Death Penalty for a Ghost in 中国 20-22

二十

"Reactionary," a stentorian voice bellowed at me the minute I walked into my apartment, and I saw there was a pile of letters strewn about my kitchen table.

The papers were yellowed with age. They were written in Chinese, in a smeared, dark red ink.

I sat down, looked them over. Used translation software on my phone to scan, translate them.

They were a prison diary, written by Lily.

The diaries were mundane, showed the tedium of her death row existence. Every day was the same. She'd be awoken at dawn by fire alarm type bells. Then she'd wash up from a cold-water tap and sit on her bunk, eat a bowl of porridge.

Then she'd be forced to stand, for an hour, in her cell, in contemplative silence.

Afterwards, she'd be sent to labor. Her job: sweeping the floors. All day, she'd pace the cells, various parts of the prison, sweeping the floors. Made to wear a special red prison uniform that labeled her a death row inmate, she was avoided by other inmates, considered "unlucky."

During the day she was only allowed two short breaks. One for lunch, which consisted of just a bowl of rice and small chunk of pork fat, and the other for dinner- another bowl of rice and a small piece of cabbage.

At dusk she'd be marched to group exercise in the yard, and then returned to her cell, where she'd be made to sit in silence for two hours with her 12 roommates, watching programming on a TV that'd be brought in on a rolling cart.

The programming was of the educational variety, often about Chairman Mao or the Anti-Japanese War or about Marxism.

She wondered why she'd need to watch politically bent programming when, after her conviction, she'd been stripped of all political rights for the rest of her life, or at least the remaining year of it, anyway.

Then at night, she'd stay awake. She didn't want to sleep because she didn't have much time left. So, she'd lie in bed, stare at the cockroaches crawling up the walls, or write in her diary. She'd wanted to write to her parents, old friends, but everyone she knew had cut off contact with her following her arrest, so she wrote to herself.

She wasn't allowed a pen so she'd used her own blood as the ink. She'd written that she'd collected a cup of her blood, from her period, and dipped a bamboo stick in it, used it as her pen. The paper she'd swiped from an office she was cleaning...

How deeply impressed I was by her legerdemain...

Like her face, her writing didn't convey much feeling. Until the last entry. It was the only part where she'd shown emotion.

The last entry was written the night before her execution. In it, she pondered who she could have been if she'd not been born poor. If she'd been her boss's daughter. If she'd been related to a high-ranking member of the Party. If she'd been born in a rich country like Japan or in Europe or a person in a bootlegged movie she'd seen from America or Hong Kong, those movies that her and her friend would watch at an uncle's house, on his VCR.

She wondered if she was free to have as many kids as she wanted, if she'd have two or three, so she could have both boys and girls. Or if she could live in a big house with the robot machines that washed clothes and dishes for you.

She wished she could have been someone else. Lived another life. She wondered if there'd be a Heaven or afterlife like she'd heard some people believed. If she'd see her aborted baby in Heaven. Who that baby would have been, a boy, a girl? A person like her?

"I'm not a monster," she wrote, "I did what they're doing to me. If it's justice, it's justice. If it's murder, it's murder. It's whatever it is. It couldn't have been worse...

"I brought shame to my family. There's nothing I can do to make up for that. But I believe my death will end much of their suffering, end much of their shame. For that, I'll be happy to die tomorrow. I'm sorry to them, I'm sorry to my family that I couldn't do better in school, land a better job, be in a better situation. That I'm a disappointment... I am truly sorry to my parents. But I'm not sorry to anyone else."

These words were the same as the final statement she'd made. I guess she'd prepared them in blood first.

(It struck me that death row inmates in their final hours were probably the only people in China with true freedom of speech, unafraid of the consequences their words would bring. I had trouble imagining anyone else in China speaking or writing publicly with such candor...)

It took most of the evening to read, translate the diaries. Once I finished them, I set the letters down. Then I went out to the street to buy some cold noodles for a fast dinner.

