by Lavie Tidhar
She carefully picks a spot on the couch where a little wine has spilled, not looking at me. Her movements are perfect, almost like a performance put on for my benefit.
I’m not doing it for the money, she says. I like it when they take you. You don’t have to decide, you don’t have to be in control. You take a break from the world and let someone else do your living. Your body becomes someone else’s and there’s no responsibility, no making mistakes, because it’s not you; it’s someone else with their own plans and you’re just there for the ride. A girl I had last month, she died on her fifteenth birthday. She had wanted to join her friends in the city but her parents wouldn’t let her out past midnight. She tied a bit of rope to her waist and climbed out the apartment window and tried to lower herself down. The rope around the window frame snapped and she fell from the fourth floor. She goes in me, and the next thing I know I’m waking up from a table in McDonalds with cheeseburger in my mouth and a milkshake in my hand. Tasted wonderful. Everything tastes better in a burger wrapper. Don’t you miss that?
J.G’s laugh is phlegmy, and she turns away to wipe the spittle with the side of her palm. I realize she looks different from a certain angle. When I don’t see the eagle–like cut of her eyes, her face looks vague and undefined, like a composite of dead people’s lives and faces. The contours of her nose and her cheekbones have blurred into each other.
You need me, I tell her, while thinking, I need you to need me.
You’re a sweet, special boy, Ben.
She faces me and looks like her roguish, pixie self again. She says, I’d miss you if you crossed over.
She gives me a little air kiss as her cellphone rings. When she sees who it is, she mouths to me, Ah Wai, and goes to the balcony to answer him.
§
In the shock of our first few days as ghosts, my father lost his belligerence and grew depressed. He became open and frank, which made me uncomfortable, and one time he sat me down and told me he’d heard that the difficulty of crossing over wasn’t in the resolution of whatever issue was keeping you in the living world, but in finding out what the issue was. Forced entry was the easiest way to start finishing your business; it happened more frequently than the ghost police admitted, and most of them did it themselves. But pinning down the right issue was like trying to figure out what was causing you to keep dreaming that your teeth were falling out, and most people forced entry and ended up wasting their time resolving a minor problem because they didn’t know themselves well enough or, more frequently, didn’t want to admit they had made a huge mistake at some point in their lives.
I was a little overcome by the warmth in my father’s voice and didn’t know what to make of it, so I just listened and nodded. But as months passed and he was reinstated to the police force in his new position as a constable in the ghost division and started coaxing me to join him, he forgot this, and returned to being the father I had grown up with.
§
J.G. doesn’t return to Brian Kwok’s apartment the next day. Hurt, I leave the young entrepreneur retching into his kitchen sink and decide not to have anything to do with J.G. while I try to find out what it is she wants from other people that I can’t give her.
I break into the body of a university senior with arms roped with muscles and take him for the ride I never got to have. We go to parties, sleep with sophomore girls, drink and share a few joints until he passes out and I’m stuck in his dead weight of a body, getting bored, so I enter another student with a matinee idol’s face and a higher tolerance for alcohol, and make him go to the claustrophobic bar area downtown. I put words in his mouth to chat up a forty–something Australian woman from an international insurance company, tell her jokes about the ghosts of Hong Kong, which she is too drunk to find in bad taste, and we do it in the toilet and later again in her apartment, where I leave them both.
Even at the height of his sexual gratification, I don’t cross over. I move into the apartment of an IT consultant to wash away the stale scent of overspent passion. I find a small space on the ledge of their bay windows and sit there with my legs up, watching his family with the protective silence of a cat. Every afternoon the eight–year–old comes back from school and plays video games. When the shadows grow longer, the maid turns the stove on and sizzles the pan with sunflower oil and garlic, humming a pop song over a plate of marinating prawns. Then the father comes back home, flings his briefcase at the sofa, and goes to the master bedroom to undress. He plays a little with his son on the felt–balled rug before he turns on the news on the TV. His wife returns from the education bureau, they have dinner. I’ve been tempted to enter each of them but I never do. Sometimes there’s a small argument between the parents, a little more TV–watching with the son, then they trickle to bed until all the lights are turned off and I’m alone on the ledge of their bay windows, watching the glowing numbers on the microwave oven change, and like clockwork it’s always at this time of the night I miss J.G the most.
§
One time I saw J.G. as I walked past one of the betting shops of the jockey club. I stopped among the children who stood outside the door, tugging on the security guards’ uniforms while they waited for their parents.
J.G. looked like her half–sister might have, if she had ever had one. There were traces of J.G. in the jaw, in the curve of her nose, but nearly everything else was washed away by the features of another woman. She must have been taking more clients than usual.
She was with a slightly stocky man and they were buying tickets from a booth. He paid for them both and created a little fake fight between them with her insisting to pay her share and him refusing.
If I had let the jealousy overcome me, I would have forced myself into Wai in the most painful way possible, and torn him apart from inside. He wears glasses and his hair is swept back with gel. Then they were laughing, looking for birthdays on the numbers on their lottery tickets, and he placed a palm on the nape of her neck, squeezing with his thumb and his index and middle fingers.
