“Every surviving man of us agreed the devil had got into him that day, Doctor. Every single man of us.”
Behind the Teak Wardrobe
Mr. Geung rejoined Route 13 at Kasi. He didn’t know it was the same road he’d left four days earlier. All roads looked alike. But the sun was prodding him south and he knew this road was now heading in the right direction.
In his hand he held a pointed stick. It was a weapon against wild beasts. It had been a much larger stick that killed the tiger, but that branch had been too heavy to carry. A stick was a stick. A dead tiger was a dead tiger.
It had been getting close to morning and he still hadn’t slept. The tiger was resting directly below him, waiting for him to tire, to drop from the tree like a ripe mango. Several times she’d tried to climb up after him and failed. On one occasion, Geung had kicked out at her. The impact of his boot against her teeth caused her to lose her balance and fall to the ground. He felt guilty about that. From then on, frustrated but ever patient, she slept with one ear pricked up. Whether she heard the crack before he felt the branch give way was something he pondered later. All he could be sure of was that he and the branch suddenly dropped, very quickly. There was a second crack and a thump that sent a bolt of pain from his bottom to his shoulder and back again several times. He was thrown into the thick grass where he lay hurting, waiting for the tiger to come and eat him. But she hadn’t come.
He looked to his side and saw her close, and dead. She was such a beautiful creature. Her eyes were mascaraed like those of the girls behind the Hanoi Road market. (He’d only looked, not touched.) Her fur was thick and prettily patterned. He reached over and ran his hand through the soft coat. He cupped her sad face on its twisted neck. Then he put his cold nose against her warm one, and he wept.
Apart from the cockroaches in the morgue and several million mosquitoes (Dr. Siri had assured him they were unfeeling and certainly unworthy of pity), Mr. Geung had never been directly responsible for the death of another living creature. He was truly ashamed of his first murder. He understood death. He worked with it every day. He knew it was the end of people. They wouldn’t come back. This lovely animal wouldn’t come back either and it was because of him. He also knew what happened after death. He’d been to temples with the nurses and watched dead people being readied for their trip to Nirvana. Although he never actually saw any of them leave, he was certain that’s where they were going. The nurses said.
He had to honor the tiger in the same way. It was the least he could do. Despite his own injuries, he spent much of the morning collecting kindling from the forest to build a pyre. The animal was incredibly heavy—so heavy he hadn’t been able to lift her onto the sticks. He had no choice but to rebuild the rude structure on top of her. He doubted Buddha would mind too much if a body arrived upside down. With the matches from his bag he lit the dry twigs and sat beside the fire as it quickly engulfed the pyre, which collapsed onto his victim. The cooking meat smelled delicious and Geung’s stomach rumbled, but his mind didn’t let him know how inappropriate such a connection might be.
He didn’t have the words the monks used, but he knew it was appropriate to chant. There was a song in his head and, in a deep voice, he sang it over and over the way the monks would have.
“The sun wakes up and climbs my back / At evening drops into my sack.”
Mr. Geung didn’t know just how long ago all that had been. But knowing the sun would always be at the tiger’s back certainly made him feel better. And besides, it was her destiny.
He’d tramped over endless hills since then on his flat feet. Whenever he came across a stream, he’d taken drinks but resisted the temptation to bathe. “Don’t you dare wash it off,” the old lady had told him while coating him with her mosquito balm. He didn’t dare. So, in all this time, he hadn’t washed and he knew he was starting to smell bad. But he’d promised the old lady. His skin was flaking, not only on his neck where the sun baked him, but inside his clothes, too; he was itchy and uncomfortable.
If things weren’t bad enough, he found that he was going deaf. It had happened before in his life. He’d been told it was common for people like him because of a buildup of fluid in his ears. But here in Nowhere Land he had no nurse to help him hear again. Of course he had Dtui, but she was only in his head.
“Never mind. To Vientiane,” she told him, and he started to march down the center of the potholed road at approximately three miles an hour. He was still 120 miles from home.
