Chapter 23.
Chugging down the street, antiquated ¼ ton trucks recycled from catastrophic invasions, wars, death, suffering, bombings, and genocide carried 1.7 million people dying from forced labor, starvation and execution illuminated by historical footnotes.
Voices blended billowing black diesel dust with forgotten cultural memory in swirling red dust.
Two barefoot mendicants walked past Ice Girl. One looked content. He wore simple tattered white cotton cloth. A red and white-checkered kroma scarf knotted his head.
He carried their possessions in three white rice bags on a bamboo pole balanced on a shoulder. A tall gaunt man followed their trail of tears.
Man #1: These bags are heavy. I am tired of carrying them. You carry them. He dropped the bags and pole on red dirt. Crash!
Startled birds flew. A brown river changed course. A woman stopped sweeping dust. A rich man getting out a black SUV smiled at prosperity. A young boy fondling his fantasy without objection paused. A prone passive girl suffering from eternal hunger in a plywood room waiting for fake love blinked. An infant dying of malnutrition cried in its sleep. A mother waiting for medicine holding her child shifted her hip weight. A monk in a pagoda turned a page of script. Ice girl massaged cold reality with an edge.
The man walked over to a large water cistern. He splashed his weathered face. He drank deep.
His friend stooped over, adjusted bamboo through twine, hoisting the pole and bags onto his shoulder.
Man #2: Where are we going?
Man #1: Muttering to his feet in red dust, Down this road.
The Wild West red dust town bigger than a village welcomed smaller. The dexterity and fortitude of millions shuffled along in a flip-flop sandal world filled with joy, opportunity, risk, chance, fate, and destiny.
They devoured French pastries and flavored yoghurt.
Ambiguity, contradictions and paradoxes assumed the inevitable. Assumptions and expectations wore Blue Zircon, seeing harlequins.
A boy near Angkor Wat sawed crystals of clarity in his tropical kingdom. He saw but didn’t see while standing in a blue hyperventilated dump truck holding his rusty trusty bladed saw. Blocks of ice disguised as solidified water were longer than the Mekong feeding Son Le Tap Lake.
He unwrapped blocks. He sawed. He tapped a musical hammer at precise points defining worlds of experience into melting scientific sections.
His co-worker loaded condensation on thin shoulders. He carried melting weight to a bamboo shack. He dumped ice into an orange plastic box. A smiling woman frying bananas over kindling gave him Real notes. Thank you for the cold.
Carver carved. Tap-tap-tap.
The woman assaulted ice with a hammer, shattering fragments to refresh java, coconut and sugar cane juice. Ice blocks melted latent potential.
An old woman in pajamas sweeping dust heard ice weep, “Hope is the greatest evil. Her daughter whispered, “Evil doesn’t exist.”
History, war, violence and predatory politicians have screwed Cambodians, said Ice Girl.
Let’s Make A Deal. Do the numbers. 15% (and increasing) of Cambodia has been sold to foreign investors. 1.7 million out of 11m were massacred. Millions are illiterate. Millions are subsistence farmers. It is a rural agrarian society. They produce what they need to survive. They eat, sleep, fuck and sit around.
Any day above ground is a joyful day in paradise, she said. Paradise is a country where genocide survivors are happy. They are free people in a free country. Ecstatic. They laugh, run, play, plant, harvest, work, breed and die. But they live in fear. They are afraid the past will become the present. Time is a scary circle.
Annual red, green, gold, yellow and white fireworks celebrating the end of the genocide regime blasted black sky. A child sang, “The wicked witch is dead!”
Another child sang, it’s a brave new world minus four old dying relics waiting to die of old age during a $100,000,000 dollar international show trial for genocide between 1975-1979.
They deny their role.
Not me! I was only following orders. I don’t have to accept responsibility for my actions.
That’s what they all say.
No, please. Have mercy. Authority ordered me to kill them all. Yeah yeah.
Denial will kill you, said an illiterate man cranking up electricity purchased from Vietnam. How quickly people forget, said a blind historian rewriting Khmer stories.
Media buys people, said Ice Girl. I sell frozen facts. That’s the truth. Facts and truth are not related.
