He was not injured, but he seemed to be. He slept as if he couldn’t wake. Or wouldn’t, but finally the woman woke him and she looked familiar. She used a sea sponge on his face. “There,” she said, and went back to weaving a mat. Next time she put a rag on his head and left it. It was wet and cool. Ice. He thought of Ruth at home, weaving. He thought about Ruth’s long black hair, falling over her shoulder, him pushing it back. He remembers pushing it away from her face even when she was a girl and they’d been out running on the beach. He must be an old man now, he thought, because that was a century ago.

When he woke the second time there were some boys in the room, running about with sticks and yelling.

“What?” he said, as if they were speaking.

They were trying to chase a cobra. The boys were sweating. “They come by boat.” They came close to the snake, then backed off.

“On the boats?”

“Done move. Done get up.”

No. They come on the boats. Then they come here. He listened. They spoke in a dialect he didn’t recognize. It was not distinctly northern, not southern, and he was good at languages.

It was a beautiful creature, the cobra, when he saw it. The high wide neck like a pair of wings.

This had once been a country of snakes. Who knew now? The poor people were gleaning rice fields that shone like mirrors of the sun with water, and cobras lifted their puffed heads looking for rabbits or rats and shelter. They were hungry, too.

He wants to remember what happened to the cobra. Rabbit, he remembers.

Someone shot a rabbit when they were struggling through the jungle. How long ago? It was softly furred, with dark eyes, and running to hide. He cried. He who never cried. And then as they traveled through the next village they tried to destroy the rice before the NVA approached. After trying to burn it, and failing, because it wouldn’t burn, they contaminated it with chemicals. He wondered, now, if anyone had ever grown hungry enough to eat it. He was upset by all of this. In his world, his old world, these things were not done, but now he knew worlds overlapped, many of them, as if they were transparent pages in a book. One world held fog, and whales were swimming across it, as was a tribe, a nation, his own. Then spread across it were boys without wisdom, layered over the once-beautiful world with fire and chemicals.

His men killed the termite mounds which he thought most beautiful, like the land itself, and the termites would immediately begin to save the young and rebuild. In the same way the people tried to put their lives back together again and again, moving to a new place, going to the water if bombs were near, leaving if bombs were at the water, knowing there were land mines, trying to divine where they were, sometimes succeeding. And he protested the destruction.