Dogs at the Perimeter

Janie

They sleep early and rise in the dark. It is winter now. The nights are long but outside, where the leaves have fallen from the branches, the snowed-in light comes through. There is a cat who finds the puddles of sunshine. She was small when the boy was small, but then she grew up and left him behind. Still, at night, she hunkers down on Kiri’s bed, proprietorial. They were born just a few weeks apart, but now he is seven and she is forty-four. My son is the beginning, the middle, and the end. When he was a baby, I used to follow him on my hands and knees, the two of us crawling over the wood floors, the cat threading between our legs. Hello, hello, my son would say. Hello, my good friend. How are you? He trundled along, an elephant, a chariot, a glorious madman.

It is twilight now, mid-February. Sunday.

Tonight’s freezing rain has left the branches crystalline. Our home is on the second floor, west facing, reached by a twisting staircase, the white paint chipping off, rust burnishing the edges. Through the window, I can see my son. Kiri puts a record on, he shuffles it gingerly out of its cardboard sleeve, holding it lightly between his fingertips. I know the one he always chooses. I know how he watches the needle lift and the mechanical arm move into place. I know the outside but not the quiet, not the way his thoughts rise up, always jostling, always various, not how they untangle from one another or how they fall so inevitably into place.

Kiri is in grade two. He has his father’s dark-brown hair, he has startling, beautiful eyes, the same colour as my own. His name, in Khmer, means “mountain.” I want to run up the stairs and turn my key in the lock, the door to my home swinging wide open.

When my fear outweighs my need — fear that Kiri will look out the window and see this familiar car, that my son will see me — I turn the ignition, steer myself from the sidewalk, and roll away down the empty street. In my head, ringing in my ears, the music persists, his body swaying like a bell to the melody. I remember him, crumpled on the floor, looking up at me, frightened. I try to cover this memory, to focus on the blurring lights, the icy pavement. My bed is not far away but a part of me wants to keep on driving, out of the city, down the highway straight as a needle. Instead, I circle and circle the residential streets. A space opens up in front of Hiroji’s apartment, where I have been sleeping these last few weeks, and I edge the car against the curb.

Tomorrow will come soon, I tell myself. Tomorrow I will see my son.

The wind swoops down, blowing free what little heat I have. I can barely lock the door and get upstairs fast enough. Inside, I pull off my boots but keep my coat and scarf on against the chill. Hiroji’s cat, Taka the Old, skips ahead of me, down the long hallway. On the answering machine, the message light is flashing and I hit the square button so hard the machine hiccups twice before complying.

Navin’s voice. “I saw the car,” my husband says. “Janie? Are you there?” He waits. In the background, my son is calling out. Their voices seem to echo. “No, Kiri. Hurry up, kiddo. Back to bed.” I hear footsteps, a door closing, and then Navin coming back. He says he wants to take Kiri to Vancouver for a few weeks, that the time, and distance, might help us. “We’ll stay at Lena’s place,” he says. I am nodding, agreeing with every word — Lena’s home has stood empty since she died last year — but a numb grief is flowing through me.

One last message follows. I hear a clicking on the line, then the beep of keys being pressed, once, twice, three times. The line goes dead.

The fridge is remarkably empty. I scan its gleaming insides, then do a quick inventory: old bread in the freezer and in the cupboard two cans of diced tomatoes, a tin of smoked mussels, and, heaven, three bottles of wine. I liberate the bread and the mussels, pour a glass of sparkling white, then stand at the counter until the toaster ejects my dinner. Gourmet. I peel back the lid of the can and eat the morsels one by one. The wine washes the bread down nicely. Everything is gone too soon but the bottle of wine that accompanies me to the sofa, where I turn the radio on. Music swells and dances through the apartment.

This bubbly wine is making me morose. I drink the bottle quickly in order to be rid of it. “Only bodies,” Hiroji once told me, “have pain.” He had been in my lab, watching me pull a motor neuron from Aplysia. Bodies, minds: to him they were the same, one could not be considered without the other.

Half past ten. It is too early to sleep but the dark makes me uneasy. I want to call Meng, my oldest friend, we have not spoken in more than two weeks, but it is the hour of the wolves in Paris. My limbs feel light and I trickle, wayward, through the rooms. On the far side of the apartment, in Hiroji’s small office, the windows are open and the curtains seem to move fretfully, wilfully. The desk has exploded, maybe it happened last week, maybe earlier, but now all the papers and books have settled into a more balanced state of nature. Still, the desk seems treacherous. Heaped all over, like a glacier colonizing the surface, are the pages I have been working on. Taka the Old has been here: the paper is crumpled and still faintly warm.

Since he disappeared, nearly three months ago now, I’ve had no contact with Hiroji. I’m trying to keep a record of the things he told me: the people he treated, the scientists he knew. This record fills sheet after sheet — one memory at a time, one place, one clue — so that every place and every thought won’t come at once, all together, like a deafening noise. On Hiroji’s desk is an old photograph showing him and his older brother standing apart, an emerald forest behind them. Hiroji, still a child, smiles wide. They wear no shoes, and Junichiro, or James, stands with one hand on his hip, chin lifted, challenging the camera. He has a bewitching, sad face.

