There are a lot of ghosts on this planet.
Geoffrey does not understand why his brain puts
emphasis on this, spells out the p-l-a-n-e-t of planet. He does
not remember being on planets besides this one.
He understands too much and too little about why
he is a ghost and what these other ghosts are doing here at the same time. It
as if all the personal information that had been built into his soul over the
reincarnations has been repressed, swept under the rug, tucked away neatly in
the back of a closet, or inside a drawer, out of sight. The only thing They had
left for him was one of his names. Geoffrey.
Even his name, one of his names, isn’t a
useful context clue for why Geoffrey is still roaming Earth as a translucent,
slightly faded ghost. It doesn’t explain what purpose he is meant to fill.
This lack of background knowledge makes him feel
different from the other, more faded, ghosts he frequently meets as he wanders
southeastward down the continent, who are all stuck in the past in one way or
another, broken records. They are mostly still caught up in patterns, in
problems they couldn’t answer or routines not even death could pry them from,
waiting for the right person to come along to pull them into the astral plain
proper. Few ghosts actually seem to wander the world of living for some purpose
that doesn’t connect to their most recent life.
Geoffrey thinks he might be one of those ((un)lucky)
few who is here again to fulfil some higher purpose. He has an unofficial
handbook on ghosts and the afterlife memorized in his skull, factual knowledge
of Earth culture, no memory of whoever or whatever he’d been before, and
chronically wandering feet- searching feet. He fits the criteria.
He just doesn’t know what his higher purpose is.
—
In some odd ways, ghosts have to behave like
humans. Like…Geoffrey can climb in the back of a car, can sit in a corner of
the bed of a pickup truck, can sit on a seat on the bus as if he still had a
body. Sometimes he sees other ghosts on those buses, ghosts following their
daily routines, or trying to get somewhere, one last time. Even though these
occurrences are more common than expected, it always slightly off putting to
see a ghost hunched over, asleep on a window, and a passenger sitting in the
same seat, a solid form superimposed over a faded one.
He’ll walk on freaking running water, though.
Some young ghost girl at a languidly moving river, frustratedly pacing and
pacing from grassy bank to grassy bank, smooth current visible under her washed
out feet, clues him into this.
The trees are tall and leafy green here, here
with dilapidated small towns and white birds in the cow ponds with the cows and
two lane highways and a lot of small backyard pools. The girl is washed out,
but she the outfit she’d most often pictured herself in is a dress cut off at the
knee, what was probably once light colored hair tied up in a simple flipped
ponytail. She paces to the opposite bank he’s standing on, and when she spins
on her bare heel, she abruptly and suddenly notices him and some of the faded
look vanishes as she remembers why she was a ghost in the first place. The
sudden blossoming colors draw the eye to a pair of slip off sandals thrown near
the base of a tree leaning over the river, one floating stationary over the
river water and the other lying propped up against the trunk. They look to have
been thrown there in a fit of anger.
“Yes, I was trying to swim here,” she snaps at
him, where he’s appeared on one bank, “no, I did not expect that swimming in a
river that’s deeper than it looks with rocks on the bottom was not the best
idea.” She stops furiously pacing to look at Geoffrey long enough to say,
deadpan, “No I am not Jesus.”
Geoffrey knows of Jesus. He’s knows of Muhammad
and Abraham and Moses and God and Buddha and Vishnu and any other number of
things when it comes to that, but as he doesn’t know that much about any
of them, this announcement that this girl is not Jesus seems like a non
sequitur.
“I’m sorry,” he says hesitantly to the girl
who’s gone back to pacing with a vengeance, “What was that about Jesus? And if
you’re not Jesus, who are you? ”
“I can’t freaking drown myself and move on
because I’m walking on water! Like Jesus! But I’m not Jesus, I’m Ellen!” she
doesn’t stop pacing to say this, but her hands are balled into fists, and
suddenly, she stomps over the sandal floating on the water, picks it up, and
flings it very hard at the tree. It thwacks off and lands near the base.
“Um, ghosts can walk into still water,” he
offers, because he found that out when wading through one of those cow ponds.
He wanted to see if he’d walk through a cow.
“What does that have to do with anything? I
drowned right here in this river,” Ellen points out, her voice sharp. She
crosses her arms.
