Today's post is about ghosts. Here are four swift introductions, and then a story. See also this.

Queen Victoria - "Up On The Rooftop".
Queen Victoria is also called Nick Malkin and The Endless Night comes in a black package without any information, just a sepia photograph that makes me think of Jandek, but the music is warmer than that (for all its desolation), and Malkin's moan does not sound as sad as it makes itself out to be, like someone who's waiting for the day when he can garage-sale all his Leonard Cohen records while his wife plays inside with their little girl. [MySpace]

Phosphorescent - "Cocaine Lights".
A eulogy, a hymn, a folk-song. In the raga of piano, guitar and tambourine you hear voices open, just singing, no words, and you hear these groans wobble & sour, all the death shaking out from their loose, live lungs. [buy]

The Harpeth Trace - "Who Knows Where You Are".
I do not know if there is mist in Los Angeles, but if there is not I suspect the Harpeth Trace spend their evenings on the beach, watching the stars begin to pinprick, wishing that maybe the Clientele's London fog will make its way through the seven seas to wrap them up where they stand. [buy/West Coast tour]

Burial - "Raver".
If you fall down at the nightclub, 3:00 in the morning, streetlights and taillights and twilights smeared in your eyes, and you hit your head, and your dreams exte-e-end, Burial would be playing behind your sleep. [buy]

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On Valentine's Day, when Lila was twenty six, she stopped hearing ghosts. It didn't happen until their dessert was coming out, something with coconut and silken tofu, but all of a sudden the restaurant around her went very quiet and she could hear the Thai music a little better and hear Jake a little better and hear the couples beside them a little better. And she didn't think anything of it, really, because the dessert was fucking good and she was trying to decide if she'd go back with Jake after dinner and it wasn't until much later, when she was walking home alone along the ice, that she realised wait wait wait wait wait wait where did they go?

When she was a little girl, Lila thought that everyone heard ghosts. Their whispers were part of regular life, like pins-and-needled feet, or the wind, and she did not pay much attention to their murmurs. But the third time she mentioned them to her parents, they began to ask her questions. And her answers led to concerns, and the concerns to late-night conversations, and to psychiatrists, and doctors, and ultimately to a wary wonderment in their eyes, not quite sure what to say to the daughter who heard spirits.

The ghosts didn't speak in words; they moaned and murmured. Their sounds made Lila think of rivers, rushes, bass saxophones, her dog's happy panting. It was a very soft cacophony, sometimes quiet and sometimes loud, but always there. At her grandmother's wake the voices were so low they almost disappeared; at the bus-stop outside St-Laurent metro, they were inexplicably deafening. When Lila kissed Gregory Pavlovich in sixth grade, the ghosts shook bells, such gentle bells, more daffodil than carillon. At dance-clubs they groaned under the soundsystem's beats, like the swerve of blood through her veins.

But now, on February 14th, they had vanished. The night whistled down Parc Avenue and there was nothing hidden under the wind. Lila slipped into a phone-booth and closed her eyes. She could hear cars skating by, a siren's distant cry, and silence. Back at her apartment every room was barren. The curtains hung unmoving at the window and she lay in her empty bed waiting, just waiting.

The next morning, the ghosts had still not returned. Nor did they return on the 16th, 21st or 28th of February. Lila trudged to work with head bowed, concentrating, straining for whispers. She sat for two hours outside St-Laurent metro, stamping her boots to keep warm. She slipped into the throng at Zoobizarre, one night, and pressed her ear to the speaker as if she might jar something free. And later she stood shivering atop Mont Royal, ankle-deep in snow, imagining a voice that would rise up & out of the skyline. No voice came.

Again she went to doctors, twenty years after those initial appointments, but this time with a different question: where did the voices go? She spoke with friends, former lovers, telephoned her parents in Florida. On a Sunday morning she found herself at church, bored out of her mind, and light streamed in through the stained glass.

"I used to hear all these voices," she said to Jake. "I don't know what they were. Who they were. But they were there, they were there. You know? Everywhere. And now it's all gone. Like someone turned off the sound of your heartbeat, or if you lived by the ocean and someone turned off the tide."

"Maybe the dead died," he said.

"Maybe they weren't the dead," she said.

Grocery shopping felt hollowed out, like all the smells were gone. Drinking felt hollowed out, like there was no one to catch her if she got too drunk. Sleeping felt hollowed out, all the dreams like paper. She seduced Jake, brought him cherries and honeycomb toffee and kisses, and she brought him back to her place, and she wrapped him in her legs, and in the midst of her flush she clenched her fists because she knew, she knew, she could hear and she knew - nothing had changed.

And what can I say, really, except that the ghosts never came back. That Lila spent the rest of her days listening for the departed voices, hunting for wisps of them in other things, carrying in her heart a nostalgia that was lonely and unsure, wondering as she aged if she had imagined it all, whether she had ever heard these things, and who believes in ghosts anyhow, and probably it was some ear problem, and who cares, and the murmurs of spirits have nothing to do with our greatest joys, and what's the point of searching for things that don't dwell here with us, and why not just love & live here, with bodies and birds, and forget the forgotten things, just live under sky and over earth, in winter and summer, and be happy and sad and mortal, yes and mortal, (and when we die we will be home again).

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If you live in Montreal, I still say you should come to this concert tonight because the bands are amazing and the price is right and many of my friends will be there so probably yours will be too. Spake the Grandmaphone: oh yes oh yes, uh huh, yup, yes, damn straight.