Eliot Pattison - The Skull Mantra

The kenpo turned and stared icily. One of the younger monks angrily stepped toward Yeshe as though to physically restrain him, but was interrupted by a sudden stirring at the door. Low, urgent protests could be heard. The flap was thrown open and Dr. Sung appeared. She glared at Shan and ignored everyone else, then stepped to the pallet. The moment she opened her bag the abbot called out and clamped his hand over her arm.

She did not speak. Their eyes locked. With her free hand she pulled a stethoscope from the bag, slung it around her neck and then, one finger at a time, peeled away the abbot's hand. He did not move but did not stop her examination.

"His heart isn't beating enough to keep a child alive," she said. "I suspect a blockage."

"Is it treatable?" Shan asked.

"Perhaps. But not here. Need to run tests at the clinic."

"Just one question," Yeshe pressed, looking at his watch. "We need to know. He is the only one who can tell us."

Sung shrugged and filled a syringe with a clear fluid. "This will wake him," she said. "At least briefly." She scrubbed Je's arm.

As she bent with needle the abbot placed his hand over the prepared patch of skin. "You have no idea of what you are doing," he said.

"He's an old man in need of help," Yeshe pleaded. "He doesn't have to die here. If he dies now, Sungpo may die, too."

"His entire life was dedicated to this moment of transition," the abbot warned. "It cannot be stopped. He has already begun to cross over. He is in a place none of us are allowed to disturb."

Dr. Sung looked at the priest as if for the first time, then slowly lowered the syringe and looked to Shan, who moved to the platform. "You're the one who asked me," she said. But her confused tone made it sound more like a question than an accusation.

"If he dies today, Sungpo will die tomorrow," Yeshe said in a desolate voice over Shan's shoulder. "It will all be for nothing. If we don't have the answer now, we will never have it."

Shan gestured toward the entrance. The doctor dropped her instruments on the pallet and followed him.

"If it is sickness we should take him back," Shan said quietly. "If it is just a natural passing-"

"What do you mean, natural?" Dr. Sung asked.

Shan looked outside, past the barbed wire to the long building where Sungpo sat. "I guess I don't know anymore."

"If I could do tests," Sung suggested, "maybe we could-"

She was interrupted by a horrified shout. They spun about. The priests were jumping to their feet. The old abbot was flogging Yeshe on the head with a ritual bell.

Yeshe stood over the pallet with tears running down his face. He had injected the syringe into Je.

Everyone was shouting. Someone demanded to know the name of Yeshe's abbot. Someone grabbed his red shirt and ripped it off his back. They were abruptly silenced by the rising of Je's arm.

The arm extended vertically, the hand rotating in a slow eerie motion, as if clutching for something just beyond its grasp.

Shan darted to Je's side and wiped his forehead with the wet rag. The old man's eyes fluttered opened and he stared at the felt roof above him. He brought the extended hand down to his face and studied it, moving the fingers with exquisite slowness, like that of a butterfly in the cold. He turned and put his fingers on Shan's face, squinting as if he could not see it well. "Which level is it, then?" he whispered in a dry croaking voice.

"Rinpoche," Yeshe said urgently. "You were the Tamdin dancer at Saskya. You kept the costume until last year. Who took it from you?" he pleaded. "Did you teach it to them? Who was it? We must learn who took the costume."

Je gave a hoarse laugh. "I knew people like you in the other place," he said with a rasping breath.

"Rinpoche. Please. Who was it?"

His eyes flickered and shut. There was a new sound, a rattle in his chest. They watched in agonized silence for several minutes.

Then the eyes opened again, very wide. "In the end," he said slowly, as though listening for something, each word punctuated by the wheezing rattle, "all it takes is one perfect sound." He closed his eyes and the rattle stopped.

"He's dead," Dr. Sung announced.

Yeshe stared at the body in utter desolation. The eyes of the old man at the foot of the pallet welled with tears. A voice in the back shouted out an epithet in Tibetan. The priest who had been conducting the Bardo ceremony began to speak with a chilling ferocity, a dark chant Shan had never heard before. He was glaring at Yeshe as he spoke, his invective coming faster and louder. Yeshe stared at him mutely, his face drained of color.

Shan pulled Yeshe's arm but he seemed unable to move. The attending priest, tears pouring down his cheek, was frantically searching through the hair on the crown of Je's head. If properly prepared, Je's soul would have drifted out a tiny hole thought to be on every human's crown.

"Get him a bone!" someone yelled from the rear.

"His name is Yeshe!" another shouted. "Khartok gompa."

Shan put his shoulder into Yeshe and pushed him out of the yurt. Something inside Yeshe had collapsed. He seemed suddenly feeble and senseless. Shan took his hand and led him to the cell block. Inside, Sungpo was chanting now, a new mantra, a sad mantra. Somehow he knew.

"It doesn't matter," Shan said to Yeshe, not because he believed it but because he couldn't bear for Yeshe to become still another victim.

"Above all, it matters." Yeshe was shaking now. He stepped into an empty cell and gripped the bars to steady himself. There was a fear on his face that Shan had never seen before. "What I did- it destroyed the moment of his transition. I ruined his soul. I ruined my soul," he said with chilling certainty. "And I don't even know why."

"You did it to help Sungpo. You did it to find justice for Dilgo. You did it for the truth." He hadn't told Yeshe about the coral rosary in the Lhasa museum, the duplicate of Dilgo's, the rosary that no doubt had been planted to implicate Dilgo and ensnare Yeshe in the lies. It didn't matter that Yeshe learned of the evidence, because his heart had learned of the lie long ago.

"Your justice. Your damned justice," he groaned. "Why did I believe you?" He seemed to be getting smaller, shrinking before Shan's eyes. "Maybe it's true," Yeshe said, with a realization that seemed to horrify him. "Maybe you did summon Tamdin. Maybe he's been lurking around us all the time. Maybe he used you to create the ruthlessness. He lays waste to everything, lays waste even to souls, in the search for truth."

"You can go to your gompa. You want to be a priest again, you've shown me. They will help you."

Yeshe moved to the back wall and slumped against it. When he looked up he appeared so gaunt it seemed the flesh had shriveled on his bones. His color had not returned. He was not Yeshe, but a ghost of Yeshe. "They will spit on me. They will drive me from the temples. I can never go back now. And I can't go to Sichuan. I can't be one of them anymore. I don't want to be a good Chinese," he said. "You destroyed that for me, too." He fixed Shan with haunted eyes. "What have you done to me? I took four. I might as well have jumped from a cliff." Throw him a bone, the monks had said. "For nothing."

He slowly slid down the wall to the floor. Tears were streaming down his cheek. He found his rosary and pulled it apart. The beads slowly dropped onto the floor and rolled away.

Numbed by his helplessness, Shan filled a tea mug with water and handed it to him. It fell through Yeshe's hands and shattered on the floor. Struggling to find words of comfort, Shan began picking up the pieces of porcelain, then stopped and dropped to his knees. He stared at the shards in his hands.

"No," Shan said excitedly. "Je told us exactly what we needed to know. Look!" he said, shaking Yeshe's shoulder as he held up a shard. "Do you see it?"