Before
I was a very sick man, before the ghosts, and I was only me, then. My sickness was not of my body, but of my own ghost. Day in and day out I clocked in to corpse-grey buzzing lights, imperious wall clock ticking, my wrists strained, fingers autonomous, my ghost ailing inside of me, malnourished, writhing, pent in my shambling frame.
Then I went home to my rabbit cage apartment: step from the maw of the groaning bus and into the little orange pool of dirty lamplight, cigarette butts and beer can floating in it round my shoes. Key into the stairway of must and smoke and piss, then up to my offwhite cell: paint-chipped radiator, roach-strewn kitchen.
I did not know anyone in any way that mattered. I did not leave this place except to work. All day, the office; all night, my walls. At home I lay very still. I spent all of my nights thinking. I felt my cells age and divide and age. My decrepit home, my tired body. A rented space in this leaky building. A rented space in this weary meat. A life drawn in the sand to be tide-erased. A flash in the pan with no observers.
Everyone knows that a ghost can be freed by violence. I learned another way. I simply practiced thinking until I learned how to think outside of my body.
At first, I stood beside my body and watched it lay still—pathetic in the dim, sallow light, its drawn and sunken face—and then I began to travel. I walked up walls, I walked through doors, I saw people on display in their own little cages, dozens of small tragedies: a bruise-eyed wife, a crying child, a man skimming the surface of overdose in his bed, brushing up against his personal eviction, against the freeing of his ghost.
Lonely, temporary, utterly meaningless. Lives spent in the furtive way of cockroaches. But I came to grow fond of these people as I watched from the shadows of ceiling-corners, as I pushed my gleaming eye under the crevices of closet doors, in the way that you can become fond of ants when you see their nest laid bare in a plastic tub, watching their inner lives from maggot to insensate drone.
Over time my derelict body changed. I watched my face turn black. I watched my limbs become round and rubber-like, mottled; the roaches emerged to feed on what little meat I had left them. I didn’t need the space anymore. Let it be useful to them. One day some men came into my apartment and put that dilapidated body in a black bag and took it away, and I didn’t come back into that apartment again.
Now I could go where I wanted. I was water with no vessel to shape it—I could take whatever form I wanted, too. But I still had an empty existence, an eternal life to myself. That is when I began to realize that a ghost, too, can be a sort of space. Gradually I realized I did not have to be alone.
❧
First Ghost
I walk through the door of my nearest neighbor. He is resting in his bed, sweating in the dog-day heat, a box fan sputtering feebly on the floor. I become a shadow and walk to his bed, then climb atop and crouch on his chest—not even a twitch on his gentle face, because shadows have no weight. Touching his brow, I test the current of his dream with a finger, and then I slip inside.
His is a dream of loneliness and yearning; here is an unearthly bar, himself perched on a stool; here is a slurry of faceless strangers brushing past, gathering around, a murmur of indistinct voices. He notices me. He feels the weight of my gaze resting upon him and brightens, and the lights grow dim and focused on us. The scene grows myopic, everything around us blurred.
He pushes my startled body gently against the wall, a tongue against my throat; I cling to fistfuls of his mattress and now we are horizontal. I understand that this is a form of love, and of knowing someone. Fingers on my chest, he pushes in and out of my pliant form, the raw beauty of need in his gaze; I would keep him. My body shuddering beneath his. He grants me a little death and I grant him a big one.
My hand in his chest, caressing his heart; his heart, seeping blood and confusion. His ghost sliding down my throat. Here is how I love him: he lives within me forever.
❧
Second Ghost
Down on the second floor, a young girl. From beyond her closed bedroom door: a shout, a shatter—a broken plate splintered against a wall. Accusations and threats sear the air.
She is huddled on her bed, hands clasped around her folded knees, and she is not pretending not to hear; it doesn’t help, she knows. From the man who once lived next door I have gained empathy, and my heart is stirred to pity to see her tear-shining face in the darkness.
She catches a glimpse of me crouched on the ceiling of her closet—I am un-careful—and startles, makes for the bedroom door, thinks better of it. She rushes to the closet and closes it. She lies back down. I don’t want to scare her. I love her. I can protect her in a way no one else can.
