Ghostwritten (25 page)

Hawks circled high. One of the last Gobi bears shambled along the fringe of forest. There are less than a hundred left. Bodoo’s brother slept in the jeep, under several blankets. It gets cold at night, even in summer. Dreams came, of bones and stones with holes.

The next day, the dunes, the longest running for eighty miles, swelling and rolling, grain by grain. Bodoo’s brother sang songs that lasted for miles, with no beginning and no end. The dunes of the dead. There were bones, and stones with holes.

There was a stationary jeep in the shimmering distance. Bodoo’s brother pulled up to it and cut his engine. A figure was asleep under a makeshift canopy in the back.

“Are you all right, stranger? Are you in need of any help? Any water?”

“Yes,” said the figure, suddenly sitting up and showing his
face, chewing gum. “I need your jeep. Mine seems to have broken down.” At point-blank range Punsalmaagiyn Suhbataar fired his handgun twice, a bullet for each of my host’s eyes.

————

Nobody replies. Firelight without color. Outside must be night, if there is an outside. I am hostless and naked. The faces all stare in the same direction, all of them all of their ages. One of them coughs. It is Bodoo’s brother, his eye wounds already healed. I try to transmigrate into him, but I cannot inhabit a shadow. I’ve never known silence so deep. By being what I am, I thought I understood almost everything. But I understand almost nothing.

A figure rises, and leaves the
ger
through a curtain. So simple? I follow the figure. “I’m sorry, I’m afraid you can’t come through here,” says a girl I hadn’t noticed, no older than eight, delicate and tiny as an ancient woman.

“Will you stop me?”

“No. If there is a door for you, you are free to pass through.” Wrens flutter.

I touch the wall. There is no door. “Where is it?”

She shrugs, biting her lip.

“Then what shall I do?”

A swan inspects the ground. She shrugs.

Tallow candles spit and hiss. These few guests are many multitudes. Thousands of angels swim in a thimble. From time to time one of the guests stands up, and walks through the way out that is not there. The wall of the
ger
yields, and reseals behind them, like a wall of water. I try to leave with them, but for me it never even bends.

The monk in a saffron robe sighs. He wears a yellow hat that arcs forward. “I’m having some problems with my teeth.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” I say. The little girl talks to her twitchy marmot.

Horses galloping by, or thunder? The swan spreads its wings and flies up through the roof. Bodoo’s brother has gone through the door.

“But why can’t I pass through? The others have.”

The little girl is playing cat’s cradle with a length of twine, knitting her brow. “You chose not to!”

“I chose nothing.”

“All your tribe leave your body while it still breathes.”

“What do you mean, my tribe?”

The monk with the yellow hat is here, humming through his broken mouth. He whispers in her ear; she stares at me distrustfully. “Very well,” she concurs. “The circumstances are uncommon. But what can I do?”

The monk turns to me. “I’m sorry—my teeth.” A prophet’s nod. “Time has gone around, the years are cold and far away.… I kept my promise.” And he, too, passes through the wall of the
ger
.

Last to leave is the little girl, carrying her marmot. She feels sorry for me, and I don’t want her to go. I’m all alone.

I was in a human host again, and the walls of the
ger
were living, pulsing with viscera and worry and nearby voices. I explored the higher rooms, but found nothing! No memories, no experiences. Not even a name. Barely an “I.” Where were those voices coming from? I looked deeper. There were whispers, and a suffusion of purposeful well-being. I tried to open my host’s eyes to see where I was, but the eyes would not open. I checked that there were eyes—yes, but my host had never learned to open them, and couldn’t respond. I was in a place unlike any other, yet my host didn’t know where. Or rather, my host didn’t know anywhere else. A blind mute? The mind was pure. So very pure that I was afraid for it.

The well-being transformed into palpitating fear. Had I been detected? A knot of pain was being pulled tight. Panic, such panic I had never known since I butchered the mind of my first host. The curtain was ripped, and my host emerged into the world between her mother’s legs, screaming indignantly at this rude wrenching. The cold air flooded in! The light, even through my eyelids, made my host’s tender brain chime.

