a june ghost story

one… two… three…

You can know where something was, but you can’t know where it is. You don’t know anything, until you look, but then when you look, you only know the past. That was a rule, right? Some German guy.… Hindenburg, maybe. It doesn’t matter. I’ve just been trying to remember. I felt like you’d remember. You always liked physics. It was funny when you became a lawyer.

Anyway, thanks for coming out. It feels like just yesterday we were graduating from high school. I’ve meant to keep in touch with you since your wedding, but of course it’s easier said than done. Me? No, I never did get hitched. It doesn’t really fit with my life, I guess. It’s easier being alone.

You’re right, I never mentioned what it is that I do. It’s a little hard to explain—do you know Vicki Jayne? Yeah, everybody knows Vicki.… She’s performing tonight, yeah. You get tickets? No, of course not. Those tickets were gone the moment they went up for sale. No chance for an average guy like you, even if you had the money. But I could get you in, if you wanted. You could bring your wife, your kids. You just have to promise me that you’ll open your eyes. That’s the job. Free tickets and a hefty chunk of change on top. And look, not to be rude, but I know you don’t have much going on. I know you got laid off. I even know why. But don’t worry, I’m not going to tell her.

Oh, don’t look like that. We’re old friends. Can’t I yank your chain…?

Heisenberg, you’re right. That was the guy. Heisenberg. The uncertainty principle. I knew you’d remember. I got it wrong? Doesn’t matter. Whatever he said, I know something myself now. A refinement of the theory. I’ll tell you all about it, if you say you’ll go to the show for me.

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This kid needed a job, that’s where it all started. He wasn’t good at anything. But he had a friend, and his friend had a friend, and that friend’s friend asked around, and then came back with a funny question: how is he at staying awake? Well, that was easy. Even he could stay awake.

So he signed one contract: that was for the job itself. It paid a nice salary, cleared his debt, and came with a place to stay in the facility, which you could leave exactly once a month, though the way things shook out he never did leave. Then he signed another contract. That one said he’d keep his mouth shut. By the time he actually saw the facility, had stepped inside, he understood that this second contract was more of a warning than a legally binding agreement. People who could build a place like this didn’t rely on contracts. If they thought he was going to talk, he would just disappear.

But he needed a job. If he’d been outside, treading water, accruing debt he couldn’t ever repay—you know how it is—he would have just disappeared anyway. He’d been selling blood to eat and when he had found the place where he’d been living, he’d had to put down a kidney as his security deposit. At some point, somebody would have decided to act while the less disposable organs were still worth something. Still, the other thing he realized, when he was being processed at the facility, was that whatever his job here was, staying awake must be of supreme importance if they’d hire a loser like himself. Actually, later, he’d even figure out that they really needed somebody like himself—people who were so desperate for a job that they’d sign up without asking questions and who could disappear without raising too many. He wasn’t a stupid kid, really. Just useless. But sometimes, in the early days, he’d talk to himself in his room, so we’d get these thoughts of his. One day he stopped.

But when he was being ushered first through the iron gates, and then into the flat grey structure itself—the facility’s mostly underground, there’s just the one floor on the surface—all he understood was that these people, whoever they were, would not hesitate to kill him. And while they were giving him his keycard and the rest, scanning his retina for security, the woman explaining the facility to him asked him if he knew Vicki. And he said, you know, the same as you: who doesn’t know Vicki?

Nobody really knows why it’s Vicki that’s on top, and not one of the others. Believe me, people have spent a lot of money trying to answer that question. But when you see her on TV or in the papers, you know, you just look. And she’s got that husky voice, even though she’s so small. And that red hair, the kind you can’t get out of a box. It’s supposed to have gone extinct in people these days, red hair, but there it is, growing right out of her. And, sure, the songs are good. She’s not really my kind of thing, I’ll admit, but I’ll hum along. Still, lots of people write good songs. Lots of girls are pretty. But only one Vicki.

I’ve always thought what makes Vicki special was her eyes. They’re just a little tilted and a little droopy, with big thick lashes. She always looks a little sad. Those eyes always look as if she’s beseeching you personally, asking you to take her away from it all, even though she is a pop star with more money in the bank than some countries and you are just some guy.

