Disco for the Departed

Divine Impotence

Mr. Geung had left the forested mountain slopes and entered a valley that contained the first rice fields he’d seen on his walk. The rice stubble crunched under his feet. Everything seemed so dry, so dead. His country had been politicked into a drought. With every postrevolution month that passed, the Pathet Lao government was learning how much more difficult it was to run a country of warm bodies than it had appeared to be on paper. For ten years in the caves of Huaphan, the dream had always been to gain power. As few of the cadres honestly believed that dream would ever come true, no detailed plans were laid for the future. No practical policy of public appeasement was worked out. Nothing spoiled a good popular uprising more than the presence of people and the need to satisfy their unreasonable demands.

In Laos in 1977, the population was becoming more and more restless. The new leaders had been given over a year to show what they were capable of, but successes were rare. Some folks even dared to suggest that the communists were no better than the Royalists. The euphoria of victory was slowly giving way to politburo paranoia, and the resulting measures had caused even more dissent. In an effort to discourage large public gatherings, festivals were either cancelled completely or greatly restricted. They were trimmed of religion, culture, and superstition, which naturally left very little to celebrate. Dr. Siri had compared this with allowing the wearing of spectacles but banning the use of glass lenses.

One such muted celebration had been the May Rocket Festival. Obviously, the combination of disgruntled villagers and large quantities of gunpowder was more than the authorities could tolerate. The government banned gatherings in built-up areas and restricted all activities to remote fields policed by both uniformed and quite obvious plainclothes soldiers. Female spirit mediums who normally gave the festival its meaning were barred from attending. There was to be no alcohol, no raucous music, and all activities had to be completed before nightfall. The amount of powder allowed for each bamboo shaft was so niggardly that many of the homemade rockets barely left their launchpads. They lurched a few meters into the air, then fizzled, and fell to earth. There were spontaneous screams of panic from the fleeing onlookers but few cheers of delight.

The consequences of this debacle reached far beyond the disappointed villagers and their wasted day. The Rocket Festival was a fertility rite. The noise and gaiety should have awakened the gods of lust from their yearlong slumber. The spirit mediums would remind the roused deities that the time had come to send the rains and replenish the paddies. The phallic rockets would stimulate a heavenly orgy and the sexual juices would spill over onto the land. Thus would a rich harvest result.

This was what the villagers believed. The new leaders had no place in their soulless socialist hearts for such mythology. Marxist-Leninist doctrine had no time for fairy tales. Buddhism and animism were sins against rational thought, and logic would always prevail in a communist system. They’d see, these simple folk. The rains would come in May as they always had, and the populace would begin to believe in socialist order.

The subdued May Day celebrations passed with the same lack of enthusiasm as had the Rocket Festival. May gave way to June and the gods of fertility still slumbered. The skies remained clear and the rice fields cracked and turned to dust. By July the people had no doubt that the new government was responsible for this unprecedented drought. Socialism was having a negative effect on the weather. This was clear to even the most simple of minds. The government’s attempts at quelling dissent had only succeeded in exacerbating it.

All Mr. Geung knew of this was that the fields crunched under his feet, but his new boots made light of the terrain. They’d belonged to the old lady’s husband, who had no use for them in his funeral pot. They were too small for her son but they fitted Geung to a T and made him feel proud to own them. She’d given him a large pack of dried food and smeared him with a foul-smelling ointment she promised would keep off even the vindictive dengue-bearing mosquitoes that plagued the land.

“W… we should f… f… follow the road,” he told Dtui, who marched beside him. “But n… n… not be on it.” The old lady had dragged his story from him over breakfast and was sure the soldiers from whom he had escaped would be searching for him.

“Stay close to the road but not on it,” she’d told him. “If a car or truck comes from behind you that isn’t the green of the army, beg them for a ride. Stay away from anything green. Got it?”

The words were embedded in his brain but some of the concepts hadn’t taken root. “From behind you” was surely confusing, because if he turned around, anywhere could be behind him. And as he always looked out through the leaves of trees, it seemed that everything he saw passing along the road was green.

Geung had walked for the whole day. The urgency of returning to the morgue was his impetus. He ached. He wheezed. His anxiety rose and fell, as if he were riding to Vientiane on the back of a dragon. But when he heard a loud crack and saw a bloodstain appear on the front of his shirt, he was surprisingly calm.

