Yesterday I went back to my old apartment. Of course, then it still felt like somewhere that belonged to me, same old place it had always been, the converted top floor of a garage overlooking a creek. I opened my mailbox, usual Thursday, nothing significant in that. I've never liked this mailbox, one of those suburban affairs, big black tunnel-shaped thing with a little hypercheerful yellow flag to tell my friendly mail carrier when I'm trying to communicate with the outside world. Annoying, really, when I try so hard to be hiply anti-hip, to be pursued by the mailbox from my middle-class childhood. Ghosts; some never go away, no matter how far you go.
So I got the mail, my usual after-work ritual -- walking the block from the bus stop wondering if maybe this time something amazing would be waiting, hoping it would change my life. Never happens, of course, but I like fooling myself into Christmas-morning anticipation. Yesterday the pattern broke. All my mail had outlines, heavy fat black borders around the edges of the envelopes. Phone bill, insurance policy, junk mail, a letter from Heather (best friend and philosophy major in Dallas, soulless city, not a town I'd choose for philosophy but she ignores me when I point this out). All of them had this tracing around the edges, like some unbalanced teenagers had been on a rampage with a jumbo magic marker. It made no sense; I shivered, reminded of the old custom of sealing condolences with black wax, of mourning armbands. Not wanting to think about it, I stuffed the mail back into the box and walked down to the creek. We had a couple hours of sunlight left, and water always makes me feel better when things are weird. The one thing I miss about my days living on the coast is the sea wall on gray days, when you can't tell where the ocean ends and the sky begins, when you think you could swim out to sea and on into the clouds.
The creek has always seemed like an ideal to me, peaceful, green, running whoknowswhere and all these immense green green trees on either side. The sunlight comes down through the fat branches thick with leaves, which stain it a delicate version of their green as it falls into the stream, transferring color. Faintly tinted but achingly clear, the water looks cold even in midsummer. You can see through it to the algae-covered rocks on the bottom, khaki and olive stones with streaks of orange mud. I stood there watching icypainful but soothing water flow over the camouflage-painted rocks and noticed a large object floating downstream toward me. People are always throwing things into this creek, coke cans and trash bags and the occasional newspaper (newspapers usually dissolve into a pulpy mass and get hung up on the tree roots upstream. Not many make it this far). This time, instead of random litter, the trash was my cat. My big biscuit-and-white cat traveled down the creek, drowned. I guess I was in shock; my only thought was that he didn't look sodden like I would have expected, but just like his usual fluffy self.
I suppose I should have been more disturbed, but that center of my brain seemed to have shut down. Still, my serene landscape had become hot and swollen and congested with something I couldn't identify. I needed to leave, to find someone who would understand and who could explain this to me, make it all make sense. I wandered around the neighborhood a while, dazed, and ended up at the corner convenience store. I'd been friends for months with the afternoon clerk in a we-don't-really-mean-it flirtatious way. The door buzzer rang as I walked in; he looked up, but didn't greet me.
"Hey, John, whassup?" No reply. I stepped up to the counter, waved my hand in his face. "What *are* you on, guy? And why didn't you share?" This didn't get the laugh I'd half-expected. Frustrating, almost scary -- why didn't he recognize me, acknowledge my existence? He didn't even seem self-conscious; he wasn't avoiding my gaze so much as just not seeing it. I wanted to scream but instead settled for getting a diet Coke from the cooler. Walking in that general direction, I nearly ran over some standard-issue frat rat complete with six-pack. Watching him talk to the clerk, it occurred to me that if John wasn't even going to say hi, chances were he wouldn't let me buy anything anyway. Why even bother? My friend wanted to act like a prick, let it be his problem. I stomped out of the store, pissed, thirsty, and in no mood for a proposition. So when the guy with the beer walked up to me in the parking lot, I let him have it. "Look, I don't have any change, I'm not available, I don't need a ride, and I don't care how big your dick is, okay?"
"No, this is important," he said. Something about his intensity stopped me, turned me around. "What is?"
"Um, well, you're dead. That's why he can't see you."
