The Hungry Ghost

by Dalena Storm

  Madeline stopped at Room 409. This was it. Madeline hesitated as she looked through the small window on the door at the crowd gathered inside. As she watched, a fit, youngish man with brown hair turned away from the group and began moving in her direction. Quickly, Madeline pushed the door open and stepped inside, holding the door open for him.

  “Hello.” He greeted her without recognition in a voice thick with emotion as he slipped past. Sam had mentioned she had a brother. Perhaps that was him.

  Around the corner, Madeline saw a man whose face she did know. Peter. She recognized him at once from her late-night stalking of Sam on Facebook. He was standing near Sam’s head, just behind her mother, Bianca, and he looked as much of an outsider there as Madeline felt.

  “Peter?” asked Madeline, and Peter turned to look at her, surprised.

  “Do I know you?”

  Of course he didn't—not by sight anyway—but maybe Sam had told him about her. "My name is Madeline. I was one of Sam’s students at a writing retreat last year.”

  Madeline was pleased to see recognition dawn in Peter’s eyes, followed quickly by jealousy as he sized her up. “I see,” he said, his eyes narrowing. “That’s right. What are you doing here?”

  “Last night…” Madeline’s words trailed off as members of Sam’s family turned in her direction. She waited for them to resume their conversations before continuing on more quietly, moving closer to Sam’s ex-husband. “I was with Sam last night. We got together for drinks, but she left early because, well, she said she got a call from you.”

  Peter’s jaw stiffened and he looked away, avoiding Madeline’s gaze. She watched a flush creep up his cheeks. “They brought her in last night around 11 p.m.,” he said in a conspiratorial voice too low for the others to hear. His breath smelled like stale liquor. “She’s been unconscious ever since. Apparently, if this goes on for forty-eight hours, they’ll officially call it a coma, but that’s just a technical term—she could still wake up at any time. So, in the meantime, they said it’s good to talk to her…”

  Though she wasn’t sure why, Madeline realized she was avoiding looking at Sam directly. She made herself look, and something about the scene made her recoil, shivering.

  “Cold?” asked Peter, smirking.

  “A little, maybe. Yeah.”

  Peter shrugged. “They keep it chilly in here.”

  Something was swelling inside of Madeline and it was very hard to remain still. She felt like she was supposed to stay, but all she wanted was to get out of there. “Well, I guess I should be going,” she mumbled at last, awkwardly. She should make some kind of gesture, some show of support. Sam’s left foot was sticking up under the sheets and Madeline grabbed it, giving it a gentle squeeze as she tried not to shudder at the cold, deathlike hardness of Sam’s skin.

  As he left the hospital Peter wondered if Sam would ever pick a woman over him. They’d discussed it before. She’d thought she was a lesbian once, back in college, but had ultimately decided against it. Did desires like that return? Had she outgrown it but now gone back—or perhaps it had been there all along, buried within her while they were married.

  “I don’t love genders. I love people,” Sam had been fond of saying, which had not really been an answer either way.

  And anyway, wasn’t it different? Didn’t it have to be? A cock was not a vagina; a vagina was not a cock. Those were the facts, and no one could say otherwise. So given the choice, which would Sam prefer?

  Of course, it wasn’t that simple, Peter knew. It was his particular cock versus Madeline’s particular vagina. Young, pretty little Madeline against fat, old, crotchety tattooed Peter. An image emerged in his head: a cartoon of the two of them depicted as walking genitalia, wearing nametags and standing on either side of Sam’s hospital bed.

  Well, that was sick. No wonder Sam didn’t like him.

  No, it wouldn’t do to think like that.

  Sam had nearly died. That reality was forcing Peter to see his life in a new light. Now, he could see that anything was possible—and that he didn’t have endless time. Today was the day he would give up drinking. No more relapsing, no more rehab. He would go cold turkey and do it on his own, and if he ever slipped up again he’d say goodbye cruel world for real.

  It was time for Peter to get his shit together. On the six-block walk to the subway, a sign on the window of a bakery caught his eye.

