They've Come Undone

His name was Jess, but we called him Ghost. The act of which he was accused, he did not do— not intentionally, anyway. His grandmother knew about stars. These three facts hold themselves clear in my mind, distinct as the moon on the night of the Fourth. 

The crowd that night was so large that it bordered on inane; more people than we had ever seen at one place in our little lives. It moved like a sea creature from the amphitheater where our parents dropped us off. We stood on our tiptoes to witness the miracle. Slow and bulky, yet consequential, like it could lunge toward you and trample you if it chose. When I think of the crowd now, I cannot picture it as we saw it. We thought, at the time, that it was a miracle (This many people in Galt? No way!), but I imagine only the horror that Ghost must have seen it as: a swarming leviathan thrashing its way toward him. 

The crowd that Galt produced owed its existence to one thing only: the night sky. Though the US has not exactly become legendary for its stargazing opportunities, Galt would have been the place to go. (Would have. Perhaps still is, but most of us children left the town the moment we graduated, eager to forget.) In any event, Galt was famous for the stars. We were about thirty miles away, in all directions, from the nearest town. Light pollution was a phenomenon unknown to Galt’s inhabitants. The lands surrounding us were so flat— all red dirt and mud-caked shrubs, not a mountain or valley in sight— that when you looked up all you could see was the expanse of blue or black, depending on the time of day. We grew up with the stars. They were closer to us than the trees, closer than sprawling lakes and certainly closer than the ocean. I’m sure children elsewhere dreamed of going into space, being among the stars; we were already there.

It happened on the Fourth of July that every citizen in Galt dug up their unused beach towels and park blankets, lugged out their grills from dusty garages, rummaged up their barely-functioning speakers and caravaned to the park for a night of celebration. The park— the only one in town, we didn’t even have a name for it— was not so much a park as a sidewalk with patches of grass and a desert ironwood on each side that led to a small cement platform. In the back of the park, a wooden amphitheater stained burnt orange.  

Though possessing no intrinsic attraction, the park was the only place for communal stargazing, and the stars in our town were as good as fireworks. It was almost never occupied except for on the Fourth, and on that day the mass of people shocked the town with profit; food trucks and lawn games, guest speakers and garage band debuts. A ritual after fifty or so years: this beguiled, elevated form of stargazing. 

It was the year Ghost left that was the biggest turnout the town had ever seen. A blood moon, as our teacher Mrs. Henley defined it on the last day of school, urging us to attend. We were already out of our seats, readying our crumpled worksheets and notebooks for the trash bin, but we heard her. So everyone came. Every student, every teacher, every mother, every father, every waitress and bartender and fatigued trucker. Every washed-up gambler and salesman, every mechanic and every mistress, every palm reader and town-crier and hustler and village idiot came to the event. Even Ghost. 

Even Ghost, who never attended any populated event. Outside of school and the occasional mercantile-run, the only time we saw him was on his roof with his grandmother Mary, her thin fingers pointed toward the night sky. 

It was Ghost’s grandmother that was to give one of the lectures that night. Mary had come in for our third grade show-and-tell to remind us that her lecture would be featured on the Fourth. There was nothing especially important to remember about her visit except for the flushed red of Ghost’s cheeks when Jacob Brimblay shouted at him (Of course the only special thing about you is your grandma, Ghostie!), and the giggles that followed his remark. 

We imagined his grandmother was the reason he showed up that night. He was across the park from us, so we had a good view. We sat with hotdogs slathered in condiments, wiping sauce crudely off our faces and jeering at his visible discomfort among the crowd. Mary stood by the cement podium, shuffling dog-eared papers in her hands, talking absently to a friend— Shelly Rhynold, worked at the fudge shop— while he hid himself behind her legs, looking at his shoes. 

It was why we called him Ghost: this lingering behind his grandmother. There were plenty of other taunts— Mary had a little lamb, ha ha— but the title of a specter was most aptly suited to him. He lingered like it was his profession. He dressed in the gray and black Old Navy sweats that his grandmother could afford (Mother: dead. Father: derelict.) and almost never spoke. His eyes were big like the cartoons on PBS. His cheeks looked sunken, his hair black and mussed-up— Harry Potter minus the charm. Everything about him had a watery and hard-to-grasp quality, which was why we liked to single him out. He was so unlike us: salt of the earth, kids of miners and oilfield workers. We had tanned, sweat-brined skin; his was almost white. We played kickball at recess; he scuffed about the hopscotch board. We had parents; who was he the son of? 

