Munter 11: The Non-being Bit

GHOST, n. The outward and visible sign of an inward fear.
Ambrose Bierce

The television spoke of a woman who'd been found dead in the river. Her body had been dragged from it like a crumpled rag last evening. The body had been covered in leaves and bruises. The television showed police cars, an ambulance, and a black bag about the size of a human woman. The television said the woman was known to be of Asian descent but that she had not yet been identified. The television stated that the police suspected foul play due to a spate of similar deaths in recent weeks. Munter tried to light up a cigarette, but the lighter refused to blaze.

*

Munter went to the fridge-freezer to see if a perfect cold had been achieved for the cans. They were not perfectly cold yet. He left them in for another five minutes. During those five minutes, he walked around the house listening for the ghost. All he could hear was the television, and a newscaster going over and over in detail the sad facts about the world. The cans had achieved the perfect cold by the time he returned to the fridge.

*

Munter didn’t know how to react appropriately to death. His reaction was always rather formal in light of how he’d witnessed others react to it. He thought it better to address Nobuko's possible demise through orderly reflection on the subject in general. He recalled what Heidegger wrote about fear and anxiety. For any being, its very being is an issue, he remembered Heidegger saying. Fear is distinguished from anxiety in that fear is fear of that which is known. If being is threatened by something unknown, then we have anxiety. Fear has a definite object in the world that is feared. Anxiety is the threat of something that cannot be seen. It is like the awareness of non-being, of nothing. It is essentially an awareness of finitude. It relates not to the event of death itself, but to the strangeness in knowing death, in knowing that one and all will die.

He conducted an experiment with the perfect cold cans; he wondered how many would bring tears.

1 can,

2 can,

3 can,

Tears.

Shit, what a cry-baby!
Just 3 cans!

*

Later in the day, the news on the television named the dead woman as Nobuko O’Neill and explained that she had not fallen to foul play. She had in fact decided to put herself to death. She’d thrown herself into the river from a significant height; her head cracked against a particularly serrated rock as she was falling. Earlier, some passing painters of the town red had spotted her standing alone in the area. She asked them for a cigarette. They'd spoken to her and she'd appeared remote and unhappy. When they asked her what was wrong, she started ‘going on about ghosts’. They thought she was strange, so they left. Nobuko must have walked for an hour after leaving Munter, up past the Custom House and on further towards the North Wall. When she got to the place where she eventually jumped, she had stopped and thought about lots of things. She may have thought about too many things at once. If you think about too many things at once, you can very easily become sadder than you really ought to be. Information overload. Then perhaps she had stopped thinking about things. She didn’t think of anything, or anyone. She didn’t think of Mieko, or Fallon, or a moose. She certainly didn’t think of Munter. Then without thinking about anything, and before anyone could think about her, she threw herself into the river, to the mercy of the hard water, cold, rocks, and current.

*

Munter heard a cough. He had no Benylin left to give the ghost. He didn’t want to buy any though. He wanted to save all the money he had for beer. The cough got louder. The ghost may have known Munter’s intentions. How else would she get her medicine?
I’m not a chemist, shouted Munter. Go haunt a fucking pharmacy!

*

Munter’s good shoes that he figured were lost he suddenly found arranged neatly beside one another in the kitchen. They were sharp-toed, lace-trimmed black ones. He was convinced they hadn’t been there before. It had been over a week since he’d looked for these shoes in order for him to go to Marlon’s café to get a big fry breakfast made for him, right after he’d filled the bag for charity with the great majority of his clothes. He recalled that day clearly. Every moment was stored in his memory index. That was the day he met Nobuko. That was the day he began wearing the sticky-taped shoe. He remembered going into the kitchen that day to look for these sharp-toed, lace-trimmed black ones. He looked everywhere in the kitchen for them. Over, under, and inside things. They hadn't been there before. As he moved to pick the shoes up, something happened that would have been seen as strange by any other human being, but it was effortless for Munter to accept because of the strange habitat he’d grown accustomed to and because he was absolutely plastered. One of the shoes suddenly jumped and landed on its side. As Munter moved closer to the shoes, the other one jumped too, the laces whipping back and forth as it did so. Munter slowly crouched down and then snatched the shoes quickly. He carried them into the sitting room and sat down on the dusty couch. He looked at the shoes for a moment, then took off his sandals and put the shoes on.

