by DM Sinclair
But if she wondered about it, she certainly didn’t show it. She just nodded and lowered her voice as though they were discussing the Bowling Trophy Illuminati. “Of course.”
Lowell stood and reached out a hand to her. “Leave it with me, Miss Nichols.”
“Nicholl.” She pushed the chair back and shook his hand.
“I’m not gonna say this’ll be easy. But I’ve been doing it a long time. I’ll find him, I promise.”
“I’m so glad I came to you,” she said, smiling and maybe even a little teary-eyed.
“Me too,” he said.
And he was. Because he found her father two hours later at the Pin Drop Bowlounge, the first place he looked. The place was teeming with ghosts, which surprised him a little. He had no idea so many people were that attached to bowling. He identified her father by asking around, but didn’t introduce himself yet. He did, however, stay to bowl a few frames and eat some onion rings, and added both the bowling and the rings to his expenses as “miscellaneous”. And he thought he might come back and bowl some more over the next two weeks, after which he would finally bring the client in to meet her father. Two weeks was generally how long he could pretend these cases took. Not too easy, not too hard.
He just needed more cases like this. Lots more. And everything would be fine.
NINE
Ryan drifted nebulously, unable to lock his attention onto anything. He couldn’t even lock onto the concept of himself.
What am I? Am I anything?
He decided that he must be something because he could remember his cellphone number, and they don’t give you a cellphone if you’re not something.
Amorphous blurs that surrounded him took on hazy definition like emerging Polaroid images. He could recognize them, eventually assigning them words that seemed to match their concepts. Light. Dark. Floor. Table. Person.
His awareness was emerging, a different awareness that had been buried beneath his senses the whole time. A broader, deeper perception of things, unobstructed. He recalled a day when he had forgotten he was wearing sunglasses and had kept them on well into the night without realizing it. When he finally removed them long after dark, it was like seeing for the first time. This was a similar revelation, except it encompassed all his senses and made no fashion statement.
He recognized in a dizzying rush that this new awareness extended in all directions at once. It was overwhelming, impossible to process. He needed to narrow it, get his perception directed into one specific arc the way he was used to.
Eyes. He struggled to figure out which way his eyes were pointed. After a quick attempt to blink he concluded that he didn’t have any eyes. So he decided he would simply choose a direction to be looking.
He attempted to block out anything that wasn’t in the direction he had selected to be forwards. It was like forcing himself to listen only to voices coming from behind him in a crowd. It could be done, but it took concentration. It made resolving the shapes in that one direction easier, and they came into focus more quickly. He could concentrate on details.
Table. Shadow. Person. That’s what that was. A human person.
Once he figured out what it was, he could discern details. He willed the face to make sense, all the parts arranged where he expected face parts to be. And he recognized it. He had seen that face before. Just a few hours ago.
In a mirror.
That didn’t seem right. He shouldn’t see himself. Especially not from above. And yet there he was beneath himself, lying on his back, his eyes closed and not seeing anything at all, his mouth open slightly like he was taking a breath to say something. His hair was standing on end like clumpy dry grass. There was an undulating tendril of smoke curling around the side of his head from somewhere behind his ear. And something with long legs was gripping his head like an enormous, head-sized spider.
He decided that his awareness was too high up. He wasn’t as tall as that, so it made him feel like he was standing on a step ladder. He attempted to force himself down to where he thought his eye-level should be. There was a weightless, vertiginous feeling as his consciousness descended abruptly. Or rather, it descended instantly, like it never passed through the intervening space at all. He found himself at a more familiar height. But he gave himself an extra inch because he always wanted to be taller.
Now he felt like he was at the right height for standing, but he could sense no weight on his legs. He looked down and was stunned to discover that he had no legs. And then he did. Hazily translucent ones, like his expecting them to be there had caused them to materialize out of nothing.
He looked over at his legs on the table for comparison, at his jeans and his shoes. When he looked back at his shimmering new legs, there were those jeans and shoes.
He was intrigued. So that’s how that works, he thought. He had assumed it was just an automatic thing the universe did to you, rather than conscious, willful construction of your own ghostly figure.
Stop, he thought urgently. He shifted his focus upwards, backwards, anywhere but down at himself. Don’t look at your shirt, he commanded himself. This is your one chance. Don’t look at your shirt. If you don’t look at your shirt maybe you can give yourself a better one.
He struggled to visualize what he’d rather be wearing. The sweater. Where was the sweater? He scanned the room for it, trying to keep his eyes off himself.
But as he was scanning, his perception flickered over his own ghostly torso. He was mortified to find that the shirt was already in place. There it was in all its ridiculous, ill-fitting, Float Beer glory. Just as horrible immaterial as it was material.
He tried to transform it, mold it into something else. But he didn’t know how.
He tried to move his legs, and they moved but he didn’t feel it. No muscles, no skin, no force. There was a strange fluid sensation and his consciousness drifted forward as though carried along by the force of his legs. He was somehow simulating the act of walking because it felt familiar. He thought he could probably advance without moving his legs at all, but he didn’t want to. It would feel strange. There were enough strange things going on without adding another.
