Ghost frequency
鬼頻率
Midnight
There are two transcausal receivers in my home.
The first one is a second-hand FoxConn Transceiver Device: used, reconditioned, a little scuffed. I bought it from a Hong Konger in a rainy backstreet in the city about a year back. It’s completely unlicensed, since I can't afford an Aether Operative License, and in any case I don't believe that the government should be controlling who listens to emanations beyond causality. But there are few transcausality detectors roaming our backwater district, so I’m safe enough.
The other receiver is my daughter. Her babylike delight, obscurely knowing, burbles from her bed, and has done so every single night for twenty-five years now. Her glad murmurings in the daytime had always sounded different to her dreaming joy at night, that wild laughter, but until I bought the device I never knew why. It’s because when she dreams, she becomes another drifter in the transcausal space, a receiver just like my patched-up device.
Hearing them humming and laughing, in coherence and decoherence throughout the quiet night, is like hearing an owl singing a wild and eerie song, serene and sublime, as if the bird were become ghost or a ghost become the owl. From inside it sounds like it fills all the night, but it’s contained in the upstairs bedroom of my corner house. An exalted music only I can hear. Not because I am special, or in any way wise, but because my circumstances are fortuitous. My wife sleeps deep and doesn’t hear, or maybe dreams and hears that way, and never remembers anything in the morning.
But I stay awake and I listen for the harmonies. I squat on the ground between the device and my daughter's bed and I listen, tuning the instrument. Or I lie in my bed, top-to-toe, with my right knee crooked and pointing across the bed toward my wife’s middle. Hanging there, listening for the harmonies in the device and my daughter as she dreams the signal.
They thrum and they harmonize, these low musics, they phase and disphase in a complex sinewave of aether activity. It sets up a pattern in the air which has become a pattern in my ear and finally a harmonic wave in my brain. The carrier signal.
The final part of the process is to dream myself into the signal and ride the carrier wave. So I lie there on the bed, right knee bent, hanging on. I take a slug of jimsonweed juice and voyage.
Daybreak
Here comes the village mayor, as he always does every morning, skipping through the fields, on his way to his office. He’s not really the mayor – our village is much too small for such a distinction as a mayor’s office – but he acts like he’s the mayor, and that’s good enough for the folks round here. We believe in his mayoralty much as roosters believe in the coming dawn, not because we actually believe it, but because it is convenient and expected to appear as if we are believers. Hear their crowing now, the roosters who so politely greet the gloaming of sunrise.
The mayor skips along like a man half his age, a quarter, coming from his house on the edge of the village, out by the forest, which – come to mention it – nobody has ever seen or visited. Well, no matter. It’s good enough that he’s mayor of a village that has no mayor’s office, and that he’s wanted and needed by us locals, most of whom nevertheless despise him utterly.
The skipping of the mayor on his progression through the fields is remarkable, in one way – quite apart from the fact that he is emerging from a home that nobody knows and is moving towards a job that does not exist – in that it is the happy-go-lucky stride of a man who has no cares in the world but whose face is lined and weary, wrinkled with a hundred cares. Wherever the mayor may skip, the paradoxes accumulate.
As always, he progresses quickly through the outskirts of the village, the farms and shacks that surround its core, and he salutes all the villagers that he passes, many of whom ignore him quite completely as they go about their business. Here he is passing "Old Yeller", Huang the Dogman, and the many mongrels which swarm round him like fruitflies.
The mayor greets Old Yeller but receives no acknowledgement. Another line of care seems to form on the mayor’s face, his expression becomes even more anxious and distressed, but his happy skipalong pace doesn’t change. He moves on.
He passes the farm where Li and Bi toil on their fields. He stops to call out good morning but neither do they return the courtesy. But they do approach.
Li asks him:
“Mayor, what do you know about the outsiders?”
“Mr Li, I know nothing about the outsiders.”
Bi passes him a fresh-laid bodywarm egg without comment and asks him:
“Mayor, what do you know about the outsiders?”
“Mr Bi, many thanks for the egg. Unfortunately, I know absolutely nothing about the outsiders as yet. When I know something, you will too.”
