300 for 30: Day 7

We had a yard sale today. To be more accurate, we participated as one table in a mega yard sale today. The Vientiane International School, which I attended from late 1996 to early 2000 - though they have a new, bigger campus now - holds one every year. My parents are moving from Laos to China and need to get rid of a lot of stuff. We spent several hours, spread over this past week, sorting out eight boxes' worth of old but good-quality flotsam.

The heartwarming thing about this yard sale, rather than an ordinary one, is that for the Lao people who come this is a major shopping extravaganza, a chance to get exotic foreign products without having to cross the border to Thailand. Laos is emerging from communism much the way China and Vietnam are, and though the markets are opening up many things are simply not available. The school charges shoppers entrance, and we still get what seems like hundreds of people looking for bargains. Today there were also bratwursts for sale, a variety of drinks and snacks, and pony/carriage rides. An enterprising coffee shop was giving out samples as well as selling cups of java, in those little paper cups designed for hot beverages that have butterfly-wing handles you unfold so they stick out. I've never seen those in the U.S. They're almost too cute.

Mom said I was giving people too much leeway in bargaining, but I figured the Prime Directive was to get rid of things rather than to make a big profit. Phi (Big Sister) Nu Kit, our cook/housekeeper, who was my nanny the first time we were here, was a tough bargainer as well, but she tends to indulge me in everything because she considers me her first child. I gave a steep discount to a family buying a bike helmet for their son, because I don't want to be responsible for him cracking his head open. I got this vision of him getting in a crash and dying, and his family weeping, "If only that rich foreign girl who spoke such good Lao had reduced the price by 20,000 kip!" (It's 8,000 kip to the dollar at the moment.)

I kept getting confused by the zeros, as I always do here, what with inflation. A lot of people are willing to pay in or get paid in the Thai Baht, it being a stronger currency. Nu Kit helped me with the accounting. The big, industrial fan periodically blowing on us often blew away bills, but we used an old keepsake box to collect them. We made about $200. Mom promises to buy me a black (or brown) trench (or pea) coat when we get back to the U.S. in July. I accepted that in lieu of a share of the cash.

There were a lot of beaming children, and one ecstatic expatriate who bought at least seven books, a great thing in a country with a paucity of good bookstores in any language, let alone English. We're donating the rest to an annual charity bazaar Mom has been affiliated with in the past. I hope people enjoy their purchases.

Raw Ghosts Chap. 12-13

For Sam's sake, and for the sake of anyone else who wants to read it, I'm putting my drafts of my The Raw Ghosts of Thailand expansion up here so she can enjoy and comment, as I've decided to not post anything new on Fictionpress. For those who don't know, our favorite virtuous vampires Ferdinand and Nat have been coping with Ferdinand's suicide attempt in Dad and I Are Sort of Human by going on a vacation to Thailand. Unfortunately, they've been captured by Well-Intentioned Extremist scientists studying vampires as a possible source of an AIDS cure. Taylor Calvin, who was studying abroad, gets caught up in it. One of the other vampire test subjects, Miriam, has died giving birth to a baby that has gestated for three years.

Chapter 12: Alone, and Yet, Alive

They awoke when the metal door clanged open, and a squadron of technicians and other professional types with rubber gloves and surgical masks came to collect Miriam. None of the vampires said a word, concentrating on cowering against the walls. Taylor squeezed Ferdinand’s hand so tightly it hurt.

Then one of the scientists tried to grab the baby. Nat clutched onto Rivki as best he could, but he was tasered into unconsciousness and the howling infant wrenched from his insensible grasp. Something hot and acrid coiled in Ferdinand’s chest, and he extricated his fingers from Taylor’s.
“No!” he shouted, bolting up and trying to take the baby back.

“We need to run tests,” the scientist replied, attempting to hold Rivki’s writhing little body in one arm and menacing Ferdinand with the other.

“You let Miriam die. You wanted us to kill Taylor. I don’t trust you.” His voice was very quiet and full of seething rage.

“I don’t want to hurt you unnecessarily.”

“Oh, I do.” The ensuing punch that he managed to land - just before he, too, was sent into the electrical pain and silence - broke the scientist’s nose.

