The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Seventh Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  The phii krasue screamed! The tongue slithered away and on the creature’s forehead was a fuming burning mark in the shape of the Lord Buddha! I got up as the evil spirit tumbled onto the grass. The scream was waking up all the lottery dreamers. Flashlights were coming on all around me. The pain was pounding at my abdomen. I was flushed with embarrassment. The phii krasue circled me warily, now and then trying to lasso my ankles with its tongue.

  “The Lord Buddha preserve us! It’s a phii krasue!” someone shouted. My writhing assailant and I stood in a pool of flashlight beams.

  “How dare you wake me up!” came another voice from behind another tombstone. “I’ve two more digits to go!”

  “Joey!” I screamed. But Joey was not there. In his place loomed the specter of my great-great-aunt, impassively watching me in my shame.

  I had to find a bush, a tree, some secluded spot—

  I started to run.

  “It’s after the boy!” someone shouted.

  “It must be that spirit they’ve been exorcizing down at the other end of the cemetery.”

  “After it!”

  I ran, tripping over gravestones, stopping now and then to brandish an amulet behind me. Others were right behind me; some waving their own amulets, some there just to enjoy the spectacle. The meatball vendor was back too, cheerfully hawking as we ran. I sprinted, clutching my stomach.

  Voices in the distance … there was the exorcism in full swing, by the side of the canal! There was Shri Narayan Dass on a dais above the throng, sitting in the lotus position in his white exorcizing robes, chanting up a storm, with clouds of incense whirling about his face. Statues of Hindu gods glared down from a plinth behind him. Sacred exorcising music, tinkling xylophones and wailing oboes, poured out of a portable CD player. I saw Aunt Joom, in her dancing costume, ready to go on. Khun Phairoj, the sponsor of the exorcism, sat in a big rattan chair, a fat man looking even fatter in his white Yves St. Laurent suit. A length of saisin cord wound round and round the nearby trees and through the folded palms of all the celebrants in the ritual. The exorcist was in the throes of a khao song, foaming at the mouth and spewing forth sublimely incomprehensible utterances as the spirits of celestial beings held his vinyaan in thrall.

  In the throes of a somewhat more earthly need, I hardly had time to take in the splendor of the situation—although I did notice Mrs. Friedberg in the audience, holding the saisin in one hand while feverishly taking notes with the other.

  It was Aunt Joom who saw me first. “It’s Samraan! And the phii krasue is after him!” she shrieked.

  The screaming became contagious. Panicking, people were crawling over each other in their haste to reach the gate. Aunt Joom, wringing her hands, stood looking this way and that. “Aunt Joom, I’ve got Reagan’s revenge!” I screamed. “That’s why it’s after me!”

  Suddenly there came an eerie voice from high above, from the platform on which the spirit doctor had been meditating. “Don’t hold it anymore, boy! We can assuage the creature’s hideous hunger and trap it at the same time!”

  “Yes, sir,” I shouted. “I’ll try.” There was no need to try. I had begun to khii laad the moment I heard the voice of Shri Narayan Dass.

  “You must now be running toward me!” came the spirit doctor’s voice, high-pitched, ethereal, plaintive. “Come to me. Try to let it out just a bit at a time…”

  I stumbled forward with the phii krasue hobbling my left leg. The creature’s clammy tongue slid up and down my calf. It fed frenziedly, propelled by the filthy obsession that was the sole purpose of its existence. The exorcist came stomping down the steps, holding aloft an image of a many-headed Hindu deity. With his other hand he twirled a length of saisin, like a bullroper in a western. An acolyte struggled to keep up, carrying a huge silver bowl of lustral water. Behind him came the crowd. The creature fed. I could hardly breathe as the wet guts twined around my stomach, pumping me for more.

  They were all around me now—how could Joey be sleeping through all this?—cheering on the exorcist as he bore down on the monster and me. Dipping a sheaf of twigs into the lustral water, intoning a sacred prayer to Yama, the god of the underworld, Shri Narayan Dass began asperging us both. The chanting crescendoed.

  “Be at peace now, evil spirit! Go and be reborn in a decent human shape!”

