Chapter 7

七

The drilling had stopped, thankfully, but I hadn’t slept in three days. After what I saw in my dreams, sleep wasn’t what I wanted. Sleep or no sleep, though, I was thinking there’d be more, more ghosts, worse ghosts, and that the ghosts were probably hungry...

Lacking sleep left me both alive and dead. I felt like my head was slurry, wet and sloshy with cytoplasm. I lay in bed, supine, awake to the night, reading my phone in the dark, my room black as marble.

A story popped up on my phone, a local news story of three people drowning to death in a manure pit. A maintenance worker, trying to fix a septic tank, had plunged in, and two others rushed to help him, and they too were swallowed into the pit of shit.

Reading it provided me a guilty bit of schadenfreude. Despite my current woes of ghosts, insomnia, and filthy air, there was really nothing I could imagine worse than drowning, suffocating in a pool of shit. That being how one leaves the Earth. What a horrific fate.

Perhaps a “ghost of shit,” a violent, vengeful janitor’s ghost sucked them in. What a bilious, malicious spirit that must be...

Then another story popped up. An anonymous news article from tomorrow, written in the future tense, saying there’s going to be a dreadful traffic accident. The article didn’t mention ghosts, but I knew the spirits would have something to do with it.

The story said that a deliveryman on a motorbike, next to our school, will die in gruesome fashion, be run over by a semitruck.

Aghast, I couldn’t read past the opening paragraph and clicked off my phone, popped a handful of pills and drifted off...

Sure enough, the next day, walking back from class, I witnessed the aftermath, the carnage, the young deliveryman’s body split in two halves. I’d seen plenty of gore on TV, movies, in video games, but seeing it firsthand would be forever etched into the eyes of my mind.

I’d suspected it’d been ghosts on the roads. The ghosts must have caused the truck driver to swerve suddenly.

I bet the apparitions I’d seen had escaped from my dreams and were appearing on the roads, day and night, frightening drivers, causing accidents...

After witnessing the grisly accident scene, I had to take a walk around campus to get my head right. I passed by the Tasmanian in the small park near the gymnasium, eyed him solemnly. He was seated on a stone bench, under a bamboo tree, practicing calligraphy, Chinese characters. He looked so Zen, so peaceful drawing them.

So, I decided I’d copy his practice. Went to the stationery store, bought a brush and paper and then went back to my apartment, began writing my own characters, stroke after stroke, tracing the particles, the radicals. The calligraphy, it was calming, soothing. It lifted my mind, set it at ease, and I didn’t see any ghosts for a couple days.

A few days later, though, after the accident, the drilling started again, waking me whenever I slept, causing me to have anxiety and trembling spells.

Worse yet, a new ghost, a lower torso, the severed waist, legs of the dead deliveryman, started walking around my apartment, walking through doors, on the ceilings and through walls, the legs maybe trying to find their way into or away from God.

To try to ward the torso off, freeze out the drilling noises, I’d draw the Chinese characters for quiet: “安静”, drawing the characters again, again, again, and again.

It helped, at first, drawing that, and it scared the torso away every time I wrote it. And along with eating handfuls of Xanax, I started wearing a blindfold and earplugs to bed, and was enjoying the serene, dreamless slumber I was getting.