I make myself the tiniest of spiders, and creep out into the dark, out onto her bed. In speed and silence, toothpick legs carry me to where her hair spills onto her pillow and I bite her earlobe. Through those little hollows I draw out her ghost. With two small forelegs I hasten it into my mouth and then she is a part of me, too. And we have nothing to fear now.
❧
Third Ghost
Here is the retired professor in her kitchen, hunched sink-ward, white-knuckled, gripping the counter’s edge as a climber descending a precipice. She retches vodka and stomach acid again and again.
Her grief is thick around her. I am hesitant to approach: an event horizon in the room, and she is the singularity. She has alternated feeling nothing and too much in the weeks since her son died. Waves of grief: she cannot comprehend her loss. Waves of fury: he could not afford his medication. He did not have to die. I desire to be a cold comfort to her. Ice for immolation. Suffering with her: this, too, is love.
The whisper of feathers: she wheels dizzily ‘round, staggering but unafraid. I am an angel to her. Shifting feather sprays, innumerable red eyes, unfurling of wings, and I unsheathe my blinding face. She gazes into my eyes and her eager ghost lifts into my body. Her pain is transcendent. I scream in agony and love.
❧
Fourth Ghost
This one is another young man, alone, living his routine, early to bed for a gray morning like all his others. I see myself in him. A different bed, a different flesh, a kindred ghost. Floating, disconnected, in his sphere. I have watched him come home and sleep and rise again for days from my vantage as a crack in his wall plaster.
He is not restful, and he wakes to me standing beside him in the dark; I am caught surprised. A sweep of his hand at his bedside table, a flash: blade of a knife. It could pass through me but I have the professor’s unwavering sorrow and I want it to hurt; I let it cut me.
Through the bloodless gash in my ethereal side I pull in his ghost, coaxing it out from his wrist, welcoming, and his thoughts are familiar to me. I sense something in him breaking, and I sense relief.
❧
Fifth Ghost
My heart is full of more affection than I have ever known. I press my face through walls, I sift myself up through drains and coalesce, I make myself into a tiny eye in the corner: watching, watching. I exude warmth as I watch the people of my building, my people. I love of all them, even the ones whose ghosts I do not take, so much that sometimes I weep with happiness—this, too, a new and wonderful experience.
And here is another of my charges who has noticed me. She tries not to show it, but I see her eyes linger too long on the doorway I peer out from behind; I see her rosary moved to a prominent field of living room wall, her nearby crucifix gathering surrounding saints; she exhales Spanish songs too loudly, too measured in this quiet space, and she keeps her line of vision near her hands. I want her to know me, to trust me. We must be open with each other. For her, I will appear as I really am, so that she can see me plainly and there will be no secrets between us, so she can feel safe in my love.
I come to her late one evening as she sits on a folding kitchen chair. She is holding a mug and looking at papers on the table. She sees me in the edge of her vision first and her head freezes. Her reluctant, trembling sight slides to me, and here I am, dark and nebulous. My eyeless eyes seek hers. Her lips make a strange shape as she looks at my gaping dark mouth, like she is about to whistle. She does not whistle; she makes no sound as I embrace her—gently, gently, soft and blanketlike, a wondrous void.
I hold her so warmly as less and less air leaves her lungs. She twitches and jerks, but only at first. In the stillness, I reassure her ghost as I breathe it in.
My love for the people I watch doubles. My new ghost makes me radiant with love; love pours from my eyes and mouth and chest in shifting, pearlescent hues. I have become something beautiful.
❧
And One
Not an addition, not really: the others are me and I am them. I have tenderly given them the corners of my mind and they have filled me, lining my walls and stretching out and out, a warm and familial overlapping til distinctions are no more.
In this building, I am a benevolent observer, a shepherd. I am a blur in the periphery. I am the cobwebs between the walls, the whistling of water in the pipes. I am a chalice richly overflowing. I am an open-windowed house shedding lamplight onto the cold street. I am loved. I am whole. I am loved.
Avery Kit Malone is a doctoral student and insomniac. His short fiction appears or is forthcoming in After the Pause, Aphotic Realm, The Gateway Review, Lovecraftiana, and others. You can call to him across the void: @dead_scholar