Ghosts
 

I think he believed in something, if you understand my meaning. He was a bit of a fatalist actually, but he was also very superstitious. Truly a mixture of nature and nurture. I don't know exactly what he believed, he probably would have said that no-one can really ever know for sure, and that it would be rather arrogant to assume that one could know. I asked him once (…) if he believed in ghosts. He said that it would be nice if there "were" ghosts, as that would imply that there is something after death. In fact, I think he said, "Gee I hope so."...He did not have a religious funeral service. He's not buried in consecrated ground. We always celebrated Christmas and had huge Christmas trees.

-        K.K.H.

The first part

Before we could tell the dog to stop barking, the man and woman were already out of the van.

The man exiting the van was covered in hair, everywhere except the top of his head. He had oversized glasses and a red windbreaker, which was strange given the summer heat. The woman had black hair and it looked like she had cut it herself. She was wearing a blue windbreaker. They each had a lumbering girth that they carried across our lawn and up the cracked concrete steps to our front door, where they knocked. More barking. I was in the hallway that led to our door.

My wife was saying something. I was opening the door asking something about a package, and in turning my head towards the hallway, I missed the hand gripping at my throat.

“Gck!” I said.

“Who’s there?” my wife said, to the room and the barking dog. I was being violently murdered in the hallway. I died.

The man who strangled me, and the woman behind him, entered the house, where they walked down the hallway I had just been in, and turned into the living room where they violently murdered my wife and the dog. My wife and the dog were dead. The woman went back and locked the door. The man huffed, dragging my body into the middle of the living room with the other bodies. The man and woman were out of breath. 

Wispy, naked, ephemeral: our ghosts flowed from out of our bodies and into the room.

I surveyed the situation. Our crumpled dead bodies. The murderers in our house. “We don’t have to go to work anymore!” I said, raising my hands in the air. The man and woman could not see us, could not hear us.

My wife covered herself up with her arms. “What is this?”

“We’re dead ghosts.” I said. “Undead?”

“Yeah,” the dog said.

We turned to the ghost of our dog. “Wait, we can talk to each other now?”

“Yeah, we’re all dead. That’s kind of the great equalizer.” The dog wagged its tail a little.

“Leonard,” I said to the dog. “Why were you always so angry?”

“I knew that this was how we were all gonna die,” he said.

“How?”

“Dogs don’t perceive linear time,” he said. There was no elaboration.

Leonard and I followed the man and the woman as they moved through the house. They were in our kitchen now, rummaging through the drawers. The man pulled out two cups and they poured themselves coffee from the percolator, and took milk from the fridge. They found two spoons and for a while, the only sound in the house was the spoons tinkling in the cups as they stirred their coffee. It was like they were too big for our house - they went from the kitchen into the dining room, and the room seemed to shrink. In the dining room they pushed the laptop that had been set up on the table to the ground and started stomping on it with their boots. It was very destructive. It seemed like the natural continuation of what we had been watching, I thought – a Youtube video of an angry, sweaty man making a lasagna.

They sat at the dining room table to drink their coffee; nestled into place, surrounded by family pictures on our walls and my wife’s plants – plants that she told me had names like monstera, fiddle-leaf fig tree, silver fern, and Norfolk pine. It was normally a calming room. They drank in a disconcertingly delicate manner – grasping the mug handles between their thumb, index, and middle fingers, taking small sips, not slurping. Looking at them sitting there, with the dark rings under their eyes, which had a vibrancy that seemed piercing and intelligent…the thick, arched eyebrows…they looked like-

“Holy shit,” I said to my wife. “These guys look like late-period Stanley Kubrick to you?”

She was in the living room, still looking at the heap of our dead bodies. “I don’t want to be dead,” she said.

“Like, Eyes Wide Shut Stanley Kubrick,” I said. I knew I was right.

I went into the living room and put my arm around my wife’s shoulders. We were facing the old leather couch. We had both done the same paint-by-numbers painting once – an old man with a white beard in a canoe that was floating down a river. There was a black dog looking west, and a white dog looking east. Hers was hanging above the couch, because it was good. Mine was hanging in the bathroom, because it was funny.

“This isn’t how I thought it would happen either,” I told her.

Whenever I pictured our deaths, I thought of hospital rooms and grey hair and like, the smell of old people in adjoining beds. A confusion of pills, tubes stuffed into one or the other of our arms in a reclining hospital bed.

Or a terrific plane crash over the ocean – blind panic and the big sea, broken bones and gulping lungs full of water, maybe some whales.

 “What about this talking dog situation, though?” I said.

The man and woman had finished their coffees and they took all of the dishes – our unfinished breakfast and their coffee cups; and put them in the sink. I appreciated that. As we watched, one by one, they took our bodies to the door leading to the basement, and they pushed them down the stairs. We were clumped together at the bottom of the stairs, my wife, the dog, and I. 

Now my wife was looking at where we used to be, but it was just bloodstains on a hardwood floor. I didn’t know what to tell her. At the bottom of the basement stairs, we usually kept old Amazon boxes for recycling, or dirty dishtowels that needed to be washed. I felt very free.

“How about we go walk the dog,” I told everyone.

My wife started to cry, but it wasn’t normal crying – it was a wailing noise that seemed to shake the windows. When we left the house, I tried the doorknob and my hand passed through it, so I pretended it was on purpose and passed right through the door. It didn’t feel like anything.

We drifted along plains of grass and wheat. This was the farm near our house, a couple of streets over. The city was full of tall buildings, but we lived past the downtown core, where there was this huge government farm. In the absence of trees and buildings, the clouds were enormous overhead. There were crops of corn and crops of wheat and crops of things I didn’t recognize. I was touching my stomach. I was picturing, like, those dead sharks where they find license plates in them.