  With each shower, I felt the creature shudder, its grip tightening. I tried to scream but only a squawk came out. Finally the exorcist, standing over us as we thrashed, began flagellating us with the sacred twigs, chanting wildly, foaming at the mouth, his eyes completely white.

  The crowd gasped. The phii krasue began to scream; a heartrending cry, the cry of a woman in pain. I felt the intestines relax their hold on me. I turned. Smoke billowed upward toward the moon. The sacred waters struck me; I felt all my uncleanness melt from me. I slid into the grass. I saw the monster slowly begin to transform into the corpse of a beautiful woman; Khun Mayuril, the unfortunate woman whose karma had caused her to walk the earth as the lowliest of demons …

  I heard Aunt Joom’s voice from somewhere in the throng. “For the sake of mercy, give the boy something to eat!” That was the last thing I wanted. I lay on my back, against the soft earth, watching the clouds stream across the face of the moon. A few more drops fell on my face … surely not the lustral waters. No. The monsoon was about to break. We were all going to be drenched. A few more drops. People were murmuring, looking hastily around for shelter, and I could see Khun Phairoj, kneeling, weeping beside the body of his late sister-in-law.

  It was at that moment that I saw Joey Friedberg. He was walking slowly toward me out of the darkness. He walked strangely, with the grace of a woman. He wasn’t walking at all. He was gliding. Floating toward me on a carpet of mist.

  “Joey,” I said softly, “how could you have slept through all that? The exorcism—the phii krasue—”

  “Samraan,” Joey said. It was a haunting voice, a voice out of some past life.… the voice of a beautiful woman, rich against the patter of impending rain.

  “Joey—you didn’t turn into a katoey, did you?” It had never occurred to me that the Americans had any people like my aunt Joom.

  “No, my child…”

  “You’re possessed!”

  “You’re dreaming,” Joey said, and enveloped me in incense fumes. The corpse of Khun Mayurii was melting and the people around about us were draining into the dark sky. He took me by the hand—his hand was soft and caked with perfume powder—and led me out of my body. We climbed up the tombstones and climbed to the clouds on a staircase of heavenly rain. The gates of the sky swung open and I saw winged apsaras on lotus pads, singing in endless praise of Phra Indra, King of Heaven, each one with breasts glistening like ripe mangoes after rainfall. Music of celestial xylophones mingled with Metallica from Joey’s Walkman.

  * * *

  “I am not what I seem to be,” Joey said, looking into my eyes.

  Suddenly I realized that he had become imbued with the vinyaan of my great-great-aunt. Appalled at my previous rudeness, I fell down prostrate at the nearest cloudbank and placed my palms between his feet. “Sadhu, Sadhu, honored ancestor,” I said piteously, “don’t be mad at me because I didn’t recognize you straight away. Please look with favor upon our family’s distress…”

  Joey Friedberg looked off into the distance. Far away, silhouetted against the moon, was a pavilion. I could see gods and angels moving against the moonlight as in a shadow play. I could see the cemetery below us. Dozens of people had sought shelter under the mango trees. The exorcist stood, waving his arms, intoning over the place where the phii krasue had fallen. Khun Phairoj was summoning the dancers; he had pledged a dance of thanksgiving, and rain or no rain the dance would now have to occur. Aunt Joom and the other transvestites, in their soggy finery, were coming out into the rain. There was some kind of altercation, but presently the music started up, and the katoeys danced—though the grace of their movements was somewhat hampered by their umbrellas. In
heaven, too, there was dancing; asparas flitted by, strewing us with jasmine petals, and we were bathed in sourceless light.

  “I could give you the winning lottery number if I really wanted to,” said Khun Chuad Snit, “but the wheel of karma moves in mysterious ways, and even if I told you, it wouldn’t make any difference.”

  The ways of dead people are not our ways. They have a very oblique way of expressing themselves, and often they’ll tell you something that can be interpreted many ways; it gives them a way out while preserving their reputation for infallibility. Nevertheless, I asked her what she meant.

