Life is good. For expats in this Southeast Asian city, it can be very good, but as I've learned, the unexpected can happen at any time. Like my new job. I'd expected to be posted to Warsaw. Fair enough. Then came the order: off to the tropics you go. So I packed my bags, crossed the Pacific, wound up in this efficient, clean and sunny city, and just moved into a new, virtually vacant condo complex.
What a find! Everything I'd read back in the US said that I could be paying Manhattan prices for a pad the size I wanted in the main business district. As I looked around, I eventually found this place, just out of the center, twice the size I'd wanted, with a grand pool, and half the Manhattan price. When I questioned the real estate agent on why so many cheap units were available here, he told me that the name, Beauty World, might've put people off. After I moved in though, I learned from a local colleague that the whole building had been built on what was once a Chinese graveyard. That's why I see ghosts every night in my dreams, I exclaimed.
It's really paradise. Take our pool, for example. It's just a two-flight walk down from my front door, and it's nearly always empty, except for one attractive young lady -- the "beauty of Beauty World," I call her -- who seems to frequent it every evening. I'd be lying if I told you that the view from my veranda of her wet, slender figure crisscrossing the pool didn't make me want to strip and take a dip. But this isn't just a carnal impulse. In fact, I've studied this lady closely, and more than even her well-endowed form and sleek black bathing apparel, I've noted how she has a most peculiar swimming style. She does not traverse the pool in free-style or an elegant butterfly-stroke. Nor does she bob, dog-paddle or do the breast-stroke. In fact, she slides arms-to-the-side completely underwater, propelled by an elastic manipulation of her torso, in one way similar to a porpoise, or from another perspective, like a corpse jettisoned from a water cannon.
I've already gone down a couple times with the idea of striking up a conversation, only to discover that she'd left. My swim was fine anyway, with the water clean and crystal clear. I have to admit though that several nights ago when I was questioning my only neighbor about the significance of the Hungry Ghost Festival and all the joss sticks, piles of ashes and oranges lying at various spots around the condo grounds, he avoided answering and instead complained vociferously about finding slime on the pool's surface. Said he'd also noticed the smell of rotting frangipani the air, and that enough was enough, he was gonna move out.
I told him to relax. It's a new complex, I said, and the various air and water filters might just need some tweaking.
Truthfully, the weirdness doesn't bother me because I've had other things on my mind. This evening I'm setting a challenge for myself: I'm going down and I swear I'm going to catch my mermaid. I'm going to sit on the edge of the pool, look lonely, forlorn, then splash water in her direction.
And tonight I won't let her leave without me.
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Exhibit A: organisms found in the deceased resident's pool
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