“I think I would have gotten this under control if I knew I was going to end up stuck like this,” I said. I folded my belly into this crease, and if my nipples were the eyes, the crease was the frown.

My wife was still crying - black birds skittered into the sky at our approach. The dog walked beside her.

“You look beautiful, of course.” I told her. “What’s that painting, Italian thing, of spring?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said. 

“Oh, you know! We saw it. In Florence or whatever. You know, all of his ladies are kind of in a frolic?” I posed in a delicate manner to explain - crossing my legs and using one hand to cover myself up and an arm to block my chest. “It’s not Carravag but a major guy.”

She sighed. “I don’t look like I’m in a Botticelli painting,” she said. 

“Botticelli!” I said. “What’s that one we saw; you made us walk all the way back to see it again before we had to leave.”

“There is a Spring one called Primavera, but the one you’re thinking of is actually The Birth of Venus,” she said. 

“That’s you,” I told her. I watched her floating along. I remembered her crouched amongst the tourists, one of the only people there not taking a picture of the painting. “It’s undeniable!” I told her. I made catcall noises in the field and they didn’t echo.

I thought of pressing a fold into my stomach again using a silly voice to make a joke about all of the bags of Franks chips and hotdogs they’d find in there when they did the autopsy. One of the clouds above us passed in front of the sun, and we were engulfed completely by its shade. I didn’t end up saying anything.

The sun came out again. I fell to my knees and looked at my hands, which were shaking. “E-MAILS!” I screamed. “I’LL NEVER BE ABLE TO SEND THE E-MAILS!” My voice was cracked and ragged. I saw my wife smile slightly, but there was no laughter.

I got up and brushed my knees off out of habit. “Look. Maybe this isn’t so bad,” I said.

“How could you even say that,” my wife said.

“I mean the...” I was treading on delicate ground “..all the…the paperwork! Forms and errands, lines, waiting and the. The. The fucking stuff! The Wednesdays and idiots and staring at your phone, the traffic, the – the commercials! The…the other people! We’re free from it! Divorced from the shit.” I gestured wildly with my hands at all of the shit. “And we’re still here, however we got here! Life ends but it goes on! That’s not so bad.”

“Yeah but it’s over now,” my wife said. “And wasn’t it just so goddamn ordinary? For it to be done now already?”

It was true. I had never even jet skied.

“I mean,” I said, “I remember feeling a kind of constant, background level of stress about not knowing how to change a car tire, and now that I’ll never have to? That’s a small victory.”

She had the look on her face that happened when she was trying not to smile at the dumb shit I said.

“And like, we still have each other?” I gave a hopeful shrug. The farm was calm. I didn’t know how this was going to work out.

“Yeah our ghost bodies and this talking dog,” she said. This was good.

“You know, none of this smells the same,” the dog said.

“What does it normally smell like?” I said.

“It’s not so much the what as the when, you know?” Leonard said. “All the smelling – it’s so we don’t become unmoored in time.”

I raised my eyebrows to my wife. She looked at the dog and rolled her eyes. I was happy to see us united against a common enemy.

We passed the green utility shed with the V of cartoon geese spray-painted on it. Underneath the graffittied birds was a dead patch of grass where a garbage can used to be, and on the dead patch of grass was a pile of multi-colored bags of dog shit. This was normally where we’d turn back and go home, but today we kept on walking.

None of us were talking about it, but we were walking to the sunflower field.

At the far end of the farm, by the hum of traffic from intersecting roads, was a field of sunflowers. Even though it was only some place we saw on the way home from doing groceries, it was still something nice to look at from the car. And other people liked them too - more and more we would see the youths littered amongst the stalks, phones at arm’s length, posing.

In our neighbourhood, it got to the point where we would see these roving groups of like 3, 5 people who looked like they were named Emma or Marlowe with shit like overalls and straw hats or clothes that made us feel old, and they were travelling in packs, lost on the streets, because the sunflowers were actually pretty hard to find if you didn’t know where to look.

It was unspoken, but walking to the sunflowers in person would give us something in common with these people, and that seemed embarrassing somehow. Only now we were dead and it’s not like there was a lot to do.

To get to the sunflowers, you had to walk over this tiny grassy hill. Doing this for the first time, it was actually very dramatic, in the low-stakes way that walking in a field is dramatic. You can’t see the sunflowers, you walk over the crest in the hill, and then you see the sunflowers.

We couldn’t see the sunflowers.

We walked up the crest.

There they were.

A patch of gold perched on top of big leafy stalks, saucers pointed sunwards in big organized rows. It was a wonder close up. I felt stupid for never having come here before. “Why didn’t we do this when we were alive?” I said. I wanted to take pictures. Once you tuned out the noise of the traffic, it was a quiet morning. We walked around the field and through the stalks, and came back out to the hill.

Leonard stopped and lifted his front left paw daintily – he’d caught a scent. He started talking enthusiastically – he went on to explain the afterlife in great detail but I wasn’t paying attention.

I was looking. Beyond the field and the intersecting roads lay a horizon of strip malls and government buildings and suburban houses.

I was thinking of the first time we saw the sunflowers. We were on the way home from the Walmart. The car in front of us stopped abruptly and I honked at them and called them a shit asshole motherfucker because I was in my car and they couldn’t hear me and my wife looked over to the farm and saw the unexpected and calming pop of yellow.

“Sunflowers,” she said, and she was right.

In that moment, I had understood why the car had braked suddenly. I recognized the harmony of connected things - those moments where the signal comes in clean and life ruffles your hair and reminds you that things are happening without you, that commonplace beauty is around us all of the time, even when you are driving home from the Walmart, if you’d only look. A wave of something warm was washing over me. But that car. Those brake lights. The people…who were just so fucking bad at driving. My hands clenched into fists.

