“Siri,” she said, “can I say something?”
“I’m disappointed you’d need to ask,” he said.
“In my humble opinion,” she said, “you have only progressed from not knowing what you’re doing to not knowing what you’re doing spectacularly. You’ve motivated an entire village to throw itself over a cliff.”
He looked hurt. “I think you’re underestimating my potential.”
“You’ve made one shamanic trip to the otherworld quite by accident,” said Daeng. “You’ve only recently learned how to communicate with spirits . . . or, should I say, one spirit? You host a shaman you never hear from, and you have a grand total of one party trick.”
“It’s hardly a trick, my love. I disappear.”
“And only when you’re alone or in the company of people who will you to disappear.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying that if your one skill is your only weapon for tonight’s show then I’m just as qualified as you.”
“Oh, be my guest. Feel free to stand up in front of a village of shamans and wag your tail.”
“Apart from cooling them down a little I don’t think that would help. Siri, the point is neither of us is qualified.”
“Daeng, it doesn’t matter what we can or can’t do. Nobody in this village is able to function due to the fact they’ve been traumatized by the phibob. This is a show of strength. A chance for us to regain control.”
“Oh.”
“What?”
“I thought the whole purpose of this was to prove Abbot Rayron’s innocence.”
“Well, yes. Of course it is. That too.”
“You know I’d be very disappointed if I thought this was just Dr. Siri plotting revenge on ghosts.”
“Don’t be silly.”
He was sorry the words hadn’t left his mouth with more conviction. He’d motivated all but one person. He watched his wife walk away. He loved how her new legs gave her the gait of a middle-aged woman, that little swing as she got the rhythm of the tail going. Of course he’d loved her just as much tailless and arthritic, but this was a gift from heaven.
•••
It wasn’t so much a motorcycle, more a vacuum cleaner with uneven wheels. The Indian Motorcycle Chief went out of production in 1953, so to keep the creature alive after all those years, some loving owner had grafted on parts of everything from military jeeps to discarded lawn mowers. It looked abstract, but it was mobile. It chugged along at twenty kilometers an hour and sounded in remarkably fine health. Civilai knew it would be useless in the event of a hasty retreat, but he hoped that wouldn’t be necessary.
He’d left notes at the guesthouse, the school and the temple. They were “Should anyone read this after my unexplained disappearance . . .” notes. They contained copies of his theories and his research and the reason, beyond all reason, why he’d decided to head off into the valley of death alone. He was no Bruce Lee, no James Bond, no Siri Paiboun. He was a weak old man with a paunch and hardly enough strength to unscrew the lid from a jar of pickles. But he had a brain, and if that failed, he was seventy-five, and that was a damned fine innings in a place like Laos. Better to go in a fistfight than an oxygen tent.
The sound of the old Chief would have been heard a few kilometers away if there’d been anyone to hear it. Civilai rode proudly into town like Gary Cooper. He saw nobody. He parked by the low wall of the colonial building, switched off the engine and sat there thinking, It’s mighty quiet. The motorcycle ironed out its nuts and bolts a while, but there were no other sounds. No dogs barking. No birdsong. No breeze rustling the trees. Nothing.
He climbed down from the saddle and rearranged the discreet package he wore beneath his underpants. After thirty kilometers on a vacuum cleaner it took a few minutes to rise to his full height. But, by the time he was halfway along the garden path he was striding confidently. Before him was a large solid single-story building with enough space for nineteen families. There had been a propaganda campaign following the revolution to house poor families in the opulent homes of the usurpers. But there were no bare-bottomed toddlers running around, no lines of washing or rows of cabbages in the yard.
He stopped at a splendid blue door with opaque stained glass panels. After so many years he would have expected the glass to be cracked, the paint to be chipped and sunburned. But it looked as proud as the day it was first hung. And the door was ajar.
“Anyone home?” he shouted.
The building was as silent as a tomb.
He was half tempted to kick off his shoes before walking inside. Beyond the door was a typical front room: a large space with doors leading off it. There was no furniture, no tapestries or pictures on the whitewashed walls. And it was spotless. It was as if the area had been primed for a surgical operation. He didn’t see so much as a ceiling lizard.
He walked to each door, knocked and stepped inside. But the rooms were just as empty and spick and span. The bathroom, the large kitchen and the maid’s quarters were pristine and deserted. He walked to the back porch, which was surrounded by French windows. There was no table, but he could imagine the administrator dining there with his guests looking out over the lush garden. It would have been pretty in its day. There were small but cared-for non-native trees of both fruit and blossom. There were the outlines of flowerbeds and borders, and, although local weeds had grown through it, somebody had taken the trouble to keep the lawn even. It was a well-kept garden by Lao standards, but it had lost its class.
One of the many questions Civilai asked himself as he sat there on the garden steps was why anyone would care for a garden of an empty house.
