Saving Fish from Drowning - Heal Burma

SAVING FISH FROM DROWNING
have the red carpet rolled out for them. A couple of CDs apiece,
that’s what Bennie would ask of his fellow travelers. Two each, or
he’d present them with the choice of staying in unruly Ruili for an­
other four days.
It was a lovely collection, I thought: from Bono to Albinoni, Nir­
vana to Willie Nelson, the disparate musical tastes of twelve Ameri­
cans who cheerfully gave their best.
Let it now be known that I, too, had given my best. The night be­
fore, I had visited Walter late in the night when he was in the farthest
shores of his sleep, for that was where I realized I could be found, in
dreams, memory, and imagination. The sensory was no longer of any
use to my existence. But I could exist in a free-floating consciousness
not anchored to any reality. My consciousness could overlap his, now
that it was so permeable. There I gave to him osmotically the memory
that I had called with an urgent request. “Walter,” I said, “you forgot
to change the entry date to four days earlier, from the twenty-fifth to
the twenty-first of December. We discussed this, remember?” He be­
came upset, for he is a meticulous person who never neglects details.
When he promised to attend to this change of dates, I sang to him
“Wishing You Were Somehow Here Again” from Phantom of the
Opera. He was immediately seized with longing for his father, who
was imprisoned more than ten years ago by the military regime and
never heard from again. Such beautiful music, the most touching
words. Thereafter Walter would long to hear those same words over
and over, the ones I borrowed from the CD that I found in Bennie’s
suitcase.
This dream did not fade as dreams naturally do. I swam with it
back to the deepest part of his memory, to the subconscious recesses
where anxious people become more anxious. And so, when Walter
awakened the next morning, he had a sense of urgency. He hopped
on his bicycle and went to the tourism office, then dashed to the gov­
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