Look, even as a ghost, most of you people drive like shit - I felt that much clarity in the afterlife.

When I started paying attention again the dog was gone.

“Where did Leonard go?” I asked.

“He reached a state of fulfillment and he dissipated into this shining light,” my wife said.

“Haha fuck! No way!”

“Yeah, he was a good boy.”

“What was he talking about?”

“All of it – life and the meaning of it and why he was always barking. What happens when you go.”

“Righteous!” I said. I was making that surfing hand gesture where your thumb and pinky stick out and you wiggle your hand. What was I doing.

We stayed to look over the field. Three men in government jumpsuits and hard hats arrived. They surveyed the borders of the field and spoke into radios, and out came this big combine harvester – a boxy tractor-like machine attached to a long row of metal teeth. There was a man sitting in the machine, which was a cool mint green.

“What is this,” my wife said.

“I think they are getting rid of the sunflowers,” I said.

“Why?”

“They spread all over the place if you don’t cut them down eventually,” I said. I was making this up. I didn’t really know anything about sunflowers.

“The end of the sunflowers,” my wife said.

The three men around the field held up their hands in a stop sign, and then a thumbs up sign, and the man in the machine started up the combine harvester – the metal teeth turned into this shiny blur, and the noise of the combine harvester muted the noise of the traffic. The machine was directed at the stalk, and the whirring metal teeth touched the sunflowers, and then the sunflowers were gone. Squelching and evisceration – the first row cut up into a cragged brown mass as the tractor spewed out thick black smoke. After four passes with the machine, the field was leveled.

We stood looking at the empty field, and we didn’t know what to say to each other.  

The workers packed up to leave, and a teenaged girl came running down the hill in a panic.

“What happened to all the sunflowers?” she asked the work crew.

One of the guys said to her “Ah you gotta cut them all down or they’ll spread and spread. Everything would be sunflowers.” He said it in the universal tone of the bullshitter trying to avoid more work, so I didn’t know if I was right or not.

When the work crew was gone, the girl walked up to the decimated field, held her phone at an angle above her head, made an exaggerated frown, and took a couple of pictures.

I turned to my wife.

“The light was so beautiful,” she said.  

The Second Part

We were dancing in an abandoned warehouse by the red glow of the EXIT sign. There was no music and we couldn’t feel each other but it was nice to sway in each other’s arms. If you paid attention, you could hear rats scurrying in the dark, sirens dopplering in the night, and the odd punctuation of an argument in the street. So I was lying about there not being any music.

The days were without end, and we didn’t feel tired, but we didn’t feel awake either. We didn’t feel warm or cold or anything. We could only walk places.

Bad things happened if we stayed in a place for too long. We went to see her father – watched him bake white fish and steam broccoli in a sparse kitchen, watched him eat it in front of the TV. Listened to him call his brother. The small phrases and gulfs of silence. He stubbed his toe walking up the stairs and swore in a manner that was defeated. It was unclear if he knew we were dead. After a couple of days, we noticed our silhouettes becoming burnt into the brick wall of the dining room and we left. He liked to watch reruns of the shows that were on when he was growing up.

My parents lived three hours away but that was by car and I didn’t want to see them squinting at newspapers and talking over each other in the sheen of a fanatically cleaned dining room.

We went to see friends who lived in town, but it felt too private. There was a sickness to our voyeurism, and everyone masturbated. One of my friends clipped his toenails while sitting in a recliner, and let the nails embed themselves into carpet. Nobody vacuumed. We would leave to wander into apartment hallways and water would trickle down the walls. In suburban neighbourhoods, the cold white light of the lampposts would seize and flicker and go dark. It was boring to look at people looking at their phones, and we would never stay for long.

We retraced the past. At our favourite restaurant, we’d linger in the murmuring conversations trying to eavesdrop on first dates. There was a kind of energy to the questions, the conversations, that was nervy and hopeful. Then a rat would scurry out of the kitchen and cough up blood on the floor. At a park where we were almost charged with loitering on the night I proposed, we watched as a chain on a swing set snapped loose. A girl in pigtails twisted her knee and cried.

We were starting to understand how haunting worked.

And in this way, we lost our families.

In this way, we lost our friends.

In this way, we lost our sense of place.

But it wasn’t terrible. We were together, and that was nice.

Sometimes I’d see my wife using her finger to trace the path of a dandelion seed being carried by the wind. Or she’d stop and look at the way a shy chubby kid at the bus stop would pull on the bottom of their shirt. Once she found a cocoon, this green bulbous mass hanging from a branch. The cocoon itself though; I hadn’t noticed it – the greens and browns of nature often blurred together for me, and I had to feign interest in the transformative power of life. In this way, I was catching more of my wife’s private smiles, and the enthusiasm was back in her voice.

We marked our endless time by watching the sun rise and set. I liked the rising more than the setting, now that sleeping was out of the equation. The ones I liked best were when the sun would illuminate the bruises in what used to be a darkened sky. To me it was the day that still seemed natural. The sun’s setting though, that slow and murky psychedelic exit, it was good – fine, even – but then it was just dark and there was less to look at. I had never seen so much of the sun coming and going in my goddamn life.

I resented being beholden to the living. If I wanted to hear a song I liked, someone else had to play it. I would linger in a coffee shop if I saw someone reading a book I knew, but their head would always get in the way. The only music I could remember were the lyrics to the Pharoahe Monch verse on this Organized Konfusion song called Bring it On. He’d say:

Gimme the P-H

Gimme the A-R

Gimme the O-A

Gimme the H-E

Pharoahe

And then he would say:

Crazy poison tip arrows are hittin' you from all directions

You cannot dodge or manage to dislodge

them

From the point at which they are connecting

I am s-s-selecting a n-n-n-new style-style

For the p-pile-piles of MC's who try to get b-buck-Buckwild

F-F-F-Fuck that!