Sitting on a plastic stool beside the noodle stand, on the street corner, I used my wooden chopsticks to pick and twirl and slurp up the salty, spicy noodles. As I ate, I panned my gaze around the campus. It was late. Most of the students were back in their gender-separated dorms, ahead of campus curfew.

Off towards the manmade lake near the campus library's clocktower, a few young couples were holding hands, strolling in the smoggy distance. In the square in front of the library, a large group of late middle-aged and elderly women were dancing, doing aerobics to repetitive techno music blasting from a distorted speaker. The women wore surgical masks as they danced. Some moved faster than others.

I wondered what would happen if all one billion people in China were to do aerobics at the same time. If it would push the Earth out of its orbit. I think I read about that somewhere.

My eyes started to burn again, but there were no skeletons, or at least any I could see. The smog was growing thicker in the distance, and I noticed that my chopsticks were two long, thin severed fingers and that my bowl of noodles was full of bloody human tongues.

I retched, cringed, and dropped the fingers, cupped my hands over my face. I drew in a deep breath, twitched, and lowered my hands. I cautiously looked back down and found that the bowl was empty, and the chopsticks were gone.

二十一

Walking back to my apartment, an icy rain trickled from the sky, burned and tickled my skin as it touched into me. The smog had picked up considerably, too, and there'd been a car accident, a pile-up, on the road nearby.

This had been common these days, with the smog, cars smashing into each other on the roads and highways due to lack of visibility, cars crashing into each other even more than usual.

Trudging up to my fifth-floor apartment, I felt a grunge. It was a gauze of grogginess not wholly unlike fatigue but more electric, stimulated. I looked left, but it was so hazy out that I couldn't see anything from my apartment building's stairwell windows, not a mere flicker of light shone from the chemical plant.

I stepped inside my apartment, pressed the heavy steel door shut, and flicked on the lights. As I turned on my heels, I gasped at the sight of Lily. The ghost, the beautiful murderess sitting on my couch.

Her lips sloped into a crooked smile, she sat with her legs crossed, arms spread wider than Jesus as she leaned back into the cushion. She was translucent as last night, but brighter than before, glowing, phosphorescently. This time she was clothed, in the white blouse and blue jeans she'd worn the day of her execution.

"They shot me dead. But you shot life inside me, dear," she spoke, and a bluish mist puffed from her mouth, accompanied her words.

"Are you real?" I asked and a rattling, buzzing sound, like a saw, sounded off in the distance.

She frowned, looked at the floor and glumly told me, "When you die, you don't really die, most of the time, until later. The spirits here, ones who died in jail, or were shot in the chest, they said they were still alive, their brains were alive, and they saw everything, but couldn't speak or react. They didn't really die until they were put into the crematorium. They felt a lot more pain being burned, they said. Not me, though, I was shot in the brain. I went out like a light. I saw my soul leave my body.

"As I said, dear, it was an orgasm, dying, such a euphoric rush," she said, her tone rising, and went on, "and it is easier than being a body, just being a spirit. It's fun, to travel around and play tricks on the living, move things, misplace keys. The living can be so stupid. Life is so totally wasted on them.

"But, yes, dear, I'm as real as you think I am.

"I'm here. I'm always here... I'd love to travel, but I'm confined to only the areas I lived, this town, this prison. There's no invisible wall that keeps me from moving. It's just that these are the only places I am."

Lily reached over to my coffee table, tried to pick up a box of the civet shit coffee. The box went through her hand, which made her sigh, and she continued speaking with me, and I sat down next to her.

"I can't always touch objects. Sometimes I can. Sometimes I can't. People, I've wanted to touch, talk with, but I never could. Until you. Why is that?"

"I wish I knew. But, sorry to say, I'm still not convinced you're real," I told her, looking straight at her, speaking loudly to reach my words over the sawing sounds.

