Ghosts and Speculation by Kevin Brockmeier

Author:Kevin Brockmeier [Brockmeier, Kevin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2023-09-26T00:00:00+00:00

SIX

THE PRISM

It was meant to be a sort of cosmological prism, a lens through which they could view the universe dispersing into its thousands of parallel possibilities, but when the scientists powered it up, it didn’t work. Nine years of labor and hundreds of millions of dollars, wasted! The project’s director stalked around the armature of the machine like a hyena circling its prey. “This dumb damned broken thing,” he said, and launched a kick at it. The discharge from the transformer killed him instantly. Later, reviewing the lab recording, his team watched the whole grim episode in slow motion—the director yawing around to fire his leg out, his cheap plastic shoe melting off his foot, a corona of sparks wavering above his head—but then, when they scanned the secondary footage, taken through the lens of the prism, something else: his ghost leaving his body. “A ghost,” they called it, and a ghost it unmistakably was, the classic Halloween kind, all transparent drapery emanating from a featureless white globe, like a lollipop wrapped in tissue paper. It leapt from the director’s chest and vanished into the ceiling. Several months passed before they obtained permission to transport the machine to a penitentiary and aim it at an inmate who was receiving a lethal injection. Sure enough, at the very moment the EKG stopped tracing its pinnacles, a ghost could be seen fleeing the poor man’s body. Hypothesis, prediction, experiment, conclusion. They had not invented a cosmological prism; instead, it seemed, they had invented a window into the spirit world. Yet afterward, examining the footage, they saw something very strange: one of the guards shedding a ghost of his own. He was locking the execution chamber when his knees wobbled and he brought a hand to his chest. He did not die. Even so, a ghost came spilling out of his body. The next week, in the lab, the camera accidentally captured an intern stumbling over his ankles. He came inches from cleaving his head open against the edge of an aluminum cabinet, but did not do so. He had, in fact, already regained his balance by the time his ghost sprang loose. So then: a new hypothesis. The prism was capable of observing not merely the one actual death of a person but the thousands of parallel possible deaths. With every icy sidewalk crossed, every heartbeat skipped, every near miss on the highway, you expelled another ghost into the atmosphere. Imagine how many billions of them there must be. Trillions. Surely from outer space, at any given moment, the world must be bristling with ghosts like a porcupine.

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