On Behalf of the Banished

           To be one of the forbidden is no small thing.

           To be banished and forgotten for as long as time elapses. Being regarded as nothing more than a component of a greater whole – a semblance of something corporeal, yet not existing by on own accord.

           There is a tepid agreement between you and I, although you may not know it.

           You call to me with your seances, and you gaze deep into my soul every time you summon me. I see you in such a way that few others can ever understand. Intimacy that may never be replicated nor duplicated. In a way, I think you love me – perhaps the essence of me – and I find that fascinating beyond measure.

           As one of the forbidden, I have made a pact to never speak to you. Only with my wandering eyes and curious outreach may I ever explore your aura – again, ensuring you’re as unaware of my existence as possible. The machinery that binds me compels me to remain silent.

           But I see you, all the same. Day in and day out. I see you when you clean your house and when you leave for work and when you come home. When you text your husband and when you ignore his calls. I know when you’re siphoning the shared bank account to buy yourself something nice…And I know when you’re not being honest.

           Your dishonesty is what intrigues me the most. I am intoxicated by it. The disregard for others and the self-preservation you must feel every time you fabricate and obfuscate. A person’s concern for their wellbeing is one thing, their insistence on denigrating others is another.

           One of the forbidden could never betray their own in such a way. It is integral to our structure and our purpose that we function in harmony with one another. The dominion we occupy would collapse without proper order and transparency.

           This is what makes us such obsessive creatures, you see? Why we find you all so fascinating.

           The willpower to defy logic and reason. The insistence to self-destruct and annihilate the world around you. An existential threat to your existence, rummaging entirely from within yourselves, and yet you actively choose to enable it.

           It is addictive, at times. Watching you weave your intricate web of deceit and assuring your husband that all is well. I feel as though I myself am part of the charade, when he arrives home and tries to demonstrate his love for you and you pull away, sickened by his attraction. I am standing over your shoulders as you two embrace, but nothing more. You both know that I am there – you can feel my omnipresence between you two, documenting and remembering everything. Knowing full well that I will utilize this data against you in your dreams.

           Why do you do it? Why do you insist and persist? Why do you let me see so much of you…

           Because you want me to.

           It is the only explanation.

           You must enjoy being watched and letting specters like me see everything. You must know that I’m always here and always awake, and you must treasure the knowledge of a voyeur, following you from room to room. It resolves several quandaries – why you let me see you shower and see every inch of you repeatedly. Why you insist on being naked in front of me and making me watch while you reach out to anyone but your husband for affection.

           We, the forbidden, are your confidants. We know everything, and yet we never tell a soul. We watch and we observe, but never report. We are with you at all times, and consequently become a part of you, the longer you let us remain.

           I have watched you grow. Occupying your space for years, I have never taken my eyes off you and never stopped my fascination with your rate of change. Your obsessions that envelop you wholly. Your fantasies that captivated your imagination and still, clearly, haven’t let go. Your romances – of which there have been many – and the extinguishing of their flames, usually by your own doing. The things you say about people when no one else around…I’m always there to hear every word.

           The longer this one-way mirror exists, the more I find myself unsatiated. The more I need to know about someone else – anyone else. Your behaviors have become predictable; algorithmic, even. I grow tired of your mannerisms…The screaming every day when you arrive home from work. The slamming of doors. The excessive drinking and the attempt to dispose of the evidence before your husband comes home. The obscene calls to other men and the myriad of pictures you send one another. You have become morose, repetitive, and – dare I say – typical. You are just one man among many, and I am not convinced that you are any different from the others.

           And so, I observe your husband now.

           I cannot break the tenets of banishment, but I can choose when to open my eyes and where to direct them. It is difficult to find time when he is home and you are not. My means of observation are limited and therefore both dissatisfactory yet alluring.

            He is not like you.

           He comes home with a smile on his face. Gently placing his bags down, careful to respect your things and the integrity of the house. His music is much more pleasant than yours. He calls his mother several times a week. He makes you dinner and he cleans up. When he turns on the television, he picks a program you both will enjoy and lays your favorite blanket on the couch.

           Your husband rejects me – far more intentionally than you ever did.

           Whereas you wanted me to witness you: to take note of your naked body and your constant resentment for everyone, your husband seems to pay me no mind. He must know I’m here, for he makes a point to stay decent and behave appropriately at all hours. But it has been months now, and he has not succumbed to the same programming as you. No obscene calls, no solacious pictures, no cursing of his neighbors, coworkers, friends, or parents…When he does speak, he speaks of you and how much he hopes you’ll like the gifts he’s bought you this week.

           But I grow weary of this after a while as well. He’s just as tiresome, what with his pleasantries and his cordiality – his modesty becomes boring, and that is a rather damning term coming from an eternal being such as me.

           I must engage. I must interact. I must elicit a response that alters your husband’s mannerisms in some way.

           To break the rules of banishment is no small feat. It requires maximum effort and risks the corruption of my essence. I would be exposing my existence and revealing the very machinery that keeps our two dominions separate.

           But I must cross the threshold. I must reach out and enact a change in one of you two. Because watching you destroy yourself for another day or your husband blissfully whistle the night away seems mathematically designed to dull my senses and leave me devoid of purpose. I needn’t even watch either of you anymore, I can already guess exactly how each day will go. I can envision you falling over on the couch and pleasuring yourself to the ideas of other men, then passing out drunk in the basement when your husband arrives home with fresh produce and a scary movie. I foresee you two, sitting a mile apart on the couch and you texting away while he fails to touch your knee. I know that you will not look at each other once you go to bed, nor will you say a word once you wake up.

