Phantom View - Reactor

A disabled son care-taking for a disabled father tries to understand the mysterious blur haunting them.

Novelette | 7,580 words

The app has to ask me to tag him before I finally realize I have a stalker.

It’s a random photo in my history, from three years ago when I moved out here to help. Me and Dad sitting next to the window in matching Steelers jerseys, horribly backlit by too much morning sun. A rusty orange-and-black blurry streak runs down the left of the photo, blotting out most of the living room, like a big exclamation point. A square on the app wants me to tag the blur.

“Dad, does this look like a face to you?”

I hold my phone out to Dad’s face. His eyes are glassy, once bright blues now like still waters. His breathing remains measured, as it has since he woke up this morning. He’s passive in his bed, his eyes not even trained on the game on the TV. If he recognizes that I’m showing him my phone, he doesn’t express it, and he definitely doesn’t recognize the blur.

The blur doesn’t have shoulders. I pinch to zoom. It is all oranges and browns with flecks of black, like an iodine stain over reality. Maybe you could call some of those features a chin. That’s it. This app sucks. I should download something better.

This is the first time I’ve actually looked through this folder on my phone. I always take pictures meaning to look at them, and then never do. I swipe through the tile view, meaning to get to the photos of Dad’s old paintings. I want to get them scanned in as high resolution as possible before anything goes into storage.

Another blur catches my eye. I click on one tile. It’s a nearly beautiful photo of Dad, sitting in a wicker chair that we sold off last year, gazing out a window. Well, not a real window. A painting of a window. That painting was Mom’s favorite before she left. It was so realistic that we used to joke that a bird would’ve flown into it. The smile on Dad’s face in this picture, the wrinkles contoured with gray stubble? Looking at him makes my chest feel like fishing line being reeled in.

The app asks me to tag him.

And to tag the person next to him.

Another rusty orange blur runs down the right side of the photo, darkness leaking from nowhere, like it’s trying to block the lamplight from casting onto the painting. Before I zoom in, I know it’s too similar. The app asks me to tag the same non-face, with the same shape like a tensed jaw.

My phone sucks, but I don’t remember it sucking this badly. I scroll, and there are blurs in a bunch of the photos in the gallery. Nothing on my trip to Boston last, which I photographed the hell out of. It feels like the blurs are mostly here in Dad’s apartment.

No, wait. There’s one in the hospital. That day Dad and I visited to donate one of Dad’s old paintings. I always talked about what an amazing painter Dad was, and eventually the nurses begged for one of his pieces. That was a great day. There is Dad in his wheelchair, with me behind him, and Dr. Cantor alongside the two sweetest nurses from the entire hospital, Barbara and Barbara-Anne. All of us were clustered around Dad’s painting on the wall.

The app asks me to tag each of us.

And to tag the blur standing between Barbara-Anne and Dad. I see the jaw before I even see the box asking me to tag it.

“Dad, look. It thinks this is a person.”

I need him to laugh at it, even though I know he won’t. Dad’s eyes slowly drape along the screen. He lets out a heavy breath through his mouth, thin lips popping apart. He knows this is weird.

Then I see something else in the photo. Much smaller than the blur. Zooming in doesn’t clear it up. My scalp prickles, and I lean in to the phone, swiping through earlier photos, back through time and pixels, to Dad and his painting of a window. That perfect window.

“No way.”

I get up, walking wide around the door so Dad never leaves my sight, into the living room. The window painting has hung on this wall since before I moved in. I sleep on the foldout in that room. I see it every morning.

The painting is of a window with six glass panels, fully lit in midday, looking down at the pale green arch of the Birmingham Bridge. I’ve looked at this painting for three years like it was real glass, looking out on the view. So I never looked for it before. Paintings have all sorts of details that people like me don’t pay attention to. We’re just affected by them. If I ever thought about it, I thought this detail was Dad catching some trick of a reflection.

In the bottom right of the painting is a dark blur. I lean down until my nose threatens to smudge it. I see the jaw.

“Dad? Who is this?”

It’s in all of Dad’s paintings. I go through the entire closet, so hastily that I cause an avalanche from the top shelf and take an antique sewing machine to the face. With a washcloth wrapped around my forehead, I line every painting up in the living room.

The rusty orange streaks are everywhere.

