Our Own Ghosts

I'm quite a fan of Camille Bordas's writing. She has a new book due to be released later in the month titled 'The Material'. Happy to read 'Chicago on the Seine' published by The New Yorker on June 9, 2024.

This narrator Mr White works in repatriation consular services at the American embassy in Paris. He had just broken up with Marianne, presumably a colleague. He definitely has an imagination, or a brain confused by both reality, getting through daily life and living, and managing remnants of childhood 'trauma'. 

Eva Glasper's heart stopped while at dinner during an engineering conference in Paris. Her daughter Lisa wanted her repatriated to Boston straightaway. She didn't want her mother's body to spend a night alone. She offered $500 for someone to sit with her mother's body for a night. The narrator wouldn't be able to accept the money, but he said he would see what he could do.

“I’m not crazy,” Lisa said, before telling me that the hours after death were critical: bodies should not be left alone and uncared for. If the dead were alone for too long before burial, they could be driven to disquiet, volatility, and eternal roaming. She used the phrase “spectral invasion.” 

“My mother wasn’t ill,” she went on. “She wasn’t preparing for this to happen, so her spirit is probably very confused right now. Confused and angry. That’s the worst combination. That’s a recipe for spectral invasion.” 

I perceived no hint of shame in her voice as she admitted to believing in ghosts.

In the end, the narrator himself went, and literally talked to Eva Glasper's body to explain to her why and how she died. But he didn't stay the night. The mortician Romy randomly came in, and sat with the narrator and the body too. Romy was crying because she just broke up with her boyfriend. 

At the same time, the narrator's life goes on. Completely mundane yet random things. He even checked out an American family, chatted with them, and naturally lied to them to make them feel closer to him. And ended up spending 500 euros on a handbag and a necklace for a fictitious wife and daughter. Exactly like how he easily lied to Lisa that his mother was from Boston. She wasn't. 

There were supposed to be ghosts in this story, but the author said that she scraped it. It was too heavy when the narrator became burdened by his relationships with his mother (who believed in ghosts) and father (whom he couldn't communicate with) and unpleasant memories of childhood.

In an interview with the magazine, to the question of whether this story was meant to be eerie, the author clarified,

The words “spectral invasion” are used. It’s an eerie turn for a matter-of-fact story. How do you think about blending the quotidian and the spooky?

When I was in grad school, I took this amazing class with the philosopher Xavier Papaïs which focussed on ghosts. It was in fact called Fetishes and Ghosts—fetishes as in the objects we worship because we think they’re inhabited by spirits, not the other kind. The class blended pure philosophy with anthropology and clinical texts, and it looked at different ways in which human societies deal with ghosts—mainly, the rituals they put in place to insure protection from them. In order not to get haunted by the dead, in order for your dead to become ancestors and tutelary figures instead of ghosts, you have to give them a certain number of things, a certain level of attention. The material covered in that class was so rich and layered that I’ve continued to think about it more than ten years later. “This leaves the door open to spectral invasion” is an actual sentence that was spoken in that class. I guess that, just as “repatriation,” years before, made a strong initial mark on me, so did the phrase “spectral invasion.” It stayed in a part of my brain for a while, and then it ended up colliding with the word “repatriation” in a way that I found intriguing. The two notions made sense together to me, for reasons that I find obvious now but that might appear odd or eerie to most. I liked that.