“A… a… a bullet wound,” he said as if assessing his state for observers at the morgue. He stood still and watched the red rose grow into a country, one of the countries in Dtui’s atlas that she tried to convince him contained millions of people. What tiny, tiny people they must be. The stain grew to something like the USSR before Geung’s eyes. He became pale and dropped like a fence post to the ground.

More panic. More emergencies and disasters. Soon, emergencies fell into a sort of natural ranking: drop-everything emergencies, do-what-you-can emergencies, and you’ll just-have-to-wait emergencies. Disasters, too, had their own ratings: unavoidable, did-the-best-we-could, my fault/your fault. Then there were godlike moments when a decision had to be made as to who most deserved to die. By the afternoon of her second day, Dtui wondered whether her heart had shrunk. She felt less. People had become less human. Death had become less of a tragedy. Her patients weren’t blacksmiths or housewives, they were percentages. “With this little skill and this little pharmaceutical backup, this patient-let’s call her number seven-has a forty percent chance of survival.”

It amazed and saddened her that, in order to do her job properly, she had to stop caring. With all his years of battlefield surgery, she understood now that Dr. Siri must have been working the percentages for a long time. It hadn’t made him cold, just philosophical. The burden was less if he lost patients when the odds were against him. Dtui had to play it that way, too, at Kilometer 8.

The lull came midafternoon. They’d sent two up the slope. They’d stabilized three. Dtui was on an adrenaline high that lifted her like a flying carpet. Tired though she was, a sledgehammer to the head couldn’t have put her to sleep. She prowled the wards like a large unblinking polar bear. She bullied patients to stay alive, ordered medicines to work. At the end of the ward, the Hmong orderly, Meej, was searching without hope for a vein on the chopstick-thin arm of a patient. Meej was a stocky, good-looking man in his twenties. Like Dtui, his natural expression was a smile.

Dtui massaged the patient’s arm until a faint bluish shadow appeared, which she speared with the hypodermic. Within seconds the patient was connected to his drip and she steered the intern outside.

“How are you feeling?” she asked.

“Drowned,” he confessed.

“You and me both. Just keep a score of the ones you save. That’s how I do it. Don’t count the others. They would have gone anyway.”

“All right. Thanks.”

“I wanted to ask you about Mrs. Duaning.”

“Is she dead yet?”

“Weak, but holding on. What I was curious about was the blood on her feet.”

“Ah, that. It’s an old superstition. If there’s something seriously wrong, the relatives daub blood on the feet.”

“Medically wrong?”

“Sometimes, or sometimes mentally. It keeps the evil spirits out.”

“But this blood appears all by itself.”

Meej laughed. “No, it doesn’t.”

“You know something I don’t.”

“The young girl’s been here since the day before yesterday. I don’t know if she’s a relative or just someone from the village who was looking for the old lady. She’d wandered off one day. The girl found her here, spent a minute with her, then ran off home. She came back a few hours later with three pigs and a machete.”

“How come I haven’t seen her?”

“She isn’t comfortable with white medicine. She stays hidden out back. Her role’s just to keep the old woman’s feet bathed in blood until it’s all over.”

“Does she know what’s wrong with the woman?”

“She didn’t say.”

“Do you know where she is?”

“Yes.”

“Can you bring her to me?”

“Well…”

“What’s wrong?”

“Could you change out of your white uniform? She’s quite certain you’re a ghost.”

Dtui looked down at the only uniform she’d thought to bring with her and smiled. It wasn’t exactly white anymore. “They have ghosts this big up here? All right. Bring her into Mrs. Nuts’s room and I’ll change out of my ghost disguise.” She covered her white uniform with green surgical scrubs.

Ten minutes later, Meej prodded a girl of about ten into the little ward block occupied only by three heavily drugged patients and Mrs. Nuts. The girl was carrying a jam jar in the bottom of which was a fresh batch of blood. Dtui smiled but the girl recoiled at the sight of her even white teeth. “Do you speak Lao?” Dtui asked.

The girl looked at Meej. “She doesn’t,” he said.

“Then can you ask her why she ran home to get the sacrificial pigs?”

He did. Dtui noticed that all the questions were long and the answers short. “She says the woman’s possessed.”

“How can she be so sure?”

The girl pointed to the woman’s mouth, still repeating her weakening chorus. “That,” she said.

“That what?”

Mrs. Nuts was still repeating the same words, over and over, in perfect northern Lao dialect.

“She said the old lady can’t speak Lao. Not a word of it.”

Dtui raised her eyebrows in surprise and whistled softly. “I see.”

“And there’s something else,” Meej told her.

