Ghost Month (16 page)

I fished out my cloth high school yearbook from a storage box
under the dining-room table and brought it into my bedroom, which had the best lamp. I switched on the Teco fan that had been my grandfather’s prized possession and one luxury. I sat on the edge of the mattress to read.

After a few pages of the wallet-sized individual pictures of students came several dozen pages of stats. Class rankings, grade point averages and finals scores for each semester. ESPN would have been proud to have such detailed figures. I cringed every time I saw my name because of how far down the page I had to go to find it. I was in the top three for only one class, English. I was in second place. Julia, of course, was in first.

Hmm. Look at that. There was Cookie Monster, Wang Ming-kuo, in third place. I didn’t know he had done so well at English. Rich little Peggy Lee Xiaopei was in fourth. I guess it makes sense that we all went on to American universities—and the three of them on to NYU.

The fan, groaning, shook its head sadly from side to side and sent over a breeze to turn the page on my accomplishment and expose my next shortcoming.

Each successive class ranking saw my name bobble to the lower half of the top ten. That’s actually pretty good, but at the time I remember thinking I was so dumb. After all, the name at the top of the page was always valedictorian Julia Huang, except for in Military Education and Robotics. She couldn’t handle the rifle training with live fire and slipped to sixth place. I was in fifth, thanks to the written test and tire run, which I was oddly good at. The guy who came in first, Tseng Wen-chen, was a small, meek sort of guy, so it was surprising he’d taken to guns so well. He even outshot the teacher, who had served in the army. Tseng went on to win a national shooting competition, and now he’s some sort of advisor to the Australian film industry.

Look at Ming-kuo, taking second in Physics. You go, Cookie Monster!

Lin Cheng-sheng. There’s always some Lin in the way. I was always so jealous of him, and now I can’t remember why. He was taller than me, but he wasn’t better looking. That’s for sure. He took the top grade in Circuits, and I’m sure he’s some
engineering whiz at a chip company in China. I’ll bet he never thinks about me.

The less important parts of the yearbook, including the social activities, were near the end, but they weren’t detailed with the same precision as the students’ grades. There, on the karaoke-contest spread, was the record of my one moment of triumph in years of academic struggle. The picture made me look even more heroic than I remembered. There I was, kneeling down and touching Julia’s hand.

And there, right behind Julia, was the girl I met today at Bauhaus, also reaching for me. The young Nancy, a waif wearing a too-big dress, was still in her larval stage. I could see the potential in the photo, though.

Why was I looking at Nancy more than Julia?

I tore through a few pages to get to a poem I wrote, based on a dream in which I was floating over Taiwan, a premonition that I was going abroad. The editors titled it “New Pledge of Allegiance.”

I shouldn’t have put the Japanese slur in there. Hell, I shouldn’t have written the damned thing at all, much less had it published in the yearbook. It was prescient, though. I was a man with no future.

I’d written it down to sort of get the words from the dream out of my head and stuffed it into the yearbook committee’s mailbox anonymously. Some people were pretty outraged by it. The faculty advisor, Mr. Shen, stood by its inclusion, saying the poem was written
by one student but spoke for many. Good old Mr. Shen. I heard he opened a bicycling-tour company down at Sun Moon Lake.

The back section of the yearbook detailed our college destinations. Those going abroad were listed after even the lowliest Taiwanese schools.

Julia had gotten into Columbia and Yale, but NYU had offered her a scholarship to cover everything, and she took it. I knew Peggy Lee Xiaopei and Wang Ming-kuo had also gone to NYU, but I wanted to double-check to see if anyone else had gone. Anyone would have been nicer than Peggy or more normal than Cookie Monster, but there was nobody.

W
HEN
I
WAS REALLY
young, that mainlander Peggy told me I was a Jap because my grandfather was a Jap. I made the mistake of asking him if he was.

“What!” he yelled, spraying me with betel-nut juice. “Who dares to call me a Jap?”

“A girl at school said you were. You read Japanese newspapers.”