There was more. It was a good song. I was coming to terms with the fact that I didn’t know anything and probably had wasted my life.

We spent one early undead day walking in a rainstorm, enjoying the sensation of not getting wet. We walked by old buildings that were covered in scaffolding and tarps, trapped in a state of perpetual restoration. The old buildings were close to dive bars and tourist trap restaurants, and a market where there were tents of unsold produce. People scurried down side streets with umbrellas. There was a park where we used to picnic, and nobody was there because of the rain, which was coming down in thick sheets from the sky. From the park, we walked to higher ground and found ourselves at a statue of an old French person who was holding up this funny-looking cross. The statue overlooked our city, and a river, and bridges from our city to the one across from us, where the people spoke French. The French side was full of brutal rectangular office buildings, and sloping hills covered in trees. We looked over at the two cities as lightning fissured the sky in these big blinding crackles, with thunder booming and rattling the ground. Everything was grey and beautiful.

“This isn’t so bad,” my wife said.

I kept looking at the statue wondering if lightning was going to strike, wondering if the moment I looked away was the moment that something good was going to happen. But nothing happened. The storm petered out into darkness, the day ended, and light from streetlamps below bled into the river.

“It’s pretty okay,” I said.

I liked it better when we spent the afternoon watching people park like assholes at the grocery store instead of looking at bugs and leaves or rain or buildings. There was something about a car slowly hitting another car - the bumpers connecting, the constipated expressions on people’s faces; it was getting me through all of this fucking liminal space.

That day in the rain was the last time I could remember where it hadn’t been sunny, dry, oppressive. A heatwave. It had been weeks, or months.

In the warehouse, we were still dancing.

The floor would have been sticky, if we could have felt it. Inside, there was discarded refuse, old and rusted machines, cans of paint, cobwebs and animal droppings. Notably, a mysterious pyramid of crushed beer cans. There was a lone piece of graffiti that was indecipherable, but whose meaning I took to be significant. We could hear someone outside vomiting with an almost religious fervor, after which they shouted, “I got it out! I got it out!” to somebody. I was happy for them but it did kill the mood.

My wife and I stopped dancing.

“Do you remember when I was throwing up like that the night we got married?” I asked her.  “It was the first day I ever really wore a ring.” I remember the toilet bowl and my wife trying to stop me from putting the ring into my suit pocket.

“You were very protective of it,” she told me.

This wasn’t a good thing to be talking about.

“Hey! What about the day we got Leonard!” I said.

The day we got Leonard we drove to some house in the east end. We had grown up with dogs. I grew up with Bernese mountain dog named Dogmo who died when I was fifteen, and my wife had grown up with a German Shepherd named Ethel that died when she was twenty-two. Having a dog would be a good thing for us to be doing with our lives, we had decided.

The house looked like a house in the suburbs, and in our car we sat on the verge of tears excited about meeting a dog. When we walked inside, the walls were coated in three feet of grime and my wife kept sneezing and there was a St Bernard – the mom – barking, and there was a Great Pyrenees – the dad – also barking, and there was only one puppy there. A man with exposed shoulders and an unkempt beard sold him to us for six hundred dollars, and the dog didn’t have a name. We named him Leonard, and when we took him home he cried and didn’t sleep. We were married within the year.

“That was a nice day,” she said.

Now a second person was vomiting outside. It was like this big competition.

“Maybe we should go,” my wife said.

“Where?”

“The forest?” she said.

To get to the forest you had to walk over this bridge and go to the French part of town and it took forever and I didn’t want to go.

“Let’s go to the forest,” I said.

Before we left, I took one last look at the graffiti. I thought if I stared at it long enough, or from odd angles, that the letters would resolve themselves into something, but there was no resolution. I felt embarrassed. We malingered on.  

I did not care about trees. They existed in spite of us. I did not know the names of anything in the forest, but we were walking through one. It was daylight when we got there and the sun was filtering through the leaves. My wife and I walked through the forest and this is what it was like:

There were trees. There were green frilly things on the ground that looked like bigger versions of plants we had at home. They shot out into a bushy form that looked like it needed a haircut. There were flowers, tiny spots of yellow and red poofing out of delicate grass, which was a thing I did know; grass. There were dead trees lying broken along the ground, decomposing in sections, loose ringlets of bark sloughing away, with disks of cadaverous grey skin rising out of the rot. Not every dead tree was the same – some were thin and whitish, others were burly and brown or blackened, some with tumorous masses. For the living, there were trees that shot up huge and round with strong branches that stretched to the sky and stole the light, there were skinny narrow trees that swayed in the wind, trees that twisted into each other, trees that were codependent. Trees that were little babies. Trees that were as delicate as breath. Trees that were an empty shout. Trees that belly danced with needles. A green that was varied and uninterrupted, except by dirt and brown and rock and sky. A green that spored and thickened. A dense and neverending landscape of the stuff. But every forest was made up anyway, a thing that happened in the dirt to turn sun and water into a way to suck in carbon dioxide and shoot out oxygen into the sky. It’s not like we could breathe anymore.

We left no trace on the ground, no crunching leaves or mush of mossy land. We didn’t follow the paths. We weren’t stung by insects. From a rocky outcropping, we watched the sunset. The sun slunk beyond the horizon making a half-hearted show of colour. Some puff of cloud got caught turning pink and then purple and then it was over.

We had been in the woods for a day.

“You know, Buckwild was the producer.” I said.

My wife was walking ahead. She stopped.

“What?”