“I doubt it could get any weirder.”

“It does, Nurse Dtui. She said this voice, the voice the old lady’s using-it doesn’t belong to Mrs. Duaning. Someone else is speaking through her mouth.”

Comrade Lit arrived at the guesthouse in the middle of the afternoon and found Dr. Siri on the veranda. “Good health, Comrade Doctor.” They shook hands. “I heard about your miracle cure of our… houseguest today.”

“Nice to see that the grapevine is still up.”

“I’d like to thank you. It would have been quite difficult if anything had happened.”

“It was nothing, really.”

“Nevertheless, the Party offers its sincere thanks, and…”

“Out with it.”

“It would be greatly appreciated if the identity of our visitors remained confidential.”

“Darn, and there I was just about to make an announcement over the national radio network. Who in blazes am I going to tell?”

“Particularly, I think it would be beneficial”-he lowered his voice-”to keep it from your nurse.”

“She’s already a security risk?”

“Not… no, she… Please.”

“I’ll see what I can do. Now, you have some news for me?”

“More than I expected to have,” the tall man said, seating himself opposite the doctor. Siri poured him a cup of tea from the thermos and left it to cool.

“I’ve just been speaking to the Immigration Police in Hanoi. I called them yesterday and gave them the names of your Cuban interns. It’s taken them all this time to go through the files. You know what it’s like. It appears neither man left on the flight he was booked on. In fact, there’s no record of their leaving at all.”

“But they were shipped to Hanoi?”

“They made it that far. They had a military escort. I talked to the driver. He remembers it clearly.”

“So may we assume they turned around and came back?”

“I don’t know. If they did, someone must have noticed. I’ve got my men asking around.”

“Anything about the Vietnamese colonel?”

“His name was Ha Hung. I’m afraid I’ve come to a dead end on that investigation-literally. The colonel was killed three months before the cement path was laid.”

“What were the circumstances?”

“Hmong ambush.”

“And what happened to his daughter?”

“I don’t know. They told me his family went back to Vietnam after the old man’s death. They won’t be easy to trace.”

“Could you try for me?”

“Certainly. Anything else?”

“Dr. Santiago will be dropping by here on his way to Kilometer 8 Hospital. I’ve asked him to take a look at our mummy. See if he recognizes him.”

“Hmm. I doubt even the great Dr. Santiago could identify what’s left. He’ll probably be too busy chasing around young girls barely old enough to be his granddaughters.” Siri noted his animosity but wasn’t really interested enough to dig down to its roots. Lit looked around. “I can’t help but notice the absence of Nurse Dtui at our last two meetings. I hope it doesn’t have anything to do with my setting her straight the other day.”

“Son, let me put it this way. You may very well be able to domesticate a gibbon by repeatedly whacking it over the head with a hammer, but people respond less kindly to concussion.”

“One of my duties is to educate.”

“You don’t beat people up with a philosophy, young fellow. You introduce them to it, gradually.”

“You think I was a little too heavy-handed?”

“I’m sorry to say you’re mired in the shattered cranium school of mentoring. Take it a little easier in future and I’m certain you’ll have more success.”

“Was Nurse Dtui upset? Is that why she isn’t here?”

“Dtui’s got a much thicker skin than that. No, she’s helping out at Kilometer 8 until the new Cuban doctors get here.”

“She is quite remarkable.”

The comment surprised Siri. “I thought you didn’t like her.”

“On the contrary, Doctor. I’ve been more than impressed from the very beginning. I admit she lacks discipline, but…”

Siri waited for the “but” to go somewhere but it just dangled. “I’ll be sure to tell her when I see her this afternoon.”

“You’re going out there?”

“I’ll go with Santiago. I’m interested to see where the Cubans were billeted, and I’d like to ask around about them.”

“And you’ll be sure to let me know if you find anything?”

“Of course.”

“The Central Administration was most distressed to learn the victim might have been Cuban. Their delegation naturally wants this cleared up as soon as possible. There’s a politburo member coming from Havana for the concert. I’d like to have the culprit locked up by then. I think I should come by and see you this evening so you can tell me what you found out.”

“Actually, I’m planning to stay out at the hospital tonight.”

“What on earth for?”

“Oh, I might be able to help a little bit, and it would be nice to get some sleep. That confounded discotheque dance has managed to wake me up every night since I got here.”

Lit laughed. “Doctor, this is Vieng Xai.”

“So?”

“So there hasn’t been a dance here since the senior members all left for the capital. That’s why next week’s concert is such a big deal.”

