The ghost looked crafty for a moment, then relented and said no, I was stuck with her. And she was pleased for me when you phoned me the next day to ask me to translate the next paragraph of my great-grandfather’s book. You hung up as soon as I gave you the paragraph, but the ghost said you’d come back for more, and you did. You began to talk to me a little after each day’s translation, asking me questions about myself and my day and whatever music happened to be playing in my bedroom whenever you called. “Glad you like it—I don’t know what this song is called, but it’s probably quite a bit older than we are. The truth is we’ve got a nostalgic ghost for a DJ around here,” I’d say, and you’d laugh, thinking I’d made a joke.
The ghost observed that I was going to come to the end of my translation one day.
“Yeah, but come on. We’re only halfway through the second chapter. And after this book there are fifteen others by the same author.”
The ghost asked if I thought my great-grandfather would be impressed by this use of his hard work.
“Oh, ghost—what have you got against love?”
Nothing, said the ghost, sounding injured. She had nothing whatsoever against love. She was just saying.
The ghost showed that she was on my side when she heard you mention the news that you were one of the two final-year students who got to select a newcomer to mentor. “It’s going to be fun. We get to watch the applicants through hidden panels in a soundproofed room so they don’t hear us booing or cheering them.”
This terrified me, but the ghost breathed on the windowpane and wrote FOR GO IT on the misted glass.
“Who’s the other student?” I asked. “Not green-haired Joe?”
“Haha, no. Though he does put on interesting Punch and Judy shows. Dad says he’s going to be very good one day. The other student’s a boy called Gustav Grimaldi. I don’t like the way he performs; it’s scruffy. And I’d say his puppets have a nihilistic spirit, if you’d understand what I meant by that.”
“Nihilistic, eh . . . sounds bad,” I said, pinning the phone to my ear with my shoulder as I googled “nileistic.”
“Sometimes his puppets won’t perform at all. He just lets them sit there, watching us. Then he has them look at each other and then back at us until it feels as if they have information, some kind of dreadful information about each and every one of us, and you begin to wish they’d decide to keep their mouths shut forever. There’s no entertainment in it at all, and I don’t understand why he chooses this way to put on a show when he knows so many other ways. He shouldn’t be allowed to choose any new students. If there’s anyone bound to introduce unsavory elements into our group, it’s Grimaldi.”
“Good thing I’m extra wholesome then. Do applicants have to have experience with puppets and all that?” I asked, and when you said that in fact your father liked people to come to the field fresh, I asked if fifteen was too old to start.
“Not if you’re serious. Are you?”
“As serious as I can be. I don’t feel one hundred percent sure that I’m not a puppet myself,” I said.
“No wonder I like you,” you said. The ghost gave me a high five.
“You need a puppet,” you went on. “Competition for places is quite fierce—people do what they can to stand out. Some people make their own puppets. I did, out of paper and pins. The thing fell apart mid-performance, but I built that into the story.”
—
MUM AND DAD wouldn’t be thrilled by my new career ambitions. Don’t forget your Uncle Majhi . . . Majhi the mime . . . and ask yourself, do we really want more people like that in our family? My parents worked a lot—no need to bother them with something that might not work out. The thing to do was gain admission first and talk them round later. I bought a brown-skinned glove puppet. He came with a little black briefcase and his hair was parted exactly down the middle. The precision of his parting made me uneasy; somehow it was too human at the exact same time as exposing his status as a nonhuman. I got him a top hat so I wouldn’t have to think about the cloth hair falling away from the center of his cloth scalp. You gave me a hand with some basics of ventriloquism, even though you definitely weren’t supposed to help—it was then that I began to hope that you’d stop saying I wasn’t right for you—and I taught my puppet to tell jokes with a pained and forlorn air, fully aware of how bad the jokes were. Sometimes you laughed, and then my glove puppet would weep piteously. When you took the glove puppet he alternated between flirtatious and suicidal, hell-bent on flinging himself from great heights and out of windows. I noticed that you didn’t make a voice or a history for the puppet, but you became its voice and history. I’d have liked to admire that but felt I was watching a distressing form of theft, since the puppet could do nothing but suffer being forced open like an oyster.
—