Let It Be Known
(Text by Gregory Fearn)
My name is Wilson Klein. In life, I was a woodworker. Now, I am a ghost. That is to say, I am a soul without a body. I was a ghost for many years before my having died – which is when most people who become ghosts do so – but we’ll get to that later.
There are several details regarding the freedoms, restrictions, and duties of being a ghost which I would like to explain. Some of these details are quite banal, and I should very much like to cover these as quickly as possible, such that I might explain how I became a ghost, what choice I’d had in the matter, and what it is I – as a spirit in the corporeal realm – am now obliged to do.
Let us begin.
I can float, of course.
I am completely invisible, also. You could liken me to a passing shadow, cast against polished glass.
I cannot speak, since I have no body, and thus have no lungs or larynx or mouth with which I might twist and rattle air into units of meaning.
I can experience emotion.
To most, this final detail may be somewhat confusing; how, might you ask, if you have no body – and so have no brain – is it possible for you to feel anything?
I will explain.
Simply, feeling is the domain of the soul, and a soul is all that I am now. This is what all ghosts are. We are souls, unmoored from their bodies.
Listen:
When I was a boy, long before I had learned how to tie my laces, my mother bought for me a pair of shoes whose mouths could be fastened with straps of Velcro. Velcro was the name of a now long-since defunct corporate enterprise. The word has also become shorthand for a fastening mechanism consisting of two strips of fabric. One of these fabric strips consists of very many tiny hooks. The other consists of countless pliable micro-loops. When the hook-strip encounters the loop-strip, the two pieces of fabric lock together. One application of this technology is in closing the mouth of a shoe, in lieu of a wearer capable of tying laces.
And human beings, as it turns out, are very similar in design to such a locking-system. Only, in the case of humans, the body – or the brain, specifically – plays the role of the hooks. The soul, then, is a rectangle-strip of very many soft, pliable, velvet loops.
Life begins when a strip of soul-fabric becomes married to a strip of body-fabric.
Life ends when the two strips separate.
Both remain, of course, just as either strip of a Velcro locking-system retains permanence independent of its partner-strip. But the body decays – and this leaves most still life-locked humans with the impression that the soul undergoes a similar process.
Not so, I have learned. Not so in the least.
Who – or what – is it that we human beings have to thank for this conceit? I do not know. If I did know, I would surely tell you now. But listen; I simply do not know.
I can move through walls, also.
Goodness, and how I used to dread doing so! In fact, any time I tried to leverage this ability to my benefit to, say, save some seconds in moving from the kitchen of Mr. Bennett’s home to his dining room, or to avoid needing to float up the stairs into his study, I would find myself briefly without any light, as I passed through solid matter.
The dark, I am afraid to say, still mortifies me as much in death as it did when I was a young boy with Velcro sneakers and many years of life ahead of me.
I credit my soul with this shortcoming.
But I have made leaps and bounds in confronting my soul’s fear of the dark. As with so many things, I have found that an excess of exposure breeds complacency; and complacency has long since been humankind’s answer to all its fears. So I sit inside walls now, for hours at a time, in that perfect pitch-black space, until I grow complacent. And then, beyond my fear, I begin to listen; since my hearing – as well as my sight – is the only other sense which has remained with me after the departure of my body.
And I hear the most wonderful things from inside Mr. Bennett’s walls.
I hear tiny, insect-skitter scratching in the woodwork.
I hear the earth shifting beneath me.
I hear the foundations of the house shift in tandem with the earth, buckling, breaking, resetting, dancing a blind and lugubrious lovers-waltz.
I even hear the rats and the mice in the attic speak to one another of their stolen, fugitive suppers. If I could speak, I suppose I would tell these mice that Mr. Bennett is – just as I was in life – entirely too defeated and apathetic a man to play judge, jury, and executioner to hungry rodents.
And how is it that the language of mice and rats is so clear to me that I might understand their fear, their hunger, and the nature of their desires?
Simple:
When the mice pass through me, I can hear their thoughts; just as I can hear the waltzing foundation of Mr. Bennett’s two-story country house.