Sometimes this apartment feels so crowded with loved ones, strangers, imagined people. They don’t accuse me or call me to account, but I am unable to part with them. In the beginning, I had feared the worst, that Hiroji had taken his own life. But I tell myself that if this had been a suicide, he would have left a note, he would have left something behind. Hiroji knew what it was to have the missing live on, unending, within us. They grow so large, and we so empty, that even the coldest winter nights won’t swallow them. I remember floating, a child on the sea, alone in the Gulf of Thailand. My brother is gone, but I am looking up at the white sky and I believe, somehow, that I can call him back. If only I am brave enough, or true enough. Countries, cities, families. Nothing need disappear. At Hiroji’s desk, I work quickly. My son’s voice is lodged in my head, but I have lost the ability to keep him safe. I know that no matter what I say, what I make, the things I have done can’t be forgiven. My own hands seem to mock me, they tell me the further I go to escape, the greater the distance I must travel back. You should never have left the reservoir, you should have stayed in the caves. Look around, we ended up back in the same place, didn’t we? The buildings across the street fall dark, yet the words keep coming, accumulating like snow, like dust, a fragile cover that blows away so easily.

Sunday, February 19

[fragment]

Elie was fifty-eight years old when she began to lose language. She told Hiroji that the first occurrence was in St. Michael’s Church in Montreal, when the words of the Lord’s Prayer, words she had known almost from the time she had learned to speak, failed to materialize on her lips. For a brief moment, while the congregation around her prayed, the whole notion of language diminished inside her mind. Instead, the priest’s green robes struck her as infinitely complicated, the winter coats of the faithful shifted like a collage, a pointillist work, a Seurat: precision, definition, and a rending, rending beauty. The Lord’s Prayer touched her in the same bodily way that the wind might, it was the sensation of sound but not meaning. She felt elevated and alone, near to God and yet cast out.

And then the moment passed. She came back and so did the words. A mild hallucination, Elie thought. Champagne in the brain.

She went home and did what she always did. She closed the glass doors of her studio, unlatched the windows, lifted them high, and she painted. It was winter so she wore her coat over two shirts and fleece sweatpants, thick socks, Chinese slippers on her feet, and a woollen hat on her head. A decade ago she had been a biomechanical engineer, researching motor control, lecturing at McGill University, but at the age of forty-six, she had abandoned that life. Now, experience unfolded in a different pitch and tone, it was more fluid, more transitory, it enclosed her like the battering sea under broken light. When she closed her eyes she saw how the corners of improbable things touched — a bird and a person and a pencil rolling off a child’s table — entwined, and became the same substance. Even her loved ones seemed different, more contained and solid, like compositions, iterations in her head. Painting was everything. She painted until she couldn’t feel her arms anymore, ten, twelve hours at a time, every single day, and even then it wasn’t enough. She told her husband, Gregor, that it was as if she had arrived at high noon, the hour when all forces converge. Gregor, a chef, grew used to falling asleep to the rhythms of Debussy and Ravel and Fauré, Elie’s preferred accompaniments. Her husband grew accustomed to the smell of oil paint on her skin, the way she gestured with her hands in place of words, the way she gazed out with a new-found passion and righteousness. “I can see,” he heard her calling to him one day. “Look what I can see.”

“I thought,” Elie told Hiroji, when he had been treating her for many years, “that my entire past was fantasy. Only my present was real.”

The champagne in the brain began reoccurring, blotting out people’s names, song lyrics, street names, book titles. She felt sometimes as if the words themselves had vanished, in her thoughts, her speech, and even her handwriting. There was a stopper in her throat and a black hole in her mind. In her paintings, she turned music into images, the musical phrases playing out like words, the words breaking into geometric shapes, her paintings grasping all the broken, brilliant fragments. When she worked, there were no more barriers between herself and reality, the image could say everything that she could not. Increasingly, she could not speak much. But she could live with losing language, if that was the price. This seemed, back then, a small price.

She was painting when she noticed the tremors in her right arm.

The first time she had met Hiroji, he had asked her if she found speaking effortful. The word had seemed to her like the priest’s green robe that day in St. Michael’s Church, an image blocking out all other ideas. Yes, how effortful it was. “I’m decaying,” she told Hiroji, surprising even herself. “What do you mean?” he asked her.

“I can’t … with the …” She put her hands together, straining to find the words. “There’s too much.”

Hiroji sent her for diagnostic testing. Those MRI films are conclusive. The first thing that strikes the viewer is the white line, the fragile outline of the skull, surprisingly thin. And then, within the skull, the grey matter folded around the hub of white matter. What has happened is that her left brain, the dominant side (she is right-handed), has atrophied — it is wasting away in the same manner that a flower left too long in the vase withers. Throughout Elie’s left brain this disintegration is happening. Language is only the first thing that she will lose. It may come to pass that, one day soon, she will not be able to move the entire right side of her body.

The images show something else too. While one side of her has begun to atrophy, the other side is burgeoning. Elie’s right brain has been creating grey matter — neurons — and all that extra tissue is collecting in the back of her brain, in the places where visual images are processed.

“It’s a kind of asymmetry,” Hiroji had told her, “a kind of imbalance in your mind, between words and pictures.”

“So what is it, all this, that I’m making? Where is it coming from?” She waved her hands at the bare walls, as if to pull her own paintings into the room, to trail them behind her like an army.

