Early morning, ornamented like orange-black butterfly wings, filtered in the small window and urged us toward action. The monks looked resplendent in their robes. Chan wore a black shirt with a circle in the center and the words You Know. Despite what happened, she somehow retained her dignity and handbag. Although there was a soft lamp nearby, Monk Bee lit a candle.
“You’re brave monks,” I said. “I owe you—”
“Nothing,” said Monk Arun.
Chan sat next to me on a sunken bamboo chair. As Bee focused on the candle, Arun looked at my travel book. “Okay, my friends. You must go,” Arun announced; “You are butterflies.”
“I want to be a monk,” I said.
Arun said, “You eat too much, and I don’t know how safe you are. We can’t be here all the time — also against rules. I also visited the embassy. The man said you get out of country.”
“I want to call my parents,” said Chan.
“We don’t know what it’s about,” I said; “Don’t get them involved.”
Arun sat down with a book of chants in hand. “When people have darkness, they need time to change,” said Arun. “Doesn’t mean they are evil forever. Is this not right, Sam?“
“Just evil now,” I said. “Do they belong to a gang?”
“No way to know that.”
“Who is your cousin, what happened?” I asked.
“Don’t forget we have a complicated history,” added Bee. “There are guns here. People can be negative.”
A young novice brought us tea. Someone said the novice had arrived from Myanmar. A few butterflies suddenly fluttered in the room, like ambassadors from a distant land. I didn’t have any answers, just fear. How did we get into this, and how do we get out? I’d read in travel books to stay away from untrodden paths and other dangerous zones, that millions of mines lay buried. Chan’s cousin was a giant landmine. From which layer of history did he arise?
We sipped tea and stared at each other, communicating with eyes.
After a few minutes, Chan said, “I met him a few times — but my family is not close to them. They moved away. Father told me: stay away from him. Not good.”
“What happened to him – drugs, gangs, war?” I asked.
Bee stared at the candle, then sipped tea, “Perhaps all of that. Are you ok?”
“When this is cleared up, I will be back here to lead the monastery,” I said.
“That’s my job,” Bee replied.
Arun stared at Bee, and we laughed. But when I crossed my arms, I felt the currents of a cold universe. I turned to Chan: “Is your family safe or not?”
She paused, “Yes. It’s you they want.”
“Hey, cool that dragon. Me?” I dug my fingers into my ribs.
“Forget it, Sam,” she replied; “Stop.”
“I have to know more.”
“Second cousin had a bad life, father said. Something happened to him when he was young; he was bad after that. There aren’t answers for everything.”
“He has a name?”
“He does,” she said, “Bong.”
“Bong?”
“Bong!”
Arun closed his eyes, as if searching for the correct answer among dozens of them. I nodded distantly, forlornly, knowing this storm could not be stopped, that if it did not engulf us, it would turn elsewhere. This was language my friends would not appreciate, but it amounted to what they called ignorance or samsara, the world we’re stuck in. The monks both yawned in exhaustion. “Arun,” I asked, “Did anyone tell you what happened to him? If we understood we’d have more to go on, to predict.”
“He got involved with bad people and makes money by not working. A criminal,” she said. “It’s not necessary to be a philosopher. Let’s leave.”
“I just want to—”
She screamed at me in Khmer. It startled me, though it seemed as if someone else was screaming. My head – my ears and eyes and mouth — opened. I looked at her messy mop of hair. Then, I shut off from her. I flattened out on the couch looking at the ceiling. No one said anything for a while, and the monks sat in silence, perhaps meditating. As a student of history, she believed that good times were brief, always interrupted by danger and torture, war and murder, the end of empire. In the centuries after the demise of the Angkor Empire, her country was besieged by invaders who squeezed its borders, until it reached its present contours.
“Chan, sok sa- bai jee-a dtay?” said Arun, with a determined smile. “Let me say more, okay. Please do not yell at him. He only wants the truth, the story.”
“What story?”
The candle flickered as if signaling an arrival or departure. Arun offered us more tea. “I am told Bong he was a happy child and loved to be in running races and kick a ball,” Arun said, yawning. “He also was a good novice. At temple, like this one. When the Khmer Rouge came, he and others were imprisoned and tortured, many killed. He didn’t get killed, only his goodness.”
Arun stroked what was left of his dark hair, which was like a shoe brush. I was out of words. Nothing; and had goose bumps and blinking eyes. Chan stared into the underworld of emotions.
“He was harmed?” I asked. “How old was he?”
“A child,” Arun said, closing his eyes.
Chan covered her eyes, I shuddered. For all that Bong had done, it was insubstantial compared to harming a child. If Bong had died, the family could remember him as a happy novice, and gain merit. Instead, he was alive and detestable, floating in darkness, and it is said that a wounded lion is more dangerous than a healthy one.
