Instead of going back to his room, Matt heads to the library and starts going through obituaries. Before long, he’s checked the site of every newspaper he can think of, and each leads to the same dead end: no death of Franklin Nelson has been reported. Neither have any missing person reports been filed for him. So, three possibilities Matt comes up with off the top of his head: Foggy’s dead and his grief-stricken parents didn’t bother to pay for an obituary; Foggy’s not dead and Matt is just going crazy; or Foggy’s not dead but somehow he’s able to astral-project without realizing it.
The weather’s pretty good, so Matt heads to a bench outside near one of the garden display beds to think.
“How was class this morning?” Foggy asks, sounding closer than ever, and Matt barely manages to cover a full-body flinch.
“Fine!” he barks, too loudly. A couple of heads turn in his direction from passersby before they quickly look away again. Matt ducks his head and sort of murmurs into his shoulder. “Did you go to class?”
“Sure I did, though I don’t know why I bother if I’m never going to get an assignment for the big group project that’s due in a couple of weeks. I didn’t see you at lunch.”
“Yeah, I went—I went to Mass.”
Foggy laughs. It’s a nice laugh; it makes the corners of Matt’s mouth pull up involuntarily. “You make the Pope look like a pagan, Matt.”
Matt breaths out a laugh of his own. “My grandmother always used to say Murdock men have the devil in them. Call it a preventative measure.”
“Well, you’ve escaped his home in Hell’s Kitchen, so I guess that, combined with regular church attendance’ll keep him at bay.”
“Hell’s Kitchen” triggers a memory from the night before. “You said you remembered me, from the news, when we were kids.”
“Sure, yeah, from when you got your peepers knocked out saving that old dude.”
Matt snorts with laughter, too amused to care that people are looking at him again. “They didn’t get knocked out.”
“Yeah, I’ve noticed. They’re very pretty.”
Foggy says it grudgingly, like it’s a concession, not a compliment, but Matt flounders a little anyway. His face is, in a lot of ways, a non-issue to him, and he wavers between using it to ease his way in difficult situations and forgetting about it until someone brings it up (usually behind his back). It’s weird to suddenly feel like maybe he wants someone to like the way he looks, especially when he can’t even map Foggy’s appearance for himself.
Because Foggy isn’t really here, oh God, he just blushed over a ghost—or hallucination—calling him pretty, what the hell is the matter with him?
Foggy seems to take the silence as more awkward than Matt meant it to be. The resulting flood of words has the air of a retreat, anyway. “Speaking of pretty, wow, this day is gorgeous. All this sunshine isn’t very late fall at all but I’ll take it. Some of the flowers are even still blooming. Do you, uh, do you want me to describe it for you? Is that weird?”
Nobody’s spontaneously narrated for him in years. Matt swallows against a lump in his throat. “No. Not weird at all. Please.”
“Okay. So, right now there’s a little sparrow pecking around the bush directly behind us. I have no idea what he’s looking for but I think he just found a french fry, so, good job, sparrow.”
Matt leans, as subtly as he can, toward the sound of Foggy’s voice as he continues. It’s a good fifteen minutes of Foggy’s sharp and funny observations, with occasional interjections from Matt, before he realizes he feels more relaxed than he has since… well. Since he can remember, really.
***
For a couple of weeks, Matt alternates between feeling like he needs to check himself into a mental hospital and wanting to spend every available moment talking to Foggy. Because Foggy is really good at making Matt laugh, sure, but he’s also smart, so smart that he can actually help Matt with his homework, and now that he’s getting over his grudge over Matt having apparently given him the cold shoulder for months, he’s got a way of teasing Matt out of taking himself too seriously without making Matt feel stupid about it.
Plus, Matt kind of likes being bothered to do things like eat, and sleep, and leave his room for reasons other than class sometimes, which is something else Foggy is good at. His voice sounds closer and closer with every day.
Matt keeps a Google Alert for Foggy’s name, just in case, but nothing ever comes up. He even goes to Hell’s Kitchen, one Saturday, and walks around, listening for someone to mention Foggy’s name, or his parents’, asks about the hardware store Foggy said his dad used to own, but it’s owned by a Vietnamese family now and they don’t speak enough English to really understand what he wants to know.