He was so used to being alone in Ban Toop that when the figure emerged from the bushes to his right, he assumed it was one of Siri’s ghosts. But it soon became clear that this was a young girl in her teens. She wore a colorful phasin skirt and a white blouse, and she had long, thick ebony hair. To complete the picture of the classic Lao beauty she should have been smiling, but she had a look of disappointment on her powdered face.
“I don’t suppose I could order a glass of lemon juice?” said Civilai when she was close enough to hear. “I’m parched.”
He noticed she was holding some sheets of paper in her pretty hand. He recognized the handwriting. There was no way of knowing how his farewell letters could have made their way to Ban Toop almost as fast as himself, or whether the collection was complete, but there was something final about the ache that squeezed his chest like a heavy concertina. It was as if the escape tunnel had caved in behind him.
He smiled at the girl. She looked at the ground in front of him.
“You have two choices,” she said, her voice thick with rancor. “They both involve you dying. You can get on your bike and start riding back to Pak Xan. On the way you’ll be killed in a tragic accident. They’ll send your body back to Vientiane.”
Civilai lowered himself down the steps, so she’d have no choice but to look at him.
“If you don’t,” she said, “you’ll die here and your wife will never know what happened to you.”
He was shocked that such a dark message could come from the lips of one so young and lovely.
“Not particularly good options,” he said, “but I’ll go for scenario B, the mysterious disappearance. At least then I might get a few answers.”
She glared at him for longer than a Lao girl should stare at an elderly male.
“Go,” she said.
“So you won’t have to clean up the blood?” said Civilai.
“No . . . I . . .”
“Darling,” said Civilai, “I understand you’re just a messenger, albeit a rather scary one, but if I’m to be killed either way I prefer to die in front of you, so the image will stay with you all through your life.”
She spat on the ground and continued to glare like a feral cat, but
he noticed a tear in her eye. It was fleeting and was swatted away in a second, but it was there. She turned and walked across the freshly cut grass and disappeared behind her bush.
Civilai shuddered and looked around. “Cue the dark assassin,” he called out. But nothing happened. And that lull was far more unnerving than any murderous intent. He walked back through the clean house along the garden path to the road, and he looked left and right. He strained his ears for human noise. He imagined this was what deafness must be like: the knowledge that there must be sound, but it couldn’t be heard. All he had in his head was the imagined thump, thump of his heart.
He walked to the center of the road where he stood and shouted, “I am Civilai. I am seventy-five years old. I know what’s happening here. I am not afraid.”
Those last two points were not necessarily true, but he wondered even at this late hour whether he might elicit some sympathy from the villagers. He wondered if the over-seventies might rush out into the street and say, “We’re with you, Civilai.” As it was he felt silly standing there alone. The whole scenario was so ridiculous he laughed. It was true. He no longer felt afraid. He realized that you can only fear death if you lust for more life, and he didn’t.
So when the old Renault appeared at the end of the road and figures in black hoods with slits for eyeholes emerged from the houses, it all struck him as rather amusing. While he still had the stage in this silent theatre he shouted his last thoughts.
“This is not . . .” he began.
One of the black hoods thumped him in the back of the knees with a tree branch. It hurt. He dropped onto his shins.
“. . . not the Lao way,” he called out. “We are a peaceful people.”
A second branch slammed into his upper arm, and the old bone snapped. A slither of nausea ran through him. He barely had the strength to finish.
“The Buddha taught us to love, not to—”
The last branch shut him up. It bounced off the side of his head, and he dropped flat on the roadway.
12
I Shot the Buddha
“So here’s the bottom line. I’ve organized this . . . event. It’s in a village so riddled with evil spirits you could poke a stick in the ground, and they’d spurt out. Daeng thinks I arranged it because I’ve lived in fear of the phibob long enough, that I want to show them who’s boss. And, to be perfectly honest, she’s right. She’s usually right. She also thinks I don’t have the wherewithal to pull it off. She’s right on the button with that too. So I was wondering if you’re not busy whether I might, you know, evoke you.”
Dr. Siri sat there on the little stool and waited for a response. Surely they knew what was going on: the guardian spirits, his dead mother, Auntie Bpoo, Yeh Ming. Surely someone was tuned in to the Siri channel. He wasn’t even in the space between the two doors. He was in the bathroom with a loofah in one hand and a cake of soap in the other. He decided at the very least he’d go to the grand séance clean. His inadequacies were another matter. He couldn’t even will himself to disappear again. He’d never felt so naked.
He splashed himself with cold water from the tank, dried himself with one of his two loincloths and wrapped the other around his waist. He walked to the door of the bathhouse and stepped outside. He thought his sandals were gone, but he’d left through a different door. He tried to go back, but the door didn’t have a handle and had locked itself. Ahead, along a neat stepping stone path, was another door. It looked remarkably like the door he’d taken to get into the bathhouse in the first place.
“What is it with the doors?” he asked, looking up at the rapidly darkening sky.
He went through the other door, but it opened into a waiting room. There were chairs lining the walls and a bamboo table in the center with magazines. There were posters of cartoon dogs with worms eating their hearts, cats with cartoon lice laying eggs under their skin. There was a calendar of livestock sponsored by an artificial insemination clinic.
