The Ghost Notebooks

“Was life, despite its myriad difficulties, an unfathomable wonder, as his pious and tenderhearted mother would have it? Or was it a Boschian array of horrors, punctuated only by inadequate bits of relief, as his revered but unstable father tended to believe.”

“there is, I think, a special gloom that comes with wedding planning. It may just be the realization that the traps you watched swallow up a thousand people before you are going to swallow you up too.”

“Almost every single person at a funeral believes that their being there is a kind of lie, that while everyone else is feeling the exact degree of grief recommended by the American Psychiatric Association, they alone are worrying about whether this will end in time for them to make their train.”

“There’s a moment, after you wake up from a nightmare, when you realize: Wait, so I don’t have to worry about any of that.”
~~~~~~~~~
“What I felt, reading this and the pages after, was a more distressing version of the thing you feel when you catch a glimpse of yourself on a store’s surveillance TV. Does my hair really do that in the back? Could that slump- shouldered stranger really be me?”

“There were, at that point, two other people with me in the waiting room— a skeletal teenage girl reading a Game of Thrones paperback so thick it was almost cubic, and a fortysomething woman with curly hair and glasses who I took to be the skeleton’s mother.”

“ I could either die or I could find out why Hannah had died. Curiosity is responsible for as many saved lives as penicillin.”

“ In my student days I read of a species of caterpillar that was prone to a most frightful misfortune. This sorry caterpillar would on occasion be attacked by a small & vicious wasp who, in the course of his assault, would lay a great many eggs in the caterpillar’s abdomen. The wasp’s eggs would then proceed, by some chemical means, to control the caterpillar’s movements, inducing it to gather precisely the type of nutriment they craved. Once the eggs had matured sufficiently, they would come pouring forth from the caterpillar’s underbelly, a hellish horde . . . Thus do I, at the end of my researches, having spent all the fall playing host to spirits, find myself husked & destroyed.”

Our fridge had become a collage of other people’s “Save the Date” cards; our credit card bills went all to flights to cities we didn’t want to visit where we sat sulking in folding chairs and pretended to be surprised when the bride appeared. I knew that I could solve our problems by proposing to her, and I knew that any remotely competent therapist would tell me that my reluctance had nothing to do with Hannah and everything to do with the fiasco of my parents’ marriage…but I couldn’t.

Just as the function of most furniture is to fill up a room, the function of most jobs is to fill up a life.

Bruce was an eye surgeon; this was the first, and possibly the only, thing he thought you needed to know about him. He took yearly trips to Tanzania, where he performed free surgeries for village kids who then hung grinning from his biceps in photos. He jogged a loop of Central Park each morning, and was under the impression that their building’s doorman (“That’s all you running today, Mr. R?”) was personally fond of him. He had a full head of gray hair and pink skin and he interacted with everyone, including his offspring, in a way that managed to convey I’m going to do you the favor of listening hard to what you’re saying right now, but please understand that the meter is running.

My own parents, by comparison, were as involved in my life as an uncle and aunt. (My mom, when I told her that Hannah and I were engaged, said, “Oh, that’s great news. We just love her, love her,” and then asked if she could call me back because she was about to pull into the garage.)

To be clear: I still didn’t hear any voices. But you never quite hear nothing when you’re in an old house in the middle of the night.