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Sometimes, he forgets he’s dead.
It’s not always at night, but it’s only ever when you’re at home alone, and that means night often enough. You’ll lie awake long past what’s reasonable, trying to drink away your misery, and then your front door opens, locked or not, the echo of a sound you heard a thousand times seven summers ago. It’s not something you’d thought you’d ever get used to, but it’s been happening more and more. You’d call it ghost senility, but then you think of his corpse and his very real decay, and you can never quite bring the joke past your lips.
“Hey, Whelk,” he calls, strolling past you to throw himself on your couch. It’s not the dorm, but he still moves like he’s home, like he doesn’t even notice the change. His arm makes an awkward shrugging motion, like he’s rolling a backpack off his shoulders. He hasn’t had anything other than his rumpled uniform in years, but he still checks his non-existent backpack is propped up against the couch before he settles himself down. His other hand clasps the empty air over his ears, drags an invisible set of headphones down so he can speak to you. “Good classes today?”
Everything in you aches. “Good enough.”
The first time you saw him was the anniversary of his death to the day, hour, minute. You’d been trying to get blackout drunk in your shitty little flat, and then he was in front of you, telling you that you should probably slow down. You’d screamed with shock and fear, thrown the bottle at him, and it had glanced off his chest, spilled out amber down his uniform. He’d flickered, just for a second, drenched in mud as well as liquor, half-buried and rotting and hollow, and then he told you in his hurt little voice that you didn’t need to resort to that and walked back out.
Afterwards, you’d rationalised it as a manifestation of grief and guilt, all your bitter feelings finally rallying against you. It was because it had been the anniversary; it was because you’d never been more lonely; it was all his black blood on your hands refusing to be quiet a second longer.
The important part was it was a single booze-fuelled fever dream that you could write off.
The Czerny on your couch now looks at you with one of his half-smiles, apparently not seeing you older, or wretched, or anything other than what you used to be. There could be flattery in there, if you cared to look, but you don’t. “I can’t believe that World Hist test,” he tells you, though that grade stopped mattering when it had become a posthumous A+ with all his others. “How’d you go?”
“Fine,” you tell him. Your mouth is dry, but you force more words out, dull, flat contributions to the conversation. You couldn’t do less for him. “I studied, so…”
“I thought you were out last night?” he says, not quite accusing, because Czerny could never do anything as bold as accuse, or instigate, or fight or put his hands up to defend himself. “Did you take your girl out?”
You swallow hard, have to pause to squeeze your eyes closed and breathe because at least to the rest of the world, your disgrace is fading. Czerny’s revenge takes the pettiest form possible. This is the undead equivalent of a passive-aggressive note. Next time, he won’t even remember. Next time he’ll ask you about the Calc homework, or if you think his Mustang needs a tune-up, or if you’ve heard this cool song he likes, like pop culture didn’t snap it up and play it for the decade after his death. He, apparently, didn’t have many things on his mind when he died. He didn’t get enough warning to come up with anything introspective, and you’ve damned the both of you to small talk.
The second time you saw him was a year and a half after the first, when he’d sat at your kitchen table and acted out some awful pantomime of homework. He gnawed on the air where the end of his pen should be, spent too long staring out the window between sentences, moved his hand in the erratic, tight little loops he used to form his illegible letters.
You didn’t scream that time. You’d asked, “Czerny?” in all the soft reverence your sobriety could offer. It was nine in the morning and you were just clinging to dregs of sleep, and the light from the window made him so insubstantial, washed out and weightless when he turned to you.
It wasn’t a deep, emotional moment. He just waved a lazy hand in your direction and went back to work. That gave you the base for your theory, and you got scraps of evidence ten months, twelve months, six months after that. He wasn’t haunting you. He didn’t even know he should be haunting you. It was a desperate relief, and one you almost threw up in the sink over. He didn’t know.
Sometimes, he does remember he’s dead, and plays it out for you on your kitchen floor. You wake up in the night to a wretched gasping, the ragged scrape of nails on your linoleum, and you rush out to find him, seventeen and dying. He’s done it in the middle of your conversations too, just stopped, like he has suddenly recalled something very important, and then his head snaps around with the impact of the first blow, he falls and hauls groans up from his gut, desperate cries. There was no one but you to hear them seven years ago, there’s no one but you now.
