Eliot Pattison - Beautiful Ghosts

“Surya!” he gasped.

The monk stared at him with glazed eyes, showing no sign of recognition. The side of his face was heavily bruised. His right hand was covered with a bloody cloth. Shan touched the monk’s cheek. Surya moaned and pulled away.

“We thought … What happened?” Shan blurted out. “They took you into that helicopter.…”

Surya stared dumbly at his bandaged hand. Under the burlap he still wore his grey muslin underrobe, torn in several places.

Shan pulled on Surya’s arm. “Please. Gendun thinks-” Surya resisted.

Shan stood, examining the square, wondering where the foot patrol had gone, then bent and tried to pull Surya again. “They think you are dead.”

“Surya is dead,” the monk said. “He was killed, too.”

Shan glanced back at the doors and the street beyond. If a bounty was posted for him, anyone in the street, not just the soldiers, was a possible threat. “You can’t leave them. You are part of them.”

A stray dog, skin hanging loose over its ribs, appeared and settled beside Surya. “The only honor he had left to give them was to leave,” the old man said. “Even the low creature he has become knows that.” His voice had changed. It was cracked and dry and hollow, not the voice of the serene throat chanter Shan had heard the day before. Surya’s head lowered and his jaw dropped open. His gaunt, absent expression matched that of the dog.

“I looked inside the lower gompa,” Shan whispered. “There was no body. There was only blood. Help me understand what happened.”

Surya’s mouth turned into a twisted grin, his upper lip stuck on one of his front teeth. “He knew what he did. He saw the black thing in his heart afterwards. If you try to change that, Chinese, that would be dishonor as well.”

Chinese. The word wrenched something inside Shan. He and Surya had been friends, had shared many stories of their lives while sharing tasks at Yerpa, had often laughed together. But now Shan was simply another Chinese. “The soldiers will take you if you stay here. Take you again,” he added, still perplexed over why Surya had been released. “What did they ask when they interrogated you? Who is the woman with red hair?”

“Soon they will accept the truth,” Surya said in his jarring new voice. A string of saliva dangled from his mouth. “They will do to him what killers and eaters of vows deserve. Meanwhile he will pretend to be alive.”

Shan suppressed a shudder. He touched Surya’s bandaged hand. “Let me clean your wound.”

But Surya pushed him away and scuttled crablike past the dead tree, into the shadow cast by the steps of the building.

Shan backed away, across the square. As he paused in the shadows of the restaurant doorway again, a wave of emotion surged through him. Twenty-four hours earlier Surya had been about to embark on a new life at Zhoka, about to change the world. Now the world had caught up and changed him, and Shan felt guilt and confusion, even a fleeting revulsion, at the twisted, hollow thing Surya had become.

* * *

Shan waited until morning traffic began moving down the street, battered trucks with broken mufflers, carts drawn by small, aged horses, an old man with a wispy beard pushing a hand barrow full of greens. The wind from the mountains mixed the scents of onions and manure, roasted barley, and diesel. When Shan finally stepped into the street he kept in the shadows, circling the block to reach the rear of the government center. He circled the building once, stealing furtive glances toward the upper windows, and found himself by the automobiles parked in the side alley. The tires of the silver car had red gravel in the treads, gravel that had not been picked up on the streets of Lhadrung. He bent closer to the treads, vaguely recalling he had seen the little red chips before.

Suddenly a strong hand seized his upper arm and dragged him backward, into a doorway on the opposite side of the alley. He was unable to wrench free before a door slammed behind him and he was released. He was in total darkness. He squatted, hands over his head to shield him. A single naked lightbulb flickered on, revealing a small storeroom, its shelves stacked with tins of cooking oil, baskets of vegetables, and sacks of rice and barley. A man with close-cropped grey hair and a face like a hatchet pulled out a chair from the crude plank table in the center of the room, resting his well-polished black boot on it.

“I thought you were dead,” the man growled. “At least gone down some hole in the mountains, and smart enough to stay there.” He wore the plain, sharply pressed uniform of an army officer, without adornment, without any indication of rank other than the pockets on his tunic.

Shan breathed in deeply and returned the man’s steady stare. “I prefer to be gone, Colonel,” he said in a brittle voice. “But here we are.”

Colonel Tan had been administrator of the county for years-for so long, Shan knew, he had lost all hope of advancement, all hope of transfer out of the remote, impoverished county, which only added to his capacity for fury and brutality. He clenched his jaw, surprised at the anger Tan’s sudden appearance had released, but acutely aware that with a single command Tan could send him back to the gulag.

“You have new deputies,” Shan observed after he calmed himself. A year ago Tan had unofficially released him after Shan had proven that the murder of the local prosecutor had been committed not by the monk held for the crime but by a ring of local officials.

“Just visitors. I get many offers of assistance these days. Nobody ever heard of Lhadrung until I made the mistake of asking for your help,” Tan said acidly.

“You mean no one knew that three of your most important offices were run by drug runners and killers.”

Half of Tan’s mouth curled upward. It was one of the colonel’s distinctive expressions, a half grin that felt like a snarl. “I was reminded that someone of lesser reputation would have been dismissed in disgrace.”

“Congratulations.” Shan knew Tan expected gratitude but in all his years in Lhadrung Tan had never lifted a finger to stop the brutality at his former labor camp.

Tan looked as if he were about to leap across the table to take a bite out of Shan. “You don’t exist,” he hissed.

In the harsh silence left by the words Shan lowered himself into one of the chairs at the table, all the while keeping his gaze on Tan, the way one watches a coiled snake. The colonel meant the words as a threat, as a reminder of how easily Shan could be made to disappear.

Shan broke away from Tan’s cool glare and conspicuously studied the storeroom. Why hadn’t Tan taken him into his administration building? Was he hiding Shan, or was it the fact that he knew Shan? “There are beggars out front,” Shan ventured. “You don’t permit beggars.”

Tan extracted an unfiltered cigarette from his uniform pocket, lit it, and blew a stream of smoke toward Shan. “I’m not asking for your help this time. I am telling you to stay away.”

Shan stared at Tan again, trying to hide his confusion. “One of them was brought by helicopter from the mountains. His name is Surya. He was arrested and released. Why?”

“The use of government resources in this county is for me to decide, not for some senile Tibetan ranting about imaginary crimes.”

“You mean it is inconvenient to have another murder in Lhadrung.”

“He was never officially detained. There was no murder. There is just another pathetic Tibetan who needs help.” Tan inhaled deeply on his cigarette, examining Shan. “Why are you so interested? Perhaps I should call one of the social intervention agencies.”

Shan fought a shudder. It was an idiom of senior officials. The agencies Tan referred to were government facilities for medical experimentation or special mental health clinics run by Public Security. Lokesh, like Shan, had spent time at one of the institutes for the criminally insane. He said it was where chemicals were used to drive out a man’s deity, where a simple injection could turn a man into a lower life form. Shan stared at the floor a moment then forced himself to look back into Tan’s eyes. “The Western woman. Who is she?”