The Ghost Variations

by Kevin Brockmeier

  The second note arrived a few months later: “I like your shoes,” written in the same pleasingly rounded hand as before. She pressed her cheek to the window, searching for a suspended platform, a bungee cord, some scaffolding or suction marks, but the face of the building offered only glass and aluminum.

  The third note appeared early the following winter, lingering in the frost above the kitchen sink as she washed the dishes. The familiar words—“I like your shoes”—almost escaped her notice, since the sky behind them was the same marmoreal gray as the ice.

  The fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh notes arrived on a hot April afternoon within the span of a few minutes, fading away and then replacing one another with a bellows-like breathing rhythm: “I like your shoes,” “I like your shoes,” “I like your shoes,” “I like your shoes.” By then she had moved to a third-floor walk-up in a converted school building. Her new boyfriend, obliged by his commute to wake an hour earlier than she did, often left little goodbyes for her on the kitchen counter or the dry-erase board, but his crabbed script was nothing like the declarations that had pursued her across the city, so fluidly, so puckishly made. She was certain they were not from him.

  What she did not yet know, but was starting to suspect, was that the notes would accompany her for the rest of her life. That some god, ghost, or demon would go on, until the day she died, liking her shoes. And that even after eleven different houses and apartments, hundreds of guest rooms and hotel suites, seven boyfriends, two husbands, and several checkerboards’ worth of windows, she would never be sure whether the message was meant to be a compliment or an insult. The phrase reminded her of the roundabout observations of teenage girls, the kind who put just enough sugar on their barbs to disguise them as flattery. Every time she went shoe-shopping, she found herself asking the same question: But what do they really think?

  EIGHTY

  THE GHOST’S DISGUISE

  The country where he lived was full of daylight, insects, gardens, dirt, and ghosts. All his life he had heard people say, when they were ill or injured or when the ghosts grew too plentiful, “The body is the ghost’s disguise,” meaning, in the first case, Remember that life is fleeting, and in the second, Be kind to them, for they were once like us. But to him the creatures were a nuisance. Frequently they congregated in the aisles of his little market. When he shooed them out onto the street, saying, “What do you want with my vegetables? My stacks of dented cans? Go away now, please,” they never answered him, only stared as ghosts do, with their wide, chalklike eyes. Outside, ghosts clogged the air like sedge flies, and indeed, in certain lights—at sunrise and sunset, for instance, or when the sky was yellowing after a midday shower—it was hard to distinguish the one from the other. Both of them, the ghosts and the flies, were just tall blurs of dots knitting haphazardly around inside themselves. Once, in the flexure of a certain ghost’s neck, and in the way her lips seemed to brim with some mysterious smile, he thought he recognized his wife, who had died long ago following a stroke. And another time, in the modest-man’s hunch of a particular ghost’s shoulders, he seemed to detect his favorite uncle, taken by cancer just the year before. But both were quickly engulfed in the swirling company of apparitions. His mother used to tell him about a place called the sea, where the horizon was made of shining water and the pathways were not so crowded with spirits, but such a place, he thought, if it truly existed, lay so far away that it might as well have been the moon. To imagine that any living person had ever traveled to either one astounded him. Though he dreamed occasionally of salt waves that threw streamers of kelp across his feet, he had never ventured beyond his country’s borders, feeling himself too busy when he was young and too tired now that he was old. Yet still from time to time he caught himself thinking, Maybe someday. All these years and still, Maybe someday. Amusing, the notions his brain turned out. How few were the somedays that remained to him, he thought. How many the somedays that had departed. He was not yet seventy when death murmured his name. One afternoon, sweeping the last stubborn wisp of a specter from his store, he slipped to the floor and awoke without a body. Around him was a great embracing ocean of ghosts, their pale eyes alight with curiosity and affection. Their voices were like waves that beat against the ears with a whispering sound: his wife and his uncle, his mother and father—shish, shish, shish. Stand up, you’re here, you’re awake now, they said. There was so much to do, and there was nothing to be afraid of. Death had already come and gone.

