Kiss the Goat: A Twenty-First Century Ghost Story

by Brian Stableford

  “From an objective viewpoint, it isn’t just life-in-death that can’t exist—it’s life itself. Perhaps that’s true, and we’re all just figments of self-delusion, from the moment we first come by the pronoun I to the moment that we lose it for the final time. But if it is true, it’s a truth that requires us to ask what kind of job we’re making of our self-delusion, what kind of fantasy we’re cutting out of the drab fabric of cause-and-effect. Perhaps we have no real choice in the matter, but even if that’s so, the necessity of invention still remains. We can see ghosts. We can be ghosts. No matter how much or how little substance we carry, we can see ourselves as others see us. Perhaps we’re the only entities in the universe who can.

  “Perhaps, if we were authentically free, genuinely gifted with the power of the will and the opportunity of choice, we could make a world for ourselves: a paradise or a realm of light. Perhaps you and I really do belong to a tiny minority of the lost and forsaken, while the vast majority really can draw heaven from the well of chaos. If so, all that we really have to do is get our act together and find some faith in ourselves or one another. But I can’t believe that, any more than you can. You and I know how life is, and how death is, and we know that although there’s no salvation, even in driving a bus, there’s a way to go and a route to follow.

  “We could pretend, if we thought it worth our while, that the ghosts people see are just projections of themselves—dissociated fragments, like cast-off multiple personalities. We could pretend that Rose Selavy is a part of you, a doll compounded out of your fears and fantasies, and that I’m a construct based on the image you’ve concocted of your father. We could even pretend that the Stephen who’s sitting here beside me is just a dream-image in your mind, and not a real person at all. But there’s no end to that kind of pretence. What are you, after all, but a projection of all the people who see you, know you, employ you? Where, in that sort of scheme, is the source of which everything else is a reflection?

  “The further you go into the mirror-maze, the more you realize that there aren’t any people there at all, and that the seers and the seen alike are mere images, everywhere and nowhere at the same time. So let’s not pretend, Kit. Let’s give ourselves the credit of being in this together, willing and able to help one another instead of vanishing into one another, willing and able to accept the consequences of everything we see and think and dream and feel.

  “You might be tempted to think that you can’t do anything about the circumstances in which we find ourselves. I know the feeling, believe me. You might be tempted to say that if you were looking for Heaven, or even just trying your damnedest to get away from Hell, you certainly wouldn’t start from here. I know that feeling too. But you’re the one at the wheel of the bus. You’re the one who takes the people where they need to go, without ever needing to know why—except that just this once, you would like to know a little of the reason why, if there’s anything to be known. I know that feeling too.

  “My name wasn’t Michael while I was alive. It was Stephen. I changed it, even though I knew that changing my name wouldn’t make me a different person. The only schooling I had was Sunday school. I learned to read, after a fashion, but the only book I ever read with living eyes was the Bible, and there wasn’t much in there that I could understand. I worked in the biscuit factory, loading and unloading the ovens, packing and stacking and storing. It wasn’t a vocation. Some might say it wasn’t even much of a life. I survived the measles and the whooping cough, and the scarlet fever too, but they left me weak. I died of pneumonia. Maybe there was consumption too, but nobody knew for sure. Nothing made me different. Nothing happened to me that didn’t happen to thousands of others. Nothing I ever did separated me from the people I knew or the people I didn’t know. But I lingered, where others didn’t. I changed, while others didn’t. I went on learning, while others didn’t. I found my way around the interstices of the world of the living, while others didn’t. Who watches the watchers? Who sees the seers? I do, Kit. That’s who I am—or was. I’m the shadow in the corner, or the shadow of the shadow, the emptiness that isn’t quite empty. I’m the man who isn’t there, but I have a name I made myself.

  “I’m Michael.