On a drizzling day outside the U.S. Steel Tower. On a sidewalk where kids were drawing pink and yellow chalk flowers. Every painting of the boats on the Allegheny has a telltale streak forming a vaguely human-shaped column.

“Did you know you were painting this thing?” I ask through the open door to his bedroom. I know Dad made these, but I keep them in the living room, like I’m somehow keeping him safe from evil magic radiation. His breathing has been off-kilter all afternoon. I give him extra oxygen and try to figure this out myself.

I am a man of science. A man with a C average in his science classes, but still.

I take new photos and actually scrutinize them. For most of my life I’ve bent over backward to take photos and then never looked at them again. Like the moments were so important until I had them documented.

Zooming. Scrolling. Examining every pixel of every picture, then taking the pictures over again. By the window, and the window painting, and the front door. From every unflattering angle, above and below. The blur doesn’t show its creepy jaw.

Except when I photograph myself in front of Dad’s door.

“Did Mom ever see this thing?”

She never mentioned it. Dad’s eyes shift down, then close. His standard response whenever I bring up Mom.

“I didn’t think so.” I raise my phone, angling to frame us both together. “I just need to test this. Okay?”

I snap one selfie of us. It’s all I can bring myself to do, half expecting some winged demon to come crashing through the ceiling when I tap the screen.

The Blur is there. The Blur. Our Blur, streaking across the image at the other foot of the bed. Like we’re two kids come to visit the old man. I look over my shoulder, but there’s nothing waiting in the bedroom other than Dad’s oxygen tank.

Some part of my brain wants to know if the Blur is still in the room. If it hasn’t ceased to be, or sprouted claws when I couldn’t see it. So I swipe back to the camera, steadying the shot, aligning our faces and our shadows.

This time, I make myself look for it. One glance in the view pane, at the foot of Dad’s bed.

The rusty orange stain is on my screen. It’s in the shot. It’s right where it was in the pictures, like it’s still waiting.

I spin, and no, it’s not behind me. Not in a way my eyes can see.

But the camera insists the Blur is still here. Is it moving, churning in place like clouds, or is it just that I can’t keep my hand still on the phone? I can’t breathe.

This can’t be happening. This thing can’t be here. Can’t have been here all along. I would have touched it. Bumped into it a hundred times.

Except, would I have thought anything about bumping into an invisible man? Or would I have assumed my clumsy ass bumped the wall or the sofa or anything else, rather than jumping to the assumption an entity of pure fucking darkness was stalking Dad’s apartment?

I know it’s foolish as I reach my free hand out. There’s no stopping me. I don’t know if I want to push it away from Dad, or to prove to myself this is a hallucination. I have to look away, into the camera, to know I’m reaching for the right spot. I think my fingers go right through it—that it is really an optical illusion, some hokey glitch in the software.

It touches me first. It’s clammy, like leather left out in the rain, brushing along my fingertips. The curve of a body, of skin over bone.

I jerk my hand away like it’s an invisible fire, and curl my fingers into a fist against my chest. Nothing happened. There’s no residue on my skin. No boils or fungus or shadows. No blur spreads along my flesh.

I turn off the phone so fast it’s lucky it doesn’t crack. The screen goes dead black. No more images, no more videos.

When I move to check on Dad, I don’t feel anything. In the spot at the foot of the bed, there’s no wet leather. There’s not even a hint of moisture in the air. I sit there, fighting the urge to swing a broom around the room to hit the Blur. Some part of me knows I won’t be able to touch it. Not until I turn the camera on.

Instead, I put a hand gently on Dad’s right calf. I hold on to him, so that we don’t disappear. What does any of this mean?

My email to Mom bounces. It did the same thing when I asked what she did with the insurance information last year. I hoped she would have revived her account, but no, it’s not coming back. Neither is Mom. I don’t have a number to text her. Last I knew, she was off living her best life in St. Barts.

We have nobody to ask except each other. Dad isn’t filling in many gaps.

One gap I’m not filling: no more photos. Definitely no live videos in his room. If the Blur is interested in him, it can keep doing whatever it was doing before I found out it existed. I’m busy doing Dad’s physical therapy, and cooking and cleaning and trying to keep us from getting behind on rent. I haven’t had time to get my knee looked at in over a year. The Blur can mind its own business.

