More Ghost Rules
Chapter 2 – Memories may be beautiful and yet…
When he was a kid, Kenneth loved to invent things. Had no idea what he was doing, of course, but he loved the idea of it. So he’d find a small box and stick an old battery and some wires inside and – voilà – a radio. Or a walkie-talkie. Or a Star Trek communicator. Whatever, really, you wanted it to be.
When he got older his parents gave him science kits and building sets of different kinds, but Kenneth always found these too limiting. After pouring all the chemicals together, or connecting all the blocks or Tinkertoys, then what? Where do you go from there?
When Kenneth became much older he discovered that it didn’t always matter if the things he invented worked or not, as long as people believed they did. Sure, science was empirical. It was all about hypotheses that could be tested, verified, replicated, blah blah blah. But life didn’t always work that way. It was the show, more than the go, that counted. Turned out make-believe wasn’t such a bad thing after all.
Take the time he videotaped weddings. Kenneth didn’t have a lot of equipment but he knew he wouldn’t be taken seriously unless he did. So he scoured the trade journal classifieds for cameras that were broken or otherwise non-functional and available for little or nothing. The more impressive-looking the better. Mounted these on tripods he made out of PVC pipe spray-painted black. Hired a couple high school kids as his “crew,” taught them how to move and behave like professional videographers.
As Kenneth barked out instructions about “coverage” and “B-roll,” pointing randomly, his minions went through the motions of adjusting focus and framing shots. And all the while they were recording the blessed event on their cell phones, which were mounted to the cameras like view screens. The happy couple never knew the difference. He’d still be in the business, too, if one of the crew members hadn’t posted some of his footage on-line, blown the whole game by describing in unfortunate detail what he did on his summer vacation. Kenneth had had to placate several outraged clients with full refunds in an effort to avoid bad publicity, not to mention small claims court. He grimaced, remembering. It was a humbling experience.
As he wound quarter-inch copper tubing into a spiral for his primary, Kenneth glanced at the Tesla coil instructions he’d printed out. The plan was to make this device one of a pair of six-foot towers forming the basis of his “ghost trap,” controlled by his “ghost detector” – basically, a modernized version of his childhood cardboard box radio. It would look terribly impressive, and that was the main thing.
Kenneth had storyboarded the whole pilot episode. There was a deserted factory just outside town where he used to scavenge materials; a perfect location. They’d arrive in the van (now bearing the letters “K*F*G*B*H” – Kenneth Fremmel, Ghost Bounty Hunter) and survey the site. He and his partner, that is. Much as he hated the thought of not working alone this time, Kenneth knew Justin was right. He’d have to have a sidekick-slash-assistant to help with the equipment if nothing else. Someone who’d be a good foil, not hog the spotlight. Probably have to hold auditions.
Anyway, so first they’d scope out the factory, cameras taking in the broken windows, peeling paint, creepy abandoned machinery. At last Kenneth would declare someplace with good lighting and interesting camera angles to be the most “sensitive” spot, and they’d set up the coils. Each would tower over six feet from its base to the toroid up top, making the whole device look like a gigantic copper mushroom. Much fussing would be required to find the perfect location, adjust alignment with the earth’s magnetic field, calibrate, run the power cables, and on and on.
Then the fun would begin. Kenneth would fuss with the detector, then announce a ghostly presence. He’d press a button on the detector panel (the only control that actually did something) and send a signal to a remote switch. Or would it be better to tell the assistant to throw the switch? He’d have to work that out later. Okay, then, the Tesla Coils would light up, generating spectacular lightning storms between them. Complete with scary zapping sounds. Kenneth imagined the camera getting tight on the silver toroid at the top of the coil, then panning along the sparks as they radiated outward …
“And then what?” Jane was sipping coffee at their kitchen counter, listening with feigned interest as her husband outlined his goofy show’s so-called plot.
“What do you mean, then what?” Kenneth looked up from the storyboard he was sketching. “Then,” he paused for effect, “we catch a ghost. In our high-voltage web.”
