ice Girl, 5

The River of Darkness overflowed with extended tedious years of silence singing a slow meandering song before being punctuated by random acts of violence, gunfire, and exploding land mines swallowing eternal cries for mercy as innocent men, women and children were slaughtered in fields, homes, and villages along twisted dirt jungle paths or murdered inside animist cemeteries wearing crude carved wooden faces remembering the dead with ceremonies, laughter, animal sacrifice and rice wine hearing the low dull roar of high altitude B-52 bombers releasing enraptured napalm canister lightning bolts through clear skies rendering humans, mountains and jungles obsolete, accompanied by the steady rhythm of a girl sawing ice.

Someone said there was a war, she said. My mother saw a plane. She thought it was a bird. She wove the image into indigo cotton with yellow, blue and red silk thread. All the women weave here. Men don’t have the patience. They love hunting and killing. Mother saw a whirling bird, called a helicopter. She wove it with our traditional motifs of weavers, people carrying water, harvesting, dancing, playing music, sitting, resting, flowers, fields, cows, chickens, ducks, birds, banana and palm trees, rivers, sky and nature. She weaves our long story. Before writing after cutting and selling ice I weave.

Animists believe in the natural world. Every living thing has spirit energy.

A shy woman shaman smiled after performing a family ceremony and healing sacrifice near the river. She smeared chicken blood over a sick infant’s stomach. Villagers are superstitious and trusting.

Bored dead eyed humans wandered red dust.

One prolific business in Banlung is mechanical. Along and adjacent to the single east west paved artery were brown wooden homes and shacks of rusting corrugated tin.

Single men or teams of laborious boys hammered, welded, and pried, manipulating iron and steel, adjusting belts, guided grinding gears, solidifying particles, firing cylinders, filing metallic blisters, reworking tired 125cc engines and formatting hard drives as spokes on crude machines sang.

Repair and restoration work implied basic life skills using eye-hand coordination, communication theory modules with colleagues, decipherable brooms, grease, balloons, laughter and a high degree of universal understanding and empathy.

Freedom worked 24/7. Under a broiling sun tempered by a soft breeze they carried buckets of cement over boards, pouring it on red dirt. Freedom shoveled 21 muscular sandy efforts into a wheelbarrow. Freedompushed it to a new world order construction site filled with profound expectations and poverty’s paradoxes.

After dark Freedom caressed a hungry $10 passive lover inside a plywood shack along a dirt road removed from neon, Zircon and the tooth fairy. Dirt floor, bed, and OK condom.

Her clothes hung on rusty nails embedded in exploitation. Stale perfume, lip-gloss and mascara sang lost memories. Her dead eyes said, plow my field with no emotional connection. She stared at a brick wall as Freedom assaulted heaven’s gate grinding desire. After 15 minutes longer than forever she joined five girlfriends sitting around a fire below stars. See who shows up, said one, the night’s young. We are tools, said another. We are fools, said one applying gloss. I don’t give a shit, said a sad one remembering her mother and siblings upriver. Fuck it.

The fat male mafia moneyman slouched in a porch hammock watched reality reruns under a red light special. 

ice Girl, 6

Living in China, Leo carried buckets of night soil or shit. It was the price he paid for questioning Authority.

-why, do we have to read Mao’s little red book, it’s mush for pigs, he asked Authority.

-because you are a tool of the state, said Authority.

-this shit stinks.

-here, said Authority. Carry some more.

After that melancholy loss Leo didn’t take shit from anybody. He burned through levels of existence as an exiled ghost. He slept with shamans in cemeteries.

He didn’t suffer from PTSD. He didn’t prowl life’s perimeter at midnight with bandoliers of munitions and Howling Wolf, his M-16 on full automatic. He wasn’t a suicide bomber hijacking ambulances in Gaza or Baghdad or Karachi or Damascus. He wasn’t blowing up cafes in Haifa or Spanish trains of thought watching children and adults fly through the air with the greatest of ease in the Greatest Show on Earth. He did not attend flight training school in Florida on a secret mission of revenge and miraculous destiny.