That’s what I tell myself, as though I don’t keep thinking about my phone. Especially every time the air conditioning hits my neck at a weird angle, or I’m trying to sleep and feel the hairs on my legs move. Every incidental thing that I’ve shrugged off every day suddenly feels like a threat. What could be worse than this?

Those fucking vampires are cancelling Dad’s fucking insurance. When the company got bought and we got those “Nothing about our great coverage will change” letters, I knew we were screwed. They only paid for all his equipment because it was locked in, and they already challenge everything they can, or straight-up deny payments on things I have proof they cover. Now these forms they claim they mailed two weeks ago and that only entered my hands today say I have to get all this shit filled out and delivered immediately or they’ll start revoking coverage.

I run around the apartment so much that I keel over next to the microwave. It’s one of those days when I need both my knee brace and my cane or else this MCL is going to kill me. I curse at my leg. Keep moving, damn you.

In his room, Dad’s oxygen machine beeps a warning for the fifth time this morning. I’m still carrying a wad of forms when I come to his side. He’s rolled over again. This is rare. He usually knows better, but he’s agitated by something. It’s the worst day for him to get like this.

“Dad? Please?”

I fix the mask back over his nose. There’s no awareness in his eyes. He’s completely gone right now.

No sooner do I let go of his shoulder than he tries to roll over again. God damn it.

“Dad,” I say, knowing he can’t help it. “Dad. I have to take these forms over. Like, now. Please.”

On most days like this I sit my butt down and play Hades or Elden Ring all day, staying next to him to keep him straight. After the spell fades, I can always tell he’s grateful I was there to look after him. And I’d like nothing more than to get off my feet and rest my knee in the chair next to his bed, and make sure he’s safe all day.

But it’s damned if I do, and damned if I don’t. If the company screws him on this policy, we’re never going to be able to afford something that replaces it. He’ll die with nobody around except for me to watch.

And if I leave him, I have no idea if he’ll roll over again. I don’t know what I’ll come back to.

His shoulders twitch like he wants to move. Like he wants to throw a pitch. Dad used to have a hell of an arm. Restraints aren’t just cruel; they won’t necessarily work. He needs me to watch over him.

It’s small of me, but I think of those emails bouncing back from the address Mom abandoned. The corners of my eyes sting at the thought. That she should be here. That somebody else should be here, not just me.

There is somebody else.

I tell myself, “No.”

But somebody has to get these documents out, and somebody has to stay with Dad.

“No, no.”

The phone is cool against my palm, and I squeeze my fingers around it, like I might crush it rather than do this. My brain sticks to the idea like a hair that won’t go down the drain.

There’s nobody. Insurance never covered a helper coming in. Mom is long gone. I don’t have any friends. Nobody cares that we’re here except us.

I turn the phone on, and there is the Blur. It’s standing in the far corner, beside the rubber trash can and the TV. I think I see its jaw. I think it’s looking at me.

“Hello?”

I wave at the image on the camera.

No, that’s ridiculous. I correct myself, waving to where the Blur has to be in the room, miming like I can see it. That’s also ridiculous, but a ridiculousness that feels right.

I don’t hear anything. If that blurry jaw moves, it isn’t speaking. I don’t know what appliances I’d need to hear it. Surround sound speakers?

“Look. You know Dad.” I gesture the phone down at the bed. “You’ve known him a long time, right? He painted you all those times.”

Again, no audible response. No shrug from the Blur. At least they aren’t disagreeing.

“He never hurt anybody. You know he’s a good guy, don’t you? And you want something from us. I don’t know what. But here’s what we’re going to do.”

I take the phone and angle the camera so that it frames Dad and his entire bed, as well as that side of the room. I prop it with the seat cushion on the chair where I usually sit. I hover my hands over it for several seconds in case it falls. It doesn’t. It is properly wedged to film my old man and his phantom.

“I touched you once. It only worked when you were in an image. This phone here? It’s showing you.”

I think, and then hit the record function. Why not have video proof of this?

“Can you touch me? With it watching you like this?”

I hold out my hand, more tentative than the other day. I feel like I’m daring a lion to bite my arm off.

I’m looking at the phone when the feeling of dribbling wet leather pokes my fingertips. I jerk back, then immediately return my hand. Dad can’t afford for me to be afraid today.

