Spirit Wars (7 page)

T
he
question on the mind of every other child in the orphanage was, what made a
psychic like me different and how to get their hands on the stuff. Many started
faking visions of phantoms and conversations with dead relatives or even
possession by the devil (the more creative and ADD ones). But they had it all
wrong because people like me didn’t only see the spirits of departed people or
malevolent entities.

In
my own unique case, what I saw was balloons, a whole different dimension of
them; and not your regular birthday-party type either. No, these were sort of
ethereal. Ghost-balloons. They were beautiful yet eerily alien, like jellyfish
floating in air, invisible to everyone but me.

There
was one for every living, breathing creature on earth, including animals and
even insects, though always proportionate to their size. The balloons all
looked identical except for the size of their heads and the length of their
stems. With perfect clarity I walked in this world of spirits. I even thought
at first that everyone else saw the same things I did.

The
first time I ever made the connection between the ghost-balloons and something
grim was during a ride on the MRT when I was six. That early on, I had put
together that people never turned their gazes to the balloons and were
perfectly oblivious to them.

I
sat in the car immediately behind the driver and was gazing out at the platform
as our train entered the station. One man stood out in the rush-hour crowd
because his balloon was unusually short. Then, as I watched, he jumped right in
front of our train. 

From
the shocked faces and voices of all the passengers, and the officious demeanor
of the police officers who questioned the train driver along with everyone in
our car, I learned a valuable lesson. I learned not to stare and to never talk
about the balloons if I didn’t want to get myself in trouble.

The
frequency of short balloons among the elderly and tall ones among the young
also confirmed the realization that we were all living on borrowed time, that
humans were designed with expiration dates. It just so happened that I knew
what those dates were exactly.

I
t was a
whole lot easier explaining it to the other orphans than to a bunch of
tight-ass grownups who thought they knew everything. Most of the adults failed
to understand that asking for the truth and being prepared for it were two
completely different things.

I
could picture the preteens now: crowding around me with their bright, open
faces. I was terrified by their adulation yet somehow I always knew the words
they needed to hear.

I
would
tell them:
What you’ve heard about storks – at least the autonomous,
intelligent ones, the Angel Storks – they’re all true. You know that myth how
at the moment when the mother’s all sweaty and groaning inside the delivery
room, a stork’s supposed to be flying high overhead? Yeah, that story’s told to
dumb kids and orphans like us but it’s actually not far from the truth.

Before
you protest that the growing lump inside the belly of a pregnant mom can’t
possibly be just gas or some evil double, listen to this: what a Stork carries
is the infant’s Umbaliccus. What people have popularized as a cloth bundle is
actually a balloon turned upside-down and is equivalent to the human soul. It’s
the single greatest responsibility entrusted to Angel Storks because that’s
like the essence of a baby’s being. Without it, the child would be born an
empty husk and very soon die.

All
these make the Storks less your dorky, friendly-neighborhood delivery men and
more extra-dimensional, amoral beings made up of pure light.

It’s
all coming back to me now, me being the dead and monstrified version. The
memories seem to belong to a double life I’ve buried in the darkest recesses of
my mind; now they’re pushing back a fount of knowledge to the surface,
including jumbled bits of ancient, arcane trivia.

In
ancient Egypt, the human soul was known as “ba” and had the same phonetic sign
as the saddle-billed stork. The soul was also depicted as a human-headed stork
that would roost every daybreak to reunite with its sleeping body.

Bartholomaeus
Anglicus, a French medieval scholar, wrote:

“For
in that time, that the storks pass out of the country, crows are not seen in
places there they were wont to be. And also for they come again with sore
wounds, and with voice of blood, that is well known, and with other signs and
tokens and show that they have been in strong fighting.”

The
truth is, Angel Storks are attracted to love because that’s what they’re
composed of, in the same way the Reaper Crows are irresistibly drawn to
anxiety, omens, and thoughts of vengeance because they have the ability to
divine the future. And so members of these two great opposing camps are
constantly locked in battle for control of an individual or a territory.

After
dueling, an individual Guardian Angel or Guardian Reaper might attach itself to
a Keeper. Like a live shadow clinging on as long as love or a grudge feeds it,
it begins to inherit human traits like self-awareness, speech, and emotion. But
the longer it stays in the mortal realm, the harder for it to return to its
original world and nature, which will ultimately be fatal.

They
have carried on a proud tradition of reaching out to man since time immemorial.
The oracles of ancient Greece definitely had them. Those priests pored over
tomes of esoteric manuscripts and attracted the Crows, but the rest of society
mistook their voices for that of God. Similarly, whenever two great lovers felt
tremendous passion for each other, a Stork could be stirred deeply enough to
descend upon them.

Then
in the Age of Enlightenment, humans who had Guardian Angels or Reapers were
sent to asylums. Having just discovered electricity, man thought he had
discovered an all-around cure in the form of electroshock treatment. But this
did nothing save torture the Keepers and force many a Guardian to finally leave
their side out of pity.

There
are still a few Guardians left these days. They’re the most constant, loyal
companions and familiars; the wisest, chattiest, and most enchanting beings.
Every Wiccan and holy man wants to have one but nobody knows precisely how
Keepers are chosen.

I
wasn’t
lucky enough to have a Guardian of my own, and I assumed this was because I
didn’t have an umballicus to begin with. Or at least nothing I could see with
my own eyes.

