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I swallowed the dumpling I was eating. I'd dipped a little too much hot sauce on it, had to swig an extra gulp of Sprite, swish it around my mouth for a second. Then I asked Jim if he'd ever seen ghosts around the school. He guffawed and spoke up, truculently.
"Ghosts? Superstitions? No way! I don't believe in that hogwash. That stuff is for Westerners, old people, backwards people in Southeast Asia, and stupid movies. Anyone under 40 these days in China only believes in science. And me too, I only believe in science. I believe in myself..."
I respected his convictions, his beliefs. But I knew what I'd seen. And knowing for sure all the negative energy that this location had manifested, I was uneasy, felt a burn in my throat and a knot in my stomach that was more than the chilis...
十四
I went back to my apartment, swallowed a handful of Xanax. I had been upping my dose weekly for them to be efficacious. While I waited for them to kick in, I lay back in bed, scooped my phone up into my hands, stared down at it like a palm reader and read and explored more about the death penalty in China.
China doesn't release official statistics regarding the number of death sentences that are carried out, so it's hard to know how many were executed per year. Being an American, I like to know death tolls, helps me to put things in perspective, I think...
I opened my laptop, found it was already on and online, and playing a news report from an Australian TV channel. The report said there's over 2000 executions per year in China and that the State will carry out the execution in 2 or 3 years, offering the convicted only one appeal.
Sometimes the execution will be done faster if it's a particularly heinous, famous case, and like Jim was saying, they usually carry out the death penalty by firing squad, but many are also done these days by lethal injection.
I heard a voice, a female voice, speak to me from the distance. It was speaking in Chinese, but I understood its words in English; it said, "The soldiers shoot them in the head and then send their family a bill for the bullet. It's called the 'Bullet Fee,' and ranges anywhere from 5 cents to $4."
I looked around, but no one was there. I looked back to my laptop, found it was on an article about a young woman who'd been executed here, back in 1993.
It was that jaw-droppingly beautiful woman, the murderess, I'd seen an article about before.
The voice spoke again, sending chills down my spine.
"In the People's Republic of China, shooting as a method of execution takes two typical formats, either a pistol shot in the back of the head or neck or a shot by a rifle in either the back or the back of the head from behind...
"Officials won't let the relatives see the body. The officials only send the family the ashes, and only after they've paid the 'Bullet Fee.'"
Jarring to my feet, barbs of fear ran through me, and I stood atop the bed and scanned around the room. A figure in the corner of the room, a silhouette of a young girl vanished into the darkness.
My eyes heavy, a rush of vertigo overtook me, exorcized my fear. Everything in the room appeared as if in a fuzzy grayish cast, a dream within a dream. I plopped back down, languorously. My head felt like it weighed 100 tons.
I rested into the soft pillows, felt as if I were floating in a warm ocean. I yawned in repose, a bag of wet bones, and I sank, drifted downwards.
