“I want to go on the record saying I hate this idea,” Dave said into his headset.

“Your complaint has been noted,” Simone acknowledged, her face lit by the reflected monitor light in her little Zoom window and reflecting on her tiara. Flanking her were two flickering orange candles for extra spookiness. “Now turn off your room light.”

“Come on, Dave,” Jessica said, her pointy black witch hat extending out of her Zoom window frame. “It’s our last get together before Halloween! This will be fun!”

Dave stood up and vanished from the camera for a moment, then his square went black. A moment later his screen-lit face appeared again. “Better?”

“Much,” Andre answered.

“I just don’t like screwing with this sort of thing,” Dave explained.

“More likely than not,” Maria said from beneath the black antenna hood of her mothman onesie, “nothing is going to happen. I’ve never heard of anyone trying this, so it’s just fun.”

“I still hate this idea.”

A chorus of everyone trying to argue with Dave all at once filled the speakers.

“Hey!” Dave yelled to get everyone’s attention. “I’m still doing it, okay? Chill.”

“Before we get started,” I began, “Simone, are you okay? I saw the Manhattan was getting some serious rain.”

“Oh yeah,” she said. I’m on the fifteenth floor anyway. We lost power the other night, but otherwise it’s fine. “Maria, are you taking the kiddo trick or treating?”

Maria brightened, “Oh my god, I have the cutest bee costume for him! I know he’ll never remember his first Halloween, but I will!”

We all went to college together and after graduation we pretty much scattered to the wind geographically. Five years and one pandemic later and we’ve been trying to keep in touch Zooming together once a week as much as schedules would accommodate.

“So…” Andre asked when there was a pause in our catching up. “How do we do this? I mean for real seances you’re supposed to hold hands, right? We can’t really do that…”

“Well, I don’t think we need to hold hands,” Simone said. “If we all just focus our energies together, we should be able to see what manifests.”

“I mean no disrespect,” Maria said, “but that might have been the most hippie thing I think I’ve ever heard you say, and that’s a pretty high bar.”

Simone flashed a brilliant smile and bounced in her frame. “Thank you!”

I took a moment to appreciate that everyone – including Dave – had dimmed their lights and seemed to be in the spirit. Maybe something would happen after all?

“Okay, everyone ready?” Simone asked.

I could hear everyone taking in deep breaths and letting them out.

“Okay,” Simone closed her eyes, “Let’s all focus on being present. Close your eyes if it helps you relax.”

I’ll admit, I kept my eyes open just to see what everyone was doing. And it did look like everyone was focusing with their eyes closed. So I closed my eyes and focused just on Simone’s words.

“That’s fantastic everyone,” she said in a tone that belied her dayjob as a yoga instructor. When she spoke next, her voice sounded more serious. “Oh spirits of the night, lost souls from beyond the veil, we invite you in to join our Zoom séance and speak with us now…”

Everyone was quiet. I honestly expected some snickering or wise cracking, but the silence felt, I don’t know, intense and almost reverential.

“Spirits,” Simone intoned again, “We invite you to join us and communicate with us—”

Simone stopped talking as the telltale chime of someone joining the Zoom call echoed in the silence.

Now everyone’s eyes were open staring open-mouthed at their screens. A new person had joined our call. Their square was blank with the icon of a person in place of a picture. The name “Jennifer” appeared below the window.

“Jennifer? May we call you that?” Simone asked.

“Y…yes?” a woman’s voice responded.

“Sorry, I don’t mean to kill the vibe,” Dave started, “Jennifer, if you’re Zoom bombing this group…”

“Zoom bombing?” the voice repeated.

“Yeah, dropping in randomly into people’s Zoom calls when you may not even know them.”

“I…I was invited,” she said. “I can go, if—”

“No,” Maria physically reached towards her camera. “Please stay, Jennifer. You’re right, we invited you here…”

“Jennifer,” Simone began in a calm, patient voice, “do you know where you are?”

“Umm… on a Zoom call?”

“Yes,” Simone nodded, “But beyond the Zoom call… are you… alive?”

Silence hung heavy in the chat. Everyone stared at the screen, no one so much as moving. I swear Jessica was holding her breath.

“No,” Jenniferr said sadly. “I’m not.”

“Can you tell us about yourself?” Simone asked.