I restrained myself. But a week later, I return to my father on his day off.
If he’s surprised to see me, he doesn’t show it. He looks at me, registers my presence, and returns to his newspaper. I ask how the hosting case is doing.
The girl’s gone off the radar, he says.
I don’t know if my father’s being euphemistic. Does he mean the police have run her off?
Where is she, I ask, trying to keep my voice calm.
Don’t know.
My father lets the breeze flip the page, and his lack of concern enrages me. Savage images of J.G. in the hands of my father’s friends fill my mind, and a bag of tears bursts in me. It’s Wai, isn’t it, I say.
Who?
Her fixer.
My father snaps to attention. You know her fixer?
Where did you put her? I’m going to get her out.
My words are irrevocable. My father searches my face. A minute later he says evenly, We don’t have her.
His voice has dropped, and this is a sign he is testing new waters, but I’m too sick with worry to care.
I won’t let you hurt her, I say, relieved and horrified at my inability to stop myself. The fever in my brain tells me it’s better this way, all the cards on the table. The waiting is over. My father has forgotten about his newspaper, which the breeze has swept off his cardboard box. The only thing I can do now is take advantage of my father’s shock to get a head start.
Nobody has seen her, my father finally replies, his words three steps behind his thoughts. Realization is suffusing him like a ghost in J.G.’s body, filling each orifice, lifting her, taking control of her limbs.
She’s stopped seeing clients, my father continues. She’s taken a lot of money with her.
It’s Wai. He’s done something to her. I’ll kill him.
Come with me to the station, Ben. You can help us find her.
I can’t read his voice. So this is what my father is like when he is about to arres
t someone: enigmatic, provoking, so easy to trust until you find your face against a wall and your arms twisted with his full weight behind you. He reaches for my shoulder and I scream at him to get off me.
I leave, half–expecting him to follow, but he doesn’t.
§
I spend the next week looking for Wai. I remember what J.G. said about him before, a man of opportunity. He likes dipping his hands into the rivers of money that flow past him. I look for him in the girly bars, the betting shops, all the teahouses. I cross the sea to Macau and look for him in the casinos, where money is dressed in colors — gold, jade, silver, the poppy–red and lacquer–black of roulette — and where people come to be bewildered by disguises, to take a mask themselves and plunge into heady pleasure. I rip their masks off, but I don’t find him there.
Exhausted and insane with helplessness, I return to Hong Kong, where money has no color and people compensate by lighting their nights with neon burning with the ambition of an entire population. I find Wai in a noodle house, hunched over a plate of stir–fried vermicelli.
I don’t wait for him to move to a private place. I explode into him and taste the beef slices in his noodles and run into a fragmented slideshow of images in his head of J.G., which infuriates me more. Wai’s nose starts to bleed and he groans, falling to the floor and losing his glasses. His consciousness gives up immediately, and a man on the next table tries to help him up, but I stretch out Wai’s arm and bat the intruder away, picking up the glasses myself. I haul Wai up to his feet so violently it looks like his knees are bending the wrong way. I drag him to the toilet, where I lock the door in a cubicle. I dip his finger into the blood pouring out of his nose and write on the door, Where is she?
I wrench myself out of him. He comes to and the vomiting begins.
He’s had enough ghosts in him before to know what’s going on. He sees the writing and says, I don’t know.
He’s losing liquid in floods. He turns around grabs the toilet seat to steady himself. He is shivering and his face has turned white.
I snake a hand into his nostrils and up in his nasal cavity and he doubles over.
She’s sick, he gasps. I told her to stop. She wouldn’t listen. She’s gone.
He starts to choke. I leave him, a sobbing mess of vomit, snot, blood and tears, his fashionable hair in disarray. For a moment, I wish I could be him and give myself physically and completely over to my grief. A group of men have started crowding around the cubicle, and I walk past them out of the toilet and into the dining area, and ignore the ghosts below the paper menus tacked on the wall who give me curious stares. A waiter near the toilet door is calling for an ambulance.
§
Even after the fire, I still imagined I’d take her to the kebab place. It’s irrelevant whose body I’m in because I never get to see what I look like. It’s not a movie. In the picture in my head, I only see her smiling and talking to me and the only thing traceable to me is my voice, in the same way everyone’s never aware of what they look like until they catch their reflection somewhere.
My father used to go to the kebab place, too. He was the one who took me there when I was young. He had the boy at the rotisserie put the spiciest curry sauce on our lamb kebabs, always lamb kebabs because, apparently, chicken wasn’t real meat. The only reason I could still return to that place afterward and want to take her there is because I had managed to withstand the sauce, and had surprised myself and my father.
He didn’t say anything as I munched half of my kebab triumphantly in front of him. He only smiled, but it looked so foreign on him I thought it would break his face. He started unwrapping his kebab and kept that strange, proud smile as I ate my way through the fire.
§
It’s my father who finds me now in the small hotel next to the big potted plant J.G. fallen asleep in five years ago. I am lying on my back in the same sofa, wondering what would have happened if I had asked for the room myself, unafraid to hold J.G. to her ambiguous hints and mixed messages. I think I would have already crossed over if I had, but even the prospect of that feels insignificant now.
