Karl (5)

5.

     Karl’s business was nothing more than watching TV and occasionally putting forth the effort to transubstantiate and change the channel. So long as the family paid the cable bill, and the two sisters were getting on with each other, he saw no need to interfere with the matters of the living. The only ambition he had, other than watching television, was to float around the living room from time to time, practicing joyful experimentation with the concept of weightlessness. These endeavors never lasted long, and usually ended with all of Karl’s energy being expended to press the power button on the TV remote.

     These small moments of exertion made Karl tired, and oftentimes he would nap for days. Sometimes he fancied that his powers were getting stronger, but if anything he was in the process of ethereal decay on the order of millions of years. Even ghosts as it seemed, were not built to last forever, only for a really long time. All the same, Karl was happier than he had ever been in life, and quite pleased with his situation. Many might have questioned their ghostly nature, but Karl couldn’t be bothered to expend the mental energy.

     This all changed on an evening in July, about twelve months after Karl’s interaction with the girls and their Ouija board. The oldest girl had suffered from deep depression and nightmares after her first encounter with Karl, and as a result had caused considerable consternation on the part of her parents. The apartment was not a particularly big space, and as such provided the family little respite from each other. Karl had been rather hoping that the parents would bring in a priest, afraid that their daughters fears were well-founded and real. To his disappointment the family were atheists, and as such brought in a psychiatrist.

     This was a shrewd woman with glasses that were far too small to be functional, and an oversized yellow legal pad full of notes. These scribbles led to a series of orange pill bottles being forked over by a pharmacist, with hopes that they would stop the maladapted moaning of a teenager. The whole ordeal made Karl feel quite awful about his initial misdeed, but then he remembered that the older girl had been mean, and forgot about his part in the matter. After months of mind bending anti-psychotics and unconvincing explanations of why ghosts couldn’t be real, the family through their hands up, fired the psychiatrist, and moved.  

     When the family left, Karl fell into a greyish haze of depression. It wasn’t that he missed the company; he could have lived without them. Well, not lived, but he could have continued to exist happily. The part that left him with a dull ache in what he assumed to be his side, was the parting of the family’s television. This left him with nothing but his thoughts all day, and in the end he thought it would be better to spend his time napping. And that’s what he did, until a young man working for a tech conglomerate had moved in a few weeks later.