Siri tried to take one of the magazines, but it was stuck to the table, so he sat on a chair and waited. There were no doors now, not even the one he’d come through, so he couldn’t go anywhere. And he couldn’t speak or shout or sing because his mouth was sealed like a wound that had healed over. A man leading a monitor lizard on a rope entered through the far wall. Siri was so distracted by the lizard he didn’t notice the man at first. It was Civilai, and he was bruised and covered with blood. Siri called out, but of course there was no sound. Civilai seemed not to notice Siri. He sat on one of the chairs, and the lizard curled up under the seat.
The wall to the right opened a crack and in walked Phosy. He too was walking a monitor lizard on a rope. He sat beside Civilai without acknowledging him. His lizard also curled up beneath the chair and went to sleep. Phosy perused the posters around the room. He was apparently unfazed by the twenty-centimeter blade sticking out from his stomach. Both men looked at their left wrists from time to time even though they were not wearing watches.
A nurse in a glossy white uniform entered through the wall immediately beside Siri.
“You,” she said, slapping Siri across the back of the head. “You nex.”
She had the type of Chinese accent Thai comedians adopted to make fun of the Chinese. Siri stood and wondered where he was supposed to go.
“Don’t forgeh you dog,” said the nurse.
Siri was holding a rope at the end of which was Saloop, his old dead mongrel. His tail was wagging and a broad, toothless grin filled his face. Siri smiled back.
“Folla me,” said the nurse. She turned to Civilai and Phosy. “You two gotta wait,” she said. “You both pendin.”
Siri followed her through the wall. The vet was delivering a piglet. The mother pig lay on her back with her legs akimbo. The nurse told her to push as hard as she could.
“Might hurt,” she said, “but it worth it.”
Siri focused on the vet. He was older than the black stupa and wore monk’s robes with an apron to keep off the blood. He was holding a bottle of whisky from which he took the occasional belt and encouraged the nurse to drink with him, swig for swig.
The pig produced a piglet that smelled of a hot cooked breakfast. The nurse took it and, unseen by the mother, dropped it down the garbage chute. Saloop the dog dived in after it. The nurse went to a small cupboard and took out a rubber duck. She carried it to the mother pig and held it up.
“I sorry,” she said. “Baby no make it.”
The pig, evidently not very smart, walked out in tears holding the rubber duck.
The vet shrugged, took a long draft of his whisky, handed the bottle to Siri and fell dead on the floor. Siri finished the bottle and fell beside him.
“Is there anything you’d care to tell me now that you’re dead?” Siri asked the vet, but the question came out in a stream of bubbles from his ears.
“People believe anything,” said the vet.
“I see that,” said Siri.
The vet shriveled up, and his remains were blown away by the ceiling fan. Siri stood and walked back through the waiting room where there were now only the two monitor lizards sitting on chairs reading newspapers. They ignored Siri, who continued through a new door that had appeared leading back to the bathroom. There, sitting on a small plastic stool, he saw a naked Dr. Siri splashing himself with water. He didn’t consider stopping for a chat. He turned around three times and went through the same door he’d just used, but this time his sandals were outside on the step. He walked through the dark temple grounds bathed in the floral scents of evening and paused to note how beautiful life was.
He returned to his room where Madam Daeng was sleeping on the floor mat. He lay beside her.
“Daeng,” he said.
She was hard to rouse.
“Daeng?”
“Yes, my husband?”
“I’ve just had a surreal moment in the bathroo
m,” he said. “In fact there might be another one of me arriving here sometime soon.”
“Hmm, that would be kinky,” she purred.
“What? Oh. Well, the point is, I feel a little drained. I’m probably going to need a quick nap before we head off for the séance.”
She heaved herself up on one shoulder. Sleep was caked around her eyes. The room was already in darkness save for an arc of moonlight through the window.
“You don’t remember?” she asked.
“Remember what?”
“It’s all over, Siri.”
“It is?”
“Yes. I was worried. I didn’t think you’d ever come down.”
“Down from what?”
“From your trance. What’s the last thing you remember?”
“I don’t . . . I went to take a bath.”
“Yes, after lunch. And you came back from the bathroom pumped up like a tractor tire. You were magnificent.”
“I was?”
“Oh, yes, Siri. We had the séance. You ran it like a circus master. The mediums mediated and the exorcists exorcised and the crowd yelled. And this shaman was possessed and that shaman was possessed. And there was a display of fireworks and a couple of bamboo rockets, and everyone agreed it was the most fun they’d had in years. Even the Sangharaj was impressed.”
“He was there?”
“He was beside you all evening. You held his hand. Even when you were in your trance you didn’t let him go.”
“I was unconscious?”
“In a sitting position on the bleachers. We assumed you were drunk from the rice whisky or high from the opium. You went through a lot. But your eyes were wide open, and you smiled the entire time.”
“I remember nothing,” said Siri, shaking his head. “But it doesn’t seem right to me. What about the phibob?”
I Shot the Buddha Page 19