Vengeful Spirits

A COVID ghost story

Nuvia has an uncanny sense of smell. My wife’s nose has always been exceptional, but it seems like it’s getting sharper as she gets older. Scents that might seem strong to other people are overpowering to her. If Nuvia were to be trapped inside a Yankee Candle factory, she’d probably drive a forklift through a wall to escape. Lately, her chief tormentor has been cigarette smoke. Even though in the past Nuvia would enjoy an occasional cigarette, like maybe once a year, the smell of cigarette smoke has become noxious for her, and she is not subtle about her displeasure when she encounters it.

So when we arrived at our lodgings in Belfast just before Christmas, Nuvia could tell right away that the previous occupant had been a smoker. That would be my friend Tom’s Aunt Margaret who passed away last summer and left her house to Tom. (It’s more complicated than that but I’m simplifying for the sake of clarity.) We settled into the house and made ourselves at home. It was a cold and rainy day and we put the heat up too high for too long and the smell of smoke became too much for Nuvia. For me? Not so much. This is Nuvia’s curse: to be saddled with a partner whose senses are getting duller by the day.

Nuvia opened some windows and lit some candles and was very vocal about the odor, which Aunt Margaret didn’t care for. No, she didn’t like that one bit. While we were playing a board game at the kitchen table, Nuvia had the sensation that someone was blowing smoke in her face. The next morning, I headed down the stairs to make a cup of tea and as I rounded the corner into the kitchen I thought I saw someone sitting in the chair that Nuvia had been sitting in. I did a double take but it was just my jacket and scarf draped over the chair. We later found out this is where Aunt Margaret liked to sit and look out the window and, of course, smoke.

There were a few other unusual occurrences. The smoke detector went off a few times for no reason. The trapdoor to the attic swung down as Nuvia was walking by. By that point we got the message. This was Aunt Margaret’s home and we were her guests and if we didn’t like it we could get the hell out. Fair play.

Nuvia outside Aunt Margaret’s house

It started as a tickle, a slight pressure in the throat. It could be anything: the cold air outside, the dry air inside, thirst. But if your partner is sick you know what it is before it is what it is.

After Christmas, we headed to Cushendall where we’d rented a cottage to share with Tom and his family. Across the street, were two of Tom’s siblings and their families. Four families, two houses, with considerable mixing between the two. Not to put too fine a point on it, but Tom’s mother Muriel, Margaret’s sister, succumbed to COVID-19 last year, and every precaution was taken. Everyone was doubled vaxed and boosted. Also, many people had already recovered from their own bouts with COVID. Still, we played it safe. We ate our meals at home and did most of our activities outdoors, going for long hikes in the bracing sea air of the Antrim Coast.

We had another weapon at our disposal: lateral flow. This is what they call antigen testing in Northern Ireland. The at-home test kits are widely available for free at every pharmacy. (This is what universal health care looks like in a crisis BTW.)

Almost immediately, Nuvia caught a cold. Very mild at first but it worsened as the week went on. Someone else in our household was getting over a cold so it wasn’t a total surprise. Plus, it was winter in Northern Ireland. We were out in the cold, traipsing about in the wet wind, the wet fog. Even when it wasn’t raining per se, the weather was still wet. We were hothouse flowers from Southern California. Of course we were going to catch colds! We were confident that’s what it was because the tests kept coming ups negative. Until they didn’t.

Someone in the house across the street tested positive. Meanwhile, I received word that a friend in Dublin had also contracted the coronavirus. We started mentally calculating who’d been in contact with whom and for how long. To be safe, half the families returned to Belfast, leaving Nuvia and me alone in the cottage, but it was too late. The next day, the tickle in my throat became an all-out clobbering of my immune system and I tested positive. Nuvia, who was now over her cold, continued to test negative. The irony is that while I was singing the praises of Mark Lanegan’s COVID memoir Devil in a Coma in last week’s newsletter, the virus was making its way through my system like a vengeful ghost.

Cold and, possibly, infected

What does COVID-19 feel like? Not to sound like a Fox News talking point, but it felt like a nasty cold. I’m fairly certain I’ve got the Omicron variant. Runny nose, headache, sore throat, cough. The whole buffet. I couldn’t drink enough water. The sinus pressure was intense. At one point I felt this relentless pressure behind my right eye. I didn’t actually think my eye was going to pop out of its socket but it sure felt like it. I shuffled through my symptoms one after the other so that I rarely experienced multiple symptoms at once but by the time I got through with one the next one started up again. Its was exhausting. This lasted a couple days.

I drank a lot of tea with honey, took vitamin C supplements, and gargled tequila. Nuvia had brought a bottle of Patron as gift for Tom and would gargle with it when she came in from our long walks by the sea. When my throat tightened up, she urged me to do the same. As a recovering alcoholic, this seemed dangerous. I used to love Patron. I have fond memories of wandering around Nuvia’s grandfather’s rancho in Valle de Guadalupe by the light of a full moon, playing fetch with the guard dog and drinking Patron. I’d throw the ball as far as I could, hide in the shadows, and wait for the dog to find me. I remember very vividly my boracho brain realizing these were shadows cast by the moon. Moonshadows! Whoa!

