Curse of the Pogo Stick

The Stiff

“What is that god-awful row?”

“One of those Hmong beggars playing his flute by the sounds of it.”

“Well, it’s annoying. Doesn’t he know this is a hospital? Can’t you go tell him to shut up?”

“You’ve got legs. You tell him.”

“I’m in the middle of something.”

“And I’m not?”

The morgue was made of concrete, and secrets had no cracks to hide in. From their corpse-side seats, Nurse Dtui and Madame Daeng could hear every disparaging word the two clerks spoke. The auditors were like an unhappily married couple. The pale-faced men in their frayed white shirts and polyester slacks had ghosted in the previous morning. They’d handed Dtui their official placement papers from the Justice Department and commandeered the office. They’d taken advantage of the coroner’s absence and chosen this week to go through his books for the 1977 audit. It appeared they’d been instructed to find errors in the records. Dtui had known straightaway that that task was virtually impossible, given that her boss had handwriting so horrible he could hardly read it himself. Dipping a cockroach in ink and having it scamper around the page would have left traces more legible to the average reader.

But Nurse Dtui had to admire the auditors’ determination. They had every flat surface in the office covered in a layer of gray papers and were tiptoeing barefoot between them. They’d been through the entire first drawer of the filing cabinet and were making copious notes in their ledgers. They’d been instructed not to discuss their mission with menial staff so Dtui had no way of helping them find whatever it was they were searching for.

“Let’s go and get lunch,” one of them said.

“Hm.”

It was the first thing they’d agreed on since their arrival. Dtui and Daeng heard one or two paper rustles, the closing and locking of a door that hadn’t been squeezed into its misshapen frame for many years, and a cough from just outside the room where the two ladies sat.

“Can I help you?” Dtui asked.

“Comrade Bounhee and I are taking our lunch break,” said one of the men.

“Perhaps you’d like to come in here and join us for a sandwich?” she suggested. Daeng smiled and shook her head. The men hadn’t dared enter the examination room since the arrival of the corpse that morning.

“Er, no. Rather not. Good health, comrade.” And he was gone.

There were four rooms of a sort in the only morgue in the People’s Democratic Republic of Laos. The paper-strewn and off-limits office was one. Then there was a large alcove and the cramped storeroom in which Mr. Geung, the lab technician, stood polishing specimen jars. And finally there was the examination area they all referred to as the cutting room. It was here that Nurse Dtui and Madame Daeng sat on either side of the deceased military officer, finishing their tea. Despite appearances, there was nothing perverse in this irreverent act. It had been necessitated by the peculiar events of that morning. Mr. Geung had a form of Down syndrome that made him very efficient at repetitive tasks and very thorough in those duties he’d been taught. Anything out of the ordinary, however, caused him to become flustered. He didn’t trust strange people or equipment that disturbed the norm in his domain. The auditors had been such an intrusion and he continued to mutter his displeasure to himself. But there had been one other annoyance that week. The morgue’s perfectly good French refrigeration unit had been replaced with a Soviet behemoth twice its size. Neither the hospital engineer who installed it nor Mr. Geung, who was responsible for turning it off and on, had any idea how it worked. Dtui could read Russian but none of the dials seemed to perform the functions they promised. So Mr. Geung had been particularly distraught to discover that after only two hours in the unit the army captain was deep frozen.

Madame Daeng, the coroner’s fiancйe, had arrived just then to discover Dtui comforting a teary Geung, and a large ice pole of a corpse on the tray. It was made all the worse by the fact that an unknown surgeon would be coming to conduct the autopsy that afternoon in the company of Mr. Suk, the hospital director. The body had to be thawed out somehow before their arrival. They agreed that wrapping him in blankets would only have the effect of preserving the frozen state. It was a comparatively cool early December day and there was no heater. Madame Daeng, always calm in a crisis, suggested they wheel the soldier into the sunlight that filtered through the louvered window and sit close to the body so their own body heat might warm him up. The only other heat producer they could find was the Romanian water-boiling element. They plugged it in, placed the water pot at the end of the stainless-steel dolly, and watched it bubble.

As there was water on the boil and margarine peanut biscuits in the tin, why not, they thought, have a cup of tea or two? For modesty’s sake, and to catch the crumbs, a white cloth was draped over the captain’s nether regions. And there they sat, discussing the latest items to have disappeared from the shops.

“How’s he doing?” Daeng asked.

Dtui poked the skin with her spoon. “Another hour and he should be ready.”

