Disco for the Departed

The Cave of the Dead

Mr. Geung woke in panic just as he had the previous two mornings. But whereas on those other occasions he’d found himself surrounded by soldiers, today he was wrapped in a canvas tarpaulin like pork in a Chinese spring roll. He struggled to get loose, kicked and punched and pushed, but could find no way to free himself. His mind was blank. All the details of where he was and why he was there were gone. And so, although it didn’t help a bit, he started to cry.

“And what, tell me, do you think you’re doing in me firewood cover?” It was the voice of an old woman, that much he could tell. But he couldn’t see her through the opening at the top of his spring roll.

“I… I don’t know,” he said, and continued to cry. He felt a tug on his cocoon and was sent rolling across the ground and then flung loose from the tarpaulin onto the dry earth. An elderly woman and two giggling children were looking down at him.

“Grandma, he’s a retard,” the smallest girl said.

“So he is,” the old lady agreed. “What do you want here, retard?”

“I d… don’t know,” Geung answered truthfully.

“Then I should call the police and have you arrested,” she said.

“Yes, I th… I think so.”

“Or maybe I should get my gun and chase you away.”

Geung thought about that option. “Y… yes, that would be f… fine, too.”

The old woman laughed. Her betel nut-stained mouth reminded him of a number of disasters he’d seen in the morgue. “Eeh. You really are crazy. How am I supposed to threaten you if you agree with all I say, boy? Where do you hail from?”

“Thangon.”

“Never heard of it.”

“Sorry. I have t… t… to go to Vientiane.” He clambered to his sore feet, smiled at the children, and started walking.

“Wait. Wait there,” the old woman said. “You think you’re going to walk to Vientiane?”

“I p… promised.”

“Is that so? You hungry, boy?”

“Yes.”

“Well, you can’t walk to Vientiane if you’re hungry, seeing it’s so far. And as…”

“Yes. I remember.”

“What’s that?”

“The mo… mo… mosquitoes. I wrapped up so the mo… mosquitoes didn’t get me. D… d… dengue fever. Comrade Dtui s… said you have to wrap up against the mo… mo… mo… mo…”

“MOSQUITOES!” the two girls chorused.

“Yes.” He smiled at the girls and they giggled back.

“All right,” the old lady decided. “Come and eat and we’ll see if we can get some sense out of you before you set out on your big march. And I think I can find you some homemade paste here, should keep the mosquitoes from your blood. It’ll last for a week so long as you don’t wash.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” he said and put his hands together in a polite nop.

“Well, I don’t know where you’re from or what you’re about, but they taught you some nice manners.” They went into her solid wooden hut. This was the home of the caretaker of the pine plantation through which Geung had trekked during the first day of his escape. “First thing you do is sit yourself down and take off them vinyl shoes. You wear them all the way to Vientiane and you’ll be a cripple as well as a retard.”

“Thank you, m… m…”

“MA’AM!” the children yelled as if the circus were in town.

“Mother,” Geung said, and smiled again at the girls with his crazy-paving teeth.

Dtui’s first day at Kilometer 8 Hospital was chaotic. It wasn’t her fault. Chaos was the norm there. After only an hour she felt helpless. There was a staff of six, two of whom had no medical training whatsoever. The most senior medic had undergone six months of emergency field hospital training in Vietnam. Dtui, with a two-year nursing diploma, was their surgeon general. Each of them simply stopped making decisions and deferred to her judgment. She immediately mistrusted her ability to make the necessary decisions. Never had she been in a situation that was so desperate.

By far the largest population in the fifty-bed hospital was made up of bombi victims. Of all the wicked tools of war, the bombi was one of the cruelest. A shell packed with baseball-sized bombis was dropped from a plane. In midair the shell opened and the bombis rained over the selected target. On contact, two hundred and fifty white-hot ball bearings exploded in all directions from each one, ripping through buildings and people with equal detachment. Some of the bombis were on a short-delay timer to catch the survivors who went to care for their loved ones. But some just lay dormant for days, weeks, months, or years, to spring their deadly surprise on the innocent and ill informed. The bombi had no sense of who its victim should be. A buffalo, a hoe, a child, a young mother planting rice, it mattered not. It took them all.

Every day at Kilometer 8 new victims arrived with truncated limbs bound to stem the flow of blood. They came on ox carts, on ponies, on litters dragged by their relatives. The hospital staff gave them generous doses of opium to repress any sensations, good or bad, and did their best to clean the wounds. Many had lost too much blood or were too shredded to keep alive. Those who survived did so mainly of their own volition. Every few days, Dr. Santiago would come by to amputate whatever was unsavable and perform whatever miracles it took to give people another chance at life.

