On the Existence of Ghosts, As If, by James Van Pelt

AUTUMN 2024, SHORT STORY, 4000 WORDS

I saw Sad Tommy the ghost in line at Starbucks behind a woman runner whose blonde hair in a ponytail hung to the middle of her back. The runner ordered, moved aside, and there was an instant, just a blink, when Sad Tommy stepped to the counter, facing the barista, as if to erase the gulf between the living and dead.

Then a cop filled the space where Sad Tommy stood, not eclipsing the ghost, but swallowing him. “A grande caramel macchiato, please,” said the cop. Sad Tommy turned out of the larger man, wandered to a back table, and sat.

Why Sad Tommy hangs out at Starbucks interests me. They built the store on an empty lot two years ago, but Sad Tommy looks like a middle-aged business man from the 50s. Hair combed into Brylcreem perfection. Old-fashioned suit. Tie.

He removed a metal box from his jacket, snapped it open, took out a cigarette, tapped it against the table, then lit it. He watched people or stared into the distance. Most days, when he finished his cigarette, he left, sometimes through a door, other times through a wall, or he faded into a wisp.

I don’t get ghost physics. He passes through a wall, but he can sit in a chair? A living person walks through him, but he rests his elbows on a table? For that matter, where does he get his cigarettes, or is he forever lighting the same one?

Maybe that’s why he’s sad. He’s mostly not here. I’ve seen other sad ghosts. Also frustrated ones and irritated ones, and ones who seem puzzled. Never a happy ghost or a busy-looking one. Ghosts must not have agendas.

The barista took my order for two black coffees. I worked at a coffee shop once, when I was young. It has a satisfying rhythm to it, steaming milk, rinsing cups, greeting customers. Cinnamon in the air and sweet rolls and cocoa. I liked the firm click of the plastic lid over a paper cup. Most customers are in a good mood. Why not? They’re getting their drinks, wrapping hands around the warmth.

Well, except for Sad Tommy.

“Here you go, sir,” said the barista.

I walked to the back of the store. Sad Tommy didn’t react. When I put the coffee in front of him, I said, “Hope you like it hot.”

He started. Looked up. My heart leapt. This is it, I thought, but then he turned away. His eyes were blue, a thin, water-color blue. Ghosts are kind of washed out. I thought we almost connected. More than anything I want to connect.

If you wish to mess with a ghost, go into an empty room and say, “I see what you are doing,” or “I know you’re here.”

You don’t have to be aware of them as I am. Good chance the room is actually empty. Still, every once in a while, you’ll catch one.

Or, move toward an unoccupied chair as if you’re going to sit, but stop yourself at the last second. “Sorry,” you say, “I didn’t know this was taken.”

If you’re in a restaurant and the table next to you hasn’t been cleared yet, a ghost could be leaning over the dishes, maybe pretending they’ve just had a great meal. Same thing with a beer mug on a bar above an empty stool.

Not always—in fact, hardly ever—but that’s where I see them.

Here’s your best shot if you want to give yourself an opportunity to be near ghosts: I’m seldom alone in a theater, even when I’m the only paying patron watching an afternoon matinee.

I’ve never seen ghosts interact with each other, but they might. They don’t generally pay attention to the living either, wrapped up in their loneliness or grief or whatever it is that drags them down. Marilyn Monroe said, “In life, we weep at the thought of death. In death, perhaps we weep at the thought of life.” But I’m sure they see us and hear us. It’s just that almost all of us don’t know they’re there, so they tune us out, or they’re so wrapped up in being dead that we don’t matter.

Sad Tommy looked at me though. That’s a beginning.

Practically Dead Dimitri sits on the stairs into my apartment building. He almost never moves, but once his gaze turned toward me, and then back to the street. He’s sort of like one of those stone lions flanking the door of a library or classy building, except wearing a soiled Cossack coat no matter the temperature. “How’s it going?” I said as I keyed myself into the building. Nothing.