Jane sipped coffee. “This is beginning to sound a lot like that movie? You know, with the three goofballs who go around shooting ghosts with their plasma guns and trapping them in this little black box?”
Kenneth put down his pencil. “Okay, first of all, those were not ‘plasma guns,’ all right? Those were proton packs. They fired proton beams.” Kenneth spat out “proton” with a mixture of snarkiness and disdain. “Okay?” His inner nerd was definitely riled.
“Okay, sorry. Don’t get all defensive. I’m just trying to help.”
Kenneth was undeterred. “And second, we’re not gonna have a little black box.” As he spoke his hands formed a cube in the air about the size of a matchbox, as if illustrating the concept of “little” to someone in a foreign country. “In this show the ghost is gonna be trapped, immobilized. You know, like a… Like a fly in a spider web.”
“Uh-huh,” Jane said, a half-smile forming. She set her coffee mug on top of the storyboard illustration of the Tesla coils, intentionally leaving a ring. “And what happens when you turn off the power?”
The man who strode from the wings to the center of the stage looked like the dictionary definition of “leader.” Military posture, chiseled Nordic features, silver hair combed up from his forehead in perfect sculpted waves like cake frosting. If not for his long formal tuxedo, exquisitely-tailored, he could have been CEO of a global corporation or maybe president of a major world power. The audience applause was more than polite; it had an undertone of worshipfulness. The members of the orchestra fixed their eyes on him.
As the applause died down the maestro climbed one, two steps to stand upon a small platform. For several long moments he was motionless, facing the musicians. The hall was silent. After another moment, he raised his arms chest-high, the right hand holding a white baton. Then both hands shot above his head and came slashing back down, jabbing toward the players as if he were snapping a towel.
The music began. Or, more accurately, it erupted.
Jake had never experienced anything like it. The sound seemed to flood the hall like sunlight, flowing from everywhere at once … most of it from the stage of course, but also the ceiling, the walls, the rear of the concert hall. The music enveloped him like a warm bath. It was intoxicating. And all without banks of speakers curving from their scaffolding like brass knuckles, like the kind of shows he was used to, music pumping through megawatt sound systems. But there were no microphones, no amps on stage. No roadies dressed in black, crouching like commandos on a secret mission. No light show, no graphics … at least not in the conventional sense. Just music, pure music, washing over him and through him, carrying him away, triggering other memories …
He was ten or twelve, maybe. In the family station wagon, riding in back, his mom and dad on one of their weekend jaunts into the country. Car windows rolled down, despite the muggy July air. No a/c for Dad, no sir. “Too windy for you back there?” he’d ask.
“No, Dad. I’m fine.” Sometimes out of boredom he’d stretch out across the rear seats and take a nap. The old white Volvo was like a baby crib, its subtle vibrations rocking him to sleep. Anyway it wasn’t as if they were going anywhere, not like shopping or anything. And there was nothing else to do. He’d get carsick if he tried to read, plus mom and dad had forbidden him to bring his PSP or his iPod. “This is special time just for us. You leave those things in your room.” So it was either fall asleep or gaze out the window at the stupid scenery. Farms, the occasional small town. Where were they? Jake had no idea. The familiar suburban landscape of low buildings and parking lots had given way to trees and open spaces. They’d left the freeway long ago. The road was now a narrow two lane ribbon, dipping and curving.
The music too had grown smaller, barely filling the cavernous hall. Just the violins now, teasing out a silky melody before throwing it to the woodwinds. As Jake relaxed into the performance he felt the music take on anther dimension, become tangible, with color and substance as well as movement. Now he could see the music up ahead, through the Volvo’s windshield; bright yellow zigzags dancing above the surface of the highway, shimmering in the summer heat. Passing fence posts keeping time. Yah di di dah, di dah, di dah, yah di di dah… Each telephone pole marking the end of a measure as it whipped by.
