"Seeking the Beating Heart in Times of Plague" by Geoffrey Waring

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Crystal had spent the better part of a month trying to influence a bird to move a t-shirt someone had dropped behind her tombstone to the stone’s top so that she would have a nicer place to sit. The cemetery ground was large and vast, and the groundskeeper had not noticed when a dirty, crumpled t-shirt had fallen from a transient’s pack and near her grave three weeks earlier. She couldn’t move the piece of cloth herself, but she wasn’t entirely without recourse: she had her breath, first of all, and the more gently she whispered, the clearer the living creatures of earth seemed to hear her, given a quiet, still night or a morning where the wind imbued her breath with meaning.

She had climbed the tree where the bird made her nest and tried to blow on its neck until it left. Once out, she crawled along behind it, blowing here and there in the spaces she did not want the little bird to occupy, until it had stumbled onto the t-shirt.

The next challenge was to keep it from taking strips of cloth up to its own nest for padding. It was a delicate task, blowing her icy breath on the bird when it was too lacking in action, and giving it a sharp, icy chill by passing her translucent hand through its feathers when it had gone too far. To be frank, rather than a piece of padding on her tombstone, her three weeks of effort had resulted in little more than a totally neurotic bird, daily considering whether or not to abandon its nest.

“Give it up,” Sally, the old woman who occupied the plot next to Crystal’s, said. “You’re never going to be able to do it. Better wait for a human to come and whisper something into their ear when they’re all alone on a dark evening. Humans possess the capacity for language.”

Sally had been dead for decades, and had succumbed to the graveyard habit of calling the living “humans.” Crystal tried to avoid it, remembering that, deceased or no, she was herself as human as any breathing person on earth; just currently occupying a different stage on the spectrum of life and death.

“What else am I supposed to do?” Crystal said, rubbing her ass, sore from hours sitting on her uncomfortable tombstone. “There hasn’t been anyone around in weeks. The hum—people are all locked up in their homes. Some kind of a disease they’re all worried about catching.”

“It’s called a pandemic, dear.” Sally spoke like a condescending schoolteacher. “They roll around every hundred years or so. Things are about to get a lot more crowded in here, just you wait.”

If she was being honest, Crystal wouldn’t mind the company. No one had consulted her about where her grave was to be located, but if they had, she certainly would have conducted interviews with the neighbors before deciding on a final resting place. Sally was fine—she was nice enough, anyway—but they had terribly little in common. Aside from being dead, of course. Sally had died decades earlier, and the confines of the cemetery gates weren’t exactly conducive for cultural or personal growth. The two were simply from different eras, and their conversations rarely ventured past the—pardon the expression—skin-deep.

The few times Crystal had tried to bring up matters more central and existential to their shared ghostly existence, Sally had merely harrumphed. If Crystal had pressed further, Sally made her lack of interest in the topic known by graduating from a harrumph to a snort, and finally, if Crystal dared to press even further, Sally would cry out, as if to God or anybody, “Shall the dead not be left in peace?”

Dramatic.

Crystal had only been dead twelve years, so she had no idea what it was like to be a centuries-old ghost, or even a decades-old ghost like Sally. She wanted to know things, things that Sally already knew but seemed unwilling to discuss or communicate with her. Were they painful things? Boring things? Did Sally simply dislike Crystal?—surely she couldn’t resent her youth. They were dead, after all. Crystal had no idea, but the things she wanted to know floated to her mind daily. Things like:

Would the forgetfulness ever wear off? She forgot things, and once in a while seemed to gradually remember them, only to forget again. Things about her old life.

What about the numbness? The strange, emotional numbness of being dead, like trying to scratch skin freed by nerve damage from the gift and burden of physical sensation. Crystal remembered things about being human, but hazily, as if through glass. Feelings of love, of sexual desire, of loneliness, of emotional pain, memories that floated by her mind at a safe distance. She knew enough to know that they were sometimes unpleasant feelings, but she longed to feel them again anyway, translated into her ghostly body. Would she? Would she ever feel any of those human-feelings again? She longed to ask Sally, but knew that her ignorance would be met with derision.

On the other side of her plot was Thomas, a pot-bellied plumber who had died in a coke-fueled jet ski accident in the 1980s. Two tombstones down lay a soldier who died in war, with a plain face and the translucent remnants of a handsome, capable body, whose family still came every Memorial Day to dress his tomb with flowers.

