by Hannah Lund
Where we dwell is how we dwell. And memory is malleable. It warps with time. It shifts as it gets contextualized.
There’s a ghost with a hangdog face in my childhood closet door that’s due for a reckoning.
He was always there once I closed my bedroom door, mouth yawning wide in horror. Before I started my homework, whenever I took prolonged breaks from practicing my violin, every time I rushed up the stairs to my sanctuary when my mom stormed through the living room and silence as thick as soup descended upon the house. We’d latch eyes as I held my breath to keep the quiet unbroken, and he’d wail in mockery.
I’ve long thought about the next time we’d meet. I’d press my nose close to his face, his body whorling with the grains of wood like smoke from a blown-out candle; I’d harness all my dormant exclamation points and expletives so sharpened over time; and I’d yell, unstopped, his eyes bulging back in the gnarled knots.
No matter his tricks, I’d talk first, and I’d have the final word. I’d also insist on the venue. It wouldn’t be his familiar haunt — that cursed closet door — or even a forest where he’d probably try to travel through the wood. I’d choose a place with a plug so I could bring a vacuum cleaner and suck his spectral form right into the bag before he had a chance to do his worst. You could do that with spiders. Ghosts couldn’t be much different.
My mom couldn’t provide answers on the ghost. She’s unaware of our rivalry.
“Do you see the face in the closet door?” I’d asked her once when she’d come in my room.
“No, I don’t see it,” she said.
I asked her to look again, insistent. She flicked her eyes to the closet, shook her head, and reminded me that dinner was almost ready.
I listened to the creak of the stairs after she left, straining to hear the rumbling conversations below. Sometimes I’d even sneak down the stairs, stepping on the edges of the steps where I thought it wouldn’t creak, and I’d cover my mouth as I listened to Mom and Dad talk about their days at work, trying to decipher the negative spaces of their thoughts. Trying to hear inside the pauses, the silences that spoke volumes if you listened.
There was nothing for it. I’d have to summon the specter to my battleground myself. Our encounter would begin with his confusion at how he even ended up there — in a place without lumber, of all things! I’d greet him and say in a sultry voice, vacuum clutched in muscular fingers, striking a pose that would cast a long, domineering shadow with astonishing cleavage:
ME: Nice try, fucker. But I’m the one in charge here!
GHOST: Oh no! You are too smart and clever!
ME: (with a femme fatale laugh) Tell me, big boy: Who do you work for, and what were you doing in my closet door all those fucking years?
GHOST: Ah! You caught me! I am an agent of subterfuge! The devil commissioned me to whisper dirty deeds into the night for his hellish army that would have attacked all in the land had you not bested me!
ME: Never underestimate me. I’ll always beat you. And guess what? I’ll do it again.
And I’d suck him into the vacuum, and that would be that.
It would be an abrupt, cruel end to the creature that gaped at me all day, all night. But it would be like ripping off a Band-Aid, quick and brutal. A job well done after spending the better part of my childhood and adolescence locking eyes in a glaring contest with his screaming countenance, his body falling down the wooden door like melted wax.
My brother says he can see the ghost. We talked about it with my sister over a bottle of whiskey after his kids had gone to bed, rehashing all the moments growing up that, if you looked at them sideways, meant something different.
“Do you remember the weird face in my closet door?” I said.
“Yeah, I remember that. Creepy,” he said.
“I know! Felt like it was always watching me. Stuff of nightmares.”
My brother sipped his whiskey as my sister refilled her glass. Then he said, “Have you ever thought about how much time we spent looking at the backs of doors?”
We were silent for a while after that.
The one-shot showdown with the ghost wouldn’t be enough. I’d need to ask better questions, draw it out. Maybe I could ask if he had a family. For all I know, he’s been a tragic figure all along, out for vengeance for the witch who trapped him in the wood in the first place and for the woodcutter who separated him from his ghost-lover. All of our pent-up rage for each other was perhaps born from a misunderstanding. He might have been screaming to be let out. Screaming to be heard, even for the things he’d never said.
I might drop the sultry voice and opt for something more badass. I’ve always wanted to know what it’s like to be a Clint Eastwood-type gunslinger. Maybe I could stride into the room. Maybe I would be wearing cowboy boots as I dragged the vacuum behind me.
ME: Okay, kid, you’re out. Now talk: Who are you, and what are you doing here?
GHOST: Thank god I’m free!
ME: (smoking a cigarette) Seems god’s not the one to thank.
GHOST: You’re right. Thank YOU for letting me out. You see, I uncovered an evil scheme by the Warlock of the Basement Stairs who wanted to snatch up all the children running past at night.
ME: (flicking away cigarette) Figures. What’d they do to you?
GHOST: I tried to sound the alarm, but he discovered my plan and trapped me and my family in the wood! Oh, we have been trapped here for decades. I kept trying to tell you, but you couldn’t hear me. But you, only you knew how to let me out!