Most of what the rats and mice think about is Mr. Bennett, who figures as an entity akin to the Devil in their narrative; and of the crumbs strewn around his dining table, which they think of as heavenly manna. Funnily enough, it is Mr. Bennett’s complacency – not any charity of the divine – which delivers upon these animals their sustenance.
I suppose now would be a time as good as any to explain who exactly Mr. Bennett is, as it occurs to me I have made repeat mention of him thus far without giving him any introduction. For this, I apologise. It has been a very long time since I have told any stories.
Kim B. Bennett – the man whose home I am haunting (which, I might add, remains a needlessly pejorative term for what is better described as co-habitation) – is an obituarist for the Wynwood Digest. He writes of the recently deceased, ensuring that their lives are capped off in a manner filigreed, intentioned, didactic, and wholly obverse to their messy, random, meaningless births.
Here, I suppose hooks meet loops once again.
Just how much of human civilisation remains forever locked in the process of pairing-up matching shapes baffles me now as much as it did in life.
Therein is revealed another facet of my soul:
I do not understand most other people. The only two people I have ever understood are Franziska Klein – my late wife – and Kim B. Bennett – my current co-tenant, whose thoughts I am privy to when I occupy his body.
Mr. Bennett is also quite afraid of the dark. He sleeps with a night light on, even in his late sixties. For this, I am grateful. Also, he seems to have a better grip of what’s going on with humanity than I ever had. His thoughts have been quite elucidating, so far.
He is thrice-married, having lost one prior spouse to a cancer of the pancreas, and another to an act of petty, domestic terrorism. His third is on the way out the door now also. Huntington’s chorea, of all things.
Perhaps this constant proximity to death is what had first drawn Mr. Bennett to writing obituaries, or perhaps the work is what had allowed him to cope successfully with these ineffable losses, or perhaps his soul is simply more prepared than mine ever was to convert tragedy and loss to joie-de-vivre and literature.
I do not know, and I cannot ask.
I found Mr. Bennett approximately one week after my body and my soul had become fully separated. One week, incidentally, is typically how long it takes Mr. Bennett to complete an obituary. This was not coincidence. Rather, it was the result of my curiosity.
I wanted to know what he had written of me.
I should clarify: I had no interest in reading my obituary. This was to be the public rendition of my life, curated and sanitised for my neighbours; and I could have found this rendition printed in any kiosk which stocked the Wynwood Digest. No; what I wanted were Kim B. Bennett’s failed drafts, the sawdust of his eventually fine work. I wondered what impression of my soul this man might have glimpsed, and how he might have figured me in the privacy of his study, away from prying eyes.
But all this was only what had first brought me to the obituarist. I have stayed with him for the better part of two years now, and I have done so for an altogether different reason:
My obituary was the first that the illustrious Kim B. Bennett could not bring himself to write.
His reason for this – I have gleaned from sitting in the lightless space within his body – is twofold:
The first was that there is nobody left alive who knows anything about me, so there were no sources left from which he might learn who I had been in life. All the circular, Velcro-loop wars over in Europe had long since swept the entirety of my family either into the afterlife, or into ghosthood.
My wife, like myself, was a sufferer of multi-infarct dementia; and so had had her soul separated from her body over very many years. The same was true for me.
This is what I’d meant, incidentally, when I had mentioned becoming a ghost years before my death. Dementia had slowly and steadily ruined all the hooks in my brain to which my soul had clung. It had un-bodied me, long before I’d died. It had done the same to my wife.
And here was something she and I had never spoken to one another about:
Whether we should like to carry on in this world, or if we should want to find one another in the afterlife. But by the time we were confronted with such questions, it lay beyond the capacity of our fizzling brains to even recognise one another.
Too little, too late, as they say. Better luck next time, as they say.
And this uncertainty was what had informed my becoming a ghost, I believe. I could not know for sure, as the decision had been made so impulsively and so suddenly, but this was my suspicion:
The thought of an eternal afterlife without my dear Franzi Klein had repulsed me so grossly that, rather than be surrounded eternally by a gathering of ancestors and relatives whom I had known at best by surname (which is what I assumed the afterlife would be – some kind of family-reunion Valhalla) I would remain on Earth as a wanderer. If I could not have the company of my Franzi, I would just as well have none at all. This decision turned out to be prophetic. I will explain how at the conclusion of my narrative.
