Swallow the Ghost

by Eugenie Montague

Genres: Private Investigators; High-tech & Sci-fi Thrillers; Humor & Satire

Synopsis

Swallow the Ghost traces the impact of one event on three different lives, each interlocking story offering a complex, contradictory truth.

Things are going well for Jane Murphy, or so it seems. She’s making it in New York, a sort of wunderkind at the social media marketing startup where she works. She’s put an experimental writer, Jeremy Miller, on the map by helping him concoct a viral internet novel, told in fragments through various fake social media accounts. But privately, Jane feels trapped, ruled by her routines and her compulsions, caught up in an endless cycle of soothing and punishing herself. There is so much that she has to keep hidden, especially from Jeremy as their professional relationship transforms into something more.

But then, tragedy strikes, and the story changes track. As the perspective shifts, so too does our image of Jane and those in her orbit as what we think we know begins to unravel.

Audacious, emotionally precise and head-spinning in its ingenuity, Swallow the Ghost interrogates our public identities and private realities through the kaleidoscopic portrait of one woman's life.

 

Release date: August 20, 2024

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 320

Sample

WHEN JANE WAKES UP, her throat hurts. She reaches for the glass of water she keeps by the bed. The glass is solid and cold from the room, and it has made the water cold. It’s too harsh on her throat, which is raw and scratchy, and she wishes the water were a few degrees warmer. It is still dark outside, and cold, she knows. She can almost feel it from the color of the sky. She wants to skip her run, make coffee, sit on her bed, and read things on her phone until it’s time to go to work. The coffee will feel good on her throat, and the words on her phone will float upward with the touch of her finger. But she had woken up with the feeling that something was wrong, that she had done something wrong. She waits for the shame to loose its hold on her, to realize it belonged to some dream, but then she remembers, and the dread she perceived, which felt like a heavy but lifeless presence, transforms into something restless and grasping. In her dresser, she finds clothes warm enough to run in.

Outside, the air hits her lungs like she is breathing hand sanitizer. Jane runs fast, except she slows down around corners, because she has run into too many people, and it seems to her that her body remembers now even when she forgets, as if it retains somewhere inside it the memory of slamming hard into another person, the bloody knees and the guilt, picking someone up off the sidewalk with palms torn from concrete, too tender to close properly around the outstretched hand. Though as she rounds a corner to turn toward the river, both her mind and body forget, and she has to leap out of the way of a woman and her dog. The woman glares at her, the dog barks, and Jane says sorry and runs even faster so she can reach the jogging path.

Up ahead, she can see the guy with the green running shoes. They are the same brand as hers but newer, and she wonders if he actually buys things like sneakers and toothbrushes on the schedules they suggest, backs up his work, replaces the vacuum bag. Jane’s nose is running when she passes him. She sniffs at the wetness above her lip. Some days, she pretends not to notice him. Today, she smiles. Last week, the smile was more like a nod: I recognize you. Now it’s something different: Oh, hi. Oh, hi. She smiles, and then she can see FDR Drive, dull and loud. The cars are out in numbers before the people on the streets. She jogs in place until she can cross, and when she does, it feels like her run properly starts. She can hear the gentle lapping of the East River. The streetlamps are still on and make patterns on the water. The path is laid out before her, wide and gray.

At home, Jane straightens up her room, showers, and pulls a pair of sweater tights from her drawer. She tugs them over one foot and then the other. She has small feet, and the tights remind her of being a child, a memory assembled from pictures of herself as a toddler, mittens hanging from her coat, her mom holding her on her hip so Jane’s pinafore dress is hiked up and the tights are on full display. She almost remembers the feeling, crying as her mom put them on her, how scratchy they were. They don’t feel scratchy now. Jane has them in six different colors. She hangs them to dry so they will retain their shape longer, and after laundry day, the bookshelf in the corner of her room resembles the kind of tree Dr. Seuss might have thought up or the yarn-bombed fence surrounding a construction site she passes every day on her way to work. A neon weeping willow.

On the subway, she plays a word scramble, two geography puzzles, and then a mini-crossword, which she tries to finish before the train gets to her stop. When she makes it, she thinks it will be a better day than it was yesterday, that she will be better.

