ALSO BY KEVIN BROCKMEIER
A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip
The Illumination
The View from the Seventh Layer
The Brief History of the Dead
The Truth About Celia
Things That Fall from the Sky
For Children
City of Names
Grooves: A Kind of Mystery
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2021 by Kevin Brockmeier
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.
Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Name: Brockmeier, Kevin, author.
Title: The ghost variations : one hundred stories / Kevin Brockmeier.
Description: First edition. New York : Pantheon Books, 2021.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020001483 (print). LCCN 2020001484 (ebook). ISBN 9781524748838 (hardcover). ISBN 9781524748845 (ebook).
Subjects: LCSH: Ghost stories, American.
Classification: LCC PS3602.R63 G56 2020 (print) | LCC PS3602.R63 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at lccn.loc.gov/2020001483
LC ebook record available at lccn.loc.gov/2020001484
Ebook ISBN 9781524748845
www.pantheonbooks.com
Cover design and illustration by Kelly Blair
ep_prh_5.6.1_c0_r0
It is not hard to imagine a ghost successfully. What is hard is successfully to imagine an object, any object, that does not look like a ghost.
—Elaine Scarry, Dreaming by the Book
Tell me what you see vanishing and I
Will tell you who you are
—W. S. Merwin, “For Now”
Contents
GHOSTS AND MEMORY
One A Notable Social Event
Two The Guidance Counselor
Three A Hatchet, Several Candlesticks, a Pincushion, and a Top Hat
Four Milo Krain
Five Amnesia
Six A Long Chain of Yesterdays
Seven The Hitchhiker
Eight Wishes
Nine How to Play
Ten The Scales of Fortune
Eleven A Moment, However Small
Twelve A Gathering
Thirteen Mira Amsler
GHOSTS AND NATURE
Fourteen Elephants
Fifteen The White Mare
Sixteen Many Additional Animals
Seventeen Bees
Eighteen A Blight on the Landscape
Nineteen An Ossuary of Trees
Twenty Things That Fall from the Sky
Twenty-one A Story with a Drum Beating Inside It
Twenty-two The Sandbox Initiative
Twenty-three Renewable Resources
GHOSTS AND TIME
Twenty-four Thirteen Visitations
Twenty-five The Office of Hereafters and Dissolutions
Twenty-six An Obituary
Twenty-seven The Midpoint
Twenty-eight The Whirl of Time
Twenty-nine Minnows
Thirty A Story Swaying Back and Forth
Thirty-one A Time-Travel Story with a Little Romance and a Happy Ending
GHOSTS AND SPECULATION
Thirty-two The Phantasm vs. the Statue
Thirty-three Footprints
Thirty-four Passengers
Thirty-five New Life, New Civilizations
Thirty-six A Blackness Went Fluttering By
Thirty-seven The Prism
Thirty-eight His Womanhood
Thirty-nine There Are People, They Had Lives
Forty The Soldiers of the 115th Regiment
GHOSTS AND VISION
Forty-one Action!
Forty-two The Way the Ring of a Moat Becomes Comforting to a Fish
Forty-three Spectrum
Forty-four Every House Key, Every Fire Hydrant, Every Electrical Outlet
Forty-five The Walls
Forty-six Playtime
Forty-seven All His Life
Forty-eight Take It with Me
Forty-nine A Story Seen in Glimpses Through the Mist
GHOSTS AND THE OTHER SENSES
Fifty A Lifetime of Touch
Fifty-one The Runner-Up
Fifty-two So Many Songs
Fifty-three A Matter of Acoustics
Fifty-four Bouquet
Fifty-five The Mud Odor of the Snow Melting in the Fields
Fifty-six Instrumentology
Fifty-seven When the Room Is Quiet, the Daylight Almost Gone
Fifty-eight A Sort of Fellow
Fifty-nine A Lesser Feeling
GHOSTS AND BELIEF
Sixty A Small Disruption of Reality
Sixty-one The Abnormalist and the Usualist
Sixty-two Real Estate
Sixty-three Which Are the Crystals, Which the Solution
Sixty-four Countless Strange Couplings and Separations
Sixty-five Rapture
Sixty-six 666
GHOSTS AND LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP
Sixty-seven Lost and Found
Sixty-eight Another Man in a Mirror
Sixty-nine The Apostrophes
Seventy A Man in a Mirror
Seventy-one Turnstiles
Seventy-two A True Story
Seventy-three Bullets and What It Takes to Dodge Them
Seventy-four Knees
Seventy-five The Man She Is Trying to Forget
Seventy-six The Eternities
Seventy-seven Too Late
Seventy-eight Detention
Seventy-nine I Like Your Shoes
Eighty The Ghost’s Disguise
Eighty-one A Source of Confusion
Eighty-two Unseeable, Untouchable
Eighty-three Ghost Brothers
Eighty-four A Second True Story
Eighty-five A Life
Eighty-six Extraordinary Gifts
Eighty-seven An Inherited Disorder
Eighty-eight Prayer from an Airport Terminal
Eighty-nine Hatching
Ninety Bilateral Symmetry
GHOSTS AND WORDS AND NUMBERS
Ninety-one Parakeets
Ninety-two Euphemisms
Ninety-three Roughly Eighty Grams
Ninety-four The Ghost Letter
Ninety-five A Matter of Linguistics
Ninety-six Dusk and Other Stories
Ninety-seven Telephone
Ninety-eight Numbers
Ninety-nine The Census
One Hundred The Most Terrifying Ghost Story Ever Written
A Partial Concordance of Themes
Acknowledgments
ONE
A NOTABLE SOCIAL EVENT
The ghost in the law firm’s doorway never stops leaving. Every few seconds she glides across the threshold of the exit, steps suddenly to her left, raises the back of her right hand to her cheek, and starts over, her face bear