I transferred into my host’s mother along the umbilical cord,
and the depth of emotion was sheer and giddy. I forgot to insulate and I was swept away by joy, and relief, and loss, and gain, and emptiness, and fulfillment, a memory of swimming, and the claw-sharp, bloodied love, and the conviction that she would never again put herself through this agony. But I have work to do.

Another
ger
. Firelight, warmth, and the shadows of antlers. I searched for our location. Well. Good news and bad. My new host was a Mongolian in Mongolia. But I was far to the north of where Bodoo was last heading, not far from the Russian border. I was in the province of Renchinhumbe, near the lake of Tsagaan Nuur and the town of Zoolon. It was September now and the snows would be coming soon. The midwife was the grandmother of the baby I just left; she was smiling down at her daughter, anesthetizing the umbilical cord with a lump of ice. Her hair cobwebby, her face round like the moon. An aunt bustled about in the background with pans of warm water and squares of cloth and fur, chanting. This flat and quiet song was the only sound.

It was the early hours of the morning. The mother’s labor had been long and hard. I dulled her pain, put her into a deep sleep, and set about helping her unstitched body repair itself. As my host slept I had time to wonder where I had been since Suhbataar shot my previous host. Had I hallucinated the strange
ger?
But how could I have? I
am
my mind—do I have a mind I don’t know about within my mind, like humans? And how was I reborn in Mongolia? Why, and by whom? Who was the monk in the yellow hat?

How do I know that there aren’t
noncorpa
living within me, controlling my actions? Like a virus within a bacteria? Surely I would know.

But that’s exactly what humans think.

The door opened and an autumn sunrise came in, with the baby’s father, grandparents, cousins and friends and aunts and uncles. They had slept in a neighboring
ger
and now crowded into their home, excited and eager to welcome their newest relative. When
they spoke I had great difficulty understanding—I had a new dialect of Mongolian to learn. The mother was glowing with tired happiness. The baby bawled, and the elders looked on.

I left the mother and transmigrated into her husband as they kissed. His tribe was known to Baljin as the reindeer people. Reindeer are their food, currency, and clothing. They are seminomadic. A few of the men visit Zoolon several times a year to exchange meat and hides for supplies, and to sell powdered reindeer antler to Chinese merchants who market it in their country as an aphrodisiac. Other than this there is little contact with the rest of the world. When the Russians were busy making a proletariat in this nonindustrial country to justify a socialist revolution, the reindeer people had proved impossible even to conduct a census among. They had survived when the local Buddhist clergy was being liquidated.

My host was only twenty, and his heart was brimming over with pride. I’m rarely envious of humans, but I was now. I am, and always shall be, wholly sterile. I have no genes to pass on. For my new host, the birth of his offspring was the last bridge into true manhood, and would increase his status with his peers and his ancestors. A son would have been preferable, but there would be other births.

I noticed his name, Beebee. He lit a cigarette and left the
ger
. I envied the simplicity of his expectations. He knows how to ride reindeer, and how to skin them, and which of their organs, eaten raw, assist which aspect of human physiology. Beebee knows many legends, but not three who think about the fate of the world.

The night ebbed away, the dawn dripped into a pool of light, and the shadows in the pine trees around the village murmured with gray. An early riser’s footfalls crunched in the heavy frost. His head was hooded, and his teeth shone. A shooting star crossed the sky.

Well, what now?

Nothing about my quest had changed. Bodoo was still the only lead I had. I had to get back south, to the town of Bayanhongoor. If I could access the museum network, it should be fairly easy to track him down. Three months had passed since he had
fled Suhbataar. This setback would cost me time, but immortals don’t lack time.

I told Beebee’s grandmother-midwife that Beebee had some business in town that day. I hated to separate the young father from his baby daughter, but the grandmother gladly shooed us out. Men get in the way.

Beebee and his eldest brother rode through forests, between hewn mountains, along narrow lakes. Fishing boats, willows, and wild geese flying up and down the morning. An ibex stood on a hillcrest. I learned from Beebee about the moose, elk, and lynx, about the argali sheep, wolves, and how to trap wild boars. We saw a bear fishing in a river thrashing with salmon. Sharp rainbows, misty sunshine. There are no roads here, but the cold weather had firmed the mud and so the going was easy.

