Disco for the Departed

by Colin Cotterill

  “See, brother?” he said. “That there, halfway down. That says Vang Vieng. Can you read that?”

  But Geung was more excited about the final name on the list. He recognized the characters for that one. He smiled at Woot, then looked back at the sign.

  “Vvvv … ien-tiane,” he said. “Vvvvientiane.”

  It was the happiest word he’d ever spelled. He couldn’t get the smile off his face. When the car sped up, he looked out at the passing rice fields and bared his teeth to the warm air that blew in through the window. He was joyful. He thought how great it would be if Comrade Woot could go all the way to Vientiane. But what he didn’t know was that Comrade Woot didn’t even plan to go to Vang Vieng.

  Siri sat alone in the guesthouse restaurant and stared into a mug of coffee so thick you could lose an anchor in it. It was his second mug. He missed Vientiane baguettes and omelets and fresh-caught river fish. In this part of the country there was no drought. Things grew readily in the northeast. Civilai had once said you could drop a lemon-flavored lozenge up here and within a week you’d find a lemon tree. So Siri couldn’t understand why the only dish on the Guesthouse Number One menu was feu rice noodles and cabbage.

  The coffee was intended to take away the taste of the cabbage and stimulate his leaden mind. He had lots of little clues but he couldn’t seem to put them together in an appropriate order. The previous night, the disco had kept him awake till two. Some infernal bongo drum had tried to lure him back there, but he’d fought off the temptation. He’d been hoping for a dream, but when sleep finally came, there had been nothing to see. At least, there was nothing he could remember.

  He’d awakened again later when it was still dark. He had an urge to go to the bathroom. It was an annoying urge because the bathroom was downstairs and dark. But he’d arrived at the age when a man’s bladder has risen through the hierarchy of bodily organs to become all-powerful. It made the rules. He slipped on his sandals and walked down to the communal lavatory. The air was still and cold. Smelly water squelched under his feet. He left the flashlight on top of the partition wall. His memory was good enough to have no need for a spotlight on his business. The beam was directed into the shower booths.

  The sound of water dripping behind him gradually became a spurt, as if someone had turned on a shower. He lowered his sarong and turned. The water beneath his feet had risen drastically. The shower opposite was gushing, throwing forth impossible torrents of water—far more than could ever logically pass through a lead pipe. Siri had learned how to overcome fear during moments such as this. It was his reverse twilight, the time before sunrise when he was neither awake nor asleep. It was a time to observe and learn. There was no need to panic.

  The water poured now from the ceiling of the shower stall like a mountain waterfall. It continued to rise past his knees. It had no temperature, no substance. He was vaguely able to make out a shape beneath the surface two yards away. He took up his light and directed the beam down into the water. There, lying flat on the bathroom tiles, was Isandro. He reclined like a cadaver prepared for burial with his large hands spread, one on top of the other on his chest. He looked serene, peaceful—complete.

  The next thing Siri knew, he was being roused from sleep by a banging on his door. It was an angry banging. His door didn’t have a lock but he’d wedged the chair under the handle, and it appeared the maid, who walked in ten times a day without warning, was taking it personally.

  “Who is it?” he asked sweetly, knowing the answer full well.

  “Your breakfast,” she snapped, “is in the bowl. If you aren’t down in five minutes it’ll be cold.”

  “You are an angel in brown burlap dungarees, Comrade,” he shouted through the door. “The Party extends its gratitude for your keeping me in sustenance.”

  He’d learned from experience, if he took five or fifty-five minutes, breakfast would still be cold. So he took his time going down, picked at the tepid noodles, and continued considering the mystery. And still, an hour later, here he sat with his second mug of sea mud, still contemplating the vision he’d had in the bathroom. If Isandro had died peacefully, why was Odon’s spirit this restless? What was the connection with water? Had he drowned? Why couldn’t Siri’s spirit colleagues just put up a blackboard with all the answers chalked on it? Why did it all have to be so cryptic?

  “Good morning, Doc.”

