The Coroner's Lunch (2 page)

As it did every day, Saloop’s eerie wail inspired a chorus of barks and howls the length of the street and beyond and, as usual, Siri creaked open the front door to the accompaniment of dogs. He could never sneak home unnoticed. Even the staircase betrayed him. Under his footsteps, its groans echoed in the bare hallway and the loose floorboards announced his arrival on the balcony.

Neither the front door nor the door to his room was locked. There was no need. Crime had stopped. His apartment was at the rear overlooking the little Hay Sok temple. He reversed out of his sandals and stepped inside. There was a desk with books waiting for him at the window. A thin mattress was rolled up against one wall under the skirt of a mosquito net. Three peeling vinyl chairs gathered around a tin coffee table, and a small stained sink perched on a thick metal pipe.

The bathroom downstairs was shared with two couples, three kids, and a lady who was the acting head of the teacher training division at the Department of Education. Such were the spoils of a communist victory. But as conditions were no worse than before, nobody complained. He lit the gas on the one-ring range and boiled his kettle of water for coffee. In a way it felt good to be home.

But this was to be a weekend of strange awakenings. On Friday night he sat at his desk reading by oil lamp until the fussing of the moths got too much for him. His bedroll was placed so he could see the moon emerging from behind one cloud, and the next, and the next, until he was hypnotized into a peaceful sleep.

Siri’s dream world had always been bizarre. In his childhood, the images that lurked there constantly interrupted his sleep. The sane woman who raised him would come to his bed and remind him that these were
his
dreams inside
his
head, and nobody had more right to be in there than he. He learned how to walk tall through his nightmares and not to be afraid of what happened there.

Although he stopped being scared, he never did gain control of them. He couldn’t keep out unwanted visitors, for one thing. There were a lot of strangers loitering in his dreams with little or no intention of entertaining him. They lurked, laid about, idled, as if Siri’s head was a waiting room. He often felt as if his was just a backstage to someone else’s dreams.

But the most peculiar visitors to his subconscious were the dead. Since that first mortality, the first bullet-ridden man to die on his operating table, all those who’d passed from here to there in front of him had taken the trouble to pay him a visit.

When he was a young doctor, he’d wondered whether he was being punished for not saving them. None of his colleagues shared these hauntings, and a psychologist he once worked with in Vietnam suggested they were merely manifestations of his own guilt. All doctors wonder whether they could have done more for their patients. In Siri’s case, the learned man believed, these doubts came in visual form. Siri was calmed by the fact that in the dreams the departed didn’t seem to blame him; they were just bystanders, watching events with him. He was never threatened by them. The psychologist assured him this was a good sign.

Since Siri had started working as a coroner, coming into contact with the bodies of people he hadn’t known when alive, these visitations had become more profound. He was somehow able to know the feelings and personalities of the departed. It didn’t seem to matter how long it had been since life had drained from the body; his dream world could spiritually reassemble the person. He could have conversations with the completed whole, and get a feeling of the essence of what that person had been in real life.

Of course, Siri hadn’t been able to mention these reconstructions to his friends or colleagues. He didn’t see it would be to anyone’s advantage to admit that he turned into a raving lunatic after dark. His condition did no harm, and it did encourage him to show more respect to cadavers, once he knew the former owners would be back.

With such mysteries going on in Siri’s sleep, it was hardly surprising he often awoke confused. On this particular Saturday morning, he found himself in one of those neither-one-nor-the-other dimensions. He was aware he was in his room and that two of his fingers had been bitten by midges. He heard the dripping of the tap. He could smell the smoke of leaves burning in the temple yard. But he was still dreaming.

On one of the vinyl chairs there was a man. The morning light filtered through the cloth curtain immediately behind his head. From inside the mosquito net, Siri couldn’t make out his face, but there was no mistaking who he was. He had no shirt and his frail torso was blue with old tattooed mantras. He wore a checkered loincloth, below which two leg stubs rested on the seat. The congealed blood matched the vinyl.

