American Ghost

by Paul Guernsey

  “Cricket,” I said. “My girlfriend. Her real name is Claire.”

  “And, were you the one who convinced her to throw her life away for the false romance of thuggery?”

  “Not really; when I met her, she was already hooked up with one of the other thugs. But you saw her; she was a few steps above his level, and I ended up seducing her away. So, yes, I was less than a good influence.”

  Professor Shallow pursed his lips and shook his head at the shame of it all—and suddenly I felt a flare of anger.

  “Hey, Professor,” I said. “What about you? I’ve admitted I haven’t been the best of people. But you must’ve done something wrong yourself, otherwise you wouldn’t be in the same situation.”

  “What situation is that?”

  “I figure I’m not resting in peace—whatever that really means—on account of all my sins, of which I have a shitload. So I have to assume you’re not here just to keep me company.”

  “Oh, I see,” he said, nodding his head a single time. “You think you’re in hell.”

  “Maybe. It’s probably more like we’re in purgatory.”

  The professor almost smiled. “Purgatory! Perhaps I should have written some popular fiction of my own, if this is the way my imagination works. Horror novels, with murdered motorcycle-gang members thinking they’re in purgatory. Oh, my; all that time I spent writing analysis and criticism was wasted.”

  “I’m real, Professor Shallow. And I’m dead. And so are you, whether you want to believe it or not.”

  The professor was quiet for a minute. Finally he looked at me and said, “Thumb. Is that your colorful name? What’s happening to me is pure physiology. The way it goes is this: The neurons of a dying cerebrum, starved of oxygen in their last moments, eventually explode with a burst of electrical activity that, for a brief but glorious interval, creates an extraordinarily vivid hallucination in the mind of the expiring person. People see angels, hear music, imagine visits from departed loved ones, are pursued by ghosts—myriad wonderful and terrible things. Think of it as the grand finale to a fireworks display, just before the sky goes dark.”

  “Dead,” I repeated. “Already. Like a doornail.”

  “Of course, part of the story you told me probably parallels reality, which is why I’m imagining it now. Likely I have had a car accident—struck a power pole—much as you’ve described. Right now I could be sitting behind the wheel of my car, my life trickling away as I wait in vain for help to arrive. But it’s also possible that I’m lying in a hospital bed somewhere. In any case, it’s clear to me that I remain alive, but barely, and probably not for long.”

  I said, “It happened a year ago, like I told you. And time-wise, you’re not making much sense; how is it you can think you’re living your final moments when you must know you’ve been a ghost since last winter?”

  “Because it only seems like I’ve been a ghost since last winter. That’s another trick of the dying mind; a full year’s worth of hallucinated experience has been telescoped into what may have been just a few seconds. In fact, it wouldn’t astonish me if I experience what feels to be another twenty years of afterlife when, in fact, I’m going to die within the next twenty minutes, if not sooner.”

  “I think I mentioned that I saw you die? I felt your throat for a pulse and couldn’t find one. You were gone.”

  He flapped a dismissive hand at me. “You’re a hallucination. Why would I believe anything you say?”

  I stared at him. Meanwhile, all the time we had been talking, the wind had been gaining force, and now it was rocking the tree around us and causing the dry snow to twist up from the ground. The branch the professor was sitting on kept lifting and dropping; whenever it rode skyward, it appeared to slice right through him until it was protruding from both sides of what would have been his ribcage, and when it bent out from beneath him, it left him hovering in the air. Through it all, he himself remained unmoving.

  Suddenly he said, “Thumb. I have to go.”

  “What? Wait! I have more questions. I need … ”

  “I can’t. I’m feeling weak. I have to get back to the river.”

  “The river! You go into the river!”

  The professor nodded. “All ghosts do that—at least all the ghosts I’ve imagined. It’s the most obvious metaphor. But it’s only a metaphor. Goodbye Thumb. Your last name by the way—it’s Spanish, isn’t it?”

  “I need help. How do I get away from here?”

  The professor began to fade until he was translucent. A tall column of airborne snow came swirling along to dance inside of him. “Hasta luego,” he told me.

