THERE IS A Chinese superstition that those who commit suicide wearing red clothes will become powerful, vengeful ghosts. They will come back and seek retribution for the injury done to them when they were still alive.
Cynthia woke up late. Fortunately, Han Lin Vocational College enforced a strict uniform code, so she did not have to rummage through her closet looking for a cute outfit. She did, however, search for a pair of long, white socks since short, calf-exposing ones were considered indecent by the president, Mrs. Lin.
The radio blasted static-y news on ICRT, the only English radio station based in Taipei. The good thing about listening to the station, although Cynthia’s listening comprehension only allowed her to pick up phrases here or there, was that it broadcast strictly international or political news. No horrible Taiwanese society news about the man who stabbed his ex-girlfriend last night or the love suicide of the daughter of Taipei's premier hypnotist. No acid poured on anyone’s face, no stalkers, kidnappers, gangsters, sex crimes.
Finally dressed and ready for school, Cynthia rushed out of the apartment. When she turned around to lock her door, she noticed a piece of paper taped onto its exterior.
Dear tenant:
a message in red mentioning your name was found scribbled on the basement wall. As much as we regret this, we must ask you to take full responsibility for cleaning the writing on the wall as soon as possible, as it must be left by an acquaintance of yours.
The Building Manager, No.3 Sing Yi Street.
Cynthia crumpled the note and avoided eye contact with the building manager at his desk as she walked hastily out of the front entrance of her ugly tile building. At the bus stop, she tossed the paper ball, now a tight, warm wad, into a wastebasket.
The sun’s last rays turned everything a burnt, golden color as Cynthia dragged her heavy feet through the front gate of her building again after school. She had no idea what went on in class all day; she drifted from classroom to classroom like a phantom.
No one sat at the front desk in the lobby. The building manager was too old to be of any use as a guard—had been for over a decade. Her downstairs neighbor, old Mrs. Yeh, had told her how in 1984 a bunch of robbers came in, held a gun to the manager’s head, and carried out over twenty bicycles right before his eyes.
“That was back when bicycles were actually worth something. When we asked the building manager how he could just let them take everything, he said, they had a thing.” Mrs. Yeh made the shape of a gun with her right hand.
If more robbers came and held guns to the building manager’s head, it would serve him right, Cynthia thought. As she ascended the stairs, she heard something behind her. She turned to see the shadow of a man in the stairway entrance. A middle-aged stranger emerged before her, his eyes round, maniacal, left hand holding a knife in a manner ready to stab. The gleam from the knife in the dim staircase contrasted with the dark stairs leading to the basement. She ran upstairs, up two stories, three, hearing the man’s footsteps always half a flight beneath her.
When she reached the seventh floor of the building, she saw that the door of an apartment facing the staircase was open. She rushed into the apartment, shut the metal door, and pulled the lock and chain in place. Turning around, she surveyed the apartment, heart still racing. Chinese scrolls, seashells, and upside-down, desiccated flowers decorated the cabinets. Most of the furniture was wicker or bamboo. Cynthia tread softly into the living room, rolling her feet from heel to toe. She saw an old woman, shriveled and hunched with age, watering plants with a spray hose on the balcony crowded with potted plants. When the old woman stepped in and closed the screen door after her, Cynthia approached.
“Excuse me, Po Po.”
The old woman gave her a broad grin: all gums, no teeth. Her wrinkled lips looked like bleached prunes. “You must be Yune’s friend. Welcome, welcome.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t know anyone in your family. I live in your building and—”
The old woman put her hand on Cynthia’s shoulder and interrupted, “I don’t have my hearing aid, darling. It broke last week. You just wait here, Yune will be back from school soon. I’m going into the kitchen to make dinner. Make yourself at home.” She wiped her hands on her floral patterned pants and shuffled into the kitchen.
Cynthia didn’t know what to do. She peered through the cloudy peep hole in the door: the hallway was empty. She was about to sit down on a bamboo rocking chair when the old woman appeared again, holding a plate of sliced mango.
“Here, have some fruit.”
