Ghost-hunters

We're talking about ghost-hunting over in Yaizu. Just another crazy gaijin thing. These guys are still the sanest I've met. Everyone gets their kicks somehow, I guess.

I'm not sure if I want to go. I'm not sure who I'm supposed to be, or if anyone else has noticed the 25-odd years between me and the present company. I'm not sure it really matters, either. I've already heard all the stories from the last 20 years, been inducted into the circle of firelight. Four hours sleep again and my brain is sticking, twisting round itself trying to find a soft spot to rest in, getting tangled in the details. Blame the guy from Singapore: yaki soba and Japanese breakfast TV, the kanji for Shizuoka and a girl who doesn't smile with her eyes.

He's picking at his fries and telling us about the women from Surabaya. It's all needles with them: the doctors cut them out, but more appear all the same, sticking people's insides like the dolls the women use. Or there's the story about the girl who thought she was pregnant: couldn't shit for a month, then after she went to the witch doctor she started shitting out spiders, scorpions, all the stuff the women had filled her with. Needles too. He says they worship demons, that's why their country is so poor. They don't believe in God.

I trade in my stories during the intervals – the watercolour girl in school, ouija boards, the doorbell ringing itself - and the Canadian guy tells us about a night on the railroad when he heard someone walking out in the corridor when there couldn't have been anyone there, but really we're just here to play the audience. It's easier than trying to make yourself understood when a guy speaks four languages and doesn't listen in any of them.

Like I told him I hate MacDonald's. He wouldn't let me get away with just passive smoking and taking in stories. Wouldn't let me get away with much if I listened to him all the time: I'd just be swept up in the narrative, taken in, knowing he's still going to answer the phone at midnight to whichever fucked-up twenty-something drunk-dials him tonight. They're all so made up, these Japanese girls: put together to unwrap and fall apart, melt in your mouth with an aftertaste of chemicals. Processed meat.

Fried McChicken turns in my stomach and won't settle. My palms start to sweat. There's the moment when I almost tell them that I'm going to throw up, but then it passes and I'm left just shivering, as Mr Singapore takes my hand, tells me how cold my fingers are (sort of my saving grace, I guess: he can't stand the cold). I feel contaminated by the interrelatedness of everything, like we're all standing on the rotting shoulders of our predecessors; international airports built over the graveyards so the newly-homeless dead can join in the carbon-guzzling race through timezones, consume and be consumed once more in the glorious McCycle of matter. Nausea again. Somehow the plot got lost in a newly politicised morbidity, the jungles of Cambodia maybe where my friend got his first taste of snake and war (puking, eating, shitting, shooting), or the giant roast chickens that a starving little girl saw staggering over the hills from Nagasaki. I don't know. Time to go.

Home alone later, I need something cheap like lust to keep me distracted while I try to sleep off the paranoia, the lights flickering through all those ghost stories with a guy I had nightmares about years back. It's like the dead are just another one of those unpleasant facts of adult life that you learn to deal with. Or just piss your pants, as my eloquent friend from Singapore puts it. 48-going-on-24. Best smile in the world if you can tease it out of him - one of those things I only realise when I'm drunk. "The human race will begin solving its problems the day it stops taking itself so seriously". Kinda hard to take paternal advice from someone you know wants to get into your pants, anyhow. Just smile, motherfucker, smile, and maybe I will just call you tomorrow. Winter's been going on too long to be fussy about who keeps you warm.

The rain starts, right on cue, and I lie awake waiting for the knock on the window, but all I'm really listening to is my own internal monologue, voices just out of my range of hearing. I'm thinking about the verb 'to sleep', with all its permutations, and realising we never made it out to Yaizu after all. Probably for the best. The suicides can keep themselves company tonight.