The TV is on halfheartedly, a documentary about human flies the kids and us are sort of watching, though as a ghost I’m drawn more to the spaces in between the pixels than the imprisoning overall grid itself. My brother Kevin, head full of beard and nodding, leans against my side of the couch but I’m not paying attention. Kevin says, trying to stir the pot, “Why is this even on? Nobody cares about people climbing skyscrapers with suction cups.”
We’re in the living room of our parents’ house. My stepmom is boxing up the leftovers, my husband Paul helping her out. Dad’s playing SuperFreeCell. It’s super, super domestic, OK? And a little bit drowsy. I float near my body, shimmering, ignoring the various semi-directed advertisements in frequencies only ghosts can see (anti-depressants and light beer ads full of people who happily choose to stay in the bodies God gave them).
I’m floating upside down, with the toes of my feet occasionally phasing through the popcorn ceiling, but I right myself so I can pay better attention to the documentary. In between grainy footage of men and women in pastel jumpsuits and exuberant hair inching their way up sheets of glass, the delighted looks of office workers as they witness so much bravery on the other side of their never opening windows, the TV laments even more of the lost past on this post-holiday early evening. No longer seen in action films or car commercials, the voiceover mourns, no longer part of Ranger or Seal training, no longer even offered as a minor at most universities, it’s so sad all the things we no longer do.
Kevin is about to change the channel, and maybe the TV senses this, because the voiceover suddenly becomes uplifting: All is not lost! We can be like the best people who have ever faced down the most soulless of architecture with just two pairs of suction cups. Never, never give up hope! The human spirit is meant to defy gravity, the TV proclaims. Game developers are currently working on a VR version for Xmas! Eventually people have to get sick of parkour, the TV mutters.
A whole bunch of suction cup ads follow.
I drift down and my brother’s two girls Alice and Ivy walk through me. They giggle because it’s ticklish to mess with ghosts. I think about getting back into my body, being alive, but it’s such a bloated, stuck thing there on the couch, and I really don’t want to come down. I’m wondering, as always, whether I should cut that last strand once and for all, be nothing but a pure signal, a song. The walls tempt me, the wiring tempts me too. Up, up, up they say with their secret signals. The music’s great. You can live forever like this. Paul’s about to teach our nieces how to leave their bodies when my stepmother tells us all to knock it off. My brother’s beard is sliding down the couch, trying to interface with everything it touches. It’s on my body’s leg, it’s trying out all sorts of passwords, make the little hairs on my ghost shape point in its direction. It’s a baby beard, full of life: it doesn’t understand boundaries.
If I can’t leave, I might as well argue, so I go back inside my body, make it stretch out its stiffness, move my legs out from under that hair. “Of course human flies matter, Kevin. Many climb: it’s still worth doing,” I say. “What about thirty-seven year old Stephen Rogata of Great Falls, Virginia, suction cup climber of the Trump Tower in Manhattan? I used to be his Amnesty International pen pal. While we’re sitting on this couch, he’s doing hard time.”
“In those letters you wrote,” Kevin asks, “Did you ask him about leaving his body, or had he already done that?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “He never wrote back.”
“And besides,” Dad says, not even looking up from his game, “if anyone with implants can learn how to cut themselves out of their bodies, why bother climbing buildings? You can just float anywhere you’d want to go.”
“It’s not like that,” I say, watching Kevin nod back off into his beard. I bet it’s singing to him, something so complex only beards get it.
“When you’re climbing up the side of a building with just four suction cups between you and death, you’re really there, absolutely there and nowhere else, and really just locked down in yourself.”
“Then why don’t you do that?” Dad asks.
“Because I don’t want to do that. Besides, when you’ve cut yourself out and float, it’s something else—you’re somewhere else.”
“So different,” Kevin mumbles softly through his beard. “One is about feeling alive and the other is about feeling dead.”
“You’re at your parents’ house and you want to feel dead,” Dad says.
I know he wants to get in a fight but I just don’t feel like it. I’m the good daughter. I’m here; at least I don’t have a beard, I’m not part of some networked mass consciousness. I don’t ghost all the time. I’m trying my best to stick around.
