Courage

This piece was dedicated to my uncle Dũng who fought valiantly till his dying breath. His journey against relapse was well-fought, and the courage he displayed will forever be etched into my mind.

In a small neighborhood in District 8 close to the University Village lies a set of houses--each nine square meters small--lined up wall to wall. Back when the first colleges opened in Saigon, this area was full of students looking to rent, thus coining the term “rent alley” into the official Vietnamese dictionary. Over many decades, rent alleys became less viable as more low-income high-rises and dormitories appeared. Today, in Mrs.Huynh’s rent alley, one would only see a couple poor college students renting her three rooms

Recently, people have been gossipping about a supposed ghost haunting room 3 in her alley. They say you could hear screaming, thrashing, loud slamming of metal against the walls of the room. But Mrs.Huynh doesn’t believe any of that. She knows that behind the door to that room lives a student who travelled eight hours down from the hills of Kontum to study at the local university.

“Don’t say that about Khanh. He’s a kind kid. You’re probably mishearing things.” she’d tell her neighbors.

But over time, she finds defending him harder and harder as those sounds start to reach her ears too. Loud muffled screams in a room inhabited by one person is very much out of the ordinary. Khanh’s unusual requests for rent deferments bugged her too. Some days, she thinks that maybe Khanh got hooked up on something and comtemplates kicking him out. Addicts lower the property value and she needs a proper income from her rent. Mrs.Huynh decides to knock on his door one day to find out what’s going on. No one answers. She knocks again but still hears nothing. Little did she know, Khanh is behind that door, strapped to his bed frame. His ankles are cuffed tightly to the bed while both his hands are tied to the metal frame with leather belts. His mouth is gagged tight. In his eyes, anything that’s brighter than the new moon is the same as having needles piercing through the membranes of his irises.

Khanh has been going through heroin rehabilitation for a while now. How many days, he can’t remember. Every waking morning is tiring and painful as the pains from the day before carries over. His wrists and ankles are blood red with scratches and burns and the edges of his mouth are pretty much torn off, the blood is left behind on the towel he used to gag himself to prevent biting his own tongue. Every morning he thinks about how good it would be to just take a hit of heroin and dull all this pain. But every time that thought comes up, he punches himself in the jaw to snap out of the thought. He has lost a total of four teeth, one on his upper left and three on the bottom right. He doesn’t remember how long it has been since he last left the house, not knowing how long it has been since he last saw the sun. The way these rooms are designed did not allow for windows, only a metallic, tinted glass door--one with a gap that’s wide enough for a fountain pen or a needle to fit through.

The pain surges through him again, electrifying his limbs, causing him to twitch and thrash erratically. As the metal frame slams against the wall, Khanh regains some of his consciousness and bites down hard on his towel. He can’t let the landlord hear or she’d kick him out. He can’t risk going home. There’s no colleges where he lived. He’d be the embarrassment of the family. He’d never get a proper job and risk getting arrested too. With those thoughts powering him, he bites down on the towel harder and harder until he feels his eyes could explode from the pressure of his whole body tensing up, his teeth could shatter from the force and his bones tearing through his arms from his tightening grip on the metal frame. As the metal slowly gives way, Khanh collapses from the shock he inflicts on his body while a silence haunts his room and neighborhood.

10 PM. Twelve full hours after his attack, he sits up in a bloodied bed. His wrists and ankles are brown from the dried blood which glued the bedsheets to his skin. Patiently, he unbuckles the leather straps to his wrists and unlocks the cuffs on his ankles. As he takes the towel off, he notices a strange suction on his gums. One of his teeth snapped off from earlier and drenched the towel in blood. He sits up, cracks his back, and hears a loud rumbling noise from his stomach. He hasn’t eaten anything since last night. Throwing his towel in his plastic washing tub, he reaches for a cup of ramen in the box of twenty four that he got for 24,000 VND (roughly one dollar). He peels off the lid, making sure to not get any of the dried blood flakes in, tearing the seasoning packet, the oil packet, and the flakes packet and pouring them into the cup. He fills a kettle of water and boils it over the fire. As he waits for the water, he takes out some gauzes, cotton balls, and peroxide and cleans himself up. The sting of the chemical reminds him of his journey to fight this addiction. Every scratch and scrape on his body is a battlescar that’ll remind him about his struggle for the rest of his life. His eyes look back at the box of ramen. He hasn’t been eating much, especially not after his first hit. One cup a day has been his goal--a significant leap from none. He counts the cups that are left in the box. One, two… seven.

Khanh smiles in comfort knowing that this fight is almost over. Though the thought of taking another hit briefly crosses his mind, Khanh wants nothing more right now than a cup of boba like his peers.