Quotidian Ghost

He stacks the shelves quotidian; clings to monotony in a defence against unspoken accusation— a quote attributed to no-one. He tidies, dusts; his shoes slip and slide on the floor. And briefly sliding like socks on polished tiles, he slips into a quotation of his childhood. Recollection wounds. The spirit of Eli did not speak; there were no whispers from the grave. To be haunted by a ghostly apparition would be a blessing; a mercy. But he is haunted by himself— by his lonesome. He remains; his brother reduced himself to remains. And he is haunted by the repetition of those remains. The deceased was condemned to the abyss of past-tense; the living cannot rid himself of the present— the tension that renders memorial joy as horror. There is no ‘they’ — only the awful presence of a ‘he’ that is utterly unambiguous in reference. It is never unclear who ‘he’ refers to, for they cannot be ‘they’ now that he is gone. 

He slides on the concrete in the psychic abstraction of memory. In the light of the past, his brother was undying and beaming joyful as he slid on the tiles. 

“Be careful boys!” their mother exclaims. “You’ll split open your heads if you’re not careful. Watch the corner of the table!” 

But the children are immortal; death is an abstraction; he is sliding on concrete. And he tries to watch his brother glide like an ice-skater, but he does not glide— he slid. Removing his shoes, decreasing the surface friction, Eli untied his shoelaces and retied them around his neck. In the slide of asphyxiation, he slid into the frictionless void of past. If it had been some kind of noose, that would have brought clarity. But it was a plastic bag. Did he intend his death? Several nights ago, he performs a mimicry of past-tense, emulating the asphyxiation of plastic in order to feel close to Eli. And he comes close, but he cannot escape the haunt of himself; he can’t flee from the presence that Eli no longer possessed. The spirit of his brother does not possess him; Eli is a dispossession. The prefix of abnegation transfixes, crucifies alike the crucified Christ, to whom he cries in that momentary miracle where he managed to incarnate the past— weeping beside Eli’s body, selfishly begging for another miracle. But the ‘l’ at the centre of Eli slides out from this side of life; he is left with an ‘Ei’ that lingers somewhere between ‘eye’ and ‘I’. He cannot elude himself. In the absence of ‘l’, (El, he used to call him) the letters that remain reshuffle. And slide becomes ‘dies.’ 

The memory fades, mutilated by recollection. Is it he who is mutilated by the memory, or the memory by him? He can’t afford to dwell on this question, but it rattles about in his mind as he resumes his quotidian shift. And that incriminate quotation of no-one resounds. It doesn’t matter that no-one said it because no-one says it. Eli is no-one, now. He is a disembodied assembly of inaccurate quotations. His mother quotes the event of his death without the attribution of suicide. It is unclear, somewhat. There is no disclosure of a note. There is a possible explanation, she insists— the intention wasn’t clear. But he is not present to clarify intent. He is gone. He was. And he tries to bury this perpetual ambiguity (like they buried his brother, who will never be ‘they’ again). But he is imprisoned by this parenthetical enclosure. He may be able to temporarily defer the quoting of his brother, but the quotidian is ever constant; cruel; always recurring. He may escape that day, but only in surrendering the day to the passage of time. 

That passage leads to the night, where he sits in the cavernous expanse of the dining room. The remnant quartet force words out as though their lives depend on it. Perhaps they do. They pile their words into sentences like the pile of food on their plates. The empty place where Eli used to sit devours the words and morsels of rissole, gravy and mash … some kind of undefined vegetables; they are mashed and blurred and lost in the dark of their loss; swallowed by grief. Eli’s former purlieu is an ink-black blotting, indiscriminate. And though they are bound together by their loss, his death exacerbates the negative space between them. The presence of absence; the ghost; the haunt; the cavern. Their dead conversation echoes in the dark; deathly meaning is discerned by echolocation. Each of them is bound by an unspoken oath to never address what they really mean. At least until time has passed. It’s easy enough, since that meaning can’t be easily spoken. The meaning is the echolocation of Eli’s purlieu, that horrible word meaning: ‘a person’s usual haunts’. A quotidian haunt.

“How was work?” his mother asks her only son. 

“It was okay,” he manages. “Becca had her shift alongside me today, and we get on. Spent most of the shift stacking shelves and doing dishes.”

“That’s good to hear,” she hazards, attempting warmth. But the words are hollow, cold. It’s better that way, he thinks— brings their words closer to Eli’s cold grave. The emptiness of their words defies the fullness of the funeral casket. And his sister talks about her day at school. His father talks about his day at the office. (Both of them never used to share their days like this, in the quotation of present, but now they do. They have to.)

“I’ll do the dishes,” his sister says. “You said you did dishes at work, so. Yeah.”