A form shifted of its own accord into his path and he called it a person because it was shaped like one. Person. Female person. Not a doctor. Margie. He recognized her and assigned her the Margie concept, and then all her details snapped clear like pressing the auto-focus button on a camera.
He could see she was talking. She was looking straight at him and her mouth was moving, and he vaguely recalled that when that makes noise it is called talking. Talking, he recalled, was basically a good thing.
But she wasn’t making noise. The silence, now that he was aware of it, felt overpoweringly oppressive. There was literally no sound at all, and it pressed in on him from all sides like a smothering blanket.
He tried to focus on sounds. But he wasn’t completely sure he could remember what sound was.
He recalled something about it being vibrations in the air. So he focused on trying to detect vibrations. He became aware that he was indeed sensing vibrations, though not through anything like his ears. They were detected throughout his being. He felt like a subwoofer, a wholly vibrating object. He assigned those vibrations to the movements her mouth was making, and again he felt clarity snap in, and he could hear her.
“Mr. Matney?” she was saying. “How do you feel?”
He let those words ricochet around in his consciousness for a while until he figured out what they meant. And then he struggled to produce a coherent answer. How, in fact, did he feel?
He had no sense of smell, taste, or temperature. That was troubling enough, but even more disturbing somehow was the realization that he also had no negative feelings. It had never occurred to him before, but when you’re alive you always have some measure of discomfort and you just get used to it. Your shoes aren’t fitting right or your hair is tickling your forehead just a tiny bit or you need to scratch your arm or there’s a bit of chicken st
uck between your teeth. It’s not enough to stop you from doing anything, not even enough to spur you into doing anything about it. You just navigate your awareness around it and carry on. But you can always find it if you look.
So he went looking for it. And he couldn’t find any. A total absence of discomfort, coupled with a total absence of comfort. And he didn’t know if that was good or bad. It was neither and both.
“Good,” he said.
Or rather, he didn’t say. He didn’t have a mouth, or vocal cords or lungs. He wondered how ghosts speak. How did they make sound at all? But they did, and they even sounded like themselves. He had heard Elvis’s ghost give a concert just a few months earlier, and while it was not up to his early stuff, he still sounded great. So it could be done.
He could feel vibrating air, so maybe he could vibrate it.
He focused on his atoms somewhere just below the level of his awareness, about where his mouth would be. And he willed the atoms to move just as he had done with his legs, only on a much smaller scale. He moved them faster and faster like he was strumming a guitar string. He felt sound waves rippling out from him. A horrifying, tortured sound, like a cello played exactly, precisely wrong. Nothing resembling a voice, but unquestionably a sound.
Margie looked at him with a puzzled expression, trying to decode what he was attempting to say. That demented noise he had made did not communicate much.
He spent a few seconds trying to shape the sound, to control the vibrations in a way that would allow speech. Finally he managed a kind of sing-songy up-and-down pitching of the tone. Close enough, he thought. Try some words now.
“I feel good, I think.”
The first couple of words barely sounded like him at all. But by the time he hit the last one, he remembered what he sounded like and managed a reasonable simulation. He even made it a bit deeper than it had been, because it sounded cool.
She nodded with a look of relief. “You’re adjusting,” she said. “Good. Mr. Matney, I’m sorry, this shouldn’t have happened. Roger is not supposed to force his patients like that.”
Ryan shifted his consciousness around the room. Where was Roger?
Margie stepped into the cone of his vision. “If you want the procedure reversed, I can do it right now. Just tell me. Is that what you want?”
He examined his new ghost hands. He noticed that a little mole he had on his right hand was missing. And then it wasn’t missing anymore. The more he could remember about himself, the more he looked like himself.
“No,” he said, uncertain but too intrigued by his new state to care. “I think… I think I’m okay.”
“Because if you feel like you were coerced—”
Roger lanked back into the room, staring at Ryan with keen interest. Where had he gone?
As soon as Roger came in, Margie was all business. “Forty percent particulate density,” she said, studying Ryan. “Fifty. Resolution no more than five millimeters but improving. Everything seems normal.”
“How long does it take to get used to this?” Ryan asked, assuming that she’d seen countless others like him in their first dead moments, so she must know.
“Well,” she said, looking at the clock.
Before she could answer, Roger cut in. “Prep the body please, Margie. I’m very sorry, Mr. Matney, but we have another appointment in three minutes.”
“But how long does it take to adjust…?”
“Right now, it takes three minutes. Thank you.”
Ryan felt like it should be longer. Like there should be a whole orientation training program, or at least a book, or a brochure. It should be called “So You’ve Decided to Sort-of-Die”. There should be a counselor here. Or some kind of buddy program. He’d made the most significant life change he could ever possibly make, and nobody was going to help him through it? He had three minutes. Three minutes, and then he’d be completely on his own, literally for eternity.
