Colin Cotterill - Disco for the Departed

People still spoke to Geung but he no longer heard them. They looked at him kindly but he hadn’t the ability to return their smiles. He concentrated, and with the last of his strength, put one foot in front of the other, one foot-in front-of the other. Left, and then right. Left, and then right. His aching head dipped low, watching his boots. Responsibility. The morgue. Left-right-food from somewhere-water from somewhere. Insects biting. Left- left, no, that wasn’t it.

One town, then another, then one more. How many more towns could there be? How many miles of road? Was the sun at his back? He no longer had his bag straps. Where did they go? Was the sun somewhere, dropping into his sack? In the morning… strap… what was the song? Then, the road… just stopped. One minute it was there-then it wasn’t. Instead, a wide, slow-moving river. A group of people, their mouths moving at each other, moving at him, laughing. A ferry comes, a flat slab of metal, so heavy, so unlike a boat, you could never imagine it staying on top of the water. Under it, yes. But not floating. Something… was… familiar.

The group, like one big crab with many heads, steps onto the slab of metal. So familiar. Amazingly they float, the crab, the car, the dozen motorbikes. A boy comes. He prods Mr. Geung in the chest and holds out his hand. He prods again. Geung looks into the boy’s eyes and sees himself reflected there.

The slab of metal runs into the far bank as if it isn’t expecting it to be there. The crab lurches forward but keeps its feet. Geung is thrown to the deck. Hands collect him, shuffle him forward. The road reemerges. People come to stand in front of him, around him. So many mouths moving, so many teeth. They steer him like a bicycle piled high with sugarcane. They steer him off the road, and the sun is off his shoulder, onto his nose, in his eyes. A face eclipses it, blocks the sun, switches off the electric light over Vientiane. It is a face without features that leans into his, a ping-pong bat all in black. Mr. Geung blinks. Why is this bat holding his shoulders, brushing the hair from his forehead?

They turn, he and the bat, in an odd tango. And by some miracle, the bat acquires a familiar face-the face of Mr. Watajak, the man who’d gone to all that trouble to sire seven children, only one of whom was a moron.

In the kitchen of the military cave complex, an area once covered in camouflage netting but now open, Comrade Lit, Dr. Siri, and Nurse Dtui stood around a trestle table upon which lay the almost complete cadaver of Isandro Jesъs Montano. Comrade Lit wasn’t feeling his best. In fact, he’d already thrown up once and was planning to do so again. It’s true he was nervous because in less than four days, the entire politburo would be attending a concert not thirty yards from where the body had been found. It’s true he was nervous because the woman whose name he’d already submitted to the Social Relations Committee to become his betrothed, the women who still hadn’t displayed any gratitude for this proposal, was standing no more than a yard from his side. Yet, daunting as these two facts may have been, it was undoubtedly the sight of the body that was causing his stomach to churn.

He had seen the other Cuban, of course, even handled his mummified cadaver. But it had been inhuman, more like a knotted tree branch. This… thing, this was obscene. So alive it might almost rise from the table and take hold of his throat. And how could a man who had been black all his life become so white? There were tints of green and yellow, but much of the bloated skin was ashen, like the flesh of the Chinese Buddha. The doctor had given the condition a name, adipish… adipoch, something like that. But there was no translation for it in Lao. The doctor had remarked on how uncommon it was, but that submerging the body in damp earth in such cold conditions had changed the chemistry of the fat and turned it into a thick, soapy substance that maintained the shape of the original body. According to the doctor, Lit was very lucky to see such a sight in his lifetime.

Lit didn’t feel at all lucky. He just felt sick. The cheesy smell was crawling through the cloth that covered his lower face, and he knew his stomach couldn’t take what the doctor was about to do.

“I’m going in,” Siri said innocently. “Hold on to your breakfast.”

He held a scalpel that glistened in the morning light.

Lit began to sway.

The night officer had awakened the security chief at midnight to tell him the doctor had found the second Cuban. According to the message, there was nothing to be done but guard the body until morning. Lit had arrived at six with two aides and was met in front of the concert cave by a smiling Siri. Without any attempt at disguising their disgust, the aides had manhandled the body from its bath and onto a stretcher. Then they had carried it through the long tunnel to where it now lay.

As they worked, Siri had updated Comrade Lit on everything he’d learned since they’d last met. Lit applauded the coroner’s skill in the art of detection and made copious notes in his book. But now, with the scalpel hovering above the abdomen of the cadaver, he volunteered to make himself scarce and return later when he was feeling better. At that time, and no sooner, he would be happy to hear the results of the autopsy.

Obviously, a rickety table in an open-air kitchen amidst a cloud of curious flies was not the ideal setting for a postmortem examination. The relative wholeness of the body made everything just a little bit less unpleasant. The only sign of disfigurement was an eight-inch incision at the top of the abdomen. The fact that the body had been submerged in damp earth for all this time might have affected the wound’s appearance, but it seemed to Siri that there was no scar tissue or tumor, suggesting that this surgery had taken place after Isandro’s death.

As they worked through the standard autopsy procedures, it was hard to believe this was a five-month-old corpse. Almost immediately, the reason for the hole in the abdomen became apparent. Someone had created the aperture in order to hack through the half inch of tough diaphragm muscle and break into the heart cavity. Once there, they’d carefully cut loose and taken the heart. All of this had occurred after Isandro’s death.

“Can I say, ‘That’s weird’ yet?” Dtui asked.

“Go ahead,” Siri told her.

“That’s definitely weird.”

“And do you know what else is odd?”

“Give me a clue.”

“Do you see any evidence of parallel scars on the chest?”

“You’re right. Not a one. That’s weird, too.”

And they were still left with the dilemma of finding out what actually had killed the Cuban. There were no other wounds, no internal traumas they could find, and without a lab, they weren’t in a position to analyze the stomach contents. Everything pointed to the big man dying peacefully, despite his sparkling good health.

Although they could ascertain what hadn’t happened, rather than what had, Dr. Siri and Dtui were left with a quandary. As they bagged their samples, they went over the scenario of what had taken place that night: The Cubans are seen carrying a comatose, possibly dead Vietnamese beauty to these caves. Isandro dies peacefully and is buried in a watery grave. Later that same night, Odon is killed in horrific fashion, buried alive in concrete. But their lovely victim vanishes without a trace, in some manner avoiding the second grave that may have been intended for her.

They put Isandro, in some semblance of order, into a body bag that the Security Division had left for them, and returned to the guesthouse to get cleaned up. They were still confused, yet strangely invigorated, by the puzzle they had been presented with. It wasn’t yet ten. Panoy knelt with them at the coffee table, playing cards with her good hand. She’d worked her way into the hearts of the guesthouse staff, even that of the frightening manageress who usually waited for Siri and Dtui to leave before coming to play with the girl.