  EIGHTY-ONE

  A SOURCE OF CONFUSION

  Some years ago, thanks to a mix-up in the order of the universe, women began giving birth to ghosts rather than babies. At first the change was bewildering, not only to the millions of sad new mothers and fathers in the world but to their doctors, their midwives, and even the ghosts themselves, if, that is, we understood what it meant when their borders wavered and their faces turned inside out. But since then, I must say, most of us have grown accustomed to the situation. The deliveries generally proceed without complication: half an hour of contractions, a sensation of deep pressure, and then, all at once, the ghost—a milky little creature that flows gracefully into the air, swaying and curling around on itself like a bubble filled with smoke before popping open and assuming its lines. Birth is still a miracle, and sometimes even a joyous one, but a miracle of a different sort, a miracle from the night side of the grave, as it were, rather than the day side. The mystery that used to envelop newborn babies—Where does life come from?—is mingled now with the mystery that used to envelop the dead—Where is life going? But I am being unnecessarily philosophical. What’s important to remember is that the ghosts arrive fully mature, demanding no coddling or attention. They require no food or shelter. They are not recognizable as the people they used to be, and do not reply to the names we give them. In their multitude there are no Jims or Arthurs, no Coras or Joannas. The surest way to attract their awareness, we have found, is a pained inhalation of the kind that happens when you prick your finger with a needle, but such little gasps, though they seem to remind the ghosts of something, are only rarely successful. Once the ghosts are born, they accompany their parents home reluctantly. It is never long before they drift through the bricks and the plaster to go quietly about their business. All those grocery stores, theme parks, and old mansions where they congregate—–one is tempted to use the word “haunt,” but the truth is that we comprehend their motives poorly. They might be conspiring against us, or meditating, grieving or simply loitering. We have no idea. In any case, every year there are more of them and fewer of us. They don’t age, or seemingly die. Or at least so far they haven’t. Logic suggests that sooner or later, as we age and meet our end, this world will be theirs, though by then maybe those of us who are now alive and have since passed away will have been born little by little into their number. Somewhere, one presumes, in whatever afterlife the ghosts have deserted, stretch vast fields of babies, just as confused as we are.

  EIGHTY-TWO

  UNSEEABLE, UNTOUCHABLE

  The game is called “Unseeable, Untouchable,” or, alternatively, “Ghost.” The players are the older girl, the younger girl, and the babysitter; the playing field the family room, the kitchen, and the foyer. The rules are simple: the older girl and the younger girl each must pick two of the babysitter’s senses to disable—two apiece; not necessarily the same two—and the babysitter, using whichever senses remain to her, must try to catch them. For instance, the older girl, a long-necked eight-year-old with the booming voice of a theater impresario, might say, “Unseeable, unhearable!” and the younger girl, so excitable that she runs at a tilt, listing forward like a wooden top, might say, “Unseeable, unsmellable!” and then the babysitter will awaken as if from a daze, declare, “There’s someone in this house with me. I’m sure of it,” and pursue the girls from room to room, sniffing for the older one because she cannot see or hear her, and listening for the younger one because she cannot see or smell her. Finally, as
if by luck, she will ensnare one of them, yanking at the thin bones of her arms and exulting, “I’ve caught one, I’ve caught one,” until the girl changes from unseeable to untouchable and slides from the babysitter’s grip. Those are the essentials of the game: not catch-me-if-you-can but catch-me-ha!-you-can’t. Though the rules were originally improvised through play, they have slowly become rigid with custom. The babysitter always stumbles along with her hands frog-toed open to show that she is feeling for the girls, squints to show that she is looking for them, duck-lips at the air to show that she is tasting for them. The girls always agitate the babysitter with quick smacks to the arms and legs. Are they supposed to be living children fleeing a dead spirit, the babysitter wonders, or dead spirits taunting a living teenager? Who, in other words, is the ghost for whom the game is named? Their roles are—she recently learned the word in her English class—ambiguous. One day, as a treat for the girls, she props her phone on a windowsill and records them as they play. The video uploads itself to her profile page, where, over time, it will be engulfed by other videos, other photos, and gradually forgotten. But exactly forty-nine years later, she will tap an on-this-date notification, and there, for a minute and seven seconds, they will be: the older girl with her butterfly hair clips, the younger girl with her chubby pink cheeks, and she, the babysitter, with her chin raised for smelling, her ears cupped for hearing. By then the girls will be middle-aged. She’ll do the math: fifty-two and fifty-seven. She herself will be sixty-three. Yet inside the video, which is to say back in time, which is to say now, they are all still children. Unfinished. Untested. Unready.

