“Ghost Town”

“Ghost Town” is the Specials song that frames Bret Ellis’s final afternoon with Matt Kellner and later returns as a landmark in his memory of Matt’s death. First heard in the pool house on Labor Day, it plays again as Bret leaves without saying goodbye; when he later revisits the room, the song’s association with that last encounter makes the ordinary sound of a record feel charged by loss.

The Last Afternoon

On Labor Day, Bret senses that something is slightly off when he arrives at Matt’s pool house, though he cannot identify the cause. The guesthouse smells more strongly of marijuana than usual, and images of forest fires in Riverside play silently on the television. Over these details, “Ghost Town” echoes loudly through the space. Matt, deeply tanned and wearing a lime-green bathing suit and puka-shell necklace, is rummaging through a drawer and initially fails to notice Bret.

After the song ends, Matt says Bret did not call; Bret replies that Matt did not answer. Bret kisses him, and the encounter becomes more intense than their usual sex. Bret suspects it may be their last time together and wants to leave a final impression. The song accompanies the scene’s ordinary, private intimacy, even as Bret’s attention to its possible ending gives the afternoon a significance Matt does not appear to share.

A Song at the Parting

Later, as darkness falls, Bret recognizes that he will soon disappear from Matt’s life and that Matt may care about his absence no more than he cares about the cat, the empty aquarium, or the world at large. Matt fills a pipe with marijuana, goes to the stereo, and lifts the needle; the Specials begin singing “Ghost Town” again. Bret leaves the guesthouse without saying goodbye.

The refrain about a town becoming a ghost town sounds against a departure that is not marked by any explicit farewell or shared recognition of closure. Bret had hoped their final conversation might acknowledge the end of what they had made together, but instead he leaves with embarrassment and the sense that Matt is indifferent. The song’s repetition gives the scene a pattern of return without providing resolution.

Memory and Loss

After Matt’s death, Bret revisits the pool house and finds it altered by absence: the aquarium is empty, the room is bare, and a column is wrapped in blue plastic. The space had been the only place he saw Matt outside Buckley, and its familiarity now makes it feel haunted. Bret remembers “Ghost Town” as the last song he heard there, while recognizing that it was not, in itself, a sad song.

That contrast is the song’s lasting force in the narrative. Its meaning comes not from an inherently mournful quality but from its placement at the end of Bret and Matt’s private history and its recurrence in Bret’s later act of remembering. The pool house and Matt have become part of a past that defines Bret, while the song preserves the final afternoon as a sound he can return to but cannot recover.