“Just because I can read and speak Japanese, that makes me a Jap? You’re learning English in school. Does that make you English?”

I wiped my face, which was now slick with his spit and my tears.

He slid over a bucket of organs to me. “This is your punishment. Wash all the shit out of those intestines!” he growled before stomping away from the stall.

I burst into open sobs until I felt someone grab my shoulder. It was Frankie the Cat. He winked at me, then took the bucket and began cleaning.

Peggy played pranks on me as we got older, everything from tripping me to spraying me with perfume. In high school her antagonism morphed into a mildly obsessive crush that I found unnerving in its consistency. When there was a seat free next to me, she’d be in it. When I stepped away from my parents’ food stall to walk around the night market, no matter how late it was, there was Peggy walking next to me, her shoulder pressed against my arm.

It didn’t stop until Julia slapped her in the girls’ locker room. We could hear the commotion from the boys’ locker room.

Funny how Peggy also chose to go to NYU. Her family had the money to send her to any school she wanted to go to and, after graduation, set her up anywhere in the world.

I couldn’t believe her stupid company wouldn’t take my phone call. Now I had to see her in person. Maybe she was better now, mellower and married.

Ming-kuo was a different case. I had no idea where he was or what he was doing. We used to call him Cookie Monster because he was obese and had googly eyes. Both his parents worked long hours, and his grandmother let him eat junk food all the time. He didn’t look anything like the scholar he was. Even the teachers called him Cookie Monster when they cited him for doing exceptionally well on a test. He would just take it with a stupid smile, thinking the people laughing the hardest were his friends.

I searched for him online but found nothing. He had to be up to something. Nerds who were teased in school always became successful in the end, right? Look at Bill Gates. Maybe he was a reasonably well-adjusted head of a start-up in Silicon Valley who worked out regularly, the ugly duckling far in the past.

I wrote an email to NYU’s alumni coordinator, asking for Ming-kuo’s whereabouts. I figured at the very least he and I could exchange some emails and I could find out about Julia in addition to the radical transformation he’d hopefully gone through.

I
WOKE MYSELF UP
in the middle of the night, unsure if I’d swung an arm or a leg out to defend myself from some dream-world menace. I fell asleep again in an instant. In the morning all but the vaguest details of my imagined struggle were left in my head, and after I yawned even those were gone.

My phone had a news alert on the body of a young man found floating in the Shuangxi Creek, which was just to the north of the Shilin Night Market. Victim unidentified.

I got on my computer to look up a corresponding story. The only other significant detail was that he was wearing a black T-shirt, like that guy who had been running through the night market. I searched for more about Julia. Nothing.

I searched for our old classmate Peggy Lee. She was still a
secondary player within her family, only mentioned as a daughter of her mogul father.

I ate two bowls of unsweetened instant oatmeal while sitting at my PC in my bedroom. Having spent my whole life around food—I’d learned how to walk by balancing myself between dividing walls of food stands—I found my own tastes tended toward the bland side.

What I really devoured was music. I was somewhat aware that I was chewing and swallowing as the sound of a Cocteau Twins bootleg played over my stereo speakers. It wasn’t actually their best stuff. It was from late in the Cocteau Twins’ career, the early 1990s when they were already on a major multinational label. Some fans called it a sellout move when they left their little indie label, but the music was still good.

Joy Division was the only band I listened to for years. For the longest time, I even refused to voluntarily listen to a single note of successor band New Order, on principle alone. That was the same stubborn kid who made the crazy promise to Julia.

I don’t remember how I changed, but it came slowly. Hearing New Order’s song “Regret” at random was a major turning point. It really stuck in my head. I loved everything about it—the snappy drumming, the trebly bass and the catchy guitar riff. After that I had to have everything New Order did. Now I do have some “regrets” about dissing the band online on the PTT.

I listened to a lot of bands now. I even liked what I heard from the burgeoning Taipei indie scene. If I didn’t have to work nights, I would be at those concerts.

I didn’t get out much, or rather, at all. I’m sure it was the same for many of my old classmates, and one in particular.

