Haunted

I am writing this in the hope that you are a bit like me. You have heard ghost stories and have enjoyed them. Perhaps you have thought that there is more than entertainment in them, that they manifest anxieties which we have about losing loved ones or about our own mortality. But you have never treated them as proof of life after death or confirmation of any religious belief. You have spotted the flaws in them, the apertures that allow you to insert a more rational explanation for what happened. If that sounds like you, then you are exactly who I need.

You’re not afraid of the idea that the end of life is truly the end. You are convinced that science will provide the answers about what our life consists of and the nature of consciousness. You have lost a loved one perhaps and it was tough, and you still think of them, but you don’t believe that they still exist.

I was like you. I want to be like you again. This account could help me get there if you bring the full force of your scepticism to it. So let me lay out what happened as well as I can.

I had a friend called Ben. On 23rd August 2000, he drove his car to the coast near San Diego, took off his watch, his belt, his shoes and socks and walked into the Pacific Ocean. Shortly before he did this, he sent an email to his friends and colleagues telling us that we should understand his actions as suicide; bothering the police to conduct an investigation was unnecessary. Ben was a no-loose-ends sort of person; as also explained in his email, the spot that he chose for his submarine stroll is characterised by a strong undertow. Jealously, the ocean has never given him back, just as Ben planned.

That’s the story of what you might call his death. Ben did something that he shouldn’t have done, in my view at least. I hate to think that he was maybe scared out there in the water; if he didn’t pass out quickly when he began to drown, perhaps he suffered a lot of pain. The consolations are that he seemed to have thought about it and it brought a prolonged period of unhappiness in his life to an end. So: goodbye Ben, I said. Goodbye my closest friend, a thousand jokes a minute, heaps of smarts, nine years older than me, my champion.

The morning that I read Ben’s valedictory email began with an odd start. I was woken up by a tapping at my window. I lived on the first floor of a student building then and it was easy for anyone who had forgotten their keys to climb up the façade and seek my help. I got out of bed, not puzzled by the sound because it was clear what it was, but weary and unalert. I recognised the person at the window and slid it open to let him in. He apologised a lot for waking me up and then he left.

Over the course of that day, which I spent mostly sitting in a chair picking at a loaf of bread, ignoring phone calls, refusing to take my place in an intercontinental polygon of grieving, I erased from my memory the identity of the person who I let in through the window, though I didn’t realise this until I tried describing the day to other people later on. I am upset that I let that happen. I want to remember perfectly the day that my best friend died. More than that, I want to know that what happened next, a few days later, happened to a reliable person.

That’s the twisty bit, the reason why I’m writing to you.

I was sitting in a library at a desk, working on a laptop. I was turning my scrappy notes about a book into a few paragraphs of commentary to show to my research supervisor. I had decided to stay on at my university and work, not to fly to San Diego and walk along the shore looking for Ben’s body, hoping that there was a flaw in his research into ocean currents. I didn’t want to go home either, to see his family or any of our mutual friends. I could think of nothing to say to them, except a formula or two of condolence. So I decided to mourn more usefully; by carrying on with my life and my studies.



I was following this prescription when I hit return on the keyboard at the end of a passage of writing and swung around in my chair. Then, as I remember it, I screamed. That’s probably an exaggeration, as I am a quiet person and flight attendants always ask me to repeat my order, so let’s assume that I yelped. It was involuntary. It was uncharacteristic. Inevitably, it drew attention. A couple of my friends who were sitting nearby got up and came close. Typically I behave well in libraries. If a friend wants to communicate with me, we write notes or walk into the stacks where whispers are less disruptive.

My lapse occurred because Ben was sitting in the chair behind me. Not any other Ben, the same. Not cherubic in his appearance, not pale, without grotesque make-up, without a transcendental light show, just Ben, the same. He wore clothes that I know he had; he didn’t glow; he looked at me evenly. He didn’t say anything and I didn’t have the chance to ask him any questions either. He discomposed me completely and then, after only a few seconds, he disappeared, instantaneously, without any movement.