  EIGHTY-THREE

  GHOST BROTHERS

  Two boys, one of them bold and one of them timid, decided to become blood brothers, but when the moment came to apply the knife to their palms, the bold one proceeded and the timid one balked. “That’s all right,” the bold one said. “Here. You can just pretend.” With his finger he traced an imaginary blade across his friend’s hand, then clasped it in his own. Between them they determined that the blood the timid one had spilled was not imaginary as such, it was supernatural—ghost blood—and, accordingly, that though the bold one was the timid one’s blood brother, the timid one was the bold one’s ghost brother. The difference, they decided, was this: while a blood brother’s bond was immediate and lasting, inseverable for a lifetime, a ghost brother’s bond, though just as strong, came with a built-in delay; it too was inseverable, but only after death. “Agreed?” the bold one asked. “Agreed,” the timid one said. The two boys remained friends deep into their middle age. Through surgeries, marriages, children, and career changes, the enjoyment they took in each other never flagged, until finally, when they were both on the cusp of retirement, the timid one fell sick and died. As a ghost—and, more important, a ghost brother—he felt a continuing attachment to his friend. For more than fifty years, the bold one had looked out for him, making sure that he was not bullied or mistreated. Now that the baton had been handed along, the timid one resolved to do the same. From then on, within the strict limits of his disembodiment, he did his best to protect his friend—modestly, for that was his nature, but earnestly nonetheless. He moaned politely at people who cut the bold one off in line. He sent a humble chill through the air when the hospital receptionist raised her voice at him. Once, a pickpocket swooped in for the bold one’s wallet at the hardware store, and the timid one sighed so disapprovingly that the fellow broke off and scuttled away down the lumber aisle. As the years stacked up, the ghost’s instinct for danger sharpened to a fine edge. A day came when his friend grew dizzy collecting the mail, lifted his hands two-thirds of the way to his face, and fell to his stomach on the driveway. Death was stealing over him visibly, like smoke edging through the loose frame of a door, but the ghost shouted, “Stop that!,” the ghost shouted, “Go away!,” his voice so fearless that the cloud of death retreated. The bold one rose to his feet guardedly, then wiped the blood from his palms. The timid one floated unseen at his shoulder, like the ghost of a knight, the ghost of a king. He sensed that the bravery to which he had always aspired, but which he had for so long fallen short of possessing, was at last within his reach.

