Third Wheel, Deceased

I want to make one thing clear before we begin: I am not a creep. I am a ghost. There’s a difference, and the difference is that I can’t help it.

My name is Gerald Pemberton, I died in 1994, and I am bound for all eternity to a fountain pen. Not a castle, not a battlefield, not a moody lighthouse on a cliff. A pen. A green Parker Duofold that I was holding when I slipped on a wet bathroom floor while trying to write a strongly worded letter to my building’s management about the wet bathroom floor. The irony was not lost on me. The irony, in fact, was the first thing I noticed after I died, right after my own body and right before the realization that I’d never mailed the letter. For twenty-eight years the pen sat in a box in an antiques shop. Then, two years ago, a woman named Ana Lindqvist picked it up, said “Oh, this is gorgeous,” and paid eleven dollars for it.

I have been in love with her ever since.

You would be too. She talks to her plants. She sings in the shower, badly, with total commitment. She cries at dog food commercials and then gets angry at herself for being manipulated by dog food commercials. She does the crossword in pen, my pen, and when she’s stuck she taps it against her lip, and I’m not saying that’s the closest thing I’ve had to a kiss in three decades, but I’m not not saying it.

So you can understand why, on a Friday night in October, I was not thrilled to find myself in her handbag, on the way to a date with a man named Brendan.

Brendan. Even the name sounded like a golden retriever that had learned to do taxes.

The restaurant was an Italian place with candles in wine bottles and a waiter whose mustache was doing most of the work. Ana set her handbag on the chair beside her, which gave me a clear view, because one of the few perks of being dead is that zippers mean nothing to me.

Then Brendan arrived, and I had to admit, with the deep bitterness of a man who was buried in a rented suit, that he was handsome. Tall. Good teeth. He had the kind of jawline that suggested he’d never once been picked last for anything.

“Sorry I’m late,” he said. “I stopped to help an old lady with her groceries.”

Of course you did, Brendan.

“That’s so sweet,” said Ana.

It’s a lie, Ana. Nobody actually does that. That’s something people say in movies. Ask him what was in the bags. Ask him what kind of groceries.

She did not ask him what kind. She smiled at him. It was the smile she normally reserves for when the bread rises properly. I decided, then and there, that this date was going to fail.

Now, here’s where I need to manage your expectations about ghost powers, because Hollywood has been lying to you. I cannot throw furniture. I cannot write messages in blood on the mirror. I cannot possess anyone. What I can do, after thirty years of practice, is the following:

Make a spot feel slightly chilly, roughly the size of a dinner plate.

Flicker lights, if I concentrate very hard and the lights are already a bit dodgy.

Move objects weighing up to approximately one breadstick.

That’s it. That’s the whole toolkit. I’m basically a draft with opinions.

But I’ve seen enough heist movies. I could work with a breadstick.

Phase One: Cold Spot.

I drifted over and settled directly on Brendan’s lap. I concentrated. I thought cold thoughts. Glaciers. Penguins. My ex-wife.

Brendan shivered. “Is it chilly in here?”

Yes. Leave. Go home, Brendan. Put on a sweater. Live in your sweater forever.

“Here,” said Ana, “you can sit on this side, it’s warmer by the candle.” And she scooted her chair closer to make room.

Which brought them shoulder to shoulder. Over the candle. In the candlelight.

I had, through supernatural means, invented the romantic booth.

Phase Two: The Breadstick.

When Brendan reached for the breadbasket, I would nudge the breadstick just out of his grasp. Then again. He’d look clumsy. Uncoordinated. Like a man you couldn’t trust with a mortgage or a child.

He reached. I pushed. The breadstick rolled two inches to the left.

He frowned and reached again. I pushed again. It rolled two more inches, teetered on the edge of the table, and fell right into Ana’s lap.

There was a pause.

Then Ana burst out laughing. Not a polite laugh. A real one, the snort-laugh, the one she does when she watches videos of goats screaming. “Did you just throw a breadstick at me?”

“I... no, it moved,” said Brendan, red-faced, laughing too. “I swear, it moved on its own.”

