by Kieran Shea
*****
But I could become one of you, she was thinking—even as they tightened the bag around her neck.
I could become you.
Life pulsed inside her urgently. Anything. I would do anything. Then it was gone—obliterated in a burst of sheer wanting.
She would have been glad to know that her body (a shell, in the end) had washed up on the beach. There were experimental bites, gnawings, of big and small carnivorous fish, but by pure chance her swollen face was intact. And perhaps someone—some startled beachcomber—would bear witness.
The Ghost Wife
by Aaron Fox-Lerner
The big boss wanted his dead son to marry a white girl. I was told it was some kind of Chinese tradition: if your son or daughter dies unmarried you find a corpse to serve as your progeny's spouse in the afterlife. The big boss was looking for a white girl as a status symbol, to show that he'd gotten so rich off of resources and transportation and graft that he could afford a swank foreign wife for his deceased son. He was willing to pay a lot of money for a dead white girl. And I had one. The only problem was that she wasn't dead.
As far as I knew, my girlfriend Mallory was the only white girl for miles around this side of Zhengzhou. I'd come over with her to China thinking of it as a grand adventure. We'd both been broke right out of college and decided to move out to Henan province to experience the real China while working as English teachers. After actually experiencing the real China, I was desperate for a way out—and the big boss's offer seemed like the best one I could find.
Coming here was more Mallory's idea than mine. She'd studied Chinese for a couple of years in college, but once we'd moved out here it turned out she couldn't actually speak that much. She claimed she was flummoxed by the local accent, but I doubt she'd be doing too much better in a different province. I thought it would be a romantic gesture to cross the sea for her, to come to a foreign land for her, to go where she went.
Where she went turned out to be a dirty single room in a rundown five-story apartment building smack dab in the middle of Wu Dong. Wu Dong had the social scene of a small town, which it was by Chinese standards, with a population of only 500,000 people. The city looked like it was a level in a rudimentary early 90s 3D videogame—nothing but poorly-rendered, washed-out gray and beige cubes fading off into the distance. It had been built almost entirely in the last 25 years to accompany economic liberalization, its population growing by rates unheard of in America. People came to Wu Dong to work. If they weren't working then they were probably eating or sleeping.
Mallory and I were the only foreigners working at the town's only private English school. I never quite got used to the stares that accompanied my presence throughout the town, inescapable even when I was working and kids would be too intimidated or amazed by my pronounced facial features and arm hair to recite the alphabet for me. I'd expected to be a novelty, but I'd expected to be one in a cozy, traditional little Chinese village, one where people would get used to me after enough time. They never did. I was always a stranger.
The school had been advertised to us as the only one in a small town three hours by bus from Zhengzhou, not even connected by rail. All this was true, but they never mentioned in the "real China" spiel how Wu Dong was also a smoke-belching monster of a town where the appearance of anyone not from China was a gossip-worthy occasion. I was surprised I never caused a traffic accident from the way people would crane their heads around while riding their bikes or scooters to stare at me.
Mallory got it even worse than I did. I attracted enough awkward attention as a dark-haired skinny white guy, but her, with her long blonde hair and blue eyes? Forget about it. People would come up behind her on the street and just start fondling her hair without a word of warning or introduction. So many people took pictures of her she could have qualified as a sentient mobile tourist attraction. She may as well have carried around an FAQ sheet to avoid the inevitable stumbling conversation about her hair and fair skin.
Needless to say, the students liked her more than me, even if they didn't actually learn any more from her. Learning wasn't generally high on their list of priorities. They were members of a nation of only children and came from the few families in the area with enough money to afford a private after-school language program, so they tended to be spoiled as a matter of course. I liked some of them, but they were all imperious and pampered.
We both got some relative enjoyment from the kids, and Cloud was alright, but everything else about the job was a drag. Cloud was the Chinese tutor at our school with the most passable (albeit still awkward) English. Mallory and I would hang out with him from time to time. I found him nice, but also a bit of a bore. Neither Mallory nor I ever turned down dinner with him because we were both desperate for company. He was the only member of the staff we got along with.
The owner of the school would lie, dissemble, and deceive us on even the simplest matters for no discernible reason, as if he were doing it purely for recreation or as a matter of principle. Both he and the rest of the small Chinese teaching staff spoke broken English at best. They mostly preferred to quarantine me and Mallory into our own native teachers' corner. The Chinese idea of saving face meant that anytime they had a problem with us they wouldn't confront us directly, creating a toxic passive-aggressive atmosphere. We were put up in the aforementioned underlit, unclean apartment, and that was about all the help we got in navigating the country that was our new home.
In the north, there was a park with some ping-pong tables where we'd take occasional walks. If I took a bus for long enough I could reach mountains that were out of the city's smog range and had a kind of dusty brush across them that reminded me of Southern California. The city had two clubs. Eerily empty most of the time, pumped up with American pop songs from five years ago and populated on the weekend by a small crop of shifty-eyed men in shiny shirts and women who might have been hookers. Mal and I could never decide if they were, but we discussed it on each of our rare visits.