****

The
old-timer nuns at the orphanage said they discovered me inside a cardboard box
on the porch. Oldest sob story in the book. Except when you were the
protagonist of that story, it was a lot harder to accept. There were nights
when lying in bed at night the loneliness would come so fiercely I wondered if
I wouldn’t be doing the world a favor if I ceased to exist; and I’d stifle my
cries with the pillow. Or sometimes at my hideout on the roof of the orphanage
a voice would urge me to jump off the tiles onto the courtyard four stories
below.

As in any other institution, there was a great deal of
brainwashing involved in the business of orphanages, I had come to realize with
some fascination at the age of fourteen. All the other orphans spoke of a
“forever family” like it was the most natural thing in the world, like there
was nothing wrong with every one of them in the first place. They would pose to
have their pictures taken like right-as-rain puppies with eyes eating up half
their faces. I imagined if I checked the websites I’d find the same layout for
puppies as for orphans.

I knew the drill: prospective adopters would arrive. As soon as
they walked in, they would be surrounded by the toddlers, all four of them
taking them by the hand and pulling them in to play. The young ones would all
look clean, well-fed, and happy. The visitors should come at night though
because that was when the off-limits stories told themselves. One orphan sucked
his thumb like a tired, little animal. Another wet his bed every night or would
indeed try to make it to the bathroom while clinging to his inseparable blanket
(which made me wonder if Linus of
Peanuts
had ever been an orphan).
These were our most unguarded moments.

Immanoel the Thumb-sucker would start crying and the bedside lamps
would flick on from one double-decker to the next. The wailing child would be
followed by one more and then two, like a coach passenger’s worst nightmare,
all children denying the reality of having been abandoned and wishing with all
earnestness for their parents to come back.

Back in the dark hallway, one of the dried-up nuns would hold
Linus the Bed-Wetter and whisper soothing words in his ear, but the feel of a
custodian would always be in her touch. Most of the gentle Sisters didn’t have
an inkling of what was tearing the little boy up from the inside, not that I
expected anything from people who hadn’t experienced abandonment firsthand. A
couple of times I had done the job myself that none of them could – that is, be
the real person telling the kid that he wasn’t the one to blame nor did he
deserve to be left. Wherever his parents were, they weren’t happy to be rid of
their burden either.

Someone had to tell the kid that no one would ever leave him again
or send him someplace else. And therein lay the contradiction. I could at least
promise with enough sincerity in my eyes that I wasn’t going to send anyone
anywhere.

Especially because I was the oldest of them, the biggest big
brother to all the unwanted, and no “forever family” would have me. I was
Nataniel the Non Person.

****

I
was also
known as the Spirit Sherlock, the Spirit Detective. It was with a hint of
derision that the supervising nuns and social workers called me this behind my
back to help identify me among the transients of that high-turnover orphanage;
they probably called the other kids other names as well.

But
among the orphans, the epithet left the lips with reverence and it was almost
always spoken in a whisper. I was treated as a hero. Stories of my feats were
passed around, exaggerated and embellished, between floor-scrubbing duties and
mealtime, prayer service and, at the most tempting hour of all, right before
bed.

Not
a day passed that an orphan didn’t request a reading from me. Surreptitiously
in the yard or under the table during supper, an item would be passed into my
hand – a hat, a cellphone, a lighter, an earring or some such trinket – so that
I might divine whatever information I could out of these lifeless objects.

It
had all started out as a joke. Two older boys thought it was funny to shove an
old, patched-up sock under my nose. They told me, “Knock yourself out, freak.”

I
only remembered snatches of what I said but the words freaked them out so bad
they became my most loyal supporters-slash-managers. This was what roughly came
out of my mouth:

“I
see two people, one elderly and the other middle-aged. The middle-aged man puts
this sock and the other on his father’s feet every evening and whenever it’s
cold outside; but that was before. Recently the middle-aged man’s too busy and
he has passed the gesture on to another person. To a maid, because his wife
couldn’t care less. The old man doesn’t like this new arrangement.”

W
henever
the young me did a reading, my facial expression and voice would become far
more serious than they could ever be at my age.

“The
old man, he speaks in a loud but feeble voice. He has feelings he wants to say
but he can’t find the words for. He has too much pride and he doesn’t want to
appear weak in anyone’s eyes; that is, except in front of his son, the
middle-aged man. The old man complains of many things: headaches, coughing, noise;
but the things he complains about are mostly made up. When he forgets or loses
things, wets himself or calls for the doctor, all he really wants is to see his
son.”

The
bigger of the two bullies knew as much about the sock. He had stolen it from
the drawer of the old man whom he would read books to.

Even
the Sisters knew I could sense things and they sometimes turned to my talents
when those were the only recourse. But the official stand of the Order was to
keep their distance not only because of religious doctrine but because, in an
institution like an orphanage, if one went around doing a reading for every
child, no one would ever get sent off. No child would ever get adopted if we
investigated every mystery and suspicion. Deep down though, the kids all wanted
a little extra screening just to be safe, especially those who were next in
line to be given away to almost complete strangers.

This
was the very real need the other orphans had when they tried to consult me on
every inquiring, potential family. They would slip away an article that either
the husband or the wife possessed and then pass this on to my seeing hands.
This would most often be done in the middle of the initial interview and the
Mother Superior would know exactly what mischief was afoot as the orphans
spirited away a handkerchief, walking-stick, hairbrush, even a whole purse one
time; all precariously returned before anyone noticed they were missing. The
Mother Superior knew but was forced to keep quiet for fear of a scandal,
instead she would do her best to engage the visiting couple.