Curse of the Pogo Stick (14 page)

“Yes, my general. There are still mice and elephants. But don’t forget the elephants used to be mice, so keep eating your spinach.”

It was the morning of the exorcism and everyone but Siri, his patient, and, presumably, the honeymoon couple up on the hill, had gone to the fields. Hmong New Year was a day away and they needed to get the opium tapped beforehand. As in most Hmong communities, opium was a source of medicine and revenue. Only the old bothered to smoke it. It was easy to carry in nuggets and would be their currency on the long journey they faced.

Siri had risen to check the progress of Judge Haeng twice during the night. On the second visit the patient allowed himself to be lifted to a sitting position and was able to swallow a large volume of sugared water. For breakfast, Siri spooned a gruel of pork and rice between the judge’s cracked lips. Siri imagined him out there in the jungle not trusting any plant or fruit. Not knowing which roots were safe to eat or which insects gave the most nutrition. He was still delirious but once or twice his eyes wandered into the flight path of Siri’s and he smiled. A miracle of sorts.

Siri couldn’t begin to imagine how he’d be able to explain all this once the little judge had regained control of his faculties. With luck he’d remain non compos mentis until it was all over and the Hmong were on their way. Siri walked outside with his cup of coffee freshly brewed from beans he’d crushed himself. He marvelled once again at the spectacular scenery all around. How would the Hmong be able to live without it? What had they done that was so terrible to deserve banishment to an alien land? They’d lost the war, so what? Laos had forever engaged in battles with itself. “Forgive thine enemy,” the Christian Bible said. Too bad the Manifesto didn’t include that clause.

The final check: on the three-tiered altar sat the silver alms bowl full of spring water, a pork-fat candle, a saucer of husked rice with a complete egg as its centrepiece, and three porcelain bowls of rice wine, tea, and water to satisfy the finicky tastes of the spirits. In his pouch were the divination horns and puffed maize for his horse, the winged steed that would carry the shaman to the Otherworld. Yet right now that particular beast resembled nothing more than a wonky wooden bench with splinters.

Several threads of pure white unspun cotton ran from the altar over the main crossbeam and down to the frame of the door, giving the guests the feeling they were entering the lair of a giant spider. Siri himself was decked out in black pyjamas. Around his head was a macramed band that held a hooded mask in place. It was pulled back over his head at present but would be lowered when the ceremony began. On the fingers of his right hand were tiny bells that made him sound like a wind chime whenever he tried to scratch his missing earlobe. On the bench were his dagger and rattle. He could hear the audience milling around outside.

“Are you nervous?” Bao asked him.

“Nervous? Me? Dr Siri Paiboun, the national coroner with a lifetime membership in the communist party? Are you serious? I’m scared witless. I never was much for costume drama. I got terrible stage fright at high school in Paris when they forced me to act. Did I tell you I went to high school in France? They made me repeat everything from eighth grade before they’d let me study medicine. It didn’t help that all the costumes were twice my size. I was five years older than everyone else and half as big. They made me look like a little boy playing dress up. I’ll never forget – I’m babbling, aren’t I?”

“Yes.”

“Sure sign the adrenaline’s pumping.”

They heard the excited chatter of the audience coming to the door.

“Oh, my word,” he said.

“Don’t worry about it, Yeh Ming. Just go through it the way we did last night. They’ll never know.”

He looked into her sparkling eyes.

“How old are you?”

“Eighteen. Why?”

“I sometimes get the feeling you’re an old person reincarnated.”

“Old people aren’t necessarily that smart, Yeh Ming.”

“
Touché
.”

Siri sat carefully on the winged steed. He nodded solemnly first at Elder Long, who was wearing his best suit for the occasion, then at his three wives. Each was attempting to out-dress the others. Their costumes were evidence of many years of work and great depth of artistic feeling. He smiled at the unattached ladies and waited for them to sit cross-legged in front of their elder’s seat. The room was full and Siri thanked the stars that two hundred more guests hadn’t been able to make it to the ceremony.

