Everywhere I went I wrote two pieces, one a travel piece for the magazine and one about what I really saw. Jacques called me young man and he was gnarly and pragmatic and occasionally he asked me to verify facts, distances, prices, locations. He said, You’re cheaper than a bunch of freelancers and you’re fast. I just have to keep making up pseudonyms for you.

I wrote a piece about walls engraved with the names of the dead. Names cut into marble and granite, carved into wood and stone, nailed onto trees and doorways and fences. Even on the moon they left a plaque to dead astronauts. Walls and borders are the natural habitat of ghosts. I do not invite ghosts in but I do not close myself to them either. I hear their voices like birdcall in the dark. They are perceptible through stone and brick and plaster. I think sometimes ghosts surprise even themselves. They have things to tell us. If we can hear, they are everywhere.

One day Jacques called me into his office and I saw the stack of my what-I-really-saw pieces and he tapped his finger on them and said, Why so much death and disease, young man? What am I supposed to do with these?

I don’t know. Publish them.

—

When I got too pregnant to fly, Jacques taught me copy editing and layout. I had travelled so much and written so fast that we had a year’s worth of material anyway. He gave me a travel gadgets section at the back to write—portable luggage weigh scales and ostrich feather pillows and rabbit-ear corkscrews. The advertisers loved it and I marvelled at human ingenuity put to no purpose at all. I liked to sit late at the office with Jacques while he rolled cigarettes and smoked. Sometimes I talked to him about journalists like Daniel Defoe and I.F. Stone who put together stories from what was around them, from public domain records and industry reports.

He said, You just say that because you’re chained to home like I am. What are you hanging around with an old guy for?

I said, You’re the only writer I know.

Lord help you then, and he leaned back in his chair and put his good leg up on the desk.

I said, You know what they have in Belfast?

To make him laugh I told him about the loos that rise out of the sidewalks after dark, and I said I wanted to do a feature on international uritrottoirs. He asked why I hadn’t thought of being a real reporter.

I said, Someday.

Oh, he said, the kid.

Jacques smoked deep into his lungs and held his hand-rolled cigarettes with his thumb and forefinger from above and mostly did not talk when he smoked, as if smoking and talking were separate activities.

He blew rings. Finally he said, Why not rewrite some of your ghost stories. Five hundred words.

I said, They’re not ghost stories.

He said, I can publish them under a different byline, maybe Joe de Pone.