Ghostwritten

by David Mitchell

  I stayed in the doctor for two years, learning about humans and inhumanity. I learned how to read my hosts’ memories, to erase them, and replace them. I learned how to control my hosts. Humanity was my toy. But I also learned caution. One day I announced to my host that a disembodied entity had been living in his mind for two years, and would he like to ask me anything?

  The poor man went quite mad, and I had to transmigrate again. The human mind is so fragile a toy. So puny!

  Three nights later the waitress slammed a bowl of mutton down in front of Caspar. She had turned and gone before he had a chance to groan.

  “Mutton fat for dinner,” beamed Sherry. “There’s a surprise.”

  The waitress cleared the other tables. Caspar was experimenting at using mind control to make his mutton taste like turkey. I resisted the temptation to help him succeed. Sherry was reading. “Get this for Soviet doublespeak. From the nineteenforties, during Choilbalsan’s presidency. It says, ‘In the final analysis, life demonstrated the expediency of using the Russian alphabet.’ What the author says this means, is that if you used Mongolian they shot you. Oath, how did people live under a master race like that, and why—”

  The next moment all the lights in the building died.

  Dim light came from the window of smoke stars, and a glowing red sign in Cyrillic beyond the wasteland. We had wondered what the sign meant, and we did again now.

  Sherry chuckled and lit a cigarette. Her eyes reflected little flames. “I suppose you paid the power station ten dollars to stage this blackout, just to get me alone in a dark room with the manly smell of mutton.”

  Caspar smiled in the darkness, and I recognized love. It forms like a weather pattern. “Sherry, let’s hire the jeep for tomorrow. We’ve seen the temple, seen the old palace. I’m feeling like a moody tourist. I hate feeling like a moody tourist. The Fräulein at the German embassy reckoned there would be a delivery of gas in the morning.”

  “Why the rush?”

  “The place is going backwards in time. I feel the end of the world is waiting in those mountains, somewhere … We should get out before the nineteenth century comes around again.”

  “That’s a part of U.B.’s charm. Its ramshackleness.”

  “I don’t know what ‘ramshackleness’ means, but there is nothing charming about this place. Ulan Bator proves that Mongolians cannot do cities. You could set a movie about a doomed colony of germ-warfare survivors here. Let’s get out. I don’t even know why I’m here. I don’t think the people who live here know either.”

  The waitress walked in and put a candle on our table. Caspar thanked her in Mongolian. She walked out. “Come the revolution, darling …” thought Caspar.

  Sherry started shuffling a pack of cards. “You mean Mongolians are designed for arduous lifetimes of flock-tending, child-bearing, frostbite, illiteracy, Giardia lamblia, and ger-dwelling?”

  “I don’t want to argue. I want to drive to the Khangai mountains, climb mountains, ride horses, bathe naked in lakes, and discover what I am doing on Earth.”

  “Okay, Vikingman, we’ll move on tomorrow. Let’s play cribbage. I believe I’m winning, thirty-seven games to nine.”

  I would need to move on soon, too. Hosted by a Mongolian, my quest in this country was formidable. Hosted by a foreigner, my quest was plainly impossible.

  I was here to find the source of the story that was already there, right at the beginning of “I,” sixty years ago. The story began, There are three who think about the fate of the world …

  ————

  Once or twice I’ve tried to describe transmigration to the more imaginative of my human hosts. It’s impossible. I know eleven languages, but there are some tunes that language cannot play.

  When another human touches my host, I can transmigrate. The ease of the transfer depends on the mind I am transmigrating into, and whether negative emotions are blocking me. The fact that touch is a requisite provides a clue that I exist on some physical plane, however subcellular or bioelectrical. There are limits. For example, I cannot transmigrate into animals, even primates: if I try the animal dies. It is like an adult’s inability to climb into children’s clothes. I’ve never tried a whale.

  But how it feels, this transmigration, how to describe that! Imagine a trapeze artist in a circus, spinning in emptiness. Or a snooker ball lurching around the table. Arriving in a strange town after a journey through turbid weather.

  Sometimes language can’t even read the music of meaning.

  The morning wind blew cold from the mountains. Gunga stooped through the door of her ger, slapping the chilly morning air into her neck and face. The hillside of gers was slowly coming to life. In the city an ambulance siren rose and fell. The River Tuul glowed gray, the color of lead. The big red neon sign flicked off: LET’S MAKE OUR CITY A GREAT SOCIALIST COMMUNITY.