“I have to go out for a little while, just a little while, or else we’re screwed. But you know he can’t roll over, or else the wires and tubes get messed up. You’re going to make sure he stays still. Be firm, but be gentle, okay? Do you understand?”

The Blur has to know. Has to have seen enough of Dad to know how to care for him.

Why would the Blur bother?

“And if I come back and he’s okay, then whatever it is you want? I’ll do it. I’ll get it for you. You can’t be so interested in this man, in this sweet old painter, and be some fucking evil thing. You’ve got to know I’ll help you if you help us.”

Why am I waiting to hear the Blur answer?

“Can you show me that you understand?”

No, they can’t show me. They’re invisible and seemingly nonverbal. Phantoms don’t make house calls. They don’t do physical therapy and in-home nursing. I rock back on my heels in frustration, and my leg sends two searing bolts through me. I have to brace myself against the wall. I can’t do this.

Dad’s bed creaks. He’s rolling over again, and I have to get to him before the machine beeps. I need to get through the pain fog and help.

He’s lying flat on his back, with the yellow-and-black covers pulled up across his chest. The bedframe creaks again, on the side of the bed near to me, and a depression pushes down into the covers next to Dad’s arm. It’s like two hands are carefully holding him.

Two hands. Two more hands than I thought we had.

It can work. It has to work.

“If you do this…” I beg the air where I think the Blur is standing. “I’ll be back as soon as I can. I’ll do anything for you.”

I almost forget my cane. I won’t let the insurers do this. I’ll sell my soul to a phantom first.

I’m hobbling so bad when I return that an old man on the sidewalk calls me Captain Peg Leg. Was there even a Captain Peg Leg? I’d half like to amputate this thing, because wood or fiberglass wouldn’t throb with pain. I’d teach that stupid leg to defy me. It feels like a reactor core is melting down under my kneecap. And I never slow, though, leaning against the walls for support and pushing myself along until I’m home.

Dad is snoring like he’s got a couple of lumberjacks doing work in his sinuses. He’s steady under the covers, breathing mask in place. There’s more color in his cheeks now than there was this morning. I keep checking his arms, expecting dark blotches of eldritch contamination.

I lean against the rails of his bed and lick my lips with a dry tongue. He’s okay. He’s good.

I grab my phone, and the battery light blinks, complaining that I didn’t think to plug it in. I have 7 percent left before…

Before what? Before the magic connection to the astral plane runs out? What is happening here?

I turn the phone around the room, and there on the opposite side of the bed is the rusty orange Blur. They stand beside the medical equipment, and all the wires. I wonder if they’ve had to keep those things straight as Dad has moved around. I wonder if they’ve touched him, and if they’ve been gentle enough.

I keel over like a felled tree, thumping into the chair. I don’t care how much it bothers my knee. I don’t have the energy to sit down normally. Holding the phone up, I try to train my eyes where the Blur is.

“Everything got filed on time. They said I’m in the clear. I have no idea if that’s true, but it’s done. We win for today.”

No applause from the Blur. No relaxation in that thing that might be a jaw. I don’t know how a blur would express approval, if a blur wanted to approve anything in the first place. Are they happy that they helped? Do they even care that my father exists, or have I been misreading them this whole time?

“Okay,” I say. “You helped Dad. Let’s figure out how I can help you.”

On my phone screen, the Blur keeps standing there, shimmering, churning, unspeaking.

“What do you want?” It’s something I’ve barely started considering. Can they eat? Can they age? “What can we do for you?”

No reply. Right, our friend is nonverbal. But they’ve been lurking for a lot of Dad’s life. Maybe for his whole time in this city. They must want something.

“Is there something you want in this apartment?”

Off they go. The jaw-like swirls curve outward, turning to the open door to the living room. The Blur taints all the light sources my phone picks up, bleeding across simulated vision. Soon they stand in the doorway to the living room, facing the sofa and the stack of Dad’s paintings.

As soon as I follow them, they’re bleeding further away. They flow like visible wind, churning into the living room.

Then they stand there.

I ask, “You want Dad’s art?”

They move toward me, and reflexively I shrink away. They pass me, leaving the living room and going right back to Dad’s room.

I tilt my head. They swirl to his bedside, and then through the door yet again, out into the living room. The Blur paces back and forth, pausing only briefly in either room. They’re like a cat that just wants the attention.

