The Ghost Variations

by Kevin Brockmeier

  EXTRAORDINARY GIFTS

  That woman in the grocery store who parades down the cereal aisle as if fated to do so, her eyes fixed determinedly forward, is a psychic of extraordinary gifts—not just a mystic performer of the bangles and caftan variety but an authentic spiritual medium. She sees actual ghosts, communes and converses with them. She inherited her abilities from her mother, around whom the ghosts of past generations bobbed as plentifully as cotton in a field. For many years the two of them sat side by side in the candlelit family parlor, conducting mother-daughter séances for gatherings of the bereaved and the curious. When the time came for the mother to die and the daughter to live on, they parted with the confidence of those who know that death is a door that opens both ways. First the psychic was standing over her mother’s bed saying, “You look parched, Momma. Let me get you another piece of ice.” Then her mother was saying, “I can’t see a thing anymore. Oh, honey, this must be it.” Then the psychic was whispering, “It’s all right. We’ll be together again soon.” And finally her mother was mustering the strength to nod, giving the barest of yeses before her pillow seemed to swell up around her ears and her soul came rattling out of her body. The psychic had just enough poise to touch her mother’s cheek without trembling.

  It was a lovely—a perfect—death. Yet at that instant, and ever since, the two of them have faced a predicament, for when the psychic left to call 911 and the coroner, the ghost of her mother, by sheer happenstance, began drifting that way, too. When the psychic went outside to collect the mail, the ghost of her mother, again by sheer happenstance, floated along the paving stones beside her. And later, when the psychic departed for the salon, the ghost of her mother set off along the selfsame path. The situation was decidedly awkward. They had already said their goodbyes, and according to the usual forms of deathbed etiquette, that should have been it. But they could not stop proceeding in matching directions. Every time the psychic tried to peel inconspicuously away, the ghost of her mother had the same idea, slanting off at her side. The longer they failed to acknowledge each other, to wave or salute or say a second bumbling goodbye, the more impossible it seemed to do so.

  From that day on, at every turn, the psychic of extraordinary gifts has been chaperoned by the ghost of her mother. She is always on the verge of addressing her, but never so comfortably that she can speak. If, in the grocery store, she pauses stiffly by the energy bars, then swivels around as if she has forgotten something, it is a sign not of grief or eccentricity but of a mind that is elsewhere, anticipating that next and greater death, when she will veer one way and her mother another, at last pursuing their separate courses.

  EIGHTY-SEVEN

  AN INHERITED DISORDER

  From an early age he resolved to be as unlike his father as possible. He was not quite seven when he made up his mind. His father was an alarming giant whose footfalls made the house shake, so he—his son—would be the opposite. At first, his rebellions were fittingly timid. He was quiet where his father was loud, shy where his father was outgoing, sickly where his father was hardy. But slowly, as his father’s jurisdiction over him diminished, he grew bolder. Your body, his father liked to say, is God’s cathedral, so at eighteen he had God’s cathedral pierced, fixing curved silver barbells to his ears, eyebrows, septum, and lower lip. “Live every hour to the fullest” was his father’s motto, so he took a job with a consumer research firm, filling out surveys with the inconsequentialia of strangers’ buying habits. He married “exactly the kind of fuss-potty boutique shopper” his father despised, raised two children in a way his father found “appallingly laissez-faire,” and “foolishly” rented an apartment, rather than “sensibly” investing in a house. Yet these contradistinctions, though genuine, were neither profoundly enough realized, he felt, nor swiftly enough gained. Recently he had noticed the shine of exposed scalp beneath his father’s hair: the old man was growing older, and so, for that matter, was he. In this respect, they were just alike. He decided, therefore, to stop aging. Over the next few years he stayed healthy and young. He was no older a decade later than he had been a decade before. Yet both he and his father, it occurred to him, were still proceeding through time consecutively, tracing the same straight line of minutes and days. Nope. No good. All wrong, he thought. And though it took some doing, after a week or so he began to experience time at a shuffle. One moment he was a twiggy little boy lining his dominoes up on the kitchen floor, the next a surprisingly fit seventy-five-year-old, and the next a high-schooler smoking his very first cigarette. But though his father was experiencing life continuously, and he discontinuously, he was nevertheless, like his father, alive. This wouldn’t do at all, he thought, and he relinquished the spark of vitality that imbued him with life. At first all seemed well: he was a ghost, and his father most assuredly was not. Yet it nagged at him, he had to confess, that they both remained singular unified beings—each of them, father and son, himself and himself alone. So rather than being someone in particular, he decided, he would instead be everyone. But as soon as this transition was accomplished—though he was, in fact, everyone (including, he could not deny, his father) and his father was no more than someone—he was disgruntled to realize that both of them still happened or abided, still eventuated, squarely within the framework of existence. Whether incarnate or incorporeal, multiple or singular, both he and his father unmistakably were. The alternative was obvious. He transformed himself from everyone who was to everything that was not. Finally, he thought, he was as unlike his father as possible, and would remain so until the universe culminated in its own vast nonbeing, into which his father would surely pursue him.

