In the morning when I wake up my first thought is whether I have gone unvisited in the night. I double-check my body in the mirror, but it is devoid of the white-blue handprints with their pinkish undertone, prints which would fade over the course of the morning. This absence is not entirely atypical, to be fair; these visitations are new, this spectral relationship just budding; but it still worries me.
So I reach for my phone and text my ghost, Why didn’t you visit?
The response comes while I am at the gym in a foam of sweat and doing my best to ignore the app-gridded reality around me. When I finish lifting the last heavy object in a strange direction and set the weight back down on the ground, gasping for calories spent, I at last see on my phone, Sorry, got caught up in something.
Of course my ghost’s text sends me into a spiral from which I do not recover until I follow a boy into the steam room, terrycloth slipping teasingly from our thighs until the straight boys have left and at once he is sliding me into his mouth expertly. Afterwards, I favor his pleading look with a small slap, and his nostrils flare—he’ll be back—at which point I finally feel sufficiently flush with pleasure text my ghost back a sane and secure-seeming, Hope you’re ok.
And my the nonchalance works: by the time I am back at my apartment, my ghost has responded, telling me all about how he wanted to come but there was some sort of disturbance in the ghost realm that prevented him from crossing over, a buildup of emotion on the human side that mucked up the crossing. We continue to text back and forth frantically as I get on the subway and make my way to work, and by the time I arrive I finally feel reassured that my ghost will not abandon me to haunt someone else. I would like to say that this morning has been an exception, that I do not usually begin my day with an emotional odyssey with a spectral entity that has leaves me exhausted before nine; but in truth it is just another Tuesday.
Then I prepare to report on my progress in seducing my ghost.
#
The Office of Analysis, they call us. To external eyes both earthly and spectral, we are government bureaucrats and policy analysts, too boring to truly pay attention to.
But what we really are is spies. Ever since the ghosts decided to make themselves known, they have been frustratingly taciturn on the details of their existence: what they know, how long they have been watching us, and most of all, why they chose to reveal their existence at this particular time. This worried the authorities. Nobody does anything without something to gain, not even ghosts. So some very savvy or paranoid person—the appearance of the ghosts had more or less obliterated the distinction—decided we needed a counter-intelligence unit.
The ghosts, you see, so oddly reticent in the context of ambassadorial overtures, showed a distinct willingness to divulge information in more emotional contexts. There were patterns to whom they chose to haunt: the unsettled, one might say. People overflowing with need and desire of various sorts. And so the Department was a rather hot-headed place, the halls prowled by adonises and bull dykes, many-gendered ladykillers of every persuasion, all of us having found at last a job to suit the otherwise unmonetizeable skillset that we had spent our lifetimes developing.
#
My supervisor’s office is empty. I hear a throat cleared behind me and turn to see Brian—twenty-four but with a veneer so hardened it could crack glass—leaning against the wall.
I have been careful not to have sex with him; there is something about the idea I find faintly exhausting. “Yes, Brian?” I say.
“There’s an emergency briefing,” he replies, very much looking not at my face. “Conference Room B.”
Brian leads the way, no doubt so that I have to look at his ass, and once we arrive I find a seat far from him. My supervisor Mitch—the actual bureaucrat the rest of us are just pretending to be—steps to the front and says, in his reedy little voice, “We think the ghosts are planning something.”
He takes a breath and goes on, “We have detected unusual patterns of activity on their side. We’ve brought on a number of new agents for this reason.” I glance around and see a few eager-eyed, fresh new faces. Barbra is eying one girl in particular, a pretty young thing with a bright gaze and an upturned nose, and at Barbra’s vulpine stare my stomach flashes with nausea.
So as soon as I am back in my office, I text my ghost, Why didn’t you visit last night.
He responds quickly, I told you, there was-
I don’t believe you, I say. Why didn’t you visit?
And when at last he replies, You’re not the only one that I haunt, it is like he has driven a stake through my heart. He follows up with, We never discussed being exclusive.
