Video from Remy a French “transduction” of this: Text
And at that moment,he stood in front of a chrome and brass and glass glittering box of a store, where the innards of a working watch violently spinning and ticking and winding down in gear shapes of industry and fibonacci spiral arcs of subatomic particles smashed in large hadron acclerators, were digitally projected onto a circular screen (like something he’d seen at a Pink Floyd show, but smaller). The twenty four jeweled watch movement mesmerized him like the proverbial hypnotist’s version swinging on a pedulum. ThisVietnam watch he watched was in turning turns surveiled by an intricately small and delicate video camera with an equally small and delicate Zeiss lens like a jewel watching the movement jewels in refraction of reflections now sparkling before him like the stars you see before fainting and his mind became unmored in time and space and he was back in Vietnam: a place he’d never been and he was a woman and he was a woman with a bicycle. It had been given to her in the North, yolked with Rocket Propelled Grenades and Claymore mines and she had left her village and her children in the South with their grandparents and the husband was either fighting in the war, or somewhere gambling and whoring and being drunk and she didn’t know which, but he was not there to help and she had mouths to feed and she had no options, or didn’t see any others and she’d get to keep the bicycle which was a great luxury and would provide steady and safer work in the city, if only she could get the munitions down from the green hills along the trail and through the jungle. When she was near the border, they heard the small plane like a mosquito buzzing off in the distance and swooping down at the canopy for a closer look and like a mosquito they learned to ignore it, but it was always there trying to sting them.
When the B-52’s came, they didn’t hear them at all. They heard the bombs. They rolled towards them like thunder down a mountain side. She closed her eyes and got under the bicycle and then she realized the bicycle was like a bomb itself with all the explosives she’d been transporting. All around her was the fire and the noise and then she was deaf and then it was just fire and the heat and the trees flying around her like dust and the blood now and the people passing by in a daze some without arms, or bleeding from great, burnt headwounds. Somehow in the distance she spotted a small shrine and got out from under the laden bicycle and began to crawl, like she’d seen the soldiers practice: on her belly. She went towards the buddha. There was no shelter asside from a small pitched roof protecting the statue, but she fealt that if she could reach the foot of the statue, she would be safe. The moment that the Buddha’s foot (or rather the representation of the Buddha’s foot in the form of the foot of the statue) came into her mind, a cannister from a cluster bomb detonated somewhere above her right calf – tearing her whole foot and ankle away from her body in a furious wet, red flash.
It was like the Americans were mocking her … like a child toying with a frog – wacking it with a stick… watching it struggle before killing it with a large rock, but she was alive now and could still crawl and the bomb run was nearly over and she did crawl over the dead body of another woman and the arm and half the head of an old man and when she was inches from the statue reaching upwards to the oranges and incense that had been placed there by other travelers along path, the cruel child’s great stone fell from the belly of last plane upon her and she was no more… or rather, she was him in another time and another place and in the exact moment of being born and falling out of the belly and crying out without words…. again and again… encore fois et encore fois: there there, there there baby.
He made a breathing in noise and stood staring at the watch and said,”I’ve just had the strangest vision.”
“It’s not a vision,” she said. “It’s a Patek Phillipe.”
“Hmmm,” he said. “Watch a vision.”
“You can’t afford it,” she said.
“Who can?” he asked, breathing deeply. “It all costs too much.”
“Let’s go.”
“My foot hurts. I need to sit down.”
“Only one foot? Which one? The gimpy one?” she asked, slyly mocking his one inward pointing foot.
“It’s not gimpy, ” he said. “It’s just not mine and it doesn’t fit right.”
“What’t that Ratso Rizzo?”
“I’ll explain later,” he said and they walked up the wide Swiss boulevard; she elegant and smooth as a Midnight Cowby and him with a slight Ratso shamble.
Book starts from Brian Raszka and yours truly for The Library