Death Penalty for a Ghost in 中国 04-14

十

The accidents continued. Perhaps the torso didn't have enough souls. Or more was going on.

Yesterday, a truck driving by the school had its cargo load escape. A bunch of loose barrels rolled out and struck a cleaner on the side of the road, bowling over, crushing and killing the elderly woman instantly.

Rooster had been hopping by on his pogo stick when he saw her mangled corpse, the crowd circled around her, snapping cell phone pics.

"She survived the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, only for this..." Rooster said to me, standing on the front steps of our building.

He was visibly shaken, his eyes glassy and red from crying.

"It was someone's mother, someone's grandma. She's not a statistic!" shouted Rooster, at the rubbernecking gaggle of students walking by. The students glanced at him curiously, then hurried their pace to a gallop...

Another unfortunate campus occurrence: the elevators in a teaching building froze, trapping a teacher, a Chinese teacher inside for over 4 hours.

The school claimed it'd be fixed, but then the next week, in the same elevator, the elevator cable snapped, dropped like an anchor and two security guards inside the elevator died. The classes on the upper floor of the building were then moved to a lower floor.

A couple days later, an escalator at the nearby subway station malfunctioned, sucking a school administrator down into the escalator's mechanical teeth inside, eating her alive...

Marco was wearing ever more eccentric clothing, beads, would whisper chants, spells. I thought the school might say something to him about it. But maybe they just figured, since he was Cuban, it was his heritage and respected it. He wasn't involving any of the students in it or discussing it in his lectures. The school also liked taking photos of him in his brightly colored garb, his robes, and dashikis. The school was using his pictures on its website and in their brochures...

Marco said he understood the ghosts. He knew. He swore the accidents were attributable to hungry and angry ghosts. That the ghosts were like the cockroaches in Rooster's apartment, that they'd been here before us, will be here after us. Marco said he'd been sleeping well and safe, though, since his Santeria skills and spells were improving by the day.

He'd had a few scorpions in his apartment, which was worrying, but he had managed to kill them with a bug zapper, used them in a spell.

"Lemons into lemonade, dog," he'd growled.

Man-bun Matty, the 9-year China vet, had a different opinion, wasn't convinced at all. He attributed the accidents, incidents to China's notoriously poor safety standards. Bribes of safety inspectors being rife. Half-assed work, construction done daily.

But, for me, after having read several Stephen King novels, watched countless horror films, I thought to the part of the movie where the protagonist goes to the library or online to research the history of the area. With the school being built on the grounds of a former prison, it couldn't be a coincidence, it couldn't be mere negligence.

I believed Marco, I believed in the ghosts, I believed in eschatology, and I had to know more...

十一

It was hard to find anything in English. But using translation software, I found much more on Chinese websites and I stumbled across a brief article about a young woman, only 24, and stunningly beautiful, who was executed, here, by firing squad.

The gorgeous youth had been convicted of setting fire to her workplace, killing several people inside.

The article had a picture of the field where she'd been shot. Recognizing the landscape, I looked up the area on Baidu maps, and sure enough, the prison, the jailhouse, the execution grounds, were indeed right here, where the campus now sits.

And sifting through the search results on Baidu, I located a few old pictures of the prison, too.

The jailhouse was right where I was sitting, where the teachers' living quarters were now located. This was the spot of the prison.

It hit me like a sledgehammer to the head, seeing it on the map, seeing its picture, and recognizing the hills in the distance that I could see on a rare day that wasn't too smoggy.

I wanted to learn more of the prisoners here, at this prison, and through the further reaches of my deep dive, I'd found that this had been a prison for the worst of offenders, many of whom were sentenced to die. I found case stories, articles about several violent offenders here who'd murdered their families or coworkers in fits of rage, and one infamous soldier who'd stolen a gun and gone on a shooting spree in a village nearby, as well as several arsonists, most of whom had attacked and set alight public buses and packed restaurants.

All of the offenders had landed here. Ended their days on this soil.

There were intellectuals, political prisoners too, hundreds of them during the Cultural Revolution, those marked as "revisionists." I read a story that said that so many intellectuals were executed that eventually soldiers started to throw the "state enemies" off the roof of the jailhouse so the army could ration ammunition...

I'd been online for hours, digging farther and farther down into a death penalty rabbit hole.

