I HAVE SEEN THE GHOSTS

I have seen them. I was there. Amongst them. They are shadows. Alive, but shadows. Moving. But slowly. Looking, but perhaps not seeing. Then alive. A word or two. Even a laugh, then receded again.

They have bodies. Real and imagined bodies. The real bodies have eroded down like ancient hills. There are no sharp angles, no cliffs, no peaks, no canyons or vistas. They have softened and begun melting down into the earth. The imagined bodies float like feint whispers in the atmosphere: “I was once 17.” “I have had sex with a beautiful man next to a fjord in Norway.”
“I once stood in front of my mirror and loved my body.”

One was 102. She had a birthday and she smiled. But she did not speak except to ask, “What did she say?” They are scarcely here, these ghosts. They, many of them, have lost most of their interest in being here. The world, once so precious, is less so. Other worlds may offer more.

They live a bit like water creatures, like jellyfish; floating in their environment more than propelling themselves through it. And like jellyfish, they are sometimes nearly translucent. You have seen them, but are not sure you have seen them. No, you have seen a ghost, a remnant, a residue, a marker of what was once there, but not much more.

They are ghosts. I once thought ghosts were frightening beings, energetically scaring us, popping out to intimidate us; beings with a purpose. But these ghosts had lost nearly all force. Except the unstoppable force of time, of gravity, of erosion; those forces which never tire and therefore which never lose.

I was not a ghost while I spent time amongst them, but I understand that I may become one of them. This is how they frighten us. They are us. They are our future. Who can imagine? Who will believe this? Who can believe these drifting remnants of lives were themselves once as alive as us? Who can believe such indignities will soon be ours to endure? Who will care for such pointless life as this? Or will we slip into a purgatory of isolation and uselessness?

But these ghosts were cared for. There were caretakers amongst them like the birds that perch on the backs of hippos. Like those birds, these caretakers seem a different species. They move quickly among the ghosts, alert but breathing different air, inhabiting a different niche of time and space. Of necessity, they are courteous, attentive, patient. Of a similar necessity, their minds seem only partially here.

“Come this way Ethel. Your room is this way. That’s right.” But the Jamaican girl is scarcely thinking of Ethel at all. Her mind is mostly elsewhere. Yesterday, she helped lower the only ghost Ethel recognized into a stretcher that could be covered with a sheet so that there is no suggestion of a form beneath it. The stretcher is wheeled away while the resident ghosts are elsewhere and will not see it. There are no farewell parties for there would be too many of them. Many of the ghosts have not really seen each other and would not know who they would be sending off; only one more farewell in a long march of farewells. Silently the ghosts slide from translucence to invisibility. If there is rage here, it is buried. It is there, but it is like the coal three miles below the surface, crushed by history and time, never to ignite, beyond observation.

Well, there are perhaps small indications, hints that history does lie somewhere. “Where did these colored girls all come from?” inquired my mother. “Why will I be forced to die amongst them?” She does not say the last sentence. What would be the point of asking something for which there would be no answer? The colored girls bare these hostilities without rancor. They will survive. They will win. They will leave at six and return to their worlds. These insults will disappear with the ghosts, vanishing into the silence. The last question is my mother’s history, well enough known so there is no necessity of saying it aloud. It is a sentiment and a sediment from another world, another century. It is an atavism, out of place and irrelevant in this new world. She is an atavism, out of place. Thus, she grows invisible. Thus, she slips into silence. Thus, she withdraws and sees less of this world. Thus, she becomes a ghost.

Ghosts have cold fingers.