Article by Zeke Lloyd Art by Alex Wollinka
The cold woke me up. Two or three times I managed to wrap the blanket around me tightly enough and I fell back asleep. But, eventually I couldn’t take it anymore and allowed my brain to switch on. The red digits on my alarm clock told me it was still the dead of night. Sitting up, I saw that the window on the other side of my room was open. When I went to shut it, my foot landed on cold, wet snow. It had collected on the floor beneath the windowsill. After closing the window and drying my foot, I again held the covers tightly around me and pushed my head into the pillow.
My heart sank. In vivid detail, I remembered closing the window the night before.
Suddenly, I felt watched. The window was only a few feet off the ground, and it felt like whatever may have come inside might not have left. I could hear the blood pump through my neck. I fumbled around the bedside table for my swiss-army knife. Wrapping my hand around the cold metal, I looked up to see the closet was now ajar.
The specter stepped out with a coy smile. His skin and clothes held a pearly, translucent sheen. In the darkness, he seemed to glow. I could see he was a little under six feet. He wore plain clothes – loose jeans and a green sweater. He looked to be in his early twenties, his face a little ragged and his hair unkempt. His expression was apologetic. He seemed embarrassed.
“I really meant to say hi in the morning. Just came in to scope the place out.”
That’s how I first met Roger.
It was my first day sleeping alone in a city over 1,000 miles from home. A few weeks before, Colorado College had asked freshmen to leave campus. Many of the residents of Loomis’ third floor chose to live at West Edge, an apartment building at exit 146 off I-25.
I remembered the August heat beating down on my neck as I stood outside my new dorm for the first time, ready and eager for college life. I remember sitting in the passenger seat of my roommate’s car as we left that dorm behind after just a single month.
It wasn’t the kind of change I wanted. But I was liberated. I biked to campus, a place online class made almost entirely void of people. I roamed the empty paths and sunkissed grass. I stopped to read or sit or watch the geese fly overhead. It was my own little world far away from everything I’d ever known. It was the kind of discomfort that kept me moving, always ready to engage and understand.
It’s a different kind of discomfort to be in the presence of a conscious, non-human entity. It’s less motivating and more mortifying. Right after his jumpscare introduction, he explained a little bit about his situation. He can’t eat or sleep. He can’t pass through walls. The confusing thing, he said, was whether he really was a ghost or not.
Roger couldn’t remember dying. He called the start of his spectral episode “Kafkaesque.”
“I just woke up like this,” he said. “The blankets lay flat on the bed. I was hovering, just barely, over the mattress. Thank God, though, there was no body in the space I occupied. That’s a good sign, I think.”
To Roger, this meant some chance at a return to his normal form. He was on the hunt for unfinished business so that he might reinhabit his body.
Sitting beside my new acquaintance, I refrained from sharing my doubts about his plan. Completing unfinished business generally moved ghosts from their spectral forms onto the afterlife, not back into their human bodies. It didn’t explain why he was talking to me, either, so I decided to ask.
“Just had a feeling about this place I guess,” said Roger. “Thought you might be the type to help me out, walk through the problem with me.”
It’s awkward to talk with a ghost, especially when they’re convinced they might still have a chance at life. What you have, and what they lack, is so plainly apparent to the both of you.
I agreed to help. I wanted to understand. And I did want to be of service. But candidly, I wanted to escape the mindnumbing online classes which had consumed my every waking moment.
“Ok. Where to first?” I asked.
Roger said he knew exactly what to do.
First, we went to campus.
“I stole a refrigerator from here a while back,” he said sheepishly. “But back to its original place now, I think. A good time to remedy the situation.”
Using a borrowed car from my roommate, we drove to Loomis, the dormitory on campus where he had left the stolen appliance.
“I put it in what we called the ‘party room.’ Four cool guys in my hall got together and swapped the beds around. One room had two bunks, and one had none. That was the party room,” he said. “I wasn’t in on the swap, but I figured the addition of a fridge would be a sign of good faith.”
He did not elaborate on whether the gift had won the favor of the “cool guys.” My mind wandered elsewhere, namely to the level of risk involved in our mission. Amidst the COVID-19 protocols, sneaking into dorms had become a much more difficult task. And with the administration on edge, it seemed like idiocy to aid and abet in burglary.
After parking the car outside Montgomery, the operation went smoothly enough. My card access somehow still worked. It was almost 4:00 a.m., so the halls were empty. The way there was simple. The “party room” seemed to be pretty close to where I had stayed before I moved off campus. The room was unlocked. Sure enough, there were two mini-fridges inside. Both beds were occupied, so Roger and I moved carefully to the far side of the room. In an attempt to be polite, we cautiously and quietly moved the contents of one mini-fridge to the other. Then, in a slow, coordinated lift, we crept out. Roger nodded his spectral head down the hill towards Bemis Hall. I’d never been inside, but Roger said he knew a secret way in.