“It comes from the inner world,” Hiroji said, “but isn’t that where all painting comes from?”

“My diseased inner world,” she said. “I’m at war. I’m dwindling, aren’t I?” She picked up the mri scans from his desk. “Do you paint, Doctor?”

He shook his head.

“Have you ever thought about it?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

He paused for a moment. “My mother painted. She was a Buddhist, and she used to tell me that I was too analytical, that I had no understanding of the ephemeral side of things.”

“The ephemeral,” she said doubtfully. “Like dancing?”

He laughed. “Yes, like dancing.”

Hiroji kept Elie under what is known as surveillance mr imaging. Scan after scan, year by year, the films show the imbalance widening. Three years after her diagnosis, Elie’s paintings, too, began to change. Where once she had delighted in turning music into complex mathematical and abstract paintings, intense with colour and the representation of rhythm, now she painted precise cityscapes, detailed, almost photographic. “I see differently,” she told him. “It comes to me less holy than before.” He wanted her to go further, to explain this holiness, but she just shook her head and poured the tea, her right hand trembling.

“The conceptual and the abstract,” Hiroji told her, “are no longer as accessible. Your interior world has changed.”

Hiroji and I co-authored a paper on Elie’s condition. He described to me how, in Elie’s home, her paintings graced the walls. He had the sense that they pleased her because they brought the interior world into the world that we live in, the one that we hold and touch, that we see and smell. “Soon,” she had told him, tapping her fingers against her chest, “there will be no inside.”

Elie is almost completely mute now. When she telephoned Hiroji, she wouldn’t speak. She would hit the keypad two or three times, making a kind of Morse code, before hanging up again. Her disease is degenerative, a quickening loss of neurons and glia in the other parts of her brain, impeding speech, movement, and finally breathing itself. Unable to paint, she and Gregor spend long days at the riverside, where, she once told Hiroji, things move, ephemeral, and nothing stays the same.

Two years ago, delivering a lecture in Montreal, Hiroji spoke briefly about consciousness. He said that he imagined the brain as a hundred billion pinballs, where the ringing of sound, in all its amplitude and velocity, contained every thought and impulse, all our desires spoken and unspoken, self-serving, survivalist, and contradictory. The number of possible brain states exceeds the number of elementary particles in the universe. Maybe what exists beneath (tissue and bone and cells) and what exists above (ourselves, memory, love) can be reconciled and understood as one thing, maybe it is all the same, the mind is the brain, the mind is the soul, the soul is the brain, etc. But it’s like watching a hand cut open another hand, remove the skin, and examine the tissue and bone. All it wants is to understand itself. The hand might become self-aware, but won’t it be limited still?

A few days after the lecture, Hiroji received a letter from a man recently diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. I have been wondering, the man wrote, how to measure what I will lose. How much circuitry, how many cells have to become damaged before I, before the person my children know, is gone? Is there a self buried in the amygdala or the hippocampus? Is there one burst of electricity that stays constant all my life? I would like to know which part of the mind remains untouched, barricaded, if there is any part of me that lasts, that is incorruptible, the absolute centre of who I am.

[end]

Before, on my sleepless nights, I used to tiptoe down the hallway and stand in Kiri’s open doorway. My son, collector and purveyor of small blankets, is a light snorer. The sound of his breaths calmed me. Daring to enter, I would listen to his sleep, to the funny, stuttering exhalations that seemed altogether unearthly. Kiri, you are a godsend, I’d think. A mystery.

Taka the Old appears at the ledge of the window. Hiroji’s cat watches me nervously, twitchily. Hours ago, I must have forgotten to remove my coat so I unbutton it now, shake it off, and fold it neatly over the back of a chair. The cat sidles nearer. We are two nocturnal creatures, lost in thought, except that she is sober. She rubs her face against the coat’s empty arms, she purrs into its dangling hood.

I open the curtains. Nearly four in the morning and the view outside is fairy-tale white, a sharpened landscape that seems to rebuke the darkness, Go back, go back, return from whence you came! Snowdrifts and frozen eaves merge into cars, outlined in inches of snow. On the frosted windowpanes, I trace Khmer letters, Khmer words, but mine is a child’s uncertain calligraphy, too wide, too clumsy. I was eleven years old when I left Cambodia, and I have never gone back. Years ago, on the way to Malaysia with my husband, I glimpsed it from the air. Its beauty, unchanged, unremitting, opened a wound in me. I was seated at the window and the small plane was flying low. It was the rainy season and Cambodia was submerged, a drowned place, the flooded land a plateau of light. From above, there were no cars or scooters that I could see, just boats plying the waterways, pursued by the ribbon of their slipstream.

Silence eats into every corner of the room, creeping over the furniture, over the cat. She paces the room like a zoo lion. At the desk, I sharpen pencils ferociously, lining them up in a row.

On the floor is the file I keep returning to. When Hiroji disappeared, I had found it sitting on his kitchen table and had taken it away, never mentioning it to anyone, not the police, not even Navin. I had kept it in an old suitcase, as if it were a memento, a relic that Hiroji asked me to safeguard. The file contains the same documents and maps, the same letters from James, that Hiroji asked me to examine last year. I remember him unfolding the map, putting his finger against Phnom Penh, here, where the ink is smudged, the city at the confluence of the rivers. Back then, the map had seemed too flimsy to me, too abstract, a drawing of a country that had little relation to the country I had left behind. I couldn’t see what he was seeing.

