“Hey, maybe we can go to the movie first,” Joey said. “We’ve got all night.”
“I don’t know why I ever brought you along.” He just wasn’t taking this seriously enough. And my whole family’s fate at stake! “You’re only going to embarrass me.”
“Embarrass you? How come you’re so sure you’re going to get a revelation from the spirits? How do you know they won’t come to me?”
“They don’t speak English.”
“But they’re supernatural beings, right? They probably all know English. They probably don’t even speak real languages—they’re probably all telepaths.”
“They won’t come to you, Joey, because … because … they don’t have spirits in America. They don’t have reincarnation and stuff. In America, people just die and turn to dust.”
“The Friedbergs aren’t like other Americans. We’re liberals.”
“And how, pray, are the supernatural beings to know that? You all look alike to them.”
“Fuckin’ bigot,” he said in English, and slapped a mosquito.
By now we had crossed the street and reached the gate of the cemetery, and I was experiencing real dread. It was all very well hearing all one’s life that I was the favorite great-nephew of this long-dead woman, but my only memory of her was that of a white-haired, cadaverous figure with a face like a skeleton and teeth blackened from betel nut, sitting cross-legged in the shadows, screeching abuse at any family member who passed by without showing appropriate obeisance. I had been ushered into her presence perhaps three or four times; each time it was either my birthday or New Year’s Day. I would prostrate myself at her feet, as was proper for such a momentous occasion, with such a venerable ancestor, and look up into her fierce sunken eyes, and she would hand me a little velvet bag containing a little spending money.
“Getting big,” she would say. “Getting big, aren’t you, tadpole! Can you talk yet?”
I could, of course, but she was too senile to realize it, and besides, I was too scared to utter a word in her exalted presence. Her house smelled of sandalwood and of the scented paste old women put on their faces to soften their skin.
She died before my fifth birthday; the funeral was a lot of fun, with all my favorite foods, including Mr. Donut, which had just opened in Siam Square and was the biggest craze of 1979 among the young.
It was a wrought-iron gate in a design of angelic thephanoms with folded palms. Joey vaulted up; much to my annoyance, I had to have help from him to get over. It seemed to get dark the minute our feet touched the ground. The walls of the cemetery cut off the brash neon lights of the movie theaters and the noodle shops. The air was thick with mosquitoes. “Here,” I said, breaking out the insect repellent, “use this.” We stood in the shadow of the wall for a while, rubbing our arms and legs with the nasty-smelling liquid from the British Dispensary. The last of the sunlight died.
Joey turned on his flashlight. “Well, we’d better find the tomb,” he said. I started to walk toward where I thought the path was. I bumped into a gravestone. A temple dog howled in the distance, and I smelled incense. Joey found me, led me toward the gravel pathway. As our eyes got more used to the darkness, three low pagodas were visible in the middle distance, bathed in moonlight and faint reflected neon. “C’mon, little brother,” said Joey.
I started to cuss him out, but I remembered in time that I was in a sacred place. I murmured a quick prayer to the Lord Buddha, hoping it would compensate for my impiety. We walked on. The pagodas never seemed to get any nearer. The insects twittered and keened and made it hard to think. We walked on. Out of the insect voices came a persistent rhythmic buzzing, and I suddenly realized that it came from Joey. He was listening to his Walkman. “Dépêche Mode!” He was shouting, as those with earphones are wont to do. His voice echoed. I saw rows and rows of white marble tombs and I realized that I had become very frightened.
“Respect the dead,” I said, yanking away his headphones.
We walked on.
The path turned. There was another kind of music now, high-pitched, tinkly. We must be getting close to our goal. I heard footsteps. Froze in my tracks. Soft, padding footsteps on gravel. Something was approaching. Someone … in a long, white robe, with long white hair … moving ineluctably in our direction … humming weirdly …
“C’mon,” Joey said. “Maybe he knows the way.”
“He’s p-p-probably a—”
The figure stopped. “Please excuse me,” he said in a thick Indian accent, “I am having lost my way. Are you not the two gentlemen who ordered an exorcism?”
