The Man Running from the Death
I wondered if the world had left us or if we had deserted the world.
He sat in the station of free ambulance fleets in a mountainous district. The rainy season was here, pouring water on rice fields, straw huts, and asphalt highways. It was 11:30 pm, he fell asleep on a hammock. The man his age sought rare deep sleep under the clattering aluminum roofs. Quietly did the breeze fill the house, easing the stuffy humidity stirred by the heavy rain.
The old Nokia phone on his belly rang, piercing my ears with the disturbing high-pitched ringtone. He picked up the phone, limping to the table on the injured right leg. He asked questions, where the alley was, which kind of trees stood by the turn, if a car could enter, if there were canals on both sides, what clothes you would wear for us to recognize you, don't stand in the middle of the highway, too dangerous, keep the phone right next to you at all time.
He wrote down the number, tore it off the notebook, and walked to the bedroom, calling the driver's name, anh Bình, wake up, they need us; their son got hit by a motorbike.
A driver, sweat in his t-shirt, still half-asleep, walked to the sink outdoors and splashed cold water on his face. He squinted to read the note under the weak yellow light. He turned on the engine. The white ambulance shook in the first ignition, reversed, and left into the darkness.
The old man was Bảy, a familiar name to number the kid in a family, although he couldn't remember much of his family. They submersed in the wipeout memory he didn't try hard to recall. Or he had never had that part of memory; that thought floated in my head when he murmured the past into my realm from the hammock:
“I left home when I was eight years old.
My family was poor, and the war was wrecking. My mom gave me to a monk. I accompanied him to the mountain. He carried everything in a brown fabric pack. I held on to a small brown bag my mom gave me. She was kneeling and genuflecting toward us when I looked back.
We walked until late afternoon; the sun left us. Now I wonder if the world had left us or if we had deserted the world. I saw plants I hadn't seen in my life. I saw everything shrinking into tiny dots and shapes when we reached the mountaintop. My feet bled on a big toe and the heels. We stayed in a small temple or a hut, where the monk meditated, prayed, and taught me how to read Buddhist scripture.
At night, I smelled smoke rising when villages were burnt. We didn't hear the pain and scream and death. We were out of the war's grips. I lost track of the direction where my home was. Sometimes, I wondered if my mother and my brothers and sisters were there amidst the fire and chaotic shooting. We prayed at 3 a.m. when gunshots and burning scenes could be heard and seen through the darkness. We were far away. Would our prayer mean anything to the people dead in this endless killing? I never knew.
The monk taught me to read and write. He told stories about Buddha and his journey. Buddha was this drawing of a ruddy-faced man, smiling while asleep amid the hell fire beneath his gaze. I observed the picture for hours when we meditated. Did he know we were hiding under his feet?
Being self-sustained in the mountain was a harrowing struggle, especially with a kid. He plotted the areas with vegetables and cassava. Our food was cassava leaves, any kind of fruit he could find, and steamed cassava. He walked down the mountain once every three months to pray for dead people and exchange his rituals for some rice and other staples for me. He carried a sack of rice uphill home mixed with casava; those dinners were sweet with rice bites. He did that until I was old enough to help him carry the rice sacks to the temple. He worried I was malnourished because we didn't have enough food.
He worked like a father and lived the life of a monk. He carried me into his life without questioning why my parents gave me away to him. He taught me about the war and their hope to save me as a child, the last resort of keeping me alive. He pointed the direction of my village in some violent raid, in gunfights, asking me to pray for people there. I was so distant from my beloved family that I didn't really understand the pain of separation. I was small enough to forgive and forget. Growing stronger, I tended to cassava, sweet potatoes, and vegetables, fixing our hut roofs, reading, and praying.
Young men was conscripted to the war. All the young men were lined up to walk to the frontline to die. The armies from both sides searched high and low for labor of killing. The monk didn't allow me to walk down the mountain and help him with chores. I had to sleep in a cave for several nights when a military squat walked up to our temple and searched for targets or young men. They didn't touch the monk out of respect for his solitude, meditation, and religious practice. They might have dragged me off the mountain to join the slaughterhouse if they saw a young guy hiding in the nearby cave.
When the peace settled almost twenty years later, the monk asked me if I wanted to leave the mountain and live the life I wanted. He was old. He couldn't accompany or protect me anymore. He would stay in the mountain and meditate for his final journey to see Buddha. He held no attachment to me nor asked me to fulfill a responsibility. He gave me a life and didn't ask a payback.
I decided to stay. The outside world didn't attract me, although I was curious about what it looked like when peace prevailed. I wanted to take care of the monk. He was my father all my youth. He picked me out from the ash of the war. He was still active and happy and worked everything on his own until he needed a bit of help to walk with a stick.