James Matsui had vanished in 1975. Four years earlier, having finished his residency at St. Paul’s Hospital in Vancouver, he had signed up with the International Red Cross. Soon after, he had left Canada and landed in Saigon, into the mayhem of the Vietnam War. That same year, Nixon’s bombs were falling on Cambodia, spies were breaking into the Watergate building, scientists had found a way to splice dna, but I was young and didn’t know those stories. I was eight years old, a child in Phnom Penh, and the fighting, at that time, raged in the borderlands. I remember staring up at the sky, transfixed by the airplanes. They were everywhere above us — commercial planes, fighter planes, transport planes, helicopters — a swarm that never ceased. My father told me about a woman named Vesna Vulovic. The plane she was travelling in had exploded over Czechoslovakia and she had fallen thirty-three thousand feet to the ground. She had survived. I named all of my dolls — I had three — Vesna. To me, she was like a drop of rain or a very tiny bird, someone whom the gods had overlooked.

From the file, I remove James’s letters to Hiroji. Born Junichiro Matsui, nicknamed Ichiro when he was a boy, he chose the name James when he was a teenager. His letters home are brief, scattered with ellipses, and yet I keep returning to them, convinced that I have missed some crucial detail. In 1972, the Red Cross sent him up the Mekong River, away from Vietnam and into the refugee camps of Phnom Penh. Cambodia was in the last stages of a civil war, a brutal war of attrition.

“Undying,” my father told us once, in admiration of the resistance, the Khmer Rouge.

“The undying,” my mother answered, “are always the most wretched.”

In January 1975, James’s letters stopped. Three months later, the Khmer Rouge won the war and the borders closed around my country.

Turn my head, go back, and I’m hiding with my brother in the hall closet, crouched on top of my mother’s shoes. “You’ll see,” my father is saying. We can hear his voice, tipsy and melodious, through the wooden door. “The Khmer Rouge will turn out to be heroes after all.”

My uncles, great-uncles, and distant uncles shout to be heard. “Lon Nol,” I hear. “Traitor!” “Crawling into bed!” “Contemptible!” “Chinese rockets!” My father’s parties are always boisterous, more and more as the war goes badly. The North Vietnamese Army against the American military, the Khmer Rouge versus the Khmer Republic, Communism against Imperialism, everyone takes a side, and some take every side. My father says that this war is about the future, about a free Cambodia, that we have to liberate the country from our own worst selves. He says our leaders have lost their moral centre, they are obsessed with cognac and soda, and villagers’ mumbo jumbo. The uncles cackle, and someone scratches at the door. I think it must be my cousin, Happy Nimol, who clings to us like wet grass.

The door bursts open and for a moment the room is stunningly bright. My father leans down, scoops my brother up. I see the pale soles of Sopham’s feet kicking in the air. My father looks down at where I’m curled tight as ball. “Aha!” he says. “My little chickens, hiding from the farmer!” He carries us, laughing, screaming in terror, out into the gathering.

Years later, when I remembered the story of Vesna Vulovic, I tried to find her in the archived newspapers of the Vancouver Public Library. As I turned the microfilm, an image, eerily familiar, stopped my hand: an exhausted face subsiding into white pillows. I paid for a printout of the image. Vesna’s plane had been shot down by two surface-to- air missiles, fired by the Czechoslovak military because the Yugoslavian plane had crossed, innocently, into restricted airspace. “I’m not lucky,” she said. “Everybody thinks I’m lucky, but they are mistaken. If I were lucky I would never have had this accident.” She sounded ungrateful but she was not. I understood. I remembered arriving in Canada, my stomach clenched, ashamed that I had lived yet terrified of disappearing. Chance had favoured us, but chance had denied so many others.

At home, I taped Vesna’s picture to my bedroom wall. For long stretches of time I would lie on the carpet, staring up at her. Sometimes I would see the shadows of Lena’s feet, faint beneath the door. Like messages, I told myself. Missives. Janie, sweetheart. Can I come in? I was twelve when I arrived in Vancouver, when Lena became my foster mother. We’d sit and watch tv together, The Nature of Things, game shows, movies of the week, anything that might improve my English. But television, with its dizzying pictures and chaotic chatter, with its sudden images of love and violence, disturbed me. I turned instead to the shelves and shelves of books. Even though my reading was slow, painstaking, I worked my way through her collection. She was devoted to biographies — she admired mathematicians Kurt Gödel and Emma Noether and neuroscientists Santiago Ramón y Cajal and Alexander Luria.

To the surprise of my new mother, I stole these books as frequently as I stole canned food from the cupboards, and I hoarded all the words for myself. In my mind, it was as if these people walked through Lena’s rooms, as if they were family and they were still alive.

Every weekend, Lena would descend into her office. “Down to the basement,” she would say. “Down to my ballroom.” Lena, an academic, wrote about the history of science. Her world was populated with mathematicians, physicists, chemists, and biologists, with the institutes and the drawing rooms of another era. Todd, my foster father, lived in Nepal and worked for Unicef, and he came home once each year, at Christmas. Some days, my new mother would spend hours sifting through piles of paper, trying to lay hands on a single reference. “Hopeless!” she would say, turning away from me, trying to mask her sadness. “Like trying to find a peanut floating through outer space.”

