Test Signal

by Nathan Connolly (Dead Ink)

  The greeting itself is recognisable, as the title of the 1987 film starring Robin Williams as a radio DJ stationed in Saigon for the Armed Forces Radio Service. Probably the most acclaimed comedy on the Vietnam War – although centred on the typical subject, American soldiers – Uncle Bill claimed it as a signature salutation. He first arrived in the US six months past his twentieth birthday, in the early seventies, to join my eldest uncle, an agricultural engineer. But over his lifetime, he often visited Vietnam to tend to the family who stayed. This lifestyle produced a cultural mishmash that normalised local monastery visits and wearing of traditional garbs alongside a prideful display of a Ronald Reagan calendar and partaking in snowball fights.

  I listened politely as Uncle Bill described how a neighbour staying over one night had heard footsteps in the room where my grandpa used to spend most of his time. Although I was happy to be in my uncle’s company, I found the recounting of this incident, especially its conclusion – that the neighbour encountered Ghost Grandpa – awkward. I grew up with these tales of translucent human visions. Sometimes they strolled around the streets because they weren’t aware they were dead, or sometimes they appeared abruptly and stared without speaking, a sign for something you had to inconveniently figure out. Hearing the story was like listening to something that used to hold sway over me, but had become distant and discredited – sort of like an ex. By then, my intellect seldom dealt with anything supernatural, and a venture towards this was considered a misstep into the irrational. Knowledge, as it was impressed upon me, was gained through rigorous research on the observable. Modern thought insisted that it was evolved, estranged from ponderings about the unmeasurable mind and soul. To be trained in the scientific method was to consider only the facts, derived from following a systematic process of careful observation and documentation. That it could be applied to human behaviour to accurately explain ourselves has its critics, but studying us scientifically was to protect the integrity of acquired knowledge against ourselves, creating a sense of certainty about us.

  *

  In early 2020, online obituaries appeared for the criminologist and psychiatrist Donald West. I knew of him but knew very little about him – I used to pass by his framed portrait when a Ph.D. student, thinking he had a kind expression. In criminology lineage, I am his intellectual descendant, as he had trained and mentored my Ph.D. supervisor during work on the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development. West was born in 1924 in Liverpool, near the docks, and was later raised in Crosby. Although his home life lacked intellectual and cultural stimulation, his parents adamantly believed in the importance of education, and West was able to study medicine at the University of Liverpool. His oldest research interest, however, seemed to be in the ability to communicate with spirits, and he first indulged this curiosity by attending séances in Liverpool.

  In one of his earliest works, Psychical Research Today (1954), he recounted the challenges of providing solid evidence that mediumship was real. In one séance, he exposed a fraudulent medium by smearing his hands with red ink and touching the supposed spirit that moved about in the dark. Sure enough, when the lights came on, the red ink also appeared on the medium. But instead of everyone in attendance being angry at the medium for fooling them, they kicked out West, claiming that a bad spirit must have possessed him and that the red ink on the medium was actually remnants of ectoplasm – a gauze-like substance that a spirit can appear in. Research into the existence of spirit communication proved to be difficult, as West detailed, particularly because the people involved really wanted to believe, and their biases distorted their perceptions and interpretations, rendering completely different observations to one another.

  By way of example, West described the experiments of S. J. Davey, who replicated the tricks popularly used by mediums at that time. Davey and a colleague had rehearsed what they were going to do during their séance: pretend to lock the door, and while their music box chimed away in the dark room of the unwitting sitters, his colleague would slip through the unlocked door and pull out their props, hidden in a cupboard, and imitate a spirit, illuminating his face with glow-in-the-dark pages from a book. After, they compared what their audience members thought they saw during the séance and what actually occurred: the participants vehemently believed they had encountered spirits. Even when Davey admitted the séance was a hoax, a leading spiritualist refused to believe him. This strong bias towards the existence of spirits led to West’s dismissal from the Society for Psychical Research, where he was a researcher. Considered a sceptic among members of the Society, first formed by a group of intellectual influencers of the day, he actually was simply frustrated by the lack of results and by other members who readily assumed the existence of the supernatural and rejected any findings that challenged their beliefs.

