnows would make a hole around it. All at once the light on the water seemed to impress itself inside him. Then, with the suddenness of a thought, he was gone. The universe had corrected its mistake. Six hundred and eighteen years would pass before the ghost returned, and eighty-one more before the body that contained him stopped functioning and he was set free. It would be male, that body, portly, slightly professorial but also slightly military, with back trouble and dry skin and the smell of soap hovering about it—the most intimate possession of an almost entirely ordinary man, one whose sole oddity, dating to his infancy, was the feeling that he had been alive much longer than he could have been, or than seemed possible.

  THIRTY

  A STORY SWAYING BACK AND FORTH

  Summer followed spring, and autumn, summer, and that was the end of it. For a week, maybe two, the trees displayed their glossiest oranges and reds, but the leaves never brittled or fell, only swayed slightly, like brushtips. Flocks of birds made nets of themselves in the air, as though preparing to migrate, but as the sun set they dispersed back into the treetops. Night after night half a moon shone in the sky. Then, just when October was supposed to tumble over into November, the leaves refilled with chlorophyll, the days brightened, the temperatures rose, and another summer arrived. The river of time was flowing backward. Spiders retracted their silk, pumpkins drained into their stems, and the clouds drank up the gullies. First the world went sliding back through October, then through September and August, until a shimmeringly hot afternoon in the middle of July when, over the course of an hour or two, while the bugs made their reverse shrilling sound, time gradually lost its wind, decelerated, paused and turned back around. Suddenly the days began moving forward again. There they went, the spiders, clouds, and pumpkins, making webs, spilling rain, and plumping out on their vines. Each minute followed the one that had come before, until, once more, the first of November approached and everything slowed down, stopped, and doubled back on itself. Time was not a river after all, it seemed. Time was a pendulum. For a few months it traveled in one direction, for the next few months in the other. The trees regreened and then reyellowed, the sun journeyed east and then west, people grew a little older and then a little younger. Some of them died and, dying, became ghosts or became nothing, but then their bodies reassembled and came back to life. With each swing of the months, however, the curve of time diminished slightly. It reached from late July to mid-October, early October to early August, September the 1st to September the 15th, swish swish swish swish, until finally, in a little series of converging agitations, it stopped altogether. Time was not a river. Time was not a pendulum. Time was a plumb line. At one minute past three on Friday, September the 8th, it fell still. Everything ceased changing. Bonfires turned to sculptures. The waves made sawteeth out of the ocean. This—this moment—was where eternity would take place, not in the glow of paradise, and not in the blackness of oblivion, but in a stillness charged with memory and premonition.

  THIRTY-ONE

  A TIME-TRAVEL STORY WITH A LITTLE ROMANCE AND A HAPPY ENDING

  The stories the girl with the penny loafers favored exhibited a particular shape. They were time-slip stories, simple and trim, about girls like her, with penny loafers—dreamy, earnest girls who experienced time travel in its purest and least complicated form, unmixed with science and untroubled by paradox. They had no doodads or rocket ships, these stories, no great machines with beams of light or circumvolving halos, only a little magic. A portal, a spellbook, a ghost, even a knock on the head would do. The mechanism made no difference. It was the slip in time that mattered: the feeling that, with just the right nudge, you could wake up inside your life but outside your moment, with people who knew you were remarkable but could not pin down quite why. Somewhere long ago, the girl liked to pretend, if only you could find your way there, you would experience an improbable but passionate romance, so deeply fated that it would surmount any barrier, “even,” the book’s covers often promised, “time itself.” The heroines of these stories, the stories she loved, were always between the ages of fourteen and twenty-one. They had long red hair, like she did, and hazel eyes, like she did, and they ventured, by accident, into the past rather than the future. Sometimes they came back to the present, but never deliberately, and never permanently, because the past was where they truly belonged, and by the final page, without fail, they would find a way to return there. Their adventures always involved a love affair that seemed doomed but was in fact merely complicated, with a man (or adolescent) who had hair that was black like India ink, and blue eyes with an ice in them that just the right kiss—her kiss—would turn to water, and a forbidding manner that hid a sweetly husbandly (or boyfriendly) vulnerability. And a happy ending: that was important. Though a desperate beginning was important, too. In the best of the stories, at the conclusion of the first chapter, after it had been established that behind her odd, almost antique shyness, the girl was extraordinary and deserved much more love than she had ever been given, she would step through a door while wearing her penny loafers, and all at once the light would feel different to her, the air. She would discover that the coins had transported her to an earlier year: to 1978 if they were stamped 1978; 1925 if they were stamped 1925; 1932 if they were stamped 1932. The dates had to match—that was the rule. Only by replacing the older pennies with current ones could she return to her own day. This was why the girl who read the time-slip stories always wore the same tight-fitting penny loafers. She wanted to be ready. Sooner or later, in her heart of hearts, she knew she would encounter a door that was not just a door but a small disruption of reality. And she wouldn’t think twice.

  THIRTY-TWO