The Ghost Variations

by Kevin Brockmeier

  SEVENTY-THREE

  BULLETS AND WHAT IT TAKES TO DODGE THEM

  That August, when they called it quits, her friends told her that she had dodged a bullet, and his told him that he had. The truth, at least initially, was that he was convinced the fault was his—certain that he had ignored her distresses and sensitivities, expressed so clearly and so often, and thereby blundered into breaking her heart—while she, for her part, was remorseful for taking such quick offense at every careless thing he said, and equally convinced the fault was hers. Before long, though, with the encouragement of their friends, they were each won around to the version of the story that most effectively consoled and exonerated them. He said to himself, If she wasn’t capable of trusting me, she wasn’t capable of trusting anyone. And in return she said, He confessed right away to his minor shortcomings but was totally blind to his actual faults.

  Their love affair had ended abruptly, after once again, to her incredulity, he had suggested that her parents, so hidebound and dictatorial, were surely more loving than she was capable of realizing, while it became apparent to him that all this time, privately, beneath the theater of her smiles, she had been livid over his slights and discourtesies, slights and discourtesies he was astonished to discover she had ever attributed to him at all but that had reduced her, she said, many times, to tears. What he had regarded as evenhandedness she had regarded as callousness, what she had regarded as vulnerability he had regarded as violence, and since there was no impartial jury to whom they could appeal for a verdict, each of them continued to believe, when they considered their spell of sexual intoxication, that only one of them was the wrongdoer, only one the wrongdone.

  Something about the suddenness with which the relationship had ended kept its memory fresh in their minds. In stray moments, they would each find themselves annotating and revisiting it—first in the weeks and months that followed, then as they grew older and the years went by, and finally after they died and the years no longer did. As ghosts, they discovered, they still occupied the precise contours of their own lives, but less fleetly than they had before, more lingeringly. Death was a kind of forever, but one that pervaded the past rather than transcended it. Bodies moved through time as quickly as fire. Ghosts moved through time as slowly as glass. As such, there was plenty of opportunity for the two of them to watch the people they once had been, a man and a woman like all men and women, whistling so fast through their days, so fast; hurtling into other bodies sometimes, and sometimes barely missing them. From the perspective of the dead, life was a dangerous thing: a world of bullets, with everyone dodging everyone else, and no one to blame but God or the cosmos, contingency or fate, whoever had fired the gun.

  SEVENTY-FOUR

  KNEES

  A bachelor and an introvert, with a monotonous data-entry job and a wait-and-see attitude toward life, is perusing the morning’s paper when he discovers, with less surprise than he might have, his first girlfriend’s obituary. Complications following. Survived by. Age forty-seven. Once, long ago, in their morbid adolescence, all white Pan-Cake makeup and black eyeliner, she had asked him, “If you could pick someone’s ghost to haunt you, whose would it be?” and he had answered, “Yours. No question.” They were smoking cigarettes at the bare-dirt back corner of the high school. “Really?” she had quizzed him. “What if I was, like, a pissed-off ghost?” She was pissed off all the time anyway, ghost or no ghost, and he told her so. She frog-punched him. “Ow!” he said. “I mean, you’re halfway there already. Ow! Ow! Hey, wait, I love you pissed off,” and you know what? He meant it. She had the kind of temper that advertised itself in frowns and edicts and bizarre discharges of static electricity, which she was able to deploy on purpose, the way other people deployed curse words. Doggedness was how he thought of it. Doggedness regarding the music she liked and the music she hated; regarding clothing, grammar, politics—everything; and the same doggedness when it came to him: his lips, and his fingertips, and the rodlike tendons in his neck. He had never believed anyone would find him attractive, or funny. He couldn’t resist her. “Let’s say you’re middle-aged and boring one day,” she continued, “and I’ve died, okay? You’re wearing a blue button-up shirt with short sleeves, because you’ve lost your fashion sense, and you’re drinking coffee with too much milk, because you’ve lost your taste buds. Suddenly you see a fly drowning in the coffee. Picture its wings, its black legs. Two seconds ago it wasn’t there. You have this image of it bobbing up from the bottom of the mug, like an air bubble, but no—it must have fallen mid-flight.” Now, so many years later, on an uncommonly cold summer morning, he is sitting at the Formica-and-aluminum table he inherited after his parents died. In his coffee, as yellow as old ivory, is a housefly, its little black prayer legs making bubbles in the liquid. “That whisper tickling your ear: you could swear it’s me. But when you turn around, I’m not there. It’s high summer—July—but there’s a chill in the air.” All at once he feels a jabbing sensation, as if someone has frog-punched him. “Pop! A knuckle mark rises in the crook of your arm. Then you hear something shuffling around beneath the kitchen table. Knees. You’re really saying you love me enough, even all dead and pissed off like I am, that you would bend down hoping to see me?” she asked. And he answered, “You bet your life.” The kiss she gave him tasted like Starbursts and tobacco. Even now, as something steals toward him beneath the table, he remembers the flavor of it. Through his khakis he feels a nip of static electricity. He flinches. And looks. And loves and is afraid of her.

