Death Penalty for a Ghost in 中国 15-19

十五

"How about an app for buying a ghost?" Man-bun Matty asked the table. His hands were raw, red with scabs and rashes, but he was in good spirits, hyper this morning, decked out in a golden traditional Chinese button up shirt and matching baggy gold pants and open toe sandals. He obviously had no fear of the cold.

Man-bun was sipping on a thermos of civet coffee, this special coffee produced by civets, the animals responsible for the original SARS in 2003...

I'd never seen it before, anywhere, the coffee, until I got to China... The stuff was made through a process where coffee beans would be fed to civets, would then be plucked from the animals' shit and manufactured into coffee.

While it sounded horrendous, I'd tried a sip, on a dare, and was smitten. It was a favorite of all the foreign teachers, including myself, the coffee having an especially pungent, unique taste and strong caffeine kick...

Man-bun sat scrolling on his phone, tapping his foot. His teeth looked rotten and dirty, as if he hadn't flossed in a while. Or ever.

Raccoon Head didn't appreciate Man-bun's question about buying ghosts on apps and heatedly shot back, "But could you really 'buy' a ghost? Own it? Isn't that a form of supernatural slavery?"

"In Laos, they sell protective spirits," Man-bun said, didactically, "a ghost that will keep you safe, bring you good luck. The more powerful the spirit, the higher the price. I was with a bird whose aunt knows a monk who deals in them. But I don't think there's an app for it. Laos is more of a developing country."

"The Laotians are Commies too, right? Do they allow that?" asked Fat Elvis, dark black bags hanging under his eyes. Today he stunk strongly of liquor.

Man-bun snorted and giggled, "You see, they're different sorts of Commies. Them and the Vietnamese. They're kinder, gentler Communists. They're not as overbearing as the Chi-Coms."

Marcoba coughed wildly, then caught his breath. For a second, I thought he was choking, that someone would have to do the Heimlich, and I didn't know how to, nor did I think anyone else here knew first-aid.

Today Marcoba's face was sticky with sweat, his lips were chapped, and his eyes were terribly bloodshot.

He was wearing a bright orange, dashiki type of shirt, matching genie pants, combat boots and an enormous necklace made entirely of white bird feathers, like a boa.

Man-bun pursed his lips, raised an eyebrow at Marcoba.

Marcoba sneered at Man-bun, the skin of his face constricted, and, voice rattling, he said, "One reason for the overabundance of ghosts is that the Communist Party destroyed the local temples, shrines and altars dedicated to ancestor worship and spirits. The temples were for placating, feeding the hungriest of ghosts.

"The Party prohibited fireworks. The fireworks were for the ghosts! The Party even abolished the Ghost Festival holiday, dog. They BANNED it... They let the ghosts loose, they antagonized them, and the spirits are running wild, like feral animals."

Marcoba cleared his throat, and then stood up, said something in Spanish and stomped off, chanting in bizarre rhythms.

Leaving the cafeteria, several Chinese teachers said hello, smiled and waved to him. The teachers and students today were all dressed in PLA military uniforms. It must have been a military holiday, but the foreign teachers weren't told about it.

"They love Marco, don't they," Fat Elvis said, contemptuously, "just look how all the teachers smile, wave to him."

"Ah, mate, it was like that with all foreigners, until a few years ago," lamented Man-bun, "used to be you couldn't walk down the street without people wanting to snap a photo with you, practice their English and chat or even just wave and say 'hello' and smile at you. Nowadays, most Chinese either ignore us, or look at us like shit on the bottom of their shoe."

"Marco, then? Is it the Cuban, Communist connection thing? Crickey, the bloke's family fled the Cuban Commies, sailed to Florida on a raft through shark infested waters. Now here he is in China. I reckon that must be why he's so into the Santeria. He has to atone to his ancestors somehow.

"But the bloody Chinese sure do love him, for whatever reason," said Raccoon Head, who then slugged down a swig of baijiu from a flask. His eyes looked like they were full of liquid.

Man-bun wagged his finger, interjected, "No, no, you don't understand. He's the perfect foreigner. His place of origin is Communist. Plus, he's not white, so he's not seen as an American Imperialist or an Opium War asshole, a conqueror, or a colonizer cunt. But then he's not black, so the locals don't view him as a criminal or a rapist. You must have learned by now that the only black people the Chinese tend to like are the NBA basketball players.