Dtui needed Siri more than she’d ever needed him. It wasn’t about the medical problems that she faced. She could just about keep on top of those. No. She needed Siri to help her with two absolutely baffling emergencies that weren’t likely to be explained in a medical textbook. In the once-quiet sleeping ward, a four-year-old child sat wide awake, babbling in the voice of a seventy-year-old woman. Meej had listened to her for an hour. The language was certainly Hmong, although the child was Lao. According to the intern, she was reeling through an oral history of the life of the seventy-year-old. He said it was like listening to a recording of everything she’d ever said, starting around 1940— played fast-forward, too quick to catch. Dtui was in no position to doubt Meej’s appraisal.
And, as if that mystery wasn’t confusing enough, there was the proposal. It sat heavily on her mind like the carcass of an overweight sloth. She had developed infinite respect for the underpaid staff toiling around her at Kilometer 8, but, no matter how much she liked them, she wasn’t about to discuss her intimate feelings with them. She needed a cynic. She needed someone to put her thoughts into perspective. Comrade Lit was tall and gangly, but certainly worthy of a hug. He had a kind, strong—at a stretch—handsome face that would be nice to wake up beside every morning for the rest of her life.
Indeed, it was only the being-an-ass issue that presented any obstacle to her falling into his arms and cooing, “Yes, yes, my love. Take me.” Was being obnoxious really that much of a stumbling block to being a good husband? Would it take much of a change on her part to fit into his two-dimensional, brainwashed, personality-deficient life? Surely, if a pig could mate with a dog, Dtui could become a good Party wife: the wife of a man who does the paperwork for marrying a woman before he asks her. There was no doubt about it. She needed Siri to slap her a few times to help her see sense.
Siri was in the president’s cave sitting cross-legged in the Cuban’s hideout. Something didn’t feel right about this story of the relationship between Isandro and the girl. If the two Cubans actually had the magical power to kill her father, to make monkey babies and peach-pit larynxes, then surely they could enchant the hospital-bound girl and have their wicked way with her. Why would Isandro go through the humiliation and loss of face of asking her father for permission to woo her? The sergeant major’s rumor didn’t make any sense at all.
Siri decided, spiders or not, he had to go through Odon’s things once more. He had to be sure he hadn’t missed anything. He burrowed deep into the knapsack, felt below the straw mat, flipped through a shelf load of books whose titles meant nothing to him. But there wasn’t a thing—no further evidence that Hong Lan, the Pink Orchid, had touched the lives of the Cubans. Yet, they’d come back. Why? They’d given up their tickets home and put themselves in a dangerous situation as conspicuous outsiders in a hostile land. For what?
Siri was a champion at asking himself questions. All he needed was another voice that could answer them. There was never a helpful spirit around when he most needed one. The ghost of Odon, assuming it was still inside him, hadn’t done a damned thing of any use. Dancing and swaying weren’t going to get them anywhere. Siri didn’t need rhythm at this moment; he needed solutions.
He shone his flashlight around the cave for the umpteenth time, illuminating the humps of clothes, the fireplace, the bed, the big teak closet that stood ominously against one wall. He thought back to his brief visit here ten years earlier. What had this room been then? He closed his eyes and retraced his previous steps
through the cave. The son and mother had been visiting from China. The boy had picked up hepatitis somewhere on the journey. It wasn’t serious. He was strong and the right diet and rest would see him through it. They isolated him.
That had been in one of the plywood rooms. The living room was down from it, the bedrooms were—that was it. This armoire had been in the president’s bedroom then, all the way at the other end of the complex. This had been the business end, where meetings were held and plots hatched. What on earth would possess anybody to go to the trouble of lugging a heavy old wardrobe to the other end of a cave? It had obviously been so heavy they hadn’t bothered to drag it down to the new house. It had been left behind. But to Siri it seemed likely that it would have been abandoned in the place in which it usually stood. The Cubans must have manhandled it here themselves. Now why would they have done that?