And so he goes on, nearing the heart of the village with every skip. Off to work.
Now he reaches the Warrior’s Knoll with Warlord’s Castle at the crest. People call it the Warlord’s Castle, but there is no longer any warlord there. Hasn’t been for a hundred or maybe a thousand years. The mayor feels the presence of the warlord regardless, and believes it merits respect.
So, just as he does every morning on his way to work, and every evening on his way back home, he pauses in his skipping progress to stand and salute the memory of that great military leader who fought for, or against, something or somebody we no longer remember.
Warlord’s Knoll is tall and thin.
My long-ago
walk meanders into peach-blossom forests.
I listen. Idle bitches bark –
stilling cockcrows.
Mind’s sudden clarity beyond a world of dust.
Morning
The mayor arrives at the mayor’s office. In fact there isn’t actually a mayor’s office, so he arrives at a shed at the back of Chen’s bar, the lonely bar, the only bar around.
The shed’s relatively spacious, but there are stacks of beer crates and boxes of snacks to contend with. Here he administers the affairs of the village and attends to the requests of his visiting constituents. Nobody has ever once asked him to do this.
A busy morning ahead for the mayor: he has to shift the peanuts to the end of the shed, balance the village budget, and find a cure for Mrs Hao’s incurable pancreatic cancer. He thinks herbs might be the answer, or at very least they’ve never been known to hurt. An answer to the cancer, that is, not to the budget or the peanuts.
Then, just before lunch, he has a preliminary meeting with the newcomers. But first he has to deal with Chen’s melancholy. It’s like rent. Relief of sadness is his payment for occupying Chen’s shed. So he goes into the bar, knowing it’s going to be as tricky as ever to pull the barman out of the deep deep pit of despair that he habitually sinks into. He takes a packet of peanuts with him for sustenance and support.
Blissful people hate the rushing of days, melancholy ones can’t bear the slowing years. Those without joy and without sorrow trust in whatever life might bring them.
When the resonances are right between the crappy old machine and the young woman burbling in her sleep, and my jimsonweed potion eases me into the carrier signal, then I sense that the universe has started to buzz and jitter just especially for me.
That I am the receiver and the whole huge scattering of it, all those billions of years of unthinkable expanse, the stretching infinities of galaxies and all the wafting strings of so many nebulae draped softly over its endlessness, has been made only to signal to me. I am the receiver.
Chen drinks beer with abandon, in full knowledge that gassy buildup will be the only result of its consumption – no joy, just gas. He belches softly and constantly in the same way another more conventionally depressed person might sob.
Nobody is in Chen’s bar. It’s early; most working-age people are out in the fields, most children are at school, most young people are in the army, and most old people are dead. Those ancient departed are the absences he feels most deeply as he sighs and belches in his melancholy. The ones who were here just a little while ago were taken by the great wave of sickness that passed through the district a few years back. Chen wasn’t taken at that time. It’s his greatest regret.
The TV is on in the corner of the bar and it tells of corrupt officials, storms provoking vast landslides, and the latest national rocket going to the moon. This news generates no joy in Chen; the moon is far away and his regret lives right here.
The mayor chimes in: “Now my friend, let’s go for a walk.”
“I can’t leave the bar unattended. Someone might come.”
“Who might come?”
“Someone who needs tea or coffee, perhaps.”
“Let’s play a game of mah-jong.”
“No fun with just two.”
“If we start, more will come along and join in.”
“Who will come?”
“Someone who wants to play a game, I guess.”
These two, Chen and the mayor, look at each other and smile. Chen’s misery is relieved a little; the mayor has paid his rent. He orders a tea and watches the news about the Rabbit on the Moon. Chen whistles to him a very old song about a heavenly rabbit. Neither of them remembers the words.
How exactly does the sky work? Why twelve houses only dwell above? What joins the Sun and Moon like that and who decides the patterns of the stars?
The outsiders drive in just before midday and park their blue BMW in the village square. A donkey comes to inquire politely of them, and it cleans some of the mossy storm debris from their windshield.