There came an almighty crash that almost bucked him from his horse. It was Bao bringing the house to order with her gong. Siri took a deep breath to restart his heart. Once his assistant had the audience’s attention she began to beat the instrument steadily, two heartbeats per gong. Siri composed himself, picked up the ceremonial dagger, and walked to the altar. With a rather impressive flourish, he buried the knife almost to its hilt in the dirt floor So far, so good. He lit the incense and the foul-smelling candle and returned to the bench. He reached into his pouch and produced the divination horns. These had been cut from the tip of a buffalo horn and split lengthwise to make two similar halves. How the horns landed when cast onto the ground would tell the shaman what particular ailment the elder’s daughter was suffering from (although Siri hardly needed horns to tell him that) and how best to go about healing her. He cupped both hands around them, shook them extravagantly like a gambler in Monte Carlo, and threw them onto the ground at his feet.

There was a gasp from the onlookers. Something had gone wrong already. One of the horns had cracked in half down its axis, leaving not two but three divining markers. The newly split horn formed a perfect cross. The unbroken horn landed horizontally beside it. It was symmetrical. No casino would have given odds on it. Siri had no idea what it meant. He was angry he’d shaken the horns too hard but he pretended it was all perfectly normal. He leaned down to study the formation and nodded knowingly. Once satisfied he sat square on the bench and breathed heavily.

This was to be the point at which Bao would lower the hood, but Siri happened to look up at that moment to see a delirious but conscious Judge Haeng leaning against the door frame wearing nothing but a splint and a pair of underpants. He glared drunkenly around the room and seemed to recognize one Dr Siri dressed as a Hmong and riding a wooden horse. Siri shrugged and let the flap drop over his face. One crisis at a time. The show had to go on.

The actual process of getting a shaman into a trance could have taken an hour or more, but he and Bao had decided fifteen minutes would be sufficient in this particular case. She increased the tempo to one gong stroke per heartbeat. He found that it curiously matched his own pulse so closely it was as if his heart had acquired a sound effect. This in turn reminded him of his own percussion role. He reached beside him for the rattle and began to shake it. He had a surprisingly good sense of rhythm for a septuagenarian. By the time he’d incorporated the finger bells he thought that at another time and place they might even have been able to make a few
kip
playing backup band at temple fairs.

He had to keep track of the timing. The hood had disorientated him but he had to remember to begin his unconscious twitching at about the right time. There was something haunting about the rhythm and he was afraid he’d already forgotten to do something important. What was that? Never mind. As he didn’t possess the gift of tongues and he was supposed to yell every now and then, he decided that French would be sufficiently incomprehensible to the audience. Although he found himself forgetting the words and slurring through much of it, he recited the chorus of ‘La Marseillaise’:

Grab your weapons, citizens! Form your battalions! Let us march! Let us march! May…da dee dee da

The gong was beating faster now along with his racing heart and his arm was aching from all the rattling. His head was nodding and his foot was tapping to the beat. He completely forgot whether he was to mount the bench at this time or simply stand and fall back into his assistant’s waiting arms. A lot of conflicting thoughts were going through his mind, memories of events that had no place there. His amulet seemed to sizzle against his skin. Feed the horse? Now? He reached into his pouch, grabbed a handful of puffed maize, and threw it into the air shouting, “Ride ‘em, cowboy,” one of his few English phrases, harvested from a favourite John Wayne movie. For some reason his arm continued to flutter in the air there and he couldn’t get it to come down.

He had pins and needles in his legs so when he looked down through the gap beneath his hood he was surprised to see his feet kicking out into thin air. To recall his errant limbs he swung his body a little carelessly over the bench to sit astride his winged steed. He was sure he’d skewered himself on a splinter or two but his bottom was numb as a loaf of bread. During the previous night’s rehearsal all the shaking and leaping had tuckered him out after no more than five minutes but he was riding feverishly now and felt nothing at all. ‘La Marseillaise’ had become complete gibberish even to him and the gong beats blended together and faded away like ink spots in a pond.

