Dredge of Decay Read online

  “It’s just a problem that I need your help solving.”

  Gen ignored him. Goh eventually disappeared once more.

  2

  The alarm was a sound Gen grew to expect in his sleep. More and more he anticipated it, never able to completely relax as he lay in bed. Even while sleeping he would wake in a start to check the clock. The sound of it blaring to wake him up almost brought relief, for it meant he’d drifted off at some point.

  He rose with a lung-clearing cough to take a quick shower. He was careful not to touch anything but the bed in his disgusting apartment as he got dressed. Coal dust filled the room and worsened as he left from the door, grabbing his rejected work boots from the hallway and swapping them for his shower slippers right then and there. There was not yet any signal of dawn except for the bustling of some early restaurant shops as they prepared for the morning in the pitch black. Gen ate two eggs from a stall while waiting in line at the train station. The line was monstrous, just as beastly as the swaying sea of people on the way home, but instead of funneling out, they funneled in past security checks to the same transfer station. The cycle of a new day relentlessly began again.

  Gen been working on a new hotel in the city center’s historical district. He wasn’t sure what screamed “historical” about a giant towering hotel, but a job was a job, and the dealings of millionaires was none of his business. They just stressed how they needed it up, up, up, done, done, done. So, he and his team had been working tirelessly, speed a more important factor than protection. Gen was one of few who wore so much as a helmet on-site. His reasoning was that he gave this job all of his waking hours; he wouldn’t give it his life, too.

  Much of their equipment was questionable at best. Failings were common, which only added more stress to the up, up, up, done, done, done. Something had dropped a beam the day before in the middle of their scaffolding and the man who’d been operating the machine was immediately terminated. Gen was certain it was a failing of the machinery. Even the truck he used was one that he had no choice but to hot wire to start.

  During his lunch break he went down to a cafeteria the next block over. He got lunch tickets there from his job, leaving it as the best, if not most crowded, option. While everyone else tended to seat themselves at the tables provided, Gen never did. Antisocial to some, he instead found an empty stairwell. His typical one stank of stale cigarettes and had a balcony that overlooked the building site.

  He inhaled his meal, a very plain lunch of pork and vegetables over rice. In a free meal, his standards couldn’t be much higher than that, and he was satisfied. It was only during this idle time when he gave pause to have a post-meal cigarette that he even remembered what had happened to him the night before, or even if it had actually happened. He’d never seen a ghost. Never bothered to think about it. He’d definitely stepped in something and had dreams about it, he concluded. The worries of a murder in the village had been fresh in his mind, the unnerving nature of the crime paired with his romp through rot all swam around as he slept, creating some weird vision.

  Of course, the things we tell ourselves to justify unpleasantness cannot be trusted. The more reasons he felt he must find to justify unpleasantness, the more unlikely it was that he would be able to. That much would always be so in denying those unpleasant truths.

  That evening, Gen got home earlier, the sun had barely fallen from the sky by the time he had reached his stop at the train station. The crowd wasn’t quite so thick being a Saturday, but a considerable amount of people still passed through. Gen’s nose stung with coal, rot, and that same gutter oil. He decided to partake in it this evening, stopping for some greasy fried egg burgers and even having made it early enough to pick up some fruit.

  He stood at a fruit stand, debating what he was in the mood for with his small bag of food looped around the fingers of his large worker’s hand. He’d heard nothing else of his incident the night before, but one constant remained: he was tired.

  As he finally reached for a pear, he noticed shifting, practically jumping back as the shadows moved to form hands, rolling over one another in waves and grabbing for each of the fruits. They turned darker and darker, pulling the fruits into the deepening shadows one by one.

  What had jarred him this time, the only thing pulling him from his trance of being horrified, was the piddling sound of a mannerless toddler, pulling his pants down to piss right on the old man’s shoe. From one horror to another more tangible one, he scolded the child. The mother, busily making sales at one of the biggest fruit stalls at this train stop, was too busy to attend him. She scolded the child, too, handing him a mop and letting him push it back and forth with great effort.

