My day job is another matter. Delia doesn’t charge her dead tenants as much as she charges her living ones—charges us just this side of nothing, in fact—but I still have to buy cat food and pay my share of the gas bill.
I make it to the coffee shop four minutes before the official start of my shift, already dressed for work, even down to the green apron with the chain logo on the pocket. We’re not supposed to take those home, and technically I never do; my “real” apron is hanging in my locker, where it’s been since the day it was handed to me. But spills during my shift are inevitable, and if I never wear the real thing, I never need to wash it. Ghost clothing doesn’t get stained. We can always re-create it clean when the need arises.
My manager is behind the counter, steaming milk. He barely glances up as I position myself behind the register. “You’re late,” he says.
“Not quite,” I reply.
“Time is money, you know.”
I don’t reply, just plaster a smile across my face and turn to wait for a paying customer. He loves that phrase, “time is money,” and uses it every chance he gets. Sometimes I wish I could make him understand how wrong he is, that time is time and that’s enough, because time is more precious than diamonds, more rare than pearls. Money comes and goes, but time only goes. Time doesn’t come back for anyone, not even for the restless dead, who move it from place to place. Time is finite. Money is not.
A man walks in, tailored suit on his shoulders and caffeine craving in his eyes, and my shift begins.
It’s not so bad, slinging coffee for a living. I don’t mind the minimum wage; unlike my coworkers, I don’t eat or go on vacation or have kids to clothe and feed. I have no college loans to pay. Sometimes I envy them those things. They get to live, and I got to drown while I was still in my teens. No matter how much my existence looks like living, it’s not. The absence of food in my refrigerator and clothes in my closet attests to that. I work to pay the rent and keep the heat on and feed the cats, but I could stop tomorrow, and I wouldn’t suffer for the change.
The customers are a steady stream, never quite overwhelming, never going away for more than a few minutes. It’s soothing. I let myself sink into the rhythm of punching orders and scrawling names on cups, passing them to my manager when he’s behind the counter with me, filling them myself when he’s not. Some of the customers smile and drop their change in the tip jar. Others barely peel their eyes away from their phones, locked in the increasingly fast-paced race of text and response. It looks exhausting. Nothing makes me feel the age that’s on my tombstone like watching people who look older than I do spending their lives staring at a screen.
My dislike of modern technology is a me thing, a lack-of-exposure thing. Danny has a smartphone, prepaid so that it didn’t require a credit check, and he loves it like a child. He spends more time reading comic book news and swearing at strangers than seems strictly healthy to me, but it makes him so happy, who am I to judge?
I pause with a scoop of coffee beans lifted halfway to the grinder. Danny has a smartphone. Danny has a phone number.
This could change everything. I finish the drink I’ve been preparing on autopilot before turning to my manager and saying, “I need to take my break.”
He blinks. I’m infamous among the staff of this store for never taking my legally mandated break unless forced to do so, which happens maybe twice a week, and never when there are customers in the store. I can see him struggling to come up with a reason to say “no,” and so I place my left hand on my lower belly and raise my eyebrows meaningfully. He blanches.
“Go,” he says, and I’m gone, walking as fast as I can toward the door that leads to the back, to the small room with its industrial-strength dishwasher and its underutilized sink. More, with its door to the break room, where a largely disused rotary phone still sits on the counter, a local-calls-only relic of a bygone age.
It’s younger than I am. It will do. I put my hand on the receiver and pause, closing my eyes, to recall Danny’s number.
Ghosts don’t have photographic memories unless we had them while we were alive. There are things that death cannot change. But we have a flexible relationship with past and present; we can move between them to a degree, as long as we don’t try to change things that have already happened. The universe is not willing to put up with that sort of thing, and smart ghosts don’t mess with the universe.
The world shifts around me. I am standing on a corner with Danny, him speaking animatedly about all the features of his new phone. He is a mountain of a man with the enthusiastic heart of a little boy, and I am surprised by the wash of love that rushes over me when I see his face. It’s not romantic, not sexual; it’s filial. He is family, part of the congregation of the dead who treat Manhattan as their cathedral, and I don’t want him to be gone unless it’s because he chose to move on.