  West was adamant that the careful design and implementation of scientific experiments was the best bet in reaching a more truthful understanding of this paranormal phenomenon. His research on mediumship suggested that this mystery was capable of being deciphered, that it was not beyond human comprehension. It was his death early in the year that provoked my curiosity towards his thorough psychical research, and it was Uncle Bill’s sudden death late that same year that prompted a revisit to old possibilities.

  *

  Up until late that year, I accepted that death was the end, and there would be nothing more, just like my pre-existence where I had known no better. For whatever reason we were here, so better make the most of it; but, also, perhaps we were an accident in a careless universe full of chance. Yet the night following Uncle Bill’s passing, my mind kept returning to what he had said about my grandpa; and so, absurdly, I hid under the covers. It didn’t help that the week before I had binge-watched the latest season of Unsolved Mysteries and there had been an episode about the surviving residents from the Tōhoku region, the area of Japan hit by the 2011 tsunami, in which more than 15,500 died and nearly 2,600 were still reported missing as of 2015 by the National Police Agency. I remember the earthquake that caused the tsunami. I had been working on some of my research in Kyoto when it struck, but as I was more than five hundred kilometres away, I mistook the slight shifting of my building walls as a sign for a break. A sight that has never left me came from live aerial footage from the news that day: a silent mass of darkness creeping steadily along, blithely devouring buildings and roads and vehicles. Miles ahead appeared a lone car, moving away. It kept going as the dark wave trailed behind, determined to outrun it. But then it slowed, tried to veer left, then right. It was so little, that car, and whoever was in it must have thought it futile to try to escape, so the car turned to face the tsunami and waited. Following the disaster, many residents reported seeing apparitions, soaked and lost.

  Some of the research on which the episode was based came from the Times journalist Richard Lloyd Parry, who described encounters from the likes of cab drivers whose passengers would disappear by the time their destination was reached, and a group of temporary housing occupants, startled to see their dead neighbour come by for a cuppa while drenching the cushion on which she sat with seawater. Those who were unable to locate missing loved ones had even sought the help of mediums. Parry noted that a ‘cult of the ancestors’ seemed to make the immense collective grief more profound because the dead were then unable to be adequately provided and cared for – proper burials were impossible following the destruction; ancestral altars were lost or destroyed; sweeping familial lines abruptly ended. ‘In such circumstances,’ he remarked, ‘how can there fail to be a swarm of ghosts?’

  Whether people believed in ghosts or whether ghosts were real was beside the point in the Unsolved Mysteries episode. Yes, the episode scared me, so that, days after, I was hesitant to even walk down my own corridor alone, but it lingered because it was so deeply sad: a mother left out her son’s toys so he could come back to play with them; a dead girl had promised to hold on to her little brother’s hand and was pained for letting go when the wave hit them;
a man finally found the body of his baby daughter under the debris and had to wipe her muddy face to confirm it. Isn’t communicating with the dead a way of knowing if they’re okay? When I found out that Uncle Bill had only a few days left to live, I rushed to fly back to Seattle. I found my hurry, though, completely nonsensical, and I couldn’t explain exactly why it was pressing for me to see my uncle one last time. Even though I would later learn he had died by the time I caught the second leg of my flight, I came to understand that my urgency was a hope of reassuring him, a show of love. And following his death, I began to think how lonely Uncle Bill would be in a cemetery full of strange others and Jimi Hendrix.

  *

  ‘Love never ends,’ Marilynne Robinson writes. ‘Projected forward it is hope.’ Love itself doesn’t die the moment someone we love does. When they go, hope is the only action we have left in expressing our love for that person: I hope you left loved and in peace, I hope you’re okay. In Uncle Bill’s bundles of news, he had let me know that I wasn’t alone, wherever I was, even over the Atlantic, but distance seemed trivial among a family history of recurrent migration. In asking whether I had eaten and if I was healthy, he was hoping that I was okay. So-called modern thinking may scoff at these sentiments about mere corpses and the inevitable, seeing these as a kind of bias towards meaning or ‘wish-fulfilment’ in a universe that in actuality is empty, but Robinson, again, provides an alternative: ‘Or we might call it a vision of Being that is large and rich enough to accommodate the experience of human love and grief.’ This is a way of saying that we are more than we have purported to discover.

