Ghosts (Book 1 Part 5)

Vera did her best to appease me the next several days. She tried to be there for me when she assumed I was in need and she tried to keep her distance when she felt I needed more time to myself. I felt her eyes always on me, calmly observing and predicting. She was very good at her job.

The TEFL class was much easier than I thought it would be: Teaching styles, Classical Method versus Direct Method, communicative approaches, active learning versus passive learning, total physical response, et cetera were all terms thrown about the first few days. The instructor, a man by the name of Paul Luante, from Australia had a very drab personality. His jokes were often only amusing to himself and he let us know how amused we were supposed to be at any given time by laughing with great enthusiasm at most of his own comments.

There were several Americans in my class, as well as a Korean woman, a French-Canadian, and an English fellow whom I soon learned had as much appreciation for the bottle as I did. On the second day of class Will and I had made plans to attempt to see some of the Shanghai bars and clubs.

The ghosts were there too. Most of them do not know I can see them. Of course the repeaters don’t seem to know much of anything, like active catatonics they repeat over and over, unaware of all else. Still, I made eye contact with a middle-aged man as I was walking to class, which was really only about a quarter of a mile from my hostel. He noticed the eye contact and began following me. He knew I was of the living and maybe he thought I could help him. He began speaking to me in Chinese. I don’t speak Chinese, so I ignored him. He kept right on talking. He must have been recently dead, confused at what was happening to him, wondering why very few people could see him. Also, I know he must have been recently dead because he soon gave up and wandered away. He had to have been recent, because the old-timers do not give up so easily once they know that a living person can see them.

Of course, later, I felt bad. I had helped many other people out of their individual purgatories, why not him? Vera and I went back looking for him that evening, before the partying started with Will, and we could not find him. I might have taken Vera out again at another time, but she was soon to be leaving, although neither of us knew it at the time. He could have gone anywhere never to return to that spot, only repeaters seem destined to return to the exact same place.

There were other ghosts too; most of them took no heed of me. I kept thinking back to the girl in the hostel bar, wishing that I could somehow help her. I pick my little battles and let emotion get in the way of reason, just like with living women in my life. The girl seemed content, certainly not a horrific repeater bound to relive her death over and over. She must have flashed back to a moment of happiness in her life before she was killed. Yes, most ghosts are killed. That is why they are ghosts, determined to haunt as they are unsatisfied with something left behind in their lives. I have never met a ghost that was a former hospice patient. When people plan to die, they accept it. Usually only those who feel the end of their lives was unfair or have some unresolved issues seemed to haunt. Often they want justice for what was done to them. Sometimes they want something simple, like their remains to be discovered or one of their friends or relatives to be told something that they never had the opportunity to do while still breathing.

Fucking issues. We all have issues. Even the dead. The dead probably have the worst issues of all of us. I wondered if I would become like them when I passed on. I hoped not. I was always ready to go so long as I was not in an airplane.

“Fucking ‘Gangdam Style,’ mate.” Will was seated across from me at a table in the hostel bar.

“What are you talking about?” Will was nice enough, but he had a tendency to dramatically switch subjects and start talking about something completely different.

“’Gangdam Style.’ Quite popular in the UK now. The song they are playing. ‘Gangdam Style,’ baby.” Will was from Manchester and explained that was why his English accent was more guttural than those from the London area. He was quite honored when I said that he sounded more like Rob Halford than Hugh Grant. I still did not know why he felt the need to call me, “baby,” but maybe he was just saying it in general.

“If it ain’t rock n’ roll I don’t like it. Never heard of it. Sounds like shit.”

“Well, where we’re going tonight, you might hear it again. The ladies are at the clubs, and the clubs play this kind of music.” Will was very tall, and towered over me by at least a foot. He was in his late twenties, but could have had people believing he was only eighteen if he chose. His shaved head and baby-face contributed drastically to his youthful appearance. His extremely light blue eyes were almost ghostly. Maybe one of the reasons I liked him was due to the fact that he slightly reminded me of the non-living entities that I often see.

“Maybe I’ll just stay here. I have a lady here if I so desire.” I started looking around the room, the thought of Vera had me do it, but I was still mostly looking for the little school girl. She had not made an appearance tonight. Often ghosts will only haunt for certain hours. Repeaters always run the same hours, sometimes nightly, sometimes weekly, sometimes monthly, and sometimes only annually. Most were nightly.

“Yeah, she’s a nice looking bird.”

“What?”

“Bird, your girl, she looks nice.”

I had heard that slang term before but I had forgotten it. We don’t really use it in the States. “Thanks, but she’s not really mine."

“She’s staying with you, isn’t she?”

“Yes, but she is married and I am me.”

“Well, let’s go get some other women then tonight. It will be fun.” Will had told me that the reason he had come to Shanghai was part of his ten year goal of travelling around the world. Shanghai was his first stop because he read somewhere online that it was quite the party city. He would teach in Shanghai for a year, and then move onto other places he wished to see. Near the end of the ten years he would be in Japan. Then, he would return to England and write his memoirs and live off the royalties for the rest of his life. He seemed quite the optimist.

“I think I’ll—“

She then appeared. The cute, little smile, the angelic face. She had come to play again, like she was most likely to do for all eternity. The ghost of the little girl was back and mere feet away from me.

“Will, what time is it?”

“A little after nine.”

“No, exactly, exactly what time is it?”

“Seven after nine, exactly, mate.”

9:07 pm. That is the time she starts. I wondered what time she ended every evening. The other night with Vera, when I first noticed the girl, was probably around 11:00pm, but I could not recall exactly. I suddenly felt very uncomfortable and saddened.

“What’s wrong?” Will had noticed something come over me and I couldn’t remember the last few minutes of our conversation until much later. The dead girl had really affected me with her sudden presence.

“Nothing. I’m sorry, what are we doing tonight?” I felt befuddled. The little ghost had affected me too much.

“We’re going to get laid.”

And we did.

But even the false intimacy with a woman I did not know proved to be lackluster and dull as I could not get the images of the ghost out of my head.