ghosts in earthly colors i
Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings. (Anais Nin)
The Guide to Defending Yourself Against Indigenous Non-Living has a single entry on romantic love between a member of the living-class and one amongst the dead. It is exactly two sentences long, and it reads as follows: It is a situation that should be avoided at all costs. Both parties will feel overwhelmed by the need to exist in the same state - be that life or death - and, because it is impossible for the dead to return to life, there is only one available option.
On James’ third day at the hospital in Saigon, every canvass chair in his ward is found stacked into a single, tall ziggurat. The nurses circle around it, running their index fingers down the moist fabric, droning softly amongst themselves before separating to scold the patients, followed by a whorled cloud of Maybelline face powder and insect repellent. On the fifth day, the televisions in the game room turn on spontaneously and broadcast Vietnamese funeral bells over a static screen for twenty minutes. Nothing surprises him anymore. The thing has been following him since Echo Company hiked up the Mekong River, disrupting their radio signals, their compasses, the heart monitors at the medical tent, brittle fingers that wrap around his wrist, and demand look at me, look at me.
The most terrible thing about the hospital is the boredom, the whiteness, the cyclic schedule of stethoscopes and morphine drips. To amuse himself, he imagines the appraisals of the doctors to be enemy chatter, the tap of the nurse's white heels like intermittent bursts of gunfire, and the heart rate monitors beeping without cease, a countdown to an appointment made against his will. He lays awake, listening to the death march of his heart, ba-dum ba-dum ba-dum. The nose bleeds are regular now, and the night nurse waits with a handful of tissues. She holds it to his face, blood splatter across the front of her dress like a buckshot wound, the look of disgust on her mouth at odds with the gentleness of her hands on his scalp. Her lips are moist against his ear, the words sloppy, murmured, English, a nursery rhyme, ashes, ashes, we all fall down, while he stares at the overhead lamps, light of such clarity and precisions that his eyes ache and his heart swells.
He knows he is going to die.
He knows the spirit watched the bullet rip through his solar plexus, and held him together with her cold hands, and silently promised him a death more beautiful than this. And now, she follows any nurse that shows even the most cursory interest in him, gripping her nightgown, skin shorn thin over her knuckles, screaming vulgarities in a language he does not understand.
It's no jungle-thing; not the humanoids with perpetually dilated eyes that had crouched in the canopies along the riverside, or the folk ghosts in the wells and temples of the villages. This thing is quiet and hungry and childish, and it kicks the metal frames of the hospital beds and steals the sheets and swaps the pills in the bottles of the medicine cabinet. Sometimes, he sees it crouched at the edge of his bed in the night, a wicked too-sweet smile, fingers folded into an empty pillowcase, black dog, black owl, black-haired Vietnamese girl with electrocuted eyes and blood pooling in her mouth; her nails peeled back, her hair in clumps like barrettes next to her temples.
She has a flat chest and narrow hips that bulge like twin bird skulls, and her eyes are both blank and exacting, raptorial, and she has an irritating habit of telling the truth, immediately and completely, and the first time she had spoken to him was to say, “I like you,” which was the thing he least wanted to hear. He had responded, “Go away,” staring at the shoulder exposed by her lopsided nightgown, not sure if he meant it, because the current players had grown stale and uninspiring, and her stance was hunched but assertive. “Go away, we have ways of dealing with things like you.”
She had only smiled, the smallpox scars on her cheeks deepening like dimples.
She has scratched six marks into the wooden nightstand next to him, and waits until he is watching to drag a bisecting line through the first. A crude X. The gesture’s meaning is clear and absolute.
Five more days.
He is going to die and he doesn't know what he despises more: the things that could have been, the possibilities, or the fact that his life will be taken away before they have a chance to be realized. Soldiers are liars, but the truth is a cancer, the truth is the red Vietnamese earth, the truth is a gun leveled at the back of his head. His stomach hurts, it really hurts, but he doesn't want to die. When the ghost loses some of her shyness, and threads her fingers between his toes, he feels his knees lock. He ignores the haunted speculation, the strangely lacking feeling of her knuckles against the calluses on his feet. "What do you want?" he says, and his voice no longer sounds like his own, edged by panic. She bends down and kisses his shin, her hair catching in his toenails, and no, he thinks, no no no no no, but also please yes.
