Ghost Month

by Ed Lin

  “Frankie? Is it true that when you were on Green Island, your cell used to fill up with seawater?”

  His left eyebrow rose slightly. “Who told you that?” he asked softly.

  “My father.”

  “Hmm,” Frankie said noncommittally and put the cigarette in the left corner of his tight mouth. He was done talking.

  CHAPTER NINE

  I texted Nancy when I got into bed.

  STILL THINKING ABOUT YOU, MY LITTLE SEX PARTNER. We had agreed to call each other that. It sounded practical and yet playful. “When do you sleep?”

  My phone vibrated seconds later.

  Her message read, I CAN’T SLEEP WITHOUT HEARING FROM YOU. HOW IS YOUR BRUISE? SIGNED, YOUR SEX PARTNER.

  I looked down. The color was becoming more consistent and was turning dark blue. That meant it was healing, right? I touched the splotch in the center and it didn’t hurt as much as it used to.

  I took a flash picture of the bruise and sent it to Nancy with the caption, PLEASE KISS IT. I put the phone down and looked out the window. Clouds were passing under the moon, sending grey wisps crawling up and down building walls.

  My phone rang.

  “Hi, sexy,” I said as I answered.

  “Ummm, Jing-nan?”

  “Ming-kuo. You sure are calling awfully late, again.”

  “Do you always answer your phone like that?”

  “I was joking. I knew it was you.” I groaned as I saw that Nancy was trying to call me.

  “Jing-nan, who was that girl you were with? Is that your wife?”

  “No, she’s a friend. She’s actually trying to call me now so I have to …”

  Cookie Monster wasn’t getting it. He continued chatting as if we had all the time in the world.

  “I was thinking I could take you to lunch tomorrow?”

  “You’re going to tell me all you can about Julia, right?”

  “Didn’t I already? Well, we have so many other things to talk about, anyway. It’s been so many years, Jing-nan. We should sit down and meet properly.”

  “I might have plans already.” My phone buzzed with Nancy’s call.

  “If that doesn’t work for you, then I can come to your stand and hang out for a few hours at a table until you’re free.”

  Nothing could be worse than that.

  “You know what, Ming-kuo? Let’s do lunch tomorrow. I’ll clear my schedule.”

  “Great!”

  I got him to agree to meet me at a Korean place with wait staff who don’t let you linger.

  Nancy hadn’t left me a message. I called her back and got her voicemail. I texted her, IS IT TOO LATE FOR YOU TO COME OVER AND COMFORT ME?

  ADDRESS PLEASE, she texted back. I’M A LITTLE TIRED. I’LL TAKE A CAB. I sent her the information. I hoped she wasn’t too tired.

  My ear canals began to itch, so I used a small bamboo spoon to scrape the wax out. I brushed my teeth again, making sure to brush my tongue thoroughly.

  Most importantly, I set up my PC to play my personal mix of songs culled from Joy Division’s best live bootlegs. I wanted Nancy’s first impression of my house to be a good one. She hadn’t said much about her place, but I was sure it was nicer than mine.

  It was almost two thirty in the morning. As a last-minute thought, I put out a pack of dried mangoes, a pack of roasted cashews, one Kirin and one Asahi.

  She texted me to say the cab was nearby.

  I stepped outside wearing a pair of flip-flops, shorts and a T-shirt that featured the drummer-boy cover of Joy Division’s An Ideal for Living EP. She had to know that one. I swung open the gate and stood on the sidewalk.

  Even though Ghost Month spooked most people into staying indoors at night, younger people seemed more blasé about it. I saw a car of joyriding kids go by blasting AKB48, a best-selling Japanese girl group that, despite the name, had almost one hundred members. Girl groups like AKB48 and the Taiwanese equivalent, TPE48, were destroying minds with their synthesized, sunny songs that all had choruses with “baby” in them. Everything’s happy! Everything’s fun! Nobody’s sad! Nobody gets murdered!

