Read More: A brief Q&A with Chris Vanjonack
Sol’s major red flag is that she does not believe in the authenticity of the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing.
She does believe in subsequent moon landings, and in science, climate change, and vaccinations, but when she’s drunk, which is often, she likes to claim that Stanley Kubrick staged Neil Armstrong’s moonwalk on a soundstage in Huntsville, Alabama. We used to get into fights about it. Long, head-banging back-and-forths that started out funny but grew to reveal deep philosophical divides between us.
“I don’t understand how you could think this way,” I’d tell her, exhausted, sad.
A few weeks before my death in an electrical storm, she took it even further: “How can you be so sure that nothing happens when we die? That there are no such things as soulmates? That our spirits aren’t recycled? How can you be so positive that a little man, just like you, stepped foot on an astronomical body?”
In retrospect, I mean, fuck.
It’s Friday night and Sol is well-dressed, confident, gorgeous, the oceans in her eyes flashing solar systems as she talks up photography, politics, mental illness, spatial awareness—the whole wide everything—to her dumb-looking date who sits rigid in his chair next to mine. He is also well-dressed but is a little bland-looking and is lacking some vital quality of spirit in his eyes or hands or humor. He sporadically checks his phone and does this weird thing where he clears his throat and looks around the restaurant patio whenever Sol makes a joke. And it’s like: laugh, dude, she’s funny. But he holds this default, neutral expression throughout, like a statue. Honest to God, if he could feel it, I’d probably hit him.
“And it’s exciting, this road trip,” Sol says, riding her own flying segue from an earlier conversation thread, “because we’ve known each other half our lives now, but we’ve never, you know, met.” The trip in question is to Portland, where she is going to meet her pen pal, Brian, who she’s corresponded with since she was a teenager.
The trip is in three weeks, and the drive will take nineteen hours. She’s leaving at 5:00 a.m. I know all this because I look over her shoulder while she fusses with Google Maps, while she reads Brian’s emails, while she writes in her journal.
I’m still not sure if this is a violation.
“You’d better be careful,” her date says. “You ever see Catfish?”
“We’ve Skyped like a hundred times,” Sol says, hurt, I can tell, because her voice goes up at the end of her sentence the way it did whenever we used to fight about conspiracy theories or where to spend Christmas. “And plus we’re friends on Facebook. It’s tough to BS that. He gets tagged in things. Pictures with roller coasters.”
“I’d never drive 1,000 miles for a stranger.”
Their waitress stops at the table and reaches through me to take their plates. “My sister met her partner on an MLB subreddit,” she says. “Couldn’t help overhearing.”
Once the waitress is out of earshot, the dude says, “God, I hate that. Talking like that to customers. It’s off-putting.”
“You’re off-putting,” says Sol. “You know, for years I dated a guy who worked in a coffee shop”—that guy being me—“and store policy was that he wasn’t allowed to be confrontational. And so one day, he’s working during a terrible blizzard, and two customers come in. The first says, ‘Hell of an April we’re having—one day it’s sunny, the next it’s snowpocalypse,’ and—you know, sarcastic—‘good thing global warming’s a myth,’ and then the second customer says, ‘I mean it is a myth,’ and he says, ‘Lady, you’ve got to be kidding me,’ and she’s all, ‘Who do you think you are, a scientist?’ and it turns out this guy is! So he’s like, ‘Yes, I’m literally a scientist,’ and the whole time Henry—my used-to-be boyfriend—had to keep his mouth shut. Wasn’t allowed to call bullshit. Which was tough for him. He always wanted to prove things. To himself, to his customers. To me. We disagreed a lot,” she says. “We fought a lot.”
Her date raises his glass. “To shitty exes.”
“Henry’s dead,” Sol says. “Coming up on a year, now. He wasn’t an ex when he died.”
If there’s ever been a moment when I’ve wanted to be present, it’s this one, to sit down beside her and take her hand and tell her that it’s all good, that death isn’t so scary, that the only real drag of it, beyond the lack of physical pleasure, beyond the lack of food, drink, pot and speed, is that I can’t be right here, in this instant, with her.
“Um,” the date says. “It sounds like you’re going through some stuff.”
“Do it,” I say. “Tell him you miss me.”
The waitress returns before Sol can reply. “Any dessert tonight?” she asks. “Coffee?”