  HELP WANTED: BAKERS

  It was a sign, the glimmer of opportunity Peter had been waiting for. He had twelve years’ experience in customer service, and a good seven of these had been spent in food service. He’d worked as a cook and a line chef at high-end restaurants; he could certainly bake a loaf of bread. He even had his own recipe for rye. He’d worked it out a few years back. Sam had liked that one, and she’d always been picky about bread. She’d made sandwiches of Peter’s rye without leaving hardly anything for him. It was a perfect opportunity. He’d pop in and fill out an application, and by tomorrow, he’d be employed! His life would come together. Sam might even come back to him. By the time she woke up, he’d be a different man—the one she’d loved once upon a time.

  The smell of freshly baked bread hit Peter as he pushed open the door to Breadwinner Bakery and made his way to the counter to request an application. There was flour in the air and the smell of yeast was nostalgic. Peter remembered when he and Sam had shared a home. Things had been so nice then. Peter would cook and Sam would grade and they’d go to bed not afraid to touch each other. Those were the days. That had been bliss. He saw that now. And it wasn’t too late; it didn’t have to be over.

  Chapter Eight

  Time passed differently while Sam was locked inside her head. For the first few days, she was flooded with dream after dream, each rising up like a wave and crashing through her mind in disarray, scattering sensations, emotions, images, and thoughts. She floated from one dream to the next without recalling the last, each new dream immersing her in its world as it tumbled her about, until it eventually left her on the beach of her mind and the next arose.

  Though her mind moved through the dreams, Sam could not toss and turn in her bed. Her body began to ache from the strain of staying still. She started to dream of confinement, of straight jackets, of torture, and of things even worse. She felt the incredible need to move, but no matter how she tried she stayed still. Immovable. She relieved herself where she lay, which forced her to dream of defilement and anger and revolt and disgust. She dreamed of sex. She met past lovers. She sucked them off, was eaten out. She became them for a while, and then people she didn’t know. She managed to escape from herself, and in so doing brushed through other possible lives—at one point a young boy, then a grown man, a fat woman, and a bluebird. Eventually, she was Sam again, but not Sam as she was now. Sam of different times, of six years old and of ten. Sam of thirty, going on a hundred.

  In real time, a week passed, and visitors came frequently, whispering into her dreams.

  I love you, my baby girl.

  I need you, Sammy. Please wake up.

  You can beat this thing, Sam. You’re the strongest woman I know.

  Sam could hear them, and in her dream world apparitions emerged, shadows of the people who owned each of the voices. She dreamed of her mom baking a pie, of her brother taking her on a boat. She dreamed of Peter when they’d first been married, only in that dream he looked as he did now and where she should have felt lust and love she felt the hot shame of disgust instead. She dreamed of Madeline and the way they had kissed in the rain.

  After a while, Sam’s brain began to adapt to a new rhythm. Amidst the constant waves of her dreams, she felt her head emerge at last above the water.

  Sam opened her eyes and looked around. She was in an empty room, surrounded by flowers. It must have been night, but despite the darkness she was able to see clearly, and when she sat up and looked behind her she was able to recognize that it was her own face she saw lying in bed, eyes closed. It struck her that she looked b
roken and pale, and not much like the image of herself she had last seen in the bathroom mirror on the night she had readied to meet Madeline—a night which now seemed a lifetime ago. Breathing tubes were stuffed up her nostrils. An IV drip was taped to her arm.

  The body lying in the bed was Sam’s, but simultaneously not hers at all. If she was sitting here, looking at herself, then how was the body in the bed still breathing? How was any of this possible?

  Gripped with a sudden terror of death, Sam lay back down in the bed and closed her eyes, crossing her arms atop her for comfort as she willed the nightmare to end. Please wake up, please wake up, please wake up, she begged herself, but rather than waking up, Sam only managed to lull herself right back into the realm of her dreams.