At work, the client team meets in the conference room with mugs of coffee and a plate of croissants and fruit, because one of their clients is here. The conference room is at the back of their mostly open office space, cordoned off from the rest with frosted-glass walls. There is a black metal table on a colorful Moroccan rug. The walls are blank so they can be projected on from any angle, except the wall facing the street, which has a series of large windows from which Jane can see brick, tree branches hitting the glass, a slice of sky, and more brick. She is nervous, so she looks at how the tree branches move with the wind.

Her boss likes to bring clients in periodically for presentations by the project leader. Much of what Jane does, if she does it right, should be invisible, so in these meetings, it is her job to show her work so the client can see it. The client group is twice as big as it was when Jane started, and her boss has asked the whole team to come in, as well as a few people from Creative. The fact that Tom has asked so many people to sit in is a compliment, though he hasn’t said that. He comes in after everyone is already seated, walking slowly through the door because he is reading something on his phone. He shakes the client’s hand, finds an open seat, and sits down. Jane tries to catch his eye because she is not sure if she is supposed to start or if he wants to say something, but he is cleaning his glasses, then leaning forward to grab a piece of fruit, then back on his phone.

“Jane, will you take everybody through it?” Tom asks, his mouth full of apple.

Jane smooths her skirt by rubbing her palms down her thighs three times, then she stands up, smiling. Her heels sink into the rug.

Their client is a young author named Jeremy who wrote a literary thriller on Twitter. All of the characters have different fake Twitter accounts, including Rita Hadzic (@ritahadzic), a twenty-one-year-old student at Hunter, though she has stopped tweeting since she went missing. Rita wanted to be an urban planner and was a nanny for a Brooklyn family when she wasn’t in class. She paid a monthly fee at Hunter to use the ceramic studio and posted pictures of her finished bowls and vases on her Instagram account, bowls and vases that are actually made by Jane’s friend Amelia. For four months starting at the end of 2018, Rita tweeted like a person addicted to Twitter—somewhere between twenty and forty times a day, more if she decided to live-tweet a TV show or a protest or discuss an article she was reading in school. As Rita tweeted, so did a number of other characters Jeremy created—an ex-boyfriend, the mother and father in the family Rita nannied for, friends from Hunter, a city council commissioner. Rather, Jeremy created most of the characters, but as Jeremy and Jane met to discuss how to make them come alive on Twitter, they changed slightly—or sometimes a lot—as Jane brought up the possibilities and limitations of the platform. Jeremy knew who the characters were and what he wanted to happen in the investigation, but Jane was the one who knew how to use their tweeting habits as characterization: who would retweet what, who would engage with trolls, who would apologize and who would double down. And so the characters they’d invented tweeted and retweeted and followed and unfollowed—each other, but also real people. They had opinions about current events; they piled on where it would be appropriate to pile on; they made jokes that didn’t come off and deleted them. Then, when Jeremy and Jane were sure they had sufficient material for the coming investigation, Jane used her background in social media marketing to make Rita go viral, and they disappeared her.

Rita’s followers have grown by thousands since she disappeared; her final post, a picture of a blue ceramic bowl with the caption Big news soon. Watch this space! The follower counts for the rest of the characters who populate her world have likewise continued to grow exponentially. They, of course, have continued to tweet—looking for her, mourning her, writing earnest and mostly ill-advised threads in the middle of the night that are “accidentally” self-incriminating. Or incriminating of someone else. Joshua—Jeremy’s alter ego, a writer figure who stumbled across the Rita mystery researching something for his own novel—continues to document his findings: interviews he conducts with campus security guards, live-tweets of stakeouts he undertakes where he follows whoever is at the top of his suspect list at the moment, successful attempts to trick the police into showing him witness statements. Every once in a while, he uploads blurry photographs of someone he believes might be Rita riding her bike but who is actually Jane’s friend Amelia.

It was Jane’s idea, the Twitter mystery. Jeremy had come to them looking to increase his follower count before sending out his recently finished manuscript, a book he planned to pitch to agents as a novel of ideas that utilized and subverted the tropes of detective fiction. Her boss often shakes his head at her when they walk by each other in the office. She loves working with Jeremy. They both sign their emails J, and it does feel like that, that the project is theirs, impossible without the two of them, so dependent on both their labor that it would be difficult to separate her contribution from his. Sometimes she feels like she has disappeared into his project, but not in a way that feels deficient. Like they both know exactly what they are good at and slotted into each other like pieces of IKEA furniture. The bespoke tool made for their particular product is the internet.