"It's shite. None of my schools in China have hired black teachers, no matter how qualified they were.

"The only black people they like are the black people they can control on their TV or electronic devices...

"But, mate, him, he's tall, athletic, handsome, and his skin's the perfect shade of foreigner. He's the only foreigner really welcome here, these days, aside from the rich investors or famous athletes, Lebron James or Steph Curry, or the celebrities who play footsie with the CCP."

"He's a beneficiary of Cuba's miscegenation and sociopolitical leanings..." I chimed in, and the others just stared at me silently for a few seconds.

"How do you know they really like him? The whole country cries wolf. They lie so much, it's hard to know when they're telling the truth," posited Raccoon Head, his face contorting into a scowl.

"They let him wear those robes and dashikis to class," said Fat Elvis, who I noticed was breaking out in terrible acne on his neck.

"I don't see how his attire vitiates his lectures. I would estimate that it only enhances the foreign teacher experience," I replied. Fat Elvis and the rest again only stared blankly at me. I was sensing a pattern...

I took my leave and pondered the idea that conflicts and backstabbing between foreign teachers was common at international schools. With all these different people, different countries and cultures represented, thrown into this fishbowl, it was inevitable.

We'd see each other every day, in the morning, afternoon, evening, weekends. There was no avoiding your coworkers, no escape, no way to not bump into them somewhere.

Especially, too, since we couldn't go out much to the city, since China had restricted movement, the places foreigners could go and stay, since the pandemic and even after. The rules that everyone had expected to be loosened up once the virus had subsided, they had in fact, remained, and some were even more stringent.

Foreigners were required to register any address, with the local police, that we stayed at for more than 24 hours.

We were made to show ID, undergo facial recognition checks, scan QR codes pretty much anywhere we went, and, despite these measures, still there were times we'd be refused entry to places, for no reason, simply told "no why." It got quite tiring...

Shanghai, wasn't so bad, but the smaller cities, like the one we were near, were difficult to navigate, travel in. There were constant police checks, questionings, passport inspections, random drug tests too.

It'd gotten so bad that most of us foreigners simply stayed inside the campus grounds. In a way, the place was still a prison.

十六

Another fellow teacher, Tony, lived a few doors down from me. He rarely ate with us but would pop into the cafeteria here and there for coffee or fried dumplings.

Tony was another ninja, like the Tasmanian, who'd been in China over a decade, and was also a teacher you wouldn't see much of anywhere, aside from his classes. I saw him more than others because I lived near him, and we'd struck up a few conversations in the hallway, became fast friends.

He was around two decades older than me, pale as flour and gaunt. His face sort of looked like Skeletor from the old He-Man cartoons. Or like a zombie. Like he'd just jumped out of a coffin.

He was cantankerous and pretty far right, Tony, on the political spectrum, while I'm more in the center, and I didn't share many of his beliefs, such as the kooky conspiracy crap he'd spout. But since there weren't that many other foreign teachers at the school, and since he lived so close to me, we sort of had to be friends.

Living in such close confines, if we weren't friendly, at least on a surface level, it would have gotten awkward quickly.

At least he read books, which is a rarity in this day and age. I appreciated that about him. He was a thinker and one of the few teachers I'd met who could carry on a conversation, wasn't halfway autistic, too weird, too alcoholic, or tree jumpery... Or all those things...

He also shared my affinity for exercise, walking, and we went out walking around the track for evening exercise, about 2 or 3 nights per week.

(Something about Tony I'd noticed, though, which was odd, was how afraid animals were of him. How birds would caw and fly away as he neared and feral cats would run in terror at the mere sight of him. Perhaps he bore a resemblance to another foreign teacher I'd heard of, one who'd run around campus, chasing wildly after the campus's feral cats...)

Stepping foot on the track, I'd begun our walk by telling him more of the area's background I'd learned, and our topic of conversation had soon veered to the pros and cons of the death penalty. The irony of discussing the ethics of the death penalty on the grounds where they'd shoot prisoners wasn't lost on me.

To my surprise, Tony was more happy than shocked or dismayed as I rattled off what I'd learned of the place's background. His eyes lit up and he perked up and smiled as I spoke.

I told him, bluntly, "I don't believe in the death penalty. So the State is saying killing people is wrong, then the same bunch of people kill the person who killed. Murderers killing murderers if you ask me, way too eye for an eye, Old Testament...

