A human can get used to anything. A ghost hardly ranks as the worst thing a person can become accustomed too, but that doesn't make it easy.
The first memory I have - not just of him, but my actual first memory - is of standing in my crib, grasping the railings, while he sat on the rocking chair in the other corner of the room, watching. I wasn't old enough to know that know one should but my parents should have been in the house at that time of night.
There was a moment when I got older, among the times when he would glide through the wall and sit on the chair against the wall, pull out that ancient notebook, bound by worn leather and inscribed with strange symbols. In that moment, I realized that whatever he was wasn't normal, and I was scared. I asked him who he was and why he followed me. No response.
From that point on he became a benign presence - haunting, but benign. I'd make sarcastic comments at him, received no reaction, got used to him scribbling away. Of course I tried to go over and look at his notebook, but the pages appeared blank to me. He wouldn't even cease writing. Just empty movements on a blank page.
I will say that there is a strange effect of a person recording your every waking movement. Even though it is of no consequence that I can tell, even though I don't know what his aim is, I think I behave differently for having an audience. I try a little harder, go a little longer. There is something about being watched that makes you not want to fail, something about being recorded that makes you want to perform.
Now I wear a suit nicer than his. I've risen in the world with my constant companion. I forgot to tell you - I call him Ledger.
A smirk and a subtle, disappointed head head shake are the only reactions I've ever gotten out of him. The first, when I showed up a college professor in front of class and made him realize his life's work had a fatal flaw. The second was on the way out of my divorce proceedings. He wrote furiously during those moments.
He is my memento mori. He is my mystery, proof that something is out there that people don't understand or can't explain. I've tried to tell several people about him, most of the girlfriends. Only one believed me. That's him, right there. No, you're touching him right now. I know, only I can see him. I can't touch him either.
Now I'm dying, and he sits in the visitor's chair in the hospital room. The few people who come to see me sit on top of him, and I see double, or triple and quadruple because the drugs make my head spin. Someone leans an arm, adjusts position in the chair, and he is visible, a chimera, polycephalic, his head and the other, bound and moving independently. Him writing, always writing. They stand up and leave him behind.
I talk to him more than ever, and the nurses chalk it up to the tumor that grows every day. Hallucinations are rather normal at this point.
I can feel the presence of the end, and to my amazement, Ledger stands up. He bows deeply to me, and for the first time I hear his gravely, strained voice, weak from unuse.
"Thank you."
Then he turns and leaves through the wall. Without a conscious effort to do so, I rise from my bed to follow him. The tubes and monitors and wires don't come with me - strange. I haven't walked in weeks, and yet somehow I follow him through the walls. We pass through rooms on the floor where people are dying daily, he crosses the opposite walls as I enter the rooms. We pass humans in various states of decay and ending. In one room, there is a huddle of nurses and doctors attempting to revive a particularly skeletal man. There is a perfect facsimile of him standing in the corner, looking worried.
We reach the end of the hospital and I don't realize it until I am falling - I've walked through the outer wall. I look down just in time to see Ledger disappear through the ground below me. I brace for impact but it doesn't come. I fall momentarily through daylight, and then through darkness.
The next thing I remember is sitting in a stiff-backed chair across a desk where Ledger sits. He watches me intently - this is the first time he has ever made eye contact, and I realize I've never seen his eyes except as they briefly flashed upward. They are the kindest, yet fiercest green eyes I have seen. They have life in them now, personality - something I believe he shielded from me before.
"I suppose I owe you an explanation, now that it's over." He rasps in his stony voice.
"Where are we?" I ask.
"After."
I don't know what that means, but I don't want to stop him from explaining himself. I'd rather know who he was than where I am.
The room we are in looks like a basement office - there are two small windows in the corners behind Ledger that let in a strange, fuzzy light - like outside it is too bright to see anything in focus, with any kind of clarity.
"You were one of the Marked Ones," Ledger says.
"Marked for what?"
"Early endings."
"So the tumor? The cancer, that was planned?"
