Night Report: Ghost Gala

I am even grateful that my brother was born already dead — for if he were really here, who would be my guardian angel?

In the club amidst an air of hysteria I close my eyes and imagine peace. It’s dark and late and N. is on my phone asking where I am, when I’m planning on leaving. The music is loud and rousing, I haven’t eaten all day, and my ears are ringing. I don’t need to be here, I can be anywhere else, my body can handle the scene while my mind wanders. I want to imagine I’m sitting somewhere in a bare room like an ascetic, maybe overlooking the sea and wearing oversized linen — but instead I find myself thinking of dead people again.

In Outer Heaven I’ve created an inner purgatory.

Every ghost was someone’s child once. Once, all of us here were dancing on the playground, ignorant to the troubles of the world, or some of us were curled up under the monkey bars looking at all the others, wishing we could join in but not knowing how. Many things don’t change with age or time.

Like my first younger brother in that little purple hearse still resting on my mother’s mantle, little X. who by now would have been big enough to join me on nights like this. I have a feeling he wouldn’t wear a watch even if he lived. Who cares what time it is? I imagine him saying out of the side of his crooked smile. (His eyes crinkle when he grins just like mom’s and mine.) It’s not time to go yet. That’s all that matters.

When I get lit enough my vision blurs just right so that I don’t see the doomsday clock ticking down over my head in the mirror. In such moments, like now, in this haunted heavy dark at O.H., I can’t help but smile and say a little prayer of gratitude. To whom? Who cares?, X. reminds me, from beyond the Door. He’s bobbing his head to the music we can hear all the way from in here, bouncing restlessly from one foot to the other, itching to get back out there with the other phantoms.

I love hanging out with my little dead brother. It’s 2001 again whenever we’re together. He never cares about me burning my life away with cheap vapes and borrowed cigarettes. If you squint hard enough at the two of us together, we look like twins, the both of us transparent and opaque at once. We dress up in suits for no reason, because the way you look is how the world treats you, and you never know which outfit will be your funeral fit.

All the way from India, S. asks what prayer means to me and the first word that came to mind was ritual. The second: gratitude. What we do is what we are, how we think is how the world is. So I’ve long since adopted the practice of praying in the midst of the good and the bad, in the middle of the club and a cutting argument. Ever since I recognized myself in the blinding light of God as a great indigo neutron star I realized: prayer is a conversation between me and I. In the way that God is me but I am not God, God is so much greater than me, God is everything I could be and have ever been. So again I pray in the club, I hold hands with my ghost brother and we grin at each other when we recognize the DJ’s transitions.

As prayer blends and transcends time. I look years back at myself and my old uncertainty, my suffering, and send good tidings and strength there my way. In the same vein, when I am in the depths of despair in the present, I’m overwhelmed with the injustice and the lovelessness of what I see in the world, if I squint through the crowd in the dark deep enough I can hear beneath the stamping of feet a rallying cry, encouragement from my future self cheering me onward from the other side of my experience. Keep going. The pain is temporary. Years are between myself and I, and only a spatial distance the length of my wingspan.

It was S. too who told me when I finished my last novel last summer: No wonder you’re tired. You’ve just given birth. That changed me. Liberated me from many a restrictive idea: that a man cannot bring life into the world, for one; that I am not allowed rest, for another.

Just the other day a client started to cry when I told them what prayer revealed to me near the end of college: that it doesn’t matter what you deserve, what matters is what you desire. If you want it bad enough you can make friends with anyone, seduce anyone, you can rebuild or destroy your life prematurely, even bring the dead back to life.

The world we know is dead and dying. I’m grateful for it. (Say it with me.) The person we used to be will never be here again. I appreciate it. The future we thought we’d have is rotten and decayed. Thank God for that.

My birthday approaches, and already people are confirming they’ll be available for whatever I decide to do. I’m so very grateful for my close friends. Their esoteric nature, their obscure interests, their attention and their acceptance. As I am grateful every day for still being alive. As grateful as I am for all the loss in the world, too; it reminds me of the beauty of gain, the absolute symmetry of divine design. I am even grateful too that my brother was born already dead — for if he were really here, who would be my guardian angel?