I
My Ghost
It’s a Thursday morning. I get out of bed, I walk to the kitchen/office/dinette (it’s a Swiss Army knife of a room), and I see a book pushed in again. Today, it’s Blood Beast by Darren Shan: it’s roughly three inches behind the books on either side; my ghost has been extra feisty today. I take a picture, which is something I’ve been doing lately, first to evidence these paranormal sightings to my sceptical friends, now to catalogue my ghost’s appearances—a fruitless attempt to make sense of it all. I forward the photo to all my friends, something they’re undoubtedly sick of, but someone needs to witness this besides me, even if it’s via WhatsApp. When the messages are marked as delivered, I adjust Blood Beast to its rightful position, in line with its neighbouring hardcovers. I’ve always been anal retentive about the alignment of my books; my friends say my shelves look like they’re stolen from Waterstones. Perhaps that’s why my ghost chose them to haunt.
Once I’m satisfied with the alignment, I step back, I pack my laptop and a book, and I leave for work. This has been my routine for the past six months. I can vaguely recall the first time I found a book pushed in: it was three books, actually, and despite each of them having been pushed in by at least two inches, each in different areas of the shelf, each with no disturbance to the books around them to indicate that, no, I did not bump into the shelf in a way that could have produced this pattern, I responded with no more acknowledgement than a huh, that’s weird. It took at least three more similar mornings before I thought that is weird. My ghost had my attention, and it wasn’t long before I was calling it my ghost.
The advice I received was never satisfactory, regardless of how practical it may have been. One friend asked me to look for any history of untimely death at my apartment, but there was nothing, which didn’t surprise me, since it was a new building and seemed free of Victorian-era spirits. The consensus, among those who had enough faith in me to believe that the whole thing wasn’t a hoax, was that I was sleepwalking.
The sleepwalking theory was as unprovable as it was unfalsifiable. I lived alone in the apartment, and I don’t have any childhood anecdotes of sleepwalking to say whether or not I have any presupposition of inherently being a sleepwalker. The question really was, could I see myself getting up in the middle of the night, opening my bedroom door, walking to my office and sticking my index finger out at random sections of the shelf? It was difficult to. When I found my books like that in the morning, it seemed so delicate, so deliberate; the fact that no other books around it were disturbed made it so much more curious to me. I suppose I must also admit that I didn’t rest so easy back then.
Is it a coincidence that my ghost’s first appearance came just a couple of months after I moved out of my parents’ house? In that apartment, I felt as lonely sailors do whilst lost at sea. My grandfather passed from Alzheimer’s the year prior, and I suspected that I, myself, was continuing the legacy. I learnt that you don’t need mind-altering drugs or a family history of schizophrenia to discover what a crumbling mind feels like. My performance at work suffered as my constant memory lapses took over; my coworkers often asked if I was drunk (which, in all fairness, I increasingly was in the coming months). I don’t think I registered those first few times that the books were pushed in, because my waking state operated on confused dream logic. That was also when my dreams became indistinguishable from reality. I started referencing times I spent with friends, only to get confused looks and then recalling that all that had happened in a dream. Embarrassing, yes, but worse was when I’d dream of a friend or coworker finding out something horrific about me, and then I’d wake up and fall into an anxiety attack, believing everyone in my life was disgusted by me. I started fearing sleep, and I began going to bed drunk just about every night.
There was one time which still stands out today. I had been selling a box of a dozen or so books that I didn’t have the shelfspace to keep. I kept the large Amazon box on the dresser in the corner of my bedroom. One night, I woke up, only, I didn’t wake up—not entirely. I watched myself get out of bed, walk to the dresser, and frantically grab for and throw aside the books, as if I were digging a hole out of literary soil. There was no logic to it, but I could sense my motive: There was something at the bottom of the box that I needed, and I needed it fast. I watched this happen, but it wasn’t me.
I woke up (for real this time). I didn’t have to get out of bed to see that the box was in shambles and the books were callously thrown about the place. It was real and I watched it happen, but it wasn’t me. It was a stunning experience of having something other than myself in control. It had been a stark reminder of my times riddled with addiction.
II
Where do we go when we sleep?
I have a theory that there is the you and the me that we know. If you have an inner monologue, this is the you I’m talking about. It’s the person who will speak and have emotions and ruminate. That is you and me. But I think there’s someone else, someone who breathes for you, pumps your heart, makes the inner trains run on time. If prompted, you can manually take control of some parts, like breathing or walking, but once you forget about them, your ghost takes over. I suppose this is your subconscious—the silent guy in the back. This guy should stay in the back but often influences the you you in other ways. This ghost is responsible for your fears and will make you react regardless of whether the you you knows something is a threat or not.