  “Most of those people behind you have forgotten their names, and not just because everyone they left behind has gradually erased the memory of them from the electrochemical networks engraved in their blood-bloated brains. They’ve forgotten because they can’t remember where they were going, or even if there was anywhere to go. But they haven’t yet fallen into the void. Perhaps they will, and perhaps there’s no way around it—but who knows? Who knows, Kit?

  “Who knows?”

  Having said what he had to say, Michael went to the back of the bus and sat down in the shadows, tilting his hat so that his young-and-old face was completely hidden. Kit looked at his slumped figure for a minute or two in the mirror that was positioned inside the cab to give the driver a view of the interior, so that any trouble could be witnessed, even if it were not preventable, and any danger foreseen, even if it were not avoidable.

  Rose Selavy stood up then, and came forward to take Michael’s place.

  “I don’t know what he’s been telling you,” she said, “but you don’t want to take him too seriously. He doesn’t even want to take himself too seriously, but he just can’t help it. You go slowly crazy, you see, when you’re dead. Sanity is for the living. Some go fast and some go slow, but everybody goes. I’m an exception. I was crazier living than I am dead, but I suspect that’s a temporary thing. Scratch the surface and I’m not that much different from anyone else, although I hate to admit it. Life’s like that, isn’t it? You can make a fetish out of not doing the things that other people do, not thinking the things that other people think, not liking the things that other people like, and not wanting the things that other people want, but at the end of the day you’re still a prisoner of circumstance, in your mind and flesh alike.

  “Everybody always thinks that it won’t happen to them. Everybody. It’s inconceivable to someone who isn’t an addict that not only could they become one but that they inevitably will. It doesn’t matter how many people tell us, or how much evidence is set before us, we all think we’re different, because it’s inconceivable to us that we aren’t. We think we’re in control. We can’t bear the thought that our power of self-determination is an illusion. We all lie, you know, in meetings. They force us to say it out loud, to look at the other people who are thigh deep in the same shit as us, or some shit of their own, and say I’m an addict; I’m not in control; I can’t control the shit because the shit controls me—but no one believes it, deep down, because nobody can.

  “It’s the same with the whoring. You always dress it up, one way or another, so that you can keep on telling yourself that it isn’t what it is, that you’re in control, because you can’t ever admit that it is what it is and you aren’t. And then you die. Just like everybody else. You die, even though you tell yourself that you can’t and won’t because it’s inconceivable that you’re anything but an exception, anything but the only real person that ever existed. You die, and you go to the Devil.

  “You might think that if you kiss the goat you can go with your eyes open. You might think that if you have the intelligence and the courage to see the world the way it is, and realize that the only thing between you and the grave is how much pleasure you can get out of life from sex and drugs and rock-’n’-roll, that you can go with a good grace and a measure of panache. You might think that if you have the stubbornness and perversity to spit in the world’s eye, to go against its grain, to get your retaliation in first, to grant that we’re all sinners and insist on sinning in style, that you can make an ally of the Devil and find nothing in the fires of Hell but the flames of ardent passion. You might think that if you only kiss the goat and mean it, and love him truly and let him kiss you back, you can go in style if not in triumph, to oblivion if not to glory, to somewhere you belong if not to everywher
e you don’t. You might think that if you know what FREE BUS TO UTOPIA really means, you can get the Oracle to give it to you straight, with no more puzzles and no more riddles and no more lies. You might. But at the end of the day, you’re not nearly as different from everybody else as you thought you were, or tried to be. You’re a prisoner of circumstance, in your mind and flesh alike.

  “We make excuses, of course. My Dad was drunker than your Dad, far more often, and he fucked me backwards to boot. Or maybe not. You can remember all sorts of things if you try. My Mum was an even bigger hypocrite than your Mum, even more depressed, and her frustration had fists that hit a lot harder. Or maybe not. What did we do to deserve it? What didn’t we do? What couldn’t we do? What do we do now? You can only play the hand you’re dealt, and maybe you can’t win even if you play it well, but if you play it badly that’s still what you did. If you find yourself less crazy dead than you were alive, then that probably is what you did. But who knows? Maybe it’s better to be crazy alive and sane dead than to be sane alive and crazy dead. Maybe it’s better to fall apart alive and be gorgeous dead than to work all your life for a pittance and spend your life-in-death pining away till there’s nothing left of you but phantom talcum powder held together by spectral spit and tissue-paper. Who knows, Kit? Do you?”

