Chapter 38 Ghost Talker
GHOST TALKER
Smell returns first. The air smells like seared bacon; the realization is almost funny. Gasping, you crawl at last from the smoldering remains of Cobra Lily’s skin, like a demented butterfly emerging from a tainted chrysalis.
Rain greets you like an old friend, like a blessing long denied. With Mercy no longer calling upon the skies to deliver a storm, it is already beginning to slacken from typhoon into mere downpour.
The top of this building is a war zone of cracked concrete and wrenched struts. Debris has scattered everywhere. Mercy releases you, stooping to gather up your discarded physical body before it can tumble off the roof like so much clutter.
“I’m not gone,” you snarl, shaking off the viscera. “It was only a body, and I can get more!”
“I’m fully aware.” Her lips don’t move, and neither do yours, yet now that you are both in ghost form, you hear her voice more clearly than any human speech.
“I wasn’t trying to end you. If I wanted to do that, if I wanted to just kill us both, I’d hold you close and banish the storm until the dry air turned us to dust. That’s the only way I think we could ‘die’ a true death, at this point.
Ghosts like us are more akin to demons.”
“So do it,” you snap, unnerved at her casual depiction. “Unless you’re too afraid to die?”
“Niece, I must insist you stop being dramatic.” She jams claw-tipped fists on her hips.
“I know this is very difficult, because ghosts are driven to be angry and full of drama, but please try. We are better than our ghostly urges. And if I can learn to control my fury, you sure as shit can do it, too.”
Your jaw drops. In all your years of preparing for revenge, nothing has quite readied you for the infuriating sass of her.
“Dying would be so, so easy,” Mercy continues.
“But what would be the point of that? We’d both carry so much grief and trauma into the next life that our existence would be misery from birth.
Nothing would be healed. I’d hate to see the kind of asshole I become with that level of spiritual baggage hanging over me. ”
“Then what did you want, bitch? My forgiveness?” The last bit, you inject with heavy sarcasm.
“Yes,” she says, and you are so dumbfounded by the audacity that you are, once again, momentarily without words. “I want your forgiveness, and I want to give you mine.”
“You destroyed me!” Slam your fists down on the wrecked rooftop floor; everything shakes.
The people you could have loved. The life you could have built.
All gone, because of this woman. “Everything I thought worthy in myself, you have stripped away, and shown to be false. I used to be good, Mei Chi. Truly good. Now, because of you, I know how awful I can be. Because of you, I have killed and killed and killed, hated and loathed and lied and stolen. I can’t go back to being better.
How the hell could anyone forgive that?”
“No one can go back, that’s true.” She inches closer; you scoot away suspiciously. “But we can go forward. Become something stronger, newer, wiser, kinder.”
“Do you think I’m stupid? There is no way you want that. I am trying to kill your city, just like I killed your boss, and just like you killed me!”
“I know,” she says, with terrible sadness.
“I know. I know exactly what you’ve done to me, and what I’ve done to you.
Isn’t that the point, that you wanted me to remember?
Well, I do, now. I remember it with horror, and I remember it with shame.
I remember it with the eyes of a grown woman, who can look back on her life as a little girl, her death as an angry spirit, and understand what she allowed herself to become. What hurt she perpetuated.”
“Then you, as a grown woman with her two lives’ experience, should know better than to even suggest it!
You can no more forgive me than I can forgive you.
We might as well ask China to forgive Japan, or Japan to forgive America.
Look at the world around us, Mei Chi. Look at the war, the ruination.
If humanity could forgive, we would already live in heaven with the immortals! ”
“I don’t know if it is possible,” she says, with a helpless shrug.
“All I know is that we must try, or the feud will go on and on. You call this immortality, Siu Yin, but I call it eternal hell. Hate is like a burn that sits in the chest, choking the life away, keeping a body from breathing. It is suffocation. And I know you understand that feeling.”
She looks down at your skin, its limp form curled around her feet.
“Pain doesn’t end with death. Karma doesn’t die with the body.
Hate and anger continue, one generation to the next, as souls return damaged and we build an ever more twisted society.
I think humanity must have always been like this.
I think this is why we all hurt, all the time. ”
From a long time ago, your traitorous memory summons up the mental image of Baba seated at the kitchen table, and the words he’d said once so long ago: War does not finish. It is a wound, sinking into flesh, leaving scars and rot that cause pain for a long time.
