Children of the dust

Omar said, Down on mean street near the Khmer House of Blues filled with wailing songs of loss, betrayal, neglect, abandonment, misery, hope and have mercy on slide guitar backed by a harmonica in the key of C crying in her heart, a girl stared up at a mirrored skyscraper watching the wheel of life flash prisms into the sky.

She’s been turned out and turned down faster than a housekeeper working with imported Egyptian threaded linen with a 300 count. No lye. The thermostat of her short sweet life seeks more wattage. She faces a severe energy shortage if she doesn’t find food.

Like Tran, she is a quadriplegic, an amputee with one good leg after finding a landmine on her way home from school. She is one of 26,000 men women and children maimed or killed every year by landmines leftover from ongoing or forgotten conflict.

Reports from the killing fields indicate there are 110 million landmines buried in 45 countries. It costs between $300-$900 to remove a single mine.

It will cost $33 billion to remove them and take 1,100 years. Governments spend $200-$300 million a year to detect and remove 10,000 mines a year.

Cambodia, Angola, Iraq, Ukraine, Laos, and Afghanistan are the most heavily mined countries in the world.

40% of all land in Cambodia is unused because of landmines. One in 236 Cambodians is an amputee. She hears children crying as doctors struggle to remove pieces of metal from their 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 through pristine rice paddies near her village expanded outward at 7,000 meters per second as ball bearings shredded everything around her.

It may have been an American made M18A1, shallow curved with a 60-degree fan shaped pattern. The lethal range is 328 feet. Maybe it was a plastic Russian PMN-2. She never saw it coming. She didn’t die of shock and blood loss.

A stranger stopped the bleeding and shot her up with morphine. All the strangers and happy ghosts carried morphine. Standard issue. Grateful, she speaks the language of silence.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

June

June from Stockholm, Sweden visited Cambodia for a month. 36-years young. She was married for ten angry years to an African American from Atlanta. She was a tight bundle of burning anxieties.

She opened up. I don’t know what I’m running away from. I don’t know what I'm running toward. We talked about the amazing labyrinths inside Angkor temples, an allegory of her life.

One door closes and one door opens but the passages can be a bitch, whispered Omar.

She’d evolved as a willing victim of old manipulative lies from authority figures like family, husband, boss and friends in her life. How she’d believed old controlling attitudes and belief systems of others.

Her new day in Cambodia, this beginning offered her new opportunities for awareness and growth. To become authentic she’d face her fears and shadows or run with a hellhound on her trail.

I want to cut off all my hair, she said. It was long curling blond movie star mane quality. We went to a salon. She was nervous. She swallowed hard. A woman cut it off.

I feel lighter now, transformed, said June.

She altered her outward appearance releasing old anxieties. By cutting her hair with bright shiny silver scissors as a complete symbolic gesture, June realized how she felt was more important than how her stone cold colleagues in freezing Sweden might react. It was a small significant step on her new path.

One day June went thirty miles north to experience a village influence on her consciousness. She visited My Grandfather’s House and the local school. What do you need, she asked. She bought them a water purifier. She purchased a battery so they’d have lights after dark.

Another day, returning from temples she stopped in a village and met some children.

The next morning she invited me to join her. We stopped at a shop. She purchased bags of toothbrushes and toothpaste. We rolled through dry brown flat countryside past bamboo homes, women selling, cooking, cleaning, washing and talking. We were far away from the town filled with fat happy white tourists doing Angkor.

June talked a blue streak unloading her honesty, hopes and dreams mixed with anxieties and fears.

I feel good doing this. I’ve never done anything like this before. My past life was all about anger. It was shit. Now that I’m in Cambodia, what, less than a week, I’m beginning to learn about myself, seeing how my life was empty with no meaning. How it was all about pleasing others, buying useless things to make myself feel better.

We turned off a paved road onto a thin dirt track leading to a bamboo thatched home on stilts in a field. Half-naked kids played. Women and men sat in the shade. June met the kids and a young mother.

Here, she smiled, handing them toothbrushes and paste. For you. The kids and mothers were amazed. An 80-year-old woman, a former Apsara dancer, performed quick delicate hand movements. June copied her to the delight of everyone.

I’ll be back, she yelled as kids ran waving goodbye. Now I feel more fulfilled, she said.

We stopped in a small market village for ice coffee. Young girls selling colorful bamboo paper birds descended on us.

Buy something? Look at my things. June met Leaf, 13, in the 5th grade. Leaf learned English selling to foreigners at the temples after school. Leaf showed us her village home.

See you here tomorrow at 2 p.m., June said to Leaf.

I saw a leader in the girl’s eyes, said June as we rolled back to the city. Maybe I can help her, get an English teacher for her village. Give her an opportunity to really grow.

June had to modify her dream for the girl.

Let’s be practical, I suggested. Finding a Khmer English teacher for $1,000 a month is like finding clean drinking water.