  EIGHTY-EIGHT

  PRAYER FROM AN AIRPORT TERMINAL

  One day a young man of meager religious faith doubted he had the strength to do what was necessary and so decided, against all his instincts, to pray, and to pray as forthrightly as he could: “If there’s a God out there who values my well-being, I admit I would be surprised. I can’t even say that I actually believe this will work. But I’m praying as sincerely as I know how. I’m speaking, I suppose, not to God, but to anyone who cares enough about me to listen. I’m in trouble. I’m in trouble and I need help. Please help me.” As it happened, the ghost of the man’s grandfather, like many ghosts, enjoyed eavesdropping now and then on the thoughts of his descendants. Characteristically, he had found, the minds of the living were a confusing ragbag of stray phrases, half-formed wishes, and flickering sense impressions that vibrated with color for barely an instant before they bleached out and disappeared, but every so often one of his children, grandchildren, or great-grandchildren would experience a thought so unmixed that it rose up and penetrated the turmoil. A piece of music could cause it. A strong kiss. A car crash. And that’s what the young man’s prayer was: a kind of car crash. That the ghost heard it so clearly was a sign of its—the prayer’s—desperation. “Help me,” the boy kept repeating. “Help me,” so much fear and pain compressed inside the words that the ghost’s sympathy was kindled. Though he was not truly fit to answer prayers—no ghost is—he did what he could, dispatching a warm gust of concentrated emotion into the world: You’ll be all right. Instantly his grandson felt better. The kindness of his gesture the ghost would never doubt. Its wisdom, though, he soon enough would, for it was upon answering his grandson’s prayer that the ghost’s difficulties truly began. The problem was that the young man believed he had found God. An unshakable confidence in the power of prayer had been awakened inside him. Two, twelve, fifty times a day, encountering the most mild obstacle or frustration, he would silence all his other thoughts and send out a petition for help, Dear God thising and Dear God thating. “Dear God, please let these trucks get out of the passing lane.” “Dear God, please keep the kids from using up the shampoo.” Sometimes the ghost was able to soothe his grandson’s worries, sometimes not, but whenever his prayers went ignored, the boy became exasperated, mulish, braying more and more loudly for attention. Enough, the
ghost thought. Enough of this endless sadness. Enough of this endless pain. Once, instead of transmitting a message of comfort, he tried transmitting a message of aggravation, Leave me alone, but this only made matters worse, generating a long procession of neurotic forgive-me prayers. Then and there the ghost realized he was trapped. Imagine it: knowing that for the next fifty or sixty years someone will resort to you and you alone to quench his troubles. He felt the way the junk must feel about the junkie.

