Spirit Wars
Page 6
“I’m not as stupid as you think I am, Nate.”
“I never think that.”
“You do. And the saddest part is, you don’t even know you’re doing it,” she went on in that tone she reserved only for our “heart-to-heart sessions.” I didn’t like the sound of it at all.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked, a slight edge creeping to my voice, sensing what was coming as fast and strong as a whirlpool but being powerless to stop it.
“It’s just you. Just the way you are. How you don’t listen, never have the patience or say sorry. Basically how you’re not opening up to me. All these rules you make up on what makes real men…”
“If I’m impatient that’s because you’re always testing my patience.”
“… indeed maybe a real man isn’t what you’d call a gentleman.”
“What’s this? Is this another of our heart-to-heart talks? Because they all boil down to one thing, you know, to me not introducing you to my parents. Is that what this is about?”
“There’s nothing wrong with wanting to meet your parents. It follows, if we’re seriously committed to this relationship.”
“What’s wrong is you’re always asking about my personal life. You know why you keep getting disappointed? It’s because of me. I keep pretending I’m who you want me to be. So why don’t you do both of us a favor and just leave me the hell alone?”
There, it was done. She was always the one to start a fight and only I had the guts to finally finish it. We were now lying stiff on our backs and not looking at each other, looking at what used to be our stars in the sky but only seeing a shape that looked so ugly and indifferent.
I didn’t want to admit it but for a second I felt freaked-out inside because it was like I had lost both Sam and myself at once. The short gap between us on the park grass stretched like the distance between the two poles of the world. I couldn’t trace the point where everything had started to go wrong. One moment we were happy and everything was perfect; the next, it was all garbled, counterfeit destiny. We were like two survivors off a shipwreck, two specks on the tides of time and chance and I could tell I was about to be washed away from her and we’d lose each other forever. This was because, unlike most normal people, I wasn’t properly anchored to existence.
“All right,” she said after a long silence. “Actually, I’ve been thinking myself. That maybe… maybe it’s not meant to be. It’s not written in the Big Book after all, like what you used to say.”
She sat up and turned her back to me.
“Stop crying,” I told her. “You know I hate it every time you cry.”
“I’m not crying for myself, Nate. I’m crying for you.” Then she stood up and broke into a feminine run.
I wasn’t going after her. Who did she think she was? A hundred retorts and last words were running through my head. Hateful words like “I don’t need your tears” or “You’re always frigid anyway.” I hated her for ruining the mood.
I didn’t know how long I just lay there on the grass smoldering and cursing the sky, but after a while I got up thinking I needed a stiff drink. I barely noticed the constant roar in my ears was unusually quiet.
Oh what is there to tell, Sam? How can you ever understand? That there’s no point to anything. All deaths are senseless because all life is pointless in the first place.
****
I could always tell when something else was in the room with me. Because the sound of its breathing was much too heavy for a boy my age and much too rumbly to be coming out of a human mouth. Eerie, alien lights would chase one another up a wall and across the ceiling as car headlights swept by on the street below, and the shadow of the mango tree touching my window would appear more elongated and grotesque inside my room. Soon the whole place would look as foreign as moonscape.
The monster was cunning. Ever so elusive and always one thought ahead, it would slip back under the cover of my own receding drowsiness, my half-wakefulness, blending in and disguising itself as my own nose, my own lips, and the night sounds that I myself made. There would be no evidence left that I could check against what was logical and firmly based on reality. But I knew better.
Of course this was not to say that monsters cared about preserving my sanity. In fact, just the opposite. They were discreet so they could come back to haunt me many times over. How evil is that? And every once in a while, they weren’t shy to use the full spectrum of the horror they could induce in me. Like that one incident with the visitor in the orphanage, my false-alarm father.
PART TWO: The Sleeper
Chapter IX: A Vision of Balloons
The question on the mind of every other child in the orphanage was, what made a psychic like me different and how to get their hands on the stuff. Many started faking visions of phantoms and conversations with dead relatives or even possession by the devil (the more creative and ADD ones). But they had it all wrong because people like me didn’t only see the spirits of departed people or malevolent entities.
In my own unique case, what I saw was balloons, a whole different dimension of them; and not your regular birthday-party type either. No, these were sort of ethereal. Ghost-balloons. They were beautiful yet eerily alien, like jellyfish floating in air, invisible to everyone but me.
There was one for every living, breathing creature on earth, including animals and even insects, though always proportionate to their size. The balloons all looked identical except for the size of their heads and the length of their stems. With perfect clarity I walked in this world of spirits. I even thought at first that everyone else saw the same things I did.
The first time I ever made the connection between the ghost-balloons and something grim was during a ride on the MRT when I was six. That early on, I had put together that people never turned their gazes to the balloons and were perfectly oblivious to them.
