The oldest bowling alley in South America is on the side of a mountain, two hours south of Santiago, Chile in a town called Sewell. Alongside the bowling alley, Sewell once enjoyed a social club, a state-of-the-art movie theater, and the entrance to the El Teniente copper mine. Today, the only way to visit is through a government-permitted tour, which can run upwards of 50,000 pesos. Most tours leave Santiago as early as 8 a.m., with a stop in Rancagua around 10. During the drive from Rancagua to Sewell, you can imagine the miners who have made the journey daily since the Sewell apartments were shut down in the 70s. You can think about how alcohol was banned in town, and picture them drinking on buses up and down the mountain, celebrating another day of safety, or taking advantage before their luck changed. Alternatively, on the drive from Rancagua to Sewell, twisting up the mountain road, you can get carsick.

In an art history class I once took in an airy lecture hall, I read that Salvador Dalí described his melting clocks as ‘the Camembert of time.’ This was a phrase I understood best when I visited Sewell, covered in fine, brown dust, the border of the present soft and undefined. Guidebooks declared the whole place frozen in time, but I think it is more accurate to say that in Sewell, then slips easily into now . I am certain that someone who believes in ghosts would feel them in Sewell.

My grandmother was one such believer. Throughout her life she changed her politics, she went back to school, she stopped eating meat, but she never wavered on the persistence of spirits. I remember being eight or nine, sitting on the floor of her house with my fingers tangled in tassels of carpet. She sat beside me, legs folded under, though she would complain later when she had to stand up. She told me–and I know she knew I wouldn’t be scared–that the dead echoed around us every day. Another time, a year or two later, I peeled vegetables into her sink and she swept under the kitchen table. She said that the moment you go cold on the street, or in your bed at night, a ghost is brushing past, trying once more to experience the joys and sorrows of corporeal life. I asked her, What does corporeal mean? I asked her, How will I know who it is? My mother shot us a disapproving look from the other side of the kitchen. She preferred to talk about things that could be seen.

My grandmother might have been right, or Dalí was. Just the other day, I thought I saw my ex-fiancé on the street. For that moment, I was sixteen and meeting him in chemistry class, I was twenty-one and not telling my parents we were living together, I was twenty-four, packing my boxes, and moving out. And then I was myself and a handsome man was crossing Vicuña Mackenna, sliding past like soft cheese. When she wasn’t telling me about ghosts, my grandmother told me about Sewell. I could recall dozens of conversations through the years as I perched on the stool propped up against her kitchen cabinets, or sat cross-legged on the edge of her bed, or leaned over to examine her jewelry box, or stood in my Santiago apartment, holding the phone to my ear. Her stories went like this: Sewell was a company town, it transplanted North American executives and managers onto an isolated mountainside. They regretted living in such a remote town of a remote country, they built the bowling alley and the social club to compensate. They also regretted raising their children in a remote town of a remote country, they imported North American schoolteachers to compensate.

My great-great-aunt was one such teacher. My grandmother told me about the mining strikes that drove her aunt away from her hometown in western Canada in the 1920s and about the ad for an English-speaking woman who was at home around mountain dust. My grandmother told me that her aunt stayed in the town for around a decade and then left during a dark period, where in just one year, Sewell reeled from the consecutive tragedies of an avalanche and a carbon monoxide accident. My great-great-aunt moved further south and brought her sister from Canada. They lived in Valdivia and said the winters were just like back home. They had children, who were home.

It was hard to justify getting up in the morning to get to Las Condes, to catch the bus, to sit for several hours, smelling exhaust, to walk only when the guide says go, just to take a guided tour of select blocks of an abandoned town, even before considering the 50,000 pesos. I had gone to Sewell only once, when my grandmother was still alive and my ex-fiancé was still my boyfriend. Since my grandmother never visited the town, I spent the trip recording the details I wanted to share with her. We wandered through the staged apartments, the museum. I took notes and ignored the looks from my boyfriend. My favorite part came after we took the bus back home to the city, when I called my grandmother to share what I had seen. In the following years I occasionally thought about returning, but when my grandmother passed, the appeal faded. I taught grade three, having moved down from five the year before when another teacher abruptly quit. In the older grades, we taught about Chilean independence and a little earth science. In grade three, there was still quite a bit of coloring. The teachers had developed a time consuming family history project—featuring coloring—in order to keep students engaged through our typical winter lull. We asked the students where they were born, where their parents and aunts and uncles were born, and then their grandparents. They drew family maps on sheets of butcher paper. I sketched a semi-recognizable port of Valdivia for myself, my mother, and my siblings. I drew in a branch for my grandmother, and then stopped, made a round through the classroom.

