Excerpt from “A Hundred Billion Ghosts Gone”
Ryan had never been to the Orpheum Theatre before, but he liked that it appeared to be the kind of place where an opera or a symphony would feel right at home. He didn’t like operas or symphonies, but liked feeling classy just for being there.
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But the auditorium was suffocatingly crowded. Ever since the Blackout, theaters like the Orpheum had started double- or even triple-selling their seats for big events. As long as there was only one living person in the seat, that material occupant could share the space with any number of ghosts all overlapping each other. With the ghosts being mostly transparent and entirely immaterial, you could usually shift around until you found a position where their fog wasn’t in your eyes. Then you could try to forget that they were there except for the occasional overlap of their emotions with yours. It only became problematic when one or more of the ghosts had a radically different opinion of the show than the others sharing the space. If you were a thirty-year fan of, say, Bon Jovi, but one of your seatmates was only there for the opening act, you could find yourself dealing with the uncomfortably dissonant feeling that Livin’ on a Prayer simultaneously both rocked and did not rock. Fortunately it would pass when you left the seat, and you could return to your usual opinion on the subject of rocking. But still, an event could be effectively ruined with the wrong ghostly seatmates.
Ryan did his best to ignore the two ghosts he was forced to share his seat with. They were an elderly couple from, he guessed, the mid-nineteenth century, and they seemed nice enough. There was also a third ghost crammed halfway between Ryan’s seat and Margie’s with the armrest jutting through his abdomen. Ryan had introduced himself to all three of them when he arrived, which seemed polite given that they were going to have their immaterial souls mixing and mingling for the next couple of hours. And the ghosts had told him their names in return. But now, twenty minutes later, he had already forgotten them. The one with the armrest through him was clad in furs and appeared to be a neanderthal, and yet Ryan was pretty sure he had said his name was Steve. The names of the other two were possibly Dutch and he had lost them entirely, but that was fine.
He had more important things to attend to.