Ghost Story
Photograph by Adora Svitak
By Adora Svitak
For three years past graduation, I lived in the shadow of the public university where I had finished my undergraduate degree. Occasionally I encountered people I knew who were still students. I was standing on the library steps when I heard my name. The voices belonged to a good-natured gaggle of boys and girls in a campus club to which I’d belonged, one that spent hours each week building vehicles.
What are you doing here? asked one of them, a fresh-faced boy, not in an accusatory way. Like the others, he looked both glad and confused to see me.
I still live around here, I said, in the voice you use to confess you are a ghost.
They were the first ones who had seen me in many months. There was the man who always stood outside a cafe on the north side of campus, wearing a heavy green coat no matter the weather. But he didn’t count: he was a ghost, too. When he saw me he looked past me and spit out rhyming invective—maggot, faggot. It wasn’t personal. Once in a moment of lucidity, he said, Fuck are you still doing here? Doesn’t take ten years to graduate!
I’ve only been here for seven, I almost said, but instead I turned away.
I never know when the scrim will thin out and they’ll see me, the ones who know me, the ones who still belong. I follow groups quietly into the same libraries where I spent nights studying before tests, the same grimy subterranean bathrooms, and wait to be identified as an interloper. No one ever glances up, points, demands for me to be thrown out.
The best and most dangerous place, where I have a fair chance of being seen, is the glade near the library. On the dew-painted grass leggy students in that invincible flush of youth spread out in the sun. Picnic blankets, girls in sundresses and crocheted bikini tops tanning, loud boys playing spikeball, cans of beer planted lopsided in the grass, a forever summer.
A girl I knew once saw me here. I hadn’t seen her since we’d hugged goodbye at an airport, her face wet and mine stone-still. She was sitting under a blossoming tree, legs crossed, peaceful expression of repose. A pretty bodhisattva. She opened her eyes right as I looked at her, and her mouth widened.
Hey, she said, rising to her feet.
What are you doing here? I asked. Last I knew, she had been far away—she left after graduation, for a job in a taller city.
PhD, she said. My first year.
I nodded. We had so much silence to give. Each of us had ceased to investigate the other’s life long ago. For some time, inquisitiveness grew easily in the fertile ground of my suspicion; I trusted her less, and this made me the more curious one. Still, I only liked to ask questions when I felt my interlocutor wanted to answer. Years in, we were finished feeling embarrassed about being known, we became tired of it. By the end, I had started becoming a ghost. Sometimes we were right next to each other and she didn’t know I was there. In those moments, she sang in a high clear voice, songs I had never heard before and couldn’t find later. Now she knew I was here and it had stoppered her mouth. For old time’s sake, I kept speaking.
Your PhD, I said. Is it in History?
Yes.
She brightened then, an expression she often made after figuring something out. Do you remember the professor from the seminar I made you take with me?
With the big mustache? Of course.
He’s my advisor now.
Congratulations, I said. I remember how much you liked him.
Now we’re on a first-name basis and it’s so weird. No one else in my cohort feels that way, obviously.
Are they all from different schools then?
Undergrad? Yeah, everyone. I’m the only returner.
Do you like them, your cohort?
Oh yeah, loads. Well—most of them. There’s one guy, it’s like he takes all the oxygen out of the room when he starts talking. And this incredibly conceited girl, who’s like—well, I should stop talking shit. But yeah, I like everyone else.
I nodded, and she shifted on her feet unsteadily, as if searching for something else to say. I almost excused myself, but then she reached forward, not quite touching my elbow with a fleeting gesture before she dropped her hand to her side.
Oh, you know what, she said. I bet you’d like them a lot. You should come tonight.
Tonight?
We’re getting drinks at a new spot someone wanted to try. I’ll let you know the address. It’s not all historians, there are some German PhDs.
Suddenly I remembered what it was like to be with her, to be awash in names, places, plans.
Okay, I said. I’ll be there.
My assent surprised me. I knew that all I would do with her classmates was watch, listen, sip some golden drink that would make me feel even lighter on my feet than before, that I would never speak to any of these people again, that maybe they wouldn’t even see me at all.
Night came and I went to the appointed place in a train car with just me and one other: a man with curly hair, a black bike, intent expression. We alighted at the same red-tiled stop. He made no indication that he had seen me. With every step he took his heels trod down on the un-cinched straps of his sandals, something I watched until we went in opposite directions.
