Death Penalty for a Ghost in 中国 15-19

"I haven't seen shit. I haven't had nightmares. Maybe the ghosts keep away from me for a reason. I don't blame them, I know Jujitsu. I'd fucking choke out a bitch ass ghost... Plus, I pray every night. I keep a crucifix in every room. I got Jesus on my side. I know He is with me...

"I think you're imagining things, Kim, I really do. Ghosts are ideas. Our ideas. Ideas of ourselves. I don't know if ghosts exist as sentient beings, if that's real or possible...

"But, I tell you, I do believe in energy. Energy that is created cannot be destroyed. There might be paranormal energy, a force left behind. But it doesn't affect me. As far as I'm concerned, most of the criminals killed here were atheists, so they're probably in Hell. They didn't accept Jesus. The only ghost I truly believe in is the Holy Ghost.

"Like I said, yanno, it's a win-win, their deaths... Listen, I'm getting winded. Let's go back. The smog is picking up. It's suppose' ta be gnarly tonight... It's already getting smoggy as shit. Fucking looking like God's up there chain smoking."

Again, I heard the voice, the female voice from before, and it whispered into my ear, "win, win."

My spine tingled, and I felt a lump in my throat. I looked around, for a split second, and saw a hovering face of one of the most beautiful women I'd ever seen. I knew it from somewhere. But where?

Before I could recall, the face dissolved into a swarm of gnats that buzzed up and dispersed and fragmented into the starless night...

There was indeed a heavy smog rolling in, or maybe a fog. In China, it was hard to tell which. Visibility was limited, but again, as we left the track, I could see trace visions, figures of dead men being hauled off on stretchers by prison guards, and soldiers in uniform, carrying guns, their figures melting into the distance, forming into the fog.

十七

I'd taken my pills but still I lay awake at night, staring at shadows. I peered out my open window and realized I'd not seen any stars, or the moon, since I'd arrived in China. I could imagine the school's ghosts as gremlins crawling and clawing up into the sky, eating the moon like a cake.

Tonight, there were no drilling sounds and my room was silent as death and my mind was racing, abuzz, unable to quiet...

I was feeling like an overloaded plane in a turbulent sky, wishing that I'd plummet, crash into sleep.

Our building sat on the same area as the prison. I was levitating over their cells, levitating over their graveyard. I was thinking of the men, crammed into the dingy rooms, imagining the torture they'd endured. The convicts in chains, counting the hours until they were brought out to the guns. Mosquitoes feasting on their flesh. I sensed a vestigial energy, spirits in the air.

Tired of staring at the air, mind in void, I rolled over in bed, pawed at my bedside table, grabbed my phone and cradled it in my hands and its blue light cut through the blackness of the room.

I surfed the net and noticed an email from the school. It was a stern warning to all teachers and staff not to throw debris of any sort from our windows or balconies after an elderly man, a Chinese teacher's father, was seriously injured by a dog that'd been thrown off an upper-storey balcony of a campus apartment building... There was no word on the dog's condition.

I was beginning to understand more why many of the long-term China expats I'd met were such nihilists... Something of angry ghosts themselves...

I looked more into past Chinese death penalty cases at the prison that was here. After a deep dive into Baidu, I found two more notable ones.

They were both striking.

The first one was of a pudgy girl, a young girl, who'd helped her boyfriend sell meth, and was convicted, sentenced to die.

There was a series of pictures of her, and I was shook by her youthful exuberance, a charisma she exuded that leapt off my phone's small square screen.

The series of photos showed the girl smiling, eating dumplings with her jailers in the hours before she was to be executed, then the same jailers bringing her out to the execution grounds, and the girl in tears as she was being brought to her death.

Seeing her face, sweet as a birthday cake, her cherubic, blushing cheeks, I could feel the anguish, the thumping of her heart.

I hoped her spirit was at peace.

The next story I read was of a scrawny young guy with a bowl haircut, big glasses, and buckteeth. Only 20, he was an unemployed loner who'd lived with his parents.

He'd been tormented as a child and later, as a young adult, sought vengeance on his middle school, where he'd been bullied.

In the article, the young man claimed that he'd been visited by a demon from a video game he'd played, a demon in a dragon robe, with a long beard and high-brimmed hat.