That sense that she wanted you specifically, she was maybe too good at it. That stalker got through her security that one time a few years ago. She keeps pretty low to the ground these days. I don’t know if you watched her first concert after her recovery, but she looked amazing. Her eyes looked even larger and sadder, her hair even more vibrantly red, her husky voice even more seductive. So, yes, this kid knew Vicki. Though, he added, he wouldn’t say he was a fan, exactly. He was kind of uninterested in her, to the extent that that’s possible. Not a hater, though.

Of course, some people don’t like her, that just goes with the territory. They even think she arranged that stabbing.

They’re half right, actually.… But it was the label, not Vicki.

Her contract was ending and she wanted to go independent. Vicki prints money and nobody knows why, nobody knows how to get Vicki Two or if there ever will be one, so the label didn’t love that idea. But they didn’t want to hurt her. They just wanted to remind her of all the perks that came with staying under their wing. The bodyguard they’d paid off was just supposed to let the guy get a little too close. The problem was that they used a genuine stalker, not a fake, to make sure it couldn’t get back to them. So the guy was crazy, and somebody who’s really crazy, it’s hard to know what he’ll do. He got the knife in her before anybody knew what was what. You know that part.

What you don’t know—what nobody knows—is that she didn’t survive.

Well, almost nobody. Just the people in the facility and the people that work for them, like me. And now, you. Technically, I should say, Vicki’s still alive. Her body’s in a glass box and they keep it frozen in there, but if whatever process they’re using to keep her on the brink of death ever got disrupted, she’d die. But that much is all they need to keep her ghost.

I guess out here, you guys still think that sort of thing—you know, ghosts, the soul—isn’t real. It’s more useful if you don’t, but we’ve known about it for a while, at the facility. She was the first time the team there had ever performed a successful extraction, though—one that left us with a useable commodity at the end. With the other girls, we didn’t really understand what was important. We thought that if we had the body, we could dispose of the ghost. Wasn’t the body what people really wanted? But audiences didn’t like it. We ran through some pretty promising girls before we realized that was a bust. Vicki made us understand, it works the other way.… Though we still don’t understand how it works, really. But we’ve run tests on some less valuable subjects to get a sense of the parameters. That was how we found out somebody needed to be looking at her. To fix her where she was, I guess, or that’s how they figure it. Heisenberg.

The guys they hired to watch her worked in staggered eight hour shifts, two at a time. Only ever men, and only ever losers, like the kid. Once you were in the room, your job was just to look at her—the ghost, that is, not the body in the glass box. If nobody looked at her, she’d stop being there—that was why they sent you in pairs, so that you could blink. If she could stop being there, she could refuse to come back. Could just get back into her body and die, or that was the fear. Because what was obvious, the moment you entered the room, was that she wasn’t happy to be there. She could make it nasty in there with her moods if she wanted. She couldn’t feel it, but she knew you could. She’d float up to the ceiling and sulk while she dropped the temperature to below freezing. We had a fake mirror up in the ceiling, which turned out to be useful, but she’d just float up there making faces and at first we were all afraid she could see through the glass. She was just looking at herself, though.

They always make ghosts seem so pale and wispy in the movies, but Vicki’s ghost is more real than real. She can move around and talk and pick things up, but that’s not what I mean. There’s a little gap between her and everything, like she’s wearing little gloves made of infinity on her hands, or all over her body. She can’t really touch things. Or, we thought she couldn’t. It turned out there was a workaround…. I’m getting ahead of things, though.

The point is, if you see her in person, she just looks like she’s cut out of reality somehow. Even the boys weren’t hired to watch her, it would have been hard to stop. At the same time, looking at her like that, your eyes hurt. It’s something that you don’t get in the TV broadcasts, this feeling that you’re looking at something that isn’t supposed to be there. And when Vicki performs live—and that’s really her, by the way, there’s no better way to ensure lots and lots of people are looking at her, you know?—people just think they’re starstruck. She was always big on fog and smoke effects, even before, so that helps too. In the room, though, staring at her for eight hours, there wasn’t any way you could think she was a normal person.

The watchers weren’t supposed to talk to each other, but they did, of course. Rumors circulated that she’d tried everything to get out of the situation, from seducing her jailers to driving them to suicide. There were all kinds of theories as to why there could only be men in the cell, but most of them came down to the theory that women were more “susceptible” somehow. Susceptible to what, exactly, nobody really knew.

