ghosts: I always felt perfectly calm, as if my whole body had been soaked in a mild tranquilizer. I politely asked this little girl in Chinese who she was. And she said, ‘Lili-lili, lili-lili,’ in a high squeal.
When I threw my Barbie doll onto Kwan’s bed, this lili-lili girl picked it up. She took off Barbie’s pink feather boa, peered under the matching satin sheath dress. She violently twisted the arms and legs. ‘Don’t break her,’ I warned. The whole time I could feel her curiosity, her wonder, her fear that the doll was dead. Yet I never questioned why we had this emotional symbiosis. I was too worried that she’d take Barbie home with her. I said, ‘That’s enough. Give her back.’ And this little girl pretended she didn’t hear me. So I went over and yanked the doll out of her hands, then returned to my bed.
Right away I noticed the feather boa was missing. ‘Give it back!’ I shouted. But the girl was gone, which alarmed me, because only then did my normal senses return, and I knew she was a ghost. I searched for the feather boa – under the covers, between the mattress and the wall, beneath both twin beds. I couldn’t believe that a ghost could take something real and make it disappear. I hunted all week for that feather boa, combing through every drawer, pocket, and corner. I never found it. I decided that the girl ghost really had stolen it.
Now I can think of more logical explanations. Maybe Captain took it and buried it in the backyard. Or my mom sucked it up into the vacuum cleaner. It was probably something like that. But when I was a kid, I didn’t have strong enough boundaries between imagination and reality. Kwan saw what she believed. I saw what I didn’t want to believe.
When I was a little older, Kwan’s ghosts went the way of other childish beliefs, like Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny. I did not tell Kwan that. What if she went over the edge again? Privately I replaced her notions of ghosts and the World of Yin with Vatican-endorsed saints and a hereafter that ran on the merit system. I gladly subscribed to the concept of collecting goody points, like those S&H green stamps that could be pasted into booklets and redeemed for toasters and scales. Only instead of getting appliances, you received a one-way ticket to heaven, hell, or purgatory, depending on how many good and bad deeds you’d done and what other people said about you. Once you made it to heaven, though, you didn’t come back to earth as a ghost, unless you were a saint. This would probably not be the case with me.
I once asked my mom what heaven was, and she said it was a permanent vacation spot, where all humans were now equal – kings, queens, hoboes, teachers, little kids. ‘Movie stars?’ I asked. Mom said I could meet all kinds of people, as long as they had been nice enough to get into heaven. At night, while Kwan rattled on with her Chinese ghosts, I would list on my fingers the people I wanted to meet, trying to put them in some sort of order of preference, if I was limited to meeting, say, five a week. There was God, Jesus, and Mary – I knew I was supposed to mention them first. And then I’d ask for my father and any other close family members who might have passed on – although not Daddy Bob. I’d wait a hundred years before I put him on my dance card. So that took care of the first week, sort of boring but necessary. The next week was when the good stuff would begin. I’d meet famous people, if they were already dead – the Beatles, Hayley Mills, Shirley Temple, Dwayne Hickman – and maybe Art Linkletter, the creep, who’d finally realize why he should have had me on his dumb show.
By junior high, my version of the afterlife was a bit more somber. I pictured it as a place of infinite knowledge, where all things would be revealed – sort of like our downtown library, only bigger, where pious voices enumerating what thou shall and shall not do echoed through loudspeakers. Also, if you were slightly but not hopelessly bad, you didn’t go to hell, but you had to pay a huge fine. Or maybe if you did something worse, you went to a place similar to continuation school, which was where all the bad kids ended up, the ones who smoked, ran away from home, shoplifted, or had babies out of wedlock. But if you had followed the rules, and didn’t wind up a burden on society, you could advance right away to heaven. And there you’d learn the answers to all the stuff your catechism teachers kept asking you, like:
What should we learn as human beings?
Why should we help others less fortunate than ourselves?
How can we prevent wars?
I also figured I’d learn what happened to certain things that were lost, such as Barbie’s feather boa and, more recently, my rhinestone necklace, which I suspected my brother Tommy had filched, even though he said, ‘I didn’t take it, swear to God.’ What’s more, I wanted to look up the answers to a few unsolved mysteries, like: Did Lizzie Borden kill her parents? Who was the Man in the Iron Mask? What really happened to Amelia Earhart? And out of all the people on death row who had been executed, who was actually guilty and who was innocent? For that matter, which felt worst, being hanged, gassed, or electrocuted? In between all these questions, I’d find the proof that it was my father who told the truth about how Kwan’s mother died, not Kwan.
By the time I went to college, I didn’t believe in heaven and hell anymore, none of those metaphors for reward and punishment based on absolute good and evil. I had met Simon by then. He and I would get stoned with our friends and talk about the afterlife: ‘It just doesn’t make sense, man – I mean, you live for less than a hundred years, then everything’s added up and, boom, you go on for billions of years after that, either lying on the proverbial beach or roasting on a spit like a hot dog.’ And we couldn’t buy the logic that Jesus was the only way. That meant that Buddhists and Hindus and Jews and Africans who had never even heard of Christ Almighty were doomed to hell, while Ku Klux Klan members were not. Between tokes, we’d speak while trying not to exhale: ‘Wow, what’s the point in that kind of justice? Like, what does the universe learn after that?’
Most of our friends believed there was nothing after death – lights out, no pain, no reward, no punishment. One guy, Dave, said immortality lasted only as long as people remembered you. Plato, Confucius, Buddha, Jesus – they were immortal, he said. He said this after Simon and I attended a memorial service for a friend, Eric, whose number came up in the draft and who was killed in Vietnam.
‘Even if they weren’t really the way they’re now remembered?’ Simon asked.
Dave paused, then said, ‘Yeah.’
‘What about Eric?’ I asked. ‘If people remember Hitler longer than Eric, does that mean Hitler is immortal but Eric isn’t?’
Dave paused again. But before he could answer, Simon said firmly, ‘Eric was great. Nobody will ever forget Eric. And if there’s a paradise, that’s where he is right now.’ I remember I loved Simon for saying that. Because that’s what I felt too.
How did those feelings disappear? Did they vanish like the feather boa, disappear when I wasn’t looking? Should I have tried harder to find them again?
It’s not just grudges that I hang on to. I remember a girl on my bed. I remember Eric. I remember the power of inviolable love. In my memory, I still have a place where I keep all those ghosts.
My mother has another new boyfriend, Jaime Jofré. I don’t have to meet him to know he’ll have charm, dark hair, and a green card. He’ll speak with an accent and my mother will later ask me, ‘Isn’t he passionate?’ To her, words are more ardent if a man must struggle to find them, if he says ‘amor’ with a trill rather than ordinary ‘love.’
Romantic though she is, my mother is a practical woman. She wants proof of love: Give and you should receive. A bouquet, ballroom dancing