The next day June bought a brand new pink bike for Leaf with a bell and basket. It said, NEW STAR on the chain guard. We went to a bookstore. She bought a whiteboard, boxes of markers, twenty English books, picture dictionaries and storybooks. We loaded them on a tuk-tuk and rolled to the village.

Leaf, her family and friends were waiting for June. They raise pigs, dad kills them, mom sells the meat in the market and older sisters hustle male tourists hoping to find a boyfriend, get married and escape.

Here Leaf all this is for you, said June. The bike will help you get to school, temples and home. The whiteboard, markers and books will help you teach English.

Leaf smiled. Thank you. Leaf jumped on her bike and pedaled through dust and broken leaves around the house. June spread the books out and kids explored images, words, letters and colors.

I feel really good about this, said June. Real good. I’ve made a small difference in a young girl’s life. I am so grateful. June had a humbling life changing experience.

That’s a good idea for a children’s book, said Rita.

Nature is what you can be and culture is what you are, said Leo.

One day on a toothbrush run June traveled along another dusty red road and stopped at a village shop selling soap, coconuts and bananas. A girl wore a t-shirt with a picture of a skull and bones.                                  

Danger! LANDMINES!

She wore a permanent tear on her left cheek. She was not smiling.

She said. Here I am. I communicate my reality to the world. Do you like my shirt? Can you read words or do you need a picture? How about a picture of a picture? I don’t know how to read so I like to look at pictures. My country has 18 million people and maybe 6-10 million land mines.

Adults say there are 40,000 amputees in my country. Many more have died because we don’t have enough medical facilities. Mines are cheap. A mine costs $3.00 to put in the ground and $1,000 to take out of the ground. I’m really good at numbers. Talk to me before you explore the forest. It's beautiful and quiet. I know all the secret places.

I showed my picture to a Cambodian man and he didn’t like it. He said it gave him nightmares. He’s seen too much horror and death in one life. So it goes.

My village is my world. Where do you live?

June woke up in Cambodia, returned to Sweden and changed her life around.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Nam to Cambodia

By Omar

It feels soft here after the mercenary rush of Saigon, said Happy Ghost. Vietnam’s population is 93 million. Cambodia has 18 million. Vietnam is about hustle and money. Cambodia is about survival. Memory. Hope and work for a better future  ... heavy weight  ... no one talks about the past … memories are dead  ... gentle smiles and resilient people.

An emotional IQ level of -7 lives in Turkey, Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia, and China. Do the math. Perpetual adolescence is an epidemic endemic disease.

That’s what happens when you kill all the educated people, said Rita. It will take a generation and then some until we get our heads and hearts adjusted. It explains our reality and ground truth.

Vietnam is a smaller version of China and Cambodia is a small version of Nam.  

Vietnamese plant rice, Cambodians watch it grow and Laotians hear it grow.

What does this say about sensation and awareness in three separate cultures, asked Rita. Everything.

One day it felt great to put on solid walking boots at 0515 as narrow Saigon alleys stirred to life. How the gentle soul and metatarsal support pressure delighted the skeletal structure. Roll the bones. It’s a walking meditation … Posture … Alignment … It’s a long walk … Walking makes the road.

At 0600 Tan San Nut airport was deserted below a soft orange sky. Outside or inside a terminal we are all terminal cases. I met a Vietnamese woman, 60, widowed now for a year returning home to Perth after visiting her son and grandchildren. She shared pictures of her standing by the ocean, with friends when she was 38, with her son, at a party. She talked how she and her husband were farmers for ten years in Australia. How she misses him. How she remembers her son. She looked wistful and resigned to her fate. She’ll grow old with friends in Perth remembering.

In the departure area a woman working for the U.N. in Geneva and her boyfriend were visiting Cambodia for two weeks. She planned to visit her girlfriend, another U.N. worker in Phnom Penh, the capital. Agrarian. Rural. Her friend’s been there three months working on the trial of a Khmer Rouge leader.

She does admin work. She says it’s a real mess. The other international legal representatives bicker and fight amongst themselves. Nothing gets done. The trial lasted 1,001 years. It cost $100,000,000. That’s a lot of zeros for the Year Zero legal campaign. A lawyer said, it’s not about Justice, it’s about Procedure.

A Swiss woman in Siem Reap worked for the U.N. in various African assignments. She said, I went to a U.N. gathering in Africa. All they did was argue and promote their specific turf and agendas. The internal squabbling was pathetic. It was pitiful.

Imagine, said Rita, You live in Cambodia. One day you wake up. You have money and opportunities to provide everyone with clean water, free high quality education, medicine, safe well-managed shelters for orphans and abused women and all the essentials for everyone who needs it. NGO businesses scream. Shocking! They’d be out of work. They’d have to go somewhere else, like North Korea or Burma. The Cambodians would be completely empowered to run their own country free of outside influence.