Jane walks the team through the various Reddits and subreddits dedicated to Jeremy’s mystery; a writer from BuzzFeed who has started collecting relevant Twitter threads; an article on Medium analyzing the various leads; biographical sketches of the suspects. Even some fan fiction. Mutually beneficial, Jane tells the group. Keeping in line with the dead and absented author. Some of what Jane tells the group about, she made happen—reached out to journalists she knew, @ed the right people, created the first meme off a cringey tweet posted by one of the characters (the father in the family Rita used to nanny for, an unfortunate “tribute” to Rita that Jane wrote deliberately, making sure it was cringey enough to meme). Then she watched it multiply, sucking in a larger and larger audience—some of whom would never understand that a fictional character was the original source material but a significant amount who did or who went back to find out what the original said and why and got caught up in the mystery. But some of what Jane shares with the group has happened without her doing anything at all. More and more each day, it has a life of its own.

After the meeting, a smaller group decides to go to lunch across the street at Mika’s and they all drink wine. Jane is lightheaded after her salad. Jeremy is smart; he didn’t have an agent for his book before he hired them. His first book was published in a contest run by a respected indie publisher, a slim novel that centered on a man whose wife went missing and where the primary action consisted mostly of the man wandering through his house, thinking about things. It was experimental, received critical praise from the small indie reviewers who covered it, and sold two hundred copies. He was paid one thousand dollars. When he finished another book, he came to Stile looking for a way to increase his follower count before he sent it to agents. Now agents are contacting him. He fingers Jane in the bathroom, her sweater tights pulled down to her ankles. She had wondered if he was flirting with her. Sometimes she reread his emails, trying to discern what kind of energy was in them. In the past week, they talked on the phone before bed almost every night, but she hadn’t been sure until today. When they are done, she makes him leave before she pulls her tights up so he doesn’t see her yank them up to her breasts, the reverse karate chop necessary to move the crotch back up between her legs. She fixes the ribbing that snakes around her calves, lines straight down her shins into ankle boots with uneven soles.

After lunch, she works, scrolling through various feeds, tracking analytics, editing tweets, uploading Instagram stories, following links, changing her music, texting with Jeremy—which makes her feel pointed and alive until around three, when he stops writing her back. She reads through the Twitter account of a young Vulture reporter, scrolls through Instagram, reads a profile of an actress she likes written by a profiler she likes. There is threat all around her.

At four, Kaya comes for her, and they put on their coats and gloves and walk to get coffee. Usually, she and Kaya talk about work on their walk, but today they talk about Jeremy. Jane can’t look at her.

“What?” Kaya screeches as something hot bursts at the back of Jane’s throat. “Jeremy fingerbanged you while I had to listen to Tom explain how to grow basil? He and his wife are trying to make the perfect tomato sauce or something.” Kaya shakes her head, laughing. “That bathroom has seen a lot of action,” she continues, because Kaya is sleeping with one of the waiters there. The restaurant is across the street from their office and when Billy works the lunch shift, Kaya goes over to see him. Sometimes when Jane is in the bathroom looking at herself in the mirror, she imagines she sees Kaya’s back in the reflection, Billy’s determined face over her shoulder. When she orders from him now, she looks just to the right of him.

Kaya is staring at her, and Jane knows she is imagining Jeremy’s finger inside her. Kaya is always coming to her desk and asking questions like “Do you think Tom has sex with his wife in the shower?” and other things Jane doesn’t want to think about. It is because of this, and because of the fact that Jeremy stopped texting her, that Jane hadn’t planned to tell Kaya about what happened. But she couldn’t help it. With every passing moment, it became more uncomfortable to keep inside her. Both unreal and painful. A dream that hurt. When Kaya came to get her, she barely got into the street before it all came tumbling out of her, a relief, the words hot and streaming. Her breath makes her scarf wet where she’d wrapped it around her mouth.

Now Kaya is scrolling through Jane and Jeremy’s text exchange, her glove hanging from her mouth from when she tugged it off with her teeth.

“No, you’re good,” she says, handing Jane her phone back. “Just make sure to be the one who goes dark first next time.”

“But what if there isn’t a next time?”

“There will be.”

Kaya is dismissively confident. It’s Jane’s favorite kind of confident. She allows it to seep into her.