It was getting late, and although I'd taken a handful of Xanax, the gentle tyrant of sleep still hadn't opened his arms. So, I stayed awake, sat by the window, which was wet with breath, and I researched more about executions in China.

I found that most executions in communist-era China, still to this day, are carried out by firing squad. Soldiers from the army serving as executioners. The condemned marched out to the execution ground.

The condemned are made to kneel and receive a bullet to the back of the head by a member of the People's Armed Police, a paramilitary organization in China that's tasked with internal security, riot control, amongst other duties.

Before the execution, the condemned has a finger pricked with a blade, presses a fingerprint in blood on the execution orders.

Family members, victims aren't allowed to attend the executions. Nowadays the public isn't allowed to watch, either, though every so often pictures or video would leak out from a concealed smartphone or from a camera nearby.

On Youku, China's alternative to YouTube, I watched a couple pre-execution vids, showing gaggles of soldiers marching the condemned out to wherever they'd administer the ultimate punishment (usually a field or ravine).

One of the condemned I saw was a drug dealer from Sichuan whose face looked made of stone as he was led out of a police van, his arms trussed behind his back...

I felt a chill misting up my spine. Peering around, it was like I was living in a cemetery, like there were venomous ghosts around me. I guess anywhere you are in China, a land with 5000 years of history, anywhere you are, like hundreds, thousands of years ago, there was someone there. Anywhere you are could have been a graveyard at one point, or the site of horrific murder, war, floods, fires, famines, or accidents.

But to so knowingly be living in this cemetery, this place pregnant in agony and death, to know...

That there were ghosts everywhere. That I was a guest in their home.

And their plans, their designs, the ghosts' agenda, particularly the venomous ghosts, the angry ghosts, concerned me most.

I decided to take another sleeping pill and listened to Sam Harris's meditation app. I find his voice soothing. It calms me. I closed my eyes, breathed deeply, and ignored the ghosts. I focused on Sam's slow cadence. His tone. Soon after he began speaking, I was finally able to pass out.

十二

When I awoke to the next morning, a severed arm was floating in the air, running its long bony, frigid fingers through my hair. I sprung up and slapped wildly at its cold flesh, and it disappeared and vaporized into the damp chill of the room.

I slapped myself in the face, told myself it was the dreams eating at me again, and I dressed, cleaned myself up, tried to focus on other things, like my lecture I'd deliver that afternoon.

But it was tough to shake off those icy fingers in my hair and to not think of what I'd learned last night, those stories. Those teachers thrown off the roof of the building. Those people, their cases, the people they killed, and how scores here were knelt and shot in the back of the head. I wondered what thoughts must have gone through their minds as they were taking that final walk.

I was having trouble really focusing on anything, though, my mind scattered.

When I was brushing my teeth, I found that the severed arm was holding my toothbrush, brushing for me, and in the sink were globs of bloody teeth.

I retched and grabbed the arm, the limb cold as a chunk of ice, and began to curse at it and beat it into the bathroom wall and spit foamy white toothpaste froth at it.

Seconds later, it again disappeared, and I discovered I was slapping my toothbrush at the wall and that the sink was empty.

I took my razor, cut a short slice on my forearm, dipped my finger in the running warm blood and wrote, on the bathroom wall, a 口, the character for mouth, hoping the severed arm would stick itself in there instead...

When I got to the cafeteria, Marco was dressed in a long, flowing red robe with gold trim, wearing several sets of bright green bead necklaces and had a crown of thorns and chicken feathers on his head. He was drinking a cup of chicken blood mixed with herbs.

"Omiero," he said, offering me a sip. I politely declined.

He continued, "Keeps the spirits away. I'm also making spirit dolls. I caught three evil spirits with the dolls, two murderers and a thief... It's like luring out a snake, with the doll. I set it near my altar, I dance, chant and drum, and the spirits are sucked right into the doll, trapped in... Then I offer the dolls to Zhong Kui. You still don't believe in Santeria, amigo?"

"Marco, I don't know what I believe," I told him, rubbing my weary eyes, which were dry, full of sand.

Marco stood up, lifted his tray. His eyes bulged. "I've changed my name to 'Marcoba.' You can still call me 'Marco,' but, just so you know, dog, I am a Marcoba."

