I have learned quite a bit since my death, having seen through my life’s illusions and into secret places that living people never reach. In life I did not read many ghost stories, except for English class assignments, Hamlet and A Christmas Carol, but now in death I see that they express an essential truth.
From this new perspective it seems that more deaths are rather uneventful, that they are natural for lack of a better word. I have only seen one other ghost in all my hauntings, a vague, distant figure unceasingly moving back and forth over a stretch of highway in the mountains. I approached it but had no way to communicate with it, and have not seen it since.
I believe that upon death most people leave this world for the next, for a bright world of spirits that I have occasionally received glimpses of. But sometimes, as in my case, a death’s circumstances have an unnatural element, a vicious element, a profane element, that throws a wrench into the very machinery of life and death.
This is the beginning of every ghost story, is it not? The gestation of every haunted house? The body dies but the spirit or soul or whatever one chooses to call it continues on, with unfinished business to attend to, with vengeance to enact.
My death story begins with a wealthy older couple, the Goodwins, who could not have children of their own. Instead, they adopted two baby boys, James and I, who bore no resemblance to each other and fooled no observer into thinking that they were natural brothers and thus the biological children of their parents. Of course my mother and father tried not to express the favoritism that we could both perceive. We were born in the same month in the same year, just nine days apart.
We lived as a family of four in a large house on the hill. On our first day of school, as our mother became fond of telling us in later years, he sat in the corner and cried until she came to pick him up, whereas I had already made a circle of friends. That day, one would say, set the tone for the rest of our brotherhood.
As we grew older I became the dark-skinned golden boy with curly hair, while he was the pale black sheep. I got good grades and ran track, listening to my father’s advice and doing all that I could to prepare myself for college. I did indeed get into a good college and went away to school, a period of my life that seems much more distant to me now than life at home.
During the same years my brother retreated into himself. I recall wondering as to whether he had simply received a poor genetic hand at birth, or whether he had seen some trauma in his infancy, or whether he had made poor decisions. Upon reflection I believe that a combination of genetics and a knowledge of his own abandonment started him down a path that he later pursued of his own volition.
I did not pursue any contact with my birth parents, as I considered Mr. and Mrs. Goodwin to be my true parents. James mentioned his curiosity about his birth parents a few times during our teenage years but I do not know if he ever made contact with them. Perhaps he may have pursued them while I studied at college. If he did so I doubt that the experience had a truly transformative impact, for the thought never surfaced in his mind through all the days and nights of my haunting him.
No, I knew that he was jealous of me from a young age, for he told me as much. As he got older he began to hide it, a trick he learned at a young age and in my shadow, with every ‘A’ I received and trophy I brought home. He became sullen, resentful.
It ate through him as acid eats through a stomach.
I do not know exactly how long ago my mother died, time becoming much vaguer after my death. I remember memories of living through seasons and recall, to some extent, time structured and divided by weeks and months and years. And the needs of the human body of course divide time into alternating periods of sleep and wakefulness, day and night. I have no such needs and thus experience a constant, undivided consciousness.
Once I began counting each day, which is to say each transition from darkness to light, and counted two hundred and thirty seven days.
I know that my mother died approximately one year and three months before my own death, and that either shortly before or shortly after the funeral my father met with me for a discussion without James in which he explained that, whereas my brother had proven a source of worry, I had grown into a responsible young man. I, he said, would have to take additional responsibilities now, especially those involving the family finances, which would have to be managed. He said what I had known for many years, that I had always been the favorite both of my father and my mother, and that at the time of her death she had felt pride in having a son who had not only met but exceeded expectations.
My father had never said such things so directly and I recall attributing it to his recent emotional shock. As a ghost I have pondered whether my brother may have overheard that conversation and if so whether it may have precipitated or contributed to the drastic action he would take. Over the next year I would certainly, as one would say, add fuel to the fire smoldering inside of him. I recall my pride in my mother having seen my college graduation before her death. After college I worked hard to establish my career and thus every time the three of us shared a meal my brother heard of my latest accomplishment. He naturally also heard our father’s praise of these accomplishments, the same praise he had heard throughout all his years as a Goodwin.
I lack memories of my death itself, for it came in a period of unconsciousness. I can recall the ensuing awakening. It seemed to me then as an awakening, as if I had gotten up from the hospital bed, before I looked down to see my own lifeless body in the bed. The feeling of disturbance I felt in that moment has since subsided.
It was an awakening not only into a new state of being but into a new insight into the previous, as I followed the body’s progress from the hospital to the morgue to the grave. At the funeral, on the way into the grave itself, I knew who felt true sorrow and who had attended out of a sense of obligation to the family, or more simply to play their appointed role in the social ritual. In the eulogy my father spoke of a young man gone before his time and of a wound which would never heal, and wept.
After my burial, which in some way severed the connection between my mind and the lifeless body, I found myself attached in some spiritual or metaphysical way to James, tethered to him, inhabiting him or, more precisely, orbiting around him, looking down on him from a few feet up in the air.
No one knows anything, he thought to himself, a private unvoiced reflection that I heard without hearing. He wore a black suit and walked with my distraught father through the graveyard to where they had parked. Science has finally done it, he thought, made the perfect poison, an untraceable poison, a poison that a team of Sherlock Holmes, Philip Marlowe, Ms. Marple and Inspector Maigret could not begin to detect. Better dying through chemistry.
I felt, with all my ghostly ability to feel, a growing, rising, swelling revulsion. He was not burning with guilt, or shaken by the ancient and universal human repulsion toward brother killing brother, or even anxious about the possibility of his becoming known. He was not remorsefully recalling memories of his dead brother. Instead, in the depths of his private reflections he could think of nothing other than a terrible pun and a few joking pop culture references. Bereft of my body I began haunting his.
Our father died a month later, my untimely death coming so soon after that of his wife being too much for him to endure. I was with my brother at the hospital deathbed and at the funeral. I knew, through none of the living human’s five senses, that his prevailing emotion at that time was neither angst nor sorrow, for he had a fortune to inherit.
I haunted him across his days and nights, observing his dissipation. He now had the means and the freedom to indulge his every desire. An inheritance built almost dollar by dollar, through generations of thrift and effort, passed into the hands of bartenders, luxury hoteliers, imported car dealers and an assortment of less legitimate businessmen. He spent obscene amounts of my father’s money to impress a crowd of sycophants. He went to fine restaurants each night, in nice suits and each time with a new girl on his arm.
One night James drove back from the airport in a new car. He had a taken a trip of sleepless nights and indolent days. Again he felt no remorse, either on a spiritual level or on the low level of simpler buyer’s remorse. He felt not the slightest doubt. He was satisfied.
The inner smoldering fire became an inferno, the acid ate through the stomach lining. Burning for vengeance I manifested my corpse onto the windshield. He screamed and swerved and drove the car off the road and into a tree.
I somehow know that he survived with serious injuries, and at times receive glimpses of him in a hospital bed and then in a wheelchair, glimpses that come less and less often. I now count this as his greatest betrayal.
I cannot move through space as I once did. My apparition perhaps exhausted the store of psychic energy that I had accumulated. As I once inhabited a body I now inhabit the scarred and twisted tree. An endless parade of the living drive by in their cars.
The dead leaves rot away in a pile on the ground and thorns pierce through the bark. Spiders weave webs between the bare branches and bats circle around it at night. Rats gnaw at the roots. Snakes eat them and lie among the same roots, digesting their bodies. A crow perches on the topmost branch at noon, a white owl at midnight.
Author’s Note: Happy Halloween, everyone. I’m currently working on something about my recent visit to Ireland and the 100th anniversary of Ulysses, which I hope to publish in November.