The demon had handed him a knife with a gold-seal and told him to slay the schoolchildren, that the children's souls would go to Hell, where the demon and the young man could torture, torment and punish them forever.

The young guy believed in the dream, and had gone over to the school, to the school's front gates...

Afterwards, he'd dashed off and snuck into an internet café nearby, was found hours later, playing the video game on a computer.

The young man was executed, and the video game banned in China.

It struck me that he'd nearly gotten away with it. Wouldn't someone have stopped him?

A voice spoke to me from the dark. The soft female voice again. It was sweet as honey, the voice, but its words bit.

"In China, they stand. They watch. The bystanders don't usually get involved. They stood and watched. Are they as guilty as the killer? Do you think?"

I dropped my phone, bounced up in bed, scanned around the room, yelled, "Who's there?"

The voice disappeared. I looked back down at my phone. The page had changed. It was now on a Baidu news story about another execution. Looking at the mugshot under the headline, I knew the face; I knew the person. It was the stunningly beautiful girl I'd read of before, executed here back in 1993.

It was her! She was the ghost I'd been seeing!

I picked up the phone, read the story. It was a more in-depth article than the one I'd read before...

The article explored her upbringing, said she'd had a tough life. Her parents were janitors and were strict, tough on her, forced her to study for hours on end. Her alcoholic father ruthlessly beat her when she got anything less than perfect grades.

She'd done well in school and made it to a top university in the province. But her good fortune ended there.

She'd had a boyfriend in college who pushed her to sleep with him, then dumped her because he said she was "impure" for sleeping with him and later forced her, at knifepoint, to go have an abortion.

Then she'd allegedly been assaulted by her boss at a mining company where she worked as a secretary after college.

Then the boss's daughter pressured the girl, under a thinly veiled threat of being fired, to have a sexual relationship with a county tax inspector. The inspector had demanded extortionate bribes and threatened to expose the company's tax evasion, fiscal malfeasance.

After being coerced into spending the night with the inspector, the girl snapped.

The next evening, when the inspector, the boss, the boss's wife, son and daughter, as well as three other workers from the company were having dinner in the company's upstairs lounge, the girl rode her motorbike to the company's office, smashed open a back window, poured gasoline into the building and rode off as the trail of flames licked its way to a dozen freshly-delivered cooking gas canisters sitting in the hallway and the building exploded in a loud fiery boom. Everyone inside died, including a security guard who'd been asleep at his desk.

The girl had been caught on a security camera starting the fire. She was guilty beyond a doubt.

Along with her looks catching the public's eye, the case itself was so gruesome and shocking on all levels that it garnered much media coverage.

She did nothing to fight or dispute the charges, neither claiming innocence nor pleading guilty. It took only an hour for her to be convicted by the three-judge panel; a year after that, she lost her automatic appeal and days later, she was sent to the firing squad.

The company she worked at was only 20 kilometers from the school. And she'd been executed here, where the school's soccer field sits.

Looking at her picture, it was hard to believe she'd committed such a crime. Her face was beautiful, I mean, really beautiful, like hideously beautiful; when I gazed at her face it was like the picture was made of knives, carving her image into my mind.

Staring at her photo, I awed at how pale she was; she was pale as a kabuki dancer, and had such delicate features, her round face with such big brown eyes and full, bell-shaped lips, and the cutest little pert button nose. Her straight, raven black, shiny hair was parted to the right and hung down to her thin, hourglass waist. She was so thin, petite, and fragile looking, so innocent looking, like a children's doll.

I couldn't see rage in her eyes. I couldn't even see there being malice, rage in her. But, curiously, I also couldn't see even a trace of sadness.

It was as if she was there but not there, a portmanteau of beauty and absence.

Scrolling down, I saw another picture of her, taken minutes before she was to be shot, and she wore casual clothes, a cotton white blouse, and blue jeans. Only 24, with her face soft as snow, she had the appearance of a young goddess. And, again, she seemed so stoic.

She'd been bent to her knees for the camera. And behind her was a handwritten poster, affixed to a wooden stake, saying her name and crime.

Shortly after the picture was taken, she was shot in the back of the head. The article stated that the soldier who shot her was said to be tormented. Haunted by what he'd done. He'd said she was the most beautiful girl he'd ever seen.