Crystal had visitors, on occasion, but this was where her faulty memory troubled her so. Occasionally she would suffer flashes of recognition—this boy, weeping over her grave. A boyfriend? A brother? She was quite sure she should be able to tell the difference. Once they had died, too, would it come back to her? Would she, as a ghost, be better able to remember and recognize the extinguished lives of other ghosts? Could they visit each other, touch, hug, remember their lives? Build new lives in the afterlife?

“Harrumph,” Sally responded, folding her arms and swiveling around on her tombstone, turning away from Crystal. Her companion gone, she was once again alone with her imperfect thoughts.

The things she did remember from her life were useless bits of trivia, sensations that lingered from things left undone. She had been in the middle of Infinite Jest when she died, her copy of the book still dog-earred in a basement somewhere for all she knew, and she regretted not being able to finish it. She remembered liking David Foster Wallace, even though she had a vague, guilty feeling she was not supposed to—that she was supposed to dislike his air-sucking maximalism, the legion of lit bros endlessly quoting his work, his treatment of Mary Karr. Which she did. Still, she couldn’t help being jealous of his grave-neighbor; it must be nicer than hearing Sally harrumph eternally. She remembered liking Bukowski, too, and felt guilty about that as well. She didn’t do drugs when she was alive (not that it ended up mattering, lifespan-wise), but she liked to read about them. That these feelings lingered even after death worried her. Certainly these bits of trivia were less important than recognizing the face of a loved one weeping at her grave, than remembering her mother and father, her family, the house where she lived, the pieces that made up the tentpoles of her life not even 15 years ago. These thoughts were pieces of scrap paper fluttering in the wind, itches that would forever remain unscratched.

She missed the taste of coffee. Sumatra, Colombia, dark roast, French press. Cherry, caramel, brown sugar, apricot. Steaming hot coffee with a splash of cold cream. She missed the taste of alcohol, of crisp champagne. She had been one of the few who waited to drink until the legal drinking age, and here she was, snuffed out only a few years later. Little things like that made her angry. What angered her even more was that she was always concerned with these trivial little minutiae, that death hadn’t taught her any grand, sweeping lessons; she knew if she had a chance to do her life over again, she’d be flying just as blind as she had the first time.

“I’m thinking about haunting someone,” Crystal said off-handedly one day, to relieve the interminable boredom as much as anything. Sally laughed.

“I knew a ghost who tried that once. Trust me: not worth it. Not nearly as fun as you might think,” she said.

Crystal wondered where Sally would have met another ghost outside their little cemetery family, and why she’d referred to the ghost in the past tense.

Tom, the plumber, perked up at the conversation, swiveling around on his tombstone. His glowing blue gut quivered through a translucent t-shirt like gelatin.

“I thought about that myself,” he said. “Find a nice, abandoned old house. Wait for the neighborhood to gentrify, for a nice young family to move in. And then,” he took up a pair of ghostly chains that had materialized like smoke from nowhere and rattled them enthusiastically.

Sally rolled her eyes.

“It would be nice to have the company,” Crystal said.

“We’re company.” Sally seemed offended.

Crystal looked past the cemetery gates at the empty streets below.

The cemetery was on a hill overlooking a high-end shopping center on one side, a lake on the other. Crystal remembered the lake and had a vague sense she had been to the shopping center, although it was another one of those memories that eluded her the more she tried to grasp at it.

“When do you think the humans will come back?” Crystal said, wincing at her failure to catch the term before it came out.

“When they’re told it’s not dangerous anymore,” Sally said, shrugging.

“Humans are timid little creatures.”

With little hope of seeing people strolling around the cemetery yard, Crystal started keeping odd hours, sleeping during the day and sitting perched on her tombstone through the night. She liked looking at the warm, glowing lights of the city in the distance. She had a sense that this was something she had enjoyed in her previous life, too, and it was something she could enjoy without the frustratingly futile necessity of interacting with the physical world. She would sit on the top of her smooth, rounded grave, or stand on top of it, craning her neck for a better view, and watch the cars move steadily up and down the highway like glowbugs. The movement was life, and life warmed her dead little heart.