  “No,” Kit said. “If I did, I wouldn’t be here, would I?”

  Rose Selavy leaned over, and put her painted lips close to Kit’s left ear. The black hair brushing Kit’s cheek was like a kittenish caress.

  “Take my advice, darling,” the prostitute said. “Don’t ever fuck with the dead again. If you don’t come, it ain’t worth it—and if you do...well, Hell or no Hell, it sure as hell looks dark out there.”

  But it wasn’t true. Up ahead, Kit could see the first glimmer of a new light. The screen of vapor that was feeding on her headlamps was losing its oiliness and fading into mere mist.

  It might, Kit thought, be her who ought to be advising the late and unlamented Violet Leverhulme not to fuck with the living again, ever, on the grounds that you never knew what you might catch. Who knew? Who could? Who ever would?

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  There was one horrible moment when Kit thought that she’d made a terrible mistake and somehow got on to a circular route. There was something about the shadows emerging from the mist that reminded her quite forcibly of Reading as seen from the top of Peppard Road—but the impression of familiarity was fleeting. If this was Reading, it was an alternative Reading in some parallel dimension—a dimension that certainly wasn’t the ghost of the world she knew, although the world she knew might conceivably have been its shadow.

  It was not the quantity of the light that determined this hasty judgment but its quality. The sun whose rays were banishing the mist was no brighter than the one with which she was familiar, but it was bigger and redder and its problematic light was far more garish. It had to be the light that was peculiar, shed told herself, because the buildings making up the town into which the road was taking her could not possibly be as vague and fluid as they seemed, no matter how much beer their being depended on.

  The light was not unlike the light in the painted-over mural on the wall of Kit’s room—or, at least, the version of it revealed in its full depth and gaudy inglory by the enchantress Rose Selavy—but this was no Hell. It might be a world still gestating in the womb of chaos, not yet ready to be born into space and time, but it was no more Hell than the deity recommended for worship by the Electric Hellfire Club was an incarnation of absolute evil. The light was neither the steadfast white light of Heaven nor the tortuous fiery glare of the inferno but the hectic, liberating light of a nascent creation.

  Rose Selavy was just as startled as Kit. Maybe more so, given that Kit had always expected to emerge from the fog at some point—not that the fog was entirely gone, nor even that what remained of it had become more discreet. Even so, the effect of the fact that objects constituting a town and a world could now be discerned within it was undeniably shocking. As Rose Selavy stepped back in surprise, however, Stephen Carraway leapt to his feet and moved into the position she had vacated.

  “Fuck me,” he said, with a strange reverence.

  Kit understood immediately why the student had been so suddenly galvanized. Insofar as the world into which the bus was moving bore any resemblance to anything familiar, the resemblance was to eccentric works of art. Not that it was merely a painting come to life—it was more like life attempting, with scant success, to imitate an art that reached beyond the representative in search of new modes of expression. When the painting on the wall beside her bed had briefly “come to life” it had not ceased to be a cartoon—a casual rendition of an imaginary landscape by an unpretentious amateur—but whatever was attempting to come to life here was quite different and not at all sketchy. The source from which it was welling up was both alien and prolific, not to mention grandiose, portentous, and illimitably ambitious. It wasn’t just the sun and the sky that bore a faint resemblance to something out of Van Gogh, but the vault of infinity which lay behind the sky. Kit knew as she looked up into it that this sky was as much a window on its surrounding universe as any other, and that space itself was in ferment here, not because it was chaotic but because its energy was resistant to the order that was continually but only half-successfully forced upon it.

  Here, it was possible for even the humblest observer to glimpse, in the farthest depths of the universe, the spiders who were spinning the web of eternity.

