In a Rocket Made of Ice

by Gail Gutradt

  The monks arrived and wrote the funeral inscriptions on a white cloth that they draped over Vannak’s face. Wayne had laid Vannak’s body on the bed in his fresh clothes, covered by a thin sheet. They spread a towel with blue flowers over his face and upper body and tucked in the edges. The bundle was slender, almost too tiny to have been a man. We were all kneeling on the white-and-green linoleum floor of the hospice, crouching in the narrow spaces between the iron bed frames. Wayne knelt with his hands in prayer. Four monks in saffron robes sat on chairs next to Vannak’s bed, chanting prayers. It was a scene Wayne had participated in hundreds of times, a member of our family dead of AIDS. But this time something felt different.

  Sama sam poot …The monks began to chant the invocation.

  Wayne heard a voice inside his head whispering, Take a photo.

  Namo Tassa…

  Hail the Fortunate One…

  Take a photo.

  Bhagavato…

  Freed from suffering…

  Take … a…photo.

  Arahato…

  Fully enlightened…

  Take … a…photo … NOW!

  At first he ignored the voice; to stand up and climb over the praying family would be disrespectful and create a disturbance at a sacred moment. But the feeling would not go away. Finally, to quiet the insistent voice inside his head, Wayne struggled up from where he was kneeling, walked to his office, retrieved his small digital camera and took a single photograph from the back of the room. Then he knelt and laid the camera beside him and continued to pray.

  After the cremation, Wayne got busy with the children and medicines and the evening’s chores. It was not until the next morning that he remembered to look at the photograph. There, hovering over Vannak’s face, was a perfect, translucent ball of light. Wayne loaded the image into his computer and examined it close up. The orb was lovely, opalescent, with clearly defined edges. You could just make out details of the room through it, the flowered towel, the white iron bedpost. The orb looked to be four or five inches in diameter. It was delicately poised above Vannak’s third eye.

  Wayne had never seen such a thing. Andrew was puzzled, but his technical background told him it might only be a reflection. Wayne emailed the image to a number of friends who were photographers or computer experts. He also sent it to a minister he knew who had been his spiritual adviser. Then Andrew and Wayne photographed the room at the same hour, in the same light, from the same spot, but there was nothing unusual about the pictures. Wayne searched the Internet and discovered 3.8 million sites about orbs. He spent a long night reading. People spoke of orbs as specks of dust or aliens or wandering spirits. He looked at scores of photos of orbs, but he found none as precisely placed as the pretty pearl of light floating above Vannak’s forehead.

  Over the next few days, answers from his technical friends started coming in. They fell into two categories. One group said it absolutely had to be some sort of light reflection or dust in the air or on the lens, and explained how that might have happened. The other group sent technical explanations of why it could not possibly be either of those, but said they had no idea what else it might be. The minister sent Wayne a stern warning “not to go ascribing any spiritual significance to this thing.”

  We asked the children what they thought. Dara looked at Wayne and then at me with the sort of look only a twelve-year-old can give a clueless adult, and said simply, “pralung,” the Khmer word for soul.

  Over the next weeks, Wayne and Andrew began taking more photographs at night, and suddenly there were orbs everywhere. After dinner, before the generator went on, or after evening clinic, I’d see cameras flashing like fireflies in the dark, and hear the children’s excited exclamations as their shadows clustered about the glowing LCD screens. Then they would run off in all directions, laughing and calling in the darkness.

  Sometimes there were no orbs to be seen, but in a second photo taken a moment later, hundreds would mysteriously appear. Some seemed to be only dust stirred up by the children’s feet, or insects swarming in the flash. Others were simply odd. A few reappeared night after night in significant places, such as inside the family room in the crematorium, as if keeping company with the living and the dead. One single orb was a frequent visitor outside the children’s sleeping porch late at night, after the youngest ones had gone to bed. The children loved this treasure hunt and would pore over the images on the computer, pointing and arguing the fine points like a convention of tiny taxonomists. They got excited over the occasional anomaly, like a candy-apple-red sphere, or one that appeared to have been caught in the process of hatching into a white flame.