The girl and her schoolmates were all sitting when I came, perched on high stools under a string of fairy lights in the brewery’s back patio. I stood in the dark of the awning for a moment just to look at her. Hair down, longer than before, easy smile across her face—the smile that made, in flash photos, a blinding row of white. I still loved her. It was a familiar and asked-for pain, like a wound you tongue in your mouth.
Her smile earned friends easily, always had. Friendships were the great romances of her life. She liked small bright rooms full of other people, their tinkling laughter and soft touch. Quickly the brewery table was becoming one of those places, her schoolmates beginning to lean on each other, lose their uprightness. One, a rail-thin boy with greying hair and glasses, started speaking at me about Hegel and The Phenomenology of Spirit.
I like you, he said loudly after this initial disquisition.
Oh, thank you, I said automatically, and almost asked why, but he had already resumed speaking. What did it mean for someone to decide they liked you based on your nodding, the way you furrowed your brow to labor at visible interest. It was as though he wanted me for my reflectivity. The quality I had the greatest claim on, in my condition.
Soon the boy moved on to the rest of the group, and names of people I didn’t know began to spill from their mouths, an orchestra of shibboleths—
David and Rhiannon live in that—
Did you see Mitt’s place though?
That, uh, colonial three-bedroom near Susie’s—
Right, right. Close to Ryan?
Ryan N or Ryan M?
There’s another Ryan? Have I been tripping?
The present blurred. I could see the future, that the girl would have many more nights like this one, gossiping about the professors and other graduate students, who was secretly wealthy and who didn’t really seem as gay or straight as they claimed. She would have many more men and women, their pliant shoulders her resting place in the backseats of taxis and the dark edges of dawn. I envied and pitied them at the same time. She and I had each other’s youth, and a gift used up cannot be re-given.
When the brewery announced last call for drinks and the fairy lights turned off we poured out of the open double doors and into a waiting car, a hulking black rectangle in the street.
Turn the radio up, said one of the schoolmates, lolling onto his side, almost through me. The driver, who had a thin line of black hair like a monk’s tonsure on his shiny head, obliged. We rolled the windows down, let cold air fill the vehicle. It had been so long since one of these nights: head in the wind, wheels eating the white lines.
One by one, the schoolmates stepped out until it was the girl and me. As we pulled up to a powder-blue house, she looked over.
Are you here for much longer? she said finally.
I realized she didn’t know where I lived, that she hadn’t known I’d been here for years.
Just passing through, I said. It was good to see you again.
She smiled and quickly clasped my hand, then pulled away, opened the door, and walked to her house. I saw her slip a key from her pocket and walk in through a side door. Lights came on and blinked off in a succession of windows, marking her passage through the rooms that faced the street.
Where to? asked the driver when the last light turned off.
The train station, please.
Driving, he seemed to forget I was there, taking loud swigs from a thermos and changing the radio station to one playing music in a language from a different continent. In our companionable not-speaking I looked out the window at the city that had finished raising me. There were the bars where we’d taken ill-advised challenges to finish drinks that bubbled up, acid, out of our mouths and into bushes and lawns later, or played trivia, or cheered for the home teams of a thousand strange cities. The green-painted public library, the redolent garden of roses on a hill. The rich people’s houses on a street bordered by the brick pillars of a gate that didn’t close. The driver and I sped round the stadium built on an earthquake fault, this road that kissed it like a ring on a finger, turned into a winding byway with a vista of all the towns and the bridges, gleaming necklaces on the water’s throat. The drive was longer than it had ever been before, the driver hypnotized, his directions gone. We were far north of the station and then we were there.
I stepped out and saw that there was no attendant in the booth and no one else on the platform—too late at night to go anywhere else but my destination. The train glided into the station, bearing the promise of warm salt air and an unfamiliar ocean. The doors opened; I stepped aboard, returned to earth.
Adora Svitak is a San Francisco Bay Area-based writer. Her stories, poetry, and nonfiction have appeared in publications including Apogee Journal, 8Poems, BUST, the Huffington Post, and numerous others. Her book Speak Up! Speeches by young people to empower and inspire was published by Quarto in February 2020.