“Like, when the guy says he’s s-s-selecting a n-n-n-new style-style for the p-pile-piles of MC's who try to get b-buck-Buckwild – it’s like, he’s at the forefront of innovation for other rappers who are trying to go crazy on the mic, sure, but also, the song was produced by this dude named Buckwild, so it’s literally…”

“Do you think we could see a deer!” my wife said.

We tried, but we only found racoons.

In the morning, there was a symphony of animals waking up. A chirruping, squawking daybreak. Squirrels, chipmunks, and birds whom I recognized if they were logos of sports teams busied themselves with the act of staying alive.

The woods carried on. There were trees that looked like pictures of my mother holding me as a baby – a wrinkled reddened face engulfed by a sweatshirt; a memory I’ll never remember. There were trees that looked like my grandmother’s basement. Trees that looked like her telling me in broken English about how she didn’t like my father’s mustache as she ladled chicken and cabbage soup into a bowl. Bark that looked like scraped knees and grass-stained clothes. Trees that looked like the pictures of my wife in grade 2, in grade 7, in grade 12, in university, that her father still had hung up around his lonely house. A lake that looked like the pitcher of beer on our first date. A rock face that looked like the indentations on our couch. A sky that looked like my wife’s face from the point of view of her lap, my head resting there, our bloodshot eyes smiling at each other while a Neil Young record played in the background. Trees that looked like the day we moved in together. Brown and yellowing pine bristled on the forest floor and it looked like every happy moment we’d ever had, kissing in public and dancing in basements. So much forest I saw trees that looked like our fights about money, our fights about having a child, our fights about where to live, our fights that weren’t even about us fighting, our fights that were our anger about the shit of daily living redirected at each other because that was the person who was around, and therefore responsible, a co-conspirator in a crime that wasn’t going according to plan. And still, not a deer, only another sunset (red across the horizon, a cloudy night, an unremarkable dirge).

We were in the dark when my wife stopped us, excited at a piece of flattened grass. “This is a deer bed,” she said. “Maybe they’re close.” It just looked like the ground to me. So I learned that a deer bed was where the deer wasn’t.

It came as a surprise to us when we heard other voices.

“Our van ran out of gas on a country road,” a guy was saying.

“Oh-hh I bet,” said another voice, a woman.

“No, I’m not joking around here. Only-”

“What, only what?” a third voice said.

“Okay, you guys know I used to be in a barbershop quartet, right?”

“Shut up,” the third voice said.

“You know, I can’t vouch for the rest of this but that part is true,” the first woman was saying. As we drifted closer, we could hear the crackle of a fire.

“There’s no way Carl was in a barbershop quartet.” A fourth voice said.

“No, really! It’s how he wins every game of Two Truths and A Lie.” The woman said.

Everyone took their turns laughing and making fun of Carl for being in barbershop quartet. The firelight was making prison bars out of the tree trunks, shadows leading us, and we came upon them there - a group of four campers huddled around a fire in the woods. Young people with sweaters and fold-out chairs, a cooler and two small tents illuminated in the background amongst giant trees.

“Thank you, Jennifer,” Carl said. “And I’m very sad for the rest of you, so blind to the glory of a good multi-part harmony. Now can I tell this story?”

There was murmured agreement.

I looked at my wife. She looked at me and said, “You know, I don’t even know if it’s safe for these people to have a fire here.”

“Oh, come on!” I told her. “It’s people – we love people! We haven’t seen people in so long.”

“Yeah but what happens when we stay in a place for long enough?” she said.

“Bad things.”

“Exactly.”

“But.”

“What?”

“What if it’s just that bad things happen all the time.”

There was a pause, and one of the campers was loading a marshmallow onto a sharp stick, and I made an optimistic shrugging gesture to emphasize my point. Carl had started talking again.

“Fine,” my wife said.

“Thank you,” I said.

We sat down cross-legged in front of the fire to listen to Carl:

“-feel about my cool and wonderful hobby, because while singing with the boys brings me great joy, I also know it to be true that there is a lot of hatred against us in the BSQ community, and this is a story that is a testament to-”

The guy with the marshmallow had fucked it up, it had caught on fire and the sugars bunt quickly and the person with the stick was frowning

“-the power of song.”

“So,” Carl said. “Our van ran out of gas on a country road. On a dark country road, actually. It was me and the rest of the barbershop quartet, and we were already in a bad mood. We were on the way home from this invitational in upstate New York, and it hadn’t gone well. Our Lead had been hungover; our Baritone was out of rhythm, our Bass maybe past his prime. My tenor floated over it all, but that’s not the point here, the point is we were stuck in the middle of nowhere.”

He paused. Another marshmallow had burnt like a coal into the fire and the guy with the stick lost possession to the woman on his right.

“If you know upstate New York you know it’s a lot of dead space in between places. Lonely roads and boarded up towns punctuated by these rolling hills and forests. It’s the kind of place where your cell phone doesn’t always get reception, and that’s what had happened to us. So: we had lost the competition, our car was stuck, and we were lost. We wore these three-piece tuxedos to meets and we all looked disheveled at this point. Untucked vests, untucked shirts, loosened bowties, that kind of thing.

“We didn’t have a gas can or anything in the back, and we didn’t know where the closest gas station was. Our Baritone thought it could have been like 20 miles since the last town we drove through. We made an inventory of supplies: all we had was a lighter, a pack of hotdogs, a two-four of MGD, and a family size bag of salt and vinegar Lays. Oh, and a hatchet.

“To me the solution was clear – we would make a night of it, find a place to camp out, get drunk, swat at the mosquitos, and eat hotdogs as we looked up at the night sky. Our Bass wanted to get home to his wife and kids, and wanted to wait by the car to see if anyone else would come passing by. The rest of us though, wanted to get drunk and look at the stars. So we worked out a buddy system that was unique to a barbershop quartet – we would sing.”