If it was expecting a tip for its trouble, a carrot perhaps, or even a friendly pat, it’s sorely disappointed. The taller one of the outsiders – moustachioed, brawny, dressed in a gray fine-patterned suit and purple open-necked silk shirt – makes as if to strike the beast. It runs off. The shorter visitor, emerging from the passenger side, clean-shaven, darker, dressed in gym clothes and festooned with gold, remonstrates at the tall one in their foreign tongue.
Clearly he’s saying that such casually-proferred cruelty against animals is an inauspicious start to their task as emissaries, that it may well be a taboo act in this country to intimate violence to donkeys for all they know, and that he – the taller, the sharply-dressed, the driver – shouldn’t be such a fucking idiot. That much is apparent from his body language and general intonation.
Their glances around the village are not entirely approving. They seem to have seen better villages and who’s to gainsay that? This village is not one of the better ones around. It’s on its last legs, which is precisely why the mayor is so eager to reach an accord with their rich organization. Now they step into Chen’s bar and the delegation is underway.
A message is here, sent from far away and long ago. Says our village is sick. Nobody cares about the emptied lives and shame’s the only vestige of my time.
Noon
Osman and Massoud come from the far west, where only snaggy stones break through the monotony of sand and dust, and quick desert rats like tiny jackrabbits infest the houses, giving their harried cats a run for their money. But that land of theirs has oil, and oil is money, and so it comes about that Osman and Massoud represent a certain mass of that dark heavy wealth which oozes from out of the deep earth’s crust.
Osman is the one in the tracksuit and gold chains, the modernish-looking one with no moustache. He appears to be the boss, and presents the mayor with his freshly-printed business card which still smells of ink. Several of the characters are wrong, but it’s readable enough. He greets the mayor elaborately in a set piece of greeting learned from some long-ago-composed book of protocol.
Massoud is the muscle, it seems, despite the tailored suit in fine Prince-of-Wales check and the silken purple shirt. So the higher status man dresses down, while the low-status man dresses up. This is a thing that westerners like to do, thinks the mayor. It’s either to deceive, or it’s an obscure custom that others like him may not ever understand.
The newcomers take a seat in the corner booth as the mayor mutes the TV. A young Japanese girl is reporting from the western lands, Osman and Massoud’s homeland as it happens, and she is standing in a dusty field telling viewers how she saved a goat from sacrifice and will now set it free. She goes on speaking soundlessly as the mayor sits down opposite the pair.
Barman Chen is still there. Where else would he be? Still chugging beers and getting no relief from them but rather an ever-greater buildup of carbonated gas in his innards. He wanders over to the corner and takes their order. Osman speaks their language well enough, and orders a pair of Fantas. The mayor asks for tea.
When Chen brings the orders on a tray, he’s brought along a beer for himself. He places the drinks down and sits next to the mayor. He seems lost in thoughts. He isn’t really invited to take part in this conversation, but neither is he excluded. It seems he has chosen to be there just for balance,
The pair of locals sit facing the pair of outsiders in the corner booth under the TV. The Japanese reporter girl goes on speaking earnestly and silently, but her eyes seem touched with melancholy too. Outside, a dog howls and a sudden shower lashes the village square.
At first, it brought us great anxiety that my daughter was born this way. My wife concealed her worry in her fussy way, mending more dustcovers and cooking more meals than we needed. Then there was anger that nobody was there to help us; but finally there was acceptance, though a certain amount of sadness too, which never seems to go away anymore.
What helped us to cope was her endless glad laugh at everything: children playing, dogs barking, music and then more music. We learned to see the truth: that she was a being with resonances in other places, that the sounds and the music were just vibrations in some drumskin that stretched across galaxies.
That’s when I started hearing the resonances with her, as she slept to one side of our room. If I slept tip-to-toe, head at the foot of my bed, nearer to her bed, knee crooked, hanging on the soft vibrance of the air as it reaches her, as it made her giggle while sleeping, then I was able to hear it too. That’s when I decided to get the unlicensed transcausal receiver apparatus and pick up the carrier signal for myself.