The music slowed; the dancing yellow lines becoming dark orange. The car rounded a curve into a town and they came upon some sort of construction site, the building materials piled in neat stacks near a half-finished structure. His father passed a small smile to his mom and pointed out the window. “Look at that, Jake. Exactly five hundred and sixty two-by-fours." He pronounced it "tubafors." "They must be framing a garage.”
Jake looked at the pile of lumber. “How do you know it’s ‘exactly’ five hundred sixty?”
“Why, I counted them,” his father replied, an aggrieved tone in his voice. “You don’t believe me?”
It never occurred to Jake that his father could be playing a joke on him. Why would he do such a thing? Information flowed from his father like water from a garden hose … the wisdom Jake instinctively knew he’d need to make his way. How could this ever be false?
Another memory, a few months earlier: Jake had been asked to join a pickup ball game at school. But he was secretly embarrassed because he had no idea how baseball "worked," and he mumbled some lame excuse about other stuff he had to do. He was also embarrassed later that evening to ask his dad to explain baseball to him but that was far less mortifying than not knowing what must be a truth all American males are born with.
Yah ta da dah ta dah, dah ta dah … The music wound around Jake like a textbook double play, the melody flying in a graceful blue arc from pitcher to batter to second base to first base. Yah ta da dah ta dah, dah ta dah … Jake found his father at his workbench in the garage, surrounded by greasy tools and coffee cans filled with rusted hardware. Smiling, he sketched a diamond on the side of a paper bag. Explained how the batter tried to hit the ball in such a way that it couldn't be caught in the air, or, if the ball was picked up from the ground, he was on base before he could be tagged out. Go round the diamond, score a run. Simple. Three strikes, three outs, nine innings. He made confident, bold strokes on the brown paper with a flat-sided carpenter's pencil. Jake often felt nervous around his father, not knowing him well enough at such a young age to predict his moods. Now Jake saw he was being taken seriously, not made fun of or talked down to.
Dum, dah dah dum, dah dah dum dah dee dah … This movement was slower, more introspective. The strings were in their element now, yellow-orange legato passages flowing like honey from varnished boxes made centuries ago out of spruce and maple and willow. The melody transitioned to the anguished moan of the cor anglais, bassoons, other woodwinds, before fanning out to all the instruments. Like ballplayers taking the field, slow-jogging from the dugout to their positions. It's a warm day in April, opening day in fact, with seats in the bleachers facing the famous exploding scoreboard. Our team hits a dinger and the whole thing lights up. Jake eating Cracker Jacks, dad nursing a beer. "Please, can I have a sip?"
"Sure but make it a small one," his dad said. He passed the over-large paper cup to Jake, who took it with both hands, slurped a mouthful. "Easy, there, cowboy." The heat rising from the green-painted wooden seats made Jake thirstier than he realized. The beer tasted bitter, so unlike the syrupy beverages he was used to. It fought with the sweet residue of the caramel corn. But it was cold, too, and combined with the bitterness the beer not only made his thirst disappear it somehow created its own craving. Jake took another gulp, wanting the sensation again.