  Chapter Nine

  Bianca, who had never been to medical school but who knew how to use Google, needed to teach these doctors a thing or two about medicine—or more specifically, about bedside manner. They should be calling Sam by her name every time they saw her, not ignoring her, and they really should consider giving her a dose of Zolpidem, a sleeping aid that was known—paradoxically—to sometimes help awaken patients from comas. That was what they were calling it now, a coma, seeing as how it had been two weeks since the accident. The term seemed somehow pejorative to Bianca, and she wished the doctors wouldn’t use it in Sam’s presence. Still, no matter how nicely she phrased her suggestions, they reacted the same as the fourth graders she’d taught every day for thirty years—which was to say they made a lot of grunting sounds or silently disagreed while avoiding her eyes.

  Nothing if not a patient woman, Bianca was doing what she could to help Sam. She had brought all of Sam’s favorite books—Charlotte’s Web, Anne of Green Gables—and had been reading them to her. Sam was a literary thinker. Not literal, but literary. Stories were her life’s blood. They spoke to her soul.

  Through the coma, Bianca was convinced, they could speak to Sam, too.

  There was a bookmark in Charlotte’s Web, a slip of paper stuck a little over halfway through. Bianca opened to the page, wondering who had been reading it last.

  “Do you understand how there could be any writing in a spider’s web?”

  "Oh, no," said Dr. Dorian. "I don't understand it. But for that matter, I don't understand how a spider learned to spin a web in the first place. When the words appeared, everyone said they were a miracle. But nobody pointed out that the web itself is a miracle."

  Bianca smiled, imagining her daughter reading the passage to one of her granddaughters, probably Rosa, and sighed. She looked at Sam and her heart trembled. It was hard to hang on to the ledge of grief like this, unable to let go but aching from the effort of holding on. She wanted her daughter to wake up. She did. But she also wanted what was best for Sam, and what was that? Could this really be what was best for her? She was spending every day attached to machines while her ex-husband leered over her like some kind of leech subsisting on her blood. Bianca feared this was destined to become another situation turned selfish: Sam trying to get away, and all of them holding tight, desperate to keep her where she was—no matter the cost.

  All Bianca had ever wanted was for Sam to be happy. She’d have given anything to give her daughter that. It was the one thing she’d failed at as Sam’s mother.

  The next time Sam was aware of herself, the sun was shining on a beautiful day on the world outside her window. She recognized the walls of the hospital room around her, but this time didn’t look at the figure in the bed. Instead, she turned her attention to the window, wondering if she could go outside.

  Sam had hardly thought it before she found that she had passed through the glass of the windowpane. Not only that, but she was hovering in the air six floors above the ground. A dizzying sense of vertigo came and then dissipated, and Sam felt free in its wake. This was the first time in many years she had felt entirely and completely free.

  Her vision was different. She was able to see three hundred and sixty degrees around herself, and she explored the world around her, twisting her line of sight as she did. She could see through things, too. Not in the form of images—not exactly—but rather a sense of the solidity of things that existed behind walls. Euphoria flooded her, and Sam recognized the sensation from her childhood. It permeated her like sunlight and lit up her soul. Had it really been that long since she was truly, completely happy?

  Where should she go? What should she do? The world was waiting, and Sam could fly.

  Sam lifted herself higher, above the hospital, and then higher still so she had a view of the city. A hawk glided lazily past her, catching the current and letting itself be carried on the wind. Its predatory eye flashed keenly, white showing around the pupil, but it couldn’t see Sam, and so it passed on, scanning for prey.

  Arriving at a low-hanging cloud, Sam paused and surveyed Boston below. Her house was outside the city, down the highway, resting in a small town by the lake. She could go there and sit on her porch and listen to the birds as they came by the feeder. She could go instead to her mother’s house, north of the city, and see what she was up to. Or, she could stay right here and meld with the sunlight. She could let her ties to everything drift away. She could rest for a while, away from it all.

  Sam floated in place and the world moved at its own pace around her. Clouds drifted past, some high, others low. Ducks and geese, crows and hawks flew past. All of the various things that had pulled Sam this way and that before couldn’t reach her up here. She felt guilt, followed by giddiness. This was wrong, but it felt so good. She was ignoring all of her responsibilities. No one knew where to find her.

