Ghostwritten Read online

  Night stole over the land again, dissolving it in shadows and blue. Every ten or twenty miles tongues of campfire licked the darkness.

  Caspar’s mental clock was several hours out, so he decided to turn in. I could have adjusted it for him, but I decided to let him sleep. He went to the toilet, splashed water over his face, and cleaned his teeth with water he disinfected in a bottle with iodine. Sherry was outside our compartment when he came back, her face pressed against the glass. Caspar thought, ‘How beautiful.’ ‘Hello,’ he said.

  ‘Hello.’ Sherry’s eyes turned towards my host.

  ‘How’s the War and Peace? I have to admit, I’ve never read any Russians.’

  ‘Long.’

  ‘What’s it about?’

  ‘Why things happen the way they do.’

  ‘And why do things happen the way they do?’

  ‘I don’t know, yet. It’s very long.’ She watched her breath mist up the window. ‘Look at it. All this space, and almost no people in it. It almost reminds me of home.’

  Caspar joined her at the window. After a mile had passed: ‘Why are you here?’

  She thought for a while. ‘It’s the last place, y’know? Lost in the middle of Asia, not in the east, not in the west. Lost as Mongolia, it could be an expression. How about you?’

  Some drunk Russians up the corridor groaned with laughter.

  ‘I don’t really know. I was on my way to Laos, when this impulse just came over me. I told myself there was nothing here, but I couldn’t fight it. Mongolia! I’ve never even thought about the place. Maybe I smoked too much pot at Lake Dal.’

  A half-naked Chinese toddler ran up the corridor, making a zun-zun noise which may have been a helicopter, or maybe a horse.

  ‘How long have you been travelling?’ asked Caspar, not wanting the conversation to lag.

  ‘Ten months. You?’

  ‘Three years, this May.’

  ‘Three years! Oath, you are a terminal case!’ Sherry’s face turned into a huge yawn. ‘Sorry, I’m bushed. Being cooped up doing nothing is exhausting work. Do you think our Austrian friends have shut up the casino for the night?’

  ‘I only hope they have shut up the joke factory. You don’t know how lucky you are, not speaking German.’

  Back in their compartment, the Austrians were snoring in stereo. Sherry bolted the door. The gentle sway of the train lulled Caspar towards sleep. He was thinking about Sherry.

  Sherry peered over the bunk above him. ‘Do you know a good bedtime story?’

  Caspar was not a natural storyteller, so I stepped in. ‘I know one story. It’s a Mongolian story. Well, not so much a story as a sort of legend.’

  ‘I’d love to hear it,’ Sherry smiled, and Caspar’s heart missed a gear.

  There are three who think about the fate of the world.

  First there is the crane. See how lightly he treads, picking his way between the rocks in the river? Tossing, and tilting back his head. The crane believes that if he takes just one heavy step, the mountains will collapse and the ground will quiver and trees that have stood for a thousand years will tumble.

  Second, the locust. All day the locust sits on a pebble, thinking that one day the flood will come and deluge the world, and all living things will be lost in the churn and the froth and black waves. That is why the locust keeps such a watchful eye on the high peaks, and the rainclouds that might be gathering there.

  Third, the bat. The bat believes that the sky may fall and shatter, and all living things die. Thus the bat dangles from a high place, fluttering up to the sky, and down to the ground, and up to the sky again, checking that all is well.

  That was the story, way back at the beginning.

  Sherry had fallen asleep, and Caspar wondered for a moment where this story had come from. I closed his mind and nudged it towards sleep. I watched his dreams come and go for a little while. There was a dream about defending a gothic palace built on sand flats with pool cues, and one about his sister and niece. His father entered the dream, pushing a motorbike down the corridor of the Trans-Siberian express with a sidecar full of money that kept blowing away. Drunk and demanding as ever, he asked Caspar what the devil he thought he was playing at, and insisting that Caspar still had some very important videotapes. Caspar had become a half-naked little boy and knew nothing about them.