“Sure it did.”

“It did! This restaurant is haunted!”

“Oh, is it,” said Ana, and she picked up the breadstick and pointed it at him like a tiny sword. “En garde.”

And he picked up a breadstick, and they fenced. In a restaurant. With bread. The moustached waiter looked over with the weary face of a man who’d seen worse, and Ana was laughing so hard she had to wipe her eyes with a napkin, and I hovered there by the coat rack thinking: I have now caused two romantic gestures. I am the worst ghost in history. I am a cupid with a death certificate.

While I was sulking by the coat rack, I noticed the old woman.

She was sitting at the bar, which was odd, because she was wearing a floral housecoat and fuzzy slippers, and was also, I realised, slightly see-through.

She saw me seeing her. She raised one eyebrow.

I drifted over. “Evening,” I said.

“Evening,” she said. “You’re the one who did the breadstick.”

“Guilty.”

“Nice work. Very cute. They loved it.” She sipped from a glass of wine that wasn’t really there. “I’m Ruth. Brendan’s grandmother.”

I stared at her. “You’re haunting your grandson’s date?”

“I’m not haunting,” said Ruth. “I’m attending. He’s thirty-four, and he’s never brought a girl home for Christmas. I want great-grandchildren, Gerald.”

“How do you know my name?”

“It’s engraved on the pen.”

Fair enough.

“Also,” said Ruth, “the old lady with the groceries? That was real. He does that. Every week. Mrs Abernathy on the third floor. Chicken noodle soup, mostly. Some crackers.”

I felt, briefly, ashamed. Then I rallied. “Well, he’s not good enough for Ana.”

Ruth looked me up and down. “And you are? You’re a pen.”

“I’m not a pen. I’m in a pen. There’s a difference.”

“Is there?”

I didn’t have a good answer, so I did what any mature adult would do. I went back to the table and flickered the lights.

Phase Three: Darkness.

I concentrated everything I had into the overhead lamp. I thought about every injustice I’d ever suffered: the bathroom floor, the unmailed letter, the time in 1981 when the Rotary Club gave the Volunteer of the Year award to Dennis Kowalski even though everyone knew he’d hired his nephew to do the litter-picking.

The lights went out.

The whole restaurant. Every bulb. Darkness, except for the candles.

I was so proud of myself that I didn’t notice, at first, Ruth floating beside me with her hand on the circuit breaker.

“What are you doing?” I hissed.

“Helping,” said Ruth.

“I didn’t need help!”

“You made one bulb go a bit dim, Gerald. It was embarrassing to watch.”

And in the darkness, in the candlelight, somewhere an accordion player, I swear to God, there was an accordion player, he’d been in the corner the whole time and I’d assumed he was a coat, began to play something slow and Italian.

Brendan reached across the table and took Ana’s hand.

“This,” said Ana softly, “is the strangest and best date I’ve ever been on.”

I made a noise. Ghosts aren’t supposed to be able to make noises, but I made one anyway. It sounded like a kettle having a breakdown.

The accordion player stopped. “Did anyone else hear that?”

Phase Four: Ghost War.

I’m not proud of what happened next.

I went for the wine. A glass of red, full, sitting right by Brendan’s elbow. Too heavy for me alone — it was at least three breadsticks’ worth. But if I really pushed, I could tip it into his lap. A man with a red crotch does not get a second date. That’s just science.

I pushed. Ruth pushed back.

The glass wobbled.

“Gerald,” said Ruth through gritted teeth, “don’t you dare.”

“Your grandson,” I grunted, “is too tall.”

“You’re jealous!”

“I’m dead! I’m allowed to be jealous! It’s the only hobby I’ve got left!”

We were both straining now, the glass rocking back and forth between us like the world’s slowest, most passive-aggressive game of ping-pong. The wine sloshed. The candle flames bent sideways from the sheer ectoplasmic tension.

“Brendan,” said Ana slowly, “your wine glass is moving.”

Brendan looked down. “Huh.”

“It’s moving by itself.”

“Yeah,” said Brendan. He watched it for a moment. Then he said, very calmly, “Grandma, is that you?”