He nodded at me, turned and walked off.

Two other foreign teachers sat down to the foreigner table and joined me. One was Fat Elvis, a Canadian, 30ish dude, who earned the nickname because he looked like the fat version of Elvis, mutton chop sideburns and everything...

Most days Fat Elvis stunk like body odor or liquor. We appreciated it more when, like today, it was liquor...

The other guy, an older guy, I think was from Australia. His name I forgot. He had a bushy ponytail, but the front of his gray, brown and black hair was balding, giving him a look sort of like a dead raccoon was hanging from the back of his head.

Raccoon Head wasn't looking too hot. "Nightmares," he said, sitting down.

"Me also," Fat Elvis said, "you?" he asked, peering over at me, fixing his chopsticks in his hand, angling them at his breakfast dumplings.

"Not recently," I told them. I wasn't in the mood to discuss my pharmaceuticals.

"The ghost rumors are swirling 'round. I'm thinking Maradona has the right idea," said Raccoon Head, before he chomped into a red apple.

"Maradona?" I asked, my eyebrow upturned.

"The robe guy cunt, into Voodoo, or bloody whatever," said Raccoon Head, making no attempt to cover his mouth as he loudly chewed. The filthy animal.

"Marco, or Marcoba, right, maybe we should join him for a ritual later at his house, buttfuck a chicken or whatnot," said Fat Elvis.

Fat Elvis had been my pick to be fired first. Guy was constantly perving on students. He had the look of a tree jumper.

"I've been having this nightmare of a ghost with a mouth like a burning torch. The ghost is missing an arm, and I'm missing an arm too. The ghost is pure raging, and after me, chasing me up a never-ending flight of twisting stairs," Raccoon Head lamented, his eyes bloodshot, one eye looking far bigger than the other.

Fat Elvis belched loudly after sipping from his coke, spoke up, "I'm thinking of doing a runner and ditching this place. I got an offer from a training center in Vietnam. I've not had a good night's sleep since I got here. And everything in my apartment keeps getting coated in this grayish dust, no matter how much it's cleaned. And yesterday morning, I coughed up blood."

Raccoon Head looked off, made a hand gesture to someone off in the distance, then returned his gaze to us and spoke in a hushed voice, "I'm starting to believe this shite. I'd like to find a local witch doctor, bring in a medium, or something like that, and find out what the ghosts are after. But none of the Chinese teachers will really talk to me. They are terribly, terribly rude here. My last school, in Dali, they'd invite us out for dinner, KTV. Here, they give me the evil eye, look at me as if I just farted."

Fat Elvis nodded in unspoken agreement.

It might have been that the two of them looked like pedophiles, why none of the locals would talk to them, but I kept this to myself.

I'd also noticed many of the locals to be gruff, uncommunicative, taciturn, but I'd not gotten too much evil eye. Maybe that was because I ironed my clothes, wore slacks, collared shirts to my classes, didn't dress in Lamb of God t-shirts or stained beer logo shirts like Raccoon Head or Fat Elvis.

I excused myself, got up to take my leave, head off to class. Raccoon Head did have a point, though. I needed to keep learning more about the ghosts, understand them, see if there's a message to be deciphered. Maybe then we could do something about them... No longer be suppliant...

十三

I'd been friendly with Jim, the teacher who'd told me of the school's history. He'd only mentioned it in passing, as we played basketball. I figured I should talk more with him. See what I could find out.

Jim was a teacher who'd lived in America for a number of years, played college basketball there, then played pro ball in Australia.

He spoke perfect English, with only the slightest trace of an accent. A soft-spoken, abnormally tall guy, he towered above most everyone, at 6'6, and had a strangely-sloped Christina Ricci sized forehead, cropped hair and thin black eyes; one of the eyes was sleeping, didn't line up correctly with the other.

Jim, a local, was originally from nearby the school. He was a nice fellow too. I'd played basketball with him several times. You could see him out balling every day on the basketball courts near the teachers' cafeteria.

I decided to approach him after a game of hoops, ask him about the school's past.

But I found he was reticent to talk, go into much detail, as it certainly isn't the best-selling point for the school.

After a bit of prodding, on the walk back to our building, he agreed to talk, speak to me over dinner...

