Eliot Pattison - The Skull Mantra

Shan felt as if someone was rolling a massive rock onto his back. He found himself bending, frantically looking toward the Dragon Claws. "My report would be worthless," he murmured, the words nearly choking in his throat. He had rushed his work to return to the 404th, to help Choje. Now Tan wanted to use him to inflict greater punishment on the monks. "I have been proven untrustworthy."

"The report will be in my name."

Shan stared at a dim, vaguely familar ghost, his reflection in the window. It was happening. He was being reincarnated into a lower life form. "Then one of our names will be dishonored," he said in croaking whisper.

The drab three-story building that housed the People's Health Collective proved far more sterile outside than inside. The odor of mildew wafted through the lobby. On the lobby wall, a collage of bulldozers and tractors mounted by beaming proletarians was cracked and peeling. The same bone-dry dust that filled the 404th barracks covered the furniture. Brown and green stains ran across the faded linoleum floor and up one wall. Nothing moved but a large beetle that scuttled toward the shadows as they entered.

Madame Ko had called. A short, nervous man in a threadbare smock appeared, and silently led Shan, Yeshe, and Feng down a dimly lit flight of stairs to a basement chamber with five metal examination tables. As he opened the swinging doors, the stench of ammonia and formaldahyde broke over them like a wave. The aroma of death.

Yeshe's hands shot to his mouth. Sergeant Feng cursed and fumbled for a cigarette. More of the dark stains Shan had seen upstairs mottled the walls. He followed one with his eyes, a spatter of brown spots that arced from floor to ceiling. On one wall was a poster, tattered from repeated folding, that announced a performance, years earlier, of the Beijing Opera. With a mixture of disgust and fear, their escort gestured toward the only occupied table, then backed out of the room and closed the door.

Yeshe turned to follow the orderly.

"Going somewhere?" Shan inquired.

"I'm going to be sick," Yeshe pleaded.

"We have an assignment. You won't get it done waiting in the hall."

Yeshe looked at his feet.

"Where do you want to be?" Shan asked.

"Be?"

"Afterward. You're young. You're ambitious. You have a destination. Everyone your age has a destination."

"Sichuan province," Yeshe said, distrust in his eyes. "Back to Chengdu. Warden Zhong told me he has my papers ready. Says he's arranged for me to have a job there. People can rent their own apartments now. You can even buy televisions."

Shan considered the announcement. "When did the warden say this?"

"Just last night. I still have friends back in Chengdu. Members of the Party."

"Fine." Shan shrugged. "You have a destination and I have a destination. The sooner we get done, the sooner we can move on."

Resentment still etched on his face, Yeshe found a wall switch and illuminated a row of naked lightbulbs hanging over the tables. The center table seemed to glow, its white sheet the only clean, bright object in the room. Sergeant Feng muttered a low curse toward the far side of the room. A body was slumped in a rusty wheelchair, covered with a soiled sheet, its head slung over the shoulder at an unnatural angle.

"They just leave you like that," Feng growled in contempt. "Give me an army hospital. At least they lay you out in your uniform."

Shan looked back at the arc of bloodstains. This was supposed to be the morgue. Corpses had no blood pressure. They did not spray blood.

Suddenly the body in the chair groaned. Revived by the light, it swung its arms stiffly to pull down the sheet, then produced a pair of thick, horn-rimmed glasses.

Feng gasped and retreated toward the door.

It was a woman, Shan realized, and it wasn't a sheet that covered her but a vastly oversized smock. From its folds she produced a clipboard.

"We sent the report," she declared in a shrill, impatient tone, and stood. "No one understood why you needed to come." Bags of fatigue shadowed her eyes. In one hand she held a pencil like a spear. "Some people like to look at the dead. Is that it? You like to gawk at the corpses?"

A man's life, Choje taught his monks, did not move in a linear progression, with each day an equal chit on the calendar of existence. Rather it moved from defining moment to defining moment, marked by the decisions that roiled the soul. Here was such a moment, Shan thought. He could play Tan's hound, starting here and now, trying to somehow save the 404th or he could turn around, as Choje would want, ignoring Tan, being true to all that passed as virtue in his world. He clenched his jaw and turned to the diminutive woman.

"We will need to speak to the doctor who performed the autopsy," Shan said. "Dr. Sung."

Inexplicably, the woman laughed. From another fold of her smock she pulled a koujiao, one of the surgical masks used by much of the population of China to ward off dust and viruses in the winter months. "Other people. Other people just like to cause trouble." She tied the mask over her mouth and gestured toward a box of kiajiou on the nearest table. As she walked, a stethoscope appeared in the folds of the smock.

There was still a way, a narrow opening he might wedge through. He would have to get the accident report signed. An accident caused by the 404th would answer Tan's needs without the agony of a murder investigation. Sign the report, then find a way to conduct death rites for the lost soul. To answer the political dilemma, the 404th could be disciplined for negligent behavior. A month on cold rations, perhaps a mass reduction of every prisoner. It would be summer soon; even the old ones could survive a reduction. It was not a perfect solution, but it was one within his reach.

By the time the three men fastened their masks, she had stripped the sheet from the body and pulled a clipboard from the table.

"Death occurred fifteen to twenty hours before discovery, meaning the evening before," she recited. "Cause of death: traumatic simultaneous severance of the carotid artery, jugular vein, and spinal cord. Between the atlas and the occipital." She studied the three men as she spoke, then seemed to dismiss Yeshe. He was obviously Tibetan. She paused over Shan's threadbare clothes and settled on addressing Sergeant Feng.

"I thought he was decapitated," Yeshe said hesitantly, glancing at Shan.

"That's what I said," the woman snapped.

"You can't be more specific about the time?" Shan asked.

"Rigor mortis was still present," she said, again to Feng. "I can guarantee you the night before. Beyond that…" She shrugged. "The air is so dry. And cold. The body was covered. Too many variables. To be more precise would require a battery of tests."

She saw the expression on Shan's face and threw him a sour look. "This isn't exactly Beijing University, Comrade."

Shan studied the poster again. "At Bei Da you would have had a chromatograph," he said, using the colloquial expression for Beijing University, the reference most commonly used in Beijing itself.

She turned slowly. "You are from the capital?" A new tone had entered her voice, one of tentative respect. In their country, power came in many shapes. One could not be too careful. Maybe this would be easier than he'd thought. Let the investigator live just a few moments, long enough to make her understand the importance of the accident report.

"I had the honor of teaching a course with a professor of forensic medicine at Bei Da," he said. "Just a two-week seminar, really. Investigation Technique in the Socialist Order."

"Your skills have served you well." She seemed unable to resist sarcasm.

"Someone said my technique involved too much investigation, not enough of the socialist order." He said it with an edge of remorse, the way he had been trained to do in tamzing sessions.