  Chapter Ten

  In the sphere of Madeline’s story, there were six realms of existence, each defined by Tibetan Buddhists. Residing in the uppermost realm, with the most comfortable and powerful lives, were the gods. Below them lived the demigods, and below them, the humans. Rebirth as a human, though not the highest possible birth, was of all births the most auspicious, for only a human could attain enlightenment. In the lower realms were the animals, and below them, the hungry ghosts. Lowest of all were the hell beings.

  In the weeks that Sam slept, Madeline continued to write, her story taking shape as it moved beyond her desire, dipping into the barren, alternate universe of the hungry ghost. Starved of inspiration, Madeline’s mind became focused on a single hungry ghost, one who had been consumed with longing for so many eons it had forgotten who it was—or who it once had been—but who had been presented with the opportunity to escape from the realm that held it prisoner. Greed had consumed it to the point that hunger defined it; it was no longer an individual with a name and a past but an empty, aching vessel. It had gone so long without eating that its hunger had become insatiable, and now, even if it were presented with the opportunity to feed, nothing would be able to satisfy it. As Madeline wrote, she ached with a burgeoning longing, imagining Sam in the rain and Sam driving away. She, too, wanted what was impossible.

  Madeline, like the ghost, was hungry.

  The hungry ghost had been following the voice on the wind for a very long time. For hungry ghosts, time passed differently, and so it might have been a week or it might have been a year since it had first heard that faint, pained cry. Seizures twisted its stomach every few seconds and between them, a dull, empty ache lingered in the hollow part of what might have been its heart. Still, it couldn’t stop moving, because whenever the ghost stopped to catch its breath the voice on the wind taunted it, jabbering on inanely about fish and birds and spiders and webs, filling the ghost’s head with fantasies of bloated arachnids. It would gobble them up webs and all.

  Over time, the voice grew louder until it seemed to be coming directly from the sky overhead. The ghost stopped, looking up at the empty sky, but it could see nothing. The voice was saying something about someone named “mother” and using the word “love” over and over again, and then, all at once, it stopped.

  The voice had gone quiet before for periods of time, but always a faint
murmur continued in the background. Sometimes it sounded like little more than rhythmic breathing.

  This silence was different. It was complete and total. A sudden rage filled the ghost. If ever the ghost discovered who or what the voice had belonged to, it would make that thing suffer for being the source of this awful hope. To make it believe relief was coming only to have it snatched away at the last second. The ghost’s body shook with a combination of rage and desperation, but when it turned its eyes upward again it saw the sky had developed a strange quality. It was almost like there was a tunnel in the gray, a place where the air itself seemed absent and some force was pulling it toward the source of a very distant light.

  The ghost’s black eyes widened. Was this a way to escape?

  There was a glint of movement very far overhead, and the ghost sensed it needed to act quickly. It dove upward toward the light, following it through the rift between the planes as it aimed for its distant source. The ghost felt like it was being squeezed very tight, very tiny, very small, and then, at last, it saw the opening to a different, higher plane. Up there, it realized, was the promise of much greater delicacies, of rich sauces and fine wines and sensual pleasures galore. It saw tables set with plates and cutlery and all-you-can-eat buffets. It saw piles of fruits and vegetables and buckets of salty, fried animal legs—none of them running, none of them still attached, all of them just sitting there, waiting to be eaten. In the urgency of its struggle, its hunger pains nearly vanished, and then it was through—

  All was spacious. All was still. All was calm.

  The ghost found itself in a small, cold room. On a bed beneath it was a vacant shell, sprawled out and empty. It had four appendages and a large face; its skin was pale and tubes were stuffed up its nose. The hair on top of its head was short and two-colored: brown at the skull and yellow at the tips. The ghost did not know gender and could not tell the difference between one of these creatures and another, but this must have been the thing that was speaking—the source of the voice. From the deep recesses of its memory a word rose to its mind—human—and along with the word came the certainty that this human body was currently unoccupied. Whoever had been inside had stepped out, abandoned this shell, and the ghost found itself fixating on the marvelous size of the human’s mouth.