Other than that I ate and played pool. I'd always considered myself to be a good player, and The Pool Hall was about the closest thing to a sit-down-and-have-a-drink kind of place I could find in Wu Dong. At the time, I found it too plain and boring to ever suspect it could harbor a criminal element. It was a single room with peeling white walls and overly bright fluorescent lights, nothing different from any restaurant in town. I also didn't sense anything odd about the customers at The Pool Hall (everything in China tended to be named either very inexplicably or very literally). They seemed like your average crop of Chinese villagers. Up until I got caught up in the scheme I would have laughed off the idea that any of the people there might have been gangsters. Everybody there seemed too plain and well-meaning to carry any menace with them. They couldn't communicate well with me but they liked to buy me drinks and seemed to consider it a welcome novelty to have a foreigner there.
I'd stick around the bar for hours sinking or missing shots, more or less breaking even on small bets over games, and drinking until the language barrier became unimportant. I was just glad to have found a place in the town that was open after 8 pm.
Mallory didn't come with me to The Pool Hall much. Maybe once or twice. I used her Chinese to learn some basics about a few of the guys there, but that was it. I got a lot of ribbing and sly looks after I brought her by. She said she thought the guys there looked like crooks and she didn't like the run-down, entirely male atmosphere of the place. She didn't like anything in Wu Dong, really. I'd go out to The Pool Hall and get drunk with guys whom I couldn't even talk to while she'd stay at home surfing on our ridiculously slow internet connection. We'd have a lot of conversations about how much money we'd need to save up from the job before we could leave. We never discussed what we'd do then or where we'd go. Neither of us said it, but we both knew we wouldn't be moving on together
If we were anywhere else we'd have started spending less time together, but that wasn't possible in Wu Dong. We were trapped in t
he same shoddy apartment, in the same strange city, in the same lousy job. Neither of us was the type to get operatic about it; there were no screaming fights, no cycles of break-up and reconciliation.
Instead we'd circle each other in an endless pattern, pulling the other in when we needed another person, pushing the other away when their proximity became unbearable. We were both experts at sniping comments just passive or joshing enough to be defensible. This only slipped when one of us (usually me) was drunk. One time I came home smashed and told Mallory how much I'd enjoyed the first time I met her, how taken I was after talking to her. She gave out the most genuine, unencumbered laugh I'd ever heard from her, barely remembering to apologize afterward. I woke up the next morning before class cursing myself and my drunken sentimentality. Ninety-nine percent of the time I was a callous, catty drunk and she just had to be still awake when I came home on that unfortunate other one percent.
If you'd asked me at the time what went wrong in our relationship I would have said it was the second law of thermodynamics. Everything falls apart eventually. What else could the energy of our bonds do but fall into entropy? In retrospect that's not really true. That attitude was a way of hiding my own bad decisions under a sheen of inevitability. Sometimes you take a chance on someone and it's a chance not worth taking. Sometimes you decide to go with someone and she turns out not to be worth following. Sometimes the grand gesture, born just as much from boredom as from desire, might not be worth making. We placed ourselves in a zoo, the only two species of our kind for miles around. We weren't strong enough to survive being put in that cage together. After three months we needed to get out.
The big boss seemed to offer that out.
I first heard about it from two of the guys at The Pool Hall, Jimmy and Zhuo. One night they strenuously tried to communicate something to me but couldn't. They then managed to impart to me that I should really get Mallory. I finally managed to convince her to come to The Pool Hall, but her limited translation only made things even more confusing.
"They keep talking about the boss or maybe their boss? They just keep saying boss or big boss. And someone's son is dead? And they say they want me to die, or something about dying. And there's a lot of money. And they say they're black something, I don't know that term. They say that they can do something? Why would they want me to die? And then why the hell would they tell me?"
"Great, thanks Mal. Good effort. All that studying really paid off."
"It's not my fault what they're saying doesn't make any sense. They're your creepy fake friends, you try communicating with them. This is too much for me to deal with."
Meanwhile Jimmy and Zhuo were entirely unfazed by our growing argument and started trying even harder to make something understood with a vociferous series of hand gestures and slowly spoken emphatic words.
"They want someone who can speak English and Chinese. They really need to talk to us. They will give money to the other person. Everyone will have lots of money," Mallory arduously drew the meaning out of their speech.
"Do we even know anyone who could help us?" I asked.
"Cloud?" she asked.
"I guess so, but it's kind of late. Just tell them we'll get him tomorrow."
"Sure, thanks for asking so politely," she said.
She told them and they broke out into furious hand signals and Chinese locutions again.
"They really, really want him here tonight," she said.
"Well, I could have figured that one out," I replied. "I suppose it's only 10:15. You think I can still call him?"
"I don't know, Derek. I don't really care."
By some small miracle, Cloud was up and not too far away. After fifteen minutes of awkward waiting he arrived and nervously entered into a long conversation in Chinese with Jimmy and Zhuo. Finally he turned back to us.
"Derek," he asked me, "you know your friends are the gangsters? How do you make friends with some people like that?"
"Well, I didn't know that until now. I guess this explains why they could sometimes hook me up with weed."