He’s not a ghost, but he might as well be.

The coffee went on the table next to my laptop. I’d learned to limit myself to sips so when I finished work five hours later, I reached the bottom. The computer dialed the first number. “Good afternoon,” I said. “I represent Chambers Automotive Maintenance. If your car’s warranty has lapsed, or you’re worried about coverage in the case of major mechanical failure, we have a program that protects your investment from crippling expense.”

They hung up. The computer connected to the next contact.

Four o’clock to nine. Right through the dinner hour. Best time to call. We only dial landlines. Too many people block unknown numbers on their cells. Almost everyone I talk to is old, older than me. Phone solicitation is a dying job.

Cold call phone sales are the worst. I get paid for attempts, but I make my best money when someone buys. That’s about one of every four hundred calls. One night I sold five policies. Generally that would be a good couple weeks. Disability checks and Social Security cover my bills, not that I’m over the hill! Calling pays for luxuries: coffee, a meal out, streaming services. If I’m feeling flush, fish and chips with a beer at The Keg and Kettle.

I’m fifty-three. Heart issues. Had an “attack” a couple years ago. The doctor said, “We brought you back from the precipice. You’re a lucky man,” although later he compared my heart to a tattered flag. “It’s in a delicate condition,” he said. “There’s considerable damage.” I saw my first ghost while on recovery. Guy in surgeon’s scrubs stood at the foot of my bed, looking at me, then dissolved into dust motes in a sunbeam.

Phone calling doesn’t stress me. Hit the dial button, make my pitch, move on.

I get hang-ups. Occasionally they’ll curse and yell. I don’t let it bug me. After all, they’re strangers’ voices. I’m one too.

The barrier between life and death haunts me. I sleep late, go to bed early, take frequent naps so I can quit thinking about mortality, the cessation of breath, the last thing I might see, and the last thought I’d think. I’m too close. Sometimes I skirted the edge: I’d exhale, then hold it. That’s what the beginning of the end will be like. You can do it yourself. Decide not to inhale. A few minutes, maybe only a couple, you pass out. Of course, you would breathe on your own, but if you didn’t, soon, your oxygen-starved brain shuts down, irretrievably. Another couple minutes after that, and you are gone.

That’s it!

For all the sleeping I do, falling asleep terrifies me. It’s like practicing. Waking up surprises me over and over.

It’s morbid, I know, so when I get out of bed, I walk downtown, away from creepy thoughts, often going to Starbucks.

Leaving the apartment helps mental health. I bought a paper from the newsstand at the corner, then headed to the park. Autumn had been mild, but the first frost wasn’t far in the future. I settled onto my favorite bench, overlooking the pond with the sculpture of a boy sitting on a rock hanging a fishing pole over the water. Ducks paddled about. Folks were out walking. I liked living downtown. There’s a light rail station two blocks away. On weekends, buskers played music. A psychic set up a card table for tarot reading. During the summer they hosted a decent farmer’s market.

A regal-looking woman in a green dress that came to the middle of her calves strolled past. Could have been in her thirties. Hair tucked under a jaunty hat. Her hands were behind her back, and she looked up at the buildings left and right, spine slightly arched, like a tourist; her pace steady, measured, assured, comfortably within herself. Not tentative like other ghosts, but she was gauzy, and her shadow barely darkened the sidewalk. Something new, a self-possessed ghost.

I put my paper aside and followed. She paused at the flower shop, inspecting bins filled with daisies and petunias for planting. A shoe store caught her attention, then she moved on, still sightseeing. If she’d produced a camera from her purse to take a picture of the skyline, I wouldn’t have been surprised. Instead, she walked through the unopened door of La Petite Baguette. When I entered, the bakery smelled warm and yeasty and full of calories. Pastries and tarts and rolls of bread filled display cabinets. The baker pounded dough on a floured table. White dust powdered her arms and face. She smiled a greeting, but I was the only customer. The Green Countess had vanished.

