Ghost Month (36 page)

“I lost all my music in the fire,” I said, feeling like a sulky teen. “Do you know how much that cost? That was probably twenty thousand NT right there!”

German put a hand on my shoulder. “I’ll tell you what I’ll do for you. The debt on the last statement was about three point five million NT, right? I’m going to bring it down to three point three million NT.” I could save that much in about a decade, if I stopped eating and buying clothes and gas.

Sensing an opportunity, I said, “Just keep the debt where it is, but drop the interest.”

German leaned over, and a dull whirring sound came from his seat as he eased it back almost completely. It meant a lot less money for him, but it also gave me a realistic path to pay off the debt fully.

“All right, Jing-nan,” he said. “I think that’s fair.”

I
DIDN
’
T HAVE MANY
albums on my phone, only about thirty compared to the several thousand on my hard drive, which included live performances by Joy Division and New Order downloaded from sites that had wound down years ago. My PC library had also included songs from pre-concert sound checks I had copied from a guy at UCLA. I’ve never seen them anywhere else. I’d probably never hear them again, especially since the conglomerate corporations that owned the publishing rights to Joy Division and New Order were now vigilant about shutting down sharing sites that dared to post material from either band.

Listening to music was a huge part of my rituals for going to sleep and getting up in the morning, almost as necessary as water for brushing my teeth, washing my face and flushing away my waste. Nancy preferred to only listen to music through headphones. That was fine for me when I was in transit, but in my home (or her
home), I really needed to feel the sound moving through the air, as a part of the living world and not just isolated in my ears.

Nancy didn’t have a desktop computer or a stereo system. She listened to music on her phone and laptop. I examined her video system, which had speakers that were better than the old stereo system I’d had hooked up to my computer.

I sat on the floor and picked my way though a drawer of cables in the wall unit under the television, as tangles of black cables piled up in my lap like cyborg pubic hair.

“What are you doing?” Nancy asked.

“I’m looking for a cable that will let me connect my phone to the USB port in the television. I lost mine in the fire.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Just a second.” She went to her bedroom and returned with a portable hard drive the size of a Big Mac. “You can plug this into the TV.”

“Whoa, what’s this?”

“It’s the music files from Bauhaus. I only asked for Joy Division and New Order, but there’s a bunch of other stuff on there, too.”

My fingers tingled with the excitement of finding Joy Division material that was new to me. “What’s on there?” I panted.

“I’ll show you my laptop. I already copied the entire drive.” Nancy plopped down on the couch, flipped open her computer and clicked on the music folder. She dragged her fingers across the track pad, showing me the names of the files.

It was hard to say what I hadn’t heard yet. Live bootlegs rarely listed the dates and places of the performances, and when they did the information was often wrong. I would have to hear them all, and I would.

“I went ahead and corrected a few misspellings,” she said. “I get annoyed by that. The best one I saw was the ‘Love Will
Tar
Us Apart’ twelve-inch single.” She looked into my eyes and laughed with her entire face and spirit.

I looked upon Nancy with nothing but love. I had nothing left, and she gave me more than I’d ever had, both musically and emotionally.

“It’s a miracle,” I told her. “Thank you so much.” I got on the ground and hugged her calves tightly.

Unfortunately, the television’s firmware wouldn’t recognize a portable hard drive of that size. We settled for listening to Joy Division playing somewhere in Manchester over her trebly laptop speakers.

Even though the music’s integrity was compromised by the quality of the speakers, Nancy agreed that it was special to hear music move through the air.

“Did you ever go to Boar Pour More’s MySpace page?” she asked casually. It was a test. If I asked, “Who are they?” I would have failed.

Luckily, I remembered that it was a band that Nancy drummed for. They had a clever name, a play on
bopomofo
, the phonetic system for learning how to pronounce words in the Mandarin dialect.

“I tried, but it looked like it had been taken down,” I said. “I found one picture in a Google search of you drumming, though.” Nancy paused the music and clicked on a bookmark that was supposed to be a shortcut, but a message confirmed the band page was gone.

“Damn it, I’ll bet Pei-pei, the singer, took it down.”

“How long did you have blonde hair?”

She put a few strands of hair through her mouth and chewed it. “Just a month. I had to try it.” Her face sank a little. “Man, I told all these people at Bauhaus to check out our page.”

“Sorry you had to find out it was down through me.”

“Aw, it’s not such a big deal.” She was glum enough that I could tell it was.

“Can you play me some of the Boar Pour More song files?”

Her face got even longer. “Pei-pei has them, of course. She was going to have them remastered.”

I grabbed her right hand. “Don’t worry,” I said. “You’ll go on to do better things.”

“I’m going to start another band sometime soon. Hey, Jing-nan, you can be the singer!”

“No, I’d be terrible!”

“You’re a great singer, and you have charisma, too!”

“Well, you don’t want to be in a band with a singer who works at night. How would we ever book any gigs?”

“Maybe you don’t have to work at night.”

“No, I have to be there, Nancy.” I laughed nervously.

“You could sell the stand and get a day job. Who cares if you make less, right?”

I took a deep breath. Clearly, Nancy and I would be seeing a lot of each other in the near future. We were going to be in a committed relationship, if we weren’t already in one. But it was still too early to tell her about my family-debt situation.

“Nancy, it’s not my dream job to run a night-market stand, but it is a dream job for Dwayne and Frankie. I would never want to let them down.”

“Are you sure? They don’t look very happy there.”

“Those are the faces they were born with. I feel bad for them.”

I
STEPPED INTO AN
elevator to find that the air-conditioning unit was broken. I immediately broke out into a light sweat. I had expected more from a high-class building like Nancy’s. I was about to step out to catch another when a white-gloved hand reached out and gently blocked my exit, also obscuring my view of the man’s face.