Of course, we made up most of the rumors ourselves, just to make sure they stayed scared of her. She’d tried pleading with the boys for the first few rounds, but after that she just treated them as beneath contempt. Though the susceptible part, that’s true. We were worried she could possess a body if it was enough like hers. It hasn’t happened yet in our experiments but, again, there’s only one Vicki. She’s not just one of a kind out there, she’s the only time the soul extraction worked the way it was supposed to. So, we try not to take risks.

After the initial panic, the label was pretty happy with how things turned out. Vicki wasn’t going anywhere now. The only problem was that she wouldn’t write any new music. She said it wasn’t that she wouldn’t, but that she couldn’t. She said, she couldn’t write music without a body. They didn’t really believe her. Why would she need a body? I mean she can still play the piano if she wants. She can still perform and sing—better than before, if you ask me.

But she wouldn’t write, and people wanted a new album. They wanted an album about how she’d almost died and then pulled through. And the great thing, from the label’s perspective, was that there really wasn’t anything Vicki couldn’t put on that album. She could be as much of a brat as she wanted, but it wouldn’t matter. She could just say “I’m a ghost in the bottom of an underground tower” or “my body is trapped in a glass coffin” if she wanted, and people would think it was a metaphor for fame or a fairy tale thing or.… I mean she does say all of that in the new single that she put out to go with the tour. Who would think it was actually true?

So that was how it was. And probably it would have stayed that way, if it hadn’t been for the day somebody brought her a new guitar when the kid was there.

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I said she could play the piano, and she can. Guitar is another story, though. It’s that gap I mentioned. She’d snap the neck of the guitar because she couldn’t feel it, or she’d hold it too loosely and it would drop to the ground. Her playing was terrible. Even if she managed to play a little, tuning it was impossible. Still, she kept asking for guitars. It was hard to figure out her angle—was she really trying to learn how to play again, or was she just wasting everybody’s time? But it’s easy to get guitars, so the label went along with it. Anyway, she was trying to tune this guitar, and it wasn’t working, and you could feel the room getting colder and colder as she got madder and madder, and then the kid—do you know what he does? He gets up and takes the guitar from her and tunes it for her right then and there. He didn’t say a word.

They didn’t like that upstairs, I can tell you, but what they liked even less was her reaction as she took the guitar back. For the first time since she’d given up, she really looked at one of the boys. I mean really looked. And he looked back. I call him a kid, but he was about her age really, or at least, the age she was when she died.

And she said to him:

“You play?”

Nobody had thought of that when they were looking for losers with insomnia—that they should make sure the boys couldn’t play guitar. I guess we always figured that the boys would be too scared of her to try anything like that. It was our one mistake. But then, I don’t know. I think maybe the kid was just crazy, deep down. And like I said earlier, you can’t really know what a crazy person will do.

But now Vicki had a favorite. And she said to the label that she would write a song, but she had to do it with this kid, because he could play the guitar for her. He could be her body. But only the kid. No session musicians. And they had to switch off the sound monitoring when she and the kid were working. And they couldn’t mess with him. They had to leave the kid alone or the magic couldn’t happen.

Well, the label rolled over. They really needed a song. And there was still going to be the other guy in the room, after all. It didn’t seem like much could go wrong.

In a sense, nothing did go wrong. We did get the song, and we still have Vicki, and the tour’s selling out night after night. All the reviews marvel at her stamina, but you don’t get tired when you’re a ghost. I don’t really know what Vicki’s so mad about. Between you and me, she was always a difficult, stuck-up bitch. Every new crop of girls, I wanted so badly for somebody to put the fear of replacement into her, so that she’d behave with a little gratitude, but somehow she stayed on top. Now that she’s dead, I think she could stand to gain a little perspective. Now she can never grow older. She can never get sick. She can never lose her voice. She can’t get stuck in a scandal. And you can’t look away from her. That’s as good as it gets for a girl like her.

Frankly, who even cares if she wants to leave? She wanted to leave when she was alive, too. Does what she wants somehow matter more just because she’s dead?

I’m sure if the situation ever went public you’d see some people wringing their hands about the ethics of it all. But they’d have to believe in it first, and of course they wouldn’t. They’d as soon believe we cloned her. Cloning doesn’t work, though. It’s been tried. A clone is just a new person. Too much trouble. Though the cleanup’s easy.

