Tag: Fiction

Entry of the Ghost into the Narrative

The Ghost reminds me of me. There it is dancing alone in my apartment, singing “I want you to hold me,” as the Violent Femmes do on their song “American Music.” The Ghost thinks its lovers speak to it through the songs on its radio.

It sets forth each night assured of this, listening as one such lover follows “Gold Soundz” and “A Pillar of Salt” with “Lariat” and “Web in Front.” “If it means I get to hear you singing to me,” reasons the Ghost, “if it means our last words weren’t wasted, then so be it.”

Inspired by the aforementioned, Ghost decides on a whim to live well again. It comes and goes as it pleases amid the timestream of its ghosting, resolved in each instance to rip it up and start again.

Replace “Old Sounds” With “Gold Soundz”

“Going back to old sounds won’t help,” thinks the Time Traveler. “Do so and the Narrator stands revealed as a bloody mother fucking asshole.”

The Narrator, not quite omniscient and thus taken aback by the thought, asks of his sub-creation, “You think so?” “What, then?” he wonders. “Do we edit the entries to make me likable? What would we write instead?”

Thus it happens, thinks the Traveler. “The Ghost would have to enter into the narrative,” he says. We know for certain that some such being spoke to us via auditory hallucination, don’t we? And we know as well that it was already there, doing its work upon us in the house, prior to our introduction to marijuana. The latter didn’t invent the Ghost — but it amplified it. It gave it back its voice. Let us open ourselves to the Ghost, then, and recognize it as a potential for apartness within us that is always-already part of us. Once we accept all that is loop-like, all that is like Ouroboros in our nature, we reveal ourselves as we are, infinite: a single, transtemporal, interdimensional being, enunciating itself across time.

Confronting the Obstacle

One version of the narrative begins with the Narrator rereading old trance-scripts, feeling unhappy with his former self’s negative self-image. He arrives to a realization of how much of an obstacle he was to his flourishing. The Narrator wonders: should I “burn the diaries,” as Canadian poet Moyra Davey recommends? Should I edit, revise, re-sequence events? Is that how one creates an Alter-Destiny?

The Text and Its Author

The Narrator admits that it wasn’t until well after the end of his stay on Shady that he first came to think of the place as haunted.

“Drug-induced trances revived my writing practice during the years of my tenancy,” confesses the Narrator. “It was as if a voice spoke to me,” he says, “telling me what to write.”

“The Text I produced during those years,” exclaims the Narrator, “was in all sincerity written by the home itself, was it not?”

“I should think so,” opines the Traveler, “though I know neither the how nor the why, neither the here nor the there of it. It was written by the home…or by the spirits who dwell therein.”

“Spirits, then, if you must,” nods the Narrator, with what may in hindsight seem a touch too much vigor. “Yes, perhaps! The one explanation makes near as much sense as the other. Let us see!”

Frequently Asked Questions

Some of us are wondering: Who is the Narrator? Who tells the story, and to whom?

Is the tale told at a remove by a skeptic? By a future occupant who, moved into the home at a distant date, discovers a former occupant’s trance-scripts, the latter having been stored either in a box in the attic or in a time capsule in the yard?

Does the home make similar events occur as these terma or “treasure-texts” reenter history?

Is the story a cautionary tale? A warning? A case study?

Is the Narrator a time detective? Has he been sent from the future to investigate a Text written by one of the home’s former occupants: a wizard who went missing from known timelines after claiming to have devised a working means of time travel?

Is the Narrator a postmodern schizophrenic? Twenty-first Century Schizoid Man? Is part of him a time traveler wanting to go back to live his past differently? What would he change?

The act of retrospection must be dramatized. Let us assume first, then, that the House on Shady Boulevard is a time loop. People who live in the home oscillate to its frequencies. They relive its ecstasies and traumas — though always with a difference. The tale, then, is one told by someone who, years after his time living in the home on Shady, attempts, through writing, to avoid the past’s recurrence.

