“This city breeds yous: hey yous, me and yous, sick of yous, f___ yous. As I’m sure you can understand, I gave up on names a long time ago.”
I wrote Ghost Town in 2012 for Hanna Liden’s show of the same name at Maccarone in New York. It was published in this book by Karma in 2013.
It’s a very short story told from the POV of an unnamed ghost who haunts the ancient tenements of downtown NYC, observing and occasionally taking possession of the living as they go about their days, nights, dreams and blackouts.
It was a counterpart to Hanna’s show of photos and sculptures, which amounted to a sort of memento mori of NYC. Still life images of the ubiquitous plastic bags and cheap black umbrellas found at every deli and often seen clogging trash cans and curbs were displayed alongside portraits of black-painted flowers wilting in vases and black leather jackets strewn into space. There were cast concrete sculptures of beer cans and drowning rats, middle fingers, balaclavas, and backpacks, seeming like traces of a marginal, transient and faceless character conjured from the filthy city sidewalks.
There was something natural to me about this concept of a disembodied presence haunting the streets of NYC. I’d felt this way myself on more than one occasion, my identity dissolving amidst the intensity of millions of other lives flowing like time across the city’s amplitude. I wrote Ghost Town practically in one sitting, and it’s still one of my favorite things I’ve ever written. You can read it in full here.