Ghost Writing
They say the whole of life flashes before the eyes as one is about to die, that time slows down to a standstill and that seconds become eternities, but as soon as he jumped off that cliff he had what he thought was a great idea, and unfortunately it was all over too quickly. There was no slow motion, there were no flashes of past events, words, thoughts or deeds, reminiscing, regret or repentance, everything went as fast as it would have appeared to anyone looking at the scene from the outside. And just before he hit the water and died, all he could think was, Damn it.
He hadn’t been thinking, at least not clearly. There was the drinking, of course, but that was definitely not the reason. He had been a heavy drinker since adolescence, and if it had increased with time and especially in the last few years, it was no more responsible for his state of mind than the amount of cigarettes that always accompanied it. In fact, he was almost sure the whisky helped him, if not to focus, at least to drown the feelings of despair, and thus propel him forward, even if in the end it was forward off a cliff. But that was only liquid courage, it wasn’t why he was at the edge of the cliff to begin with. There was also his wife’s infidelity, which he discovered by accident when he picked up her phone instead of his, and there saw a message from his agent. There was no doubt, they were having an affair. Two betrayals for the price of one. But while his pride was hurt, the whole thing made him more sick than sad, and given his own numerous affairs, he could not even feign the faintest moral outrage, much less pretend that it led him to suicide.
None of that was to blame, because he really did not care enough about his wife or his health. There was only one reason for jumping off that cliff, and it was the fact that, ever since he won that stupid prize, he hadn’t been able to write anything of value, and if he couldn’t write, he might as well not exist. It had been now ten years. How sweet that victory had been, and how bitter the aftertaste came to be. Yes, of course, he published, he was almost obliged to, but there was nothing new, he had merely been recycling old material, stories and fragments and ideas he had set aside because they were not good enough, stretching some of them well beyond what was reasonable to fill the pages they expected him to fill.
Worse still, probably because of the prize and the prestige that came with it, no one dared to say the truth, that it was garbage, pure and simple. He kept on getting accolades and giving interviews, the acclaimed genius writer, the voice of a generation, a generation he hated, we might add. He couldn’t jeopardize it, he had contracts, and despite everything he needed the money, he needed to keep the charade going. And so he did. But the accolades and acclaim and applause he received only made him feel more like a fraud.
The last three years of his life he spent mostly drinking, pretending to be working on something great, he had even gone beyond what was needed and talked about it as if it would be his magnum opus, that’s how it is with lies, the falser they are the bigger the liar must make them. But the truth was he had not written a word. Not a single word. Before the divorce he had at least made an effort and written a few pages of drivel, but since then nothing at all. He had believed all his life, and well after he received the damned prize, that he had written primarily to be read and appreciated, but now he understood there was more to it than that. Being applauded for mediocrity was worse than being forgotten, and now that he couldn’t write, he felt like he didn’t even exist. And if he didn’t exist, what reason was there to keep on living. He was done deceiving himself and others, and so he jumped.
He was never one of those writers that sits down every day and writes even if he has nothing to say, even if there is no idea to shape. No, he could spend months without writing much at all except sparse notes and vague ideas, and then inspiration struck, that’s really how it felt, a strike from above, and once it hit him he sat down and the pen would almost move on its own, he would spend hours upon hours, days upon days, sometimes up to two months of obsessively returning to the material, barely taking any breaks, until it was done. But then the downtimes began to take longer to disappear, months turned to years, the notes became sparser, until there was only nothing, he was out of ideas. Whatever ability he had to capture a story from the ether was gone. He had even began to forget how it felt, to be struck by an idea, the exhilaration and excitement, the jolt of electricity, the forgetfulness of the world around and outside. And what a cruel twist of fate, to be struck with such intensity just as his body was about to hit the water to its death.
Of course, there is the idea and then there’s the execution. That indeed accounts for much, but throughout his career, his best ideas had come almost fully formed, as if the whole story could be captured in a picture, and that image would flash in full detail in his mind, and then his only job was to focus on each detail, to connect the dots and translate it, as it were, from image into writing. Thus, when he had the flash, just before he died, he was disappointed, because the clarity of the image, the richness of detail, it all meant he finally had something good, something to work on, something to give to the world, and it had come too late.
