The Ghost Variations by Kevin Brockmeier

Author:Kevin Brockmeier [Brockmeier, Kevin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2021-03-09T00:00:00+00:00

FIFTY-SEVEN

WHEN THE ROOM IS QUIET, THE DAYLIGHT ALMOST GONE

A ghost, through no fault of his own, found himself trapped inside a living body: an infant’s, to be exact. Over the eons he had heard rafts of legends, parables, poems, bromides, stories, jokes, and songs about hapless spirits who, caught in the snare of a body, were yanked out of the herebefore and into the corporeal world. The moral was always the same: your task was to endure. Simply that: to endure. The infant you had become would ripen into an adult and waste away, and in a century or so you would be free. The ghost had traversed half an eternity’s worth of centuries already. Doing so had never presented him with any particular difficulty. To say so was not immodesty on his part, only frankness. He had a proven ability not only to exist but to continue existing. What, he told himself, was one century more? And with that thought, the ghost settled into the body as if into a sturdy hammock and prepared to while away the decades. Soon, though, to his dismay, he discovered that his situation obliged him not only to pass the time but to experience it, in full and without distraction, his attention fixed carefully on each fleeting moment. Otherwise his ghostliness, his selfhood, would slip away from him and his existence become irrecoverable. At first the life within which he had become enmeshed was all milk-drunk afternoons and curtains twirling in half-open windows. He believed he might survive it, if only barely. But one day, during his third year of captivity, when the body that had trapped him was crunching an ice cube made from orange soda between its back teeth, the strain of the ghost’s vigilance began to wear on him. Deep inside himself he felt a warning twinge. When, he worried, would this intimation of pain and inattention turn into the thing itself? The question so bothered him that he nearly lost his presence of mind. From then on the ghost was forced to be on constant guard against himself. In his fifth year, while the body that contained him was making whip noises with a stick it had found in the yard, a momentary daze swam over the ghost, an absentmindedness he corrected just in the nick of time. In his twelfth year, he developed a persistent ache that caused his senses to tremble. At twenty-five he began experiencing groundswells of intense fever and nausea; at thirty-two, a tireless ringing noise. The body that was imprisoning him went on aging. Never once, as far as he could tell, did it notice his distress. He found it hard not to trace his difficulties, setting off after them the way a cat does a butterfly. Sometimes it was not until the very last second that he reasserted his self-control. Midway through the forty-third year of his imprisonment, to his horror, as the body that had trapped him was racing across a racquetball court, the ghost noticed the wringing sensation of its muscles tightening around him.

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