Spirit Level by John Kessel (F&SF, July-August 2020) opens with Michael, the story’s middle-aged and maritally separated narrator, waking in his parents’ house in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom. On his way he sees the ghost of his wife Lauren—who asks why he left her after twenty-eight years, and demands the truth. She then walks into the living room and disappears:
He touched his hand to his head. He took a deep breath.
Yes, he was awake. He went to the bathroom, relieved himself, then returned to the bedroom.
He told himself it was some vivid fantasy, but lying on the air mattress, hearing the furnace turn on and then off, he felt a bone-deep uneasiness. Lauren was not dead. She was alive and living in the house they had lived in for the last twenty years. p. 53
The rest of the story sees Michael haunted by the ghosts of other failed or troubled relationships: the first is his (dead) father, who ends up striking Michael with a spirit level; then his (live) teenage son Trevor, whose ghost visits just after Michael has sex with his current girlfriend, says, “I smell her on you . . . You stink of her” before fleeing.
Alongside these encounters we get more backstory about the failure of Michael’s marriage and his unhappy relationship with his father, and we also come to see that most of Michael’s relationships are unsuccessful (we see this at his work, with his current girlfriend, and with the care staff where his senile mother lives—and whom he hardly ever sees). We begin to realise that Michael is part of the problem, something put in sharp focus when he dumps on his girlfriend Donna about a troubling visit to his mother:
Donna sighed. “I think you need to ask yourself a few questions, Michael. Is this about your mother or is it about you? If you can’t stop beating yourself about the head and shoulders, you shouldn’t expect someone else to stop you. You certainly shouldn’t expect them to give you sympathy for something you’re doing to yourself. Your mother’s situation is tragic, but it’s what happens. If you wanted to visit her more, you would, though I doubt it would make much difference.”
“That’s cold.”
“I don’t mean to be cold. You know I like you. You’re not a bad guy. But I can’t solve your problems for you. I’m sorry about your mother. At least you can be with her at the end, if you want to be.”
He looked her in the eyes; she took a sip of coffee.
“I don’t think we ought to keep seeing each other,” Donna said. p. 72
Eventually, Michael’s late-life crisis worsens (as well as the previous events, he starts taking drugs he has found in his parent’s home), and (spoiler) the climactic scene sees him entering his parents’ house to find himself in his childhood home, his mother still in her mid-thirties, and his father’s spirit-level lying beside an unfinished doorway (the spirit level is obviously some sort of symbol, as it appears on a number of occasions throughout the story).
This is fundamentally a literary short story about late life problems and angst (the spirit level, the references to Moby Dick, etc.) with a few fantasy tropes thrown in. For the most part this works pretty well—there is a lot of good observational writing—but the problem the story has is that the genre features are not used consistently, i.e. we go from ghostly apparitions to an ending where the protagonist is apparently transported back in time to his childhood home. This (perhaps dying fantasy) makes for a dissonant and inconsistent ending (I can see why he may want to return to when he was younger and start over, but why to his parents? And how does this ending flow from ghostly apparitions?)
I think this piece will mostly appeal to males in later life, who may recognise some of the situations and appreciate the story’s insights1—but, even if the ending doesn’t throw them, they may tire of a disgruntled protagonist who seems to be unable to get out of his own way.
**+ (Average to Good). 9,700 words.
1. Re the story’s observations, a couple of passages that struck me:
Nobody had a soul, Michael knew. All you had was the face you prepared to show to other people. Your character was a performance, a persona you put on; by the time you were a teenager, under the pressure of other people’s expectations, you worked out who you were supposed to be. You lived your invented self to the point where you imagined that was who you were. Everybody thought they knew you—you thought you knew yourself. Until something happened, like Michael walking out on Lauren, to reveal that there was nothing inside you but a few desires and an echo chamber. p. 71
He couldn’t blame anybody, and he realized that the sadness overwhelming him was not a result of things he had done or failed to do. It was the result of the simple passage of time. Things changed. When you were young, you thought the past could be recovered, or if not, corrected by the future. When you were old, the silent, inexorable slide of now into then, and its associated accumulation of losses, small and large, crushed any future. p. 76