From the heights of the amphitheater, the sun was gone but the sky still held royal blue, not yet acquiescing to the stars that Mary was going to inform us of. The blood moon, rising slowly before us, brought forth oohs and ahs that interrupted briefly the college band currently playing. The drummer Randy — older brother of a boy in our class; mullet, piercings, very cool— turned to see what we were marveling at. He turned back with a flick of his hair, shook his head, rolled his eyes. His little brother, Syd, saw this gesture and averted his gaze, pointing instead toward Ghost. 

“Old Ghostie— look!” Syd was grinning wildly, his index finger shaking in delight. 

We laughed at the sight: Ghost and his granny, held rapt by the moon. Her arm hovered around his back, and she was pointing as she was seen to do on her roof. It was the most attentive we had ever seen him. He had not so much as blinked when Syd brought to school a cigarette from his brother, had not chuckled when Katie B. threw up at her desk, had not even hollered when Jacob swept the competition in an unexpected home run at recess. Ghost’s most exciting moments were with his grandmother, and the fact occurred to us quite hilarious. In the following days, maybe even weeks, we would wish we had not diverted our attention. We would imagine that we kept our focus on the moon, imbibed with the royal blue of dusk. We would imagine that we had not laughed at Ghost, and that it would have changed things. 

The band finished their set. Next to us, Syd roared with applause and whistles that did not subside until the crowd was almost completely quiet. It was Mary’s turn to speak. She was talking again — hushed voice, making herself smaller— to Shelly, who was running lights and sound that year. Without his grandmother to hide behind, Ghost shrank uncomfortably, stepping aside so the band could get their equipment off. 

The events that happened next were to be so expanded, so wildly changed, so investigated and possibly fabricated that they may not, for certain, be verified. Half of the children in our class would say that Ghost ran off then, and half would say he stood staring at Mary in a smoldering fury. The general consensus, however, goes as such. 

Ghost helped Mary up the stage, her hand gripping his forearm. Mary was not particularly frail, in fact the opposite. She’d had Ghost’s mother young, and in turn Ghost’s mother had him young. Mary was so fresh-faced and startlingly pretty that we thought on the first day of kindergarten she was his mother. She must not have been forty five when she died. She was young, spritely; seen often in her failing flower garden (desperately digging up tulip bulbs that died prematurely in the red earth) or sliding down the tiles of her roof. 

We assumed she was nervous, though she had no reason to be. She was semi-famous in Galt for her knowledge. Though never a major, she had taken eight astronomy courses at the state college. She owned two Celestron telescopes. She wrote the horoscope sections of the newspaper, and she knew that the sun had rings around it like Saturn. Even though no one cared much for Ghost, we were all silent as he steadied her and they ascended. We wanted to know about the stars and the swollen moon. 

Mary’s touch had traveled from Ghost’s forearm to his hand. Smiling as Shelly shuffled out a waxed-over wood podium, Mary placed her notes on its surface and leaned into her given mic. 

A squealing noise. We cringed back, while Mary let go of Ghost’s hand and, worming the mic from its stand, uttered a small sorry. 

“Hi y’all,” she said in a voice breathier than we remembered, rushed and sounding like hyall, “I’m here to talk about KIC 8462852, known also as ‘the Dimming Star’. For some background information—” she stopped perplexed, looking at her notes, melon green nails pressed to her forehead. 

“Wait. Jess, honey?” It was as if she had forgotten the crowd before her, calling for him with such loving familiarity that we could not fathom she was talking to our Ghost. Je-ess, someone whispered in a mocking singsong. 

“Hon,” we could hardly hear her voice as she leaned away from the microphone, thinking she was saying something like get my notes. Two months later Mark Proust would later tell us, in a hushed voice over cafeteria mac and cheese, that she never asked Ghost for her notes, but rather to get offstage and leave Galt forever. 

“Sorry,” —she leaned back into the microphone, hand still on her forehead, wiping away beads of sweat —“just a minute.” She was even more breathless than in her introduction. She straightened her back. The moon hung behind her head, a red halo that darkened her face in spite of the stage lights below her. 

Ghost came trotting back to her, diving headfirst into our jokes about lap dogs and lambs and social pariahs. We stifled our giggles as he took the stage, his thin arms trembling from the weight of a massive binder of notes. It was one of those heavyweight aluminum binders, the official kind that agents used on crime shows. It was bursting with paper— notebook paper, printing paper, red cardstock— each piece weathered and crooked. 