  “Camelshit,” thought Gunga. “When are they going to dismantle that?”

  Gunga wondered where her daughter had got to. She had her suspicions.

  A neighbor nodded to her, wishing her good morning. Gunga nodded back. Her eyes were becoming weaker, rheumatism had begun to gnaw at her hips, and a poorly set broken femur from three winters ago ached. Gunga’s dog padded over to be scratched behind the ears. Something else was wrong, too, today.

  She ducked back into the warmth of the ger.

  “Shut the bloody door!” bawled her husband.

  It was good to transmigrate out of a westernized head. However much I learn from the nonstop highways of minds like Caspar’s, they make me giddy. It would be the euro’s exchange rate one minute, a film he’d once seen about art thieves in Petersburg the next, a memory of fishing with his uncle between islets the next, some pop song or a friend’s Internet home page the next. No stopping.

  Gunga’s mind patrols a more intimate neighborhood. She constantly thinks about getting enough food and money. She worries about her daughter, and ailing relatives. Most of the days of her life have been very much alike. The assured dreariness of the Soviet days, the struggle for survival since independence. Gunga’s mind was a lot harder for me to hide in than Caspar’s, however. It’s like trying to make yourself invisible in a prying village as opposed to a sprawling conurbation. Some hosts are more perceptive about movements in their own mental landscape than others, and Gunga was very perceptive indeed. While she had been sleeping I acquired her language, but her dreams kept trying to smoke me out.

  Gunga set about lighting the stove. “Something’s wrong,” she said, to herself, looking around the ger, half expecting something to be missing. The beds, the table, the cabinet, the family tableware, the rugs, the silver teapot that she had refused to sell, even when times were at their hardest.

  “Not your mysterious sixth sense again?” Buyant stirred under his pile of blankets. Gunga’s cataracts and the gloom of the ger made it difficult to see. Buyant coughed a smoker’s cough. “What is it this time? A message from your bladder, we’re going to inherit a camel? Your earwax telling you a giant leech is going to come and molest your innocence?”

  “A giant leech did that years ago. It was called Buyant.”

  “Very funny. What’s for breakfast?”

  I may as well start somewhere. “Husband, do you know anything about the three who think about the fate of the world?”

  A long pause in which I thought he hadn’t heard me. “What the devil are you talking about now?”

  At that moment Oyuun, Gunga’s daughter, came in. Her cheeks were flushed red and you could see her breath. “The shop had some bread! And I found some onions, too.”

  “Good girl!” Gunga embraced her. “You were gone early. You didn’t wake me.”

  “Shut the bloody door!” bawled Buyant.

  “I knew you had to work late at the hotel, so I didn’t want to wake you.” Gunga suspected Oyuun wasn’t telling the whole truth. “Was the hotel busy last night, Mom?” Oyuun was an adept subject-changer.

  “No. Just the two blondies.�
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  “I found Australia in the atlas at school. But I couldn’t find—what was it? Danemark, or somewhere?”

  “Who cares?” Buyant rolled out of bed, wearing a blanket as a shawl. He would have been handsome once, and he still thought he was. “It’s not as if you’ll ever be going there.”

  Gunga bit her tongue, and Oyuun didn’t look up.

  “The blondies are checking out today, and I’ll be glad to see the back of them. I just can’t understand it, her mother letting her daughter wander off like that. I’m sure they’re not married, but they’re in the same bed! No ring, or anything. And there’s something weird about him, too.” Gunga was looking at Oyuun, but Oyuun was looking away.

  “ ’Course there is, they’re foreigners.” Buyant burped and slurped his tea.

  “What do you mean, Mom?” Oyuun started chopping the onions.

  “Well, for one thing, he smells of yogurt. But there’s something else too.… It’s in his eyes.… It’s like they’re not his own.”

  “They can’t be as weird as those Hungarian trade unionists who used to come. The ones they flew in the orchids from Vietnam for.”

  Gunga knew how to blot out her husband’s presence. “That Danemark man, he tips all the time, and he keeps smiling like he’s touched in the head. But last night, he touched my hand.”

  Buyant spat. “If he touches you again I’ll twist his head off and ram it up his asshole. You tell him that from me.”

