Survivors Talk - TLC 65

More Cambodians own a cell phone than have a toilet, said Rita. There are eleven million Khmer people with twenty million SIM cards. Ha, ha, ha. Priorities sing quality of life. Playing with a small toy prolonging adolescence our young generation talks yaks, chats, and texts enjoying cheap thrills. My condolences.

Goodbye and good luck to you and your family are our famous LAST words.

I am sorry.

Yeah. Yeah. The science of imaginary solutions regulates exceptions.

The beauty of travel, Lucky said to Zeynep, is my anonymous sensation in a crowd like you feel as a street photographer. Invisible. An outsider. After Vietnam flying from S.F. to Denver to see family before finishing my military time in Germany I became a ghost-self. Other. Passengers stared and averted their eyes. Guilt.

If you’re not living on the edge you’re taking up too much space.

I share field notes from Battenbang, Cambodia where I evolved for three months.

Men gather at 0615 for coffee, companionship, tea, lies and stories.

A fire roars inside the cement stove in the local java/tea shack along a muddy road. Orange and bright red flames heating water consume kindling. Stacked kindling stands like 12,000 orphans in 269 safe places exonerating memories of loss and abandonment.

Words crackle, spit, and dance with laughter's sensation of heat.

Survivors stare at a ghost-self writing/drawing in a notebook.

Khmer Rouge, The Organization, murdered everyone my age.

They are over forty and survivors of The Dark Years. They wear fresh pressed short-sleeved white cotton shirts and black pants. They talk about money, business, jobs, kids, wives, girlfriends, weather, facts, opinions, plans, construction projects, rice harvests, myths and fear of ghosts. Eating fried bread they drink brown tea and thick java. Spoons create music with glass class and style.

1.7+ million ghosts dance through silent conversations whispering, What if I die here? Who will be my role model? All my role models are gone. Feed me, feed me, cries a ghost to their family burning sandalwood incense.

No one talks about the past. Silence is golden noise. Men talk about the long now.

Some focus on another’s face hearing words discovering kindness intention and meaning. Others study cell phones or watch a Thai music video on a plaza scream at full volume. One hears an abstract conversation disguised as a peddler pulling his trash cart down the red muddy road squeezing air out of a worn plastic bottle summoning attention deficit disordered sellers waiting to hear wheezing AIR knowing they can pawn junk, an old family heirloom or a traditional wooden loom with or without cotton or silk threads where women wove white cremation shroud clothing for relatives long gone.

Living in the past is time consuming, said Memory. Keep me alive.

Ghosts live in the past, present and future. Leave it there, said one. Half our population is under thirty. They have no memory of the past. Education is the key. We missed our chance. The only chance I had was to run and hide in the jungle. My education was nature. Look at my hands. I know two things. Now I spend my life in an office rewriting our sanitized history. A tedious thankless job I'll have you know. And one more thing, I'd rather be writing than eating incense, if you get my meaning. We do, we do, said his friends cupping hot java jive sakes alive. History is time and geography is space, said a survivor. I disappeared by hiding where space folded, you don't say, Oh I do.

I realized my dream to be a gardener at a meditation retreat, said a thin 60-year old genocide survivor. White t-shirt, blue shorts and black flip-flops. His silent black eyes contained secrets.

How did you survive, asked Lucky. I ran away. First I hid in the jungle then I ran into mountains, deep, very deep, deeper than unconscious memories of life’s transient nature. I ran from the shadows of Death. I became a living ghost, a stranger to myself. Other. I survived hearing screams 24/7 from room 101 as generations slaved starved and died, hearing, witnessing brainwashed peasant soldiers murder everyone kids like you fathers, mothers, aunts, uncles, grandparents all disappeared gone erased finished evaporated exterminated dead.

Yes, agreed Death. Everyone comes to me.

Khmer Rouge reign of terror: three years, eight months and twenty days.

I lived every one.    

When I thought it was safe I crawled out of slime crossing landmine paddies into a Brave New World. I stumbled over 1.7+ million bodies and bones, smelling, tasting, hearing seeing Death. Death bones in my dreams rattle freedom, food and family. My family is gone. I never sleep. Death sees me. Here, now. I feel it. I feel it closer than skin on bones, closer than white on rice.

It will take another generation before we adjust to breathing. Laughter is rare. My people have suffered hopelessness and passiveness for twenty years. That’s a humbling life changing experience, said Lucky, yes I discovered life in a desperate situation.

They met every afternoon in fading light after torrid heat. Gardener waters red roses, flame orange bougainvillea, green ferns, purple orchids, hanging planters. Water rainbows cascade through white light coating green, sliding down stems, meeting petals. He smiles. Water disappears toward roots below the surface of appearances.

He sat curled up on a brown chair calm and silent watching Lucky mine an unexploded episode from a notebook. The gardener realizes a notebook, once used by Authority to write down names of the dead or soon to be, is now a potential source of liberation and memory.

I don’t know this tool, this machine, he said pointing at a plastic screen and floating artificial letters as Lucky played with twenty-six letters. I can’t read, no chance, it was all about surviving, labor, nature, planting, harvesting, scheming and deceiving, running, hiding, blending in, keeping your mouth shut. We work, breed and get slaughtered. Such is our fate.

A screaming voice from a nearby classroom wafted through orchids.

Quest-ions are forbidden!

Overworked, underpaid and undersexed teachers named Authority and Social Control said, Ask at your peril. Anyone with courage raising their hand to ask a quest-ion is shamed or silently beaten into silence. Fear and ignorance are great motivators, forever and a day. Conformity breeds conformity. Conditioning.

Curiosity is fatal, said Rita. Curiosity kills more humans than war, disease, lack of medicine and starvation. Humor, curiosity and courage are basic elements of intelligence.

Conversation’s silence attracted flies.

A gaunt man who survived The Dark Years from 1975-1979 wearing a dirty white hat ringing a hollow brass bell pushed his orange ice cream trolley through red dirt. He passed a woman unloading kindling. Men stared. Trembling eyes pursued life’s endless stream.

After Conversation died someone picked up a cell phone and called another living, breathing conversation. Hello, are you alive? Yes? Just checking. Have you eaten yet? No? I had rice and eggs. Tomorrow it’s lobster. Ha, ha, ha. Good luck to you and your family. Bye-bye.

Listening is a lost art, said Conversation. I don’t have a hearing problem. I have a listening problem. Most people don’t listen to understand. They listen to reply. Sullen suffering is a pervasive conversation.

People without love die from neglect.

You can say that again, said Silence.

People without love die from neglect.

The Language Company