Read Online Ghost Month by Ed Lin - Free Book Online Page B

teeth, dripping with saliva, made the click sound as they clamped on a human bone.
    I STILL LIVED IN the three-room, one-floor building I had grown up in. Considering that the place was constructed illegally, it was well built. It was painted white on the outside and was pushed up against a larger residential building, like a pop-up toaster against a kitchen wall. At one point four people had lived there, including my grandfather. How had we all fit?
    I went into the bedroom, disrobed and wedged my feet into a pair of sad plastic slippers. I clicked on my stereo amplifier, spun the balance all the way to the right and put the right speaker in the doorway, pointing out. On my PC I cued up a bootleg of Joy Division playing one of their last shows, in early 1980. I started it near the end of the regular set. It was the right soundtrack for two in the morning.
    My bathroom is set up in the traditional Taiwanese style. No sit-down toilet or bathtub. Just a ceramic oval on one side of the room and a recessed drain in the center of the tiled floor. I ignited the gas heater to warm up some water and listened to the lumbering, feedback-strewn “Atrocity Exhibition.”
    I stopped up the sink and poured hot water in, then ran the cold water for a few seconds to offset it. I soaked my one-foot-square towel, rubbed it all over my body and lathered up with a green-striped soap bar. I dunked a little bucket in the sink, stood over the drain and rinsed myself off.
    Ian Curtis wailed from my bedroom, powerless against a world where fate overruled everything and bred indifference among the living.
    Julia.
    I could see her face, her tough but graceful jawline. Maybe that was a strange thing to admire in a woman, but I knew it well because she loved for me to kiss her neck. When I held her, I was in awe ofher physical and mental strength. She always thought her eyes were too small, but they could light up like a two-star constellation, particularly during the several times we escaped to love hotels. We felt like we were running away to another world. Even after the sex, which we usually did right away and one more time before leaving, we lay there and lied about how great our lives were going to be together.
    Love hotels are a hallowed institution that don’t exist in the US. They are the only places young couples can be intimate, because Taiwanese live with their parents in small apartments until marriage. Even after marriage, one might still need a love hotel for trysts to break up the average workaholic day.
    I should consider myself lucky to have the whole house to myself. I could have as many parties and women over as I wanted, only I didn’t really want to have parties, and the few women I had slept with since returning to Taipei I hadn’t wanted to bring home.
    The concert recording ended with drums crashing wildly. From what I’ve read online from people who were supposedly there, this was the show that ended with Ian having an epileptic seizure and tumbling over the cymbals and bass drum.
    I felt trapped in the sudden silence.
    I thought about my parents, Dwayne, Frankie the Cat and the
jiaotous
. As exhaustion took hold of my body, I felt my skepticism slip away from me. What if we were all fated to be what we were when we were born? I was meant to be operating the food stand, no matter how well I did in school or what I studied. I was also probably supposed to spend my life alone.
    Like Ian Curtis, I had control of little to nothing in my life. The singer had been married to a woman he no longer loved but was too stigmatized by the shame of divorce to leave her for his mistress. Complicating things, his fits were increasing in frequency and severity. His medication sent him on wild mood swings. Curtis found a way out, though—he hanged himself the night before the band was to embark on their first US tour.
    I shivered and wrung out my towel over the drain.
    I WOULD BE LYING if I said I had never contemplated suicide before