You don’t need to see it again. Every second of his death burned into your head the first time, and you could play the frames against your eyelids. On your miserable, sober nights, you do.
When the rattle in his chest finally quiets, there’s only a moment or two for you to stare at him, your heart as cold as his, and then he’ll be gone. You’ve learned he’ll be back.
“Are we going back to the woods this weekend?” he asks you, rubbing a thumb absently over the heavy smudge on his cheek. You wonder if it’s even there for him, with the same, dull, desolate wonder you now reserve wholly for Czerny. “Weather’s meant to be good. And you had more ideas about the standing stones.”
“Mm,” you say, non-committal. He doesn’t remember when you make plans, and you don’t have the energy to fake it for him.
He glances at you, dark eyes looking tired but not as much as they should. There’s something off in his face, but you can’t put your finger on what; there’s just a little bit less of him, like his own idea of what he looks like is fading. “You don’t want to?”
“I just,” you say, and sigh. You can’t keep doing this. “I just want to get some rest.”
“We can stay in,” he says, immediately, hand shifting from his cheek to rub slow circles against his skull. He gets a lot of headaches now, presses his fingers to his right temple, the same spot every time, frowns in deep, furrowed concentration. He never used to look so serious. Sometimes, when he thinks about it too hard, he’ll remember, stare at you with raw betrayal, always raw, the wound always fresh to him, and he’ll shutter out in an instant.
Once he was just talking when someone skated past outside. The long, low grate of those awful wheels on the pavement had him frozen, memories locking up inside his head until the sound passed. For a moment there was nothing but stillness, in the air, in the room, in him, the total stagnation of death. And then his head creaked around, eyes as black as your hands had been. He’d vanished a second later, but you never felt he stopped looking at you.
His hand drops from his head and he sighs. Maybe you won’t have to see his hurt tonight. Maybe you can just keep talking. And then he slides off your couch and you know something worse is coming, because he’s been doing the same few things for seven years and this is different and that has never been good. Maybe he’s finally going to kill you, too.
“I’ve been thinking,” he says, and you do your best to look like you’re listening and not crumbling internally, “When you come to my place this summer. My parents wouldn’t think it’s weird if we take adjacent rooms.”
No. You cannot pick up where you left off, not after how you left off. He’s staring at you, blank but hopeful, and you feel your throat bulge when you swallow. You can’t decide which option is less painful; playing along, or trying to put an end to this.
He sees your hesitance, mistakes it for something else, something it used to be and shouldn’t have been, the umbrella in your noxious cocktail of regret. He takes a step closer, shy but determined, reaches up to brush his icy fingers over your jawbone. It’s about as much as he ever dared when he was alive, as much as he’d do on his own without your instruction, and Czerny always asked so little that when he finally does demand, you have to comply. “It’ll be okay,” he says, voice brittle. The tips of his fingers reach your cheekbone, cold enough to shatter bone. He’s too close.
You can’t.
“Czerny,” you say, shoving him back a step and bracing yourself against the immediate rush of his shock, and it is not fair for either of you. There is a fissure inside you, wide enough to swallow you up, and you say the only thing you can think in face of Czerny’s broken expression. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
You say it like a mantra, like a prayer, like it can grow to mean something through repetition, like it might have meant something if you’d said it seven years earlier. You say it too many times and that’s what finally sets him off, what sparks the black light in his ghost eyes. You know he’s remembered, and you ache to finally be alone, wait for him to disappear. He doesn’t.
“You killed me,” he says, and he says it like he can’t believe it, in the smallest voice you’ve ever heard.
“Please, stop coming back,” you say, and your voice cracks. He looks at you, and you expect to see his eyes glassy or dead, hateful or betrayed. Instead, they’re wet with bitter tears that he shakily wipes away with a sleeve. It’s the worst you’ve seen yet. “Czerny. I’m sorry. Please stay dead.”
He makes a torn, breathless sound, and then he goes, blurring at the edges until there’s just not enough of him to stay. You wait until the air in your apartment warms and then you let out the shredded sob you’ve been holding onto since he first walked in your door.
At the rate he’s going, you give him a fortnight before he’s back, before he’s blinking up at you and chatting like there’s still things ahead, like his afterlife is pointless if he can’t constantly, constantly remind you of how much you stole from him. You say, “I’m sorry,” to an empty room, and grab for your bottle. You’ll be saying it to him again in two weeks.