I packed my things and left the library. I had thought that I accepted the decision that my friend had made to end his life. I was fine, I was coping. But I lost control over the process of bereavement on the day that Ben came back. There are supposed to be stages which you complete as you grieve, but that progression can’t take place when the person you are grieving for might appear behind you at any moment. There was so much of Ben, so many ways in which he might come back. I had known him for five years; he was the only friend that I had known for so long. He was the worst person that I could be haunted by.

***

My family moved to Glasgow in 1995, when I was 18. I met Ben a few months later. It was raining and the rain in Glasgow is the sky’s spit, it hits you with deliberate disrespect. Before I moved there, I knew to stay inside when it was raining, or travel by car, or carry an umbrella. In Glasgow, however, I was older, so I wanted to go outside more and I didn’t have a car. Coming out of my house one Monday morning, I saw Ben, hands in pockets, rain dripping off the tips of his long, dark hair, walking like the rain wasn’t a nuisance, walking like he wanted to get wet. I set down my umbrella on the front step and followed him.

I had seen him before. Like me, he didn’t drive. Like me, he walked to the train station. Sometimes we travelled on the same train to the city centre. But I’d never spoken to him before. That day, when I cast down the umbrella, I did.

Ben and I were incautious from the start. We didn’t increase the amount of time we spent together incrementally. Within a few weeks of meeting, we saw each other every day. Ben was older than me and, in the beginning, I wanted to impress him, to make sure that I could keep him, I guess. I raced through books so that I could hand them over to him. I learned about contemporary music because that was what he enjoyed. I played the piano less because he had no patience for listening to me play. In return, he showed me Glasgow, where he had lived for most of his life and I didn’t know at all. He called me over every time he bought new records and we listened to them together. I remember realising, on one of those evenings as he worked his way through a shopping haul, telling me in excited gestures about what I was going to hear, that he was my closest friend and I was his. He didn’t have a boyfriend when we met; afterwards, he had boyfriends but never for long. Typically, they didn’t like me, they were puzzled by my closeness to Ben, or jealous of it. Ben made things worse by breaching their confidence with me and then telling them that he had.

Despite the boyfriends, there was a lot of room in Ben’s life. He lived alone. His mother had died when he was a boy; I never found out exactly how old he was when she went. She was diagnosed with cancer; swiftly afterwards, she declined and passed away. She died in the spring and Ben didn’t go to school for several months. After the summer, his father sent him to a boarding school. Ben did well there; he told me that it was the one place where the disadvantage that he bore of not having a mother was equalised. However, in the last year of his absence from home, he received news that his father had killed himself. Ben returned to Glasgow after finishing his exams, cleared the house of everything that he linked to his parents—apart from one photograph of his mother, which he kept in the conservatory, the outermost room of the house, because, he told me, it made him feel afraid to put it anywhere closer. He loaned the house to his aunt, who was his legal guardian until he turned 18, and went off to college in the American northeast.

He learned how to write computer programs. Between two degrees, he spent a year surfing and diving in the Caribbean. I didn’t know him then but I have seen photographs. Tanned, toned, with money to spend from his inheritance, he seems to be enjoying his life; at the least, he smiles in many of the photographs, though he is always alone. A year after he died, I was looking through the photographs again, and I realised for the first time that someone must have taken them. Scuffling through them, I looked for clues about that person but I found none. Perhaps it wasn’t one person. Perhaps Ben just handed the camera to anyone close-by. Perhaps the photos were taken so he could prove to himself that he was happy that year.

After completing a PhD in California, Ben worked for a software company in New York for six months. He rowed with the management constantly. He tried to solve every coding problem in a new way rather than in the quickest way; they didn’t like that. So he left and returned to Glasgow to set up, successfully, his own company with Marcus, the son of a family friend.

***

I lived in Glasgow for the next four-and-a-half years. I can probably count all the days on which I didn’t see Ben during those 55 months. There were times when he was travelling for work. There were times when I was away. There were some days when I was studying or he was working too hard for us to meet, so we spoke on the phone. There were probably some days when he or I were in bed with flu—quite a few days, I’d guess, because neither he nor I used an umbrella.

