I am not open to ghosts. This is what I said to anyone who started to relate an encounter they had. I said the words hoping all discussion of ghosts would cease. I was careful not to say I don’t believe in ghosts, or to in any way diminish the speaker’s relationship with the paranormal. (I was aware that such semantic concerns had to do with my own superstition.) When I said I’m not open, I spoke as much to my interlocutor as to any potential ghosts. Haunt elsewhere, I pleaded. Even writing about ghosts made me uneasy; I liked to turn away, to make jokes and act impervious. The problem was that the disquiet rooted in my own body, from feeling myself spectral, neither here nor there. So, I can’t really turn away at all.

•     •     •

I learned from the obituaries section of the local paper that my paternal grandfather was dead. I knew him only by name, and there it was. I read in the article that he was born in Owosso, Michigan, which is a city I don’t know how to pronounce, because no one has ever spoken it aloud to me. For example, my grandfather never took me on his lap and told me about how it was to grow up in Owosso. I have never said it, though people always say you should read your writing aloud, and though the sibilance is very nice, I don’t put the word in my mouth because to utter it seems profane.

•     •     •

To sidestep, a college professor of mine once said that the scariest book she ever read was The Turn of the Screw by Henry James. A girl is hired as governess to two young children in Essex. From time to time, the girl sees the figures of a mysterious man and woman on the country estate. The couple are strange, not fully corporeal, and they seem to bear some intention toward the children. Was it good or ill? My professor was a petite Italian woman called Monica, who had the ragged fierce face of a crone and wore tiny leather miniskirts and sharp boots. (One night I visited her in her apartment in Ferrara. We students urged her to perform a tango with her husband and, while from a record an accordion wailed, lamplight bounced in from the street and made her glow. Was there anything ever more alive than a pair embracing this way? I felt us watchers disappear from the room when the dancers grasped palms and pressed chests.) In class, she taught me a word for the feeling stirred by James’s book. She pinned me with a stare—she may have been a witch—and said, it’s like uncanny. But uncanny and all the other English words she knew failed to describe what she meant. She said the better word was unheimlich, which,
as you may know (I did not), is a German word expressing the discomfort of feeling something is simultaneously familiar and alien. When the novella was published, critics said that the ghosts were really an expression of the girl’s madness. That the whole terrifying plot was about her psychic unspooling. I read The Turn of the Screw and was duly disturbed and a little resentful at my professor for bringing it to my attention. I had been told a ghost story. I don’t speak German, but she seemed exactly right. All the unbearable unheimlich resided in the ambiguity.

•     •     •

My grandfather had four children while he lived in Owosso and one of them was my biological father, who is also a stranger I’ve never met, though he, at least, is likely still living. The obituary said my grandfather excelled in track and field in college, which makes me feel simultaneously proud, and like I’ve squandered some latent genetic ability. He owned a grocery store chain and then he owned a helicopter dealership, if you can imagine that. He liked skiing and fly fishing. He liked to take long drives. He played the harmonica.

•     •     •

My best friend, who lives in rural Kaua’i, is comfortable with her local ghost community and, knowing my aversion, she has tended to overshare about it. She feels as certain and complacent about her ghosts as I have felt sure I want nothing to do with them. She said, for example, that there was a child ghost residing in the preschool where she taught. What could possibly be more unsettling than a child ghost? I told her: stop right there. But on she went, saying that occasionally she had seen him—for it was a small boy—moving from room to room, passing like a flicker behind a doorway. She wasn’t specific about how he looked, beyond saying that he was “clear,” which sounded a lot like “invisible,” to me, which reassuringly implied “figment of her imagination.” She said these things to me with something like resignation. (She’s hard to disbelieve; her voice is sure and steady. Also, her hair is traffic-cone-orange. Burning bush red. Soothsayer bright. You wait for her to shoot off sparks. Maybe something about being a redhead means you can’t tell a lie. I didn’t like to think about it.) She suspected a ghost wouldn’t linger unless there was some sad story around the death, something that trapped the child-spirit on the wrong plane. I didn’t know anything about planes. I feel unsure of where I am at almost all times. What I took away from the description was that now I couldn’t ever visit her at her haunted preschool. When I acted skeptical, when I laughed and tried to get her to agree she was joking, she looked at me like I said I didn’t believe in evolution or the big bang theory or climate change. It was a pitying look, one reserved for the naive and ignorant—for someone unwilling to see light.

•     •     •

The obituary appeared three years ago. I was at the gym when I read it. I had been browsing the San Diego Union Tribune on my e-reader, which is something I didn’t usually do. But that day I had indeed opened the local paper on my Kindle. I won’t say I was prompted from the beyond. The coincidence is likely to do with personalized web content or targeted marketing or something else banal. It’s not anything supernatural.

•     •     •

I have a friend called Jena, a person I met at a workshop a few years ago, at a time when I had decided to finally try and write. There I was, already feeling vulnerable. One hot night at the workshop in the woods, over several glasses of ice-cubed wine, Jena and I got a little buzzed and she asked if I believed in ghosts and I said no, but, in my cups, I let her tell me about how she used to coordinate excursions of college kids through Edinburgh. She said that one group insisted on seeing a tourist trap known as the South Bridge Vaults. For a fee, a guide would lead tourists through a series of dank underground chambers, a city beneath the city, while giving an oral history of run-ins that visitors had with resident ghosts. In return for actual money, people would get frightened. Guides told them the story of Burke and Hare, a pair of nineteenth-century serial killers, who stowed their victims in the Vaults. My friend Jena was rosy. She shone with summer sweat, quite alive, quite beautiful. (She has Medusa type curls, unmanageable and large; yes, she might turn you to stone, catch you like prey the way she pierces you from inside that dense forest.) She leaned back in her chair and said she was a nonbeliever her whole life, but things were different now. She was unperturbed during her hour-long tour in the Vaults, but when she arrived home that night and undressed for bed, she bore marks in three perfect parallel lines from her hip to her knee. She hadn’t ever felt herself scratched. From the Internet she learned the marks showed up often on people who visited Vaults. In the morning, one of her students reported a similar wound. Solemnly—was she drunk?—Jena told me she was sure the ghost was someone desperate not to be forgotten.

