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A Happy Ghost

Book by Karl Kristian Flores · 20 quotes · Society, Loneliness, Life

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A Happy Ghost Quotes

“The actor blinked, hurt. He felt that chilly world of duplicity— having been given her benevolence and now her indifference. Few things burned men as much as the cold side of a woman that was once warm. They’d had her once, right in their hands, but now that woman had insensibly disappeared. Will I ever know her again? What have I done? God, how she flipped her warmth altogether like a switch! I hate not knowing her anymore, he thought. The actor tried to meet her eyes, but accepted from her composure she would not be kindled.”

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“He hit her again. “I’m sorry,” she said. The young woman was scared, but this strange, obedient part of her at that moment wanted to get nearer to him. She’d tested him, but now it was time to go home. He terrified her. She wanted to get under the monster’s large arms and look to it for help. While he often hit her, he was capable of sweet nights and being lovely sometimes. She wanted that part of him to return, and maybe she could bring that soft part back if she surrendered. The deep voice always commanded her. It told her what to think and what to do so that even when he caused her pain, she would look to him for pleasure.”

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“It was hard to invest in a person when one saw how things passed. Take the ball player, for example, who dedicates his life, gets injured, and then watches the sport proceed without him. He sits on his leather couch, watching better athletes run across his television screen, younger ones on renovated fields. And he, who sacrificed his sweat, youth, and sanity to the sport and knew coaches, teammates, and even janitors at the stadium like brothers—is forced to still live afterward. His teammates said kind words before a match, hugged him after a goal, but now seem to be focused on new seasons and new goals. He gets left behind. Did none of it mean anything? He cries for the fast world to stop and says, “Slow down. This pains me. We were just here. I used to joke with you. We said we loved each other. Wait for me. Will you just wait for me?” Those hands he shook after a victory could not care for the weeping, broken-footed man hiding in the shadows of his home, once lit by the sun, once the life of the party. When Andrei walked into a job now, or even met someone for the first time, he thought: How long will it take you to forget me?”

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“Sometimes, Andrei would feel like the moon. When he dined in solitude, when he masturbated to the couple at the hotel, or when he finished a book he could tell no one around him about, he felt singular and unaccompanied, like the stupid, radiating circle stuck in the sky. His soul would glow softly, through the darkness, deadened, but there, as if solemnly leaving a light on for anyone to come join him. Andrei would feel so far away from everyone else, like a floating object in space, lost in orbit, that no hand worried about, remembered, or attempted to retrieve.”

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“Sometimes, a feeling would creep over Andrei. And actually, it would creep over the dead man’s son beside him, too. A particular awareness would swallow them both individually, in different moments in their lives, for a few seconds. They would lie in bed and out of nowhere, freeze as they remembered that all sensation would end. Everything they’d worked on would be entirely erased. Movement would cease. The visor of consciousness would be taken off. Andrei, and his new friend, would someday no longer have the capacity to try. And they would no longer remember that they could try. They would simply no longer remember.”

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“People had tried to reel Raphael in from his silence. Their attempts were precisely why he felt so uncomfortable. He did not want to be saved or included. He liked to listen. When he asked a question, it was because he wanted to know the answer. But then they turned it around to ask, “What about you?” and this bothered Raphael, who believed the speaker only returned the question out of manners and so was never a real inquiry. Raphael would be pressured to respond and endure the painful seconds of saying something someone did not want to hear. He would trace their faltering eyes, then his words would crumble into sand, and his listener would never notice because they were not interested in the first place.”

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“From my understanding, this is a matter of value?” asked Andrei. “Like other men have had her leg, so her leg doesn’t mean anything to you anymore?” “No... no, that’s not even it. It’s that you can’t pretend to give someone your leg. Even if it’s just a photo. Legs can’t pretend. You can, but legs can’t. And when someone gets your leg, it’s given. And you multiply that by a hundred, but she has only two. Two little legs. And it’s as if her legs know. The body is not meant to be mass distributed, Andrei. We’re not large gods in Olympus—we need assistance climbing up the stairs and eventually porcelain teeth to chew our food. Thousands of strangers have every part of my girlfriend’s body, down to the ears. But the one thing they don’t have is a woman in the other room sending herself away. They don’t have that,” cried Raphael. “I have that.”

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“Every artist loved their art for the same reason, and this caused no suspicion to the world. They regularly say: 'My field captures the human experience.' 'And what is the human experience to you exactly?' questions O’Hare. 'I want to be a storyteller who inspires and expresses their imagination.' 'But how does your chosen art differ from other mediums?' questions O’Hare. 'I am a quiet observer who innately loves philosophy.' But here you are screaming this in a room, cries Dr. O’Hare. 'I am beyond grateful for the people I’ve worked with who made this the greatest collaboration I could have ever asked for.' 'But how did you collaborate—with thought and rehearsal?—or did you just perform some damn thing and sign both your names on it?' asked O’Hare.”

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“He frowned with difficulty at everyone’s quick transition. He felt something crack in the room. It was like the feeling an artist got when he closed up his gallery, walked upstairs to his living quarters, and stared at the window to watch his former crowd rush to party next door and forget his exhibition one martini at a time. It was like goodbye. There was an unsaid, incomprehensive quality of unfairness to endings. They lacked a transition. The guitarist’s identity, for example, was in her strumming ten seconds ago, not when she finished and looked up at the seduced crowd as “her” again. The singer’s heart was housed in his lyrics, not in his thick-accented voice that rooms never understood.”