  Siri looked up in surprise to see Dtui walking into the dining room. Her once-white uniform looked like she’d offered it up as a canvas to an abstract painter from an Eastern Bloc country. In her arms she carried little Panoy who, despite her splints and bandages, was looking quite rosy. The sight of them erased the puzzles from the doctor’s mind.

  “Morning, Panoy. Morning, Nurse Dtui. What are you doing here?”

  “The Cubans have landed. They got in last night. I’ve been relieved.”

  “How did you get here?”

  “The truck that brought the new doctors gave me a ride back.”

  “And should I assume you’ve become a foster parent?”

  “I found out what village her mother was from. As soon as she’s back to normal I’d like to take her there.”

  “That’s nice of you. I doubt the fractures will take long to heal. I imagine we could take her anytime.”

  “Er …”

  “Yes?”

  “It isn’t really the fractures we need to worry about.”

  He felt the child’s forehead and looked into her eyes. “Has there been some complication?”

  “You could say that. The truck ride quietened her down a bit, but I reckon she could start up any time now.”

  “Start up what?”

  The spirit of Mrs. Nuts had a marvelous sense of timing. Even as Siri stared at the girl, she seemed to change to a different gear. She smiled and giggled once as a four-yearold, then continued where she’d left off in the voice of a grandmother.

  “Oh, I say.” Siri raised his bushy old eyebrows and watched in surprise. “We seem to have a few wires crossed here.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “I’m not sure I can. If she were a radio we could just twiddle with the antenna a bit. But this isn’t going to be easy. Not easy at all.”

  Mr. Woot—the spy, the bounty hunter, the chicken counting Khon Khouay representative for the region—was sitting in the office of the local Insurgency Intelligence Unit five miles from Vang Vieng. He still had that Darkie toothpaste smile on his face, just like the minstrel on the tube, but it was beginning to fade. Woot’s capture of the day was safely in his cell, and all Woot wanted now was his bounty money. Once he was paid, he could return to the streets to hunt down insurgents, discover double agents, and weed out Royalist sympathizers. But the unit director still hadn’t handed over the reward.

  “Woot,” he said. “You know? I don’t think I can sell this tale to Vientiane.”

  “What are you talking about?” Woot said indignantly. “I caught him red-handed taking notes at the airfield.”

  “You didn’t bring me any evidence.”

  “Ooy, I told you. Before I could get to him, he’d swallowed the paper. I wasn’t about to reach down his throat and fish it out, was I now?”

  Captain Bounyasith was an old drinking buddy of Woot’s and he got a percentage of all the bounty money he handed out to his field agents. He was trying very hard to make the story fly, but it was still too heavy to get off the ground. “Plus,” he said, “there’s the fact that the airfield down there hasn’t been used since Air America left.”

  “Reconnaissance, Comrade. Reconnaissance. The insurgents have obviously got it earmarked as a future invasion site. Come on. Work with me on this, brother.”

  “I’m just telling you what Vientiane’s going to say to me. That’s all.” The tired old captain sighed and dipped his Vietnamese biscuit into his tea. All but the pinch between his fingers broke off and sank beneath the surface. He swore under his breath. It was a crumbly, soggy type of day all around.
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  “OK,” Woot conceded. “But we do have the actual insurgent locked up.”

  The captain fished around in the tea with his pen. He could find no evidence at all that the biscuit ever existed. “Have you not noticed what he is?” he asked. “Don’t you think they’ll notice that at the interrogation?”

  “It’s a front.”

  “A front? You mean he’s pretending to look the way he does? You mean he doesn’t actually have speech and hearing problems? You mean he doesn’t have flaky skin and flat feet and stink like a field latrine?”

  There were a few seconds of silence.

  “He’s good, I’ll give him that.”

  Captain Bounyasith leaned back and emptied his tea out of the open window into the yard. They heard the chickens cluck toward it in a frenzy. “No, Woot. It isn’t going to work. Nobody’s going to believe it.”

