À Ơn came close and felt my forehead. ‘Eh, you might be right. Oh, but it’s nothing: you’re just tired, that’s all. Turn off the radio and go to sleep. You’ll feel right as rain after a good night’s sleep.’

I couldn’t help but think the same, and so I shut off the radio and settled down to sleep. It was already past four in the morning. We had been run ragged, me, À Ơn and Old Đường. The night before, Army Unit 179 had requisitioned winter blankets; they’d cleaned out nearly half of the warehouse, working us to exhaustion in the process. Later on, I thought that if I had just gone straight off to bed once our work had been done then I’d have been all right, but I was covered in sweat and reeking – I had to take a shower. It was Old Đường’s turn to heat the water, but he couldn’t. He was too tired, he said; so I decided to just quickly hop into a cold shower. We had just finished work and my body was boiling hot, so the idea of a cold shower didn’t seem all that bad, and certainly not frightening. So I had my wash. Afterwards, I lay in my bed for a bit, listening to the radio, but unlike normally when my blanket would gradually fill with warmth, the opposite happened: it got colder and colder. I told À Ơn this, to which he replied, ‘Hey, on such a cold wintry night, after a cold shower, who’d think it was warm? I’d find it chilly myself.’

‘But I think I’m running a fever,’ I said.

À Ơn replied, ‘Turn off the radio and go to sleep. You’ll feel right as rain after a good night’s sleep.’

That’s what I did.

The following afternoon when À Ơn woke up, he asked me how I was doing. My body felt as though it were on fire. I thought of telling him this, but my body just wouldn’t listen. I couldn’t open my mouth. A short while after, I heard À Ơn say, ‘Fuck! How can you be burning up like this? Vĩ Phu? Wake up, Vĩ Phu! Open your eyes … it’s me, À Ơn!’

Reality always repeats itself; change is temporary. When I finally opened my eyes, I saw what looked to be at least three blurred À Ơns frantically moving back and forth. I had the same feeling as I had had ten years before when tuberculosis first attacked my body – it was exactly the same …

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