  Gen decided not to buy fruit.

  He set foot towards home, and upon stepping into the east gate of the slum, he heard the clearing of a throat right next to his ear. He peeked over to see the same figure as the night before: Goh, he’d said his name was. The lights of a barbecue stall and a particularly cheerful wok-fried chestnut vendor were hardly visible through his face.

  “Goodness, I’ve been waiting all day for you to get back!” he said in a sigh of relief. Gen ignored him initially, unsure if he was alone in being able to see him, unwilling to believe he was there, hole in his head and all.

  “Oh yeah?” Gen grumbled, seeming to Goh to be constantly discontent.

  “Those pears were really weird, huh?” Goh asked, making conversation without a hint of anything but cheer in his voice. All of his words sounded to be in good spirits. Goh was willing to give anyone the benefit of the doubt.

  Taking pause, Gen took a bite of his oily burger.

  “You saw that, too? I thought I was just tired. Stressed out.” Gen engaged Goh for the first real time. Goh was excited by being given any recognition. He had spent his evening and much of the day being disappointed by the fact that the only person who could see him was dismissive and unyielding.

  “You really have a strange way of reacting to things. Like seeing a ghost, for instance.”

  “I’ve seen a lot.” Gen shrugged, looking over the few visible features of the guy, the ghost, the apparition.

  “Even a ghost?” Whatever he was, he appeared quite young judging by the bridge of his nose and one remaining eye covered in messy makeup. It gave the opportunity for Goh to look him over in return.

  “Never a ghost,” Gen answered. He had dark skin from working long days in the sun, deep wrinkles, likely for the same reason, Goh surmised, all over a wide face. He had dense muscles on a lanky frame and gnarled, swollen hands. He got the sense that Gen appeared much older than he was. Most people who lived in the slum did.

  Goh also figured that he should try to see the positives. He should be grateful. The person who’d stepped in him was useful and perhaps even fearless. He was much braver than himself. He’d found a lot of his own fear in having recently been murdered.

  “That’s good,” Goh said, “So you’ll help me then?”

  Tactless or not, he was insistent on knowing.

  Gen thought it over as he walked the long distance to his minuscule apartment. He took in the sights of everyone bundled up to protect from the biting cold. Uncle-aged men completely covered in soot rode by in junky trucks filled with bags of coal. Cart after cart of food was slung by the poor souls who slaved over their stoves all night. He followed where the people were.

  He stopped across the street from a fish monger’s shop. Instead of a counter, it had a large, particle-board-capped fish tank, so murky you could barely see anything inside. The fish man would reach in with his bare hands to pull out a fish, throwing it with a wet splat onto the ground to kill it. It may or may not have worked. He’d then gut it and scale it on top of a soggy piece of cardboard covered in fish insides, sending flakes of hard, shiny scales flying everywhere for the sake of efficient work.

  Gen watched this process while he weighed the options on his mind. He wondered if those long rubber boots that the fishmonger wore had any ghosts of
fish on them for all the guts they slid across in a day.

  “What happens if I don’t?” he asked, raising a brow without his gaze leaving the work of the fish man. Until the very moment he tossed the rest of it into the same type of thin plastic bag that everything else came in, Gen waited for a response.

  “Then I guess I’ll stay!” Oh. He remembered then.

  “So where is it? The rest of you.”

  “I can’t get to it.”

  Goh illustrated by reaching out and pushing his hand right through Gen’s chest. He felt a chilly buzz where his hand was inside of him. He didn’t like that, but felt like a fool to have tried to push his hand away. He kept walking home before anyone would notice his strange behavior. Gen was grateful for the mask of thousands of people around him, making things often difficult to notice. Goh followed along.

  “Have you ever seen anything like those pears before?” Goh asked.

  “Nah, never.”

  “Don’t you think helping me find my body will like- get rid of seeing weird stuff like me? Maybe?” He had no idea either, only trying to make a convincing argument. “It’s kind of lonely being stuck here. I mean, no one can see me but you, and no offense but you aren’t the best company.”

