Death Worship by River

Rumors of intelligent life in Hanoi is an exaggeration, said Leo. Rumor control reports existence.

Take my neighbors Sam and Dave for example, said Tran, Sam is the kid, Dave is the father. Their names and roles are interchangeable. These are not Viet names. If they were, they’d be named Binh and Thin and New Yen, like new Yin or old Yang.

Dave had kids so he and his wife can yell at them. So they will have someone take care of them in old age when they are lying or dying on bamboo recliners absorbing 10,000 wafting kitchen smells.

It’s an Asian thing. It was an arranged marriage after a three year courtship. Her parents demanded $50,000. Cash or no deal. Virgins have high value in the marriage market. They are have been sequestered behind fear and insecure superstitions and trapped by hovering in-laws and outlaws for centuries.

Marriage is legalized prostitution.  

Father knows best. You don’t marry the girl in Asia. You marry the family.

Cash gives them security. You pay and get the girl. The fun begins. Grandparents need kids to support them in old age. When you’re young pregnancy is always the only option. The tyranny of motherhood.  

Accelerate production comrade. Many procreating humans have more desire thinking about providing offspring for their security than the physical pleasure of sex. So it goes.

Sex is a DUTY. It ain’t about pleasure. It’s easy to have kids in the 13th most populated country on planet Earth. Get on. Go for the ride. E jack U late. There are 90 million hard and fast parenthood rules according to the popular Vietnamese Party book, Produce & Consume. Get married early erotic pressure is on and off, on and off. Savior a small death in 8 seconds.

You do not want to be unmarried, sad, lonely and forgotten. Loss of face and shame haunts singles with vengeance. Fear of loneliness increases the possibility and probability of heart attacks, strokes of genius and arterial vestiges of debilitating forms of social upheaval and social instability in a socialist society. They’ve taken their hormonal cues and social control systems from Uncle China.

Extreme pressure is on girls to find a husband. Sapa females in the NW, a future fragment of this tale, illustrate the value and necessity for rural girls to marry at the ripe old age of sixteen and produce genetic replicants. Petri dish. More Y chromosomes. It takes courage to raise kids with integrity, respect, and authenticity.

            Humans crave less suffering and neglect and more love.

Dave’s voice releases anger, bitterness and frustration allowing him to relax, expend and expand the sound. Dave is startled to hear the sound of his voice ricochet off cold molten gray interior Hanoi cement or is Ha Noise the block wall? His life is one long cold cement wall.

Echoes dance through his brain like sugarplum fairies. He knows the echo because he made the WALLS. He stacked red crumbling bricks, mixed the fine sand gemstones and quick dry cement.

He slathered it over red bricks with coherent circular logic fulfilling an abstract desire to create a work of realist art lasting forever which is how he remembered it the day he trow welled the paste. His voice manifestation expresses human primitive guttural sounds in a tight enclosed space near his gigantic liquid plasma television.

It is permanently implanted on a wall blaring news propaganda and perpetual adolescent dancing drama programs about life next door where the family sits on red rose cold tile floors hunched over with spinal deficiencies ... slurping from cracked bowls shoveling steaming rice and green stringy vegetables into lost desperate mouths and yelling over each other in tonal decibels ... competing with their gigantic plasma television featuring dancing bears and uniformed military pioneer patriots devouring acres of rubber plantations, palm trees, teak forests, beach front property and farmland ... with a double bladed axe singing a high Greek-like chorus their national anthem about land, sea, air, water and big profit with peasants as small players.

            Everyone’s being played.

Book of Amnesia, V1