  “There won’t be any fucking luego. You won’t come back here; you don’t even think I exist.”

  “Come to think of it, you’re probably right.” Then snap, he was gone.

  *

  I waited for him to return; there was nothing else I could think of to do. As winter wore on, I would spend entire days in doglike vigil on my front steps, hoping to see him, and I would not leave my place until I grew so faint I needed to return to the river for some rest. Often it was snowing as I sat, and fresh snow would pile up inside of me and all around. At other times, freezing rain sliced through me as if I were not even there—which, actually I wasn’t. My situation was absolutely pathetic.

  It was around this time that I had my second, brief encounter with the ghost named Angelfish (Ben has been nagging me nearly constantly about her; finally it’s the right time to tell him a little more). She came upon me as before, while I was tumbling in the underground river. Her greenish lights whipped around me. She sounded like she was out of breath as she said, “Thumb! It’s Angelfish! Thank God! Help! Oh my God! The baby! The baby!”

  “The baby?” I was horrified. “Your baby? Is he living, or is he … one of us?”

  “She’s in between. She’s in danger. You need to help us!”

  “Where the hell are you, even?” But that was all; she was gone as quickly as she’d come.

  Ben stops when he hears this. He lifts his shaking hands from the planchette. No doubt he’s thinking about his own little half-brother and -sister, far away and possibly endangered by their own parents. After a moment he asks, “So, what happened? Did you help Angelfish save a baby? Her baby or some other one?” Before I can answer, I have to wait for him to remember the planchette. Finally, he does.

  HW CD I WN I DNT NO WR SH WZ

  4 ALL I NO SH CD HV BN N ANTHR PRT F T CNTRY R T WRLD R EVN N ANTHR CENTURY

  (How could I when I didn’t know where she was? For all I know she could have been in another part of the country or the world or even in another century)

  “I doubt that,” Ben says. “If she said you were the one who could help. Why would it be you unless that baby was in trouble in the here and now? Unless it was someplace close to here?”

  ITS G SHT B U DNT UNSTND IT

  (It’s ghost shit Ben you don’t understand it)

  “You don’t either,” Ben says—and he has a point. The he adds, “You told me you heard from her three times. What happened the third time?”

  But I refuse to talk about her anymore—I’m still worried about him scrambling my story. Ben retaliates by taking an unannounced and extended work break. He gets up, goes to the kitchen, makes and eats a tuna sandwich on white bread, goes out for a walk. He doesn’t return to resume his amanuensis duties for another three hours.

  *

  So winter continued and things kept happening to the house I haunted, seemingly whenever I was away. The first thing was that the landlord, or someone he had sent, nailed boards over the back door, which the scrap-metal scavengers destroyed when they had broken in. The house’s plumbing remained unrepaired, and the “For Sale or Rent” sign in the front yard vanished and was replaced by two hand-painted rectangles of plywood, fastened to the outside wall on either side of the front door, that said, “Keep Out! Police Take Notice!”

  But if the cops ever acted on this request, they, like me, mus
t have come around at the wrong times, because it was not long before I found two back windows smashed from the outside in, with blade-like shards of glass shining on the floor. I also found cigarette butts and beverage bottles littering the kitchen; a few of these empties bore the Twisted Tea label, a sight that ignited a strong memory of the hatred I’d seen in Dirt’s eyes that afternoon when he told my mother about how I had beaten the shit out of him for shooting the pileated woodpecker.

  As part of my landlord’s reactive war against the vandals, plywood soon was affixed over the outside of every window—broken as well as not. After that, and in spite of the fact that I had no trouble “seeing” in the dark, the house seemed even more depressingly crypt-like than it had before, without so much as a puff of living air moving through it—which was another reason I preferred to sit out on the steps rather than remain inside. In addition, the landlord installed a hasp with a heavy padlock on the front door, and also attached an array of bright, motion-activated floodlights all along the overhang of the front roof; I did not notice these until one starless night when they all flashed on at once to temporarily paralyze a laser-eyed porcupine shuffling across the snow-covered driveway.

