Zachary Houle

A Ghost Was Born

When the ghost boy who’d eventually be named Gary against his mother’s will came into being, nobody saw him; he passed into the world with hardly a sound. His mother’s belly suddenly deflated like a newly flat tire as she passed Gary out of her system. Neither the delivering doctor nor any of the nurses who were present were able to see or touch Gary, as he emerged into the human world, transparent and new. Gary simply passed unnoticed along with his afterbirth, and tumbled out onto the floor unhurt because he had no way of feeling physical pain. A minor sound trumpeted his slippage into the New World, a sound not unlike a trombone’s sliding honk, the only way anyone could have known he had passed on.

A few days after the delivery, Gary’s mother would desperately try to get the doctors to explain what had happened, pointing to the only picture of her ghostly son that she now possessed: a single ultrasound of Gary, taken as a four-month old.

“Tell me what you’ve done with my son!” she pleaded.

All the doctors could do was shake their heads and tell her the obvious: there might have been a baby inside her at one point, but it disappeared during the delivery. Nobody knew where. Nobody knew how.

And so, Gary became famous before he was even a month old. An ultrasound image of his tiny fetal body was printed on milk cartons around the country in the hopes that someone would perhaps recognize him. Newspapers and TV news outlets had a field day, particularly since Gary was born a Leo. Summer is often referred to as the silly season in the news business — nothing ever happens except bears suddenly starting to attack celebrities who are celebrities solely based on the fact they made porn movies that they wanted nobody to see (except, maybe, accidentally) — so the news could devote a lot of time and attention and extra special care to Gary. The picture of him curled up inside his mother’s body, sucking his thumb, became almost iconic during the months following his so-called birth.

However, newscasters could only go on so long calling him “the missing baby” or “the vanished infant” before they had to start referring to him as “the missing baby who has been missing a really, really long time.” So when one station started calling him Gary to find a way around this problem, other news outlets quickly followed suit, thinking it was a bona fide news item.

This upset Gary’s mom quite dearly.

“I was going to call him Xerox, just like his father,” said Gary’s mother in a sound bite that was played and replayed in the news for exactly one day. With those words, she was then written off as a freak in the media, who didn’t come to talk to her ever again.

As the ghost that was Gary would discover, there is an unwritten rule in the journalism business that only rich or famous freaks are worth dealing with on a regular basis — and then only out of obligation. So, because his mother was an ordinary freak, she disappeared from the nightly news and was never to be heard from again. Instead, they brought in expert psychics and mystics who came from weird European countries so tiny that nobody had ever heard of them, much less been able to pronounce them, to explain what might have happened to baby Gary.

There were lots of theories that were bandied about during this period. Some of the mystics claimed Gary was still alive, kidnapped by Scientologists in search of a keen mind they could brainwash from the earliest possible age. Other talking heads with less outlandish ideas claimed that Gary had simply been given to the wrong couple in some kind of administrative mix-up.

It didn’t matter, however, since everyone was wrong. Gary had been born a ghost. He didn’t exist, at least not in this world.

Because Gary was a ghost, he didn’t need water or food. He didn’t need to go to the bathroom, either. All he did was lie on the delivery room floor like a dead person. One doctor likened the spot to walking through placenta, which raised some eyebrows among his peers, as no person in his or her right mind should know what it is like to do this. When a number of corpses went missing from the morgue, this doctor was fingered as the culprit.

While he was carted away by police officers, the doctor yelled the old, famous cliché: “This is a miscarriage of justice!” But nobody listened. He wasn’t a rich or famous freak. He was just a freak, which made him utterly ordinary and, thus, unimportant. Which is why he was sentenced to jail. For how long doesn’t matter. Pretty soon, the unjustly imprisoned doctor — and Gary, for that matter — became forgotten by the media, once the summer silly season ended and the truly silly season of business and government began in earnest that fall.

Meanwhile, Gary grew up in a different sort of prison altogether. Most of the time, especially during the first year or so, he just lay in his spot on the floor, utterly helpless as doctors and nurses walked right through him and got down to business as usual, grumbling about the floor’s cold spot all the while. Gary never complained or made a sound. He was a ghost, which meant that he couldn’t feel any physical pain when someone used him as a doormat.

