“Please, luk,” I said. The term of respect came back without my realizing. He looked up, startled.
“At oy té.”
“Don’t leave us behind.”
“No one will get left behind.”
“You’re frightening me,” I whispered.
Ignoring me, he opened his krama and removed some crabs and a handful of rice. He offered this food to the woman and the teenager. They began to eat. The woman took a portion from what she had and brought it to us. In my mouth, the little crabs had serrated edges, it hurt to chew, but I could feel the blood flowing in me again, a quickened pulsing.
When the food was gone, they rose to their feet.
“Come,” the man said, turning to us, his expression lost in the shadows. “It’s time to leave.”
We stood. My brother began washing his face in the water that slid along the walls, and then I, too, did the same. In his eyes I saw my own fear, my own acceptance.
The man walked first, and then the woman, myself, Sopham, and the teenaged boy. Every moment, I expected to hear voices, the release of the safety, the word Angkar. Instead, I smelled the sweetness of leaves, of roots, of the wet earth. The man disappeared through a narrow mouth of the cave walls. On the other side, I saw a soldier in army fatigues holding a green helmet in his hands. Without speaking, the soldier hid us in a nearby truck, underneath sacks of rice. The teenaged boy didn’t come with us, he faded back into the opening of the cave. The truck shuddered into life, time seemed to contract and expand. I pulled one of the bags open, fed the grains into my mouth, held them there until they disintegrated. I willed myself to feel nothing, neither fear nor hope, only the jolting road beneath us, the weight of the burlap sacks. Twice, the vehicle was stopped. Both times, I heard men speaking Vietnamese, low voices followed by gaps of silence. Nobody searched the truck. We continued on.
Finally, the sacks were removed and what I saw seemed impossible, the night sky and a thousand stars burning. The woman and the child were bundled away down another road. “Are you ready?” the man asked us. We didn’t know what to say, who to believe. “It’s time for us to leave,” he said. The soldier gave us biscuits, noodles, dried fish, a few cans of milk, and water, and then we climbed into a small wooden boat. It ferried us to another boat that waited, anchored in the sea. Inside was a shallow cargo hold filled with many people, many families, who watched us descend, their faces etched with fear. The man spoke to them in Vietnamese. He told us that these people had been waiting several days; already, they were running out of water.
We took turns lying down, first my brother and I, then the man, who told us to call him Meng. Above us, slats of wood had been removed and we could see up into the sky.
My last image of Cambodia was of darkness, it was the sound of nearly forty mute wanderers, of silent prayers. I closed my eyes. My father told me how Hanuman had crossed the ocean, how he had gone into another life. Look back, my mother said, one last time. I followed her through our twilit apartment, walked in the shade of my father, past bare walls and open windows, the noise of the street pouring in. Between us, she said, I had known love, I had lived a childhood that might sustain me. I remembered beauty. Long ago, it had not seemed necessary to note its presence, to memorize it, to set the dogs out at the perimeter. I felt her in the persistent drumming of water against the boat’s hull. Guard the ones you love, she told me. Carry us with you into the next life.
Exhausted, holding tight to my brother, we set out across the sea.
Our time in the boat was infinite. One long night that battered on and on until the food was gone and the water drained away. Meng, ever watchful, would take my hands. Gently, he would massage my fingers and my cupped palms, telling me that soon, any day now, we would arrive.
He showed us a photo of a smiling man in an oversized floral shirt and dark slacks. This was his younger brother, Sann. They had hidden in the caves together and then his brother had gone ahead with his wife and sons, using the same smugglers, arriving finally off the coast of Malaysia. The smugglers had given Meng this photograph. “To reassure me,” Meng said, “and to raise the price.”
“Do you come from the city?” I asked him, trying to see Phnom Penh, to hold it once more in my mind’s eye.
“I was born there,” he said. “But I lived many lives. Teacher, farmer, soldier.”
“Khmer Rouge?”
He nodded. After a moment, he said, “Your father, what work did he do?”