“This guy sucks. Say you’re tired.”
“Just the check,” Sol says.
“Heck yeah.”
“Besides, I’ve got coffee at home,” she says to the date. “Unless dead boyfriends make you limp.”
I don’t hear what happens next. A kind of cloud comes over me, like when you stand up too fast—well, not exactly, because I don’t get dizzy anymore, but I still feel as sad, as overwhelmed, and as hopeless as I ever did alive—and so rather than watching this guy smile for the first time all night, I phase downwards through the chair I’ve been floating on top of, through the floor of the rooftop patio and the crowded kitchen, into the basement, as deep as I can force myself, where the boiler gurgles apocalyptically and I’m alone.
Before the storm, I spent plenty of nights wondering what it would be like to be dead and how I might, you know, make that happen, but now that I really am dead—son of a bitch—I just want to be alive again.
I’m going through some stuff, too.
Here’s what my love life looks like now, although it’d be tough to justify the use of “love” and “life”:
Chloe and I start at opposite ends of an empty bedroom in a run-down apartment, and then, on three, float towards each other, through each other, and to the other side of the room. “Again,” Chloe says, and so again we float through each other. I can’t feel anything, but this time Chloe moans. “Oh,” she says. We go again. Slower this time. Then faster. Then sideways. We can’t see each other because we don’t have bodies anymore, but if we’re close enough we can sort of sense the other’s presence. Finally, we pause as we collide, occupying the same space as the other’s ethereal matter.
Chloe and I are fuck buddies. We don’t know what else to call it. She’s been dead longer than me and claims to have had a similar arrangement with Beatrice, who’s not around anymore and who Chloe suspects might have transcended. We first met at Group Therapy, where Chloe was first attracted to me because, she said, she’s always had a thing for sad boys, and also because we’re both pretty into the Vikings. Two months into this arrangement, and digs-the-Vikings is still nearly the only thing we know about each other.
In the empty bedroom, Chloe asks, “Do you feel it?”
“I mean.”
“Oh,” she says. “God.” I’m about ready to push out but she says, “Stay here. Oh.”
I do my best to stay right where I am.
“This is so much better than it was alive.”
“It’s,” I say, “different.”
“Definitely. Alive, it’s too fast. This is like, full, you know? We’re not in each other; we are each other.”
“Sure.”
“I do wish you could run your hands through my hair. I always liked that. Could you say it?” she asks. “Could you say that you run your hands through my hair?”
“Okay,” I tell her. “I’m running my hands through your hair.”
“Oh, God. Good. Now kiss every inch of my body.”
“Right, sure, I kiss every inch of your body.”
“Oh—yes. Now hold me.”
“I hold you.”
She moans.
At 3:00 a.m. the following Wednesday, we all meet for Group Therapy on the shore of a sleepy beachside town just north of Rockport, Maine. I stop phasing when I hit sand and hear the ocean, and it’s funny, because you always hear about phantom limbs, but until I died, I never considered the possibility of phantom sensations. Floating in the dead of night before the waning surf, with the full moon shining down on me, I can almost—almost—feel the seaside breeze, the cold adrenaline of water against exposed toes, the smell of salt.
“Did you know we’ve only explored like, 5% of the world’s oceans?” I hear Elizabeth telling someone as I join the collective. It’s Elizabeth’s week, which means that she’s the one who picked this meeting spot. “Like, what’s up with that? This is why we need more women in STEM fields. Men have no imagination.”
Elizabeth’s pretty open about how she died at fifteen years old, in a car wreck on her way home from a pep rally. As she tells it, while bleeding out in the center lane of I-95 she thought bitterly of her boyfriend and her mother and of how much it sucked that she’d never see Paris, and then, when she woke up like this, suddenly she could go anywhere—no curfew—and so she did, phasing across the Great Wall of China, floating above the Grand Canyon, and traversing what’s left of the Amazon Rainforest. After a month of exploration, though, she had exhausted terrestrial Earth, as well as the shiny new car smell of unlimited possibility.
“There’s nothing to be learned from the sea,” retorts Jamie, the ghost who thinks he’s not dead but dreaming. “Scientists should be exploring dreamscapes. Each of you are but figments of my subconscious.”
Chloe floats next to me. “Hey,” she says.
“Polite nod,” I say. Shitty, but I never like talking during Group, not even informally.