"It'd be better to have them do hard labor for life. Or even to scrub toilets, wipe the asses of invalids, mop up puke, scrape gum off the sidewalks, take customer service phone calls, do all the most horrible things, you know. That'd be a real deterrent."

He wasn't convinced. Flattened his lips. Shook his head. He answered back, in his glissando, nasal voice, his Boston accent strong, "But then you gotta house them, feed them, and the taxpayer is on the hook."

"Not if you get value from them," I replied, "and if they're scrubbing toilets, wiping asses, fighting forest fires, all that, they're creating value. Simply warehousing them in jails is wasteful and murdering them is plain unethical."

"What if the bastards refuse?" he asked, his voice rising, "what if they won't do the work? Then you shoot them? Then we're back to square one."

I nearly yelled at him, "No! You don't shoot them. You do something else. You make their life so unpleasurable that they beg to mop up puke, take customer service phone calls."

"What's with the customer service phone calls?" he asked, curling his upper lip, and thinning his eyes at me.

"Have you ever called a company, pissed off about your phone bill or whatever, sat on hold for 30 minutes, then screamed your head off when you finally got through to a person?"

"Of course. Who hasn't?"

"Imagine being the poor soul on the other end of the line, getting screamed at. And taking 200 of those sorts of calls in a row. It's like being a public toilet, taking customer service phone calls, working in a call center, everyone just coming in, pissing and shitting on you..."

He raised his eyebrows, shrugged his shoulders. Somehow, I'm not sure customer service phone calls would bother him as much as it did me, when I did that job, part-time, many years ago, as a struggling college student.

"Back to the jail thing," he went on, after taking a prolonged, not so subtle stare at a female Chinese teacher's rear, "yanno, I heard about this asshole in Texas, who was robbing young dudes, then banging them up the ass, and they caught him, sent him to jail for 99 years. They sent him to jail, JAIL. For ass-banging dudes. It sounds more to me like they were doing him a favor. Now he can buddi bang dudes for 99 years. Being in prison is probably like heaven to him, an buddi-bandit's version of Disneyland.

"Not me, sir, no, no, no. I know sodomy is a deterrent for me. It's always made me think twice about doing illegal stuff, having to be raped in jail. I can fight but I'm way too skinny to fight off 5 or 6 musclebound butt pirates...

"Look, jail should be terrible. People should be terrorized there. That way people don't want to commit crimes. They're too scared to commit crimes.

"That's why the Chinese are more law-abiding. They know how jail is. And Chinese jails are wicked horrible too, wretched, like 20 guys in one room, sleeping on a concrete floor, next to a dirty, stinky squat toilet.

"In most Chinese prisons, there's no heat, no AC, only one cold water tap for 20 people. There's cockroaches and rats crawling everywhere. And they keep the lights on 24/7, force the prisoners to work hard labor all day and at night they gotta sit still and watch Chinese TV propaganda. It's Hell."

I paused and shuddered at the thought of jail in China or in any third world country. Third world jails are probably the closest thing to Hell on Earth, and I'm sure the Chinese jails aren't even as horrific as countries further down the Human Development Index...

"But, Tony, what I don't understand is how anyone who calls themselves a Christian could be a proponent of the death penalty." My eyebrows furrowed, I went on, speaking forcefully, "It's an anathema, a gross contradiction to the Bible and to the teachings of Jesus."

Tony just shook his head and grinned, coolly, "I think it's been too long since you've read the Bible if you think Christians can't kill. Maybe you forgot about the Crusades, too.

"It's His work, His plan. He's got our numbers. He's got our data stored. Google ain't got nothing on God, man.

"God giveth and taketh, Kim. It all happens for a reason. And I'm more on the taketh side, to be frank. I'm more of a vengeful God, spiteful Jesus type of Christian myself. And look, the Bible is like the Constitution, it's open to interpretation.

"As for me, I interpret it like this, that some people are just shit. They're irredeemable. That's why there's the death penalty. That's why there's Hell. There's a Hell for a reason. We have to remove the scum, the dregs, get rid of them. Or else they'll kill again if given the chance.

"Look at some of the criminals we have in America. Like the mafia, fuck the mafia. They extorted my old man's business for tens of thousands of bucks, bled him for years. Fuck John Gotti. Fuck Sammy 'The Bull' Gravano. Fuck Al Capone. Fuck Tony Soprano. Fuck The Westies, fuck them all.