  When I finally saw the professor again it was almost spring, and every new snow had begun to melt within a day or two of falling. I was in my usual place on the steps when he appeared. Without hesitation, I rose and ghosted toward him.

  “Thumb, isn’t it?” he said. “You’re still here.”

  “You promised you’d come back.” There was accusation in my voice.

  “Well, I don’t think I said when. And I’m here now, am I not? And, in fact, it’s not always my choice where I go and when I get there. Much of the time, I seem chained to my old office at the college—which, by the way, is now occupied by someone I’ve always hated.”

  “Can you show me how to get away from here? I’ve got things I need to do.” In fact, I was worried that my killer’s trail already had grown irrecoverably cold.

  “Maybe I can,” he said after a moment—though he seemed reluctant. “I myself learned much of what I know during a dream I had of an older ghost whom I met when he was passing through campus. He wasn’t actually older than I in mortal years; he’d just been dead longer—although, as I’ve explained, I’m not actually dead. I’ve always thought of him as the ‘post-graduate ghost,’ and while I only dreamed of him that once, he was able to help me with some of the mechanics of this imagined afterlife. It seems that common decency, if not karma, might demand that I share what I’ve learned with you.”

  “That’s good to hear. Now is not too soon.”

  Professor Shallow frowned. Then he said, “All right. Well, the thing that will be of most use and comfort to you is the knowledge that, although as supposed ghosts we start out nearly as helpless as we do in our mortal life, we gain abilities with time and experience. You must have discovered some of that yourself, since you’re here talking to me in the shape and shade of a man, and not still trapped in a floor crack beneath a bathmat, or looking out at the world from the inside of a dust bunny.”

  “It was cobwebs, in a corner.”

  “For my part,” said the professor, “I started my imagined afterlife in an electrical wall socket, behind a bookshelf. It’s still my gateway back to the river.”

  “Yeah, that all sounds familiar.”

  “You already have more mobility than you’re aware of—but what you haven’t yet discovered is that almost nothing goes in a straight line. The world, for us, has become a maze; there are ghost routes that connect one place to another, but they’re all crooked, and most of them are hard to find because they are invisible to us, at least at first. I’ve gotten so that I can see the outline of them sometimes—faintly, but I can. And the post-graduate ghost told me he could see most of them, and that he could visit hundreds of places, some of them very far from where he died. In fact, he had originally started out in Montreal and was planning to travel as far south as he could go, perhaps all the way to Antarctica. But he also warned me that he had been unable to find paths leading to many of the places and people he most wanted to visit—which to my sorrow has been my experience as well. In this dream I’m having, the people I truly care about have all been out of my reach.”

  “Purgatory. That’s just part of our punishment,” I said.

  The professor shook his head and continued talking. “Another aspect of the maze in which we travel is something that the Post-Graduate Ghost called ‘wormholes.’ We usually run into them by accident—they’re always invisible—and a ghost who steps or falls into a wormhole jumps directly from one place or time to another. They suck you right in and shoot you somewhere in a flash, and you don’t always know where you are when you arrive. And the ends of wormholes can be treacherous: they often slide around so that once you’ve emerged from one of them you can’t always find your way back in.

  “Wormholes are also uncanny. By this, I mean that sometimes the places they take you to will seem to have some sort of personal significance to you, but the connection often is rather enigmatic—kind of like that wreath, hanging from the pole, whose supposed meaning I didn’t know until you told me. Other times, the wormhole just seems to dump you in a random spot, sometimes among living people who are not in the least bit interesting. For instance, you’ll find yourself with some lumpy-looking family in a fast-food restaurant, all of them chewing with their mouths open. Then you have to find your own way home.”

  When he finally stopped speaking I said, “I used to grow weed that made people talk like that.”

  The professor’s laughter seemed to surprise him as much as it did me. He quickly became serious again and said, “I fought in Vietnam. I could tell you about a dance or two with Mary Jane myself—though not recently. But Thumb, let’s try traveling now. Stay right behind me; ghost pathways are narrow, they twist, and they’re easy to lose.”