“Awesome!” said Joey.
“No … we’re here for the lottery.”
“Oh … second fork on the left is where most of the lottery dream-seekers are, isn’t it?” he said. “But where, oh where are those customers of mine?”
“What kind of exorcism are you doing?” Joey said.
“Oh … no major thing,” said the Brahmin priest, “… just a little matter of a phii krasue that has gotten out of hand. My client’s sister-in-law, Khun Mayurii, was doomed to wander the earth in this hideous shape because of some unflattering remarks she once made concerning a minor functionary of His Divine Majesty’s Ministry of the Interior.”
“What terrible karma,” I said, shaking my head in rueful sympathy.
“Well, sirs, if you should ever need any help along those lines…” he solemnly removed a card from his robes and handed it to me. I read: “Shri Narayan Dass: houses blessed, exorcisms, scrying, love potions, and general astrology, reasonable rates.”
“Quite a racket,” Joey said.
“Don’t be disrespectful!” I said. “Don’t you see he’s a spirit doctor, a mo phii?”
“No, the young farang boy is being quite correct,” said Shri Narayan Dass. “It is something of a racket, but it beats selling polyester in Pahurat to the nouveau riche.” He fished something else out of his capacious robes—it was a length of cotton rope. “Take this saisin,” he said. “That should stave off the more egregious evil spirits.”
I thanked him humbly and watched him leave the path and shamble, muttering incantations, into the darkness.
“Jesus,” Joey said, “that dude could really clean up on the Beverly Hills guru circuit. Why are exorcists always Indians, anyways?”
“They must have ancient secrets which the Thais, people of a modern kingdom, have lost,” I said, wondering about this for the first time.
We followed the exorcist’s instructions, and presently we reached the oldest part of the cemetery, where my great-great-aunt’s ashes were. As my father had predicted, it was a madhouse. There was a Porsche parked on the grass beside one ostentatious monument, and a woman in black was praying hysterically beside it, weeping and shrieking imprecations in Chinese. There was hardly a tomb without a straw mat laid out next to it and someone desperately trying to sleep or slapping mosquitoes. There was a woman hawking meatballs on skewers with chili sauce as well as lottery tickets. A man in a pair of silk pajamas was watching a Twilight Zone episode on a portable television set. The fragrance of incense melded with the stagnant odor of a nearby canal.
Where was my great-great-aunt’s tomb? Every New Year I had paid my respects there with the rest of my family. In daylight I could have found it in my sleep, but now everything looked different. I wandered around in circles while Joey went off to buy food.
It was maddening. The place was getting more and more crowded by the minute. Suddenly I heard Joey cry out, “This way!”
“You’ve never been here before.” Angrily, I stalked toward him.
His eyes were glazed over. “Something awesome’s happening … like, déjà vu, dude! I’ve been here before! I remember … Jesus, I remember—”
“Control yourself!” He must have smoked that entire joint while I was looking the other way.
“I know the way, I’m telling you!” he said, jumping up and down. He dragged me past the food vendor toward—
“Tadpole!�
�� A familiar voice. It was Aunt Joom. “How nice to see you!”
She was wearing an embroidered silk sarong, gold bracelets, necklaces and earrings, and pancake makeup an inch thick. She had been praying at a tomb. As Aunt Joom got up from her prostrate position with a chillingly feminine wiggle of the hips, I could see Khun Chuad Snit’s photograph, a frayed black-and-white thing in a gold-bordered frame, in the light of Aunt Joom’s votive candles. I was infuriated to learn that Joey had been right about the location of the monument.
“Oh, don’t worry, darling,” said Aunt Joom, as she applied another layer of lipstick, “I’m not here to steal your lottery dream. Your great-great-aunt never liked me anyway. It’s the exorcism, you know, across the way. Khun Phairoj, who’s hired the priciest Brahmin to help rid his sister-in-law of the curse of—”
“We met him,” Joey interjected.