Numbed silence covered rice paddies. Traumatized and anesthetized survivors cried, Send in the clowns. Send in the politicians and bankers and thieves and Chinese manipulators.
Same-same but different, said a hungry girl in a plywood shack waiting for Freedom to say OK.
Freedom laughed, I’m not saving anybody.
Paradise survivors are happy because they are alive, said Ice Girl. They started over after Year Zero. 14 million now have enough food, clean water, medicine and Socratic educational critical thinking opportunities in a NGO fabricated world to rebuild their identity, self-esteem and life.
Culture means you can forget.
It will take another generation, or sixty years given the average life expectancy, to recover revive and renew our simple uncomplicated life.
Down the road, Alice in Slumberland, a human pretending to be an economically depressed Khmer teacher making $40 a month minus gifts told her students: You should just blend in. During genocide people who asked quest-ions disappeared.
They vanished. They became extinct.
Asking quest-ions was not allowed. Asking quest-ions is seen as strange and startling and dangerous. Dangerous people ask quest-ions. People who ask WHY are a clear and present threat to growth, development, intention, incentive and robotic daily comatose poverty existence.
Accountability is a foreign language.
Economic terrorism is an unpleasant fact. Personal incentive is rebellious and counter-productive to maintaining the status quo ho, ho, ho.
An a priori communication theory without facts or truth or thought or doubt or wonder or curiosity or hard quest-ions is a male land mine survivor without legs living on Ground Zero. He rests near a pagoda waiting for compassion from strangers. A bookseller of genocide memories smokes a cigarette w/o hands.
Where are the female land mine survivors? Leo asked. Maybe they are dead and gone, said Ice Girl. Maybe they live somewhere safe with someone taking care of their daily needs. Removed from Fibonacci’s spiral and the golden mean.
Ready for a trick quest-ion, she asked. Sure. What’s louder than a group of Khmer people? I don’t know. Another group of Khmer people.
Get used to it, she said. Volume. Signal-Noise. They love distractions. They live, eat and breathe distractions and signal-noise. They love talking over each other. The one who talks the loudest without saying anything is the winner.
Most are too poor to pay attention.
Listening is hard work, said Leo.
Silence kills people, she said. Fear of death is one long conversation. They’ve been traumatized by their past into the immediate present facing unknown scary futures. It’s a time machine, a time warp and a shift in consciousness.
For example, said Leo it’s curious seeing the FIRE inside the cement stove in the local java/tea shack at 0615 along a muddy road in Battenbang. Orange and bright red flames heat water, consume kindling.
Words crackle, spit, and dance with laughter's sensation of heat. Kindling stands stacked like 12,000 orphans in 269 safe places waiting to exonerate memories of loss and abandonment.
It’s a male thing. They are over forty and survivors of The Dark Years. The men wear fresh pressed short-sleeved white cotton shirts and black pants. They talk about business, jobs, kids, wives, girlfriends, weather, facts, opinions, big plans, construction projects, myths and ghosts. They eat fried bread drinking brown tea and thick java. Spoons create music with glass.
1.7 million ghosts dance through their silent conversations. Ghosts whisper, What if I die here? Who will be my role model? All my role models are gone.
Feed me, feed me, cried an Asian ghost to their family burning sandalwood incense.
No one talks about it. Silence is golden. Men prefer to talk about the long now. Ghosts live in the past. Living in the past is time consuming. Leave it there, said one. Half our population is under thirty said another. They have no memory of the past.
Education is the key, said another. We missed our chance. The only chance I had, said one, was to run and hide in the jungle. My education was nature. Look at my hands. I spend my days in an office rewriting our sanitized history. History is time, said another. Geography is space.
My dream is to be a gardener, said one. He watches Leo 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.
He works at Bliss, a meditation retreat.
I love gardening, he said in Khmer. We have nature as our common teacher. Yes, said Leo, Your work here is beautiful.
He’s a 60-year old genocide survivor. White t-shirt, blue shorts and black flip-flops. His silent black eyes contain all the secrets of his survival.
How did you survive, asked Leo. I ran away, I hid in the jungle, then into the mountains, deep, very deep, deeper than unconscious memories of life’s transient nature.
