10. Specter
Specter
Ananda Lima
“Think of humanity,” he said, “as a great oyster shell. Our first task, Soares, is to extract the pearl—that is, reason.”
—MACHADO DE ASSIS, The Allienist (translation: William L. Grossman)
“So be careful, be very careful.”
—PRINCE, 1999 Yahoo! Internet Online Music Awards
I fed it words. Words I brought home in pamphlets, packaging, paragraphs in ripped magazine pages.
I poured them into its empty mouth. I whispered stories, lyrics, memories into its hollow ear.
When I walked into my room and turned on the bedside lamp, there was the rubbery alligator snout peeking from the side of the wooden bookshelf.
It liked to wait for me on the old leather chair in the corner, all cozy and amberlit, snuggling under the copper-brown crochet throw blanket.
The alligator head seemed to be its favorite.
From afar, it looked like an ordinary mask, a person in a costume.
But peering into the holes in search for the eyes, the giant mouth, there was nothing there.
An oblivious hollowness shaping the rubber as a human head.
If I paused, unsure how to continue after I told it about my day, the paper I was working on, the news, it would nudge me, placing its hand with the enormous curving nails on my lap, like a puppy wanting to be petted.
And I gave it more, until it was full. Sometimes, after it was gone, I found scratches on the leather seat cushion and arms of the chair, from its kneading as it fed.
Of course, at first I was terrified. I wasn’t sure it was real.
I thought I was losing my mind. Before I had seen it for the first time, there was the occasional glimpse in my peripheral vision of a blurry, shadowy figure reflected in the mirror that disappeared when I looked at it straight on.
A lullaby played, barely detectable, under the songs in my playlist as I walked to campus.
When I rewound the songs, the lullaby was always gone.
And the creepiest instance up to then: a flickering of the fluorescent lights, and the lullaby again, now all mechanical sounding, barely audible in the crackling speakers in the Linguistics department’s computer lab.
I tried to avoid the computer lab after that.
But I had a paper due, and I didn’t own a computer.
It was the early 2000s and I was a graduate student.
My stipend was just enough to live in a dingy place and to eat, as long as I attended the functions on campus that offered free pizza.
I was on a fellowship and on a student visa.
I couldn’t mess around with my grades. Also, I wasn’t sure I fully believed it then.
A haunting is a little like other bad things in life: the impending cancer diagnosis, the eviction, the cheating spouse—you may suspect it but still not bring yourself to believe it would actually happen to you.
Or maybe it’s more like living through a coup d’état.
The signs are there, but they are contradictory and hard to follow.
It all seems so unlikely, so absurd. It not happening would seem like the rational thing to expect, until you can no longer deny it.
I told myself it had all been coincidences or my imagination.
But as I walked the empty corridor at Campbell Hall, I begged whatever powers there might be for my classmates Ana or Zach—or anyone human and not ghostly or monsterly—to be there, working on their papers, too.
But I knew they were not usually around late Tuesday nights.
When I entered the room, it was dark and empty.
I turned the light on. Nothing out of the ordinary: a row of clunky beige monitors along the right wall, matching desktop towers, and rolling office chairs.
On the opposite wall a couple of writing desks and a large gray printer.
I sat in front of my usual desktop in the middle of the row and turned it on.
As it powered up (it took a while back then), a noise behind me startled me.
I turned around slowly, heart racing, afraid to look.
But it was just the printer turning on. I noticed I had placed both my hands on my chest, like my grandma and her friends, sitting in foldable chairs in front of their houses, and whispering the latest rumors about the kidnappings or other horrible crimes supposedly going around their small town.
I laughed at myself, being so scared of nothing.
Probably just some old printing request that got activated when I turned the computer on.
I got up and walked to the printer. Pages started pouring out.
They were completely blank. I hoped the old thing had not gone out of toner.
Maybe someone had put the paper through the feeder facing the wrong way and the request got held up in the queue.
I walked back to the computer as it continued spitting out its growing pile of emptiness.
As soon as I sat down again, the printer came to a halt.
The fluorescent lights above turned off.
For a second, I thought it might have been a power outage.
Back in those days, people from my country didn’t think the US could have power outages, or people living in the streets, or long waits to see a specialist. But by then, I knew those impressions were wrong about these things.
So maybe, yes, a power outage. But then the left monitor came on.
I yelped. I was terrified, but strangely also embarrassed thinking somebody might have heard me, or maybe everything was a joke and someone was hiding, laughing at me.
I sat very still, my left hand back on my chest, my heart racing.
Then another monitor came on, followed by another: every row of monitors turned themselves on one by one from left to right.
I was screaming now; each time they powered on, the embarrassment completely replaced by terror.
On the screens, a classic-looking video game appeared, a Pac-Man-like thing.
Except that instead of Pac-Man, there was a little alligator prancing through the labyrinth.
It ate all the terrified ghosts and cackled.
Then all the screens went dark, except for the one on my right and the one on my left.
Each displayed a green pixelated circle, as big as a dessert plate, surrounded by darkness.
A third circle appeared on the monitor right in front of me, casting its green light on my face and trembling hands.
The three circles together made a triangle, like the holes on a bowling ball, forming a rudimentary face.
Pitiful pixelated eyebrows appeared, making it look desperate, afraid and screaming, mimicking my expression.
It was mocking me. Then the eyebrows inverted and turned angry.
I dropped my notes, my empty vending machine coffee cup, and ran.
As I was exiting, the two eye circles squinted with pleasure. I could hear the face laugh and laugh.
I got home, not knowing what to think, but relieved I made it out of the computer lab.
My roommates were out. I was focusing on keeping my hands steady as I grabbed some water from the refrigerator, when I closed the fridge door and saw it there, right next to me, for the first time: the alligator head, the hollow eyeholes.
Its body then was that of a skinny old woman—think the evil stepmother transfigured into the witch in the old Snow White cartoon—hunched over her basket of apples.
I screamed again and dropped the glass water bottle on the floor.
It didn’t break, but the water was leaking everywhere.
I fell backward, managing to hold myself up on the kitchen counter.
The thing was coming toward me, reaching with long, yellowing nails.
I thought it wanted to eat me. Or maybe steal my head to replace the nothingness floating above its neck.
Unable to move, I scrunched my eyes closed, squeezed them tight, and leaned away from the thing heading toward me.
Then, nothing. It reached past me, toppling a basket of red apples, which rolled down onto the floor. It grabbed my roommate Meg’s vegetarian cookbook, which had been right next to the fruit basket, then proceeded to rip the pages and push them down, one at a time, into its large rubber mouth.
The mind has an incredible capacity to get used to things.
And just because you start being visited by a monster doesn’t mean you can forget about rent or keeping your immigration status.
You’d be surprised, after the shock and the sickness, after thinking it’s not right, it’s not fair, and why me, and this shouldn’t be happening, and not knowing how to go on, etc. , etc., somehow you just do.
The next day, I was too afraid to stay home, so I went to class to be surrounded by my fellow phonology classmates.
I was relieved to sit through a dorky discussion on combining autosegmental and optimality theories to account for a tonal language dataset.
Not the crew I would pick to defend anyone in a horror movie (in a heartwarming spelling bee movie, perhaps), but it was better than being alone.
I asked for an extension on the paper, and, eventually, I wrote it.
It took me a while to be brave enough to return to the computer lab alone.
But soon I found that as long as I continued to feed it my papers, my ramblings, my words, the terrorizing was kept at a manageable level, and I could go on somewhat like before.