The meetings work like this: every Wednesday at 3:00 a.m.—because it’s the witching hour, so why not?—we congregate to support one another in our shared state of being dead and stuff. It’s the same format as the Group Therapy programs I scoffed at when I was alive, except for now the whole world is our meeting room and there isn’t any coffee.
I was first invited to join Group not long after my death, when the facilitator, Dale—this older ghost who purportedly used to write for Cheers—found me floating around my graveyard moaning Sol’s name like I was auditioning for the Haunted Mansion. “Universality, catharsis, construction of a family unit, and the installation of hope,” he told me, when I asked what the hell the point was. “These are our objectives.”
Each week, a different ghost decides where we’re meeting. Whoever’s up talks a little about the spot they’ve chosen, and then we take turns monologuing about how we’re handling death. It’s a structure that could work, but it doesn’t, not at all, in part because, despite his best intentions, Dale knows shit-all about psychotherapy. He’s awful at reigning us in and at managing egos, and so our meetings tend to devolve into a cacophony of invisible voices shouting at one another about why we’re ghosts and what we’re doing here.
That night, on the beach, Dale asks, “Is everyone present? Where’s Beverly?”
“We were floating over Tulsa when she got summoned by a Ouija board,” someone says. “I almost got drawn in myself.”
“Sigh,” Dale says, and he begins the meeting with Elizabeth’s affirmation. “Elizabeth,” he says, “We affirm you. You exist.” Everyone repeats after him, but I barely mumble it. I’ve never once spoken to the Group or picked our meeting spot, so I’ve never been affirmed myself, but I suspect it’d be embarrassing, all that attention.
Dale invites Elizabeth to speak, and she tells us that she picked this spot because she stayed here sometimes when she was little. “My aunt lived not far from the beach, and she did this weird thing where she’d dress me up like these old dolls she had? In the attic? I guess that doesn’t matter.”
Beyond Elizabeth’s voice, in the far-off distance of the collapsing horizon, I see the slow, steady lights of a passing cruise liner, and above it, this ridiculous splatter of stars, bright as hell, burning.
“I was ten,” Elizabeth continues. “My mom would hit these awful depressive episodes where she wouldn’t leave the house for weeks, and my dad sent me here to keep me away from everything.
“I just loved the beach so much—I would float on my stomach, doing the whole snorkel thing for like, ever. Until the sun went down.
“I’ve been coming out here lately. At night. For a couple hours. A few times a week.
“Just to stare at the ocean. It helps me think less about being dead. About everything.
“I’ve tried phasing into the water, but I can’t make myself. It’s like trying to jump off a cliff. Still, the waves are so crazy to look at, it’s like they’re calling me.
“I want to phase in and never come out. I want that so badly.”
She closes by saying, “I’m just so fucking sad,” which gets maybe a beat of recognition before someone shouts, “I’m sadder,” and then another someone says, “I’m sad too, and also frustrated with the prison-industrial complex,” and then a third someone says, “I’m much sadder than all of you. I wish I’d transcend already,” and the reference to transcendence throws off any hope of a productive meeting.
“Nobody’s transcending,” Dale says.
“At least not until I wake up,” says Jamie.
“I’ve tried every way imaginable,” someone says. “If phasing into an electrical socket doesn’t do it, there’s not a damn thing that will.”
Transcending is Dale’s term for the troubling phenomenon in which, suddenly and without explanation, ghosts just seem to disappear. No one’s ever witnessed it, since we can’t see one another, but every couple months, we lose someone.
There are all sorts of fringe theories, of course. Bill must’ve settled his emotional baggage; guess he can move on now, or They’re just hiding because they don’t want to be our friends anymore, or What if there’s some kind of fucked-up, invisible, ghost-devouring monster we should be worried about? But deep down, everyone knows the truth of it, which is why it rattles us so much, why it’s only discussed in duress or in hushed whispers, why Dale takes count at the start of every meeting.
It’s suicide. It has to be.
The only mystery is how it’s done.
I notice that Elizabeth’s voice is absent from the anxious chorus surrounding me, and I imagine her staring into the ocean, silent, alone, and nostalgic. Wanting.
I look up towards the stars and the moon, and I think of Sol.
Dale gets frustrated and tells us all to go home, but I’m still staring into space when Chloe floats over. “Hey,” she says. “When are we going to get together next?”
