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THE WRITERS POST (ISSN: 1527-5467) VOLUME 7 NUMBER 2 JUL 2005
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THE SHOCK TO ROOT A Magical Fiction DANG
THAN
Having
sat still for 18 hours working by the computer with numerous branches of GDM
(Grand Dragon Multiplanetary) he feels his whole
body hot as an atomic station. If all of a sudden there was a string of water
pouring onto his head now, it would surely be sizzling into steam,
evaporating in a nick of time. Intending to stop his daily routine work, Adam
leaves the system. Right when standing up he has a feeling that he has
unplugged himself from a thousand kilovolt power source. Shocked into a daze
he walks with dragging feet to the window. It has turned dark already.
Natural wind! It must have been ages since he experienced this
difficult-to-describe sort of buoyant feeling when facing puff by puff of
natural wind. Ages but how many he knows not. Just simply because his
generation hasn’t experienced this kind of feeling. Probably it sprouts from
the sub-consciousness. He is on tenterhooks as if SOMETHING is stirring in
his bosom. It seems that his consciousness has sunk deep in wave after wave
of the unconsciousness. He is sunken in a chaotic and nebulous state like the
murky water. Infinite and endless… ... gives birth to One One... gives birth to Two Two... gives birth to Three Three... gives birth to Thousands
of... What! Is it?
It sounds unhuman. It seems voiceless. A micro-wave
message from the universe? Or from the bottom of my heart? It seems like the
sound of the root / the form of the origin. Vague. Appearing / Disappearing. * The whole
city is flooded in artificial multi-colored light. Fleets of aero taxis are
shuttling among sky-rise shelters of all forms: one like a funnel, the other
like a pillar against the sky, another – a concrete butterfly… But it is dark
around his home. A thought appearing in his brain turns on all the lights in
the garden, at once making a magnificent day-light evening. A somewhat-stinging sense arouses.
Hunger. The kind of feeling everyone nearly forgets. Coming from the
sub-consciousness? Having dinner alone he presses the keyboard for a
vegetarian diet just because it is the first day of the lunar month. It is so
strange that his small mouth swallows so fast as he
hasn’t dined this way before. Press after press, one, two, then
three rations. Four, five… Adam has a feeling that he is eating all the meals
for the sake of many a man. Well, that small twenty-first century belly wants
to swallow the whole world. Or is it as big as a world in there? A giant
snake-of-desire swallows and swallows as though it cannot fill to full. Hey you – snake! Are you existing for my sake or am I existing for yours?! * On the super
HD screen in his room there appears the latest news. He can hear the magical
voice of the Chairwoman General of the United Planets of which the Earth’s
United Nations is an active member: “…Have you ever by chance thought
of your origin? Where do we come from?”. “Where do you come from? You ought to know that in Greek ‘woman’ means ‘from
man’”, murmurs Adam. “We have conquered thousands of
worlds, crossed the universe, controlled the galaxy and discovered the
Infinite. We have been flying very fast outwards with hope that we will meet
the Truth one day and sit side by side with the Creator. We are eager to
investigate, discover and conquer; therefore, we have set up the empire of
the United Planets where I am your Chairwoman General. We have become the
Lords of the Universe, haven’t we? “Gentlecitizens!
I’ve got a question. Whoever you are - Earthian, Anusian or Russosour, Amerostein, Chinite or Nami. Whatever you are, toughcreatures!
Are you a cloned man, an ammoniac cloud being or a multisexual? Or you are black or blue, pale or purple...