I could have taken it as a threat or a joke or the raving of an insane man, or even as a really offbeat approach from a fundamentalist. But I *knew*. He could have said "the bracelet on your left wrist is made of fishing spinners" and my agreement wouldn't have been more absolute. I'd always expected it to be more traumatic, though. I had at least believed I'd notice my death. Strange how calm I was, as if somehow not being alive caused a blunting of emotion somehow, a dampening-down as life juices dried up. I thought about my cat's corpse floating by. Then a suspicious thought: "Hey, how come *you* can see me? Are you some kind of guardian angel?"
He laughed. "No, silly, I'm dead. We can see each other."
"But John saw you. He sold you beer." Hope flared; maybe being dead wouldn't be a huge change after all. If this guy could walk around and have a ... I hesitated to think of it as a life, but certainly it wasn't a death, not really, and if he could have one, maybe I could, too.
"That's because I sprinkled myself with rice powder." I had to laugh. No way. This didn't make sense, was too stupid, too weird. Rice powder?? "Yeah, that's what I thought when they first told me to try it. But it worked." I guess I still looked skeptical, because he sighed. "Look, I have better things to do than argue all day with someone who's not going to believe me. Just try it, then go talk to someone. Trust me." He pressed a small packet into my hand and walked away before I could react. I examined his gift: rice powder.
I had no clue about how I'd died. Strange that the actual event wasn't more memorable. Probably swift and painless, to have left so little trace. Instantaneous, but in retrospect inevitable. I didn't know the fate of my remains, not that I really cared to find out. I can live without it, I said to myself, unintentionally ironic. Planning for my continued existence, I realized it would force me to leave town. News of my death must have spread; staging a resurrection would snag the fabric of reality in my circle of friends. I wondered where the stranger had lived before. How many in this city were dead? I had a vision of places where most of the citizens were ghosts, only the rest of the town didn't know it -- a nomadic population of the dead, dying and dusting and wandering off to start new nonlives in different areas. So easy to cheat death, after all the worry we invest in it!
I walked downtown, oblivious to the people and cars passing by, thinking. I needed to find Glenn. He'd been a constant in my life as long as I'd been living here even though we'd only been lovers for the last year or so. We'd recently been on the verge of breaking up and I wanted to explain, to tell him my leaving didn't change my love for him, to invite him along. I wanted his presence, for him to wrap himself around my soul (assuming I still possessed one) and make me warm again, make everything okay. I walked over a bridge downtown, over the same creek that flowed past my house, and my cat joined me. Ghost woman, ghost cat, walking through twilight streets.
Right in the middle of downtown, someone built an office complex during the boom years. It outlived the prosperity and was mostly empty now, a silent flying dutchman of the street. Standing in front of thirty-five stories of granite and glass (only an empty street and the setting sun reflected in the banks of windows), I knew he was inside, would be waiting at the top. Don't ask me how -- I just *knew*. Through heavy glass doors, elevator up. I opened the packet again, watched my reflection emerge palely in the mirrored walls, listened to the cat sneeze. The roof door stood ajar.
He sat on the roof, brooding, and turned at my approach. I wasn't the custodian he'd expected to see, and I could see from the shock on his face that he'd heard the news. He stood, wind in his hair, staring at me. "It's okay, really, love. I can continue to exist, I just have to move away..." I explained everything, told him about my benefactor (for that's how I saw him now, as Jesus to my Lazarus). "You can come with me," I said excitedly. "We'll go somewhere cool, maybe California. We can start over, get away from the bad stuff here. It'll be great." He backed away from me, toward the door, horrified.
The sky darkened, reflecting his mood, and a windstorm arose, the sort that happens around here a lot in spring, a storm like the moment of orgasm: violent, intense, over almost before you have time to register it. And the wind blew hard against the building, making it sway. I sat down, terrified; heights have never been my thing. "What are you afraid of?" Glenn said from the doorway. "Afraid you're gonna die?"
His question slapped me. Hard. Dead people can't die. I couldn't die. If I fell it wouldn't hurt, wouldn't affect anything. I'd still have my rice powder and my cat. Somewhere behind me I heard the door close, but Glenn's escape didn't concern me. I stood up, stood there in the clean sweet wind, feeling the building sway underneath me like the deck of a ship or the top of a tree and for once standing on the edge and looking out over it and no knot of fear in my stomach because there wasn't anything to fear. This, I thought, is freedom, absolute and real. Looking forward, not looking down, I held out my arms as for an embrace and stepped over the edge, ready to glide.