  “Shit!” The spy, who everyone in the province knew without any doubt was a spy, stood up and cursed his luck. “What are you going to do with him?”

  “Give him a bite to eat and let him go.”

  “Did he have any money on him?”

  “Not a brass kip.”

  “Shit. I can’t even get my petrol money back. What a day.”

  Mrs. Nuts Goes Home

  Mrs. Nuts’s village was only three miles from Vieng Xai but there was no road to it. To get there, Siri, Dtui, and Panoy had followed their guide along a narrow track that wound slowly through a gentle valley, past rocky outcrops that poked up like fingers making rude signs. The village itself sat ridiculously on top of a high knoll as if, one day in its distant history, it had fled there to escape a flood. The final fifty yards of pathway seemed to climb vertically. Panoy weighed no more than a wish, but Dtui had carried her all the way and she was certain this final stretch would be the death of her. Fortunately, the girl who had daubed Mrs. Nuts’s feet with blood recognized the big nurse and came running down to relieve her of her burden.

  They were welcomed with some confusion by the villagers and led to the hut of the shaman, where they discovered him swaying in one corner. He flapped his arm slowly as a gesture for the strangers to come in. He was a man of around forty, muscular and kindly. But he was so laid-back, Siri and Dtui almost fell asleep listening to him. He had apparently invented a cocktail of local herbs that, he claimed, dispensed with the need for food if taken three times a day. It also left him in a state of perpetual bliss, one which he was reluctant to disturb with work.

  “You see?” he said in a slow drawl. “Organizing an exorcism takes many, many, many days. Weeks sometimes. Years.” He obviously didn’t know to whom he was speaking. Dr. Siri understood only too well that given the right frame of mind, an exorcism could be patched together in an hour or so. He just had to elicit that frame of mind from the stoned shaman.

  “Great and respected witch doctor,” Siri said. “Of course, you’re right. But here in your village you have a poor unfortunate lady wrapped in betel-nut leaves who can’t be cremated until her soul has been reunited with her body. And we have brought that soul to you in the body of this little girl. It’s barely an exorcism—more like replanting a yam in a different garden. It couldn’t be any easier.”

  Of course, it wouldn’t be quite that easy, but all Siri needed was for the shaman to bring together the tools of his trade and Yeh Ming would probably oblige with the rest. The shaman sighed long and deep and started to list the difficulties. Siri didn’t really have time to hear them. He decided it was necessary to give the man a small prod. He reached for his hand and gripped it firmly. All those present noticed a change come over the shaman. He seemed to be witnessing events nobody else could see. It was as if he were being filled with information like a tire slowly pumped full of air. But, before he could burst, Siri released his grip.

  “Well, why didn’t you say so?” The shaman smiled. “Welcome.”

  Within an hour, the paraphernalia was ready. The shaman was dressed in red and had a hood pulled back from his face. It was a humble affair. Apart from the two main participants, the shaman, Siri, and Dtui, there were three witnesses. One of these appeared to be the shaman’s wife, who played various percussion instruments, making them all sound like kitchen utensils rattling together in a drawer. Ordinarily he would not have cared but now something within Siri bemoaned this lack of rhythm.

  Siri had seen this all before on a much grander scale, but it was Dtui’s first paranormal ceremony and she wished she’d had the presence of mind to bring the morgue camera. She studied the tray of assorted stones and ornaments, the dagger, the offering of food and cigarettes. The cone of banana-leaf origami she’d seen often at weddings and funerals, but never decorated as lavishly as this. Threads of unspun white cotton looped down from the display and were long enough to drape across the supine bodies of Panoy and Mrs. Nuts. For everyone’s sake, the village women had treated the old lady’s body with musky oils and scents. These had the effect of dulling the putrid stink of death for long enough for the ceremony to take place.

  For twenty minutes, the shaman sat cross-legged in front of the display, chanting a well-worn series of mantras. A ceremonial dagger jutted from the lightly packed earth at his feet. Siri held his amulet lightly. A tingle of nervous apprehension climbed the back of his neck. At his last exorcism, the Phibob had killed the shaman and all but drained the life out of Siri. He was better prepared now, but still hoped the malevolent spirits weren’t tuned in at such an early hour.