From the time I was sixteen years old, I worked in the ballroom, helping Lena organize her documents. Not just papers, she would have said, but thoughts. Her office was a city all its own: towers of research notes, clippings, books, interview transcripts, recordings. I wanted to be of use to her, to repay her somehow. I liked the idea that I could stand in her place and find my way along the avenues she had built, the knowledge she had accumulated.

One night, wanting to surprise me, Lena dusted off the projector and sat me down in the living room. The sofa was covered with brown velour, a fabric unfamiliar to me, and I always felt as if I were sitting on an animal. The film spun into life. I gazed up, mesmerized by the world projected onto the white wall. I saw a much younger Lena walking on the beaches of Kep, on the southern coast of Cambodia. The camera closed in on Lena’s bathing cap and her lemon-coloured dress. She and Todd had vacationed there in the 1960s, when Cambodia was at peace, a few years before the fighting had begun. She had never forgotten it, she told me, the heat, the saffron temples, the sea. She and Todd had been newlyweds.

Night after night, I crept downstairs, thieved the reels, and fed the film into the machine. I sat on the couch staring up, hearing only the ticking of the projector as the reels spun and the tape ran, and this clicking became the wordless sadness of a lost time. I saw the skyline and the light-flecked water, Lena’s legs smooth against the ocean as she dove and dove again. In another reel, the city of Phnom Penh flickered grainily into the room. Todd, holding the camera, turned slowly, taking us in a 360-degree tour of the intersection in front of the Central Market. Cars glided, cyclos wobbled through the field of vision, and families, clothed in oranges and pinks and browns, turned to stare into the lens. The images came one after the other, now in a place I recognized, and now not. There was no order, no chronology, yet it was so real I could smell it, I could feel the city’s grit on my skin.

One night, I sat on the edge of Lena’s bed and told her that I wanted a new name, a new existence, and she had stared at me, her eyes wet with tears. I admired those tears, she was not ashamed of them, or frightened by them. Jane. Janie. In the language of the aid world, I was an unaccompanied minor, a separated child, but Lena told me that I was no such thing at all. “Sometimes,” she said, across the gap of space I kept between us on the bed, “we are granted a second chance, a third one. You don’t have to be ashamed of having lived many lives.”

I thought of my friend Bopha, about my brother, Sopham, and my parents, I wanted to tell Lena that we were too many, that I needed to guard the world that held us all together. I was afraid that I would drop it, shatter it, let it break apart.

The Khmer Rouge had taken Phnom Penh and then, quietly, they had gone around and severed the lines that connected us to the outside world. They named their own leadership, their own government, Angkar. The word means “the centre” or “the organization.” In the beginning, our family had stayed together. But afterwards, when it was no longer possible, I tried to imagine a way back. Time had to be held, twisted, cut wide open.

Angkar had been obsessed with recording biographies. Every person, no matter their status with the Khmer Rouge, had to dictate their life story or write it down. We had to sign our names to these biographies, and we did this over and over, naming family and friends, illuminating the past. My little brother and I were only eight and ten years old but, even then, we understood that the story of one’s own life could not be trusted, that it could destroy you and all the people you loved.

There is no air in the apartment, but I don’t want to open the windows as I fear that the ice will come inside. I get up, throw a coat over my wrinkled clothes and a hat on my head. Out, out, out. Down the treacherous stairs, sliding along the invisible sidewalk. My brother is here. Sopham and I take the quiet streets, we file past the silent houses. I am drawn to the windows, to rooms lit by the inconstant blue of their televisions. A car swerves around me, the driver punctures the silence with his impatient horn, but I am moving with the slowness of the old. When I get too warm, I pull my hat off and hang it on the spoke of a fence. My brother walks ahead of me. He is small and thin and he finds the cold difficult. Where are his shoes? I look everywhere for them until my hands are numb with cold. Tomorrow I will not remember where my hat is, tomorrow I will feel confusion, but for now I duck into St. Kevin’s Church. On the bitterest winter nights, they leave the front doors unlocked. My brother trails behind me. I sink both hands into the holy water and bring my fingers to my eyes. We sit in the very last row and gaze at a man, kneeling in prayer, who seems to be thinking of the heavens, of the high windows that no one can reach, he is somewhere far, far above us. The smell of incense calms me. Long ago, I read that the cathedral in Phnom Penh had, in 1975, been dynamited. Even the very foundations were dug out, as if to prevent these foreign ruins from ever competing with our own. The vast temples of Angkor Wat, the old kingdoms of Funan and Chenla, were the markers of a history that went back two thousand years. All else, the Khmer Rouge insisted, was mere transience.

An elderly woman turns toward me. She comes closer along the pew and says, “I’m glad that you’ve come.” Her white hair frames her head like a halo. She says, “You know that wonderful passage? It’s always been my favourite. ‘In my Father’s house there are many rooms.’”

I feel myself trembling.

“You’ve been drinking,” she says, compassionate. “Many of your people have this illness. But you’ve come home now. It will be all right.”