I gargled the tequila and good lord was it nasty. The smell, the taste, everything was horrid. The second time I did it I nearly gagged and violently ejected a slug of clear mucus from my nose. So, mission accomplished, I guess, and if I ever relapse it’s not going to be with tequila. Fuck that.

I don’t know if I had a fever but the first day of symptoms I had chills and I was very, very tired. One night I slept for over twelve hours. My dreams were rabbity and strange. I dreamt I was trying to get onto a college campus for a presentation and no one would let me in or I was being chased through the streets of Belfast by unknown agents. Locked out and on the run, the usual juvenile delinquent dreams.

I’d been reading Keith Ridgway’s A Shock, which is full of secret rooms, gaps in the walls, spaces between spaces that we pretend aren’t there and don’t talk about—like the attic here in Aunt Margaret’s house. What’s up there, I wondered in my semi-delusional state.

I woke up and when I opened my eyes I saw what looked like a solar eclipse, a black sun ringed by white flares, all black and white, like something out of a comic book illustrated by Jack Kirby. I closed my eyes. It was still there. I opened my eyes and it was just a room. I closed my eyes and the black sun began to fade.

My old friend vertigo came for a visit, adding another layer of disorientation to the party. My emotions were all over the place. I thought about my mom a lot. My mom and Tom’s mom were friends. Near the end of her life, my mom woke up from a dream she had. She told me she thought her mother, whom she hoped to see in heaven, would like Muriel. She talked about the afterlife quite a bit at the end. Her hopes for what might happen. Her fears. I haven’t believed in heaven or hell since I was a little kid, but when your body becomes a prison that keeps letting you down, the idea that death is the mechanism that lets your essence escape into a new form must be very appealing. Believing in the afterlife is like plotting a prison break: the odds are slim but it’s gotta be better than the million indignities that make life a living hell, so why not?

I thought about Aunt Margaret and her hard, hard life. No one who lived through the Troubles made it without experiencing unspeaking violence and staggering losses. No one. Like my mom, Margaret lost her mother at a young age and became very independent, very headstrong. She had a son to whom she was devoted but he died young. Life was not kind to Aunt Margaret. You could say that at times it was downright cruel.

When we told Tom about the unusual activity at Aunt Margaret’s house, he was skeptical. Not because he doesn’t believe in ghosts, but because his aunt loved having people over and was happiest when she had guests in the house. Our being there, Tom was certain, would have made his aunt happy.

I wanted Aunt Margaret to know that I was very grateful to be her guest, that it was a blessing to recover in her home. And, also, maybe, if there is an afterlife, make sure that my mom and Tom’s mom are getting on all right.

View from Aunt Margaret’s

Before we returned to Aunt Margaret’s, I made Nuvia promise not to talk about the cigarette smell while we were in the house. Nuvia laughed because usually she’s the one in tune with the mysteries of the spirit world while I’m more of the logical agnostic type.

But as a lover of horror movies, I know that when a group of people enter the home of a vengeful spirit, the snooty interloper who says things like “OMG this place needs a decorator” is usually the first to die. Nuvia was slightly annoyed by this because she never likes to be seen as being of a type, but in the world of horror the rude guest is definitely a type and she rarely makes it to the third act.

“You would like that if that happened to me, wouldn’t you?” she said.

Of course I wouldn’t like that. What kind of question is that? But I would appreciate the irony. Vengeful ghosts thrive on spite, which is like oxygen to the Irish. The Irish survived 800 years of English oppression, and do you know how they did it?

Spite. If spite is the desire to cause offense, the Irish variety is more inward-looking. Irish spite is the effervescence of stubbornness served with a measure of meanness and a dash of humor. To make the most of a bad situation because it will irritate those who will only make it worse.

One of my mother’s worries about the afterlife was that certain people she didn’t like might slip through the pearly gates with a last-second confession. In other words, she’d go to heaven if they let her in, but she wasn’t going to be happy about it if so and so was there. That was my mom in a nutshell, getting ready to nurse a grudge for all eternity.

I don’t think Aunt Margaret is the vengeful type—the real vengeful ghost in this story is the coronavirus—but knowing her nephew as well as I do, I’m sure she’s capable of a little mischief. So I made a deal with her. If she opens the hatch to the attic again, I’ll go up and take a look around and if there’s a doll sitting upright in the corner, staring back at me with its cold dead eyes, I’ll say, “You got me, Aunt Margaret. You really got me.”

And if you never hear from me again, please know there’s a haunted doll in an attic in Belfast, and I’m trapped inside.

Entrance to the Underworld?

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