Of course it was nearly dark, of course the music stopped abruptly so that the only sound was the pop-and-tick of tires over the gravel driveway, of course the headlights picked up and threw uncanny shadows against the house as Jim and Mona pulled up in the moving truck. They sat in the cab without talking, the truck not even in park yet, looking at their new house, taking in its molting grey shingles, its wickedly sloped veranda, its turret with boarded windows on the northeast corner. A ring of maples surrounded the roof like guards, spiky leaves flushed red in their last, grasping days.
Stirring to life, Mona hopped out before Jim even unbuckled. She lit the last of a joint she’d been nursing all day, and then she was at the house, key in one hand and joint in the other, couldn’t even remember fighting across the lawn through the thick deep honey-colored grass, with Jim shouting something at her back—“Hey, wait for me!”— that she ignored. The key stuck in the lock, and the front door only opened after she applied all her weight. Inside it was dark but when her eyes adjusted she saw that the living room was oak paneled, with a pressed tin ceiling and a fireplace large enough to roast a vast army of chickens. Deep scratches in the floor of the foyer seemed to spell something out, although in no language she understood. She took a deep drag as she walked across the dim room, accompanied by the sound of creaking floorboards (of course the floorboards creaked) and dropped the end of the joint in the fireplace.
The house was old and tumbledown, two states to the north, and as far from an interstate as it was possible to get, but Mona and Jim had bought it anyway. Until that day they’d only seen pictures on the real estate website where Mona found it: awkward angles that highlighted pestilential stains on the carpet and walls that were indecent with mold. Even still, the house seemed to offer something that Mona wanted to take—and Mona was getting good at taking what she wanted. She wanted it because she’d spent all the gruesomely hot days of that summer working from home on the bed in their non-air-conditioned studio apartment. She wanted it because the bar scene was getting old and because her plan to be a painter, to display her art in pristine settings full of rich people nodding obsequiously, had not yet materialized, and in fact showed no signs of doing so in any future she could reasonably imagine. On top of all that, things with Jim would be better with more space and aside from its faults the house was big, three stories plus an attic. Mortgage payments were half what the rent was on the studio, and that was how she finally talked Jim into it. Jim never could turn down a good deal.
When she went back outside Jim was standing near the truck and stretching, lacing his fingers together and raising his arms over his head. His back cracked, and Mona laughed and called him an old man as she reached up to ruffle his hair. Together they watched the sun crawl below the hunched backs of the hills and the sky turn pink and apricot—colors too earnest to use in a painting but that in nature Mona forgave. A crow flew close enough that she felt the breeze from its wings before it swooped up and landed with a croak on the roof of the house.
“Does the electricity work?” Jim asked, looking at the crow.
“I…I don’t know, I didn’t even check.” It hadn’t occurred to her that something as fundamental as electricity might not work, and now she had a stricken look on her face. Jim laughed at the stricken look and grabbed a box to bring inside.
The house, of course, was haunted. During a beer break, under the emaciated yellow light of the only fixture in the kitchen (the electricity did work, although fitfully, like a sleeping infant), the ghost of a woman appeared before them. There was a long moment of silence, and then Mona numbly dropped her Miller High Life. As a wave of foamy liquid spread across the cracked linoleum, the ghost introduced herself. Her name was Heidi. She talked for some time, explaining her death (officially, a mix-up with a dosage of laudanum) and her situation (the unholy physics that presided over such things forced her to remain, always, in the house). She gesticulated with long pale fingers as she spoke.
To Mona, Heidi looked more like a sommelier at an innovative restaurant—someone who would tell you that a wine tasted like running through a field with your mouth open—than a ghost. Her hair was cut in a french bob, and she wore a linen smock, the kind of woman who had she lived now would have eventually transitioned to an entirely Eileen Fisher based wardrobe. It was a specific look, but slightly more bourgeoisie than what Mona would have expected from a ghost. Mona stirred to life and mopped up the spilled beer, wondering if her joint had been laced with hallucinogens.
“So you’ve been here, how long?” Jim asked. He was adjusting quickly. Mona struggled to open another bottle.
“Far too long,” Heidi said. “You can’t imagine the years. Hundreds of years, more or less. It would have driven me crazy without my practice.”
Jim thought about it for a second and then said, “Oh, you’re an artist?” He pushed his hair out of his eyes and looked at Mona. “She is too. Or was, maybe? Trying to be? What do you think, babe? How would you describe it?” Mona smiled thinly but did not answer.
“What’s your medium?” Heidi asked.
“Um, painting?”
“What mode do you work in?”
“A little bit like Cindy Sherman does the Dutch masters,” Mona said, almost automatically. It was the way she’d described her work when she’d applied to grad school and thank god she’d been rejected everywhere because at least she’d never been forced to actually paint whatever that meant. “But like Jim said, I haven’t figured it out yet.”
