The Seventh Wave, Episode 18: sneak peek

The city is full of ghosts. By day they crowd into the subway cars and sprawl manspreading in the seats or stretch out on the floors to sleep or they dance between the cars banging drums, jiggling tambourines, and tooting horns, demanding real-world money to spend in the ghost-world on whatever’s available out there to nourish or entertain; and at night the whole system has to be shut down so that the cleaners can sweep the specters out, can scrub the carriages clean of the kind of debris that ghosts leave behind. Ghosts are transitional entities, they have left life behind but haven’t fully entered death, and life falls away from them little by little, until at last they have shed the last scraps of it, and are able to move on. As a result of being in this halfway state, ghosts are often unclean, leaving behind the detritus from their former lives that they are slowly discarding, crumpled magazines, cigarette stubs, ragged clothes, but also bodily material: hair, toenails, spittle, urine, semen, blood. Here and there pieces of gristle and bone lie rotten on the floor. Consequently a place that has been haunted stinks of decay, and the cleaners have their work cut out. For four hours each night they battle the half-dead with the weapons of the living: Lysol, Clorox, air freshener, the elephant trunks of suction pipes attached to industrial vacuum cleaners, hot water, soap. They get rid of the night’s phantoms but the feeling of ghostliness, of possession, goes on floating through the subterranean air. And when the subway reopens, the city’s spirits return.