Here Carl sang out a Hello in the voice of the Lead. Then he sang Hello in the voice of the Bass, and again in the voice of the Tenor, and again in the voice of the Baritone.

The woman had successfully toasted a marshmallow and had passed the stick to the other woman, who I understood to be Jennifer.

“So – hello, hello, hello, hello! – we had our buddy system. So Bass is waiting in the car and off the three of us went. There was this big field by the side of the road, and the darker darkness of trees off in the distance. In the sky the stars were clear – you could see the Milky Way, kind of like how you can see it tonight.”

Everybody looked up at the sky, us too. A bag of chips opened and we all looked down.

“And like on that night, I opened the bag of chips. Look, I’m a tenor but the truth of the matter is that I’m lazy, so I like to delegate. Our Lead and the Baritone go off to the trees looking for firewood. I see the tiny light from the lighter move down the field and I open a beer.”

There was a rustling in the woods. Everyone looked around.

“What’s that?” Jessica said.

“Probably raccoons.” Carl said. “They can smell the food.”

The guy who kept burning the marshmallows stood up. He cleared his throat and bellowed into the woods: “GET OUT OF HERE, RACCOON.”

The woman who was good at marshmallows looked embarrassed.

“I’m sure that worked,” Carl said. “Okay, so now I’m alone eating chips in the middle of nowhere. I can’t see the light from the lighter anymore, and I’m done my beer. I open another one, and to test out the system again I sing: ‘Hello.’ And I hear a hello from the van, and a hello from the woods, and a third hello that turned into a blood-curdling scream.”

Here Carl let out a blood-curdling scream. It echoed into the woods.

“And I don’t know if my friends are fucking with me or whatever, but now I’m running to the woods to see what that scream was – I’m a very brave person. I lost the hotdogs, I tripped on the ground, I’m shouting out to see where people are – it’s a nightmare. I can’t see anything. I shout out one last time and I hear-” Carl grabbed Jessica abruptly and she acted like she wasn’t afraid but you could tell she was a little bit afraid. “I hear my name being shouted by our Lead! And I find him in the woods, and he’s holding the Baritone, but the Baritone’s throat is slit and he’s bleeding all over everything.

“And I’m there, and I see my friend is dead, and I’m freaking out. And I’m telling the Lead, ‘Holy shit, we need to get back to the van, some maniac is out here killing people in the woods!’ And now we hear the van honking – quick and urgent – HONK! HONK!! And we start running to the van – I’m holding the Lead’s hand, we’re running through the woods, only I feel his hand get pulled back, I lose him, and the horn goes long and flattens out – HOOOOOOOOONNNNNNNKKK – Like something is stuck pressing down on it.

“So I get to the van, I’m out of breath, and the windshield is covered in blood, our Bass is dead, body slumped onto the horn, and I lost the Lead, and I am panicked, I can’t think straight, I don’t want to die here too. But I collect myself. I remember our buddy system.

“I sing out ‘Hello,’ and it echoes into the field. And tiny, off-in-the-distance? I’ll be damned if I didn’t hear another hello.”

“Oh come on!” the guy who was bad at marshmallows said.

“No I’m serious,” Carl said. “I’m running towards it. I sing out, ‘Hello!’ one more time.

“And it’s quiet.”

Carl stops talking to emphasize how it was quiet.

“And then in the dark this giant ball comes at me. And I catch it! I catch it in my hands and I look down, only it’s not a ball. It’s the severed head of our Lead. He really had had such a beautiful voice. And I know with all of my heart at this point that we’re being murdered by this monster, I don’t know maybe a barbershop quartet killed his family or something and he’s out for revenge,” Carl said.

Carl stood up with the bag of chips in his hand, and he said into the woods “LOOK. I KNOW SOMEONE IS OUT THERE.”

“I KNOW SOMEONE IS TRYING TO STOP ME FROM SINGING THE SONG THAT IS IN MY HEART”. He shouted.

“BUT I’LL NEVER STOP! I’LL KEEP SINGING IT!”

And here he paused,

he breathed in deep,

                                                                        he opened his mouth to sing,

and was interrupted by a grunting in the woods behind him.

Everybody looked behind Carl, and we saw the animal – it looked like a moose but smaller, with this crown of antlers, and it charged through the darkness behind the fold-out chairs and it knocked Carl off to the side and it ran through the fire, briefly alight in a fury of red, before charging at my wife and I, passing through us and running off into the darkness beyond.

The logs of the fire spilt embers that spread - tiny fires spilling everywhere as Jessica grabbed Carl to try to get him up, and the other two ran off, the girl reaching for a jug of water, the guy out of sight now, the firelight raging all ways out.

It was too late.

We walked in silence through columns of red and orange, through pure white heat and the cracking of trunks. Walking in fire for that long was disorienting – nothing made sense. My wife - it wasn’t like I was chasing her, but it was like she had been drifting further and further ahead. We didn’t say anything to each other.

When we were out of the worst of it, we looked back. The forest was ablaze, and beyond the inky smoke, it was like there was an ocean flowing into the sky. The ocean seemed to breathe and pulse, and before it disappeared forever, it shimmered like light passing through diamonds.

“That’s what happened to Leonard,” my wife said.

“I think it’s happening to the trees,” I said.

Now it was just fire and smoke.  

In the morning, she was gone.

The Third Part

The fire in the sky and the smoke in the air made everything glow. It looked like golden hour as I walked down the street, seeing familiar neighbourhood houses, birds chirping and children biking, laughter and whizzing colour, older women walking yappy miniature poodles, people clasping hands, happy times indeed on this side of the river – the fire wasn’t here. I approached the house, the yard still neat and trimmed, weedless really, and saw that the mini-van still parked out front all these months later.