I sat in the car immediately behind the driver and was gazing out at the platform as our train entered the station. One man stood out in the rush-hour crowd because his balloon was unusually short. Then, as I watched, he jumped right in front of our train.
From the shocked faces and voices of all the passengers, and the officious demeanor of the police officers who questioned the train driver along with everyone in our car, I learned a valuable lesson. I learned not to stare and to never talk about the balloons if I didn’t want to get myself in trouble.
The frequency of short balloons among the elderly and tall ones among the young also confirmed the realization that we were all living on borrowed time, that humans were designed with expiration dates. It just so happened that I knew what those dates were exactly.
It was a whole lot easier explaining it to the other orphans than to a bunch of tight-ass grownups who thought they knew everything. Most of the adults failed to understand that asking for the truth and being prepared for it were two completely different things.
I could picture the preteens now: crowding around me with their bright, open faces. I was terrified by their adulation yet somehow I always knew the words they needed to hear.
I would tell them: What you’ve heard about storks – at least the autonomous, intelligent ones, the Angel Storks – they’re all true. You know that myth how at the moment when the mother’s all sweaty and groaning inside the delivery room, a stork’s supposed to be flying high overhead? Yeah, that story’s told to dumb kids and orphans like us but it’s actually not far from the truth.
Before you protest that the growing lump inside the belly of a pregnant mom can’t possibly be just gas or some evil double, listen to this: what a Stork carries is the infant’s Umbaliccus. What people have popularized as a cloth bundle is actually a balloon turned upside-down and is equivalent to the human soul. It’s the single greatest responsibility entrusted to Angel Storks because that’s like the essence of a baby’s being. Without it, the child would be born an empty husk and very soon die.
All these make the Storks less your dorky, friendly-neighborhood deliver
y men and more extra-dimensional, amoral beings made up of pure light.
It’s all coming back to me now, me being the dead and monstrified version. The memories seem to belong to a double life I’ve buried in the darkest recesses of my mind; now they’re pushing back a fount of knowledge to the surface, including jumbled bits of ancient, arcane trivia.
In ancient Egypt, the human soul was known as “ba” and had the same phonetic sign as the saddle-billed stork. The soul was also depicted as a human-headed stork that would roost every daybreak to reunite with its sleeping body.
Bartholomaeus Anglicus, a French medieval scholar, wrote:
“For in that time, that the storks pass out of the country, crows are not seen in places there they were wont to be. And also for they come again with sore wounds, and with voice of blood, that is well known, and with other signs and tokens and show that they have been in strong fighting.”
The truth is, Angel Storks are attracted to love because that’s what they’re composed of, in the same way the Reaper Crows are irresistibly drawn to anxiety, omens, and thoughts of vengeance because they have the ability to divine the future. And so members of these two great opposing camps are constantly locked in battle for control of an individual or a territory.
After dueling, an individual Guardian Angel or Guardian Reaper might attach itself to a Keeper. Like a live shadow clinging on as long as love or a grudge feeds it, it begins to inherit human traits like self-awareness, speech, and emotion. But the longer it stays in the mortal realm, the harder for it to return to its original world and nature, which will ultimately be fatal.
They have carried on a proud tradition of reaching out to man since time immemorial. The oracles of ancient Greece definitely had them. Those priests pored over tomes of esoteric manuscripts and attracted the Crows, but the rest of society mistook their voices for that of God. Similarly, whenever two great lovers felt tremendous passion for each other, a Stork could be stirred deeply enough to descend upon them.
Then in the Age of Enlightenment, humans who had Guardian Angels or Reapers were sent to asylums. Having just discovered electricity, man thought he had discovered an all-around cure in the form of electroshock treatment. But this did nothing save torture the Keepers and force many a Guardian to finally leave their side out of pity.
There are still a few Guardians left these days. They’re the most constant, loyal companions and familiars; the wisest, chattiest, and most enchanting beings. Every Wiccan and holy man wants to have one but nobody knows precisely how Keepers are chosen.
I wasn’t lucky enough to have a Guardian of my own, and I assumed this was because I didn’t have an umballicus to begin with. Or at least nothing I could see with my own eyes.
****
The old-timer nuns at the orphanage said they discovered me inside a cardboard box on the porch. Oldest sob story in the book. Except when you were the protagonist of that story, it was a lot harder to accept. There were nights when lying in bed at night the loneliness would come so fiercely I wondered if I wouldn’t be doing the world a favor if I ceased to exist; and I’d stifle my cries with the pillow. Or sometimes at my hideout on the roof of the orphanage a voice would urge me to jump off the tiles onto the courtyard four stories below.
As in any other institution, there was a great deal of brainwashing involved in the business of orphanages, I had come to realize with some fascination at the age of fourteen. All the other orphans spoke of a “forever family” like it was the most natural thing in the world, like there was nothing wrong with every one of them in the first place. They would pose to have their pictures taken like right-as-rain puppies with eyes eating up half their faces. I imagined if I checked the websites I’d find the same layout for puppies as for orphans.
