Tuesday Mooney Talks To Ghosts

by Kate Racculia

She was, to the office, an oddity. She didn’t leave her cube often, communicated almost entirely through email, didn’t socialize or mix with her coworkers. Or with anyone, really. Being alone made her better at her job. It’s easier to notice what’s important when you’re outside looking in.

she didn’t trust people. People, in groups, alone—people disappointed you. That was what they did. They abandoned you. They didn’t believe you. They looked through you like you were made of smoke. You had your family, your work colleagues; you needed other humans around so you didn’t go completely feral, but the only person you could trust completely with yourself was yourself. That was, like . . . Basic Humanity 101.

was keenly aware that she had much to be objectively grateful for, and she was. But it was a life without mystery. It was a life without an organizing hunger, and it was slightly surprising—though maybe it shouldn’t have been—that the reward for achieving one’s goals wasn’t total satisfaction. It was a new, vague itch. For something else, something unknown and as yet unnamable. Tuesday was bored.

They started The X-Files over the summer. Dorry loved it so much she dreamed about it. It made Dorry want to grow up, because the world was big and strange and exciting, and as long as you had your true partner—and you loved each other so much you couldn’t even, like, discuss it—you would live to fight another monster. You might meet a miracle.

The screen filled with a picture of her parents’ dog, Giles Corey III, pressed to sleep under a mound of couch cushions.

“The internet takes all the effort out of detecting, doesn’t it?”

A broken heart hurt like hell, but it kept beating. A lost mind was something else entirely.

he’d found the fine-art nerds both delusional and charming; they legitimately believed they were creating objects meant to last. Performance, by comparison, had always felt more authentic. Performance was alive, so performance had to die. A piece or a song or a play was designed to last for only as long as it took to perform, to begin and end and echo in the mind. But he had to admit there was something noble, too, in the pursuit of permanence, and something beautiful and sad about how much art had been lost and forgotten by time.

“We spend our whole lives becoming worthy. Of ourselves. Our mysteries, our solutions, the fruits of our quests.”

Normally, he didn’t fume so much as seethe, quietly, privately, until the trigger for his rage dissipated: slow walkers, distracted tourists, people who clogged up the left side of escalators by standing when they ought to have been climbing—so, really, anyone who impeded the speed of his movement through the world.

He was never in more danger than when he allowed himself to be most himself. When he was most himself, he ran the constant risk of being entirely Too Much.

“That’s all. Have fun. Take care of one another. This is my party; like my life and yours, it too will end. Not very long ago, I found myself wondering whether it was time to seal myself into my own tomb. I had lost a dear friend, and I had, in my grief, retreated from the world, with nothing left but to set my affairs in order. But then one mystery led to another, and led me back to myself, and I found I had yet more life, and more people, to love. Do not stop. For you, there is still time. To do the work. To reckon with the past. To shed light, and to become it; to make and remake this world and to imagine and build others. Yes, for you there is time, because you, unlike me, are not dead. Please, if not for my sake then for your own—”

Dex did not, strictly speaking, believe in God. He didn’t strictly not believe in God either, and when he was feeling particularly self-castigating he told himself his agnosticism was another manifestation of his general cowardice, his disinclination to pick a side, to make up his mind; the proverbial hottest places in hell were reserved for persons such as himself. But then he’d remember what he learned, long ago, at the altar of Our Lady Madonna Louise of Ciccone: the power, the necessity, the elemental beauty of refusing to stop becoming.

Love lasted by becoming art. The art made yesterday haunted him today. The art he could make today would haunt the future.

There was still time to be who he’d always been, again. As a kid, dreaming, it had seemed impossible to be satisfied with only one life. As an adult, indebted, afraid that what he loved and whom he loved would one day cost him more than he could afford, it had seemed impossible not to protect himself with money. But he didn’t have to be all one thing or all another. He didn’t have to live only one life at a time. And a living wasn’t something you made but something you did. Again and again, over and over, always, always becoming.

It was me. I was looking for who I used to be. For the ghost of myself. What I used to love, what I spent my life doing. So.” He squeezed her hand. “Why don’t I become the person I’m looking for?”

everything that had already happened was always, still, the beginning of what came next.