He left me for a moment, and for a few minutes I looked around at the winter scene. An eight inch layer of snow lay overtop everything. Between McGregor, Bemis, Antero, and Ticknor, total silence captured the night. The cloudy sky reflected light off the white blanket below. Underneath the glow of street lamps, I felt as though I’d just entered Narnia. Making friends, breaking into dorms, discovering new places– this was the beginning of college.
Just as I began to catch snowflakes on my tongue, Roger let me in. We carried the mini-fridge up the stairs to the booth. To my surprise, there was already a mini-fridge there.
“Right, yes. They had two when I stole one,” he said in response to my puzzled expression. I shrugged. We put down the mini-fridge. When nothing happened, Roger appeared frustrated. He moved it over slightly. He plugged it in. He moved a milkshake from the first fridge to the one we’d just put down.
“Fuck,” he said.
This marked the beginning of Roger’s slump. I was surprised to learn he didn’t really have a back-up plan. I guess he thought moving the fridge would do it. When it didn’t, he holed himself up in my closet for weeks. Roger listened to loud music, slammed his body into the wall, and often moaned with little concern for my online academics. He rarely left, and when he did, it was to brainstorm what he might be missing.
The day he brought me a letter was his last day. It was a frigid, stormy evening. Rain pattered against the glass of the very window he had slipped in through a month prior. Lightning flashed against the mountains’ silhouettes. Clouds hung low over the city, a light mist whirled close to the wet earth.
“Can you mail this?” He handed me an unsealed envelope with a note inside. “I want you to read it, too.”
I glanced up at him. His eyes looked tired, his shoulders slumped. He looked older, then. It didn’t seem like he had much faith in this new attempt to complete his business. He just seemed ready to leave. Existence had become his curse. I looked down at the words on the page.
Dear Mary,
I’m sorry about everything.
The main problem, I think, was the way I talked about it all. I got a lot of words wrong. I might do just that in this letter. Sorry for that, too. I tend to get the words wrong in complicated moments. That’s when I think about you most. That’s why I’m thinking about you now.
I can’t imagine how much I hurt you. Can I ever know? I felt a horrible, gut-wrenching shame. And afterwards, I never really could ask how you felt. Can I step away from myself and understand how it was for you? Maybe someday. But not now. How terrible a thing like pain to wash away guilt.
I picture you happy now. Happier, at least. But I think you think about me. Maybe it’s arrogant. Maybe it’s just because I think about you a lot. Sometimes when I think about you, you’re alone. Sometimes you’re next to someone handsome. I can’t bring myself to smile when I picture that. I just imagine your face in my mind’s eye and I feel all right to know that you’re not so sad anymore.
But I can’t undo anything. And if undoing anything would take away the time we spent together, I wouldn’t want to at all.
I miss you.
That didn’t hurt to write. It hurt to read and know I wrote it.
But I do miss you.
I hope we can talk again sometime. I’m sorry about everything. Really sorry.
Yours,
Roger
I looked back at him. He looked away.
I pulled out a small packet. It was a draft for my class. We had to write a letter to someone who helped us in our transition to college. I handed Roger the papers.
My Friend Roger,
I didn’t feel so alone at first. I came here to find a new life for myself. I figured a new life would be lonely.
I can’t say for sure that I’ve found a new life yet. I feel lonely a lot. Then I met you, a horrifying translucent whisper of a person. I realized pretty quickly – your time here is over. Your next steps, they’re somewhere else. You can go back and try to fix all of your mistakes. You can return fridges and tell her you’re sorry, but it doesn’t change who you are. You did those things. You have to exist with that.
But to think that’s who you are?
Roger, I admit I don’t know you. We do seem eerily well-connected, and I’ve learned a lot from you, but I only met you a few weeks ago and I’m still not totally sure you’re real. But in that short time, I’ve learned about your mistakes. If I could try to fix my mistakes from the last four years, I would.
But I am done trying to change who I am. I just want to change. I hope you can do the same.
His eyes met mine. It felt like I was looking at a person, a human person. I almost smiled. Then he turned away. The wisps of his outline curled in quiet shapes. He opened the window, stepped outside, and walked towards the mist. A flash of lightning showed him crossing away from the parking lot. Then, in the darkness, he was gone.
I turned his envelope over in my hand. There was no address on the back. Just a name. Mary. I wondered if I would ever meet her.
I put the letter on my bedside table, turned over, and went back to sleep.