  My own infancy was spent at the foot of the Holy Mountain. There was a dimness, which I later learned lasted many years. It took me that long to learn how to remember. I imagine a bird beginning as an ‘I’. Slowly, the bird understands that it is a thing different from the ‘It’ of its shell. The bird perceives its containment, and as its sensory organs begin to function it becomes aware of light and dark, cold and heat. As sensation sharpens, it seeks to break out. Then one day, it starts to struggle against the gluey gel and brittle walls, and cannot stop until it is out and alone in the vertiginous world, made of wonder, and fear, and colours, made of unknown things.

  But even back then, I was wondering: Why am I alone?

  The sun woke Caspar. He had dried tears in his eyes and his mouth tasted of watch-straps. He badly wished he had some fresh fruit to eat. And the Austrians had already beaten him to the bathroom. He slid out of bed, and we saw Sherry was meditating. Caspar pulled on his jeans and tried to slip out of the compartment without disturbing her.

  ‘Good morning, and welcome to Sunny Mongolia,’ Sherry murmured. ‘We get there in three hours.’

  ‘Sorry I disturbed you,’ said Caspar.

  ‘You didn’t. And if you look in that plastic bag hanging off the coat hook, you should find some pears. Have one for breakfast.’

  ‘So,’ said Sherry, four hours later. ‘Grand Central Station, Ulan Bator.’

  ‘Strange,’ said Caspar, wanting to express himself in Danish.

  The whitewash was bright in the pristine noon sun. The never-silent wind blew on over the plains, into the vanishing point where the rails led. The signs were in the Cyrillic alphabet, which neither Caspar nor any of my previous hosts knew. Chinese hawkers barged off the train, heaving bags of goods to sell, shouting to one another in familiar Mandarin. A couple of listless young Mongolians on military service fingered their rifles, thinking of where they would rather be. A group of steely old women were waiting to get on the train, bound for Irkutsk. Their families had come to see them off. Two figures hovered in the wings, in black suits and sunglasses. Some youths sat on a wall, looking at the girls.

  ‘I feel like I’ve climbed out of a dark box into a carnival of aliens,’ said Sherry.

  ‘Sherry, I know, erm, as a young lady, you have to be careful of who you trust when you’re travelling, but, I was wondering—’

  ‘Stop sounding like a Pom. Yes, sure. I won’t jump you if you don’t jump me. Now. Your Lonely Planet says there’s a halfway decent hotel in the Sansar district, at the eastern end of Sambuu Street . . . Follow me . . .’

  I let Sherry take care of my host. One less thing for me to worry about. The Austrians said goodbye and headed off to the Kublai Khan Holiday Inn, no longer laughing. The Israeli team nodded at us and marched off in another direction. Caspar had already forgotten about the Swede.

  Backpackers are strange. I have a lot in common with them. We live nowhere, and we are strangers everywhere. We drift, often on a whim, searching for something to search for. We are both parasites: I live in my hosts’ minds, and sift through his or her memories to understand the world. Caspar’s breed live in a host country that is never their own, and use its culture and landscape to learn, or stave off boredom. To the world at large we are both immaterial and invisible. We chew the secretions of solitude. My incredulous Chinese hosts who saw the first backpackers regarded them as quite alien entities. Which is exactly how humans would regard me.

  All minds pulse in a unique way, just as every lighthouse in the world has a unique signature. Some minds pulse consistently, some erratically. Some are lukewarm, some are hot. Some flare out, some are very nearl
y not there. Some stay on the fringe, like quasars. For me, a roomful of animals and humans is like a roomful of suns, of differing magnitudes and colours, and gravities.

  Caspar, too, has come to regard most people as blips on a radar. Caspar is as lonely as me.

  ‘Did I blink?’ remarked Sherry. ‘Where’s the city? Beijing was a city, Shanghai was a city. This is a ghost town.’

  ‘It’s like East Germany in the Iron Curtain days.’

  Ranks and files of faceless apartment blocks, with cracks in the walls and boards for windows. A large pipeline mounted on concrete stilts. Cratered roads, with only a few dilapidated cars trundling up and down. Goats eating weeds in a city square. Silent factories. Statues of horses and little toy tanks. A woman with a basket of eggs stepping carefully between the broken flagstones and smashed bottles and wobbling drunks. Streetlights, ready to topple. A once-mighty power station spewing out a black cloud over the city. On the far side of the city was a gigantic fairground wheel that Caspar and I doubted would ever turn again. Three westerners in black suits walked by. Caspar thought they were in the wrong place and time.

