The Skull Mantra by Eliot Pattison Page B

their questions. So they had progressed to subtler means, eventually shifting from hardware to chemicals, which were far worse because they made it so difficult to remember what he had already told them.
    He had sat in his cell in Moslem China—once, in a room with a window, he had seen the endless expanse of desert that could only mean western China—and recited the Taoist verses of his youth to keep his mind alive. They had constantly reminded Shan of his crimes, sometimes reading like professors from blackboards in
tamzing,
or shouting from statements of witnesses he had never heard of. Treason. Corruption. Theft of state property, in the form of files he had borrowed. He had smiled dreamily, for they had never understood the nature of his guilt. He had been guilty of forgetting that certain anointed members of the government were incapable of crime. He had been guilty of mistrusting the Party, because he had refused to reveal all his evidence—not only to protect those who had given it to him but also, and this shamed him, to protect himself, for his life would be worthless once they thought they had everything. In the end, the only lesson of those months of endless, shredding pain, the one resolute truth Shan had learned about himself, and the great handicap that kept the pain alive, was that he was incapable of giving up.
    Perhaps that was what Choje had seen that first hour when Shan had stumbled from a Public Security van into the compound, dazed, wondering if they had decided to risk shooting him after all.
    The prisoners had at first seemed just as dazed, staring at him as if he were a dangerous new species. Then they seemed to decide he was just another Chinese. The
khampas
spat on him. The others mostly shunned him, some making a
mudra
of cleansing as though to spurn the new devil in their midst.
    Shan had stood unsteadily in the center of the compound, knees shaking, considering what sort of new hell his handlers had found for him, when one of the guards shoved him. He fell into a cold puddle face first, and splattered mud on the guard’s boots. As Shan struggled to his knees, the furious guard ordered Shan to lick his boots clean.
    â€œWithout a people’s army the people have nothing,” Shan had said with a doleful smile. A direct quote from the Inestimable Chairman, from the little red book itself.
    The guard had knocked Shan back into the mud and was slamming Shan’s shoulders with his baton when one of the older Tibetan prisoners walked toward them. “This man is too weak,” the prisoner had said quietly. When the guard laughed, the prisoner bent over Shan’s prostrate body and took the blows on his own back. The guard administered the punishment intended for Shan with great relish, then called for help to drag the unconscious man to the stable.
    The moment had changed everything. In one blinding instant Shan forgot his pain, even forgot his past, as he realized he had entered a remarkable new world, and that world was Tibet. A tall monk who introduced himself as Trinle helped Shan to his feet and led him into the hut. There had been no more spitting, no more angry
mudras
cast against him. Only eight days later, when the stable released Choje, did Shan meet him. “The soup,” Choje had said with a crooked smile on seeing Shan, referring to the 404th’s thin barley gruel, “always tastes better after a week away.”
    Shan looked up as he heard Choje’s question again.
    â€œWhat is it they are doing to you?”
    He knew Choje did not expect an answer. It was simply the question he wanted to leave with Shan. The 404th would never be the same after the knobs took over. With a sudden aching in his heart, he realized Choje would probably be taken from them. He stared at a new
mudra
formed by thelama’s hands. It was the sign of the mandala, the circle of life.
    â€œRinpoche. This demon called Tamdin—”
    â€œIt is a wonderful thing,