  Gunga shook her head. “No, it was like a kid playing tag. He just touched my hand with his thumb, and was gone, out of the kitchen. Or like he was casting a spell. And please don’t spit inside the ger.”

  Buyant ripped off a gobbet of bread. “A spell, ah yes, that must be it! He was probably trying to bewitch you. Woman, sometimes I feel it was your grandmother I married, not you!”

  The women carried on preparing food in silence.

  Buyant scratched his groin. “Speaking of marriage, Old Gombo’s eldest boy came around asking for Oyuun last night.”

  Oyuun stared steadily into the noodles she was stirring. “Oh?”

  “Yep. Brought me a bottle of vodka. Good stuff. Old Gombo’s a buffoon horseman who can’t hold his drink, but his brother-in-law has a good government job, and the younger son is turning into quite a wrestler, they say. He was the champion two years running at school. That’s not to be sniffed at.”

  Gunga chopped, and the onions made her nostrils sting. Oyuun said nothing.

  “It’s a thought, isn’t it? The older son is obviously quite taken with Oyuun.… If she gets Old Gombo’s grandson in the oven it’ll show she can deliver the goods and force Old Gombo’s hand.… I can think of worse matches.”

  “I can think of better ones,” said Gunga, stirring some noodles into the mutton soup. A memory passed through of Buyant visiting her in her parents’ ger, through a flap in the roof, just a few feet away from where her parents were sleeping. “Someone she loves, for example. Anyway, we’ve already agreed. Oyuun will finish school and, fate willing, get into the university. We want Oyuun to do well in the world. Maybe she’ll get a car. Or at least a motorbike, from China.”

  “I don’t see the point. It’s not like there are any jobs waiting afterwards, especially not for girls. The Russians took all the jobs with them when they left. And the ones that they left the Chinese grabbed. Another way foreigners rip us Mongolians off.”

  “Camelshit! The vodka took all the jobs. The vodka rips us off.”

  Buyant glared. “Women don’t understand politics.”

  Gunga glared back. “And I suppose men do? The economy would die of a common cold if it were healthy enough to catch one.”

  “I tell you, it’s the Russians—”

  “Nothing’s ever going to get better until we stop blaming the Russians and start blaming ourselves! The Chinese are able to make money here. Why can’t we?” Some fat in a pan began to hiss. Gunga caught a glimpse of her reflection in her cup of milk, frowning. Her hand trembled minutely, and the image rippled away. “Today is all wrong. I’m going to see the shaman.”

  Buyant thumped the table. “I’m not having you throwing away our togrugs on—”

  Gunga snapped back at him. “I’ll throw my togrugs anywhere I please, you soak!”

  Buyant backed down from this fight he couldn’t win. He didn’t want the neighbors overhearing, and saying he couldn’t control his woman.

  Why am I the way I am? I have no genetic blueprint. I have had no parents to teach me right from wrong. I have had no teachers. I had no nurture, and I possess no nature. But I am discreet and conscientious, a nonhuman humanist.

  I wasn’t always this way. After the doctor went mad, I transmigrated around the villagers. I was their lord. I knew their secrets, the bends of the village’s streams and the names of its dogs. I knew their rare pleasures that burned out as quickly as they flared up, and of the memories that kept them from freezing. I studied extremes. I would drive my hosts almost to destruction in pursuit of the pleasure which fizzed along their neural bridges. I inflicted pain on those unlucky enough to cross my path, just to understand pain. I amused myself by implanting memories from one host into another, or by incessantly singing to them. I’d coerce monks to rob, devoted lovers to be unfaithful, misers to spend. The only thing I can say for myself is that after my first host, I never killed again. I cannot say I did this out of love for humanity. I have only one fear: to be inhabiting a human at the moment of death. I still don’t know what would happen.

  I have no story of a blinding conversion to humanism. It just didn’t happen that way. During the Cultural Revolution, and when I transmigrated into hosts in Tibet, in Vietnam, in Korea, in El Salvador, I experienced humans fighting, usually from the safety of the general’s office. In the Falkland Islands I watched them fight over rocks. “Two bald men fighting over a comb,” an ex-host commented. In Rio I saw a tourist killed for a watch. Humans live in a pit of cheating, exploiting, hurting, incarcerating. Every time, the species wastes some part of what it could be. This waste is poisonous. That is why I no longer harm my hosts. There’s already too much of this poison.