"They made for great movies, sure, but, in real life, there's nothing cute or funny about any of them.

"Fuck the gangbangers too. And fuck the mass shooters. Like James Holmes, the Batman shooter asshole. Why is he alive? He eats and sleeps for free at the taxpayers' expense. At least most of the other mass shooters, like those Columbine pricks, did us a favor and shot themselves."

Tony stopped to hack up another wad of spit at the far edge of the bright red track, then hurried his pace, walking in long strides, at a rapid clip.

I picked up my speed to match his and averred, "James Holmes is in a tiny cell for the rest of his life, sleeping next to his toilet. Living the rest of your life in a bathroom is a terrible fate, but still not enough of a punishment, particularly for him. Get value from him. Have him doing hard labor. But if he's too weak for that, make him take customer service phone calls. For people pissed off at Netflix. Make him do something. Something terrible."

I looked over the same Chinese teacher Tony had scoped as she passed by, powerwalking, her black spandex pants hugging her full hips nicely. She was not bad.

Tony snuck another glance at the teacher's protuberant wiggling rear and said, "Nope. Jab a machine gun up James Holmes's ass and pull the trigger. Or shoot him in his face. Oh, even better, put him in a cell with the Texas buddi bandit. Then shoot them both."

"Nah," I disagreed, "put James Holmes in a Chinese jail. Make him watch Chinese propaganda shows and eat cockroaches."

"Nah, hand me a gun, hire me for the firing squad. I'll save the taxpayers a bundle," Tony said, before he stopped in his tracks, stepped aside for a breather, wheezed and coughed, then spat out another hefty greenish gob of spit.

Then he looked around to see if anyone was close to us. He'd do this before he said particularly offensive things, things that were bad even for him. I guess it was his way of issuing a trigger warning...

It really was fortunate we didn't have any politically correct, social justice warrior type people... I couldn't see many of those sticking around for too long in China, anyway, and Mao have mercy, they certainly wouldn't appreciate Tony...

When I saw Tony's head panning around, like a radar, saw him smooth his jet-black slicked back hair, saw the fire in his eyes, oh yeah, I knew something awful was coming.

And it did. Tony, started speaking, and behind him, around him, I saw energy, white flashes, and further off in the oily night's horizon were figures of men with shaved heads, kneeling... A row of them... Like they were in a mosque ready to pray...

The white flashes and traces of men in the distance disappeared as he exhaled deeply, readying to speak. He didn't look like he'd seen anything, though, and spoke in a happy-go-lucky voice.

"I don't know, Kim. I'm a Christian, a Catholic, but I kinda liked George Carlin, the cranky old fart. I also kinda like it when a lot of people die. As long as it's not anyone I know or care about.

"But where I differ from Carlin is that I think it's God's Plan. God does it to remind us of our place. Of the value of time.

"Plus, there's too many people in the world. China has certainly reinforced that notion. It's an environmental disaster, this place, all these fucking people. That's why they're having these plagues, famines, floods, wars throughout their history...

"And nowadays it's the air, the cigarettes, the people falling from high-rise buildings, debris from high-rise buildings landing on people below, or the buildings themselves collapsing...

"And if that doesn't get you, you've got fake medicine, fake vaccine, fake alcohol, poisonous food, and if you survive that, you got the mass stabbers, kindergarten killers, public bus arsonists, car accidents, train crashes and buses driving off bridges. God is cleaning them out. Mopping up the Earth, like he does to us all.

"It's not only God's way of population control, but, admit it, accidents, disasters and murders make for good TV and movies...

"As much as I hate James Holmes, shooting up a movie theater is, albeit grimly, perfect. It was a classic case of cause and effect. Life imitating art. It was performance art, in a way, yanno.

"Mass shooters, murders, tornadoes, war, terrorists, natural disasters, tobacco companies, shit, even the coronavirus, provide a service to the planet. Entertainment. Fear. Commerce. But, most importantly, it's population control. It's all from God. It is His plan. He is at the controls.

"So, I tell you, Kim, these people, these stinking bastards, these criminals, the executed, they served their purpose. They served God. And they served us.

"They brought the population down and entertained us, and they themselves were killed. It's a win, win..."

I asked him if he believed in ghosts or had seen any, had any nightmares. He hadn't seemed affected like the other teachers.