Drunken Love by Que Son (red scrolls of magic .TXT) 📕

Shakespeare takes another drink and half the bottle is gone. He feels hungry. He has not eaten anything except a cold bagel this morning. But he has no appetite; and furthermore, he knows that if he eats, the effect of the alcohol will be lessened, while he wants to get as drunk and liberated as possible.

The woman in the black coat has turned the corner and disappeared. She would probably continue walking into the night, delirious, and would return home after midnight with her heart chopped and bloody, still without a solution to her problems, and she would crash on the sofa and fall asleep out of exhaustion, then the husband would come out and ask her to join him in bed but she would say please I want to be left alone, and the husband would be perplexed as to what has happened to his wife, she has not been herself for the last two months and would not disclose to him what has turned into her a walking dead. She is Eve.

Feeling cold, Shakespeare gets up and walks out of the park. It is now completely dark, and the streets are almost deserted. He sees lighted windows on both sides of the street and thinks it must be warm behind those windows. There may be loving and sexing going on, why do I not find a warm place to sit too, this cold air if exposed to too long may make me sick with pneumonia, Shakespeare thinks. So he walks to the nearest corner where there is a coffee shop. The shop has a back room hidden from view where people can sit, have coffee, and smoke, too. So he comes into the shop, buys a tea, walks to the back room and sits down. There are two other people in the room and they are looking at the tv in the corner. Shakespeare feels good, almost elated. He has no fear and anxiety now, and feels like talking but with whom is he going to talk and about what? What a ridiculous idea, he cannot just approach a stranger and start a conversation. However, if a friend happens to be with him right now, Shakespeare will pour his heart out since he feels such an overwhelming need to tell someone the sufferings he is going through. He feels terrible when he thinks it is so difficult to permanently reunite Adam and Eve. It is only creative pain, the pain and frustration a writer feels when he confronts an impasse. But it is pain, nonetheless.

It is warm in the coffee shop. Shakespeare removes his coat, taking care not to make noises with the vodka bottle that he has in the coat's inside pocket when he hangs the coat on the back of the chair. He takes a sip of the hot tea then slides his slim frame slowly forward until his head rests on the top of the back of the chair and his eyes see the ceiling. He feels relaxed and well. Thoughts of Adam and Eve come back into his head. Images of their life in Viet Nam when they first met begin to form in Shakespeare's mind. What was their life like? And how did they meet and fall in love, and under what circumstances? I , Shakespeare thinks, have to begin with that, the first steps in the project of rewriting “The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet," only this time it will not be Romeo and Juliet, but Adam and Eve, and should I call it a "tragedy" again? Hmm, Why should it is still called a "tragedy" while I don’t want it to be one? But at this point, I still don't know how this new version of the story will turn out. Of course I want a happy conclusion for both characters, but is it possible? Sometimes events happen beyond one's control, even a writer has to listen to the dictates of the characters and their circumstances. So let's just leave the word "tragedy" alone for now, and see how the story turns out first. Having thought so, Shakespeare fixes his eyes at the ceiling and lets loose his imagination:

Da Nang. The year Adam met and fell in love with Eve was 1977 when they were seventeen. Adam had been living like a bum for two years. Bum, because he had no job, was not in school, and spent his days getting drunk and getting high.

Two years before, the country had just concluded a terrible long war after one faction defeated all others and united the land under one rule. At fifteen years old, when the victorious faction took over the government of the country, Adam was still too stupid to fully understand what was going on. One beautiful spring morning in March 1975 he woke up and saw columns of soldiers marching outside his house and people lined the road and waved to them. That was the beginning of the end of his life as a student.

Growing up, Adam was vaguely aware that a war had been going on. He had been a child, a school boy, safe under the protective wings of his parents. There were signs that serious things were going on like city wide curfew every night after ten pm and talks between his father and friends about people dying that he overheard. His uncles sometimes dropped by to stay for a few days and boasted about their war activities. There were also sights of American soldiers being chased by the military police from the whorehouse in the neighborhood. Some of them had to climb over the fences and run. The siren also went off every now and then during the night when rockets were fired into the city and the next morning Adam saw a few houses destroyed. But to him all these happenings were so routine and normal. War and savagery and killings and destructions mostly happened far away in the countryside where he had never had a chance to be. But the irony was--the so-called countryside was just on the edge of the city, but to Adam, it might as well be another world.