So Vicki and the kid are working on the song. They’re doing these jam sessions where they learn to work together. Nobody’s listening in, as per her highness’s request, but the other boys are grilled as they rotate in and out and they don’t report any funny business. The only thing that’s weird, and you can see it on the CCTV, is that they make eye contact the whole time. But eventually, she and the kid get to the point where she’s improvising a melody as he plays. She got them to bring in some recording equipment so they could cut a demo. She asks for an electric guitar. She gets it all. No corners cut for darling dead Vicki.

As I’m talking to you, I think the mistake we made was kind of simple. I told you, Vicki’s a ghost. But she’s not quite dead, right? It’s her soul floating out there. If we’d called her a soul I think we would have clocked their plan. What I mean is, we would have remembered all those little sayings, like “the eyes are windows,” or that art comes from the soul. All that shit. Which, you know, if you work for the label, you work in the facility, you get that “art” is a lie we sell to girls who want to sing on stage. Vicki, though, Vicki always thought of herself as an artist, even before we discovered her, and that was why she was such a pain in the ass. So she knew, I guess, that making music would let her make contact. She was communicating with him the whole damn time she was writing her song, in a way she knew we’d never catch.

It happened like this. They were playing the song. The kid was on the electric guitar. They were looking at each other, like they did. And then she leaned in and kissed him. She sort of cradled his face in her hands while she did it.

Remember, this whole time, their eyes are still open, they’re still looking at each other, he’s still playing the guitar. It was really beautiful, actually, because Vicki was sort of floating up toward the ceiling while she was holding onto his face and kissing him, like they were underwater and she was a mermaid or something. I remember thinking it would make a great concert visual, just as she slid her hands higher up on his face and she drove her thumbs right into his eyes.

Then she shorted out the electrical equipment.

It almost worked. I guess the gamble was that the explosion would distract the second boy, or blow the support system for the coffin. What Vicki didn’t know—because the kid didn’t know—was about that false mirror up on the ceiling. Somebody was watching her there too. So there she was when we burst in—the blood sliding off the space around her hands, looking at the boy with her sad, sad eyes. She didn’t look at us. She didn’t say anything at all.

We took the kid away. We told her that if she played nice and made a real recording of the song, we’d see to it that he was okay. She did as she was told, for once. She recorded the song and didn’t make a fuss about going on tour. If she gets sassy, they threaten to go after him. Sometimes I say it just because it’s nice to have the upper hand on her for once.

But maybe you’d noticed, there’s a moment in her stage patter where she says to the audience, right before she starts the new song, “I’ve got something for you. Put out your hands!” She shuts her eyes and counts: One… two… three… And I don’t know where it started, really—some post in some fan board, probably, that along with putting out their hands, all the fans should shut their eyes. It was a cute idea, sure, but who goes to a concert to shut their eyes? But it’s become a trend. Now more people do it at every concert.

Upstairs doesn’t like it. Sure, the risks seem low. A whole stadium of people—is there any chance that you could get every single one of them to shut their eyes? Out of devotion to this idol, who they have, after all, come to see? It doesn’t really seem possible, does it? But, you know, you don’t get where they get without sometimes taking unnecessary precautions. That’s where I come in. Where I came in. I was in the audience, as a spoiler. Just in case.

But then people starting noticing me in the background of videos, and I started getting these little social media names, so I had to stop going. It’s not good to be noticed in my line of work. I guess I never did quite say what it was that I did, did I.… I’m a fixer, I guess you could say. I’ve worked for them for a long time, doing this and that. How they noticed me anyway, I don’t know.

Anyway, that’s why I called you up. It’s really a formality. I know you can’t afford to say no. One thing I’ve learned working at the facility is that people do what they’re told, unless they’re crazy.

Even Vicki does as she’s told. She performs night after night, just like she’s supposed to. And night after night she tells the audience, “I’ve got something for you.” And maybe she thinks one night it will happen, that all the eyes will shut, that there won’t be anyone to count to three, that when they open in confusion there will be only the empty stage. She can only dream. It keeps her going.

Oh, the boy? He’s dead. I killed him myself as soon as we got him away from the room. He was limp already, not even screaming. They just lied to keep her cooperative. How could she ever know if he was alive or dead, you know? But that’s what makes it so odd. About the concert trend, I mean. If we really had let him go, it would have been him that tried to start it, no-brainer. It must just have been a coincidence that somebody suggested it. If we could find the original post… But he’s dead. And we’ve done a lot of testing in the lab. I know there’s only one kind of ghost.