They’re sitting at a table in a coffee shop near campus a week later—well, Matt is sitting, Foggy is… existing—when Marci Stahl walks up to them. Matt recognizes her immediately from Philosophy. She has a way of debating Professor Beardman’s points that simultaneously signals her complete disdain for moral quandaries and her consummate ability to use them for her own purposes.
“So,” she says, and her voice is sharp with a note Matt can’t quite place, but it’s got a tremor underlying it, so faint it’s barely there. “I was going to ignore your little ghostly tête-á-têtes I keep observing around campus, but he’s got you laughing like an idiot in public now, and I have to wonder, Murdock, if this is a bit more serious than the average haunting.”
Ah. The note is pure fear.
Matt can’t help his start of surprise, but before he can ask, Marci says, “Yes, I can see him.”
“M-Marci,” he stammers, caught halfway between elation—she can see him! Matt’s not crazy and Foggy is real—and worry.
Foggy, at least, seems pleased. “Finally, someone besides you decides to acknowledge my existence.”
Marci tilts her head in a way that usually signals utter disdain in class. “Oh my God, how can you be so incredibly obtuse. Even for someone without an actual brain that’s pretty impressive.” Leaning over, she sticks her hand right where Foggy’s sitting and waves it around. “Did you just not notice how you can walk through walls now? You’re dead. Leave Murdock alone; he might specialize in wrecking the grade curve but I hardly think that warrants this sort of punishment.”
“It’s not a punishment,” Matt blurts, at the same time Foggy whispers, “Fuck me.”
“Sorry, you’ve missed your chance on that one.” Marci turns to Matt, and her tone slides straight into judgmental. “Are you telling me this is voluntary? You know he’s here and, what, you just rolled with it? I can’t escape the dead bastards, but it’s beyond me why anyone would subject themselves to that sort of shadowing of their own free will.”
“I don’t think he’s dead,” Matt says, then catches himself and adds, “Bastards, plural. You see ghosts a lot?”
“Like I said, I can’t escape them.” She sits down in Foggy’s seat. He makes a startled noise of protest. “Catch up with reality, sweetie, you don’t have muscles that get fatigued if you stand.”
Matt can’t ping Foggy’s location anymore with her radar impression overlaying his, but Marci makes a satisfied sound before sipping her latte. “Good, he’s gone. You don’t think he’s dead? What else could he be?”
“I don’t know, but there haven’t been any obituaries for him, and he’s from Hell’s Kitchen like me. I would’ve been able to find something.”
Marci’s silent for a long moment. “Personally I was just thrilled that someone else has the same curse as me. I was hoping to find some misery-loving company to bitch about how moping spirits ruin the cityscape. Now you’re telling me you’ve done some actual detective work for this one? Why do you care?”
We were supposed to meet. We were supposed to be friends. “He was supposed to be my roommate, but something happened, and he never showed up. Then, weeks later, he did, but… the way you saw.”
Marci drums her fingernails on the table, one quick tap-tap-tap-tap, before stilling again. “Have you tried calling hospitals?”
Matt sighs. “It’s… quite a bit of work, for me, and anyway they couldn’t tell me anything.”
“You wouldn’t ask about him, Murdock. You’d ask for his room. If they say they don’t have a patient with that name, move on.” Marci swirls her cup around Matt listens to the coffee form its own tiny cardboard-encompassed whirlpool, watches the heat fluctuate within the motion. “You wanted to know if I see a lot of ghosts. Do you not? I know you can’t actually see them of course, but… hear them?”
“Foggy’s the only one.” Matt swallows. “How many do you see? Right now.”
Marci hums speculatively. “Five.”
“And where—where are they?”
“One’s behind the counter. Two are talking at the table next to us. One’s across the street. I think she’s window shopping. The other one’s sitting on the roof.”
Matt listens, but he can’t hear the two at the table beside him. “Do they know? Know that they’re dead?”
“I’d imagine it’s hard to miss.” Matt does his best to stare her down, and after a moment she relents. “Yes. They know. Your personal poltergeist is definitely an exception to some rule or other. I just don’t know which one. It’s not like the second sight came with a guide book.”
***
Foggy finds Matt in his room a few hours later, listening to his screen reader go through the list of hospitals. There are… a lot of them. Matt’s concentrating so hard on listening that he doesn’t even notice Foggy until he says right next to Matt’s ear, “Dude, this is going to take forever.”