  SEVENTY-FIVE

  THE MAN SHE IS TRYING TO FORGET

  That woman with the long neck and the narrow shoulders is searching for a man to forget another one. She began her search nearly a year ago, at the basement bar half a block from her apartment building, before moving on to other bars in other neighborhoods, then to museums and yoga studios, political rallies and supermarkets. Each night she leaves home ceremonially, in a hush of deliberation. She feels like an acolyte proceeding toward the altar. In her skirt and her heels she steps carefully, pauses, steps again. Listens to her clothing rustle. Waits patiently by the crosswalk. The brake lights of cars flicker. Store signs tick and buzz. The city has a different cologne after the sun falls. She breathes it in. Maybe this, she thinks, will be the night she finds him, at the bar or the art gallery, the health club or the cooking class. He will fix her with a smile and a tilt of the head, then enfold her in conversation, the man whose company will outshine or obliterate the man who has broken her heart. But it never happens. Oh, she meets men, of course she does—whole casts of them, whole orchestras—but they always remind her of the man she is trying to forget, at least tenuously, and sometimes uncannily. This one has his build; this one, his posture. This one wears his expression of slightly cross-grained amusement, visible mainly across the lips and the eyes, as if he has never stopped expecting a teacher to chastise him for letting his attention wander. This man likes the same movies he does; this one, the same music. This man sneezes once, then sneezes again: two times without fail. This one has neglected to shave his Adam’s apple, too prominent to be considered shapely or beautiful, yet alluring for all that, though its troughs and escarpments must be a hazard to his razor. This one shares his focused, almost gladiatorial, approach to card games and pool. This one expresses the same skepticism toward what he calls the supernatural, by which he means ghosts, angels, astrology, reincarnation—but also fate, karma, “vibes.” A dozen men might buy her a drink, a dozen more might offer her their number, but the result is always the same. The effort aggravates and depletes her. She feels as if something that once quivered before her almost visibly, shining from the tips of her fingers, has been extinguished. Increasingly she suspects that the man she is trying to forget is literally, definitionally, unforgettable. It is not that his characteristics are universal. He simply has too many of them. Her only hope, she thinks, is to find a man with no characteristics at all, or else with one characteristic and one a
lone: the vision to see her as the woman who will overshadow the woman who once broke his heart.

  SEVENTY-SIX

  THE ETERNITIES

  Her husband was affectionate, charming, wealthy, handsome, and considerate, and also fundamentally heartless. Imagine a tropical island that is all shore and no interior: sure, the sand might warm your toes, and the breeze might cool your skin, but try to venture inland and some mysterious turnabout will spin you around and you’ll find yourself facing the waves again. That was their life together—ringed by comforts but inaccessible at the center. By the time she perceived it, she had rounded the corner into middle age. Oh, her marriage was peaceful enough, habitable enough, no question. It seemed wrong to be inundated by regrets, yet frequently, eavesdropping on herself, she would notice that she was repeating the same two words. Somewhere and faraway. Faraway and somewhere. Somewhere, somewhere, faraway. The distant land she was coveting was not a place at all, she realized, but a time, and that time, she understood, was not the future but the past, her own past, all those stupid happy years that had gone trembling into the air like ashes from a fire. Why couldn’t she go back and try again? Surely, she thought, this was not her only life. Then she died, at fifty, of a coronary, and discovered that it was. All around her at first was a peculiar darkness, blotched and streaked with a rich red overcolor. After that came the blunted steel and the rubber gloves and a pulselessness she was almost ready to mistake for silence until she made out the buzz of an electric light. How soon she realized where she was she could not say, only that, eventually, she did. What she had been given was not a new life but the same life again, with the same mother and father, the same springer spaniel, the same duplex apartment with the nettles climbing the back fence. She was not a ghost exactly; or rather, if she was, she was haunting only herself, peering out at her experiences from the inside. Think of it like this: once she had been a native to her life, but this time she was a tourist, without the language to converse with anyone or the ability to affect anything. Turn left, she would command her body, and her body would turn right. Take the job overseas, she would tell herself, and her body would stay put. Marry someone else, she would say, and her body would walk the aisle, accept the ring, and offer the same old I do. Leave the island, she would plead. Leave the island. On her fiftieth birthday, as she was nearing the end again, she wondered if it would happen the same way this time. Would she wake up once more inside her own life, haunting not only herself but the second self who had haunted the first? How many hundreds of her might there be in here, how many thousands, standing on that slinking line where the sand soaked up the surf?