  About this time, on a weekend trip to Phnom Penh, I discovered a book called Calling the Souls: A Cambodian Ritual Text, published by Reyum in 2005. The author, anthropologist and Cambodia scholar Ashley Thompson, translated an epic poem still recited today as part of a traditional healing ceremony. She described the Khmer concept of the soul, the pralung, as a fragile confederation of nineteen separate elements, prone to fracturing at times of physical or emotional stress, or during vulnerable periods of passage, such as puberty, marriage, the ordination of a monk, old age or even a momentary shock such as tripping on the stairs. Parts of the soul can break away and are believed to wander off, lured by demons and spirits into dark and dangerous lands, veiled by illusion. Times of malaise or vague unexplained illness might call for a ceremony where a healer leads villagers into the forest to retrieve fragments of the wandering pralung. The verses are moving and tender, reassuring the beloved soul that it will be welcomed home with good food and a soft pillow, that no one is angry, and warning of frightful animals and innumerable cruel spirits that lurk just beyond the safe community and loving home.

  If the idea of a fragmenting soul strikes many Westerners as an odd notion, think first of the vestiges in our own language, or of our own rituals designed to ensure the integrity of the spirit. They are so much a part of us, we use them without conscious thought, such as when we bless someone who sneezes to guard against the going out or coming in of spirits. We speak of being beside ourselves with worry, feeling scattered, jumping out of our skin when shocked, going all to pieces, having an out-of-body experience, and we talk about the split personalities of people suffering from schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.

  Wayne’s office manager told me that her parents had once called an old woman from the village to perform the ritual for her. She was a young woman then, and had been feeling weak and uninterested in life. Afterward she felt much better. I do not know whether any of the Wat Opot children have experienced this ritual, and I do not mean to draw a direct comparison between their searching for the souls of the dead and the calling of the soul as a healing ritual. Yet there seems to me to be a resonance. In a culture where one can go into the forest with a fishing basket to call back wandering bits of soul, it might not seem odd or unusual at all for the children to go abroad at night searching for spirits with a camera.

  On one dark night, Wayne and the children went looking for orbs. They had not seen any for several nights. It was getting late, and they were about to give up. Someone suggested going to Chhang’s Place to see if they could call up the spirit of Mister Chhang, a little boy who had died. Wayne told me that he and Chhang had been very close, and that when the child died in his arms, Wayne saw his spirit fly out from his eyes and felt Chhang’s soul pass through his own body.

  A small open-air dining pavilion was dedicated to the memory of Mister Chhang, and his framed and matted portrait still hangs on the wall. On the front of the building a local artist painted a flowering bougainvillea tree and the words “Chhang’s Place.” It is very beautiful, with blossoms of several colors on one tree like a real bougainvillea, but the children were not satisfied with the painting. “This is Chhang’s Place?” they demanded. “But where Meestah Chhang?” The artist thought for a moment and then painted a beautiful bird with a flowing tail, flying up from the flowers toward heaven. The children were happy
to have that image of their friend’s spirit painted on his house.

  The children ran toward the dining pavilion laughing and calling, “Meestah Chhang! Meestah Chhang!” Wayne said he would take one final photograph, and then it was off to bed for everyone. He aimed his camera at Chhang’s photo, snapped the picture, and the children swarmed around to look at the screen. They gasped and exclaimed. There, just above Mister Chhang’s portrait, was an orb, traveling from left to right, with a long tail like a comet. The children were delighted. And Wayne? As with the orb that floated over Vannak’s face, he is moved to marvel at the perfection of the moment, and to keep an open mind.

  Back home in America, in the cold reality of a Maine winter, I examine the photographs again. It is easy to get lost in theories, yet it seems to me there is a more important question than whether the orbs are dust or bugs or whether a few of them might actually be spirits. What are the children really searching for when they venture abroad at night with cameras, looking for the souls of the dead?

