In “Out of Body” a ghost checks in on his former girlfriend

Phases

Sol’s major red flag is that she does not believe in the authenticity of the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing. She does believe in subsequent moon landings, and in science, climate change, and vaccinations, but when she’s drunk, which is often, she likes to claim that Stanley Kubrick staged Neil Armstrong’s moonwalk on a soundstage in Huntsville, Al- abama. We used to get into fights about it. Long, head-banging back- and-forths that started out funny but grew to reveal deep philosophical divides between us.

“I don’t understand how you could think this way,” I’d tell her, exhausted, sad.

A few weeks before my death in an electrical storm, she took it even further: “How can you be so sure that nothing happens when we die? That there are no such things as soulmates? That our spirits aren’t recycled? How can you be so positive that a little man, just like you, stepped foot on an astronomical body?”

In retrospect, I mean, fuck.

It’s Friday night and Sol is well-dressed, confident, gorgeous, her eyes sparking solar systems as she talks up photography, politics, mental illness, spatial awareness—the whole wide everything—to her dumb- looking date who sits rigid in his chair next to me. He is also well- dressed, a little bland-looking, lacking some vital quality of spirit in his eyes or hands or humor. He sporadically checks his phone and does this weird thing where he clears his throat and looks around the restaurant patio whenever Sol makes a joke. And it’s like: laugh, dude, she’s funny. But he holds this default, neutral expression throughout, like a statue, and honest to God, if he could feel it, I’d probably smack him.

“And it’s exciting, this road trip,” Sol says, riding her own flying segue from an earlier conversation thread, “because we’ve known each other half our lives now, but we’ve never, you know, met.” The trip in question is to Portland, where she is going to meet her pen pal, Brian, this guy who she’s corresponded with on and off since she was a teenager.

The trip is in three weeks, and the drive will take nineteen hours. She’s leaving at five in the morning. I know all this because I’ve been looking over her shoulder while she fusses with Google Maps, while she reads Brian’s emails, while she writes in her journal.

I’m still not sure if this is a violation.

“You’d better be careful,” her date says. “You hear stories about this kind of thing.”

“We’ve video chatted like a hundred times,” Sol says, hurt, I can tell, because her voice goes up at the end of her sentence the way it did whenever we used to fight about conspiracy theories or where to spend Christmas. “And plus we follow each other online. It’s tough to bullshit that. He gets tagged in things. Pictures with roller coasters.”

“It just feels a little weird, you know? Driving a thousand miles for a stranger.”

Their waitress stops at the table and reaches through me to take their plates. “My sister met her partner on an MLB subreddit,” she says. “Couldn’t help overhearing.”

“God, I hate when they interject like that,” the guy says, once the waitress is out of earshot. “It’s off-putting.”

“You’re off-putting,” says Sol. He cocks his head and starts to re- spond, but before he can, she adds, “You know, for years I dated a guy who worked in a coffee shop,”—that guy being me—“And store policy was that he wasn’t allowed to be confrontational. And so one day, he’s working during a terrible blizzard, and two customers come in. The first says, ‘Hell of an April we’re having—one day it’s sunny, the next it’s snowpocalypse,’ and—you know, sarcastic—‘but good thing global warming’s a myth,’ and then the second customer says, ‘I mean it is a myth,’ and he says, ‘Lady, you’ve got to be kidding me,’ and she’s all, ‘Who do you think you are, a scientist?’ and it turns out this guy is! So he’s like, ‘Yes, I’m literally a scientist,’ and she says, ‘Okay, well accord ing to who?’ the whole time Henry—my boyfriend, at the time—had to keep his mouth shut. Wasn’t allowed to call bullshit. Which was tough for him. He always wanted to prove things. To himself, to his customers. To me. We disagreed a lot,” she says. “We fought a lot.”

“Well.” Her date raises his glass. “To shitty exes.”

“Henry’s dead,” Sol says. “Coming up on a year, now. We were still together when he died.”

If there’s ever been a moment when I’ve wanted to be present, really present, it’s this one, to sit down beside her and take her hand and tell her that it’s all good, that death isn’t so scary, that the only real drag of it, beyond the lack of physical pleasure, beyond the lack of sex, the lack of food, drink, pot, and speed, is that I can’t be right here, in this instant, with her.

“Um,” the date says. “It sounds like you’re going through some stuff.”

“Do it,” I say. “Tell him you miss me.”

The waitress returns before Sol can reply. “Any dessert tonight?” she asks. “Coffee?”

“Fuck this guy. Say you’re tired.”

“Just the check,” Sol says, and then, once they think they’re alone: “Besides, I’ve got coffee back at my place. Unless dead boyfriends are a turnoff.”

I don’t hear what happens next. A kind of cloud comes over me, like when you stand up too fast—well, not exactly, because I don’t get dizzy anymore, but I still feel as sad, as overwhelmed, and as hopeless as I ever did alive—and so rather than watching this guy smile for the first time all night, I phase downward through the chair I’ve been floating on top of, through the floor of the rooftop patio and the crowded kitchen, into the basement, as deep as I can force myself, where the boiler gurgles apocalyptically and I am alone.

Before the storm, I spent plenty of nights wondering what it would be like to be dead and how I might, you know, make that happen, but now that I really am dead—son of a bitch—I just want to be alive again. I’m going through some stuff, too.

Here’s what my love life looks like these days, although neither word feels totally appropriate:

Chloe and I start at opposite ends of an empty bedroom in a run- down apartment, and then, on three, float toward each other, through each other, and to the other side of the room. “Again,” Chloe says, and so again we float through each other. I can’t feel anything, but this time Chloe moans. “Oh,” she says. And we go again. Slower this time. Then faster. Sideways. We can’t see each other because we don’t have bodies anymore, but if we’re close enough, we can sort of sense the other’s presence. Finally, we pause as we collide, occupying the same space as the other’s ethereal matter.

Chloe and I are fuck buddies. We don’t know what else to call it. She’s been dead longer than me and claims to have had a similar arrangement with Beatrice, who’s not around anymore and who I sus- pect must have transcended. Whatever happened, Chloe doesn’t like talking about it. She and I first met at group therapy, where Chloe was first attracted to me because, she said, she’s always had a thing for sad boys, and also because we’re both pretty into the Vikings. Two months into this arrangement, and digs-the-Vikings is still nearly the only thing we know about each other.

In the empty bedroom, Chloe asks me, “Do you feel it?”

“I mean.”

“Oh,” she says. “God.” I’m about ready to push out but she says,

“Stay here. Oh.”

I do my best to stay right where I am.

“This is so much better than it was alive.”

“It’s,” I say, “different.”

“Definitely. Alive, it was too fast. This is like, full, you know? We’re not in each other; we are each other.”

“Sure.”

“I do wish you could run your hands through my hair. I always liked that. Could you say it?” she asks. “Could you say that you run your hands through my hair?”

“Okay,” I tell her. “I’m running my hands through your hair.”

“Oh, God. Good. Now kiss every inch of my body.”

“Right, sure, I kiss every inch of your body.”

“Oh—yes. Now hold me.”

“I hold you.”

She moans. 

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