  “Joey Friedberg will take care of you,” she said. My American friend twitched, as though he were trying to dodge my great-great-aunt’s vinyaan.

  “Why Joey?” I said. I didn’t want him taking care of me. It was an annoying habit of his that I’d been trying to wean him of since knowing him.

  “Well you may ask,” she said. “But you see, I am Joey Friedberg.”

  “You are—”

  “He is my reincarnation.”

  “Oh, come on! That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard. They don’t even have reincarnation in America!”

  “Now, now,” she said, and smiled through Joey’s lips, the smile of an indulgent old woman. “All living things are part of the eternal cycle of karma … I must admit that I was a little nonplussed to find myself being reborn in the body of a farang, but then I’m afraid I did a terrible thing in my last life…”

  I listened in horrified fascination, eager to learn what monstrous crime she had committed to be reincarnated so far from the City-of-Angels-the-Divine-Metropolis-Etc.-Etc. “I killed a cockroach,” she said ruefully.

  “But everyone kills cockroaches!”

  “Ah, but this particular cockroach happened to be a reincarnation of my grandfather, you see. One must always be very careful about the wanton destruction of life; one never knows who it might be. Think about it next time you step on an ant.”

  “But … Great-great-aunt Snit … Joey’s older than me! How could he possibly be you? You died after he was born…” I had her there, I thought. She’ll never talk her way out of that one.

  “The fact of the matter is, I spent quite a while in the underworld, going through the usual tortures, being punished for the usual minor offenses like adultery and so on. There is in the underworld an enormous chamber, something like a border immigration center, where the new souls come in. I happened to be in charge of the—as it were—immigrant register one day, when they brought in the soul of a young American boy who was in a car accident. He had been in a coma for a year, and his soul had been flitting back and forth at the border of the kingdom of death. He was crying and carrying on so, but I couldn’t send him back; the dictates of Yama, the Death Lord are irreversible. I prostrated myself before His Dread Majesty and said, ‘But my Lord, there is a loophole. The boy’s brain is dead, and the farang, in their mechanistic way, consider him gone for good; but we Thais know that it is the heart that is the seat of life, and the boy’s heart is still beating.’ Which was almost true—there was a machine that was beating in place of his heart. The Death Lord, who has a macabre sense of humor, began laughing uproariously; then he said to me, ‘Your compassion for this child is commendable, and goes a long way toward mitigating the evil for which you were cast into the underworld. I can’t send him back, but maybe I could commute your sentence. If, as you say, the farang soul is dead but the Thai is not, I suppose I could simply send a Thai vinyaan to occupy the child’s body, and no one will be the wiser. For I am a servant of the teaching of the Lord Buddha, and it is my duty to reward compassion by hastening your soul in its trillion-year journey back towards enlightenment.” Then Lord Yama waved his hands, and—poof!—I was reborn.”

  “That is the weirdest thing I have ever heard,” I said.

  “It is all part of the great chain of being,” my great-great-aunt said, shrugging. “Take it or leave it.”

  “But the lottery tickets—”

  “It’s out of my hands.”

  “But you know the winning number! You as much as said so! Wait … does that mean Joey knows?”

  “Hard to say. The conscious mind has little knowledge of past lives.” Her voice was getting fainter. To my dismay, we were plummeting back to earth. I could see the whole of the city whirling beneath me: the great palace of the Chakri Kings, the glittering shopping malls and freeways, the great river choked with houseboats in the shadow of the Temple of Dawn …

  “Joey…” Desperation flooded me. I had failed! How could I face my parents, knowing they would have to give up their apartment? “Joey!” I was shaking him now, gripping his shoulders as he convulsed under the spell of possession …

  I was still shaking him as the dream faded away.

  They canal was still swollen from the torrent, but the rain had ended as abruptly as it had started; that is how the monsoon rains are. I came to, still shaking Joey, who was rubbing his eyes. “Did I miss something?” he said. It was still dark … not even midnight yet.

  “We can go home now,” I said. “It’s useless. You’re my great-great-aunt, and we’re not going to win the lottery anyway.”