“Well, he made a pledge to the Four-Faced-Brahma shrine next to the Erawan hotel that, if the exorcism worked, he’d have a troupe of dancers immediately perform ‘The Dance of the Celestial Chickens’… well, a group of us girls is standing by in case everything works out as planned.
“I see.” I wasn’t surprised; transvestites are always in demand as dancers, as they can switch roles with ease.
“Just don’t sleep next to me,” Joey jested.
Aunt Joom laughed. “We katoeys always make white people queasy, I don’t know why. But while I’m here … why don’t I buy you some meatballs? You look like you’re starving.”
“I’ve got a Big Mac,” I said.
“Bah. That stuff’ll give you Reagan’s revenge every time.”
“I’d love some meatballs,” said Joey, and the two of them went off, hand in hand, cracking obscene jokes about meatballs, leaving me alone with my Big Mac, my Snickers bar, and the spirits of my ancestors.
* * *
First I took out the saisin the exorcist had given me—better safe than sorry. I looped it around some bushes so that the cord made a sacred circle around my great-great-aunt’s memorial. It was past midnight. The carnival atmosphere had subsided. It was time for serious business, communion with the supernatural. The moon had disappeared behind a high-rise that towered over the temple wall. In the distance, the exorcism was going on; most of the crowd, including my aunt, had gone to watch, leaving only the dedicated lottery-dreamers. Joey, stuffed with luk chin in chili sauce, had gone to sleep with his Walkman, and there was a buzz of Metallica coming from around his head.
Carefully I lit seven joss-sticks and seven candles. I arranged the candles beneath my great-great-aunt’s photograph. I lifted my folded palms to my lips and murmured a prayer to the Lord Buddha, then hung a puangmalai wreath of jasmine petals across the tombstone. Soft sound in the night: the stridulant crickets and the snoring dreamers, the far-off music of the exorcism and the farther-off traffic along the overpass. As far as I could see, I was the only one awake. I was alone, the still center of the crowded city.
What was I to say to my great-great-aunt?
I gazed at the photograph in its brass frame. I had seen the picture before—we had one like it in a family album at home—but it was nothing like the withered betel-nut-chewing crone of my childhood memories. This was a young woman. Her hair was like a woman on a videotape box I’d once seen at Joey’s house—Claudette Colbert in Cleopatra. She wore Western-style clothes—the height of 1920s fashion—and I remembered that she had once been the third minor wife of a provincial functionary of the government of His Divine Majesty the Sixth Rama. We’d been somebody back in those days! Our karma had certainly taken a sad turn for the worse, with my father forced to eke out a living collecting bribes from traffic violators, unable to afford the down payment even on a one-room condominium.
I put my hands together in the phnom mue gesture and addressed the photograph in tones of deepest humility: “Great-great-aunt,” I said, “things really aren’t going too well for your descendants at the moment.”
Light flickered. Had the photograph been smiling a moment before? Somehow the monument seemed taller, the fragrance of incense more pungent. I felt a chill. There were spirits present. Somewhere. The cold tickled the base of my spine. Even though it was a hot tropical night, the dark air pregnant with impending rain. The cold moved up the small of my back.
“Great-great-aunt!” I said. “You’re frightening me! Don’t you remember me, the one you used to give the little bags of money to twice a year?” The photograph wavered … or was it the candlelight, the wisps of incense? “Listen, we really have to win the lottery,” I said urgently. “We’re getting farther and farther behind on the rent. My father drinks too much and he spends the rest of the money gambling on boxers. I know you don’t like my grandmother because she accused you of being a whore for agreeing to be the mistress of a government official but it was just your ticket out of the village and into the provincial capitol—and it wasn’t her fault your husband died of syphilis! I know you always thought my father was a layabout, and I know how disappointed you were that my mother married him … but it’s all karma anyway. So show compassion to me, honored great-great-aunt, and even if you don’t tell me the number for the jackpot, at least give us one of the lesser prizes, enough to scrape by for a month or two while my father gets his life back together again.”