I look up to see Brian passing by my office. “Brian,” I call out, and he steps in, looking curious. “Come in. Close the door.”
I text my ghost, I want to feel you inside me as I fuck.
Brian gives me a look and then turns and closes the door. “Can I help you with something?”
“Yes,” I say. “Having sex with my ghost.”
Brian nearly manages to hide the frisson of excitement that passes over his expression. “Now?”
I nod look at my phone. Now? he has said.
Now. I do not wait, I do not play it cool. Imagine if you were in me all the time, I type, my thumbs blurring, feeling everything I feel, touching everything I touch. The idea turns me on so much, you won’t even have to use words all you will have to do is want to something and then I’ll want it the way that you want-
Fuck, my ghost says, fuck fuck fuck.
Brian is taking off his shirt in rather perfunctory fashion. Your eyes in my eyes, I type, your dick in my dick. Breathing together, shitting together, cumming together. Until there’s nothing that’s not sex.
Jesus Scott, this is a lot, my ghost says.
I’m a lot, I say. Don’t you want a lot?
I am buzzing with nerves and desire, chewing my lip and barely cognizant of my surroundings, Brian down to his underwear and examining his ass in the mirror in the corner of my office, seemingly more turned on by himself than by anything else which frankly I admire tremendously. Tell me you you’ll haunt only me.
The typing dots start and stop and start again while I dangle over a precipice, and then at last they say–
Okay, the dots say. I’ll haunt only you.
Visit me now, I say, and then put my phone down quickly because I can already feel the cool sluice of air that means my ghost is approaching, and I walk toward Brian who says, “About time,” and reach out to him and pull his mouth to mine roughly and see his expression slip from insouciance to the vulnerability that accompanies real need; and then I lose track of what he is feeling because my ghost is finally in me.
#
The sex is the sex. The sex is the sex is the sex and there is nothing to say because the sex is the sex.
But the sex is not the sex in the way that you think. You think that the sex is the taking of one body and the putting of it in another, vigorously introducing insides to out so that the pleasure centers are stimulated specifically. You think that the sex is the feeling of touch, the thread of cool sweat trickling down warm skin while you press Brian against the sticky laminate wall of the office so that every time you pull back there is a steamy outline that is rewritten with every thrust. You think it is the smell from under his arm and yours which intensifies the longer you go on and which taps into some primal, pheremonal part of your brain over which your only form of control is to fight.
But that is not the sex. That is the conduit for the sex, the medium through which the message is transferred.
The ghost is the sex. The sex is the thing that accompanies you in the act. The way it takes every feeling you feel—the heat and the cool, the tight muscle that squeezes you so that you only want to be squeezed—and it divides it, or doubles it, it is hard to tell which, by instilling the awareness of another presence inside yours. The sex is the way that as the fucking and the kissing and the grunting forces your barriers down, your ghost begins to drift deeper, bleeding into your blood and your heart and your head, and then all at once it is not just the physical sensations that are being divided but thoughts: I I want want more more more.
And then at last, when it is over and your ghost has rescinded from you, and you have rescinded from Brian, and both of you have rescinded from becoming undressed and Brian has rescinded from office with a flush of satisfied shame on his lips and you have collapsed behind your desk, you realize that you cannot tell if your ghost is still there or not since you are now your own ghost, examining your thoughts and sensations with an alacrity that might come from someone else or from just you, and there is no telling when that feeling will stop.
That is the sex.
#
My ghost pushes me as hard as I push him. He spends so much time inside me at this point that he knows precisely what buttons to press.
Isn’t this what they warned you that you might become, my ghost says, seeing my worry and feeding it An obsessive personality, a depressive one.
Yes, I say, feeling terrible.
Isn’t this the reason that Elijah left, he says, because you took a good thing and you ruined it. Because you didn’t know how to listen to when enough was enough.
Yes, I reply, barely able to think through the grief.
Isn’t this your first fear, your worst one, he types in a rush. When you were a little gay child, gross and gangly, and you knew in your heart that there was something wrong with you, that you were impossible to love. You were right, weren’t you.