****

Ferdinand woke in complete darkness. He tried to sit up and promptly hit his head. A second, more cautious attempt allowed him to sit as long as he maintained a stooped posture. The walls were all just barely beyond arms’ length away; fingertips came upon a small, drafty gap that he supposed was allowing him air. He felt himself to be naked. It was cold.

He figured out quickly that this was meant as punitive solitary confinement. They would let him out eventually to do more tests, presuming that he’d learned a lesson and would “behave” to their liking. It was just a matter of mental toughness for however long they decided he should stay there.

Ferdinand felt the familiar silvery taste of depression at the back of his throat and contemplated using his fangs to score distracting wounds on his arms. He decided to keep that in reserve, a cold comfort to be his companion. He hugged himself to preserve what little body heat he had.

At least it wasn’t blisteringly bright in here. He preferred darkness. It occurred to him that he could test to see whether it was day or night by whether he could turn into a bat. Right now he couldn’t. He remembered Nat’s story, last told when Dianne was still in high school, about how he amused himself while stowing away on a ship headed for Vietnam. Ferdinand wasn’t that good with scores of musicals, but in what he admitted were self-indulgent melancholic fits he had memorized many different poems. He needed to hear something besides silence if he was going to keep his mind together. Maybe Oscar Wilde’s “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”? Words had always comforted him, and when he was at a loss for his own he quoted writers more eloquent than he would ever be. He spoke very softly so that he wouldn’t get thirsty from even mild exertion.

Unable to remember the beginning, he started with what he felt was a relevant verse. A small part of him considered how poetic it was for him to suffer so elegantly – and a larger part of him kicked at that impulse as temptation to, yet again, wallow in misery. The first part did have a point in that there was very little he could do right now about helping his fellow prisoners and getting them out.

I never saw a man who looked
With such a wistful eye
Upon that little tent of blue
Which prisoners call the sky,
And at every drifting cloud that went
With sails of silver by.

I only knew what hunted thought

Quickened his step, and why
He looked upon the garish day
With such a wistful eye;
The man had killed the thing he loved
And so he had to die.

Yet each man kills the thing he loves
By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!

Some kill their love when they are young,
And some when they are old;
Some strangle with the hands of Lust,
Some with the hands of gold:
The kindest use a knife, because
The dead so soon grow cold.

He’d read that over and over in the first months after Selene died from the AIDS he had given her unwittingly, caught from a mugger she could have easily defended herself from, and in any case he could have incapacitated without biting. But this well-traveled line of thought was making his throat constrict and eyes sting, so he dove into the next verse that he could grasp.

Some love too little, some too long,
Some sell, and others buy;
Some do the deed with many tears,
And some without a sigh:
For each man kills the thing he loves,
Yet each man does not die.

Confident that Nat wouldn’t hear him, Ferdinand whispered, “I wish you were here with me. I’d forgive you if you were here.”

He does not sit with silent men
Who watch him night and day;
Who watch him when he tries to weep,
And when he tries to pray;
Who watch him lest himself should rob
The prison of its prey.

He had to live, though. Taylor and Rivki needed him. He didn’t regret hitting that man. Dying wish. Woman’s dying wish. Innocent downtrodden victim woman’s dying wish dying dying cold OH GOD…

Ferdinand steadied his breathing, realizing that the tempting friendship of hysteria had nearly pulled him in. He wasn’t a wimp-lightweight-weenie-softie for having trouble this early, was he? It was because they took away his Zoloft. He needed his Zoloft.

He was technically on Sertraline – the generic form – but when he was growing up there had been commercials for Zoloft, with big puffy animals becoming sad and crooning because of clinical depression. After being prescribed Zoloft they bounced happily again. Those would make great pets. Not as great as Luna, but if you could ride them (and assuming they didn’t constantly need Zoloft/Sertraline to function, because he didn’t think Edofine would prescribe him enough for both of them), they would make wonderful steeds. Also they should be big enough to hug. Maybe Derrick Jangoral could invent some like he created Luna using magic? They should be called “zum-zums”.