  • • •

  Gunga spent the morning at the hotel, sweeping and boiling some water to wash sheets. Seeing Caspar and Sherry again from the outside was like revisiting an old house with a new tenant. They paid and waited until their rented jeep turned up. I bade Caspar good-bye in Danish as he slung his backpack in, but he just assumed Gunga was saying something in Mongolian.

  As Gunga made the beds, she imagined Caspar and Sherry lying here, and then thought about Oyuun, and Gombo’s youngest son. She thought about the rumors of child prostitution spreading through the city, and how the police were being paid off in foreign money. Mrs. Enchbat, the widow who owned the hotel, stopped by to do some bookkeeping. Mrs. Enchbat was in a good mood—Caspar had paid in dollars, and Mrs. Enchbat needed to raise a dowry. While Gunga was boiling water for washing they sat down and shared some salty tea.

  “Now Gunga, you know that I’m not a one for gossip,” began Mrs. Enchbat, a little woman with a mouth wise as a lizard’s, “but our Sonjoodoi saw your Oyuun walking out with Old Gombo’s youngest again yesterday evening. People’s tongues will start wagging. They were seen at the Naadam festival together. Sonjoodoi also said Gombo’s eldest has got a crush on her.”

  Gunga chose counterattack. “Is it true your Sonjoodoi’s become a Christian?”

  Mrs. Enchbat considered her reply coolly. “He’s been seen going to the American missionary’s apartment once or twice.”

  “What does his grandmother have to say about that?”

  “Only that it proves what suckers Americans are. They think they’re making converts to their weird cult, they’re just making converts to powdered milk—whatever’s the matter, Gunga?”

  A riot of doubt had broken out in my host. Gunga knew I was here. Quickly, I tried to calm her. “No. Something’s wrong. I’m going to see the shaman.”

&n
bsp; The bus was crowded and stuck in first gear. At the end of the line was a derelict factory from the Soviet days. Gunga had already forgotten what it had once manufactured. I had to look in her unconscious: bullets. Wildflowers were capitalizing on the brief summer, and wild dogs picked at the body of something. The afternoon was weak and thin. People from the bus trudged their way past where the road ran out to a hillside of gers. Gunga walked with them. The giant pipe ran along on its stilts. It had been a part of a public-heating system, but the boilers needed Russian coal. Mongolian coal burned at temperatures too cool to make it work. Most of the locals had gone back to burning dung.

  Gunga’s cousin had gone to this shaman when she couldn’t get pregnant. Nine months later she gave birth to boy twins, born with cauls, an omen of great fortune. The shaman was an adviser to the president, and he had a reputation as a horse-healer. It was said he had lived for twenty years as a hermit on the slopes of Tavanbogd in the far-west province of Bayan Olgii. During the Soviet occupation, the local officials had tried to arrest him for vagrancy, but anyone who went to get him returned empty-handed and empty-headed. He was two centuries old.

  I was looking forward to meeting the shaman.

  I have my gifts: I am apparently immune to age and forgetfulness. I possess freedom beyond any human understanding of the world. But my cage is all my own, too. I am trapped in one waking state of consciousness. I have never found any way to sleep, or dream. And the knowledge I most desire eludes me: I have never found the source of the story I was born with, and I have never discovered whether others of my kind exist.

  When I finally left the village at the foot of the Holy Mountain I traveled all over southeast Asia, searching the attics and cellars of old people’s minds for other minds without bodies. I found legends of beings who might be my kindred, but of tangible knowledge—I found not one footprint. I crossed the Pacific in the 1960s.

  Remembering my insane doctor, I mostly maintained a vow of silence. I had no wish to leave behind me a trail of mystics, lunatics, and writers. On the other hand, if I came across a mystic, lunatic, or writer I would sometimes talk with him. One writer in Buenos Aires even suggested a name for what I am: noncorpum, and noncorpa, if ever the day dawns when the singular becomes a plural. I spent a pleasant few months debating metaphysics with him, and we wrote some stories together. But the “I” never became a “We.” During the 1970s I placed an advertisement in the National Enquirer. The U.S.A. is even crazier than the rest of humanity. I followed up each of the nineteen replies I received: mystics, lunatics, or writers, every one. I even looked for clues in the Pentagon. I found a lot of things that surprised even me, but nothing related to noncorpa. I never went to Europe. It seemed a dead place, cold in the shadows of nuclear missiles.