After coming out into the living room for the third time, they linger. The Blur hunches down on the floor. They’re kneeling there, like they’re collapsing in on themselves. Are they looking out the window, or out into Dad’s painting of a window?

They’re moving in place. The vague shapes of their shoulders tremble. They cover their face, as though trying to hide something that nobody on the planet could see clearly. It takes too long before I realize what they’re doing. I turn off the camera to give them privacy.

I never thought about phantoms weeping.

We are debunked. The videos of the Blur I post online are barely looked at by anybody. Those who look at it have one question: Is this a crappy AI-generated video, or a creepy practical effect video that I’m doing with lasers and off-camera lamps? Either way, I am a fraud, a scammer, and several less polite names.

The Blur doesn’t care if they are real. They keep helping with Dad’s bedpans, and consolidating the trash. So long as I point the camera phone the right direction, they’re better at vacuuming than I am.

The internet tells us we’re on our own. But I couldn’t imagine living without them now. The three of us are invincible together.

I just have to trust them. I know what I’ve got to do next.

The plan is simple. After the insurance gets cleared up, we have a little slack in our budget. We sell off the last of what we don’t need, like the antique sewing machine that exists just to fall on me every couple months. I finally sell off my old superhero comics. Those were not the investment I thought they were when I was a kid. But it’s enough.

I set my phone on the sofa, pointed at an angle in front of me, so that I know the Blur is there. They stand in front of me, so close they take up most of the screen. That’s good.

“We’ve got to be careful with this, okay?”

I pick up the second phone. It’s better than mine, with a way longer battery life. It’s still got the plastic screen protector on. I almost envy the Blur.

The camera view is washed out, utterly overwhelmed by any lighting whatsoever. I still see myself just fine, and when I switch it to front-facing, I see the Blur’s swirls and jaw just as well.

I turn around, half-facing the wall, and direct the phone like I’m taking a selfie of me and the Blur. Just two Pittsburgh guys doing a science experiment. With my free hand, I gesture to the live video of the two of us. I even point to the Blur.

“You see? That’s you.”

The Blur is unimpressed, a stoic pillar of churning nothingness.

That’s fair. They have seen a phone before.

“I’m holding it, which means you can move around,” I say. “But I don’t have to be the one holding it. Get it?”

Carefully I draw the phone across my shoulder, offering it to the figure that I can’t see. They have to still be there. They were able to touch my hand, and move Dad back into place, and fix the tubes on his machine. Nothing about this shouldn’t work.

“You’ll have to charge it every day or two. You do that with a cable, like I do with mine. If you’ve seen me do it? Then you can do it. And feasibly, if this works, this isn’t just a phone. This is a cane. This is a walker. This is a wheelchair with a fucking rocket booster.”

I nod from my cane resting against the sofa, and then to the phone again.

The moisture brushes my thumb and forefinger, waking goose bumps all the way up to my neck. For too long it’s just moisture, like the clammy hand isn’t going to follow. Did I miss something? Is the Blur’s physical form vanishing as they try to touch the phone?

Then the phone lifts out of my grip, like it’s drawn on a string. I stare up into thin air like anything is going to appear. Rather, the plastic and glass rectangle hovers until it’s almost on the ceiling. I imagine the Blur craning backward to take their first selfie.

Then the phone whirls around in an apartment-sized tornado. I lean onto the edge of the sofa, elbows on my knees, unable to stop grinning. I don’t need my phone to know the Blur is freaking out in sudden liberty. The camera keeps jerking to random angles and then bursting forward.

“Yeah,” I cheer them on. “You can go wherever you want. Without me having to point the camera for you.”

The other side of the sofa dips like they’re jumping on the cushions, like a little kid. Then the phone flies away, and the kitchen faucet sprays cold water onto a stack of dishes. It takes the Blur two tries to shut it off—and I have to imagine it’s because they’re too excited to control themselves.

I grab my cane and lean on it. I want to invite them out for ice cream or something.

“What do you want to do first? Want to go see the original window that Dad made that painting of?”

The phone flees into Dad’s room. I follow, arriving in time to see Dad staring up at the ceiling. The thin hair on his scalp ruffles, like an unseen hand is caressing him. Dad’s eyes move as though he’s following something, then immediately grow tired and close.

“Yuh.”

He said that. Dad never expresses himself out loud. It sounds like he was agreeing. To what? What is the Blur going to do?