  Ulan Bator was much bigger than the village at the foot of the Holy Mountain, but the people we saw here lacked any sense of purpose. They just seemed to be waiting. Waiting for something to open, for the end of the day, for their city to be switched on, or just waiting to be fed.

  Caspar readjusted the straps on his backpack. ‘My Secret History of Genghis Khan did not prepare me for this.’

  That night Caspar dug into his mutton and onion stew with relish. He and Sherry were the only diners in the hotel, which was actually the sixth and seventh floors of a crumbling apartment building.

  The woman who had brought the food from the kitchen looked at him blankly. Caspar pointed at it, gave her a thumbs up sign, smiled and grunted approvingly.

  The woman looked at Caspar as though he were a madman, and left.

  Sherry snorted. ‘She’s about as welcoming as the customs woman at the border.’

  ‘One of the things that my years of wandering has taught me is, the more impotent the country, the more dangerous its customs officials.’

  ‘When she showed us the room she gave me a look like I’d run over her baby with a bulldozer.’

  Caspar picked out a bit of fleece from a meatball. ‘Service-sector communism. It’s quite a legacy. She’s stuck here, remember. We can get out whenever we want.’

  He had some instant lemon tea from Beijing. There was a flask of hot water on the sideboard, so he made a cup for himself and Sherry, and they watched the waxy moon rise over the suburb of gers and campfires. ‘So,’ began Caspar. ‘Tell me more about that Hong Kong pub you worked in. What was the name? Mad Dogs?’

  ‘I’d rather hear more stories of the weirdos you met during your jewellery-selling days in Okinawa. Go on, Vikingman, it’s your turn.’

  So many times in a lifetime do my hosts feel the beginnings of friendship. All I can do is watch.

  As my infancy progressed, I became aware of another presence in ‘my’ body. Stringy mists of colour and emotion condensed into droplets of understanding. I saw, and slowly came to recognise, gardens, paths, barking dogs, rice fields, sunlit washing drying in warm town breezes. I had no idea why these images came when they did. Like being plugged into a plotless movie. Slowly I walked down the path trodden by all humans, from the mythic to the prosaic. Unlike humans, I remember the path.

  Something was happening on my side of the screen of perception, too. Like a radio slowly being turned up, so slowly that at first you cannot be sure of it being there. Slowly, I felt an entity that was not me generating sensations, which only later could I label loyalty, love, anger, ill-will. I watched this other clarify, and pull into focus. I began to be afraid. I thought it was the intruder! I thought the mind of my first host was the cuckoo’s egg, that would hatch and drive me out. So one night, while my host was asleep, I tried to penetrate this other presence.

  My host tried to scream but I would not let him wake. Instinctively, his mind made itself rigid and tight. I prised my way through, clumsily, not knowing how strong I had become, ripping my way through memories and neural control, gouging out great chunks. Fear of losing the fight made me more violent than I ever intended. I had sought to subdue, not to lay waste.

  When the morning brought the doctor he found my first host unresponsive to any form of stimulus. Naturally, the doctor could find no injury on the patient’s body, but he knew a coma when he saw one. In south-west China in the 1950s there were no facilities for people with comas. My host died a few weeks later, taking any clues of my origin that may have been buried in his memories with him. They were hellish weeks. I discovered my mistake – I had been the intruder. I tried to undo some of the damage, and piece back together some of the vital functions and memories, but it is so much easier to destroy than it is to re-create, and back then I knew nothing. I learned that my victim had fought as a brigand in bad times or a soldier in good ones in northern China. I found fragments of spoken languages which I would later know as Mongolian and Korean, but he had been illiterate. That was all. I couldn’t ascertain how long I had been embryonic.

  I assumed that if my host died, I would share his death. I turned all my energies to learning how to perform what I now call transmigration. Two days before he died, I succeeded. My second host was the doctor of my first. I looked back at the soldier. A middle-aged man lay on his soiled bed, stretched out on his frame of bones. I felt guilt, relief, and I felt power.