  In his final book, a memoir written towards the end of his life, Donald West provides a similar stance. His lifelong research interest in the paranormal is apparent throughout, and the last substantial section just before the brief ending is an overview of the latest in para-psychology. Unfortunately, no strong evidence has been reported to date, but West maintained he was never a complete disbeliever, as he understood there was something there in a few of the astonishing historic cases of psychics and experiments on telepathy. His dedication to psychical research was born out of love: at the University of Liverpool, he had fallen for a fellow student named Richard whose friendship and interest in the paranormal provided encouragement to pursue the subject further. Life as a gay man, when it was a crime and then when it was not, informed many of West’s intellectual curiosities. He found the received wisdom of his youth on what was then known as homosexuality suspect, so, in university, began reading books on spiritualism and psychical research. A lifetime of research on the paranormal, though, yielded no certainty for him, no grand findings or firm conclusions, but he was fine with this. As someone who was used to being an outcast, he seemed confident that psychical research had philosophical and social importance despite its dismissal by mainstream science.

  *

  Whatever happens after death isn’t certain. But it is love after loss that now makes the notion of emptiness and a lack of wonder, while alive and afterwards, a dreary and unworthy prospect for Uncle Bill. There are two lines from the fourteenth-century West Midlands poem ‘Pearl’, about grief and loss, that I hope for him:

  My soul by grace of God has fared

  Adventuring where marvels be…

  I became acquainted with these lines because of Marilynne Robinson’s essay collection What Are We Doing Here?, its title taken from her 2015 public lecture at Liverpool Hope University. Two lines that make me breathe easier, like the world suddenly expanded and became vast, capable of accommodating the knowable and unknowable about us – a place able to appreciate my uncle in all his complexity.

  On my way to the prayer service, I briefly registered a woman speaking to my eldest uncle and a couple of other relatives off to the side of the funeral home’s main entrance.

  ‘Good morning, Vietnam!’

  I stopped and looked up. It was her voice, but I heard my Uncle Bill. The woman was gesticulating, and I realised it was part of her story as she continued her conversation with my family. I hadn’t heard the greeting in such a long while that the sound was a jolt of joy shot out from somewhere dormant and nearly forgotten. A door opened, a haste of beloved familiarity appeared: Uncle Bill calling by in a white dress shirt and wide tie, a head full of dense black hair, tucking away his earpiece, asking if I had already eaten. I first came to Seattle because of him, and he had welcomed me at the airport. As we drove in his car, untidy from a full life of family, he told me all about the aunts and uncles and cousins who lived nearby, their names, ages and what they were up to.

  CUCKOO

  DÉSIRÉE REYNOLDS

  He could tell by the way the air hung around her head that she wasn’t sleeping. He pretended to stretch and yawn and rolled on top of her. Afterwards the same air dried her eyes.

  Niomi raised herself up and lit the rest of last night’s spliff; she lay back down, trying not to disturb that same talkative air. She felt between her legs, still wet. Years ago that would’ve made her feel loved and warm, safe and cared for, but now it made her feel wrung out and tired. She caught her breath on the roach and choked a little. Shit. She got up.

  ‘Wha? What’s happening? Where, where you goin, Niomi?’

  ‘To have a wee, is dat okay wid you?’

  ‘Galang den, chuu, what’s wrong wid you? Skip it, don’t care.’

  She crept around the room, found knickers on the floor and put them on. She got fully dressed, even though she only wanted to wash.

  ‘Go and fine him.’

  ‘He’ll still be sleeping.’

  ‘I said go an fine him!’