“You should use those implants we got you and do something interesting instead of playing SuperFreeCell all the time,” I say.
“I bet Stephen Rogata never wrote back because he left his body the moment they stuck him in a cell,” Kevin says, snapping awake. “And he laughed at his jailors while they broke his ribs trying to make him climb back in. Or, get this,” and now he’s grinning with the brilliance of his beard assisted insight. “Maybe he’s in the room with us right now, just because you said his name.”
“You need a mirror to make the name thing work,” Dad mutters, in the scary way that says he knows what he’s talking about. “And the person has to be dead. Really dead.”
“Well, that’s what he wanted, isn’t it? To be dead,” Kevin says. “Otherwise why’d he make himself such a target? He could have climbed any building in NYC; why did he have to choose that one?”
The TV, deciding we’re not watching it, switches to the Inescapable Depression Channel. Before the nieces start seeing things they’re too young to know I grab them. “Let’s see if we can summon my friend Stephen and settle things once and for all.”
We go in the bathroom and yell Stephen Rogata over and over at the mirror. Nothing happens. We try the mirror in my room and more nothing happens. The girls refuse to give up—they laugh and run looking for mirrors around the house, in my parents’ bedroom, in the upstairs bathroom; they whisper “Stephen Rogata” into the compact they dig out of their grandma’s purse.
Alice and Ivy shriek when the compact begins to vibrate. «You have reached the Prison Escapees Union. The person you are attempting to reach is very much alive and wishes you well, but is unable to answer your call. Freedom is precious. You will not hear from them again.»
I look hard at my stepmom: I had no idea she was in the Union. I’m swallowing all sorts of questions I’m not sure I should be asking her: When did she do time? Was she political? Why did she escape?
She just turns and walks away from us. Her compact is once more just a compact, no matter how much the girls shake and yell at it.
Paul tugs at me, “Don’t judge. You did time too.”
I was grabbed at a rally (when we were still having rallies); I think I was lucky in that they only broke three of my fingers before I told the police every name I could think of. I got five years, plus wondering for the rest of my life if people disappeared because of me. I never heard from Amnesty International, but now it makes sense why my stepmom never wrote to me.
All I want to do right now is leave, either ditching my body or everything and everyone else. But I don’t, I’m a good person: I keep telling myself that. I didn’t deserve what happened to me. I help clean up while the nieces play with my now sleeping brother’s beard as it wrestles with the TV set, trying to hijack it and make it play something cheerful. My hands stay busy washing dishes, while Paul dries beside me. I think he’s minding me, making sure I’m not going to do something that’s going to break my parole.
Sometimes I think I don’t know what to do with my freedom, such that it is, that I’m wasting it, spending so much time as a ghost, or maybe all I’m doing is waiting for it to get taken away from me once more, practicing what that’s like so it won’t hurt as much.
When the Union approached Stephen Rogata with the offer to start all over, did they make him give up the suction cups as well? Did he miss them, or did he figure he was just swapping out his real suction cups for metaphorical ones? Because if freedom is precious, it’s also slippery. You can’t be careless when you have it. Maybe suction cup skills are transferrable to real life situations; that he figured out how to walk so carefully nobody notices he’s free, that the police let him get away with it, and that he’s living somewhere with a new name, surrounded by people who believe his cover story, that he’s still climbing in a way the rest of us can’t. It’s a good thing to hope for, to hope that for him, but it makes me furious to think about nonetheless.
I track down my stepmom in the family room, where all the various souvenirs and totems of our happier pasts sit on shelves like our own private museum. I know better than to pry; if she wanted to tell me she would have told me when I needed most to hear it.
Instead I ask her, “Why is the Inescapable Depression Channel still on your TV set?”
“How come you never tried to escape?” she asks back. The kids are shrieking in the other room, and I wish Kevin would stay out of his beard around his own kids, and I also wish I didn’t have to be talking to my stepmother about any of this.
But I pull myself together and I tell her, “Because you and I both know there’s no such thing as ‘escape.’ They just let you go if you agree to a new identity and you don’t reoffend. Despite what everyone thinks I love my husband and this family; I chose to do my time instead of leaving everyone forever.”