  EIGHTY-FOUR

  A SECOND TRUE STORY

  A certain Russian philosopher maintained that people are not born with their souls but must labor to create them. Anyone who fails to do so, he conjectured, will dissolve upon dying into nonexistence. He was partially correct: indeed we are not born with our souls. Instead each of us is born possessing the soul of someone else, which is ours to safeguard but not to keep. Eventually, if we are lucky, our lives will introduce us to exactly the right person and the trip lever of some secret drawer will disengage, whereupon our soul will be relinquished to us—though the likelihood of an even swap (the chance, that is, that the soul we have been stewarding will belong to the same person who has been stewarding ours) is incalculably small. Take that boy, barely five years old, kneeling in his front yard beside an agreeable big wet-eyed sheepdog. He listens to her snuffling out a slow peaceful breath, then, after half a minute goes by, another. She is sweet and sad, as solemn as a cloud behind her face. Inside her body, the boy thinks, it must sound like a giant cave: a heartbeat for every breath, and a breath for every heartbeat. She is as large as he is, maybe slightly larger. It’s hard to be sure, since dogs aren’t shaped like people. But there’s one thing the boy knows for certain, which is that even though she appeared in his yard only this afternoon, and without any tags, they belong to each other. Best friends: that’s what they are. He recognized it immediately, as soon as she came trotting over flinging her ears back and forth in the sunlight. Now she sits in the grass cocking her head at him, her pink tongue extending from the slot of her mouth like a Skee-Ball ticket. He runs his hand through her fur. It is white and gray and very soft: feather-duster fur. She has run away from home, he thinks. She has no one to love her but him. His mom and dad are stupid and mean and said, No. No stray dogs. You can’t invite a stray dog into this house, and he doesn’t know if she will be there when he wakes up tomorrow. It hurts, but they both pretend it doesn’t. All at once the boy feels the strangest emptiness he has ever felt, as if he hasn’t eaten in days and days. It is six o’clock on an orange October night. For a while the insects were clicking and buzzing, and now they are chirping, and the sound is so loud that it’s straining the light from the sky. Soon the boy’s parents will call him back inside. In his pajamas, while he is supposed to be in bed, he will walk over to the window and watch the dog standing beneath the trees, silently asking for him with the tilt of her brow. After a while she will pad away down the street, her soul newly enclosed in her body, and the boy will go sprinting off into the rest of his childhood, and then his adolescence, and then his life, in search of whoever might give him his own.

  EIGHTY-FIVE

  A LIFE

  There was a skip, like on a record, and she realized she was dead. Her house was still arrayed around her, identical down to the last accoutrement, from the glass jar of seashells in the foyer to the wizened black commas of the candlewicks, but the walls had suddenly become permeable. She found herself seeping through them, flowing silently from room to room. In the kitchen her husband was pouring a midmorning drink for himself, in the bathroom her twelve-year-old was peeing with the door open, and in the stairwell her youngest was playing ricochet with a tennis ball. Oblivious: that’s what they were. She filtered back into the master bedroom, where her body lay bunched on the carpet. Forty-three years—my God, so little time! As a girl, convinced she was going to die from whatever cold or fever she had contracted, she used to picture her friends, her parents, her teachers, everyone she knew, rounding their backs in grief over her coffin. For some reason, it was imagining the sobs of her babysitter that always brought her, finally, to tears. To this day she had not lost her sentimental streak. What would they do, her husband and children, she thought. What would they do without her? The impulse must have been all it too
k, because no sooner had she asked the question than she went welling through the house toward them. Their thoughts, she discovered, were no longer secret to her. She could read them and read them bright. Here was her oldest, flushing the toilet and wincing as he reached for the door: Sorry. Forgot to close it. “What’s the matter with you? Do you think the whole world wants to watch that?” Can’t even relax in my own house with her around. And her baby boy, chunking his tennis ball at the wall, then pausing at what sounded like a footstep: Was that her? Guess not. “Once and for all, Dustin, will you stop that? How many times do I have to tell you, you’re going to leave a mark on the paint.” God. What’s the big deal about paint all the time? And her husband, upending an Irish whiskey to brace himself for the rest of the day: All right, what? What’s wrong now? You know, Lauren, even your smiles look disappointed. Has anyone ever told you that? Okay, wait. Take a deep breath. Be generous. No doubt she tries. And about that, at least, he was right: she had tried, she really had. But it was too late to say so now. That briary, demanding woman to whom they were all privately speaking—how could that be her? She had always been so confident that she would be missed one day, so certain she was loved. If nothing else, she thought, her life had been a learning experience. But she hadn’t wanted a learning experience. She had wanted a life.

  EIGHTY-SIX