I bought two croissants.

When I climbed my apartment steps, I put one croissant in my pocket, and the bag with the other on the cement beside Practically Dead Dimitri. “Beautiful morning,” I said. He didn’t move.

Dying filled my thoughts for weeks after my “attack.” I took comfort from a Sandra Bullock movie called While You Were Sleeping. There’s an elderly woman in the story whose health is fragile. Another character mentions she’s had “attacks.” The woman said, “They weren’t attacks. They were episodes.”

I like that. An episode happens in a larger story. It’s not the whole story. My “attack” was an episode in a big story. I didn’t know that at the beginning, though, not the first week after the hospital discharged me. I watched a young couple sitting in the bistro, The Little Soup Shop. She wore a wool sweater that overlapped her knuckles. He seemed earnest in a collared shirt and neatly pressed khakis. They had that first date look. His posture strained to be relaxed, but he leaned toward her when he spoke, and she bent toward him, like static attraction. It almost crackled, drawing them close.

The doctor told me that I might feel depressed afterward, or anxious or tearful. He prescribed propranolol, a beta blocker, because I’d been sweaty and shaky. I quit taking it after a couple days. It gave me nightmares, horrifying dreams where paralysis pinned me to my bed. Bats or buzzards or shapeless black, flappy creatures circled me, closer and closer.

They smelled of the end.

So when I observed the couple, I wanted to yell, “It’s a fake. What you’re feeling doesn’t matter. Death knocks on your door.”

My porcelain chest, frail as a teacup, barely held my weakened heart in place. It could crack and would, and I would end. The woman reached across the table, put her hand on the man’s cheek for a second, then laughed. Tears ran down my face.

Middle of the afternoon, an ordinary, midweek afternoon, while a couple fell in love in The Little Soup Shop, I wept thinking about their deaths, and mine, and every soul walking on the street outside, and how fucking scared I was.

The hospital’s chaplain talked to me my last morning in the hospital. I asked him if he knew what happened when we died. The only ghost I’d seen until then was the dissolving surgeon, and I thought he was a hallucination. I thought the chaplain would give me a comforting answer about God and heaven, but instead he said, “Death is the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns.”

The first days after they discharged me, while I quit my job, while I applied for Social Security and disability, while my savings dwindled, I couldn’t rest for a second without feeling my heart ticking a terrible countdown timer. Bump, bump, bump. That’s three beats I’ll never get back. There’s three more.

That night, after I staggered from The Little Soup Shop, despair-soaked, I chose While You Were Sleeping as I sat still as possible on my couch. Any effort might be the last. Then the old woman spoke: “They’re not attacks. They’re episodes.”

I played her speech over and over.

Ghosts hang out around the same places and repeat actions. Sad Tommy smokes a cigarette in Starbucks. An old man ghost waits at the 5^th and Broadway bus stop with his straw hat on the bench beside him almost every Friday. A frazzled-looking woman cradling a grocery bag in her arms like a child paces the sidewalk in front of Grant Elementary about the time the buses arrive. Students walk through her when the first bell rings, dismissing them from class.

I arrived at the park beside the fishing boy statue, hoping to find the Green Countess. Other than a moment of recognition with Sad Tommy, I’d not communicated with a ghost. I sat with them. I followed them. I confronted them, but they turned away or dissolved. The one time I startled Sad Tommy, he reacted, but the Green Countess struck me as different from the ghosts I’d seen so far, not beat. Maybe she had a secret. Who had she been in life? Why had crossing over not made her bereft?

After an hour, I walked to the French bakery, ate a raspberry tart with a cup of their coffee, waiting for her, but she didn’t come.

That evening, I worked at the computer, saying over and over, “I represent Chambers Automotive Maintenance.” Not a great evening for my total number of calls. A retired couple in Virginia talked for a half hour about their car, and how they were giving it to their son. It was an old car, and they didn’t want it to be a burden if it broke down. They didn’t buy the insurance when we finished, but they were pleasant. Ruined my quota.