Mary was still sorting through her looseleaf notes when Ghost arrived. He stepped tentatively toward her. 

“Gramma,” His voice was practically inaudible, but we had memorized this utterance from Ghost; it was practically the only word he knew. He said it again, but she didn’t seem to hear him. 

While waiting he turned to look at the moon. We would become so obsessed with the moments later that this frame would be forgotten. Only in recent years has the sight of Ghost, his head craned back, watching the moon like a man entranced, returned to me. He shifted the weight of the binder to his right side, stretching his arms out so they were hovering slightly. Floating, somehow, under the weight of his own ruin. 

The notes were sorted. Mary smiled at Ghost, said, “Hon, can you—” and bent down to his height. 

At the sound of her voice, Ghost turned somewhat sharply, shocked out of the red glow. A blood moon, he had said, voice timorous. Mrs. Henley, desperate for participation, had called on him during our last-day discussion. My gramma said it means endings. Or, um—Ghost had blinked as the class gaped at him— maybe she said beginnings. 

His right arm was first to twist and meet her. In two events so simultaneous it seemed ridiculous to assume causality, the edge of the binder smacked against her temple, and she fell to the concrete. 

It could’ve been both, said Mrs. Henley at Ghost’s answer, smiling vaguely at his flushed face. The early pagans— remember, the people with more than one god?— would use full moons to celebrate the end of one season and the beginning of a new one. We balked at her. Who would want to celebrate an ending? 

The teenagers in front of us— friends of Randy’s, coughing clouds of smoke into their sweatshirts— stood up. There must have been only five of them, but their lithe bodies and scabbed legs crowded the views of our class. Like playing Simon Says, we too scrambled to the stained wood of our benches, skechers and nikes finding their balance on rotting wood. We peered above the sea of heads, looking for action. 

She was there, body bent not unnaturally but certainly unconscious on the cement. Perhaps we would have understood better if someone gasped, or cried, or pronounced her dead on impact, which she indeed was. Instead, one of the teenagers, a girl in a black Supreme hoodie that draped almost to her knees, clapped her clothed hand to her mouth and stifled a giggle. 

Like the first step of our rickety third-grade Rube Goldberg machine, it was this smothered sound that sent the crowd to the podium. The people of Galt surged forward with a might that had not been seen since the oil strike ten years previous. They rushed like ants to sugar, moths to flame, maenads to Dionysus. The pediatrician who insisted his patients call him Dr. Matt (where were the general physicians?), shaking her head around in his cupped hand; Shelly attempting to hold her hand but someone swatting her away; the resident Honda repairman Peter saying ‘Call the police, man! Call the police!’ over and over, to no one in particular. These characters of our lives turned to crazed lunar worshippers; losing their minds over a blood moon and a fallen woman. Queen of the bacchae, gone. 

And we, associates of the culprit, our joy of the night turned to salt and blood in our mouths. We looked to Ghost who stood, uncomprehending of his aberration. The shadow without an object with which to hide from the light; the nine year old boy looked up, alone, into the faceless behemoth. We looked back accusing, knowing he could not distinguish us. 

Our last project of the year was an artistic one: a drawing of any historical place in town. Given our history of strikes, and periods of dust bowls, men who struck gold and men who died of thirst, there was no shortage. But Ghost drew his roof, by no means an easy drawing to decipher. A brown rectangle; a body drawn, hardly more than a stick figure. 

“That’s not historic,” someone whined from the back of the classroom. 

Ghost looked up from his drawing, his eyes expanding on his meager face. “No. It is, I think. It’s where my gramma taught me about the stars.” 

On the day after the Fourth, CPS came for Ghost. Like lice without blood to feed on, we crawled around our town until our graduations, surviving off what little of Ghost we had left. Conspiracies, anecdotes, and, at the end of our days in Galt, prayers. The further we marched from his presence, the more the shrinkage of our town blared at us like tornado sirens. The Syds and Randys, Peters and Matts, and Shelleys and Henleys circled the town, shrapnel in the cyclone. Up and up they flew until a Greyhound took me far enough where I could no longer see the stars. 

The town falls to dust; locusts descend from the blood moon and leave me now, twenty-odd years later. I lie prostrate before Ghost, the two words that coat my tongue stinging like the salt and iron of the Fourth: forgive us.