Tuesday Mooney Talks To Ghosts

by Kate Racculia

A prospect researcher is one part private detective, one part property assessor, one part gossip columnist, and one part witch.”

He just—wanted to play. Dex, all his life, had wanted to feel that he was part of a team, a member of the cast—an integral member of an ensemble that appreciated his comedic timing, his showboating, his talents, before they withered to dust. Though he supposed the vast majority of humans felt like unpaid extras. Milling about, uselessly waiting to be discovered, recognized for their innate yet invisible value, but doomed never to be anything but human scenery. Maybe that was his team, and he was already on it.

Maybe this was how adult friendships happened: by accident, embroidered over time, visible only from the height of years.

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.

A wish flickered across her mind: that her mother’s funeral had been like this. A party. A concert. A place she could imagine her mother grabbing her hands and asking her to dance, and even though her mom could be sad, and angry, and sometimes she had been so painfully uncool it made Dorry’s teeth hurt, her mother had known how to be happy. And when she was happy, it sort of radiated out, like a campfire, and could make you happy too. Yes: if her mother’s funeral had felt like remembering it was possible to be really happy—that, Dorry knew, she never would have forgotten.

All he had to do was recognize and celebrate the pain and the mystery of life, the mystery of being not what one seemed, and not one thing only, but being, being nonetheless. And what he was meant to be was an artist, and what he was meant to do was to sing, and to move in the spaces surrounding the definite, between the sacred and the profane, the body and the spirit, the silent and the spoken, the living and the dead. That was his gift. That was what he could give to others. The practice of this art was the transmutation of love.