Yeah, said Rita, Don’t hold your breath. Why learn how to fish when the fish is free?

Storytellers flew into Cambodia on a prop-jet seating 100 jaded travelers on the one-hour flight. Low and slow. Whir.

A caustic European woman said to her husband, Where are we flying today? Siem Reap? Oh how tedious.

Like thousands of visitors they’ll stay for two or three days in a guesthouse or four star hotel, hire a tuk-tuk driver and DO Angkor, eat in tourist restaurants staffed by bored, happy children pretending they are mature and sensible.

Look at all the people European tourists say, how sweet. They will tour 8th century Khmer civilization with their mechanical cameras, not their heart. They’ll dance under stars with lightning. Tourists zoom around and leave. We came, we ate, we drank, we toured, we slept, and we left. Hail Caesar.

We skimmed west over the mighty Mekong, brown snake rivers, rice fields, strong lush green land, water and islands with southern mountains looming through low grey clouds. The baby plane soared, floated, turning north over the Tonle Sap Lake. It is the largest lake in Asia fed by water flowing from Tibet through China and Laos.

All the way down to the delta, said Gravity.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Visceral Realists

By Rita

We are in a small sleepy river town in southern Cambodia, said Rita. Faded yellow neglected French colonial buildings face a river, corroding iron bridges and green mountains.

A block long incomplete cement shell of a new market to revitalize neglected downtown failed. $70,000 start-up costs. Nada. No takers. It will never be built because of Fear & Superstition & Ghosts.

From 1975-1979 the Khmer Rouge hung severed heads along the walls to teach survivors Life Lesson #1.

Shut your mouth and blend in.

Survivors stir woks and sell the same thing. Boredom.

Don’t speak of gruesome true facts, said Leo, It reminds me of my Chinese atrocious atrocities, genocides, purges and 40 million peasants starving to death. Let them eat grass, bellowed Mao waving his little Red ideological book. Eat my red words comrade. Peasants stole copies from the Friendship Store. This makes great toilet paper, said the proletariat.

Kampot is famous for black pepper, which is nothing to sneeze at, said Rita. The Shakers live in Ohio. One minor quest of the literary outlaws is to get the pepper from Cambodia to Ohio. Buy land. Two buy sea. Water dilutes the effectiveness, taste and aroma. The pepper will need to be grinned down by hand. A Khmer laterite stone pestle and mortar is ideal. Most adults here are confused and sullen and apathetic breeding happy children, said Rita.

For good reason, said Tran. I know how it feels to be an abandoned ghost with a disability in double jeopardy. I’m laughing because I am a survivor … everything is fucking hysterical above ground. I lost my right leg when I stepped on a landmine playing in a field near my village south of Da Nang. I was five. I lost my family in the war. Maybe they died. Maybe they wandered away.

You never know.

The sleepy town, villages and country are famous for people experienced in Milling Around, said Rita. For cultural, historical, educational, environmental, emotional, intellectual and economic reasons milling around is a popular daily activity.

This unpleasant fact cannot be denied or ignored or forgotten like Tran’s missing leg. It needs to be up front because it is a clear immediate fact and way of life.

Limited job opportunities, substandard education, lack of medicine, faint hope and inconclusive futures enhance Milling Around.

It kills time alleviating boredom, the dreaded lethargic tedious disease. Milling Around kills the human spirit. No Initiative. Period. How sweet. How charming. It’ll take another generation to clean it up with high hopes. Cambodia is alive with ghosts.

Zeynep, Rita, Tran, Devina, Leo and Omar are invisible ghosts feeling comfortable with energies, vibrations and frequencies. They are floating experiences.

Immediate and direct, said Zeynep. I am western on the outside and eastern on the inside, a chameleon and a prescient systems analyst.

This is a talk-story.

Impermanence and non-attachment is reality. Movement is my mistress and my meditation. WE are here to go. The deeper the silence means deeper the bliss.

I am the music between the notes. I am the silence between hammer and anvil music. I am the poetry between the lines.

I became my ghost-self in 1970 after 364 days in never-never land, leaving Vietnam in one coherent piece, said a reliable narrator. Where I met Tran in a hospital. He taught me courage. After a war everything is easy.

Z: As a writer and artist I bear witness revealing my imaginary sense data using a Mont Blanc 149 piston driven fountain pen, Moleskine notebooks, watercolors, brushes, and cameras. I won’t go into the technical details about the optical equipment.

I am two cameras said Rita. Kinds?

I am a sweet little Leica D-Lux 6. I am a bulky Nikon D-200 with a 35mm 1.4 lens. Ya gotta Leica the Leica. Play sounds. It’s small with excellent optics. Black with a cool little red circle on the front. Small and powerful like me. One for my left eye and one for my right eye. Dual dynamic visual acuity.