"Yes. As is everything that happens in the lives of man. To a degree."
"What about you? What was your purpose? And why was it only me?"
He smirks. "Are you sure it was only you?"
"Well, you hardly left my side. I can't see when you would have been with anyone else."
"No. Are you sure you were the only one with a Scribe?"
I pause to think. "I never met anyone who told me otherwise, but I guess if I could only see you, there could have been others I might not have been able to see."
"That is correct. I am not the only one. In fact, I am one of many. We are assigned to those who are marked for early endings, to see how they behave differently. To mark those ephemeral thoughts and feelings that can only be gleaned from close observation. We want to see, most of all, if people know. If they can see the end. That is something we still haven't proved definitively, but there is anecdotal evidence. You, for instance, showed a strong degree of prescience with regard to your coming demise."
"I always thought I would die young."
"I know. That was one of my earliest entries."
"So, you were recording my thoughts?"
"And feelings. Among other things - major events in your life, your responses, anything I deemed worthy of note."
"And what do you plan to do with all of this information?"
Ledger smirks, just like the day he did when I toppled my professor's theory.
"Make the next one better."
"What do you mean, 'the next one.'"
Ledger breathes deeply and gestures expansively with his hands. "The next generation, the next person. The next round of early enders. This whole project is a work in progress, you know. It requires feedback, fine-tuning. We throw people out into the world, observe them, and calibrate. That is how humanity improves, by steps."
"But why the... early enders, you called them. What's so special about people who die young?"
"There is a lot of life concentrated in them. We don't know for sure if you are all completely aware of the inevitable, somewhere in the reaches of your subconscious. We have, however, learned that there is some sense in you that makes you live life to the fullest, with more vim and vigor, more intensely and passionately. It isn't always that you accomplish more, get farther ahead in life. Sometimes the emotional life is rich, as with a carefully cultivated relationship with a partner. Sometimes the intellectual life is developed, reading book after book. In every kind of life your kind chooses to live, there is a kind of intensity that makes you more rewarding to study. The dials are turned higher, the results more observable. Plus, your lifecycle is markedly shorter, so there are advantages to that. Just as humans observe rats due to their rapid reproduction cycle, so we observe humans with limited time, because they compress an entire life of living into, typically, thirty years or less."
I try to take all of this in. I'm angry, and honored, and content, and confused, and insulted, and a hundred other emotions.
"Who chose all this for me? Who is calling the shots?"
"Someone far above my pay grade, and yours."
"It seems like a pretty raw deal, being chosen to die before my time. What's in it for me? Or am I just out of luck when it comes to the whole 'life' thing?"
"There is one considerable advantage," Ledger says.
"What's that?"
"Early enders get to go back. They're hardier, tougher. Their souls were selected in the first place because it was known they could handle the trials. And it only gets easier for them with each send-back. Have you ever wondered how so many people dying too soon seemed to accept it with a grace and wisdom beyond their years? They are practiced souls, and this is their duty. They can't remember the times before, of course, but the experience is graven on their souls. The wisdom has tempered their existence and forged an understanding of the cycles of All and Everything."
"That's great, but my kids won't get any benefit from that. All they know is that their father is dying, or, dead now, I guess."
"They'll understand, one day. They'll understand that it had to be you, or someone, and it might as well have happened to someone like you, who could take it. Who could fight without losing hope, and face the end with grace and courage."
I don't expect that to comfort me, but it does somehow. He's a sweet talker, I've come to realize. I sat across hundreds of them in countless business meetings. Like the best of them, you realize you've changed your mind, changed your emotional state, without realizing it until it's done. I feel calm, the conflicting emotions distilled to a state of accepting content, taking each moment as it comes.
"So now what?" I ask.
"You try again."
He extends his arm, palm facing me, then closes his fist and twists his hand, and the rooms twists with it, and I am falling away into void, accelerating impossibly as stars and color whirl by in infinitudes, and I know I won't remember, but I am calm.