Beebee and his brother discussed the new baby, and how she should be named. I wondered about kinship. For all my Mongolian hosts, the family is the
ger
, to be protected in, to be healed in, to be born in, to make love in, and to die in. A parasite, I could experience all of these, secondhand, but I could never be
of
these.

Unless, perhaps … This hope kept me going.

Zoolon was another decrepit town of wooden buildings, concrete blocks, and dead lorries rusting in shallow pools where dogs drank. A power station churned smoke into the perfect sky. Another ghost factory with saplings growing from the chimney stack. A few squat apartment blocks. A crowd gathered around the small corrugated shack that served as the town’s only restaurant. Bee-bee usually drank there after seeing the owner of the tannery.

“Some foreigners in town,” a bearded hunter told Beebee. “Round-eyes.”

“Russians from over the border? Anything new to trade?”

“Nah. Others.”

Beebee walked into the restaurant, and I saw Caspar poking at something on his plate with a fork, and Sherry poring over a map with a compass.

“It’s good to see you!” I spoke before I thought. Townsmen in
the restaurant stared, amazed. Nobody knew this nomadic herder could speak any language other than a reindeer-flavored dialect of Mongolian.

“G’day,” replied Sherry, looking up. Caspar’s eyes were more guarded.

“How are you enjoying their country?” This was very indulgent. I had to dampen and then erase Beebee’s shock at hearing himself speak in a language he’d never learned.

“It’s beautiful,” Caspar and Sherry said at exactly the same time.

“Full of surprises. Anyway. Enjoy the rest of your stay. But I’d advise you to get somewhere warmer before winter sets in.… Somewhere nearer the ocean. Vietnam can be beautiful in November, up in the hill country, at least it was.…”

Beebee sat down and ordered a plate of food while waiting for his brother. His tribe exchanges reindeer meat for credit with the restaurant owner. I picked up the three-week-old newspaper from Ulan Bator. Beebee was illiterate: his dialect has no written form, and his tribe has no schools. There was little news, much whitewashing, and a belated report on the national-day festival. None of it meant much to Beebee, who rarely left his tribe, never left the province, and never wished to.

I was turning past the obituary page when an article caught my eye:
DOUBLE TRAGEDY FOR MONGOLIAN CULTURE
.

Bodoo was dead.

I rarely feel despair; I forget how it gouges.

Both brothers had died in the same week of a heart attack, which I knew from Suhbataar was one of the Mongolian KGB’s favorite ways to dispose of political liabilities.

I should have sent Suhbataar over a cliff. Damn him. And damn me.

A hand slapped down on Beebee’s shoulder. My host’s hand slid to the hilt of his hunting knife. The drunk man swayed. His breath made Beebee flinch. “What are you pretending to read the newspaper for, Reindeer Man? And what’s this about you speaking arsey foreign languages? Where were you when
I
was fighting for democracy? That’s what I want to know.” His pupils were huge, and his eyelids red. “You can’t read Cyrillic. You can’t read Mongolian. And it sure ain’t written in reindeer. Where were you when I was fighting for communism? That’s what I want to know. Go on, read for me, then, antler-head.” Then he bellowed: “Oy! Bring me some frigging vodka! It’s story time.…”

I was back to where I had started. I was frustrated enough to transmigrate into this wino and hurl him through the wall, but what would be the point? I read the story. I owed it to Bodoo.

In a lost spring of the Buriat nation, Khori Tumed, a young hunter, was roaming the southernmost shore of Lake Baikal. Winter was melting from the silver birches, drip by drip, and Khori Tumed gazed at the turquoise mountains beyond the lake.

As he rested, the hunter saw nine swans flying from the northeast, low over the water. Khori Tumed grew uneasy—they flew in a circle, and silently. Fearing enchantment he hid in the hollow of a gnarled willow. And sure enough, as the swans alighted on the strand, each transformed into a beautiful girl, each with pale skin, slender limbs, and jet-black hair, and each more radiant than the last. The swan-girls disrobed and draped their garments on the very willow tree that concealed Khori Tumed. The hunter’s limbs grew heavy—not from fear, but desire and love. Very carefully, when the girls were swimming a little way from the shore, he stole one of the robes.