Page 16 of Earthly Ties

Harriet shrugs. “To be honest, I haven’t the faintest idea. No one ever comes back once they do. They just slowly disappear into nothing. The other one in the room is close. They probably can’t see or hear us at this point, just their Tie. The dimmer they get, they see bright ones, like us, as part of the living. We blend into the haze around their Tie. Speaking with the faded ones gets their attention better than anything. Hearing is the sense that tends to last the longest.”

Interesting. No wonder I can’t focus on anything except Esther. If I’m Tied to her, then she’s my anchor and therefore the focus of my…brain? Soul? Conscience? The longer I stay interested in what’s happening around us, then the longer I can stay here, with her. I tuck that away to add to my voice notes later, when Harriet isn’t here to judge me.

To my surprise, my reaction to learning how to move on is more hesitant than I expected. I glance at Esther, who is politely nodding as a student rambles an answer to one of her discussion questions. Maybe I’m not as apathetic to the idea as I thought; I still have more to learn, I suppose. “If it’s not rude to ask, why haven’t you moved on?”

Harriet looks fondly at Syd, who is raising their hand to join in the discussion. “I want to stick around for as long as I can, to be there for Syd. When my baby was little, I used to sing to her—them!—when they were crying. Or I’d try to push papers around so they’d remember to do their homework. It kind of worked. Made me feel less guilty for dying and leaving my baby behind.”

I can’t imagine Mom caring about me enough to linger in the afterlife to make sure I’m okay. Or Dad for that matter. He’s been dead longer than Mom, so even if he was Tied to me when I was a kid, I’m sure he’d have moved on quickly.

“Is she your Tie?” Harriet interrupts my train of thought with a nod to Esther, who is struggling through an explanation of the Neoplatonic concept of returning to the One, in response to something Syd said.

Distracted by her tentative, stilted lecture, I grimace. Not that I believed in the Neoplatonic One in the first place, I certainly do not feel like I’ve returned to the universal cosmic soul. A lot of my course material has been discredited at this point, though as a skeptic with religious trauma, I never gave credence that anything could be “truthful” in my lectures. I tried to keep everything agnostic, so students could have room for their own beliefs, or to challenge them. Many esoteric concepts are iffy pseudoscience at best, in my opinion. But nineteenth-century spiritualism is useful to teach at the beginning of the semester, to give the students a jumping-off point for their research papers.

For a brief moment, I imagine everything I might include in one final book, all the voice notes and observations I half-remember, if I could somehow find a way to publish it. Beyond the Grave. What a waste of a perfect title.

“I guess she must be,” I finally answer Harriet. “She’s the one who pulls me around everywhere.”

“Girlfriend or something?”

I shake my head, ignoring the surge of longing to have lived a life where I could answer yes. “No. Not even friends. Never even had a real conversation.”

“Secret crush, then?” Harriet’s smile is teasing.

I shrug noncommittally. I refuse to admit having whimsical yet graphic wet dreams about my colleague to anyone, even a ghost like Harriet. Some secrets get taken beyond the grave. And “crush” is a really strong term. I didn’t even know Esther.

I know her now, of course. So yeah, admittedly, I might be crushing hard. Even her worst habits—which I’m sure she’d be embarrassed about if she knew I knew about them—are incredibly endearing. Like how she narrates everything when she’s making a new recipe, as if she’s hosting a cooking show. Or how she whistles out wind sound effects when she makes the bed in that soft voice of hers. Or how she twists the hair on her thigh when she’s upset.

But I’m dead, and she’ll never know I’m watching. A pang of loneliness crumbles within me. How can I be lonely, when I’ve never been so close with someone before?

But that’s just it, isn’t it? I’m close with Esther; Esther is not close with me. She’ll never learn anything about me in return, and doesn’t that make the hollow ache even worse? My one-sided attraction when I was alive was nothing compared to this; I deserve the unrequited crush trophy.