And he was gone – a dream – a hallucination – the effects of a wood splinter puncturing an important nerve? He wasn’t sure which. But something had sent him. And the place he’d arrived at was more real than the one he’d just left. He felt – not sensed but actually felt – the winged horse between his thighs. He felt and smelled and tasted the night air rushing against his face. The moisture in the clouds they passed through was icy cold on his cheeks. His senses in the real world had been draining of late. There were no distinct colours or tastes in the actual Laos. But they were all here. They assaulted and bombarded him. This was his new reality.

The muscles of his steed flexed and relaxed as the huge white wings found currents of air on which to glide down towards the building tops. Siri’s stomach heaved as the creature soared and dove between the skyscrapers. He clung to the cusp of a wing and its force vibrated through him. They flew down past office windows where men in shirts and ties drank coffee and watched them pass with looks of astonishment on their Western faces. Then an apartment building where a woman in curlers hanging washing from her window was so shocked she dropped her stockings and they floated down to the street like wisps of smoke from the tenth storey.

Lower and darker: the smells of smog and fried meat and garbage and hairspray. And a bump. The winged steed skidded to a stop on the icy pavement and white steam smudged the air around her nostrils. Her front hoof scraped at the ground and she shook her mane. Siri stayed put.

“This is the Otherworld?” he asked. For some reason he expected a flying horse would have the ability to speak. “This is where all the shamans come to negotiate for lost souls? I’m disappointed, I don’t mind telling you.”

She didn’t answer with words and he didn’t speak whinny so he gave up and climbed down. He wasn’t appropriately dressed at all. He knew he’d catch his death of cold. He felt the burn of the ice on the soles of his bare feet. Yet instinctively he knew the thrill of it – the warming excitement of being on the other side – would keep him alive. His thudding heartbeat alone could power a tank.

They’d arrived on a deserted main street at the mouth of a dark alleyway. He looked at the horse, who in turn looked towards the side street.

“I was afraid you’d say that.”

Siri walked into the yawning darkness and immediately felt a morbid sense of familiarity. He’d been here recently. He’d walked along these uneven paving stones and squinted through the gray lamplight. It was his dream. This was the selfsame place he’d walked on the day he was given the sleeping poison. He knew what to expect. He knew that up ahead he’d meet two thugs and be attacked. He stopped. Common sense told him that he should learn from his mistakes. The dream had been a warning. He had no weapon still. He couldn’t outrun them.

“No, Siri. Go back to the horse and find a different path. Once bitten…”

He turned on his heel and headed back the way he’d come. But the stones seemed more uneven than they had just been. The street lamps stretched further into the distance than was possible. He passed a doorway he hadn’t noticed and heard familiar voices from the shadows.

“Well, whaddya know? The gook’s back.”

“So he is. What’s new, Red? Been busy torturing the good guys, have ya?”

This was wholly different from the dream. It had an extra dimension. In dreams he was in some kind of control, aware that he was in a dream. Even when he was frightened by them, something at the back of his mind told him it would all be over at cockcrow. But this all felt so real. His feet and fingers were aching from the cold. He had a terrible urge to go to the bathroom and a tingle of fear rode the back of his neck. Up ahead, in the direction he thought he’d come from, he saw the lights of the Silver Pheasant.

Somehow, he had to do a better job of getting past these goons.

“Look,” he said. “If you leave me alone I won’t call on my auxiliary spirits.”

“Ooooh,” mocked the first thug, stepping out of the doorway. The lamplight turned his skull the colour of nicotine-stained teeth. He seemed to have grown in stature since they’d last met. Siri considered asking whether he’d been working out but decided it was a bad time for humour.

“You hear that, Eric?” the thug said. “Grandpa’s gonna call the auxes.”

Eric remained in the shadows.

“Think you might be too late, Red Man,” the second thug said.

Siri knew the skeleton was right. That was what he’d forgotten. He could see it underlined on his cheat sheet. “Must invoke guiding spirits
before
going into trance.” He was a hopeless shaman. But, hell, he hadn’t planned all this. It was supposed to be a hoax. It was worth a try anyway.

“I’m warning you,” he said.

“I’m trembling,” said the first thug.

“Very well.” Like some ancient magician, Siri raised his arms to the tops of the buildings that towered over him. “I invoke the spirit of the otter.”