The Ghost in Love by Jonathan Carroll

followed orders without protest. When all of the food was either moved to other shelves or put on the nearby counter, Pilotwalked up to the refrigerator and put his head inside. Ben thought the dog was going to take food but that wasn’t it.
    â€œCome over here. Put your head in here like me.”
    â€œI can’t, Pilot, it won’t fit. It’s too big.”
    Pilot’s tail wagged impatiently. “Then, put it in as far as it will go, Ben. Come on, get in here with me.”
    Ling stood two feet away, closely watching and listening. The ghost did not know what was happening. Like Ben, it had no idea what Pilot was doing. The dog had not said a word to it since waking Ben. Ling had been taken aback to hear Pilot speak the man’s language and
to
the man, no less. While they were walking down the hall to the kitchen, Ling asked what was going on, but Pilot ignored his friend and kept moving. They had never been rude to each other, but this silence was unquestionably rude. That hurt Ling’s feelings, on top of everything else. In any event, there was nothing the ghost could do at that point but watch, wait, and hope things would eventually come clear. But the dog held all the cards.
    Ben got down on his knees and awkwardly slid forward on them up to the refrigerator. He felt like a complete fool, but what else could he do after what Pilot had divulged in the bedroom? The cold from inside the refrigerator was immediate, sending a shiver over his skin. Hesitantly, feeling ridiculous, he pushed his head forward until his face was almost all the way in.
    But that didn’t satisfy Pilot. “No, farther—as far as you can go. You’ve got lots more room.”
    From behind, it looked as if the dog and the man were worshipping the contents of the refrigerator. On tiptoe, Ling tried to see over their shoulders in case there was something inside the appliance that might explain everything.
    â€œFrom now on, whenever we need to talk about this subject, wehave to do it in here. They can’t hear us when we talk inside a refrigerator. I don’t really understand why, but I was told it has something to do with the chlorofluorocarbons in the Freon.”
    Ben turned his head slowly and looked at the dog. The deadpan expression on his face asked,
What
are you talking about?
    Pilot saw the look and understood the other’s consternation. “I don’t understand it, either; I’m just repeating what they said. Whenever we want to talk about this, we have to do it in the refrigerator.”
    â€œAny refrigerator?”
    â€œI guess so, Ben. A fridge is a fridge, right?”
    â€œI thought maybe there was something special about this one because—”
    â€œCan we drop that subject now and talk about more important things?” Pilot’s voice was brusque; dogs often get frustrated with human beings.
    Ben’s eyes flared in anger. Suddenly he wanted to wring the dog’s neck. How
dare
it be curt, especially after what it had just done to him. And what had it just done to him? Oh, only turned Benjamin Gould’s world—his entire system of beliefs, his vision of reality, his perspective on the past, present, and future, God, the Afterlife, redemption, eternal damnation, et cetera—inside out, upside down, and everywhere else but loose. That’s all.
    Taking a deep calming breath, Ben stuck his head farther into the refrigerator and said, “Tell me the whole thing
again
, very slowly.”
    Pilot toned down his own impatience with the man and tried to choose the words more carefully this time. “All right: like I said before, in my last life my name was Dominique Bertaux.”
    Hearing her name again, Ben closed his eyes and kept them closed while the dog spoke. If there had been more room to maneuver in the refrigerator, he would have put his head in his hands.
    Dominique Bertaux was Benjamin Gould’s girlfriend when he lived in Europe.