Harriet luckily accepts my silence. “There’s got to be something Tying you to her. For most people, it’s always the last person they care about in the world. Was for me, anyway. My family was all gone. My husband cared more about work than me, and I only really cared for the stability he brought me. My friends stopped talking to me after Syd was born. I just gave up on everything but my baby. Still have, I suppose. One spirit told me I probably had postpartum depression, but so what? Doesn’t change the fact that Syd is my whole world. They have been since the day I found out I was pregnant.”

“If Esther was my whole world, I had a very sad existence.” The words escape me without thinking, but honestly? That tracks. My focus drifts back to my East at the front of the gloomy classroom, on the other end of my spiritual tether, doing her best to teach my morbid passion with her sweet, genuine enthusiasm. The last remnant of my depressing legacy: one kind woman in over her head because of me, and a handful of weird young people in the moldy Castle basement, who are probably regretting their decision to register for this course.

My throat tightens, my eyes burn, and I wish I could turn my thoughts off, drown them in wine like I used to. Heartbreaking as it is, I had a sad excuse for a life. I wish I’d left behind something other than a burden on Esther’s shoulders. Once Cash died, I had no friends, no family worth talking to. Nothing but thankless work, and beautiful dreams of Esther.

Acceptance

Through the thin sound of Esther’s laptop speakers, Gilda’s stern voice grumbles, “Allan, help me understand why all of your Bioethics students failed the midterm.”

Esther relaxes her shoulders a bit, thankful Gilda’s ire is directed anywhere but her. Based entirely on the exasperation in Gilda’s voice, Esther could easily imagine that Gilda’s forehead lines would be deep, and her eyes narrowed, more from exhaustion than frustration. The pop of a cork being pulled from a bottle, and the glug glug glug of wine splashing into a glass drowns out Allan’s rambling excuses. Their cameras are thankfully off for this Friday morning meeting, because Esther’s eyebrows shoot up faster than she can think to mask her surprise.

The background noise falls into silence when Gilda remembers to mute herself again.

If she was Gilda, Esther would also pour herself a glass of wine at nine in the morning. For as small as Gilda could make her feel, Esther never wants to be in her shoes. Herding a dozen out of touch old men to do their jobs sounds miserable.

Despite his defensive explanation blaming the students, the real reason Allan’s Bioethics students all failed the midterm is because he gave up teaching long ago. In a course that actually has concrete deliverables and objectives set by the premed program, his usual teaching style—pacing around with his hands in his pockets, rambling on about whatever popped into his head—is incredibly inadequate. Not that his teaching style is ever particularly effective, but it becomes much more obvious when faced with objective metrics for his students to hit.

But Allan is tenured, so he gets to talk about sandhill cranes and yellow warblers as much as he wants until his retirement. Meanwhile, his students take on crushing amounts of debt to listen to a dinosaur phone it in. Not all of her colleagues are as bad as Allan, but he isn’t much worse than the average professor in the old boys club.

“…students these days don’t understand that they have to read the course material.” Allan drones on. Esther zones out, distracted by the plant in Lucy’s window across the alley. The long stems and fluttery leaves are desiccated beyond recognition, clinging to the sides of the terra-cotta. “In my day, we were expected to teach ourselves, and lectures were an opportunity to learn from an expert! I refuse to hold their hand and walk them through every assigned reading. That’s infantilizing to the students.”

Esther checks she’s muted before she scoffs. In Allan’s day, informed consent for medical procedures was seen as optional. When Allan was a student, racialized communities were still subjected to experimental sterilization as a front for eugenics. Just last week, he questioned why human studies needed an internal ethics review, if there was no chance of physical harm. Allan should not be teaching ethics to future medical professionals.

Not that he ever teaches anyone anything, beyond how to spot wood duck nests.

Though Esther isn’t exactly volunteering to take over Bioethics; she’s still pissed that she has to teach six—six!—intro classes and two seminars. On top of that, she somehow got roped into being an academic advisor, which is so far outside her responsibilities as an adjunct.