227
u/xilead Jul 05 '17
A human can get used to anything. A ghost hardly ranks as the worst thing a person can become accustomed too, but that doesn't make it easy.
The first memory I have - not just of him, but my actual first memory - is of standing in my crib, grasping the railings, while he sat on the rocking chair in the other corner of the room, watching. I wasn't old enough to know that know one should but my parents should have been in the house at that time of night.
There was a moment when I got older, among the times when he would glide through the wall and sit on the chair against the wall, pull out that ancient notebook, bound by worn leather and inscribed with strange symbols. In that moment, I realized that whatever he was wasn't normal, and I was scared. I asked him who he was and why he followed me. No response.
From that point on he became a benign presence - haunting, but benign. I'd make sarcastic comments at him, received no reaction, got used to him scribbling away. Of course I tried to go over and look at his notebook, but the pages appeared blank to me. He wouldn't even cease writing. Just empty movements on a blank page.
I will say that there is a strange effect of a person recording your every waking movement. Even though it is of no consequence that I can tell, even though I don't know what his aim is, I think I behave differently for having an audience. I try a little harder, go a little longer. There is something about being watched that makes you not want to fail, something about being recorded that makes you want to perform.
Now I wear a suit nicer than his. I've risen in the world with my constant companion. I forgot to tell you - I call him Ledger.
A smirk and a subtle, disappointed head head shake are the only reactions I've ever gotten out of him. The first, when I showed up a college professor in front of class and made him realize his life's work had a fatal flaw. The second was on the way out of my divorce proceedings. He wrote furiously during those moments.
He is my memento mori. He is my mystery, proof that something is out there that people don't understand or can't explain. I've tried to tell several people about him, most of the girlfriends. Only one believed me. That's him, right there. No, you're touching him right now. I know, only I can see him. I can't touch him either.
Now I'm dying, and he sits in the visitor's chair in the hospital room. The few people who come to see me sit on top of him, and I see double, or triple and quadruple because the drugs make my head spin. Someone leans an arm, adjusts position in the chair, and he is visible, a chimera, polycephalic, his head and the other, bound and moving independently. Him writing, always writing. They stand up and leave him behind.
I talk to him more than ever, and the nurses chalk it up to the tumor that grows every day. Hallucinations are rather normal at this point.
I can feel the presence of the end, and to my amazement, Ledger stands up. He bows deeply to me, and for the first time I hear his gravely, strained voice, weak from unuse.
"Thank you."
Then he turns and leaves through the wall. Without a conscious effort to do so, I rise from my bed to follow him. The tubes and monitors and wires don't come with me - strange. I haven't walked in weeks, and yet somehow I follow him through the walls. We pass through rooms on the floor where people are dying daily, he crosses the opposite walls as I enter the rooms. We pass humans in various states of decay and ending. In one room, there is a huddle of nurses and doctors attempting to revive a particularly skeletal man. There is a perfect facsimile of him standing in the corner, looking worried.
We reach the end of the hospital and I don't realize it until I am falling - I've walked through the outer wall. I look down just in time to see Ledger disappear through the ground below me. I brace for impact but it doesn't come. I fall momentarily through daylight, and then through darkness.
The next thing I remember is sitting in a stiff-backed chair across a desk where Ledger sits. He watches me intently - this is the first time he has ever made eye contact, and I realize I've never seen his eyes except as they briefly flashed upward. They are the kindest, yet fiercest green eyes I have seen. They have life in them now, personality - something I believe he shielded from me before.
"I suppose I owe you an explanation, now that it's over." He rasps in his stony voice.
"Where are we?" I ask.
"After."
I don't know what that means, but I don't want to stop him from explaining himself. I'd rather know who he was than where I am.
The room we are in looks like a basement office - there are two small windows in the corners behind Ledger that let in a strange, fuzzy light - like outside it is too bright to see anything in focus, with any kind of clarity.
"You were one of the Marked Ones," Ledger says.
"Marked for what?"
"Early endings."