I had to laugh.

I went inside and my house was more or less the same, except there was more garbage on the floor. The paint-by-numbers in the living room still hung up, although perhaps slightly askew. The family pictures all accounted for, the plants, even, still alive. My murderers – still the same hulking figures –  were in the kitchen banging on pots and pans, making dinner. The woman was stirring something in a giant steaming pot, while the man was hacking at a whole chicken with a big knife, each swing landing in an imprecise stroke, until the chicken was rendered into senseless pieces.

I laughed and laughed as they moved carefully around each other in the kitchen to navigate the space. When the woman needed to get something out of the fridge they looked like they were engaged in a coordinated dance, and I laughed some more.

I laughed until it was no longer genuine; until it was this nervous noise I was making. To have still had such faith in cause and effect, even now. I found that surprising.

I decided to take a little tour.

In the basement, our bodies were bloated, leaky, skin cracked and degenerating. The walls were still unfinished, exposed wiring sticking out, loose pieces of wood nailed to the shape of the halls down there. The floor was cracked tile, and there were boot prints trailing away from us, from our bodies, towards the laundry machines, and again on the way back up the stairs.

In our bedroom, the blinds had been ripped away, and a series of wooden boards were blocking the windows. In our spare room, the mattress had been cut into pieces and rearranged into a cryptic fort. In our office, old textbooks and floppy paper manuals lay ripped up on the floor. The tub in the bathroom was clogged with matted hair, and the mirror had been broken, but the toilet was clean. Every now and then I would see a hole that had been punched into drywall.

I was alone, and I wanted bad things to happen in this house, and I decided to stay.

I’d follow them from room to room, these funhouse idiot versions of us, and I’d watch them live their backward lives, mumbling in their language to each other, the jangle of their cutlery in the mornings, the gall of their ability to persist in the spaces I used to. My jaw would clench, I’d watch them brushing their teeth in the evening, foam dribbling from their mouths, and wanted nothing less than the annihilation of this place. I wanted the ceiling to split open and for the bed to come smashing down on top of us, all sitting in the living room on the puffy leather sofa. I wanted the basement to flood, for the flooding to spill upstairs, these golems slipping on the floor until the faulty wiring electrocuted them. I wanted smoke to drift in from the windows to suffocate them. I wanted a meteor to fall here and only here, obliterating the rectangular plot of the house and nothing else, a deep and smoking cavern.

The worst part was that the man would get up early on Saturdays and would go up and down the street mowing people’s lawns. The worst part was how the woman would smoke cigarettes with our neighbour, a wraith-like woman who was hooked up to an oxygen machine. They would help her with her groceries when the delivery boy came by. All of this with smoke in the air and the fire across the river still blazing.

I did like it when they put on the television.

When we had been alive, my wife had bought a maroon sweater with the name of a beach we had never visited, and when it came in the mail there were was a second, identical sweater that had been sent as well, as an accident. We would wear these sweaters on weekend days when we wanted to fill our bodies with pizza and wine and trash television, and we would call these beach days.

Our murderers had stuffed themselves into the beach day sweaters and I was sitting with them on the couch. We were watching a woman on the television - she was in a red gown, and her eyelashes were big, and she was happy because so many men in suits were arriving in limousines to try to marry her, and she had roses to give out to them.

During a commercial break, where actors chosen by focus groups ran errands happily as a friendly voice detailed the debilitating side effects of a pharmaceutical product, the woman forcefully gestured to the basement and through her grumbling I got the impression that the man had been putting off an errand of great importance. The man got off the couch and started yelling, and the woman got off the couch and joined him, and their faces were catching globs of spit from the other’s words.

The woman punched the man in the stomach, and he doubled over, and when he had bent down, he grappled her legs and pushed her onto the coffee table, which splintered under the weight. The woman grabbed a piece of the table and smashed it against the man’s head until he stayed on the ground. He was breathing heavily and he seemed to lose consciousness.

It was a very hopeful moment for me.

But the commercial break ended, and the woman watched the show until there were no more roses. She went to bed. When the man woke up from the floor, he buried our bodies in the yard.

Nights would often turn acrimonious - broken bottles, threatening shouts and fists mashed into faces, into walls. These evenings always resolved themselves tenderly - quarrels would end in slow kisses, they would clasp hands and sing happy gibberish to each other before falling into a tranquil sleep.

I wasn’t heartless. I thought of my wife, and our dog, the people we saw in the woods. I thought of endings. I knew that everything ended, wholly and without satisfaction. I knew that I had ended, but that I was still here, and that this would end too. I remembered how big life could be, how enormous the rooms of my childhood seemed, until I grew up and looked at pictures of the cramped spaces. I wondered if life was the act of rediscovering how small things really were, until that fateful moment where a door opened and it was over.

I said, “But those are earthly concerns,” to the empty room

Outside of the window, you could see that the fire hadn’t stopped.

Flecks of grey ash would float in the sky. Sometimes you could see a person on the street wandering in these dirty rags, and you’d know they were from the other side of the river. I saw a naked person roaming the streets one day and surreptitiously leaned back from the living room window. I wasn’t interested in new people. I wondered if this lasted long enough if I’d see the end of the world. There was more boredom than I expected.

I remember one day the man and the woman seemed particularly engaged in a series of preparations. The man spent the day constructing a casserole-like structure that was baked for many hours in the oven. The woman had spent the day collecting liquids from mysterious containers she had been minding in the basement – it was the brown of too many colours mixed together, and it was pulpy. They seemed eager, nervous, excited.