  EIGHTY-NINE

  HATCHING

  Not that he truly wished them dead—that wasn’t quite it—but more and more often, when the man considered his lifelong friends, his colleagues, even his wife and sons, he felt that their image of him had become so mildewed by habit or complicated by misunderstanding that he took comfort in the idea of their mortality: the thought that soon, very soon, they would die and he would no longer have to be the person they had concluded he was. Instead he himself died—tree branch—which was even better. As a ghost, he was free of all constrictions. If he wanted to bob on the wind like light reflecting from cut glass, he could. If he wanted to trace the path of every capillary on every leaf on every tree in a grove of oaks and birches, he could. Or say he wanted to follow someone and emit a toneless shriek that only he or she could hear, like the squeal of chalk skidmarking across a blackboard—well, he could do that, too. He could be anyone or anything: a statue or a wisp of fog, a sudden slowing of the temperature. And anywhere, too: on a grassy plain or a busy street corner, a shopping concourse or a Himalayan ridge. He had already been dead some years before he took seriously to haunting people. Often at night, but occasionally in hard daylight, he would arrange himself in the shape he remembered possessing when he was alive, emerging from the air in a ferment of vapors. The families whose homes he visited could never settle among themselves whether he was hostile or benevolent. “All I’m saying is he’s never actually hurt anybody.” “Okay, not yet, but remember when he dashed that mirror to the floor?” “And all those little fires! My God, we’re lucky this place hasn’t burned to the timbers.” “Yes, but who opened the door to let Mr. Whiskers in that night during the snowstorm? Someone did, and it wasn’t any of you guys.” He took pride in the contradictions of his character. They were like the extra limbs he sometimes wore, the additional faces: evidence that he could take whatever form he chose. That was the marrow of it—his contentment, and his malleability, and how the one arose directly from the other. He had finally accepted that this was genuinely his hereafter, and that its pleasures would not simply dissolve away, when, like houseflies laying their eggs, they found him—the ghosts of his friends and family. “That smile of yours,” they effused. “And those eyes, so thoughtful and quiet. It’s been half a lifetime and look at you: you’re exactly the same.” They were convinced they had lost him. For decades they had known it as a certainty. But fate had shown them otherwise, and now, they promised, they would never let him out of their sight again. They had missed him, missed him so much, they said. The miracle of it. The blessing.

  NINETY

  BILATERAL SYMMETRY

  By a mishap of circumstance, he died twice in the same instant, his heart seizing just as the alligator snapped its jaws closed around him. Accordingly, his ghost was bisected. On the left side, along with his good ear, was the ghost of the first half of his life. On the right side, along with his tinnitus, was the ghost of the second. He tried for a time to wind himself back together, circumvolving like the stripes of a barber’s pole, but eventually he was forced to accept that in this great world of mist and shadows he would never be whole again. His left ghost and his right ghost exchanged their goodbyes, separating to meet their fortunes. Because the first half of his life had been dominated by the many humiliations of love and poverty, his left ghost was restless and unhappy. The best remedy for his dissatisfactions, he soon discovered, was to lose himself in his work. Every ghost who took up haunting had a different specialty. His were the wealthy and the lovestruck: young couples, ideally, luxuriating in an ocean of money and affection. He learned the trick of emerging sideways, slowly, from the giant mirrors in their hotel suites. If he paused just so against his reflection, he could exhibit what looked to careless eyes like the full contours of a human body, half inside the wall and half out. This itself was disturbing enough. But when he broke the symmetry to reveal his spectral cavity—the slick pod of his stomach, the fat maze of his brain—the response he drew from his victims was often profound. The way their screams stair-stepped from fear to genuine horror invigorated him. The second half of the man’s life, up until that fateful moment in the Everglades, had been easy, companionable, and secure. As such, his right ghost was remarkably content. He, too, liked to call upon the living, but the hauntings he conducted were recreational rather than professional, a few hours of quiet visitation in the gentle pink of the evening. He became a regular guest at the bed-and-breakfast where he had honeymooned with his second wife. Each afternoon, around the time the insects began to sing, he crossed the mortal border and emerged from behind those damasked walls, relaxing in the scent of potpourri and candles. It wasn’t long before his reputation grew wings. Intrepid lovers booked the large southern room on the house’s top floor hoping to catch a glimpse of the Welcoming Spirit. They cozied up beneath the covers to wait for sunset, when the space around the sofa would ripple and unfold like the air above a bonfire and an agreeable warmth would rush over the lovers, both erotic and oddly tranquilizing. One night, hunting for someone new to torment, the left ghost happened upon this same bed-and-breakfast. Seeing his other half, he called out in recognition, but in the right ghost’s ear there was only the bell of his tinnitus, filling the world with its infinite peal, as strong and as loud as the day he had died.