I tell her that she is wrong, that even though we are surrounded by the sea, there is nothing to drink. Yet the salt water is seeping into our skin, swelling our bodies, making us unfit for land. “You know,” I say. “Don’t you?” The woman hesitates, then she looks down at the boy in my lap who is nothing but a knotted, filthy scarf. Red-chequered, tattered. I unfold it and try to smooth the scarf against my legs. “I tried to save him,” I tell her. “I tried to keep him from drowning.” She looks up toward the high altar, the glowing lights, Jesus illuminated on his cross, then she gazes at me with understanding in her eyes. Sometimes it’s pity, undeserved as it is, that hurts me most.

When the unthinkable happened, I had gone to Hiroji’s apartment. Years ago, when he was travelling more frequently, he had given me a copy of his keys so that I could take care of Taka the Old. For nearly a month now I have slept on his couch, leaving the curtains open as if I believe he will re-enter through the unlatched windows. I know that he is in Cambodia, the place where his brother, James, was last seen. There is no other place he would go. I imagine him unpacking his suitcase, telling me what he has learned, all the things he has seen: the Tonle Sap reversing its waters, the sprawling jungle, bats high in the shadows of the caves. He will tell me how to accept this life. I dream of returning home, not only to the place of my birth but to my son. My mother who died without me, who died so long ago, will finally close her eyes. She will turn her gaze from this world, she will slide like a boat up against land, into her future.

—

In the morning, I walk to Kiri’s school. From Monday to Friday, I see my son once each day, we meet in the playground before school begins. This is the routine Navin and I have worked out. It is an interim measure, we have both said. A way forward.

When I arrive, Navin is already there, leaning against the fence. I go to stand beside him. He touches my cheek. For a brief moment, his lips are warm against mine. “You didn’t sleep last night,” he says.

I tell him that I did, a little, enough. My hands are icy and Navin takes hold of them. He says that I look exhausted, that I should take some time off. “It’s okay,” I tell him. Work gives me a feeling of order, of cheer. He kisses my frozen fingers, and the kindness that I have always loved in him, that he gives so freely, washes over me. But Navin, too, is worn out.

I say again, “It will be okay.”

In the playground, there are so many snowsuits in so many primary colours that my vision is temporarily dazzled. I stand at the fence and search the kaleidoscope for Kiri. There he is. I see him now, I see him. My son races across the grounds, a cub in a pack of awkward pups, pursuing a soccer ball. When his team scores, he howls with joy. The pink sky burns around us. Kiri chases the soccer ball, he tussles, fights, drops his hat, picks it up, and waves it like a flag.

“Did you get my message,” Navin asks. “About Vancouver?”

I nod. “When will you go?”

“Next week, if I can pull everything together.” He says he is just finishing up a project, a new building design, but his colleagues can oversee it. He thinks the distance will be good for Kiri. He says that Kiri keeps asking when I’ll be coming home. “I’ll talk to him,” I say. We are surrounded by parents and children, by the rippling joy of the playground. Navin begins to say something but just then Kiri glimpses us. He runs forward. A girl stops him. “Kiri! Kiri!” she calls.

“I’m a caterpillar,” he says.

She frowns, “No! You’re not.”

“I’m a worm,” he says charmingly, and the girl waves both arms in kind of Hawaiian dance.

Kiri comes to me. I kneel down and he tells me, in a rush of words, that he’s going to visit his Auntie Dina later, they’re planning to build a rocket park, that she’ll make him murtabak and roti canai, that her dog, Bruno, is kind of old and shuffles very slowly. Kiri has taken to speaking quickly now, as if he is afraid he will run out of time. As if he will be too late.

“Will you build a moon?” I ask him, kneeling in the snow. I busy myself readjusting his hat, which has fallen between his neck and the collar of his coat.

“Oh!” he says, surprised. “Good idea.”

“What about moon boots?” Navin says. “Moon cakes?”

Kiri frowns.

“Moonlight,” I say.

My son frees his hands and begins buttoning my coat up, all the way to the top. “Don’t get cold, Momma,” he says. I promise that I won’t. His mittens, attached to his coat, swing back and forth like a pair of extra hands.

I kiss them both goodbye. They walk through the schoolyard, up the front steps of the building. Navin turns back, watching me, love and pity in his eyes. They go on, Kiri’s hat bobbing up and down. In this way, my son is embraced by the glow of the school. Snow hurries forward to lay its thin white sheet over the teeter-totters, the swings, and the monkey bars. Through the big windows, I can see a movement of colours, children swirling around one another. Even at the edge of the schoolyard, I can hear their voices.

I catch the 535, heading downtown. The man next to me is nodding off to sleep, his body propped up by his fellow passengers. When the bus jumps, startling him awake, he looks up, surprised to see us. Rivulets of melted slush glide back and forth along the floor. In our heavy boots, we step daintily through the muck.

We arrive at my stop and I exit through the back doors. Above me, in the clearing sky, pigeons roost on the high wires, clouds descend, and I turn and walk east along the frozen skirts of Mount Royal. The mountain, dipped in snow, has an eerie beauty, tree after tree rising up the hill, slender as matchsticks. The temperature is dropping fast and people, blank-faced beneath their hats and scarves, shoulder roughly by. This place wears its misery so profoundly. Mean-eyed women, sheathed in stiletto boots, kick the ice aside while small men in massive coats lumber down the sidewalk. The elderly fall into snowbanks. All human patience curdles in the winter. On University Street, I turn left, continuing until I reach the heavy doors of the Brain Research Centre.