In the minutes before he shot her, as they marched to the field, the soldier said he'd gazed at her, saw her expression, her lips hanging open, her face in a look oscillating between sadness, terror, reluctance and bitter acceptance, and he said that he knew her meaning, the telling message in her eyes, and he knew exactly what she meant when she whispered to him, "fragrance vanishes and jade crumbles," before she knelt to accept death.

Three months later, her executioner killed himself, in his barracks, shooting himself in the mouth.

The company where she'd worked had gone out of business, and on the grounds where its building once stood, there'd been an apartment building to be constructed, but so many accidents kept occurring during its construction that the empty shell, the half-finished concrete shell of the building was abandoned.

The land considered to be cursed, the construction project has sat there, unfinished, moldering, for nearly 30 years...

I felt barbs of sadness, reading her story. She'd been wronged. Assaulted. Couldn't have been in her right mind. And who wouldn't have been enraged in her situation? And who could she have gone to? A local rich man like that in China, a tax inspector for the government, with their status, their connections, there'd have been little chance for her to pursue legal recourse. The whole thing was ugly and tragic from every angle...

My mind quit racing when the pills kicked in hard, and, drowsy, I wished to jump from the archipelago of insomnia, to dip into the warm sea of sleep, and I wiped my dry eyes with the back of my hand...

"Do you think I'm beautiful? I always wanted to have a foreign boyfriend," a presence whispered into my ear. The words were carried by a hot wind that warmly tickled my neck. Then the room started to feel colder. I could see my breath.

Jolted, I jumped up out of bed. But I didn't see anyone around. On my phone, though, there was a video image. A moving one.

"Hello?" I said curiously, picking up the phone, and I glared down at it, apprehensively, my head cocked back, and my lips pursed.

It was her. The girl from the article.

"Ni hao..." said the beautiful face on my phone's screen, "my name is Lily. It's nice to meet you."

I hadn't opened any video app. There wasn't any box around the image. It'd taken up the entire screen of my phone, the image.

I wasn't sure how she'd hacked into my phone, but she had. And it definitely was her. I'd know that face anywhere. Her ghost was alive.

"I'm Kim," I told her, in a syrupy voice to soothe myself, before sitting back into my bed, "Nice to meet you, Lily. How'd you get, um, my phone..."

"You're silly. I'm everywhere. But I'm glad you found me. Not everyone believes," she said, and behind her was a bright tunnel of light, the light brighter and whiter than any I'd seen, like thousands of flashbulbs. "Do you believe, Kim?" she squinted her eyes and asked, "Do you believe in ghosts? In me?"

"Sure, I do. I, I, uh, think, you're utterly enchanting. And I want to know your story. Did you do it? Did you murder those people? I can't believe you did. I don't want to believe you did."

I had to look away for a second after asking that. And I shifted my gaze towards my window and saw out to the lights of the nearby chemical plant, its golden and silver lights swimming and blinking through the mist of the cold gray night.

When I looked back at the phone, she didn't hesitate in her reply. She nodded and blurted out, bluntly, "I did."

All the air had left my lungs, like a balloon that'd been popped. I struggled for a second, gathered myself.

She giggled and shrugged her shoulders. Didn't say a word, but her gesticulations were telling.

"Did you deserve it? Did you deserve to die?" I asked, drew in a deep breath. I worried I might hyperventilate, and it started to feel as if shards of broken glass were in my throat.

"I guess. But I'm not really dead, am I? In China, we believe a ghost isn't dead. But it will die later. The second death is the final death. The real death. I'm still waiting for it.

"Did you, know, Kim, that death was a massive release? Did you know that death is the most incredible orgasm you'll ever have? Don't fear it...

"I'm here, Kim. I'm with you. When you opened your phone, you found me, right? I'm alive in images, in words, in people's minds. When the last person speaks my name, when the files are gone, and I'm deleted, my last picture burned, then I'm dead. That's the second death, the real death. Right?"

The phone went blank. Shut off. I thought I'd lost her. But she reappeared. Her silhouette next to me, forming into a translucent figure, a body, glowing, lying next to me in my bed.

She was nude; her slender body, its curves, its peaks, the cleft between her legs, illuminated, in a silver hue. She reached over, touched me, stroked my chest, cupped her hands on my cheeks.

Her touch was warm, but her breath was ice cold. She raised her face to mine, puckered her bell-shaped lips, and we kissed, her icy tongue, like a spoonful of ice cream, touching tenderly at mine.