“Umm,” Jennifer began, “Well, I… oh god,” she gasped. “No! Stay away! Get away from me! Stop! You’re hurting me—” Her Zoom square disappeared.

No one spoke for a long time.

“What in the fuck just happened?” Dave asked.

We ended the call shortly after that. Even after I got off the call, the feeling of a presence was still around. I chalked it up to the weird vibes and whatever that Jennifer girl was all about. I took a hot shower and called it a night.

The next day I got a text from Andre, “Dude, you’re not going to believe this. I was in our department Zoom meeting and someone joined. IT WAS JENNIFER!!! She didn’t say anything and my boss told her to leave. She did. But WTF?!”

I texted Simone, telling her what happened to Andre. “Wow, that’s freaky!” I wrote back that I know, it was really freaky. But she wrote back saying, “That’s not the half of it! I was doing a Zoom yoga instruction with one of my clients and guess who showed up?!”

I stared agape at my phone and Simone’s message. Suddenly the chat notification sounded and I clicked back to the list of text messages and saw the new message was from “Jennifer”. I clicked on the name to see the message and it was just two words, “Help me.”

I will admit, these books were actually picked out of my unread stack. We’ve all got that stack, right? Right?

No one plans to die.

Alright, that’s not true – there’s the whole dying with dignity euthanasia thing. But I’m talking about during the normal passing of our lives. Actually, I guess some suicides are planned, right? Fine, euthanasia, suicide… I’m sure there’s something I’ll remember.

Okay, okay, I didn’t plan on dying. And I didn’t plan on dying so goddamn quickly. Life was humming along. My career was progressing, there was a boy I was seeing, I owned my own condo in the Sunset, and I’d even managed to read the top book in the stack of books I kept next to my bed – Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad. Julius (the aforementioned boy) gave it to me, said I had to read it. That’s why it was on the top of the stack. That’s why it got read. I was ready to dazzle him with my insightful take on the way Whitehead melded realism and allegory when I got sick.

Okay, I had trouble breathing. And that turned into a thing. Well, the thing was cancer. And it was so far past the point of just being a thing. Fucking cancer, am I right?

Four weeks.  

Four weeks from that trouble breathing to my deathbed (Julius wasn’t there – I never heard from him after the diagnosis). My sisters were there, though. Bless them. They split duties after I passed – Julie handled, well, me. Cremation, memorial service, ash scattering – all that jazz. Theresa closed out my estate. That sounds so fancy. Really, she had to wade through 34 years of my accumulated shit.

Watching from this side and not being able to help… Well, that’s another story entirely.

One thing I focused on was that stack of unread books next to the bed. I don’t know why I fixated on them… No, I do. They were the embodiment of everything I planned to do but didn’t. Couldn’t. Didn’t get a chance to. Theresa and Julie looked through all my books, picked out the ones they wanted to keep and then gave the rest to the San Francisco library to do what they wanted with them – stock them, resell, them, thrown them out…

I had a fair amount of books, mind you, but that stack of a dozen books that I was going to get to… It’s funny how recall is in the afterlife. I can see that stack so perfectly clearly, read each and every spine individually…

Julie moved into my condo – good for her! Go Julie! But it wasn’t my space, and I didn’t want to haunt her new abode, so I decided I would find those unread books and read them. Not just the books in general. I set out to find my books – the actual books from that stack next to my bed.

How does one go about finding books lost to the world you might ask? Turns out, if you’re a ghost it’s not that hard. I pictured the book I was looking for – I picked out the one I wanted in that image of the stack in my head and focused on that one particular title, the spine, the way that book must feel in my hand, what it must smell like…

I was in the San Francisco Library – not the main branch. It was the Noe Valley branch on Castro. It was a quiet midday and I found myself in the middle of the stacks. I looked up and the book I had focused on was right there on the shelf. Strange Piece of Paradise by Terri Jentz. I reached for it and was shocked that my hand closed around the spine – interestingly, I passed right through the books next to it, but this book I could touch. I pulled it off the shelf and carried it to one of the comfy chairs that looked out on the street and I sat down to read it.

