It’s late afternoon and I’m on the bus for another long series of hours: beautiful, sleepy, mesmerizing. Every bus ride is different. Every day is different on the road. Riding through fields of grass and pink skies screaming across the sky until it becomes a vision of eternal stillness, the shallow waters that glow with lily pads, purple-blue lotuses standing in the breeze, trembling in a place where so many have died. These aren’t the foothills of Laos, covered with twisting mountain roads and elevated vistas and dense vegetation. The army chose to bomb that country into oblivion — the price of neutrality in a war where no one gets to choose what side they’re on. They’re given a weapon and a choice to fight or run. To run is to get shot in the back. To fight is to feel the bayonet. Choose one. We’re on a flat basin where there is nowhere left to hide; the Mekong floods for months at a time. You live with pant legs high and feet open to leeches always trying, trying, trying. The flat expanse of earth is without division or variation in slope or altitude. You are at the bottom of the world. You were looking for it; this is it. There is nowhere deeper to go. Only green stretches of indica and sativa and memories of rice trapped in sky beneath the distance of holiness and a raindrop, which becomes a bud, the buds, which become pearls, a steaming bamboo bowl and a face giving grace before his or her god. Beyond the palms leaning on the horizon, like thin blue poles, the sunlight besets upon our bus a silhouette, with the luminescence of a grapefruit and the soft blue formation of shadows where one may hallucinate hills among the silhouettes of mirages, of mountains in the distance, whereupon sit temples that aren’t there, a city that no longer is, but in the echo-chamber infinite, burning stars.
