Ghostlove. Dennis Mahoney
threshold would court annihilation.
“If you tell me you’re real,” Other William said, “it’s either true and I won’t believe you—because how can it possibly be true?—or it’s false and I’m delusional.”
“What if both of us are real and both of us believe it?”
“Ask me, then,” he said.
I straightened and inhaled. He slumped and held his breath.
“Are you real?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Maybe we’re hallucinating.”
“If we’re both hallucinations, there would have to be a third me. An actual hallucinator.”
I nodded and paused, acknowledging his good sense and feeling a strange sort of pride, as when I sometimes visualized myself as very wise. I wanted to impress him with an intelligent response, and I gave the matter an extra minute of consideration, knowing only a fool would consciously shortchange himself.
“We’ll talk about ourselves,” I said. “I’ll tell you everything I did today, in the finest possible detail, including what led me to open this door. When I’m finished, you’ll do the same.”
“What will that accomplish?” Other William asked.
“It’s easier to recognize a truth-teller once you get him talking.”
“Or a liar.”
Coming from anyone else, his persistent contrariness might have irked me, and yet his voice and even his thoughts were wonderfully familiar and I felt a kind of deep mental calm as we conversed.
I recounted every part of my day: my morning coffee and cinnamon banana; the four accounts of ravenous ghosts I’d read in the study; my exploration of the oddments room; the fingertip I’d accidentally severed; the reattachment of my fingertip using skinwort; the levitating squirrel; and the irresistible urge, beginning at 3 p.m., to visit the current room for no particular reason.
“Five accounts,” he said.
I realized he was right: I’d forgotten the dullest account of ravenous ghosts, but Other William had apparently read the same stories that morning and both of us remembered all five when he corrected me.
“We had the same day,” I said.
“Which proves you’re in my head,” Other William answered. “My brain created you and didn’t even bother to get imaginative.”
“Or we’re doppelgängers living identical lives, in identical brownstones, on opposite sides of the doorway.”
“Then shouldn’t we be opposites?”
“Mirrorlike,” I said. “Equivalent but backwards.”
“Is one of us evil?”
“I don’t think so. But you strike me as a pessimist.”
“And you’re an optimist,” he said with subtle condescension.
“We’re a literal split personality. It’s marvelous.”
“And chilling.”
We were restless then, as eager to do something else as anyone after intense self-reflection, and we agreed to separate for the time being and independently research our encounter before we met again.
I smiled. He did not. We said goodbye and closed the doors.
Walking away from myself left me viscerally disassociated, as if I’d floated out of my body as a whole second body. I was hyperaware that everything about me, from my tiniest movements to my thoughts, was being mirrored by myself in some identical reality. At first I felt doubly self-conscious, but my embarrassment seemed more in line with Other William’s negative demeanor, and so I shifted my perspective and began to feel positive and doubly alive. I was twice as active, twice as hopeful, twice as me.
I wanted to share my experience with someone other than myself and went to my bedroom, hoping June was there. She wasn’t in the room.
I wrote, “I need you,” in the window fog and felt twice as lonely.
A house is haunted only by the people who are in it.
My small square kitchen, with its familiar cabinets, cans of soup, and Mr. Coffee, was normally a room of nourishment and comfort. Then one night alone, I entered and found the space inexplicably smudged with sadness. The ceiling fixture’s bulbs glowed like failing candles and a sorrow from the past—from within the kitchen itself, or from a corner of my childhood?—seeped into the present like color through a bandage.
The three-winged pigeon continued to visit my study’s windowsill. I tried offering pumpkin seeds, corn kernels, breadcrumbs, cranberries, maggots, pine nuts, granola, and jackfruit, but the pigeon rejected them all. Every day, he perched and watched me with an unexplained intensity. There was something crazed and focused in the pigeon’s staring eye, conveying both inquisitiveness and imminent attack. I wished he would eat. I wished he would trust me.
I put off revisiting my doppelgänger, not yet prepared to face the ontological implications of his existence, and felt assured that he was wrestling with the same reservations.
I wrote on many of the house’s other windows, carrying a kettle of boiling water room to room to fog the glass. I left personalized hellos to June, my mother, and Mr. Stick, along with generic hellos to any other ghost who might discover them, but only my bedroom window retained its foggy words and none of the other windows ever showed an answer.
Sometimes I woke with no recollection of falling asleep—only a vague remembrance of insomnia—and felt the cosmic gap that yawned between days. Long ago, I didn’t exist. Would I cease to be again? What if the voids before and after, and the night-gulfs between, were truer than the twinkling lights that constituted life?
I had nightmares of waking up to solitude again.
One night as I was preparing for bed, I switched off my radio and the music kept playing at the lowest perceptible volume. A lingering charge in the radio, I thought, or a tuning-fork effect in my inner ear’s bones. And yet the music carried on, delicate and ghostly. I had to hold my breath to hear the melody unfurl.
It was Mr. Gormly’s radio playing in the basement. I was two floors above him but his music floated up, maybe through the radiator pipes or hidden ducts.
I hurried down from my bedroom, determined to finally meet him. But although I made little sound in my descent, he must have heard me coming because the music stopped playing. When I opened the basement door, the stairs were unlit and I regretted leaving my pocketlight behind.
“Hello?” I said in the dark. “Mr. Gormly, this is William. I’ve been hoping we could talk.”
Not a word, not a rustle followed my appeal. I used the railing to feel my way down and pulled the lightbulb cord, which was inconveniently placed at the bottom of the stairs.
The cord, no longer attached to the light fixture, tipped a bucketful of small, scrabbling insects into my hair. I shrieked and clambered back upstairs, swatting at my head and slamming the door behind me. The insects clung despite my frantic tousles, and as I fled to the bathroom for adequate light and a mirror, Mr. Gormly’s radio resumed playing music.
I spent the next hour shampooing, combing, and tweezering my scalp.
Removal proved difficult as the insects rolled themselves tightly into my hair. My head was a thicket of writhing cocoons, and I began to seriously consider shaving my head when I finally managed to extract one for study.
I consulted Philo’s Enchiridion of Extraordinary Insects and identified the vermin as Hungarian curlers. They were translucent gray, like blisters full of slush, with tacky abdomens that made them inextricable once they fully twisted into a host organism’s hair.
After learning that common smoke irritated their membranes, I lit a tightly