  The shaman, already one or two paces closer to Nirvana than most, was quick to enter his trance. His wife lowered the hood over his head and Dtui wondered how he was going to see what he was doing. But he didn’t need his eyes. For the next few moments, all his movements would be guided by some nonbeing. Siri had seen mediums thrown across the room by the spirits that possessed them at this stage. He’d seen shamans hit themselves violently with their own fists or rise into the air. But there were no such histrionics for this gentleman. His visiting spirit seemed as lethargic as its host.

  He rose to his feet as smoothly as smoke rising from a mosquito coil and walked once around the spectators. His feet seemed barely to touch the ground. He sighed and knelt by the body of Panoy, who still muttered in a stranger’s voice. She lay on a straw litter parallel to that of Mrs. Nuts. He leaned down at her head, cupped his hand around her ear, and began to whisper. Siri knew by this stage that the shaman would need no help. All was under control. After two or three minutes, the little girl’s body jerked slightly. Only one person in the audience saw what happened next. The spirit of Mrs. Nuts rose from the girl’s body, looked around the room, then crossed over to her own. She woke the spirit of the little girl, who slept in her place and watched as she stumbled sleepily back to her own body. Mrs. Nuts then curled up in her old carcass, oblivious of the smell. It was that simple. Like changing beds in the middle of the night.

  Little Panoy’s eyes opened. She looked at the threads that lay across her body like spiders’ webs, then noticed the red-hooded shape beside her. She jerked away and, like any normal four-year-old, began to wail. Dtui rushed to comfort her, but none of this noise or movement had any effect on the shaman, who was by now in a deep sleep.

  Later, Dtui and Siri and their guide took tea beneath a straw canopy. The sun was harsh but a breeze skimmed across the top of the knoll. Siri stared at the pretty girl who’d brought them the cups and was now sitting beneath the leaves of a banana tree. There was something about her that drew him to her.

  Dtui’s voice pulled him from his reverie. “Of course, it was interesting. I’m not saying it wasn’t. But I have to say I was expecting something more—more violent. You know? Blood and screaming and people going crazy.”

  “That does occasionally happen,” Siri told her. “This was the soporific version.”

  “When will the shaman fellow wake up?”

  “Judging from his normal relationship with consciousness, I’d say sometime around November.”

  “So we should
get going.”

  “Hold on a while.”

  “What for?”

  “There’s something else here.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know. But there’s a connection. There’s always a connection. I feel we shouldn’t leave just yet.”

  “You’re the boss. I’ll go see how Panoy’s doing.” Dtui clambered to her feet and walked over to the hut where the little girl was sleeping off her ordeal. Siri sipped his tea and smiled at the teenager. Her features were finer than those of the other women of the village and her skin darker.

  “Little sister,” he called over to her. She smiled shyly. “Where are you from?”

  “From Vietnam, uncle.”

  “You’re montagnard, aren’t you?”

  She seemed pleased that he’d not used the derogatory word moi. “My mother’s Hmong; my father’s montagnard. He came here with his family when the Vietminh started to …” She stopped herself.

  “I’m Lao, not Vietnamese,” he told her.

  “My father’s people had sided with the French colonists against the communists. When the war was lost, the Vietnamese made them suffer for it.”

  “There can’t be many montagnards here in Huaphan.”

  “There are a few.”

  “Tell me about them.”

  She appeared to be delighted that the old Lao doctor was showing an interest in her people. She sat beside Siri and told him about one young man who was portering for the military and about a family she knew who were working on the Vietnamese roads, and on she went. There was an amazing grapevine. In spite of her isolation here, she could reel off the details of dozens of the expatriates from the Central Highlands. At last she got to one that pricked Siri’s interest.

  “Then there’s H’Loi,” she continued. “She’s married to a Lao. She used to be the maid of a big Vietnamese soldier who died. Then there’s …”