“Comrade Lit. I hear it. I feel the vibration of the speakers.”

“Perhaps it’s a radio or someone’s record player. What type of music is it?”

“That annoying American rubbish. The type they used to bounce up and down to in the hotel nightclubs in the old days.”

“Well, I’ll look into it for you, Doctor. We certainly don’t want our youth polluting their minds with decadent Western pop. But, believe me, Dr. Siri, there never has been a discotheque in Vieng Xai, and as far as I’m concerned, there never will be.”

At the wheel of his yellow jeep, Santiago arrived at Kilometer 8, like every swashbuckling hero, with a screech of brakes and in a cloud of dust. The beleaguered interns came out to greet him, sighing with temporary relief. Only one person knew who the little white-haired man in the passenger seat was. While the rest of the staff gathered around Santiago, Dtui strolled over to Dr. Siri.

He smiled at her ruffled look. “How’s it going, Nurse?”

She laughed a sort of desperate laugh. “How many years did you do this?”

Siri climbed from the jeep and wiped the dust from his face with an old towel. “It gets easier after the seventeenth year.”

“This is my second day and I’m a wreck.”

They walked into the ward, and Siri briefly summarized the events of those two days from his point of view. “Santiago seems quite certain the body is that of Odon, the smaller of the two interns.”

“Did you ask him about the parallel scars?”

“I pointed them out to him and I noticed a look of… I don’t know, not fear exactly… but some darkness came over him. Don’t forget, we can’t speak to each other, so I’m looking forward to your translation later tonight. Meanwhile, what’s to be done here?”

Siri and Santiago were a formidable team. Dtui followed them on their rounds and assisted them in the four operations they performed. Everything seemed so much more straightforward in their hands. By eight, the wards were settled and the staff was sitting around a table eating a dinner of baked lemur and sticky rice. Santiago preferred to save his comments until the three of them were alone, so Dtui entertained them with the story of Mrs. Nuts. Both surgeons were so fascinated by the tale they went to her ward the second they finished their meal. Dtui was saddened to see how pale the old lady had become. She still spoke in her stolen voice, although now the words issued painfully on labored breaths. They had to lean close to catch them, and her breathing was rank with decay.

Santiago asked what she was saying.

“She says, ‘Almost too late,’” Dtui told him.

“What is?” Siri asked.

“I think she means she won’t be around for much longer.”

But Siri believed otherwise. The amulet around his neck was warm against his skin. It seemed to vibrate as if it were receiving an incoming call. The doctor was starting to recognize its signals. He took the old woman’s hand in his and held the amulet in his other. Images fell into his mind that he knew weren’t his own.

“Dtui, remember what I say,” he called and began to describe what he saw. “Bushes, chest high. I’m falling. Water trickling. Concrete. All of this surrounded by darkness. A door, a very thick metal door, green, too heavy to budge. Hands. Small white hands. My own, as if I’m looking down at myself. There’s blood on them.”

And then, as if the line were suddenly cut, Siri saw nothing at all. He opened his eyes and the old woman was silent. He knew she was dead. “What did I say?” he asked Dtui.

“You don’t know?”

“Not at all.”

Dtui recited back his words as accurately as she could, then translated for Santiago, who seemed to have no idea what he’d just witnessed. She asked whether anything Siri had seen sounded familiar to him. He shrugged and opined that bushes and water could be anyplace.

“All right. Let’s start with bushes.” Siri took control. “Is there anyone on staff who’s lived here all their life?” After a consultation they came up with Nang, a jittery nursing orderly who still fainted from time to time at the sight of blood. She seemed delighted to discuss something that wasn’t related to surgery. What Siri wanted to know about was fruit. He didn’t have the sample with him but he was able to describe the berry he’d crushed in his room at the guesthouse. The others looked on, bemused, as they tried to give it a name.

“Monkey ball plums,” said the girl at last. “That’s what you’re talking about.”

“And where can they be found?” Siri asked.

“All over if you know where to look. They grow on the karsts. At the market they pay well for this fruit, so a lot of village people go looking for it. More than a few people have been blown up while out scrounging for monkey ball plums.”

“Can you find them around here?”

“Of course, at certain times of the year. All the mountains at Kilometer 8 have bushes where they grow.”

“Do you want to share what this is all about, Doc?” Dtui asked.

“Clues,” Siri told her. “We mustn’t ignore any clues. Like the green door. Ask Santiago again if he remembers any green doors.”