She sat and watched and thought, and as the sun rose she went to bed, then got up at sunset and sat and watched again. This had been going on for a couple weeks, when one night she heard a rustling that spooked her and nearly made her fall off her tombstone.

It was a girl with sandy blonde hair, a teenager, in jeans and a pink tank top. Crystal had not seen a mirror in ages, but she vaguely remembered that she herself had black hair and brown eyes, dark features—now she knew her hair and face and eyes were a translucent blue, like her hands and legs and the rest of her visible body, easily deduced by the fact that she was a ghost, and that, to the best of her knowledge, all ghosts were the exact same shade of translucent blue. But some kernel stuck in her mind made Crystal think the girl was exotic-looking, whatever that meant, the picture of a farmer’s daughter, a surfwax beach bunny perched on a car, an icon of the American suburbs; a heartland being sprung from the earth like sand and wheat.

Crystal hopped off her tombstone and started following the girl around the graveyard, quietly. She gazed at her with curiosity, wondering if they might have been friends in another life. The girl had a sweatshirt tied around her waist and, leaning against a large tombstone, she put it on. Crystal had noticed goosebumps on the girl’s skin, and tried to remember the feeling of a chilly spring night.

After a few minutes another being came shuffling up the hill, a high school boy in a sweatshirt and cargo shorts. He had the greasy black hair that only teenagers seem to have, and small earrings twinkling in his earlobes. The two ran to each other and awkwardly hugged.

So it was a lover’s rendezvous in the cemetery, Crystal thought.

The dead are beyond concerns of privacy, so starved are they for something to alleviate the boredom of eternity, and Crystal perched on her grave to watch the awkward couple fumble and gesture over warm cotton. Crystal wondered why they had decided to meet in a hilltop graveyard, of all places. After an hour or two of awkward kissing, rolling around in the dewy grass, and talking, the couple parted ways with a reluctant final kiss.

And Crystal was alone once again, staring at the cold lights of the city.

The days came and went, the sun rose and fell, the dew clung to the grass then evaporated, and Crystal waited, wondering if the couple would return to their secret spot amongst the dead. A few days later, they did. As if following a script, the two engaged in a reenactment, almost identical from start to finish, of the first night Crystal had seen them. Not wanting to wait for another opportunity to interact with the world of the living, Crystal climbed off of her grave and waved her hand through the boy’s arm. She watched as he jumped back from the girl with goosebumps prickling up on his skin.

“What was that?” he yelped, his voice higher than Crystal had expected, and Crystal had to repress a smile as the girl looked around, confused and a little frightened.

“Stop,” she said, drawing the word out into two syllables. “It’s scary enough here.”

“You didn’t feel that? It was like I’d dipped my arm into ice water,” the boy said, and the girl hit him playfully on the shoulder.

“Shut up,” she said, the words curving like a bridge over a river. Crystal was delighted. She wondered why she’d never been bold enough to try this before.

Sally poked her head above her tombstone to see what the commotion was about.

“Be careful,” she warned.

“Of what?” Crystal asked.

But Sally refused to elaborate. “Just be careful,’ she repeated, then slumped down behind her grave and disappeared.

Crystal couldn’t imagine what a ghost would need to be careful about. The worst had already happened: she was dead. The ultimate end of every cautionary tale in the book had already been robbed of its teeth.

A few nights later, the couple came back; or, Crystal thought they had at first. It was the same boy, but this time he was with a different girl. Crystal had trouble telling at first, because this girl looked, at first glance, so similar to the last: thin, shivering, tanned, with sandy blonde hair and a sweatshirt that had “Class of 2020” emblazoned across the chest. She was perhaps an inch or two shorter, and the impression of similarity crumbled upon closer inspection: when Crystal looked, she could see that it was clearly someone else. The boy, handsome in a strange way, with a long, narrow face, as though it had been pressed by a vise, was the same, and Crystal was grateful to see someone she recognized. Two couples coming separately for a tryst by her graveside was a story about her grave; a boy bringing two different women for a tryst by her graveside was a story about a boy. She knew enough about her grave; it was the boy she was curious about.

Determined not to miss out on the simple pleasure of being able to influence the world around her, Crystal sat cross-legged next to the couple as they tried awkwardly to make out with each other. She would wait for the right moment, then tweak and poke, invasively, impolitely, hopeful she could elicit some reaction. This time she focused on the girl, tweaking her ear, pulling at her pinky finger and thumb.

