At least, I hope this is what Heaven will be like. One thing no one told me when I was first trying to adapt to existence as an earthbound spirit is that the longer I spend here, the less I want to go. I’m still working to earn my time, still fighting to get to my sister, but as the years have passed me by relatively unchanged, finding the finish line has become less and less urgent. I never want to stop helping people. The thing I used to do to make myself feel better about being a thief of time has become the thing I do because I want to. I want to make the world a better place. I want to keep people here—but among the living, not because they died too soon. I want to know that somewhere out there, somebody is living and breathing and enjoying their life because I convinced them to hold on long enough to find joy again.
I’ve been dead for forty years, and with every day that passes me by, I’m a little more certain I don’t want to move on. This is the place I’m supposed to be. And yet I keep earning the time I need to move me closer to my dying day, because being a part of the world means letting the world be a part of me, too. I’ve known ghosts who stopped taking time, who decided they’d rather be haunts than people. There’s nothing pretty about what happens to a spirit who decides that’s the way to go. Nothing pretty at all.
New York is an expensive town, and getting more expensive with every year that passes, but the dead get by. My landlady died in 1934, nearly fifty years before her husband. Way she always tells it, she knew he couldn’t take care of himself without her, and so she came back before her family was done sitting shiva, moved right back into her kitchen, and got on with her life. She took time from her husband for years, keeping him with her, up until the day when he was hit by a crosstown bus. It was a freak accident, the sort of thing no ghost could have predicted or prevented. He had already been long past his intended dying day, and he’d had nothing to linger for—he and she had both expected that when he moved on, so would she.
Only, she still had tenants, and there was his funeral to arrange, and it seemed like she blinked and thirty years had gone by, still anchoring the neighborhood with her family-owned, rent-controlled building. “It’s worth millions now,” she confessed to me a few years back, both of us standing on the roof and watching the stars. Being dead means not sleeping much. “Millions! As if one little old lady needs millions more than she needs to know her people are sleeping good under roofs that don’t leak, with electrical sockets that won’t catch fire in the middle of the night. People think too much about money, and not enough about taking care of each other.”
“They’re alive.”
“They won’t be forever.”
She was right about that. No one lives forever. Maybe that’s why the living are so eager for things like million-dollar buildings and abolishing rent control: because they don’t understand that they have more time than they think they do. They’re swimming in the lake and I’m standing on the shore, and it’s hard to understand the water when you’re in it.
My locks haven’t been changed since the early eighties. There hasn’t been any reason to; it’s not like I have anything worth stealing. I dig out my keys and let myself inside, enjoying the simple normalcy of the process. A key, a tumbler, a doorknob, the metal beneath my fingers; these are things that don’t change, no matter how much time flows past me. Like me, locks remain essentially the same, updating slowly when they update at all. There’s something to be said for that, especially in the here and now, where everything changes so fast. So fast. This city is not the one it was when I arrived, new ghost-girl from Kentucky, stumbling and confused. If I reside here another ten years, it will be another hundred cities before I go. That’s the beauty, and the horror, of New York.
My fingers find the light switch and flick it on, illuminating my living room, the shabby furniture rescued from street corners and carted home from thrift shops and dusty secondhand stores, the bookshelves built of brick and unfinished pine. Everything is primary colors and bright patterns, like a Barbie house made large enough for me. It’s the apartment I dreamt of when I was a living teenager, standing at the beginning of the seventies and believing that this, here, this playhouse paradise, this was where Patty was living; that she slept on tie-dyed sheets and opened her eyes in the morning to crystals hung on fishing wire, throwing prism patterns on poster-covered walls. Nothing else could have been good enough for my beloved elder sister. She told me all about it in her letters home, before those letters darkened into quiet complaints about how loud it was, how she never saw the stars.
Before those letters stopped.