In the evening, I washed dishes and called my mother. We chatted through pleasantries—I asked her if they were getting rain and she asked me when I was moving home. I said to her, Where was my grandmother born? My mother was cooking, I thought, because I could hear water running in the background. She hummed, distracted, and said, What was the name of that place, the mining town she and Catalina would talk about? My mother always said my older sister and I sounded the same on the phone. I waited her out, folded my dishtowel. She corrected herself. Catalina, my mother said, the mining town that you used to talk about.

Grandma didn’t live in Sewell, Mom, I said. That was her aunt, but she left before Grandma was born. From my third floor window, I watched a man struggle down the street with a suitcase. When I had taken my boxes and left my ex-fiancé’s apartment, a kind woman had offered to help. I hadn’t explained why I was standing on the street with all my worldly possessions.

Maybe you’re right, my mother said. It’s not like I can ask her.

I was annoyed at my mother’s disinterest, at the casual way she addressed her grief. She was a forward-looking kind of person, she didn’t share my interest in our family history. My father was a forward-looking person too, it was one of the many things my parents had in common. My oldest sister was a forward-looking person, she and her husband lived up north and were nearly exclusively looking forward to having children. My younger sister, who lived with my parents, was a forward-looking person, possibly because, still at home, there wasn’t another option. My brother was an in-the-moment person, but he lived abroad and primarily communicated by sending photos of the beautiful dishes he was cooking.

My grandmother had told me once that she and I were different—that we were both checking over our shoulders for hints of the past, for the smudge of another time that we were sure we could see. Even remembering the conversation brought back the taste of too-sweet iced tea that we drank out of delicate glass mugs. My sisters coveted those mugs, my brother coveted the sweet tea. I coveted the attention. I had the disconcerting sense that my grandmother could read my mind, or perhaps I had imagined the words coming out of her mouth. I knew that feeling, and she had described it precisely.

My mother and I hung up, and I glanced back out the window. The man with the suitcase disappeared; perhaps someone had helped him. With no more chores, or at least none that were urgent, I turned to the internet. I had looked Sewell up a handful of times, but had always found its online footprint disappointing—the UNESCO page, travel websites, nothing that made it sound particularly alive, or particularly dead. This, I supposed, could explain why I had never paid close attention to dates. It took only a brief search to see that the carbon monoxide tragedy my grandmother had described happened in 1945, not the decade earlier, as she had always said. It took a calculation that even my students could have done to recognize that at the time, my grandmother would have been six years old. I double-checked the websites, and the math, just in case.

In the years since her passing, I had often wanted to talk to my grandmother. My grandmother had of course believed in signs, a way that those who had passed could wave to the still living. But I had the same ambivalence to this as to ghosts, and I had not yet convinced myself that the flower that dropped to my feet on the sidewalk or the notes of a song I recognized floating out a car window were messages from her. Especially in those first years after she passed, I wasn't looking for a sign anyway, so much as for my grandmother who talked back. I would struggle to reach a student in my class, or I would watch a movie with an ending I didn’t understand, or I would shake cinnamon in my coffee, and wish to be able to tell her, hear her advice or her laugh, her recognition or her sympathy. In that moment, I wanted answers—I wanted to know why my grandmother, who had treasured our family history, had given it to me wrong.

In class the next day, I drew a picture of a mountain on my model family history project. I said that my grandmother was born in the mountains. I thought: and then she moved, and then she had a family, and then she had her house with her garden and her tea, and then she told me something less than the truth. I turned away from the board, towards the classroom and found several children had already copied me, possibly because they liked to draw sharp lines. I walked carefully through the rows of desks. I passed the boy who reminded me of my brother, the way he shifted back and forth in his seat. I passed the girl who wore out-of-date clothing, like she was dressed in her own mother’s childhood outfits. As a class, we strategized different ways to illustrate the ocean, the desert, the city. Several children drew the Costanera Center, completed in the year they were born. I still remembered the jagged, half-finished skyline from when I had moved to the city for university. Out of the corner of my eye, the skyscraper’s profile still surprised me sometimes. I thought about my mother, who believed in things she could see. I booked the tour to Sewell, shelled out the 50,000 pesos, and when the weekend came, woke up on time to make it to the pick-up point at 8 a.m. We boarded the bus promptly, and I leaned against a window. Across the street, there was a hotel. The front door opened and a man about my age walked out. He was handsome in a way that made him seem instantly familiar; he also was instantly familiar because he was my ex-fiancé. I wondered what he was doing at a hotel in Las Condes at eight in the morning. I blinked, and considered that I was imagining him. I hoped that if he was real, he hadn’t seen me. He had called my interest in Sewell odd and regressive and most cuttingly, boring. It had been more than two years since I moved out of his apartment, and in a city of more than five million, it seemed impressively unfair that I still had to see him.

