4 - About Transparent Eyes and Startling

I woke up and instantly forgot the dream I’d been having. I looked at the clock first, then at the strong sunlight coming through the closed curtains. I stretched.

Today, I was going to put my mother on the phone with my grandfather’s ghost. I must have dreamed about something similar. For a brief moment, I closed my eyes toward the strong sunlight coming through the curtains and tried to remember my dream.

“Charlie, I’m visible, right?”

I opened my eyes with a start. There had been a deep silence in my room before my grandfather spoke, and my ears had quickly grown accustomed to that silence during the ten minutes since I had woken up.

‘’When did you get here, Grandpa? Why are you suddenly talking in the middle of all this silence? Let me know you’re there first. Cough, clear your throat, do something, then talk.’’

‘’Yeah, but you’re just sitting there watching me like you’re lying in wait. It’s like you’ve ambushed me. In situations like this, people usually let you know they’re there first. Say you came home and caught your son in an inappropriate situation with his girlfriend. He didn’t notice you and kept going. What would you do? You’d make some noise first, maybe make a door-opening sound, cough or something. If someone is there and you don’t know they’re there, they should quietly make their presence known first.’’

‘’That’s your problem, Charlie. If you get startled that easily, that’s not my problem. People shouldn’t get startled that easily. A person’s threshold for being startled shouldn’t be someone suddenly speaking when you didn’t know they were there. You get startled when the TV suddenly falls to the floor, or when someone suddenly comes into your room in the middle of the night and starts screaming, but, I don’t know. I never get startled, for example. It takes a lot to startle me.’’

I didn’t want to get into a long argument with my grandfather so soon after waking up. But I filed the matter away in my memory, intending to bring it up again later and argue that I had every right to be startled.

‘’Okay, so why did you come this early today?’’

‘’Am I wrong? You tell me. Is it my fault that you got scared out of your wits? And now you’re telling me how I should make my presence known. Son, I’m a fucking ghost. Do you really think you know better than me how to make my presence known?’’

My grandfather had completely woken me up. I sat up in bed, getting into a sitting position so I could argue with him. He acted as if he’d made a good point with his little analogy. He seemed to think he’d invented the rules for suddenly appearing without scaring someone, and that pissed me off.

‘’Yes, of course you’re wrong. Just because you’re a ghost doesn’t mean you’re going to know this better than anyone else. It’s a matter of courtesy, of being considerate.’’

I heard a sharp exhale. Since I couldn’t see his head, I couldn’t read his facial expressions. He knew that too, so, to show how annoyed he was, he made some kind of gestures with his hand that I can’t quite describe now.

‘’Kid, they literally train us for this over there. Are you crazy? There’s no way you know more about not startling people than I do. It’s impossible.’’

“How do they train you for that?”

‘’They absolutely do. There’s this experienced ghost. He’s conducted observations on the subject. He’s appeared to a lot of people and studied their reactions. He was a professor of sociology when he was alive, too. He spent years studying this subject after he died. He’s challenged other ghosts countless times, saying, ‘Watch this, I’m going to talk to this guy without scaring him at all,’ and he’s won every single time. So, he’s a very, very experienced ghost. Smart and well-educated, too. Anyway, he gives regular training sessions, and you can attend if you want. He’s been giving a lecture once a month for the past three years.’’

‘’You’re just making this up to prove yourself right.’’

‘’If you want, I can call him over. He can come and explain it himself.’’

‘’You don’t have a head, of course. I can’t see your face, so you can bluff all you want.’’

‘’No bluffing. Say the word and I’ll call him.’’

‘’Okay, go ahead, then. How are you going to call him, telepathy?’’

I was the one bluffing, trying to expose his lie. If what he was saying was true, I didn’t actually want him to call this other ghost. I wasn’t curious about another ghost. I didn’t want to communicate with another ghost, become part of his social circle, or have him see me as someone he could talk to. After all, they were beings who could go wherever they wanted, whenever they wanted. The idea of another ghost knowing I existed would make me feel unsafe. On top of that, they could become invisible; if some new ghost I didn’t know or trust found out about me, I’d be uncomfortable with the possibility that he could come over to me at any time, or that he could be around me without my knowing. I’d become paranoid.

‘’No, I was bluffing. I don’t actually know anyone like that, and we can’t just call other ghosts whenever we feel like it. A system for calling them hasn’t been developed yet.’’

‘’So you’re admitting that I was right.’’

‘’Let me think about it again.’’

While I waited for my grandfather to think, I saw a pair of eyes in the area where his head should have been. They were two transparent eyes, looking from side to side, blinking rapidly. They weren’t very distinct, but I could still make them out if I looked carefully. I don’t think my grandfather knew that his eyes were visible. It felt strange. A body and two transparent eyes floating in the air. It was an aesthetic image.

There were two reasons I didn’t want to tell him about it right then. First, I liked the image. The improvised movements of a pair of transparent eyes that didn’t know they were visible gave me the feeling that I was watching a beautiful scene from a film, and I wanted to keep watching. The second was that the subject would change completely, and my grandfather’s being in the wrong would get lost in the middle of it.

My grandfather stayed silent for two or three minutes. Luckily, we hadn’t made eye contact, and he hadn’t realized that his eyes were visible.

‘’My defense on this subject slipped my mind because I made up that other story. Let’s argue about this later. ‘’

After that, he slowly became transparent and disappeared. I kept stealing glances at his eyes; they were still visible. He was looking down at the floor as he left. I couldn’t tell whether he was sad, angry, or thoughtful. I hadn’t found out why he had come at that hour, either. But I had enjoyed seeing my grandfather at that hour, with his transparent eyes.