“I…” Your hands clench. “We don’t deserve forgiveness.”
“If we deserved it, then it wouldn’t be forgiveness, would it?
Besides, Siu Yin, life isn’t about what we deserve.
It’s about how we change, and who we love.
” She looks up, holds out a hand. “Please, niece. Fight the ghostly anger and sit with me. Let’s talk about this, like the humans we once were. While we still can.”
The rain softens into a drizzle, light enough that your ocean-adapted skin is beginning to tighten uncomfortably. It will be the same for Mercy, you’re sure, and only a matter of time before one or both of you start to suffer the effects. Yet neither of you move.
You should kill her, strike her down, trap her, any of that, all of that, summon greater and greater storms, inflict worse and worse agony and … and …
And then what?
And then, like Mercy says, you will each be reborn into some other life, carrying pain you can’t explain or remember, and so never address.
Like your mother, haunted by feelings she could never speak of, driven from joy to cruelty; well meaning, yet ultimately lost and harsh. Trauma perpetuating pain.
The despair of that fate stretches out before you, a long and unrewarding path.
“It won’t work,” you insist, voice sounding cracked even to yourself. “It … we will fail.”
Above you both, the rain is slackening, the clouds beginning to thin. The effect is immediate; your skin and hers are starting to dry out, already.
“How do you know, when we haven’t even attempted it?
” She tilts her head up, eyeless gaze on the grayed sky above.
“Let me put it this way, niece. What’s the worst that happens if we fail?
We go back to destroying each other, and everything around us.
Just like you say we must. But Siu Yin, what happens if we succeed? ”
“It’s already too late,” you snap. “I’ve already killed so many, brought these ghosts up here—”
“Nothing can be done for those you’ve killed, but that doesn’t mean you have to keep doing it. You can choose to stop. And as for the ghosts—they deserve to be freed,” she says, which shocks you. “Just, not like this. Not all at once, without safeguards or warded rooms. You know?”
“… Are you being serious?”
“There’s a middle ground between avoiding the past and having it shoved forcefully up one’s nose. Most people have forgotten those ghosts are there, which is why they keep languishing. We can help them without risking hundreds or thousands of lives.”
Your mouth opens and shuts. “But … Kowloon! You have fought for your district, Mei Chi. Don’t tell me you are going to walk away from it!”
“I am already dead,” she says, gently. “Of course I care for Kowloon, and I haven’t walked away from it.
A good friend is going to make sure the demolitions come to a halt, and that real talks begin.
However … this is not my life or my world.
So, I must leave that task to others and focus on my truest duty: to put right the island, and to offer healing in your life. If I can.”
You fall silent, thinking harder than you ever have before. Trying to process everything she has said, fighting against the ghost fervor in your brain and heart. Attempting to imagine a future not soaked in hate and hurt, as Wing Yun once urged you to do.
“It occurs to me that I haven’t actually said the words.
Let me fix that now.” She lets go of your body and kneels in front of you, her forehead and palms pressed to the floor.
“Siu Yin, I am so sorry. There is no excuse for my actions, no justification for your murder, or the hurt you’ve endured.
Please, return with me to Shek Ham Chau, the place where it all began for you, and let me try to save what future you have left. ”
Sentiments you never thought you’d hear, and they strike to your core more deeply than even the lightning did. Ghosts can’t cry, yet your eyes ache and burn with the desire to do so anyway.
“I’m … so tired,” you confess, dropping to your knees next to her. “Everything hurts, all the time. I wish I could breathe.”
“Me too.” She looks up. “I’m beyond tired, at this point. That’s why I think we must go to Shek Ham Chau and speak to a certain goddess.”
It takes you a moment to remember who and what she means. You have not thought of me for a very long time, or our brief encounter after your death.
“I don’t know about that…”
“But I do. I’m the ghost talker, remember?” She grins with a mouthful of jagged teeth. “The island is where it all began, and the island is where it must end. Everything else follows from that. If it doesn’t work, you can always destroy me after. Come with me, Siu Yin, and let’s try. Please.”
She reaches out, jade-hued skin frazzling with dryness in the slacking rain. Dawn will be coming soon; if neither of you move, you’ll both die a final death. Still you hesitate, thinking and agonizing.
Mercy gives you time, and waits.
As the sun begins to set the world alight, you finally take her hand.