  In some ways, the children’s search for souls is much the same as their nocturnal hunt for frogs. Instead of running around with little bamboo traps, they carry digital cameras. Watching them, I sense no terrified titillation, no fear of ghosts. Any adult worth his salt remembers clearly that it’s a blast to run around in the dark long after his bedtime, whispering and giggling.

  But here is the difference: these children have lost, or in most cases been denied, their birthright, to grow up safe and cherished in the family of their birth. AIDS has robbed them of their loving parents, of siblings and close friends. They may have been disowned by their villages, passed along by grandparents or siblings, uncles and aunts too poor or too frightened or just unwilling to invest scarce resources in taking care of children who may never be anything but a burden. So at night, when they go hunting for the souls of their loved ones, maybe it is just plain comforting for them to believe that the spirits of their brothers and sisters, friends and parents, choose to stay close in the dark night, watching over them and loving them and keeping them safe. Perhaps they are creating their own meaning, in a ritual of reassurance.

  In the spring of 2008, as I was preparing to make reservations for a return trip to Wat Opot, I was diagnosed with cancer, a mirror of my mother’s illness. I had found a lump in my breast in April, and in the next few weeks there were mammograms and a biopsy, both inconclusive. I lay in the bathtub one day, worrying about the second biopsy. My own mother had died of cancer, and I had spent her last year taking care of her. I knew what a slow death from cancer looks like. Soaking now in hot water I looked down on my own body. I felt small and frightened and alone.

  When I told Wayne he wrote, “You join a new family now of people often avoided because of the uncomfortable feeling that others get when they think it could happen to them.”

  Wayne told the children I was not coming back that winter. They were curious; they didn’t even know what cancer was. In their world people rarely live long enough to develop diseases like that. I sent a photo of me without hair. At first the children did not recognize me. Then they laughed and told Wayne I looked very enlightened, probably because monks and nuns in Cambodia shave their heads. Pesei wondered whether we had good doctors where I live. Wayne told me that after they found out the children dedicated their weekly meditation to me.

  In the days that followed I often pictured what it would be like to return once more to Wat Opot, to Wayne and the children. I came to hope that the crucible of my illness would help me remake myself into someone more understanding, more compassionate, more loving. I prayed I would no longer avoid the very ill or dying out of fear of making a mistake or saying the wrong thing. During many long nights I dreamed that through this illness I would finally be able to cross the chasm that divided me from the children, and that we might go on, all of us together, somewhere beyond hope and fear.

  32

  How It Was

  Chemotherapy, radiation, the works. Poisoned dreams in a perpetual twilight. Tedious waking hours tinged by nausea. It would be three years before I could return to Wat Opot.

  How sweet it would be to arrive all dusty from the tuk-tuk ride and see those kids! Alone in my room in Maine, I savored every moment of my imaginary journey: how I would ride past village markets, past women selling coconuts and soda bottles filled with gasoline, past beaded curtains of red sausages dangling from frames by the side of the road. Motos with whole families on them. Wicker baskets crowded with live piglets, their pink flesh bulging in hexagonal tesserae. Clusters of ducks and chickens strung upside down from poles like living epaulets. Skinny moto drivers with their baseball caps pulled down to shade their eyes from the battering sun.

  I conjured minivan taxis so crammed with packages and bodies that you could see no light through the windows, and crowded buckboards carrying workers to the fields and factories, and big smelly buses and the giant SUVs of the NGOs and UNICEF, all honking and passing each other, and passing the passers in the insane life-and-death bumper-car boogie that is traffic in Cambodia, and I wanted to go back.

  Finally I pictured my tuk-tuk turning from that paved chaos and riding the last half mile down the dirt road through Ants-in-a-Line Village, and dogs barking and shying away, and children waving, and chickens rising up, each stirring its own tiny dust devil.

