Dead Lovers
by A.M. MuffazThey say the worst thing you can do in a haunting is to acknowledge the presence of your ghost.
J-- follows me around, I think, because he can. His eyes are downcast puppy-things, forlorn, as if he were waiting to be petted. He hunches over often, dragging his feet, shuffling off if I catch him (though I never acknowledge him). But the next time I fail to look behind me, there he is again, at the other side of cafeteria tables or on the opposite end of a hallway. Death took three shades out of his cheeks, but that didn't make him any lighter. J-- isn't just a ghost with a tan; he couldn't scare drool out of a baby.
Yet his eyes follow me with the rest of him - pining, yearning, waiting to be loved. It is hard to shake the feeling he is always only a few steps away.
He'd been bony in life; now he is gaunt. Alopecia crowned him with bare flesh from his forehead to the back of his ears. I couldn't imagine ever having dated this man, so maybe it didn't help I looked away, often, in disgust.
"I just wanted to say hi."
I'd forgotten the sound of his voice. I'd forgotten the timbre, if it had one, forgotten if it was young or old. But I hear him, in the pit of my mind, and I know his words. Don't acknowledge the ghost, and it won't acknowledge you. Don't acknowledge the ghost, and it'll leave you alone. Just walk on, deeper into the rows of metal filing cabinets, where the cold might as well be traces of the dead where they once stood. I'm armed with my files and the loudness of my heels, pausing at the right alphabets.
Stiles, Stone, Stone Grill Restaurant Pty. Ltd.
"I don't mean to sound like I'm stalking you or anything, but I was just wondering if we could ever be friends again."
Vanvaria, Valentini, Vanzetti.
"I know things will never be the same, and I don't expect them to."
I try not to give him the pleasure of my face. Sometimes, he's little more than a coloured shadow wavering at the edges of my eyes. Sometimes I blame myself for the lack of closure. J-- and I go a long way back, back to when I was still a little schoolgirl with big glasses, and he was a souped-up artist who'd dragged his ass back to a small town because San Francisco had grown too expensive. He'd been taken in by my lack of guile, and I'd been taken in by the entire experience of an older man, an artist, back when I dreamed I'd be something more than a girl who wrote sad poems about snow.
He'd never pushed, never seemed more than a friend who couldn't make up his mind, and somehow we'd soldiered on this way for five years.
I quit being the girl who wrote poetry. He quit advertising, tried to pick up his art again, quit trying, picked up advertising again.
So when I first broke us up, I came in with the idea that we could still be friends. But you can't be friends with lovers, and ex-lovers can't be friends with that much hanging in the air.
I grab more files to lug back. The main office is a fluorescent-lit setup, where any shadows are lost among the tooth-white walls and dusty carpeting. This week's stack of letters has already been alphabetized. The Boss stuffs his correspondence into the files, and I take them out again to file. Pulling apart papers from their folders must be like taking apart prey. We get a couple of hundred letters a week, usually single sheets. Status reports make up the bulk of them, followed by notices of change of address, followed by account cancellations. People up and leave, never bothering with last goodbyes. That's what they do. We hang onto them for twenty-four months, then the accounts are automatically revoked.
His letters clogged my inbox for two years. They were never angry, but they were argumentative. J-- counted years spent together as mutual understanding. I'd point out years spent together in one-sided conversations didn't matter in terms of years. He railed at my better judgment. I tolerated what he failed to express. He maintained control by staying present. I left the phone unhooked till he stopped talking.
"Don't you still want to be my friend?"
He stands against the door, never so close as to be next to me, but not so distant he is ever far away. I unlock bindings, punch holes in the right places, file according to date and snap everything back in its place. I don't look him in the eyes, and if I have to, I look through him, focusing directly at and past him to some solid, non-eyeball place. At chair level, that put me in direct sight of his stomach. It's a long battle, but eventually, he quiets down.
This is my last pile for the day. When I get up, J-- doesn't move aside. I walk through him. I wonder if he feels me go bitter when I do. There's a point where I'm sure even he realizes he's suffering from a severe case of death.
My jacket feels too warm. I'd rather wear it than let him see my naked shoulders, even outside. Outside, the humidity beats on my back and chokes my lungs, but the sun's better on my nerves than an unnatural photophobia. He's less obvious in the sun, as if like me, all the added people rakes at his ability to be.
I head for the bus stand and avoid everyone's eyes. There's a train of buses to collect us, as many of us that can clamber in.
I'm jammed into a corner between a bag of vegetables and a high school student who smells of cigarettes. Around me are people in transit, people with their bodies in the same small space but their minds already home. We stared out the windows or at our hands, anywhere but each other, tuning out because it's the only time of day we can.
