Chapter One

When he left, what Maxwell discovered was that he would never forget the sound of it. The door, specifically, he would never forget: the way it closed, softly, without an echo, at least not in that moment. It would subsequently echo back and forward, until it had filled Maxwell’s ears and drowned out all his memories. He thought it might be better if it had slammed instead.

Three weeks later, Maxwell got out of bed begrudgingly, hungover and lazy, and decided that there was a ghost in his house.

You don’t hear much about Midwestern ghosts. They’re usually confined to the coasts, or the South, with all its history and bloodshed and those old houses that creaked in the night and wind. It’s the kind of place you’d expect to be haunted. But Maxwell’s house was in deep and rural Ohio, new, or newish, constructed in the fall of 2002, and it only creaked on occasion.

But things kept going missing, maybe turning up in places he didn’t leave them. Small stuff, at first: pencils and erasers, then his keys, then one specific key taken from the ring.

And then, after becoming aware of the ghost, Maxwell began to feel its presence whenever he moved about the house. Its force, acting down upon him, made everything around feel more still, and made him feel more isolated. It alienated him. He would eat these bowls of tomato soup and wait, all still, for something to come.

Maxwell ended up keeping out of the house as often as possible. It was infected, now. He would spend nights in other beds, stay at work as long as possible, drive slow on the way home.

“But how do you know it’s haunted?” Atys Muffler asked Maxwell one morning.

“I know.” And he would sort of turn away, not in a rude sense, just a slight neck-shift away, toward the ceiling, and pull the sheet they were both entangled within up a little closer. He would have a sharp inhale then. “It’s the kind of thing I can just feel. I’m not alone when I’m there, I know that much.”

He was so tired, still, after a night’s sleep. He had been tired for a while.

And that was that, usually.

Maxwell knew that most people didn’t believe him, but he knew that he wasn’t crazy. Call it a ghost or a force or whatever you want, I know that something else, something beside me, resides in that house. A closed mind is the worst defense against the supernatural.

 

Reverend Doctor John Alexander Gumshoe commanded crowds. The first time he spoke to a crowd of one thousand plus, he had to press his foot hard down on the floor to keep his knees from shaking. Now he was able to stare down a crowd, to control it, to calm it down, to handle the beast, to shake a red flag at it and control each of its figure-eight turns. It’s so easy to get people to believe you. It’s shocking how readily people will follow you. All you need is to convince them that everything else in their life -- their job, their music, their friends, their news -- everything that isn’t you, is fake. But, true, to get people to buy into your own solipsistic fantasy, you have to believe, at least a little bit, in it yourself. So Reverend Doctor John Alexander Gumshoe retreats into himself, into his meaningless titles and his persona and the way his words flow over you like silk. He seduced himself to escape his own mind. To be a follower was so easy. All you had to do was listen to orders, and to complete them. While following himself, Gumshoe admittedly did not know where the orders he followed came from. His solipsistic fantasy was too vast to convince himself they were orders of God, and he His prophet. But he was, he had to admit, quite baffled by his thoughts’ origins. In order to stay sane, he kept a catalogue of all the things he knew to be true, and tried to apply this dataset to his day-to-day functioning. He knew, via his college-day calculus, that the fastest route from point A to point B was rarely, if ever, a straight line. He knew that no hypnotist was more adept than the American television advertiser, except for perhaps himself. He knew no pain was so great that it could never be remedied. He knew the first thing he noticed when he met someone was their hairline, and then everything else followed in order on the way down, eyebrows, eyes, nose, lips, chin. He knew how to say hello in seven languages -- English, German, French, Spanish, Latin, Mandarin, and Hawaiin -- and he knew how to say goodbye in eight -- English, German, French, Spanish, Mandarin, Hawaiian, Japanese, and Dutch. He didn’t know if we did actually ever go to the moon, but he did know that he never would. And he remembered what his sister taught him.

The morgue was colder than he expected. He half expected his breath to freeze in front of him. Carolyn Gumshoe was there. Doctor’s fault, this whole epidemic is. She seemed so constant, even then.

They grew up together. Their mother would sometimes count their toes and fingers, years after being born, to make sure that all was accurate and accounted for. They would stay up late at night watching B-movies on the television. Carolyn loved stories about witches. Young, enticing women who danced streaked with moonlight, performing spells on flowers and pigs, fingers outstretched, hair wild and free. John Alexander loved the monster movies, about gigantic crabs and ants and women dropped from the sky, torn apart by atomic experiments, beyond human comprehension.

Like Mary Shelley learning to read by tracing her mother’s tombstone, Carolyn Gumshoe gave her brother, upon departure, a piece of knowledge he found, in his increased age, invaluable.

Gumshoe knew that drug use and overuse occurred because American life continued to be something from which all had to escape. From the ‘50s, when bomb shelters were constructed beneath these perfect suburban homes, nothing had really changed since then, just bomb shelters moved to the interior mind, and Gumshoe knew that if anyone ever sat in silence, in real silence, without the ringing of it all outside, they would feel very much in pain. So he got all the tortured together and gave them something outside of themselves to believe in.

He gave them himself.

 

[…] felt fine, or pretended to, and went on all normal. Lucy Zahler would drive him to and from work, and they would watch TV at night, and drink on Fridays and Saturdays and some Sundays.

Actuaries deal with managing uncertainty. That was […]’s job, to take uncertainty and to make it objective, to represent it in clear numbers. Numbers don’t lie, is the popular expression, but […] knew there were thirteen different ways to represent the same statistic and to interpret the same data. He would survey damage after some disaster and decide how to go on from there, business-wise. The right property insurance, reserve, reinsurance, capital management strategies.

Statistics and data rang in […]’s mind all day, and rang especially clear whenever he got into a car. Roughly 1.3 million people die in car accidents each year, 37,000 in the United States. Car accidents are likely to be the fifth leading cause of death in 13 years. Single greatest cause of death annually for healthy, traveling US citizens. And […] knew, quantitatively, that the chance of his life being lost in a car crash was small -- not infinitesimal, but small -- and that by refusing to drive himself he didn’t further any of his chances of survival, primarily just acting as a burden to those around him. But that had no effect on how his body seizes up behind a wheel, how his palms sweat and his heart beats and how dry and cracked his throat feels.

So Lucy drives him. And he pays her more than his share in gas money, even when she says he doesn’t have to, and he lets her pick the music, and lets her complain about bad drivers, and he just sits in the passenger seat, gripping the side of the seat so tight that his knuckles turn white, but he positions himself so as not to let her see.