The Coroner's Lunch

The Exorcist’s Assistant

The village elders were dressed in their Sunday best and standing at attention when the jeep arrived that evening. As per instructions, only Siri and Kumsing were on board. Kumsing had driven. The village guards had reluctantly pulled back to the post on the road. The two visitors were at the mercy of Meyu Bo Village. Kumsing was already having doubts.

Siri and the elders greeted each other in Hmong. He’d explained his theory to the captain that morning. Siri had been born in Khamuan. He’d lived there for the first ten years of his life. He knew nothing of his parents. When he was about four, he went to live with an old woman. But if his mysterious family had been Hmong, or if they’d lived in a Hmong area, he would have absorbed a lot of the language and spoken it.

His scientific explanation was that the language had remained dormant for all these years, but was reawakened by this exposure to Hmong people. Kumsing found it hard to believe, but Siri felt a good deal more comfortable with that explanation than with the alternative. He’d check its likelihood with the professors at Dong Dok College when he went home.

The elders led the two men to Lao Jong’s hut, where an ornate shrine had been set up facing the door. An ornamental sword was embedded in the earth in front of it. Two trays sat on the altar. One was decorated with a banana-leaf cone, other banana-leaf origami, and flowers. An unshelled chicken’s egg sat proudly at the summit of the cone, defying gravity. Thesecond tray contained small portions of foodstuffs, alcohol, and betel nuts all shrouded in white unspun cotton threads.

Tshaj went up to the captain. “You bring?”

Kumsing displayed all the outward signs of calm skepticism, but when he spoke, his voice trembled. He handed over his old uniform shirt. “Here, but I don’t want candle wax and ash all over it.”

Tshaj took it from him and folded it flat. Lao Jong’s wife lifted the second tray on the altar. It had been sitting on a third, empty tray upon which Tshaj placed the shirt. The woman then replaced the tray of offerings on top of the shirt. Kumsing’s essence was now present in the ceremonial paraphernalia.

The elders retied the long white cotton threads that looped down from the wood rafters, circled the altar, and fanned out to the door jambs.

“Please wait, sir.” Tshaj sent Kumsing to sit with Siri on the ground.

An audience was gathering slowly. It was important that everyone in the village attend this evening. It was the only way to discover who harbored the malevolent spirit; the Phibob. The Phibob could not possess its victims directly and inflict harm on them. It chose a living soul to hide in. This allowed it to channel evil from all the aggrieved spirits toward the aggressor. The hosts rarely knew they carried the Phibob.

“I don’t know about this, Siri. If the men found out….”

“If the men found out, I bet they wouldn’t be surprised at all. They weren’t born soldiers. I bet a lot of them would recall rites like this from their own villages. Anyway, I’d also bet they know already.”

“What makes you think this isn’t just a plot to discover who’s commanding the project now? Why should they want to help me?”

“Survival.”

“What do you mean?”

“If the commanders of the project continue to die, what do you suppose the army will do?”

“They’ll assume we have been attacked by the Hmong.”

“And wipe them out.”

“We aren’t barbarians, you know.”

“Really? You’d be surprised what your army’s doing in the name of rooting out insurgents. Chemicals are being rained down on villages suspected of harboring Hmong resistance. One more little village wouldn’t make much difference. That’s why. They want to be spared. The only way to do that is to placate the spirits and keep you alive. If it works, you’ll have to beg forgiveness for every tree you cut down from now on.”

“I’d be a laughingstock.”

“Better a live laughingstock than a dead unbeliever. But it’s up to you.” It was hard for Siri to convince him of something he wasn’t convinced about himself. He didn’t know why he believed this was Kumsing’s only chance. He hadn’t expected that his description of his night in the village would have been enough to persuade the captain to accompany him. But the young man was so desperate, he would have tried anything.

Siri looked around at the unlikely cast of this night’s drama. It all seemed so ridiculous. Lao Jong, dressed all in red, was attaching tiny cymbals to his fingers. His wife was tying a hood around the top of his head. Tshaj was lighting the tapers and candles. The sickly sweet scent of the incense mixed with the smell of the beeswax lamps.

Auntie Suab was working the crowd, handing out amulets like a peanut seller at a soccer game. Most of the village had arrived already. The elders and key figures were on the floor inside, the rest standing or sitting on benches outside. Despite the numbers, there was no sound. Even the babies lay silent against their mothers’ breasts.

“Is this dangerous?” Kumsing whispered.