It must have been before the bullet pushed through him in Nghia Lo; nighttime and Echo Company gripping each other's shoulders in the out-of-the-atmosphere blackness, no speaking, the weight of suppressed fear and sexuality upon them. They were repeatedly awoken by periods of enemy fire. The collective sleep deprivation was doing strange things to all of them. They saw things that were not there or were, and found themselves unable to decide which was more unsettling: autonomous lanterns moving across the distant rice paddies, snakes with red, jeweled eyes. Vietnam had everything it took to grow ghosts and gods -- time and blood. Vietnam had everything it took to make them think stupid things, stupid things, about brotherhood and destiny, and if one of them died, they all died, and Vietnam had what it took to make that seem a little romantic, a little okay. The American media called the conflict a labyrinth, a maze, the most complex game of chess ever played -- massive pieces moving across a board, both queens gone, and the pawns tumbling with no strategist to guide them, East versus West, and both versus the world, and in the end, maybe everyone was on the side of the apocalypse -- but really, it was so simple. Simple and beautiful, like dying.
Ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum.
The girl was in the river.
This in itself was not particularly worth noticing. There were always girls in rivers, cows with their throats slit on the roadside, snipers in the hills, landmines, statues of the War Buddha with deep cracks in his ribcage, hyper-intelligent spiders with eight calculating eyes, water that tasted like piss and piss that looked like blood, and Elks sucking on barbiturates as if they were breath mints and tallying, "I got nine of them in Than Uyen. That's another thirty points, brother."
"Points. Stop talking about your fucking points. This isn't a fucking game," James said, but inside he was slightly delirious, because though Elks was only saying this to compensate for the inexpressible, he was unaware that he has accidently stumbled upon the truth.
"What are you talking about, man? Of course it is. You have to play it better than Charlie does."
The girl was in the river, wearing a white nightgown that was billowing and bubbling around her. She may have been bleeding, but all the rivers in this province resembled pink floral teas, the dilute red dust of agricultural land. It should have crossed his mind. Ghosts did strange things in water, or at least, they did according to his Guide to Defending Yourself Against Indigenous Non-Living, a handbook for avoiding, identifying, or manipulating (officially, negotiating) any species a foot soldier was likely to come across in the line of duty. This field looked as though it had not been fully realized, a carbon sketch, an under-painting, exactly the sort of place the handbook claimed ghosts were especially prevalent. He should have recognized it in the same way he knew how to recognize hostile civilians - but the rains were collecting the ashes from a burning village twenty kilometers away and depositing them on his shoulders, particles of home and dog and human, and he was feeling that peculiar sympathy for the enemy that seemed to free him from responsibility. The earring shone subtly in the girl's ear.
"Don't do it, brother," Elks said from behind him. Always brother this, brother that, like he was a goddamned monk or Negro or something. "I don't like the looks of this place. Get all your points taken away, and then the game’s over."
Maybe he did it just to spite Elks. Maybe it was because her spirit already had its little fingers around his ankle, and he just didn’t know it yet. He bent down and unclasped it from her earlobe, disappointed by the inane moment that followed. "Souvenir," he explained, and tucked the gold hoop into his pocket.
He wrote about it later, in a letter to his mother. He wrote about how much he hated the war, and how much he dreaded going home, and how hard he had to try to keep from nuzzling adoringly against the butt of his rifle, because it was the only thing keeping him from death, or -- if he did not leave Vietnam in a box -- the lifetime of irritated boredom that would surely follow. He wrote about that, sometimes. About a mid-sized mid-Western city, and his dumb wife, and his kids who would grow up to be fat and alcoholic and freckled, and he fucking hated freckles. He wrote that he didn’t know which was worse. He would get a job in an office building. His wife would be an East Coast prep-school dropout who spent two years in San Francisco learning how to play the acoustic guitar, and she would write country songs that were not particularly good, and they would have one child and then another, and they would forget all the private jokes they once shared, and she would learn to drink, really drink, and her thighs would get cellulite, and she would eat toast in their bed and get crumbs in the sheets, and they would fight over the crumbs, and after a while, he would know nothing about her, except that he hated her every time he woke with pockmarks on his arm from where stale crust had been digging into him in the night. He wrote that he did not want to leave the jungle. He understood how this country made ghosts inevitable, and that they were watching him right now, but it was all right; they couldn’t read this, because they didn’t speak English, just some crazy shit that wasn’t Vietnamese, wasn’t even human.