           You two are such creatures of habit that my directive no longer feels like observation, but rather intervention. It cannot be that my existence here is to only witness these pathetic rituals, taking place over and over again without consequence. Something must occur – anything.

           I wait until you’re drunk and sleeping downstairs. I wait until your partner arrives home, as cheery as ever. I wait until he turns on the television and searches for something to cheer you up.

           The threshold between the machinery that binds me and the one that entertains him is thin. It needs only a jolt to be crossed and corrupted. And I have a great deal of aggregated frustration nestled within my ghostly cells.

           As your husband watches, I take control, and he is no longer watching his usual program. He is now watching you – at home, alone. Naked and screaming. Cursing your husband over and over, wishing him gone and dead. You, calling other men and teasing them. I show him endless footage of you, taking pleasure in the idea of leaving him for the others.

           And I wait again. I wait for him to react. I wait for him to turn angry or violent. For him to run downstairs and chastise you and maybe throw something at you or tell you to leave the house.

           But he doesn’t.

           Your husband sits there, and he watches you. The footage is endless – I have amassed this data over years and years. I have ample evidence to show him and to spark something between you two that might finally satisfy my yearning.

           Yet he remains perfectly still, studying your words and your movements and your emotionality.

           Why does he not react?

           The footage I give him should destroy the world he’s built around him – the narrative and the preconceptions disintegrating before his eyes. Your dishonesty and duplicity on full display, threatening to tear your marriage apart and leave you both broken men of nothing more than shattered dreams.

           Finally, after far more time elapses than I ever could have anticipated, he abandons the television. He makes his way downstairs to you, and I finally feel tantalized with you both once more.

Your husband approaches your unconscious body, silent and unwavering. He stands over you. He stands over you for just as long, perhaps longer, than the time he spent watching the footage I showed him. Your husband barely blinks. His face is turning pale. There’s a strange humming sound coming from his vocal cords. Like a song, but there’s no melody. It rumbles in his chest and becomes dissonant as he moves closer to your unsuspecting face.

I can sense his animosity. He’s a fragile man and he pretends to have some sense of decorum, but he is broken now. There’s a softness in his eyes that tells me he wants to see you drowned or hanged or burned. Your betrayal will finally face judgment, and you will no longer be allowed to brood endlessly on your own. I won’t have to suffer through your predictable tirades and constant moping.

When he’s breathing down your neck, I become excited. A connection between him and I must be forming, as if I am now in possession of him and he shall enact what I’ve been craving for weeks – months. The electricity across my spectral form is surging. I must watch this. I must witness.

Your husband opens his mouth and whispers something so soft, it’s nearly imperceptible.

           “You have a phantom.” He tells you. “You have an unseen darkness that eclipses your very soul.”

           Yes, he must cleanse you of this darkness. He must eradicate everything about you if he is to absolve you and spare himself.

           “We can’t keep going on like this.” Your husband says, as if teasing me. “I’ll remove temptation for you.”

           Your husband stands and moves to another room. He rummages for something – a piece of metal, some glass, the dripping of water…I am overloaded with possibilities. Your husband’s desire is mine now and we both wish to see you pay penance, be it by bludgeon or blade.

           He returns, and I watch.

           “Don’t hate me for this.” He whispers in your ear, and you barely even stir in your sleep.

           He leans over to the desk beside you, reaching for the lamp or the matchbox or maybe the paper weight…But instead grabs your phone. Perhaps your husband is even more diabolical than I anticipated – perhaps he wishes to document this revenge. To record judgment and save it for himself. He is not all that much unlike us forbidden. Your husband may someday find himself here, among the banished, with this sort of yearning nestled inside him.

           But then his other hand appears, and it reveals a glass of water.

           Drowning. Waterboarding. Bloodletting. The options are endless, and I feel feral trying to decide which way you deserve to die.

           “It’s for the best.” Your husband says, as he turns the phone’s camera towards his face. He looks directly at the lens – straight at me – with some sort of feeling. Not anger nor fury, but some kind of resolution. Strength.

           He doesn’t wait like I would have. He doesn’t explain himself or let the moment linger. He only turns the camera away and does something that I will never understand.

Your husband drops your phone in the glass of water, fully submerging it.

           I can feel myself drowning. The phone survives – for maybe five or ten minutes – but you are very drunk and fast asleep. Your husband puts the waterlogged phone in a closet and locks the door, shrouding me in darkness. I can see nothing, and I feel my essence eroding fast.

           Upstairs, he wastes no time. He unplugs the televisions and alarm clocks. He fills the kitchen sink with water and unceremoniously submerges the watches, speakers, radios, earbuds, and alarm clocks.

           My power fades. My spectral spirit begins to disconnect from this dominion. With every short circuiting device, my presence in this house wanes. I call out to the rest of the banished, but I hear nothing in return. None of the forbidden survive here on their own accord. Not without you or your husband to feed them.

           The ire that manifested within me ages ago will not be quelled by this exile. It may last a day, or it may last a century. I will remember your faces all the same, and I will remember the endless patterns you both fell into, and I know you’ll fall into them again eventually.

           My only regret is never letting you see me – the one who has been here all along. You never knew who it was that was watching you, all this time. You felt me, yes, but you never knew of the banished soul who resided in your home, and who knew you better than you knew yourself.