Sherrington, Broca, Penfield, Ramón y Cajal: in the atrium of the building, the names of our scientific forebears are etched in gold lettering along the wall. The wide hallways buzz with fluorescent light. Rather than going downstairs to my lab, I climb the stairs to the airy fourth floor where the clinicians hold court. The morning neurology and neurological surgery rounds are already underway and this hallway is temporarily deserted. I come to Hiroji’s office. In January, the brc disabled his code but not the code of our laboratory group. When I punch in the numbers, a green light blinks fleetingly before some mechanism clicks. I turn the knob and enter.

Here is Hiroji’s window with a view of the mountain. Here is his desk.

I step inside, shutting the door behind me. File cabinets range against the right-hand wall, all the way to the ceiling. Morrin, the head of our research unit, has been pushing me to move our shared files from Hiroji’s office, but I hadn’t yet gotten around to it. I thought that, by the time I organized everything, Hiroji would be back and then the files, too, would have to return. There seemed no point in even beginning. The cabinets whine when I open them. Half of the contents are already gone, all the patient files have been moved elsewhere, but the entire history of our collaborative work remains, perfectly ordered.

I call Morrin’s extension and tell him that, if he’s looking for me, I’m in Hiroji’s office, doing the dreaded deed. He says he’ll bring up some boxes. When Morrin arrives, he, too, lingers for a moment. The three of us have spent many hours in here, discussing, arguing, idling. The office unnerves him. He goes to the window, glances out, and then returns to the relative safety of the door.

“Janie,” he says. “Sorry to make you do this.”

“You were right. It’s time.”

He nods. Weeks earlier, he had tried to draw me out on this subject, but I had rebuffed him. Now, he takes a pen from Hiroji’s desk and taps it soundlessly against his fingers. He says that I should call downstairs if I need anything.

“A second brain?” I say.

He laughs. “Hmm. No, but there’s a new dissecting scope. Come and see it when you’re done.” Still holding the pen, he leaves.

When all the files have been removed, I shut the cabinet and sit down in Hiroji’s chair. The morning light, tipped in gold, has laid its gaze across the desk, illuminating a stapler, a box of paperclips, and a thumb-sized bronze Buddha in a seated posture, both hands extended in the gesture of protection. Hiroji has an object coveted by all the other neurologists: a phrenological map of the brain, drawn onto a porcelain head. During the Victorian era, the brain was believed to have forty-eight mental faculties, and each of these had a specific location that could be felt via bumps on the skull. Destructiveness, for instance, curves like a horseshoe behind the ear. Immortality floats at the crown of the head, far above vagrancy and animality, low qualities that swell the neck. Blandness is neighbour to agreeableness. My own head has a bump above my left temple. Hiroji had studied the map.

“Mirthfulness,” he had said, grinning, looking up.

We had both laughed. He used to rest his glasses on the head’s porcelain nose, so much more upright, he said, more Roman, than his own.

I open the drawers. This trespass shames me, and yet I continue, running my fingers through the contents of his desk. In the middle drawer, I see a box of slides, various batteries, an adapter, and a half-finished roll of wine gums. Underneath all this is a small yellow notebook. Hesitantly, I reach for it, thinking that it might be a calendar or even a journal. When I open it, my friend’s handwriting is so familiar, so known, that a surge of emotion hits me. Names, addresses, and numbers fill every page. Under my own name, there are at least a dozen crossed-out entries, a decade-long list of all the cell phones I have lost and the apartments I have vacated. I see where Navin’s name has been added to mine, or Naveen as Hiroji writes it, and then Janie/Nav/Kiri, so that we become variations of one another. Our names are accompanied by two exuberant exclamation points, which makes me suspect that Hiroji is beside me, pulling my leg. I continue through the alphabet. At the very end, on the inside back cover, is one last entry. Ly Nuong. Underlined once. Two numbers have been written beneath it, one appears to be North American and has been crossed out, but the second remains. It begins with +855, the country code for Cambodia.

I close the address book and put it back in the drawer. I carry the boxes downstairs, one by one. On the last trip, sweating, I return to the desk. I take out the address book and place it, carefully, into the box.

Evening arrives quickly. In the foyer where the brc branches off to the hospital and the university, I sit, unable to face the freezing cold. This foyer is an intersection, a place where patients, neurologists, researchers, families, and students meet and part. I have been a researcher at the brc for twelve years. Many floors below, in my electrophysiology lab, I have listened, hour after hour, to the firing of single neurons. In my work, I harvest cells, gather data, measure electricity while, in the upper floors, lives open and change: a patient with a brain tumour begins to lose her vision, a girl ceases to recognize faces, including her own, a man stares, disgruntled, at his left leg, refusing to believe that it belongs to his body. So many selves are born and re-born here, lost and imagined anew.