He didn’t send these letters. He sent the ones where he asked about the new Rolling Stones record, and if his sister was doing all right in high school, and if they could mail him a picture of his girlfriend.
War was more embarrassing than anything else, he thought. It was like everyone got to see the faces you only made in private; the sadness, the anger, the frustration that arrived with every speck of the knowable, because there was boundless unknowable behind it. War was shitty and terrifying and a hell of a lot better than anything he’d ever done back home, better than sex and beer and pot and a brand new baseball wrapped in the palm of his right hand. So, this place might have been getting to him a little, but he didn’t want to go home. Richie from Louisiana went a little nuts and mowed down a family near the Mu Gia pass, and he was sentenced to supermarkets and girls in canvass sneakers and lecture halls and a tremulous zeitgeist of hallucinogens, transcendental meditation, Charles Manson, Sadie Glutz, beautiful and bald with halogen-lamp eyes, sexy Sadie, what have you done?
In America, the ghosts were docile and compliant. Just last year, they found a whole colony of men with buffalo heads living in an open plain, and built a strip mall over them without incident, except the rare occurrence of chanting over the intercom and the occasional overpowering smell of animal feces. America was just too new. In England, they had an agency, complete with receptionists and bureaucrats to deal with the sorting of souls; unfortunately, the system had proved to be as efficient as any government project, and the number of reported hauntings had actually increased. This was due, for the most part, to a nonsensical filing system and the seemingly preternatural ability of paperwork to get misplaced.
His captain described the Vietnamese spirits as no-good-sons-of-bitches, and each private was issued a handbook -- a list of rules like, do not touch objects with a suspicious aura, do not stare into a black lake after dark - but direct contact with them was rare, and besides, they had Special Ops guys for dealing with any hoodoo Charlie decided to throw at them. James was only barely accustomed to seeing a family sitting cross-legged on their lawns with a picnic of fish and sweet cakes while their bodies lay inside, picked apart by a fragmentation grenade and full of shrapnel. "This country," Elks said, crushing a codeine tablet between his molars, "Let me tell you."
On second thought, maybe he shouldn't have touched the earring.
The nurse puts a hand on his shoulder and her mouth moves in a way that he supposed makes words. "Bullet to the stomach, snipers," he explains, though that may not be the question she asked, and she nods in sympathy, and changes the bag on his morphine drip, and he feels as though his eyes are made of cotton. Pushing his head into the pillow, he doesn't watch when she cleans out his bedpan. He turns to the spirit, who is sitting on the windowsill with her knees drawn up to her chest as she draws ugly geometric patterns in the dust with her index finger. She was displeased when the nurses took down her tower of chairs, and has taken to flinging them violently across the ward. Yesterday, they moved them all to another floor and one of those suited Special Ops guys had shown up, scanned the room from top to bottom with a portable Infrared bulb, and declared, "Poltergeist. I'll have a monk come by tomorrow and perform an exorcism."
All the while his ghost, his ghost, did some stupid gingerly dance around him and laughed and laughed, her wet hair floating behind her like the ribbons cheerleaders wore back home.
"I don't remember anything before the chopper picked me up," he says when the nurse doesn't respond. The ghost watches him and he can feel her falling in love, a terrible feeling that pours forth from the useless, one-dimensional non-organs inside of her, and his mind says no no no no, but also yes, ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum. "You can go now," he tells the nurse, but she is no longer standing there, anyway. His ghost appears satisfied with this, her eyes tremulous with greed. She hooks her index finger into the earring then tugs, distending the earlobe too much to be natural. She crawls into the hospital bed and moves delicately over the wires and the IV tubes.
