Colin Cotterill - Disco for the Departed

“Dtui, step back. Stand next to Santiago,” Siri shouted.

She did as she was told even though she could see no spirits. Siri stood with his neck craned upward and his arms out to his sides. He clenched his fists and shuddered slightly. The shudder grew in intensity, became more like the vibration of a silent truck engine. Dtui and Santiago looked on with astonishment as Siri started to shake with such violence they knew some external force was exerting itself. Fearing for his safety, Dtui threw her arms around the doctor. All the strength she could muster didn’t stop his movement.

Then all at once, he went limp in her arms, and she lowered him to the ground. For several seconds there was no movement, no sound. Dtui put her hand in front of Siri’s mouth but felt no breath. Then, just as suddenly as he had collapsed, his eyes opened and he gave her a friendly smile.

“Nurse Dtui, you really will have to resist these urges to throw yourself at me.”

“I have a weakness for men who wobble,” she said. Santiago, pale as marble, came over to take a look at his old friend. He checked first Siri’s pulse, then his own. Siri looked as if he’d been in a fight. His face bore mysterious bruises that stood out against his drained white skin. Dtui looked into his pupils. As she held him, his strength gradually returned and, before her eyes, the bruises faded.

“Now that was an impressive recovery. I think you’ll live, Dr. Siri,” she said.

“Sony about all that.”

“You saw something, didn’t you?”

“Yes, indeed I did.”

“What did it say?”

“Nothing.”

“But it did something to you.”

“Dtui, I may be wrong about this, but I do believe one of our Cuban friends just took up residence in me.”

That she didn’t translate.

There were three things Spiky Hair had forgotten to mention when he sent Mr. Geung off on a beeline for Vientiane. One was that the reason the road took such a mammoth detour was to avoid the Kuang Si foothills, some of which had a gradient too steep even for goats. No sooner had Geung huffed and puffed his way over one than another loomed ahead of him.

Another thing Spiky had omitted was what to do if the sky became overcast, as Geung was orienting himself by the sun on his bag strap. In the beginning, he just stopped, sat, and waited till the cloud passed. But as he climbed higher, the clouds became thicker and his guiding sun made fewer and fewer appearances. His waits became longer so that by 3:00 P.M. he’d stopped completely. It was a dilemma. He knew he had to keep moving but not in which direction. Every hill looked the same. Any one of them could have been the one he’d just crossed. There were no landmarks. Every tree looked the same.

And then there was the third thing. It was a whopper. Despite the efforts of hungry villagers and traffickers and traders in animal pelts or exotic organs, these hills still teemed with wild beasts. If they should ever have met, most of them would have been more afraid of Mr. Geung than he was of them. But a tigress that had been stalking him since he’d passed the waterfall wasn’t afraid at all. She had cubs to feed and she’d traveled far to find game. The human she was following was meaty enough, and he was heading almost directly toward her lair. It was as if she’d ordered room service and it was delivering itself.

Siri returned to Guesthouse Number One. Santiago dropped him off and, as usual, said several things that Siri didn’t understand. Siri replied equally incomprehensibly, and they parted company with a friendly handshake and a lot of laughter.

While they were still with Dtui at Kilometer 8, Santiago had submitted the circumstantial evidence that had convinced him Isandro and Odon were dabbling in ugly magic. It was quite compelling. Two cases were particularly hard to explain away. The first was that of a Vietnamese woman who had come to Vieng Xai with the Vietnamese engineers. She cooked for them and did their laundry. As it turned out, she was an incurable racist. She believed that black-skinned people were barely a rung above the ape on the ladder of evolution and had no qualms about voicing her opinions. Whenever she saw the two Cubans around the hospital area, she would quite proudly call them monkeys. As she believed they lacked the intellect to speak her language, she even went to the trouble of miming her views for them.

She was an average-looking woman with an unpleasant personality, but lonely men in a foreign country tended to overlook such flaws. So it transpired that the woman fell pregnant. She claimed it was a miracle, a divine conception, and as none of the men stepped forward voluntarily to claim paternity, one by one, the local people started to believe her. They realized this would be the perfect opportunity for her to finger some randy soldier and blackmail him into marriage. Yet she swore to the last she was still a virgin.

Santiago had been away on the early morning she was carried into the hospital. It was her seventh month and something had gone horribly wrong. The young Lao surgeon on duty that night believed the only way to stop her hemorrhaging was to remove the fetus. It was his call and nobody later questioned his judgment. But the woman had died on the operating table. When Santiago returned, the Lao surgeon was inconsolable. He found the boy drunk at midmorning and ranting. Nothing the old doctor did could calm him. He knew this was far more than a doctor’s grief at losing a patient. There had to be something else. Santiago talked to the staff nurse. She told him the surgeon had ordered her out of the theatre before she could get a look at the fetus. He’d carried it himself up to the cave of the dead, where it was to be cremated the following night. Santiago, intrigued by the story, had gone up to the cave and there he found a burlap sack small enough to contain the Vietnamese woman’s baby. What he discovered inside was not human. In the sack was the incomplete fetus of an ape.

Both Siri and Dtui felt they’d been spun a campfire horror yarn, but the teller was impressively calm and sincere. His second tale was no less peculiar. A Party cadre had come from Havana to make an official appraisal of how Cuban aid was being spent at one of the country’s few humanitarian projects overseas. He was due to stay for a week, check the books, and return. It was quite straightforward, but he was an observant man and not without some experience of Palo ways. Yet he was committed to the Cuban Communist Party and had no desire to complicate his life with magic. The Party had taught him that shamanism was one more opiate for a people who would be better off drunk on socialism.

In Vieng Xai, the bookkeeper saw something that concerned him, and he decided to discuss it with Santiago. They had an appointaient to meet one evening at eight, but an hour before that time, Isandro came to Santiago’s office to tell him the accountant had been struck down by some affliction and was clutching his throat, unable to speak. The director went to the man’s bedside and could see he was in agony. They rushed him immediately to the theatre, where Santiago performed an emergency tracheotomy. There was no evidence of disease or trauma to the respiratory tract, so the surgeon concluded the man’s labored breathing resulted from intense pain. After several more exploratory incisions, Santiago found the cause of his problem. The accountant’s epiglottis had turned to wood- more accurately, to a hard substance like the pit of a small peach. The surgeon had no choice but to remove it. They sent the bookkeeper home in a deep coma. When they were putting together his belongings to ship back to Havana, they found a slip of paper in his bag. On it were the names of the two interns, and beside them the man had doodled various Endoke symbols.