The Ghost Variations

by Kevin Brockmeier

  SIXTY

  A SMALL DISRUPTION OF REALITY

  Whether the afterlife was located overhead, as the Aborigines believed, or underground, as the Greeks and the Mesopotamians contended, was answered definitely last September when, with a sound like a brush fire, the membrane between this world and the next ruptured and it became evident that death was situated, as the Narragansett had always maintained, to the southwest. Not, it should be understood, to the southwest of any particular point, but to the southwest of every particular point: the brick courtyard next to the Hostel Budva, the grassy bend in the Stanley Esplanade, the beach behind the Chatham Pier Fish Market, the stone steps of the Plaza Baquedano. The afterlife’s appearance was simultaneous, omnifarious, and continuous. Wherever you happened to be, on that late-September day with the sun’s rays blanketing the earth, or on that late-September night with an almond sliver of moon in the sky, a rift opened up just a yard or two away from you, at an azimuth of exactly 225 degrees.

  What lay behind the rift was difficult to say: some shifting allness of color and motion over which the eyes seemed to skip like a stone. It might have been white but might just as plausibly have been black, or gray, or transparent. The edges were friendlier to investigation than the center was. From the evidence of the trees, clouds, and buildings against which the opening appeared like a gash, it was roughly as tall as a bus shelter and roughly as broad as a wine cask. Its borders were not static but pulsed and fluttered. And through it came pouring a great wind of ghosts. This wind of ghosts was neither hot nor cold. It blew powerfully, even aggressively, but failed to discompose so much as a single blade of grass. To the senses it offered little more than a distant smell of dust and ammonia, plus a faint ionic zizz that resembled the vibration of a dying lightbulb. Yet turning to face it, you had to catch your breath. Call it limbo or call it paradise, it was only a few steps away.

  Since that day, the ghosts have never stopped blowing. Occasionally now, in a fit of morbid ebullience, what the Germans call Todbegeisterung, someone will brave the wind to cross the barrier between this world and the next. Whether sick or healthy, young or old, these travelers all wear the same expression: an elsewhere look of zealous distraction. To someone standing nearby—a spouse or a child, a friend or a stranger—they might say “Goodbye” or “Excuse me.” Usually, though, they will leave without so much as a word, turning their feet abruptly to the southwest and pegging upstream until they vanish into the afterlife, that strange disburdening of lights and shapes that is either as much of nothing as anyone has ever seen or so much of everything that it merely looks like nothing.

  SIXTY-ONE

  THE ABNORMALIST AND THE USUALIST

  The two senior faculty members at the Center for the Study of Theoretical Scripture were not colleagues so much as adversaries. Both of them specialized in the New Testament canon, specifically the Synoptic Gospels, but the older of them had made his reputation as a Usualist, while the younger was rapidly gaining fame as an Abnormalist. The Usualist, a nearsighted gentleman with a knack for menacing appearances, contended that all things supernatural were bunkum. As such, he had devoted his career to ridding the Scriptures of their miracles and wonders, their exorcisms, resurrections, and transfigurations, each and every hint of the hereafter or the divine. Such appeals to the otherworldly were, he maintained, relics of a simpler and more credulous age, and therefore had to go. The Abnormalist, a red-faced fellow with the habit of swinging around corners as though his fingers were the hinge and his body the door, insisted that the very purpose of Scripture was to reveal the numinous within the everyday. He had made it his mission, therefore, to purge the Gospels of all their laws, genealogies, and denunciations, together with their baptisms and benedictions, their dusty roadside lectures, their ordinary suppers. It was not the commonplace he intended to repudiate, he often quipped, but the merely commonplace, the humdrum. Both of the senior faculty members at the Center for the Study of Theoretical Scripture sifted through the Gospels fastidiously, verse by verse, the one panning for the gold of the demonstrable, the other for the gold of the ineffable. To the Abnormalist, the Usualist’s scholarship was just so much wallpaper and weeds. To the Usualist, the Abnormalist’s was all ghostliness and puffery. Each of them had proclaimed as much, publicly, many times. These days, when they met each other in the corridors of the Center for the Study of Theoretical Scripture, they no longer bothered to exchange hellos, yet one afternoon, as was bound to happen, the Usualist strode squinting into the copy room just as the Abnormalist came pivoting out. The two of them collided, keeling over in an eruption of books and papers. “Must this office always be your personal playground?” the Usualist snapped. “Why can’t you keep your eyes open?” the Abnormalist rejoined. From his fiberglass chair in the hallway, the Center’s lone adjunct faculty member, a Parablist, who held that even the plainest fact was a story that proposed some alternate meaning, watched the two of them shouting and tangling their limbs together as they attempted to stand up. Inwardly he grinned, reflecting how, despite the inexhaustible quarrels of matter and spirit, life was harmonious and sweet, and the world something magnificent.