*

Another cough. Munter tried to ignore it. He threw his head back and closed his eyes tight attempting to impose sleep. He scrunched his eyes so forcefully that it hurt.

*

Ghost 6 had so far avoided assuming visible form before Munter. Poltergeists rarely do. They tend to mess around, make noise, cause invisible havoc. They are performers in the shade. They like to sing and dance in the dark of a spectator’s perception, shadowy figures jumping in and out of the spotlight. But on this night she appeared. Tap-tap-tap. He jumped up from halfopeneyed and turned to face the fizzling light that fell over the dusty couch like a starry night. She wasn’t the Mieko he expected, the punk rock star he believed was gently playing tricks on him. She wasn’t Nobuko. She wasn’t sister, mother, father, brother. She wasn’t friend, acquaintance, face in the crowd. She wasn’t past, present, future, or any readable feeling he'd ever had, good or bad. She wasn’t the flash moment of spiritual understanding he’d at the very least anticipated. She was an exquisite composite of all these things, at once the hostile forehead of Nobuko, at once the smile of his brother, at once the rejection of Judith, at once the sexless, morose face on the cover of Bold Uniforms. She coughed very loudly.

*

The spectre vanished, was swallowed by air. Munter sat down again. He had a difficult time holding to any motivation in the ensuing hour. It was a while before he finally got up and went to the fridge to get a beer.

*

Munter was all out of alcohol. He’d drunk everything, so he went out to buy some more. He couldn’t afford to buy any more whiskey, or any more wine, so he would once more have to make do with cans of beer. Maybe the slime-green Tuborg stuff. It was not cold outside, even though it was a winter’s evening, about seven or eight o’clock. How many personalities does the weather in this country have to deal with? he remarked to himself. Its pattern was a lack of one seemingly. Rain and cold one day, sun and warm the next; sun and cold another day, rain and warm the next. This week the weather had shown itself in an implausible spectrum of colours without pausing to reflect on its responsibilities as the weather. Forget about winter, Munter remarked to himself. Forget about all the seasons. There was just one season, and it wasn’t just moody, it was mildly deranged, an emotional calamity that smiled and cried according to its own personal chart, ignoring the seasonal chart it was dealt at the beginning. Munter knew that if this sun went on for long enough, there would likely be thunder and lightning next week. The weather liked to get drunk sometimes too, and when it went too far, there was sure to be vomit.

*

Instead of going directly to the off-licence, Munter decided to walk down along the quays by the river, to maybe trace Nobuko’s last steps. He didn’t want to go anywhere near the place where she jumped. Not yet. He hoped she would transmit messages to him from the afterlife if she knew he was still looking for her. His search was continuing out of an inability at this moment to understand the cosmic flow of things. He couldn’t see the world clearly. Even though he was up close to it. He was ignorant of the universe. The Chinese philosopher Chuang-tzu would have disapproved.

*

He needed a drink fast, so he ducked into the nearest off-licence and bought three cans of slime-green to accompany him as he mapped Nobuko’s final movements.

*

The weather changed. It suddenly became much colder. So much colder that Munter’s hands turned blue. Stopping for a moment to warm them with his breath, he noticed a figure walking slowly behind him. It was a small female figure dressed entirely in black. The person’s hair was the blackest thing of all. He could see that even from the considerable distance that was between them. It carried a brilliant patina under the streetlights. He continued walking. There were nightgulls squawking and fighting in the air above him. He watched them bring their battle sweeping along the river, sprinkling the murky water with their falling feathers.

*

He stopped again to look behind him. The figure was still there, following. Maybe it’s Nobuko, he remarked to himself. Maybe it’s her ghost. He started walking again, but slowed his advance, trying not to look behind him as he walked in case he frightened her away. He’d brought his CD player out with him and three CD’s. The CD’s were a disc of wind music from the Faroe Islands, Axis: Bold as Love by Jimi Hendrix, and the Yellow River Concerto. He put on Jimi and looked once more at the figure that was following him. The figure had stopped walking, and was just standing now. Munter didn’t want her to know he was aware of her, so he continued walking, the bag of cans dragging along the pavement, bouncing pathetically.

