Hiring a Ghostwriter
She was perfect, a pale shade of pale, with delicate translucent fingers and the faintest hint of nightshade on her breath. She glided past me down the corridor of the building where I work, and a frost spread through my veins as she turned to me and sadly smiled. Her teeth twinkled like icicles in moonlight. Oh, I had to have her, I had to have her right away! She was so slender, so ethereal, so mute.We had a position open at my office for a ghostwriter. I tried to tell her this as she drifted by, but she turned away from me slowly and passed directly through a brick wall. I touched the cool bricks and pressed my lips to the mortar, whispering my distress. "What is your name, what is your name?" But the bricks made no reply.
All that day I sat before my computer in the basement and churned out one executive speech after another. Then I started in on the executive correspondence, and after several hours of typing "I am in receipt of your letter of March 15th . . ." or "On the behalf of all of us here at the firm, I would like to congratulate you . . ." or "It has come to my attention that you are interested in a position with our firm . . ." or, most enervating of all, "Please accept my heartfelt condolences . . ." my fingertips began to go numb. The life of a ghostwriter is no life at all, a colorless facsimile of the real life executives lead, and I knew in my bones that I had to escape from the basement very soon or I would be suffocated by my meaningless existence.
However, in order to do so, I had to first find my replacement. One of the unwritten laws of the ghostwriting business is that once you become a ghost, you can't return to the world of light of until you have found someone to take your place in the kingdom of shadow. I had wallowed for weeks through a Stygian stream of cover letters and resumes sent by sad and lonely spirits who desired to replace me with an eagerness that bordered on madness, but not one of them could write an intelligible sentence, let alone a coherent paragraph, and all seemed too full of the zest for life to be satisfied with the kind of work that would be required of them. I began very quickly to despair of ever finding my replacement. And then I saw her, my vision, my phantasm, gliding down the corridor like the dream of a dream.
How could I summon her to my office? I tried closing my eyes and envisioning her seated at my desk and jotting down notes with the phone pinched between her shoulder and ear, her wisps of chalky hair fluttering as she spoke. When I opened my eyes, of course, she wasn't there.
So I tried typing her a letter:
Dear Unknown One,I have been trying to get in touch with you ever since I saw you gliding down the corridor. Why don't you come work here? The pay is respectable and the benefits are good. You don't get much vacation, but the hours are reasonable, and you can work unsupervised most of the time. To tell you the truth, I am rather desperate at the moment to find a replacement. All of the other ghostwriters have left us, and now I am the only one here. If you agree to take my place, I will give you anything you want: my computer, my desk, my telephone, and my potho. What more could you possibly want? All I ask is that you write for another, an executive of good standing in the business community, a man of substance and high character, a true leader in the eyes of many, a near god in the eyes of some. He will never meet with you or thank you or even acknowledge your existence as long as you keep his letters free of typos and his speeches free of facts. Surely the terms I offer you are better than what you have been given in Limbo. Isn't it time you settled down to do some serious ghosting?
Sincerely,
Anne Onnamus
ABCDEFG, Inc.
Director of Executive Communication
I was pleased with the letter until I printed it and held it in my hands; then it dawned on me that I didn't know where to send it. Oh, this was going to be much more difficult than I had thought! I was on the verge of tears when an eerie light began to suffuse the room and the fragrance of night-blooming jasmine wafted towards me. "Oh, my darling!" I cried out in a passion bordering on ecstasy, "At last, at last you have come!"
She appeared in a shimmering veil woven of spiderwebs and bejeweled with ice crystals. She whispered something so softly that it sounded like the far-off tinkling of bells. My whole being seemed to resonate with the sound. And then she lay a frosty finger upon my lips and bade me not to speak.
"I have come . . ." I thought I heard her say as I began to swoon from the power of her presence, "I have come to replace you, Anne Onnamus, to release you from your thankless servitude. May your retirement be an eternal state of rest." Tears stung my eyes as she spoke, and time crept as slowly as a glacier. I felt as though I were drifting off to sleep, a cold and bitter sleep, a numbness bordering on oblivion. Scarcely able to breathe, I peered into the glittering ice caverns of her eyes and struggled to stay awake, but her power was too great for me. I had no choice but to succumb.
Now I lie on my back in a cold dark place filled with echoed whispers and muffled laughter. Far off I hear her talking on my telephone or tapping on my computer keyboard or pouring water into my potho pot, and I wonder why I ever desired to be replaced. I sometimes struggle mightily to stand up and walk toward her in the darkness, but I can't even lift my head from the ice on which I lie. I often hear her speaking to other ghosts -- it sounds as though there are dozens of them -- and it makes me so sad and lonely that I could scream. But whenever I try, my breath freezes in my throat, and all that escapes my lips is a tiny swirling blizzard.
Anne Onnamus anne@starchamber.com The StarChamber |