“And who’s performing the autopsy? I thought Siri was the only one in the country qualified.”

“Well”-Dtui leaned back in her chair-”technically, Dr. Siri isn’t all that qualified either. I mean, he’s good, but he doesn’t have any formal training as a coroner. Our politburo didn’t seem to think that fact was terribly important; surgeon-coroner, same difference. Luckily for them, Siri’s a bit of a genius in a number of ways.” As Dtui wasn’t sure how much Daeng knew about the doctor’s spirit connections, she kept her praise vague.

“So, today…?”

“Is some young hotshot surgeon who just got back from East Germany. He went over there as a medic six years ago. Amazing what they can achieve in the Eastern Bloc. Must be some type of fast track. But the new boy isn’t qualified to perform autopsies either. If our friend here hadn’t been a soldier they’d probably have kept him on ice till Siri got back. But the military are really curious to find out what killed their officer. The boys who brought him in said he hasn’t even been identified yet. They’re waiting for his unit to report him missing. The hospital director asked Hotshot if he could do an autopsy in a hurry and the fellow evidently said, ‘How hard can it be?’ Well, we’ll see.”

“It would have been a lot harder if we hadn’t thawed him out. I think it must be working. I’m starting to get a whiff.”

“Me too.”

“It looks like we generate more body heat than we thought.”

It was true. Both women had good reason to glow. Big, beautiful Dtui could thank her first sexual experience for the baby taking shape inside her. Fortunately, Phosy the policeman had done the right thing. Auntie Bpoo the fortune-teller had said the child would be a girl. Their daughter was barely three months along and Dtui had already given her a name and started to crochet pink sun hats for her. She would be fat and jolly and intelligent like her mother… and she’d be a doctor… and she’d get married before she got pregnant and not at a registry the week after the test came back positive. In that respect she wouldn’t be like her mother at all.

Madame Daeng glowed because, at sixty-six years of age, she’d been proposed to by a man she’d secretly loved for much of her life. When she had been reunited with Siri in the south just a few months earlier, those same old girlish feelings had still gurgled around inside her. She and Siri were both widowed now-both battered by cruel circumstances in a country that had only ever known war. But the two old warriors were gloriously open to new love. She’d unashamedly followed him back to Vientiane and kept her fingers crossed. Siri had proposed to her in a most un-Lao fashion: with flowers. To her joy he’d acquired that peculiar habit during his years in France. She’d refused him, of course. What respectable woman would accept a man’s first offer? And, luckily, he’d asked again, over coffee, not a flower in sight, and this time she’d accepted. They would marry immediately upon his return from the north.

“Do you suppose we can leave our little soldier now?” she asked Dtui.

“Absolutely! Let’s go open your restaurant. If he thaws out any more he’ll insist on coming with us.”

Mr. Geung agreed to watch the body and the two glowing ladies climbed onto their respective bicycles and rode out of the Mahosot Hospital grounds. They tinkled their bells as they turned left on Mahosot Road even though there was very little chance of being hit by anything but other bicycles. Vientiane was a cyclist’s paradise. Unless they had friends in the Party, very few citizens could afford to fill up their motorcycle tanks with petrol. Cars had become front yard ornaments. The sound of a passing engine prompted little children to run to the street’s edge and wave. Siri might have been right. Laos was shrinking back into a preindustrial age.

Dtui and Daeng rode past peeling signs that pointed to services and establishments that had ceased to exist, past long-since vacated spirit houses and leaning telegraph poles that seemed to be held up by the wires strung between them. The few tarred roads were frayed at the edges like nibbled licorice and the sidewalks were clogged with unkempt patches of grass. They pedaled along the Mekhong past Chantabouli Temple to the little noodle shop Daeng had acquired on her arrival in the city. It wasn’t a particularly bright period to be setting up a new business. But she’d brought with her a reputation as a cordon bleu noodleist. The word had spread and even though it was only eleven thirty, hungry customers were already gathered in front of her shuttered store. When she arrived they cheered and made bawdy comments. Humor was one of the few glues that held people together in hard times.

“Been visiting with your gynecological nurse, have you, Madame Daeng?” one asked. “I suppose you’ll be making an announcement sometime soon.”

“If I were to make that particular announcement you could expect to see the world press gathered out here,” she said. “Now, move aside and stop your insolence.”