It’s a nice gesture. He finds himself smiling. A weak smile. But the weakness somehow persists against the abyssal echolocation. For a moment, the room is a room again— not a cavern. Their echolalia makes sense. It is warm. And he wonders which one of them will next attempt to quote Eli. None attempt it that night. It’s still too raw. How much time has passed since Eli died? He does not ask this question. (Or he tries not to.) Every day that passes pulls him further away from the presence of his brother. He does not want to allow time to mend his wounds. His pain is a stigmata. Time is the enemy; the satan; the demon who steals and destroys in the night. 

Before he sleeps, he prays, “Eli, Eli! Why have you forsaken me?” It is not a prayer to God, but to the damned. He and his family are Protestants, of course— they do not pray to the dead. But at that moment, he does. He seeks the ghost. But the ghost is silent. It could not be otherwise. A ghost is a person sought, but not found. He does not pray to God. He cannot. His blood flows too harshly; he is too alive. And Eli isn’t. It isn’t that he’s an atheist again— how could he dare? No, he must believe; he must atone. He clings to the hope that he and Eli might be ‘they’ again, though he knows that Eli has lost his faith. This loss becomes permanent in death. And he is the cause. Was he? Eli unveiled a blasphemous truth. If his brother is not saved, he vows that he will descend into hell to taste the bliss of ‘they’ again. He has to do this, he thinks, as he approaches the threshold of sleep. He has to, he insists, because it was his own brief stint of atheism that inspired his brother’s disbelief. It was the ambiguous overlap of ‘he’ that led his brother to die. Because Eli was young; impressionable. If God forsakes Eli, he must forsake him. 

And he is possessed by a half-remembered dream. He is Eli, sobbing in the shower. And he hears himself knocking on the door. “Hurry up, Eli! You’re gonna use up all the hot water.” He is using the shower as a mask for his tears. God died; and Eli experiences a godforsaken world for the first time. The weight of existence crushes him, purloins water from his tear-ducts. Shower and tears; brother and brother. He awakes in a cold-sweat. A third liquid-likeness. It is a supposition; a theory. He didn’t leave a note, so his theory of his brother’s death is just as plausible as his mother’s denial of suicide. In his ambiguity, he accuses himself of intent. He blames himself for his brother’s death. He performs a genealogy; feels Cain to be his forefather. He is unable to disentangle himself from his brother. Incestuous, almost. Who was his brother? Who is he? A murderer?

“I’m not guilty,” he says to himself. He knows this. But the abyssal pit does not condescend to reason. It gnaws in the chest; reaches up from inside, clawing the throat, erupting from the mouth and coiling like a noose around his neck; a parasitic worm peeking out of his mouth in the middle of the night. (He recalls a story of a missionary, who, waking one night, found one such worm protruding from his mouth. And he grabbed it with his two hands and tore it from inside.) But there is no worm to grab; it is a ghostly worm. And the next day ascends; and another; and another. Time is like that. It moves. Things move in it. And each day he claws at the past that is not his. Each day it slips. 

Each days he says, “Eli killed himself because he couldn’t bear the weight of godlessness.” He tries to convince himself of this with the rising and setting of the sun. But each day, the words bear greater resemblance to himself. They appear less like his brother, who fades. He realises that he is losing sight of him; realises that he maybe never knew him. He does not know why his brother killed himself. Accident or not. He knows that he had wanted to die; he can’t bear to live. But in the light of Eli’s death, he can’t slay himself. So each day he rises, again and again, showering in the corrosive forgiveness of time past. Crying often; but less and less. Seconds into minutes; minutes into hours; hours into days; days into weeks; weeks into months; months into years. Sometime or another he quits imitating the circumstances of Eli’s death. He doesn’t recognise it in the knife-edge of present— but looking back … in retrospect, he realised that something shifted, something slid. He stacks things quotidian. And somewhere, along the line, he calls himself by his name: “Isaac.” Even still, even with the individuation of a name, he finds himself incriminated by the recurrence of death-quotes. Even still, he has a different job now; he is a different person now. And alongside the torment of the ambiguity of his will, Eli drifts into the past. His finitude brings Isaac relief. The balm of temporal oblivion is unwanted, at first. Isaac could not let go of his Akeda; he could not let Eli slip. But all things slip. All things slide. And lapsing into the recollection of childhood, the blurring, the reinvention, the recreation of things from memory in a psychic shape … it all grows softer. It does not move quite as fast as this prose. But it does move; it cannot but move.

Isaac would condemn himself to hell to be with Eli again, yes— but he did not need to. He realises this one day as he laughs heartily for the first time in … since Eli died. He accepts the laughter of his name, in spite of the hell of deathly echolocation. He was blind and then, suddenly … how did he get here? Quotidian. In forgetting, hell wanes. Though agony is still agony; though death does not cease to be death— it does slip; it does slide. And Isaac himself slips into the past. 

“Remove your shoes,” he says, “for where you stand is holy ground.” (He says this; not God. And he still can’t pray to anyone but the dead.) In spite of this, laughing, he slides on the concrete floor. He, in the unity of past and present, dies in the future: a quotidian ghost. Isaac, who cannot always forgive himself; but he tries. And forgiveness gets a bit easier each day.