  Abruptly the dream snapped shut. Something in me decided that homecoming could never be as I imagined, not at all like my idyllic vision of reunion. Surely I had been away too long, and the children’s memory of me had faded by now. Many of the children I knew had gone: Miss Raksmai and Baby Cheab had both been adopted to Australia; and Miss Chan Tevy, whose uncle had finally allowed her to come home, would not come running to demand double helpings of cookies and shampoo. Miss Malis lived in the village now with her grandmother, and Samphos and Sophea, two little brothers whose father was finally well enough to take care of them, were also living at home now. Miss Yanni had not been getting along with her stepmother and had gone to live with relatives. Most of the weavers had moved on, and lovely Lan Tip, with her broad sweet face, and other children whose names I never did learn. Mister Bott, builder of wondrous singing kites, had gone to live with his father, and Dara and Rajana wanted to be monks and were living at the wat. Sovann and his brothers were at the university in Phnom Penh. And of course Mister Vantha, who was still living with the people who had bought him from his mother. And Baby Mai, whose death left a hole in our hearts.

  No, I was sure it could be nothing like I had imagined.

  I flew to Bangkok and on to Phnom Penh. The Golden Gate Hotel was as I left it, with the same tuk-tuk drivers lounging outside, eager for fares. “Opot! Opot!” They greeted me as if I had never been away. I went to Lucky Supermarket to buy treats for the kids, wavered between oatmeal cookies and less healthy forms of sugar, bought both and piled into my tuk-tuk for the trip to Wat Opot.

  It was almost dinnertime when we reached the narrow driveway. We turned into the parking area and the low sun was in my eyes. We stirred up a cloud of dust when we stopped and it glittered in the late-afternoon light. For a moment we were all alone, and when the driver turned off the little two-stroke engine the rattle of the last two hours settled with the slow golden dust.

  But the children had heard the sound of the engine and ran to see who had come, and soon there was a crowd. Some I knew at once. Ouen and Kosal and Mister Heng I saw first, still skinny but much taller, and Sampeah smiling with his front teeth grown in. “Is that you, Bopha? Srey Pich?” They had grown up so much that I had to look again to recognize the little girls they had been. Here came Pesei on his bicycle, handsome as a silent-film star with his new pencil mustache. Little Kiri, whose mother still chopped her hair ragged with a razor blade. She looked like a very small Joan of Arc ready for the stake. Rithy was first to scramble up into the tuk-tuk. He climbed into my lap and squeezed me with one of his long melting hugs, and then the tuk-tuk was all little arms and excited faces and hugs and reac
hing hands and little bare feet, and the driver just standing there grinning at the spectacle. Over to one side two new boys who didn’t know me stood there staring, wondering what all the fuss was about.

  The kids unloaded the tuk-tuk. A couple of bigger boys carried my luggage and the little ones stumbled on with the bags from Lucky Supermarket so they could be first to peek and see what treats I had brought, and the other children crowded round and grabbed my hands as we walked toward the office to find Mr. Wayne.

  33

  Return to Wat Opot

  Wayne and I sat in the big gazebo in the middle of campus. It was new since my last visit and serves as a patio, study hall, reception area for visitors and shady breezeway. Miss Punlok and Srey Pich napped, curled up together on the generous cushion of a papasan chair. Sokun, a new little boy, wriggled in and out of Wayne’s lap, never sitting still for more than a moment.

  Wayne looked relaxed and at ease. We sat for hours, enjoying our friendship and talking about the changes at Wat Opot. One of the volunteers, a young woman from Taiwan, had brought a group of businessmen for a visit from the Taiwanese Lion’s Club in Phnom Penh. They had been so impressed that they had raised money and descended on Wat Opot with an architect and builders and earth movers. Soon there was a new dormitory for the children. There were two wings with separate sleeping quarters and bathrooms for boys and girls, and in the center an office for Wayne and a generous common space. The dorm rooms were broad and airy, with high ceilings and a long raised wooden platform on each side. During the day the children used the platforms to play and study, and at night they rolled out their sleeping mats and hung their mosquito nets, and the platform became one huge bed.