Dtui and the customers helped her open up and move some of the tables out to the street side. They wheeled the portable kitchen to the front of the shop and Daeng lit the twigs and charcoal to get the water boiling. She’d prepared all the ingredients before heading off to the morgue; now she only needed to parboil the noodles. While they were waiting, she poured everyone a cup of cold jasmine tea. At last, Dtui and Daeng stood side by side at the stand dishing out feu noodles in deep bowls. When the better part of the crowd was fed, Daeng leaned toward her friend.

“So, are you going to tell me what’s bothering you?” she asked.

“What’s that, auntie?”

“Something’s crawled into your head since we left the hospital.”

“Oh, I don’t know…”

“Tell me.”

“It’s the body. There’s something wrong with it.”

“What?”

“I don’t know. I’m just getting one of those feelings. It’s like when Dr. Siri tells me I’m looking but I’m not seeing. Or perhaps I’m seeing but I’m not getting it Oh, listen to me. I’m just trying to be clever like him. I wish he was here, you know?”

“Me too.”

They were there, trespassing in the private grounds of his snooze. They loitered-those malevolent spirits-like teenage thugs, never in focus but there nevertheless.

Wherever his afternoon siesta led Dr. Siri Paiboun-down forested paths, through bombed towns-they lurked and watched him pass. He was aware of them in every dream. The Phibob, the ghosts of the forest, had no more useful occupation than to hang about in his subconscious and remind him of the constant threat they posed.

Dr. Siri was the reluctant host of Yeh Ming, a thousand-year-old shaman. During that old witch doctor’s comparatively short stay on earth and his comparatively long sojourn in the afterlife, Yeh Ming had caused no end of grief to the dark spirits and now they sought revenge. “A load of old supernatural pig swill,” some might say, and two years earlier Siri would have been the loudest in the chorus. But now there was not a doubt-no question. Only the charmed stone amulet he wore around his neck hung between Dr. Siri and a nasty end.

Although he hadn’t yet mastered his unwanted life, he’d learned to live it. Despite all this occult thuggery, the old doctor purred in his sleep like a snowy-haired cat. His chin rested on his chest and a barely audible snore resonated through his nostrils. At seventy-three years of age, he’d learned how to sleep through all variety of meetings and conferences undetected. He hadn’t once fallen off his seat. Of course, he was built for balance-short and solid-and from the distance of the speakers’ platform he appeared to be just one more rapt member of the thousand-plus audience, deep in thought. In truth, only the extreme volume of the Vietnamese loudspeakers could have drowned out the collective buzz of hundreds of snoozing cadres. If the generator had failed that chilly afternoon, residents of Xiang Khouang would have gone running to their homes in fear of a plague of bumblebees.

Most of the regional delegates had been up through the night slurping sweet rice whisky through bamboo straws and reminiscing with long-lost allies. Siri, more than most, had endured the thanks of countless old soldiers he’d repaired in battlefront surgery. He’d accepted a glass from each of them and was ill prepared for seven more hours of keynote addresses and reports. It would have been impossible to withstand such torture without the odd nap or two.

It was around three when he regained consciousness in time to learn that “the quintessential socialist is patriotic, technically and managerially competent, morally upright and selflessly devoted to the greater social good,” but he’d forgotten to bring his notepad. He caught sight of his boss, Judge Haeng, nodding enthusiastically in the second row. Siri clicked the bones in his neck and instinctively reached up to scratch the lobe of his left ear. He’d lost it in an altercation a few months before but its spirit continued to tingle. Damned annoying it was. He shifted his weight from buttock to buttock to revitalize his circulation and looked absently around him. The regional representatives sat unfidgeting like maize on a breezeless day, silently counting down the minutes. Although Stalin had never actually bothered to write it down, Siri was aware that a good communist had to be a good Buddhist. Only meditation and a banishment of pain could get one through a day of Party political bull.

Siri looked with admiration along the furrows. Only one undisciplined cadre had succumbed indiscreetly to fatigue. He sat two rows in front, six seats across. Obviously the quarterly Party Planning and Progress Conference had been too much for him. He slumped like a wet rag in his chair, his head hanging uncomfortably backward, staring at the temporary tarpaulin roof. One would have to be extremely tired to adopt such a drastic pose-or dead as an absent earlobe. Siri opted for the latter. He calmly stood, pushed past knees to the end of his row and more knees to the seat of the dead comrade. The disturbance in an, until now, unruffled event caused the speaker on stage to lose his place in his speech and look out at the melee.

Siri, delighted to have an opportunity to make something happen on this otherwise wasted day, felt for a pulse in the old cadre’s neck and shouted with unhidden glee, “This conference has suffered its first fatality. There will undoubtedly be more.”