She did just that and watched the Cuban flick mentally through all the doors he’d known in his life. At last he asked her whether she was sure it was green and not blue. Siri had no recollection at all of his vision and could not confirm the color.

“If we say blue,” Dtui asked, “would that make any difference?”

Santiago told her that indeed it would. The bomb doors at the old hospital were heavy metal, and they were blue.

“And where is the old hospital?”

He pointed through the window to the black shape of the mountain. It stood out from the indigo sky, looming over them like a giant raven.

She translated for Siri, who knew the hospital well. When they’d moved everything down from the original buildings, the old place was abandoned and closed up. There was no way in. The bombproof doors had been locked to keep out inquisitive children from the middle school down the hill. But in his mind all the pieces fit together: the berries, the doors, the water, and the concrete. “Who has the key?” he asked.

Santiago took them to the administration office, unlocked the desk drawer, and rifled through the bunches of keys till he found the one that should have opened the old hospital main-door padlock. From the store cupboard he took a machete and three battery packs that powered headband-mounted lamps; their hands would be free. He led the way along the overgrown path that snaked up to the nearest entrance to the hospital. The door was nine inches thick and hadn’t been opened for a few years. It took the combined effort of all three pulling on the handle to budge it enough to permit them to squeeze through the gap.

A sad, musty odor escaped as they entered. The hidden vents that brought air from above were clogged with weeds, and the air they walked into was old and stale. The histories of the hospital’s victims still clung to the place. But Siri recognized something else deep inside its unrelenting blackness-the smell of a recent death. Dtui took a little longer to identify the scent. She and Siri switched on their batteries, and the three headlight beams swept back and forth across twelve hundred square meters of gray stone. The old doctors had spent many hours inside this hidden chamber, so the only thing that surprised them was the absence of sound-no scurrying of animals, no chirping of bats. It was as if nature had been too afraid to take over the vacated premises.

But Dtui stood open-mouthed at the sight before her, amazed that in wartime, under a barrage of bombing, such an incredible feat of construction had been achieved. Conduits in the cement floor allowed natural water from the surrounding mountains to pass through the cavern. There were operating rooms and offices off the main chamber and cleverly designed latrines that allowed effluent to flow away from the ward. Then the beam of her lamp caught a shape in the center of the vast concrete floor. It was a body. Its limbs were bent at impossible angles. As they walked toward it, they could see that she had been a woman in her early twenties. From her state they could tell she’d been dead more than twenty-four hours.

Directly above her, weeds dangled from one of the ventilation shafts, a perfectly round hole some two meters across. Siri knew the vent angled upward to a spot on the mountain slope, invisible from the sky, where fresh air would be drawn into the hospital by means of a pump. The pump was long gone, and all that remained was a hole, an almost invisible hole into which some unsuspecting woman collecting berries might drop.

Santiago bent over the body and looked at the dead woman. Dtui translated the words he spoke.

“The doctor’s very impressed. He really wants to know how you were able to find her. But he’s sorry that you were too late to help Miss Panoy.”

“No,” Siri said, strafing his beam across the cavern. “This isn’t Panoy. The spirit of this woman spoke to us through the old Hmong, but she wasn’t talking about herself. She had to be dead already to communicate in that way. There must be someone else here.”

Dtui passed on the message to Santiago, who joined them in a continued search. The water in the old aqueduct had been diverted to the village at the foot of the mountain but the open drains still remained. Water still trickled through them. In some spots they were a meter deep, and that was where Santiago found Panoy. He called her name and dropped down into the channel beside her. She was about four years old. She was seriously injured and weak from hunger, but miraculously she was still alive.

Santiago called up to the others that he believed she could be saved. He climbed from the trench with the girl in his arms and walked quickly through the blue door. Dtui and Siri couldn’t keep up with him. They stood at the entrance and watched the energetic old Cuban scurry down the slope to the new hospital. Dtui put her arm around Siri’s shoulder and smiled at him.

“Nice one, Dr. Siri. How do we explain all this to Santiago?”

“Much as I appreciate the benefits of a good lie, I fear we may have to tell him the truth.”

“You sure? Lying might be easier.”

“Oh, I don’t think that skinny old lion will have a problem with this. I get the feeling he’s seen it all before.”

She turned her head and her light beam drilled into the metal door beside them. “Tell me something. What color is this, Doc?”

“Green.”

“You’re color-blind, aren’t you?”

“If this isn’t green I suppose I must be. I dread to think what else Mrs. Nuts might have passed on to me.”