Only in a t-shirt and boxers, I broke our kiss and undressed, lay between her legs and inserted myself inside her. I thrust, pushed, swam in. I was a ghost inside myself, a warm corpse, and I pushed into her with the strength of ten men.

Her arms lay as a T on the bed, as if she'd been crucified, and she squirmed like an eel under me, panting and gibbering, and when I came, my body quaked, rocked and shook like a comet hitting the earth, and the room caught on fire, orange flames eating into us, and everything swirl-faded to black...

When I woke up, I was nude under a cocoon of warm blankets. My phone lay next to me, under the sheets, and was still on, but was displaying a spreadsheet, full of info, facts about the prison, notable convicts it'd housed.

I read over it for a few minutes, then got up, showered, dressed and went to meet Marcoba for breakfast before class. I was supposed to be at home this morning, grading papers, but I had to go cover a class for Raccoon Head, who'd been in the hospital with a severe case of food poisoning.

十八

Marcoba and I met in tacit silence at the front of the cafeteria. Today he was dressed in a full dinosaur costume, a T-Rex.

Chinese teachers gazed at him, with soft warm eyes, lips stretched into smiles, while they stared at me, curiously, some condescendingly. When we sat down to the laowai corner, began our breakfast, a shifty-eyed auntie, sitting nearby, motioned, laughed to her brethren, and mimicked me eating, simultaneously perplexed and amazed that I could use chopsticks.

Terrorist Reggie or Reggie The Terrorist, or simply "The Terrorist," was joining us. Terrorist Reggie had coined his own moniker, after his experiences with racism in the States, "taking the words back," he'd said. Terrorist Reggie, the 45ish Arab, the math teacher, the birdman with the big bald head and big hook nose and bulging eyes that almost leapt out of his head.

Buddha-bellied and bald and with long eyelashes and man tits, his semi-feminine features made the Terrorist look sort of like a pregnant woman with cancer.

The Terrorist always brought his own fork and knife to the cafeteria. Something about hygiene, he'd mumbled.

The Terrorist, carrying his metal tray of fruit and bread, hard-boiled eggs, walked over to meet us, tracing his footsteps on the floor as if he were walking a tightrope. He didn't look so hot. His face was pale as milk.

He sat down to the foreigner table, next to a pair of quiet, clean-cut young teachers. Chunky, and with androgynous features and haircuts, they looked like cult members. The weird Utah twosome had invited everyone to their apartment for cookies and Bible study...

The Terrorist nodded his hellos and then spoke in a soft, raspy voice, "Bro, I was having crazy dreams last night. I was trapped in a fire, in my classroom, and I couldn't get out. All my students...

"They were in prison uniforms, and the classroom was a factory. The students were burning, they were screaming and crying and whimpering. It was the most realistic dream I'd ever had," he paused, drew in a deep breath, exhaled, and went on, "I woke up screaming, drenched in sweat."

Chuck the Canuck, the walrus, was there, and he also looked of shit. He'd been listening intently, and then spoke up, which was rare for him. He was usually pretty taciturn, morose. His Toronto accent colored his vowels and gave his words punching power.

"I too had a nightmare. A satanic one. I was in a plane, and after liftoff, it began to descend, fast, plunging to the ground. Everyone on the plane was shrieking and bracing for impact. I looked out the window and saw the ground was becoming bigger and bigger. Then there was a crazed man, eh, cursing in Cantonese, running and splashing petrol down the aisle of the plane, flames following behind him. The cabin was filling with smoke. Then I awoke. I was also dripping sweat like I'd just stepped out of a sauna."

The pair looked to me, in anticipation of a similar nightmare, a tale of fire, death.

But I wasn't entirely sure I wanted to share my, uh, encounter with the ghost... Which I wasn't sure was a dream, hallucination, paranormal, or simply abnormal.

I did, however, horripilate, and then felt like ice water had been thrown at me when I suddenly recalled what I'd just read on the spreadsheet.

"Reg, you know why they closed the prison?" I asked. He just stared blankly at me, shrugged his shoulders.

"Because part of it was used as a factory, one part for producing Christmas lights, the other for making lighters. The side with the lighters caught fire, burned alive all the convicts in there; 50 people, at least, died..."