There exists a contest among the dead. Each week they enter a lottery. They hold slips of paper between the dusty tendons of their fingers and creep up to a hat that’s been placed on a small table in their respective town squares. They drop the slips of paper inside the hat, extending and releasing like carnival cranes. The hats are then collected by a particularly ghoulish bureaucratic employee, their contents dumped inside a spinning ball, the location of which is kept secret. Back at home, the dead turn on their screens or plug in their phones or their AM/FM radios (depending on when they died). Then they wait. There was some debate, at first, over whether to broadcast the lottery live. The concern had to do with time zones. In the afterlife, your day and night are the same as they were on Earth. It seemed unfair that every dead Japanese person who’d ever lived would be sleeping when the results were announced. But selecting a time was better than selecting no time.
What the dead win is the chance to walk among the living for exactly three minutes. Very little can be accomplished in three minutes (aside from murder, ask around) but three is all they get. This explains why every ghost sighting in history has taken about the same amount of time. Ghosts don’t go on road trips. They don’t wait in line with you at the supermarket or watch television over your shoulder. Astoundingly, some try to stretch their time. These are the kinds of ghosts who, when they used to be people, sauntered into dressing rooms and tried on pants at a pace that suggested an unfamiliarity with pants. They get summoned back quickly. On top of which, they have their pads of paper revoked for all eternity. It’s a devastating blow. But this is how much it means to them, this opportunity to stare at a cracked ceiling, to wash their hands or set the table or tidy their rooms. They miss it so much, the chance to participate in the mundane, it consumes them beyond reason.
This is the story Clive Glenn’s mother used to tell him whenever he’d complain of boredom.
I think about this story a lot these days, which is strange, since Clive has given me plenty to think about since. It’s more successful as an anecdote than a lesson, but part of the story had stuck with Clive, maybe the wrong part. Being a kid is like this. Your parents pack you a suitcase full of pedagogical messaging and by the time you’re grown, it turns out most of the items were perishable anyway. You have to start over, pack your own bag. I remember the day I heard Clive talk so earnestly about this parallel ghost world, expecting him to laugh it off. But he wasn’t laughing, he was confessing. That’s the first time I can recall thinking something was off with him. Way off. For all our surface similarities, there was a whole layer of one-eyed sea creatures on Clive’s ocean floor.
It was a Friday afternoon. We were sitting around the conference room table, perched on the edges of ergonomic chairs, plastic bowls of half-eaten salad warmed by the midtown sun. A centerpiece of untouched delivery napkins. We assumed Clive was turning his mother’s wacky parenting into lunchtime fodder, but no—he was floating the idea. Did we think it was possible that the dead operate like this? That this is how planes of existence are organized and maintained? Look beyond what you know, beyond “science,” and just ask yourself what’s possible.
But we were not capable of asking, never mind answering. We were young and poor, eating lunch at the office so we didn’t have to pay for it ourselves. We scrounged for segues. Vadis had an aunt who’d hired an exorcist once. Zach had a toaster oven that would turn itself on in the middle of the night. That was pretty weird. Clive excused himself to make a call.
I’d hoped that was the end of it. But as we were leaving an editorial meeting the next day, Clive held me back to tell me about the time he’d seen a ghost in the building. Our magazine had occupied the same space for more than a decade. Before us was a branding agency, before them, the ad men, before them, a Berlitz language center, before them, a Pan Am call center. Really, it could’ve been anyone haunting the halls. It wasn’t a figure, he clarified, so much as “a shadow that moved with its own intent.” Could I believe some poor schmuck had used its break from eternal damnation to watch the light on our copy machine plead for a refill? I shook my head. What I could not believe was that we were having this conversation.
The shadow, he went on, unprompted, was a reminder to appreciate whatever lies beyond our way of thinking, a world made no less logical by our lack of understanding and no less valid by our skepticism.
“Mysticism,” he concluded, “is as rational as math for those living inside it.”
I blinked, waiting for him to say something else. He didn’t.
“Are you kidding me with this shit?”
Now seems like a good time to mention that the magazine in question, where Clive was editor in chief for eleven years and I was his deputy editor for nine, was called Modern Psychology. This was a scientific periodical, the oldest and most prestigious in the nation, if not the world. We were the gatekeepers for the profession, the legitimizers of research, the debunkers of myth. I was not trained for this kind of talk, certainly not from my mentor, a man animated by logic and brown liquor. I felt betrayed by his sincerity regarding the occult, and he, in turn, felt betrayed by my judgment. It wasn’t long before he began shutting me out, confiding in me less, whispering into the phone, missing work without telling me why. Our coworkers hadn’t gotten the memo. Whenever they needed a stamp of approval, they asked me if I knew where Clive had gone. Or when he’d be back. I was the one to ask. But I never knew.
This was before the magazine folded, before the print-media world evaporated, before we began new lives.
And now? Well, now nothing, Clive. Now you’re dead.
I hate to be the one to tell you this, but life on Earth has proceeded at pace without you. All your scheming did not alter the human experience as we know it. No one’s emotions can be purchased or cured from the outside. People are not your puppets. If it’s any consolation, I am not the same. Not after everything you did to me. I no longer believe in coincidences, for one thing. I often feel as if someone is waiting for me as I round certain corners, a feeling strong enough to set me walking in the opposite direction. I have difficulty relaxing in crowds, which is hardly exceptional, but solitude can be fraught in the same way. When I fall asleep, a force not entirely benign passes behind my eyelids. Like I can hear the mechanics of a curtain being drawn.
And if it helps, I’m sorry. That one is tough to admit, considering all the time I spent feeling wronged by you, but I suppose death is the ultimate lubricant for truth. You were my friend once and I’m sorry I didn’t try to understand you better when I could have. I fell for the projection and forgot the person. I wish I’d listened to you that day in the conference room. What you were trying to tell us is that, like ghosts, each of us would sacrifice anything—money, sanity, security—for a chance to go back in time, to make sense of our choices, of the unholy mess that is ourselves. So if it helps, Clive, I think you are out there right now, writing your name on a slip of paper, patiently waiting your turn. I really do. If it helps, I know you can fucking hear me.