Lyndsay Hall
His ghost appears at the nightclub. With one hand he dangles from the icicle lights that drip from the rafters and flash orange then red then yellow: the threat of hell. I can tell it’s his ghost because a physical form can’t do that, hang from string lights. His body is partially framed by the L-shaped head-neck-shoulder combination of the man I talk to. When I lean closer to speak into his ear, there is the ghost. The ghost is there, somehow more real than he was the last time I saw him, the person: eleven months, three weeks, six days ago. An anniversary of sorts approaches.
The man tells me it’s his birthday. I know what that means.
Sounds like someone needs a present, I say.
The man, it should be said, is hot. Six feet tall with broad shoulders. He has short, curly hair and a disarming smile that reminds you men are people, too. He offers me champagne that he wrangles from the ice bucket.
Bottoms up, he says.
I take the bottle, and the ghost soars toward me and contracts small enough to cannonball inside. Fuck. Not again.
The man clocks my hesitation and asks what’s wrong?
I can’t drink and risk ingesting the ghost, letting him inhabit me. He has enough control without being inside of my body. And I can’t tell this normal man, who I assume has a sensible relationship to the paranormal, about the ghost. I’ve tried before. It doesn’t go well.
Here, let me, he volunteers.
This naive gentleman, so sweet, wants to heroically prove the champagne isn’t drugged. He raises the bottle to his lips. I’m left with no choice. I rip it from his hand and smash it onto the ground. The bottle shatters into a million shards, bubbles rippling across the floor like a cresting wave. The man–reasonably, expectedly–wants to know if I’m insane. From the wreckage, the ghost. He smirks at me with the satisfaction of a win before disappearing, just like that, a wink.
***
Let me explain the ghost. The ghost is not a figment of imagination or alcohol, nor is he corporeal in the way I am and you are, in that he lets the light pass through. He is, if we are getting technical, a hallucination, although that belittles his impact. Only I can see him, but go on a date with me, and it is your spaghetti whipped around like a lasso, it is your gin and tonic splashed into the innocent waiter’s face. The ghost is my ex-boyfriend. Renowned for his jealousy and rage, my ex-boyfriend the real man is alive and well two states north of where I escaped to.
And yet he has appeared in the fruit stand of the grocery store, in a boutique’s dressing room, smack dab in the middle of the ocean like Jesus. He has slumbered upon my nightstand and backstroked in my soup and scowled across the dinner table every night. Sometimes we play a game of hide and seek. In his absence I call out, oh ghost! I know you’re here! Because the ghost is always there: on the median of the MacArthur Causeway, tightroping the spine of a palm frond. At the gym. At the doctor’s. For a week, the ghost made a bed of my pillow. I slept face flat on the mattress. Often I can find the ghost in the sun.
***
I sulk to my one-bedroom riddled with signs of my impermanence: suitcases in lieu of a dresser; an orange, thrifted couch patched with electrical tape; only paper plates. I mean to buy the stable, adult kind but every month buy these instead. No one aspires to do the dishes. In bed, I take my Rabbit from the nightstand. The vibrator is hot pink and long, a replica of the real thing sans veins. I turn it to the highest setting and close my eyes, the blackness absorbed by a flipbook of all the men the ghost has denied me. At least I have this.
In the eyes-shut dark, I see a flash of life. He’s here, the ghost. He dances in the reflection of my mirrored closet doors. Once our eyes meet, game over, he beelines toward me and straddles. He grins that dumb, mischievous grin before colliding with the vibrator, becoming one. He’s never embodied anything before, but I am sure that’s what happened. The feeling on my clit has morphed into something else familiar. It is him inside of me again, and with him all of the complicated feelings of fear and pleasure. I spit the vibrator from my hand. It seizures on the floor, a light bounce in its buzz, until I turn it off.
Fuck this.
I throw the vibrator–like a quarterback or a confident drunk girl, whichever–out the window, glass exploding then raining onto the front lawn below. I imagine it shimmers, a fairy dusting onto the hedges. You’re welcome, hedges. All night the breeze hums through.
***
I wake up to bzzzzz, bzzzzz, bzzzzzzzz. The vibrator has returned, trembling in the nightstand drawer. I didn’t hallucinate the possession: the vibrator now pulses a dull light inside its shaft, the ghost’s way of saying hello, I guess. There’s proof in the window; the hole is now today’s problem to patch. So what I’m saying is, what the fuck?
The vibrator and I are taking a long drive–that’s what my ex said whenever he had become too angry to look at me and his voice screamed itself hoarse: taking a long drive. The vibrator sits shotgun. Nearing the cruise ships off the bay, I roll down the window and toss the vibrator, though at the wrong time, it turns out, as it hits the unsuspecting man in the bike lane. He wobbles. I shout sorry as he shrinks in my rear view mirror.
But there it is again: the vibrator in the front seat. Absolutely not. I drive to the shooting range, which smells of gunpowder badly masked by Pinesol, and explain to the desk attendant that I have a target but no gun.
His eyebrows frown. The target’s not a person, right?
Not in any meaningful way, no.
Charitably the attendant masterminds a way to mount the dick to a wooden shooting target by resting the space between the testicles and shaft on a long rusted nail and duct taping to the board the emptied battery component. I wear goggles and headphones. My body thrusts with the gun’s recoil. I shoot again, again, again. The pink skin chips away.
Once I’m satisfied, I thank the attendant for his help and toss the mauled Rabbit deep into the woods beyond the range.
In the car, it lays on the dashboard hot pink and pristine, no bullet wounds in sight.
***
At night, I sacrifice the vibrator like an offering to a beach bonfire. It appears again in bed.
In the morning, I package the vibrator and ship it to a morgue. It appears again on my doorstep.