She’s with us, my father says. We found her.
I expect him to take me to the station, but instead we go to the parking lot next to the warehouse where he reads his papers. It’s past midnight. I can make out a few ghosts around the place where his big rubber tire usually is, and the way they acknowledge my father tells me they’re his colleagues. I vaguely realize I don’t know any of my father’s friends. A mortal constable stands on the side, the vermilion look of bribery on his face. A girl is slumped on the tire and leaning against the cardboard box, where a half–eaten fried rice takeaway and a foam cup of coffee rest.
It takes me a while to realize it’s J.G. because it’s not her anymore. When Wai said she was sick, I had imagined her cheeks gutted, her face aged, and her skin sagging like an old jacket from being slipped too many times. She looks fine here, tired, her mouth open, some dried vomit on her lip, but all right. What’s different is her entire face. Her cheeks are broader and her forehead has lengthened a little, and her eyes are a little closer together and more deep–set. Her nose has grown smaller and her lips a little wider and fuller. I don’t recognize her until, with a rush of panic and guilt, I see the cigarette burn on the back of her hand and realize I don’t know who she has finally turned into.
She looks asleep but when I come closer, I hear her murmuring. I see a slight bruise above her left eye.
You hit her, I say to the policemen, not with anger but as a quiet question. My father shakes his head though he doesn’t try to explain. He puts a hand on the shoulder of the mortal constable, who can’t see any of this, and the man gives a jump. It’s a sign. The constable comes over to J.G. and rouses her. When she groans, he waves a wad of notes in front of her and says, For Ben Siu.
It’s only when she hears my name and her eyes fly open, eyes I’ve never seen before, looking wildly around for me, her savior, her sweet, special boy who will always be there in spite of everything, that I finally understand. I make no move toward her. All she sees is a constable handing her money and nervously hooking this thumbs into his belt loops, waiting for something to happen.
I look at my father and he stares back at me with pleading expectation, and it occurs to me that this is a gift. I feel an ache somewhere.
I imagine sliding into J.G.’s mouth, wrapping her warmth around me, lodging inside her darkness, luxuriating in her every thought of me, but I find myself thinking of how much trouble my father must have gone to, to ask favors from his friends and bribe a colleague to delay the arrest of J.G. Ip, whom I barely recognize; of the risk my father has taken that could strip him of his badge and his name. I don’t know what to do. I feel my father’s eyes on me.
The ache in me grows stronger, and it must be showing because hope drains from my father’s face. They’re all waiting for me. I look at the woman supposed to be J.G. counting the money and glancing up occasionally in bewilderment, and I try very hard. I think of her hair lifting and revealing her dangling earrings, I think of her passionate defiance of the limitations of her own life. I think of the furious, uncontrollable obsession with her that consumed me until my heart broke.
I remember how the obsession feels but I can’t recall what started it. I can only think of how J.G. pushed and pulled me into a position of limbo, how she hurt me, knowing I would never leave, this woman whom my father is risking his reputation for.
My father asks what’s wrong. His face is twisted, and I know he can tell everything’s been for nothing. The pain on his face reminds me of the time when he sat me down and talked to me about crossing over.
I try to tell my father it’s all right. I try to thank him and raise my arm to touch him, but my vision blurs. That can’t be right because ghosts have no tears, until I realize everything is melting into everything else, J.G.’s new face and the mortal constable’s discomfort, my father and his colleagues coalescing into a gas, the sky c
ollapsing into the ground, and the glass of the buildings pooling like a liquid mirror; and I feel myself spreading thinner and lighter, like the neon when it fights against the dawning sun, until everything disappears.
Three Little Children
Ange
Translated from the French by Tom Clegg
Anne and Gérard Guero, writing together as Ange, are well known in France as the creators of bandes dessinées such as La Geste des Chevaliers Dragons (Tales of the Dragon Guard), and novels such as Les Trois Lunes de Tanjor (The Three Moons of Tanjor) trilogy.
Of course I know that song. But I can’t sing it for you, not even this evening… I’m sorry, my little lambs, but grandpas grow old and my voice isn’t what it used to be.
Anyway, don’t you think it’s time to go to sleep?
No? All right. But wouldn’t you rather hear a story? Because the song, even if I can’t sing it for you, has a story behind it that I can tell you. Snuggle up under the covers, dears, or you’ll catch cold.
So, all ready, should I start? This may take a while, but that’s what grandpas are for, right? Telling stories.
You won’t be frightened, now, will you? Because Three Little Children isn’t a song about shepherds who fool princes or about a nightingale who chirps nonsense in the garden. There are some scary bits in it… Although if teachers in school have been singing it to their pupils all this time, I suppose they must believe children can bear to listen.
All right.
How does it go, now?
Il était trois petits enfants
Qui s’en allaient glaner aux champs.
(They were three little children
Who went gleaning in the fields.)
Or rather, they gleaned in the market. The one by the Couronnes metro station, that’s still held on Tuesdays and Fridays between Belleville and Ménilmontant…