11/27/22: Ghost Car

When I was 6 years old, my father bought me an Xbox. It was a big expenditure for our family at the time. Looking back, the money arguably should have gone towards rent instead. 

But I wasn’t thinking about that at the time. The console came with three games, Street Fighter, Pigeon Pete, and Speedcar Xtreme. We must have played a thousand hours on those three games alone, until he died when I was 8.

I didn’t touch the console for 10 years after that. 

Those years were hard. My father didn’t have any life insurance, and my mother earned just enough to keep us above the poverty line. At school, I mostly kept to myself. When I was old enough, I started working concessions at the local movie theater to help pay the bills, and that was the first time I made any real friends. We called ourselves the Popcorn Rats. I think without the Rats, I would have withered away into nothing.

I was also lucky in that the high school counselor was an old buddy of my father’s. She used to be part of his fishing group. She was also the one who got me into college, at a time in which that was the last thing on my mind.

I came home from college that first summer, listless and full of ennui. My mother was working all the time, chipping away at the last of the medical bill debt, and so it was just me in that empty house.

On a whim, I booted up Speedcar Xtreme, the loading screen familiar but painfully slow by modern standards. It was right then that I found a ghost.

It turns out that the fastest lap on the timed track is recorded as a ghost driver for you to race against. And the record-holder on our console was my father.

And so I played and played and played and played. It felt like I was a kid again, like my father was sitting right next to me on the couch. 

That summer, I played every evening when I got back from work. I talked out loud about my day while driving, and it felt like he was listening. I got good enough that one day, I finally got ahead of his car, surpassing it - 

- and I stopped right in front of the finish line, just to ensure I wouldn’t delete his record. Bliss.

I brought the console with me to school when the summer ended. It became a ritual for me to play in the evening, looping around the track while telling my father about my day.

Then, one day, his ghost car deviated from its usual routine. By that point I knew the exact timing of every turn, lane-change, gear shift that the ghost car would make, and so the change was immediately obvious. 

Everything about its behavior was the same except for a series of brake-taps it made on the course’s lone stretch of straight road.

I played it again. The same series of brake-taps happened again. And again. And again.

At first I thought it was a prank, that someone else had overwritten my father’s record for the track. But I had told my roommate and friends about his ghost car, and they knew better than to touch the console. It also was very obviously still the same ghost car loop - just with a series of brake-taps that were added to it.

I was spooked. It was my friend Tim who finally figured it out.  

“It’s Morse Code,” he said. “The car takes two loops around the track, and each loop translates into a different string of numbers.”

He wrote it down for me. The two strings were each 7 digits each. 

“It’s a set of coordinates,” he said. “My dad’s a pilot. They used to use this system to convey landing areas, during emergencies. No one uses it anymore though.”

I stared at the paper with the coordinates. I felt not so much stunned as much as a passenger in my own head, like I was observing myself from a distance.

“You okay, Ben?” he asked. I nodded dumbly.

The coordinates matched up with an area of woods near my hometown. I vaguely recollected that my grandparents had once owned a plot of land near there, before they moved out East. I drove there the next weekend, almost unthinkingly. 

The coordinates were specific down to a one-meter radius. My phone had enough signal to get me to the exact location - a small clearing in the middle of the woods. I suspected that it had once been a meadow, before being overtaken by the woods. 

The air was cold, and I wasn’t dressed appropriately for the weather. I had, however, brought a shovel.

I brought a shovel, because my father used to tell me a bedtime story every night before I went to sleep. 

“You should know, Ben, that your great- great- grandfather was the one from our family who first came to this land. Back when the Gold Rush first glimmered in the dreams of men, he knew that there was a future to be found here. So he loaded up a wagon - not with shovels or pickaxes, but with the supplies needed to start a store.”

“And he built a general store that all the prospectors frequented. The Gold Rush came and went, the town grew into a size big enough to put it on the map, and your grandfather became rich off that store.”

“He became so rich, in fact, that his sons and daughters were spoiled. One day, he woke up, and he realized that they had stopped trying to make it on their own. They were just waiting for him to die - then they could inherit his wealth.”

“He was already sick by then, and knew he didn’t have long left. But he was strong enough to gather all of his riches, all of his gold, and put them into a chest. And do you know what he did, Ben? One night he went out into the middle of the woods, and he buried that chest ten feet deep. He buried it where no one could find it.”

“And when he died, weeks later, he did so knowing that the children gathered before him would finally need to make it in the world on their own.”

As I dug into the earth, I thought about my mother, who had worked two jobs for as long as I could remember. I thought about how I had learned from a young age never to pick up the phone from an unknown number because the chances were more likely than not that it would be a debt collector. I thought about the fact that I could no longer remember my father’s face in my memories, but that I could still remember the feeling of being tucked into bed every night as a child. 

I thought about how we had had to make it in the world on our own, without him.

Then, three hours in and ten feet down, my shovel hit something hard.