The Ghost Variations

by Kevin Brockmeier

  THE PHANTASM VS. THE STATUE

  His name was the Phantasm; his power, to move discontinuously through space. Most people, he liked to explain, advanced through space along an unbroken line, interval by interval, but he, the Phantasm, retroceded into space, as if through a thousand tiny holes, then emerged from behind it again, either nearby or far away. It had not always been so. Growing up, he had moved through space like everyone else: by walking, running, occasionally bicycling or roller-skating. But ever since his days as a young subnuclear scientist, when a trillion-to-one accident bathed him in a torrent of lambda radiation, he had come and gone from space instantaneously, like a ghost. Accordingly, he had become a superhero. Not the most formidable superhero, he had to admit, nor the most effective, but a superhero nonetheless. The problem was that in order to progress from place to place, he had no choice but to use his abilities, vanishing from one point and reappearing in another even if the location to which he was traveling was only a fraction of a millimeter away. When, for instance, he wanted to flip a hamburger, he was required to disappear from his position beside the grill and rematerialize in a position that substantially overlapped with it, one in which little to nothing had changed except for the angle of his hand and the spatula—upended, the both of them. In order, however, to maintain his grip on the spatula and ensure that the blade remained underneath the patty, he had first to pivot a single degree or, rather, to issue from space at a point so close to the one from which he had originated that the arrangement of the handle in his palm showed only a single degree’s disparity, then a second degree’s, and then a third degree’s, until he had successfully overturned the spatula and along with it the patty—so many incremental motions, so rapidly achieved, that to an outsider he must surely have looked like an ordinary man, flipping a hamburger with no superheroics whatsoever. Alternatively, if he chose, he could travel across the world in the blink of an eye. His archenemy, the Statue, was a victim of the same subnuclear accident that had created the Phantasm, but unlike the Phantasm, the Statue moved through space inflexibly, adhesively, to all appearances not at all. On his concrete plinth he stood with the same air of straight-backed malevolent boredom he had displayed ever since the lambda rays overtook him, surveying parks and bazaars, college quads and cemeteries. His powers immobilized any person careless enough to touch him. No one but the Phantasm could set those people free. Once, and only once, had the Phantasm come into contact with the Statue himself. The Statue activated his superpowers, the Phantasm activated his, and all at once the two of them, archenemies, found themselves together in the spaceless everywhere of the underverse, that strange blizzard of electrons that lay between all places, where no point was different from any other. For that bare instant, neither of them could have said which of them was stationary and which was in motion, nor which the hero, which the villain.

  THIRTY-THREE

  FOOTPRINTS

  This story is a parable. You may have heard it before. Once there was a man who was part giant, part ghost, and part magician. So remarkable was his enormity, so strange his otherworldliness, and so profound his mystic ability that those who knew of him fell to their knees when he came into sight, trembling and hiding their faces. Around him swirled waves of worship, fear, and adoration. The world would have been his toy if not for the fact that he lived in a constant state of antagonism with himself. After all, he thought, how mysterious, really, was a magician the size of a fortress? How menacing was a giant who passed harmlessly through walls and fences? And didn’t spells and enchantments demean a ghost? The problem, he believed, was that he was one person rather than three, or three inside of one. This indivisibility, it was a burden. This terrible gumminess of being. And yet, for all his power, there was nothing he could do about it. He should have been three great men, and instead he was a single tri-part man, irredeemably damaged and compromised. The thought of it, the imperfection, stung at and bedeviled him. Again and again over the long years he attempted to wrench himself in three. The more frustrated he became, the harder he struggled, but though his exertions ravaged everything around him, to his body they brought only sweat and bruises. The part of him that was a magician traced symbols in the air to cast out the part that was a ghost, recited incantations to raise up and unfasten himself from the part that was a giant, but this was one spirit he could not dispel, one mountain he could not lift. Instead, if only by accident, he stripped trees of their branches, hefted boulders into lakes and hillsides. The part of him that was a giant battered at his chest and yanked at his limbs, trying to beat out the ghost and the magician, but in his clumsiness he only toppled schools and barns and churches. The part of him that was a ghost twisted one way and then another, hunting for some doorway out of his body, but the cage of his bones was far too tight, and all that sprang loose were his rage and desire, which blew from him like an awful wind, tearing down forests and dividing rivers. So it was that the man who was part giant, part ghost, and part magician wandered the earth in his agitation, trying desperately to cleave himself in three. He cared for nothing else. Behind him along the shore of his life, as far as the eye could see, stretched three sets of footprints, and wherever they passed lay obliteration and ruin.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  PASSENGERS