Often I wonder what we did with the days. I feel that I have too little to show for them. The moments that I remember are odd ones. One night we both stopped by a blinking streetlight for 15 minutes, when we were supposed to be hurrying to a film. The light went from red to orange, orange to red. That’s all. But we stood watching it for 15 minutes and neither Ben nor I nudged the other to say, let’s go. We watched, then we left, without exchanging a word. We did something else instead of the film and felt no regret about having wasted our tickets.

On another day, we saw an old woman fall over. We were sitting on a bench and neither Ben nor I got up to help her. We watched her get her wind back, gather her belongings and stand up and she watched us too, baffled and paranoid. We didn’t laugh at her. We didn’t sneer at her fragility. We watched. It was a delicate, unrepeatable incident. I might even say that it ought not to be repeated. It was ugly, what we did, watching that woman. But as a result, since that voyeurs’ experience, I never fail to help someone who falls over.

Sometimes I wonder whether losing Ben would be easier if what we had shared was more extraordinary. Then it might seem like a treat and it would be greedy to expect it to be everlasting; if we had travelled through Borneo, or jumped from an airplane with parachutes, then having the memory of that experience and some memento of it would be enough to summarise our friendship. But our friendship did not consist of one-offs. It was an everyday friendship, a friendship of all sorts.

We had happy experiences but I was also witness to Ben’s depression. I convinced him to go to a doctor and get anti-depressants. When he threw them in the bin, after a year of taking them, I was there. When he found his father’s suicide note, which he had missed in the first clearout of his parents’ things, he didn’t read it until I got over to his house. Over years, sitting by his bed in Glasgow, by phone when he was working in Frankfurt, by email when he went to San Diego, I told him again and again that he was not to repeat his father’s choice.

Hence losing Ben in the way that I did was hard, hard enough, without the fact of his strange return. I tore a strip out of my life when we became friends and gave it to him. When he drowned thousands of miles away, he hadn’t given it back. And it seemed that he had no intention of doing so.

He demonstrated his intent by turning up again, a few days after the incident in the library, as I was walking home down a long path that was lined with trees on both sides. As it was his second reappearance, I was able to to keep more of it for thinking about later. It was a sunny day, beginning to lose its heat. I had worked four or five hours that day. It was the most that I had done since he died. I was going home to watch the news, and then I planned to cook a meal. I was carrying a bag of groceries. I was looking at the ground as I walked. I was watching the shadows of the tree branches move in the light breeze. I wasn’t thinking about anything in particular, letting what I had read that day crawl around in my mind. Then suddenly I felt that there was someone on the path with me. I looked to my side to check and there was Ben again. He was walking down the path with me, keeping a wary distance, but walking like he walked, wearing the same pair of scratched glasses that he’d worn since he was 17.

I didn’t scream this second time—or yelp. Ben is around 6ft tall. He has broad shoulders which give his chest a V shape, like a male hero from a comic book, except Ben has no muscle mass. He has a bad habit: he chews on empty space when he isn’t talking and sometimes has to pause until the end of a chewing cycle before responding. I saw all of this in the Ben who was walking next to me. But, most of all, I noticed how he walked. Ben has a bit of a limp to his left leg and so he prefers to keep to the left of anyone he is walking with to obscure it as much as possible. I’m good at noticing how people walk and I’ve often thought that a person’s walk is not only unique like a fingerprint but a culmination of physiology and character. Your sense of your own importance shows in how you walk. So does your level of anxiety. And obviously your size, the curvature of your spine, the strength of your knees. Hence I am certain that it was Ben who walked next to me that day.

Obviously, it shouldn’t have been Ben, for one very important reason: Ben was dead. Yet I recognise many things about Ben and I would have noticed any variance. There was none. The person who walked next to me on the path was Ben. If there had been any reason for doubt, perhaps I would have tried to touch him. But it didn’t occur to me to try.