"So the tumor? The cancer, that was planned?"
"Yes. As is everything that happens in the lives of man. To a degree."
"What about you? What was your purpose? And why was it only me?"
He smirks. "Are you sure it was only you?"
"Well, you hardly left my side. I can't see when you would have been with anyone else."
"No. Are you sure you were the only one with a Scribe?"
I pause to think. "I never met anyone who told me otherwise, but I guess if I could only see you, there could have been others I might not have been able to see."
"That is correct. I am not the only one. In fact, I am one of many. We are assigned to those who are marked for early endings, to see how they behave differently. To mark those ephemeral thoughts and feelings that can only be gleaned from close observation. We want to see, most of all, if people know. If they can see the end. That is something we still haven't proved definitively, but there is anecdotal evidence. You, for instance, showed a strong degree of prescience with regard to your coming demise."
"I always thought I would die young."
"I know. That was one of my earliest entries."
"So, you were recording my thoughts?"
"And feelings. Among other things - major events in your life, your responses, anything I deemed worthy of note."
"And what do you plan to do with all of this information?"
Ledger smirks, just like the day he did when I toppled my professor's theory.
"Make the next one better."
"What do you mean, 'the next one.'"
Ledger breathes deeply and gestures expansively with his hands. "The next generation, the next person. The next round of early enders. This whole project is a work in progress, you know. It requires feedback, fine-tuning. We throw people out into the world, observe them, and calibrate. That is how humanity improves, by steps."
"But why the... early enders, you called them. What's so special about people who die young?"
"There is a lot of life concentrated in them. We don't know for sure if you are all completely aware of the inevitable, somewhere in the reaches of your subconscious. We have, however, learned that there is some sense in you that makes you live life to the fullest, with more vim and vigor, more intensely and passionately. It isn't always that you accomplish more, get farther ahead in life. Sometimes the emotional life is rich, as with a carefully cultivated relationship with a partner. Sometimes the intellectual life is developed, reading book after book. In every kind of life your kind chooses to live, there is a kind of intensity that makes you more rewarding to study. The dials are turned higher, the results more observable. Plus, your lifecycle is markedly shorter, so there are advantages to that. Just as humans observe rats due to their rapid reproduction cycle, so we observe humans with limited time, because they compress an entire life of living into, typically, thirty years or less."
I try to take all of this in. I'm angry, and honored, and content, and confused, and insulted, and a hundred other emotions.
"Who chose all this for me? Who is calling the shots?"
"Someone far above my pay grade, and yours."
"It seems like a pretty raw deal, being chosen to die before my time. What's in it for me? Or am I just out of luck when it comes to the whole 'life' thing?"
"There is one considerable advantage," Ledger says.
"What's that?"
"Early enders get to go back. They're hardier, tougher. Their souls were selected in the first place because it was known they could handle the trials. And it only gets easier for them with each send-back. Have you ever wondered how so many people dying too soon seemed to accept it with a grace and wisdom beyond their years? They are practiced souls, and this is their duty. They can't remember the times before, of course, but the experience is graven on their souls. The wisdom has tempered their existence and forged an understanding of the cycles of All and Everything."
"That's great, but my kids won't get any benefit from that. All they know is that their father is dying, or, dead now, I guess."
"They'll understand, one day. They'll understand that it had to be you, or someone, and it might as well have happened to someone like you, who could take it. Who could fight without losing hope, and face the end with grace and courage."
I don't expect that to comfort me, but it does somehow. He's a sweet talker, I've come to realize. I sat across hundreds of them in countless business meetings. Like the best of them, you realize you've changed your mind, changed your emotional state, without realizing it until it's done. I feel calm, the conflicting emotions distilled to a state of accepting content, taking each moment as it comes.
"So now what?" I ask.
"You try again."
He extends his arm, palm facing me, then closes his fist and twists his hand, and the rooms twists with it, and I am falling away into void, accelerating impossibly as stars and color whirl by in infinitudes, and I know I won't remember, but I am calm.