One morning, he wanted to walk after our early meditation. I put his arms on my shoulders and let him lean on me when he walked. He said that he would miss the birds singing beside us. He would miss the leaves crushing against the tree branches. He would miss the tranquil sky that we were blessed into living under its roof.
We stood among the stone steps and listened to the quiet wind and motorbike sound echoing far down on the rice fields. He said he wanted to sleep in the forest on this mountain to pay back their kindness for feeding us all our lives. He wished to be "among them". He held my hands tight, and I saw his skin had dark spots, darker than my natural skin. A slight squeeze tightened my heart. Time was munching him away from me.
That afternoon, he lay and reached his eternal sleep in peace. I tried to wake him up to no avail.
I buried him next to the hut. He left me a closed envelope, inside a yellowed piece of paper with my parents' name, their village's name, the directions to my house.
I walked down the mountain. There was no bombing, no gunfighting, no night raid. People rode motorbikes and bicycles on small dirt roads. Children chased each other around a giant tree. I walked toward my village, tracing the paper's guide. There was no house on the piece of land described. No one around knew my parents' names or my closest brothers and sisters that I vaguely remembered. I stood on a marshy patch of land, my feet sunk into the grass. My life slipped out of the reality that the monk gave me.
I walked to some nearby villages, asking the same questions. I was tracing my own form. But I was invisible, non-existent. I couldn't see myself in others' eyes. Nobody knew anybit about my parents or me. The war had this immense power of uprooting individuals collectively. A family. An extended family. A village. A town. Units didn't matter in a large-scale destruction. It blew up physical things and annihilated invisible things. Things like me were vaporized. The community was erased from my head. We existed at the same time and space, consumed by the same fate.
I was not sad or happy. I was empty. My saddest moment had passed when I put the monk into the grave pitch. His closed eyes contain my growing years. I had left myself by his side in the womb of the earth. I went back to the mountain and lived as I had lived. The jungle retreated as more people ventured to the mountaintop and put their praying huts near my place.
Once, I met this man hiking up to the top. We talked and shared some tea. He became my friend, hiking up often to see me and sharing stories he couldn't tell anyone; his father was rotten in jail under the new regime; his mother cried until she was blinded; he tried to be the adult of a broken family. He prayed in the hut before leaving.
Many years after the encounter, he asked if I could leave the mountain to save people. He had enough money to buy a car and run a free ambulance service, but no one worked as a phone operator. Young men fell asleep and didn't pick up the phone. Old people were tired of losing sleep. He had to do everything on his own, and he couldn't stand long with all-day jobs.
So, I left the mountain. I moved here seven years ago since we had only one van. Now we have a fleet of three ambulances and other volunteer substituting cars when all are busy.
I don't even know how to drive. The hard work is on the drivers; they have to deal with street hassles, patients' hassles, even hospital hassles, and fulfill their family's duties. I just make phone calls.”
When I met ông Bảy, he was over 70.
A gentleman wore brown bà ba, operating the ambulance station eloquently with multiple tasks. The free ambulance service was the last resort for traffic accident victims, stroke patients, mentally-ill patients from the far-flung mountainous district with sketchy canal networks.
He scolded a young driver for arriving late for his shift, and then he asked him to go in and have some rice and stewed fish. He cooked extra food for drivers to eat anytime they returned from a trip. He was there on the phone if the drivers had trouble with the police or hospital guards. He provided them the reference numbers of the ambulances, permissions, and legal papers. He connected doctors and ER departments with the drivers or family members to accept the patients as fast as possible when the ambulance arrived.
Sometimes I walked out with him and he sang quietly. What he sang, I only knew many years later. They were Buddhist scriptures written into poetry with rhymes and measures. He said that he would not be healthy to serve the station anymore. He was training all the young volunteers to operate the station. In case he was not around, others could take over.
When I left the station, he gave me a folded paper with four lines of Buddhist prayer in poetry. They were about the inner peace of meeting kindred souls.
I imagined his lonely feet wandering from the mountain, seeking kindred souls among the phone calls he picked. Not many families knew the man pick up their call at midnight. Not many people met him after their emergency situations. He found kindred souls in people he saved, in their grave hour of life and death.
Life moved on.
The experience of living in the low land, the upheaval people tasted, the salty soil on their rice are written in my latest poetry collection Drowning Dragon Slips by Burning Plains, which you can find in the US at Bookshop.org, Texas Tech University Website, Amazon, and Barnes and Noble, in Canada at Amazon Canada, in Europe at Amazon UK, in Switzerland, Hungaria, in Portugal and Asia at Amazon Japan.
I read this prose with a wrenched heart.