Thirty-Three Teeth

That Old Dead Feeling

It was no dream. Siri was unequivocally dead-in Nirvana, he hoped. Even if points were lost for being a communist, he trusted he’d earned enough to be in heaven rather than the other place. He saw no fire, heard no pop music, and smelled no opium smoke, so his hopes were high.

“Have you forgiven me, Lord?”

It was the trunk that confused him.

He’d arrived back at the temple long after midnight. When he left the Town Hall, the celebrations were still raging. No guards had stayed around to lock up.

It was the most fun Siri could remember having for a very long time. The impromptu show: the shamans impersonating the officials, the heated debate the spirits may have had as to which option to choose, the transportation problems in getting them to the Northeast. It was sparklingly brilliant entertainment for a town whose heart had been removed. But his assumption that no spirits had been awakened and summoned by the phony seance was a mistaken one.

At That Luang temple, the night guard was asleep beside the staircase. Siri walked to the prayer hall and retrieved his small bag from behind the Buddha images. He dug through the contents, retrieved his waistcloth, stripped, and went out to the earthen jars to bathe.

He was on his way back when the disturbance began in his ears. At first he assumed it was water lodged there, and he shook his head to free it. But the pressure turned to a sound. It was an annoying single note, metallic, at a pitch that set his teeth on edge. He looked around the yard to see where a machine could be to make such a row.

The temple dogs slept at peace. The birds roosted in the tree branches, all undisturbed by the jarring sound. It was evidently exclusively his. He followed it to its source, the destroyed stupa inside the blue wall. The closer he got, the more deafening the sound became, the more painful the pressure on his eardrums. He looked into the foundation of the stupa base lit by a generous moon but saw nothing. Yet instinctively he knew there had to be something in there inviting him to come closer.

He climbed over into the square of bricks and picked his way carefully to the center. There he cleared a place to kneel and began to dig with his hands. Beneath the rubble, the earth was soft, mulched, teeming with the warm bodies of earthworms. The deeper he dug, the louder became the sound.

He was so focused on his task, he didn’t notice what was happening around him. The destroyed stupa was slowly reforming. The bricks were reattaching, the mortar hardening. But Siri had only one thing on his mind: to stop the awful sound.

Although he couldn’t yet see it, his hand arrived upon the source of his discomfort. As soon as he took hold of the cool stone, he knew what had lured him there. He could feel the leather thong attached to its loop at the top of the black amulet. He knew the shape and the slight ripples of its indentations. He could feel the power of Phibob that now had a hold of him. It was pulling him-pulling with the strength of a thousand malevolent spirits-pulling him with the conviction of righteous revenge-to his death.

He felt his arm being wrenched downward through the soft earth writhing with the bodies of maggots and centipedes. They attached themselves to his naked skin and helped to drag him down. He couldn’t let go of the amulet even when his shoulder was flush with the ground. Like a man about to vanish underwater, he looked up to take a last gulp of air.

That’s when he saw that the stupa was complete and he was entombed. The air was musty with the exhalations of four hundred years. That was the last taste on his final breath. That lungful didn’t last him long once he was buried and traveling on down through the earth. He held it for as many seconds as he could, but he knew it was futile. He was packed in dirt. There was no point in trying to breathe again. All he could do was wait.

As a coroner he knew the process well. His face twitched as the muscles went into spasm. The death rattle rose in his throat, and he allowed himself one last agonized struggle until his heart stopped beating. Just before the machinery shut down completely, the metallic drone stopped and he heard his name called. It was a beautiful sound. Hearing is the most stubborn of the senses and the last one to leave a dying person.

He was aware that his pupils were dilating, and he could feel the warmth seep from his body. In another hour he would be stiff with rigor mortis. There was no more movement, just the calm that comes from sensing the cells and tissues dying at their own sweet pace, a process that could take weeks to complete. His goosebumped skin would be the last to submit to death.

In less time than it takes for a fish to fry, the nerves feeding the cortex of his brain would be gone and whatever feeling remained would come as an observer hovering outside the packet he’d once lived in. By then, it would be as useless as one of the plastic bags that floated down the Mekhong.

He looked up into the golden light that showered onto him, and through the beams he saw the smile of the Lord. He sighed and smiled back at his maker. It was a relief, after all. He felt no bitterness. He’d had enough of life. He wasn’t depressed, just bored. It was as if he’d read the book of living and knew how it ended. There was nothing more to learn. He abandoned the body and reached out to Buddha.

That’s when the Great Plan proved to have a page or two missing. The Lord’s head shook from side to side as if he didn’t want Siri after all. His face distorted and out of it grew a trunk. It snaked down to where the soul of Siri hovered and blasted the dead doctor with a torrent of warm breath that stank of stale peanuts.