“Don’t know. Never been to one before. You’d better shut up now.”

Lao Jong, with his hood still pulled back from his face, knelt at the altar and offered up the tray of snacks and liquor to his own teacher and all the teachers before him, way back to the time of the first and greatest shaman. His wife lowered his hood, and he gently tapped the finger cymbals together in a slow rhythm. His wife took up a gong and began to beat in time to his rhythm with the thigh bone of a wading bird.

Lao Jong slowly began to chant a mantra that was in no language Siri had ever heard, yet somehow he seemed to know it. Somehow he seemed aware that Lao Jong was calling for the great gods, the angels, the good spirits to come to him, to use him. He rocked gently back and forth next to the altar and summoned the spirits. For thirty minutes he chanted, and no one grew restless. People seemed hypnotized by the rhythm and the movement. There was still no other sound.

Only Captain Kumsing huffed in frustration again and again. The smoke was irritating his eyes. The gong and the cymbals were buzzing in his ears. He thought he was going to throw up.

Then, almost undetected at first, the repetition of the mantras grew faster, and the volume rose. Lao Jong’s breath was becoming strained and, even though his face was hidden, all there could tell he was in a trance. His arms began to twitch. He rose quickly to his feet, and his whole body and his head jerked in increasingly violent spasms. It was neither a dance nor a fit. Unseen deities were jostling for position inside his body. Lao Jong, the toothless farmer, was gone. Not one person there believed this specter in front of them was the man who had gone into the trance earlier.

Although he could see nothing, the shaman appeared to look around the room. His focus fell on Siri, who shrank back as everyone looked in his direction. His hopes of attending his first exorcism as an observer were soon gone. Lao Jong’s body fell, not like a person, but like a tree crashing to the floor of a forest. It fell hard, face first, at Siri’s feet.

Siri was sure Lao Jong had knocked himself out. His head was inches away, unmoving, unbreathing. Siri reached his hand forward to see if he could help. But in the speed of a breath, in one swift motion, the shaman rose to his feet. It was as if a film had been reversed. As if the tree had been unfelled. The crowd gasped.

The new owners of Lao Jong’s body leaned over the stunned doctor and brought the palms of the shaman’s hands together in front of the hood. The deities spoke in their own voice, a voice that could never have belonged to Lao Jong.

“Yeh Ming. Tell us where the evil spirit Phibob is lurking. Whose body has he chosen? Who is the host?”

Siri was overwhelmed. This was a grave responsibility. Why him? Every eye was fixed on him, an actor who’d forgotten his lines. He gazed around the room and through the open windows. He looked at every face, every man, woman, and child, hoping there’d be a sign, an arrow or something, a flashing light. But he saw nothing and conceded defeat. “How the hell should I know?”

Even though the shaman’s body had come no closer, Lao Jong’s gnarled hand somehow shot forward and grabbed Siri’s wrist. A sliver of pain shot through his arms and down his legs. It was as if his nerves were being over-stimulated. Then that energy traveled up through his body and settled at his neck. The amulet, which had been so cool against his skin, began to burn like a white-hot ember. He opened his mouth to scream, but no sound came out. He yanked at the leather to take it off, but the thong held. Worse, the amulet burned. It burned through skin, through muscle, to the bone. There was the sizzle of flesh. He tried to wrestle the thong over his head now, but the leather constricted, tighter and tighter, like a garrote. He couldn’t breathe and he knew he was going to die. He was going to die anagonizing death. He was choking, but nobody came to help him. Nobody came to pull the burning amulet from his skin. He could understand none of it. Kumsing sat beside him as if nothing were happening. Couldn’t he see the flames? Smell the burning flesh? He was writhing with pain, kicking his legs, yanking at the thong. Then in his death throes he saw her. She sat beneath the window smiling serenely like an angel.

Kumsing saw none of this. He only saw Siri gaze calmly around the room, close his eyes, and breathe deeply. Then Siri re-opened his eyes and looked directly at an old lady beneath the window at the farthest point from the altar.

Siri knew now who was killing him. The amulet had been a screen to stop him seeing Phibob. In his dream, she’d collected together the spirits of the jungle and released the plague of insects. It was her. Auntie Suab was hosting the malevolent spirits. Phibob was in her. He looked at her through the slits that were left of his eyes and she smiled. And the smile was red, not with betel, but with the blood of revenge. Suddenly he could see them, the unsettled souls of the troubled dead. They sat inside her. And with the last of his strength he raised his hand and pointed at the old lady under the window. And although his hearing was draining away along with his life, he heard her speak. He’d never heard such a sound. The voice that came from her mouth contained the voices of many, gruff, angry voices,voices of generations of lost souls. They belonged to the spirits of men and women who had suffered violence and indignation, unsettled ghosts denied a resting place. They all spoke from the mouth of the tiniest, most gentle lady in the village: “Fuck you, Yeh Ming. You’ll be cursed for this. Believe us. You will be cursed.”