“He was a translator. Angkar took him away.” I didn’t know how to continue. Hearing the words, I felt defenceless, ashamed. Meng lowered his eyes. Even here, in the crowded boat, he tried to shelter us, to give us space to breathe.
I curled on my side and watched my brother sleep. All the time he asked for water. “There is the tap,” he said, half-dreaming. “But look, nothing comes out. I twisted it all the way around but there’s no water, no water anywhere.”
That morning, Meng paid the fishermen and they let us up into the open air. Sopham and I climbed out of the hold, clinging to the sides of the boat. We were impossibly small. The waves crowded against our ears, muting our thoughts. All was blue, all was noise.
“I saw so many things,” Sopham told me. “One day, I promise, I’ll find a way to tell you everything.”
On the sea, we moved through a turbulent world, forever adrift. Three or four nights passed, but each day, no land appeared on the horizon. On and on we went until the night when the men came. The collision hit like an explosion. Once, these men had been fishermen, but now they were something else, some instinct that has no pity, no name. They robbed us, and then they forced the girls up out of the cargo hold. I remember the sound of crying, a noise like a serrated edge. Minutes passed, hours. I remember crawling between the bodies to the edge of the deck, away from the smell of fuel, but still the men were there. Pulling us back, taunting us. Time stopped. I have no words for what was done. Sopham appeared and we fell into the sea. I fell, I kept falling, and then my body rose to the surface. Still they were behind me, holding me, crossing oceans and continents. Coming into every room, every place, preceding me into my life. I no longer wanted to breathe the air. My brother kept repeating my name. He used his krama to tie my wrist to a piece of floating wood, checking and rechecking the knot. Don’t leave me, I said. The boat withered and dark shapes bent across the water. I tasted salt, dreamed salt. Morning came and it seemed that we were caught on broken glass, countless fragments that turned the light aside. My brother said the guard had gone to sleep, he could go past, he could leave without her waking. I told him that our wandering was over, we had nothing more to be afraid of. The key was gone. I said that I could not bear to be alone. My brother wept. I was not strong enough to hold him. He opened his hands and I watched as the ocean breathed him in.
I saw my wrist and my hand bound to the wood but I no longer recognized it as my own. The knot my brother had tied would not come loose. Inside me, all the feeling went away.
I can taste the faint, distilled light, it rests on my tongue like a coin. I am nearly at the edge of the city. The road gives way to open space, untrodden snow. The northern reach of Boulevard St-Laurent comes to an end and I stand at last at the river. Behind me, trees tower up into the pale sky.
On a park bench, a woman wearing ski gloves is carving letters into the wood. I can hear the hard edges of her blade, like an animal burrowing into the frozen ground. I remember how, in the ocean, the water had become a shining mirror, how the sun had touched everything and left no shade, no chasms. The fishermen who drew me from the water hurried across the sea until, finally, their boat reached land. I remember the sudden, incomprehensible, stillness. One of the men lifted me from the boat and I looked up and saw the high palms, the amber sky. The man who carried me began speaking, words that rustled together, and then I was passed into another person’s arms. They brought me into a house where I was laid down and washed and covered.
Something has turned over in me, broken and come undone
. I take my phone and begin dialling Meng’s number. He picks up on the first ring. When he hears my voice, he shouts in joyful surprise. “It’s Mei,” he says to someone, to us both. “It’s Mei!”
Voices rattle behind him. Grandchildren, he tells me, laughing proudly when I ask. “Mes petits canards,” he calls them. One by one, they come to the phone and greet me in high-pitched voices, then my friend returns.
“Meng,” I say finally. “On the boat that night, did you hear them coming?”
In all these years we’ve stayed in touch, I’ve never been able to talk about what happened. He, too, had been pulled from the water and saved. He asks me where I am. I tell him I am at the river, I have walked as far as I can away from the city, I cannot find a way to go any farther.
“No,” he says. His voice is quiet. “I didn’t hear them. Until the very last moment. I never heard them.”
I want to tell Meng that I know too much, I have too many selves and they no longer fit together. I need to know how it is possible to be strong enough. How can a person ever learn to be brave?