Cynthia stood, unsure of what to do. She wanted to tell the woman she shouldn’t have gone to the trouble of peeling and cutting up mangos, that she didn’t know Yune, and she didn’t feel like eating fruit because a stranger had just come after her with a gleaming knife. But the woman could hear nothing, so instead Cynthia nodded graciously and accepted the plate.
She heard the sizzle of moist vegetables landing in a wok coming from the kitchen. She picked up a piece of mango with a toothpick and put it in her mouth. It tasted treacly, over-ripe. She pushed the other pieces on the plate aside, creating an empty space, making it look like she had taken more pieces and had appreciated the hostess’s efforts. Then, slipping the toothpick into her uniform skirt pocket, she left, closing the door behind her.
He was Cynthia’s first boyfriend. They met under unremarkable circumstances. She was on her way to the stationery store for manila envelopes, and he stopped her to ask what time it was, leaning down from his motorcycle. In the following weeks she gave him more than her time—all her firsts besides her virginity. Once or twice they went to a motel and rubbed against each other’s bodies, and she watched or helped him finish, but she never let things get further than that. He was discontent, and things between them began going south.
When Cynthia asked for a break-up, he threatened to kill himself. He would write a suicide note, he said. The note would instruct his gangster parents to kill Cynthia, the girl who made their only son take his own life, and they would. And then they would kill her family. He sent her letters written in his own blood, the ugly handwriting bleeding shades of orange and rust on paper crinkled from the uneven drying of blood. He followed her after school, once or twice pushing her into construction sites near her campus and feeling her up savagely.
Cynthia’s father knew nothing—he did not notice that his daughter never left the house during the weekend without his company. He did not see that she had picked at and bitten her nails until they were so short and broken they cracked and bled.
This continued all winter and spring. In the summer, Cynthia went south to stay with her paternal grandparents.
When classes began again in March, Cynthia’s stalker was gone. She still never felt entirely safe, and wished she had friends at school. She was just one of the faceless many wearing the same uniforms and hairstyle at Han Lin Vocational School. Nobody knew her, and ultimately, nobody would notice when she was killed by her ex-boyfriend’s parents, her insane ex, or a middle-aged stranger with crazy eyes and a sharp knife in the basement.
The morning after receiving the awful note, after a broken night’s sleep, Cynthia finally trudged downstairs in her slippers and pajamas to look at the writing on the basement wall.
Cynthia you heartless Bitch I am going to Cut Slice your heart OUT just like you did mine You Just Wait
Cynthia put one palm against the horrible wall to support herself. The message was scrawled in either red paint or blood in his crazed handwriting. He was back. She wished they had never met. She would be the next headline in the Taiwan news, she could see it: “Vocational School Student Brutally Mutilated by Spurned Boyfriend.” The old woman on the seventh floor would open the newspaper, read about her and say, “Why, that’s just awful,” as she sipped the cup of tea her granddaughter Yune brought to her. Cynthia’s grandparents would sob and blame their son for not bringing her up right, for letting her live alone in dangerous Taipei when her thoughtless mother had already abandoned her as a baby. They would lament the fate of their nineteen-year-old granddaughter, too young and innocent to meet such a horrible end.
Cynthia walked stiffly back up to her apartment. She combed her hair, washed her face, put on a bright red dress she wore to a wedding last year, and eased her feet into a pair of red ballet flats. She turned on all the lights in her apartment and switched the radio to ICRT.
Instead of going down to the first floor, she took the elevator to the twelfth floor. She climbed up a staircase which led to the roof of the building. A jungle of gas and satellite equipment lined the flat, cement roof. A large water tower hummed in its metal net. She stepped over some ailing plants in cracked pots and made her way between rows of clothes drying on bamboo poles fixed in place with stacked bricks. Cynthia gazed down at the rest of Taipei through a layer of moist morning smog. The sun malingered behind clouds.
She approached the waist-high ledge, leaned on it with trembling hands, and closed her eyes for several seconds.
She put one red shoe on the ledge, then with a boost, the other. She didn’t take the time to rebalance herself as she stood, and she simply fell, fell, and landed on the first floor, in an unswept alley beside No.3 Sing Yi Street.
A neighbor’s dog barked, hearing the dull thump of the body.