  By the time the spaceships arrived, a series of microorganic accidents had stripped the earth of life, leaving only the bare rocks, the ashy water, and a throng of human ghosts. The aliens spent little more than half a morning exploring the planet’s surface before they entered the record in their log—“no signs of life”—and departed. They were several solar systems away before the second assistant engineer noticed a small reality imbalance in the lead vessel’s structural field. He was loath to risk the hectoring of the first assistant engineer, his all-too-predictable insults and comminations, for what was probably, after all, just a diagnostic glitch, so he sent a query to the fleet’s thousand-some sub-engineers, asking whether their scans had detected anything unusual. Immediately the responses cascaded in: “Ship 0113 is point-six degrees off the reality standard,” “Ship 0272 is reading a spike of eleven—no, make that twelve units in our nonbeing metric,” “Ship 1091 here. We’ve got some kind of wave malformation in our tangibility drive,” and then, from Ship 0837, “Oh, no. What’s happening? They’re coming from the floors, the walls, they’re everywhere.”

  The second assistant engineer was not reassured. With each message, the traffic of unlikelihoods increased: power losses and temperature drops, pounding and rasping noises, fainting epidemics. Seeing no alternative, he left to report the matter to the first assistant engineer, who contrived as usual to blame him for the chaos. “Molecular distortions! Authenticity blurs! You’ll fix this and you’ll fix it now, or so help me, I’ll yank every antenna from your head.” Though the second assistant engineer attempted to defend himself, he had little time to formulate his reply. He had squeaked out only the most tentative “Sir” before a hollow buzzing noise passed through the air, the sealing panels detonated from the walls, and a thousand dark forms flowed wobbling into the room. From outside the door came screaming, moaning, the sound of breaking equipment. The rest happened more rapidly than anyone could have predicted: the pools of ice and shadow, and the captain’s evacuation order, and then the second assistant engineer slithering alongside the first assistant engineer through a dozen narrow hallways of airborne debris until the two of them reached an escape pod, which dropped at once through the dilating lips of an ejection portal, joining the thick litter of other spheres the fleet had jettisoned into space—ten thousand bobbing life capsules. The stately silver vessels that abandoned them to the vacuum were not empty, not exactly, but from then on the crew that haunted their cabins was bodiless, wistful, and only half real. At last mankind had reached the stars.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  NEW LIFE, NEW CIVILIZATIONS

  By the twenty-fourth century, the question had been answered definitively: transporters did not i
n fact convey a person, bodily, from one place to another. They killed him and replaced him with an exact duplicate. The new question was whether the copy, like the original, was endowed with a soul.

  A team of researchers was appointed to resolve this mystery. They located a subject who had never, in all his life, availed himself of a transporter—no easy task at this late stardate. “Do you certify that neither you nor your component molecules have ever been reconstituted via teleportation?” Never, the subject agreed. “Do you understand that, once beamed through subspace, though you will perceive yourself to be indistinguishable from the person you have previously been and therefore continuous with him, you will in fact be a re-creation, and may or may not possess a soul?” I do, the subject consented. These preliminaries accomplished, the subject was scanned, his metrics catalogued, and the researchers escorted him into the transporter lab for the test. The inaugural phase went off without a hitch. The subject was energized, a frequency shimmer filled the room, the subject materialized on a nearby platform—check, check, and check. But a close comparison of the initial and subsequent scans revealed an anomaly. The copy of the subject, the researchers discovered, did indeed possess a soul. It was the original who did not. Perhaps there was a malfunction in their diagnostic equipment. Over the next several weeks, though, taking all due precautions, they tracked down and tested eighty-three additional subjects, from sixteen separate planets, transporter virgins every one. In each case the result was the same. Whether the subject was human, Saurian, Vulcan, or Betazoid made no difference. Inside the replicas: souls. Inside the originals: no souls. It was unexpected, indeed most perplexing, but incontestable.