But first:
Mr. Bennett would be forever incapable of knowing all this about me. He would also be forever incapable, it seems, of completing my obituary. So, allow me the indulgence of doing so myself:
Let it be known – Wilson Klein remained ever faithful.
𓆣
The second reason for Mr. Bennett’s incapacity to finish my obituary:
That single word which he might have used to describe my life had been purged from all dictionaries and from all languages the world over.
The reasoning given by most governments for this was that this word – and its synonyms, all so dreadful in their meaning – were crosses entirely too heavy for the human race to bear. So, if this word could be eliminated, the burden of these crosses could be relieved, and human beings could carry on living unmitigated lives, themselves unconcerned with the future, unconcerned with the consequences of any of their decisions.
And at any rate, human beings – ever rich with complacency – had overcome their fear of these terrible consequences through constant, excessive exposure to them. So much had assailed the human animal, and so much had been survived. What use did anxieties regarding these assaults serve, then? What use was the language describing them, when it described something utterly unremarkable? What purpose was there to waxing philosophical about the afterlife and about ghosthood with one’s partner when these concerns were entirely fantastical and harmless?
Most human beings seemed to agree: There was no purpose.
And so it would be; this dreadful word was dead and gone now, itself either having become a ghost, or a courtier of Yahweh, or a participant in whatever long-hall festivities were being held in the afterlife. Any consequences or conditions which this word might describe, then, were also well and truly gone.
Who knew; that was all it took!
The global climate was repaired overnight. With a turn atop its heel, the economy boomed; and it would thrive forevermore. All was good and stable in the world, since there was no longer any word for that which was abruptly awful anymore. And all the human animal had needed to do in order to induce such a golden age was to lobotomise its language.
Tough cookie, though, for Kim B. Bennett, who was financially dependent on his obituaries; who needed that language to describe my passing; who needed to feed not only himself; who needed to keep the rats and mice in the attic fed with manna-crumbs.
Tough cookie for myself, also; but alas, it was curiosity that killed the cat, and it was satisfaction that brought it back. I myself had no prospects of being brought back, with all the Velcro hooks of my body bent, broken, and buried.
I suppose I have no reason to be belly-aching now.
But, if I could for a moment indulge in one such bellyache:
I am so desperately alone now.
I mentioned restrictions at the beginning of this story. I suppose now is a time as good as any to explain.
Simply, I am utterly and completely alone; as are all ghosts. This is a particular cruelty of my condition and my knowledge which I cannot understand. I know that there are other ghosts besides me, and I know that we are all completely alone. I do not know how I know this; nor do I know what good this knowledge does me.
Here, I feel no curiosity. There is no answer that could satisfy me, that could bring back the cat. All this, it turns out, was what was prophetic about my refusing a reunion with my ancestors.
And why is this the case? Why are all ghosts damned to be eternally alone, and to know that they are alone? I am ashamed to say that, again, I do not know. Frustratingly, my time without a body has taught me very little about myself, and Mr. Bennett’s thoughts have only taught me one thing about humankind:
What’s out of language is out of mind, what’s out of mind is out of sight, and what’s out of sight may as well not exist – if it exists only in concept.
I suppose this constitutes a kind of third reason, also, for Mr. Bennett’s failing to write my obituary:
Franzi and I had been recluses, had been perfectly contented with one another’s company and nobody else’s. Few people ever saw us in the flesh. When they had, they’d certainly just seen strangers. They’d seen our home also – such a lovely bungalow – and they must have known there were people living in there. Our lawn was always neatly kempt. Our postbox was emptied regularly. Every two weeks, a black bin would appear on the street before the house; and it would disappear as soon as its contents had been taken by the waste collectors.
To most, the two of us were as corporeal as language; as corporeal as I am now. I wonder if our names had been stricken from the record, if Franziska Klein and Wilson Klein might not also have found their dementia vanishing overnight. I doubt this, somehow.
One more bellyache:
Should I have passed into the afterlife, I might have found loop-fabric answers to pair with my countless strips of questions. I might have found any number of answers to all questions, I suppose. I might even have found God Almighty, mingling amongst His subjects, asking if they’d all enjoyed their time on the ride, asking if there was anything they should want for supper, and so on.