Each word I say feels like a brick I haven’t decided what to do with, and my stepmom won’t stop staring at me like she can see my ghost. “That said, I find it really fucking ironic that I stayed in prison so I’d still be in your life, considering you hadn’t done the same for yours,” I tell her.
“I’m not a bad person,” she says. “You can’t imagine how hard it is to cut out your past.”
Now it’s my turn to play the staring game.
“And the Union isn’t them. It’s us, all of us, and it really helps if you let it.”
“Who’d you leave? How many people have never heard from you? How many people think you’re dead? Now that we all know who you really are, are you going to cut us out too when they pull you back in?”
“I know why you keep leaving your body,” she says. “With that ghosting bullshit. It’s because you’re still in prison. You think they let you go, but you’re still in there: you never left.”
For a moment I wonder if she’s right: maybe I still am in prison, that they’ve finally found a way to break me even worse than they already did. I’ve done the are you in a real or virtual space meditation often enough to know what’s what, but I still pick up one of the little bird figurines from its shelf. I throw it so hard over my stepmom’s shoulder it shatters.
Still in the real world: we’re so sorry, try again later.
Anger management ads pop up in my peripheral vision, where they would swarm over me if I let them. I make myself turn my fire down.
“So long as I’m not violating the conditions of my parole it’s nobody’s business whether I’m in my body or not, nor where I go when I’m gone.”
My stepmom looks at me, or maybe she’s looking at her own set of ads. Maybe for the latest beard, the one where you get to share your hopes and dreams with your loved ones as it grows around and through you while you sleep. I’ll never understand why she and Dad never set up adblockers or at least detuned their house’s mood receptors: both me and Kevin have offered to do it many, many times.
“There’s a broom and dustpan in the kitchen. Next time you’re in Puerto Rico on your honeymoon you can pick up a figurine to replace the one you just broke.”
She’s crying; I feel horrible. Who am I to tell her anything?
I go to the kitchen and Paul wants to know what’s going on. I tell him, the short version.
“Once you’re done sweeping we should go home,” he says.
So I do and we do. In the car after we’ve been on the freeway awhile the mirror swivels so it’s facing me, and I see the face of Stephen Rogata staring at me instead of my own. He tells me the location and time of the next Union meeting. It’s never too late to be free, he says. We can teach you how.
I’m thinking about leaving my body again, of trailing behind like some sort of ghost-kite. I’m weighing whether to ghost a little way out, or just snap it all for good and go all the way. Paul’s somewhere else, his body breathing steadily. I tell the car to unglaze the windows; I watch the various cars surrounding us as we all ribbon our way to our destinations.
“Tell me the secret, the one everyone seems to know but nobody’s willing to tell me,” I ask the car, not for the first time, instead of joining Paul wherever he might be. The car doesn’t respond. “Ok. Keep your secret. Play me the song I’ve never heard before, the one I’ve been singing my whole life.”
“Which song is that?” the car asks.
“I don’t know the name of it,” I say, impatiently. “It’s cathartic, and sometimes it’s funny; the one that makes it easier to let go.”
“I’m sorry,” the car says. “I can’t play that for you yet.”
“How long am I supposed to wait?”
“I can’t tell you that either,” the car says.
“Then show me the documentary about people who climb skyscrapers with suction cups, just the good parts.”
I stay in my body, but as I watch the footage I imagine myself climbing. I imagine all my weight first on one leg, then the other, then on one of my arms, and then just my fingers. Trying to imagine that this is what having a body means, my strength supporting my weight, choosing not to let go. And that’s what I do the rest of the way home.
Hugh Behm-Steinberg’s fiction can be found most recently in The Glacier, Hex Literary, Bull, Your Impossible Voice and Waffle Fried. His short story “Taylor Swift” won the Barthelme Prize from Gulf Coast, and his story “Goodwill” was picked as one of Wigleaf’s Top Fifty Very Short Fictions. A collection of prose poems and microfiction, Animal Children, was published by Nomadic/Black Lawrence Press. Stories of his can be found at Heavy Feather Review here, here, here and here. He lives in Barcelona.
Image: shutterstock.com
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