Fire spread through Siri’s chest and over his skin, the garrote cut through his neck, he kicked and grunted the finale to his death knell, and he was gone.

Kumsing watched as Siri stared at the old lady. The doctor sat cross-legged, his hands in his lap, more serene than ever. She smiled back at him, a little nervously. Then the doctor lifted his hand and pointed at her.

“Phibob,” he said, calmly. “Phibob is in her.” Then, as if he were suddenly tired, he keeled over sideways and collapsed.

That was the end of the ceremony as far as Siri knew. When he woke up, the sun shining through the unshuttered window was like warm balm against his face. He reached instinctively to his neck, but there was no dressing, no contusion, no injury at all. The amulet was gone.

“Spiritual wounds don’t leave scars, Yeh Ming.”

Siri looked to the end of the straw mattress to see Auntie Suab spooning soup from a large black pot into a bowl. His face must have shown fear. She smiled. “Don’t worry, they’re gone. You missed quite a show last night. I missed a lot of it myself, although I was apparently the star.”

“I’m sorry for ratting on you.”

“It had to be done.” She brought the soup over to him and helped him sit up against the beam of the hut. He felt weak. She handed him the bowl and a spoon. He looked at the soup with suspicion.

“Nothing poisonous, Yeh Ming. You need some nourishment. You were as sick as a dog last night.”

“I was?”

“At least you waited till they got you outside.”

“I’m polite that way. What happened?”

She sat cross-legged on the floor as he ate. “I’m afraid Lao Jong was a bit beyond his depth. He’s actually more of a fixing-of-stomachache, saving-of-vegetable-garden type of medium. He can deal with little troubles like that very well. But what we had last night was hell and brimstone. He’d never experienced anything like that before. Fortunately, you had.”

A sudden dark flash came across Siri’s mind. He saw himself with his hands around Auntie Suab’s throat during the exorcism. He shrugged it from his mind.

“Me? What good was I? I was unconscious.”

“This body was. But Yeh Ming was with us. You acted as a mentor for Lao Jong. Kept everyone calm. Between the two of you, you were able to chase the Phibob from my body. [Siri again saw himself with his hands wrapped tightly around the old lady’s throat, but this time there were sounds: the gong, screaming.] We made certain they couldn’t possess anyone from the village, not even your soldier friend. He was crying like a baby at the end.”

“Where did they go, the Phibob?”

“Back to the trees. They don’t use hosts very often. They’re more at home in the jungle.”

“Why did they pick you?”

“The amulets, I suppose. I pick up a lot of bad karma from my clients. I handle a lot of cursed talismans. Malevolent spirits often target women.”

“And you didn’t know they were in you?”

“The host never knows. Their influence works on your subconscious. This, for example.” She held up the black prism in front of his eyes. “I had no idea it had been tampered with.”

As it swung back and forth, the images of the previous night became more vivid. He could smell the beeswax from the lamps. Suab was fighting him off with incredible, unearthly strength. Nobody came to help. Lao Jong lay unconscious on the ground, blood seeping from the corner of his mouth.

Auntie Suab looked at him. “What’s wrong?”

“I…I’m getting visions of last night. They’re so real.”

“That’ll continue for a while, I’m afraid. It’s only to be expected after what you went through. That’s one more reason why you need to put this back on.” She slid across the floor toward him and held out the amulet.

“Put it on? But it was the amulet that stopped me seeing the Phibob in the first place.”

“It stopped you seeing them while they were in the host. Now that they’re gone from me, there’s no danger. The amulet’s charm has been reversed. The prism will protect you from their revenge. Are you listening?”

Siri was shaking his head. The quiet of the morning was invaded by the sounds of last night’s ceremony: The villagers were chanting his name. A woman was crying; it was Lao Jong’s wife lying over his body.

The morning was losing its warmth. The sun through the window had fallen behind a cloud.

“It’s so real.”

“Put this on, Yeh Ming. Put this on and it will all go away.”

“I can’t. For some reason I know I shouldn’t. There’s something wrong here.”