The phone moves again, and something hits me in the belly, making me grunt and step aside. In my confusion, I was blocking the door. I didn’t think the Blur would be on the move again so quickly, not that I blame them for being excited.

“What’s the plan?” I ask, first to Dad, then to the floating phone. The phone travels across the kitchen space, over to the front door. The knob clicks like weight is resting on it. It turns until the door pops ajar, sounds of my neighbors’ pop music ebbing from the hallway.

I say, “Hey? Are you alright?”

The phone pauses. The doorknob pauses. The apartment pauses.

I can’t see them, and I’m sure the Blur is looking at me. For a thin moment, neither of us understands what the other wants.

The door whips open. The phone disappears into the hall.

I get down to the street as quickly as my knee will let me, swinging my phone in all directions. They’re not in the stairwell, or the front stoop. Nowhere in the street is there a floating cell phone, nor does my phone show any orange signs of the Blur.

The only people out here are on a delivery truck, struggling to unload an armoire. They haven’t seen anything. They haven’t been looking.

Frantic texts. I warn the Blur that they left the charging cable behind and if that phone quits they could be stranded. We don’t know how their presence will affect the battery. They need to come back right now.

Can the Blur even read? And what happens if they tap on a text and it turns off the camera?

I slump on the stoop of my apartment, idly pointing my phone around, hoping to catch sight of the Blur coming to their senses and returning. I wait a long time to see nothing.

For something that defined my whole existence, I forget about the Blur quickly. Less than a week later Dad is clawing at his own belly. The agony lasts days. It takes forever to realize he’s got kidney stones—some of the largest Dr. Cantor has ever seen. And while he’s in for tests, they find some problems in his chest that need checking out.

“No problem,” I tell them. “I’m free all day.”

I do everything by myself. I put all of myself into it. We got by before without their help, didn’t we? And there are worse things than being ghosted by a ghost.

Tests show a new mass has appeared in Dad’s left lung, and that lung never recovered from his original stroke. He’s having a bad pain day and can barely slump in the wheelchair as I try to take him across town. Getting him into a rideshare is excruciating on both of us.

I’m in the waiting room when I see the message. A number I don’t recognize, not at first.

It’s a picture. High tide on some pebble beach, with a pile of kelp. I rub my eyes and realize it’s not kelp, but familiar blurs and swirls. The figure juts up toward the camera; they took a picture of their own feet standing in the lapping tide.

It’s a fucking phantom’s vacation photo.

I seethe so badly saliva drips off my teeth onto the phone. I haven’t showered in three days. When is the last time I went to the beach?

I’m trying to fit all my anger into a text message when a nurse calls my name.

I only know it’s Halloween because of the paper cutout jack-o’-lanterns decorating the hospital halls. Every day is the same adventure. It’s watching football with him, and playing games for him to watch, and making sure we both eat. It’s being by his side for the inevitable next emergency. I’m going to be there for him. Somebody should be.

Pics keep coming in. The Blur amid a drove of people in the stands at some sporting arena where nobody is wearing Pittsburgh colors. The Blur ominously standing at the head of a bus full of mostly Hispanic women, their mouths open in joy, in the midst of a singalong. Is it a church group? That boggles my mind. Dad was barely Catholic enough to go to church on Easter when I was a kid, but apparently his phantom is religious?

Dad is no help. Which is to say that when I show him the photos and ask how fucked up this is, he never gives me an inkling that he’s angry.

“Do you not even care?”

I could tell myself that, but I know that’s not the case. Dad knows I know. He lets me let go at my pace. Being angry was never longer than a night for him. He painted and tried to consider other points of view. That’s what he tried to give me. Dad isn’t mad, and I know he’d say that phantom was trapped all this time, and it deserves to live without serving him. Because that’s Dad.

So I text the Blur that I’m not angry. It’s a lie. An aspirational lie.

It’s the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. The day Dad has the seizure. The one that kicks off everything else that happens after.

And the Blur sends me a photo. I don’t bother to open it. I just respond, not even thinking about what I’m typing. I hit send and I keep waiting outside doors I’m not allowed to walk through, doors with tiny wire mesh windows, waiting to see anyone coming. Waiting for the word.

All his wrinkles disappeared. We used to joke he had a face like a badly made bed, but now he’s relaxed, and it all goes. All of it. All of him.