Matt nearly jumps out of his skin. “Foggy!”
“Yeah. Sorry for bailing earlier. Your friend’s terrifying. And hot. But also terrifying.”
“She’s not really a friend, more like a semester-long object lesson in mutually assured destruction,” Matt says absently, preoccupied with digging his phone out of his pocket and calculating how many minutes he has left.
“Matt.”
“Yeah?”
Foggy’s voice has gone small. “Do you think the reason nobody talks to me anymore is because I’m dead?”
Matt reaches for him automatically, but remembers in time to pull his hand back before it goes through him. “No. No, buddy, Marci said the ghosts she sees know they’re dead. You’d know.” He hesitates. “But you’re definitely not physically here. You realize that, right?”
Foggy makes a miserable sound of assent. Matt wants to hug him so much. Which is weird, because he’s not usually a very huggy person. But this is Foggy, and he’s hurting, and there’s nothing Matt can do about it.
Except maybe figure out why he’s here.
“It’s going to be okay.” It has to be. “Let’s just—let’s just call the hospitals and see what we find out, okay?”
Foggy takes a moment to answer, but he sounds better when he does. “Okay. You want me to read the numbers to you?”
Matt smiles, and ignores how warm his chest feels at the consideration. “Sure. That’d help.”
It takes over an hour, but Matt finally calls the right number. When he asks for “Franklin Nelson’s room,” the operator says, “One moment,” then, “I’ll connect you, sir.”
Matt sits in blank surprise until the line starts ringing again. Before he can decide what to do, a woman picks up the phone and says, “This is Anna.”
Well, what the hell. “Hello, I was—I was calling for Foggy?” On behalf of him, anyway.
“Ooh, did this one work?” Foggy asks.
The woman’s voice sharpens. “Who is this?”
“Matt. Matt Murdock.” He fumbles for an explanation while Foggy moves closer. “I was supposed to be Foggy’s roommate at Columbia this year, but he didn’t show. We’d spoken a lot,” a lie, but also not really, “so I was worried, and—someone mentioned he was here?”
“Oh...” The edge vanishes from her words. Matt can practically hear her shoulders slump. “Oh, honey.”
[Fill] If Only It Were True (part three)
Instead of going back to his room, Matt heads to the library and starts going through obituaries. Before long, he’s checked the site of every newspaper he can think of, and each leads to the same dead end: no death of Franklin Nelson has been reported. Neither have any missing person reports been filed for him. So, three possibilities Matt comes up with off the top of his head: Foggy’s dead and his grief-stricken parents didn’t bother to pay for an obituary; Foggy’s not dead and Matt is just going crazy; or Foggy’s not dead but somehow he’s able to astral-project without realizing it.
The weather’s pretty good, so Matt heads to a bench outside near one of the garden display beds to think.
“How was class this morning?” Foggy asks, sounding closer than ever, and Matt barely manages to cover a full-body flinch.
“Fine!” he barks, too loudly. A couple of heads turn in his direction from passersby before they quickly look away again. Matt ducks his head and sort of murmurs into his shoulder. “Did you go to class?”
“Sure I did, though I don’t know why I bother if I’m never going to get an assignment for the big group project that’s due in a couple of weeks. I didn’t see you at lunch.”
“Yeah, I went—I went to Mass.”
Foggy laughs. It’s a nice laugh; it makes the corners of Matt’s mouth pull up involuntarily. “You make the Pope look like a pagan, Matt.”
Matt breaths out a laugh of his own. “My grandmother always used to say Murdock men have the devil in them. Call it a preventative measure.”
“Well, you’ve escaped his home in Hell’s Kitchen, so I guess that, combined with regular church attendance’ll keep him at bay.”
“Hell’s Kitchen” triggers a memory from the night before. “You said you remembered me, from the news, when we were kids.”
“Sure, yeah, from when you got your peepers knocked out saving that old dude.”
Matt snorts with laughter, too amused to care that people are looking at him again. “They didn’t get knocked out.”
“Yeah, I’ve noticed. They’re very pretty.”
Foggy says it grudgingly, like it’s a concession, not a compliment, but Matt flounders a little anyway. His face is, in a lot of ways, a non-issue to him, and he wavers between using it to ease his way in difficult situations and forgetting about it until someone brings it up (usually behind his back). It’s weird to suddenly feel like maybe he wants someone to like the way he looks, especially when he can’t even map Foggy’s appearance for himself.