“How are you feeling?” Siri asked him. It was an odd question to pose to a dead man, but this was a dream after all. He became aware of the high-pitched howling of the dogs from the lane out front. All the signs of consciousness were gathering, but the longboat man still refused to leave.

He was sitting, looking back at Siri with a toothless smile smeared across the bottom of his face. Then he glanced away and pointed his long bony finger in front of him. Siri had to sit up against his pillow to see. On the tin coffee table there was a bottle of Mekhong whisky. At least it was a Mekhong bottle, but it contained something darker and denser than it should have. It could have been blood, but that was just Siri’s morbid fancy at work.

He lay back on his pillow and wondered how much more aware of his environment he needed to be before the old man would leave. Then the curtain fluttered slightly and more temple smoke puffed in on the breeze. And in the second he was distracted, a doubt was cast. The fisherman’s head could have been a fold in the curtain, his body the indentation made by countless backs that had slumped in the chair before him.

As if some conductor had swiped his baton through the air, the dog chorus fell silent and Siri was left with the dripping of the tap. There was no doubt now that he was awake. He marveled again at the magic of dreams,
his
dreams, and chuckled to think that one of his inmates might have been trying to escape.

Suddenly refreshed, and mysteriously elated, he pulled back his mosquito net and got up. He saw the midge that had been trapped inside with him and feasted gloriously on his finger’s blood. It flew to the window and out to boast of its coup.

Siri put on the kettle, drew the ill-fitting curtain, and carried his small transistor radio to the coffee table. It was a sin, but one he delighted in.

Lao radio broadcasts boomed from public address speakers all over the city from five A.M. on. Some lucky citizens had the honor of being blasted from their beds by statistics of the People’s National Rice Harvest coming directly through their window. Others’ houses vibrated to reminders that salt borders would keep slugs off their vegetables.

But Siri was in a blissful black hole, far enough from the PA’s for their messages to be no more than a distant hum. He listened instead to his beloved transistor. By keeping the volume down, he could tune into world news on the Thai military channel. The world had receded somewhat on Lao radio recently.

Naturally, Thai radio and television were banned in the People’s Democratic Republic. You wouldn’t be arrested for listening, but your District Security Council member would knock loudly on your door and shout for all the neighbors to hear, “Comrade, don’t you realize that listening to decadent foreign propaganda will only distort your mind? Aren’t we all content here with what we have? Why do we need to give satisfaction to the capitalist pigs by listening to their pollution?”

Your name would be added to a list of grade-four subversives and, theoretically, your co-workers would cease to have complete trust in you. But as far as Siri was concerned, the edict only succeeded in depriving the Lao people of some jolly entertainment.

The Thais were devastated that evil communists had moved in next door, in Laos. Their paranoid military could never be accused of subtlety. Siri loved to listen to their broadcasts. He honestly believed that if the politburo allowed free access to Thai radio, people would decide for themselves which regime they’d prefer to live under.

He’d listened to “expert” commentaries on the Reds’ inborn taste for wife-sharing, an infirmity that caused such confusion in their society that “incest was inevitable.” How communism had led to a dramatic increase in two-headed births he was uncertain, but Thai radio had the figures to prove it.

Saturday morning was his favorite because they assumed the Lao would be gathered by their radios on the weekend, desperate for propaganda. But today Siri was distracted. He didn’t even get around to turning on the radio. He brought his thick brown Vietnamese coffee to the table, sat in his favorite chair, and inhaled the delicious aroma. It smelled a lot better than it tasted.

He was about to take a sip when the light from the window reflected from something in front of him on the surface of the tin coffeetable. It was a circle of water, the kind you get from a damp glass. This was nothing incredible, except that he hadn’t put anything on the table that morning. His cup was dry and it hadn’t left his hand. And in Vientiane’s climate, this moisture could not have been left over from the previous evening.