  I stayed in the doctor for two years, learning about humans and inhumanity. I learned how to read my hosts’ memories, to erase them, and replace them. I learned how to control my hosts. Humanity was my toy. But I also learned caution. One day I announced to my host that a disembodied entity had been living in his mind for two years, and would he like to ask me anything?

  The poor man went quite mad, and I had to transmigrate again. The human mind is so fragile a toy. So puny!

  Three nights later the waitress slammed a bowl of mutton down in front of Caspar. She had turned and gone before he had a chance to groan.

  ‘Mutton fat for dinner,’ beamed Sherry. ‘There’s a surprise.’

  The waitress cleared the other tables. Caspar was experimenting at using mind control to make his mutton taste like turkey. I resisted the temptation to help him succeed. Sherry was reading. ‘Get this for Soviet doublespeak. From the nineteen forties, during Choilbalsan’s presidency. It says, “In the final analysis, life demonstrated the expediency of using the Russian alphabet.” What the author says this means, is that if you used Mongolian they shot you. Oath, how did people live under a master race like that, and why—’

  The next moment all the lights in the building died.

  Dim light came from the window of smoke stars, and a glowing red sign in Cyrillic beyond the wasteland. We had wondered what the sign meant, and we did again now.

  Sherry chuckled and lit a cigarette. Her eyes reflected little flames. ‘I suppose you paid the power station ten dollars to stage this black-out, just to get me alone in a dark room with the manly smell of mutton.’

  Caspar smiled in the darkness and I recognised love. It forms like a weather pattern. ‘Sherry, let’s hire the jeep from tomorrow. We’ve seen the temple, seen the old palace. I’m feeling like a moody tourist. I hate feeling like a moody tourist. The Fräulein at the German embassy reckoned there would be a delivery of gas in the morning.’

  ‘Why the rush?’

  ‘The place is going backwards in time. I feel the end of the world is waiting in those mountains, somewhere . . . We should get out before the nineteenth century comes around again.’

  ‘That’s a part of U.B.’s charm. Its ramshackleness.’

  ‘I don’t know what ramshackleness means, but there is nothing charming about this place. Ulan Bator proves that Mongolians cannot do cities. You could set a movie about a doomed colony of germ-warfare survivors here. Let’s get out. I don’t ev
en know why I’m here. I don’t think the people who live here know either.’

  The waitress walked in and put a candle on our table. Caspar thanked her in Mongolian. She walked out. ‘Come the revolution, darling . . .’ thought Caspar.

  Sherry started shuffling a pack of cards. ‘You mean Mongolians are designed for arduous lifetimes of flock-tending, child-bearing, frostbite, illiteracy, Giardia lamblia, and ger-dwelling?’

  ‘I don’t want to argue. I want to drive to the Khangai mountains, climb mountains, ride horses, bathe naked in lakes and discover what I am doing on Earth.’

  ‘Okay, Vikingman, we’ll move on tomorrow. Let’s play cribbage. I believe I’m winning, thirty-seven games to nine.’

  I would need to move on soon, too. Hosted by a Mongolian, my quest in this country was formidable. Hosted by a foreigner, my quest was plainly impossible.

  I was here to find the source of the story that was already there, right at the beginning of ‘I’, sixty years ago. The story began, There are three who think about the fate of the world . . .

  Once or twice I’ve tried to describe transmigration to the more imaginative of my human hosts. It’s impossible. I know eleven languages, but there are some tunes that language cannot play.

  When another human touches my host, I can transmigrate. The ease of the transfer depends on the mind I am transmigrating into, and whether negative emotions are blocking me. The fact that touch is a requisite provides a clue that I exist on some physical plane, however sub-cellular or bio-electrical. There are limits. For example, I cannot transmigrate into animals, even primates: if I try the animal dies. It is like an adult’s inability to climb into children’s clothes. I’ve never tried a whale.

  But how it feels, this transmigration, how to describe that! Imagine a trapeze artist in a circus, spinning in emptiness. Or a snooker ball lurching around the table. Arriving in a strange town after a journey through turbid weather.