*

When he turned again to look at the figure, a taxi was pulling up beside her. She'd stopped to flag one down. Jimi’s Wait Until Tomorrow played as the silhouette melted in the black air before bleeding into the taxi. Munter stopped in his tracks and waited for the taxi to drive past him, hoping to get a closer look at the mysterious figure. Faces in the back seats of taxis are usually emotionless, even if the taxi driver is a live wire. Travelling solo in the back seat of a taxi is a private, secretive experience; it brings out the aloofness in people. The face in the back seat of this taxi told no story as it passed Munter, not even one of back seat detachment. It was the blackened shape of a human being and nothing more, featureless and frozen in the darkness of the evening. It now appeared weightless, amorphous, sexless even. Just another cipher in the back seat of a taxi, Munter remarked to himself.

*

He realised he was approaching the area he’d seen on the news, where Nobuko’s body had been found. He decided not to search for the exact spot. He was getting tired from all the walking. He chose the site on a hunch. He sat against the wall of a building, across from a spot he appeared to recognise. A small ledge overlooking the river. Munter imagined an abrasive face of rocks on the other side, a coarse, malevolent countenance gazing down at the misty water, a sharp nose sticking out of it, perhaps the stony protuberance that caused most damage to Nobuko as she fell. He wasn’t sure if it was the exact spot she’d jumped from. He recalled the area from seeing it on the news. Something inside him was telling him that she hadn’t walked any further than this spot. He bust open a can of Tuborg, placed it on the ground next to him, and held his knees underneath his chin as he sat. The spot where Nobuko had probably jumped was sheathed in the opaque steam of cold air. He tried not to think of Nobuko standing there, but he couldn’t help it. She kept appearing before him like a ghost. However her spirit was a trick of his sorrow. He wished her ghost was appearing before him now, an apparition of some kind, anything. He would then at least know she was somewhere, not nowhere. He thought about all the people he’d known and loved who were not immediately on call. They did not form a society around him anymore, so he was not to know if any one of them was deceased or still alive. He was sure most of them were still hanging around somewhere, travelling the universe, invisible to him, but visible to someone. Names cluttered his head. Tom. Ray. Tilly. Siobhan. Where were they? They were somewhere. He didn’t know where.

*

An anger fell over him. Nobuko’s no longer existing made him want to punch his fists into the wall at his back. He hadn’t felt this way when his sister died. He’d coped with the non-existence of Rachel by measuring it against the cosmic flow of things, by placing her passing in the corner where all passings resided. In essence, he'd sat down and smoked a cigarette as she died. He missed his sister. But he’d placed missing her in a corner also. He’d put the grief in a box. He hadn’t allowed himself to truly miss her. He'd chewed on the pain until it was a substance he could swallow quickly and comfortably.

*

It surprised Munter to learn it was one o’clock in the morning. His watch hadn’t spoken to him for a while. He’d fallen in and out of sleep as he’d been sitting against the wall. He stopped imagining Nobuko at the point of jumping. He wanted to believe she hadn’t jumped. He couldn’t see her there anymore. He couldn’t see how she could have done such a thing. It angered him that she'd done it. But he was more enraged with himself for pushing her to that ledge with his ridiculous opinions on bereavement that now made no sense in the glow of his emotions. He couldn’t believe he’d held such opinions considering he now wished to tear all the hearts from the living, and give them back to the dead. He had killed Nobuko in a way by sending her off that night drunk and sorrowful. It was his job now to mourn her even though he had only known her for two days. The mourning would last the length of the river; then it would separate and flow elegantly through his lifetime. He would mourn her good and proper, like no one had ever mourned.

***************************************************

He woke at about eight and picked himself up from the ground. He’d been a pathetic sight for early morning pedestrians. He walked the alcohol out of his system on that frosty November morning. He could almost see the alcohol leaving him as vapour like it was an ad on the television for detox.