  He tipped forward until he was hovering in the air with his face to the ground. Then he rose a few more yards toward the sky and began soaring up the road in the direction of Riverside. I did my best to copy his movements, but at the point where I had always been stopped before—on the side of the street, less than fifty yards from my house—I once again found that I could go no farther. The professor, meanwhile, kept sailing along until he was almost around the curve and out of sight. As I watched him vanish, my despair grew so great that I nearly screamed his name; fortunately, just before I gave in to that shameful impulse, he stopped and returned to me, feet first.

  “Right on my heels, Thumb. You’re about half a meter above the path; you must not have noticed when I changed my altitude. Remember; it’s a maze in several dimensions. Shall we try it again?”

  After that, I found myself flying far beyond my former boundaries. The professor soared above the tops of the trees and I stuck right behind him, awed by our view of the muddy, snow-blotched, late-winter landscape that passed below. On the edge of the marsh not far from the house, a gliding seagull cut right through both of us with a startling whoosh, then kept right on going, none the wiser and not the least bit put off its course by our unsensed presence. For the first time, I thought, It could be the Professor is right; maybe I am having a dream in my final seconds of life.

  Virgil guided me on a zigzagging route that led over woods, brown hayfields, and housing tracts, and we ended up high above the city, looking down on our college. We paused side by side to watch as scores of students crossed campus during a change of classes.

  “I love that place,” Virgil said. “It makes me sad to be leaving it.”

  Directly below me a man and a woman, both of them carrying backpacks, stopped to kiss before heading their separate ways. The sight gave me a pang that I felt through my entire being.

  “I wish I was back there myself,” I said. “I wish I had never left.” Suddenly it occurred to me that I might be able to travel all the way to the Blood Eagles’ clubhouse, which stood only about three miles away as the seagull f
lies. I could almost see it from where we were. If I were able to eavesdrop on conversations at the clubhouse I might learn who had stood behind me with that gun.

  I said, “Can we go across the river? The above-ground one, I mean?”

  “I haven’t been across that river since I’ve been dreaming,” Virgil said. “Crossing bodies of water is difficult for us and I’ve never found a path, though I have searched a time or two. Bridges are of no use to us. However, as I think about it, there must be a way, or the Post-Graduate Ghost would not have been able to continue traveling south, as he said he was planning to do. And, if he hadn’t made it across, I’m sure I would have seen him again.” After a moment he added, “In my dreams, I mean.”

  “How would I find the path?”

  “You just have to keep looking. The more you look for them, the more skilled you become at finding them. But now, Thumb, I have to tell you that I’m feeling tired. It’s time for a tumble in the other river—the metaphysical one. My office is right down there. That’s my home haunt.” He pointed to a brick building on the edge of campus.

  “Aren’t you going to take me back to my place first?”

  “You can get there on your own. In fact, it’ll be good for you to do it yourself. Practice makes perfect. If you get stuck anywhere, just feel your way through.” He tipped toward the ground and began to descend.

  “See you again?” I called.

  “Maybe,” he answered, without turning around. “If I don’t finally die for real between now and then.”

  I did find my own way back home that day, but not without a few moments of confusion and a few others of stark panic. And when I was once again “standing” among the piles of snow melting into my front lawn, for the first time since I had died, I felt hope.

  CHAPTER 8

  The motion-activated lights on the front of the house failed to discourage the vandals. They smashed all the lamps within days of their installation. Then, before my landlord could take action, they pried the plywood from the back door, invaded the house again, and scrawled graffiti all over the living room walls in a combination of spray paint and permanent marking pen. Rather than any kind of semi-artistic or self-expressive tagging, these messages were mostly made up of swear words, accompanied in several spots by primitive illustrations. Also, I found further, abundant evidence of boozing and smoking—of cigarettes as well as the flower of my former life’s work—along with strong hints of some chemical-solvent abuse. It was clear that the original profit-minded scrap-metal foragers had been replaced by teenagers seeking relief from the boredom of their own pointless lives. I was mad about the damage but, as a ghost, there was nothing I could do that wouldn’t threaten my own continued existence, such as it was. My afterlife was haunted by humans and there seemed no way of exorcising them.