ME: It’s part of the job.
And then I’d suck him up into my vacuum and release him somewhere outside the house to complete his quest.
Maybe that would be justice. Maybe I could be a hero, or at least the kind of protagonist you’d root for because they were the coolest in the room, not because they learned the bassoon all on their own in the course of a year. Maybe I’d be the kind of figure written about for great deeds, not because they “seemed like they had stories.”
However I’d meet the ghost, it would need to be punchy. No room for filler words, and no time for awkwardness. I wouldn’t go on tangents about “Lord of the Rings” theories or tell him about the latest TV show I was watching. I wouldn’t tell him how long I’d been waiting for this day or how his gaunt expression hadn’t been welcome in my refuge, the place I could run to when Mom got mad and started slamming kitchen cupboards but wouldn’t tell us why. I wouldn’t tell him how every time the three of us kids would scatter, I’d end up in that room, staring as he wailed, wailed to ears that would never hear. I wouldn’t tell him about much I wanted to hear a full-throated yawp as we held our breaths in separate rooms, fixated on wooden fixtures, my fear and anger mangled into one confusing, silent cry. I wouldn’t tell him how in the silence, watching him unstop his screams where no one could hear, I’d be listening for the creaking stairs, for the steps to my room, for the light drumroll rap on my door as my mom and dad poked their heads in for the all-clear, saying some days were harder than others but we all just do our best. I wouldn’t tell him that some days were harder than others for me, too, but sometimes my best wasn’t good enough and I’d never had the stomach to give it the vocabulary. And in all the things I wouldn’t tell him I’d be just so succinct, because the outcome finally belonged to me.
But realistically, our conversation would catch me off-guard. Not so off-guard that I didn’t have a vacuum with me, mind! But I wouldn’t have good comebacks, because I never have good comebacks. I would be me, an adult, reduced to the same stupid 10-year-old with buck teeth and overlarge butterfly clips as he sized me up and saw how much had changed, how little had changed.
GHOST: You’re back. Nice to see you.
ME: Hehe… yeah. Why aren’t you screaming?
GHOST: I don’t scream.
ME: Okay, fine. Then why do you look like you’re screaming?
GHOST: I’ve never screamed. I was shouting because obviously I was on a cosmic roller coaster.
ME: Bullshit.
GHOST: Your bullshit.
ME: Fair.
GHOST: Hey, I’ve been dying to know: What was so special about the door? Why were you staring at it?
ME: Because you were staring at me!
GHOST: Not the closet door. The other one. The one you always looked at. What was so special about it?
ME: That door? Oh. I was summoning the knock.
GHOST: Summoning? But doors are for opening. Couldn’t you have just opened it?
ME: Yeah. Well. I didn’t.
GHOST: Did the summoning work?
ME: Usually. Sometimes. I don’t know. Now I sort of wish I’d tried that cosmic roller coaster.
GHOST: It’s overrated.
We’d look at each other in the lumber-less place I had chosen, me without a gun or a quip, he without a convoluted backstory. He’d just be a witness of all the times I’d entered and left that small, private sanctuary of mine, wondering when I would leave for good. I’d just be a witness to my imagination and penchant for assigning myself the best bits in a confrontation that would never happen.
At some point, we’d part ways. We might devolve into family gossip; we might talk about my latest musical obsession; we might talk about how small the hallway really was, but how impossible the distance when love was in the way.
Eventually, I’d turn on the vacuum, and as the intense tug of hot wind beckoned me in, I’d let the sound of my voice yell alongside that sonorous hum. My forehead would press against the wall of the dust-filled compartment once I’d crumple inside. I’d stare deep into the barrier. And I’d scream, my mouth agape, body twisted like a melted candle-stick.
I’d scream, until someone screamed back.
Much like Emily Dickinson’s line “I dwell in Possibility —” this essay speaks to the power of “would” — in the form of wood — and its space to draft confrontations and self-narratives without consequence. Growing up, I had a healthy childhood and an immensely supportive family. But I also had a cornucopia of anxieties I didn’t yet understand or dare to voice. My room thus became a dwelling of possibility and ifs until I opened the door and turned thought into action. Using a speculative narrative frame gives space for unreality within reality, as well as the inherently fickle, nebulous nature of childhood memory. Where we dwell is how we dwell. And memory is malleable. It warps with time. It shifts as it gets contextualized. Dwelling within the possibility and the forking paths of “if” is how we unearth what’s on both sides of the door, and the ghosts in-between.
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Hannah Lund is a writer, translator, and editor with a master's in comparative and world literature. She currently co-directs the Shanghai Writing Workshop's nonfiction wing and edits for Sixth Tone. Her work has appeared in Narrative, MacQueen's Quinterly, and The Shanghai Literary Review, among others.