“Well try dying. That’ll give you time to figure a lot of things out,” Heidi said and coughed out a sound that must have been a laugh. After a beat Jim laughed too.
“What can you do?” Jim asked.
“What do you mean?” Heidi said.
“I mean, ghosts can, like, walk through walls and stuff?”
Almost before he finished speaking, the kitchen went dark, and then they watched as Heidi grew as pale and moist as the belly of a fish. A black vein appeared on her forehead and tarry blood vessels were now visible on her cheeks, as though her skin was turning increasingly opaque in an effort to exhibit whatever wretched matter lived inside of her. A dark line in her forehead pulsed and, a sickening second later, broke the surface of her skin. The vein paused, vibrating slightly in the cool air, then detached itself with a wiggling motion. Freed from its bondage, it wormed its way to her scalp, where it disappeared amongst the hair that had, somehow, become a writhing mass.
The next moment the light came back on and Heidi was as before, tired looking and strange and kind of chic. “Does that count?” she asked.
“Good enough for me,” Jim said. “Oh, and that reminds me, babe,” he continued, turning to Mona, “we’ve gotta set up the WiFi so we can work tomorrow.”
Over lukewarm cups of instant coffee on their second morning, they decided that a ghost for a roommate was something they could live with. More importantly, they decided that Mona would quit her temp job. It was Mona’s idea but Jim came around in the end. It didn’t pay enough anyway, the mortgage was cheap enough already, and that way she could work on the house, or coordinate the work on the house when it was beyond her abilities. Most of it was beyond her abilities, Mona thought but didn’t say. The foundation was crumbling, floors were slanted, and a mushroom colony was moistly thriving in the cave-like room that had once been the butler’s pantry. The grayish, shedding paint that covered everything, inside and out, was almost certainly lead-filled and the chimney listed this way and that in high winds. Still, that afternoon Mona opened a beer and gamely fell to tearing up the stained carpet, which exhaled brown cotton balls of dust as she worked. Over the next few days, she set up a composting toilet and removed sections of crumbling drywall and pulled rotten wainscoting off the walls and set out humane rat traps. When she’d caught enough of the creatures she donned yellow latex gloves and a mask and gingerly drove a county over to release them in stubbled gray fields, watching as they blinked and scurried.
Soon the house was less livable than when they’d moved in. Jim barricaded himself in the one viable room downstairs—it had fleur-de-lis wallpaper that Mona was itching to scrape off—and worked on his endless spreadsheets. Heidi, meanwhile, spent her time in the attic making her art. She called them her Mix-Ups and the attic was full of them, things like flattened basketballs attached to antique egg beaters and threadbare stuffed animals sprouting water bottles where appendages should be. Heidi’s favorite Mix-Up was one that resembled a hunched vulture in shape and size but was constructed of a broken flowerpot, a deflated pillow, an ancient flip-flop and several tennis balls cut in half. Everything was mounted together to create a gravity-defying, knee-high goblin-like creature that seemed needy to Mona in some oblique way.
Heidi had also commandeered a room in the turret for a painting studio and talked Mona into providing the canvas and the paints. The world in which Mona thought of herself as a painter was further away than ever, so she shrugged as Heidi began setting up easels. With Jim and Heidi busy, Mona focused on other things. Some days she devoted herself virtuously to the house, scraping her knees against the rough wood as she pulled up mangled trim or coughing as she removed an ancient and defunct wasps’ nest from the hall closet. Other days she scrolled on the internet for hours, watching videos with millions of views where people rated cookies according to how much they resembled Tom Cruise. Sometimes she read interviews with artists (sparingly because it was an activity that made her feel vertiginous, as though she was looking down from a great height). Mona had begun thinking she would explore performance art, although she was not sure, yet, what the performance would be. It might take some time to find, but she was certain there was something inside her worth excavating.
After a few weeks of this routine, Mona convinced Jim they were ready for a housewarming party. The wires that hung from bare studs and the fact that there was still a bucket instead of pipes under the kitchen sink were actually a positive thing, she explained—it meant they could have a real old-fashioned rager. Jim agreed (Jim always agreed) and once that decision was made they had hushed discussions about Heidi, torn between offending her and scaring their friends. In the end, on the morning before the party, Jim asked Heidi if she wouldn’t mind not telling anyone she was a ghost. With a little blush, her pallor could be addressed.
“Are you embarrassed by me?” Heidi asked mildly. Mona and Heidi were sitting on stools around the improvised kitchen table that had sawhorses for legs while Jim dried the breakfast dishes.
“No, it’s not that we’re embarrassed,” Mona said as she picked through a bowl of nuts, looking for the cashews. “It’s just that it might freak people out.”
“Maybe it could be fun to pretend to be alive for a night?” Jim asked over the banging of the dishes as he put them away. Jim never did anything quietly.