“You must trust me.” She was losing her patience with him. Her voice became deeper.

“How do you know they talked of revenge?” The tiniest drip of blood appeared at the corner of her mouth, and Siri understood. The night was not intruding into the morning; the morning was intruding into the night. He wasn’t imagining he was strangling Suab. He actually was. That was the reality. The soft bed, the kind Suab, and the soup, was an image forced into his head by Phibob.

The malevolent spirits were lulling him, coaxing him to put on the amulet to weaken him. It was their only hope. He had Suab by the neck and he was casting the spirits from her. They couldn’t withstand his power. They’d killed the medium, but Yeh Ming was too strong. He removed one hand from Suab’s neck and with inhuman ferocity slapped her across the face.

“Be gone, Phibob. Be gone.”

And gone they were, in a rush of static that sucked the air from the room. Suab’s body became limp, and Yeh Ming let it drop. He looked around at the silent villagers, who held their palms together and cast their tear-filled eyes downward. His work was done. Slowly he crumpled to the ground and slept.

When he awoke he heard the sound of a spoon clanking against a pot but didn’t dare look. He heard the sound of soup pouring into a bowl and tried not to listen.

“He’s awake.”

It was a man’s voice and it was answered by the grunt of another. Siri looked up to see some of the elders sitting in a huddle at the far side of the hut. They got to their feet and hurried across the room. They seemed pleased to see him. The young girl he’d met before was dishing up soup for everyone. It smelled good.

Siri said nothing to the men. He watched them. He looked for abnormalities, anything out of place, sudden changes in the light. Tshaj spoke first.

“How are you feeling, Yeh Ming?” The voice seemed legitimate, but Siri wasn’t about to make the same mistake twice.

“Who are you?”

The men looked at each other, confused. “I’m Tshaj. What’s wrong?”

“What year is this?”

“1976.”

“The date?” Siri figured a malevolent spirit wouldn’t have an up-to-date calendar.

The elders looked at one another again. Unfortunately, dates weren’t something they needed to concern themselves with either. One of them took a stab at it.

“November?”

“What day?”

“Monday.”

“No. That isn’t possible. What happened to Friday and Saturday and Sunday?”

“You slept through them.”

“You’ve been out like a clod of earth since…that night.”

It wasn’t unlikely. He felt leaden and uncommonly hungry. The smell of the soup was bringing on rumbling in his insides. But he still wasn’t absolutely at peace with what he was seeing.

“Where’s Lao Jong?”

Tshaj looked down at his hands. “He’s gone.”

“Gone, dead? From the exorcism?”

The men nodded solemnly.

“He wasn’t in physical condition to tolerate all that turmoil he was hosting. He’d never really done it before, not to that degree. He had a bad heart already, and the Phibob could tell. I can’t think what they made him see that shocked him so. Not sure I’d want to know.”

“I can imagine.”

“Lucky for us, Yeh Ming was open to the deities. There was the devil of a battle.”

“I think I met that devil. What happened to the Phibob?”

“Back to the forest.”

“Just like that? They just happily scurried back to the forest with their tails between their legs?”

“There’ll be nothing happy about it. There’s still a lot of mischief to be had in the jungle. But they’ll think twice about possessing any of us, now that we’re protected. Yeh Ming left us a blessing and put a spell on our village.”

“Nice of him.” Siri decided this was reality, if only because his stomach was bleating like a tethered goat from the aroma of the soup. Recovering from seventy-two hours of sleep is no easy matter, and he needed help from the elders to sit up. They were flesh and blood, but mostly bone. The blushing girl spooned soup into his mouth. He could have done it himself, but he rather liked the service.

“What about the captain?” he asked between slurps.

“He was blessed too. It seemed to make him very confident. He decided to protect his men as well. Auntie Suab’s doing a roaring trade in amulets for the army. She can’t make them fast enough.”

Siri stopped eating. “Auntie Suab? Is she all right?”

“She’s fine. She knows nothing about that night. The host can feel nothing. Once you exposed her, she was unconscious and the Phibob took over.”

“But I was…wasn’t I choking her to death?”

“No. You were attacking the Phibob. They weren’t your hands and it wasn’t Suab’s throat.”

“Thank goodness for that. Feed me, my sweetness.”

The girl blushed and spooned more soup into his mouth.

Once he had shaken the sleep from his body, and the food had re-stoked his energy, Siri felt better than he had for many years. Perhaps he felt better than he ever had. Something was stirring inside him that made him think of youth, of his romance with Boua. It was a marvelous feeling.