  The report the researchers issued to the Federation numbered roughly six hundred pages, most of them purely technical, as befit the parameters of their assignment. In a half-page addendum, however, they offered two notes of poetic conjecture: (1) If, as some argued, voluntary teleportation could be considered a form of suicide, had they discovered evidence that suicide, in at least this one form, might result not in losing your soul but in gaining it? (2) If, as now seemed likely, the invention of the transporter some 180 years ago had generated the first souls in an otherwise soulless universe, had Heaven come into being along with them; or had it been waiting all along, a grid of empty golden streets whisked with light and gentle breezes, since the first men rose from the dust and the clay?

  THIRTY-SIX

  A BLACKNESS WENT FLUTTERING BY

  In the end, as it transpired, the engineers could not prevent the barrier from collapsing, and the explosion, when it arrived, was even worse than they had anticipated: formidable enough to destroy not only the core galaxies but the universe itself. Of that gentle, orderly cosmos, home to so many magnificent minds, only a ghost remained. It lay spread across the light years, a vast spectral emptiness powdered here and there with deposits of oscillating particles. These “planets,” these “stars”—they barely deserved the name. One might have mistaken them for matter if not for the compactness of true matter; the matter, that is to say, of the actual universe, the perished universe. For the fact was that the eruption had taken with it not only the celestial plenum but everything that once filled it—the warmth of space, the indelibility of the senses, the supernal pulse, the outer strand: all of it. To be a ghost, it seemed, was to undergo a great transposition. Where there used to be light within you, the ghost of the cosmos thought, suddenly there was darkness; and where there used to be darkness, pinpricks of light. In your innermost depths, where the celestial melody once resonated and sang, you generated only a faint thermal hiss, impossible to ignore, so maddeningly persistent that it kept you from resting or falling asleep. What else was there to do in your wakefulness but catalogue what you had known and lost, along with the few frail substitutes that had replaced it? So you made an inventory of your comets, your novas, your black holes, your constellations, the galaxies that quivered with a sensation of turmoil and unease, the photons that flickered with exhaustion. After a time, with so little rest, you did not even know what you were anymore. That’s what it was like, the universe reflected: you failed to recognize yourself for what you were, a ghost, and believed you were a living being, the cosmos itself, the real thing. Maybe in your cells there lingered a dim awareness that long ago, in the indeterminate past, you had been something other than what you now were—something better, more real, amazed by the bounty you contained—but no matter how close you came to the truth, it continued to elude you. Only occasionally, for less than a moment, did you recollect yourself as you used to be. Then the memory faded, and you resumed counting your planets, your stars, and the few sentient beings, on one world or another, who, like you, supposed they were alive, and who spent their days telling all the wrong stories.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  THE PRISM