That morning in March 1975 when the liberation army's tanks rolled into Da Nang after a long week of chaos and looting by the Saigon troops, Adam was sitting by the window on the second floor of his house. He saw communist soldiers marching down the street, passing his house. Curious people gathered on the sidewalks and waved to them. The soldiers were so thin, pale, and young, and their bodies bent forward under their heavy backpacks. They marched in formation, orderly and silently. Adam was at the window taking it all in and suddenly tears rushed to his eyes. He didn't know why he cried. He didn't know exactly how he felt at that moment, but the strange feeling was powerful. He sensed that a tremendous change had finally taken place, and that his and everyone’s life would never be the same again. History was here and now, carried to him on the bony shoulders of those young soldiers. Adam distinctively felt that the moment was big, so big, and he was there as a small witness.

That year, he had been in the tenth grade, and he loved school, the friends, the lessons, and even got fascinated now and then with girls. Like all of his classmates who were growing up, girls caused curiosity in them, and the curiosity remained just that: curiosity.

School reopened a month after liberation, after things quieted down, and Adam went back to classes but he did not feel the same anymore. There was a sense of disintegration and disconnection, of being suddenly taken out of a familiar place and put in a strange situation. The lessons were different. The teachers now taught a different version of history. And students did not wear uniforms anymore. Depression was the general atmosphere in school, at least that was how Adam felt.

The same depressed atmosphere pervaded every aspect of people's life. Everyone was affected by the abrupt change of government, by the unfolding of another chapter of the country's history. People learned to adapt to the new rulers who repeatedly issued decrees that were hard to make sense of. Everyone had to be in some kind of political organization according to their ages. The children belonged to the Youth Organization; whoever is between 15 and 35 must join the Communist League; older people were members of organizations that addressed their own generation’s concern; and no one was allowed to float. All must attend weekly political education meetings held in each district's police precinct. Overnight visitors to anyone's home must register with the local authority. People were issued new ID cards, and travels between provinces required permits by the police. The police often harassed people for trivia reasons, like when they saw a boy with hairs that covered his ears and necks, they would stop him and take him to a barber shop to have his hair cropped like a soldier; or if they saw him with an wide open shirt collar that exposed his chest, they would stopped him and scolded him and ordered him to button up. Shit like that. The victors acted the role, and they were running a dictatorship.

There were also political groups in school and students must go to meetings where lessons in Communist ideology was taught. Life had become regimented and structured, the new leadership controlled every aspect of people's life. But the biggest impact was that most people no longer had the means to make a living like they had used to. Worse if they had worked for the old regime now that is was gone. In the city, private business was discouraged and curtailed by the government. In the countryside, peasants were organized into collectives where everyone worked in teams and shared the crops and no one owned anything, not even a spade. Some small private businesses were still allowed, such as sidewalk coffee stands and petty commerce, but rice and other essentials of daily life were rationed, like fish sauce and even cooking oil. Food became scared. The bottom had fallen out of the country's economic life, and everyone scrambled for their daily meals. Hunger was the new reality. The Communist party was trying to implement new economic policies but most were not popular. Families who had used to depend on the old regime for a living--civil servants and soldiers--and now had no means to make a living were forced to leave their homes in the cities and move to the wild undeveloped outer areas to become farmers, making their living from the land, something they had never done before but now had to learn. Those areas were called the New Economic Zones.

And Adam did not like what was going on around him. He had a rebellious nature and did not take structure and discipline very well. In fact, he hated it. He ignored notices from the police that requested him to join the district's Communist League. He did not go to weekly political meetings. And eventually sick of it all, he dropped out of school at the beginning of the eleventh grade. Adam's parents did not know that he had stopped going to school because every morning he would still get up and go out with books under his arms like he was going to school, and so his parents had no suspicions. But instead of heading to school, he went and sat in the