If anyone else noticed a book come off the shelf by itself and float over to a chair where it was opened and pages were turned, they kept it to themselves. I took my time reading about Jentz as a young woman with her friend on a cross-country bicycle trip camping in eastern Oregon when a man in a truck deliberately ran over their tent and then savagely beat them with an axe. Both women survived and 15 years later Jentz returns and tries to solve the crime.

I think I must have heard an interview with Jentz on NPR years ago – that seems right, right? I don’t remember when I bought the book, but it had been in my stack for a long time. So, I took my time with it – I don’t remember how many days passed. I’d read until I was tired (yes, ghosts get tired! At least this one does), put the book down, rest, and the next day take if back off the shelves (those librarians were fast!) and pick up where I left off. When I finally closed the book I felt rejuvenated and wanted to keep going.

I focused on the next book in the stack, pictured the book in my mind’s eye, felt it’s small stature and the color, and…

I was standing in the most gorgeous room I’d ever imagined. Floor to ceiling windows looked out over a valley with the bay… That was San Francisco in the distance. Oakland Hills. I was in the Oakland Hills. I looked around the room and the walls were dominated by bookshelves filled to overflowing. A small desk sat unobtrusively in the corner – notably not looking out the window for some reason. Looking around I surmised that this person was a rather successful writer – I’d heard of her (no, her books weren’t in my Stack, but I’d heard of her). And on her bookshelf was my copy of B. H. Fairchild’s Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest collection of poetry.

This book was given to me, I remember that. By whom… I don’t remember. I remember reading about B. H. Fairchild, a Midwestern poet. I turned to the titular poem and luxuriated in the words:

In his fifth year the son, deep in the backseat  

of his father’s Ford and the mysterium

of time, holds time in memory with words,

night, this night, on the way to a stalled rig south  

of Kiowa Creek where the plains wind stacks  

the skeletons of weeds on barbed-wire fences  

and rattles the battered DeKalb sign to make  

the child think of time in its passing, of death.

My apologies to the author whose house I was now haunting because, though the book wasn’t long, I read and re-read and read the thing again. I gave each and every poem the time and attention it deserved and I never could in life.

I could tell I was freaking her out a little bit – understandable seeing as every time she came into her writing space she’d find Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest laying on the table and every day she’d reshelve it. But spending that much time in that poetry really loosened my spirit.

When I finished it for the eighth time, I decided it was time to move on. Like all good poetry, I vowed to revisit it, and I explained to the author that I’d be back from time to time to read in her writing space. She didn’t have any clue I was talking to her, of course, but at least I felt better for it.

I focused on the next book and found myself sitting on a curb in suburban Fairfield. It was an older neighborhood – houses of different shapes and landscaping dotted the cul-de-sac. This wasn’t a cookie-cutter community and the various cars and RVs and boats in the driveway told me no HOA was invoked here. I felt better about being in the suburbs. But where was my book? I turned around and found myself face to face with one of those adorable little neighborhood lending libraries. It was painted bright colors – likely by kids who were taking and contributing titles to it.

Looking over the contents, I was heartened to see something for just about every age group from picture books to Infinite Jest because of course fucking Infinite Jest. But there among them was my copy of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. I bought it second hand when I was in college from a little bookstore downtown. This one I actually did crack the cover before. I just… never got further than a couple chapters in. I don’t know what it was – Pynchon’s prose? The protagonist? I just could not get into it.

Which made it a great book to approach now that I was dead!

This wasn’t the first Pynchon I’d read, but for some reason this one always stymied me. I know it’s supposed to be his master work, but…

Okay, it was good. I mean, of course it was good. But of all the books so far, this felt like doing work. Not necessarily in a bad way, though. I estimated by this point I’d been dead for two years and this was the first time I really pushed myself to do something  I didn’t want to do.

I will say, dear reader, it was not easy. Or fast. But I persevered. When I finished the book I was glad for my accomplishment.

I was also ready for my next book.

I focused on this book and found myself in the desert. Okay, not like in the sand. No, I was in a beautiful cottage. Looking around at the modern architecture and sterile furnishings, I determined it was an Airbnb outside Beatty, Nevada.

Of course I was.

I looked to the carefully curated bookshelves and found my copy of Richard E. Lingenfelter’s Death Valley and the Amargosa: A Land of Illusion artfully positioned on a shelf. On one hand it just seemed so… I don’t know… cliché – a book about Death Valley in an Airbnb outside of – wait for it – Death Valley! On the other hand… it kinda felt like it returned home. I put cynical Lauren to bed and took the book off the shelf and went out onto the patio.

