We did not have to get down on our knees to see them. We did not have to pray. When she gently touched my shoulder and whispered, “Look, here they come”, I only smiled, knowingly and trying not to disturb her innocence. “Yes, darling, I know. I know they are”.
I still could not tell from her eyes or the way she spoke whether the ghosts scared her or made her happy. I assumed it was both, but then there was so much to assume away from Fifth Avenue. When New York took you outside its famed junctures and buildings, it began to lose its disgusting clarity. The clarity that banged on your head and thrashed your chest and your exhausted ankles. Suddenly, the engrossing mess no longer looked or sounded all that engrossing. Suddenly, you badly wanted the noise, the pavements, the people to make sense. Because right in front of your eyes New York was splitting itself into this stupefying maze of millions of streets that were there not to be listened to. Those streets… They were filled with ghosts and they were there to listen to you.
As we were walking here this evening, slowly and almost reverently, I remembered the first day that she told me about the ghosts. It happened in late August, three years ago. That day, it was not so much us exploring the streets as the fact that we got horribly lost. Invisible newcomers, we had drifted away from the civilized wilderness of Central Park, and ended up in an anonymous street where you could almost be alone. It was not dark yet, and we happened to be in that sort of mood: we switched off the mobile phones, we stuffed the muddled maps and tourist guides deep in our pockets, and we were just… “Flânons”, she said, trying to remember her French. “Flânons”, I replied, trying to remember mine.
That evening, it was still quite early, but the low clouds, paving the way for a premature autumn, made the day look much older than it really was. The low clouds were teasing us with the swift, sullen wind that was not yet capable of doing much damage to the trees. Too unsure of themselves, random leaves were floating around in a tentative, detached manner. You felt for them. They did not look brave, they looked panicky. And then suddenly she said, “The girl who is playing the guitar, over there. The street corner, look”. The street was not empty and still it only took me a handful of seconds. “Yes, what about her?” She looked a little disappointed, a little taken aback. “Well, the girl is not really there. Can’t you see?”
I looked around. I noticed an Indian curry place with its smudgy door and windows, a local bakery, steady rows of lamp-posts that shed no light but were merely posts, scraps of local newspapers and ice-cream wrappers scattered about our feet… People who were either too numb or too business-like to care for a melody that got drowned in their heels, iPhones and the smoke of their cigarettes. “Yes", I said, suddenly believing it myself. "I see what you mean. Oh God, you are right”.
All the same, we stopped to listen. The girl was good. Her playing was not entirely accurate, but then, in the immortal words of some old Englishman, anyone can play accurately. Nobody asks you to be accurate on a street of New York City, especially if you were a ghost. “It’s brilliant!” I said, trying to take in all thфе passion that was so irresistible yet so out of place. What was it she was playing?.. We pricked our ears, we strained to listen, but it was hard to place the tune: that proverbial piece we knew, vaguely recognized yet found so hard to remember. At some point she pulled at the lapel of my jacket, as softly as only she could, and we came up to the girl. The girl, who looked no older than twenty, may have been nothing but an apparition, but there was a hat, and there was money in it. We stooped down to throw in all the change that we had. The girl nodded abstractly as we retreated and made our way further down the street. “Won’t be of much use to her”, I said. She sighed in agreement.
And of course, as the night grew nearer, we saw many more of them. Sometimes it would be me who stopped her and pointed in the direction of a phantom drunkard, policeman, dog-walker, office clerk rushing off home, and sometimes she was the first to exclaim: “But look, look at the beggar! The beggar is a ghost, too”. Which, of course, he was.
However, it was different this evening. At first, it was the usual routine we had long gotten used to: one by one, the ghosts were slowly emerging, creeping and crawling out of tenement buildings and street corners. Dangling in the background. But it got worse, inevitably, and pretty soon there were simply too many of them. Which made it all a bit of a blur, because at some point it became increasingly difficult to distinguish between them and… others. Normal people, real people, people like us. Usually, it would be so easy to tell: this lack of lustre in their hair, the peculiar curve of their lips, the very remoteness of their frail silhouettes… This time, though, nothing was giving them away. And this evening, for the first time ever, she seemed confused about New York ghosts.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
“Why”.
“I don’t know. You look… pale”.
“You… don’t think…”.
I smiled, knowingly and trying not to…
“No, no, don’t worry, I don’t”.
And then I saw it, the direction of her gaze. She was looking at someone.
There is perhaps one thing you should know about New York ghosts. They never reappear. They only exist once, and if you choose to retrace your steps and face their cadaverous features for the second time, you will not be able to see them. Sometimes you might be so lucky as to see trampled grass or maybe their footprints, but even that is unlikely. What is more likely is that you will face other people, other ghosts; or you woill not face anything at all. But this evening was different, and here was that same girl, on the street corner, playing her guitar, playing the same piece. There was no mistake: I suddenly became conscious of the street, which was the same street as three years ago.
“It’s… her”, she said.
“Yes, darling”.
“But it can’t be! And she’s playing that same piece…”.
“I know”.
I could feel her trembling. She was like a warm, frightened bird caught out in the chilly air of an open-street evening. I wanted to lead her away, take up her thoughts and her imagination with the latest exhibitions of the Metropolitan Museum, but at the same time I could see that she could not resist and simply had to put it all to rest. Besides, none of the latest Metropolitan exhibitions interested her. And so we got closer. This time, though, it was not about the hat or the change. We wanted to get a closer look at the girl’s face and that pallid summer frock, to prove ourselves wrong and laugh at our own silliness. But all we saw was the same girl, the girl that was our first New York ghost from three years back.
The girl noticed us, and we felt the expression of her eyes that in a matter of seconds turned from anxiety into fear into utter, all-encompassing horror. The girl stopped playing and began muttering something. The name, the title: we did not want to hear.
It was seconds later that we became aware of some strange movement behind us, and, as we turned around, we saw dozens, hundreds of other ghosts closing in on the two of us. All those ghosts we had seen in this city, they were probing us with their ashen eyes and their slow-motion steps. “What do they want from us?” she cried. But what was it that I could tell her? How could I possibly break it to her? That they were after our innocence, laid bare against the dusty pavements of New York?..
The strange silent garden of this awful, delightful city. No, we did not accept it. After all, it was New York, and you accept nothing in New York. But then New York does not really care: it accepts you, whoever you are... So no, we did not take them in, all those ghosts, as their one single breath began to tickle our senses. We did not. But there was one unspoken deal between us, one that none of them had a clue about: it was too late, closing time was upon us, so she and I, we decided to play along.