An hour after waking, he was walking around Meyu Bo receiving small gifts and congratulations and saying his good-byes. At Suab’s hut he apologized again, but it was certain she neither remembered nor felt a thing. She had no idea what he was talking about when he mentioned the trick she’d played. She handed him a small leather pouch, which he accepted cautiously.

“This isn’t a black prism?”

“No, Yeh Ming. That was destroyed. Smashed to a thousand pieces and scattered over the forestry site. Take a look.” He pulled the drawstring and found a white talisman inside, smaller than the prism but every bit as ancient. It hung on a string of plaited white hair. “This is the converse of the black prism. Where there’s evil, you’ll see it. No spirit can blind you, if you have this.

“I hope the Phibob is finished with you, but it’s a wicked spirit, an amalgam of many malevolent souls. The exorcism probably showed him who’s boss, but I want you to be prepared for revenge. If he chooses to follow up on the curse, you’ll need this. Promise me you’ll carry it with you always.”

A feeling of deja vu came over him, although it seemed unreasonable. Auntie Suab wasn’t Phibob. She was offering him her help. It was just that, if she had no recollection of the possession, how did she know about the curse? He dismissed the thought.

He thanked her for the amulet but had no intention of carrying it with him. He wished her well with her amulet sales, and hoped they would bring in enough revenue for the village to reverse its slide into poverty. There were an awful lot of soldiers, and superstition spread faster than a forest fire.

Later that afternoon, Kumsing escorted Siri to the airstrip. The captain did indeed seem to be a new man. His nervous tic was gone, and he was wearing his uniform with resolute defiance. His own amulet peeked out from between the straining buttons.

They watched the Yak approach from the horizon, like a bee full of pollen. Siri and Kumsing walked toward it with their arms around each other’s shoulders like survivors of a great ordeal.

“You don’t have to hurry back. You could stay and rest up for a day or two,” Kumsing said.

“I think three days of sleep’s enough rest. And who knows when our charming Soviet friends will be back this way again? I have to take the opportunity while it’s here.”

“Siri, about the reports….”

Siri laughed. “If your bosses are anything like mine, I think the last week will have been very mundane. I took a couple of days to do the autopsies. Then I came down with a mild bout of….”

“Malaria.”

“Malaria, that’ll do, and I had to rest up until it passed. I don’t recall anything about any Hmong, do you?”

“Not a thing.” They shook hands. “Siri, how do you feel?”

“About what?”

“This whole bloody circus. I know I can never be normal again after all that’s happened, and I was just an observer. You must be-I don’t know-confused?”

“How could I not be? I’m a man of science and I have not one sensible explanation for what I went through. And yet it happened. You saw it. I felt it. How can I ever go back to being Dr. Siri, the downtrodden, after that?”

“I admire you.”

“Because?”

“Just think how interesting the world will be from now on.”

“I’m seventy-two, boy. I was planning on gradually losing interest in the world, not acquiring it. What I’m hoping is that this will all go away once I leave Khamuan. Frankly, the thought of taking Yeh Ming back to Vientiane frightens the life out of me.”

Their conversation was drowned by the sound of the airplane bouncing along the strip with its motors roaring. Once it was almost stopped, the Yak opened its door, coughed out one passenger, and sucked in Siri and two forestry specialists. It pivoted, accelerated, and was airborne again all in the space of ten minutes.

Through one small porthole, Siri could see the captain walking back to the truck. A crow with a brown crest, unmoved by the noisy aircraft, sat on a log not five meters from it. The driver ran at the bird, expecting it to fly off, but it sat defiantly and the driver gave up. When the truck drove off, the crow followed.

The shirtsleeved forester was very helpful in pointing out the project site to Siri as they passed over it. The doctor was overwhelmed by its scope. Hectare upon hectare of prime jungle had been shaven bald. The devastation extended in each direction as far as his eye could see. He pressed his nose up to the scratched glass and shook his head slowly.

“Shit.” He noticed how his hand had involuntarily reached into his pocket and was holding the leather pouch. Hemumbled an apology to the Phibob and the other displaced souls. “I’m sorry, I didn’t realize.”

“What was that?” The forester leaned over to hear him better.

“Nothing, just a little prayer.”

“Afraid of flying, are you?”

“Afraid of going back down to the ground, more like. Listen, comrade. You wouldn’t happen to know exactly where this timber goes to in Taiwan, would you?”