An artist can never truly be an atheist, but intellectually he was one, so when he died and saw that there really was life after death, that the earth was full of spiritual beings that one cannot see while in the flesh, and when the guardian angel appeared and explained everything, he was understandably taken aback. For a moment, because he felt he had more pressing business. The guardian angel was confused, What do you mean more pressing business, and the writer was very blunt, I have something to write. The man was not happy when the angel told him he had at most a few days left on the earth, then they would have to move on, But what if I need to stay longer than that, You will be stuck here forever, or until you become insane, which is very likely, the earth is no place for disembodied human beings. The writer was thinking of the implications, and after a while he asked, Will I be able to write over there, and the angel said, Not how you mean, and so the writer decided then and there. He shook the angel’s hand, said thank you, and went away. The angel started to say, Don’t you even want to know where you’ll be buried, but he was already floating away. The angel was still speaking but he was caught by some wind, and so he couldn’t hear what it was saying, but he wasn’t very interested, it was fun to fly. The angel was trying to warn him that he wasn’t going to protect him anymore, his job ends when the spirit leaves the flesh, or rather, when it leaves the earth, and the writer was unwilling to leave, but he couldn’t stay behind. Secondly, because of this he would be at the mercy of all the spirits and ghouls and entities that inhabit the earth but are normally unseen. Among these, and this is what the angel wanted to prepare the writer for, his characters.
Once the initial wonder of flying waned, the man decided to go home and get to work. He wasn’t far, but he found it was difficult to move as he wanted. Theoretically, he always assumed that once he was out of the body, he would have more powers, he would be able to move around at will, and go anywhere, undeterred by the heaviness of the flesh. But apparently lightness has its own disadvantages. Since he was spirit, he was finding himself dragged by the slightest breeze, this way and that way, and it was difficult to travel in a straight line towards his destination. As he was fighting in the air against the wind dragging him away from where he wanted to go, he noticed that several other spirits had crowded around him, and seemed to be following him. The spirits seem to also be moved by the wind, and more and more of them were coming towards him, and then quite a few of them started to attack him. At first he was afraid, but then he realized that they really could not do much at all, he was still intact despite them being relentless, they just passed right through him. They seemed to be shouting but he couldn’t quite hear them, their voices seemed far away. They were above all annoying, but he could reason that, given enough time, they would easily make him insane. He would have to find a way to keep them at bay if he was going to write the book. As he thought this he recognized one of the spirits attacking him, and then another, and then another. They were his characters. Why had he made them so despicable and so violent, why had he focused so much of his writing on the worst things in the world and in humanity, this is what he thought as he tried to ignore the attacks and keep his sanity. His new book would be nothing like this, all the more reason to get to it.
He did not quite feel the time passing, at least not as he had when he was alive in the flesh, but it took him quite a while to get home, the sun was coming up when he was speaking with the angel and when he arrived home it was night time. Another power he vaguely imagined he would have as a spirit was seeing in the dark, but again this was not the case. Thankfully there was a full moon, and though the house was quite far from the nearest street lamp, it was difficult but not impossible to find his way. Finally he was at the house and now he discovered another power he didn’t have. He could not pass through walls. There was nobody home, even his housekeeper had left, all the lights were shut, including the ones outside, so he bumped into the walls and was thrust backward, like he was bouncing on a trampoline in slow motion, and this lasted a long time until he was able to float towards a window, which he imagined he could crash and thus open, but instead he floated right through. Then the same happened inside the house until he was able to find the light switch, and then, not without a certain effort, more effort than was needed in the flesh, he was able to turn the light on. He was in his office. Most of the phantoms that had followed him had stayed outside, unable to get in, but they kept trying, over and over and over, he could see them through the window.
It was distracting, if not a little disturbing, but he had no time to waste, he should strike while the iron is hot, start to write while the idea is fresh and he has the very first sentence, which is always very important to get the thing going. He found it very difficult to open the drawers where the paper was, and then found it very difficult to pick them up and put them where he wanted them. It wasn’t a tiring effort, but it was annoying, like trying to use a limb that has gone numb. Then picking up the pen was another kind of difficulty. He couldn’t quite grasp it correctly, he felt handicapped, and then when he tried to write his handwriting was so bad he couldn’t even recognize a single letter, an outside observer would see only squiggles and think they were made by a child who was not very bright, and perhaps using the script of an alien race.
He tried all night with no success, and maybe it was the fact that time seemed to go by so strangely, but he kept on trying until one of the phantoms, another one of his characters, this time a common criminal, came in trying to steal from him. Apparently they could not go through walls, but doors, much like windows, could be traversed without being opened. The effort from the character was completely futile, of course, he had nothing that could be stolen and both of them were made of something like smoke, but since the character really had been minor, and with one motivation alone, this was all he could keep doing. He had to spend some time to lead it to another room, and then left him there to go back and forth against the walls, while he focused on his writing. When he returned to his office he saw the papers full of gibberish on his desk, and then he noticed the sun was already up, and that he had spent the whole night trying to write and with no success. But he wasn’t ready to give up.