In the afternoon, I buy a chainsaw. That night, I take the chainsaw to the dick and slice it into seven pieces. Like disposing of a severed body, I bury each chunk someplace new.
I lay down on the couch and believe, finally, it’s over.
In the morning, the ghost dick and I drive to the church. I have to see a priest about a penis.
***
What a beautiful building. The archways, the marble tile, the vaulted ceilings lined with wood. I take a seat in the pew nearest the exit and wait for mass to end. The churchgoers stand and kneel and stand again while I make sense of the scene portrayed in the stained glass and how the worst man I know believed in all this. Out comes the church’s offering plate. I donate my only dollar to clear my karmic debt. Soon the churchgoers sing their final hymn, echo their final amen, and flood the aisle out the doors. A few line up to speak with the priest, and I join their queue. I avoid eye contact with Jesus, enormously spooky as he looms beyond the altar. He appears forlorn about his hanging situation.
When it’s my turn, I preface: my request is unconventional. Maybe we should speak in private?
Here is fine, dear.
Well. I clear my throat. I want to inquire about an exorcism.
OK. He hesitates, and I’m not sure whether he does so because he fears the devil or this request has betrayed him in the past. And who needs to be exorcised?
Not who, what. I fetch the vibrator from my purse.
His hands, they’re immediate, swatting the dick back into the bag. His eyes scramble around the church. Miss, I’m sorry. I can’t–
It’s not what it looks like. This has been possessed by my ex-boyfriend. Trust me, God would not approve.
As a show of sincerity, I perform the sign of the cross.
I really don’t think this is appropriate, he says and flags down a staff member.
I am confirmed! Really–Saint Valentine! Please, this is all I have left.
Two men escort me from the building.
***
I drive home hopeless. At last I’d escaped a man who threw me into walls and choked me over a balcony, a man who made me feel infinitesimal as a speck of dust or a cockroach or whatever else is small and insignificant and bad in this world. Years I felt so bad. And I’m trying! I am trying to build a new life from scratch. God forbid I pursue love despite all of my fear and mistrust, or at the very least get off sometimes without the suffocating guilt of experiencing any pleasure by his hands (what kind of self-hating monster could get off–), and now this! This! I am parked in front of my apartment building, shaking the steering wheel, wailing, the sound stemming from somewhere ancient, this stupid fucking cock in my handbag, his omnipresent existence a crushing weight on my psyche, collapsing the time barrier between past-pain and present-pain, please Lord deliver me from evil.
***
A bug guy sprays my apartment building’s exterior, and I could choke on the scent. His head swivels at the sound of my cough.
Bad day?
What do you think? I have a fucking ghost in my vibrator.
I see. He stands, the height on him not much greater than my own, and lets the spray gun hang by his side. I notice his knees caked with dirt and search for specks of glass.
You think I’m crazy, whatever. I fidget through my purse for keys.
I can help.
That wasn’t an invitation. No offense. I shove the key into the lock. Actually, yes offense.
Not that. I’m saying I’ve done this before.
***
Exorcisms begin with an intention, the bug guy explains.
OK, easy: I want the ghost out of my vibrator.
Throughout the bedroom, he closes the blinds and places citronella candles on various surfaces. He lights one on the nightstand. Mhm. What else?
I want the ghost out of my vibrator and out of my life, for good.
Hold that in your mind, he says. All the candles lit, he shakes out the match and unpacks bug repellant that advertises its continuous spray functionality. He explains it’s as good as any holy water. He begins to pray quietly in what I assume is Latin. His face grows angrier. His words rush out faster. He’s practically hissing. With arms spread wide, he calls out to the queen for assistance. He doesn’t specify whether he means the queen of bees or ants or England. I tap my foot. I want the ghost out of my vibrator and my life.
As the bug guy mumbles through his incantation, the dick rises like vapor off of the bed.
What–
Shh.
He continues. The room goes dark, the sun plucked from the sky. The vibrator circles like a spinner on a board game, then jerks wildly in the air. It is fighting for its life. I feel electricity pulse through me. I am a believer!
The spray, he commands. Spray the repellant.
I float around the room performing my own interpretive misting dance. I jete, I pirouette. I am overcome with relief. I spray like a firehose onto every surface in this room and the next. The vibrator becomes soaked. My home is doused in the stuff. The room shivers with thunder. The candles blow out. The vibrator moves more unpredictably, ignorant to Newton’s Law and suddenly a threat to anything glass. The bug guy grabs it by the shaft, and it yanks him around the bed.
You, too, he shouts. Hold on!
I grab the tip, and we jerk around like a joystick. The bug guy howls his Latin sermon. The power of Christ or the queen or this glorious man in his dirt-ridden cargo pants compels me! I could kiss everyone on the mouth. Sparks erupt from the dick, knocking both of us backward into the wall.
And the bug guy goes silent.
And the vibrator drops onto the bed, inanimate again.
And the daylight streams through the cracks in the blinds once more.
It is done, the bug guy says, and after silently gathering his things, he unceremoniously exits the apartment.
***
For days my home is still. In the ghost’s absence, I call out for proof of death. Our usual game: come out, come out wherever you are! But the ghost does not come out. The ghost is not here. Weeks pass without him. The chemical scent of bug spray evaporates. My freedom withers into restlessness into loneliness into empty. Who am I without? I lift couch cushions, meet men in bars, post missing signs in search of. Nothing. I am alone. In the ghost’s absence, a gaping hole wide enough to swallow.
#
Lyndsay Hall has an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University Los Angeles, where she was the managing editor for the program’s literary journal, Lunch Ticket. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and appears or is forthcoming in Electric Literature, Hobart, juked, and elsewhere. She lives in Los Angeles and is at work on a novel.