  SIXTY-TWO

  REAL ESTATE

  If you’ll join me up here, ma’am, you’ll see that the rafters are lit from below by antique sanctuary lamps. This gives the shadows what we call a “thicketing” quality, perfect for eerie half-sightings or spider-like plunges. Down here along the south wall we have the confessional. The curtains are made of opaque cotton velvet. They reach all the way to the floor, you’ll notice. Now what does that mean? I’ll tell you what it means. It means that, without whisking them open, no one can determine whether or not the booth is occupied, or by what. It could hold an innocent old lady, or a schoolboy, or a body with the flesh of its hands peeled all the way back to the wrists, its face frozen in a pallor of ghastly fear. Or it might be empty. Or just seem empty. Regardless, if you’re human and you want to find out, you have to part those curtains. Over here to the right is the votive rack. At this time of night it’s not in use, of course, but believe me, come seven or eight a.m., it will be quivering with candle flames. Dozens of them. Imagine the parishioners igniting as they say their prayers. You can practically hear it, can’t you? First the whoosh, then the squeal, then an inferno of arms and legs drawing air. Now the altar in back of the chancel is original to the space. It dates to the 1840s, as do the chalice and cross. I know what you’re thinking, but let me tell you, ma’am, they might seem innocuous, but pervade a holy object like that—not just haunt it, but saturate it—and it will become positively menacing. Nothing is more disquieting to worshippers than wine that turns to curds in the mouth. I know from experience. Ah, I see the stained-glass window has caught your attention. You’re right to admire it. Notice how the Virgin and Child seem to smile down on the church with an exalted benevolence, as if to say, One day all your pains will be comforted, one day all your happiness restored. But look: with just the subtlest contortion of the lead—there, where the Child’s eyes meet His brow—His face takes on an aura of predatory menace. And see: the Virgin is still smiling, yes, but smiling the way a slave smiles to placate Her master. And of course, as I know you’re well aware, it doesn’t take much to turn a window into a cataract of glass. To the left here is the baptismal font. Mind you don’t touch the water. Now if you’ll follow me through this door, ma’am, I can show you the sacristy. It was in this room, shortly before last month’s unfortunate exorcism, that the priest was found strangled by his vestments. The new fellow they’ve brought in is just a pup, still convinced of Creation’s essential goodness. “A blind panic opportunity,” as we in the business call them. Out back is the graveyard, but then I don’t need to tell you that, do I? I should make it clear, ma’am, this place is going to go fast. It has every modern amenity—amenities by the thousands. 15,617 of them, in fact, according to the parish’s latest roster. All that’s missing is a tenant. If you’re interested, you s
hould let me know as soon as possible. Tonight. Yes, ma’am. We can move you in right away.

  SIXTY-THREE

  WHICH ARE THE CRYSTALS, WHICH THE SOLUTION

  That man in the corduroy jacket, waiting in his car for the traffic light to change, is not a pessimist but a fatalist. He believes people can generally expect things to turn out for the best but that he, in particular, is doomed. He is not wrong. Some years ago, unbeknownst to him, he attracted the notice of a “teasing spirit,” mischievous if not downright hostile, what his Polish grandfather used to call a psotnik. What the man did to provoke the spirit, she—the spirit—can no longer recollect, but ever since he did it, she has served out an array of punishments, inducing his life toward dishevelment, inconvenience, and humiliation. Her specialty is love. The voice that keeps whispering to him—whispering tenderly, persistently—that his most necessary happiness is hiding behind the face of some woman he barely knows and whose inner life he can only dimly imagine is hers: the spirit’s. Her most recent selection is the receptionist at the library, ten years the man’s junior. The woman’s slender fingers play over her keyboard like water trickling through a rickrack of stones, and the man has found that he can’t stop picturing them disarranging his hair. Even better, from the spirit’s perspective, is that she seems as nervous in his presence as he does in hers, exactly the kind of blundering the man is inclined to mistake for attraction. Make another excuse to drop by and talk to her, the spirit prods. Ask her to dinner, the spirit suggests. It won’t be awkward, the spirit insists. Do it. Gleefully she anticipates the look that will wash through the woman’s eyes, and then immediately through the man’s, when it becomes plain that, by asking her out, he is obligating her to reject him, and that, by obligating her to reject him, he has wounded her, leaving her no choice but to parry the jab, no matter how kind she might wish to be. It is all so delicious. But the man is stopped right now at the corner of Evergreen and Mississippi, alone in his car, and the spirit will have to save that trap for later. Instead, with an ability born of her spite, occult and unappeasable, she pierces the signal box at the base of the traffic post and stems the electricity in a particular loop of wire. The man in the corduroy jacket sees the side lights switch from green to yellow. He eases his foot off his brake, allowing his car to bump slightly forward, but though the opposing lane receives a long through-signal, his own light remains stubbornly red. He replaces his foot on the brake. Why do so many four-way lights fail to complete their cycles? he wonders. Invariably the first three operate exactly as they should, but the fourth light, his light, always malfunctions. Before long, to his left and right, cars are accelerating back into the intersection. Of course, he thinks. Here it is again. The endless red light, training itself toward him like the needle of a compass.

