Slash and Burn

Rouge were flooding into Thailand and southern Laos. The Lao government had issued twenty official statements denying KR claims that they were allowing Vietnamese troops to cross Lao territory. They absolutely weren’t amassing at the border in preparation for an invasion, which, of course, they were. But as there were still no actual laws, the Politburo could logically argue that they weren’t breaking any. The forty-six-member Supreme Council had been working on a national constitution for eight years and had barely made it beyond the design of the front cover. This general disorder, plus the fact that money was harder to come by than a cold beer, resulted in an estimated 150 citizens crossing the river to Thailand every day—120 successfully. An editorial in Pasason Lao newssheet informed the 40 per cent of the country who could read and the 2 per cent of those who could be bothered, that the People’s Democratic Republic of Laos had never had it so good.
    During the month of July in 1978, people did the morgue at Mahosot Hospital a great favor by not dying mysteriously. They merely passed away as people do and no questions were asked. No motives sought. It was almost as if they sensed that Dr. Siri Paiboun, the country’s only coroner, was reaching the end of his unasked-for tenure and they didn’t care to trouble him. The good doctor had been putting in his notice every month since the Party first manhandled him into the job three years earlier. His boss, Judge Haeng, little in so many ways, had ignored the requests. “A good communist,” the man had said, “does not let go of the plough halfway across the paddy and leave the buffalo to find its own direction. He eats with her, tends to her injuries, and sleeps with her until the job is done.” Siri had resisted the temptation to spread the word that the Party was advocating bestiality. He’d known his time would come. But when it did, he’d been only a heartbeat away from occupying his own slab. He’d met the departing spirits eyeball to eyeball, and they were waiting for him. After the horrific events of May that year, he was still deaf in one ear and could barely feel his right hand. His few hours of sleep were plagued with nightmares. Everyone agreed that after his runin with the Khmer Rouge, Dr. Siri had earned his retirement.
    If he could stay out of trouble, Siri had under two months left on the job. Then, the leisurely life he’d dreamed of through decade after decade in the jungles of Vietnam and northern Laos would be his; coffee mornings overlooking the Mekhong, leisurely noodle lunches at his wife Daeng’s shop, long evenings of talking rice whiskey nonsense with ex-Politburo man Civilai, and nights stretched out against a triangular pillow in his illicit backroom library reading French literature and philosophy. Dallying through to the early morning with comrades Sartre and Hugo and Voltaire. Really. All he had to do was stay out of trouble. For anyone else this might not have been much to ask. But this was no simple man. This was Dr. Siri Paiboun: seventy-four years of age, forty-eight years an unconvincing member of the Communist Party, host to a thousand-year-old Hmong shaman spirit, culturally tainted beyond redemption by ten years in Paris. Emotionally numbed to the horrors of injury and death by years of battlefront surgery, Dr. Siri felt he had earned himself the right to be an ornery old geezer. And, no. Staying out of trouble for two months was no easy task for such a complicated man.
    He’d had just the one case since his retirement notice was accepted. Compared to some of his adventures, it was barely worth mentioning as a case at all. The children at Thong Pong middle school had become unhinged. A number of them had started to vibrate uncontrollably and speak in languages none of them knew. The local medical intern had seen nothing like it and requested assistance from the Ministry of Health. Stories in Vientiane spread like atomic bomb fallout and word very quickly found its way to the morgue where Dr. Siri and his staff had been sitting lifeless for several weeks. Almost immediately, Siri had set off to visit the school on his Triumph motorcycle with his faithful nurse Dtui and lab assistant Geung squashed together behind him. As religion and superstition had no place in the new regime, nobody voiced what everyone suspected: that the school was haunted. Both doctor and nurse feigned indifference when they arrived, even