"Derek!" Cloud answered, astounded, "that is very illegal here! It is not like in America where everyone does drugs."
"Alright, great, got it. So what the hell do they want?"
"Do you know who is Hong Hai Shao?"
"No. Do you?" I asked Mallory.
"No idea," she answered.
"He is very rich man in Henan, richest in Wu Dong. He makes a lot of money from mining and transportation. Many of the mines and factories here, they need him to move their products. He has trucks and helps to build expressways and gets a lot of money from the government, too."
"So?"
"So we should drop this right now because he sounds like someone that can make our lives very difficult," Mallory said.
"So, he needs a ghost wife," Cloud said at the same time. "He wants a foreigner. I mean, a Westerner. He is offering a reward. A lot of money."
"What is a ghost wife?" I asked, ignoring Mallory.
"It is when your son dies and you do not want him to be alone so you find a dead woman to marry to him."
"So who's the ghost wife?"
"They say they want you, but not really," he said to Mallory, "they will use you and your passport. They will take a real dead girl and lie to Hong Hai Shao and say she is you. Take a Chinese girl and dye her hair blonde to fool him. You will leave and Derek will stay and say he is your boyfriend and you are dead."
"Tough luck for them," she said, "I'm not doing that. This whole thing sounds like bullshit. How could they even get a dead girl anyway?"
"They say that is not a problem."
"Jesus," I said.
"This is all fucked," Mallory said, "there's no way I'm getting involved. They're going to kill someone? No. Just no. I'm going home."
"I don't know if they will kill someone or not. I think it is dangerous, but there will be a lot of money," Cloud said.
"It can't be enough for this crap," Mallory asked.
"150,000 yuan."
"Each?"
"Yes. And that is after half for the gangsters and ten percent for my help."
Mallory had turned away but stopped at the mention of the money. We looked at each other. Both of us knew this was more than enough to leave with. It was enough to go anywhere with, enough to do a lot with. We could each go our own separate ways with our own fat, separate bankrolls.
I took a bus to Zhengzhou with her a day later. We both entered the train station and showed our passports and tickets to security before getting on the train. Then she handed me her passport and I got off the train while she stayed—both of us bound our separate ways, me back to Wu Dong, her onwards to Beijing. We'd made plans for me to meet Mallory in Beijing later, but only after Mallory set out a series of contingencies drawing on all our shared personal relations and a breakdown of contact information for my entire family to ensure that she got her money. Three months earlier she would have just left and waited for me with no elaborate guarantees. Three months earlier she never would have agreed to this plan in the first place. And after the bus ride back I was all alone in Wu Dong.
I took her passport and a bag of personal effects and met up with the gangsters and their dyed corpse the next day. The two of them had always struck me as a bit seedy, but never as professional criminals.
Jimmy was a big, chubby guy with a shy smile that hid a voice which could get surprisingly loud when he was excited. Almost everything made Jimmy excited. Zhuo meanwhile was just a skinny little kid. He was nineteen and looked a few years under that, with a harsh country boy's face. One time they'd managed to convey to me that they were tired from work, this being the most I'd ever heard about their profession. I'd gotten high with them a couple times, but didn't think it meant anything at the time.
They were waiting for me at the big boss's office building. Cloud was nowhere to be seen, but he'd left me a note with the address written in Chinese so I could take a taxi there. The building looked like any of
the other generic glass and steel towers that dotted China like acne on teenage skin, the kind of building that seemed to have taken a couple of hours to plan and only twice that to build. It was probably the tallest building in town, but not obtrusively so. I showed up and saw that Jimmy and Zhuo were waiting nervously outside. We walked in together and were greeted by a couple of tired-looking men in suits with no ties and one man with glasses and a polo shirt. One of the other men said something to him as I came in.
"You are Derek Walinsky?" the man in glasses asked me.
"Yes," I answered.
"And who is your girlfriend?"
"Mallory Louise Stiglietz."
"Can you prove who she is?"
"Yes."
"And how did she die?"
"Drugs," I said, "she OD'ed. We were getting high and she took too much."
"Who knows about this?"
"Almost no one. I haven't talked to her family yet."
"We can maybe take care of that. How do you know these men?"
"Mallory and I bought drugs off of them."
Everyone was looking at me. For once it wasn't the vacant looking at a novelty kind of stare, but a stare of interest. Their looks seemed to indicate that I was an actual person performing a real and potentially useful function. We proceeded back to a chilled room so I could confirm the corpse. I noticed that the big boss may have been rich, but his office building was still cheaply furnished. Everything about it looked like it had been set up on the quick with an eye toward functionality above all else.
They opened a door and we all went inside. I got my first view of the fake Mallory. Her hair was dyed a surprisingly similar shade of blonde; they'd done a good job. The body was around the same size, although it had none of that white American slight chubbiness that even a small girl like Mallory had. There was too much make-up on her face, presumably to help disguise the fact that she was really Asian. I looked at the body. There were no wounds that I could see. No major marks. I found myself wondering how she had died and how much the two gangsters were involved in that death. I looked up and caught the English speaker's eye. I said that the body was Mallory's and handed over all of her documents.
