Chapter 9

九

I think the torso had escaped back out to the road. Perhaps was animated by a malevolent spirit, doing its bidding. Maybe I should have kept it in my apartment where it wasn’t really hurting anyone, just being mischievous, mostly.

Out on the road, in the same spot where the semitruck had struck the deliveryman, there’d been a series of strange car accidents where cars’ breaks failed or their lights would switch off at night, cause collisions with other vehicles, often smashing into motorbikes. 8 people died in just one week...

But I’d not personally seen any ghosts for a few days, and the drilling had cooled down to a barely audible hum. I’d been taking pills, so I wasn’t dreaming and was far happier that way.

Marco, who’d gotten heavy into Santeria, had taken to wearing traditional Cuban island clothing and an elaborate charm around his neck made of bird feathers, clamshells, and beads.

Squinting his eyes and frowning, his fingers tapping on the table like oil derricks, he told me over breakfast that “a lot of ghosts want to escape, rest in peace, but they can’t because they’re stuck in a space between Hell and Earth, so if they sell a soul, or souls, to a demon, the captured souls can take the ghosts’ place, and then the ghosts can escape and rest ... That deliveryman, he’s doing a demon’s bidding; he’s collected, sold and bartered souls ... He’s already got 8. My Mom said that’ll be enough, likely. Still, don’t ride a motorcycle or even a bicycle on the roads for now.”

From the window in the cafeteria, we looked outside, saw Rooster, who was barefoot, wearing a Beijing bikini and jorts, despite the cold. He was hopping on a pogo stick, with a mad glint in his eyes, on his way to teach a class.

Rooster really had been losing it. He’d had a bout of explosive diarrhea in one of his classes yesterday. Over the last week, he’d been complaining about the drilling sounds more than anyone, spazzing out about it online, in the teacher WeChat group, posting floods of shitposts, along with random strange, outlandish outbursts, much of it gibberish. He’d been drinking too much, too, drunk in his classes, yelling and throwing textbooks and chalk at students. There was a running bet amongst us foreigners that he’d be the first teacher this term to be fired.

“Think it’s safe to ride a pogo stick?” I asked Marco, who only grimaced, stood up and walked away with a sullen expression, rubbing his rabbit’s foot key chain.