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| George Harrison, author of the song, "Someone" |
Ghost
stories are always fun to write, and the challenge of the story is to make it
somehow different, quirky, dashing expectations, or opening a new understanding
what ghosts are or what it feels like to be a ghost. In one of my stories, “The
Ghost on Fulton Street,” a girl is murdered. When she finds herself standing beside
her dead body, her first thought is, Shit!
I’m a fucking ghost. What now? It would be a thing that takes adjustment.
In the
story “Someone,” character Michael Paston, who has just gone through a divorce, finds himself drawn to ruined places and abandoned buildings. He goes through a site where
workers are demolishing a brownstone. They are listening to the radio, and the
song playing is the old George Harrison Beatle song, “Someone.” He listens,
hearing the line, Carve your number on my
wall / And maybe you will get a call from me—if I needed someone. On
impulse, he writes his phone number on the wall. A couple of days later, he
gets a call. A young woman named Portia Mallory asks if he would like to get
together at an all-night coffee bar. He wonders if she might be a hooker, a
mugger, or something along those lines, but agrees to meet with her. She turns
out to be petite, attractive, and friendly. They drink coffee and talk. He
finds out she works in a cookie factory in town and lives in one of the
satellite cities around Grand Rapids (my home town, where most of my stories
take place). She allows him to kiss her goodnight and they make plans to see
each other again. Michael thinks the date went well.
He asks
a friend who works at the coffee factory if he knows Portia Mallory. He says he
did, but she died a year ago by stepping on an electrical cord that had been
uncovered during a repair of one of the machines. Michael looks up articles on
the internet, reads news stories, looks at photographs, and finds that his
friend is correct. The girl he met is dead. She is a ghost.
He
is afraid but curious. And he remembers the sad look in Portia’s eyes and
remembers how forlorn she seemed at times. He has watched Sixth Sense and knows that ghosts want something. He will find out
what Portia wants and why she appeared to him. At a
bar, he confronts her. She admits her spectral identity and explains to him
that the building she haunts, the building where her apartment was, is, like the
building where he wrote his phone number, to be demolished.
“I have to be anchored to a place. I have to
have a place to center—somewhere that contains a residue of my past life. By
residue, I mean energy, memories, recollections. When the place is torn down,
I’ll be sent out into the air.”
“Meaning?”
“I’ll have no place to be.
I’ll be a spirit whirling around in the wind and the elements—like in Dante’s Inferno
where he meets the two lovers.”
Michael
thinks on the situation. The next time he and Portia meet he tells her he
intends to stop the demolition of her old apartment building. She asks how,
and he reminds her that he is a poet. She is skeptical, but he tells her never
to underestimate the power of a poet.
He
begins a campaign to save the old building, which has a shop downstairs and, at
one time, was declared a protected historical property. The City Council,
however, waived the protection and permitted a company to tear the three
buildings on the block down and build a parking garage there. Michael
circulates a petition, organizes a rally, and holds a public poetry reading to
protest the action by the City Council. The news media takes notice. People in
the city rally to oppose
the demolition.
He
also learns (this is my take on ghosts) that a ghost can take on a body from
about 11:00 until around 3 a.m. He and Portia become lovers. But complications
come.
Portia
manages to break out of the negative aura she has created around herself due to
bitterness over her death and fear of being thrown out into the elements.
Breaking out allows her to meet other ghosts. She finds out there are quite a
few them around, and some of them are quite attractive. Michael suddenly has competition.
He despairs, thinking he has lost her. She learns he is divorced, his wife is a
lawyer and left him a spacious house and pays alimony to him; also, that they
had a child and custody belongs to her, not to Michael.
In
the end, Portia decides to stay with him, though she tells him he may have some
rivals for her love—rivals from the ghostly community. She and Michael go to his house and
bed down for the night. The future for them is uncertain; but so is life, as
they both have learned.
“Someone”
is one of the best stories I’ve written. It appeared in Electric Spec. Unfortunately, the journal has not archived all its past issues, so the story is not available online.
Soon, however, a new novel, Sinfonia: A Painted Lady, will go into publication. Stay tuned for the release date. And, in preparation, read the first novel in the series, Sinfonia: The First Notes on the Lute. Below is the banner for the new novel. As I said, it will be out soon, no doubt in time for Christmas.