Now he was getting silly. Hell, what if this broke his brain somehow? He was going to be a grandfather in a few months and he didn’t want to be a gibbering wreck by that point. Assuming of course that Taylor wasn’t delusional and she indeed could communicate with Derrick telepathically – what, even when they were on different continents? – and he and Dianne were indeed coming and they didn’t get in trouble or killed or lost or arrested how dare she endanger his granddaughter like that? At least her husband was steady. Matthew Gabriel Spiralli, a nice boy. Nice boy with a job that was going to keep him in Laconia so Dianne wouldn’t leave him until she died, which would still be leaving him but maybe not so soon or so bad or…

“Hey, Ferdinand? Getting the signal – signal you’re…in and out…hard uncoordinated…gotta unison…I we are is am having trouble…”

“What?” Ferdinand said aloud, pressing his ear against one of the walls. But he wasn’t hearing voices with his ears. It was like two people, a man and a woman, talking at the same time, except they weren’t talking but thinking really hard.

“You have to imagine shouting things aloud for this to work. And it’s not…can’t…long…not…argh!”

“Who is this?” Ferdinand thought as clearly and distinctly as he could.

Telepathy in all the fictional media to which Ferdinand was exposed was like having a telephone inside your head. This was more like hearing a very weak channel on the radio, constantly static-ful, hissing, cracking, swiping.

“Taylor and Derrick together – we aren’t – um…the signal’s weak…we’ve never done this before…just with each other…but your mind was crying out because you had no stimuli and we were able to get through together…two stations broadcasting…same time…Dianne says don’t give up up up up….”

“Are you okay?”

“They’re doing a behavioral experiment with Nat and Sally because they defended…nicer room…toilet and sink and I’ve Taylor’s getting gotten food…they bastards don’t swear want to see…if they those them stay hungry long enough will vampires…even good vampires…give in…I’ll have you know Derrick says if I Taylor dies or gets hurt your remains will never be found, Derrick! Don’t think things like that! Sorry dear I’m worried…lines you don’t cross…let’s not fight in front of Good idea...you’ll probably join us…Ferdinand remember that time you told me Taylor to fear the dark…now we I she tells will tell you not to run towards it and let it swallow you did me a favor now I will do you one…don’t despair …we can tell stories…don’t despair…”

“I’m not despairing.” Ferdinand realized that while he struggled to decipher meaning from the confusing communication, he was also chewing on his left thumb.

The “male” stream of thought, bright and forceful, that Ferdinand now knew was Derrick became much more prominent. “My friend, you’re naked and trapped in a completely dark box. If this isn’t upsetting you, you’ve either got a fetish or you’re lying.”

“Stop chewing on your thumb,” went Taylor’s weaker but steadier undercurrent, a swift-flowing stream. “I can’t keep this level of perception…”

They merged once more, sunlight glittering through rushing waves. “I Taylor can’t keep it up much longer and since Derrick I is am is doing this by possessing Taylor’s body to boost boost it’s terrifying Dianne and Nat and Sally it’s really disturbing them so we’ll take a break before Taylor I get a migraine…”
Then he was alone.

Chapter 13: Ferdinand’s Prayer

“God, if I get out of this sane and alive, I’ll convert to the first religion I come across unless it’s Scientology or something else equally questionable. I swear. I swear. How much time has it been? Can you hear me? Can anyone? I’m cold and I’m hungry and this was supposed to be my relaxing vacation, You damn it! I swear. I swear. I swear. Please oh please. I don’t want to die. I guess that can be counted as progress from being suicidal? I mustn’t laugh at that; it’s not really funny and I get a feeling that if I start laughing I’m never going to stop, seeing how hard it was to get myself to stop banging my head a while ago. I wonder how long that was. Can’t change into a bat, it’s not night yet. I’ve been here less than a day. Unless…no…that would be too horrible…what if a whole night passed in between attempts? How would I know? And are they going to let me out at all? You’d think I was a valuable specimen, as they would put it, but maybe I’m an example to the others. They could let me starve in here and put my corpse on a pike. How long does it take vampires to starve to death? Months? Years? It’s bad enough for an ordinary human being!

“Any non-psycho religion, God, I mean it. And I’ll adopt Rivki and give him a home, and give a bigger chunk of my income to charity…I just want to see my grandchild…I want to hold Dianne…I want to…not sure what I want to do with Nat, really…please God. Please oh please. I swear.”

300 for 30: Day 6

I generally try to keep the men and women I date - or pine for hopelessly - out of my work, for similar reasons that it's a bad idea to get a tattoo of their name. They betray, they dwindle, they turn out different than you thought, they fall in love with someone else and let them break their precious heart that you would have cherished and nurtured (or at least you think so, when in reality you are just as prone to shattering others as anyone else is).

