Ghosting

Nathan Grover

She needed him to drop her at the donor conference an hour early, but while she was in the shower, he zipped his sports fleece over his sleep clothes, plucked the key fob from the dish, and drifted out the front door. He drove twenty miles north, pinching absently at his bottom lip in the morning traffic. Downtown, he turned into a parking high-rise and circled the helical ramp to the dark upper floors. As he pulled into an empty space, his phone buzzed beside him. He dropped the fob onto the passenger seat, got out, and hurried away between the sleeping vehicles, leaving the phone to convulse and float like an air hockey puck across the center console.

The day before, he’d been talking to his coworker Fernando at lunch.
          “It’s not that I’m invisible,” Jon said. “I just don’t register on other’s senses like I used to.”
          Lately on the sidewalk, for example, he’d come face to face with a stranger, a professional on a call or a young mother peek-a-booing into a stroller, who without looking forced him to the margin of the public right-of-way. On one occasion he’d bloodied his shin on a planter box, on another he’d grazed a restaurant sandwich board and got pink chalk dust all over his chinos. Jon glared. The stranger passed. Nothing. Others followed down the center of the sidewalk without a glance in his direction.
          “I thought I was being pranked, but now I understand,” he said. “They don’t see me. Like physically see me.”
Across the table his coworker Fernando gorged himself on a falafel wrap. Muscles pulsed at the hinges of his jaw. His nostrils flared, discoloring the etches of his nose. Upon working the food down his throat, he looked thoughtfully at Jon and cleared his mouth with his tongue as though to speak—then dove in for another bite.
          There, Jon thought. It’s happening again.
          “And it’s like, the less people see me,” he said, “the less of me there is to see.”
          Fernando continued to devour the falafel wrap without guile.
          Jon’s own parents hadn’t seen or heard him in several months. When he called his Mom over FaceTime, as he did every Sunday afternoon, the main topic was always Mom’s phone, as Mom and Dad quibbled and corrected each other over how to work it. When they did ask Jon a question it was usually What’s the phone doing now? Had he done something on his end? Any answer he gave was lost to the marbled pink confusion of their hands blotting out the screen.
          A steady stream of tahini dripped from Fernando’s knuckles into the paper-lined basket. The sound of food squishing around Fernando’s mouth, the deep breaths between swallows, were inflected with an ennui that Jon had come to associate with the physical world.
          “I should volunteer probably,” Jon said, sinking his chin into the cradle of his hand. “Try to stop thinking about myself so much.”
          In other words he should be more like his romantic partner, Victoria.
          Over the past year, the charitable organization Victoria worked for had lost a number of key employees. Jon was impressed to see Victoria leap in without hesitation and prove herself the kind of capable, indispensable person Jon had always pretended to be. But now the organization hounded Victoria endlessly. At night he found her, head bowed in front of her laptop, taking measured breaths to calm herself. Over months of coworkers failing to reach targets they’d promised to their funders, her panic had settled into a weary fatalism and a resolve to do everything herself.
          Occasionally, as he passed Victoria on the way to the kitchen, he danced for her. He suaved his mouth and bopped his head, just a goofy dance to remind her that fun existed also. But the more important Victoria became at her job, the harder it was to draw her attention from her laptop. So he edged farther into her field of vision and gave it his all, beckoning to her with his pelvis and getting down and dirty with it. When Victoria finally looked up, she expressed concern: “What’s happening? Are you okay?”
          He would blush and try to play it off. Then, to his relief, she’d recall this game of theirs, and his dedication to it, and they’d both chuckle and agree it was funny.
          “You’re a maniac,” she said and turned back to her screen.
          He recognized the demands he was placing on her when she was already so weighed down with demands. A need for attention was surfacing in him and grew harder to keep in check. If he tried being vulnerable with her, could he turn it into something constructive?
          The opportunity came on a Tuesday evening. As he bent over the sink washing basil leaves and she stood at the stove boiling pasta shells, he felt something bump against his back. It was a stranger’s bump, mindless, not realizing he was there to bump into. Then, the realization of water stinging through his sweatshirt and the waistband of his pants, and there was Victoria behind him hurrying a frothing pot of perfectly al dente pasta to the colander in the sink, her face blank. He leaped away, dropped his pants and shucked his sweatshirt and undershirt in one go.
          “Oh god,” Victoria cried, “I’m so sorry,” as she dumped the pasta in the colander and ran the tap over it.
          They stood looking miserably at each other, he in his underwear with his pants bunched around his ankles, she with a steam cloud rising behind her.
          “Jesus, Vic. Did you really not see me there?”
          “I know I know,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
          “I was right there.”
          “I know!” she said.
          She was quiet as they ate dinner in front of the TV. Afterward she paused the show and said:
          “It’s not that I didn’t see you. I knew you were there. But for a few seconds all that mattered was that I needed to get the pasta to the sink. It was like I could make the fact of you standing there untrue because I needed it to be.”
          She’d just been so inundated with work lately, she said, this big donor conference coming up. She felt so impatient all the time. She didn’t like herself like this.
          “Yeah,” he said. “That was weird.”
          But it was actually the kind of thing that happened all the time, like when you push your glasses up on your nose and discover you aren’t wearing any. What struck him was how a small splish of water seeping through his clothes had triggered a reflex that left him instantly and nearly entirely naked.
          “I wonder what it is that makes me so easy to miss lately?” he said. “Are people really not seeing me or have they never seen me and I’m only noticing because I really need to be seen right now?”
          He felt himself working up to an impressive act of vulnerability, something that would reveal the problem in raw, probably unflattering clarity, but Victoria was so deep in thought over what had gone wrong in the kitchen that she’d stopped listening to him.
          Sometimes he was reminded of a world he used to retreat into as a kid, how when his parents were at work he’d wander around the house, walking on the furniture and making faces at himself in the mirror. He’d perform monologues, half aloud, half mouthed to himself, following whatever idle notion popped into his head. As an adult these notions were always there, an oblique commentary running in the background. He assumed most people did this. But the longer he went without being seen, the more these idle notions stepped out into the open, struck odd poses, waved their arms.
          To Fernando, who had now reduced the falafel wrap to a milky puddle of lettuce and aluminum foil in the bottom of the basket, Jon said:
          “I know this all seems abstruse. It used to be if I let out any of what I was really thinking I was always careful to package it to be acceptable to others. And they could open the package or not. I guess mostly they didn’t open it. But now everything just falls out of me without any packaging at all. And with no one to receive it, it all just gathers. I can’t stop it. Or maybe I don’t want to stop it. Maybe I want to fill up everything around me with more me. Come to think of it, that was probably always the answer to feeling alone.”
          Fernando looked at Jon. His brow rose in sympathy.
          “You’re not hungry?” Fernando said.
          A twinkle lit Jon’s eye. Such small gifts of attention now, so delightfully small. He slid his untouched basket of pita and hummus forward and imagined that by the time it reached Fernando it would appear as though the basket were sliding across the table by itself.