There were no shifts at Kilometer 8. Staff slept during the rare moments of quiet, day or night. They cooked for those patients whose relatives weren’t camped in the wards. They kept them full of a painkiller they knew would leave them addicted, and they stretchered the deceased up the slope to the cave of the dead, a crematorium on the skirt of the mountain. At the end of her incredibly long first day, Dtui estimated she’d lost four kilograms. Singsai, the senior medic, told her if she stayed a month she’d be so skinny they’d be able to store her in the closet with the mops. She enjoyed that image.

It had been a comparatively good day. Only one lady had made the journey to the cave of the dead. Dtui had personally been able to save the life, perhaps temporarily, of a ten-year-old child, and at two in the morning the residents at Kilometer 8 were all stoned into a restful sleep. Dtui and Singsai sat in front of the long rectangular room that formed the main ward. They were too fatigued to sleep, so they gazed up at the stars that showed themselves so rarely in the northeastern sky that the medic saw their appearance now as an omen.

“Days like this make you realize how stupid you are,” Dtui said.

“You aren’t stupid at all, Nurse,” Singsai assured her. He was such a brown-skinned little man his words seemed to come out of the darkness from a floating set of teeth. He reminded Dtui of the mummy in the president’s house.

“Okay, perhaps not stupid exactly, but… lacking.”

“You’ve done a lot of good today.”

“But there’s so much more I didn’t know how to do. It’s so frustrating. It makes me appreciate your Dr. Santiago and my own boss that much more. They do this stuff day in, day out, year after year, saving lives as if it were as natural as breathing.”

“I hope to be a surgeon someday,” Singsai told her, looking at the sky as if that were the place such a hope might hang. He was in his fifties and unconnected so Dtui knew he had little chance.

She scrambled for a change of subject. “Do you ever have any cases here that aren’t emergencies?”

“One or two malarials,” he said. “We’ve a little boy with chronic diarrhea. They say that’s the biggest killer of kids in the whole of Southeast Asia. Most of them don’t make it, but we’re fighting for this chap. He’s been lucky. Oh, and then there’s Mrs. Duaning.”

“What’s wrong with her?”

“Nobody knows. She’s been in a coma for two weeks. We found her out on the road.”

“Nobody’s come to claim her?”

“No.”

“Then how do you know her name?”

“We don’t, but we can tell she’s Hmong. One of our Hmong interns christened her ‘Duaning.’ It means ‘nuts.’”

They went to visit Mrs. Nuts, who lay in a small block away from the others, where the non-life-threatening cases were billeted. She was on her back with her eyes wide open, staring at the ceiling and muttering.

“What’s she saying?” Dtui asked.

“She only started speaking the day before yesterday. She says the same thing, over and over.”

Dtui leaned over her and listened. The old lady’s voice seemed less gravelly than one would have expected from such a battered old crone. The words came from her mouth on a breath that smelt musty. “Have to feed Panoy,” she said. “Have to feed Panoy.”

“You don’t suppose Panoy’s her name?”

“This woman’s? No. It isn’t a very Hmong-sounding name.” He pulled up the single blanket to cover her and her feet were momentarily exposed. Both Dtui and Singsai looked at them in amazement. “What the…?”

The soles of the woman’s feet were caked in some maroon substance. “Has she been walking anywhere?” Dtui asked.

“No. As far as I know, she hasn’t moved. And this doesn’t look like clay.”

Dtui scratched at one sole with her fingernail. She knew exactly what she was seeing. “It’s congealed blood,” she said.

“Why would she have…? Are there any wounds?”

Dtui took a damp cloth from the basin beside the bed and carefully rubbed at one foot. “No.”

“Then how…?”

“It doesn’t look random, Singsai. Look at this other foot. It’s as if someone painted symbols onto her soles.”

“With blood? Whatever for?”

“That Hmong intern might have some idea.”

“Right. I don’t want to wake him now, but in the morning I’ll be very interested to see if he has an explanation.”

“Me, too,” Dtui said. “Me, too.”

Two more emergencies during the night meant that Dtui didn’t actually get to sleep until after seven. The breeze through the thin cotton curtains woke her at ten. Before heading for the main block, she stopped by to see Mrs. Nuts. She still lay staring at the ceiling but her tune had changed during the night.

“Panoy is weak now. Panoy is weak,” she said.

“Who is Panoy?” Dtui asked.

“Panoy is weak.”

Dtui pushed back the woman’s white hair from her face and put her palm on the woman’s cold brow. Her skin seemed dull, as if she were covered in dust. Her pulse was slow. She wondered whether Mrs. Nuts would make it through the day. Before she left the room, Dtui pulled up the blanket to look at her feet. The left sole, the one she’d wiped clean earlier that morning, was once again covered in dried blood.

Dr. Siri was downstairs in the guesthouse dining room reading a month-old copy of Pasason Lao. There was a picture of his old friend Civilai shaking hands with a Mongolian diplomat. Both were smiling, neither convincingly. He could tell exactly what Comrade Civilai, his only ally on the politburo, was thinking. It reminded him of an earlier time and two more idealistic people.