“Shrug,” I say. “Same time next week? I forget whose turn it is.”
“It’s my week,” she says, stammering a little, but clarifies that what she meant was, when are we going to get together next. “Just us. Somewhere other than the apartment. I was thinking we could watch the sunrise together.”
I don’t say it, but I think to myself, dismissive eye-roll, because I’ve seen the sunrise from just about everywhere, and it’s all so overrated. I mean, sure, there’s nothing quite like watching an explosion of color above Mount Kilimanjaro, but when you see these things without feeling the wind in your hair or your heart pounding in your chest, it’s like browsing somebody’s vacation photos on Instagram: they’re pretty, sure, but they don’t mean a heck of a lot.
“There’s this park in Minneapolis,” Chloe continues. “It’s too crowded on weekends, but it’s nice in the mornings. Not many kids.”
I look back at the moon and try to let her down easy. “I don’t know if this can be more than it is,” I say, as the last gasp of a wave rolls towards us. I feel a surge of loss, like I am letting go of something, or the possibility of something, and I wonder if I really feel these things or if, like the touch of the breeze and the smell of the ocean, whatever I’m feeling is nothing more than a phantom emotion, a slowly evaporating leftover essence of the person I used to be.
“Oh,” Chloe says, and we float in silence as the breeze slides sand across the beach. “Do you want to know something silly?” She tells me that when it gets windy like this, she worries that the air will break her apart. “Into a thousand pieces,” she says. “And then there will be a thousand Chloe ghosts, but each one just a thousandth of who I am. And then I wonder—what if that already happened? What if I’m just a tiny piece of some previous, fuller version of Chloe?”
“I get it,” I say, and then, sheepishly, I tell her sure, I’d like to catch the sunrise.
We nail down the specifics and then I phase to Sol’s apartment, where the lights are out because she’s sleeping. There are no photographs of me in her bedroom, none of my old things. Sol snores, and I hover, like always, next to her.
It’s funny: I’m not terribly excited for my date with Chloe, but in thinking about how I’m not terribly excited, I remember my first-ever date with a girl who, at the end of the night, kissed me in her parents’ driveway and crawled into the house through the doggie door, and in recalling this—the way my arm shook, how I kept my eyes open, the smell of rain—I feel an approximation of that excitement for my date with Chloe, even as I am not, strictly speaking, excited.
I’m not sure if I’m onto something with my phantom emotions theory, if the phenomenon is specific to ghosts, or if I would feel this way even if I had lived into my nineties. Maybe nothing will ever feel as good as when I was alive, the same way nothing will ever feel as good as when I was a teenager. This is a burn I certainly felt in the final months of my life, during which I believed sincerely that I would always be working at a coffee shop, would always be fighting with Sol, and that each moment would be damned to feel less meaningful than the one previous.
Depressive episodes like this were not uncommon for me—are not, I guess—but that last one before I died was something awful.
Sol’s alarm clock says it’s 4:30 a.m., and I’m pretty sure I’ll spend the day following her around. After all, maybe today she’ll finally cry on her way to work, or call my mom, or, during a conversation with a close friend, admit to missing me.
See, Sol’s grieving process is frustrating because it’s almost entirely internal. She never shows it, which is a marked contrast to the grief stories that are shared in Group. There’s Dale’s son, for example, who locks himself in the bathroom every night to whisper to his dead father. Or Chloe’s best friend, who still updates the “R.I.P. Chloe” Facebook group, especially on Chloe’s birthday, the anniversary of her death, and Halloween. Even Jamie, when he can be distracted from his belief that he’s dreaming—or, realistically, when he can be convinced that he’s in a dream inside the original dream, therefore negating any chance of agency—enjoys watching his younger sister’s softball games, because his sister has written the words “Whole Dickerson” on her glove, the sentimental meaning of which he says would be lost on us.
Sol, though.
She’s never memorialized me.
She maintained a stiff upper lip at my funeral.
She won’t even write my name in her damn journal.
All she’ll do is go on first and only dates with men, who she informs—dryly—that she had a boyfriend, a boyfriend who died, now let’s bang the shit out of each other.
As I consider this, I find myself drawn towards the window. I float to it, and by 5:00 a.m., I’m not looking at Sol. I’m looking up, staring at the moon.