I knew the drill: prospective adopters would arrive. As soon as they walked in, they would be surrounded by the toddlers, all four of them taking them by the hand and pulling them in to play. The young ones would all look clean, well-fed, and happy. The visitors should come at night though because that was when the off-limits stories told themselves. One orphan sucked his thumb like a tired, little animal. Another wet his bed every night or would indeed try to make it to the bathroom while clinging to his inseparable blanket (which made me wonder if Linus of Peanuts had ever been an orphan). These were our most unguarded moments.
Immanoel the Thumb-sucker would start crying and the bedside lamps would flick on from one double-decker to the next. The wailing child would be followed by one more and then two, like a coach passenger’s worst nightmare, all children denying the reality of having been abandoned and wishing with all earnestness for their parents to come back.
Back in the dark hallway, one of the dried-up nuns would hold Linus the Bed-Wetter and whisper soothing words in his ear, but the feel of a custodian would always be in her touch. Most of the gentle Sisters didn’t have an inkling of what was tearing the little boy up from the inside, not that I expected anything from people who hadn’t experienced abandonment firsthand. A couple of times I had done the job myself that none of them could – that is, be the real person telling the kid that he wasn’t the one to blame nor did he deserve to be left. Wherever his parents were, they weren’t happy to be rid of their burden either.
Someone had to tell the kid that no one would ever leave him again or send him someplace else. And therein lay the contradiction. I could at least promise with enough sincerity in my eyes that I wasn’t going to send anyone anywhere.
Especially because I was the oldest of them, the biggest big brother to all the unwanted, and no “forever family” would have me. I was Nataniel the Non Person.
****
I was also known as the Spirit Sherlock, the Spirit Detective. It was with a hint of derision that the supervising nuns and social workers called me this behind my back to help identify me among the transients of that high-turnover orphanage; they probably called the other kids other names as well.
But among the orphans, the epithet left the lips with reverence and it was almost always spoken in a whisper. I was treated as a hero. Stories of my feats were passed around, exaggerated and embellished, between floor-scrubbing duties and mealtime, prayer service and, at the most tempting hour of all, right before bed.
Not a day passed that an orphan didn’t request a reading from me. Surreptitiously in the yard or under the table during supper, an item would be passed into my hand – a hat, a cellphone, a lighter, an earring or some such trinket – so that I might divine whatever information I could out of these lifeless objects.
It had all started out as a joke. Two older boys thought it was funny to shove an old, patched-up sock under my nose. They told me, “Knock yourself out, freak.”
I only remembered snatches of what I said but the words freaked them out so bad they became my most loyal supporters-slash-managers. This was what roughly came out of my mouth:
“I see two people, one elderly and the other middle-aged. The middle-aged man puts this sock and the other on his father’s feet every evening and whenever it’s cold outside; but that was before. Recently the middle-aged man’s too busy and he has passed the gesture on to another person. To a maid, because his wife couldn’t care less. The old man doesn’t like this new arrangement.”
Whenever the young me did a reading, my facial expression and voice would become far more serious than they could ever be at my age.
“The old man, he speaks in a loud but feeble voice. He has feelings he wants to say but he can’t find the words for. He has too much pride and he doesn’t want to appear weak in anyone’s eyes; that is, except in front of his son, the middle-aged man. The old man complains of many things: headaches, coughing, noise; but the things he complains about are mostly made up. When he forgets or loses things, wets himself or calls for the doctor, all he really wants is to see his son.”
The bigger of the two bullies knew as much about the sock. He had stolen it from the drawer of the old man whom he would read books to.
This was the very real need the other orphans had when they tried to consult me on every inquiring, potential family. They would slip away an article that either the husband or the wife possessed and then pass this on to my seeing hands. This would most often be done in the middle of the initial interview and the Mother Superior would know exactly what mischief was afoot as the orphans spirited away a handkerchief, walking-stick, hairbrush, even a whole purse one time; all precariously returned before anyone noticed they were missing. The Mother Superior knew but was forced to keep quiet for fear of a scandal, instead she would do her best to engage the visiting couple.
More than a few times, I prevented the supervisors from making the grave mistake of sending a child to a molester or an abusive family; something that would’ve sent them to court and shut down the entire orphanage. And in their heart of hearts they were grateful, not to mention the imperiled orphans.
But, like I said, I was sometimes forced to turn a blind eye. There would be outcomes I couldn’t predict and things well beyond a teenager’s control. Those always filled me with remorse and I’d be disconsolate for days. The Sisters would know exactly what the problem was but speak nothing of it. Only when my talents were really needed, like when they were thinking of hiring a new help or investigating a case of theft, would I be sent for. Most of the time the nuns sympathized without encouraging.