I talked to him instead. I greeted him and, shyly, he asked me how I was doing. That question, given the decision that he had made, despite knowing how it would affect me and his other friends, irritated me. Perhaps I should have been more gentle in speaking back to him, but I was in an overwrought state, sleeping badly, panicking about what it meant to have seen Ben after he was supposed to be dead. In any case, affronted by his question, I told him plainly how I felt about what he’d done. I told him how stupid he was. I reminded him about the times that we had spoken about depression. I told him that I felt he had let me down. I said all of this aloud. If there was anyone else on the path that afternoon, they would have heard me. Eventually I listened to Ben as well. He said that he saw nothing interesting in his future. He had done everything that he wanted to do in terms of work, the rest was business, there was no challenge anymore. He wouldn’t fall in love, he said, because he had met people that he should be able to love, but he didn’t have the ability to love them. There was no answer that I could give that I hadn’t given before. I remember thinking that, despite the fact that I was talking to Ben, it was clearly too late to change what he had done to himself. I remember too that I began to cry. So, after what were I think several minutes of conversation (more than five, less than ten, though I’m not certain), I told him to go away; and, with a sad expression, he obeyed. As on the first occasion, he vanished from exactly where he had been, rather than leave by some process or route. He was dead, then he appeared; he was as he was, then he disappeared.

The first person that I told about Ben’s reappearances was Marcus, Ben’s oldest friend and business partner. It was on the day before we held a service to commemorate Ben.

“Did he seem real?” Marcus asked me.

“Was he hurt?”

“Was he sorry?”

“Did he seem happy?”

I felt that it was awful that Marcus believed me. He spoke at the service the next day, as did I, but I only did it because he asked me to. He played some of Ben’s records. Afterwards, he asked me if I had seen any vestige of Ben at the service, as if I had become the authority on Ben, though he had known him much longer. I wanted almost to say that I had invented the story, or that seeing Ben had made me realise that I was in a bad way and I was going to seek psychiatric help. Yet I knew throughout the service convened to mark Ben’s departure that, for me, Ben had not gone for good. I couldn’t explain it. There was no reason for anyone to believe me. Yet I was certain that Ben was around, as he had been since that rainy day in 1995.

***

The service was eight years ago and I’ve had time to make new friends, not to forget Ben but to mourn him. But Ben’s still around. It puzzles me why he won’t go away. Other people that I was close to died before he did, and others have died since. But they don’t remain in my life. Why did Ben become so special? I loved my grandmother too. There was a friend who died in a car crash. Another friend who went by his own hand. Either I ought to see everyone or Ben ought to disappear too. I’ve catalogued and stored the stuff that he left me. I’ve even executed his will, because he put me on the hook for that on his final day. I’ve disposed of his money in the way he wanted. I’ve moved several times. Yet, despite everything, Ben hasn’t gone.

There was the time at Chicago airport, late at night, rushing to catch a connecting flight, having already missed one. I told myself that it’s fine, I will get to the gate before it closes and there will be standby places, there must be at this time. I felt that he was hurrying behind me, shaking his head, bemused at why I didn’t just go and take a hotel instead, eat well, have fun.

Soon after I moved into the flat where I live, I was looking for the bins in the pit of the building and I felt that Ben was making sure that the doors that I blundered through were left ajar by an inch so that I could see my way back.

When it’s raining and I clean my glasses on a handkerchief as I’m going down the escalator to the subway, I feel that Ben is standing next to me, ready to catch me if I eddy to one side.

I wonder sometimes if I made a mistake in the process of bereavement. I missed a step. There was a form of words that I didn’t use at the right time. Or perhaps it’s an absurd fantasy, a pathetic fallacy. I don’t rely on him anymore. I am not a lonely person. Yet he’s there. I don’t believe that there is a life after death. I’m not religious. Yet he’s there. I believe that our bodies decompose in the earth and that we have no soul; I believed this before Ben died, and I believe it still. Yet he’s there. I don’t have premonitory dreams, I cannot speak to angels, I’ve never experienced déjà vu. It doesn’t matter. Still he’s there.

My feelings would be different if I was able to see him fully and reliably. Then I could talk to him. I could ask the questions I should have asked when I saw him before: how are you? Are you safe? Do you like it where you are? Is there joy in your new life? But he is only a trace these days, literally a non-entity and it is hard to keep relating to him like that.