  NINETY-ONE

  PARAKEETS

  Not long ago there lived a man with three pet parakeets: the first appareled in jewel tones of green and yellow, the second with a blue brow that faded into a creamy purple breast, and the third an albino with a beanbag-like belly. Every day from dawn to dusk their chattering permeated the man’s sunroom, all blond wood and arched windows. It was the most calming space in the house, his sunroom, but for a single perplexing defect—a frigid patch against the back wall, roughly the size of a water tank. How was it, the man wondered, that even in high summer, at three-thirty in the afternoon, when his shirt was pasted to his back with sweat, he would feel an alarming chill whenever he passed behind the sofa and to the immediate left of the credenza? Sometimes, walking in or out of the room, he would pause before he had emerged from the temperature well just to appreciate the sense of disorientation it caused him: two-thirds of his body warm and comfortable, yet the ice lopping off an arm or a leg, a slice of his foot, the escarpment of his shoulder. One day the man was polishing his hardwoods when, to access a section of the floor, he moved the birdcage into the cold patch. A silence enshrouded the birds. Their feathers flattened. Whether through tiredness or simple absentmindedness, the man neglected to restore the cage to its spot in the corner, and by the next morning, when he returned, the perches and wires were covered in a verdigris of frost. As he approached, the parakeets stood at attention. Try as he might, he had never been able to extend their vocabulary beyond a few basic words: birdseed, not-now, pretty-bird, night-night. Yet now, so quietly he would not have heard them if the air conditioner had not clicked off, the first bird said, “I do not know where I am.” And the second bird said, “I deserve another chance.” And “The wind here is so bitter and it never stops,” said the albino. The man felt as if someone had emptied a breath onto the nape of his neck. A marshy smell rose from his armpits. He had always enjoyed riddles, even insoluble ones, but there were riddles and then there were riddles. He instructed himself to move the cage back to the corner. Do it. Do it. But the cold of the copper bit his fingers to the skeleton. He flinched. He backed away. Without thinking, because he had said it so many times before, he asked, “Who’s a pretty bird?” The parakee
ts eyed him with a daunting directness. “Is someone there? Will you speak up? Let us out. Come closer. I can almost hear you. Come closer. Come closer. Let us out.” Between the bars of the cage everything was green and yellow like the grass at daybreak, or blue and violet like the last brush of the evening, or fat and white like the sun pinned in the sky, until he reached for the latch and the darkness rushed in.

  NINETY-TWO

  EUPHEMISMS

  In the village of which we speak, bordered by mountain folds forested with vine-draped trees, everything was a euphemism for something else. The villagers laughed and cried, but it was not what they meant. They fell in love and out again, but it was not what they meant. They told jokes, and visited the doctor, and celebrated birthdays, and attended weddings and baby showers, and they woke with hangovers, and they gossiped with their neighbors, and they watched the rain douse their window screens and the sun play keno with the mesh squares afterward, but none of it was what they really meant. One might think that in such a place, so ruled by circumlocutions and genteelisms, life would be impossible, an impenetrable tangle of codes and mysteries, but in fact the villagers understood each other perfectly well, for it was not a million different somethings they could not bring themselves to acknowledge but a single, conflagrating something, unified and elemental, which cast its light over them like the midday sun. They behaved as though a peck on the cheek meant a peck on the cheek, a physics lecture meant a physics lecture, a gardener plucking weeds from his vegetables meant a gardener plucking weeds from his vegetables, but in reality they knew better, since the peck, the lecture, and the gardening all concealed the same harsh truth, which, though widely understood, indeed swaying on the tip of every tongue, remained not only unexpressed but inexpressible. On those rare occasions when one of them tried to speak of it directly, the response was immediate. The others would meet him with a tucked-away look of nervous disgust, the muscles working around their eyes, but barely, in twitches, as if they were trying to remain dignified in spite of some great pain. They need not have worried. A protective internal mechanism always swung into place to guide such blunderers into the usual benign substitutions, into speaking as if every word possessed one meaning and one alone, which was too obvious to be questioned. Only the most careful examination revealed the tension behind their exchanges. Occasionally, when the villagers asked “How’s life been treating you?” or “Work going well?” they did so with a brief delay. Sometimes their smiles looked as if they had been tugged into place by an invisible stitch. At moments it seemed for all the world as if they were gazing back, regretfully, on a life that had already passed. There are two kinds of being. This was the other one.