A peal of thunder made me jump. I looked around, panicking. Joey was still asleep. A slithering sound in the grass nearby. A snake? I listened. Only the crickets. I made sure that the protective saisin was securely fastened. No evil spirit would dare profane such a barrier. I listened carefully again. No snakes … only the moist wind rifling the leaves of the mango trees next to the cemetery wall.
“Khun Chuad?” I said. “Are you listening to me?”
There was thunder, more distant. My heart was thumping. The grass was whispering. I unrolled the sleeping bag and lay on it with my head propped up against the stone. My stomach growled. I was getting nervous. I wolfed down the candy bar and the Big Mac. I could hear the chanting of the exorcist, somewhere far away. I burped. “Excuse me,” I whispered, hoping that my venerable ancestor would not take offense. “I shouldn’t have eaten my food so fast. Grandmother is always telling me to chew slowly—”
I stopped.
There was someone standing just beyond the saisin … a woman. She was young. A strange perfume emanated from her. She wore a traditional phasin of black silk. Her lips were red and glossy, her hair done in that 1920s flapper style … she was a living, breathing incarnation of the photograph of my great-great-aunt Snit. And yet …
“My favorite grand-nephew,” she said. Very softly. Shook her head. The moonlight danced in her soft dark hair. “Come to me … I always loved you best.”
There was something not quite right about her.
My heartbeat quickened. I felt hot and cold all over and suddenly I realized I was beginning to get an erection. I breathed in perfume mingled with incense and it intoxicated me. How could this be? I got up … took a tentative step toward her …
Something grabbed my foot.
“Joey! Let go!”
“Stay inside the sacred circle, you idiot!”
“But it’s my great-great-”
He leaped off his sleeping bag, tried to restrain me. I freed myself. The vision of my ancestor shimmered in the humid air. He lurched after me but his limp made him trip over a stone. Just as I reached the saisin, he managed to get hold of my ankles. I reached out my arms to the woman as she floated toward me in a cloud of mist. Her eyes glittered. She grasped my hands. She was cold, colder than ice. I screamed.
At that moment, with my friend trying to pull me back into the circle and the spirit trying to pull me out, I felt the first pangs of Reagan’s revenge. A moist, noisy fart tore through my sphincter. I could have died of embarrassment. I looked up into eyes that were glowing like charcoal embers. The hands gripped tighter, burning my wrists. Joey tugged with all his might, his back against the tomb.
“Let go, one of you,�
� I gasped. “Or I’ll crap in my pants!”
“Don’t do that!” Joey shouted. “Can’t you see, that’s exactly what it wants you to do!”
I didn’t think I could hold it for another second. I was going to defile my great-great-aunt’s tomb and I was never going to receive her blessing now. I had to get away … find a good spot, maybe among the mango trees …
I wriggled free of Joey and was pulled across the sacred cord. No sooner was I clear of its protection than I saw that the hands that gripped me were no hands … they were the slimy, prehensile tongue of a phii krasue! “The Lord Buddha protect me!” I said. The tongue tightened its hold, squeezing my arms like a hungry python. I could see the face. Bits of skull showed through the torn flesh. Yellow goo spewed from pustulant sores. The phii krasue’s oesophagus and intestines flailed about on the grass like a mass of serpents.
“Get back inside the circle!” Joey screamed. I turned around. Rising from the tomb in a miasma of candlelit incense fumes was the skeletal form of Great-great-aunt Snit! The ghost looked at me, its finger pointing straight at me, and I felt all the terror I’d felt when I was three years old and being ushered into her presence, and I knew I was going to shit myself but I didn’t dare do so because I knew that the phii krasue wanted to feast upon my excrement …
Where was Joey? He was nowhere to be seen. His voice had been coming from the place where my great-great-aunt’s ghost now stood, her shroud flapping in the wind. The phii krasue’s intestines were inching up my leg. I couldn’t move my hands. I struggled. Sweat was pouring down my neck and mingling with the creature’s slime. My wrists were getting so slick that the demon’s tongue was losing its purchase. I managed to ease my hand toward my chest, reached into my shirt, pulled out one of my grandmother’s amulets.
The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Seventh Annual Collection Page 45