后未来主装配 “Postfuture Assembly”, is what it says on the card. But ‘assembly’ like a piece of furniture you have to assemble at home. This makes the mayor think that these men of the west, Massoud and Osman, represent some kind of large mechanical structure, like a huge unit that is being pieced together following some cartoonish instruction sheet. They assemble some great thing that now lies in pieces, in its component parts. He comments on this interesting observation, and the perturbed Osman checks his phone for another translation. He passes it over to the mayor to see. In this new translation it’s “Postfuturist Congress”, so the mayor borrows Chen’s pencil, scratches out the characters for mechanical assemblage on the business card and replaces it with the characters for an assembly of people, a rally for a common cause. 后未来主义集会
The Group of People from After the Future, then. Is it a political group? Maybe it’s the government where they’re from. In any case, they are people interested in what happens after the future happens, and so is the mayor. That’s common ground already.
“We have bought the Fighter’s Hill site and will construct a visitor center there for spiritual meetings and study retreats.”
“You mean Warrior Knoll? The Warlord’s Castle?”
Osman asks him to write it down, scans it on his phone, and checks the translation.
“Yes, that’s the place.”
“Won’t the Warlord be angered?”
“Who is the Warlord?”
“He ruled over this land a long time ago. Had his castle there, but now it’s a ruin.”
Osman blinks, murmurs a while with Massoud. “Our surveyors say there is only a derelict site from the Civil War period, a military bunker that collapsed under shelling in 1947.”
“That’s the Warlord’s Castle,” says the mayor. ”You’ll need to do something to placate his spirit if you want to build there.”
Osman says something to Massoud in their language. Massoud writes something down in a notebook.
“That will be taken care of.”
Whose home is this, this weed-strewn lonely hilltop?
Ghosts crowd the place, the wise and the foolish both.
‘Lord of Dead, why are they evicting us from here?’
‘It's just how it is’
– None lingers, they simply float away.
Afternoon
The gentlemen discuss their business over a meal of Chen’s noodles and fried chicken, a hen killed just now by Chen’s wife in the yard behind the mayor’s shed. Gentle childish laughter comes from the upstairs floor above the bar as the chicken dies, clucking wildly, bereft both of head and future. It’s cooked up in a jiffy, fresh as they come. Chen serves their meals and then resumes his seat next to the mayor, sipping beer and belching softly. Nobody else has come in to the bar so far today.
“We seek to expedite and facilitate our coming to this village, to smooth the way so that the local people come to accept us warmly as friends,” says Osman. He doesn’t smile. The friendly warmth he speaks of is purely notional.
“I’m sure that can be done easily enough,” says the mayor. Chen nods solemnly and burps his tacit agreement. “There’s the matter of local situation fees, of course.”
“What is ‘situation fees’?” asks Osman. He’s frowning in concentration, not disapproval. He keeps up a steady patter of commentary in their language to Massoud. Conducting this conversation in another language and interpreting in the way of a running commentary must be exhausting. The mayor is most surprised the operation’s boss would make such an effort for a lowly employee like the bulky Massoud.
“Situation fees... How can I explain?” says the mayor. “There’s a situation here: you want to move into this village, be with us. That’s the situation.” He considers explaining his whole developing philosophy of the situation, how situations exist separate from us, outside of us, waiting for us, that these situations exist just to test us as humans, but decides against it. Brevity.
“This situation incurs fees?” asks Osman. Between mouthfuls, he’s intently babbling his interpretation of this discourse to his underling Massoud, who seems to be greatly enjoying the chicken and noodles. He nods and chews.
“Exactly put,” says the mayor. “You are indeed a very perceptive person with great perspicacity.”
“What is ‘perspicacity’?”
“You know, shrewdness, penetration... You see stuff.”
Chen nudges the mayor. He burps conspiratorially.
“He’s not the only one who sees stuff, eh, mayor?” He’s maybe had one too many bottles of beer, passing from sullen to garrulous without ever having arrived at cheerful. “Seen a few things yourself, haven’t you? Opportunities, like. Situations.”