Ruth and I both froze.

The glass stopped, perfectly upright.

“...Grandma?” said Ana.

Brendan rubbed the back of his neck. “Okay. This is going to sound insane. But my grandma died last spring, and ever since then, weird stuff happens. My keys turn up in the fridge. My phone autocorrects ‘meeting’ to ‘marry a nice girl.’ Last month I was on a date with a woman named Tiffany and her soup became extremely hot.”

“She was rude to the waiter,” Ruth muttered to me. “I don’t make apologies.”

“So I’m sorry,” said Brendan, “if my dead grandmother is being weird. She means well. She’s just... really invested.”

There was a long silence.

Then Ana said, “Okay, this is going to sound insane too. But I think my apartment is haunted. I bought this pen at an antique shop” she pulled it out of her purse, and I felt the strange swoop of being held “...and ever since then, whenever I’m stuck on a crossword, the answer just sort of... comes to me. Like someone’s whispering it. And whenever I bring a guy home, the shower turns ice cold.”

Ruth turned to me slowly. “Gerald.”

“That plumbing was very old,” I said. “It’s not my fault the building was poorly maintained. I wrote a letter about it.”

What happened next was not something I had planned for.

Ana looked at the pen. Really looked at it. She turned it over and found the little engraving on the clip, the one she’d always assumed was the maker’s name.

“G. Pemberton,” she read aloud. And then, to the pen, to me, she said, very gently: “Hi, Gerald.” Thirty years. Thirty years of being nobody, of being a draft with opinions, of being a man who died mid-complaint. And here was the woman I loved, saying my name in candlelight.

I flickered the candle. Once. It was all I could manage.

Ana smiled. Not the bread-rising smile. A new one.

“Thank you,” she said. “For the crosswords. You’re really good at the ones with the old-timey movie stars.”

“I’m exceptional at those,” I whispered, though she couldn’t hear me.

“But I need you to stop doing the thing with the shower.”

I sighed. It was a long sigh, a sigh with decades in it. And then I looked at Brendan. Brendan who bought soup for Mrs. Abernathy, Brendan who fenced with breadsticks, Brendan who apologized for his dead grandmother like she was a dog that jumped on guests and I made my decision.

I nudged the breadbasket toward him. Just an inch. The international ghost sign for fine. You win. Be good to her.

“I think,” said Brendan, staring at the basket, “that’s a blessing?”

“I think it is,” said Ana.

They left the restaurant hand in hand. I rode in the handbag, as usual, and Ruth floated alongside us down the sidewalk in her fuzzy slippers.

“You did a decent thing back there,” she said.

“Don’t make it weird.”

“I’m just saying. For a pen, you’ve got class.” She paused. “There’s a bingo night at the cemetery on Thursdays. Spirit-only. It’s mostly Civil War soldiers and a very angry Victorian child, but the company’s not bad.”

I looked at her. She was looking straight ahead, very deliberately casual, the way a woman does when she’s asking you something without asking you something.

“Ruth,” I said, “are you asking me out?”

“I’m asking if you play bingo, Gerald. Don’t flatter yourself.”

“I do play bingo.”

“Well, then.”

“I’m bound to a pen, though. I can only go where the pen goes.”

Ruth smiled, and for the first time all night, she looked like she was up to something. “Leave that to me. My grandson’s going to be spending a lot of time at that girl’s apartment, I imagine. And my grandson,” she said, “is very forgetful about where he puts his pens.”

So that’s my story.

Ana and Brendan are doing well. He moved in last spring. The shower is a perfectly normal temperature, and I’ll have you know I’ve had nothing to do with the fact that Brendan can never, ever find matching socks. That’s just Brendan.

Thursday nights, the pen ends up in his jacket pocket. Nobody knows how. And every Thursday I play bingo at the cemetery with a woman in a floral housecoat who cheats outrageously and claims she doesn’t.

Last week, the angry Victorian child threw a tombstone at me. Ruth threw it back.

Thirty years dead, and I finally have a social life.

I still haven’t mailed that letter, though. Some things are worth haunting for.