They distracted me enough that while we talked I forgot about the Green Countess. Soon after I thought about her, and when I slept, she appeared in my dreams.

The next day, no sign again, and none on the third. I walked as far as I dared, through the clothing district, to the better restaurants, even the art museum. It’s quiet there, and cool. I saw several ghosts among a school field trip, standing in front of sculptures and paintings, walking in the gift shop.

On the fourth day, I went to Starbucks. Sad Tommy faced the barista as he had every time I’d seen him, then sat at the table in the back. I took my drink and egg sandwich and sat across from him. He didn’t look away, but he wasn’t looking at me either. He didn’t vanish, though. His metal cigarette case came out of his jacket. He tapped a cigarette on the table before lighting it.

“I’m searching for a woman you might know,” I said. He glanced at me, just a twitch of a look that acknowledged my existence. “She’s classy. Wears a green dress and pillbox hat. I saw her at the park by the lake and in Le Petite Baguette. Could you tell her I’d like to meet?”

Sad Tommy finished his cigarette while I breakfasted. Oddly, sitting with a ghost comforted me. We were like acquaintances who already knew each other’s stories, so we shared time in silence.

He stood, then walked through the wall.

I tried giving the same message to the old man with the straw hat, and to the woman in front of the elementary school, but I couldn’t tell if they knew I was there.

Pills define me. In the morning I take down my white pill container. It’s a six-inch-long rectangular box with flip-top lids labeled for the days of the week. Under each lid is enough room for a half dozen pills. I asked my doctor when he prescribed them if they were “lifetime medications.” Would I be on these until the end of my days? “Yep,” he said, as if that was the answer I hoped for. I wondered whether I’d live to refill any of the prescriptions, or did a single bottle contain all I would use?

Another couple pills at lunch, and then my evening meds, this time from a yellow box.

Sunday evenings, I line up my pill bottles on the kitchen counter, then meticulously put the correct pills into the days-of-the-week boxes. I wondered if they’d studied the interactions of so many medications. I also thought it might make sense to throw them away and just take one baby aspirin in the morning to see how I’d do. Start from scratch, so to speak.

My doctor said it was better living through chemistry, then laughed. I didn’t find it funny.

Even with the meds, I sleep poorly, use the bathroom too often, have cold spells and night sweats, suffer from vertigo, and any walking pace above a shuffle makes me wheeze. When I complained, my doctor said, “It’s better than the alternative.”

On the other hand, I’ve gotten good at taking pills.

The next morning, the Green Countess sat on my bench at the park, clear-eyed and undistracted, watching me as I approached. “It’s a nice day,” I said as I joined her.

She looked onto the lake, where a breezed ruffled the water.

I said, “Thanks for meeting me.”

She nodded.

The bench pressed solidly into my back. Now that we were here, I didn’t know how to begin. I folded my hands in my lap. I thought if I could observe her, she would teach me about what lay beyond. Was she scared? Did she hurt? Did she have desires? Was she self-aware, or just an echo of whom she’d been when she lived? Why were there so few ghosts? A city our size should be crowded with the dead going back hundreds of years, but now that I had a chance, I couldn’t speak.

She reached toward me, fingers extended and slightly down, as if she wanted me to take her hand. A bracelet made of slender chain dangling a small stone graced her wrist. Then she faded away. She shrugged in the last instant as if to say, “What are you going to do?” as if disappearing amused her.

Trenchant Memorial bordered the park on the far edge. A walk around the lake would be about a half mile, more than I’d gone since the hospital. The doctors suggested I take gentle hikes. “Nothing steep. Don’t do a lot of stairs, at least until you feel stronger.” Getting to the cemetery didn’t seem that hard. Stones and crosses filled the property, covering the hill beyond. A maintenance worker in a golf cart, shovels and buckets piled into the little trailer it towed, waved as he passed.