  If Van Gogh had been a madman, Kit thought, then this entire universe had to be crazy—except, she was quick to remind herself, that the idea that Van Gogh’s art reflected some innate craziness was just a myth; and anyway, this wasn’t just an extrapolation of Van Gogh, or even of all the visionary artists of history miraculously drawn into collaboration. This wasn’t second-hand. It wasn’t an imitation, or a copy, or a fake. It wasn’t a hybrid, or an experimental blend of established styles. It was not only an original but the original. And it was real. The fact that it didn’t come remotely close to making sense didn’t matter. It was here, and it was what it was, not a reproduction of something else.

  The world in which she had always lived, Kit realized, was not even a reproduction, but a reduction. It was the merest echo of the world it might have been. It was a world designed and kitted out for the living, a world domesticated and made comfortable, unbreakable even by the most childish of drunks or the sluttiest of children.

  Looking up into the at sky was so vertiginous that Kit was tempted to take refuse in the notion that she was only dreaming, but she couldn’t. Dream or not, it was the real world, the honest truth. It was not a world habitable by the living, except perhaps for those protected by the aegis of Morpheus and the carcass of a bus, and then only for a little while.

  “I’d appreciate some help here,” Kit murmured to Stephen. “This isn’t the kind of landscape I’m used to navigating.” The bus lane was still stretched out before her, but she couldn’t tell whether it was straight or not. All she knew for sure was that it led into the heart of the shadow-town’s seething uncertainty. She found it very difficult to lower her eyes from the sky and face the road. The horizon seemed to be made up entirely of pyramids, with not a green hill or a snow-capped mountain to be seen.

  There had been a time, Kit remembered, when the living had given almost all of the labor that was not required for their own support to the provision of tombs for the dead, but the living had moved on since then—and so, perforce, had the dead. Now, pyramids and other mausolea were distant prospects even in the world of the dead, relegated to a vague background. The foreground was something else: something far less easy to fathom. It was an urban landscape of sorts, with dwellings and places of business, but its streets weren’t laid out with the geometric regularity of a purpose-built American city, or even subject to the improvised simplicity of an English one-way system.

  Kit’s eye couldn’t make sense of the townscape’s lines
in either the vertical or the horizontal dimension. She had the curious sensation of looking into a human termitary whose individual members were subject to all kinds of immeasurable and inexplicable motivations, and whose highways and by-ways were continually twisting into the fourth and fifth dimensions.

  “The first thing we have to do is get some perspective,” Stephen told her, trying to sound calmer than he obviously was. “We’re not going to get to any kind of destination while everything’s in a mess. We have to find a means of interpretation. Look for the vanishing point.”

  “That’s the last place we should be aiming for, love,” Kit told him, not unkindly.

  “We’re not going there,” Stephen assured her. “It’s a matter of finding reference-points. We won’t be able to import our own order into this kind of chaos until we can get our bearings. We have to figure out our point of view. There, do you see? That’s where the perspective-lines converge. That’s where the road ought to lead.”

  Kit followed the direction of his pointing finger to a nexus of stability that his casual action seemed to have created. She didn’t see how it helped, at first, but then she realized that this was a world where everything was relative. When she turned the steering-wheel the bus stayed still and the universe moved around it. From now on, it wouldn’t be so much a matter of guiding the bus but of knitting the universe about its problematic path.

  “You can change gear now,” Stephen told her. Kit had been crawling through the fog in second, but she could see her way far more clearly now. She moved up to third. Cross-town routes didn’t usually have much scope for fourth, but now she was back on the long-distance she figured that it was safe to let the vehicle have its head. The speedometer told her that she was only doing forty, but the miles here weren’t like the miles she was used to, because the vehicle was swallowing up the terrain far more greedily than it had ever done before, even on the motorway. There was something strangely hyperbolic about its progress, as if it had acquired the ability to magnify and elasticate the ground it left behind even though its ultimate destination was lost in asymptotic infinity.