The Merry Misogynist

anything about it. His father had not bothered to-stick around in Siri’s childhood memories. For as long as he could remember, Siri had been visited in his dreams by the ghosts of departed patients. Over the past two years, those spirits had begun to slip out of his unconscious and haunt him in his waking hours. He didn’t allow them to frighten him.
    Siri was certain that if he were more intelligent or a better detective, he’d be able to interpret what he was being shown. He often arrived at the eureka moment long after the fact, when the mysteries had been solved by more conventional, mundane methods. His forehead was permanently bruised and disfigured from his constant slapping at it when he realized what the spirits had been trying to tell him. Perhaps it was due to his inadequacies as a host that he had only confided his infirmity to three people: his lab nurse, Dtui; his best friend, Civilai; and his wife, Madame Daeng. They’d taken it quite well, considering. Inspector Phosy of the Central Intelligence Unit had arrived by means of a policeman’s instinct at the conclusion that Siri wasn’t all there. But he was not averse to a good ghost story either.
    Siri had learned to observe rationally. There were times when he braved nightmares like a confident swimmer, knowing he’d end up on the bank unscathed. There were malignant ghosts like the Phibob of the forest who hounded Yeh Ming’s spirit. They constantly hummed around him like vindictive wasps, waiting for a moment of weakness when they could sting. Had it not been for a sacred amulet at his neck, Siri would certainly not have made it to his second marriage. But the vast majority of spirits were harmless.
    Siri sat on the saddle of his Triumph and shook his head as Saloop rose creakily on his dead legs. The scientist in Siri wondered what had happened to his inner cynic. He’d mocked his way through a temple education, raised a philosophical finger to the Virgin Mary while studying in Paris, and made fun of the shamans and fortune-tellers upon his return to Asia. Perhaps this was their revenge: bringing him eyeball to eyeball with a dead dog inquiring after his health.
    “How are you, boy?” he asked.
    Saloop had, not surprisingly, lost his big-smiling, waggy-tailed savoir faire since he’d passed away. He scratched halfheartedly and drooled green bile. He stepped across the loose bricks and into the vegetable garden, where he started to dig. Siri decided that a filmmaker might have had trouble representing the scene. Saloop was undoubtedly digging deep into the earth but the actual dirt wasn’t moving. There was no hole, yet the dog was in it. He emerged with a bone in his mouth and took one step towards Siri.
    A bicycle bell sounded behind the doctor and he turned to see Dr Mut, the urologist, attempting to reach his parking spot. When Siri turned back, the dog, the bone, and the non-hole were gone.
 
    By the time Siri entered the morgue, Nurse Dtui and Mr Geung, the lab assistant, were already at work. Siri heard their voices in the cutting room so he threw his shoulder bag on his desk and went to join them. They were standing on either side of a body. He knew it must have arrived that morning while he was convening with the dog. He’d been there till eight the previous evening, and as it was an offence to die outside office hours in Vientiane, this body wouldn’t have been allowed in the morgue until eight that morning. The tobacco leaves in which it had been wrapped were on the floor beneath the table.
    “Hello, my staff,” Siri said with a smile.
    “G…goo…good morning, Comrade Doctor,” said Geung. No matter how many times he’d attempted it, Geung had never once managed to get out the greeting in one breath. Down’s syndrome was a bugger.
    “Mr Geung, what have you done with your hair?” Siri asked. “You look like a – ”
    “Like Elvis?” Dtui interrupted. Already a well-rounded girl, she was now twice her normal size, swollen with her first child. She was a country lass, born in the troubled north-east, and she’d never crossed an ocean. But she had spent a good many years with her nose buried in Thai pop magazines so she knew the world – or at least the important parts of it. Siri was a movie buff so he knew of Elvis from Jailhouse Rock and G.I. Blues .
    “I was about to say a mountain goat,” he confessed. “What have you done to him?”
    “It’s a fra…a fra…What is it, Dtui?” Geung