  SIXTY-FOUR

  COUNTLESS STRANGE COUPLINGS AND SEPARATIONS

  They made him leave the afterworld when they found out he was not a ghost. Asked directly, he was forced to confess the truth—that he was living and breathing—and before he knew it he was back on earth, sitting on a thermoplastic steel bench in the food court of a shopping mall. Atoms were pinballing every which way. Mobs of people were galumphing around inside their fat and muscle. His stomach ached from what he gradually identified as hunger. Oh, great, he thought. This again. To his left was a noodle bar, to his right a fried chicken counter, but the thought of taking the matter he possessed and adding yet more matter to it repulsed him. He was practically bursting with the stuff already. He had to admit he found the haste with which he had been banished from the afterworld galling. What, after all, was his real offense? “Willful and premeditated materiality”: that, word for word, was the accusation they had leveled against him. As for “materiality”—well, okay, he couldn’t deny the charge. But “willful”? “Premeditated”? A more deplorable mischaracterization of his motives he could hardly imagine. If you asked him, his expulsion was unjust, and not only unjust but profoundly so, elementally so. The fact that he had not yet died, while true, was a mere technicality. Surely they would have realized as much if they had allowed him to argue his case. Not that he didn’t understand their concerns. No one wanted to find the gates between life and death demolished, the otherworld teeming with lookie-loos, tourists, and honeymooners. But he was no tourist, no lookie-loo, didn’t they see? He was one of them: pensive, ceremonious, a ghost in all but essence. He had never been at ease with himself—not, at least, as a corporeal being. Five minutes back in the world and already he felt just like everyone else, a big bag of skin sloshing with water and proteins. Through his clothing he could feel the empty diamonds of the bench against his thighs. Wherever he looked, another piece of matter was moving, changing, decaying, or maturing. Light was agglutinating on every available surface. No, no, no. It just wouldn’t do. He intended to file the paperwork to contest his deportation as soon as possible—or, barring that, to die, and to die just as quickly as he could arrange it. One way or another he was determined to return to the afterlife, his proper home, where everything slid pleasantly toward nonbeing. And with that thought, he stood up and strode to the mall’s glass doors. Outside he was sure he would find what he needed—either an attorney with a specialty in the transcendental or a good, heavy, fast-moving car.

  SIXTY-FIVE

  RAPTURE

  Mostly it happened just like the Scriptures said it would. The plains swallowed the mountains, the waters turned to blood, disease and warfare thundered across the continents, and whatever paradise the future might once have promised lay in an appalling wreckage of masonry, char, and bones, but then the trumpets sounded, and the skies rolled open, and five billion faces were lifted, like sunflowers, to the brightness of His coming. No prophecy could have reproduced the beauty of that light; after so long, and in the gravest of hours, Jesus. Believers the world over dropped to their knees. That they had misunderstood His story, and in what way, they did not yet suspect. The introductory sign came shortly after He descended from the firmament to prepare the earth for the dawn of His kingdom, though almost no one recognized it. As He began to walk among them, an old woman, palsied along her left side, reached for the hem of His garment. Her hand swept through it intangibly, clapping against the pavement. Asked on camera what His robe had felt like, she answered in a tone of puzzlement, “Like nothing. Like when I was a girl and I visited my grandfather in his barbershop and he let me play with the combs after he toweled them clean. It felt like that. Like the static charge on a hard rubber comb.” Though her voice was weak, it seized everyone who heard her, not only in Jerusalem but across the world, on a billion phones and television screens. For the first time since God had scattered the races, the languages had all become one—a bygone tongue, honeyed and pure, in which each word praised His name. Soon, from the Mount of Olives, Jesus marshaled the faithful to His side. The carnage of two thousand years had made every field a battlefield, every hillside a cemetery, and when He called the departed to rise, the soil seethed with their spirits. Then, in the blinking of an eye, the living vanished from their bones and joined them. Father greeted son, and husband, wife; friend, friend, and sister, brother; yet to each other they were like a fog. Extending their arms, they found only air. From the slope of the Mount, Jesus addressed their confusion. You have died, He said, as I have died. You are shadows as I am a shadow, you are ghosts as I am a ghost. Your bodies are gone and shall not return. Truly, He said, you have all been changed. And truly they had. They were imperishable the way a draft from a cave is imperishable, imperishable the way an apparition is imperishable, imperishable because it is not alive. Of course. At last they understood. The Second Coming had finally taken place. It was the Resurrection that never had.