I’m wondering what it would be like to transcend.
Chloe’s park is neglected and graffiti-stained, with broken pieces of glass mixed into woodchips, but it grows in charm as she tells story after story while the sun creeps over the playground. “A boy kissed me here once,” she says, “by the slide. It was past curfew and we’d duck whenever a car drove by. I’m totally blushing.”
“You grew up here?”
She tells me about high school and puberty and the abstract, never-finished notion of home. Her mom died recently—she hasn’t run into her—and now her dad takes long walks alone each morning. Chloe loves Surly Brewing, misses Coffee Bender and shots of Jameson. “The Vikings really choked at the end there, last season,” she says. “Still cool to watch, though. Free season tickets are a perk of this that nobody talks about. You ever go to a game?”
“Oh man,” I say. “I never even thought about that.”
“Lame.”
I tell her that at first I did all the usual new-to-being-dead stuff—ping-ponged between commercial airliners, floated around closed film sets, hung with giraffes— “But after two weeks I fell into this dumb rut.”
“Which is?”
“Boring,” I say. “I float around the coffee shop. Watch my parents work the crossword. Follow my old girlfriend around.”
“Were you still together?” she asks. “With the girlfriend, I mean. When you died.”
“Nod,” I say. I consider saying more, but this is a date, and even if I’m not sure I want to see Chloe like this again, it wouldn’t be awesome of me to monologue about Sol for twenty minutes.
“Show her to me,” Chloe says. “Not in a weird way—if we were alive we’d for sure look up each other’s exes.” After some trepidation, I tell Chloe to follow my lead and we phase to a studio in Denver, where Sol is crouching with her camera, snapping photos of an indie band comprised of several punk-rock hipster chicks attempting to appear at once serious and easygoing. They lean against the wall. Cross their arms. Pantomime conversation. Sol takes photo after photo, giving instructions between each flash for the arrangement of their next tableau.
“Now, pose like you’re chatting at a wedding reception, and you’re very close friends but also meeting for the first time.” Sol crouches to take the shot, and I admire the way her bangs fall across her face, how her tongue sticks out involuntarily as she angles the camera.
The session ends, and the drummer extends her palm, “Appreciate your time, dude.”
Sol ignores the handshake, turns to pack up her things. “Expect the edits over email in the next twenty-four hours,” she says, and watching this through Chloe’s fresh perspective, I’m reminded that Sol is often reserved with her gratitude.
“Is she always so aloof?” Chloe asks. “Don’t answer that. Shitty question. Anyway, she’s got a great butt.”
We phase back to the park. It’s busier now, kids laughing under monkey-bars. “Did you have anyone?” I ask.
“Sort of,” says Chloe. “I had this toxic approach to dating where I spent all my time with whoever I was seeing. It didn’t matter if it was going well or poorly—they couldn’t get rid of me. They’d ask for more space and I’d hold tighter, knock on their door unannounced, show up at places I shouldn’t be.” She tells me that she would drive by their work and their parents’ houses. “The word I’m avoiding is stalking,” she says. “It’s just tough to say out loud. I had something going like that when I died, but I’m pretty sure he was about to dump me. He didn’t come to my funeral.”
I remember that she told me how her old fuck buddy disappeared. “Is that what happened with Beatrice?”
“I don’t want to talk about Beatrice,” she says. “I’m really trying to be better.” She tells me that she’s tired of intrusive thoughts and of indulging her worst impulses. “I don’t want to be that person anymore.”
“What do you want?”
“I want to be present,” she says as a game of tag sends two kids right through us. “And I want to exist with purpose. I think you’re cool, and I like you. I want to get out of my head and I want to see more of you.” Her voice is vulnerable but firm, like she’s deciding what she wants as she says it. “So, can I?” she asks.
I’m not sure what she means. “Can you?”
“See you,” she says, and—ha-ha—I can almost see the ironic quotation marks around the verb, but goddamn if it doesn’t bum me out, because even before I died, I can’t remember the last time anyone really saw me.
That night, as Sol snores, I once again watch the moon through her bedroom window, recalling the shouting matches, the broken plates, the way her body felt against mine after a night of arguing, nights that always ended in sex. “I love you,” I’d say afterwards, quiet, but she’d turn her back to me, and I’d be left awake, staring at the ceiling, hopeless.
That moon though. Jesus.