A yellow shirt with blue triangles follows me across different crowds. In the randomness of people and the buildings I've memorized en route, J-- pops up like a cardboard tease. A hand reaches up the inside of my leg. A strange hand, large and blocky. I pause, because it just might be the crowding and the lurching that makes you imagine things. J-- still flashes in front of my eyes, a shimmering, sunflower-bright malady among grey-on-white office leavers. He hates small spaces, and doesn't follow me into crowds. So I reach back to where the hand is, where it's now rubbing in circles and more than a mistake. The guy it belongs to has glasses and is Chinese, that's all I care to know. Maybe if I had some kind of angry streak, I'd handle this better, but all I can think of to say is, "Excuse me, Sir. Your hand."
It's good enough to make people see. I move over for a lady in flower-patterned jeans, make way for the high school student, who now reeks of Hacks.1 A bus whirls me through a tango of arms and legs and spits me out before I can breathe.
The courtyard outside my apartment is colder than what the sun provides. Sure enough, he's waiting by my door. I think he likes me bitter more than he shows. Crossing the threshold is like slamming into a wall.
"Did that turn you on?"
I lock the door and the moment I turn around, he's waiting behind the couch with his hands on the backing. I trudge to the fridge to grab some juice, wiping the moisture off the carton over my eyes. I can smell the street on my sleeve as I do so. I'm only able to finish half my drink before the stench gets to me.
When I enter my bedroom, I find it warm. My sheets smell like me, like my own strength has penetrated their very pores. Though I'm not alone there either, and I still have to plough through him to get through the doorway, this is where my energy's best. I'm most in control. I make a grab for fresh clothes before stepping into the bath. I stopped wearing sleeveless nighties when I first got my ghost. Full-length pj's, with pants, seemed more practical.
I take great care about how I approach the shower. The shower curtain is a bit longer than needed to reach from wall to wall, so I wet the edges and paste it to each wall. My towel is always within range of my hand if I stuck it out of the curtain. My clean clothes stay next to the towel, also well within range. I take off absolutely nothing till I'm behind the curtain. And there are always enough bottles in there to leave just enough room for me, alone.
Water isn't a balm for the soul. It rips through your artifices and shreds all the pretensions you've caked to your skin over the course of an average day. I know he's out there, standing in the doorway leading back to my safe places, and I shudder to think what crosses his mind. He knows what I look like, under the water and nothing else. I know he's thought about it long after I left. He's told me as much.
"I hope we can still be friends, sometime in the future."
He knows I'm not a pretty sight, but neither is he. All the scratches on my skin, every ripple of fat and what makes him happy gets a scrub down. I know he's hard in his ectoplasmic underpants. I'll pass him by when I leave. Death hides nothing that he wasn't ashamed of in real life.
The towel scrapes my skin till it's grated. I like rough towels that have crisped on the line. What helps peel off more layers I don't need is a good thing. By the time I'm in my flannel, he's not moved an inch.
Bathing is love, but my thoughts might as well be bile. I walk through him and walk him down. My warm little bedroom may as well be the chill of people where they once stood.
I'm seldom hungry these days, as it's hard to eat in the presence of a ghost. I get my food from where there are other people, even if I have to force myself to say hello. The steam clean makes me thirsty, and I find my half glass of juice back in the kitchen. The pulp floats in liquid citrine. The glass seems heavier than I remember it to be.
J-- has one expression, one he uses well. The forlorn eyes match his greasy hair, what wisps of it that age and death didn't shave. "I've missed you."
Screw the juice. I need sleep. My disembodied pet follows me, but he stays at the foot of the bed. I'm barricaded in pillows, in case he ever tries more. I've never found out if he was capable of more than show.
Switch off the lights and he'll be my glow bug, but I've a cure for that too. It's called don't acknowledge the ghost, and the ghost won't acknowledge you.
That, and an eye mask. Because there's an adaptation to counter every wrong, and I was going to fight tooth and nail for the last word. Though there's one thing I can't bring myself to say, and he was never good at saying goodbyes.
"Just trying to be friendly."
1 - Hacks is a popular brand of boiled sweet in Malaysia. It was originally sold as an anise-flavoured cough drop. High school students usually consume Hacks to hide the smell of cigarettes on their breath from their teachers.
©A.M. Muffaz
A.M. Muffaz is a 25-year-old Malaysian writer. Her work has recently appeared in Chiaroscuro and Fantasy Magazine. She is currently working on her first novella, set in Kuala Lumpur, about a conservative Muslim man haunted by evolutionary theory. More about her and her work is available here.