Being a worthy asset with nonofficial cover he was quieter than a mouse. The second mouse gets the cheese. He disembarked, disabled, distributed, declassified, delineated, discussed, and detonated unconscious trip wires. He was a silent night hymn, a predator practicing silence and cunning with his tantric eye wide open.

I am a camera, he told ice girl. Like you I see the big picture. We are ahead of the future. Wandering storytellers accepted my willingness to walk point. It was the Tao of insight, intuitive friendship and leadership. I don’t sweat the small stuff.

It’s all small stuff, she said. God, the Devil and Allah are in the details. Checkmate, said Death.

In Cadiz a well-dressed bald man with Gypsy blood wearing polished black wing tipped shoes used the financial section of a daily rag proclaiming a 33% unemployed human statistic to collect his dog’s shit off a Roman cobblestone chessboard. He dumped it into a metal trash basket nailed to a postmodern yellow splattered wall.

Five minutes later an obsessive-compulsive cleaning woman in her ground floor flat yelled, “What’s that smell?”    

“History.”

ice Girl, 7

“Are you with us?” pleaded a Cambodian land mine child survivor removing shrapnel with an old rusty saw after stepping in heavy invisible shit, “or are you against us?”

She‘s been turned out and turned down faster than a housekeeper ironing imported Egyptian threaded 400-count linen. No lye.

The thermostat of her short sweet life seeks more wattage. She faces a severe energy shortage if she doesn’t find food.

She’s one of 26,000 men, women and children maimed or killed every year by land mines from forgotten conflicts. Reports from the killing fields indicate 110 million land mines lie buried in 68 countries.

It costs $3.00 to bury a landmine.

It costs $300–$900 to remove a mine. It will cost $33 billion to remove them. It will take 1,100 years.

Governments spend $200–$300 million a year to detect and remove 10,000 mines. Cambodia, Angola and Afghanistan are the most heavily mined countries in the world.

40% of all land in Cambodia and 90% in Angola go unused because of land mines. One in 236 Cambodians is an amputee.       

She hears children crying as doctors struggle to remove metal from her skin. She cannot raise her hands to cover her ears. Perpetual crying penetrates her heart. Tears of blood soak her skin.

The technical mine that took her right leg off that fateful day as she walked along village rice paddies expanded outward at 7,000 meters per second. Ball bearings shredded everything around her heart.

It may have been an American made M16A1, shallow curved with a 60-degree fan shaped pattern. The lethal range was 328 feet. Or maybe a plastic Russian PMN-2 disguised as a toy. She never saw it coming after stepping on the pressure plate.

Fortunately or unfortunately, she didn’t die of shock and blood loss. A stranger stopped the bleeding, checked her pulse and injected her with 200cc of morphine. Strangers in a strange land all carried morphine.

Cut the heavy, deep and real shit, said a shaman.

Fear is a tough sell unless it’s done well, well done, marinated, broiled, stir-fried, over easy, or scrambled.

Fear is ignorance.

Ice Girl in Banlung

ice Girl, 8

You can say that again, sang Leo, a broken-hearted brainwashed exhausted starving peasant practicing free speech with the fluency of intellectual rational objectivity at a Reform Through Re-education work labor unit on the edge of the Gobi desert or Hell on Earth.

He was short, fast and deadly.

He was condemned to the labor unit for questioning heavily armed moral authority at Beijing Abnormal University. It was the beginning of the Brand NEW Cultural Revolution lasting 10,000 brutal years.

China was systemically dismantled and converted into a gigantic jigsaw puzzle. It was sold at global discount stores labeled Made In China By Poor Illiterate Sweatshop Slaves.

Millions of educated people were purged from jobs. All social connections were severed. Informers prospered. Families turned each other in to save their skin. Dignity and self-respect devolved into humiliating samzen or self-criticism sessions.