Eventually, as he grew older, he began to become much more curious about his surroundings. He attentively learned how to crawl, and later walk, by mimicking his human counterparts in the room as they went about their lives. By the time he was about 18 months old, he was learning to speak in fairly complex sentences, simply by listening in on the conversations of the doctors and nurses. While most infants learn how to speak by saying things like “car” and “Mama,” Gary was different. He first learned words like “Demerol” and “vacuum extraction.” It could be said that Gary had acquired a wisdom and intellect well beyond his years during his stay in the maternity ward. It could also be said that Gary was showing one of the first signs of Asperger’s Syndrome. But, because he was a ghost, nobody in the physical world was able to hear or have a conversation with Gary, much less offer him any sort of diagnosis.

After a while, Gary began to have conversations with himself. He populated the delivery room with his own imaginary friends, who all resembled Gary in various ways. They sat around at night, pretending to be real “adults” like the people who populated Gary’s world. They drank from IV tubes as though they were filled with alcohol, and gossiped about how fat all of the pregnant ladies looked and what the purpose of the small people who were ejected from their bellies might serve in life. Weird theories abounded. One of Gary’s friends conjectured that they only existed to taunt ghosts, to remind them of their own inhuman failings, namely the failure to exist.

Gary didn’t necessarily enjoy these discussions, but felt that he should participate, if only to prevent himself from being lonely. It wasn’t long, however, before Gary found that he was his own worst company and began to feel quite alone with his non-existent friends, though he wasn’t able to explain it as such since “loneliness” wasn’t in his vocabulary. If a doctor could have examined him during this period, they would have concluded that Gary was a depressed, very sullen little boy. Perhaps they may have been right, but one can only speculate on these things.

What is certain, though, is that Gary was also naturally very inquisitive. Thus, as he grew older, he began to leave his de facto nursery and wander the hospital. He only did this at night because, even though he’d grown in size and stature as he’d aged, he wandered naked as the day that he had been, well, “born” (for lack of a better term). Even though Gary couldn’t have been, by this time, more than four or five years old, he suspected by this time that he wasn’t like the other human beings that roamed the rest of the hospital; he had a sense of modesty and self-consciousness that was a bit unnatural, after all. He even had a sense that, perhaps, one day he might be seen, and for what he was: a freak of nature. This is precisely why Gary spent a lot of time practicing dodging in and out of walls, trying to avoid those who might actually discover him. Dodging in and out of walls was a technique he stumbled on quite accidentally when learning to crawl as a child: he had frequently hit his head on equipment and the bed in the delivery room, but found he didn’t feel any pain; he could put his head or any part of his body right through it without inflicting any damage on himself.

One night, Gary stumbled upon a room in the basement that felt cold and altogether unfamiliar, although he couldn’t quite understand the words on the door leading into the room, nor feel the cold that emanated from it. However, he had a ghostly twinge. Something told him that something was wrong, that he shouldn’t venture beyond the door.

Being slightly curious, and knowing full well that nothing could hurt him physically, he put his hand out towards the door and evaporated part-way to the other side. That way, he could look around without fear of being caught.

Inside, there were a bunch of metal drawers, and a few gurneys scattered around the room. On one of the gurneys was a body with a tag on one of its big toes. Standing directly above it was a pale figure with an open notepad and a shaky hand holding onto a pen. The hand was trying furtively to write something onto the notepad, without much success. The figure glanced at the body up and down again.

The standing figure then turned and noticed Gary.

“I used to be a reporter,” the figure said. “What… what happened to me?”

And then Gary noticed the blood stains on the pale figure’s shirt. He quickly put two and two together about the true nature of the person’s identity. This man before him was not a journalist, not that Gary would have probably known this. What Gary did understand, however, was that the man was only a shell of his former life.

This man, Gary also quickly concluded, was on the same plane of being as himself. He was another ghost, just like Gary.

With this knowledge, Gary sucked his body out of the door and drifted away screaming. He was afraid to know he was now no longer alone in his world of hospital wards. He went right back to his spot on the delivery room floor and spent the rest of the night frozen there, curled up in the fetal position, wondering what he was going to do from now on. After all, his worst fear had suddenly come true: he had been seen. While this could have and should have made him happy had he been a real, live human being, suddenly he wasn’t sure that he’d been caught sneaking around.

It was at this point in his young un-life that he had a revelation. He came to a conclusion.

I must leave this place. At once.

And so, with little more than a green doctor’s smock he’d stolen from one of the little side rooms he’d happened to discover on his nightly sojourns, he floated out into The Real World, a world beyond the womb of the hospital.