He drank some coffee and looked at the ring of water calmly, waiting for an answer to come to his mind. He looked up at the chair where the morning shadows had played tricks on him, then back at the table. If he wanted to be perverse, he could remark that the ring was in the spot where the longboat man’s whisky bottle had sat. He turned to the shelf on the wall behind him and ripped a sheet of paper from the roll there.

But when he turned back to the table there was no ring of water.

His second strange awakening that weekend wasn’t so occult. Miss Vong from the Department of Education had a habit of not knocking on the door until after she’d walked through it. She’d often caught Siri putting things on or taking things off, but she always looked at him as if it was his fault. If he’d done the same at her apartment, he’d be facing a court summons for certain.

But on this Sunday morning, he was still fast asleep when she arrived, so he knew it had to be early. The scent of temple incense had already filled the room, but the roosters were still dreaming of magical flights over mountains and lakes.

“Come on, sleepy. Time to get up.”

As she had no children of her own, this annoying woman had taken to mothering everybody. She went to the single curtain and yanked it open. The light didn’t stream in, it oozed. It was an early hour indeed. She stood by the window with her hands on her hips. “We have an irrigation canal to dig.”

His mind groaned. What had happened to weekends, to free time, to days off? His Saturday mornings at work invariably became days, and here they were, stealing his Sunday too. He pried open one eye.

Miss Vong was dressed in corduroy working trousers and a sensible long-sleeved shirt buttoned at neck and wrist. She wore her thinning hair in pigtails and reminded Siri of the Chinese peasant eternalized in Mao posters. Chinese propaganda skimped on facial features, as nature had done with Miss Vong. She was somewhere between thirty and sixty, with the build of an underfed teenaged boy.

“What torture is this? Leave me alone.”

“I will not. You deliberately missed the community painting of the youth center last month. I’m certainly not going to let you miss out on the chance to dig the overflow canal.”

Community service in the city of Vientiane wasn’t a punishment; it was a reward for being a good citizen. It was the authorities’ gift to the people. They didn’t want a single man, woman, or child to miss out on the heart-swelling pride that comes from resurfacing a road or dredging a stream. The government knew the people would gladly give up their only day off for such a treat.

“I’ve got a cold,” he said, pulling the sheet over his head. He heard the tinkle of water filling a kettle and the pop of the gas range. He felt the tickle and heard the rustle of his mosquito net being tethered to the hook on the wall. He heard the swish of a straw brush across his floor.

“That’s why I’m fixing you a nutritious cup of tea with a twist of—”

“I hate tea.”

“No, you don’t.”

He laughed. “I thought after seventy-two years, I might know what I hate and what I don’t.”

“You need to build up your strength for the digging.”

“What happened to all the prison inmates? They used to do all this. Dig ditches, unplug sewers.”

“Dr. Siri, I’m surprised at you. Sometimes I wonder if you really did fight for the revolution. There’s no longer any excuse for the uneducated and ignorant to be doing all our dirty work. We’re all perfectly capable of lifting a hoe and swinging an ax.”

“…and dissecting a cancerous liver,” he mumbled under the cover.

“All our ill-advised criminal types are undergoing re-education at the islands. You know that. Now. Are you getting up, or do I have to drag you out of there?”

He decided to punish her for her unsolicited familiarity.

“No. I’ll get up. But I have to warn you, I’m naked and I have a morning erection. It’s nothing sexual, you’ll understand. It’s a result of pressure on the….”

There was a slight click and the battering of loose boards on the veranda. He peeled down the sheet and looked triumphantly around the empty room.

When he went downstairs, he found two trucks loaded with drowsy silent neighbors, obviously overcome with delight. Area 29C was providing the labor for irrigation canal section 189. It would take the better part of the day, but a sticky rice, salt fish, and
tamnin
ivy lunch would be provided absolutely free.

He shook off Saloop’s lethargic charge and climbed onto the rear truck. He’d spotted Miss Vong on the front one, lecturing the young couple from the room opposite his. He nodded and joked with his neighbors as the convoy set off. They nodded and joked back. But none of these good moods could be described as sincere.