We take turns holding the pickle jar, passing it back and forth in the dark so that we can hold it close to our mouths and ask our questions through the nail holes in the lid. Neither one of us is sure what we will find out, or even if we’ll find out anything, for that matter. But it seems important that we ask the questions anyway. You don’t capture a ghost and not ask it any questions. I can’t imagine anyone being that foolish.
“Are you Mr. Cooper?” Imaginary Keith whispers through the lid, then lowers his ear to hear the answer. He’s such a fool sometimes.
”No,” the ghost answers.
“You fool! Of course he’s not Mr. Cooper!” I’m trying to keep my patience with Imaginary Keith, but judging by his questions, he doesn’t know anything about ghosts. “Maybe he’s the ghost of Mr. Cooper, but he can’t be Mr. Cooper. Anyone knows that. Watch, listen, and learn.”
I take the jar and whisper in my own question.
“Are you the ghost of Mr. Cooper?” Ghosts are tricky business. You need to be specific if you want to learn anything. I lower my ear to the jar for the answer.
”No.”
“Ha!” Imaginary Keith is beside himself that I am wrong. As far as I’m concerned, this whole ghost questioning business is not really going as planned.
“My turn,” he says, taking the pickle jar from my hands.
“Ask him something about the Russians,” I tell him. “We should try to find out what they’re up to.”
“You ask him about the Russians. I’m not wasting any of my questions.”
It’s a good point. Even though the ghost has given no indication that we might have a limited number of questions, we have no way of knowing for sure.
“What are you going to ask it?”
“You’ll see.” Imaginary Keith lowers his lips to the jar’s lid and whispers so quietly that I can barely hear his question.
“Are you Mr. Cooper?” I can’t believe it!
“What?! Are you crazy? You just asked that. Quit wasting questions.”
“I’m not wasting questions.”
“Then what you think you’re doing?”
“I’m trying to catch him in a lie. We have to know what kind of ghost we’re dealing with here. There are two kinds of ghosts - honest ghosts and lying ghosts. We need to know which kind we’ve caught.”
“Oh for Christ’s sake.”
Imaginary Keith puts his ear to the lid and listens, waving at me to be quiet. “Shhhh. I can’t hear.”
The answer seems to take a long time coming, and for some reason I start thinking of a girl I saw ahead of me in line at the coffee shop with an infinity sign tattooed to the back of her neck. What was that supposed to mean on the back of someone’s neck? Her neck hadn’t looked that long to me. Who knows. And what was taking the ghost so long? I felt the urge to draw an infinity sign on the pickle jar. See what the ghost had to say about that.
“Maybe it ---” I start to say.
“Shhhh!”
Imaginary Keith keeps his ear to the jar, waiting for the answer. Sometimes his patience for the ludicrous truly amazes me. But finally, after what seems like an eternity to me, the ghost begins to swirl around in the jar like it does before every answer.
“Shhhh, here it comes!” Imaginary Keith pushes his ear against the lid even tighter. The swirling stops and I know the answer is coming.
”No.” Imaginary Keith looks up, satisfied.
“Honest ghost,” Imaginary Keith says, handing me the jar. “You can tell by the way it thought about the answer.”
“You don’t know that.” Sitting there in the closet with an imaginary friend and a ghost in a pickle jar, the path to truth suddenly felt very long. “You can’t possibly know that about ghosts.”
“Sure I do. Honest ghosts think about their answer. A lying ghost will just blurt out whatever comes to mind.”
“Kind of like you do, you mean.”
“Well, yeah. But I’m not a ghost. That’s the difference.”