Gary took the smock along with him, for he believed it would be a good disguise that would prevent him from being seen, prevent his sense of failure, his inadequacy at fitting in with the world that had been built around him, prevent him from being seen by anyone at all. This ploy, however, did not work well. Even though Gary traveled by night and hid wherever he could behind dumpsters during the day, this did not prevent the occasional witness from seeing the smock being tugged by invisible forces down city streets. One middle-aged woman with a particularly weak heart, upon returning home from an upscale martini lounge, became a ghost herself upon seeing Gary’s smock.

Gary’s fellow apparitions were also not fooled by the disguise he wore.

“How cliché,” noted one ghost, whose features were scarred beyond all recognition, the result of a bad chemical burn.

“Doing the old Halloween spook thing, eh?” said another with a chainsaw firmly embedded in his skull as Gary skittered by.

Gary found his time among the dead during this period to be rather unbearable. Even though he barely stuck around long enough to talk to them, from the snippets of conversations that he could overhear he could tell that most of them couldn’t let go of the fact they were deceased, even the ones who’d been that way for many, many years. Unlike him, they were in a suspended state of agelessness, in which they could grow no older. Many walked around sporting their injuries like fashion: an axe to the head, a knife to the throat, or a gunshot to the heart. Others, usually the more elderly ones, just walked around looking exceptionally pale. Gary surmised that these people had probably died of more natural causes. (Actually, on occasion, Gary would mistake a few of them for Goths.)

One evening, just before the sun went down, Gary had been on the move, wandering near a school during a particularly blustery day. Thanks to the wind gusts, he felt he could get away with wandering around in the doctor’s smock without raising much suspicion, as long as he simply kept low and let the wind pick him up every now and then. However, when he saw a little girl, alone, playing dodgeball against a brick wall of the school, his heart would have nearly stopped — if not for the fact that it already wasn’t beating.

She was a blonde girl, wearing some kind of uniform not unlike the one he was wearing, except it was blue and had a weird sash-like thing with tiny badges sown all over it. Gary wondered for a second if that made her a cop of some sort, except she was obviously much too young to be a cop. Gary settled on cop in training.

He shirked into his costume like a turtle retreating into its shell, and tried mightily to scurry on. The girl, unfortunately, still noticed him.

“I know you’re out there, and I’m not scared of you,” she said. “Ghosts come around here all the time. Nothing new to me.”

At some point in their somewhat brief and tumultuous relationship, Gary would discover that the little girl was actually talking to herself, hoping that her dead father would come back to pay her a visit if she acknowledged to the world that she knew he was there. But, because Gary had no knowledge of this at the precise moment that he met the girl, he took this as a friendly invitation and managed to work up all his courage. He went up and revealed himself to her as what he was — nothing more than the ghost he thought she was looking for.

Fortunately, the girl took a liking to him as soon as he said hello.

Unfortunately, Gary soon encountered a real problem: this little girl had no idea when to shut the hell up. Every time that Gary would pay her a visit, she’d always make a big deal about the fact that she’d received her irony badge in Girl Guides, a badge on her sash exemplified by the symbol of a single raised eyebrow. The girl took any and every opportunity to let the world know that she’d received this badge. So much so, in fact, that Gary wished she could vanish in a puff of smoke — not realizing that he could pretty much do this at any time without any consequence.

And so…

“Hey, I just got my irony badge in Guides,” she said to Gary one evening on the dodge ball court. “Do you want to know how I got it?”

Gary didn’t want to know, but didn’t say anything, as to not hurt her feelings.

“I’ll tell you how I got this irony badge,” she said to Gary one evening on the volleyball court as the two of them played.

Gary wished she wouldn’t, but still remained silent.

“I got an irony badge at Guides,” she said to Gary one evening as she poured tea into a teacup with a bunch of dolls she’d brought to school with her. “Have I told you why I got this irony badge?”

He told her he normally didn’t do tea parties; just not his scene.

“Fine,” she said very non-dramatically, and then proceeded to disappear into thin air just like Gary had secretly wanted.

He was flabbergasted at this sudden departure, and it took a number of days for it to sink in that the girl had really just been another apparition like him. This realization left Gary nearly catatonic with disbelief. He’d been fooled not only by a female (and females had done nothing to him but abandon him, it seemed), but one of his own — a ghost. This double whammy had him wandering the city aimlessly, then lying on strange sidewalks in a stupor like one of the homeless, the abandoned, until some drunk guy came along and tried to steal his smock, believing it to be a gift from God brought forth on the wind — an event that led Gary to begin wandering aimlessly again for fear of being mugged. Gary quickly learned that it was best not to stay in one place, lest anything bad happen. Bad things always happened; people had a tendency to disappear from Gary’s life.