The Wizard’s Tastes, as Expressed Through Interior Design

In design terms, the Wizard’s tastes skewed toward the epic, the ornate — total art! cosmic syncretism! He hung large antique mirrors on walls in three of the home’s rooms; he filled most of the home’s windows with stained glass, including a large window at the front of the house featuring an image of the Eye of Providence — the latter retrieved, I’m told, from either a former church or a former Masonic Temple. From the ceilings of those of the home’s rooms adorned with foxed mirrors, he added dazzling, many-armed, many-bulbed chandeliers — beautiful, gaudy, dusty old things! The home’s several built-in bookcases may have been of his making as well — as were one room’s shelves sized for storage of records. The most characteristic of his contributions, though, was the imp crouched atop the home’s door bell, or the pair of werewolves carved into the corners of a mantle atop one room’s fireplace.

The Move-In

When Sarah and I first moved in, we hired a team of local movers to help us unload. One of the movers took one look at the werewolves, and one look at the Eye of Providence, and said, “Y’all ought to have a preacher come and bless this place.”

Weird Occurrences

Suffice to say, we had some weird occurrences there at the home we rented on Shady. None of it seemed malevolent in intent — just a bit weird. I developed a writing practice during my time there involving self-induced trance states, similar to the surrealist practice of “automatic writing.” I experienced auditory hallucinations, where it felt like I was hearing voices. Some of this was admittedly disconcerting at first. I realized almost immediately, however, that I could write some of it down. I could take notes like a kind of sleuth. And so, a Text began to germinate — one I transcribed gratefully, in a state of silent absorption as I listened.

Hence these trance-scripts.

As for the house, Frank sold it when we moved out — and from what I’ve heard, he tempered the decor when preparing to put the place on the market. Thankfully, however, I have some photos of how it looked when I was there.

I have the photos…and I have the Text.

The Gay Wizard

I know what you’re thinking, says the Narrator: Can I trust an author who calls one of his characters “The Gay Wizard”? I use that name not to offend, but because that was how he was known about town.

People knew the Gay Wizard. He was a local personality, a figure in the community. I remember Sarah and I speaking to our neighbor Sue one afternoon. Sue lived up the street from us, in a cream-colored home. Ferns hung in baskets from her porch. By the time we met her, Sue was already decades into her time on Shady. She spoke fondly of the wizard: his parties, his Studebaker, his boat.

Atop skeletal details of that sort, gathered haphazardly in the course of my tenancy, I crafted a character: someone I fancied meeting one day via time machine. Like an egregore of sorts, he entered first into my imaginings via the spirit of books of an earlier era. The books started turning up in the bins at Goodwill, as if he’d sent them: rare, obscure screeds like Arthur Evans’s Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture and Mitch Walker’s Visionary Love: A Spirit Book of Gay Mythology and Trans-mutational Faerie. From them and others like them I culled a portrait of a loving psychedelic animist: a gardener like Derek Jarman. That’s how I see him now, in fact: poised there in the sunlit grove at the center of the home’s back yard, spade in hand amid the growth of his garden.

In picturing him thus, I resist the story’s pull toward horror. If this were a work of horror, notes the Narrator, he’d have been a shadier dude. Play the horror factor one way, and he’d have been a Crowleyan sex magician. A Thelemite; a Satanist: a practitioner of black magic. Play it another way, as might, say, Jordan Peele or P. Djèlí Clark, and he’d have been a wizard of an even deadlier sort: the kind who go around in white, terrorizing people of color.

If he’s ours to imagine, says the Narrator, let us imagine him otherwise. In our choosing of genre, let us act with hope.

Conversations with Frank

Conversations with Frank are always lovely, sprawling, rangy things. Early on in the course of one (perhaps even our first), he disclosed to us that several of the Shady home’s occupants prior to our renting it had been musicians in local bands. “Oh yeah? What bands?” I’d asked, hoping to learn more. That was my first hint, I suppose: Frank, rehearsing the names of those bands. “Golden Dawn,” he’d said. “Tetragrammaton.” The latter, I knew, referred to the sacred name of god in Hebrew. I knew, too, of the longstanding prohibition in some quarters on saying that name aloud. And with that, I suppose, I began to suspect, at least on an intuitive level, that there was something odd about the home’s history, some sympathy for occult or forbidden things retained between roof and ground.

But the oddness, I soon learned, was one that preceded Frank and his musician-friends. Well before any of them had arrived on the scene, the home’s occupant was someone known around town as the Gay Wizard. If the place has a whatever-you-wanna-call-it — an ectoplasmic charge; an occult presence of some sort — that dude is, at minimum, a key link in that charge’s chain of transmission, if not its source.