"Hey, hey, hey, that's enough" his father said, a bit louder than necessary, wresting the cup from Jake's grasp. Nearly a quarter of the beer was gone. It was the first and only adult drink they ever shared together, that warm ballpark afternoon the last Spring before high school. Dee dum, da dum da dee, da da da dum da dum da dee … The first violins spun out a delicate leitmotif, becoming red and blue ribbons spiraling around a pole …
Horsehair brush rubbing against his neck, shoulders, back and front. Smell of talcum. Firm hands gripping Jake around the waist, lifting him up and off the barber chair, depositing him on the black and white linoleum floor now covered with blond curls. Looking up at his father with adoration, six-year-old mouth repeating the words Jake had heard him say in the company of buddies and co-workers. "Hey, let's go over to Phil's and hoist one!" Ya ta da dah ta dah, ya ta da dah ta dah … General laughter rippling though brasses, basses, percussion, the men waiting their turn for a trim. Jake not sure what he'd said that was funny and yet unafraid nor embarrassed. Always comfortable in adult company. Ya tah da, yah ta da …
But no alcohol for youngsters at Phil's Tap over on Sixth Avenue. Just orange soda. The hyper-sweet taste so unlike the tart acidity of the real fruit that Jake actually refused to eat a fresh orange until well into his teens … Ba rah ta ta tah ta ta dah, rah ta ta tah ta ta dah … The color orange missing from the music's palette now, awash in greens, blues, occasional flashes of lavender, magenta. The conductor himself bathed in an aura of purple energy, his arms, body, all in motion, exhorting the players, urging the music out of their fingers and mouths and hearts and souls. Except the players had morphed into the patrons of Phil's, working men whose tough arms were lifting glasses to lips in this dingy bar across the tracks, not pulling bows across strings …
"Jake? Jake?"
"Not now, Dad. I'm busy."
"Dad? Do I sound like your old man, Daddy-o?"
Jake paused the memory. It took a few seconds for him to shake off the unexpected emotions of his childhood, back again like an unwelcome guest now that he'd grown up. "Oh, hi. Sorry. I was at a concert at Lincoln Center. One of Max's memories."
Betty's trademark smile softened her sarcasm. "Oh ex-cuuse me, Mr. Longhair Van Snooty. So sorry to disturb you and the other lords and ladies," she said in a mock-British accent. Her image displayed the classic American teenage girl’s look from the 1950s — saddle shoes, poodle skirt past the knees, light blue sweater over white blouse.
With a sigh, Jake switched off the memory and watched the auditorium, musicians and audience collapse into a singularity and disappear into the swirling energy cloud that now comprised his being. He knew he could find it there any time he liked, stored alongside his other memories, all instantly accessible. Each one indistinguishable from any other.
"Yeah, well, Max thought I needed to, um, 'absorb some culture' was how he put it. Said he couldn't believe I'd never heard a real, live symphony orchestra. So he picked one of his favorites. Some German guys playing Beethoven."
"Sounds like total Nowheresville." The hands in Betty's image traced a square in the air in front of her. "What was it like?"
"Well, he had great seats. Like, third row center, right up front. And the sound was incredible. I mean, it was loud but not 'hurt your ears' loud. But the funniest thing was the music had color. I don’t mean it made you think of color, it was color. It’s like when you have hot coffee? And the steam, you know, comes rising out of the cup? But in this case the 'steam' was colors. Reds, yellows, blues … all kind of shades and, and hues and brightness, rising out of the orchestra. I mean, was he on drugs do you think?”
Betty’s face displayed the “I know more than you do” expression – half smile, half smirk – that Jake had come to know and sorta love. “No, goof. What happened was, when you were in Max’s memory you experienced his senses, and Max has something called synesthesia. That’s where one part of the brain is stimulated but a reaction happens in a different part. Dig it — like, some people look at letters of the alphabet and see colors. You know, J is purple and B is turquoise…”
“Why is J purple? What can’t it be red?”
“Don’t be an ickeroo — it’s just an example, you dig? And it gets wilder. Other people with synesthesia can actually see numbers as points in space. Like 10 and 1 are both hanging in the air but 10 is physically farther away than 1. Crazy. Or there’s rare cases where words and taste might get mixed up. For example “Thursday” might taste like … tomato soup.”
“That’s nuts.”
“But it’s real. I got it from the librarians.” The ghost library, based in Angkor Wat, was the repository of all memories, collected and stored in the minds of ghost librarians. It served as an ultimate database of human experience. “Anyway, our friend Max has a kind of synesthesia called chromesthesia, where sounds produce color.” From anyone else, this would have sounded condescending and superior but Betty had an ability to convey information in a way that made it seem as if you were being let in on a juicy secret, one that welcomed you into the exclusive world of trivial conspiracies. After spending any length of time in her company, Jake had to struggle not to call other ghosts “Man” and “Daddy-o.”