For years, Siri and his wife, Boua, had been members of the Lao Issara, the Free Lao resistance. But Boua was working her way toward a more disciplined independence from the French than just being a nuisance to the colonists. She was the devout communist of the pair, and it was she who led Siri to Hanoi and into the Nguyen Ai Quoc college. There he learned his Vietnamese and attended classes in communist ideology. He was baptized in red paint, held under until he breathed Lenin and defecated Marx. And with this new vital system he’d gone out into the Vietnamese countryside and convinced the farmers that nothing but communism could free them from the yoke of French colonization. He’d worked in field hospitals throughout the north of the country, and even after eighteen straight hours of bloody surgery, he’d still find time to engage the villagers in ideological debates.

It was a period in his life he came to refer to as “the years they borrowed my mind.” It wasn’t until he met another enthusiastic cadre, a serious member of the Lao People’s Party and lifelong communist named Civilai, that Siri was able to put everything into perspective. Although he’d been trained to report comrades who strayed from the axiomatic straight and narrow, Civilai was so experienced and so obviously intelligent that Siri had no choice but to listen and reevaluate his own clouded beliefs. Civilai loved communism. There was no question of his loyalty to the Party. But he believed that communism should work without scaring the daylights out of people. For his opinions he was labeled an eccentric. He was too senior and too well respected by the masses to be kicked off the central committee, but he was kept backstage.

Siri had immediately warmed to Civilai’s middle path so he, too, had been ostracized by the top men of the Party. While Boua soldiered on in her attempts to educate a nation of proletariat, Siri hung up his red flag and became a full-time doctor. That was probably when his wife’s love for him began to dim. In Siri’s heart, the love light never went out. He loved her until her death, but he knew she’d already begun to consider her husband a disappointment. Through all that time, only his friendship with Civilai had kept him rational, and as the Party dumped more and more meaningless duties on Civilai, it was Siri who offered encouragement and hope to his friend.

The photograph before him showed one more symbolic handshake with one more foreign official. It was another snap for the diplomatic album. Civilai had told Siri he was becoming the Mickey Mouse of the new regime. He-

“Comrade?” Siri looked up to see the guard whose station was at the upstairs partition standing, drained of color, in the doorway. “You’re a doctor, right?”

“That’s right,” said Siri.

“Come with me quick.” He didn’t wait for a response, but turned on his heel and ran back up the stairs four at a time. From his many years of experience, Siri knew that ten seconds saved by sprinting up a flight of stairs rather than walking rarely made a difference, apart from possibly killing the physician as well as the patient. So he took the stairs one at a time and was met by the flustered guard on his way back down.

“Hurry up,” the guard said. “It’s a life-and-death matter.” Despite the urgency, he’d spared the time to relock the upstairs door before going for Siri. His hands shook now as he attempted to insert the key into the padlock. Siri reached the top landing just as the man burst through the first door and ran along the corridor to a second. That, too, was locked. Siri wondered what ferocious beast required such security measures. As he walked past the first room, he looked in through the open door. Three expensive-looking leather suitcases sat on one of the beds. On the floor was a large tray of seedlings and small pots containing cuttings.

“In here,” shouted the guard. “He’s not dead yet.”

On the only bed in the next room, convulsed in pain, frothing at the mouth, was a middle-aged man with greased hair wearing simple but expensive pajamas. On the floor beside the bed, lying on its side, was a brown glass bottle. The label was in Russian but the universal skull and cross-bones left no doubt as to its contents. Siri prized open the man’s eyes and looked into his pupils. He then forced open the man’s mouth to see his tongue and sniffed at his breath.

“They was cleaning the rooms after them others left. Stupid bitch must have left the cleanser in the sink. Don’t know how he got hold of it. Must’ve been on his way back from the toilet and grabbed it without me seeing. Stupid bastard. It’ll be me that gets shot if anything happens.” The guard was ranting, pacing up and down the room. “Hospital! Can we get him to the hospital? Can you fix him up? Doc? Can you, Doc?”

“Listen, comrade,” Siri said, looking up at the frantic guard. “I can’t do anything with you stomping around like a rampant capitalist. I want you to go down to the kitchen and get the ladies to boil two liters of water. Stir in a handful of salt and about thirty cc’s of cooking oil. Don’t come back till it’s all ready.”

“Right.” The guard abandoned his charge and sped to the kitchen. The poisoned man still squirmed in agony on the bed.

“It’s okay,” Siri said. “He’s gone. You can stop now.”

The man flinched for a second but then began to growl deep in his throat. “Hospital.”

“You and I both know that isn’t going to happen, don’t we now?”

“Dying.”

