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 nearly 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.