“Huh. Well, anyway, I guess it should’ve freaked me out but it didn’t. Instead it actually switched on some of my own memories when I was a kid. Mostly memories of my Dad.” Just thinking that word brought up associations Jake had to suppress before he started down a dark path. He’d been dead long enough to have passed through the five stages of grief and to know that he’d never “get over” the loss of his physical body, not to mention his living world. His family, all his friends. But Jake was beginning to realize that this was also the start of a new life, or anyway, a new existence. And he had new choices to make and a new purpose. Whatever that was.
The skewed expression on Betty’s face reflected the puzzlement in her voice. “Usually that doesn’t happen. When you’re in someone else’s memory, that memory takes over. You can turn it on or off, stop it and start it; that’s about all.” She looked through the ceiling of Max’s apartment toward the sky. “Now, the watchers, they’ve learned how to make a memory transparent. That’s so they can still see the landscape down below while they’re looking at a movie or something. But I’ve never heard of running two memories at the same time.”
“Well they weren’t exactly running at the same time.” Jake was feeling defensive. Had he broken yet another of these seemingly endless ghost rules? “My own memory was flashing in and out, taking over from Max’s memory. It was like free association. You know, one thing makes you think of another thing. It’s not like I consciously called it up or anything …”
Betty moved in closer. “Huh. Well, let’s take a look at that subconscious of yours and see if there’s anything funny going on.” As a handler, Betty was well-trained in GEP observation … the study and analysis of ghost energy patterns. These fluctuated from person to person, naturally, but always in specific, predictable ways. Same as a PET scan can show living doctors how a patient's brain is functioning, a GEP can tell a handler whether a ghost is a looper or a normal and many other things besides. To Jake it was like looking for a loose end in a tangled skein of yarn. Or a bit of garlic in a plate of pasta. Or the one burnt Cheerio in the box…
“Stop thinking about food for a second, okay?”
She did a 360 around Jake as he tried not to think about food, which of course made him think about nothing else. To an observer happening on the scene it would have looked like one pulsing cloud of energy orbiting another, a pas de deux of two tiny incorporeal galaxies. If the observer had been another ghost, that is.
“Mm-hmm.”
“What mm-hmm? What does that mean?”
“Means there’s definitely something going on with you.” Betty stepped back, put her shared image’s arms akimbo, judging how best to convey a moderately highbrow theory. “So here’s the knowledge from the college. There’s an area in the GEP we think was created by the part of the living brain called the hippocampus. It’s a kind of … central switchboard, sorta. Involved in memories of facts and events. Anyway, the hippocampus connects to other parts of the brain that store certain types of memories. So when you remember a party for instance, you remember everything about it: the people, their names, the music that was playing, the food, the sights, the smells — all that jazz. You dig?”
“Um, I guess.” Biology and Jake had never been best friends. “So?”
“So this pattern, which I call the Hip, ‘cause it’s what makes you hip to your memories, you dig? — the Hip is usually crystal clear. I mean solid, like a diamond. Except in loopers, where it’s almost totally burned out, maybe just one or two connections left.”
A bad feeling welled up in Jake. “Just let me have it, all right? You’re saying I’m turning into a looper?” The thought of such an existence, continuously reliving an event in his past life over and over again, no matter how pleasant, filled him with horror. The fact that the looper was completely unaware of his or her situation somehow made it even more horrific.
“No no no! Oh, God, no.” In a moment she transformed into Betty the best friend, her voice soothing and warm. “Not even close. No, this is something else completely. Your Hip is fine. Believe me. It’s the textbook picture of good ghost health.” She paused. “But if I didn’t know better…”
“What? If you didn’t know better, what? Stop doing this, okay? Just tell me.”
Betty drew the memory of a deep breath. “I’d say it was growing.”
