Arrival
Share Article Take the A Train from Lao Cai to Hanoi arriving at 4:30 a.m.
Rain cleans air.
Streets are deserted.
The Dream Sweeper Machine collects dreams from talking monkeys. Narrow alley dreams stream crawling, flying, dancing, staggering, singing, laughing, weeping, sighing into The Machine. Dreams, like writing, need simplicity, accuracy, brevity, clarity and humanity.
It’s a new day. The first day in a new space, new neighborhood, this Shikumen twisted Hanoi dream alley. People share toilets and kitchens. They share their lives on Fake Space, a glorious Internet frontier of brief equality and eternal technological distractions. Walls. Barb wire. Thick rusty window gratings. Dark. Silent.
Prison is a refuge and release.
Solitary confinement with the junkyard blues. Environmental impact statements.
Climate needs spare change.
No one gets out alive. You are a Stream-Winner, this cessation of sensation, perception. U experienced this deep illusive truth in Hanoi while editing a 227 page Ph.D. thesis of Buddhist enlightenment written by a monk in Nepal sitting under the Bodhi tree.
Edited pages are returned to Thanh. She’s the manager of Just Massage, a team of seven visually challenged masseurs and masseuses in the Hanoi diplomatic area. Great people with healing hands. Empowered.
Everyone is a Buddha, she said, smiling.
