The docents show the two mediums, a woman and her boyfriend, the coins left on the governor’s writing desk and the turned-over top hat in the lobby. The mediums tread carefully, heel to toe, over dark floorboards. When they rest eyes on the water spot on the ceiling, they give the impression of turning their gaze inwards in search of new flutters within their bodies.
But how do two mediums meet, anyway? On an app? Or at a medium convention in a hotel in the South? Among swaying grasses, near the whiz of a highway, with a truck moaning its horn from time to time? Yes, that’s how. The grasses there are something from another century, save for that clearing near the hotel with the empty coke can and a condom wrapper. Trojan, Raw.
The mediums say three ghosts inhabit the house, two fighting sisters and a man. Are the sisters fighting over the man, the docent Elizabeth asks. The female medium cuts her with her eyes. Not all problems stem from a man, she says. Elizabeth sinks. She won’t say another word now. The male ghost is slim and sickly, anyway, the medium continues. A waif, a nonentity. Elizabeth, who loves sickly men most of all, wonders what it means to be a ghostly nonentity.
Yes, these two mediums had been the ones to do it on the ground near that hotel. She had initiated—she was violent, fervent, like the ghost sisters—pulling him by the collar onto the packed, hard earth. But why there? Hadn’t they had rooms inside the hotel? Maybe the energy of the grounds boomed so large it overtook them. But wasn’t she concerned that all the mediums, in their boxes of rooms, could feel them doing it outside? Or did she want precisely that? Did she want them to feel the sensation rising inside her? Then again, perhaps mediums don’t feel the energy of humans as intensely as that of ghosts. Perhaps humans are more subtle. Hard to imagine.
When they enter the sick room upstairs, Elizabeth is afraid to say that she was standing right here a month ago when a man called out her name. From the children’s room. She thought it her brother’s voice at first, but her brother lives two towns away and has always declined tour invitations. Since then, she has begun singing to herself, low enough so as not to irritate the ghosts and loud enough to block out any noise that might reach her. She even calls her mother now and then and speaks for hours about the latest news. When on the phone, she feels emboldened enough to use her full voice.
Another docent asks whether the ghosts are related to the governor’s family. None are, the female medium says quickly, too quickly. Moreover, one should not think of ghosts as having died in the house they inhabit. Ghosts are like us—they drift from place to place and find a structure in which to dwell. But the male medium, who can feel the male ghost flickering in the corner armchair, says: Actually, the male ghost came to the house when alive, seeking healing of some kind. He lay in the sick room for days. A substance was injected into his veins.
The female medium tightens her jaw. She hates it when he contradicts her. She hates it when he starts sentences with “actually.” And one wonders about their life day to day, so different than that first weekend in the isolated hotel, when everything vibrated with exhilaration and possibility, when they did not yet know the patterns that made each other run.
Now they play chess on their thrifted chairs with ghosts, in between runs to the store for toilet paper and eggs, and she always wins, and he always loses. And she wishes that once, just once, the ghosts would throw him one so she could stop averting her eyes from the whole pathetic affair.
