Page 81 of Haunted

“Thanks.” I rack my mind for something polite to say about him, but I haven’t done my homework. I have no idea who he is. Fortunately, he’s already turned back to his phone.

I sit down next to him at the table they’ve set up at the front, below the tiers of seats. I try to organize my notes, but my mind keeps drifting back to yesterday. Lance in the kitchen, asking questions that stopped being questions. The way his voice shifted into something harder and more precise the longer he talked, like a dial being turned. The way he didn’t even notice the shift until I pointed it out.

He came back from that run pink in the face and apologised so profusely it was almost comical, and then did it again over dinner, and then once more with the light off.

He even agreed to talk to somebody, which is such a relief that I nearly cried about it in the shower. I know he thinks he came home from his deployments whole, because he can still function perfectly well. But functioning and healing are not the same thing.

I scan the students as they settle into the seats in front of me. They look so young. I’m relieved, however, when I see Roger sitting in the back row. I give him a little wave and a smile, because I’m relieved to see a friendly face. I’m just about to go and greet him when Ryan starts swearing at his phone.

I turn to him. “You okay?” I ask. I scan his side of the table for notes. He doesn’t have notes in front of him, which means that he’s just one system outage away from having to wing it in front of fifty strangers.

He looks up, catching my eye, and sighs. “My gaming group. They let the tank die. Again.”

“Oh.” I’m relieved that it’s not something worse. I can’t bear seeing people scrambling in public. “Sorry, I’m not a gamer,” I say. “What’s a tank?”

“A tank’s job is to stand in front of any threat and take the majority of the damage so that the rest of the party can survive. It’s hard work and they take more hits than they should, and my party never heals him fast enough.” He shakes his head. “The worst part is that he never tells us when he’s had too much. He just keeps taking damage until he drops.”

Something turns over in my chest, and it is not cold at all. “Do you really need them, though?” I ask. “Tanks.”

He gives me a look. “If you don’t have a tank, everybody dies.”

And there it is. The whole man, handed to me across a table by a stranger with a phone.

Lance thinks he is my tank. He has thought it since he was seventeen years old and it has never once occurred to him to want anything else, and for weeks I have been braced against it like it was something being done to me.

But a tank is not invulnerable. A tank is the thing that takes every hit so that nobody behind it has to, and the party stands around afterwards complaining about the repair bill. Somebody has to look after the tank. Somebody has to notice what it costs him.

Nobody ever has. Not the Corps, not Nash, not his own mother, who is so proud of him she has never once asked him whether he is all right.

I am not the thing he is protecting. I am the person who takes care of the man who protects. That is a job I know how to do. God help me, it is the only job I have ever been good at, and I have spent ten years running from it, and here it is again wearing a face I love.

I want to go home right now and start.

The professor calls the class to order. “Today we’re privileged to have two of the speakers for our upcoming digital entrepreneurship conference. I expect you’ve watched the assigned episodes and that we’ll have an excellent conversation. Let’s start with Jonny Bishop. Class? What questions do we have?”

I do the short version of who I am and what I do, which I could deliver in my sleep, and then I open the floor.

The first hand goes up. A scrawny young man with wild curls. “Do you think your content is a little colonialist? Would it be fair to say you’re fetishizing India for the neocolonial gaze?”

Holy shit. The fact that I never went to college has never felt heavier than it does right now. I take a breath. “I think I’m providing content that makes India less of a mystery so that we can engage in an honest conversation. I don’t know if that’s neocolonial, but I think there are a lot of people who don’t have the tools to understand India on its own terms, and they want to understand it anyway.”

A man in a pink triangle T-shirt raises his hand. “You say you’re a member of LGBTQ community, yet your content is dismissive of LGBTQ issues. Why do you pretend India is friendly to gay people when you’re simultaneously showing it as hostile?”

“I would never call India hostile to gay people. Homosexuality was decriminalized there in 2018, and in many cities there are thriving queer communities. But I do advise gay travelers to be aware of their surroundings, because the cultural landscape varies enormously between regions. That’s not cowardice. It’s survival. I’ve been doing it for nine years.”

I take a breath. “And on the first part of your question—am I dismissive. I’d say my channel is made for a general traveler, and that a general traveler is who I’ve built an audience out of. That’s a commercial decision and I’m not going to pretend otherwise.” The room has gone quiet. “What I’d say back to you is that there is a difference between a channel that isn’t only about being gay and a channel that pretends nobody watching it is. I’m on that line every week and I don’t always get it right.”

The man sits down, looking unsatisfied. That answer was solid and I know it. Lance’s brutal cross-examination gave me the muscle memory to deliver it without flinching.

The professor looks pleased. I feel a notch of tension release.

Then a woman in a floral shirt and cat-eye glasses raises her hand. “A lot of your content is solo. You moved to a country you didn’t know, learned a new language, built a new life from scratch. And yet, in every episode, it’s always just you, alone, in front of the camera.” She pauses. “Do you ever feel lonely?”

I open my mouth to say no, of course not, and stop.

“Well, it’s quite hard to feel alone in a country of one and a half billion people,” I say, and a ripple of laughter breaks the tension. “And it’s true that I traveled alone for a lot of my content, but I still had friends, and families I’d gotten to know—”

I trail off. How many real friends were there? And in how few cities? Searching out hostels so I’d have someone to talk to. Saving my best stories for strangers. The festivals and weddings I filmed as an outsider, always behind the camera, always on the other side of the lens.