Its glow is intoxicating. At first, staring up, I don’t think about Chloe, or Group, or being dead, I just think about Sol, about how things were, and then, after an hour or two, I’m not thinking about anything. I am the absence of thought. Three hours go by. Four. I’m shaken out of it only when Sol’s alarm jolts us both to consciousness.
This happens again the next night.
And the next.
On the fourth night, though, I don’t wake up until I’m floating far above Sol’s apartment and the Denver skyline, higher than I’ve ever been able to make myself go, ascending into the night through hazy atmosphere, towards the moon, oh, God, the moon, and the indefinite darkness surrounding it, and—holy shit—I feel something, actually feel something, my ethereal matter contracting inside itself and expanding into the thin air around me. It’s warm at first, then cold, and the sensation of sensation is overpowering. The higher I float the more it hits me, and soon I’m getting a dose of everything I’ve ever physically felt all at once: my first orgasm, the rib I snapped in high school, Sol’s touch, and the lightning bolt that killed me— a sudden flash of pain that electrocuted throughout my every nerve ending and froze my whole body, blinded by a blaze of white light and faintly attune to the scent of burning flesh while what must have been a millisecond stretched out just long enough for me to realize that this was it, fuck me, this was really it.
Higher now, I realize that this might be it too, but that I’m choosing it, consciously willing myself towards what I suspect will be the end of me, and it is pain, bliss, and ecstasy all at once, beyond what human beings are meant to feel, but I am not human anymore. I am more than human. I am becoming metaphysical. I am reaching critical mass, about to burst, about to become one with the stars, gone for good and done forever with this post-life existence, transcended—
Dazed, I stop myself from going any higher. I phase back to Sol’s apartment.
And wait.
And wait.
And watch her sleep.
And wait.
And do my best to practice mindfulness. “I still get to see Sol,” I say. “Chloe likes me. I can still go to Vikings games.” I list gratitude after gratitude, but each one sounds trivial when what I really want is up there in space, and nothing down here makes me feel a single goddamn thing.
My attention drifts back to the moon.
I wait.
The next night, at 3:00 a.m., Group meets at Coney Island around the base of the Wonder Wheel, which is dark and unsafe looking. I float towards Chloe, and as I phase through the collective, I overhear a newly-dead twenty-something discussing the feminist implications of our predicament with Elizabeth.
“…the male gaze is taken entirely out of the equation. Gendered physical power dynamics, too. We’ve got a real chance to build something positive here.”
“Uh-huh,” Elizabeth says, fatigued, hollowed, none of her usual enthusiasm. I feel numbed too, like I have a hangover that’s so bad I can’t see color.
“Oh hey,” I say to Chloe, trying to play it cool, because I’m not sure of the degree to which our relationship has changed, only that I am glad it’s changed, that it might distract me from last night, when—let’s not mess around here—I just about annihilated myself.
Even worse: I liked it.
This is what happens when you can’t feel anything. You take what you can get.
“Shy smile,” Chloe says. “You down for tonight’s Twins game? They’re playing the Tigers.”
“Hard yes,” I say.
Group affirms Chloe, and she explains that her dad’s been obsessed with this place for as long as she can remember. “He always wanted to take me, but we never had the money, and then after, you know, dying, I’d have felt crummy coming without him. I always imagined he’d visit alone one day, and that I’d float beside him as he walked the boardwalk or rode the Wonder Wheel. That it would be like we were together. That maybe he could feel me.”
“What changed?” Dale asks, trying to move things along, because again, dude is not a licensed professional.
“Shrug,” Chloe says. “I was tired of waiting.”
Dale thanks Chloe, and one by one it’s the usual problems: Kevin feels like a creep for floating around a strip club a few hours each day; Jamie wonders if, as the dreamer, he bears any moral responsibility for whatever happens to us when he wakes up; and Beverly admits that she’s addicted to Ouija boards. “I fly around all day looking for séances,” she says. “It’s better than Group. More cathartic, I mean. You get so much off your chest.”
“Beverly, we affirm you,” Dale says, annoyed. “You exist.” The group echoes him, and he offers me the floor. “Henry?”
Part of me wants to disclose that I tried to off myself last night, that I’m afraid it’ll happen again, and that I’ve been fantasizing about the moon, about experiencing so much sensation that it kills me. But then again there’s no need for Group to know, or Chloe. I never told Sol about the suicidal stuff, either—and why start now, I figure, at the literal end of my life?