“You’re cold!” the girl exclaimed.

“Sorry,” the boy said, crumpling the sleeves of his hoodie in his fists and pawing at the girl like a cat playing with a ball of yarn.

Two nights later, he appeared again, this time with a third girl. This girl looked distinct from the other two, with dark hair and green eyes that Crystal could pick out even in the dull spillover of the streetlamps that lined the road next to the cemetery. Her interest in the boy wasn’t stirred by anything the living might recognize—she was not able to feel the sort of stirring or emotional attachment based on sex, though she could appreciate the unusualness of his face, long and melancholy, something Crystal might call resting sad face—and in fact, her attachment to the boy rather than any of the girls was probably only determined by his repeat visits. Why the cemetery? Why so close to Crystal’s grave? She knew there was no why, but it occupied her mind in the lonely nighttime hours that the boy was away.

She started to wonder what the boy did during the daytime. The humans—the people, she was correcting her own thoughts now—seemed to be confined indoors. She wondered about the boy, what he did to occupy his time. Watching TV, doing pushups, playing guitar. What did teenage boys do with their free time? Crystal had never been a teenage boy, so it was not so much a case of forgetting as of never having known.

But most of all, Crystal was happy when the boy would return with another girl, for the sheer joy of being able to interact with the world around her. She was delighted by the reactions she could provoke by blowing on the couple, by leaning down and running her hand through their bodies, the squeals and ticklish laughter she could elicit with her icy touch. She could see the appeal of haunting, of occupying a house, the sheer delight of being noticed. It amused her, and while the sensation was new for each girl that visited, she wondered why the boy had not noticed the repeat occurrence of an unnaturally cold breeze, of an icy touch, of the chill of death passing through his body on an otherwise warm spring night.

She listened to their talk after the awkward fumbling around and physical experimentation was over. They talked almost exclusively about the pandemic, something they kept referring to as simply “the virus.”

“When do you think we’ll be able to go back to school?”

“How is your family dealing with the virus?”

“Aren’t you going stir crazy, being at home all the time?”

“Are you having your groceries delivered or does your mom still go to the store?”

It was boring hearing the same things over and over again, especially things involving death, since it was a barrier she had already passed over, but when she heard the boy talk about worrying about his grandmother and even getting a bit teary-eyed, Crystal thought that she felt something stirring in her cold, translucent heart. Nothing she recognized: not pity, not sympathy, but something else, something tiny like flint hitting tinder with no kindling around to catch the spark. It was the stirring of something long forgotten, a dusty bottle of wine locked away in a cabinet and newly rediscovered. She leaned in enthusiastically, hoping to catch hold of the feeling for one more brief instance, and, recklessly, she found her whole body suddenly plunging into the pile of teenagers, stacked one on top of the other on the slick dark grass.

She blinked. She blinked again. She lifted her arm, looked at her hand. And gradually, it dawned on her that she was seeing the world through a different pair of eyes.

She raised her arm again, experimentally at first, and wiggled her fingers, watching the boy’s larger, tanned fingers wiggle in the dark at her silent command. A thrill of excitement shot through her, the first rush of genuine emotion she’d felt since she had died. Was this what they called—she struggled to think of the word, heard with her own fleshy, living ears, long ago—was this what they called possession? Here she was, inside the boy’s human body, controlling it, making it move. The thrill quickly gave way to a flood of anxiety. If she was here, where was he? But she forced that out of her mind and enjoyed the thrill of inhabiting a human body again, feeling the touch of another person’s skin on her own, of the cool grass beneath her legs, the dirt pressed down under her bony new knees.

“Is something wrong?” the girl said, gazing at Crystal with a plain look of insecurity.

“No,” Crystal said quickly, her voice deep, unexpectedly deep, the tone registering differently now than when she had heard it before externally; a tone rich, unfamiliar, corporeal, male. “Nothing. Everything’s fine.”

The girl did not look reassured, but they went back to kissing, Crystal enjoying the feeling of human contact after all these years. She had never been interested in women, but what did it matter? She was alive again.