I do write them little poems and essays sometimes, just for them, but I don't consider that "work". It's tentative wooing. There was one young lady with porcelain skin, except for the slightest dash of brown freckles, springy hair, a profile like a Victorian cameo, the greenest of eyes, and a scatter-brained joie de vivre that I found enchanting. I never got the courage to tell her how I felt, I've always been so shy with the women, but I taped a yellow rose to her dorm room door with a note saying I wanted her to know she was admired by someone who wished her well. The only woman I've been in a relationship with was trans, which mattered to me not a mite, though she was so uncomfortable with her own body that I couldn't press her to show it to me. I would have loved every bit of it, pre-op awkwardness and all. It took me a long time to get over her. I still wish her well.

But oh, my significant other at the moment (male), my love, my dear, he's like the quiet, warm sunrise after a series of brilliant - but ephemeral - shooting stars. He's the first person I've dated steadily that I didn't see some kind of doom impending with, something that would inevitably separate us. He's the first person I have equal give and take with, who can provide comfort and strength at my times of weakness but who needs them from me at other times as well. He smells like home and hearth. I can imagine him intentionally hurting me the way I can imagine him repeatedly, purposefully hitting himself with a hammer - it's physically possible, but why on earth would he ever? He makes me laugh and he loves to just lie beside me, us holding each other, sometimes so comfortable that we drift off to sleep in that clutch, the lights still on.

I hope hope hope nothing bad happens to him, to us, that we keep on going like this. We're separated at the moment because I'm visiting my parents, but we both know we're going to run to each other with glad cries.

I've changed my mind...

As Margaret Hsu has begun to form more fully in my head, I realize that poetry is the writing that will be integral to her healing, not working on a script. The script is too much me. I write decent enough poetry but it isn't my favorite form. I haven't written much, on my own, for a while. I wrote it in the hospital, though. I can write it for her.

Here, actually, is the one poem I wrote in the hospital I still like:

~*~

The Gargoyle Principle

Written Halloween 2010, in ---- Psych Ward (Nonviolent, Temporary, Women’s)

It was All Hallows’ Eve, Samhain, Hallowee’en when the pills

helped me fall asleep despite the shhhnoisyshhh

which, it being 3 AM, means it is All Hallows

the day, itself, with spirits awake and walking

the way I am awake and wanting 48 hours enchanted away.

We don’t sleep well here on the best of nights

and one might think our own demons animate

us to mutter and toss, thrash and request

for sedatives from the front desk, the night shift –

nurses nursing coffees as they nurse us.

Cathedrals have gargoyles as sort of psychic

bodyguards, a demon on your side to frighten

the ones that would do you ill. In my current

illness I have an ugly bat-doll clutched by my side

hug-sized, looking alarmed enough for the both

of us so I can be calm, calm, thanks to the gargoyle principle,

thanks to the slow but reliable tick of time

towards the day, hour, minute my body is free as my spirit

sheltered by my plush gargoyle and a blanket of inky scribbles.

300 for 30: Day 5

I write because it gives me peace. I write because it gives me energy, purpose, fulfillment. I write because it fills up the hole in my chest that only a few people, when they are with me, can do, and without the writing I keen for them in a long, long, silent yet constant way, the way the Star Whale in that episode of Doctor Who screams.

I write because what about me is that special if you take away the words? I write because there must be a purchase for the prices I've paid. I write because books were my constant friends growing up, and I want to provide friends for other lonely people as well. I write because it pays, a little, and it makes me feel like a real woman to get paid for my creative work.

I write because it's fun. I write because it spills over. I write because if I talked all the time, people would get tired of hearing me and my throat would get sore and dry and stuck.

I write for Caitlin, for Sam, for Maggie, for Indigo, for Sally, for Alexandra-Sasha, for the girl who held my hand under the bathroom door when I was crying alone in a stall and never showed me her face or said her name. I write to spit in the face of the dreams of the memories of the echoes of the bullies, the nightmares, the haunts, the anxieties, the tongue chewed in my sleep, the shake of my hands, my fear of getting behind the wheel of a car.

