For seven months, I watched Catherine’s ghost walk all over the city at night. I watched the high shadows of Iria wherever I walked and remembered everything about the four conversations I had had with Catherine back when she was only corporeal, unghostly. She’d been my student. She’d asked questions that showed she’d done the reading, and even had some insight. She asked about madness, Gwendolyn MacEwen, length limits on the term paper. She wore tank tops with skinny straps that showed her shoulders and a backpack with enormous straps that covered her shoulders. That was in early fall, but she disappeared in March and her ghost was dressed for warmth. The ghost had no backpack.
Iria is a good city for ghosts, darker than most, though it’s got a creamy orange shimmer running close to the ground. The night light doesn’t hover up higher here, though, so it isn’t difficult to keep an eye on all the ghostlies that haunt us, if you care to. Up around six or seven feet, where most ghosts seem to float, is too high for ground glow and too low for streetlamp glare. Their silhouettes loom and linger there, if you look.
There’s nowhere that’s not haunted; Iria might be a little denser with spectres than most towns, but it’s all there everywhere for those paying attention. Everything lost leaves a ghost behind, not just the dead but everyone and everything in danger of being forgotten: the passed-away, sure, but also lovers we hurt and left and never called, lost library books we never paid for, paintings we made and later burned. And of course the girls that went missing. If you want, you can see everyone: heart-attack grandparents and roadkill cats, unsuccessful bands now-disbanded and bad ideas now-discredited.
Look up, and the past is dancing just above your tilted face.
You don’t have to look up, of course, and lots of people in Iria and elsewhere choose not to. There’s plenty to see down here on the ground, amongst the living. My wife, Gretta, doesn’t see a gleam of ghost in the whole city. It’s her choice, and Gretta would choose to look at the real bodies every time.
At night she sticks to the butter-coloured puddles of streetlamp light and the rainbow refractions of neon, since light and gravity fade spectral bodies near to invisible. For me, though, long before I found and lost Catherine, I was caught again and again by all those ghostlies. In the thickest shadows they are the only light, and I can’t not look.
Catherine’s ghost was a slender spectre, just like her living body. Her ghost still wore not that tanktop I remembered but her last-seen-wearing wine-coloured sweatshirt, though the colour looked a little lighter in insubstantial form. There’s quite a breeze up that high, making her hair flutter as I couldn’t remember it ever doing when she was real, when she walked on the ground. It was still tar-black hair, pin-straight hair, Catherine’s hair. That ghost was Catherine, and no, it wasn’t, either-just some dead form of her.
Of course, Catherine didn’t die.
Catherine’s ghost weighed too heavy on the air of even a low-lit city like Iria. So young to go ghostly. A twenty-three year old ghost has too much substance, especially if she’s still alive.
She couldn’t drift away from us, which maybe saved her in the end, brought her back to life again, at least a little was back. As far back as a pale cotton pillow case, no, don’t fast forward: her face first was in the mud, and then it was fully alive, raving struggling horror fantasy alive. It was only in the ghost-pale hospital white that escapee body began to revert to ghost, to lapse into coma.
All the ghostlies have their plans and hauntings, and I wouldn’t presume to say why. In the seven months that she was gone, I saw Catherine several times flickering idly near the parking lot where she was last seen, but she pointed no accusing fingers, produced no clues. Once she was keeping an eye on kids drunk-brawling outside the bar across the street, but she didn’t intervene; once peering through the windows of the Kelsey’s watching families eat midpriced suppers and drink unlimited soda. Who knows why, or where she really was at the time?
Everyone imagined something. While her body was struck invisible she put ideas in the heads of the citizens of Iria. Everyone who ever read the newspaper had a story-dream about Catherine being murdered and dumped in the woods, sold into white slavery and shipped to Vancouver, married and moved to the States. I imagine citizens twisted into sweaty pillows trying to blot out the night-image of her inflated corpse caught and shredded by a speedboat motor. If they were kind and hopeful and only slightly mad, it was easy for these dreamers to phone the police tip line and try to convince whoever answered, and themselves, that these dreams were visions, premonitions, facts.
Me, I didn’t tell anybody what I dreamed. I didn’t even tell Gretta when she rolled onto my chest and said, Hush, it’s a dream, what is it? As if she both knew and didn’t, which is exactly true. I always said I couldn’t remember.
For as long as Catherine was gone, Iria accepted her ghost, her gaze, her guard. We missed her, loved her and she seemed to love us back. She was everywhere at night, her ghost was- parts and bridges and concerts and lectures-even as her real self was nowhere at all. Though she never said so, I think even Gretta sometimes glimpsed bright shadows out the corner of her eye. She said not a word about it, but when Catherine was close she always looked away fast and grabbed my hand while I watched that small shimmer. I never knew if Gretta took my hand wanting comfort, or only half resisting the urge to pull me away.
It got a little more complicated about Catherine’s ghost after her living body was found. The dreams and imagings we all had could be finally fleshed out, a little, even if what we were so sure would be the denouement was betrayed-missing girls always die, no matter what we dream or desire. And even though a real body was present now, in Iria General Hospital, another ghost still lingered, different, white-gowned, of Coma- Catherine. The woman pinned to the barred bed at the hospital was not the one who had been snatched in the snow seven months before-that girl was gone. Too, all the facts other than her factual body were still gone. She stayed in a coma that the doctors could not explain, medically. But when they looked at the forensic facts of what had been done to her, they didn’t blame her. They would’ve wanted to stay unconscious, too.
She had bracelet scabs that indicated binding, said the newspapers, and I could picture perfectly the old grey twine that dug into her wrist and rubbed red sores at the top of the palms. Her hands I have seen, the wounds witnessed, but I don’t know what caused them. I know I don’t know. The sores were so crusted and infected by the time Catherine was on the street, on the news, on the surface of the earth once again, they could’ve been caused by anything. By flame or a blade or some violence that even my mind can’t conjure.
Despite new and tragic stories on the front page of The Iria Herald-Gazette, you’d think new ghostlies would crowd out this breathing girl. Yet Catherine still haunts tollbooths and cabstands and Irians know it. But we still don’t know the story, just the prologue and the first little bit of the epilogue, what but not how or why. Catherine’s ghost still drifts around offramps near the ring road. Without a firm fate for her body, her spirit still has the power of possibility. The body could have been anywhere, doing anything, in the circus or on Mars or in a bordello in Texas, and the spirit of those lost months still floats free. She is everything, every fate and twist thereof.
Every murdered mangled disaster could have been Catherine, but so also was every fantastic rescue and brilliant escape. And every gone-but-not-taken adventure scenario where she set off of her own volition with a man, a plan, a baby on the way. She was every ending you could imagine.
Second Place
Hart House Literary Contest