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“A man, perhaps an inch shorter than Andrei, sensing the height comparison, slowly passed him. The stranger still wore an N-95 mask. The pandemic ended three years ago, but Andrei identified why masks were still worn by others. While millions had died from COVID-19, others silently and ashamedly rejoiced in the virus’ demands. The requirement of face masks made it mandatory for everyone to cover more than half of their face. And for those who disliked their face, they, for nearly two years, had the chance to go out in the world and not be ugly for once. Suddenly, while they were not beautiful, they were not hideous. Neutrality can do so much for someone. This period was like a gift for those with horrid teeth, large features, cystic acne, injuries, scarring, and discoloration. Never before were so many people looked straight in the eyes. Masks were some people’s only chance to show who they were. And now, when the pandemic had ended, they were back in the shadows. Large groups of people, however, as Andrei had seen, still wore them, beneath the excuse that the virus could still return. "I would love to kiss one of you on the cheek, he thought.”

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“He yawned, his face performing that universal mixture of a smile and a frown as he stretched his arms out. One was not sure why faces did this—either waking people were activating their muscles in preparation for the day or more soulfully, the smile was gratitude for life and the frown to follow was recognition of what that life entailed.”

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“Andrei was in an elusive period in life, much like a snow leopard. He’d spent a couple of years having successfully filtered out all that was terrible and ugly in his life, from old shoes to lifeless people. However, the purification finished and he had not yet found the glint of gold to replace the damned. He had nowhere to place his lifted foot. Instead, his moral foot hovered, awkwardly, a crepuscular flesh, trembling every night, unable to set itself in a correct place. He lived in that hanging imbalance every day, and some would say this period of searching takes a while. But to him, all it did was take. Not a while. The peace of his life just takes. And takes. And takes. While Andrei may not suffer from the heat of stress or common negativity that improperly placed feet do, he lived cold, in a void, without the luxury of finding a worthy arrangement for his leopard paw.”

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“Pornography did not serve him either. Andrei used to have his personal kinks and fetishes, but after a while, nothing could get him off. For a long time, the only videos he would search were the ones titled: “Who is she?” The only thing that vitalized his self-play was the prospect of some woman on the earth no one knew of and could not find. There was something infinite to these tapes, not the appearance of the girls, but the agitating dissatisfaction and momentary access of a not-so-innocent stranger who men innocently lost forever. It consisted of poorly recorded videos, posted from a smartphone or webcam, and a desperate number of melancholy comments trying to search for the mystery woman. There were plenty of these recordings. But it broke Andrei even more when eventually he knew all the girls no one knew.”

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“He did not want to write a book about it. He’d tried once, attempting a novel, even some poems, but they broke his heart and he could not bring himself to art anymore. 'So the only way to end this painful curiosity is to transfer it to someone else? To fictionalize it? To talk about it and still live the same problem tomorrow? To appear as if you’ve beaten it just because you can identify the problem?' He would sob in museums, where he sought refuge but escaped in horror. 'Fuck that—art’s not an answer to life, it’s a disguise.”

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“He kissed the wall and bent his knees. For an instant, he grew ashamed and sad. He himself was not touched very often. Andrei sensed how pathetic he must have looked, but he was much too lonely to care. He sped up and could feel the devil cheering, “Lower. Go as low as hell,” and he limboed his way into that hell. And it was freezing and it was hot. One knows they are truly gone when their own tears start to lubricate their self-play. Andrei kept going, stroking wet, painfully, finishing at the same time the man did. And then the door opened.”

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“Andrei avoided the internet as well and this evasion only added to his gloom. He loved music, especially old songs, and he loved movies, of all sorts. If he had the patience, sometimes he would read. While most of the pages he turned bored him to sleep, certain books with certain lines disarranged him. Some literature brought him to his feet, laughing and howling in his room. When the book was right, it was bliss and he wept. His room hushed with serenity and indebtedness. When he turned to his computer, however, or took out his phone, he would inevitably come across a viral trend or video that took the art he loved and turned it into a joke. The internet, in Andrei’s desperate eyes, managed to make fun of everything serious. And if one did not laugh, they were not intelligent. The internet could not be slowed and no protest to criticize its exploitation of art could be made because recreations of art hid perfectly under the veneer of mockery and was thus, impenetrable. It was easy to use Chopin’s ‘Sonata No. 2’ for a quick laugh, to reduce the ‘Funeral March’ to background music. It was a sneaky way for a digital creator to be considered an artist—and parodying the classics made them appear cleverer than the original artist. Meanwhile, Andrei’s body had healed playing Chopin alone in his apartment. He would frailly replay movie moments, too, that he later found the world edited and ripped apart with its cheap teeth. And everyone ate the internet’s crumbs. This cruel derision was impossible to escape. But enough jokes, memes, and glam over someone’s precious source of life would eventually make a sensitive body numb. And Andrei was afraid of that. He needed his fountain of hope unblemished. For this reason, he escaped the internet’s claws and only surrendered to it for e-mails, navigation, and the weather.”

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“He had tried so hard that day. Andrei looked toward the smoke, searching for a face, and found none. He knew there was no reward for his life. It would continue to be excruciating for him to venture into the world with stakes and yet receive no friendly consolation. No audience. There were only things and him. The state of aloneness was the condition comets came with. Oh, what a hand could do! A friend! A touch on the shoulder! But this loud torment of silence would serve as the rhythm of a much larger song that played in him—the tune of ceaseless risk. The song commences at the first streak of undertaking. And the lyrics of progress are never congratulated. How could others toast to a victory they did not understand? That they could not see?”

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