Four years later.
When Ryan first moved into his apartment in Cambridge near Harvard Square, there were three ghosts haunting it.
Which was, obviously, far fewer than he expected. Normally for the kind of rent this place was asking, he would have expected to be stuck with a dozen at least.
So he signed a two-year lease even though, aside from the ghosts, the place was a horror show.
It was the third floor of a century-old three-story house. It had creaky floors and low ceilings and walls that slanted and bent alarmingly. The windows were small and narrow, and seemed to allow in only what scant light passed a pat-down and rigorous background check. Its location seemed precisely calculated for maximum inconvenience in commuting anywhere on the T. Everything in it rattled, or creaked, or dripped. The radiator did all three, and yet the heat from it never permeated beyond the three-foot bubble immediately surrounding it. There were frequent other noises from above, below, and all other sides that he variously wrote off as squirrels, water heaters, or “settling”. On one occasion he went down to the basement to see if he could make one of the noises stop, and had gotten trapped down there by a sticky door for an entire night. Which was fine, because the rank basement was actually far more comfortable and quiet than his apartment. That had been his best night’s sleep in the house so far.
Ryan didn’t plan to be there forever. He saw it as a temporary stepping stone on his way to buying a property, perhaps even in two years when his lease was up. Three at most. Then he’d forget that these few years of cold, creaking, and commuting had ever happened. That he was presently forced to live through them was something he put out of his mind.
But only three ghosts was nice. Practically solitude. And solitude was in short supply since the Blackout. In the weeks following that event, most people thought that the solar flare—or whatever it was—had brought all the ghosts back from some other place. But the truth was that they had never actually left. Whatever freakish charge the flare blasted into the Earth’s atmosphere, it just made the ghosts of everyone who had ever died much more apparent. And there were, by conservative estimates, about a hundred billion of them. So it was tough afterwards to find a solitary place anywhere in the world, given that ghosts tended to occupy all the spaces people used to have solitude in. And all the other spaces too.
Ghost number one in Ryan’s apartment was Benny, killed by heart attack in 1983 at the physical age of thirty-eight and the mental age of about twelve. He had busied himself since his death by scaring people: making things move on shelves, writing threatening messages in dust, and so forth. Before the Blackout, when ghosts were still invisible, he would have been called a “poltergeist”. And indeed the movie of that name had come out shortly before his death, and he cited it as inspiration for his post-death hobby. Benny still kept up his old habits even after the Blackout, not bothered by the fact that he could now be seen doing them. What might once have seemed like the machinations of a terrifying trickster spirit, now seemed like a fat guy in a tracksuit being a bit of a jerk. Ryan had one morning caught him on the kitchen counter, trying and failing to open all the cupboard doors. And every time someone knocked at the front door, Benny would bolt for it first with a cry of “I’ll get it!”. Yet in the years Ryan had been there Benny had never once managed to get it open. These tricks were an annoyance, but Benny was otherwise friendly enough. And he spent a lot of his time out of the apartment, “scaring” people elsewhere. So Ryan didn’t mind him.
The second ghost was a man whom Ryan took to be an Algonquian tribesman, likely dead since long before the Europeans had even arrived. He wasn’t inclined towards communication, so Ryan didn’t know his name or anything about him. He spent nearly all of his time fairly unobtrusively in the fridge. If you opened the fridge door you could see his body up to the neck, and if you opened the freezer door above it you could see his face staring at you in astonishment over a bag of frozen Lima beans. Ryan so rarely saw him that he didn’t mind him at all. Ryan would say the occasional hello when he needed to get ice cubes, and the ghost might, on a good day, grunt in reply. But that was about the extent of their interaction.
The third, of course, was Sye. Sye was the problem.
Sye looked to be in his 80’s, and although he never spoke, Ryan guessed from his clothes that he had died sometime in the 1940’s or perhaps 50’s. He never moved from the kitchen chair that had been in the apartment already when Ryan moved in. It was an objectively hideous chair made of some unidentifiable yellowish wood that was somehow developing fresh new knots on top of its old knots as it aged, and it appeared to be lashed together with strips of varnished bark. Ryan kept it when he moved in, partly because he needed another chair, but mostly because he was waiting for Sye to vacate it so that he could remove it discreetly. But Sye never, ever left it. Ryan had to guess that the chair had special meaning for Sye. Maybe he had built it himself. It was old enough. But it didn’t seem like an achievement to be proud of, or attached to.
Sye was really only a problem at breakfast.
While it has been asserted that breakfast is the most important meal of the day, Ryan took the concept and ran with it in entirely new directions. It had nothing to do with nutrition. In fact, he specifically avoided nutrition as a factor by selecting only the most honey-coated, multi-colored, vitamin-and-mineral-devoid brands of puffed chemical nonsense on the market. Some had special meaning from his childhood. But he had never stopped discovering new ones, even as he crossed into his 30’s. He had become a connoisseur of them, a sommelier of cereals. He was able to assign exactly the right sugar-frosted puffed-corn-and-marshmallow delicacy to each day based on the time of year, the weather, what he had on his agenda, and how long his present supply of milk had been in the fridge. When he got it exactly right, it could set him up for a day of productivity and success. But when he got it wrong or, worse, when he ran out of milk and had to eat his cereal dry, it could put him in a dark frame of mind that made normal functioning nearly impossible.
Ryan rarely ate dinner at the table. He liked to watch TV at dinner time and it was hard to see the TV from the kitchen. But he liked to eat breakfast at the kitchen table, because it afforded him a view of the cupboards so that while he ate he could plan what he was going to eat the following day and determine if he needed to pick up anything for it. And in the spring the sunrise aligned with the little kitchen window, providing a bit of light in the morning.