I write because it's better than writhing, sobbing, rocking back and forth, eating too much, shopping too much online, attempting to have intimacy with people who will never love me. I write because I'm full of agape and wonder. I write for the sake of the prisoner and the flight of birds. I write because the children they mark, the children they know, the place where the sidewalk ends. I write because my own words and words I've borrowed get all mixed together but they're both sublime.

I write because my fingers need exercise. I write because it makes people admire me. I write because I'm bored in my room by myself but sometimes I'm scared to go outside. I write because it's honest. I write because it's the closest thing to sweet lying that I'm comfortable doing regularly. I write because I am where the falling angel meets the rising ape. I write because my favorite authors will die or succumb to Alzheimer's and I must be ready to make the Dust to keep the light and joy of the world alive.

I write because I live.

Why do you?

300 for 30: Day 4

I don't feel like working on any of my novels today, so I'm just going to type 300 words of what comes into my head.

I have a mood disorder that I generally consider Bipolar Disorder for the sake of having a label, though I have never been officially diagnosed with it. The semester before last one of my medications - I've been medicated for almost six years now - stopped working properly for me, and I had the second breakdown of my life and had to go to the psych ward for six days. Though I was never suicidal, this is part of where my ideas for Sweeping the Puddles Away are coming from.

The other part is when I first realized something was wrong, at age nearly-fifteen, and had suicidal thoughts for months on end. Eventually my parents and I were told by doctors that I should move from Beijing, where we were living, to Virginia, where I could do daytime group therapy for three weeks at a (different) psych ward. You can see how I've melded those two experiences in the premise of my new novel. I plan to meld several different people who have made a difference to me in a few composite characters as well, to protect the real inspirations and also to make the thing more story-shaped. Novels work better than life; everything means something and though nothing really ends, you can frame it nicely.

When we first moved into the house in Falls Church I was finished with Waking Echoes and had spent roughly six months trying to get published, about the same time I had been finished with the hospital treatment. I checked out pretty much the whole section the local library had on writing. I credit this self-created program as a major part of my healing process, and it seemed both logical and wonderful to do something similar again, except with a combination of writing-as-way-of-life books and good exercise at the Embassy gym this summer.

It helps me not miss my love so much. And I am nearly as aglow from it as he makes me.

300 for 30: Day 3

This is meant for my expansion of The Raw Ghosts of Thailand, book 6 in the Laconia series, and as it originally stood by far the shortest. I have since come up with some plot developments that would lengthen it but haven't gotten past Ferdinand being put in solitary confinement by a bunch of misguided scientists studying kidnapped vampires. Here he finally wakes up with company. Note that Ferdinand found out less than three days ago that his best friend and housemate, Dr. Nat Silver, has been in unrequited love with him for several years.

Light, light, bright light...too bright...but at least his eyes were working. Ferdinand had started to think he would never see anything again. His head hurt.

“Sometimes I really hate you,” he heard a familiar voice say. Nat?

Cupping his hands around his eyes made it possible for him to get a better picture of his surroundings. They were in a little room about the size of his bedroom closet at home, cement walls and slick, wet linoleum floor, with a cracked squat toilet, a roll of paper, and a faucet that was ticking out of the wall about five feet up, facing the wooden door. Ferdinand had been propped up in a corner like a stuffed animal missing some of its filling. He realized he was still naked, and Nat was in the room too.

“Relax, I’m still a doctor. And they gave me your clothes to give to you.” Nat crouched and held out the neatly folded pile. “I had to check for concussion. They stitched you up but I don’t trust them.”

As he took the bundle Ferdinand must have been making faces, because Nat rolled his bloodshot eyes - already quite red in the irises to begin with - and turned his back to give Ferdinand some privacy.

“Sally, Taylor, and Rivki are just outside. We’re in a different cell now, but there’s the bathroom for Taylor, in a suite if you could call it that, and a pair of mattresses at least. They’ve separated us out. Taylor gets food but we don’t.”

With a throat that felt like it was coated in that chunky kosher salt, Ferdinand croaked, “Why?”

“I’m surprised you need to ask, bright lad like you, unless you gave yourself permanent brain damage with your idiocy.” Nat’s voice turned to venom for a moment, then softened again. “Are you dressed yet? You should lie down.”

“Nearly.”