Memories are tricky things. To say the least. They can provide comfort and joy, or they can remind us of terrible sorrow, loss, misery. They’re at once the source of our ability to succeed as human beings on this planet as well as an impediment to that success. The facts we have memorized can be of tremendous usefulness. They can also be wrong, and cause us embarrassment at best or put us in harm’s way at worst.
They come and go, these memories, these stored bits of our experience. In the quiet of night when sleep refuses to descend, the brain trots out its memory games. Let’s play … Who’s This? Someone’s face, long forgotten, appears in the mind’s eye like a long-lost mitten now discovered in the pocket of a coat shoved in back of a closet. Why this one and not that one? Why now? the rational self wants to know. The brain responds with a smile. You’re not playing the game. For each face you land on you must take a Place card.
Oh, right. It was the end of the school year. May or maybe June. Senior class party at someone's house. Bunch of us standing on the lawn. He …was showing kids the car his parents gave him for graduation, parked right up on the grass. Looking uncomfortable, as well he should since it was a brand-new sports car for chrissake, must’ve cost a fortune. Who knew his family was that wealthy? Every guy at the party envious, every girl hoping for a ride. And then the thought: why would someone like him, a normal, unassuming guy (really, who knew he had money?) … why would he flaunt such an expensive gift? Kind of tasteless, when you come down to it. On the other hand, if you owned that car wouldn’t you show it off? Bright blue and so shiny. Or maybe it was black.
Anyway what was his name? James, Jim something. Jim … Jim … Jim … Didn’t hang out together, wasn’t on any teams. Quiet guy. James … Something. Or maybe Jason. Jay?
I’m sorry. You’ve landed in memory jail. You can either play a “Forget This, Try To Sleep” card, or you can get up, turn on the light, pull the yearbook off the bookshelf and spend the next several minutes flipping pages.
Thanks, memory.
Because they’re so unreliable, memories of an event are frequently challenged in a court of law. How can you be sure the person sitting at that table is the same individual you saw robbing the convenience store? Was the light green when you went through the intersection or had it in fact turned yellow? Was the attacker holding a weapon? Are you sure?
Are you sure. Because we can never, really, deep down, be sure of anything we’ve remembered. We remember events of significance, especially when they’re charged with emotion. Fear, joy, contentment, nervousness, awe. Terror. Where were you on 9/11? Over time events fuse with their emotions. Emotions take over the memory and become the memory. The context usurps the information.
It was a warm, sunny day. Out driving with parents. Pulled into a drive-in. Or maybe it was a diner. Anyway, root beer in a glass mug. That’s the thing. Just the heft of it in the hand. Thick, heavy, heavy, frosted glass. And oh, so sweet, so cold against the hot steamy summer air. Ambrosia. Happiness.
And not even your memory. Your father’s, told to you as you sipped your own root beer. Through a straw in a paper cup. At a food court in a mall. The smile on his face as he told it. Now it’s your memory too. Happiness transferred.
If you want to take the time and trouble, you can train your memory. Or rather, you can train yourself to have the appearance of an incredible memory. Simplest way to do this of course is by using a mnemonic device. Mnemonic for memory. Like a nonsense phrase that’s easy to remember because it serves no other purpose than helping us recall a series of things. We do this all the time as school kids. Which is further from Earth, Saturn or Jupiter? The first letter of each word in “My very earnest mother just served us nachos” can help you remember that.
Stepping up your game, there’s a technique that’s been around since ancient times. Known as the Method of Loci, loci meaning “places.” Others call it a “memory palace.” But you don’t need an actual palace. The house where you grew up will do. Or a street you know very, very well. Or any place you could describe in minute detail.
Say it’s your home. And say you have a shopping list to remember. Milk, bread, eggs, cheese, soup, bar of soap, breakfast cereal, celery. That’ll do for now. So, start in front of the house. The first thing you see is a can of soup on the front steps. Soup on the stoop, you think to yourself. How appropriate. Open the front door, enter the vestibule. Someone left a long, skinny French baguette sticking out of an umbrella stand. Silly-looking, isn’t it.