  I watched the car with contempt as it turned the corner and left. Those kids would be safe during Ghost Month. The undead would flee from that music.

  A cab swung up to me from the other side of the street, and I reached for my wallet. I knew I couldn’t beat Nancy to taking care of the fare, but I had to make a good effort. Her window was down and she smiled at me.

  “I have it,” I said, showing her a few bills.

  “I’ve already paid, Jing-nan.” She popped open the door.

  “Hey,” said the cabbie. “Don’t you guys want to go out? I know the best clubs!”

  I ducked my head down and looked at him. He seemed to be about thirty years old. Maybe he knew the best clubs from a decade ago. Anyway, Nancy and I weren’t into club music. That little snippet of AKB48 was already more than I needed tonight.

  “We’re tired,” said Nancy, stepping out and straightening up. She was wearing a Magazine shirt that featured the cover art of the reunion album.

  “Next time!” the cabbie said. He pushed his card onto me before pulling away.

  “Any problems getting here?” I asked as I guided her to my toaster house.

  “No, it was very easy. Longshan Temple is a good landmark, and you’re only three blocks away.”

  “Did you see the homeless people in Bangka Park?”

  “That’s the place right across from the temple, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ve seen the park on the news before. I feel so bad for them.”

  The most recent controversy was that the city was hosing down the benches and concrete platforms late at night and early in the morning, ostensibly to clean the park. The workers evacuated the park before spraying, but the homeless men couldn’t return to sleep there while it was wet.

  “My father used to point to them and tell me I was going to be one of them if I didn’t study hard enough.”

  As we stepped into my house, Nancy sighed. “We have it so good, don’t we? Shouldn’t we be helping the homeless?”

  Shit. This was the wrong thing to be talking about, and it wasn’t going to lead to anything good tonight.

  Luckily, the music changed the subject.

  “Wow,” Nancy said. “This is the first song on the second side of Closer!” She stepped into a pair of slippers I had set out.

  “ ‘Second side’? You have this album on vinyl?”

  “Yes. I’m not a big audiophile or anything, I wanted it mostly to have the cover art full-sized.”

  “You want some snacks or beer?”

  She sniffed. “Did you cook something?”

  “No, I didn’t. What do you smell?”

  “Smells a little like something fried.”

  “You’re probably smelling my clothes in the hamper. I stink after coming home from work.” I touched the back of my neck and winced. I’d been alone so long I didn’t realize that my place stank.

  She stepped into the minuscule kitchen. “I think it’s something else.”

  I didn’t want to admit that at home I rarely cooked anything other than instant ramen, so I said I would clean up better before she came over again.

  I was glad Nancy wasn’t the shy type. She burped while drinking her beer and it made her laugh. When she first stepped into the bathroom, she squealed that the toilet was a squatter and not a sit-down.

  I didn’t want to, but we went through my yearbook. Man, why had I left it out? We stopped on the spread of me singing while reaching out to Julia with Nancy right behind her.

  “I liked you, but I was scared of you,” she said. “You always wore that big trench coat. It was menacing. People said you robbed graves.”

  I laughed as I tore a dried mango slice. “I was just trying to dress the part. I didn’t mean to scare anybody.”

  “The younger girls loved it. We all called you Ian.”

  “Oh, really?” I said
, unable to suppress a smile. “I didn’t know I had made such an impression.”

  “I think the fact that you were with Julia was a big part of it. You, as a man, become more attractive to women because you are already partnered with a woman.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “It’s a matter of social selection. A woman has selected you as a mate, and that means there’s something worthy about you, you’re better than the pool of single guys. So other women would rather try to mate with you than waste time with potential losers.”

  “Nancy, does this somehow tie in with your bioengineering studies?”

  “It’s more like psychology, but I like psychology. When you study human behavior, sometimes it’s hard to distinguish individual choice from what we’re hardwired to do. Maybe we really can’t exercise much choice in our lives.”

  “You did choose to come here, didn’t you?”