Now, a woman in a hospital gown has been brought to a halt, overwhelmed by the patterned lines on the floor. A nurse comes and prods her forward. My friend Bonnet, rushing by, catches sight of me. He asks me what I’ve been dissecting today and I tell him sea slugs. Bonnet, who works in brain imaging, and whom I often tease for walking fast to nowhere, is already halfway down the corridor. “How’s your boy?” he says, walking backwards now. “Seems like ages since Kiri visited.” I deflect. “You never weep for the sea slugs.” He laughs, pirouettes in his lab coat, saluting me, and vanishes around the corner. The woman in the hospital gown is still walking, considering each line as it comes to her. Parkinson’s, well advanced. The nurse says, “Are you sure you don’t want a wheelchair, Nila?” The woman looks at me, aggrieved. “It’s like being in a pram, isn’t it? Why race to stand still? They won’t bring the lunch trays for another hour yet.”

As they move across the foyer, I retrieve the yellow book from my coat pocket. All afternoon, the name Nuong has been clamouring in my thoughts. I calculate the time difference once more. In Cambodia, tomorrow morning has arrived. I take out my phone and dial the international number. On the sixth ring, a woman answers.

I ask to speak to Ly Nuong.

When she doesn’t respond, I ask a second time, switching to Khmer, though the words no longer come easily to me. She laughs, relieved, and says, No, Nuong isn’t here, he’s already left for work. She has a Phnom Penh accent, the same as my parents.

“Who is this?” she asks.

My English name feels awkward so instead I say, “I’m calling from Canada.”

“Canada, yes. I will tell him.”

I thank the woman and hang up. The phone feels heavy in my hand. I pick it up again and dial Meng’s number. Though it rings for a long time, nobody answers.

The first time it happened, it was January. I had been anxious and overworked, and then, that day, I couldn’t find my wallet, and then my keys. In the confusion, I forgot to pick Kiri up from daycare. By the time the aggravated staff reached me, my son had been waiting in the deserted rooms for more than two hours.

I ran all the way. At the daycare, I thanked the staff and apologized as best as I was able, then I took Kiri’s hand and we made our way through the snow, stumbling together on the patches of ice. The sky was charcoal and the cold ambushed us. My son had lost his scarf. He asked me where I had been and when I didn’t answer, he started to cry, he pulled on my hand but my body was light and my hand felt far away.

At home, I made dinner and he wandered around beside my legs, tugging at my clothes. “What’s wrong, Momma?” he asked me over and over. In my head was a thick sadness, but I tried to concentrate on the rice and the carrots and then the faded green beans. I knew that if I spoke, my words would be slurred and broken so instead I tried to conserve my energy. My child began to weep. He picked up his cat and buried his face in her fur. There was a memory at the edges of my consciousness, but with a great force of will I managed to avert my eyes from it. I put rice and carrots and green beans into a small plastic bowl and I set the bowl carefully on the table. I stood in front of the stove for one long minute after another, trying to make certain that all the burners were off. Kiri asked for a spoon. I switched the dials on and off to make sure. I must do things in order. I walked through the darkness to the bedroom. Kiri’s voice was far away, like the scuffling of mice between the walls. “What happened, Momma? Why are you crying?” I went to the bedroom and shut the door as softly as I could.

Jambavan was lying on my pillow. Kiri’s cat watched me lazily. I liked her company. I remembered the day we brought her home, this tiny kitten who loved to nestle inside Kiri’s sock drawer. Around the apartment, my son would crawl like a maniac, sputtering, “Jambajambajamba.” Navin said, “Sounds like a Latin dance.” The name had been my idea, Jambavan, the king of bears, a hero of the Ramayana, the epic that, in Cambodia, we called the Reamker.

My son scratched at the door. “Can I make you dinner?”

“I love you, Kiri,” I said. I could hear him sobbing for what felt like hours, and the sobbing was like a coat of skin that I wore, that I couldn’t remove.

Navin came home to this wreckage and still he forgave me.

I wanted to tie my son’s wrist to mine with a piece of string and in this way save us both. It’s in the night, I know, that the ones we love disappear. Once, when I was ten years old, Kosal, the head of our cooperative, had given me the clothes of another girl. He told me to wear them out into the fields. Later on, when I undressed in the half-light, I saw that blood had seeped through the fabric and marked my skin, it covered my chest and my thighs. I remember the sound of water, my mother scrubbing the clothes over and over. I remember she scrubbed so hard the black dye came off in streaks. We wrote the girl’s name on a piece of bark and buried it in the earth. My mother prayed for life. I looked at the sky, at the trees, at the disturbed mound of earth and saw no possible gods.

While Navin slept beside me, I fought to contain my thoughts. In my dreams, I saw everyone and everything, but never my mother, never Sopham. The Khmer Rouge had taught us how to survive, walking alone, carrying nothing in our hands. Belongings were slid away, then family and loved ones, and then finally our loyalties and ourselves. Worthless or precious, indifferent or loved, all of our treasures had been treated the same.

Outside, I am surrounded by tiny sequins of snow. I walk downhill on University Avenue, toward Café Esperanza, where inside, the heat welcomes me. The owner is washing the laminated menus, vigilantly, as if polishing fine silverware. He grimaces out the window at a man in yellow overalls, harnessed to a complicated system of belts and clasps, floating above the traffic. The man is part acrobat, part city worker, repairing the wires. The orange light of his truck spins over us like quiet laughter.