Heidi shrugged. “Maybe when I first died. But the entire concept of living is simply not interesting to me anymore.”
“It’s just for the party,” Mona urged. “This way you can talk to people about your art. If they knew you were a ghost that’s all they’d want to talk about.”
“Fine, I’ll do it,” said Heidi, with the air of someone making a great concession.
The night of the party people filled the shell of the house and then spilled outside, where there was a grill full of meat and a portable speaker devoted to a playlist Mona had spent hours curating. Mona found that after spending so much time in her own orbit the gravity of others was destabilizing. She blinked at them all, reminding herself of all the rats (hundreds of rats) she’d relegated to soggy fields, and then she joined the fray, hugging and laughing with all her friends who had made the trek from the city.
By ten-thirty, Mona was drunk and stoned. She went to the bathroom and in the time it took her to pee the house somehow became too crowded. Everywhere she looked people talked over each other loudly or shrieked with feigned laughter, mouths gaping, vacant eyes. Holding on to the wooden frames of the walls for support, she wandered upstairs and found more people (more people, everywhere more people) gathered in a little crowd in the turret room. Mona hadn’t been there since Heidi set up the studio and now she was surprised to see finished paintings leaning against the walls: blocks of color tracking across a canvas that reminded her of a Frankenthaler except without the precise, satisfying mess; an Alice Neel-esque portrait; a bright blue Hockney pool. People were nodding seriously and among them Mona saw Florence, from her undergrad BFA program, leaning in to look more closely at the Alice Neel knock-off. Last month Florence had been at a residency in Wyoming and next month her work would appear in a group show in Tokyo (facts Mona had gathered, regretfully, from social media).
Heidi was explaining to everyone that she’d set herself the challenge of replicating a hundred great paintings, one for every year of the last century. She’d already finished passable versions of a Mondrian and Schiele and a Hopper, she said, gesturing to paintings Mona hadn’t even noticed. Now she was working on a smaller (but to scale) El Guernica. Florence told Heidi to be sure to document her progress, and that the project could use its own Instagram account.
“What about, like, originality? Authenticity?” Mona asked. She felt unsteady on her feet and leaned against the doorframe as she spoke, her skin as inflamed as a sunburn, the skin on her face tight and loose at the same time. She swallowed a hiccup.
“Isn’t that the entire point of the project?” Florence asked.
“What is?” Mona said.
“That authenticity is an outmoded concept. That to wrestle with the issues of our day we need to recycle thought itself,” Florence said. To Mona this seemed almost entirely wrong.
“But doesn’t replicating an outmoded canon just reestablish its power?” Mona asked.
“Or it brings attention to the way the entire concept of a canon is absurd. Like, it’s creating a funhouse image of the canon, you know?” Florence used air quotes on the word canon.
“Yes, that’s it! You really understand this, Florence,” Heidi said. The room fell quiet as everyone absorbed the martial grey of the miniature Picasso in progress; Mona alone was looking at Heidi. For a brief, chilling moment, as Mona watched, the ghost’s face turned into a skull. Chunks of putrid skin fell from her cheeks and her dark hair was long and tangled and half rotting, like hair pulled in clumps from the drain. Then she was back to normal, breaking the silence, saying, “My Mix-Ups are my first love, but I was interested in trying something new. You’d be surprised at how much changing your perspective can lead to generative work. You should try it, Mona.”
Of course Mona took Heidi’s advice. With a bottle of wine and a joint, she went up to the attic. Noise was muffled up there and soon she forgot entirely about the party downstairs. She started slowly, moving Heidi’s assemblages around and wiping the dust onto her pants. Then she began painting. She painted and painted, oblivious to the drips she left on the floor. Hours passed; she peed into a jar. She painted until her hand cramped and she switched hands and kept painting. When Jim looked for her the next afternoon, shouting her name throughout the house, she was disheveled, almost unrecognizable, but she’d finished her first important work.
“Mona? Are you okay? This was the last place I thought you’d be,” he said, side-hugging her. It had only been twelve hours but she’d already forgotten the way his body generated warmth, the way his body was a familiar animal.
“Look what I did,” she said, sweeping her arm out to encompass Heidi’s Mix-Ups, all of them now entirely covered with paint.
The new layer on top of the sculptures gave them a strange energy; crouched together in the stuffy attic they were uncanny, almost alive. Everywhere there were odd limbs and juts and rounded things that looked like bellies, the paint on top forming a kind of skin. The one that had been Heidi’s favorite, with the flowerpot, was painted a pinkish-taupe with dark splotches that gave it a rakish look. Each of the Mix-Ups were entirely unrecognizable from their former selves; she had transformed them, like an alchemist, into new, odd things, devoid of all context. Here it was, finally—something Mona had unearthed from her obtuse, unyielding interior. Something she could show the world.