  She dropped her slippers, pulled her feet up on the couch and placed the back of her head in my lap.

  I played with her funny little right ear a bit. Who was this woman on the couch with me? She seemed to be on her own, although she had alluded to her estranged family “down south.”

  Had she come back into my life because Julia was gone for good? Had I somehow willed myself to find her? Maybe this was supposed to happen.

  But things couldn’t be meant to be, could they?

  Nancy began to murmur along to “Twenty Four Hours,” the hardest-driving song on the mid-tempo Closer. I thought about the lyrics, in which the speaker tries to make sense of an illusory world in the wake of a relationship that has come to a jarring end.

  Too close to home.

  I rested my head against the couch’s backboard and felt the furious drumming thunder through the house.

  Could anybody else in the world really understand and love me except for Julia? After all our time apart, though, our relationship had become theoretical in nature. I could see that now as I sat here on the couch with this woman. I felt more alive than I had in years. I even seemed to be able to breathe more deeply.

  All those wasted, loveless years of living in exile! I was the Chiang Kai-shek of love. But things were looking up for me now.

  I moved my hand down to Nancy’s chin and she teasingly licked my index finger. I chuckled. She could do so many surprising things.

  “Twenty Four Hours” ended, and now we were at the last two songs on Closer, mid-tempo curtain closers that pushed the boundary of what post-punk was at the time.

  “What do you think of ‘The Eternal’ and ‘Decades,’ Jing-nan?” Nancy asked.

  “I think they’re great,” I said. “I think Joy Division ended at their peak. Everything built up to this.”

  “I have to confess something,” said Nancy. She sat up on the couch and held her hands. “I remember when you ripped on New Order on the PTT.”

  I instantly thought of all the stupid talk online.

  “Oh, that,” I said. “Ha!”

  “You said the surviving members of Joy Division shouldn’t have gotten together again.”

  “I was wrong to post that. I really like New Order now,” I said, putting my empty bottle down. “Well, it was all over, in a way, right? Why did they start up again?”

  She crossed her arms. “They wanted to go on! That’s the only reason to do anything.”

  “At the time I was mad that they didn’t stop.”

  “Because you think they owed it to Ian Curtis to stop?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Do you think you can’t love someone else after Julia?”

  I looked at the floor, although I didn’t see anything. “I don’t know,” I said. She touched my face and I looked into her eyes. They were lovely. “I didn’t think so.”

  “Let’s just be happy,” she said. “I haven’t been in a long time, either.” I reached over and closed my hand over hers.

  “Nancy, you must have guys all over you!”

  “That’s not a good thing! It gets really annoying.”

  I felt her little knuckles. “Let me know if I annoy you.”

  “How could you?”

  The album ended and I became aware of the time. It must be after three.

  “What time do you have to be at Bauhaus?” I asked her.

  “I never have to go back,” she said, shifting on the couch. “It was just a temp job while somebody was on vacation.”

  “Damn. I was counting on you to get me a whole bunch of music!”

  “You can download almost anything. I can buy you the rest.”

  “I don’t need you to buy me stuff.”

  “That’s true.” She pointed to my bookcase overflowing with CDs. “You probably have too many things already.”

  “I have more CDs in the bedroom.”

  She looked directly at me. “Ah, I’m not falling for that line.”

  “I swear, it’s not a line!” I stood up and opened the fridge. “Do you want to cool off by splitting a can of Apple Sidra?” It’s a Taiwanese sparkling apple cider. I used to think it was misspelled, but it turns out that sidra is “cider” in Spanish. Why Spanish? Some things about Taiwan will always remain a mystery.

  “It’s not that hot out here,” said Nancy, “but I’ll have a few sips.”

  “We could move to the bedroom. There’s a fan there.”

  She stood up and brushed her hair behind her ears. “Again with the bedroom, huh?”

  “I don’t want to wear out the couch.”

  I popped open the Apple Sidra and led the way.

  After playing bumper cars for a while, we fell asleep.