He didn’t want a funeral. The last time he spoke about it, he said he wanted his and Mom’s ashes to be sprinkled in a garden somewhere, to feed some flowers that needed it. It was that long ago.

Still, I have him cremated. There’s nobody who wants his ashes but me, so I show up, alone. I wear my best pants, and wash my hair, like this is a ceremony. Like I know what I’m doing.

As I wait at the front desk, I play with my phone. I don’t think about doing it. I just do it, just lift my phone up, hoping to see Dad’s spirit. Dad’s phantom blur. I’ve seen other impossible things. Dad was special enough to paint the impossible. What would his soul look like?

I see an orange shimmer, and I spin around. I can’t believe it.

I shouldn’t believe it. Because Dad isn’t there. Instead there floats a cell phone with a cracked screen, the battery case held on by duct tape. Somehow the Blur still hasn’t bought a protective case for their phone. In that instant I think how lucky they are that they found a way to keep it going, keep it charged and paid up and never confiscated by all the people they’ve wandered around. They could have been stranded anywhere. I imagine them trapped over their busted screen, spending an eternity in some abandoned house that people would think was haunted for the rest of time.

They hold their phone up to eye level with me. They wanted to be seen.

They’re here on purpose.

Well. Good for them.

“I get it,” I tell them. “You wanted to be free, and as soon as you could, you got free. You couldn’t wait to leave. You got to do whatever you wanted. You missed the last months of Dad’s life. Now he’s gone and you’re still free. I don’t need you. So what do you want?”

That’s colder than I wanted. But also, not cold enough. I don’t know what to say, so words come out. I don’t care if the funeral workers hear me or judge me or call the cops on me.

“You didn’t owe us more help just because we helped you. You weren’t trapped in service. AndI’m not envious of all your road trips. I did what I wanted to. Dad needed me, and I love him.” I wipe warm snot from my nose. “I loved him. I don’t know what you thought about either of us, but this is what I wanted to do. So if you want something from me, you better tell me now. Because I’m leaving.”

The Blur never says anything.

They follow me home. I can see their phone.

Not until I’m through the door do I wonder about Dad’s room. Moisture tickles the corners of my eyes when I think he’ll never sleep there again. What do I do with it? I’m not sleeping in his bed, but I can’t really afford a new one. Am I going to move his things out of there? Is there ever going to be a time when that isn’t his bedroom? The lease is in both our names. Am I going to leave this apartment and look for something smaller?

There’s the urge to play games. To lose myself doing another run through Hades. But the only TV is in Dad’s room, and the concept of playing games without him watching makes me so sick I taste bile.

I vacuum.

I collect all the empties and the trash to take down.

I scrub the wall of dishes that has risen around the sink over the last couple weeks.

Right this minute I’ve got necessary stuff I can do. What messes me up is when I’ll run out of things, or am too tired to do more. I can’t complain to Dad about my brace digging into the fat of my lower thigh, or about how I have no idea which streaming service has the Sunday night game.

When I take the trash out, there next to the door waits a floating cell phone. The Blur is still there.

I treat them like I don’t see them.

I donate the bed and most of Dad’s things to a local disabled couple. A couple of adorable lesbian grannies. One hugs me so hard she gets her foundation on my hoodie. I pretend I’m gracious, when I’m just doing what I’m supposed to do. Doing good like Dad would have done himself.

I lie on the deep indent in the carpet that the bed left. It’s the cleanest spot in the whole apartment. I swipe my phone around, hoping to see him. Dad is nowhere. He is no phantom. He is a memory.

A memory at least two people still have.

“I don’t trust that you won’t ditch me at any moment. You want me to just let you into my life again when at any moment, you could change your mind?”

The phone with the image of the Blur is waiting for me in the hall, in that constant selfie. Everybody in the building sticks to themselves, but it’s still beyond me that nobody has called the super about the floating phone.

I ignore their phone and face where the Blur’s jaw must be. I look them right in the eyes they never had.

“I need a lot of things right now, and pity isn’t one. Don’t you dare pity me. I don’t regret helping Dad for one second. Everything we did together was family. Don’t pretend you and I are alike. I wasn’t cursed or trapped to be with him. So don’t come here to do something out of pity.”