  Gen shrugged. He knew Goh wasn’t wrong, after all. He hadn’t been good company in a long while. When was the last time he’d been happy? He scraped by, all of his resources pushed towards making it in a big city. All that scraping left no time for fun and no mood for jest. It was hard to be a person who was nice to be around when one’s baseline was that of misery.

  “Alright.” Gen gave a long rumble of a deciding sigh. “It’s worth a shot.”

  “Great! I can tell you what I remember. Follow me.”

  Goh sped along, his textured brown hair bounced atop his head just as any real person’s would have. Gen followed obediently despite his annoyance at how chipper the ghost appeared. Goh led past the dumpsters at the edge of the village and past the second-floor pool hall that inexplicably stated “Michael Jackson Michael Jackson” on the window as proof that pop culture existed outside of these streets. He led past the towering stone epitaph, put in place by government officials and brandishing gilded letters that read, “Keep working and live humbly. We are grateful that we have enough.”

  Everywhere within the gates was densely packed, all leading to the center of the slum, near where Gen lived. The cracked pavement turned to compacted dirt as Goh led him off of his typical route, past more garbage bins and public restrooms that had been long abandoned, lost to disrepair and a heavy layer of indiscernible filth.

  Their trip was silent. As they went further out, Gen started to find fine grit making its way into his mouth, a result of stepping through the dirt roads that weren’t so worn. Goh led him to the opposite end of the village to a lone dusty dumpster, only a ten-minute walk from where he had been. This one rested on the outskirts where only dust and crumbled buildings remained. It was punctuated by a couple of stubborn restaurants, likely run by stubborn people like Gen. One of them advertised one of his favorite hometown squid dishes and blared upbeat traditional music.

  As they looked, Goh stopped outside of a cubby that housed a vending machine for sex toys. The doorway was concealed by a pink bead curtain that Goh noted as particularly trashy and expressed his adoration for. It was another attempt to bring some distraction to their task.

  “I think it’s this one. I remember seeing that building,” Goh pointed, but it was a concrete block that looked just like all of the others, and Gen wasn’t confident. He was here to do a job, though. All of the jobs he had to do were pretty awful, but none were as disgusting as panning for limbs.

  Gen prepared himself for the less-than-glamorous task of wading through garbage sludge. He just wanted a decent night’s sleep, and if this let him rid himself of his newfound traveling companion, he’d do anything.

  Goh felt around, as if trying to find some sort of imprinted memory on his limbs. He tried to remember, guiding along to where he thought he might be while Gen begrudgingly followed. His feet began to drag while the ghost showed no sign of weariness or slowing.

  Goh’s gratefulness to having found Gen grew. No matter how resistant he was, in order to get rid of Goh he seemed to be able to do anything. This was evidenced by the fact that he was currently waist-deep in garbage and tipped over the edge to dig for the black plastic bag. There was no small amount of guilt in Goh’s uselessness.

  That guilt was washed away by Gen’s triumphant toss of the hefty bag over his shoulders and onto the ground. He’d deduced it was correct by the large package with one solid item inside. His carelessness disturbed a heavy bloom of dust which stuck to the wet underbelly of the bag and created a cocoon of mud which became the chrysalis of syrupy cosmic schism.

  Gen hopped down upon his success. He didn’t want to check to be sure and looked to Goh for some sort of confirmation that would exempt him from it. Goh couldn’t find anything to say, nervous himself about confronting his own demise. As much as he tried, he couldn’t manage to remember everything.

  Gen’s fruitless answer-seeking left him with nothing left to do but to open the bag just to check. There was no use in hauling a bag of mundane garbage. Ghosts were one thing, leaving him relatively unbothered. There was nothing visceral about Goh’s presence nor was it something that Gen couldn’t blame on his own consciousness. Connecting the ghost of this mostly-normal guy with a sack of body parts was something that finally challenged him. He frowned as he untied the top of the bag. The unmistakable scent of death wafted out, causing him to wince. It wasn’t the same as the sweet-smelling rot of fruits and vegetables. It was foul, moving something deep within Gen.