Since I’d started seeing ghosts, I’d wanted to visit. What better place to find spirits? But I had the cemetery to myself. A Mylar balloon, its ribbon tied to a baseball-sized rock sitting on a tombstone, said, “Congratulations!” The breeze swayed it gently back and forth. I wondered if the ground’s staff would tolerate it if I brought a balloon that said “Get Well Soon!”

I spent the morning wandering among the graves, the most ghost-free area I’d been since I’d begun paying attention. Recently cut grass left a crisp, clean odor that reminded me of summers when I was twelve. Dad paid me a dollar to do the lawn. I remembered taking my shirt off, feeling the sun on my back like a blanket. My legs were strong then. I’d reach the yard’s edge, wrestle the heavy machine around, and go the other direction. Never out of breath. Never tired. Holding the buzzing handle, letting the roar consume me.

When I exited the cemetery, I turned to take it all in. Hundreds of gravestones lined in neat rows. Nothing frightening in the cemetery. I thought I could spend a pleasant hour there, resting on a blanket, reading a good book.

I woke near midnight to the apartment’s low groan. The building was old. It creaked and cracked and moaned in an alarming manner when temperatures outside changed. But it seemed something more roused me. I turned to look at the window where a streetlight gave an incandescence. Sitting in the chair, half in the dark, the Green Countess sat. I pushed myself up on the headboard. Had she followed me? Had she always known where I lived?

We faced each other in my room for several minutes. She seemed so transparent that I wondered if I only imagined her, constructed her shape from shadows and suggestions, and then she moved, cocking her head to the side, and I knew she remained.

I became self-conscious about my apartment, my worn pajamas. Her elegance threw it all into contrast, but I was stunned by happiness to see her. Finally, I said, “You are welcome here,” my voice a rude break and way too loud.

The Green Countess rose, crossed the room to my bed, and lay beside me on her back, hands laced across her stomach. She’d set her purse on the nightstand. When she let it go, it vanished. I scooched down until my head rested on the pillow, looking at the ceiling. No sounds in the room now except the thready beat of my pulse in my ears. I almost convinced myself I’d dreamed her like I had the night before, but when I chanced rolling to my side, she was there, our faces inches apart. She closed her eyes. Her expression relaxed, and soon, like her, I fell asleep.

I’d like to say there was a moment when my life changed, that I had an epiphany about death, or I suddenly came to peace with bad health, the pills, the doctors’ appointments, the dying pigeon that is my heart, but the transformation slipped up on me sometime over the days after the Green Countess’s night visit.

I still take my coffee at Starbucks. I wave at Sad Tommy, and once, I think, he moved his hand to wave back before catching himself and heading for his table for a cigarette. The old man who waits at the bus stop doesn’t seem to notice me, except once when I read a newspaper there and I caught him looking over my shoulder. I shifted to give him a better view, and then he vanished like a murmuration of birds, holding his shape for only a second. The woman who paces in front of the elementary school continues to ignore me and everyone else. I wonder if she eternally waits for her child to be dismissed from class. Maybe her daughter or son still lives, now an adult, unaware that Mom can’t let go and has never abandoned her post.

I see the Green Countess almost every day. Sometimes she’s already at our park bench. She smiles, then watches the ducks. Other times I’m alone and she appears. I think she sits closer than she used to. I think from the other side of the abyss she sees me as a friend. Her dress is perfect. Her composure perfect. Whatever happened to her, she continues on, unruffled, an inspiration.

Today I came home after stopping at Le Petite Baguette. I’ve grown fond of their croissants. It was time to open the laptop and make my calls. At the top of the stairs, I set a bag with a croissant next to Practically Dead Dimitri. I fumbled with my keys at the door.

Dimitri said, “Thanks, man,” and slid the bag toward him.

For the first time in months I walked to my apartment without thinking about my chest. I felt at last a lightness, a hope, no barriers, a path before me that need not end, as if.

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