After fumbling through the physical motions, up to the point she had observed the boy take with the previous girls, neither daring nor wanting to go further, Crystal lay side by side with the girl on the grass and listened to her breathing.

“You’re quiet,” the girl said, stroking Crystal’s hair. “What’s on your mind?”

Crystal didn’t know what to say. She didn’t know anything, about the girl, about the boy, about their lives, their common interests, their hobbies, where they went to school. Her first instinct was to ask the girl’s name, but that clearly wouldn’t do.

“Nothing,” she said quickly, and they went back to breathing silently next to one another.

When it was time to say goodnight, Crystal did not offer to walk the girl home. Instead, Crystal stood there, alone in the middle of the cemetery, where all the ghosts were soundly sleeping, now invisible to her. No one knew what had happened. She didn’t even know if they could know—if they could see her underneath the flesh and skin and bones. The idea of the boy still bothered her. If she was controlling his body, where had he gone? Was he disembodied, as she had been, watching her control him from some other place? Or was it like he was asleep, temporarily relieved of the duties and responsibilities of captaining the human body? Was he still in there, unable to respond but physically aware of what was happening to him? These thoughts rushed through Crystal’s mind, and though this was the most excited she could remember being since she left her own body, she now suddenly wanted to know if she could get out of the situation, if she could leave the body she had unwittingly hijacked and return to her own form. What would happen when she did? Could she get back here again? Could she come and go as she pleased, or was this something permanent that had occured, something destiny-altering and even scary, damaging, wrong?

For want of anything better to do, she left the cemetery gates and walked through an alley that intersected with the street by the grassy block. It had been so long since she had wandered outside its gates, and into the city. Why was that? She could not remember. It’s not as though she was physically unable to leave; it just never occurred to her to do so. Ghosts stayed close to their graves; it’s what everyone did, what everyone had always done, but here she was, outside, and the whole world was still going on without her.

She passed a piece of graffiti tagged on an alley wall in a rainbow of primary-colored spray paint:

SEEKING THE BEATING HEART IN TIMES OF PLAGUE

Seeking the beating heart in times of plague. The streets were empty, though it was almost midnight, so maybe that was not unusual. Stil, it felt quiet, even for someone used to living in a graveyard. Crystal walked past empty bars and restaurants, the streets devoid of vehicles. She had forgotten how things used to be, somehow, but remembered enough to know that cities were not supposed to be like this.

Floating past the different buildings and peering up into lit windows, where people were watching sports analysis shows on TV, playing games with their children, toweling off freshly-washed dishes after dinner, she expected to hear laughing, but all the sound was muffled through the glass. The buildings were sleek and modern, in dark blues, grays, and orange trim, full of sharp reflective surfaces, a crush of glass and steel. Crystal wondered if she could have been doing this for years, without a body. She was a ghost, after all, and didn’t being a ghost come with a whole range of supernatural abilities? Could she, for example, float into windows? Could she take a running start and burst effortlessly through a wall?

It had never occurred to her, or any other ghost she knew, for that matter, to try.

She found herself wandering past the city center and into other parts of town, rows of middle class, single-family units, with pristine lawns and decorative chimneys and clever welcome signs hanging on doors. What could she do with a living body at her disposal? The possibilities seemed so limitless that she didn’t know where to begin, and she realized that the bits and pieces of residue that had followed her into the afterlife like so much sticky tar were the least important things imaginable. Finishing a book; knowing how a television show ended. She had sulked about not knowing how technology had advanced, the hangnail endings to the day’s political and social dramas, and yet here she was now—was she supposed to go to the library and look them up? It occurred to her how little it mattered.

But, if that was the case, what did matter?

Without thinking, Crystal looked up and found herself standing on the lawn of a familiar-looking house. Grass was grass, and the grass in this yard had the same damp, midnight scent as the grass surrounding her cemetery plot. It was a smell she was used to, but had never noticed before. Now it filled her nostrils, and in the pit of her stomach, in her elbows, in her chest and bones, she felt a new feeling, pulling her toward the house in front of her. She stood there, in a teenage boy’s body, facing the facade of the house, looking into the window.

There was a dark figure inside, risen to his full height, staring back at her.