  His instincts at the core of his being wanted to remove himself from the situation. He didn’t. Instead, he peeked inside.

  “How long have you been dead?” Gen managed to ask, the purple-spotted flesh inside turning his stomach while he identified tapered fingertips. Goh shook his head in response. He wasn’t sure. At least a day, since he’d waited around as long as Gen was at work. Gen knew it had been at least two. At least it was still winter.

  Gen looked at Goh’s fingers to briefly compare before further inspecting. He didn’t know what he’d have done had they not matched up. Goh showed discomfort, not daring to take a peek for himself and drawing his shoulders in as Gen looked at the most vulnerable his body had ever been: rotting among garbage. It might have been different if he had shown a hint of compassion, but Goh was learning that he shouldn’t expect it from him.

  “It’s about a quarter of your torso,” Gen concluded, “and an arm, I guess.” The heft explained, he closed the bag back up, tying it far tighter than he’d found it in an attempt to seal the contents within.

  The reality of what had happened to Goh juxtaposed against his strange but cheerful demeanor was something Gen didn’t want to explore.

  Gen was disgusted by the act that had led Goh here and that had produced a dead body in their village, as well as a ghost with nowhere to go. He was disgusted with the contents of the bag, and certainly wanted to join the search to find who had done this. Silently, he lamented how many pieces it must have been. Sure, it was an inconvenience, and he should really mind his own business, but he was certain that nobody else would want to step up, nor had a ghost on their heels to aid in solving this crime. Somewhere, in a place in his heart he’d never admit to having, he was sympathetic to the younger man. As monotonous as his own life was, so often dreaming of escaping it never meant death.

  “So, what do we do with it?” Gen asked.

  “Maybe bury it?” It was an uncertain response from Goh. Gen felt like he was floundering.

  “Just the one part?” His brow furrowed in skepticism.

  “The rest of my head...” Goh trailed off as Gen hopped down from the dumpster. Goh wondered how far he could distance himself from the man whose boot he was tethered to. Gen was determined to make more progress. The sun was long gone
now. This still counted as work, and he wasn’t keen on keeping up for any longer than he had to.

  “Is in front of that auntie’s place. Where I stepped on you,” Gen finished the thought.

  The trips back and forth had given Gen a lay of the land greater than ever before. He had found that between the west gate and the landlady’s store was practically a straight shot, the alley that included his own apartment in between.

  Goh hesitantly followed, eventually leading the way again, the pair of them choosing to stay on the outskirts of the village. Prying eyes were unavoidable, but they could limit them when transporting pieces of a corpse.

  “So, what’s your name?” Goh asked. He realized he had never gotten in before from the stubborn man.

  “Gen.”

  Goh laughed.

  “What kind of name is that?”

  “What kind of name is Goh?” he retorted, “Keep on with that and I’ll slap you with your own hand.”

  The threat fell flat. Goh was happy for the banter. It broke up the solitude of leading through chilly dirt back roads with such a morbid parcel. More than that, it was the first time he’d seen Gen do anything but frown and complain. He was laughing. For only a brief moment, they were both able to forget the contents of the bag. Instead, Gen’s natural way of joking, through insults, had been roused.

  “It’s an adopted name,” Goh chuckled, “My family isn’t from here.”

  “Mine’s a nickname. Stuck since I was a kid.”

  “So, we’re just two guys with weird names,” Goh snickered, pleased by that link between them.

  The body of a quarter of a human was proving cumbersome, but as uncomfortable as their task was, the journey became an almost pleasant one, and the pair made it to the opposite side of the village.

  The buildings they passed from the previous dumpster had turned from crumbled debris piles to multi-story apartments and shops, and then back to crumbling single story brick shops built half into the ground. The apartment buildings here were barren concrete shells, though still inhabited. Only the center of the village, the deepest parts, had roads and multi-story buildings.