My apartment in Queens is the size of a shoebox and smells faintly of old cabbage and desperation. I am Leo, a freelance translator who spends most of his time translating technical manuals for industrial air conditioners. My life is a series of beige events.

Then I met Gary.

Gary is a ghost. He doesn't rattle chains or moan in the night. He mostly just sits on my thrift-store sofa and complains about the quality of modern television. He died in 1974, apparently of a very boring heart attack while eating a ham sandwich, and for some reason, he decided my living room was the perfect place to spend eternity.

"The resolution on this screen is appalling," Gary remarked one Tuesday, gesturing toward my laptop. "In my day, we had the dignity of static. You could actually imagine things in the static. Now, everything is just... too clear."

At first, I was terrified. I tried everything—salt circles, sage, a very expensive vacuum cleaner I bought from a late-night infomercial. Nothing worked. Gary just floated through the salt and told me my sage smelled like burning tires.

Eventually, the terror faded into a dull, domestic annoyance. Having a ghost as a roommate is remarkably like having a very judgmental uncle who doesn't pay rent. We developed a routine. I would read the news aloud, and Gary would tell me why the 70s were better, despite the polyester suits and the music.

"You're too anxious, Leo," Gary said one evening, watching me fret over a deadline. "You spend all your time worrying about the future. I'm dead. I can tell you, the future is just a long sequence of things you didn't want to happen, happening exactly when you least expect them. Just eat the sandwich."

The horror of my situation wasn't the presence of the supernatural; it was the realization that my life with a dead man was the most social interaction I'd had in three years. I found myself looking forward to his complaints. I started buying the kind of ham he liked, even though he couldn't eat it.

One day, Gary told me he was leaving. He'd finally found a way to "move on," or so he said. He didn't give me a profound farewell or a secret to the universe. He just looked at my beige walls and said, "For God's sake, Leo, paint this place a different color. It's depressing even for a ghost."

He vanished in a flicker of grey light. I sat in the silence of my apartment, looking at the empty sofa. I felt a sudden, sharp pang of loneliness. I realized that I had spent more time talking to a dead man than to any living soul in New York. I walked to the hardware store and bought a can of bright, obnoxious yellow paint.

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