Because Foggy isn’t really here, oh God, he just blushed over a ghost—or hallucination—calling him pretty, what the hell is the matter with him?
Foggy seems to take the silence as more awkward than Matt meant it to be. The resulting flood of words has the air of a retreat, anyway. “Speaking of pretty, wow, this day is gorgeous. All this sunshine isn’t very late fall at all but I’ll take it. Some of the flowers are even still blooming. Do you, uh, do you want me to describe it for you? Is that weird?”
Nobody’s spontaneously narrated for him in years. Matt swallows against a lump in his throat. “No. Not weird at all. Please.”
“Okay. So, right now there’s a little sparrow pecking around the bush directly behind us. I have no idea what he’s looking for but I think he just found a french fry, so, good job, sparrow.”
Matt leans, as subtly as he can, toward the sound of Foggy’s voice as he continues. It’s a good fifteen minutes of Foggy’s sharp and funny observations, with occasional interjections from Matt, before he realizes he feels more relaxed than he has since… well. Since he can remember, really.
***
For a couple of weeks, Matt alternates between feeling like he needs to check himself into a mental hospital and wanting to spend every available moment talking to Foggy. Because Foggy is really good at making Matt laugh, sure, but he’s also smart, so smart that he can actually help Matt with his homework, and now that he’s getting over his grudge over Matt having apparently given him the cold shoulder for months, he’s got a way of teasing Matt out of taking himself too seriously without making Matt feel stupid about it.
Plus, Matt kind of likes being bothered to do things like eat, and sleep, and leave his room for reasons other than class sometimes, which is something else Foggy is good at. His voice sounds closer and closer with every day.
Matt keeps a Google Alert for Foggy’s name, just in case, but nothing ever comes up. He even goes to Hell’s Kitchen, one Saturday, and walks around, listening for someone to mention Foggy’s name, or his parents’, asks about the hardware store Foggy said his dad used to own, but it’s owned by a Vietnamese family now and they don’t speak enough English to really understand what he wants to know.
They’re sitting at a table in a coffee shop near campus a week later—well, Matt is sitting, Foggy is… existing—when Marci Stahl walks up to them. Matt recognizes her immediately from Philosophy. She has a way of debating Professor Beardman’s points that simultaneously signals her complete disdain for moral quandaries and her consummate ability to use them for her own purposes.
“So,” she says, and her voice is sharp with a note Matt can’t quite place, but it’s got a tremor underlying it, so faint it’s barely there. “I was going to ignore your little ghostly tête-á-têtes I keep observing around campus, but he’s got you laughing like an idiot in public now, and I have to wonder, Murdock, if this is a bit more serious than the average haunting.”
Ah. The note is pure fear.
Matt can’t help his start of surprise, but before he can ask, Marci says, “Yes, I can see him.”
“M-Marci,” he stammers, caught halfway between elation—she can see him! Matt’s not crazy and Foggy is real—and worry.
Foggy, at least, seems pleased. “Finally, someone besides you decides to acknowledge my existence.”
Marci tilts her head in a way that usually signals utter disdain in class. “Oh my God, how can you be so incredibly obtuse. Even for someone without an actual brain that’s pretty impressive.” Leaning over, she sticks her hand right where Foggy’s sitting and waves it around. “Did you just not notice how you can walk through walls now? You’re dead. Leave Murdock alone; he might specialize in wrecking the grade curve but I hardly think that warrants this sort of punishment.”
“It’s not a punishment,” Matt blurts, at the same time Foggy whispers, “Fuck me.”
“Sorry, you’ve missed your chance on that one.” Marci turns to Matt, and her tone slides straight into judgmental. “Are you telling me this is voluntary? You know he’s here and, what, you just rolled with it? I can’t escape the dead bastards, but it’s beyond me why anyone would subject themselves to that sort of shadowing of their own free will.”
“I don’t think he’s dead,” Matt says, then catches himself and adds, “Bastards, plural. You see ghosts a lot?”
“Like I said, I can’t escape them.” She sits down in Foggy’s seat. He makes a startled noise of protest. “Catch up with reality, sweetie, you don’t have muscles that get fatigued if you stand.”