I also feel that it’s wrong for him to stay around this way. He was such a forceful personality, so sure that he was allowed to explore the world in any way that he liked; he didn’t have the inhibitions that other people have, that I have. He dropped boyfriends quickly because he felt entitled to a better man. He approached programming projects as he wanted to, regardless of what the client had asked for and when he was finished, he convinced the client that what he had done was right. It isn’t fitting that Ben, of all the people that I’ve known, should have an impotent afterlife, that he should hang around following me in airports. I expect that it’s my fault he does and so it’s up to me to bring it to an end.

It’s important for you to know that I’ve tried, in a range of ways, to get rid of Ben before bringing the matter to you. I wanted to succeed in this myself and it’s difficult to admit failure in any circumstances, but especially these, when what I’m talking about is my closest friend. Yet that’s the pass that I have reached. I’m out of ideas and now I need your help.

***

I sought out a ghost hunter, a pair of them in fact. They had an ultrasound scanner, a digital voice recorder, an infrared pistol-style thermometer because ghosts are often said to cause changes in temperature, a high output laser pointer and of course a digital camera. But using all this equipment doesn’t make sense. It records ordinary changes and events. But ghosts don’t behave in ordinary ways.

It was Samir who helped me to realise that. Samir is a heart surgeon. His success rate is good, though only a little above the average in the hospital where he works. He has never implied that he is a hero. He admits that, sometimes, he shirks from conveying bad news to a patient’s family, assigning the task to a junior doctor instead. There are people whose lives he has improved or extended by his work but, as he sees it, if he hadn’t done the operation, the patient would have just found another surgeon instead. And of course some of his patients die. Samir qualified in 1985. He’s had time to become accustomed to these departures, which are often predictable but still sudden and unexpected and are followed by no period of bereavement.

Hence, when Samir operated on a nine-year-old boy with a hole in his heart, whose parents were informed of the risks, and the boy died during the operation, Samir should have felt no guilt and he didn’t, he says. He personally told the parents about what happened, explaining which of the ominous scenarios that they had discussed previously became a reality. And the parents talked to him without rancour; he said goodbye to them sadly. Samir has had many encounters like that one.

Samir left the hospital soon after he had spoken to the boy’s parents. He and a colleague ate a light dinner in a restaurant. They gossipped about the hospital’s management and argued about whether a flat tax was a good idea. After dinner, Samir drove home, stopping to buy some DVDs. He flung them on to the sofa in his lounge and then took a shower.

An ordinary day. So Samir was startled when, clad in a towel bearing the name of the university where he trained, he slid open the wardrobe in his bedroom and found the small boy who had died on his operating table that day sitting in the top compartment with his hands over his eyes. The boy returns regularly in unlikely parts of Samir’s flat. Samir leaves when the boy turns up. And the boy never sticks around for Samir’s return. He disappears as mysteriously—through locked doors and solid concrete—as he appears.

So you might think that ghost hunters can help. Their equipment might track the boy in a way that the eye cannot. But there’s a problem with an ultrasound scanner: it detects solid objects, and the ghost of the boy obviously isn’t solid, or it couldn’t sneak into wardrobes or pass through walls.

But don’t rush to the judgement that I’ve been narrowly scientific about all this. I’ve been to see a Muslim exorcist as well, in west London. In Islam, ghosts are known as jinn. Jinn, according to the Koran, are a separate form of life. Allah is quoted as declaring: “Verily We created man of potter’s clay of dark mud altered. And the Jinn did We create aforetime of a flameless fire.” (Al-Hijr, verses 26-27). The Prophet Muhammad enumerates the difference between jinn and men in the same way: “The angels were created from light, the jinn were created from a smokeless flame of fire and Adam was created from what has been described to you [in the Koran].” Stories about jinn can be found throughout the Islamic world and they are common in south Asia, which is where my family is from and where I lived as a teenager.

