Eliot Pattison - The Skull Mantra

From outside a long moan of pain punctuated the silence. A monk in the next hut was dying of some internal ailment.

Choje's hands gestured toward the invisible circle of worshipers, asking what they brought for the glory of the inner deity. A pair of thumbless hands appeared in the light, the index finger of each hand touching at the tip, the other fingers folded. A tiny murmur of approval moved through the room. It was the golden fish, an offering for good fortune. New hands appeared, each after sufficient time to silently recite the dedication prayer that accompanied the prior offering. The conch shell, the treasure flask, the coiled knot, the lotus flower. It was Shan's turn. He hesitated, then extended his left index finger upward and covered it with his right hand flattened. The white umbrella, another prayer for good fortune.

The room filled with the tiny, remarkable sound, as if of rustling feathers, that had become a fixture of Shan's nights, the sound of a dozen men silently mouthing mantras. Choje's hands returned to the circle of light for the sermon. He began with a gesture Shan had not often seen, the right hand raised with palm and fingers pointing up. The mudra of dispelling fear. It cast an uneasy silence on the room. One of the young monks audibly sucked in his stomach, as though suddenly aware that something profound was happening. Then the hands shifted, clasping together with the middle fingers pointing upward. The diamond of the mind mudra, invoking cleansing and clarity of purpose. This was the sermon. The hands did not change. They floated, unmoving, as though carved of pale granite, while the devotees contemplated them. The message could not have been more intensely communicated if Choje had shouted it from a mountaintop. The pain was irrelevant, the hands said. The rocks, the blisters, the broken bones were inconsequential. Remember your purpose. Honor your inner god.

It wasn't clarity that Shan lacked. Choje had taught him how to focus like no teacher before. Through the long winter days when the warden kept them in- not for fear of losing prisoners, but for fear of losing guards- Choje had helped him reach an extraordinary discovery. To be an investigator, the only job Shan had ever known before the gulag, one had to have a troubled soul. The exceptional investigator could have no faith. Everything was suspect, everything transitory, moving from allegation to fact to cause to effect to new mystery. There could be no peace, for peace only came with faith. No, it wasn't clarity he lacked. In moments like this, with dark premonition weighing heavy, with his prior life pulling him like a man tangled in an anchor line, what he lacked was an inner god.

He saw there was something on the floor below Choje's hands. The bloody rock. With a start, Shan realized that he and Choje were thinking about the same thing. The kenpo was reminding his priests of their duty. Shan's tongue went dry. He wanted to blurt out a protest, to beg them not to put themselves at risk over a dead foreigner, but the mudra silenced him like a spell.

He clamped his eyes shut but still Shan could not focus on Choje's message. He kept seeing something else each time he tried to concentrate. He kept seeing the gold cigarette lighter hanging five hundred feet above the valley floor. And the dead American who had beckoned to him in his daylight nightmare.

Suddenly a low whistle came from the door. The candles were extinguished, and a moment later the ceiling light switched on. A guard slammed open the door and moved to the center of the room, a pick handle cradled in his arm. Behind him came Lieutenant Chang. With mock solemnity Chang extended a piece of clothing so that no prisoner could mistake it. It was a clean shirt. He jabbed it toward several men as though feinting with a blade, laughing as he did so. Then he abruptly flung it at Shan, who lay on the floor.

"Tomorrow morning," he snapped, and marched out.

A sharp, chill wind slapped Shan's face as Sergeant Feng escorted him through the wire the next morning. The winds were harsh to the 404th, which sat at the base of the northernmost ridge of the Dragon Claws, a vast rock wall rising nearly vertically behind it. Updrafts sometimes ripped roofs from huts. Downdrafts sometimes pelted them with gravel.

"Already reduced," Sergeant Feng muttered as he locked the gate behind them. "Nobody already reduced ever got the shirt." He was a short, thick, bull of a man, with a heavy stomach and equally heavy shoulders, his skin as leathery as that of the prisoners from years of standing guard in sun and wind and snow. "Everyone's waiting. Making bets," Feng added with a dry croak Shan took to be a laugh.

Shan tried to will himself not to listen, not to think of the stable, not to remember Zhong's white-hot fury.

Zhong's temper was in control for once. But the warden's gloating smile as he paced around Shan scared him more than the expected tantrum. He gripped his upper right arm, which often twitched in Zhong's presence. Once they had connected battery wires there.

"If he had bothered to consult with me," Zhong said in the flat nasal tone of Fujian province, "I would have warned him. Now he will have to find out for himself what a damned troublemaker you are." Zhong lifted a piece of paper from his desk and read it, shaking his head in disbelief. "Parasite," he hissed, then paused and scribbled on the paper to record the insight.

"It won't be for long," he said, looking up expectantly. "One wrong step and you'll be breaking rocks with your bare hands. Until you die."

"I constantly endeavor to fulfill the trust the people have bestowed in me," Shan said without blinking.

The words seemed to please the warden. A perverse gleam rose on his face. "Tan's going to eat you alive."

Sergeant Feng had an unfamiliar look, an almost festive air about him. A drive into Lhadrung, the ancient market town that served as county seat, was a rare treat for the 404th guards. He joked about the old women and goats who ran from the side of the road, spooked by the truck. He peeled an apple and shared it with the driver, ignoring Shan, who was wedged between the two men. With a spiteful grin, he repeatedly moved the key for Shan's manacles from one pocket to the next.

"They say the chairman himself sent you here," the sergeant finally said as the low, flat buildings of the town came into view.

Shan didn't reply. He bent in his seat trying to roll up his cuffs. Someone had produced a pair of worn, oversized gray trousers for him to wear, and a threadbare soldier's jacket. They had made him change clothes in the middle of the office. Everyone had stopped his work to watch.

"I mean, why else would they put you in with them?"

Shan straightened. "I'm not the only Chinese."

Feng grunted as though amused. "Sure. Model citizens, every one. Jilin, he killed ten women. Public Security would have put a bullet in him except his uncle was a party secretary. That one from Squad Six, he stole the safety gear from an oil rig in the ocean. To sell in the black market. Storm came and fifty men died. Letting him have a bullet was too easy on him. Special cases, you from home."

"Every prisoner is a special case."

Feng grunted again. "People like you, Shan, they just keep for practice." He stuffed two slices of apple into his mouth. Momo gyakpa, he was called behind his back, fat dumpling, for the curve of his belly and the way he was always scavenging food.

Shan turned away. He looked over the expanse of heather and hills rolling like a sea toward the high ice-clad ranges. It offered the illusion of escape. Escape was always an illusion for those who had no place to escape to.

Sparrows flitted among the heather. There were no birds at the 404th. Not all the prisoners were fastidious in respecting life. They claimed every crumb, every seed, nearly every insect. The year before there had been a fight over a partridge that was blown into the compound. The bird had narrowly escaped, leaving two men with a handful of feathers each. They had eaten the feathers.