Matt can’t ping Foggy’s location anymore with her radar impression overlaying his, but Marci makes a satisfied sound before sipping her latte. “Good, he’s gone. You don’t think he’s dead? What else could he be?”
“I don’t know, but there haven’t been any obituaries for him, and he’s from Hell’s Kitchen like me. I would’ve been able to find something.”
Marci’s silent for a long moment. “Personally I was just thrilled that someone else has the same curse as me. I was hoping to find some misery-loving company to bitch about how moping spirits ruin the cityscape. Now you’re telling me you’ve done some actual detective work for this one? Why do you care?”
We were supposed to meet. We were supposed to be friends. “He was supposed to be my roommate, but something happened, and he never showed up. Then, weeks later, he did, but… the way you saw.”
Marci drums her fingernails on the table, one quick tap-tap-tap-tap, before stilling again. “Have you tried calling hospitals?”
Matt sighs. “It’s… quite a bit of work, for me, and anyway they couldn’t tell me anything.”
“You wouldn’t ask about him, Murdock. You’d ask for his room. If they say they don’t have a patient with that name, move on.” Marci swirls her cup around Matt listens to the coffee form its own tiny cardboard-encompassed whirlpool, watches the heat fluctuate within the motion. “You wanted to know if I see a lot of ghosts. Do you not? I know you can’t actually see them of course, but… hear them?”
“Foggy’s the only one.” Matt swallows. “How many do you see? Right now.”
Marci hums speculatively. “Five.”
“And where—where are they?”
“One’s behind the counter. Two are talking at the table next to us. One’s across the street. I think she’s window shopping. The other one’s sitting on the roof.”
Matt listens, but he can’t hear the two at the table beside him. “Do they know? Know that they’re dead?”
“I’d imagine it’s hard to miss.” Matt does his best to stare her down, and after a moment she relents. “Yes. They know. Your personal poltergeist is definitely an exception to some rule or other. I just don’t know which one. It’s not like the second sight came with a guide book.”
***
Foggy finds Matt in his room a few hours later, listening to his screen reader go through the list of hospitals. There are… a lot of them. Matt’s concentrating so hard on listening that he doesn’t even notice Foggy until he says right next to Matt’s ear, “Dude, this is going to take forever.”
Matt nearly jumps out of his skin. “Foggy!”
“Yeah. Sorry for bailing earlier. Your friend’s terrifying. And hot. But also terrifying.”
“She’s not really a friend, more like a semester-long object lesson in mutually assured destruction,” Matt says absently, preoccupied with digging his phone out of his pocket and calculating how many minutes he has left.
“Matt.”
“Yeah?”
Foggy’s voice has gone small. “Do you think the reason nobody talks to me anymore is because I’m dead?”
Matt reaches for him automatically, but remembers in time to pull his hand back before it goes through him. “No. No, buddy, Marci said the ghosts she sees know they’re dead. You’d know.” He hesitates. “But you’re definitely not physically here. You realize that, right?”
Foggy makes a miserable sound of assent. Matt wants to hug him so much. Which is weird, because he’s not usually a very huggy person. But this is Foggy, and he’s hurting, and there’s nothing Matt can do about it.
Except maybe figure out why he’s here.
“It’s going to be okay.” It has to be. “Let’s just—let’s just call the hospitals and see what we find out, okay?”
Foggy takes a moment to answer, but he sounds better when he does. “Okay. You want me to read the numbers to you?”
Matt smiles, and ignores how warm his chest feels at the consideration. “Sure. That’d help.”
It takes over an hour, but Matt finally calls the right number. When he asks for “Franklin Nelson’s room,” the operator says, “One moment,” then, “I’ll connect you, sir.”
Matt sits in blank surprise until the line starts ringing again. Before he can decide what to do, a woman picks up the phone and says, “This is Anna.”
Well, what the hell. “Hello, I was—I was calling for Foggy?” On behalf of him, anyway.
“Ooh, did this one work?” Foggy asks.
The woman’s voice sharpens. “Who is this?”
“Matt. Matt Murdock.” He fumbles for an explanation while Foggy moves closer. “I was supposed to be Foggy’s roommate at Columbia this year, but he didn’t show. We’d spoken a lot,” a lie, but also not really, “so I was worried, and—someone mentioned he was here?”
“Oh...” The edge vanishes from her words. Matt can practically hear her shoulders slump. “Oh, honey.”
And then she begins to explain.