If I Can

Did you know that there are ways to induce ghost sightings? I read about it in one of the articles I looked up. I know all about it. Strong electromagnetic fields can trigger them, as can a sound frequency of about 18.98 Hz. Ghost hunters say these attract ghosts, while scientists say they may only trigger hallucinations. You can’t believe that. Scientists are pretty terrible people, and liars to boot. They’ll tell you they have all the answers. Oh, they’ll tell you whatever they think you’ll believe, so long as it’s all you believe.

I have selected a fine location. This room lies right over a damaged ground line and my EMF detector is spiking. I don’t know the numbers or symbols, but I know this place is good, because it’s also a darkened basement. I know what you’re thinking- that an attic would be a better choice, attics seem more likely to be haunted, but I tried that and got nothing. Haunted locations tend to be creepy, but maybe it’s the other way around. Maybe ghosts are naturally attracted to eerie settings. I test a lot of ideas like that and I note them in my journal. I have my Bose pumping out 18.98 Hz from a youtube video on my phone.

I sit in the center of the dark basement with my back to an open root cellar door. I don’t know that this will help, but I read that facing away from an open doorway puts us in a heightened state of alert. It triggers the fear of the unknown. The floor is cold and I try to think of it as a battery I draw from. I pull the cold of the basement up through my spine and let it inform my nerves, synapses, senses, everything, all the while loathing the alien discomfort.

I imagine Marc appearing to me as an apparition, telling me he loves and misses me. I jot this in the journal. I imagine it but I do not see it. It’s important to make that distinction.

I brought a candle. Sometimes candles work for the mood, sometimes they hinder it. It's unlit right now, waiting up on the windowsill. If I keep going without results I'll light it before much longer.

My tattoo is scarcely visible in the laptop’s glow. I hold it up. It reads Marc. He bought the tattoo gun when we learned he was terminal. We spent a day figuring out how it worked and scrawling our names on each other’s arms. Neither tattoo wound up looking that great, but my handwriting was better. I can see in the lines how the buzzing machine fought his control. All the same, I love it. I look at it frequently.

I shift my weight and listen to the noise coming from the speakers. It’s unsettling. They use this frequency in horror movies, often, because it puts people in a state of anxiety. I still don’t see anything out of the ordinary. I keep darting my vision around the room, scanning for movement. For anything. My eyes don’t look the same these days- they’re darkly ringed and wide. My entire appearance seems more drawn. Friends have remarked on it. No one says much to me about it anymore, because I don’t see anyone. I don’t see my friends anymore and quit my job. I spend most of my time in places like this.

I flip to the first page in the journal and read it again.

Karen - I will be with you if I can. Stay strong. I’ll love you forever. -Marc

The words fill me with hope as they always do. He promised he would find me, and Marc never lied to me, not once. He’s trying to find me right now. All I have to do is keep looking and listening for a sign.

I don’t know how atheists go on thinking there’s no life after death. I get into arguments with them. They’re smug because science leans toward them and I think that’s the basis of their whole position. They enjoy bullying people. It’s fun for them. Beneath their cruelty, though, I can’t help but sense that these people want just as much as anyone else for consciousness to go on. They have to, right?

I check the waveforms of the sound I’m recording to the laptop through the expensive ambient microphone I bought last week. There doesn’t seem to be anything. Smooth seas, ha ha. I’ll have to listen to everything later to be certain. I heard something in the recording from June 13, but I think it was me because it sounded like a sob.

I picture Marc walking from the darkened door behind me and putting his hand on my shoulder, then sweeping me up in an embrace. We cry and kiss and after a time prattle about everything we’ve been through. Again, this is just me focusing, willing an encounter. Nothing happens. I mark this in the journal.

I thought of something perfectly horrifying the night Marc died. They tell us that heaven is a state of perfect happiness. I thought about happiness, real prolonged happiness, and realized that it’s the absence of want. Consciousness is a state of constant want. You move from one desire to the next. Contentment is very much like what is achieved with sleep, which is very much like nothing at all. Heaven could be oblivion. That would mean that both the atheists and the religious are correct. The thought feels too big for me and pushes out of my mind as if repelled by magnets. I can’t hold it for long.

I will be with you if I can.

“Marc?” My voice echoes back from unseen planes of dank cement. Marc doesn’t answer me. “Marc?”

I think about ghosts and ghost stories. We tell ghost stories to frighten, but these are comforting, because they tell us that there’s more, that there’s not just a sudden brick wall when your heart stops beating. The scariest ghost story is that ghosts might not exist at all.

I sit alone in the basement and I imagine Marc appearing to me, and he keeps not appearing, not responding, not seeming to be there at all.

I am utterly terrified.