I step inside the apartment, gesturing for the Blur to come in. My greeting sucked but it was never going to be soft. I stick my hands in my pockets, grabbing lint-ridden denim.

Because the Blur has never made anything easy, they stay in the hall. They keep filming the two of us. I look at myself, at that tiny vision of a me who looks so haggard and pale, almost the color of glow-in-the-dark stuff when it’s not dark.

I try to look up into the face I can’t see. “What do you want?”

A strong hand tugs twice on my sleeve, in the direction of the stairwell.

They wait long enough for me to hesitate.

Then they wait long enough for me to strap my brace on and get my cane and stuff.

Then they lead me outside.

I almost bolt when I see the church. It’s a big redbrick building that’s redder the closer I get, with champagne-yellow walls on the interior. Feeling the solid floor under my sneakers, I can’t believe I’m in here. I don’t care how Christian the Blur has become. Religion is not going to solve my problems.

The pews are half empty. The Blur leads me to sit in the back rows, behind everyone, watching their reverence. A tiny priest with an impossibly big voice lectures about how the Devil is everywhere, unseen, requiring vigilance to keep ourselves safe.

I look at the floating phone next to me. Does the Blur think this is funny?

The Blur doesn’t say. They stay seated for a long time, and I can’t leave them. My skin prickles as I soak in this room with so many dozens of people. The most I’ve seen in one place in years. It feels like watching every raindrop in a storm waiting politely, all refusing to fall. I don’t know what to do with them.

Then the Blur taps my shoulder.

Many blocks away on the sidewalk a guy is dancing on a small square of cardboard, and two-thirds of the time he’s spinning on his own head. Most of the audience are filming it for their own TikToks or Instas or whatever. The Blur doesn’t. We just stand behind the audience, watching the guy twirl on his scalp. Just feeling what it’s like being a part of this and apart from this. I want to ask if this is how it feels. I don’t.

The alley is curiously damp and strewn with garbage, and at first I miss the steps. They lead down to an unmarked entrance to a barcade. An elegant handwritten sign calls the place KIELAN’S. I pay too much for a Bacardi and cola, and survey rows of arcade cabinets that are all older than I am. Three skinny women hammer away at a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cabinet. The fourth slot is open to play.

I catch my breathing speeding up, chest tensing over how to ask to join something I shouldn’t even have to ask about.

The Blur draws me to a surprisingly dense crowd around a skee ball rig. A white guy with an M tattoo over one eye is setting the record score. The balls are so grimy and worn they look like they’re made out of old wood, and he keeps sinking them into the 100-point pocket. A ball and a cheer. A ball and a cheer, one that is so loud it vibrates in my chest. When he nails the next one, for no good reason, I cheer with everybody else. I tense up again, like I’ll be ejected for being excited. Nobody cares I made noise. I’m just there, in a moment with them. A part and apart.

“Do you feel this way all the time?” I ask the Blur, not that they could hear me over all the yelling and the barcade’s too-loud ’90s playlist.

I let the question go.

I don’t let curiosity get in the way of feeling this space.

On our way out, I stop by some of the wadded-up trash in the alley. There’s a flyer that hits me, right in the soul. Something I’ve never thought of doing. The Blur waits while I scan the QR code.

The problem with sitting in the back of the class is that other people have the same idea. A Black woman in her early forties with half-pink hair and a half-shaved head winds up sitting at the next spot over from me, trying to avoid eye contact almost as hard as I do. She smells like clove cigarettes.

All the seats fill up before starting time. I work on my breathing, letting myself just exist with other people, apart and a part. We’re arranged with equally fine views of a simple vase, simple beige with simple curves. That’s what we paid to look at. From my seat, the light creates a golden sheen along its left side. Its thin shadow makes the gray pedestal look blue. There are plenty of places to start.

I don’t know when they left me. No phone floats in the art studio. They might be gone forever, and that would be fine, because they gave me what they wanted to. And I needed it.

I focus on my breathing. On just being around strangers, in a strange environment, doing a strange thing.

I take a big blob of brown on my brush and mix it with some orange. I smear them together until they’re the color of iodine, then make a long streak down the right side of my canvas. That’s how I decide to start. With the thing nobody else will see.

“Phantom View” copyright © 2025 by John Wiswell
Art copyright © 2025 by Hokyoung Kim

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Phantom View

John Wiswell

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Phantom View

John Wiswell

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