He had always preferred to write by hand, but he reasoned that, given his current limitations, typing would be a better way to go. He turned on the computer, opened a word processing program, and started to type. This did not work either, at first he wasn’t sure why. No matter how many times he wrote them, the sentences would always came out with typos, grammatical inconsistencies, strange symbols, all seemingly appearing out of nowhere. It took him a long time, since he was so focused on the task, to notice that there were other ghosts besides his characters. They were exceedingly small, if they had been smaller he wouldn’t have been able to tell they were there at all, but as he focused his ghostly eyes he saw them better, little spirit critters, like insects, and they were all over and even within the computer, messing things up. He now could see that some of the ghosts were leading his fingers this way and that, so that unnecessary letters were added, or commands triggered, destroying the coherency of the text. And in the screen he could see other spirits moving things around as he typed, and stopping when he stopped. This suggested to him that they were sort of powered by himself, but how to get rid of them he didn’t know. Again none of this was exactly tiresome, but it was extremely annoying, and the sun was already going down.
He decided to take a break and take a walk, or rather float, around the house. It was getting dark so he turned on the lights as he went and every time he could not avoid getting scared, for every room was full of phantoms, some he recognized as being his characters, or strange versions of people he knew, if there was any difference between one and the other. He opened another door, and turned another nob, and the light revealed that it was his old room. There he saw all his lovers, licit and illicit, they seemed to be screaming as they flew around the room and splashed against the walls. Even his wife was there, or rather a ghost that looked like her. They were only phantoms of course. Still terrified, he heard someone knock on the door, it was the police, at least that’s what they said. He went towards the front door but they had already opened it through force, and now all the ghosts of his characters were coming in to torment him. Only later did he realize what they were doing there, someone had seen the lights and called them, thinking it was a robbery. They walked around carefully around the house with guns in their hands announcing their presence and telling the imaginary criminal to come out peacefully with his hands in the air, checking everything and finding nothing. Then finally they went around turning off the lights. He tried to talk to the policemen and though they seemed to be affected by his words in some way, they could not really hear him or perceive there was someone else there, so after a while he went back to his office. When they passed by it on their way out, the policemen were confused, Didn’t we turn off this light, the other confirmed. The writer understood what was happening and decided to have some fun, throwing the papers into the air, scratching the walls, blowing away the policemen’s hats. The joke got old very quick, the policemen were terrified and ran away.
He couldn’t tell how long it was after this episode when other men came and the house was emptied, but by this point he had more or less given up. He wasn’t able to write, not by hand, not in the computer, and he had no other ideas. If someone had told him about these events when he was alive, and asked him how he would react, he would have answered that he would feel anger and then despair, and then try to kill himself. But of course that was out of the question now, what would it even mean. Perhaps the only form of death as a spirit was madness, and this he somewhat feared because he could see how easily he could succumb to it. But it was more than that, he found himself caring less and less about the project, maybe he was finally becoming a proper ghost, for he felt no anger and no despair, he felt nothing at all, not even boredom.
Some time after this, he was floating over his old bed, the ghosts of his lovers were gone, he just wanted to lay there, or as close to it as a ghost can. Of course he couldn’t sleep, but it did not feel like insomnia either. Time was just at a standstill. How many hours passed he didn’t know. The thought occurred to him to stay there forever, it made no difference either way, but he abandoned it just as quickly, even that was some kind of choice, some kind of will, and he was aiming for nothingness. But then someone came in through the door, was it a real person or a ghost, he couldn’t tell at first because he had turned off the lights and it was still too early in the morning to illuminate the room. Then as the person got closer he thought he was seeing himself, but quickly understood it was a fictional version of himself he had put in one of his books. He hadn’t seen this ghost before. If the angel he’d seen was like his self perfected, this was a like a variation on himself, no better and no worse, just with slight differences, so that at once you could see both what was similar and what was not, more like two brothers, perhaps even twins, but of the type that are not identical, making both the resemblance and the difference quite eerie.
The writer said, What do you want, and the ghost replied, I know what you don’t know, And what does that mean, I know how you can write the book as a ghost. This was sufficient for the writer to understand. Of course, he couldn’t write the book himself, much like his fictional character could not. What he needed was to influence someone who was alive and in the flesh, put the thoughts and the sentences into someone’s head and then they would do the work, supervised by him of course. But then he ran into another problem. Who should be the one to pen the story, and all the writers who were still alive and that he could remember the name of he considered his rivals, and the idea of giving this to them gave him nausea, everyone knows both writers and ghosts can be petty, so one can imagine the pettiness of a writer who is also a ghost. He decided to sleep on it, metaphorically speaking of course.