I did not pass into the afterlife. I chose to stay here, in the realm of light and matter, and it is amongst light and matter that I am stranded now.
Better luck next time, as they say.
In my defence:
The choice of my becoming a ghost had presented itself – as most crucial decisions present themselves – implicitly and anonymously. I would liken this phenomenon to breathing or blinking, perhaps. But these comparisons are little more personal indulgences, I must admit. It has been so long since I have either blinked or breathed, that perhaps my notions of such acts have become embellished or otherwise unreliable.
But oh! How wonderful it had been to breathe, and to blink, and how rarely I’d felt gratitude for such gifts in life. And I am grateful now, I find, to nobody in particular, for even being given a choice in becoming a ghost or in passing into the afterlife.
I wish only now that I’d have been more so grateful before I’d made my decision. I wish that I had pushed fewer of my fears away, that I’d been less complacent of a man, and – God Almighty help me for admitting this – I wish that I’d spoken more to my relatives while I’d still been in possession of a larynx.
I have been dead for two years now; I have been a ghost for seven. In all this time, I have yet to encounter a single djinn, faerie, devil, god, or any other such wish-granting entity. So, I will strike from my language this impossible, meaningless word – ‘wish’ – just as all the living have blinded their all languages to those tragedies with which the human animal assails itself.
In its lieu, I will speak only of catastrophes.
𓆣
It has been three years since my death, and very little has changed.
Though, lately, I have taken to telling stories as a remedy to my loneliness – a condition to which I have yet to grow complacent.
Still, I work at learning how I might speak through only my velvet-loop soul. I try to twist and rattle air without a body.
I tell all sorts of stories, all within the boundaries of only myself, such that by virtue of my telling them, this empty well of ghosthood – into which I project my narratives – might twist and rattle some air back at me.
I do so, in the hope that other ghosts might hear me; in the hope that the well might call out, and that I might recognise its voice.
No luck, so far.
In response, I hear only Kim B. Bennett – my now-thrice widowed co-tenant, and my personal interpreter for the human race – mumble arcane, long-forbidden words in his sleep.
‘What a catastrophe,’ he says, speaking to the starving rodents in his attic. ‘What a catastrophe.’
Ah, I must apologise. I am only indulging in more bellyaches. All is beautiful in this world of human beings, after all.
By language itself; so has it been decreed, and so shall beauty remain forevermore!
𓆣
To close this narrative, I feel – truly, I feel – that I must explain how it was decided that I should become a ghost.
Only a few days ago, it struck me that I never truly chose to become a ghost, but was made into such a being by my malfunctioning brain. I did make a decision at the moment of my death, it is true; but I had decided only to remain as I was.
The human animal, also, has made many such similar decisions in the last few years. Just this winter, they peeled all the words for ‘poverty’ and ‘suffering’ and ‘mocking-bird’ apart from all the hooks of all their languages. They too have chosen to remain as they are; to remain ignorant and complacent.
They grow more ghastly and demented by the day.
Mr. Bennett, who is every day left with fewer and fewer tools for obituary-writing personally laments each of these losses; yet he does so only in his sleep, preaching to a silent choir of mice and ghosts.
So, once more, in my defence:
As with breathing, or as with blinking, or as with any other such parasympathetic bodily function, my decision to remain a ghost had been made automatically. It had been made on my behalf; though it had not been made by my brain.
It’d been made by my soul, which had decided to make me alone, to make of me an eternal vagabond in the realm of light and matter.
My soul, I am sure now, had done so for fear of forsaking my dearest Franzi; whose soul had surely done the same for me. I say this beyond a glass-shadow of a doubt. My dear Franzi has become a ghost. Neither of us will ever see one another, ever again. For this, I suppose we both have our fear of the dark and our complacency to thank.
Finally, I would like to act in honour of my duty as the spirit haunting Mr. Bennett’s old two-story country house; which is to inscribe into my soul all those obituaries that the language of alive-humankind is not permitted to write.
Kim B. Bennett has, in the last decade, been denied by humanity the completion of two obituaries. One of these is, of course, my own. The other is one I should very much like to present to you now – my dear, silent well:
Let it be known – Franziska Klein remained ever faithful. What a catastrophe!