Love Songs from a Shallow Grave

reception area, were dressed exactly as their guide. The women had short hair and stern faces. The men glared accusingly. There was not a pretty or handsome one amongst them. Nobody smiled. Nobody was animated. It was like a visit to a slowly melting waxworks.
    Siri and Civilai pointed to their names on the hotel guest ledger and a serious man with a limp led them up to the second floor. He unlocked two doors and left the keys in the locks and the guests in the hallway.
    “Is this weird enough for you yet?” Siri asked.
    “I suppose room service is out of the question,” said Civilai, looking up and down the deserted corridor.
    “There’s still half a ton of Chinese inside you. You can’t be hungry?”
    “I was thinking of a nightcap.”
    “Perhaps they’ve left us a little something in the rooms. Sandwiches and a bottle of Beaujolais perhaps?”
    “Now, why do I doubt that?”
    In their rooms they found beds, chairs, cupboards, unlabeled bottles of water and slightly grimy glasses.
    “What time is it?” Civilai asked.
    “The only working clock in reception said it was eight o’clock in Mexico City.”
    “Well, assuming that’s eight a.m. then it’s only about nine a.m. here. Fancy a stroll around town before bed?”
    “I can’t imagine what else to do.”
    They emptied their bladders in their respective bathrooms and regrouped in the hallway. As they walked along the light green carpet they heard a loud squeaking, grating sound coming from the floor below. It was unmistakably the sound of Godzilla chewing on a Volkswagen Camper. They walked down a dimly lit stairwell to a reception area whose lights, all but one above the desk, had been extinguished. The staff had fled but for one of the male cadres. He was now shirtless and tending to some business behind the counter. The entrance to the hotel had been blocked by a huge metal roller-grill. Phnom Penh beyond was apparently out of bounds. They were trapped.
    They walked to reception and discovered that the clerk was connecting a mosquito net. One end was tied to the switchboard, the other wound around the neck of a stone statue, a poor copy of one of the apsaras from Angkor Wat. He seemed annoyed to have been disturbed. After ten minutes of mimes and gestures; bottles, drinking, staggering drunkenness, then down the scale to eating, rice, peanuts, bananas, the cadre was positively livid.
    “My brother, Civilai,” Siri said at last, “if our friend has a weapon of any sort down there behind the counter, I feel he’s reached the point at which he’ll use it.”
    “Then, I’ll say goodnight.”
    “Goodnight and sweet dreams,” they wished the scowling receptionist.
∗
    There was no sweetness in Siri’s dream that night. That same disconcerting nightmare was waiting for him. But everything was so much more vivid. The streets through which he walked had acquired a scent, a rancid smell he knew well from his work. The song came at him from everywhere like a sensur-round soundtrack with strings and a harmonious backing group. But it was certainly the same eerily beautiful song.
    The boy-soldier who approached him with his pistol raised had a history now. He had a family, brothers and sisters, all hungry, others dead because there were no medicines to cure simple ills. He had been drafted into the military because his mother had no rice to feed him. Siri knew all this, not because he’d been told, but because, in the place where dreams are produced, this was a logical plot development. It made the character more dimensional. We now had reason to feel sorry for the antagonist, to side with him. It created an element of conflict in the conscience of the viewer, in this case, Siri. Something in him wanted the boy to pull the trigger. And, with so much unexpected support, that’s exactly what he did. Siri’s head was gone. Splattered like a kumquat on a busy highway. And the dream-Siri was filled with dread, not because he was headless – inconvenient though it was – but because he was afraid he might stumble into the singer and that would be the end of mankind. He knew there was nothing to pull him back. Finding the origin of the song would signal the end of all hope, worse than anything he’d ever experienced.
    The explosion of the gun had reduced the soundtrack to a single beautiful voice. Headless Siri was on his hands and knees. He reached a plot of earth where the sounds climbed up through the dirt and lingered there like invisible