Colin Cotterill - Curse of the Pogo Stick

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 centerpiece, 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 pajamas. Around his head was a macramйd 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.”

“Touchй.”

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 outdress 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 disoriented 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 favorite 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 colors or tastes in the actual Laos. But they were all here. They assaulted and bombarded him. This was his new reality.