Going down the hall there’s a picture of your parents’ wedding day on the wall. Except your mother isn’t holding a bouquet, she’s clutching a big bunch of celery. Have to ask her about that.
And so you proceed, walking through this environment you know so well. Except each spot has a connection with one of the items on your list, a connection you devise. The more vivid and ridiculous the better. Maybe your little brother is playing with blocks in the living room, except the blocks are bars of soap. Maybe you go through the house to the garage, where your father’s changing a tire on the car. Except instead of a proper spare he’s using a gigantic wheel of cheese.
Retrace this journey in your mind when you get to the store and you’ll have no trouble remembering everything on the list. Memory champions have practiced and honed this technique to enable them, for example, to memorize the order of 52 random playing cards in just a few minutes.
Does this make you smarter? At least, does it make your memory stronger, better able to remember? No. Yes. Maybe.
Memory is a living thing. And all living things are more or less fragile, subject to damage. A blow to the head can bring about amnesia. Or something more invasive can produce catastrophic results. In one famous case, a part of a man’s brain was removed to cure him of severe epilepsy. The surgery stopped his seizures but created a new set of problems. The man lost some of his memories, especially the ones from just before the operation. But more devastating in its way was an inability to form long-term memories. Each time his doctor checked on him it was as if they were meeting for the first time. He couldn’t tell you what he did yesterday, what he had for breakfast that morning.
In the ghost community the man with part of his brain missing would be called a looper. Stuck in the now, perfectly happy, unaware of his condition. Those ghosts who in life had been religious wondered if this was what was meant by Hell, or Gehenna, or Hades — call it what you will — an afterlife of tragic mindlessness, an endless, static purgatory. The saddest existence imaginable: being unable to access one’s memories. Sadder than sad. Horrific, as Jake put it.
Because memories are a ghost’s currency as well as its identity, its means of self-expression. That is why so many of the ghost rules center on memory. A memory shared is a memory kept. It’s inappropriate to share a memory without permission, but it’s good manners to share a self-image when meeting someone. Receive too many memories and risk losing your identity. The most heinous transgression imaginable is altering a memory and sharing that false memory. Before a ghost dissipates, he or she must upload all significant memories to the ghost library. And on and on.
Each newcomer to the ghost continuum is assigned a handler, whose job it is to bring the person into an awareness of a totally new form of life with all its implications: No body, just pure energy. No interaction with the living. An ability to perceive all forms of energy. A new world filled with other ghosts from other times. And total, instant recall of all its own memories. That last part the most unsettling for many ghost newbies. So many memories, not all of them pleasant. Which is why we suppress them when we’re alive. A skillful handler can help a young ghost deal with the flood of recollections, show how to switch them on and off as necessary.
Sharing those memories is something else again. Easy to recall, the actual memory is challenging to locate within the ghost’s energy matrix and even harder to separate and move to someone else. One ghost called it “loading mercury with a pitchfork.” The process reminded Jake of copying a computer file from one device to another: drag and drop. Some tricky business with the computer’s interface but once you’ve got it, you’ve got it.
The shared memory disappears into the ghost who receives it and becomes a permanent resident, so to speak, of his or her energy system. A new grain of sand on a lifetime’s beach. At first it’s easy to tell which memories are shared and which are one’s own. “I know I wasn’t at this Madonna concert. Couldn’t afford tickets. Besides, I don’t know any of the people sitting around me.” Other memories are harder to place. “I think I was here. Wasn’t I? It sure looks familiar.” As years, decades, centuries elapse and the sand piles up eventually it’s hard to tell whose life you’re living, through whose senses, from whose perspective. The ghosts call it “eidetic oblivion” and it’s the biggest occupational hazard of the ghost librarians.
All of which brings us back to Jake, and may help explain his reaction to Betty’s discovery of a significant change in his neural net.
“Holy crap!”