“Come on. You’re no more dying than I am. In fact, I probably look in worse condition than you do. Exactly what did you think this little show would achieve?”

The man spat the remainder of the foam from his mouth and looked up angrily at Siri. “Who in blazes are you?”

“Dr. Siri Paiboun.”

“Egad. What are the odds of there being a bloody doctor in a place like this?” He sat up and shook his head.

“It was a good show. I doubt anyone else would have dared get close enough to smell the toothpaste. I imagine the staff would have thrown you in a truck and carted you off to the medical center in Xam Neua. But I still don’t see what good that would have done you.”

“No? Well, it’s simple. There wouldn’t have been security in a hospital. I could have sneaked out.”

“And gone where?”

“I don’t know, man. Stolen a car? Headed south?”

“You obviously don’t realize where you are. There’s one road in the direction of Vientiane, and there are some hundred PL and Vietnamese encampments you’d have to pass through on the way. Are you really that desperate to get killed?”

“Better to die fast from a bullet than after the slow torture your people have planned for me.”

“How do you know what we’ve planned?”

“I’m not stupid. I know how you do it. Hard labor, primitive conditions, no access to medicines.”

“I survived for thirty years in those conditions. Why couldn’t you?”

“You obviously don’t know who I am.”

“Oh, I know very well. But that doesn’t answer my question.”

The man shook his head and looked out the window. “I’ve never had to fend for myself. Just the merest sniffle and I was pumped full of drugs. I have no natural immunity, no resistance, no stamina.”

“You’d be surprised how quickly your body adapts.”

“No. It will kill me. I’m certain. Listen. The guard will be back as soon as he completes the ridiculous mission you sent him on. How about you and I come to some… arrangement?”

“Surely you don’t mean financial?”

“I have access to more money than you could ever imagine. If you could get me to Thailand, I c-”

“What would I do with money?”

“Do? What would anyone do? Live a comfortable life. Be free.”

Siri laughed. “If you don’t mind my saying so, in your present predicament you’re hardly a glowing advertisement for the combination of wealth and freedom. But, good try, boy. You know, you’re quite unlike your father.”

“How would you know that?”

“We met. We spent a night together drinking rice whisky and sharing philosophy. I haven’t spent a great deal of my life in the company of royalty, unless you count playing cards, but I was impressed. He was more resigned to fate than you seem to be.”

“He’s a defeatist.”

“He’s a realist. He was here, wasn’t he? And the queen?”

“They took them away last night. Did you see the room they forced them to stay in? Disgraceful. Goodness knows what awaits them out there in the jungle.”

“You’re afraid.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“It’s nothing to be ashamed of. Fear helps us survive. I’ve spent a larger portion of my life being afraid than I have being in control. But here I am. Forget this escape idea, son. It won’t help you or your family. Play the game. Find a tall tree somewhere, a tree that’s survived all the coups and massacres of history. Go to that tree and dig a hole near its roots and bury your pride there. Invest all your royal heritage into the majesty of that great tree, stash it there, and become the simple, humble person they’ll ask you to be. Suffer the indignities they inflict on you and impress them with your will. Win them over with your humility. I know that’s what the king and queen will attempt to do.”

“I… I can’t.”

“You can. And it will have a deeper and longer-lasting impact than any bravado, any heroics, any royal histrionics you have in mind. Show them you’re a person of character. They won’t know how to respond to that. There’s nothing more disheartening to a bully than a man who doesn’t get scared.”

Siri picked up the bottle from the floor. The crown prince looked forlornly ahead of him. “Why did they separate us?”

“To break your will. You didn’t actually drink any of this, did you?”

“It was empty.”

Siri laughed. “You see? You’re a very resourceful lad. You can survive a hundred reeducation camps.”

The guard came running into the room. He held the handles of the steaming pot with rags wrapped around his fingers. The entire kitchen staff was behind him.

“It’s done,” the guard said. “What should I do with it?”

“Throw it down the toilet,” Siri told him. “Better still, boil some decent vegetables for dinner.”

“What? But you said…”

“I seem to have performed a medical miracle without it and brought the prince back to life. There won’t be any more problems. We won’t have to boil him in oil after all.”

“Thank you. Thank you, Doc. Thank you.” The guard mumbled the words a hundred times. The thanks, of course, were for the preservation of his own skin. He had no interest in the well-being of his royal charge.

Before Siri left the room, he saw the bamboo klooee on the desk. “Ah, so this is the weapon that’s been inflicting pain on us since we got here. You only know the one tune?” he asked.

“And I can’t even get that right.”

“When I see you next, you’ll have a thousand tunes of the jungle, and you’ll be playing them to the envy of the birds in the trees. Mark my words.” He gripped the prince’s arm and smiled at him. “Give my regards to your father when next you meet him. He’s an impressive man-with an impressive son.”