Out of respect for the professional nature of Peggy Lee’s office building, I dressed in a buttoned, collared shirt and slacks. My best shoes hurt like hell, but I carried a pair of Converse in my moped pack to change into after.

I drove to the Xinyi District in the southern part of Taipei, the capital of shopping malls and American chain restaurants. I continued east on Xinyi Road, embracing the “integrity” and “righteousness” of its name and my mission to find out what had
happened to Julia. The looming Taipei 101 skyscraper observed my approach as shorter, older buildings between us seemed to scurry away. I’d disliked Taipei 101 the first time I saw it; it looked like a stack of green soup containers. It grew on me, though. Now I appreciate the segmented-bamboo aesthetic.

I entered the building and had to push past the shoppers swarming the upscale retailers and teeming to get to the escalators to the food court. I found my way to the office elevators and shot up to the eightieth floor. It was almost noon, and the elevator cars going up were less crowded than the ones going down stuffed with hungry office workers.

Lee & Associates’ double doors of chemically antiqued wood were weighed down by two oversized, gold-colored metal plaques. Replica ancient Chinese-lion knockers were set on each door near the center. I brought my hand near the right knocker, tripping an invisible sensor that caused both doors to swing open.

A young man wearing a headset over his windswept hairstyle looked directly into my eyes. “Welcome to Lee & Associates. How can I help you?” He leaned slightly to one side, showing off a sunken cheek and enhancing his famished look.

“Hello there. I’m here to see Peggy Lee.”

His eyebrows shot up. “Do you have an appointment?”

“No, but could you tell her Chen Jing-nan is here?”

“Chen Jing-nan? Do you have a more familiar English name, Mr. Chen? A business name?”

“No, I don’t.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Chen, Ms. Lee is booked today through the …” Suddenly he sat upright, held on to the headset with both hands and stared straight ahead. “Oh, all right,” the man said into his microphone. “I will tell him.” He looked at me with a newfound sense of respect and fear. “Ms. Lee will be right out to see you.”

He had barely spoken the words when Peggy strode out from the far right hallway. She hadn’t changed much. She still wore that hurt, indignant expression of a soap-opera heroine. Still wore a pantsuit. The top button of her blouse looked like it might have just been unbuttoned.

“I knew,” she said triumphantly, “that you would come crawling back to me someday, Jing-nan!”

Peggy shook my right hand and clapped me on the shoulder. I wondered if she could feel my reluctance.

“Peggy, it’s not like that at all,” I said.

“C’mon, Jing-nan! I’m just joking! We’re old classmates, we should hug!” She pulled me in tight and I could only smile to the greeter, who was staring at us. “Loosen up a little,” Peggy chided.

She hooked my arm and dragged me through a maze of potted bonsai and antique landscape scrolls to her office overlooking the city. We walked by a pool filled with kumquat-colored koi and surrounded by a guardrail.

“I was just thinking about you,” she said, kicking her office door shut with her heel. “Our horoscopes probably line up better now.”

I gave a nice fake laugh. Taiwanese liked to consult with advisors to find auspicious days for weddings, business relationships and investing. Peggy would have to be well versed in astrology and mythology for her family’s hedge fund to be successful. It would be lousy to call on a client on a Bad Day. Then again, if you were a good talker, and had the proper Taoist charms and mirrors, you could transform that Bad Day into a Good Day by reversing its evil.

“I don’t know much about the stars,” I said. “I’ve been too preoccupied by the news, anyway.”

“You mean Ah-bian?” she asked. She used the nickname of Chen Shui-bian, the former Taiwanese president who was now in prison for embezzlement. It seemed that every week he was pulling another stunt—hunger strikes and alleged medical conditions that required hospitalization. He had recently tried to hang himself with a towel.

I looked at Peggy’s face. As always, her eyes seemed guileless. It was impossible to tell whether she was pretending not to know about the murder. All I could do was sigh and prepare myself to ask her about Julia. But she interrupted my thoughts.