Yes, they cried. I am guilty, stupid and the cause of all my suffering.

Yes, they wailed. I am a Running Capitalist Dog. Have mercy. Where do I sign my glorious true confession?

Here, said Authority. On the dotted line.

After accepting Leo’s coerced confession interrogation thugs dressed as acrobats rehearsing for a Beijing Opera beat Leo with tofu sandwiches and sand-filled rubber hoses. A clandestine CIA torture manual instructed them how to adapt modern waterboarding tactics with ancient Chinese water torture techniques.

Sink or swim sucker, said a diving instructor in a bell jar.

They hung Leo upside down in the asylum. They spun him around until he became a flashing strobe light jellyfish. A literate starving peasant poet applied electrodes to his genitals. An illiterate starving peasant cranked up the juice on an old car battery.

Leo talked. Leo stuttered. Leo cried for mercy.

Leo screamed, Why me? Not me!

Denial will kill you, said interrogators. You are an enemy of The One State. You are a clear and present danger to social harmonious stability. Questioning authority is forbidden. Repent Running Dog!

Leo screamed, I’m a mongrel cur. I will never ever ask another question. Have mercy. They cranked up jungle juice shocking Leo back to a Brave New World.

His memory was erased.

ice Girl, 9

When I was 20 I packed a bag and crossed the border. I went to the capital. I met other Vietnamese girls and they helped me find a simple room in a house for $25 a month. We shared a common toilet and kitchen. We became friends. They were my first teachers about life in Cambodia.

“Always look your best and wear high heels. They make you look taller. Men like tall girls. Always negotiate their offer. Negotiate means talk more. Get the most you can. Save it. Let them do what they want with you. Many will be rough and try to hurt you because they think you belong to them. They bought you. They hate their wives and will take it out on you. Women are only objects, things to be abused. Learn to be passive. Accept what happens. Close your eyes, pretend you feel pleasure and learn to close your heart. Close it tight. Don’t become soft and weak and open it for anyone. The only pain you will feel is physical. It will go away. We have local doctors who understand our life and help us. You can choose to be either a bargirl and entertain customers there or a taxi girl. They go to homes and apartments. They make more money but they service more clients. Always give Tan her cut or she will throw you out.”

My head spun from all this.

One night I put on my best red and green dress. I applied makeup and went to the Hello bar with two girlfriends. It was loud and crowded with men and girls. We bought cheap drinks and sat at the bar. My friends introduced me to Miss Tan, the owner. Her diamond ring flashed. So you’re the new girl. Vietnamese? Yes.

You can demand more money. Your skin is pale. Men will want you. You work here as a taxi girl. You go out, you come back. You give me 70%. If you cheat me I kill you. I know everything. Understand?

Yes. We shook hands. Hers were soft. Get to work girls.

A fat man sat down and offered to buy me a drink. He ignored my friends.

Where are you from?

Vietnam.

I am from here. This is my country. I am a rich businessman. You are very beautiful.

Thank you.
How much for one hour?
I played dumb. What do you mean?
He laughed. Are you stupid? I said how much for an hour with you.
I looked at my girlfriends. One raised her right eyebrow. Go for it.
How much are you willing to pay?
$50.00.

This was the most money I’d ever heard of. I gambled. Make it $500 for one night. I’ll take good care of you all night long. Maybe you can help out my friends.

He looked at them. Five hundred is easy money, he said. Let me make a call and have another drink first.

Ok, take your time. He bought me a whiskey. He talked about making money, exploiting the poor, twisted business deals using connections, land grab property development. I pretended to be interested. It was getting late. I gambled. Time’s up, I said. Are you going to help my friends? If you want me it’s $500. All night.

Yeah, yeah, he said. He called someone. I have some chickens for you. He laughed and hung up. I have a place near here. Get me a taxi.

We went through dark streets and stopped at a house. Inside were two older men, drinking. They looked at the girls, paired off and disappeared. 

Ice Girl in Banlung