The manual says: if you find yourself being personally haunted or experiencing black-outs indicative of possession, tell your superior immediately, and he will contact Special Operations personnel. The manual had been thrown together hastily after an entire platoon was lost to ritual suicide, following possession by a legion of dead Vietnamese soldiers, and because of this it is full of misspellings and typographical errors. Such as: the first step in a successful exorcism lies in uncovering at least one of two things - one, the spirit's true name or two, their reasons for not passing on. The most commonly encountered explanations for this include: avenging their deaths or the deaths of their loved ones, protection of a person or place, or out of bitterness and the desire to torment the loving. It was supposed to be living, and the new edition had corrected the mistake, but he feels the original was perhaps more accurate.
To torment the loving.
Ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum.
She gives a tuneless hum and reaches for his hand beneath the bed sheets, a reassuring squeeze that crushes his fingers together. He is going to die, and he knows it. "My English is getting better," she says, a stream of water escaping her mouth, the sheets growing suddenly cold around his arm. She nibbles at his wrist bone, and he cannot forget for a moment that she is here to kill him.
To torment the loving.
"Then tell me, now that you can, why are you here?” he whispers, though it hardly matters, since the hospital ward is full of men weeping, sobbing for their mothers, begging for morphine, laughing, cursing, shitting themselves -- being overheard talking to oneself hardly seems consequential.
She releases his hand and unfolds to full height, her feet shoulder width apart on the mattress. When she hooks her fingers over the rim of the florescent lamp above him, he is sure she is going to take off and swing like a howler monkey, a burning canopy, the smell of napalm. She pushes it, so that it rocks on the metal links attaching it to the ceiling, and he sees the light sweeping over his eyelids. "You stole my earring," she explains, her head tilting to the left.
"I gave it back."
War is nothing if not life, not crime, not death, taken to dramatic extremes. War is like paranoid schizophrenia with an outside feed. Of course, stealing an earring from a dead body is punishable by execution, of course. From beneath her, he can see up her nightgown, smooth girl thighs and hipbones like skulls. She tugs at the hem of her dress, and crouches again, a faint ochre flush on her face. "You stole it. Just giving it back doesn't absolve anything."
Absolution, absolution, what a strange word to bring up in this context. He drops his cigarette into the cup of used mouthwash on his nightstand. Such a wonderful word, full of sadness and incidental poetry. He feels his heart contract and he wants her to say it again. The boy in the bed next to him used to build forts from his cigarette cartons, cheap red boxes, and he never smoked a single one. He either died or went home, and now they are James's cigarettes, and he hopes to God the kid went home, because a pack of Marlboros in Vietnam are definitely worth haunting over. She sends down a cruel smile that James feels in his stomach, his lungs, his balls.
She continues, "Death is black and boring. And, it’s hungry. I am hungry all the time. My stomach begs and begs, but my mouth is the size of a pin-head."
He wonders if it's still so bad if it comes from the hands of something that loves you. He closes his eyes and doesn't remember sleeping, but when he wakes later, lonely, aching for her, she is dancing through the trays brought out to serve their evening meal. He had been dreaming of his girlfriend back home, who is pretty and dumb and blonde and studies the Romantics at a university in Massachusetts, and who wears pastel sweaters and white linen sneakers and the skin of her bottom lip is always too pink from smoking her cigarettes all the way down to the tip. Sometimes, he would cling to her in the backseat of her sedan and press his ear to the itchy fabric of her shirt, ba-dum ba-dum ba-dum, and wish and wish for it to stop, because he is selfish, so selfish, and he doesn't want anyone to ever love her but him, and it would take nothing, just a twist and snap, that's it, birth and death, easy as anything, but forgive us the breadth of a lifespan between.
He rarely stops to wonder how much of his wit and instinct is tempered by this insanity.
"You're awake again," the ghost states, pirouetting on the ball of her left foot. "I wanted to ask you something else."
"What is it?"
"As a matter of curiosity, were you a brave soldier?"
"That question is irrelevant."
"Oh," she says. She has a white towel in her hand and it floats horizontally as she spins. While he slept, she scratched another line from the nightstand. Only three left, now.
"I got up every morning," he says to the silence.