We met on a chilly evening, in the far corner of the cafeteria, over a plate of steaming hot pork dumplings and ice-cold bottles of Sprite.

He looked around nervously as he talked and spoke in a quiet voice, only mouthing certain words.

He said the school paid to have most of the history of the area wiped off the internet, though a few things would inevitably pop up in a deep dive, like they usually do with the Great Firewall, which made me think of Bill Clinton having once said something to the effect of China's internet censorship efforts being like trying to pin a glob of Jell-O to a wall using a hammer and nails...

Jim said he'd seen the prison from afar, as a child, riding on his bicycle, and more personally, he'd heard firsthand stories about it, from his uncle, a retired prison guard, who'd worked there for a time.

Jim sighed, stared at his dumplings as he talked and told me, "My uncle was there. He saw tons of executions. He said that at first the executions didn't bother him, because they involved criminals. He saw the criminals as cockroaches, my uncle said, like, big human insects, parasites, stains on humanity. He never pulled the trigger, but he helped walk them to the grounds, tied up a few of them, their arms behind their backs, in special knots that prohibited movement.

"The only execution that bothered him was that of a guy he knew. A former classmate in middle school. They weren't close; they were more acquaintances than friends. The guy was a poor farmer, and a decent man. He was never in trouble. The farmer was on death row because he was convicted of killing a businesswoman, a woman he didn't even know...

"It was widely believed the real killer was the woman's husband, who was a terrible deadbeat, a wifebeater and violent drunk; there was scant evidence against this poor farmer. And my uncle heard firsthand whispers that the drunk used his wife's cash to bribe the cops.

"There was talk too, the farmer might have been paid to take the fall for the wifebeater, but then got cold feet, and it was too late.

Pausing, Jim drew a deep breath, looked up towards the ceiling, grew pale, like he'd just seen the farmer's corpse.

"That one, the day of the execution, that haunted my uncle...

"My uncle said he has flashbacks to that morning, that the morning sky had this color of milk, and he'd see the farmer's bloodshot, tortured eyes, the expression of horror on his red face, his classmate's crying, flailing, and pleading as they had to, literally, drag him out of the jail, like an animal, and pull him, kicking and screaming, to the grounds, two guards holding up his twisting body, for the ... Ah, the poor guy, he was so upset, so afraid to die.

"My uncle retired early, after that. He said he still can't watch action movies or violent TV shows.

"So, it is true, many were killed in this place. Where the school is, that's where the prison stood.

"About where the soccer field and track, the jungle gym, that playground area for the kids, that's where the execution grounds were.

"All those kids out there running on the same spot where... Well, you know..."

Jim paused, shook his head, took a swig of his Sprite, and went on.

"There's a brand new, more high-tech prison around 50 kilometers from here. My uncle said they're still using rifles to execute prisoners, however, only the violent offenders. They've been conducting more executions by lethal injection these days, though that's usually for businessmen convicted of graft or the drug dealers.

"It's fitting they'd take out the drug dealers that way, by lethal injection...

"There's a 'death van', where they conduct the lethal injections. It rides around, to the prisons, the death van. In the van, it's equipped with a gurney, needles, poisons. They bring the prisoners in there, stick them and juice them up, then, if he's in good health, they'll surgically remove a kidney or two, eyes, gums, a lung or a liver, place the organs in ice boxes, hand them off to the carrier, who takes the organs to the hospitals.

"The van can accommodate one put down by rifle, too. They'll wheel them in on a gurney for the surgery.

"After the surgery's finished, then another team comes, removes the body, brings the body out to another vehicle, drives the body out to the crematorium."

"So, is it true? That you can, uh, like, just buy an organ?" I cut in and asked, wincing and contorting my face as I spoke.

Jim shifted in his seat, like he had hemorrhoids. He was visibly uncomfortable. He glanced around the room again, and he focused his attention back on me, and whispered, "I'll say this. My aunt's friend bought a kidney from an executed prisoner. I think it was around $15,000.

"And, honestly, I don't think I have a problem with that. It's better the organ goes to someone who needs it.

"I know a lot of people in America or Australia might think it's terrible. But look at it from our point of view. We've got a billion people. How do you take care of a billion people? That murderer, whose kidney is now my aunt's friend's, that prisoner redeemed himself, in a way, with the donation."