“Hey, hey, relax,” he raises his hands in a
calming gesture. “I’m just saying, if trying to drown again in a river isn’t
working, try something else. Like that nice cow pond back there,” he points
back over his shoulder.
“I drowned in a river,” Ellen reiterates,
tightening her arms, as if he hadn’t heard her the first time.Suddenly, she
flings her arms out, anger flying wide, “THIS river!”
“Yell a little louder, why don’t you, I don’t
think the cows heard you.” He says dryly and pointedly, a bit taken aback by
how loud Ellen had suddenly gotten. If she has to drown again to pass on, why
doesn’t she just go do it instead of yelling?
“I don’t want to try drowning myself in front of
some cows! It’s not the same as drowning in this river! Where I already
drowned!”
Geoffrey sighs, rubs a hand over his face.
“Obviously, trying to drown again in this river isn’t working. The cow pond is
another place to drown.”
She has gone back to crossing her arms and
squints at him suspiciously, not quite believing him.
There is a silence.
“Look,” he says finally, “a drowning is a
drowning, and it doesn’t really matter where it happens.”
“Changing the location of a drowning changes the
experience of drowning,” Ellen argues, but her arms have uncrossed, she’s
listening now.
Even if Ellen is listening, Geoffrey doesn’t
really have a comeback for that response. He’s never considered that point
before. He opens his mouth; then he closes it again. However, he still feels
like he has to win some sort of point or they’ll spend the rest of eternity
arguing, so he asks, “Why do you care about drowning again?”
Ellen blinks once at him, long and slow, as if
he’s stupid. Her voice raises again, a bit, “because drowning was what killed
me in the first place, and now I can’t get there-“Ellen makes a
frustrated gesture at something she obviously can’t describe, Geoffrey knows
because he wants to make the same one so often, “because for some stupid reason
the river won’t let me drown myself again.”
Geoffrey is beginning to see what the problem is
here, what lesson was so crucial to her soul that she needs to learn it before
she can fully pass on.
“Why should you try to recreate the exact same
experience, when another similar one will do just as well?” he asks Ellen
reasonably.
She tugs at a hank of hair, looking into the
middle distance, then turns her face at an angle and squints at him. He raises
his arms at the elbow, spreads his hands out at about shoulder height,
scrunches in his shoulders a bit. It’s a shrug.
“Drowning in the cow pond?” she asks, testing.
Geoffrey nods.
Her expression loosens and some of the squint
fades from her eyes as she rights her head.
For a moment Geoffrey can see nothing behind
her. She’s opaque, solid, fully colored. Freckled skin, turquoise blue eyes,
butterscotch colored hair, and her dress is mauve purple with darker blue and
dark crimson red accents.
“Huh. I never thought of it like that before,”
Ellen says.
Ellen turns, and picks up her sandals, as if in
trance. Her colors- not her colors - and solidity had reached
their climax in her moment of understanding. The falling action begins, then,
and her and those colors are fading as Geoffrey watches her take her
sandals by the straps, fading as she walks out onto a certain part of the river
and, fading until she’s see through and then she’s not even that. She’s gone.
With her seem to have gone the colors, and this
wonder of watching a ghost move on loses some of its awe, for he is suddenly
and indescribably sad. He can’t even find the words for why he is sad, only
hazy images sliding out of his mental grasp when he tries to pin them down,
only the deep and despairing feeling of watching something important
slip out of his hands. Then there is a horrible shuddering fear, sinking
invasive runners into even this, and he can’t find what memory fragments he was
trying to search for anymore.
He’s happy for Ellen the Drowned Girl, but it’s
only a small thing buried under the feelings of loss and terror.
Geoffrey grimaces, toes the grass clinging to
the edge of the bank a little with his boot, and then turns away from the river
and starts walking in a random direction. Ahead of him are rolling fields of
green and the occasional tree. There also appears to be a collection of
buildings to the west, and Geoffrey heads in that direction, knowing there will
be a road somewhere nearby.
He sighs, and lets the knowledge that his
wandering feet are leading him toward some sort of answers push away the
terrible feelings from watching the colors Ellen had chosen fade away. There is
something right about seeking out whatever might be in his future.
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