Up on the Roof

The funny thing is, I could start by saying "When you're dead, you can..." or giving some other articulation of "the rules"—but I don't know what it's like for other people, do I? Sorry—other spirits. Entities. Nonexisting former bloodbags. I can only convey my own experience; I can't definitely say, "When dead, you can concentrate like Patrick Swayze and, with a training montage or two, kick a can." Or "If you've passed on, you're allowed to talk to Bruce Willis and interact with red objects." If there's a manual to being gone, it fell out of the cardboard box and is lost in the recycling bin.

So, I can only say this: I'm stuck on the roof.

I used to love the asphalt territory up there. You can get a perspective on a neighborhood, see how humans organize their collective existence, watch kids on rollerblades disappear behind summer-green tree branches. But when you're dead—sorry, sorry; in my experience being dead—I can't see super well. It's not like having bad vision was in the living realm; it's more like having less vision. The sights from up here have very little impact, I guess, in that they don't stick in what used to be your brain.

Down on the deck, I do see her, wiping her tears with the pads of her fingers, pulling them down her cheeks in a way that makes me ache. She's not looking up where I am, probably because this is where I died. It's not clear to me whether it was a fall, or I brushed the 200-amp hot wire without thinking, or maybe I just had a heart attack. Either way, Mike and I were going up and down the ladder one Saturday morning (a few of my attic vents had cracked and were making noise in the wind, and he offered to give me a hand with replacing them), and the next minute I know, I'm on the roof. Permanently, it seems. Obviously, I've tried to roll or jump off. I just can't. Can't squeeze in any of the vents or exhausts, either.

But, yeah—I can't hear in the same way as I did before, but that doesn't stop James Taylor's "Up on the Roof" from playing on repeat in my ex-brain. I can't decide if it's worse, though, to not be able to hear her crying, night after night, out on the deck below my shingled purgatory. (It was a small consolation, though, to note that Mike must have fixed the attic vents, which I've had plenty of time to inspect, as they're screwed down with those fat 11/32" Torx head screws he loves so much).

I can't write notes or any of that creepy phenomena, either. One thing, though, that you read about is true: I am, in some way, on the same electrical plane as the living universe, because any time I accidentally lean against the service drop—the metal pole where the electrical service enters the home—I feel like my soul is filled with burning, expanding gas. If I do it long enough, which is unbearable, the house browns out for less than a moment, which I can see (more like perceive) in the yellow kichen light's slight dip in power on the lawn.

I do this more and more lately. Partially because there's literally nothing else to do; partially because lately, Mike will come over and cry with my wife. Lately, they don't even cry. Lately, they have a drink. And a laugh. And other things I don't notice because I'm filling my essence with the inside-out explosion of 200 amps.

Last night, I leaned into that service drop long enough that I thought I might disintegrate, and then I lay my ex-head down on the asphalt so that roof eave blocked my view of them down there on the deck. I've inspected lots of the roof this closely in my post-life tedium, but never the service drop, mostly because when I'm over here, it's to gaze/spy upon my wife, which inevitably leads to me zapping myself.

But lying here, I get a close view, and as the orchestral swells of James Taylor's tune once again wash over me, I see it.

The service drop grounding wire has been removed. Cut off, actually. And attached to the metal body of the service drop, with a 11/32" Torx screw.

I curl myself around the service drop. It's been re-grounded thoroughly, in about 3 places.

My first thought is that I will brown out the electricity in patterns, to let her know what happened. She'll notice the Morse code, decipher it, and know the truth! Problem: Neither of us is fluent in Morse. My wife was and is a thoughtful, clever, erudite person who is not a East German spy and therefore does not know Morse. And neither do I. Unfortunately, up here, there's no Internet to look it up, either—

That's actually not true. The cable Internet enters the house three feet below the service drop for electrical. It's true that I can't step off or leave this roof. But, can I reach down and interact with the coaxial cable? I reach, and with my fingertip, I feel it: tiny impulses, much, much more controlled than the fire hose of electricity up top.

So here's my Patrick Swayze training montage:

With my middle finger on the coax, I begin to sense the packets of information flowing over the line. We've never actually gotten cable TV through our cable, so that made it easier to sense. Most people know about the bits and bytes that computers use to transport data, but the security checks that hosts and clients use to communicate? That took a while to figure out. But like I said, I have nothing else to do up here. And so test packets and pings sent in and out of my house—unfortunately, now Mike's house, too—went through my ever-understanding fingertip. Once I got a sense of the email server packets' shapes and protocols, I was close—but then, I needed to add the subtle skill of adding my own data to the server requests.

Again, what else did I have to do? I had my one-song playlist; I had my mission.

At one point, I had composed an email to my wife outlining Mike's guilt. But by then, their relationship was—well, I don't want to think about it. So I took a few more months, or years, or whatever, and I took a closer look at the data. Images are simply hexadecimal data sets, and videos are just sequences of those images. One more training montage later, I had created a video of Mike's murderous act (at least how I imagined it), and I sent it to her, and to the police. It makes one wonder how many videos people have seen that were created by ghosts.

I rolled onto my back and sat up. (Again, this may be just me, but: the dead don't get sore or stiff. No ligaments to freeze up during the years of physical data manipulation). My sight had dissapated enough that I couldn't really sense anything. I felt no breeze on my face, smelled no grass clippings, heard no birds or insects. All my consciousness was

"On the roof, the only place I know

Where you just have to wish to make it so..."