  “Why not?” Joey said, “HK 2516635—that’s the wining number, isn’t it? I assume you got it too.”

  I gaped at him.

  “It’s early yet,” he said. “Maybe we can catch the midnight showing of Aliens before we go home.” He looked at me. “How’d you manage to stay so dry, little brother?”

  * * *

  HK 2516635. By an amazing stroke of karma, we found that lottery ticket the next morning at the stationary store at the head of the soi. Joey and I bought the whole ticket and split it in half.

  A day later, a group of us gathered to watch the drawing on television. We were at the Friedberg’s house: my grandmother, my parents, my little sister, and some raucous friends of the Friedbergs from the American embassy. We sat around the television set while Aunt Joom served us elegant hors d’oeuvres and Coke. A revolution was going on that day; the embassy people were sitting around pontificating about it, quite oblivious to the antics of the announcer. They were playing a music video in between each drawing, and the suspense was mounting … mounting … mounting …

  The Friedbergs’ friends droned on: “Who’s going to get into power this time?” … “I got interviewed by CNN this afternoon.” … “That new field marshall, what’s his name, really seems to have the support of the CIA…”

  “Shut up, you guys!” Joey said. “Anyone who’s lived here can tell you that this revolution’s gonna fizzle out before dawn.”

  “Yeah, revolutions only work in October,” I said. After all, I distinctly remembered the last five. “Coups in other months are always abortive.”

  “Army’s got to have something to do,” my father said, guzzling a Singha beer.

  “How anyone can be interested in such things is beyond me,” my mother said, as she vigorously pounded shrimp paste in a mortar and pestle, stinking up the entire living room. “What possible difference can it make when Their Divine Majesties are the true heart of the Siamese people?” Meanwhile, my grandmother, serenely confident of victory, was ignoring the entire thing, merely humming away to herself, one of those peasant melodies.

  Everyone started arguing, and it was a moment before Aunt Joom noticed our winning number pop up on the screen. “Merciful Buddha!” she shrieked. “Be quiet everyone! Look! It’s come! It’s the number!”

  “We’re rich,” my father said softly.

  I didn’t even mind that it was Joey who had come up with the winning number. We were going to have our new condominium after all, my father was going to have our new car—everything was going to be all right after all!

  At that moment, the army took over the television station and announced that there would be a few changes.

  We watched in horror as a general in a shiny uniform came on the air and informed us that, because of tampering by certain high official
s, it had become necessary to declare the lottery void. The abovementioned high officials would all be resigning in the morning, and his humble self the general had been asked to form a new government to preside over the aftermath of the scandal. He apologized for the revolution, but things would be back to normal in the morning.

  “I know that general!” I said. “That’s Khun Phairoj, the man whose sister-in-law I…”

  My father shook his head. “It’s not even October.”

  “Does that mean we’re not going to be rich?” said my little sister Kaew.

  “On the contrary,” said Mrs. Friedberg. “I may as well tell you now. I’ve obtained a big grant from the Ford Foundation to study your grandmother’s peasant songs. It’s not much by Ford Foundation standards, but your share of it could come to … say, a million baht.” General excitement all around.

  “Besides, honored father,” I said, “I rescued the prime minister’s sister-in-law from wandering the earth as a phii krasue. Surely you can get a promotion out of that.”

  I heard Joey calling from the balcony. “Awesome, Samraan! There are tanks rolling up the main road.”

  “Here we go again,” my father said.

  I went to join my friend. Two tanks were proceeding up the street on their way to seize the government. It was another humdrum evening in the Divine Metropolis. The street was crowded with food vendors, shoppers, laughing students; no one but Joey seemed to notice the revolution. The monsoon rain was about to come again. The air was heavy with moisture and gasoline fumes and the fragrance of ripening bananas.

  Joey watched the tanks starry-eyed, transfixed. It’s a quality I had grudgingly come to admire in the Americans: their ability to feel as though everything around them, no matter how many times the world has seen it, is happening for the first time. They have a spanking-newness about them, a sense of wonder. Perhaps it is simply that in their country they rarely have revolutions, exorcisms, or lotteries. I don’t know.