Seeking the beating heart in times of plague, she thought to herself. What a strange thing to write on the side of a building. It resonated with her like a koan, as the call of flesh, shuffled off with the rest of the mortal coil, must have resonated with dead people everywhere. They outnumbered the living, they must have, by many times, or did they? She had heard somewhere once that there were more people alive now than there had been in history. Was that still true? She tried to imagine the surging wave of humanity, the white, effervescent crest of the living, the dark and seaweed-infested ocean behind it representing everything else, representing her, like dark matter, unknowable, filling up the universe.

Crystal raised her hand and waved. The figure shut the curtain, and for several seconds, a wave of sadness rushed through her. She imagined the man retreating to his bedroom, safe inside, ignoring the strange person illegally trodding on his lawn.

But in another moment, the door opened. The man stuck his head out.

“Can I help you?”

The voice is what did it. She recognized it instantly, its deep resonance rushing through her and filling her bones with long-forgotten memories. This was the story she had wondered about; this was the story that mattered.

“Who is it?” a voice called from behind him, and Crystal saw a woman, short and slight, in a nightgown behind the man.

“Are you okay?” the man called out. “Do you need help? There’s a virus going around, you know. You shouldn’t be outside.”

“I’m okay,” Crystal said, turning away, the voice not hers. “Sorry to bother you.”

The man paused for a second, then said: “You sure?”

Crystal shrugged and took a flier on an old pleasure: “Do you have a cigarette?”

“I don’t smoke,” the man said. Then, after a pause: “Anymore.”

“That’s good,” Crystal said. “It’s bad for you.” She had been worried about her brother’s health but, now that she was back in a human body, she strongly craved a cigarette. It might have been disrespectful to the teenager whose body she was borrowing; but, considering the very high level of disrespect she was showing to his autonomy anyway, she figured that one cigarette was a very small sin to add to her ledger.

“Your face looks different,” she said.

“Excuse me?”

“You got older,” she said, suddenly feeling stupid. Of course he got older; everyone did. She didn’t know what to say.

“Do I know you?”

Crystal shrugged. “Sure you don’t have a cigarette?”

The man paused, his body still hidden behind the door, looking a bit confused. Then he said: “I might have one in a drawer somewhere. For emergencies. Hold on.”

Crystal was tickled at the idea of an emergency cigarette. Somehow the idea of her brother quitting smoking but keeping an old, battered pack in the back of a drawer somewhere—just in case—was just what she had expected.

He re-emerged with the truly ancient-looking pack of Marlboros she had imagined, along with a long-necked kitchen lighter designed for lighting candles at restaurants. He walked over and sat on the lawn with her, the grass damp and springy and soaking through the ass of her shorts.

“Sorry,” he said, a little absurdly. “We’re not supposed to get this close to people.”

“I know.” Crystal shrugged.

“I’ve been going a little crazy, to be honest, with the quarantine and all,” he admitted, laughing. Crystal had lit the cigarette and was enjoying the familiar taste of stale tobacco, the strange sensation of burning deep in borrowed lungs. “I’m a pretty social person.”

I know, Crystal wanted to say, but something told her to be cautious. Instead she found herself asking: “Are you still writing stories?”

This made him cock his head and give her a good, hard look in the eyes.

“Who are you?” he asked, unafraid but deeply curious.

Crystal took a drag of the cigarette and looked forward.

“I dabble,” he said, bewildered but apparently wanting to see where the conversation would lead.

“Still having trouble with endings?”

He paused again, this time looking a bit spooked.

“Well?” Crystal pressed.

He nodded. “I hate endings,” he said.

“Everyone hates endings,” Crystal replied.

“It’s like you can stumble along for a whole story, but once you get to the end, it’s like you suddenly need to answer the question ‘What is this story about?’ And I never know the answer. I have a whole pile of stories without endings.”

Crystal couldn’t keep herself from laughing, but the sound that came out from her mouth—the deep, male laughter of the body she was inhabiting—startled her.

“It’s easier in real life,” she said. “Things just end. You don’t have to think about it too much. And then you can try to make sense of it, or not, it doesn’t matter. Because it’s just a jumble of things that happened and then suddenly stopped happening.”

Her brother nodded. “Yeah, I guess that’s true.”

“Can I ask you—,” Crystal said, aware that the cigarette was nearing its end and not sure she would be daring enough to ask for another one. “This may seem random, but did you ever read Infinite Jest?”