Panoy was remarkably resilient. There wasn’t much they could do about her cracked ribs but they reset both of her arms and an ankle, stitched a couple of large gashes, and put her on an intravenous drip that would slowly replenish her lost energy. Meej stayed with her to check her vital signs through the night.

Siri, Santiago, and Dtui sat beneath the night sky. It was cold enough for jackets but not so uncomfortable they needed to light a fire. The rice whisky worked well enough to keep the blood flowing. Siri was a bystander while Dtui, with her hard-worked dictionary and a flashlight, attempted to explain Siri’s connection to the spirit world. She told Santiago about the thousand-year-old shaman called Yeh Ming he unwittingly hosted. She told him this spirit was patiently waiting for Siri’s peaceful and natural death so he could retire from the shaman business. She told him about the teeth and the dreams and the white talisman he wore to keep away the evil spirits. During this explanation, Siri watched the reaction of his old friend. It was difficult to read, as if Santiago was organizing the information into compartments. At the end, the Cuban looked at Siri for a few seconds with an expression of pity. He pulled the perennial cigarette from between his lips and surrounded his head with a halo of smoke. Then there was a glint, perhaps of admiration, and finally, Santiago began to laugh. He refilled their glasses and patted his colleagues on the back as if this was the best news he’d heard in a long time.

Siri was once again sidelined while Santiago took his turn to tell another story. Dtui interrupted often to clarify points, looked shocked here, fascinated there, and at the end she sighed and raised her eyebrows. Then there was silence.

“What? What is it?” Siri said, flustered at being left in the dark.

“Oh, hello, Doc. You still there?” she smiled. “Look, I tell you what. I’m a bit tired…”

“Nurse Chundee Vongheuan, if you don’t tell me right this minute…”

She giggled. “Only joking, Doc. Keep your toupee on.” She took a sip of her whisky and settled back to begin Santiago’s story. “Now that the old fellow knows how weird you are, he seems to feel confident enough to tell you what really happened here. It seems there was more to the two interns than met the eye. He was afraid if he told you everything you’d think he was out of his mind, so he’s happy we can all be nuts together now.”

Santiago smiled and looked at Dtui as if he was enjoying the story he had told her anew. He threw back another mouthful of whisky like a fire-eater about to blow forth a torrent of flames.

Dtui began, “In Cuba, it seems, they have their own shamans and strong connections to the spirit world. There are big cults and little cults. Many of the priests of these cults are phony. But there are some that really communicate with the spirits.”

“Does Dr. Santiago actually believe this?” Siri asked.

Santiago laughed again when he understood the question.

“So he says. He strongly believes in the spirit world. He says he’s seen too much in his life that has no scientific explanation. He says if you like, he could spend the next two weeks describing the rites of Palo and-what was it, Santeria?” She looked at Santiago, who nodded. “We don’t want him to do that, do we?”

“I think not.”

“Good. Then I’ll just keep to the point: the reason that he sent the two Cuban orderlies home. It wasn’t because Isandro was fooling around with the local girls. That was a good excuse, something he could write in a report to Havana. But there were other reasons. He was happy with the work they did, so obviously the things he found out about them had to be serious for him to sacrifice two valuable assistants.”

She stopped.

“Well, what were they, these reasons?”

“He didn’t tell me.”

“What?”

“He says he’ll take us to their cave in the morning so we can see for ourselves. Frustrating, isn’t it?”

“Painfully so.”

No amount of pleading and sulking would force the Cuban to change his plan.

They finished their nightcaps and retired to their allotted sleeping spaces in the nearby middle-school classrooms.

Earlier, Siri had been shown his spot, where several nylon quilts were laid out for him at the front of a year-two classroom. Someone had chalked WELCOME VISITOR on the blackboard. But as he approached the room now, he noticed that the door was open and he heard peculiar sounds from inside. Desks were being shifted. Something dropped to the floor and broke. Breaths, deep inhuman snorts. He considered going for help but realized he didn’t know what he needed help for-or from. He grasped his amulet through his shirt and strode to the doorway.

In the light of a small orange candle someone had left burning for him on the teacher’s desk, Siri saw a bizarre scene. Five buffalo in the small room were each apparently vying for a position at the front by the blackboard. One creature had leaned against the chalk and been branded with the message Two had already claimed their places of honor and lay on the dirt floor on either side of Siri’s quilt like enormous Dutch wives. All five looked up at him when he entered the classroom and, as far as creatures with no upper teeth are able, they smiled.