“Sir, this elevator was called for you,” he said. The voice was familiar, but I couldn’t place it.

“So what?” I asked.

“Sir, you need to stay in it.” The man stepped in with me and pressed a button to close the door. I still couldn’t see his face, because he kept his back to me, but his uniform and cap were in good shape.

The doors closed, and the walls became transparent. Stars surrounded us. Why was I having such strange experiences with elevators?

“Can I breathe here?” I asked. “We have oxygen, right?”

“Sir, of course.”

I looked down at the earth. As we rose I saw the West Coast of the continental US beneath us.

“That’s where I went to school, for a while, anyway,” I said.

“Sir, look over there by that light,” said the man.

“Is that the sun?”

“Sir, some people call it that.”

We were drawing closer to the light, and I felt the car heating up.

“Can’t we do something about the temperature?”

“Sir, only the lady can.”

“You mean Julia, of course. Let me ask her for help.” I saw her in the distance, asleep on the floor of her own elevator car, also bound for the sun.

The conductor pointed at the emergency call box on the elevator. “Sir, you may ask her for help.”

I pressed the button and watched Julia slowly stir in her car and then answer the intercom.

“Jing-nan, is that you?” She didn’t bother to cover up a huge yawn.

“Yes! Julia, I need your help!”

“Where are you? Have you been out here the whole time?”

“I’m behind you. Listen, can you do something about the air conditioning? It’s broken.”

“I could, but I don’t have the money to send a repairman there.”

“I have money. How do I get it to you?”

“Just burn it and I’ll get it.”

“Do you mean burn notes as if you were a dead person?”

“It’s similar to that. You and I don’t believe in such things, but this is how it works out here. There’s no other way.”

I opened a smaller panel at about waist height, revealing a single flame the size of a tiny pilot light. This was going to take a long time. I sat down cross-legged, threw open my wallet and slowly burned the first bill.

“Did you get that, Julia?”

“I did, but it’s not enough. I need another hundred NT.”

I had trouble with the next bill because it was wet with my own sweat. As I struggled, out of frustration I said, “This is the worst elevator I’ve ever been on.”

“You’re not on an elevator,” said Julia. “You’re in a coffin, Jing-nan.”

I tried to stand up, but the elevator had shrunk to the size of a coffin. I didn’t have enough room to even turn my head. Where had the man who was with me gone?

“I don’t want to die!” I bleated.

“We all have to die, Jing-nan. I’m just ahead of you. Now burn me money so I can help you!”

“It’s just making it hotter in here, Julia.”

“If you’re not going to send me money, then I’ll have to go to work for it.” The intercom clicked off.

I looked at Julia. She shed her clothes and then began to swivel her hips around. She was completely naked.
“Binlang, binlang!”
I could hear her cry through space.

I pounded on the wall. “Stop it, Julia! I don’t care about the air conditioning! It doesn’t matter! Just stop what you’re doing!”

The elevator man’s face, now upside down, came in close, until we were touching noses. “I wanted to warn you, Jing-nan, but you were destined to take that ride.” The man was Ah-tien.

I woke up with my elbows and head pushed up against the headboard.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

I stood outside of Big Shot Hot Pot and looked back at the kitchen. I saw Kuilan and her husband Bert. Now where was that—

“Hey!” someone called out right behind me. “You looking for me?”

“Ah-tien, I was looking for you. I wanted to ask you something.”

He shoved his hands in his pockets and looked left and right. “Not here,” he said. “Follow me.”

He brought me to an alley off of Daxi Road that had no name and not a lot of light or air.

“What is it?” he asked rudely.

“Why did you try to stop me from getting on my bike that night?”

He laughed bitterly and shoved two sticks of gum in his mouth. “You think I had anything to do with burning your house down?”

“How did you know about it?” I got in his face a little bit. “I didn’t tell anybody about it except Dwayne and Frankie. They sure didn’t talk to you.”

Ah-tien squeezed his gum into his left cheek and sneered. “You just don’t get it, do you, Jing-nan? When someone you know gets murdered, just shut the fuck up about it.” I wasn’t sure, but I thought I saw tears forming in his eyes. “You think you’re the only one who’s lost a friend?”

“Tell me how you knew about my house,” I said, a little bit more softly this time.

“I hear things.” Ah-tien wasn’t going to give me anything until I showed him I was in the know. He leaned against a wall and slouched.

“I know that a faction of Black Sea is being liquidated,” I said casually.

Suspicion flashed in his eyes. “What do you know about Everlasting Peace?” So that was the name of the faction.

“I know they’re killing the members of Everlasting Peace.”

He stopped chewing and looked at me hard. “Won’t be long now. There are only two left.”

“Why did the Everlasting Peace guys kill Julia?”

He folded his arms and sighed. “I don’t know, but they ended up signing their own death warrant.” Ah-tien made a fist with his right hand and rubbed the side of his nose with an extended thumb. “This is where you stop asking questions about Julia,” he said. “Seriously, Jing-nan. You’re not safe as long as there are still Everlasting Peace guys out there.”

“I thought it was Black Sea that was after me.”

“Black Sea just wants you to shut the fuck up. Julia’s murder is embarrassing to them. But Everlasting Peace wants you dead. They’re trigger-happy young punks just looking for an excuse.” He broke away from the wall. “Watch your back,” he said.

A
T A BREAK IN
the action later that night, Dwayne called out to me. “How long are you going to crash at Nancy’s? Real men don’t mooch.” He was at the stove, stirring our heaviest pot, nicknamed Da Pang or “Fatty,” which was filled with stewed tendons, spice leaves and bones that needed to be broken down. He ladled out the steaming stew into four smaller pots.