•     •     •

I was climbing up the Stairstepper machine at the gym when I read the obituary, when I saw the small square picture of my grandfather. I was the highest person in the gym, perched atop that apparatus, its hard steps unfurling endlessly. The article took me like a gut punch. I was marching forward, making no progress, only sweat, unable to make sense of the text, trying not to stumble off the machine, my thoughts not unfurling. I only tripped a little, though my legs felt stuck and not my own. Part of the problem was that, though he was unknown to me personally, learning that my biological grandfather was gone made me feel a little gone, too; made me start to rise up away from my own skin and bone. When my thoughts re-latched, I admit that one of my first reactions was disappointment about him not being better looking. Looks should be trivial. My grandfather was at that moment a dead stranger to me, in a box or an urn, a forever missed connection. But we had the same jaw line. I saw it in the photo. I could become jowly. God knows what else we shared. I didn’t give a whit about the helicopter businesses. But the harmonica was undeniably endearing.

I don’t know how he passed. According to the article, he was 93, which is old enough that death might just be related to age. Nothing could be more natural, perhaps. The absence of explicit information about his passing had me thinking, you get a reasonable amount of time to be here, to love your people as well as you may, or not. To form a fondness for long drives (I speculate: the wind buffeting you, the solitude, music as loud as you like, or no music, just direction, motion and speed), to make mistakes, to atone for them. Maybe when you die at 93, you leave some peace in your wake, and death at a ripe old age reduces the likelihood that you will dwell here as a ghost. Seems a little greedy to hang on after that. I may feel very different when I’m 93, which, based on new knowledge of a genetic predisposition to longevity, is an age I could reach, but hasn’t one had enough? When is living asking too much? I suspect that a person can become superfluous. I imagine myself that way. Some great grandchild might say: Her? Is she still here? To become a ghost after all that—after a presumably full life—to remain? Profligate, I thought. One must let go.

•     •     •

I marched steadily and read the word Owosso. It sounded like an incantation, a fairy tale word you say to conjure hidden realms. I panted and sweated and climbed to nowhere.

•     •     •

My biological father, as happens sometimes, first flatly denied any role in my conception. Once science proved him wrong, he became a vitriolic fear monster. Part of the problem seemed to be that he was from money and he felt sure that my existence (a superfluity, if you will) was a financial irritation. My mother decided she would go it alone, rather than expose a child to hostility, to being treated like a nuisance. Then a couple years after I was born she met a very nice man who would lovingly raise me, would help produce my two sisters. We all enjoyed one another very much, have had good lives, I think. So far. I have been folded into love at every stage. How does malice grow in such conditions?

Yet, I have often fantasized about confronting my biological father to tell him what I think about his behavior. I have heard from people who know his family that he lives just a couple hours from me. After his short relationship with my mother he met a suitable woman and had a son. The child, now a man, is a year younger than I am. He lives an hour away. This I discovered on social media, and about all of it I have feelings so dark that I scarcely recognize myself as their thinker. Many nights in my life, right before lapsing into sleep, I lay in bed and imagine confronting my biological father. I taste rancid insults. They start with something like, “What kind of a man . . .” and continue with silly threats like, “You’re going to die afraid,” which I think is a product of my affinity for bad action movies. I flirt with my power to disrupt whatever peace he enjoys in his life by my mere existence. For a long time, I didn’t actually try to find him. But the Internet makes it hard to stifle curiosity. So, in idle moments at work or late at night I search for him online. I think about calling his home, going to his door, or stepping by his window swiftly and then being gone—a flicker. No telling whether I was a shade or a shadow, malicious or angelic, or the product of some creeping madness. But no amount of wishful chain rattling makes people change their choices. It doesn’t turn a no into a yes or harden a specter into flesh.

Though, as I say, I am not open to visitation, sometimes I allow myself to reason that if there was ever such a thing as unfinished business, it is a child abandoned. Such a child is a tether, invisible and tenacious, a stranger you would recognize. You wouldn’t know why goose bumps raced over your skin, though quickly they would spread. I know he will never come for me, just as surely as his father from Owosso will not be coming back for me, is not waiting for me in any so-called plane. I like to think I can turn away from the supernatural, but in half-awake morning minutes, while my mind softens in the shower or when I do dishes, I wonder if it’s worse to be a ghost or to be haunted. I wonder if both are possible in me.

•     •     •

The words I feel are not actually rancid, nor plaintive, but calm. They are: I wish that you’d think of me, and some days hold me steady in your mind.

•     •     •

I climbed and climbed. Sweat beaded and slid from my body and splashed on the Stairstepper like a faulty faucet. Over and over the drops exploded. I looked up the town of Owosso on my Kindle. The Internet told me that it consumed just over five square miles of Michigan, within the boundaries of Shiawassee County. Its best-known landmark, indeed the town’s very website icon, was a very small, false castle, confirming my suspicion that there was at least some magic at work, separating this place, dimensionally, from my own. It would remain a legend. We would be myths on either side of a door. (I press my ear against the door; I listen still.) Upward, with machine rhythm I stepped, until my time was up.