“Janie,” he says. “My child.” He says that my parents, my brother, lived their lives. “They wouldn’t want you to fight on and on. To fight even when it’s done.” Long ago, Meng and I had stood together at the water’s edge. “Your daughter is leaving now,” he had said, addressing my ghosts. “Your sister has found a new home. You, too, must walk to your own destiny.” The incense in my hands had left its smoke in the air. The next day I would depart for Canada.
“We have to try again,” he says. “Not just once but many times, throughout our lives.”
I feel as if I am swaying over the river, but that this river, finally, is blind to me. I can see it now for what it is, only a membrane, a way down. Leave me, I think. Let me go.
Kiri
Down in the subway, the tiled walls begin to shudder. A train storms in, coats flap backwards, a little girl’s golden hair blows wild. One by one, we find seats inside the nearly empty cars.
I take out my phone again but there’s no signal. Meng’s words circle in my head, the train hurries through long tunnels, emerging into stations. We move from brightness into a furtive grey, my reflection floats against the window. “Entre chien et loup,” Hiroji would have said. It was his favourite expression: that quality of light when we confuse the dog and the wolf, the beloved and the feared.
I was a graduate student when I heard him lecture for the first time.
On that day, I had arrived early to class. The visiting professor, dressed in a pinstriped shirt and pressed trousers, laid an image on the overhead projector. I recognized it from Lena’s books, an ink drawing by Ramón y Cajal depicting a single neuron, a deep pool fed by, and feeding, dozens of arterial streams.
Students shifted papers, slept, took off their shoes, and daydreamed, but I was transfixed. The ebb and flow of Hiroji’s voice, its polite refinement, its insistence, caught all my attention.
Partway through his talk, Hiroji described the experience of a woman who suffered from asomatognosia: for varying periods of time, she ceased to feel her body or its boundaries. All sensation – air on her skin, warmth, cold, the weight of her hands – vanished. Her thoughts continued, anchored to nothing. She herself was immaterial.
“She had lost her body,” he told us, “but not her being.
“Let us take the example of Zasetsky,” he continued, “a university student, a young man, shot in the head. But he survived.” The bullet had cut a path through the parietal and occipital lobes of his brain, affecting Zasetsky’s vision, movement, language, and sensory perception. His world was constantly shattering apart.
Hiroji laid a second image on the projector: a notebook page, crammed with sentences.
Zasetsky’s physician, Aleksandr Luria, was, Hiroji said, one of the first to write the narratives of his patients. Luria treated Zasetsky for more than thirty years, finally collaborating with him on a medical text. Zasetsky wrote more than three thousand pages over the course of two decades, pages that he himself could barely read. Each sentence required that he hunt through the disintegrated rooms of his memory, fumble blindly for words, the simplest words, hoarding them like gold dust until he had enough to construct a sentence. An entire day would pass in which Zasetsky underwent a superhuman struggle to remember language itself; he might, if lucky, emerge from the effort with two or three sentences. Luria had hoped that, through this text, Zasetsky would not only remember his life, but he would make a wholeness of it. Neurologically, Hiroji said, it was possible for the world outside to fragment, to splinter, and yet for the self to remain intact.
“This writing is my only way of thinking,” Zasetsky wrote. “If I shut these notebooks, give it up, I’ll be right back in the desert, in that ‘know-nothing’ world of emptiness and amnesia.”
After his lecture, in response to a question, Hiroji described the work he had done on the Thai–Cambodian border in the late 1970s, in the refugee camps. He went, he said, because his brother had been a part of the Red Cross humanitarian mission in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, during the years of the Vietnam War.
As the students filed out, I approached him. Awkwardly, I planted myself in his path as he made his way up the steep steps of the lecture hall.
He looked at me inquiringly.
“Excuse me, Professor,” I said, staring at his shoulder. “Could I ask you, your brother, the one you mentioned, could I ask if he has returned to Cambodia and how he has found it there, for the people, and what is Phnom Penh like? This is something I’ve been wondering. Have they repaired the buildings and are people able to return to their former homes? Can you tell me, please, what the city is like?”
He stared at me, as if trying to translate my words into another, more decipherable, language.
“Oh,” he said at last. “But he didn’t come home.”
I stared harder at his shoulder.
“What I mean is,” Hiroji said, “my brother is still missing. James disappeared. In 1975.”
“Oh,” I said, blushing. “I see.”
“But I went there. I went to Phnom Penh.”
When I met his eyes, it seemed he was about to ask me something in return but I backed away from him, turned, and ran away up the stairs. The teaching assistant, standing beside Hiroji, called my name but I kept going.
Years later, when I met Hiroji again at the BRC, he still remembered this encounter. We were in my lab, the computer crunching its way through layers of statistical analysis, when he reminded me of it. I asked Hiroji to tell me about the border camps and the boy, Nuong, he had grown close to.
By then, something in me was changing. My brother was returning to me, so finely, so clearly, just as he had been at the end. I wanted to keep him near to me and yet, I told Hiroji, I couldn’t live with this memory. There was nothing about his last moments that I could change.
Beside us, my computer scrolled through data, pulsing signals.
For hours we talked, roaming together, stopping at the wide branches of Gödel and Luria, the winter stillness of Heisenberg, the exactitude of Ramón y Cajal. He told me about memory theatres, how the Italian philosopher Camillo constructed his own in the seventeenth century. His theatre was a room filled with ornaments and images, inside a structure that he believed echoed the layout of the universe. Standing in this room, one could be simultaneously in the present and within the timelines of the past. Bopha’s imaginary book came back to me, but now her book was something that I could enter. The pages would remain, like a library, like a city, holding the things I needed to keep but that I could not live with. If such a library, a memory theatre, existed, I could be both who I was and who I had come to be. I could be a mother and a daughter, a separated child, an adult with dreams of my own. These ideas, these metaphors and possibilities, were the gifts Hiroji gave me.
Once, I asked him, “Why are you so kind to me?”
Hiroji had looked at me with a gentleness that I will always remember. “Because
you’re my friend, Janie. Because a friend can do no more.”
The doors of the metro clank open. This is my stop. We go up and up to the world above. On the sidewalk, snow-plows come, flashing lights, slowing traffic.
Sunlight angles off the snow, blinding everyone.
On the fourth floor of the BRC, I go to Morrin’s office. When he looks up, his eyes register surprise. I comb my fingers through my hair and tell him that I was delayed this morning. “Janie,” he says, focusing on me. “Do you want to come in and talk? I’ve been thinking about you since –”
Alarmed, I step backwards. I ask if the talk can wait, I have some work to finish. He nods. The door rattles as I pull it closed.
Outside the door to my lab, I telephone Navin. When I apologize for not seeing them this morning, he says, “Why don’t we visit you in the lab? I was planning to take Kiri downtown.” I falter for a moment and then agree. “We’ll be there around six,” Navin says before hanging up.
Inside, silence reigns. When I turn on the rig, my hands are damp, from warmth or perhaps nervousness, but slowly I lose myself in work. This room, deep in the basement, is where we electrophysiologists barricade ourselves from the dancing robots, fizz-bang experiments, and jumbo scanners of the more flamboyant researchers.
When Navin and Kiri arrive, the laboratory has emptied. I am the last one, still trying to catch up.
“Momma, we’re here,” my son says. “We’re here.”
I take him in my arms. Navin is holding Kiri’s discarded hat and mittens. They bubble, ripe with colour, from his pockets.
“You’re warm,” Kiri says. “See how warm you are.
“We walked all the way from Côte-des-Neiges,” he says proudly. “Down the big hill and then we saw a hawk but it didn’t come too close.” Unzipping his coat, he goes directly to the Zeiss. He looks into the microscope, studies the slide for a moment, and lapses into a contemplative silence. The first time my son came here, he was four years old. He had gazed at a neuron, lithe as a starburst, stained Nile blue. My son knows about pipettes and single-unit recording, he knows that there are neurons and also glia, that Aplysia is a kind of marine snail, and that the brain, full of currents and chemistry, is never at rest.
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