Most everyone else on the tour had come in pairs, and chatted quietly to each other as we wound up the mountain road, flat, austere, and windswept from years of mining and erosion. And then we shuddered to a stop at the entrance to town, pink and blue buildings exactly as they were in the photos, and in my memory.

The tour guide gathered us first at the social club, where we admired the grand staircase with a shiny wooden banister and the arched glass windows coated in a thin layer of dust. Light filtered in half-heartedly, throwing shadows over the tour guide’s face. As she launched into her story about the founding of Sewell, I couldn’t focus on the well-practiced speech. I was anxious for any hint about the school, about children. On my first trip, my grandmother’s stories had unfolded before my eyes. This time, it felt like fact-checking.

After a brief stop at the bowling alley, we made our way up a set of wooden steps towards an apartment block. I trailed my fingers on the iron handrail, warm from the sun, and remembered hearing the machinery of the mine on my first trip, scraping and banging. Even outside, there was nothing but the footsteps of other tourists. Maybe it was a faulty memory, inserted because it seemed appropriate. Maybe mines didn’t sound like that anymore, noise pollution lost to the speed of technological advancement. Maybe the daily sounds that would have been so familiar to my great-great-aunt, to my grandmother, simply didn’t exist anymore.

My grandmother had told me that her aunt wore saddle shoes when she arrived in Sewell, that they smacked against the staircases, echoed hollow on the wooden slats that served as sidewalks. She would make the noise for me, a tap-tap-tap. I thought that my grandmother collected those stories from her aunt, I thought it meant that my great-great-aunt told stories in that same way, cradling details like fresh eggs in their shells. I thought that trait was my lineage. Once, I told my mother that for years I had believed my brother when he told me that I would grow taller if I lay upside-down off my bed, and then felt unbelievably stupid when I was ten and realized that wasn’t how bones worked. I wished I was haunted by someone that I loved.

I wanted to see the school room. Had they maintained its original look, as they had with the apartments and the bowling alley? Did it look like mine, with our frayed, colorful rug and wall-sized map of the world? Questions bubbled up, suddenly urgent. The tour group wound through a block of apartments where, on my first trip, I had looked at the framed photos and wondered what my great-great-aunt had brought to remind her of home.

The other tourists tiptoed around as if the inhabitants of the apartment would be bothered by the interruption, as if any minute, some copper manager’s wife would be on her way back from the store. I strained for a sense of the family who had lived there, but it was staged, a faint smell of plastic in the air. The guide checked her watch. Can I ask you, I interrupted, about the children who lived here? She turned to look at me, and then spun back to where someone had gotten too close to the dining table set for lunch. This apartment wasn’t for families, she said. Right, I said, but there were children here. My inflection made a question I hadn’t meant to ask, there were other questions I did want, answers I needed. I thought hurriedly for them. Do you know their names?

The guide tilted her head, a gesture of confusion. It was the wrong thing to ask, too large and too specific for her to know. I mean—I said, and she smiled like she was going to let me down gently and said, Why don’t you ask at the museum. The museum might have a census, old photos; my only memory was of an exhibit about copper. But no census would tell me a story over a cup of hot chocolate or teach me to prune the flowers in the garden. The tour guide waved me on, moving us with a resigned efficiency as one couple still peeked around the corner into the kitchen. I wondered how she ended up in Sewell, if she lived nearby. She tucked one hand behind her back and hooked it around her opposite elbow. Sometimes, when my students attempted multiplication problems, I did the same.

The tour group exited the building and started the final stretch of stairs down to the museum. My fingers trailed the handrail again and I wondered what it felt like in the winter, if it cracked with frost at high altitude. If tours ran much at all in the winter, and what Sewell looked like when it was truly empty, like the day the last apartments had been shut down and the families moved out for good. I asked the town, the mountains, for a slippage in time, for some kind of sign. On the way to the museum, my shoes tap-tap-tapped against the wooden steps. There was a tour behind us, entering the apartment, and another group behind them. They were in the corner of my eye, a handsome man who seemed instantly familiar, a school teacher with a map of the world, a girl in saddle shoes, my grandmother.