The evening before the big donor event, Victoria and Jon had dinner in a nearby shopping district to avoid cooking or doing dishes. By the time they finished eating, many of the shops were closing and Victoria slowed to gaze into the shop windows.
          “It’s nice there are still places like this,” she said. “Real places, so you don’t have to buy everything online. I miss this.”
          As she admired a top worn by a tailor’s dummy in a boutique window display, he stood beside her searching for his reflection in the glass. He shifted side to side, restless to find himself among the other ghosted shapes. There. There I am. He’d been in his head so much lately, he hadn’t really stopped to look at himself. His hair had grown and given him a soft outline. The features within the outline kept disappearing before they could come to resolution.
          Then he saw something else reflected in the window. A sober, thick-set face was looking directly at him from behind.
          He wheeled around and found a missing person poster taped to the pole behind him. Have you seen me?
          No, Jon hadn’t noticed the poster until now. No one passing along the sidewalk engaged in conversation or thumbing at their phones saw it either.
          And look, an identical poster was taped to every pole along the street, like an alarm bleating in the margin of the public right-of-way. HAVE YOU SEEN ME?
          Jon chuckled and shook his head.
          The missing man wore thick glasses. His dark hair was cut straight across his forehead and his flat face weighed heavy around his mouth. His gaze was confrontationally simple. He seemed not mentally impaired, per se, but like he might need a little help—his gaze suggested he’d often rejected help. Likely as he got older his frustration had hardened into a frankness that was off-putting to others. Jon wondered what had happened to him. Had he gotten lost? Had a crisis of some kind? Had bad people preyed on his unhappiness and led him astray?
          There was no information on the poster, only a number to call, and yet Jon knew this man, recognized his complete lack of putting on. The longer he looked at this man the more Jon had always known him, had sensed his dull, unrelenting presence deep in the margin of the public right-of-way. He was Jon’s doppelgänger. Maybe. The missing man looked nothing like Jon, but he was the face of a future now coming into view.
          You and me, brother, Jon said.
          Aloud or not, it made no difference.
          Just you and me.
          Victoria was still waffling over the top in the window.
          “I don’t know,” she said. “What do you think?”
          He moved back into position beside her and examined her from an oblique angle. Amid her indecision he found a trace of amusement on her lips. That she should suddenly care about this top. She’d never been an impulse shopper; to be so would’ve made her feel out of control. And yet this top, this colorful but professional-looking top, which so perfectly embodied the charity’s brand, which was more and more her brand, seemed the key to unlocking a work situation that was evermore a means of self-expression for her. Victoria had arrived. He was so impressed.
          “I’m going to join a cult,” he said.
          “It’d be perfect for the conference tomorrow,” she said, “but I already have an outfit all picked out.”
          “I don’t care what cult,” he said, “as long as we all dress the same and speak in a code only we can understand.”
          The boutique was about to close. It was now or never for the top. When the shopkeeper smiled through the window and waved them in, it was decided.

Stepping out from the stairwell of the parking high-rise, he emerged into a swift-moving crowd. It was morning rush in the city. People busied along the sidewalk in both directions: office personnel young and old swishing by in well-cut clothing; delivery men and women in sporty uniforms; packs of men in orange vests and chalky boots; everybody carrying phones, bags, packages, thermoses or disposable coffee cups; all of them riding the currents of the city to their various places to be.
          He nosed diagonally across the sidewalk, upsetting the tempo of the foot traffic. The crowd clotted and corrected around him. Slowly, he lifted his arms.
          Alarm transmitted through the crowd. As he raised his arms outward, people began to scatter. Some turned irked or puzzled looks at him while others maneuvered by instinct, staying clear without looking up from their phones. The crowd carved away from him with the uniformity of a school of fish. As his arms reached their full extent, a void opened around him. A stable, self-contained nothing floated through the crowd.
          With his fingertips he grazed the edges of the void, where the crowd tensed and hurried ticklishly by. He felt the sleight of fabric, the crisp of freshly hairsprayed hair, the glancing warmth of an arm, a neck.

Nathan Grover lives in San Francisco’s most beautifully named neighborhood, the Inner Sunset. He’s the lead contributor for the new collaborative press, Puzzlegrass. Read his stories published by Epiphany, X-R-A-Y, ergot., Whiskey Tit, and others listed at nathangrover.com.

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