Yes, I reply. Yes, yes, yes, and open the door for Brian once more. Then when we are done and Brian is on his way out I grab him and pull his pants down and we do it again. Then I kick him out and ignore the expression of pain on his face. Poor sad hot Brian fits into gay human life like a hand into a glove and he will be fine.
When I reach for milk in the grocery store it is my ghost reaching for milk. When I bite my cheek at the gym it is my ghost’s blood that I taste in my mouth.
Sex. It’s all sex.
#
My face begins to take on a sallow cast. My well-moisturized cheeks are growing arid and thin, my dark eyes becoming unglossy, my daily hours at the gym fading to minutes.
And yet others seem to find me more desirable than ever before. When I walk down the street, every gaze lingers too long. When I pass in the locker room, the gym bunnies all perk up straight, and I can tell my body is glaring in every peripheral.
This bewilders me until I catch unexpected sight of myself in the mirror one morning fresh from my shower, and I stare at the nearly unrecognizable figure, spare fatless and one fifty of pure sex. Who knew that hunger could be so becoming?
But even though unchaining the world’s desire for me from its facade of restraint has always been one of my highest goals, at the precise moment it happens, I couldn’t care less.
#
But then one day Mitch calls us all in and tells us, “It’s over. The ghosts are planning to invade.”
Everyone in the room looks at each other. Judging from the surprised and frustrated expressions of all my coworkers I am not the only one blindsided; I swivel toward Barbra, expecting the worst, but she seems furious.
“I want to single out one agent in particular for praise, one of our newest, and most promising: Jeanine.” Mitch gestures and as one the room turns and I see the girl that Barbra was so intent on seducing, standing and taking the humblest of bows. “It is entirely thanks to Jeanine’s efforts that we have been able to devise a plan of response.”
Someone asks, “What’s the plan?”
Mitch looks to Jeanine, who scans the crowd with supreme, unassuming confidence, and daintily says, “We wipe the fuckers out of existence.”
#
The key to winning the war, it turns out, is the same kind of emotional disturbance that prevented my ghost from visiting before. Once our scientists realized that what humans felt could have a material effect on the ghosts, they set about weaponizing it, with the result a straightforward tool of apparently devastating effectiveness: an emotional nuke, of sorts. Gather enough humans in one place and get them all to feel the same thing intensely enough, and the effect on the realm of the ghosts is one of unparalleled devastation.
As Mitch relates the details of the plan relentlessly, including that they have cut off communications with the ghosts so as to prevent any warnings—I check my phone to verify and I see that my last texts to my ghost have gone unread—I am provided with a modicum of amusement by the thought of bland government bureaucrats in some even more secretive office, all struggling to feel enough to affect the world itself; but my amusement vanishes quickly because the new human army is already gathering apparently, and at the appointed hour tomorrow they will all feel the same thing so hard that the ghost realm will shatter.
Can you guess? What feeling our leaders have chosen to aim at the ghosts like an arrow? Whoever has made this choice either has a fine sense of irony, or absolutely none whatsoever; I cannot decide which is worse.
Because it is kindness. That is what we will kill the ghosts with.
#
I go to my office and do my best not to panic.
But I am full of worry, worry that my ghost has cultivated, which is all at once useless. Worse than useless: occupying every space in me so that nothing else can exist. I can barely think, I can barely breathe; all I can do is worry in great crashing waves and struggle to come up for air.
I suck in a deep shuddering breath and look up from my palms to see Brian loitering outside my office. I gesture him inside and he all but runs in. “How does it work?”
He blinks. “How does what work?”
“The bomb,” I say impatiently. “I know you know.”
A moment passes. “You’re trying to warn them, aren’t you?” he says curiously, and looks at me closely. I look away; I have built no barriers to withstand this kind of scrutiny and every page in me is open for reading, and I prepare myself to be turned in but instead Brian at last says, “There’s a way to cross over.”