"Every ghost I've seen in a movie or on TV, in a book, they speak in like 'raaah' kinda of bursts, maybe a word or two here or there. But you're so lucid."

I put my arm around her. She felt like a body. Was warm. I could smell her scent. It was like roses. I leaned over, pressed my lips to hers.

We kissed, a deep, wet hot kiss. Tonight, her tongue was like a warm slippery stone. After a few seconds of locking lips, we broke apart.

"Whoa, that felt real," I told her, my body trembling.

She gazed deeply in my eyes, replied, "It's as real as you think..."

"You said I shot life into you. So does that mean, if we're together, if we stay together, you could live?" I asked, twirling a finger around in her shiny black hair. It was so light and soft as a feather.

Her expression soured.

"Not like this," she said.

"Why not?" I asked, reaching for her hand, but she jerked it away, shifted her gaze towards the windows, and spoke in a poignant, staccato rhythm.

"Listen, dear, they know magic. Black magic. Blood magic. They harbor grudges."

"Who?" I implored, drawing myself closer to her.

But she recoiled, scooted to the end of the couch, away from me, curled up into a fetal position, and her tone shifted to a trembling, lugubrious cadence, "The demons. They've seen the offerings, they've seen the fires by the school, but it's not enough. It's only scraps. The demons, they're insatiable. They want not only the flesh, the blood, and the bones, they want the cement.

"They need to destroy the school. Swallow it into their grave of night.

"Nearby the school, those smokestacks, the chemical plant there. It will explode. A fireball will wash over the school and surrounding area. It'll be a ghastly explosion. The lick of a fire that size can send the ghosts and demons back to the Underworld. When it burns they'll dance... They'll be free. The grounds will be contaminated for years.

"The poisoned land will be their legacy, their vengeance. It will preserve their privacy and sanctity.

"The forthcoming inferno, it's the expense of progress. The demons' debt to be repaid.

"We will all leave this place, Kim. We're just passing through. Death is the destiny of everyone," she told me, with the saddest expression I'd ever seen painted across her pretty face, like that of a sad clown.

"When you die, dear, it'll be known, who you really were... And when you join the sky, dear, I hope to see you..." she whispered and then dissolved, with a whooshing sound, shifted into a small pink cloud, and floated up and through the ceiling...

二十二

Seeing her go was a punch in the stomach. My eyes burned, and hot tears streamed down my cheeks.

But then it all made sense. Her presence. Her telling me. What I'd learned and seen. I knew. I knew their motives. Their actions. Their offerings and missives. My blood boiled and my lips quivered. My body trembled with rage.

The hateful spirits wanted their vengeance, to push us out.

I got up, looked out the window, and saw that a curtain in the vaporous smog had parted. I saw ghosts of dead convicts, hundreds of them, in their prison uniforms, in the drizzly rain, marching in a single file line down the road, surging forward, on their way towards the chemical plant.

I recognized the ghosts, too. I knew them! I'd seen them in dreams! I'd seen them banging on doors! I'd seen them digging in the distance! I'd seen them kneeling to the rifles! I'd seen them staring from windows!

Then the drilling sounded, buzzing louder than an airplane engine...

NO! I wouldn't allow the ghosts' treachery!

THEY were dead. But WE were alive. Just because they'd suffered didn't mean we had to!

My heartbeat thumping, my teeth chattering, I seized my phone. Using my translation software, I alerted the local police of a terrorist threat, a plot to explode the chemical plant, and I sent the message from the dark web where it'd be untraceable.

After I sent the warning, a tingly warm wave of calm washed over me, and I stood at my window where I would soon see firetrucks, ambulances, and the cops and PSB (the People's Security Bureau) swarm in and illuminate my windows in flashing blue and red lights, and I would gaze out, grinning at the police circling around the plant's leviathan glitter...

