Prologue (non-member)

Ghosts

The first time I see the ghost I am on some back road heading home from a garage sale.

Immediately I think it’s a farmer inspecting his hedgerow, but as I pass and look back in the rearview, there’s nobody there. I then turn my head over my shoulder in disbelief but my eyes do not decieve me.

I realize this happens in stories where the narrator hallucinates some vision and calls it a ghost, but this is not that story and I am not that narrator.

I really should have brought it about, whipped a U-ey at the fishing pulloff by the creek, but for some reason, I keep driving.

When I get home, I grab a Hector Logger from the fridge, but I don’t open it immediately. I sit for a long time on the couch with the fan blowing on me. The cold can causes a fair amount of condensation, and this makes me wonder if the humidity didn’t cause some sort of mirage, like a will o’wisp in a swamp, except up the hill near the hedgerow. I think about this for an inordinately long time until Troy starts whimpering and wagging his furry tail. His peepee dance. I let him out, still not sure.

I think for a while about spectrographs. What if something near that hedgerow acted as a virtual prism of some sort and the angle of the sunlight created a phantom that my mind read as a person? I doze off with visions 19th Century spectacles like the Spectographia, scaring Victorian women and children.

I remember a dream I had some time ago and a second time the night I see the ghost. In the original dream, I am walking a cold rocky beach on a cloudy, windy day. Slowly, I realize this is not a rocky beach, this is Afghanistan. I am wearing my night vision goggles. Tonight is the same dream, except I shout at the cold. Except I am not me, I am a character in a Baudelaire poem, not wearing my goggles, shouting at the deepening chill. Eventually, I am just a cold nothingness. Like the ghost.

•••

The second time I see the ghost he is walking down Route 90 about a mile or so from the backroad where I first saw him.

I had realized last week as Troy was out doing his business that there is a large difference between merely seeing a ghost and actually encountering one. I thought I saw a ghost. Indeed, the only reason I label what I saw as ghost is the fact that something was there and then gone. Had he been in my rearview when I looked back, I would definitely have not given him a second thought.

Today, here he is, walking along the side of the road like he’s an actual farmer or whatever, a resident of this section. Or district. I feel like I should be describing him in the language of old newspaper articles because if he is indeed a ghost I want to be respectful, it just feels right.

I make an executive decision to offer him a ride. I slow as I approach him, roll down the passenger window and call out.

“Want a ride?” I don’t necessarily expect a response, so I slow the rest of the way and pull off onto the gravel shoulder. I reach across and swing open the door. In my rearview, I see him slow and stop walking, somewhere about three or four meters behind my truck.

I realize my intrusion with a shock, my disrespect. Walking is an intensely personal activity and here I am legislating my manners upon him. What if he is not walking because he has no other means of transport but it is his preferred method of locomotion? He could be doing this with intentions — to connect with the land about him; to gather his thoughts and ponder his place in the universe? And of course, he is a ghost.

I reach over and pull my door closed. I look in the rearview but I can’t see him. I turn my head and look out the rear window. He is gone.

In retrospect, he may not have been a ghost at all. I can see him as an Amish walking around instead of driving a drafthorse-drawn carriage. In my memory, there is a vintage look to him, like he has stepped from a black & white photograph into my world. Truthfully, I’ve gone too far projecting my own ideas onto him. If he’s a ghost, I know why.

•••

The third time I see the ghost, it is twilight and I am walking Troy down my road.

Troy stays near me unless he wants to play, and this time he is in an overgrown field chasing a rabbit. If he were a beagle instead of a Bernese, he may someday catch a rabbit, but he’s really too big and noisy to chase after rabbits in the brush. At home, in the backyard, I may give him a slight chance, but he normally won’t chase enough. Surely, he ramps up as fast as he can, but the poor guy tires right out and will lie down panting in 30 seconds. He prefers chasing frogs at the creek anyday. Though he’s never caught a frog either.

I happen to look west to see how the sunset is progressing and there my phantom is, again, a hundred meters or so down the road, standing on the shoulder like he’s hitchhiking. Is he wearing a suit and hat? Like some guy on an old tv show? Or am I seeing things? I wish I had my binoculars, but they’re in the truck.

I try squinting to no avail. At that distance in this light, that ghost could be me for all I know and I’m him, some sort of horror movie where Death screwed up and grabbed an extra soul before his time. At least I hope it’s before my time.

I see him seeing me like he’s a momma bear assessing the situation. Or I’m the bear and I have poor eyesight so I’m trying to fix his scent in the wind. I wish I were closer, but he disappears.