For a moment, we stare at each other. Then Brian continues. “Building a bomb and a bridge aren’t that different. For a bomb you need one feeling; for a bridge you need two. Opposite feelings, in roughly the same proportion. Two people.”
Somehow I get out the words, “Help me.”
There is a sudden motion outside my office and both of us turn to see Mitch pass by with Jeanine, talking to her quietly, excitedly. I see Mitch’s hand drift toward the small of Jeanine’s back, and I see the expert way that Jeanine shifts her gait to throw him off without ever seeming to do so. Jeanine seems to sense us watching and glances toward us, and something hard inside her gaze clamps down. She smiles the thinnest of smiles and then vanishes down the hallway with Mitch to wherever it is winners go.
“Okay.” Brian turns back to me. “I’ll help you. But it will only work if we can feel complementary emotions. Usually each person has only one or two feelings that they can feel that strongly–”
“Worry,” I say. “Mine is worry. What about you?”
It is a long moment before Brian replies, and when he does, his voice is suddenly calm, as though the volatile thing inside him has at last been let out. “Love,” he says, looking at me, his gaze so full that I have to turn away. “I can feel love.”
#
A short time later we are sitting on the floor of my office and facing each other. I am jittery and nervous; I do nothing to quell these feelings because they seem like the ones that I need. I look to Brian, who is the opposite, who has spent every second of the last several minutes growing stiller and more assured and solid until it seems he might drop through the floor at any moment. “Okay,” he says, “I’m ready.”
He closes his eyes, and I follow suit. I stare at the darkness inside my lids, and for a moment, feel nothing. I think that I have overextended myself, that there is no worry left; but then I recognize that thought for the worry it is, and that spark catches on the tinder of my soul and ignites.
And then there is nothing but worry, and it is beautiful and bright and brand new.
#
I open my eyes. Brian is blinking slowly, looking faintly dazed. I realize with a start that the worry inside me is gone.
“Crossing over uses up the feeling,” he says when he sees my look. “It’ll come back eventually.”
I nod and stand and look around. Where we are is just like the office we just left; and yet it is different. I go to my door and look out; the corridor is empty, and the sounds of the world seem stilled to nonexistence. But there are strange distortions moving around where the air itself seems to warp and twist. I reach out a hand as one of these distortions passes by and can feel new, bizarre sensations, happiness-sadness-excitement-fear all along my hand, the emotions as tangible to me as any physical thing.
“Those must be the living,” Brian says from behind me. I look back. He is looking around with a restrained sort of curiosity. “That must be how we look to them.”
We stand in silence for a moment. “If those are humans,” I say finally, “then where are the ghosts?”
#
There are no ghosts to be found on the way; only more of the strange, swirling eddies. “This isn’t right,” Brian says at one point. He sounds nervous. “It’s not supposed to be like this.”
For my part, I do not comment. I have my suspicions already; I have had my suspicions all along, and it is more relief than anything else to at last learn they were right.
When we arrive at my apartment, I buzz up. There is no response. I try the front door and it is already open. In the elevator, Brian shifts from foot to foot, muttering, “Something’s wrong.” The reprieve offered to him by our passage seems to have vanished in short order; but then again, being cleaned of his love may not have been much of a reprieve in the first place.
I hesitate on the threshold of my apartment and knock, all at once overtaken by a strange, intense sense of déjà vu; I have been here before, in a way. I have always been here. As I put my hand on the knob Brian says, almost desperately, “Don’t-” but I ignore him and push forward.
My apartment is just as I left it. The bed unmade, dishes still in the sink, the space on the wall where the picture used to be, and the whole thing drenched the clean, faintly lemony smell that a ghost always leaves. Of my ghost himself, there is nothing left.
Brian prowls the rooms, looking for something, anything beyond what is there; something that will reassure him of the reality he believes in.
I know better. I do not need reassurance. I know precisely where my ghost has gone. I know where they all have.
So I sit down at my kitchen table, and I wait for the bomb to go off.