The charcoal has helped. I am back in control, if not of the consistency, at least of the timing. I can now wait for the bucket they bring. The boys. The boys with three watches rattling around their wrists like bracelets. The boys not old enough to shave. The clone boys, identical to the one in my dark dream. Playing soldier with live ammunition. A real gun pointed at my forehead. Night after night. That finger, twitching, deciding whether to squeeze the trigger and take this old man out. And some nights he doesn't. And some nights he does. And on those nights when the gun blasts, I find myself walking through what's left of my nightmare with nothing above my frayed neck. But, even on those headless nights I can hear the eerily beautiful singing. It's a dream. Who needs ears? All right. All right. Perhaps I sense the sounds. Would that work? The honey dew voice of a man. The words mean nothing to me but I can tell he's singing to his lover. And each night I wake in a humid inside-the-house sweat and I tell my wife, "Something bad is going to happen." And Madame Daeng brushes back my hair and says, "It's only a dream."
But it isn't.
The key clicks in the lock of the unpainted door. Why lock the door? I'm not going anywhere chained by the ankle to eight metres of lead pipe, am I now? And sure as hell there wouldn't be a queue to get in. Why lock the door? Why lock the door? And they don't need to worry about you folks any more: you dead ones, you ghosties. You can come and go as you like, lock or no lock. And you came, didn't you? But you stayed. And you sit, bored out of your minds. Dr Siri on the stage, forgetting his lines, forgetting his mind, edging on delirium, bordering on insanity. And I understand. Really I do. You aren't just watching. You're waiting, aren't you? Waiting like Vultures for me to leave my body and join you on your quest to find a better place. Oh, that's easy. Anywhere is a better place than this.
The smiley man is in the doorway. A silent 'boo' and 'hiss' from the stalls. The boys unfasten me, force me to get dressed. Wrap a scarf around my eyes. Poke me with their bamboo canes. Whip my legs. It's only acting, son. You can open your eyes. But then it comes to me, when I should be concentrating on the pain, when I should be fearing what torture I am being led to, it is now I solve the mystery of the three epees. And I know that a man will walk into a concrete yard somewhere, a yard stained with the blood of others, and be shot for something he didn't do. Riddled with mistaken bullets. Perhaps it has already happened. How long have I been here? The future and the past all hang here in the glow of the overhead lamps, hypnotised by the light, not knowing where to fly.
Only I can save him, this wrongly convicted man. The proof has been there all the time and I've ignored it. "Stop the torture. Somebody hand me a phone. Hey, boy, run this note across the street to Vientiane. Here's fifty kip. Lassie, girl, go find judge Haeng. Tell him he's got the wrong man. I'm sorry, I'm a little tied up or I'd go myself. Tied up, whipped, burnt, electrocuted…bits removed and mutilated."
I let out a manic laugh in the face of death.
"I see you're in good spirits still," the smiley man says as I'm dragged out like the garbage — stage right. "We'll see what we can do about that."
'Boo' and 'hiss,' cries the silent audience.?
There was no sound of footsteps, only the hushed click of the latch and the door opened.
"You should be a spy," Siri said.
"Can't sleep?" Daeng asked.
Siri was sitting cross-legged on the floor of the home library, a desk lamp leaning over his shoulder like a curious, light-headed stork. Sunrise wasn't that far off. A book, heavy as a temple lintel, pinned the old doctor to the ground.
"Camus," he said.
"The soap people?"
"Distant relative."
"Does he have a cure for insomnia?"
"Who has insomnia? Just a peculiar dream. I wasn't in a hurry to get back into it."
She sat on the cot.
"Do you want to tell me about it?"
"It involved children and guns."
"Then, perhaps you shouldn't…"
"I've had a thought."
"Good. Then all this was worthwhile."
"Your question about eastern European alumni and clubs and reunions."
"Civilai squashed me flat as a postage stamp on that one."
"He did, but he shouldn't have. There is something. Imagine you've spent four years in Bulgaria and you've just come back to Laos. What is it you need?"
"Food that isn't dripping with fat?"
"No! I mean, yes. But something else. You've spent four years learning and speaking a foreign language. You have knowledge. Skills that you learned in that language. Do you just switch that all off when you come home?"
"You find someone who speaks the same language to keep your hand in."
"You could do, but I can't imagine a day when we Lao would sit down and speak to each other in Bulgarian just to maintain a language. It isn't natural. And it's far too active for us. There's a less stressful, passive outlet."
"Books."
"Exactly. And where would Russian, German and Bulgarian speakers go to keep up with the news and the latest technical advances in their adopted countries?"
Daeng clicked her fingers.
"The government bookshop on Sethathirat."
"It's the only place. Lao translations of Marx, Lenin, and Engels. Socialist newsletters and magazines in foreign languages. Poster-sized photographs of politburo members. All those perfect gifts for birthdays and weddings."
"The victims could have met there, browsing, shared their experiences and become friends. And…"
"And that's where they met him."
"The sword coach. Bravo. At three a.m. it all sounds perfectly plausible. But now you have to put in some sleeping hours so you're alive enough to follow up on this train of thought in the morning." She stood up and stretched her aching legs. "Does your author have a parting comment for us before we retire?"
"You know, I think he does," Siri said. He heaved back the pages to a strip of paper that poked forlornly upwards and ran his finger down the page until he found the quotation he'd discovered earlier.
"I know of only one duty," he read. "And that is to love."
"I think I'm going to like Mr Camay," Daeng smiled.
11
The male clerk at the government bookshop was ugly enough to draw tears from a lime. It was as if he had breathed in too heavily one day, perhaps in shock, and his skin and all his features had been sucked inward, stopping only when they hit solid bone. But his teeth, the only camel teeth in the whole of the PDR Laos, stood out proudly from his jaw like a prehistoric jetty. He was tall and gaunt and ungainly, and more than a few prospective customers had taken one step into the store, seen him standing there behind the counter like Hell's own gatekeeper, and withdrawn in terror. Even Siri baulked momentarily when he saw him through the window. When the doctor pushed open the door, a brass bell tinkled above hjs head like a small idea.
"Comrade," the clerk sang. "Welcome."
It was a peculiar bookshop, dark, in spite of the large windows, and unfriendly. There weren't walls of book spines to walk along and browse. What scant reading material they had was displayed flat on boards like beef or fish at a country market. One or two selected tomes were held captive in glass cabinets. In two minutes a customer could perform one perfunctory circuit of the room — feigning interest in this or that — then be on his way. But Siri had cause to stay longer after his circuit, during which he identified Russian, German and — although he wasn't certain — what looked like Bulgarian magazines. The clerk, with nothing else to do, had observed Siri's every move.