“Maybe next week,” I say, like always.
“Elizabeth?” Dale says.
She doesn’t respond.
“Elizabeth? You’re up,” he says.
A long quiet follows.
“She was here earlier,” says the newly-dead twenty-something.
“Maybe she transcended,” someone whispers.
“The way she’s been acting—”
“Elizabeth,” Dale says, louder.
“Maybe she’s in Hell,” someone offers.
“We’re already in Hell.”
“It’s a dream!” Jamie yells. “I’m fucking dreaming!”
“Dammit,” Dale says. “Can anyone sense Elizabeth?” He curses some more and sends everyone off to search for her. I have this terrible pit in my stomach as I weave around the Cyclone. She’s gone, I think, and for a split second, I’m envious.
It’s almost morning when Jamie finally finds her floating above the Needle.
“She said she was watching the waves come in,” he tells us as we gather around them, and there’s real concern in his voice.
“Elizabeth?” Dale says. “Elizabeth?”
“Oh,” she says. “Sorry. I’m here.” Her voice sounds different. Lower. Dispassionate. “I’m still here,” she says again, but she won’t be for long, I know. And neither will I.
After the meeting, I tell Chloe, “I can’t make the game tonight after all.”
“Why?’ she asks. “Literally, what else could you have going on?”
“I have a function.”
“A function.”
“Yes.”
“You have a function.”
“I do.”
“Henry,” she says. “Tell me. Where are you going?”
I want to tell her, but I don’t think I could stand to say it, and so I vanish from Coney Island and, because it’s the first place that comes to mind, reappear in the parking lot outside the Target off Alameda, where, on a stormy Tuesday night just over a year ago, I died for the first time.
I think it once more: for the first time.
Tomorrow I’m going up.
What follows—I fully intend—will be my final day of this.
I visit my parents, watch them bicker against the lonely backdrop of MSNBC. Catch a matinee. Shadow old friends, dispersed, each of them, across the Midwest. I even figure, you know, fuck it, and check out Oprah’s house, just to see what that’s like.
Sol’s apartment is my last stop. When I arrive, she’s reading an email on her iPhone, and it’s a normal start to the evening, given that she’s alone and I’m sad, but it’s an unusual one because I’m going to transcend tonight and will be gone by morning.
For the first time since my funeral, I’m “feeling” sentimental. I want to watch Sol in slow motion, with music playing, nice music, and take note of every detail. I’m bursting with melancholia, but even now, at the edge of oblivion, I can’t shake the part of me that’s human, and I look over her shoulder at the email. It’s from her old pen-pal, Brian, writing to confirm her ETA next Friday.
I think this will be good for me, Sol writes. She hits SEND, then just sits there thinking for almost twenty minutes, then takes a long shower, watches a Gilmore Girls, and writes a lengthy, involved passage in her journal detailing her attraction-from-afar to her old pen pal and her exhaustion with one-night stands. Reading this, it occurs to me that Sol might mean to pursue a relationship with Brian. Not a one-and-done hookup, but a real relationship. Like what we had. Like what I could have with Chloe.
God. Fucking. Dammit.
I want to be alive, stoned with Sol in a field somewhere, running one hand through the grass and the other up her leg. I want to kiss her. I want us to fuck again. Actual fucking. I want to feel it. For it to sting a little. I want to hold her.
And if I can’t have that, I’m out of here.
I’m getting beyond worked up, and I’m about to do it, too, I’m about to head to the window, because the moon is out, it’s shining, and this is it, here we go, too painful to linger, let’s do this, just one final burst of sensation and then I’m gone, transcended and transcendent, when, in her notebook, Sol writes, Before this starts with Brian, I’m going to try to communicate with Henry.
I postpone my function.
Alive, road trips were long but rewarding, all cramped legs and accidental erections as we flew down the interstate, Sol’s hand across my thigh.
Dead, I float in the passenger seat, en route to Portland, careful to keep up with changes in traffic. The cramping’s no longer an issue, nor the erections, but the claustrophobia remains, as does the sense that you will always be in this metal, that the day’s been stolen from you by an endless highway, that you’ll never be anywhere permanent.
Even still, it feels good to take time to get somewhere, to be away from Chloe, to have told Dale I’d be missing Group.