But Sye’s chair was between Ryan and the window. His vaporous form was dense enough that, while technically Ryan could see the sunrise through him, Sye diffused all the morning brilliance right out of it. It made Ryan resent Sye even more in the spring.
Plus Ryan couldn’t take Sye staring at him. Sye never spoke, and had one look: an accusing one. Ryan guessed that Sye was mad at him for moving into what Sye probably still considered his home. But Ryan wasn’t moving out over an angry old man, dead for nearly a century. He also wasn’t about to move the chair, since that would likely only make Sye angrier.
So for a while Ryan regularly took his cereal bowl to the sofa and ate breakfast in front of the TV even though he didn’t want to. And Sye would stay where he was, staring at Ryan’s empty chair as though furious at how Ryan wasn’t in it to be stared at.
Those were dark days. Holding his bowl in his lap inevitably meant drops of milk falling onto the cushions and soaking in, and sometimes bits of cereal would tumble out into recesses of the sofa where they could never be recovered except by vacuum. Sometimes his mood was so dark that he wouldn’t even finish.
After a few weeks of that, Ryan decided he was giving Sye too much power. He was going to eat at the table and pretend Sye wasn’t there. That’s what people did post-Blackout: carry on like the ghosts weren’t there. It felt rude at first but constant interaction with them just wasn’t possible. There were too many of them.
Besides which, Ryan reasoned, this was his place now. Maybe Sye had lived there in the distant past. But his time was done. Just because he was physically constrained to this place forever by some cosmic rule didn’t mean he paid rent. If one of the two of them was an intruder or a squatter, it wasn’t Ryan.
Emboldened by that, and also by the sour milk smell the couch was taking on, Ryan embarked on a show of territorial strength.
He started eating breakfast at the table. He half-expected Sye to protest, to angrily overturn the table and demand that Ryan leave. But Sye didn’t react at all. He just stared at Ryan with that seething soup of hate behind his vaporous eyes. Ryan ate in silence and pretended Sye wasn’t there, feeling the old man’s semi-translucent anger directed at him the whole time.
He kept it up for nearly two years. Eating his breakfast quietly at the table, thinking about tomorrow’s breakfast, glancing up occasionally at Sye and looking quickly away. Neither of them saying anything.
Two years. And then Sye’s chair fell over, and everything changed.
Ryan did not kick it on purpose, or at least not completely on purpose. But it was an early morning and Ryan was off to a bad start after trying to get through a bowl of Frosted Flakes without taking notice of Sye’s simmering rage. He had planned Frosted Flakes for this morning because A) it was autumn, B) the forecast called for rain, and C) he had to get up while it was still dark out if he was going to walk to the bus in time. Golden flakes of corn lovingly factory-drenched in sugar could have eased him gently into a miserable day like that. But because of Sye and his relentless eye-hate, the day now promised to be cold and wet and hopeless. When he left the table to get dressed, he passed too close to Sye’s chair and caught the leg with one foot. Almost sort of not on purpose.
But he completely forgot that Sye had no weight, so he was essentially kicking an empty chair. He had almost sort of not intended to shift it an inch at most, but instead it pivoted a half turn, caught on a protruding floorboard, and tipped. Reflexively, Ryan grabbed the back of the chair to keep it from falling, and his hand passed inadvertently into the substance of Sye’s back.
Ryan felt a surge of electricity flow upwards through his hand. The hairs on his arm stood on end.
He had passed through ghosts before, felt that tingle and experienced flashes of foreign emotions and thoughts as their being passed through his. Everyone had. Since the Blackout, it was impossible to walk a block without passing through a dozen of them. People had been doing it even before the ghosts were obvious, only without realizing it.
This was vastly more powerful. He was blasted by a jolt of sadness-contentment-love-loneliness-joy-humanity-frustration-anger-longing. Ryan thought that it might be everything Sye had ever felt in his entire existence, all compressed into one moment. Its intensity stunned Ryan, and the sheer volume of emotions was staggering, especially given that he had always thought Sye’s emotional range went from rage to smoldering disdain, and nowhere else.
Ryan jerked his hand back. The chair followed it and toppled backwards, hitting the hardwood with a loud crack as the backrest snapped in half down a jagged diagonal line.
Sye hadn’t moved. He was still sitting in the chair in stubborn defiance of physics, lying on his back on the floor and aiming his resentment at the ceiling. He seemed to have no awareness that his vertical alignment had changed so radically.
Still reeling from the rush of emotions that weren’t his, Ryan delicately lifted the chair onto its legs, holding the two halves of the back, each dangling by a single rusted screw, so they wouldn’t come off. He slid the chair back to its spot at the table, and Sye moved with it like he was an immutable, massless part of the chair’s construction. The two disconnected halves of the chair back wouldn’t take any weight, but Sye had no weight and didn’t seem to notice.
Forgetting the time, Ryan sat across from Sye and studied him for the first time ever. Really looked at him. Sye’s expression hadn’t changed. He looked like he would dive across the table and choke Ryan if he could.
But Ryan understood now. He had felt Sye’s entire emotional life in fast-forward and first-person, and he knew Sye’s anger had a specific focus. It wasn’t directed at Ryan at all. He had been wrong this whole time.
It was the chair. Sye wanted out of the chair.
The chair, wherever it had come from, was his prison. He was doomed to haunt it forever, and it was keeping him from doing… something.
Despite ruined Frosted Flakes, Ryan’s day was looking up. Because he now understood that he and Sye had something in common.
They both wanted Sye gone from the breakfast table.