My grandmother—a small, savvy woman who lived into her nineties—used to tell me that jinn can take the form of insects or snakes. She warned me that it was wrong to kill an insect or snake without first checking whether it was a jinn. I had to say aloud three times: “If you are a jinn, go away.” Only after the third request had been made—and ignored—was it permissible to take up a slipper or a stick. To lurch at the creature before then was to risk harming a being with moral agency. My jinn exorcist was named Faisal. I called him after seeing an advertisement in an Urdu-language newspaper and he was very serious, telling me not to make an appointment if I expected “theatricals.” When I went to see him, his front door was ajar. I pushed on it gently and called his name. He came to the door and stared into my eyes as he shook my hand. Later Faisal told me he was checking whether I was a man or a jinn.

Faisal practises at home. He took me into his consultation room. There was a low table covered with unwashed coffee cups; a computer monitor on a desk; a bookcase of mostly Arabic texts with a bottom shelf of medical textbooks in English. He offered me Arabic-style coffee and I followed him into the kitchen as he went to make it. I noticed that all the kitchen cabinets were open as well as the kitchen window, even though it was December and cold outside. When we left the house later, I discovered that he had left the front door open while we were talking inside and that it stayed open, even at night.

The reason for this was that Faisal didn’t know when a jinn may want to enter or to leave his house. Jinn possession is much more frequent, he claimed, in countries where people lock their doors and windows. Jinn are accustomed to moving around freely; they resent restrictions and the people who create them. “Besides,” he said, “I have nothing worth stealing.”

Faisal was a compelling figure. He asked me the details of my haunting and told me that true jinn possession is rare. Faisal receives visits from parents whose children have the characteristics of epilepsy or autism. The parents want an exorcism but Faisal urges them to go to a medical specialist instead. He has also found that women in abusive or constrictive domestic settings will claim jinn possession as a means of escape.

But unfortunately, Ben has never been around when I’ve visited Faisal, so it’s hard to convince him that I am possessed. Quite properly, Faisal won’t preside over an exorcism in absentia; Ben has to be there to hear the charges against him and the holy words of the Koran that Faisal will use to cast him out.

I blew around £1,500 on a private detective as well. I paid a man in a long coat to follow me for a fortnight. I gave the detective a photo of Ben but he never saw Ben with me. The detective even looked into my flat with binoculars when I was at home but he saw nada, a nil return.

At the end of all this, I ought to accept that Ben isn’t here anymore, that his presence is due to my imagination. I want to believe that. I want to get rid of Ben, to let him go on to the oblivion that he chose for himself. It’s not fair on him that I keep him around. He made his decision; by my weakness, perhaps I am stopping him from achieving what he wanted. But he is my closest friend and no doubt I’m tempted to keep him around. So what I often do is to tell the story that I’ve told you to friends. I tell it in the hope that they will roll their eyes, tell me off, spot the flaws, the better reason for why I’ve seen Ben as I have. Either by their castigations or their explanations, I’ll then get rid of Ben—my dead, useless friend—and I will keep the favour and respect of my live, active, happy friends.

Can I convey to you the frustration that I feel then when instead of spitting out their food and heaping scorn on me, my friends offer sympathy and fascination? They tell me their own ghost stories: a father who saw a ghost, a grandmother who spoke to her sister after the sister’s death. But I suppose it’s unreasonable to expect anything less than sympathy from friends. Plainly, they’re the wrong people to talk to about this.

And so that’s why, finally, I’ve come to you. We’re not friends. This memoir ends soon and we need not have any association past its end. So you’re entirely free. And I’m a stable person, like I said before, un-lonely, so I am quite ready to lose Ben, I’m not anxious about what life will be like without him.

What I’m asking for is your scepticism, expressed brutally if possible. Curl your lip and laugh. Throw this magazine at a wall if you like. Actually that would be ideal. I want to imagine the sound of magazines slapping against walls in quiet rooms, the clump of your feet on a floor as you rise, irritated at how I’ve wasted your time with a stupid story. Go on. Please. This can be the end of Ben, if you decide to make it so.

I have taken up too much of your time already. And, forgive me, but I don’t have too much confidence in the part that you are about to play. You will probably be just like the others to whom I have told this story. But if you can help me, whether it’s because you can diagnose the psychological condition from which I suffer or because you did throw this magazine against the wall and you want to tell me that, then write to me. Like I said before, you’re my last chance for getting rid of Ben.