Sol is meeting up with Brian in twenty-two hours, which means we’re in the endgame now, that within this short window, I’m going to find out what it looks like when Soledad Gallegos misses me.
As we drive, Sol sometimes hums along to the radio or mutters indecipherably to herself, but mostly she is silent. I, too, am inside myself, and just as we were together in long, spiraling conversation during trips to the Grand Canyon, we are together too in this calm.
Twenty-one hours later, in her hotel room, Sol sits on her bed, staring at a text from Brian, which reads, Hey 🙂 I’m headed to Wonder Bar. Looking forward to meeting!
I’m going to be late, she writes, and I think, here we go.
Sol unzips her suitcase and withdraws a box that’s been printed to look decrepit, like something out of a haunted house movie.
HASBRO, it says on one side.
OUIJA, it says on another.
“Oh shit,” I say.
Sol kills the lights and shuts the blinds. She sits cross-legged on the floor, sets a candle, sprawls the Ouija board across the coffee table, and places the battery-operated planchette on the center of the alphabet. “Spirits,” she says, pressing two fingers from each hand against the plastic heart.
“No. No. No.”
“Listen and listen sound,” she says. “My name is Soledad. Are you here, Henry?”
There’s no way in hell the power of love is going to move that stupid thing. “God da—” I start to say, but before I can finish my syllable, dozens of voices break through from the walls and ceiling, drawn to the pull of the séance and losing their collective shit.
A panicked woman: “I woke up in the morgue and I think there may have been a mis—”
A thick southern accent: “Well, fuck me, you are beautiful. What are you doing among the living, baby doll? Hang yourself and let’s zip across the sand dunes, writhe around inside each—”
A hushed whisper: “I repent. I repent. I—”
I have a sudden urge to howl. For Sol. At Sol. At everything. I am so angry. I am so sad. I am so afraid of carrying out my plan to transcend. I want to shout it.
Sol is still standing by, though. She’s ostensibly going to say something if she can just convince herself that the damn planchette is moving, and it takes all my willpower to hold in my feelings and focus on what she’s trying to accomplish here instead of on the board. She’s breathing heavily, her hands are shaking, and she lets out an exaggerated, un-Sol like, B-movie gasp as her fingers vibrate the planchette.
“Eye-roll!” I shout, and I think, goddamn it, Sol, if you’re going to fake it, at least project your own shit onto my goofy, fake-ass spirit.
Please spell L-O-V-E.
Or point the damned thing to GOOD BYE (right there at the bottom of the board!), since we never got to say it.
“If you can hear me, contact Andres Moreno. Tell him—”
“I just know I’m going to waste death the way I wasted—”
“No one believes me, but I swear to God I’m Hubert Humph—”
Trembling, Sol’s fingers guide the planchette up and to the right. “I,” she says, as the plastic lands on its first letter, and I can’t believe she’s taking this so seriously. She’s really committing to it, though, and her fingers slowly guide the planchette from letter to letter.
M
S
S
“Miss,” she says. “Miss. You forgot a letter. That’s okay,” and I’m thinking, holy shit, Sol, you are projecting! You do miss me! You glorious crazy person! Are you really so guarded that the only way you can admit to missing me is if you pretend I’m saying it?
“I miss—”
The third word comes into focus, and for the first time since even before my death, I’m happy. Really, truly, holy shit happy, like this whole sleepless nightmare will be worth it if she’ll just admit that she misses me.
Y
O
U
Sol looks at the “U” and her face drops. She moves the planchette once more.
G
U
R
T
“I miss yogurt,” she says.
I can’t remember the last time I’ve been this close to completely flipping the fuck out. This is pathological emotional avoidance; she could have stopped at that first “U” so easily.
“Hi, Henry,” Sol says, and I’m frustrated, sure, but it still feels so damn good to hear her say my name. […]
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Chris Vanjonack is an M.F.A. candidate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, a reader at Ninth Letter, and a former language arts teacher from Fort Collins, Colorado. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in One Story, Hobart, CRAFT Literary, The Rumpus, Carve Magazine, Quarterly West, and elsewhere. Find him on Twitter @chrisvanjonack and read more stories at chrisvanjonack.com.
“Phases” originally appeared in One Story
Read More: A brief Q&A with Chris Vanjonack