At first, it looks like he turns and walks into the woods, but that may be my brain filling in the gap. Basically, as soon as I imagine him as a momma bear, he is gone. Troy hadn’t noticed him, but he’s a ways off hunting in the brush on the opposite side of the field. I call to him once, twice, and on the third time he comes crashing clumsily out of the deep brush. His long hair is tangled — he’ll need a wash and good brushing.

I walk with Troy to the hedgerow where I last saw the ghost to see if Troy will startle or investigate. He notices nothing and keeps walking on the gravel shoulder all the way home.

•••

The fourth time I see the ghost he is sitting on my living room couch.

It is early Sunday morning and I am hungry, so I get out of bed to make some poached eggs and toast. As I come downstairs, I see Troy sitting near the front door, something he never does. His hackles aren’t up, but he is staring intently at the couch. I follow his gaze and there’s the ghost. He’s sitting on the couch looking out the front windows. He ignores Troy and he ignores me standing on the bottom step. I don’t know what to do. Troy barks, startling me. I command him to be quiet. I look at the couch. The ghost is gone.

I do the only thing I can do. I forego the poached eggs and quietly sit where the ghost had been sitting. The couch is not warm, but not inordinately cold either. It is essentially room temperature, which confuses me.

Is the ghost not real? Does he not interact somehow with the physical world like I do, like Troy does? As I’m pondering this, Troy walks over to my feet and eases himself down onto the floor, unhurried and unworried. Did I misinterpret Troy’s posture and manufacture a phantom ghost on my couch? This idea tickles me. A phantom ghost, a figment of my own overactive imagination.

•••

Before I see the ghost for a fifth time, I conclude he is not real.

I spend several hours mentally reviewing each time I thought I saw him, and in each case I realize I could have fabricated his presence. Twice I was driving fast enough to not have a clear view of what I thought I saw. Twice it was either early or late, with less-than-optimal lighting. In each of the four instances, the weak link was my vision and my visual processing of whatever anomalies I thought I saw, resulting in my brain creating a phantom ghost. This is the only thing that makes sense.

But then I see the ghost again.

I am in my neighbor’s barn to load a few bales of straw into my truck. He used to keep retired racehorses until a few years ago when it all became too much for him to handle alone. I’ve been buying up the last bales of straw he had stored in the top of the barn. Mostly I use it in the spring to cover seeds in the garden, but it works great for my chicken coop too. Troy is laying in the shaded grass beside my pickup.

I drop a bale down the chute where I can easily drag it to my truck. As I climb down the ladder from the loft, I sense someone behind me. Jack is out of town and nobody else lives here, so I whip my head over my right to see. Nobody. Same over my left shoulder. I take the last several rungs more quickly and jump sideways from the bottom, thinking I can better parry an attack. No attack comes. My senses are on high alert.

I call to Troy, no response. I call again, with a note of ragged urgency in my voice. Again no response. I take a few steps so I can see my truck through the open door and there’s Troy, sleeping.

His lack of awareness should calm me, but it doesn’t. I peer through the barn’s murky shadows and see nothing. I stand completely still and try to isolate the feeling I felt on the ladder. As I examine more carefully places someone could hide, I hone in on the ladder to the basement. I need to retrieve my bales, but I will walk around outside and down the hill to the bottom of the barn. I decide to wake up Troy on the way.

Several moments later, my dog and I step into the basement of the barn. The straw bales are there at the side below the chute. The old stalls are dark, but quiet. Satisfied we are alone, I walk over toward my straw. Normally, Troy might follow me, or he might sit and wait patiently. He does neither. Instead, he stands alertly, staring into the last shadowy corner with intent.

Bernese mountain dogs are very happy-go-lucky unless they have occasion to be more aggressive. And then they are. I have only seen Troy like this one time before, when a guy came up to my truck’s window. Troy nearly leapt from the passenger seat over me. I don’t know if the guy intended to do anything wrong, by the time I calm Troy down, he was gone.

Each step I take, Troy growls more deeply — warning the ghost, warning me; maybe both. He does not continue to advance himself with me any farther than he already has. I am on my own.

And then I see the ghost. His back is to me, he’s hunched down. If this were a working farm, I’d say he is looking at an animal, like a birthing cow or a horse in distress. He seems not to notice me, or if he does, he doesn’t care.

You’d think that a lifetime of reading Stephen King and watching scary movies and tv shows would be the perfect preparation for clearly seeing an apparition in person. You’d be wrong.

I know I should leave, the old joke of not realizing you’re in that movie plays on repeat in my head, but this is distinctly uncinematic. Instead, I stand firm, watching. If there’s a veil between worlds, I cannot confirm it. There is just a very dark corner in the stonewalled barn basement with what can only be a ghost. He is completely occupied doing whatever he’s doing. Until he isn’t.