At the coffee shop, Kaya laughs with the baristas, a skateboarder with gauges in his earlobes and a slight female drummer who wears platform high-tops. Kaya is funny; Jane always goes to her when she needs to use humor for a client. Jane has spent years trying to understand humor. What happens when we laugh? How does humor make us trust people online and in real life? What is funny? People tell Jane she is funny too sometimes, but it makes her nervous that she can’t pinpoint the source of it, the same way she can never tell why men want to kiss her. It feels scary to have important things like that both inside her and also completely out of her control.

Kaya and Jane live in the same neighborhood and they often walk home from work together, reach Jane’s block, and keep going.

“I have to go to the pharmacy,” Kaya will say, “do you want to come?” and they’ll turn away from Jane’s apartment, run errands, grab dinner, take Kaya’s dog to the dog park, suit up for a run or a yoga class until it is past dark. Jane has spent full Saturdays at Kaya’s, the sky darkening outside the window, their positions changing on the couch, sweaters added or discarded. A surprising absence of memories; hours, days, where she has retained nothing but the sense of a surprised laugh warming her chest on the way out—or the sense she is about to say something funny, the knowledge of it shaping her mouth, altering the tone of her voice, the satisfaction of Kaya’s laughter, the whole body of joy of it, like hot summer nights with no rain, only lightning.

Kaya pays for their coffees and says something to the drummer that makes the young woman laugh. Kaya can do it with anyone, but Jane can do it comfortably only with Kaya. Jane makes Jeremy laugh too, but she feels nervous.

The rest of the workday is marked by waiting for a text she does not expect to come. Still, every few minutes, she notices the absence of it. She switches screens back to her computer. She wants to create a Tumblr for Rita, the presumably murdered college senior at the center of Jeremy’s Twitter mystery. It’s supposed to be her old Tumblr, something she stopped using in high school. Jane’s experimenting with another Tumblr now—song lyrics scrawled across pictures of empty subway stations—backdating posts versus manipulating the HTML code to hide when the posts were uploaded, both of which Tom had just taught her to do. She sends various versions to him to see if he can find the date anywhere using web browsers or applications.

Rita’s about to reveal her teenage self as a soulbonder. Jane had needed to explain the concept to Jeremy, but he’d immediately gravitated to it.

“So they think they’re a fictional character?” he’d asked.

“No, it’s more an intense bond with a fictional character to the point where they exist in your own head,” she told him. “That thing that happens when you’re a kid reading books but times a million so you think they were written for you, exist inside you.”

“Like multiple personalities?”

“No. The character is still the character, and they have their own life, but they also exist in your head. Or some people believe there’s a soulscape where your soul and theirs meet, but it feels like it’s in your head. Plus soulbonds don’t front, for the most part.”

“Front?”

“A multiple personality fronts—becomes dominant. Soulbonds don’t do things like that.”

“And how do they meet? Why do they bond?”

“Well, they meet in fiction. And it can get a little convoluted after that. Some people believe it’s essentially just a soulmate situation. Some SBs believe it’s related to the multiverse—where, of all the possible worlds, there is one world where the fictional character exists and lives the life they lived in the book. There’s something about reading that opens the portal between the worlds—possibly because to write the book in the first place, someone from this world had access to that world. Somehow.”

“SBs?”

“Soulbonders. It was a Tumblr thing. I guess you were never on Tumblr?”

“No.”

“So you hate it?”

“No.”

“Really?” The relief she felt was palpable, troubling. “I thought it worked on a few levels, because there’s all these people identifying with Rita—who’s not real—and she does the same thing, so there’s a sense of unreality/reality all the way down.”

“It’s perfect,” he said. “There’s also this concept of the double in mysteries.”

“Why?”

“Because we can only see what we are.”

“So you really like it?”

“No, I love it,” he said. “And this is a real thing that people believe in?”

“Yeah. Well, some people. Mostly on Tumblr.”

“What about you? Do you have one?”

“No. I just like to eavesdrop on people on the internet. They’ll tell you anything.”

“So, then, is the bond part of them or something they want to fuck?”

“It’s unclear. Both, either. It can be a romantic interest or a part of yourself you’re too scared to express. Sometimes, it’s more like a guardian angel.”

“Amazing.”

When Jane got home that night, Jeremy followed up with texts full of links. He’d been on a deep dive into the soulbond universe and had some questions. It was the first time they’d texted all night, sending possibilities for Rita’s soulbond back and forth, watching snippets of movies, quoting from books they’d loved as teenagers. She came to work bleary-eyed and ecstatic.