He walked to the beast and stood in front of it. He’d already given it a thorough internal examination and found nothing. He closed the doors and scanned the front in the beam of his light. He looked to its right side and found nothing. He was walking around to the left when he stepped on something that sent him skidding forward; he almost fell. He heard whatever it was ping against the wall in front of him, then roll back in his direction. He slowly regained his composure and waited for his breathing to return to normal.
He shone his flashlight at the floor. There he saw the cause of his skid. The floor was dotted with ball bearings—the type used in truck or tractor wheels. Hundreds of them sat on the ground in no particular pattern. When he’d visited the room earlier, he hadn’t noticed them. Nobody would have, unless they’d bothered to go around the wardrobe. But, once he saw them, he knew immediately what their function was. It was a simple but brilliant idea. He knew it had been conceived by the same mind that had created the optical-illusion back door. He returned to the right side of the closet and pushed. It didn’t take a great deal of effort. The massive wooden cupboard glided majestically on the ball bearings beneath it as if it were on ice.
Siri stood back to admire his discovery. In the wall of the cave an aperture large enough for a man to climb through had appeared. His heart was beating fast. It was like discovering a Pharoah’s secret chamber in an ancient pyramid. He shone his light inside the opening. Here it was. This was the Cubans’ temple—a room no bigger than an air-raid shelter. Here was their sacrificial altar, their cauldron, their paraphernalia. A feeling of foreboding came over him. He had little doubt that this was the center of their black magic.
He removed the white talisman from inside his shirt and allowed it to hang openly around his neck. He breathed deeply and clambered inside the chamber to get a better look. There were two more beds in there, woven more carefully than the bed in the first room, one was covered in a stained cloth. There were various pots and jars of unidentifiable pastes and powders. In one corner there was a stack of dried fudge from tapped opium plants. In that state, the drug would maintain its potency for years. He recognized the unmistakable odor of dried blood and went over to the sacrificial altar. It was broad, easily wide enough for a body. Behind it was displayed what looked like photographs, but as he reached out to touch them, the talisman began to tremble against his chest.
He wondered what wickedness had been conjured up here, what evil spirits had been awakened inside these walls. He sensed something lurking, pressed high in the shadows against the cool stone. But it was nothing you could use a flashlight to see. His instincts told him to leave. He knew that he now hosted a dark Cuban spirit and that made him susceptible, open to attack. Panic took hold of him, but even so, he willed himself to reach out again for the photographs that were taped behind the altar. As he ripped them free, a high-pitched scream seemed to emanate from the rocks all around him.
He hurried for the aperture and flung himself through it. On the other side he lay on the ground, trying to catch his breath. His lungs were weak and useless now in times of crisis. Once more he’d ignored the advice of the shaman— “Do not subject the spirit of Yeh Ming to danger. Protect your ancestor and yourself at all costs.”
Siri wondered what there was about his character that impelled him toward dreadful danger. He was a terrible disappointment to himself. When his breathing was almost normal once more, he rolled the wardrobe into place to conceal the secret chamber, sat with his back against its doors, and shone his light onto the pictures. One was slightly larger than passport size. It showed a handsome black man in a humorless photo studio portrait pose. The other was larger, about six by eight inches. It was also a studio picture but the girl, whom Siri took to be the colonel’s daughter, Hong Lan, had been posed to look above and to the left of the photographer. She was a long-necked beauty with a shy, Mona Lisa smile. In her hair she wore a pink lotus.
Siri could certainly see how Isandro had fallen for her. Any red-blooded man would have. But this was wrong. The pictures as the centerpiece of a sacrificial altar pointed Siri to one unavoidable conclusion. The Cubans had used their magic to bewitch the girl. Her heart had been hijacked and she had been forced to love this man against her will. Odon must be dead. The living didn’t have the facility to haunt. Siri didn’t know why the man had chosen to use him as a vehicle but he could imagine a reason. Siri was afraid the Endoke priest needed his body to complete whatever process had been set in motion in this temple. He knew he had to find Hong Lan, but was afraid that this was exactly what Odon wanted him to do. By making contact with the girl, would he be bringing danger into her life once more? If Odon had been killed by the girl’s family to protect her, would it not be better to leave these skeletons in their cupboards in order to keep her safe?
