Colin Cotterill - Disco for the Departed

Somewhere between numbers seven and eight on the list, order finally gave way to sleep. The crow and the sparrow returned for a dream sequel, still on their wire above the valley, still preening one another. But slowly, one by one, other sparrows came to rest alongside them. One settled beside the first and attempted to flirt with her. She rejected its advances and returned to her crow. This caused a terrible kafuffle in the sparrow community, and they flapped and fluttered and squawked and it seemed an assault on the crow was inevitable. But, before they could attack, the crow enfolded the sparrow in his broad black wing and the two of them dropped. There was no attempt to fly away. They merely dropped like stones into the valley below and deep into the soft mud of the fields.

Siri was awakened, not by the weak morning light through his window, but by the whimpering of a child. He thought of the girl he had seen in an earlier dream but the bunk opposite was empty. This child was more real, and seemed to be closer, so close he even raised his netting and peered under his bed. He went to the door and looked out into the empty corridor. But there was no doubt the sound came from inside his room. He touched the talisman at his neck. It could sense tricks from the malevolent spirits. They’d fooled him before. Their black magic had almost killed him on two occasions. But the white stone hung still and cool. This was no black magic. It was a sincere cry for help from some other troubled soul. But, with no clues and no way of responding, Siri could only lie back on his mattress and listen to the feeble cries. The sound gradually climbed to a higher pitch and became more hollow, and at some point it blended with the sound of the bamboo klooee that played its solitary morning tune.

Mr. Geung woke in panic just as he had the previous two mornings. But whereas on those other occasions he’d found himself surrounded by soldiers, today he was wrapped in a canvas tarpaulin like pork in a Chinese spring roll. He struggled to get loose, kicked and punched and pushed, but could find no way to free himself. His mind was blank. All the details of where he was and why he was there were gone. And so, although it didn’t help a bit, he started to cry.

“And what, tell me, do you think you’re doing in me firewood cover?” It was the voice of an old woman, that much he could tell. But he couldn’t see her through the opening at the top of his spring roll.

“I… I don’t know,” he said, and continued to cry. He felt a tug on his cocoon and was sent rolling across the ground and then flung loose from the tarpaulin onto the dry earth. An elderly woman and two giggling children were looking down at him.

“Grandma, he’s a retard,” the smallest girl said.

“So he is,” the old lady agreed. “What do you want here, retard?”

“I d… don’t know,” Geung answered truthfully.

“Then I should call the police and have you arrested,” she said.

“Yes, I th… I think so.”

“Or maybe I should get my gun and chase you away.”

Geung thought about that option. “Y… yes, that would be f… fine, too.”

The old woman laughed. Her betel nut-stained mouth reminded him of a number of disasters he’d seen in the morgue. “Eeh. You really are crazy. How am I supposed to threaten you if you agree with all I say, boy? Where do you hail from?”

“Thangon.”

“Never heard of it.”

“Sorry. I have t… t… to go to Vientiane.” He clambered to his sore feet, smiled at the children, and started walking.

“Wait. Wait there,” the old woman said. “You think you’re going to walk to Vientiane?”

“I p… promised.”

“Is that so? You hungry, boy?”

“Yes.”

“Well, you can’t walk to Vientiane if you’re hungry, seeing it’s so far. And as…”

“Yes. I remember.”

“What’s that?”

“The mo… mo… mosquitoes. I wrapped up so the mo… mosquitoes didn’t get me. D… d… dengue fever. Comrade Dtui s… said you have to wrap up against the mo… mo… mo… mo…”

“MOSQUITOES!” the two girls chorused.

“Yes.” He smiled at the girls and they giggled back.

“All right,” the old lady decided. “Come and eat and we’ll see if we can get some sense out of you before you set out on your big march. And I think I can find you some homemade paste here, should keep the mosquitoes from your blood. It’ll last for a week so long as you don’t wash.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” he said and put his hands together in a polite nop.

“Well, I don’t know where you’re from or what you’re about, but they taught you some nice manners.” They went into her solid wooden hut. This was the home of the caretaker of the pine plantation through which Geung had trekked during the first day of his escape. “First thing you do is sit yourself down and take off them vinyl shoes. You wear them all the way to Vientiane and you’ll be a cripple as well as a retard.”

“Thank you, m… m…”

“MA’AM!” the children yelled as if the circus were in town.

“Mother,” Geung said, and smiled again at the girls with his crazy-paving teeth.

Dtui’s first day at Kilometer 8 Hospital was chaotic. It wasn’t her fault. Chaos was the norm there. After only an hour she felt helpless. There was a staff of six, two of whom had no medical training whatsoever. The most senior medic had undergone six months of emergency field hospital training in Vietnam. Dtui, with a two-year nursing diploma, was their surgeon general. Each of them simply stopped making decisions and deferred to her judgment. She immediately mistrusted her ability to make the necessary decisions. Never had she been in a situation that was so desperate.

By far the largest population in the fifty-bed hospital was made up of bombi victims. Of all the wicked tools of war, the bombi was one of the cruelest. A shell packed with baseball-sized bombis was dropped from a plane. In midair the shell opened and the bombis rained over the selected target. On contact, two hundred and fifty white-hot ball bearings exploded in all directions from each one, ripping through buildings and people with equal detachment. Some of the bombis were on a short-delay timer to catch the survivors who went to care for their loved ones. But some just lay dormant for days, weeks, months, or years, to spring their deadly surprise on the innocent and ill informed. The bombi had no sense of who its victim should be. A buffalo, a hoe, a child, a young mother planting rice, it mattered not. It took them all.

Every day at Kilometer 8 new victims arrived with truncated limbs bound to stem the flow of blood. They came on ox carts, on ponies, on litters dragged by their relatives. The hospital staff gave them generous doses of opium to repress any sensations, good or bad, and did their best to clean the wounds. Many had lost too much blood or were too shredded to keep alive. Those who survived did so mainly of their own volition. Every few days, Dr. Santiago would come by to amputate whatever was unsavable and perform whatever miracles it took to give people another chance at life.

There were no shifts at Kilometer 8. Staff slept during the rare moments of quiet, day or night. They cooked for those patients whose relatives weren’t camped in the wards. They kept them full of a painkiller they knew would leave them addicted, and they stretchered the deceased up the slope to the cave of the dead, a crematorium on the skirt of the mountain. At the end of her incredibly long first day, Dtui estimated she’d lost four kilograms. Singsai, the senior medic, told her if she stayed a month she’d be so skinny they’d be able to store her in the closet with the mops. She enjoyed that image.