Seasons passed and months came and went. Soon, Gary was 8-years-old and had traded his doctor’s smock in for a trench coat he picked off a corpse whose shell had been long vacated by its spirit in an alleyway. Gary now spent much of this time as an observer, perhaps even a voyeur, withdrawing from both the living and the dead.

Things happened, some of which were of consequence, some of which were not. However, Gary didn’t bother to remember any of them. For one thing, he already carried too many bitter memories as it was of abandonment, and didn’t want to add further examples to his laundry list of woe. He also felt like he should have a notepad to jot down any experiences worth remembering — that way, he could maintain some level of detachment from his life or what passed for it. Of course, he didn’t really know the written word at all. However, he figured that perhaps he could make a bunch of symbols up, throw them onto a blank page and see what happened.

The only thing holding him back was his memory of the man in the morgue: the reporter. That man had seemingly been unsure of his status as a dead person, and Gary felt that perhaps writing things down might actually just add to his sense of ambiguity about what was real in his life and what was not. Call it logophobia, but, to make a long and convoluted story short, Gary gave up any ambition to write, and traded it in for a hazy existence spent in a semi-permanent state of non-remembrance; a state where the days and nights flowed together without any reason or rhyme.

One day, Gary decided it was time for him to stop roaming and have a place that he might call home — whatever that might turn out to be. He didn’t know what caused this urge, but now recalls some sort of nebulous urge to return to the comforts of what he knew best: the warmth of a cavernous tomb that would shelter him from the living and the dead. He did not return to the hospital. He did not return to the school where he’d met the girl with the irony badge, either. He chose to seek refuge instead in the nearest cavern he could find. The building he chose turned out to be a library.

Gary cannot fathom how long he remained holed up in the building. He spent his days and nights among the books, and found that nobody in particular disturbed him. It would turn out that the library was a good hiding spot, since it seemed that few people, living or dead, visited often. The place was a hollow cavity that rarely filled up.

However, this mere fact made Gary a bit sloppy on the occasions when he did encounter the living. Once, a busload of students came barreling into the building and Gary — lonely and listless, and not thinking too much about the consequences of his movements — got too close to the students and passed right through a pigtailed, blue-eyed girl. Normally, Gary wouldn’t have felt a thing, for he was a ghost, and ghosts cannot feel. However, this time, Gary felt something akin to a bizarre, prickly feeling going down what would have been his spine. It felt awful, and actually made him feel like he’d just violated or altered something in the physical world, a world in which he’d never belonged. For once, he felt he was a part of something, but it simply felt wrong. He was standing inside a skin that wasn’t his own. He felt like such a freak.

“That felt weird,” said the girl, shivering, as she stepped out of the spot Gary occupied.

“Lydia, there’ll be no talking in the library,” said what Gary initially mistook to be the girl’s mother, but was actually her teacher. “Move along, now.”

And that was the last Gary saw of the girl and the students, and the last he saw of a human being for quite some time. He lay on a bookshelf between the empty spaces in the unused sections of the Dewey Decimal Classification System between 653 (Shorthand) and 657 (Accounting).

He stayed there, preserved in the empty spaces of the shelves within his tomb, for weeks and months on end. Nobody came by to disturb him. Nobody bothered to bother him. He stayed, cooped up and curled like the fetus he once was.

Now that he was surrounded by words, he wondered if he should do something better with his time and, perhaps, teach himself to do something productive.

This is how Gary came to learn how to read, and read very prodigiously. He came out of hiding — but only at night, when the library was closed — and very quickly migrated from the children’s section to adult fiction to medical and academic tests. This was a move perhaps influenced by all the time he’d spent in the hospital. If only he’d been alive, one might be tempted to speculate that Gary could have become something of a prodigy — that he would have made something of himself. Gary thought about this once, and then decided to never think such a thought again. It depressed him greatly to have such thoughts of greatness.

Gary began eavesdropping on guided tours of the library somewhere in this period, and came to learn all sorts of wonderful things. One thing, it can be said, led directly to another. Late at night, the microfiche cabinets would mysteriously rattle as Gary walked inside them, examining them like tiny X-rays of information from the past.