  SEVENTY-SEVEN

  TOO LATE

  His wife was tenderhearted, idealistic, guileless, nurturing, and intuitive, but also quick to take injury from simple accidents of phrasing. He himself was simultaneously talkative and bumbling, the kind of man who said three wrong things on his way to every right one, punting figures of speech around like soccer balls. Though he tried to be gentle toward her, and she tried to be charitable toward him, it couldn’t last, and didn’t. His second wife was more ambitious than he was, and also more fastidious, but at twenty-six she was still a virgin. She had begun to feel as if her virginity had metastasized, like a cancer, and so, in desperation, she had married him, admitting only after their honeymoon was over that he was the wrong man. His third wife was an amateur actor and a devout Christian. She mistook his irreverence for an elaborate act of prolonged theater and was incensed when she realized how extravagantly she had misunderstood him. His fourth wife could not stop imagining all the alternate paths her life might have followed. What if she had accepted that job overseas? Kept that child? Married someone else? His fifth wife was still infatuated with her prior husband, her third, who himself, it developed, was also still infatuated with her. His sixth wife was a perfectionist, irritated not so much by his defects as by his failure to notice hers. His seventh wife was too naive for him; his eighth, too adventurous. Not until his ninth wife left him for her chiropractor was he able to diagnose his problem. He was one of love’s wishful thinkers, blown this way and that by his faith in romance, and thus always vulnerable to the next woman, the next wife. He would meet someone at a lecture or a party, feel a canyony sensation of intimacy and potential, and before he knew it—bam!—another marriage. His tenth wife objected to his politics: too wishy-washy. His eleventh objected to his silences: too damning. He was preparing to wed his twelfth wife when he died. Some six months later he found himself on the other side of a Ouija board, speaking with a woman so desperate for evidence of the spirit world that her stomach kept producing sound effects, the kind of noises a bear might make, or two balloons rubbing together. “I’m sorry,” she apologized, and, “Oh, dear. Forgive me.” The planchette traced out his answers. F—O—R—G—I—V—E—N. “Forgiven.” M—E—T—O—O. “Me, too.” A—L—O—N—E. “Alone.” Suddenly, by instinct, he knew that he should marry her, knew that, given the chance, this love was the one that would actually persist, but before he could ask the question, she moved the planchette to goodbye and he faded away somewhere, because in death, as in life, when it comes to questions of the heart, “You came just in time” always means “You came too late.”

  SEVENTY-EIGHT

  DETENTION

  It was a lot like school, the afterlife. That was what she discovered. Some vague time ago she had been the mousy girl with the B+’s, the one whose name the teachers struggled to recollect whenever she was missing from the head count, shy beyond all reason, and though there were no grades now, and no names, once again she felt like that girl she used to be, filing through the phases of being with the twenty-three ghosts who were her nearest contemporaries, each of whom, like her, needed some structure, a few friends, and above all else an education. There was a physics of ghostliness: This is the force it takes to rattle the silverware. This is the energy you’ll need to shake the curtains. A social studies: In this country you’ll be seen as a harbinger of misfortune, while in that you’ll be celebrated as a blessing from the ancestors. Even an etiquette: The west side of a room is for visitations, the east side for summonings. You should send a chill through the air before you make your appearance, never after. It’s discourteous to haunt the recently bereaved unless you happen to be the ghost they are mourning. Her weakness, then as now, was public speaking. For her to gather the confidence she needed to moan before an audience, the eloquence to skipper a planchette across a board, took considerably more courage than she possessed. She had always preferred to let her friends do the speaking for her. How typical that on the first day of her immateriality, after someone asked her how old she had been when she died and she realized, to her mortification, that she couldn’t remember, another ghost with the same sheen of newness about her showed an infinitesimal twinkle of sympathy, letting a me-too smile flash across her features, and from that moment on she regarded her as her closest friend. Nothing came more naturally to her than to be the second ghost in a pair, trailing along behind the pretty one, the cheeky one. Now and then, the way a bonfire throws off a cinder, her mind would emphasize that none of this was preordained, that not only her best friend but also the boys she liked and the boys she avoided and the girl who teased her and everyone else was just an accident of the calendar, in this life just as in the last one. The randomness of it all unsettled her. So much depended upon the dates on either side of that dash: when your lungs drew air dash when your heart gave out. A few days earlier or later and fate would have scripted her existence with a different cast entirely. Occasionally, as she floated before yet another unimpressed family, attempting to produce a preternatural keen, she wondered if she would ever change. Eventually time would make her a new person, of that she was confident, if not soon then surely on her graduation day, when some other, greater death would call her name, hand her a diploma, and superintend her out of reality.

  SEVENTY-NINE

  I LIKE YOUR SHOES

  Th
e note read “I like your shoes.” She found it spelled out in the condensation on her living room window, written glidingly, with a sort of throwaway prettiness, in strokes the width of a fingertip. When she attempted to wipe it off, her palm came back dry. Even so, it took her a moment to understand the situation. The writing was—had to be—on the outside of the glass. Her apartment was on the sixteenth floor, with no balconies or even window ledges. How such a message could have gotten there, who could have composed it, eluded her. The heat of the morning took hold as the sun crested the high-rises, and she watched as, all at once, the words were inhaled back into the air.