Unleveled
While I walked, I practiced speaking short phrases that I had read in a Vietnamese language book with the people I encountered. No one understood me, so I stopped trying.
Before sunrise, towards the end of my second week living in the city of the Ho Chi Minh, I had set out from my apartment on foot to explore the city with two names. By midday the sounds of 9 million people running 9 million different ways filled the city with buzzing white noise. Saigon's bright white sky haloed everything but people in soft white light. Building shadows formed walkways on sidewalks shielding walkers from scorching sun. Fragrant smells from simmering street food carts saturated city streets entreating everyone to stop, sit, and eat.
A man caught my eye as I was passing the intersection where he was crossing. His body above the waist was bent forward and downward like a nail that has been beaten relentlessly but does not break. Strong arms pushing up prevented his spine from folding. Tempered muscles from around his neck pulled his head up and against his downward sloping back; though his body pointed downward and his head twisted slightly left, his eyes still gazed straight in the direction where he was going.
As he walked, his arms and legs both strode the ground, alternating rhythmically in diagonal synchrony, one arm reaching out and unbending his body, the other pulling him forward and back together. His exposed skin was burned black by the oven formed from above by Saigon's summer sun and from below by sandal-melting streets. The palms of his ungloved hands pressed hard against dirty pavement. His veins swelled, his brow furrowed. Every step he took revealed a man with great intentions carved into him.
Stoplights forced lanes to swell wide and deep with motorbikes. The man was still crossing when red lights turned green and four lanes of traffic surged towards him.
The man began to run in the way he walked.
Horns fired mercilessly until merging into one continuous scream. Motorbikes engulfed the man like a swarm of angry bees defending their hive. Wakes of air formed by racing people blew his hair in the direction they ran. Pinched beneath a wheel, his hand rapidly recoiled the way an unexpecting hand pulls away from a scalding hot pan. Passing drivers glared down at him. Those unable to drive around him braked hard, nearly struck him, then kneed him from their path as they fought their way back into a river of flowing traffic.
On the sidewalk, voices chattered with excitement. Fingers pointed, faces smiled. Pedestrians grabbed cell phones, racing to post photos on social media, each mesmerized to see a man whose body forces the operator to walk in a way that most men do not. None seemed to notice the most striking feature about him: he was unlike the leveled individual who knows not the terror of surmounting untamed peaks nor the ecstasy of escaping deep jagged valleys, but only the flatness of shallow concerns. He had not been worn featureless the way conquerable spirits get rubbed into unliving souls.
While others only saw an animal, something to be photographed, I saw a person to be revered, a man stronger than any man I have ever seen. Each day he must do what most men cannot: he must suffer the wrath of people that look down at him, judge him, scream at him, and push him down while others watch. And that is only what I saw, for I cannot imagine what else such a man must endure in a world that does not forgive those who are contoured differently.
I walked to meet the man. Motorbikes swerved around me. I stopped between the man and the onrushing traffic. He looked towards me, not at me. He looked me down, then up. Our eyes connected, then I gestured to the sidewalk. Without closing his eyes, he nodded. The swarm continued to buzz around us. Together we walked. When we reached the sidewalk, he paused, looked at me again, and then, without a word, he walked away in the same way I saw him approach.
After he walked away, I regretted that I had not asked him his name, for I feared that I would be the one who would not be understood.