“I remember him,” Arun announced, then turned his face. “Maybe.”
“You do? Were you a monk then?” I asked.
“A novice. When the Khmer Rouge came to our village, I had to join. Families were split up. People from the former government and teachers and people who knew foreign languages — they vanished. I was a boy — older than Bong.”
“You joined them?” Chan asked sharply.
“Please,” Bee responded.
I took a gulp of sadness and despair. Tears joined rage in Chan’s eyes. Without rage, she couldn’t go on and it became her identity, her innocence. Arun, fingers holding up his head, eyes blinking, whispered, “If we didn’t, then we would be killed. I didn’t harm your cousin.”
“You must remember what happened,” she coaxed him.
“There were many.”
“Not you,” she said. Arun looked at me. He looked everywhere but at her. I died at this exposure. I looked for words that softened his fate, his forced inhumanity, but no such words existed. I could not think of him as I had before. That spell of innocence broke. He transformed from the heroic pedestal to the witness stand of history.
Otherwise, I admired him more than anyone. He transcended the quandaries that others fumbled with or used for amusement. He was not cynical. He did not see life as a game. With him, ideas became real, to be turned into right action, to be achieved, if they were worth anything. He showed you the joke of the ego, that circus, that siren’s call. He showed how fear was an illusion.
Chan was full of tears. We looked at her. There was nothing to say, no consoling. This was too big for words. Yet there lurked an invisible presence in the room, Pol Pot — the death’s head. He was often lurking behind people and events, behind new money, behind the blown-off arms and legs, the emptiness that filled empty chairs. It was said Pol Pot had a bright smile and never showed anger. Even his family members were tortured and killed, not ever realizing the identity of the man behind the curtain, the great leader.
We took a break from each other and drank tea and made ourselves comfortable in the crushing heat. A stray dog strolled by. Bee gave him some food. Finally, Arun said, “I am a monk. If anything like that happened again, I would fight or choose death. I avoided harming others and hid some people and gave rice to others. But when guns – what could I do? They’d kill my family too. Chan, would you see your family clubbed to death in front of you?”
“Life is always changing,” Bee said to Arun, grabbing his arm, but he was speaking to us. “You are best monk.”
“Arun you are a great person and monk,” Rachany said. I agreed.
Each day, the Killing Fields destroyed Arun – only to be renewed by right living, a continuing cycle. Chan was in a corner by herself, unreachable. She must have felt sorry for second cousin Bong: he represented all the unseen people who had died but, unlike Arun, could not return to innocence. Bong’s second life was as a dealer in darkness.
***
Arun and Bee asked us to walk with them, to meet up with another monk. We went up the stairs into a room with an old refrigerator and various computers. Baskets filled with computer gadgetry and candles hung from the ceiling. Through the window we could see the main shrine and the Bodhi Tree.
“This is Computer Monk,” said Arun; “That’s Chan. That’s Sam. He’s from Pennsylvania. That’s USA.”
Computer Monk smiled and bowed. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, but what should I call you?” I asked.
“A long name,” he said; “Just Computer Monk.”
Computer Monk was round and had the habit of touching his smooth head. He knew everything that was going on but acted as if we were merely traveling. He didn’t speak much English, yet we communicated and he told us about his hometown where his dad was mayor and owned rice fields and a cell phone business. The other monks said that Computer Monk could fix anything, “just like Mr. Spock.”
“Happiness to you,” said Computer Monk, handing us a printout of our escape route, including hotels and holy sites. At the top of the printout, it said Route of Escape.
“A million thanks to each of you. You saved us. We’ll be in touch as soon as we can,” I said, touching Chan’s shoulder; “Please tell her family she went on a retreat for good merit. No need to involve them. I won’t go back there either.”
Chan walked like a zombie, her hair fanning over downcast eyes. I pulled her along. We walked for a few minutes and then released a scream, like some possession ceremony. It was the voice of horror, of innocence vanquished. I conveyed her along. Poor girl, I thought — she can’t be reached.
I turned to look at the monks, seeing them through a drizzle of tears. Arun, Bee and Computer Monk bowed. A wheelbarrow with a clunky computer sat along the temple wall. I was not used to saving anyone or anything and felt doomed. Maybe the best thing would have been to fly from that region, but we didn’t do that. Maybe her family was in danger. Chan and I didn’t know each other enough to be in danger together, but it certainly forced us into a union of sorts.
As we passed through the red gates, the monks watched us. We hurried off; and on the corner, we hailed a tuk tuk. I imagine them still there, the caramel faces peering, wondering how to repair the broken mechanism that is life. That was the essence of their path: repairing the brain.