I was running from the shadows of Death. I became a living ghost, a stranger to myself. I survived hearing screams 24/7 from room 101 as generations slaved starved and died, murdering everyone, kids like you, fathers, mothers, aunts, uncles, grandparents all disappeared gone erased finished evaporated exterminated, dead.
Yes, agreed Death. Everyone comes to me.
When I thought it was safe I emerged, crossing landmine paddies into a Brave New World. I walked over 1.7 million bodies and bones, smelling, tasting, hearing seeing Death. Death bones in my dreams rattled freedom and food. I never sleep. Death sees me. I feel it closer than skin on bones, closer than white on rice.
It will take another generation before the Khmer adjust to breathing. Laughter is rare. My people have suffered hopelessness and passiveness for twenty years. That’s a humbling life changing experience, said Leo. Life is found in a desperate situation, the man said.
They meet every afternoon in fading light after torrid heat. He waters red roses, flame orange bougainvillea, green ferns, purple orchids, hanging planters. He smiles as water rainbows cascade through white light coating green, sliding down stems, meeting petals. Water disappears toward roots below the surface of appearances.
He sits curled up on a straight-backed brown chair smiling and silent watching Leo typing notes from a black book. I don’t know this tool, he said pointing to a plastic screen and floating artificial letters. I can’t read, no chance, it was all about surviving, labor, nature, planting, harvesting, scheming and deceiving, running, hiding, keeping your mouth shut. We work, breed and get slaughtered. Such is our fate.
The gardener and Leo heard a voice from a local classroom: Quest-ions are forbidden, screamed overworked, underpaid and undersexed Asian teachers named Authority and Social Control.
Ask at your peril. Anyone in the 2% group raising their hand to ask a quest-ion with confidence is shamed or silently beaten into silence. Fear and ignorance are great motivators, forever and a day. Conformity breeds conformity.
Curiosity is fatal, said Ice Girl. Curiosity kills more humans than war, disease, lack of medicine and starvation. Humor and curiosity are basic elements of intelligence.
Two pale female French tourist conspirators plotted their narrative at Bliss.
We colonized this place, said one, Giving them baguettes, war, illusions of freedom, top heavy dull administrative procrastination, fake NGO bureaucracies, administration tools, wide boulevards, imaginary legal systems, an eye for an eye, corruption possibilities and designs of egalitarian ideals, morals, ethics and principles, faded yellow paint and French architecture.
Yes, said her friend, this IS the old brave new world and I am lazy and passive and my stomach comes first. I am starving. Let’s eat our sorrow.
She is a super thin model of anorexia boned with stellar constellations. Her grim hawk faced rotund lesbian lover has flabby upper arms. She scribbles her serious fiction-memory and sense of entitlement in an unlined black notebook with one hand while massaging her forehead to increase creative blood flow.
They examine a microscopic map of Angkor Wat
filled with unconscious alliterative jungles,
gold lame Apsara dancers,
232 species of black and red butterflies,
1.9 million anxious tourists in a big fat fucking hurry,
Chinese, Japanese and Korean robot tour groups,
crying elephants, super tour buses, 125cc motorcycles, tuk-tuks,
begging illiterate children speaking 10 European languages
hawking gimcracks
whining predatory adults with an 8th grade education
accompanied by miles of flaming plastic bag garbage,
narrow boned white oxen,
14 million attention deficit disordered citizens addicted to simple minded FACELOST entertainment,
cell phone adolescent sex text nonsense,
1,001 laterite cosmic Hindu Khmer temples stretching from Thailand to Laos and Vietnam in a boomerang circular dance evolving from the stillness,
letting go of outcomes
as the French ladies whisper,
Where did we go,
What did we see,
How did we feel,
Where are we,
Did we discover the magic eye of sudden insight or any wisdom in this totality of mystery, devotion, and sublime splendor?
They’re on their grand Asian tour. One describes fragments of her short life with an animist talking stick.
She cuts out brochure pictures and ticket stubs. She pastes them into her book. It will make a fine future visual memory of her ear and snow.
Her attention span is shorter than a grisly tour for eternity at the Genocide Museum in Phony Baloney filled with 2,000,000 skulls.
Here we are.
Ice Girl in Banlung
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