That night, another minivan pulled up to the house. Seven people who were clearly family, and so who also resembled late-period Stanley Kubrick, flooded the house, giving bear hugs to the man and the woman, crying in happiness, and sharing meagre gifts – a beaten up cardboard box that appeared to be full of old socks; a bucket of cold chicken wings, a handful of batteries, a bag of paper plates and loose plastic cutlery.

They all had a great night together, crowded around the dining room table, shoulders and arms touching, sharing the chicken and casserole on the plates, drinking the brown liquid, dancing in the room with the broken coffee table. The new people gathered the garbage into bags at the end of the night, and I watched from the living room window as they all went outside, arms around each other’s shoulders, looking at the orange tinted smoke that lay beyond the houses across the street.

When the others left, car horn honking down the street, cheerful goodbyes shouted out of open windows, the sunset that night was the man and woman, changed into the beach day sweaters, plopped in front of the TV again. I sat down next to them. The room was dark and the screen illuminated us.

Sometimes, I’d catch them trying to mouth the words that the TV said.

I knew that there had to be a way out.

I knew that a dog could figure it out.

I pictured myself floating in a calm sea. The sun was washing over me, and there was the deep and unknown water beneath me. It felt important to me to slip into that unknown.

One morning I had parked my car on a gravel lot and looked up at an office building and the people walking towards it. I could not. I drove home, alone, and Leonard barked and wagged his tail and I pet him on the head and walked to the cupboard and gave him treats and let him outside. I opened our junk drawer and pulled out a ziplock bag that had all of our weed stuff in it and I rolled a joint and smoked it in the backyard. I wrote an email with great focus. The email that said I was sick, and I sent it to my boss. The sun was on my face, and the tree in the backyard swayed gently in the breeze, leaves rustling, the only noise in the quiet of that morning. I had eaten oatmeal for breakfast but I was hungry. I took the ziplock bag and put it in my back left pocket, and I took my bike lock key and put it in my back right pocket, and I felt my other pockets to make sure I had my wallet and my phone. I took enormous handfuls of the dog treats – dried out liver bites – and I told Leonard in an excited voice that it was treat time, and I put one handful of treats at one end of the couch, and the other handful of treats at the other end of the couch, and I said Treat Time Treat Time and I left the house. I took my bicycle and rode it slowly over the bridge to the French part of town and my mouth was incredibly dry, and I had no water and the wind over the bridge felt amazing. I locked up my bike next to a pub and now that the wind was gone and I was still, I noticed that I had sweat through my office clothes. In the pub, seated at their outdoor patio, I ordered a breakfast that had three eggs and beans and ham and bacon and peameal bacon and sausage and four pieces of toast and orange juice instead of coffee and I ate it in silence and so quickly that I remember the waitress being surprised. Like ‘Oh, szir would you like the bill?’ with the Oh going up in register like it was its own separate question. The only other person eating was a stylish French woman with grey hair and enormous sunglasses. I couldn’t see her eyes. I paid and I left the restaurant and walked to a little park but there was a child playing with its mother and so I went to a different park and it was empty and I sat cross-legged in the grass and rolled another joint and smoked it outside and I felt great and I wandered around until I found a used bookstore, and I bought a slim paperback that had a detective on it shooting a gun at this shadow that was engulfing him and this woman he was holding. The pages were stained green and it smelled musty and it cost 3.95, and I felt for all of the change in my pocket as I paid, the person in the bookstore not speaking English and me not speaking French. I walked back to my bike and rode it back to the English side of the river, and I rode my bike along the path at the river’s edge, mindful of the geese and their droppings, until I found a park bench. I tried to read the book but it wasn’t good, and I felt like I had made the wrong decision in buying it, and it felt like the day was turning, that I was wasting it, and so when the path was clear I made a gesture out of throwing the book into the river, the book splaying in the wind and landing in a white hush before floating along in the water. I felt like an idiot for throwing the book in the river and my mouth was the dessert, or cotton, or nothing that could sustain life. I needed a new thing to do with my day. There was a momentum I was not properly seizing. I took my bike up downtown to a food court that had just opened, and I made a diligent study of the many vendors, and jostled my way through the crowd of people dressed like me, and I thought in my head Treat Time Treat Time and I ate pizza, and then I ate chicken, and then I ate Thai food, and then I ate a donut, and I left clutching my stomach. Outside, I saw the French woman again, the one with the grey hair and the sunglasses. I nodded to her and said “Same day,” and I had said it cheerfully, and she took off her sunglasses and looked at me and there was no recognition. I felt terrible from the food, and I walked to a coffee shop that I knew had a clean public bathroom and I XXXXX and felt an enormous lightness and freedom, and walked back outside and thought to myself Treat Time Treat Time again. I stopped at a brewery, and I drank a beer outside in the sun and I didn’t enjoy it, finished anyway. The bike home was uphill and felt and the bloat and the pumping of legs made me feel … but I got home, I did, and gave more handfuls of treats to Leonard instead of taking him on a walk, and I fell asleep on the couch. I woke up and took a shower and looked at my phone until the front door opened and in came my wife with the rustle of grocery bags. She was in a good mood, her day had been good, and she told me I looked sleepy and I decided to lie about my day and complained about work. There was no reason to any of it. She had bought pork chops from the grocery store that I didn’t want to eat but I had already lied, and this might be the closest I would ever get to becoming pregnant, full of life but it would be my own chewed food. I thought I could do anything. They were thick and took a long time to cook and they smoked out our house – it really smelled like pork inside for days.

I was still on the couch and the TV was still on and the man and the woman were still there.

The man kissed the woman on the forehead.

A commercial came on.

I thought long and hard, and in the end I think that was the most I ever ate.

Eventually it rained again, and I don’t know, people stopped glowing in the street.