I would stand on my tiptoes and applaud, laugh and cheer for the PSB, in their blue helmets, the men looking and moving like militant turtles. While watching their movements, their formations, my guts would catch on fire, and I would grab the empty pages of Lily's prison diaries, the palimpsest, and on those yellowed pages I'd write a story about the ghosts, the prison's history, and for the purpose, use my blood as the ink of the first draft.

I'd sit up until the small hours of night, typing it out on my laptop and post it online, so it could go from brain to brain, in a digital form of telepathy, so the stories of those involved could be heard. So the ghosts could have their say and be fed!

I stood at the window knowing that tomorrow I would read online that the chemical plant was shut down due to numerous health and safety violations. Then my insomnia would stop. And the demons would stop drinking my sleep.

The car accidents on the road could return to their normal frequency, and the ghosts in the school would merely be memories...

The police would conduct further background checks on all the school's foreigners, and like I anticipated Fat Elvis will be found to have been convicted of child molestation charges in another country, probably in Southeast Asia, probably Cambodia. He would quickly be fired and deported and Marco and I would spit in his face as he was led away in handcuffs.

That pair of young, clean-cut teachers, the cult members who'd invite everyone to their apartment, peddling Jesus and home church services, they would be outed as undercover missionaries and their several stacks of homemade Bibles, translated into Chinese, would be confiscated from their apartment and be burned by the PSB. They'd no longer be handing them to students, discretely, along with paper bags of homemade chocolate chip cookies. The clean-cut pair would be deported and banned from China, praying to Jesus, praying for salvation for the souls of the police who'd chained them.

"Forgive them, for they know not..." they'd writhe and bellow, in shackles, on their way to the airport.

Rooster would do a runner. No one would know where he'd gone, but we'd all wish him the best and clink glasses to his name.

The rest of us would stay out the year. Marco would become Marco again, begin to dress normally again, wearing Miami Heat team gear nearly every day as he'd done before.

Most of the foreigner teachers would leave the school after their 1-year contracts expired.

The leavers fleeing China, on to other schools in Asia, the Middle East, or Europe. Marco would go to Colombia, like he mentioned, and a couple teachers would go back to their home countries. The only foreigners staying would be Tony, the Tasmanian Ninja and the Man-bun: The China Lifers.

And me. I'd stick it out. I'd survive my contract. Go back, triumphantly, to FIU as a tenured professor and return to the golden sheen of the Florida sun. I'd go to the beach every weekend and breathe in the clean, salty sweet sea air, and never take it for granted again.

And I'd think of Lily. A lot. I'd miss her, miss her dearly. I'd paint a portrait of her and stare longingly at the painting. Every time I'd look at it, she'd become more beautiful. Eventually I'd memorize every angle of her face.

I'd lay and stare at her photos and wonder if she was my soulmate and ponder how tragic it would be to have a soulmate who was dead or from another time, place. A person you could never know.

And I'd wonder if her telling me of the chemical plant, if it was her atonement, and if it let her ghost die, move on to the next realm...

But, of course, I wouldn't know for sure. I would be filled with an ineluctable sense of dread. I would worry for her soul, her ghost and decide that, to ensure she'd find peace, I'd take her as a ghost bride, as per traditional Chinese custom.

After the séance, after making my vows, I'd delete all her photos and articles from my phone and laptop. Then, after kissing her painting, I'd burn it, along with her blood diaries and fling the ashes from my bedroom window, off into the chilly mist of night...

I would hope to God that the séance would allow Lily's soul to finally rest and that maybe I could see her again in the sky, in the next realm, or in another life...

But all this could wait. I was exhausted, drained from the ordeal. Without even taking pills, I walked, somnolently, with stone footsteps to the bed, and I lay supine, pressed my head to my cold pillow.

I drifted off, having no evil visions, no fear of nightmares, and when I heard the fireworks, I felt the boom and quake, and my body tensed up and then loosened when the white wave washed over, into the release.

THE END