At the end of the day, Kaya gets her for yoga. Amanda is teaching, and they love Amanda. She is less earnest than the other teachers, and her classes are hard, but she never seems like she is trying to make people fail, which they both agree Leslie does. Jane has fallen on her face in Leslie’s class, her arms buckling after the nine hundredth chaturanga. In Amanda’s class, Jane’s arm balances have gotten longer and steadier. Most days, she’s sure she’s never experienced progress like this before in her life.

During savasana, the sweat chills on Jane’s body. She feels rooted to the floor. Amanda comes by and pulls gently on all her limbs like she is trying to make her a little bit taller. Kaya is asleep, snoring lightly. Jane is not asleep, but still, when Amanda begins speaking again to guide them through the end of class, she feels as if she is pulling herself up from under something heavy.

They eat at the Whole Foods salad bar with their yoga mats rolled up by their feet. Kaya buys a small bag of Mexican wedding cookies and eats them with one leg pulled up on her chair, powdered sugar on her fingers.

A couple from their yoga class is wandering the aisles. They plan their meals for the week and grocery shop according to this menu. Jane and Kaya have seen them do this after Amanda’s class for the past six months. They are reading the ingredients on a bottle of salad dressing.

“How often do you think they have sex?” Kaya asks.

“God. Why do you do this?”

“How do you not do this? I picture people having sex within the first minute of meeting them.”

“That is not normal.”

“He seems like the kind of guy who would make sex all about flexibility. Like, ‘Let’s see how far we can bend each other.’”

“He is pretty flexible,” Jane concedes as the images populate her mind. “Fuck. I’m never going to be able to unsee this now.”

“It makes class go by faster,” Kaya says. She pushes her cookies across the table at Jane. “Please, eat the rest. I’ve already eaten three.”

Jane peeks in the small paper bag at the remaining cookies. “I’m full.”

“Well, take them for later, at least. I can’t take them or I’ll eat them.”

“Okay, sure.”

It’s almost ten by the time they get to their neighborhood, but Jane doesn’t really feel like going home, so she sits on the stairs of Kaya’s building while Kaya gets her dog, and then they walk around the block together. Kaya’s dog is strong, barrel-chested. He yanks Kaya toward cracks in the sidewalk, tree stumps, cockroaches, feral cats. A rat crosses their path, running nimbly over the broken sidewalk. He disappears somewhere near the stairs of a brownstone.

“Randy,” Kaya says, nodding at the rat’s retreating back.

“And a good evening to you, sir,” Jane adds. “Give our best to your family.”

At home, Jane showers and puts on an extra-large hooded sweatshirt that makes her feel like she is disappearing. Jeremy has not texted her, but he has sent her an email about work, drafts of some possible tweets, an outline of upcoming plot points. Regular tone. No signaling about the bathroom except for the final line: Hope you were able to get some work done after all that wine. I basically passed out—J.

She smiles, relieved that he has alluded to it at all and then a little elated, because if he passed out, that could explain why he suddenly stopped writing her back. But the more she rereads it, she wonders if it’s meant to imply that he was very drunk, and what happened was the result of that drunkenness and not anything else, like mutual attraction. Wonders also whether he is giving her the opportunity to cosign this interpretation so they can move on, egos intact, without the need to talk about it ever again. She forwards the email to Kaya with a question mark, then clips her nails as she waits for her to write back, but she doesn’t. Jane puts the clippers away, washes her hands in the bathroom, searches for Kaya’s leftover cookies in her purse, and eats them while composing her response. She licks the sugar off her fingers and rubs them on her arm to dry them before typing.

Me too, she writes, and includes a GIF of Nicolas Cage loading bottles into a shopping cart. Then she reads what he has sent her and starts editing. When they began, after Jane pitched Jeremy the idea of the Twitter mystery, he would go home and write it, consulting with her occasionally about how it could be accomplished online. Slowly that had changed, because Jeremy didn’t really understand the internet—he just knew he needed it. They met once in the beginning to discuss ideas for how they could position the ex-boyfriend as a suspect—what Jeremy had planned for him and what they could do before and after Rita went missing to lay the proper foundation. Jeremy came to the meeting with some cryptic tweets the ex-boyfriend could post as well as a list of incriminating information his alter ego, Joshua, would discover after Rita disappeared (it looked like he was reading her emails; some indications he was cheating on her before they broke up; explosive fights described by a witness; a temper—maybe they could upload a photo of Rita’s cracked phone and somehow insinuate he h. . .