ing a sunken look of hard concentration. She does not return to the spot where she began exactly. She recurs there. Her irises are white with death, her skin silver, her hair a gray-green Spanish moss. A hundred and seven years ago, in this very hall, when the law firm’s warren of desks and tables was a ballroom with red oak parquetry and a hammered tin ceiling, the young physician on whose attentions she had set her heart had spurned her for the linener’s daughter, putting his lips to her plump pink knuckles and declaring his infatuation before the entire room. Back then the ghost was only a living girl of fifteen. Though she tried to leave furtively, at the doorway she stumbled into someone’s manservant, a tall oak post of a fellow who punctured the silence between waltzes with “I do beg your pardon, miss,” and then, seeing the tears on her cheeks, “Are you not well?” The girl lifted her hand to her face in a spasm of embarrassment, then ran off into the square.
Now she repeats the same maneuver again and again, but with a million minor variations: raising or lowering her elbow; rotating her ankle a quarter-inch to the right; pivoting her waist to move the bustle of her gown. She flees through the door, then flees through the door again. She brings her hand to her cheek, this time as if to fend off a blow, the next as if to swat at an insect, the next as if to test for a fever. She separates her fingers slightly. She adjusts the angle of her wrist. It is not for shame that she haunts these few square feet of the law office but for the inadequacy of the original gesture. At fifteen, she thinks, she failed to express the true complexity of her emotions, all her humiliation, resentment, forlornness, and heartache, each feeling in its exact proportions, and so, ever since she died, she has performed her flight from the ballroom with countless tiny reinflections. She is like a singer who cannot stop trying to perfect a particular syllable. When she was alive she spoke the moment—in truth she mumbled it—and now she is trying to sing it. Sometimes, in the long hours of a summer afternoon, when the paralegals at their desks are seeking a distraction, they watch the ghost emerging from her pleat in space and time and wonder if their lives will slip by like hers did, leaving them fastened so hopelessly, so desperately, to the past. As if a life could work any other way. As if that weren’t precisely what a life must do.
TWO
THE GUIDANCE COUNSELOR
“This has never happened before.” The guidance counselor brandished the printout like a lawyer presenting an annihilating piece of evidence, though in truth he was amused: playacting. “It seems that you’re ideally suited to be, one, a conductor, or two, an actuary. So far, so good, presuming you like music and statistics. But then there’s number three. Maybe they mean a host? Here, why don’t you take a look.” He offered the page to the girl, who sat unassumingly in one of his office’s sprung vinyl armchairs. She was his fourteenth student of the day. Without a file to consult, he could not remember who she was, her GPA, how she had tested or which extracurriculars she boasted, but in almost forty years on the job, he had developed a knack for swift appraisals. So then: a grayish girl with wiry hair and jeans that bunched at the knees. Quiet and deferential. Not a troublemaker. Not even a nonconformist. To his best assessment a classic B student, which made her career aptitude results all the more ridiculous. She read the page, creased it smartly down the center, and, smiling almost invisibly, glanced at the wall clock. She said, “We still have twenty-five seconds. I don’t see why we can’t get an early start, though. Come with me.” The girl led him into the lobby, where a tall bank of tempered glass windows showed the blue sky, a few tousled-looking pine trees, and the car dealership across the street. The guidance counselor was not sure why he had allowed himself to follow her. Letting his counselees believe they were in charge almost never ended well. He was usually smarter than this. He remembered what it was like to be their age, tantalized by dreams and visions—pianist! novelist! movie star!—all those sunlit futures you imagined for yourself before you took out a loan, enrolled in the nearest state college, and earned your ed. psych. degree. The guidance counselor had never married; had hardly even dated. It was better, easier, he had decided, not to disturb anyone with his love or his sadness. And, honestly, he found more fulfillment in the commotion of the high school, with all its teenage theatrics and uncertainties, than he did anywhere else. Take right now: the halls were bustling, turbulating, as though the bell had just rung, but an elemental silence presided over the scene. It was not the usual vortex of students and teachers, though, who engulfed him, but something else: a crowd of ghosts. In a single fixed moment, he watched the light shining through them, the sparks of dust that pierced them like comets, watched their strange underwater way of moving, and the stillness on their faces, the repletion. Ghosts, he thought: no question. When he tried to speak, he found that he could not use his voice. But the grayish girl with the wiry hair nodded as if she understood him anyway. She stroked his cheek. She took his hand. Her eyes were full of kindness.