“Maybe you should make a tea for yourself, Mr Chen.”
“I’m fine right here. Grrrawp. Excuse me.”
“Then perhaps I should make you a tea. It might be good for your digestion. Your stomach seems somewhat disturbed.”
“Be my guest – hwaauup – mister mayor.” He makes room for the mayor to squeeze out of the booth and head behind the bar to boil the kettle.
While at the bar, the mayor hears laughter from upstairs and a pop song he doesn’t recognize. Mrs Chen pops in her head at the stairs, sees him, then ducks back. Her footsteps trail up the stairway, up towards the gurgling laughs. The mayor sees Chen whispering to Osman. He puts the not-yet-boiled water in a cup along with a teabag and hurries back.
You starved in wretched villages, destiny a gutter death foreseen – yet sang all day long of gladness, of glories lived in the everyday
Early evening
They drive away, payment of the situation fee duly completed in hard cash, no haggling. The mayor thinks he could pass on the money to Mrs Wen, whose son has gone a bit funny and started to see clouds of tiny human beings floating around in their backyard. She could do with a holiday, or maybe pay for a nurse to look after the son, or for her old mother who had a fall. The mayor really has no idea how much help the situation fee money can buy for Mrs Wen, but he can just give it to her and see what she decides to do. She’s a sharp lady.
“They were nice,” he says to Chen as the outsiders drive away. Now the car has gone, the donkey ambles back into the village square and brays. This calls forth some laughter from Chen’s upstairs apartment. Up on the second floor, Mrs Chen calls out in a singsong voice to the laughing girl.
“Probably time to give my little one a donkey ride around the village”, says Chen. He’s sobered up quite a lot, maybe thanks to the tepid tea. Not quite so melancholy either, though perhaps a bit more anxious than usual, fidgety and on edge.
“What were you talking to them about?” asks the mayor.
“I just asked them why they were coming to build here,” says Chen.
The mayor feels like such a fool for not even asking this simple question. Why are they even coming to the Warrior’s Knoll?
“So what did they say?” he asks.
“They said there are emanations, resonances, moving on the carrier signal in this district. They want to be here to pick up on them.”
“What absolute crap! Whoever heard of such nonsense? Right, Chen?”
“Well... they may have a point. There is quite a strong signal here. Massoud said it was from UFOs, you know, flying saucers and that. But I don’t really think so. The signals don’t sound like from some alien.”
They step inside the bar to find that a number of farmers have stepped in to play mah-jong. They’ve served themselves beers and marked up their own tab. The TV is on again and they’re talking about a major trial in the city. Local official sentenced to death for corruption. Clampdown. Chen switches to a pop video channel.
The mayor is about to leave, but something suddenly occurs to him. He stops, turns back to Chen.
“Chen, you said you were talking to Massoud about aliens.”
“Not necessarily aliens. Could be time travelers from the future. Or maybe ghosts from the past, using some kind of spirit vehicle, you know? Sizing up the situation.”
“But you were talking to Massoud. The tall one with a moustache?”
“Yeah.”
“Why him? The other one was the boss.”
“Osman? No, mayor, Osman’s just the interpreter. Massoud’s the boss.”
“He’s the boss! Well, fuck! I never even looked at him once the whole time!”
“He said it was strange that you were ignoring him like that. Kinda rude.”
Chen walks over to the mah-jong players at the back and has a quiet word. The mayor stands at the bar and runs the whole afternoon over and back in his head like a looping video. He badly misjudged the situation. Some moments sting like whipcracks as he resees them. The man he thought was boss wasn’t even the boss, just a flunkey. What else has he misjudged?
He walks out of the bar and begins to trudge home.
There are things that the carrier signal sings to me when I drink my jimsonweed juice and ride the wave between the cracked apparatus and the spiral-shaped body of the girl in the bed who burbles so happily through the night.
They tell me everything will be well. This is why my daughter laughs so hard. She knows this, though they say she knows nothing at all. She knows this one thing, though, and who else knows it? Nobody, that’s why they fuss around with their nonsense. They are frightened to go transcausal, so they hide it with their jobs and their shuffling of money from here to there.