Lulled by his inaction, I am caught off guard to see him standing immediately in front of me.

I didn’t see him stand up and turn around or even move at all. One moment he is squatting, back to me, the next I am gazing into his eyes. More accurately, he is gazing into mine.

This is the boy I killed in Afghanistan. In his eyes, I can only see the abyss, which makes me think about Nietzsche. The line from the Dawes song echoing in my ears. An abyss, the abyss, nothingness.

That’s a lie. It’s only now that I can say that I had a thought, a thought process at all. In the moment, there in the barn, with the ghost peering inquisitively into my soul, I could feel my brain free of thought for the first time in my conscious life.

I piss my pants.

Had my bowels anything to empty, I would’ve shit as well.

Troy whimpers and I break the ghost’s gaze to check on him. This is a mistake.

The ghost steps to me. I feel cold, but only on the inside, like the abyss is reaching out, pulling me into nothingness. I try to move but I am paralyzed. The ghost is inside me.

•••

The sixth time I see the ghost is the night I finish rereading Exley’s A Fan’s Notes for the fifth or sixth time.

An idea stuck with me that Exley would take the high road through Talcotville any time he could in case he might catch a glimpse of Edmund Wilson through the windows. I’d been by the old stone house tucked tight to Route 12D, but Wilson died in 1972 and Exley left us a mere five days more than 20 years later.

There’d be a nice tidy symmetry there if Exley had the etiquette and respect to die five days earlier, but he was never that guy. Never once have I seen the ghosts of Wilson or Exley to my everlasting dismay.

I finish the book late, and as I prepare to climb into bed, I catch sight of the ghost outside, near the garage. I startle, immediately thinking it’s an intruder with malice or at least burglar tools. Even as I reach for Grandpa’s .41 on the nightstand, I try to determine the identity of the phantasm.

I recall something about the perception of reality in one’s brain creating a self-affirming loop that you come to accept as stable reality. Is this what my mind is now doing — accepting some repeated anomalous illusion as a nominal haunting? How can I tell either way? I have spent my life trusting my senses, and trusting my own assessment of them. Isn’t that all we can do?

I hadn’t planned on getting caught up in this mental netting remnant from Philosophy 101, but I had, and now that I’m once again self-aware, I redirect my attention to the window, or more properly, to the area about my garage door. Of course, it is empty and I castigate myself for reinforcing this recurring epiphenomenon.

Not content to mentally dismiss my hallucinations, I go downstairs with the intention of investigating outside between my back door and garage. I don’t believe I will find anything, but the lack of evidence is a kind of evidence in and of itself.

I walk slowly from the stairs to the back door, navigating by ambient light only. How many times

I feel as if I am in an old movie, the main character who is about to be jumpscared, everyone in the audience knows except for me.

The world is monochrome and I go with it, just continuing my walk through the kitchen to the back door. I pre-decide to not go outside if there’s nothing there.

I stand behind the curtain my wife had put there, optimistically, when we moved in. It hasn’t moved in all these years except slight ruffling when the door is opens and closes. It has survived all these years as door-dressing, never fulfilling any purpose beyond becoming a decorative frame to the glass. For a quick moment I feel lonely, deep in my bones. Troy is asleep back upstairs, completely oblivious to my plight. I should take this as a sign, but then I see the ghost digging in the garden beside my garage.

The moonlight is dim behind the clouds, a waning crescent or some similar state of lunacy; not enough light to do more than paint a diaphanous haze across my yard. I can feel the ghost in the pit of my stomach, like I feel my wife in my bones, but nowhere near as palpable.

I tell myself it’s only a ghost, because if it were a person, they would have hit one of my tripwires. My property is boobytrapped, but in a way that Troy can be safe. I am not afraid, there is nothing to be afraid of. I know that I can stand here for days and nights on end and the ghost will not manifest in any physical way, nothing to be afraid of.

I wish my mind itself knew this in its core, but it daunts me, an unreliable narrator of my own reality. It is, if not impaired, certainly confused about its role in my life.

•••

I stand there in the night, the moon like a bleached skull in the desert above me. I can’t smell death on the night breeze, but I don’t need to.

This ghost is something important I’ve forgotten and I’m struggling to remember, like with Long COVID or getting older. Day by day, I know it’s there without seeing it as sure as I know the river’s bottom as I stand on the bank and it flows by me in the dark.

Some things don’t need to be seen to be believed. They don’t even need to be remembered. They just can’t ever be forgotten.