  I had a dream that Julia was trying to tell me something using only her right eyebrow. I wasn’t sad when I woke up. Just confused.

  I didn’t tell Nancy about it. She left without showering because I didn’t have a shower and she didn’t want to wait for the hot water to boil for a bucket bath.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Ming-kuo had dressed in a shirt, tie and jacket. In the bright lights of the Korean restaurant, he looked like a chubby variety-show host minus the microphone and charm.

  “This isn’t a job interview,” I told him.

  “I wanted to look professional,” he said eagerly. “My mother always said that even though I wasn’t good-looking, I could at least dress well.” Man, was she right.

  “Your mom was wrong,” I said.

  “I don’t dress well?”

  “You are good-looking,” I said as I wiped my mouth. I delved into the menu so I wouldn’t have to look at him.

  “Thank you, Jing-nan! You’re a good-looking guy yourself!”

  “Say, Ming-kuo. If I take you to Hsinchu City, do you think you could point out the stand Julia was working at?”

  “I don’t know if I could. It’s been a few years and it was dark. No, I definitely couldn’t.”

  “A few years? I thought you said it was a few months ago.”

  He smiled and nodded. “Ah, you see how bad my memory is?”

  “So which was it, a few months or a few years?”

  He gave me an exasperated look. “Jeez, you’re making me feel like this is a job interview, putting all this pressure on me!”

  I mashed my right foot into the ground. “Ming-kuo, could you please get serious about this? I’d like to know any details you can remember.”

  “Well, then I guess we can choose something in between. Let’s say it was a year ago.”

  “Last Ghost Month?”

  “Sure, let’s say that.”

  Gan! Could I believe anything this guy said? I sipped some water and swished it around my mouth. “Ming-kuo, I’m going to level with you. I’m actually asking for Julia’s parents. I’m seeing them after this and I’m going to have to tell them I couldn’t come up with anything useful.”

  His eyes bugged out and he cracked his knuckles again. “You’re asking for her parents, Jing-nan? I thought you were trying to get to the bottom of things for yourself. I mean, you tw
o were practically married.”

  “Only in our minds.” I noticed that our silently furious waitress was standing at the ready. She took our orders for zhajiangmian, wheat noodles in bean sauce, without saying a word, and returned with several appetizers, ranging from salty to spicy, and steamed to chilled. There are a lot of different ways to make zhajiangmian, but for my money the best one is a dish that originated in the ethnic Chinese communities living in Korea. This variety includes a thick black paste made from roasted and fermented soybeans and tiny chunks of pork. The only place to find this type is in Korean restaurants that include Chinese items on their menu. Apart from that I didn’t know much about Korean food, and I knew even less about the little snacks. I didn’t want to ask our waitress about them because she was already mad enough that she had to serve us. It also didn’t help that Cookie Monster was looking at her like she was the daily special.

  Classy as ever, Ming-kuo craned his neck and stared at her ass as she left.

  “It’s not a crystal ball,” I said.

  Ming-kuo sighed, shoved his elbows up on the table and cradled his head. “I’m not like you. Looking is all I get to do.”

  “You haven’t been dating?” I asked, suppressing a laugh.

  “Every few months I work up the courage to approach a girl, but I strike out every time.”

  “I’m sorry, Ming-kuo.”

  “I’m a virgin,” he said with exasperation.

  Gan! Or rather, non-gan!

  “That’s an honorable thing, Ming-kuo. You’re saving yourself for marriage.”

  “But how do I get to marriage if I can’t even get a date?”

  “What a situation you’re in. You work at a love hotel and everyone else around you is getting laid.”

  He dug his chopsticks into a cold dish of sprouted beans and threw them into his mouth. “You don’t have to rub it in,” he said with his mouth full.

  I sampled some silvery fish that looked like crumpled foil candy wrappers with eyes. “I’m just making an observation. I’m not making fun of you.”

  “You’re laughing at me.”

  I bit into the inside of my left cheek. “I’m not laughing.”