  She didn’t want to bump into him now. Last night was intentional, they’d been watching him for weeks. He shuffled under the dark yellow street light and turned when she said hello. The flat was tiny, every door faced another door. The bathroom had once been nice but the orange blossom was covered with mildew, and wetness streaked down from somewhere on the ceiling, making small puddles she had to step around on the floor. It smelt of old water, musty and desperate. She’d been in bathrooms like this before: only barely serving its function, more there to witness its own lack of use. She cleaned herself with cold water and the sleeve of her jumper and listened. She thought she heard something: shuffling movement, that wheezy cough; fat feet in fat slippers slapping against the lino.

  She listened at the door; she felt him pressed against it too, listening for her. She moved back and sat on the toilet, waiting.

  ‘Shit.’

  She waited until she didn’t hear anything, grabbed her stuff and opened the door a crack.

  There he was.

  He had been there all that time, a cup of tea in a white cup with tiny rivers of brown fractures running down it. Pink flowers on it, on a mismatched saucer. He held it out to her and his hands shook, his eyes fixed on the floor. His nose remembering the smell of a woman.

  ‘I mek dis fi you.’

  ‘Oh, er, right, thanks, Mordacai.’

  She took it from him and he waited. She held it and her clothes and willed him to go away. He didn’t.

  ‘Don’t mek it get cold.’

  ‘Oh, right.’

  She dropped her stuff on the floor and they both stared at the toothbrush, T-shirt and knickers. She quickly took a sip and fought back the urge to vomit. It was cold and sweet. He’d made it with evaporated milk, like her gran used to make it.

  ‘Lovely, thank you.’

  She didn’t know what to do. She could feel her hair making her top wet. The damp sleeve made her shiver. She drank it all and handed the cup back to him, picked up her clothes and stepped past him back into the bedroom.

  Jay was sitting up now, smoking a spliff and switching channels on the TV.

  ‘Was dat him?’ ‘What do you think?’

  ‘Easy, what’s wrong wid you?’

  She stared at him, thinking her hatred could pour out of her, tepid and sweet like Mordacai’s syrupy tea, and cover everything. And he would never know
it was her. She saw him sink down into the liquid, it coming burning out of his nose, him screaming for help. The thought made her smile. She sat with her back to him on the edge of the bed. He threw a paper at her, made her jump, and suddenly she remembered what they were going to do.

  ‘Shit! Can’t we jus get out of here, you know, jus go. He gives me the creeps.’ She didn’t hear as he slid down and kicked her off the bed.

  ‘God, Jay! What did you do dat for?’

  ‘Can’t see the TV.’

  She got up. He was smiling as he held out the spliff to her. She took it because she didn’t know what else to do.

  ‘You know what? You’re looking old. You need to sort yourself out. Can’t keep doing this if you lose your looks. No one wants pensioner pussy.’ He smiled happily up at her, not registering the pain in her body or the hurt in her eyes. She sat on the windowsill.

  ‘So, what’s happening today, Jay?’

  She blew the smoke out the window and watched it curl up into the spitting sky. Sky hemmed in by the estate, blocked off by high-rises, a small patch of grey-blue in the middle. She listened to the music around her. The dripping tap beat out a rhythm in the bathroom with the pipes knocking and the boys spitting lyrics under a stairwell, dog barks and sirens. She took the end of the spliff and held it close to her leg. The smoke trickled out the top, caressing her thigh, snaking close to the fabric of her denim skirt. It seemed to her it was looking for a way in. A tiny, marshy grey cloud dancing with the material, stretched over and tied her up, hypnotising her and the cloth. While she was watching the smoke, she could block out everything.

  Her eyes felt heavy, maybe she could sleep? Right here. The smoke trying to get her to sleep. She smiled down at it. It meant everything. She finally tore her eyes away from her leg and looked at Jay. She never realised how ugly he was. The shape his mouth made when he was angry, the way his eyes would dare her to breathe, and she wasn’t sure, but wasn’t it her right to breathe? How most of the time he never asked her how she was, what was she thinking, feeling, never gave her anything, but could take until she was empty. Who was he anyway? Why was he? All this in a moment. What was he saying?