How do we interpret visual sensation? I am chained to the earth to pay for the freedom of my eyes, said Omar the blind seer.

Begin with a telescope then use opera glasses then a microscope.

I am a prime lens, said Z. From the spotlight to the floodlight and back to the spotlight.

I am the truth of your imagination, said Leo.

I am synesthesia personified possessing the ability to hear colors and see sounds, said Tran.

I may grow old, but I will never grow up, said Rita. She shared a story about Cambodia. The kingdom has a long violent history. Remember the Killing Fields, S-21 high school prison, and genocide with 1.7 million people killed, slaughtered, raped, mutilated, gone, erased. Year ZERO. Can you wrap your mind around that factoid?

It was a third of the total population. People don’t talk about it because they are super superstitious. Survivors live with the cold hard unpleasant fact. Old people are rare. It is curious. It’s 2023 in the long now.

Writer: After writing and editing The Language Company in Kampot for five months I moved to Battenbang for three months. A Khmer boy in a Battenbang java & tea joint said the reason everyone stares at me is because all my generation was killed. They see you as a ghost, he said.

I am Happy Ghost.

I am surrounded by happy, laughing, curious, kind, childlike, grateful and beatific humans. Comedic. Sweet. How simple life is. How monosyllabic.

Yeah, yeah. Let’s dance, said a survivor.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

welcome to the freak show

Write about that unpleasant fact, said the agent. Literate types want something to read while stranded in a foreign airport when an Icelandic Norse goddess volcano explodes creating a huge swirling cloud of ash complicating their mundane superficial lives with anxiety. Pass me some Xanax please. Life happens where sheep feel anxiety as a subterranean level of FEAR.

Travel isn’t fun. It’s an adventure.

Many humans love living in the past filled with regret being exhausted by their monkey mind where it is very comfortable … They absorb static or moving pictures to escape their terminal condition needing electronic reality and soft machine material…They burn out brain cells staring at little screaming screens … Cheap effective pervasive advertising permeates their consciousness speaking of Faust and making a deal … Dying is a grim comic business. It’s messy. It’s more expensive than anger.

There’s nothing more expensive than poverty.

Ask Grave Digger about plot development, said Rita. Humans suffer from monkey mind. They regret genocides and fear the future. Not me! Why me? The ego loves the CIRCUS of daily distractions … it wears them down … they become lethargic, depressed, suicidal, lazy and so on… lazy people never kill themselves.

They die of boredom, alienation, loneliness and neglect.

Fate and Death conversed, I’m a funny thing, said Fate.

Yes, you are said Death.

Healthy individuals respect the monkey mind. They are present now. They meditate. They are patient, understanding, tolerant and kind. Sheep don’t read and are lazy to face their fears with courage and honesty to learn their truths. Brave ones ask why exploring flow with their microscopic pure energy … A bag of bones … Atoms … WE are pure light.

Everything is energy, frequency and vibrations.

Many are not cosmologically or ontologically or evolutionarily engaged in how the world works on a sub-atomic level. They want fast food and a remote to operate their 46-inch plasma screen with 500 channels … They eat their phone … They enjoy simple stories with simple characters, a hero and a quest … They want happy endings like orgasms. Got it?

Keep it simple stupid. KISS. Experiment with dirty realism. Give me the surface. Be a witness. Throw in some absurd human activities.

Don’t write about what you know.

Write about what you need to know, write to find out.

The role of the writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say. - Anis Nin

Write to discover a new universe, a new skin, a new lover, an old idea with shiny tin foil packaging like a love sock named OK condom. Write about a decisive moment, like the condemned guy stepping around a puddle on his way to the gallows in Burma.

The Savage Detectives by Bolano is about poets searching for a lost Chilean poet in Europe, another quest to consider. Don’t take it too seriously. Everyone dies in the end, one more unpleasant fact about publishing and life. My tedious job is to accept or reject manuscripts. In the food chain I market it to a publisher.

Publishers have editors who read the work. Editors leave or die laughing. New editors read the work. Maybe the first editor helped us. Maybe a new editor thinks its garbage needing a major rewrite, revisions, deductions and electromagnetic fluctuations.

If so, a narrative HOOK leaves the author in the brothel-publishing graveyard, got it?

Yes, said Zeynep. Does that mean or imply you’re really a publishing prostitute with no values, morals or principles?

It’s all about money honey, said agent XYZ, And eyeballs … everything has a price, a user and exchange value in the world market of ideas, weapons, drugs, and humans…don’t give me any philosophical arguments.

You’ve been very helpful. What a great saga, said Zeynep. Now let my storyteller friends and an omniscient blind scripter show the tale.

Yes. It’s all yours. I have one question, said lick clit lit agent, how long have you been here?

All fucking day said Zeynep. Here’s your ticket to the greatest freak show on Earth.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged