Dogs at the Perimeter

Hiroji

Monday, March 6

[fragment]

It is April 1976. A burning hot day and the sky so delicate a blue, the white sun will surely burn the colour off. Hiroji should have sunglasses but he lost them in a Bangkok government office where an official with concerned eyes hid them under an airmail envelope, distracting Hiroji with instructions to another border town, where the sixth and hopefully final permit could be obtained. He should have said something, he should have snuck his hand under the envelope and retrieved his sunglasses, but he didn’t. He could only sit, dazed by the heat and the man’s shy audacity, and watch.

Now, a half-dozen permits later and several months gone by, he stands on the Thai side of the border and stares across a narrow river into Cambodia. When Phnom Penh fell to the Khmer Rouge, the airport was in ruins. A year later, and it hasn’t reopened. There’s been no word from his brother in all that time, not a letter, not a clue. James has been wheeled into another room but the room itself has disappeared. On the opposite bank, the Cambodian side, blistered grass unrolls, folding up into stark mountains. The heat is dizzying. He shifts his feet on the dry ground, blinks the sweat from his eyes, and tries to comprehend what he’s seeing. A black-clothed boy, the Khmer Rouge guard, stands alert at the end of a one-lane bridge, his Kalashnikov leaning against his fingertips, barrel up. The border is eerily quiet and then, abruptly, gunfire sounds. Khmer Rouge soldiers arrive. They gaze disdainfully across the border, at Hiroji. When they depart, one remains, like a black feather fallen from the crow.

Soon the rainy season will arrive and it will be nearly impossible to travel in the flooding. Even James won’t be able to manage it. Hiroji paces the border. In his head, he adds up his expenses: how much cash he needs to stay another month, another two months. How much for a lift to the next refugee camp, from Sa Kaeo to Aran, and farther north. Fees and living expenses for September, when he must return to university. The return flight, all his bills. He paces until the sun has burned a headache deep behind his eyes. It’s a twenty-minute walk back to Aranyaprathet, a long walk through wrinkled scrub and gnarled trees, behind tin shacks, beside military trucks that shake the road and heave the dust up. He walks slowly because he is still not used to the heat. In all his life, he has never felt so powerless.

—

Aranyaprathet smells of overripe pineapples and mangy dogs. Beside his guesthouse, a shrill, dead-eyed woman tries to sell him Buddha heads. She scratches at him with her fingernails, tugs at his clothes, alternately whispers and barks at him until, finally, he chooses one, a sleepy bodhisattva with its eyes half-open, cold against his fingertips, too light for this world. The old woman clucks reassuringly, scratching the bills together, she drums them on the surrounding objects, holds the money up against her forehead, smiles generously.

Upstairs, inside his room, he sets the bodhisattva on the desk, inside the square of sunshine floating through the window. He removes, from his shirt pocket, two colour photographs of James, damp from his sweat, and lays them on the desk to dry. Hiroji sits on the edge of the bed, thinks of making tea, thinks of calling his mother, thinks of an empty stairwell in the School of Medicine at the University of British Columbia, the carpet of grass out front, where he used to read and watch the girls go by. Objects in the hotel room begin to disconnect from one another, first the mirror turns away, then the table stutters toward the door, then the walls come apart. The bodhisattva falls face down as if to kiss the earth, he’s so tired and he hasn’t slept in days. Hiroji blinks his eyes. It’s his birthday, today or tomorrow depending on the time zone, and he wonders if the party (the non-existent party) will bring him gifts or money, plans for the future, or just fond memories.

A rattling at the door bothers him. He watches the knob turn of its own accord, the door jumps open and a face appears at the level of the table: furtive eyes, a heavy frown. The Cambodian boy, Nuong, comes into the room, exhales a jumble of Khmer words. His flickering hands clutch his stomach.

“I’m sorry,” Hiroji says, ashamed. “I lost track of time.”

Nuong looks at him, wide-eyed and anxious.

“Okay. Let’s go.” Hiroji returns the photographs to his shirt pocket and they descend. Nuong, hunched like a shrivelled leaf, hurries quickly along the road.

At their regular place, they step through a windowless wall, drop down onto red plastic chairs. A long-faced man brings them two bowls of noodles, they arrive in a bouquet of steam. Hiroji removes his glasses and lays them, arms open, on the table. It’s crowded in the restaurant this morning. Men in undershirts snap their newspapers back, hold them high like flags. The regulars nod at him: Thai Red Cross and usaid workers, gamblers, black market profiteers, foreign service officers, stringers for ap, afp, Reuters, stringers as the conscience of the world, here for a few days before pulling out. The owner has a bird in a bamboo cage, the cage covered by a thin sarong. The bird chortles in its private darkness.

Hiroji closes his eyes, rubs the dust and wetness from them. He isn’t upset, just tired, but Nuong, his mouth bursting with noodles, stares at Hiroji in shocked sadness.

“Allergies. I have allergies,” Hiroji says, even though the boy doesn’t understand much English.

To trick the sadness from Nuong’s eyes, he pushes his food toward the boy. Nuong accepts. In minutes, the noodles are gone.

“They won’t confiscate your food,” Hiroji says, but the boy just looks up at Hiroji expectantly.

After lunch, Hiroji stops in at the makeshift Red Cross office, where a terse woman his mother’s age operates the Xerox machine, telling him, as it spits out posters, that his bill is running high and he should clear his account, then she disappears behind a stubble of folders. He takes the posters out of the machine. By the time he carries them outside, the sheets are already moist from the sweat on his hands.

James’s face smiles out from Aranyaprathet’s bulletin board where the locals come to read the daily newspapers, James smiles from all the downtrodden shacks along the road toward the border, Hiroji keeps going until he runs out of posters, and then he turns back to see the sheets dancing along the road, Nuong running back and forth to gather them up. Cheap glue. The ink fades fast in this climate and he’ll do it all over again next week, this is what he tells himself and it works, it makes his heart slow down, it calms his hands.

Back at the Red Cross, Hiroji stations himself at the telephone. He calls the Cambodian Ministry of the Interior, he lets the line ring fifty, sixty times before giving up. He telephones the Cambodian Foreign Ministry in Paris, a man with a delicate voice answers, puts him on hold, and then the line goes dead.

The Xerox woman tells him there are a dozen refugees newly arrived in the south, near Mairut. “Take a moto-taxi,” she says. “Better yet, ask our driver to take you.”

Hiroji stares at the map and absent-mindedly fingers the cash in his pocket.

“Okay,” he says. “Tomorrow.”

The heat is surreal. Hiroji walks back to the border, stares across the river, wonders if the Khmer Rouge soldier will suddenly vacate his post, if some door will swing open, if people will rush out as he rushes in. Cambodia is right there, right in front of him, as accessible as a landscape painting. But chip off the paint and there’s a dirty, yawning hole. His thoughts are melting. James needs you, he thinks. He tries to think of someone else he can appeal to, a diplomat, a fixer.

James is waiting, he tells himself again. But when his brother finally does come home, what will he do? Will he disappear again, like he used to after binge drinking at some forgotten dive in Chinatown. Even blind drunk, his brother could walk a straight line, tell a joke and remember the punchline, advise Hiroji to stay a kid because a kid’s life is the best life, the bee’s knees.

“I’m not a kid,” he had protested.

“Dream on, brother. Let’s go for a drive.”

It was Hiroji who had steered them through the wet nights, while James pushed his tipsy head out the window, toward Lion’s Gate Bridge, toward the sea-swept darkness of the north. Once they went all the way to Squamish, they rolled the windows down and listened to the tide, admired the teenaged girls sitting on the picnic tables. “Japs,” one said and the other girl giggled. “Sayonara!” They smiled at Hiroji enticingly.

“One for you and one for me,” his brother slurred. Then James closed his eyes as if the darkness was too bright. Hollow beer bottles clinked together, the girl’s voices pitched and rolled like the tide coming in.

“James,” Hiroji said when the beach was empty. “Can I drive us home now?”

“Sure, brother. Drive away. I might take a snooze.”

Hiroji swung the door open.

“Do you remember Dad?” James said, collapsing into the front seat.

He hesitated before answering. “Not so much.”

“That’s good,” James said. “That’s okay. That’s what he would have wanted, that’s what we all want, isn’t it? Hey, world! Turn a blind eye to my misdeeds.”

Hiroji just drove, uncomprehending.

Every week now he tracks down government officials who nod sympathetically, who shake his hand and tell him, frankly, there’s nothing to be done. He goes to sleep thinking about the covered birds and wakes up, the air close, smelling of mud. Once, Hiroji saw Nuong cooking strands of meat. He had killed a cat, skinned it, and roasted it. “If you’re hungry,” Hiroji had said, pointing at the carcass and shaking his head, “why don’t you tell me? Those animals could be diseased. They might make you sick.” The boy had blinked in surprise.

“Try it,” Nuong said in Khmer.

He watched the boy devouring the meat, sucking the marrow noisily and succinctly from the bones. The boy only rests in the afternoons. He lies down on Hiroji’s bed, hands interlaced, studying the cracked ceiling.

“What should we call you,” Hiroji had asked when they met, for the first time, in the medical tent. The boy had crouched on the bamboo mat, keeping his distance from the translator, a teenaged girl.

“Bruce Lee,” Nuong said. “I am Bruce Lee.”

“We walked through the forest,” Nuong told him, his voice humming beneath the girl’s. “We came up through the forest.”

“Who?”

“Me and my brothers.”

It costs Hiroji thirty dollars every week to bribe the Thai guard, but at least Nuong comes and goes freely from the camp where the UNHCR rations are only twenty cents per person, per day.

James calls to him from the other room: “You home, bro? Is that you?”

Hiroji holds his breath and doesn’t answer.

His brother shrugs, “I had to live my life.”

Back at the Red Cross office, Hiroji telephones his mother, trying to sound upbeat. “You’ve heard from Ichiro?” she asks, her voice wobbling with joy. “Not yet, but soon.” Her disappointment leaves a cut in his heart. He tells her, impulsively, that he’ll stay in Thailand another month, he will delay his studies. When he puts down the receiver it seems like the end of the world: the phone call cost forty-two U.S. dollars. He can live on dried noodles but what will he feed Nuong? Where will they sleep? He returns to his room but Nuong is gone. Hiroji lies down on the hard bed, watches the crooked turning of the fan. In his dreams that night, his brother offers him pastel-pink candies to make all the helpless thoughts go away, they taste like Pepto-Bismol. Pepto-abysmal, his brother says. He wakes up and knows that James is dead, there’s nothing to be done, the vigil is over. He wakes up and it’s his twenty-seventh birthday. Lightning stutters in the sky and the rains start again, raucous and temperamental. He can’t accept it, he doesn’t know whether to stay or leave, he wants to do right by James but he doesn’t know how, he can’t imagine how.

At dawn, unable to sleep, he dresses and slogs through the mud to the border. Nuong is there, incongruously, half-blotted out by the rain. The boy is nearly unrecognizable, his eyes are bugging out, he looks rabid. “Nuong,” Hiroji says but the boy doesn’t react to his name. On the other side of the bridge the Khmer Rouge guard lifts his Kalashnikov, lifts the goddamned thing so easily and swivels it so the barrel is facing forward. The rain is everywhere, obscenely loud, drumming against the frozen air. Nuong looks like he is about to run across the bridge, straight into the guard, deep into the minefields.

Nuong calls, in Khmer, “Are you going to shoot me?” His voice carries, both childlike and detached.

The guard on the other side makes no response.

“Will you shoot? Shoot, okay? Shoot.”

From where Hiroji stands, the guard looks like a piece of smudged charcoal. Nuong takes a step forward. “Why don’t you shoot?”

The guard picks up something from the ground, grips it in his right hand, and then flings it nastily across the river.

Nuong flinches. The rock flies through the rain, it clears the bridge but misses him.

Nobody says anything for a moment and then, slowly, Nuong walks to the foot of the bridge. The guard yells at him to get back. The rifle shakes as he raises his voice, high-pitched, stunned and enraged, and the rain seems to part around the gun. Nuong gets down on his hands and knees. He starts pawing at the mud. The guard keeps screaming. The torrent has softened all the edges so that the land and the boys are the same brown colour, the same weak consistency. Nuong stands up, holding something in his right hand. The guard lets off a hail of bullets. Still, nothing happens, it must be the heavy rain that is blurring things or maybe the guard is intentionally firing wide, but Nuong continues to stand there, drenched, holding what Hiroji can now see is a rock. The guard taunts Nuong to come forward, to throw it, to cross the bridge, to come home, come home, if you come home I’ll give you everything you want, but the boy just stands there staring like a lost dog, a sick child.

At the guesthouse, Nuong takes off his wet clothes, lies down on the bed, and there is no emotion at all, just an extraordinary, disturbing stillness that Hiroji has never seen before in anyone. He had picked up the boy after he sat down in the mud, unmoving, and carried him back to Aran, piggyback style, as if they were a father and son coming home from the park on a Sunday afternoon.

He could feed this boy and defend him but there’s a limit he finally perceives now, a limit to what Nuong will say and what he, Hiroji, will ever be able to understand. The boy has survived, he’s turning into someone else, but all the broken edges are rubbing together and injuring him every time he moves.

Nuong opens his eyes and says, in English, that he’s hungry.

They get up and walk to the restaurant.

Hiroji wants to ask him if there are any foreigners in the new Cambodia, if there are doctors there, and why so few people have escaped across the border. Are the stories of the refugees true? They say the cities are empty, that children are executed for missing their parents, that torture and killing are commonplace. The French newspapers are reporting that eight hundred thousand people died in the first year of the revolution alone. But how could he ask a child such a question, even if the child knows the answer?

At the restaurant, Nuong says insistently, “I’m hungry.”

By the end of 1977, they are surrounded by scores of missionaries and aid workers, by reporters, spies, and swindlers. More shelters bubble up from the ground, more generators and supplies arrive, but it’s never enough. He alternates between a dozen camps along the border, leaving Aranyaprathet for Lumpuk and Mairut, then threading back again. The shelters, blue tarpaulins hooked onto bamboo stakes, are overrun, polluted, and dank. Twice a month, he hitches a ride in the Red Cross truck, he returns from Bangkok with cases of tinned milk and dried noodles, with notebooks and pencils for Nuong, and he does the same things over and over again, asks the same people the same questions, Xeroxes more photographs of James, phones his mother. Over the decrepit lines, he tries to reassure her. She tells him not to give up hope.

The hills are completely green, the grass is technicolour, fruit falls everywhere and rots on the ground.

The boy draws unbelievable things.

The objects in the hotel room separate. Metallic paint chips off the bodhisattva’s head.

Nuong says, in his precarious English, that he would like medicine. “What kind of medicine?” Hiroji asks, curious.

The boy just looks at him.

“What kind?” Hiroji asks again. “What kind?”

The boy cradles his head and stays in that position for a frighteningly long time.

Somewhere, now, a surgeon could burn a lesion into the boy’s brain. It’s possible to lessen Nuong’s suffering if the boy accepts some degree of loss. They can turn down the volume on all his emotions, pinch the air out of his sadness, turn him dull and pure as snow. Hiroji has professors who say there is no suffering, there is only chemistry. Suffering is a description but chemistry is the structure. In any case, a pill can dampen some receptors, dim the lights a little. Surgery can make him care a little less. Pain and suffering are not, in the end, the same thing, one can be cleaved from the other like a diamond split along its planes, so that you feel pain but you are no longer bothered by it. He has seen a patient, huddling in a corner, at the mercy of a condition so devastating that even a slight breeze from the window would cause him unbearable suffering. After surgery, he told his doctors that the pain was exactly as it was, but he did not feel it as greatly. “It’s as if,” he had said, a cool blandness in his eyes, “the pain is not being done to me.” One day, maybe in a ten years, or fifty years, a surgeon will be able to do this with disturbing precision, destroy a whirlpool of memory, an entire system of feelings, but in the meantime it’s like taking a hatchet to a spider’s web.

By early 1979, the border area is a dead-eyed, stinking hell. He signs on as an aid worker with the Red Cross and they give him a stipend and a room. In January, the Vietnamese Communists crossed the Cambodian border, swept the Khmer Rouge aside, and took Phnom Penh in less than two weeks. The refugees wash up in their black clothes, so debilitated and disturbed that Hiroji thinks he is walking through an exhumed cemetery, they are more soil and sickness than human beings. Orphaned children piled together in a cloud of flies, little girls who are a jigsaw of bones, numb parents. He volunteers with the Red Cross but the supplies are so limited he works in a state of heartless efficiency. It’s the only way that he can cope. Film crews record a girl, the same age as Nuong, suffering from starvation. On camera, she dies. Rows of cork boards overflow with letters, queries, and pictures of the missing. He adds James’s photograph but, within a day, it’s covered over by other missing people. He falls asleep tasting flies in his mouth, he hallucinates dead women stuck to his shoes. Vancouver and the University might as well be drawn on paper, he begins to forget that other people don’t live this way. Bye-bye, the children say, when they glimpse him arriving, walking, working, leaving. Bye-bye! He keeps James’s photo in his pocket all the time but the shame he feels searching for his brother, this foreigner, one person out of two million, distresses him.

Nuong is sponsored, all of a sudden, by a family in the United States. The adoption, arranged by an American Christian relief agency, happens so fast Hiroji is caught off guard. He has to hide his unhappiness in a bloom of smiles. In a few weeks, Nuong will board a plane from Bangkok to Chicago, and then from Chicago to Lowell, Massachusetts. His new family sends him a greeting card with a snapshot of balloons. Nuong wants to know if he will be given food on the crossing, if Hiroji will visit him, if it is advisable to take everything with him, his books, pencils, and quietly accumulated stash of Nescafé, and not glance back over his shoulder, the way the Christian missionaries taught them, to prevent the salt from flowing back up through his mouth, out his nostrils. Hiroji doesn’t know what to say, he doesn’t understand this boy.

“Why are you so sad all the time?” Nuong asks him in his now-melodic English. “Is it so very bad where you come from?”

Hiroji has to laugh.

Nuong doesn’t smile. He says, “Thank you heaven I am not going to Canada.”

More refugees arrive every month, wasting, mangled bodies.

Hiroji makes a gift to Nuong of all his remaining money, which isn’t a great deal, and the shining bodhisattva. He accompanies him as far as Bangkok and he tells Nuong to be strong, not to look back, to be brave.

The boy looks so small with his suitcase and his blunt haircut, wearing a knit sweater for the first time. He does what Hiroji says and he doesn’t look back, he launches himself courageously up into the sky.

A few weeks later, Hiroji sits with his mother in the apartment he grew up in on the east side of Vancouver. Her hair has gone wiry and white, and the tea is pale because she has been re-using the same leaves too many times. They go through all the details ten times, a hundred times. She, too, makes lists. She smiles her old smile at him and asks when he will go back to Aranyaprathet.

“Soon,” he says.

“Next month?”

“Soon.”

After a week of this they both fall silent. He spends too many hours in the second bedroom, which is overflowing with their adolescent junk: deflated soccer balls, bottle collections, homework assignments, and the assorted dregs of childhood. In a biscuit tin, he finds James’s birth certificate and an expired driver’s licence, both with his brother’s birth name, Junichiro Matsui. In each photo, James is grinning. He looks young, he looks careless, as if the days have no weight on him, as if he is higher up or better than all the rest. Hiroji shoves the id into his backpack.

It is surprisingly easy to impersonate his brother and, each time he passes for James, he feels more in control, more at peace with himself. He gets a new driver’s licence, opens a bank account, and deposits a small sum of money. The truth is, they don’t really look alike, but Hiroji has a trustworthy disposition, people look at him and see an honest face. They seem glad to help. A month later, while attending a conference in Rome, Hiroji gets a fresh haircut and presents himself at the Canadian Embassy. Calmly, believing his own illusions, he tells the wary man behind the glass that his passport has been stolen and could he apply for a new one? He has a police report showing that he, Junichiro Matsui, had his briefcase stolen while visiting the Trevi Fountain. The hard-nosed man barely looks at him: he takes Hiroji’s falsified id, photocopies it, and hands it back. Two weeks later, Hiroji signs for the passport of Junichiro Matsui. He buries it in his suitcase and tells himself that he is only preparing to meet James again, that these are necessary preparations for his brother’s repatriation. On paper, his brother still exists, he still belongs to a country, a home.

Finally, he is able to enter Cambodia, flying in on a Red Cross plane with two French doctors who murmur the rosary.

It is mid-1979, months after the fall of the Khmer Rouge. All over the city, people are rebuilding their lives in the street. He sees old men cooking meals in front of the Royal Palace where gold shingles sparkle like the crests of the ocean, he sees girls who sleep in the rusted carcasses of tanks, in straw huts, in silken hammocks. Farther along, on Monivong Boulevard, a wide road shaded by blossoms, smashed cars are piled four, five high, in a kind of monumental fuck you to Mercedes. Heaps of refrigerators and sofas are degrading in the humidity, bourgeois comforts evicted from their homes and left to rough it out. A boy waits with a car jack slung across his chest, cradling it like a mini AK-47. Alert with insomnia, Hiroji wanders the city that hardly seems a city at all. The citizens are all sleeping outdoors, where they can see and hear in every direction. He passes Vietnamese patrols, women ringed by children, people on mats and sheets all along the pavement, no electricity but dozens of candles shivering in glass jars. People follow him, they ask him if he knows the man from UNHCR who promised to bring charcoal last week, or the technician from the factory who was supposed to repair the sewing machines, or the doctor who ran out of bandages but said he would be back. Hiroji cannot bring himself to say that these experts have already flown out. All the Western aid is at the border, in Thailand, not here, in Phnom Penh. They ask him to please pass on their requests, to impress upon someone that there are things they need, now, right away. Persistently, they crowd in on him, but it is as if they are restrained, their limbs move slowly, or is it his eyes that are deceiving him because all he sees are wraiths, bodies out of proportion who, in the morning when he emerges from his cotton sheets, might very well be dead. An old man who speaks English and claims to be the former Minister of Public Works asks him to come back tomorrow and take a letter to his sister, now living in California. He wants to tell her that her children are dead but her husband concealed his identity and lived. The volume of his voice flickers along with the lights in the jars. Hiroji shows the man a photograph of James. The former Minister of Public Works studies his brother’s face and then directs him down along the road, to Tun or Old Mak, maybe one of them will know.

“What cooperative?” Tun asks, holding the photo close to his eyes.

Hiroji shakes his head.

“Do you know what district, what sector?”

“He lived in Phnom Penh,” Hiroji says.

“Non, non,” a woman interjects. “Personne a habité ici.”

Two men nearby are screaming at each other. Their fists are out, faces venomous, but people watch languidly. It is simultaneously loud and still and bright and fast. One man picks up a brick, wraps it in his scarf, and begins to swing the weapon, like a cowboy, over his head. Beside Hiroji, the woman says, “Vas-y. Get away from here.” She is talking to herself, but the French and Khmer words lodge in his mind. Forcefully, she pushes him back.

He passes through the crowd, disoriented. He is holding James’s photograph and an old man selling individual slices of grapefruit runs after him and takes the photo from him.

He tells Hiroji, in graceful English, “I know this man. This is the friend of Dararith. The doctor.”

“Yes,” Hiroji says, stunned. “The doctor.” The crowd is grumbling now, in counterpoint to the yelling. “James Matsui. Sometimes he went by Ichiro or Junichiro.”

“But he died,” the old man says. “He died and left his wife behind, long before April 17.”

“No, that isn’t the same person.”

“Of course it is,” the old man says calmly. “I went to the wedding. Yes, the sister of Dararith.”

“Where is Dararith now?”

“Dead.”

“And his sister?”

“Oh, certainly dead.” The man hands the photograph back to Hiroji, his expression unreadable in the twilight. “She taught my son. She was a good girl, a good teacher.”

“It must be a different man.”

“On my soul,” the old man says, his voice barely audible above the commotion behind them. “Yes. On my soul. Sorya and Dararith lived on Monivong. If you want, I will show you the place.”

They walk to Monivong, up and down the wide street, past people so pitiful Hiroji looks past them to the darkened buildings, the smashed windows, and broken-down doors. Campfires burn haltingly. There is rubbish everywhere. The old man moves very slowly, he gets confused and turns around, squints up at the French façades, wonders aloud if the shutters were blue or green. He sighs and says, “My eyesight is very poor now. I believe it was this building but … third floor or fifth floor? An odd number. I’m very sorry. It’s difficult at night. I can see it in my mind but I don’t see it here.”

They stand for a few moments gazing up at the shadowed buildings.

“If you remember,” Hiroji says at last, “will you come and find me?”

“Of course, of course. I would be happy to.”

In neat block letters, Hiroji writes the name of the hotel and then the address of the Red Cross office.

“I’ll come speak to you again,” he tells the man.

“Of course.”

Hiroji buys two whole grapefruit and carries on. More people mumble over the photograph, they ask themselves is this so-and-so, is this the son of our friend Tan? He hears a dozen leads and possibilities, he writes each one down in a black notebook, each one as likely and unlikely as the next.

Night after night, he wanders through Phnom Penh and the wary Vietnamese soldiers leave him alone, the rats scurry from underfoot, children watch him pass as if he were an apparition.

“You’re stubborn,” his brother says.

“I’m tired, James.”

“Do you remember Dad?”

“I’m so tired now.”

“It’s okay. He didn’t want to be remembered. It was war, he said. ‘It was just another war.’ That’s why he did the things he did.”

“What kinds of things?”

His brother shakes his head impatiently.

A girl on the street asks him, “Mister, where are you from?”

“Canada.”

She looks at him, puzzled. A deep frown spreads across her forehead. “Czechoslovakia,” she says suddenly, victoriously.

“Canada,” he says.

She smiles and she keeps smiling, her eyes are half-mad and he has to look away.

“Mister,” she says slowly. “Do you want to help me?”

He covers his face with his hands.

The thing is, a part of him wants to remain in Phnom Penh. The jungle eats the buildings up, and the people come and push it back, and violence isn’t hidden anywhere, it just is what it is, it dogs you like the river, it arrives and returns, it arrives and remains.

He tells James, “I won’t abandon you.”

“You’ll never be ready,” his brother says impatiently. “You never had it in you.”

The rains start. He’s ashamed to witness such hardship. People cling to nothing, they stare out with empty expressions, a blankness that seems like a screwed-on lid, slowly cracking under the pressure. Meanwhile, he goes back, every night, to the Hotel Samaki, where a three-course dinner is served on fragile painted plates. The food in the hotel is fresh and bountiful, the Red Cross has its own private stock of food. He’s never eaten so well in his life. The sound of the metal forks raking against the plates disturbs him. He wants to pray or meditate or walk on water. Stories pile up in his black notebook: the Japanese cameraman who was captured in 1973 and killed. The Canadian sailor who washed up on the south coast in 1977, he was imprisoned and finally executed. All the children who, orphaned or separated, flew away to the other side of the world.

At the hotel, he stands, drenched, under the once-sublime balustrade. The water carries lost objects, a rubber sandal, a baby’s tub. A boy races to retrieve usable items, the water rising as high as his waist. Thirty years later, Hiroji thinks he sees him again, the very same child, except that this one is shouting, pursued by another boy, and the street is a current of reflected colours, headlights, and neon signs rubbing the darkness. Phnom Penh is under water again, but this time it is strange and out of season. Nuong snaps and unsnaps his cell phone, extends an umbrella, and guides Hiroji through the rivered streets to Nuong’s own guesthouse, the Lowell Hotel. A young helper lifts Hiroji’s suitcase, frowns, tells Nuong that this Korean tourist has come empty-handed. Hiroji stands like a potted plant, gazing at Nuong’s wife, she is fine-boned and lovely, her flower-patterned dress quivering in the fan’s current. “A twenty-hour flight!” Nuong is saying. “Just one more set of stairs.” They go up and up. Behind them, the helper, Tarek, balances the suitcase on his shoulder. “The best room,” he hears, “you can stay as long as you want,” and it is comfortable, cool and sun-dappled. Nuong aims a remote at the ceiling and the air conditioning clanks into life. “Relax for an hour or so, then we’ll go to dinner. The rains will stop. There’s a great place …” and Hiroji sits on the bed. There is the bodhisattva just as it was, one hand pointing to heaven, the other caressing the earth. “It’s yours,” Nuong is saying. “Do you remember? You gave it to me at the airport, before I boarded the plane. I’ve always kept it.” When the door closes, Hiroji stands for a long time at the window, trying to understand the choice he’s made, the things he’s done. There’s no going home now. Some part of him is still in the airplane, still looking down, unable to see.

Three weeks went by and he travelled from one edge of the country to the other. Sometimes Nuong accompanied him, but usually Hiroji went with Tarek. They went by car or motorbike, they spent days away from Phnom Penh. First stop, the Dangrek Mountains, Sisophon, the narrow road to the Thai border. Turning east again, to Kampong Thom, then crisscrossing southwest. He thought he could go forever, towns giving way to villages, giving way to lone shacks. Hiroji carried the same black notebook he had used in 1979. It was the hot season. Sometimes he and Tarek sat for hours, waiting for the sun to retreat. Tarek grinned helplessly at the ladies, they were a pink-or blue-or violet-shirted flock of swans, arranged on hammocks. Hiroji saw James everywhere, in the old men resting their elbows on plastic tables, sitting astride their motorbikes. Monks hurried by, bright along the road like autumn leaves.

When he had been in Cambodia nearly a month, Nuong introduced him to Bonny. He was a fixer, a survivor who had made a living digging up the dead. In the bar where they met, he wore a loud, disco-era shirt, sunglasses up on his forehead, and a drooping frangipani behind his ear. Men like Bonny, Nuong said, were Cambodia’s secret service. Usually, they were former Khmer Rouge, disbanded in the mid-1990s when the coalition government fell apart, who had since reinvented themselves as private detectives. They had taken foreign journalists to Pol Pot, to Comrade Duch, and Ta Mok. “Everyone is my friend,” Bonny told him. He had the most piercing eyes Hiroji had ever seen. “From the cave-dwellers to the politicians to the cia. Now you,” he said, sliding his mirrored sunglasses down, “you are my friend.” Hiroji gazed into the double reflection of himself, the restaurant, the beer girls behind them.

He paid Bonny in American dollars. A few weeks later, at the height of the dry season, the fixer knocked on Hiroji’s door.

He entered the room in a calico shirt. In his hand, he brandished a dozen photographs. “Didn’t I tell you?” he said, smiling his sunlit smile. “Bonny can work miracles.”

He lay the photographs on the bedspread. Hiroji stood and stared. The face in the picture was older, lined, and achingly familiar. He saw his mother’s eyes. Bonny was speaking and Hiroji had to shade his face, block the man’s grin, in order to comprehend. James was living under a false name, Bonny said. Kwan. A decade ago, he had moved to northern Laos, and he lived there with a woman and her grown children. The woman was Laotian but had lived in Cambodia nearly all her life. Vanna.

“Look,” Bonny said. “I even bought you an airplane ticket. You leave tomorrow for Luang Prabang.” He tapped his chest with the open flat of his hand. “Courtesy of Bonny.”

Hiroji felt nothing.

This was the initial fist of shock.

“Your brother is alive,” Bonny said. Grave, sympathetic.

That night, Hiroji and Nuong went to a bar on the riverside. The walls sang with tropical light. The foreigners were loud and drunk but Hiroji, unbearably sober, remembered his mother who had died two decades ago. He thought of all the ways he had abandoned James little by little, year by year. By the time he moved to Montreal, he had given up returning to the Thai border and to Cambodia. Nuong ordered a round of drinks. Outside, moto drivers slept on the seats of their vehicles, their bare feet balanced on the handlebars. Hiroji drank beer and then whiskey and then beer again. Beside him, the waitress played with the sleeve of her uniform, staring at the clients as if they were images on a television screen. He told Nuong that he was ready to leave his brother behind. “Yes,” Nuong said, not meeting his eyes. Why was it that forgetting James was like cutting off his hand, but his brother had chosen to live an entire life away from them? Could they possibly still be brothers? If so, it couldn’t mean anything. Tomorrow he would go home to Canada. He would explain his disappearance as a fugue state, an amnesia that carries a person away for weeks, even months. He would return and throw himself into his work, already new ideas and research projects were taking root in his mind. He would accept that he had been the only one looking, it was his own guilt that had driven him here. The whiskey softened his thoughts. He was a good researcher, a good man. He had let his mother down but, still, it was no reason for weeping.

“Come on,” Nuong said. “Let’s go to the river. Let’s get out of here and see the city.”

Hiroji arrived in Luang Prabang the next afternoon and hired a driver to take him to James’s village. In the road, children came and swirled around him, they called him farang Hmong, he gave them candy and they flew off like summer birds. He followed the directions that Bonny had given him. He went up to the house, unsure whether to knock or push the door open, he had the uneasy sensation that it was himself he would see, as if all the lying and forging of documents had finally caught up to him. He knocked and eventually an old man opened the door, an old man who looked just like the photographs of their father, a father Hiroji could barely recall.

“James,” he said.

The man didn’t respond.

“I was told that you were here.”

The man stared past him.

“It’s me, Hiroji.”

He could hear children everywhere, he could hear water boiling, strangely near, persistent voices, it must be the neighbour’s, a door smacking closed, chickens. “Can I come in?” he asked. “Just for a few minutes.”

James pulled the door open a little wider and stepped back. It was cool inside, away from the glare of the sun.

His brother made him tea.

Hiroji said, “I’m a doctor now. I live in Montreal.”

His brother was barely listening. He moved constantly, sipping tea, eating peanuts, standing up to wipe the table, getting ice for the beer, cleaning glasses, misting a baby plant, adjusting the volume of the radio, up, down, lower, then finally moving the radio to a different room entirely without ever switching it off. A woman came out of the room. She was bare foot, wearing a blouse and a blue sampot. When she saw Hiroji, she smiled at him, her eyebrows lifting in a question. James spoke to her in a language he didn’t understand. A few minutes later, the woman, perhaps in her mid-fifties, with a dignified, gracious face, slid her feet into a pair of sandals and left the house.

Hiroji opened his bag and took out an envelope. He removed photocopies of the letters that James had sent to him before he disappeared, a photograph of their family, of his mother’s funeral, of their childhood home in Vancouver. A photograph of James as a child.

James studied them from afar. Then he stood up, set more beer on the table, went into another room, and shut the door behind him.

Hiroji shifted his weight on the flimsy chair. It was okay, he thought. How could you prove to someone that you knew them? How could you prove that you were related by blood and something more than blood? It felt useless. So innate as to be useless. He could leave now. This room would still exist, his brother would still be here, but the cut glass inside himself would no longer pain him. It was finished. Wasn’t that good enough?

He got up and knocked on the closed door.

“Ichiro,” he said. “Don’t you know who I am?”

“Don’t be upset,” his brother said. His voice was muffled. “It’s no use being upset. What’s done is done.”

Something, bitterness or grief, was choking him but nothing came out, no blame, no words. He stood up to leave. When he opened the door, the warm air soothed him, but there were people outside enjoying the evening, there were children beside two oxen, and a girl in a wheelchair with her father behind her. They seemed like impossible obstacles so he went back inside. A little girl followed him through the door. James had emerged, he had already started to clear the table, and the little girl went to James and held his hand.

Hiroji walked past them, to the back of the house. He climbed a staircase and found himself on a sheltered veranda, with a view of the jungle. He felt that he was absurd and out of proportion and his hands were too big for his arms, his neck was too long, his head too heavy. He sat down on the veranda. An ant sidled up his foot and he brushed it lightly away. When he lay back, it was as if he was setting his exhaustion, an infinite misunderstanding, against the floor.

Much later, footsteps sounded. His brother stood over him.

“When did she die?” his brother said, holding a picture of their mother.

“A few years after we lost you. She died of cancer.”

His brother nodded, still staring at the photo. Hiroji was too tired to sit up. He closed his eyes.

“I used to tell myself,” James said, “that my family was living in California, that I should try to reach them. So many children went to America. But how could I get there? I tried to go but … it was difficult. I was afraid.”

Hiroji looked up. “We lived in Vancouver. Don’t you remember? Is that why you never came back?”

“No,” James said. “My family.”

Hiroji said nothing.

“Dararith, my baby boy. My sweet boy. I waited for him, but he never came. I looked everywhere but he couldn’t be found.” He shook his head. “I had to stop searching. In the end, I had to give him up.”

There was a closed room behind Hiroji. James went inside and returned with a full bottle and two dusty glasses. When Hiroji drank the liquor, it burned everything on its cascade down and made the trees spin silently. He emptied the glass quickly, and so did James. His brother poured generously. The stars glistened. On the road outside, Hiroji thought he saw his mother. She was walking through the village. She had come to fetch her coat, and now she wrapped it tight around herself. She told him not to follow her. He felt lost, immaterial. He wanted to shelter the things he loved, to keep them from washing away.

“Say goodbye,” his mother said.

He was running in place, he was afraid to drown, he was afraid to touch land.

“Isn’t this what you wanted?” She looked at him with such intensity, such understanding. “You’ve already come so far. Hold your brother and say goodbye.”

She did up the buttons on her coat and turned away.

[end]

Hiroji travels with me, back through the mountains, eleven hours in a bus with a rattling air conditioner, all the way to the airport in Vientiane. After I fly home to Canada, he’ll go north again, to James. We talk about the brc, about my family, about the things that have changed and not changed since Hiroji went away. Together, we ascend through limestone valleys, we shoulder along hairpin turns. Exhausted vehicles wait in the shade, doors flung open at the side of the highway.

At a rest stop in the mountains, I call Navin. “Where are you?” he asks and I try to find words to describe this place, ivory sky, stilt houses, and children everywhere. A little boy named Pomme is leaning against Hiroji’s legs, watching his mother, who sells mangosteens to the passing travellers. The boy calls us farang Hmong, Westerners with a face like his, strangers both foreign and familiar.

Kiri comes on the line. He says that he is in my old bed, in Lena’s house. He asks me if I still remember it and I say, Yes, I remember.

“We went to the cemetery,” he says. “We put flowers there, for Lena. Lilies.”

The air up here, in the high altitudes, is thin, cooling. Hiroji is kneeling on the ground, talking to the boy, who stares shyly up at the tall trees.

“Dad told me, sometimes when you miss somebody, you lose yourself for a little while.” Between our voices, static, continents. “Promise me,” my son says. “Don’t disappear.”

Between us, cascading mountains, an infinite vista. I make this promise.

In the bus, Hiroji drifts to sleep, his head cushioned by a rolled-up coat. A family across the aisle from us brings out green desserts and the children eat them blissfully. The father sleeps and his wife watches him, her face lined with anxiety and I remember how, long ago, my parents’ lives came apart. One night, Sopham woke from a nightmare and my mother climbed into bed with us. My father came and lit a cigarette and the tiny orange glow held all my attention, burning slowly out. They did not speak to each other. I yearned for their argument to spill over, to explode, to end. One day I came home from school and I saw my father leaning against the kitchen wall, my mother seated at the table, weeping. I heard her accuse him, and my father said nothing. My mother’s face could not be borne. I wanted to go to them, to help them somehow, but it was not possible.

My childhood is full of images like this, passing moments I didn’t understand, as if I were looking through a window into the aftermath of a great event. The school year passed and another began. Sopham and I grew accustomed to our parents’ silence, to the way they withdrew from each other. And then, one night, I saw them sitting side by side, their shoulders touching. Later on, I saw my father caress my mother’s face and between them, once more, was a world I couldn’t enter, full of pathos and history and seeking. What I saw this time was not an aftermath, but a window open to a different way of loving each other. My mother’s longing for my father returns to me. At the end, their lives had grown so intertwined the one could not go on, could not survive, without the other. I had known this from the beginning, from the moment when my father was taken away. From that loss, there had been no return. I try to face the depth of her love. The way she never abandoned us, and how it tore her open.

I want to remember the way they lived, carried forward by intimacies and dreams I cannot know. The way they lived much more than the remaining days could give them.

The bus goes on, past cerulean lakes and ragged caves, past mist encroaching on the jungle.

Hiroji wakes. He takes his jacket and lays it across his knees. “I was trying to remember my brother’s face,” he says. “Before he left for the east, when we were young. But, somehow, that memory of him has gone away.” How many lives can we live? I wonder. How many can we steal back and piece together? I cannot measure how much Hiroji and James have given me, in trust, in friendship.

I remember the stories my mother used to tell me, stories that had been handed down by her own grandmother’s grandmother, who had married a merchant and travelled from the villages outside of Battambang. My mother once told me that when a child is born, threads are tied around the infant’s wrists to bind her soul to her body. The soul is a slippery thing. A door slammed too loudly can send it running. A beautiful, shining object can catch its attention and lure it away. But in darkness, unpursued, the soul, the pralung, can climb back in through an open window, it can be returned to you. We did not come in solitude, my mother told me. Inside us, from the beginning, we were entrusted with many lives. From the first morning to the last, we try to carry them until the end.

“When everything is finished here, will you come home?” I ask Hiroji.

The passing landscape, the folding light, reflects in his eyes. He turns to look at me. “Yes,” he says. “I will.”

I imagine awaiting his arrival, remembering my own. The sky is such a pure and fragile white, filling all the space between the trees and the road.