Meanwhile she and I, and maybe even the FoxConn transcausal receiver machine itself, hum in harmony and sing in joy. We tune in to the carrier signal wave, and we sine up and down its flowing back like porpoises.
Sunset
Li and Bi, as they hoe the field scrubbing weeds from between the melon patch rows, expect to see the mayor skipping back to his home from the village, just as he does every evening. They expect to see him stop across from them and salute the Warlord on the hill in his ruined castle.
But he doesn’t do any of that. Oh, he comes back by the usual route, alright. But he doesn’t stop to salute, in fact he barely looks up at the Warrior’s Knoll as he trudges towards where they work. He doesn’t see Mr Chen the barman jogging up the path behind him as they do.
Chen reaches the mayor just as he arrives at the spot in the melon patch where Li and Bi are hoeing the furrows. All four have converged to this point, just as the sun declines to a point just above the Warlord’s Castle, streaked in black strips of stormcloud now broken.
“Mayor – I’m glad – caught up – to you.” Chen is breathless, panting hard. He may well upchuck on the melons. He’s no longer young. But then nobody really is anymore, not even those few children who still straggle listlessly around the village at weekends. Who even has the energy for running?
While they wait for Chen to get his breath back, and wonder if he will actually vomit before he can speak, they observe the full moon standing over the eastern mountains. The Sun and the Moon, Li and Bi, the mayor and the sad barkeep: the gang’s all here.
“Mayor, I did something very bad back in the bar.” Panting still, but coherent, Chen is able to relate his story. “It was a mistake, but I’d been drinking and it seemed like the right thing. I’m sorry.”
“Chen, what is it?” says the mayor. Li and Bi crowd closer, leaning on their hoes.
“I... I told those men, Massoud and the interpreter guy, that you were a corrupt official, that they had to report you and claim a reward for helping to clear out the swamp of bureaucratic corruption in the district administration.” Gulping air. “To pay you, then turn you in.”
“But Chen, I’m not even really an official! I just do it to help, like a volunteer!”
“I forgot... Like I said, I was maybe drinking too much and I did the wrong thing. Sorry.”
“They execute corrupt local officials now, “ says Li. “Bullet to the back of the head. Painless.”
“I hope they don’t shoot you in the head, Mister Mayor,” says Bi. “I always liked you.”
Chen now starts vomiting on the melon patch. Seems the strain is too much. Remorse or something, maybe. Bad beer and poor fitness.
“Chen, I’m not even going to keep the money for myself!” says the mayor. “I never keep the money I collect! I was going to give it to Mrs Wen. Her son has gone mental now, and she could really use it.”
“I know – “ gasps Chen between retches. He’s on his knees now. “Clouds of tiny men or something.” Retch. “I’m so sorry, mayor. So so sorry.”
There is a moment when the retching stops, when the rising moon to the east and the sinking sun to the west balance out. When Li and Bi sigh at the same moment, leaning on their tools and considering retribution and mercy. When the mayor sinks into a sort of serenity, thinking that the waves of happenstance that flow through all things are probably all for the best. Even the tormented barman Chen is still, rocking on his knees and mind empty of everything.
Then the siren of a single police car can be heard, closing on their place at the foot of the Warrior’s Knoll.
The sun and moon are both in the sky. These are days that leave no mark. Behind the backs of the brown farmers I bend to thump a fat watermelon whose green is tinged yellow from the setting sun curving beyond me.
The signal is clearer now that others have come here to boost it. When the moon is full, that’s when it’s at its strongest. I hit the jimsonweed nectar and I lie hanging onto the waves of soft laughing across the room, the chimes and peeps from the other side. The carrier frequency resonates through the night and it throbs and buffers through my soul.
I’m riding the wave of night, just hanging on, my head at the foot of the bed, my right foot at the head, left knee crooked and pointing across myself as if I were a giant upside-down number four.
Or a vehicle that’s coming off the road.
man this is so cool. terrific writing
Oh man, this is cool. And well written, as always. Nice one, A.P.!