In my father’s twenties, he was prescribed anxiety medication for his fear of heights which had become so disruptive that he couldn’t drive across any bridges or take any planes. Living in Australia and working a job that required frequent travel made this a no go. My dad probably had enough sense to know that bridges aren’t a real threat, but I think his ghost told him otherwise.
People who can’t control their ghosts all the time aren’t necessarily mentally ill. You can have phobias and irrational emotions while getting on with your life perfectly fine. In fact, I think you’d come across rather robotic if you didn’t. But I think my ghost was more real and, ironically, more alive than I liked.
Part of the reason why The Exorcist was so radically terrifying is because of how it displayed this lack of control. A child, the face of innocence, is possessed by a demon and made to commit ungodly acts. My possession has never been as severe, although, I think you can understand my point as to why this was so distressing.
Saying this all, you may find it rather ironic when I go on to describe that after I constructed this theory in my head, I experimented with giving control over. The easiest way to start was walking. After you’ve reached a certain age, walking, of course, becomes natural. This means that you can pick a destination, and, like a point-and-click RPG, your legs will take you where you want to go. This may differ when you’re drunk, for example; in those times, you can feel how clunky the conscious (or you you) mind handles physical tasks like this. Have you ever noticed that when you focus on how you’re walking, especially in a public place, you feel kinda stupid? So, I began walking consciously, and then distracting myself with something else. Walking, distracting, walking, distracting. I was switching control between me and my ghost. Then, I could focus on my walk while keeping autopilot on. Doing this feels like you’re separated from your legs. People call this muscle memory, but I, of course, call it my ghost.
I went to the driving range with my dad and saw how this could be put to my advantage. Golf, which I am unquestionably shit at, requires a particular form that can take years of practice and coaching to get down right, and that training all goes to muscle memory, which seemed to be my ghost’s domain. Hitting the astroturf too many times to forgive and having largely inconsistent results, I shifted to my ghost. It’s hard to explain the sensation. I can watch myself do it, but I’m not deliberately making any movements; I simply say, ‘hit the ball; do it well’, and off it goes. This was the mind upload from the Matrix, or the Bradley Cooper scene in Limitless. (It reminds me of the joke about how Oprah would hire servants to move her legs for her because she couldn’t be bothered to exercise.) It very well might’ve been luck that I began hitting the ball every time and at just about the same distance and speed, but my guess is that my ghost was taking notes all the way back from the first time I saw Happy Gilmore to the thirty seconds prior, when I saw Dad take his turn.
Admittedly, this part could be feeding into my instinct to write science fiction. After all, I write in the same café with the same cup of Earl Grey to keep the same writing vibe. I believed all of this at one point, even if I don’t know how credible my recollection is. Maybe I’m exaggerating the trivial shifts into autopilot and muscle memory all of us but infants do every day. But I guess it gives me some answer as to why I found my books pushed in like they were. I attributed it to my ghost because I wanted there to be a non-zero chance that I wasn’t going insane.
There’s a second reason too. Maybe I invented my ghost to keep me company. Locked in my apartment—alone and with no accountability but my own conscience—my ghost was with me. I think my ghost was real in some sense; after all, there was something other than the me me doing all of this. Maybe my subconscious was doing anything it could to keep me alive.
I’ve been depressed for some years now, and I can’t really accept that if I don’t also acknowledge that I’ve been at risk of dying at the same time. Depression puts you in a quantum state of dead and alive, and it’s the scariest thing of all to know you’re okay now, but the next night could be torturous enough to push you over the edge. Maybe my ghost was born out of survival instinct. I think I needed a friend who could keep me accountable.
III
Now
It’s a Saturday evening, months later, and I’m drinking cheap Pinot Grigio. I’m at my desk, which is a dining table, and I’m finding a way to make a story as personal as this accessible to the public. I no longer live in that apartment, and I no longer live alone. After I moved this story to my Completed folder, I wondered if I’d find any more books pushed in—I didn’t. I haven’t heard from my ghost since.
Good people don’t feel this way, is what I thought; I was therefore not a good person. But it’s taken a lot of talking to some very intelligent, very compassionate people to know that those whom we deem insane aren’t so alien and, in fact, the mind is so fragile that no one should be blamed for losing a bit of it from time to time. There’s been a lot of work to forgive myself and I might not be all the way there yet, but I think I can rest contentedly living a life where I love the people and the things I love, ignoring the rest. And when I sleep tonight, I won’t go anywhere; I’ll just rest.