Soon, Gary had obtained all sorts of history on himself, simply from examining miles and miles of microfiche. It took a considerable and deliberate kind of patience, but, eventually, he came to find exactly what he had been looking for. What’s more, he had some names to work with. He knew that his father was Xerox H___, and, just before Gary’s “birth,” had worked as a _______ at a _______. His father had lived on K______ Avenue with his mother, who was named D____. Something terrible had befallen him, but Gary never read that part. He couldn’t bear to.

Gary then consulted other library references, such as a current city directory, to verify the address was still correct (it was), and a map. Once he had this information in hand, he made a decision. He abandoned the library. He simply vanished, gave it up as easily as all the police officers and journalists had given up on finding him all those years ago. He went on his quest to find out what had happened to his parents, and perhaps to find out, in the process, what had happened to him.

The trip took precisely two days, 11 hours and 19 minutes, owing to some heavy traffic in the downtown core and the fact that Gary still preferred to travel as slowly as possible to mitigate the chance he might be seen.

When Gary arrived, he wasn’t sure he had arrived at the right place. He couldn’t articulate why, however. Even though Gary had spent a great deal of time in a hospital learning arcane medical language, and additional time near a school and in a library, he simply found that he lacked the language to properly describe what he felt inside. For no real reason he thought of the reporter-ghost looking at his body in the morgue. Gary felt even more like a loser, or like someone not worthy of his position as a free spirit in the physical world.

This sensation was only heightened when he stepped into the house, which he did from the southwest corner, if one wants to be a stickler for precise, inconsequential details. Coincidentally — not ironically, as Gary would have mistakenly thought, thanks to his time with the Girl Guide — he noticed that he’d stumbled into something that appeared to be a bedroom. It was an otherwise unoccupied room, aside from a solitary figure underneath a blanket on the bed. At first, he couldn’t help but imagine the worst: that he’d stumbled upon a dead body, like the corpse on a slab in the morgue: a soulless vessel separated from its spirit. Upon closer examination, he realized the figure was, in fact, a living, breathing woman at rest.

My mother? he wondered.

A flood of other questions came rushing into his ghostly head. If this was his mother before him, what was she doing alone? Where was his father? Did he have any brothers or sisters who’d been lucky enough to survive him? Where was his family? Was this even the right address? And, most importantly, had he accidentally left the city directory open on the reference desk back in the library? Had anyone had any physical evidence that he might have lived a life separate from everybody else?

It was at this precise moment that Gary knew what he had to do. It would be an incredibly risky move, but one that he suddenly felt at peace making. He had no way to explain himself, but this time it didn’t matter. It just felt right.

Cupping his hands like a diver about to take a forward plunge, he leapt off the floor and into the belly of the woman, the woman he believed to be his mom.

She awakened as if somebody had just tossed a bucket of cold water on her. For a moment, she was frightened that something terrible had happened. She fleetingly felt violated, even. However, once her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she quickly saw a humungous bulge in her stomach. Not that she necessarily needed to obtain visual proof to know that she had just taken part in an immaculate conception. She, too, had an inability to articulate how something that had belonged to her and then disappeared for years and years had somehow mysteriously returned. She had nothing to go on but gut feeling that her prodigal son had returned, and the fact that her belly and her insides suddenly had seemingly been stretched out to a point where it felt like she had a 10-year-old inside of her.

At first, knowing this made her uneasy. Her son had been cursed, just like his father — both had disappeared into the ether without any reason. Now, the curse had returned. This might not be such a good thing, she realized. However, she meekly smiled and patted her stomach, ready to accept whatever fate had thrown her way. In fact, what had initially felt like discomfort now felt like something else entirely.

“Xerox,” she murmured, casting a glance at her now swollen self. “It’s you!”

With that, she turned on her side and passed out entirely. The neighbours would find her the next day, owing to the terrible smell. One of them actually made a comment that somehow made it into the papers: “It like someone filled up a tuba with their own s___.” Not that it mattered. It would be long forgotten and cosigned to microfiche, just like all the other comments that make up each day’s newspaper.

As Gary’s mother’s body was removed from the house, somewhere, deep inside it, Gary was experiencing for the first time what it might actually be like to sleep, to dream, to have a place to call home, even if it were nothing but a bloated carcass. Somewhere out there on the ghostly plane, Gary’s mom knew this, like any mother would. She looked down upon him, happy at last: happy that the two of them were together; happy that, soon, both of them would be utterly forgotten, just as the world had already forgotten Gary’s father, the man named X___.