I could tell it was hot – I didn’t know what time of year it was, but it was definitely over a hundred degrees – but it didn’t bother me. I guess that’s another benefit of being a ghost – you don’t sweat? Weird spooky flex, but okay…

I sat on one of the lounge chairs and started to read the book. In many ways this book was as dry as the desert it covered. Bless Mr. Lingenfelter, but he writes some dry history. But it was perfect for me. I read some, then explored the hills and valleys and came back to the Airbnb and read some more. Being able to effortlessly move across the vast desert distances instantly was another nice perk of being dead. The more I read and the more I explored, the more peace I found in the solitude.

I remember visiting the desert with my parents as a child. I felt small and utterly insignificant in the enormous expanse of empty space. Reading Lingenfelter’s book reminded me just how insignificant we all are in this inhospitable landscape.

And that realization was freeing.

I wasn’t finished with the book yet when The Light™ appeared. It was straight out of Central Casting – brighter than the sun, there was even some kind of ethereal angelic choral music bullshit. I guess I was ready to go. I could see my family members that had passed on inside the light. They were smiling and waiting for me.

I took a step closer to the light, cupped my hands around my mouth and yelled over the din of those goddamn angels, “I’m not finished with my book yet!”

They looked confused.

“And there’s still like seven more books after that!”

“Okay, if you could have dinner with anyone who ever lived, who would it be?”

Samantha looked pained as she thought about the question. “That’s such a hard question because… I mean… well…,” she hesitated and then offered, “Top 5?”

Isaac sighed but acquiesced, “Fine – top 5.”

“Okay,” she said, holding up her hand and ticking the names off with each finger. “Jesus, Martin Luther King Jr., Ghandhi, Amelia Earhart, and… ooh, Freddie Mercury!”

“The first four we already sent invitations to – America Earhart was a maybe, the rest were busy. But I like the Freddie Mercury addition!” he started jotting the name down in his notebook.

Samantha buried her head in her hands in frustration. “Ugh, this is worse than when we compiled our guest list for our first marriage! Why do we have to do this again?!”

Isaac took a deep breath and gave her a patient smile. “Because when we got married the first time there was that little clause in there that said ‘Til death do us part’. And, Sam, we’re dead.”

“I know we’re dead, but can’t we just, I don’t know… I guess we can’t live in sin, haunt in sin?”

“Sam, you’re the one who wanted a big wedding…”

“I know, I know…” she said. “Ooh, Aunt Linda – did we invite my Aunt Linda?”

Isaac flipped a page back in the journal. “Aunt Linda, Aunt Linda…,” he traced his finger down the list of names. “Aunt Linda, yes,” he paused and looked up. We already tried to invite her, but she’s still alive.

“She’s still alive? The last time we saw here before the accident she looked like she had one foot in the grave already!”

“I remember!” Isaac said. “Be that as it may, she’s still alive and kicking.”

“She’s half dead but alive, and I’m all dead but more alive than she’s been in, what? Fifty years? Makes me want to haunt her out of spite!”

“Come on, Sam… let’s focus.”

Samantha scowled. “How many ‘yes’s do we have so far?”

“Two… thousand thirty six.”

“Wow,” she said. “Can’t we just elope?”

“Honey, we’re ghosts. Where are we going to elope to?”

“Haunted Mansion? Catacombs of Paris? New Orleans? I don’t know – I think we’d fit in at those places!”

Isaac gave her another practiced patient smile.

“Okay, I give up – I don’t want a big wedding after all. When the guest list could be literally anyone not living… that’s a lot of folks to choose from. Besides, can you imagine an open bar for two thousand people?

“Two thousand thirty six,” Isaac corrected.

“Whatever,” she said. “Let’s just be you and me and the officiant.”

He stepped closer and took Samantha in his arms. “Are you sure? You’re not going to regret not having a big second wedding?”

Samantha wrapped her arms around his neck. “I’m sure. I just want to be with you in the afterlife, too. Besides, more time to haunt!”

“I’m so happy to be dead with you, Samantha.”

“And I’m happy to be dead with you, too, Isaac!”