The question is that if you’ve ever asked yourselves this question: we have
set foot into the universe billions of miles, but how far have we stepped
into our inner world? Is it so dark? Is it so vague? Or is it so rugged? Have
you ever perceived your own existence? Your root? Your future? That is to say
if you have discovered and conquered yourselves, the ‘Universe Minor’, in order
to understand why you are existing, striving for happiness and being painful…
Why do you have to keep sitting by the multimedia
for 10 to 18 hours everyday so as to turn your
precious bodies into battlefields in flame…” Adam rarely pays attention to her
speeches but now it is so different. “Replacing the Creator we have
created bodies and organs of all kinds. But dangerously, nobody can make a
Soul. That’s the dead end of the Mind of Reason. Who could escape this dead
end is mistakenly replacing Reason with Feeling, thus getting ‘ahead’ to
another dead end. So now Self Reflection should be the way for perceiving the
integrated bond of all beings for the sake of a Heaven - Humanity - Planet
Integration. Discover your root and go to your Mother…” * An hour of
upheaval has spread through his mind to the tiniest cells. Gnostic upheaval? Adam steps into the bedroom where
Eve is sleeping soundly right after the first yawn, bare
as the truth, naked as the root time. It is also a fashion of coming to the
root after centuries of colorful and multi-layered styles. She has just
returned from a vacation in Ha Long Bay. ‘The Ninth Wonder’ has come to ‘the
Eighth Wonder’, making the planet more and more mysterious and marvelous. How
great the Creator is! Sea, sun and wind have blown away her anger, tiredness,
thirst and want. And the artificial fragrance of l’Urinet,
Eaux de Colonhue, and
etc. as well. This makes her more brilliant and smarter with the beauty of
simplicity and the natural smell emitting from her body. The smell that
caused his love-at-first-‘sigh’. Eve is now so attractive and beautiful that
she would make an old man who has been bed-ridden for years sit up. Suddenly Adam senses a strange
smell. From Eve’s body? Surely not. How can THIS come from THAT
sweet-smelling? THIS grows stronger and stronger. He cannot recognize what it
is. He decides to seek for help from B.B. (Bim Bee)
- an incredibly multifunctional computer. From the software of Windos (20)97 he gets the answer: the smell of clay. How
strange! Why clay? After long and hard trials in discovering her he supposes
that there is nothing to do with Eve he doesn’t understand at all but now… As
the ancestors’ saying goes, women are always mysterious. Consulting Bollix
(20)97 Multimedia Encyclopaedia he looks for the word Eve. The answer: Eve
n. (proper name) the first woman of the world. That’s all. He tries all
the 39,000 channels but finds no more information. Oh my God! The clay-like smell –
where is it from?… that emits from his Eve for whom
he strives and fights. “I gotta find out the truth
’bout ’er”, shouts loudly Adam in the dark. The
first… first… woman… of the world. Right, he’s got to find out the first
woman. Hurriedly he rushes to the garage where he keeps his T.T. (Timeless
Traveler) - the time machine. Wahoo! If that Valga
the Witch knew about this stupid machine she would laugh at it until it is
out of power. He gets into it, starts the machine and vanishes into thin
‘air’. A song sung by the kids is heard somewhere in the middle of nowhere… “ Remember the time when the hairs of the legs were
stubbly... How now turned out to
be bushy? Why still growing after being pulled
out? Where’s the root? Where’s the root... OUCH !... Oh, NOTE! Hanoi
1997 DANG THAN *
The Vietnamese version of this fiction
was published in People Weekly in
1999, The Hanoian
and Tien Ve in 2004,
The Mekong River and eVan in 2005. **
The ending song was published by the International Library of Poetry - Watermark
Press in the anthology “Eternal Portraits” in the US, 2004, & by Noblehouse Publisher in the anthology "Labour of the Heart" in the UK, 2004 The Writers Post &
literature-in-translation, founded
1999, based in the US. Editorial
note: Works
published in this issue are simultaneously published in the printed Wordbridge magazine (ISSN: 1540-1723). Copyright
© Dang Than
& The Writers Post 2005. Nothing in this
magazine may be downloaded, distributed, or reproduced without the permission
of the author/ translator/ artist/ The Writers Post/ and Wordbridge magazine. Creating links to place The Writers
Post or any of its pages within other framesets or in other documents is
copyright violation, and is not permitted.
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