Her brother laughed. “Yeah, I did. A long time ago.”

“Do you remember how it ended?”

He scratched his head and scrunched his face, looking like he was trying to remember. “I don’t really remember,” he said. “I think someone died? It was a long time ago.”

Crystal laughed again, stubbing the cigarette out on a patch of dirt at the edge of the lawn. “That’s how every story ends,” she said. “If you stick with it long enough.”

“I guess that’s true,” he nodded. Then, after a pause, he said: “I don’t know how you’ve been feeling lately. But for me—I always had this idea that things were more or less steady. That someone was in control, even if I wasn’t sure who it was or which direction we were heading in. I didn’t know the destination, but I assumed someone did. But I look around now, I see everyone shut up in their houses, scared to death, and it strikes me—no one is in control. Nobody knows how things are going to turn out. It’s just this illusion we’ve all agreed to because it feels better.”

Her brother’s voice cracked a bit at the end, and Crystal realized how difficult things must have been for him. It had been so long, and she didn’t know anything about him anymore. She had never met his wife—they had never met while Crystal was alive—she didn’t know basic things, like what he did for a living, who his friends were, how having a dead sister had affected his life. Whether or not he was a good man. He had lived almost a third of his life without her.

She wanted to tell her brother that everything was going to be okay, pass on some wise, reassuring edict from beyond the grave, but she realized that she couldn’t honestly say if things were really going to be okay, whatever that meant. She still didn’t know if anyone was in charge. She could look to Sally, or Tom, or any of the other ghosts that had been there longer, she could ask them questions and listen to their answers; but they didn’t know what they were doing, either. That much was obvious. Ultimately, she felt the expanse of the universe stretching so far above them, and below them, out in every direction, and wondered herself if there was any purpose, if anyone knew what they were doing, if anyone was in charge.

She wanted to tell her brother all of that; she wanted to reassure him, or hug him tightly, or give comfort, or take comfort from him, but this was the extent of what she could do. Sitting here with him on the lawn, enjoying the simple pleasure of a cigarette and, more importantly, his company. Being together: in all the dark reaches and expanses of the universe, this was all she could do at the moment to fill her tiny, dead heart, beating at the center of her large, borrowed body.

This was what it meant to be human, what it had always meant to be human: to be huddled around a tiny fire in the vast dark, basking in the warmth of each other’s company, sunning oneself on the dark warmth of love. A small, glowing ember flickering in the vast dark country.

She wanted to tell her brother this, but instead, she stood up and wiped the dirt off the back of her pants. “Well,” she said. “Thanks for the cigarette.”

“Sure,” he said, raising his eyebrow.

She turned and started to walk away, but stopped. “Everything okay with you?”

Crystal could feel the familiarity creeping to the edges of his good nature, and he raised his eyebrow before saying: “Sure. I guess.”

“That’s good,” she said. Her lip was almost trembling with emotion now, and she knew that if she was going to keep this from slipping into very weird territory she was going to have to leave quickly. She resisted the urge that was flooding through her very human, fleshy body to run up to her brother and hug him with all her might, instead turning away and walking down the street. Her brother walked back to his house, stopping to take one last, amused glance at the vanishing figure shuffling down the road, and finally disappeared behind his front door.

She pictured him writing a story without an ending, about the strange teenage boy that came up to his house one night in the middle of a plague and asked him if he remembered how Infinite Jest ended. She wondered if it would end up in his stack of stories, or tossed out at a dinner party, and when he came to the part where the boy walked away forever, what he would say to make sense of it and imbue it with a feeling of purpose and meaning.

It’s just a jumble of things that happened, and then stopped happening, she thought. And at that moment, Crystal regretted nothing, in her brief, crackling life or thereafter. Because she had found the beating heart at the end of a cigarette, in a glowing light sucked down and extinguished, in the community of a moment. These were times of plague, these were always times of plague. And she knew that all anyone ever had to do was wait.

Featured Art: "Embrace ('Our Fragile Glimpse')" by painter Edward Lee

Geoffrey Waring is a writer and translator from Los Angeles. His work has appeared in Litro, The Los Angeles Review, MonkeyBicycle, Fugue, and elsewhere. He can be found online at geoffreywaring.com and on twitter at @HonyakuPanda.