  It was meant to be a sort of cosmological prism, a lens through which they could view the universe dispersing into its thousands of parallel possibilities, but when the scientists powered it up, it didn’t work. Nine years of labor and hundreds of millions of dollars, wasted! The project’s director stalked around the armature of the machine like a hyena circling its prey. “This dumb damned broken thing,” he said, and launched a kick at it. The discharge from the transformer killed him instantly. Later, reviewing the lab recording, his team watched the whole grim episode in slow motion—the director yawing around to fire his leg out, his cheap plastic shoe melting off his foot, a corona of sparks wavering above his head—but then, when they scanned the secondary footage, taken through the lens of the prism, something else: his ghost leaving his body. “A ghost,” they called it, and a ghost it unmistakably was, the classic Halloween kind, all transparent drapery emanating from a featureless white globe, like a lollipop wrapped in tissue paper. It leapt from the director’s chest and vanished into the ceiling. Several months passed before they obtained permission to transport the machine to a penitentiary and aim it at an inmate who was receiving a lethal injection. Sure enough, at the very moment the EKG stopped tracing its pinnacles, a ghost could be seen fleeing the poor man’s body. Hypothesis, prediction, experiment, conclusion. They had not invented a cosmological prism; instead, it seemed, they had invented a window into the spirit world. Yet afterward, examining the footage, they saw something very strange: one of the guards shedding a ghost of his own. He was locking the execution chamber when his knees wobbled and he brought a hand to his chest. He did not die. Even so, a ghost came spilling out of his body. The next week, in the lab, the camera accidentally captured an intern stumbling over his ankles. He came inches from cleaving his head open against the edge of an aluminum cabinet, but did not do so. He had, in fact, already regained his balance by the time his ghost sprang loose. So then: a new hypothesis. The prism was capable of observing not merely the one actual death of a person but the thousands of parallel possible deaths. With every icy sidewalk crossed, every heartbeat skipped, every near miss on the highway, you expelled another ghost into the atmosphere. Imagine how many billions of them there must be. Trillions. Surely from outer space, at any given moment, the world must be bristling with ghosts like a porcupine.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  HIS WOMANHOOD

  A cognitive scientist, long-limbed and handsome though sad to say bald, developed a method by which to stimulate the neural centers responsible for presentations of masculinity and femininity. His technique was neither invasive nor dangerous, and when he discovered that his assistants were meeting in the lab after hours to employ it recreationally, what, he decided, was the difference? Why not join them? They fit the device to his bare head, adjusted the dials, and triggered his masculine plexus. All at once the brilliant young cognitive scientist felt ambitious, decisive, and blunt. He stretched his shoulders, flexing his trapezius muscles until he heard his spine crack. When someone—Avery, he believed the name was—mentioned that the science center used to house a charter school, he did not say, “I never knew that,” but instead, “I
must have forgotten that.” Avery, Jordan, Kelly, Parker, and Robin: the cognitive scientist had just arranged their names in alphabetical order when the device was recalibrated to trigger his feminine plexus. He experienced a mild itching sensation, and then, in an instant, felt nurturing, patient, and a little sheepish. He worried that he had been tactless, that Avery (who was the most sensitive of his assistants, after all, and whose name, besides, was Jamie, he now recalled) had perceived him as cavalier or dismissive, just a skosh rude perhaps. Should he apologize? he wondered. He caught himself rubbing the collar of his shirt between his fingers. The cotton was beginning to pill. Then the gender excitation equipment shut down with a surrendering hum, and his assistants removed the device from his temples. How instructional, the cognitive scientist reflected. It appeared that the barrier between manhood and womanhood—or at least his manhood, his womanhood—was not a chasm but a seam. It barely existed at all. In the weeks that followed, however, his womanly qualities did not abate. The cognitive scientist might be drinking his coffee or checking his phone when suddenly, without warning, some Mrs. or Ms. would come tiding up inside him. Hello, he would think, it’s you again. His usual grayness or brownness of feeling kept giving way to strange brilliances of sadness or pleasure. At every sniff of jasmine or lavender, or, oddly, pumpkin pie, he felt a small pang of sensual longing. Clearly the neurostimulators had awakened something inside him. He set off to discover what it was. It took many years, several hundred discarded hypotheses, a cancer scare, a religious conversion, and a spur-of-the-moment palm reading before he began to suspect the truth: that while his mind was a man’s, his soul was a woman’s. The two of them, his mind and his soul, had achieved a sort of marriage, he mused, though whether death would mark its divorce or its consummation, only time would tell.