The Small Blue Peugeot
In July 1977, the average yearly income in Laos was a little over eighty dollars. In Laos, some things people in the West considered necessities were unattainable luxuries one might read about in foreign magazines. Gasoline was one of these. Most people who owned a car and hadn’t been quick enough to flee to Thailand considered their vehicles to be permanently immobile; now they were small wheeled sheds or outside cupboards. On the roads, the majority of transport had some government connection or was owned by foreigners. Anyone who could afford to run a private car and claimed not to fit in one or the other of these categories had to be viewed with some suspicion.
Mr. Geung had made every effort to leave the road whenever he heard an engine approach. He was exhausted. His feet were blistered and the muscles in his legs were screaming for him to stop and rest. But he had to get to the morgue. Dtui had helped him fashion a hat from banana leaves that kept off the sun and made him look quite decorative. She was with him most of the time now, giving advice, urging him on. He couldn’t have made it this far without her, however far this far might be.
As his hearing slowly faded, he found he was catching the sounds of approaching trucks later and later. But for the last hour or so, nothing at all had passed him on the highway. It was almost as if the road were running out of strength, along with Geung. The asphalt had gradually turned to gravel, which had now become sand. The sun was on his shoulder so he knew he was still heading in the right direction, but the road beneath him seemed to have lost faith that it could make it to Vientiane.
A car—a small blue Peugeot—suddenly darted out of a side track a hundred yards ahead of him. Mr. Geung was in the center of the road and there was nothing but open clearing on either side. There was nowhere to run, so he continued walking. There was nothing to worry about. Only army trucks had to be avoided. One thing he was sure of was that the army didn’t drive little blue cars. He expected the driver to ignore him and go past but the car stopped beside him. The driver obviously expected Geung to stop also and talk to him, but Geung continued on his journey. After a few seconds of silence, the car dropped into reverse and rolled backward till it was traveling parallel to him.
The driver was a middle-aged man with dyed black hair and a cigarette hanging from his mouth. “Good afternoon, Comrade,” he shout
ed above the sound of the whiny engine.
“I … I’m walking,” Geung told him.
“That, brother, I can see. Are you walking because you like to or because you have no choice?”
“Yes.”
“Yes, which?”
“I … I’m w … walking to the morgue.”
“Oho. Don’t be so negative, brother. Nobody died from walking. Where you headed?”
Mr. Geung thought it was funny that the car could go backward along the road. It made him laugh. It was the first time he’d laughed all week. “Vientiane,” he said.
“Well, then, maybe it will kill you. Especially seeing as you’re on the wrong road. Route 13 took a left turn some ten miles back. You missed it.”
“I have to go … go straight.”
“You’ll end up in Thailand if you do that. Listen, Comrade, I’m on my way to Vang Vieng. That’s halfway to Vientiane. It’ll take a big chunk out of your journey.”
Vang Vieng. Geung had heard of that place. He didn’t know where it was but people in his village used to talk about it a lot. If it was near his village, it couldn’t be that far from Vientiane.
“All right,” he said, and stopped walking. The driver opened the passenger door. Geung noticed a pistol on the spare seat; the man hurriedly put it into the glove compartment.
“Nothing to worry about,” the man told him. He watched Geung climb painfully into the front seat. When he was in, the driver leaned over and slammed the door shut. His passenger smelt like a latrine. The man introduced himself as Woot. Geung introduced himself as Comrade Geung, and they shook hands. Woot’s fingers were sticky, as if he’d just eaten glutinous rice and had not bothered to wash them. That thought reminded Geung that his supplies were gone and he was hungry.
The little blue Peugeot went back along the old road, then—just as Woot had promised—they turned right onto Route 13. Geung had seen the sign earlier but ignored it because the sun had wanted him to go straight. A few miles farther on, there was a tall signpost listing the names of the places the road would take them. The driver slowed down as they approached it.
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