“Ghosts don’t live by our rules. Each ghost is different. Good ghosts, bad ghosts, happy ghosts, sad ghosts. Ghosts of people who die when they’re old, when they’re young, when they’re small. You think baby ghosts behave the same as grandfather ghosts?”
I knew nothing about ghosts. I had not believed in ghosts and neither did anyone else I knew except for my mother and Victor, who himself seemed spectral, the heat of grief rendering him pale and nearly translucent, his only color coming from a burst of uncombed red hair. Even with him the otherworldly came up only twice, once on the phone and once in his living room. Nothing had been touched since the day his family left for the airport, not even the sorrowful dust. I had the impression that the windows had not been opened since that day, as if he wanted to preserve the depleted air that his wife and children had breathed before they suffered their bad deaths, so far from home. “The dead move on,” he had said, coiled in his armchair, hands between his thighs. “But the living, we just stay here.”
These words opened his last chapter, the one I worked on after my mother went to sleep and I descended into the bright basement, illuminated with fluorescent tubes. I wrote one sentence, then paused to listen for a knock or steps on the stairway. My rhythm through the night was established, a few lines followed by a wait for something that did not come, the next day more of the same. The conclusion of Victor’s memoir was in sight when my mother came home from the nail salon with shopping bags from Chinatown, one full of groceries, the other with underwear, a pair of pajamas, blue jeans, a denim jacket, a pack of socks, knit gloves, a baseball cap. After stacking them next to his dried and ironed T-shirt and shorts, she said, “He can’t be wandering out in the cold with what you gave him, like a homeless person or some illegal immigrant.” When I said that I hadn’t thought of it that way, she snorted, annoyed by my ignorance of the needs of ghosts. Only after dinner did she warm up again. Her mood had improved because instead of retreating to my basement as usual, I had stayed to watch one of the soap operas she rented by the armfuls, serials of beautiful Korean people snared in romantic tangles. “If we hadn’t had a war,” she said that night, her wistfulness drawing me closer, “we’d be like the Koreans now. Saigon would be Seoul, your father alive, you married with children, me a retired housewife, not a manicurist.” Her hair was in curlers, and a bowl of watermelon seeds was in her lap. “I’d spend my days visiting friends and being visited, and when I died, a hundred people would come to my funeral. I’d be lucky if twenty people will come here, with you taking care of things. That frightens me more than anything. You can’t even remember to take out the garbage or pay the bills. You won’t even go outside to shop for groceries.”
“I’d remember to take care of your soul.”
“When would you hold the wake? When would the cele-bration of my death anniversary be? What would you say?”
“Write it down for me,” I said. “What I’m supposed to say.”
“Your brother would have known what to do,” she said. “That’s what sons are for.”
To this I had no reply.
When he had still not appeared by eleven, my mother went to sleep. I descended to my basement once more and tried to write. Writing was entering into fog, feeling my way for a route from this world to the unearthly world of words, a route easier to find on some days than others. Lurking on my shoulder as I stumbled through the grayness was the parrot of a question, asking me how I lived and he died. I was younger and weaker, yet it was my brother we buried, letting him slip into the ocean without a shroud or a word from me. The wailing of my mother and the sobbing of my father rose in my memory, but neither drowned out my own silence. Now it was right to say a few words, to call him back as he must have wanted, but I could not find them. Just when I thought another night would pass without his return, I heard the knock at the top of the stairs. I believe, I reminded myself. I believe that he would never harm me.
“Don’t knock,” I said when I opened the door. “It’s your home, too.”
He merely stared at me, and we lapsed into an awkward silence. Then he said, “Thank you.” His voice was stronger now, almost as high-pitched as I remembered, and this time he did not look away. He still wore my T-shirt and shorts, but when I showed him the clothes that my mother had bought, he said, “I don’t need those.”
“You’re wearing what I gave you.”
His silence went on for so long I thought he might not have heard me.
“We wear them for the living,” he said at last. “Not for us.”
I led him to the couch. “You mean ghosts?”
He sat down next to me, considering my question before answering.
“We always knew ghosts existed,” he said.
“I had my doubts.” I held his hand. “Why have you come back?”
His gaze was discomforting. He had not blinked once.
“I haven’t come back,” he said. “I’ve come here.”
“You haven’t left this world yet?”
He nodded.
“Why not?”
Again he was silent. Finally he said, “Why do you think?”
I looked away. “I’ve tried to forget.”