THREE
A HATCHET, SEVERAL CANDLESTICKS, A PINCUSHION, AND A TOP HAT
The man keeps waking from dreams he has presumed, while sleeping, to be real, then apprehending, through some commonplace object pregnant with dream-meaning, that they must have happened after all. Every morning the same dumb story. Just now, for instance, he sat up suddenly in his bed, centuries and continents away from the beautiful green-eyed princess whose devotion he won by vanquishing a dragon, and then discovered, to his surprise, that he was clutching her locket and chain. He draped it from his bedpost. It nestled there against the locket of the prairie schoolteacher who mistook him for her long-lost son, and the locket of the stage actress who was also, to the rapture of her fans, a swarm of yellowjackets, and the locket of the Russian countess who posed watertight riddles to her suitors and then had them killed, and a dozen others like it, all of them transported out of dreams he had perceived as actual until he awoke, when he deduced that he had merely been sleeping, until he noticed the object in his hand and he realized that he hadn’t. Most of the items he has woken with are similarly small and trinkety: a key, a coin, a pencil. But he has also found himself carrying full-length mirrors, fur coats, and soup tureens, as well as saddles, croquet mallets, feather dusters, a Bunsen burner, a mortadella sausage, wigs, a toy train set, a Van de Graaff generator, a papermaking press, and even, once, a sofa. From every corner he is confronted with memories of the worlds he has visited. He cannot see the abacus on his nightstand without recalling the ghost of that lady with the broken fingers, proud and despondent, who both haunted and was in love with him. The stethoscope on his dresser reminds him of that city where he slipped into a whirlpool of vaned glass marbles. This little apartment, with its inundation of keepsakes—he half-expects to waken from it, too, one day, clutching a toothbrush in his hand, or a wallet. What a tragedy it would be, he thinks, what a joke, if the best, worst, strangest, and most extravagant hours of his life were spent escaping it. He throws back his covers and lifts himself out of bed. The lockets on his bedpost jingle like a puppy. More and more it seems to him that all the certainty in his life, if not the pleasure, is concentrated in the approximately eight seconds of confusion, bereavement, relief, or exultation he experiences each morning when he is convinced his dreams have abandoned him. In truth those eight seconds are the only time, when he is awake, that he does not doubt it.
FOUR
MILO KRAIN
“Sign the petition?” The old man standing outside the bakery does not ask the question so much as gruffs it, summoning the words up from someplace deep in his body. The other man, younger and fitter, stopping off for a loaf of ciabatta and a bottle of red on his way home from the office, hunches into his suit and attempts to parry past him, but again the first man says, “Sign the petition? Sign the petition to addle Milo Krain?” And at this the younger man pauses. For two reasons the question strikes him as peculiar: first that exotic verb, so casually deployed, as if “addling” someone were the most ordinary of human activities; but second, and chiefly, because he is Milo Krain.
He steels himself, then makes up his mind, swiveling back around to face the man with the petition. “Pardon me,” he inquires, “did I hear you say something about Milo Krain?” Immediately the older man’s carriage changes. He smiles deferentially and extends a brown Masonite clipboard. “Would you like to sign our petition, sir? I assure you it’s for a worthy cause.” The dispirited note in his voice has been replaced by a salesmanlike zing. When Milo asks, “And what cause might that be?” the man taps his clipboard for emphasis. “Well, sir, we’d like to ensure that the initiative to addle Milo Krain moves forward as planned. As you know, the population of ghosts, specters, and demons approved this measure overwhelmingly, but there’s been a rumble among some of the council members to dismiss Mr. Krain with only a few seconds of mild disorientation. Now, I ask you, is that fair?” “But,” Milo begins, “I’m—” and though he hesitates, he must unintentionally say the name out loud, because the man with the clipboard summons a second man with a clipboard and tells him, “You’ll never believe it, but this fellow claims he’s Milo Krain.” The two of them look him up and down. Their skin, he notices, on this, the most sunstruck day of the whole blue winter, glistens—or no: effervesces. It is as if they are caught inside a rain that affects only them, not the pebbled concrete of the sidewalk, not the cars idling at the curb, not the shoppers parading in and out of the bakery and sending gusts of yeasty air through the doors. After some Is-that-so?-ing and It-hardly-seems-likely-ing, the two men appear to come to a decision. One of them says to Milo Krain, “I’m afraid you’re mistaken,” and the other adds, “Yes, that’s right. You’re not Milo Krain. You’re not Milo Krain at all.” And suddenly they are gone, just two clipboards that fall to the ground without clattering, because they don’t in fact exist, and he is a man without a name, standing alone in a heathered wool suit, most thoroughly addled.