Even God is Lonely
Every Buddhist temple has a room for rebirth.
Marked by sharp chiascuro Ely squatted at the angle where wall met the floor, at the penumbra of the light and shadow. Inside a charnel house of memory he floated on borrowed spirit, susurrating softness. All around him, photographs of the dead. Black and white ghosts lurking in the gloom. Light spears thrown by Gautama struck terracotta tiles through skylights. They burned onto the retina. Incense rose in slow pirouettes, moving upwards toward the roof. The rich, heavy smell. Outside, the sun. Burning under doors, restless behind shutters. Every possible possible entrance daubed with light. The house of rebirth; cool waiting room for the soul.
And every minute the sound of the gong.
An old man, bald, in chocolate coloured robes sat behind it with tamped mallet. Counting down to zero.
From where he sat Ely could sense the vast continental splash of sun beyond. Outside. Up and outside for a moment. Bamboo canes against the mustard glow of exterior walls. Beside those an exhausted jasmine bush, with a single flower. Enduring. Brown and losing its battle. Kiệt sức. Exhausted. He closed his eyes.
Gong.
When Ely looked next the jasmine flower had fallen to stone tiles beneath. Overhead the implacable sun roiled away. Broiling the surface. Connecting with the deep.
Flower seller at the pagoda gate. Beyond it the street. At the limit of his vision on the duong’s far side a dog butcher. The de-furred hind quarters of a dog hung in the mouth of that shop. A barely perceived shiver in him. The Chinese border a stone’s throw. Far from home now. Destiny’s wind had died. Left him there.
Difficult to think. In this heat.
‘Can’t seem to get it together.’ He spoke aloud. Incense pirouetted ever upward. Receding memory trails of a distant ex-wife’s flesh had left vestigial animal sadness. A heaving. Pooled in a deep recess of his guts. Pool. Whirlpool. Slowing moving vortex of electro-chemical pulses. The quartered dog. The white jasmine flower.
Gong.
He stood up. An immense stiffness in his back, shuffled outside to the concrete benches they have in the east. From somewhere the whiff of distant, growing industry; the reek of sweat, toil, angst, mistreatment lay on the thermals. Small cruelties, unavailable leisure, too much beer.
One day he would break out of this heavy torpor into his future. For now there was only the Nguyet Hue and Jasmine here, fragrance dormant, their snow flowers cool in the midday heat.
Gong.
An announcement of nothing. Only a minute passing. A wisp of breeze brushed his face. Heat closed in again.
If you took a video camera to his face, reviewed the footage, you could see. There was something absent in him. He scratched at salt and pepper stubble on his chin. Muối tiêu. And still he stayed, in the burning sun, sweat oozing from his pores.
Ely carried a small pebble found on a river beach in the Bernese Oberland. He slipped it into his mouth. Money had not yet transferred. He at a tangent to life.
Gong.
The sun went behind an ink black cloud. It started raining. The first for six months. The kind of rain that you can see ahead but isn’t yet where you are. A miasmic wall of precipitation that you can watch until it arrives. And when it does the flame tree flowers fall to the asphalt under its powerful hand. The sky no longer blue but pitch. The wind thrashed the jasmine, the palms, the flame tree. All around the flowers fell. The world appeared black and white and silver. He knew everything was going to get worse before it got better.
Robert Karl Harding is a tea entrepreneur, writer of fiction and poetry, ex-schoolteacher, university lecturer and academic researcher, living in Saigon. Teablog: http://singingbirdsingingbird.blogspot.co.uk/
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