One day he felt like going outside, he knew the crowd of ghosts would appear to annoy him, but he was now more apt at getting away from them, and so after a while he was enjoying the peace and quiet when he heard a voice calling his name. It was very faint, and he wasn’t completely sure, so he let it go. But the next day he heard it again, that day twice, one time in the morning and another in the afternoon, and when it finally happened again on the third day he tried to go towards where it was coming from. But it was very hard, because the voice only spoke for a little while, it almost seemed like someone praying, and as soon as it was over it was hard to tell where it had come from. Then he had an idea. One of his most beloved characters had been a woman who was a medium, and that could communicate with people telepathically, or rather hear other people’s thoughts and know how to find them. In the context of the story she was used to save innocent kidnapping victims, and now he was hoping that she would help him find the source of those curious prayers. He looked around the crowd of ghosts and saw her, but she was not exactly like he remembered, or as he wrote her. It seemed more like a faint and muted version of the same character, very much lifeless. Still, he had to try and so called her name and when he did this she gained color and a more human appearance, and was now looking him in the eyes, she was even a little more solid, at least compared to the other ghosts. He said, Would you help me find this voice, and she replied, What voice, This voice that’s calling my name, I’ve heard it only a couple of times, Well I haven’t heard it at all. So he asked her to stay with him and wait for the voice to appear again. In the meantime she asked him a question she always wanted answered, Why did you kill me at the end of the book, it made no sense to end the story in such a tragic note, and his honest answer was that the editor had convinced him to change it from a happy ending to a sad one, because it was more on brand. He apologized and she forgave him. Eventually the voice did call again, and this time she heard it as well and was able to find where it came from. More than that, she was able to hear perfectly what the voice had said, And what was it, asked the writer, and the ghost woman said, He was asking for your help in writing a book. It took them a while to get there for the same reasons that it takes a while for any ghost to get anywhere, as he had experienced, a simple breeze would throw them off course, and this was constant. Once again he had no idea how long it took, but they arrived at the house where the voice came from, and the strangest thing of all was not that it was just around the corner from where his body had been buried, but that he could know instinctively this was the case.
They entered through one of the windows and found a man and a woman sleeping. They were around thirty years old. The writer asked which one had called to him and the medium pointed towards the man. Then she asked, Do you mind if I stay, I want to see what happens, and the writer agreed. The clock on the bedside table marked seven minutes past four o clock in the morning, but for a ghost that time is no different from four minutes past seven in the afternoon, and so the ghost started to talk to the young man. He kept calling to him until the sleeping man started to squirm, and then finally woke up, disoriented, but clearly with a purpose. He put on his robe, picked up his notebook and went to the balcony. He lit up a cigarette and opened the notebook to an empty page. Then the ghost writer started to talk, as if explaining his idea, and soon the young man was writing.
The process wasn’t as easy as he had hoped, it took quite a while for their rhythms to become synced, for his ideas to be properly communicated and for the young writer to properly set them down, but then as the days went by a certain fluidness in their relation was found. The young man soon thought to surround himself with the old author’s books, reading him constantly, and this, coupled with his prayers, seemed to strengthen their bond and ability to communicate. Because of the peculiarities of the process, the final product ended up being more young man in some parts and more ghost in others. Sometimes the ghost could influence the man to write exactly what he wanted, other times the man wrote what he felt like, as if ignoring the ghost’s input. Eventually they had finished the first draft and now they had to go over it from the start, and the ghost writer immediately noticed he quite disliked the first sentence. It was understandable, at the start he could not exert as much influence as he did later on, so that the beginning was barely his own, only the idea really remained. He always took the first sentence very seriously, so he tried to get the young man to change it completely, but maybe his powers were waning, or he was tired, or the young man had grown more confident and hence less needful of the ghost’s help, and so in the end the final version of the first sentence was a mixture of the two personalities, and it read,
They say the whole of life flashes before the eyes as one is about to die, that time slows down to a standstill and that seconds become eternities, but as soon as he jumped off that cliff he had what he thought was a great idea, and unfortunately it was all over too quickly.
The young writer was proud of his achievement, it was the first project he had been able to finish. Even though he was absorbed in a trance as he contemplated the printed pages with the final product of his labors, he remembered to thank the writer, his idol, his literary hero, fully convinced that somehow he had been there with him all along, and that without his help, he would not have been able to do it. The ghost writer was moved, but also a little disappointed, for in the end and despite all the trouble it took, his idea had only yielded a short story.