After thirty seconds he realized he hadn’t said anything, and nothing much was changing. Margie was busy detaching the spider from his body’s head, and Roger was impatiently watching the clock and reading a chart.
So Ryan asked, “Do I have to stay for the three minutes?”
A minute later he was out on Mass Ave., his first public appearance as a ghost. He tried to approximate a strut and a smile.
There were hundreds of ghosts in the street. He flowed among them, smiling and nodding at each one he passed. I’m one of you now.
Not one of them took notice of him. Not for a second.
It reminded him of all the times he’d had a haircut when he really, really needed one. He would come out feeling transformed, a new and fresher and less hairy version of himself. And he expected that everyone he passed would notice it and they would turn their heads and look, and point his hair out to their friends as they whispered “You should get yours done like that”. But he never got that reaction. Nobody knew he’d had a haircut. They didn’t see the “before” so they didn’t notice the “after”. He was inevitably disappointed.
And this was no different. These people had no idea that he’d been alive half an hour ago. He wanted to flash a secret hand signal to other ghosts as he passed, like he’d just joined their exclusive club. But he began to realize that all he’d done is what every single person who existed before him had also done. It was the least exclusive club in the world, because literally everybody gets in.
He amused himself as he walked by doing little experiments. He wondered if he closed his eyes, would he be able to see through his eyelids? They were, after all, translucent. So he tried it.
Nope. His awareness went dark when his eyelids dropped. But he felt like he had willed it to go dark, simply because that was what he expected to happen. Like his consciousness was keeping things working in familiar ways. He tried covering his eyes with his hands. And sure enough his hands, though transparent, blocked his view. It made no sense, but it worked every time. Ryan was fascinated.
Or at least, he was fascinated for about two blocks. After that he was crowded and bored, and thinking about going home.
He shook that off. If he was bored today, how would he feel in a billion years? He reminded himself that this was a completely different existence, and he could do literally anything he wanted. This, he told himself, is the beginning of your eternity. Start big. Start really big.
Four days later, he was standing at the summit of Everest.
TEN
The mountain cast a long evening shadow that stretched for hundreds of miles into, Ryan supposed, China. But Ryan had no shadow. He didn’t even make footprints in the snow.
He had been at the bottom that morning, and now he was at the top. During the climb he fell into a crevasse. There were two frozen climbers at the bottom, but fortunately their ghosts had long since departed so he didn’t have to chat. He climbed out and the whole mishap only slowed him down by an hour or so. Climbing isn’t that big of a deal when you can’t get tired or hurt.
There were nine other ghosts at the summit when he arrived, waiting their turn. One of them was in a SCUBA wetsuit and flippers and had half his torso bitten out in a rough semicircle. The combination of shark bite and flippers must have made scaling the north face a challenge, even for a ghost. Near the front of the line were three men who might have been Vikings, sporting several impressive ax- or sword-inflicted wounds. They stood at the peak and whooped Nordic things at the sun, then stepped politely back in line to let an elderly Asian woman go next.
As Ryan waited his turn he contemplated what route he would take down, and what he would do when he got home. He felt like once you’ve scaled Everest, most other things are going to be kind of a let-down. He wondered if he should have saved this for much later in his post-mortal life.
He glanced at the man behind him. He was hunched, avoiding Ryan’s gaze and keeping his head down. It hid his face but made the ragged wet hole in his right temple all the more prominent. Ryan could recognize a guy who didn’t want to
chat when he saw one, so he said nothing.
Finally the old Asian woman came down the slope grinning and pumping her arms triumphantly. Evidently Everest was a high point for her, figuratively and literally. It was Ryan’s turn. He walked up and stood at the peak and watched the brown crags to the west suck down the sun, and he wondered how cold the wind was. He was pretty sure it was deadly. No doubt it would at least hurt.
I guess that’s it, he thought. I’ve done that.
He stepped off the peak and the man behind him moved forward. They passed each other halfway, and Ryan caught the man’s face. It was round, and stern, and had a short, dark toothbrush mustache. He avoided Ryan’s gaze as he passed.
Ryan said nothing, but he was fairly certain it was Hitler.
Ryan had encountered celebrities before, both living and dead. Once the guy who played Victor Newman on The Young and the Restless had asked him where the nearest bathroom was. But Hitler was a celebrity on a whole different level.
There was no way Ryan could prevent his face from betraying his considerable surprise. And when Hitler, if indeed he was Hitler, saw that he had been recognized, he hunched again and turned his face away.
As they passed, Hitler snickered softly and muttered something, and Ryan barely picked it up. And he was so stunned by what he heard that he stopped dead, frozen in place. It was several seconds before he turned to watch Hitler, if indeed it was Hitler, walking away from him.
The Hitler-resembling man didn’t look back at him. He slumped the rest of the way up to the peak and stood there silently contemplating the twilight vista.
Ryan remained frozen in disbelief. He spoke no German at all, but it wasn’t hard to guess what had just been said to him.
What Hitler had said was: “Schickes T-Shirt.”