No Room for Ghosts

I’d shot rabbits on the farm. I knew what it was like. You hit them even when you miss them, because they scare so easily that their little hearts explode. I guess that’s how it was with Leanna.

As I sprinted down the street, my still-dusty sneakers pounding the pavement, a million thoughts streamed through my mind. It was as though a projector had been jarred, and now that it was unstuck, reels and reels of film coursed through it. They flickered through my brain at an impossible speed, as though someone was firing a machine gun loaded with images. As each segment flashed before me, a new square of pavement disappeared beneath my feet.

The police were right about the gun. That was what I packed inside my bag that day, wrapping it snugly in a towel, to avoid detection and accidental firing. In hindsight, it seemed like such a stupid precaution to take, given what I intended to use it for, but I had a specific target.

Actually, I had two targets.

I wanted to die. I knew that much all along. Even now, I couldn’t pin the desire to any single problem. It was more an insurmountable tide of anxieties that had submerged me, so that water filled my lungs and gasping was painful. Each failure, regret or heartbreak I faced was a drop in the ocean, and as I repeated the cyclical process of aspiring to change and being disappointed by myself, a wave crashed in, its stinging, salty surge renewed. Each time, the waves were a little more intense, until the onslaught was too much, and I begged for nothing more than to sink under the surface.

Well, that was a lie. I wanted one more thing.

That was why I picked Leanna. She waited for the same bus I caught into town every day. That was where I’d known her from, and why she seemed so familiar to me when we ‘met’ and exchanged phone numbers. If anything, it was surprising that she didn’t leave a stronger impression on me as a ghost. I guessed that was the result of my mind playing tricks on me, again. Probably, it had learned that tricking me was the only way to secure some fleeting happiness.

When I saw Leanna, I saw first how beautiful she was, or would have been, with her long, swinging ponytail of silvery blonde and her sparkling eyes, rimmed with thick lashes like reeds around twin pristine pools.

Secondly, I saw everything she was that I wasn’t. She was a city girl, or else had taken about as well to life in Sydney as I had failed to. She dressed smartly, and carried a stack of books. She was clearly destined for some pedestal I never had a hope of reaching. Yet, at the same time, she was fragile. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that she was flawed, but she was just broken enough for me to see in her the possibility of mutual understanding. I was drawn to her like a moth to a flame, because she was exactly the kind of person I had always wanted.

She was everything I wanted in a friend.

It was wrong of me, therefore, to rob her of her entire future in the misguided belief that she could nurse my past.

I had taken everything from her. I was the sole cause of every tear she cried over a dead little girl, a fresh grave, a sundered family, or an angst-stricken life that she would never have the chance to rectify, because of me. I was even the reason for the cast on her arm. It was selfish of me to try to possess her. So utterly, unforgivably selfish. How could I have thought for a second that it would last?

Gritting my teeth as I hiked up the hill, I knew the answer to that question instantly. I was notorious for my bad decisions. They were the reason I had dropped out of high school, the reason I had been forced to leave home after a row with my parents, the reason I had chosen to come here, to the city, where I had nothing and knew no-one, just because it was the antithesis of home. My poor choices were me. If I was the sum of my accomplishments, then I was nothing else.

Even the environment seemed to notice it now, and was rejecting me. Perhaps it was because I was a self-aware dead person, and so my haunting was over, as Randolph might have put it. The city that had turned a blind eye to me for so long, in life and in death, had finally been alerted to my presence, and was furious.

The pavement reared up in front of me, its slope ever increasing, so that if I didn’t run faster, I might topple and slide back down towards the café. Trees penned in iron cages clawed at my face and neck with gouging branches. Living pedestrians swarmed in front of me. Although they were no permanent obstacle, they served to buffet me as I ran, slowing down my progress.

Overhead, birds swarmed ominously in the sky, and I sensed a tingling in the air, like the static that anticipates a thunderstorm. I predicted that they would soon descend, swooping me from all angles. By the park, a flock of seagulls squabbled over scraps. As I watched, they rose up as one being, a winged storm of brown and white feathers, pointed beaks and airborne chips that resembled a cloud of locusts. Thankfully, the wind caught them, and before they could focus on me, they rolled on like a tumbleweed.

Spurned by this narrow escape, I ran faster.

I had almost reached my apartment, when a shout accosted me. I turned, and saw my fright reflected in the dark, shield-like sunglasses of a modern policeman. With a nauseous pang, I realised that it was a member of this police force, not the kindly, lost soul who peddled the girl’s photograph, who had looked for me in the graveyard. This policeman knew who I was, and now that I recognised him, I knew why he wanted me. For all I could tell, the city was crawling with his doppelgangers, each of them a single cell in a hive-mind built of radio satellite signals.

A second shout was directed at the black, antennae-topped box by the policeman’s ear. It was only a matter of time before his whole unit zeroed in on me. I couldn’t tell to what degree they might be assisted by the hostile matrix of roads, tunnels and footpaths that was increasingly becoming a trap.

More unnervingly, I didn’t know what they would do when they caught me. Was there a hell for people like me- sinners who didn’t repent? I hoped not. I hadn’t been religious.

Maybe it wouldn’t matter, I thought, without much comfort. What I’d done was probably too despicable for remorse.

With a mixture of panic and self-loathing curdling in my chest, gripping my heart so tightly that it writhed in protest, I lunged around a corner. Immediately, I found myself struggling against momentum. The way was barred.

Black and yellow investigation tape stretched around the block, encircling the building where my apartment was under siege. The tape had sprung up overnight, or so I thought, until I realised that it had in fact been several nights since I was home. I hadn’t been home since I had discovered I was dead. As a ghost, I didn’t get tired, and I had been much too preoccupied with ascertaining the rules of my transient afterlife to care much about my messy abode. Of course, I hadn’t dared to show Leanna where I lived.

Leanna.

The thought of her stabbed me, further rending the raw gash in my soul. After a moment’s conflict, I wrestled off her memory before it could strangle me. I had to focus on getting back inside my flat. It wasn’t that there was anything in particular there, or that I was sentimental. Part of the reason I had been happy to wander was that I viewed it as a sleeping space only. It was in death as it was in life to me, a hovel, devoid of the ghosts of anyone else who might have lived there. It was my space.

At least, it had been my space.

Now I wondered whether my haunting had thrown a glamour over the place, so that I previously interacted with the room that existed just before I died. That was the main reason I needed to break in. I needed to know. I needed to see if it was different. The grey plaster walls with their grimy floors and crumbling ceiling together formed a kind of Pandora’s Box that reeled me in. I only had suspicions, and I knew that inside it, I would find answers.

It took me nearly twenty minutes, assuming my perception of time was accurate, but I found an entrance. In a narrow, gated back-alley that was like a detainment centre for garbage bins, there was a trellis of drainpipes I could climb. This crevice was free from police tape, and, as long as I was silent –although that would be a challenge– I prayed that I could to force that rusted window that had never properly closed.

It was a slim hope, but I clung to it as I scaled the rickety pipes, swinging more deftly from railing to windowsill than I ever could have done when I was alive. In a small way, I was grateful that I had no fear of death.

I breathed a sigh of relief and victory when the window budged and I finally dropped in, my landing muffled by the decades of stains and musky damp that soaked the carpet.

I made it!

A full heartbeat passed before I saw that someone else had made it first.