Fall 2008  (Go back to current issue)

Ghosts

by Rigoberto González

My brother Alex tells me he saw a ghost in the hallway last night, a boy wearing a baseball cap mouthing to himself as he leaned into the bookshelf as if trying to make out the words on the spines in the dark. It is five a.m., the time of night when Alex rises to piss, to lumber along the cold floor from his bedroom to the bathroom at the end of the hall. It's the only time he regrets not having slippers; it's the only time he remembers all about the icy concrete beneath his feet.

When he stumbles upon the boy, my brother's shaken out of his drowsiness, and it's his hands that feel clammy now. But the boy doesn't realize he has been caught in the mischief—escaping his ghost-world to take a dip in the realm of the living. So my brother gives him the universal psst! (It's understood in both English and Spanish and in the language of the dead, apparently.) Startled, the boy snaps his neck to look at my brother, and then scurries into the darkness, vanishing through the wall at the end of the hall.

He tells me this on the cell phone as his truck crawls across the border on his daily international commute from Mexico to the U.S. I'm listening to the honking of my homeland as I look out my window in my eighth floor New York City apartment. I tell him I believe. I am certain that a previous tenant died in my place, that the spirit roams the room in search of the comfort of its bed. We are both displaced, my ghost and I, and therefore have been adequately matched across the dimensions, just like Alex and his ghost because they are both border crossers.