Comrade Thinh’s corpse had been in the morgue for almost a week with nothing to do but nurture this nasal display while his wife and his mistress argued their respective cases for taking the corpse home. It was fortunate for Thinh that he was dead because the two women were loathsome creatures. He’d probably inflicted a broken neck upon himself to be rid of them. The decision was currently in the hands of an ad hoc council composed of members of the Vietnamese Central Committee, naturally, all men. That it should be under consideration by such a lofty team was a testament to the importance of the deceased and the potential ramifications of sending him off to the wrong pyre.

Dr. Siri was no longer connected with the morgue in any official capacity. His lot now lay behind the portal of his wife’s noodle shop, where he sat between shifts at a rear table with a cup of coffee and a book, any book. His illegal library had been destroyed some years earlier, and 1981 Laos was not a world hub of literature. The one bookshop had five Lao translations of Soviet Communist rhetoric, a shelf of official reports, and a three-year archive of the weekly edition of the Passasson Lao newsletter. The rest of the space was occupied by dusty sports equipment and stuffed endangered creatures with marbles for eyes and the terror of that final chase frozen on their faces. But once you have a reading habit it’s a bugger to shake off. No love nor money could produce a Proust or Victor Hugo in Vientiane, so Siri read the minutes of the last Central Committee conference and the proposal for the next three-year development plan. And, of course, he read and reread the script of his motion picture that would never make it as far as the silver screen. He yearned for something creative and stimulating to enliven his dull days. As is often the case, a strong-enough yearning was just enough to tweak fate into action.

He had promised never to set foot in the morgue again but there was something about postmortem nostril hair growth that was far too tempting to pass up. As soon as Mr. Geung arrived for his evening noodle shift and passed on the news of the body in the freezer, Siri was on his bicycle and peddling in the direction of Mahosot with Ugly, the thrice-almost-dead mongrel, trotting along behind. There were no cars on the road. A recent survey had suggested there was a total of fourteen thousand motor vehicles in Laos. Eleven thousand had no access to gasoline because the scant offerings were monopolized by the government. Children were growing up bemused by these four-wheeled, moss-covered monuments in front yards.

It was a balmy evening that followed a balmy day at the end of a balmy month. The hot season lurked beyond the mountains of Vietnam, awaiting its cue to bake the Lao capital, but until it made its entrance the calm evenings brought out a procession of girls and boys doubling up on bicycles like amusement park duck targets hoping to be hit with a smile or a nod. They pedaled so slowly it was inconceivable the momentum was enough to hold them upright. Siri had invented the word “ertia,” which was a microscopic step up from “inertia” and perfectly described flirtatious cycling. He shamelessly teased the girls he passed and they pretended not to hear him. But there was no disguising the small curl of lip, the flutter of eyelashes. No woman is deaf to a compliment.