Dogs at the Perimeter

by Madeleine Thien

  I tell Nuong that I don’t think I can ever return.

  He understands. “Hiroji is in Laos,” he says. “I can tell you where he’s staying.”

  That night, I dream of Navin. I dream and when I wake, the curtains are open, the blanket is twisted around me, and the air smells of rumdul flowers and smoke and the river. I get up and go to the door and open it but no one is there, no cars, only the faint glow of the streetlamps. I stand for a moment and let the cold sharpen my senses, invade my dreams. When I first arrived in Montreal, this city had seemed so alien to me, so self-contained and mysterious. How many winters have I passed here? Nearly a decade’s worth, the cold months accumulating, white and silent, the years opening toward another existence. I remember the warmth of Navin’s apartment when I first met him. We were like two coins left in the bottom of the jar: here by circumstance and luck, here together. It was dawn the first time we made our way to the bedroom, dawn when the building began to wake, when his neighbours prepared breakfast, gathered their children, packed their bags and briefcases, jingled their keys. I smelled coffee through the walls but I was holding Navin. Doors slamming upstairs, downstairs, and Navin watching as I touched my lips to him, as I knelt on the blanket. His lean body, surprisingly strong, dark in the unlit room. The building emptying, the air disappearing. I pushed the windows open, back then I craved the shock of air on my skin. In the beginning, we never talked about Cambodia or Malaysia. Our countries remained behind us, two lamps dimming. Like his father, who died young, Navin was an engineer. When I met him, he had just come back from Kuala Lumpur and its towering, silvery skyscrapers. He took me to hear ice melting on the St. Lawrence River, a steady crackling and firing. In the kitchen, there was a picture of his father. They had the same narrow face and dark eyes, the same solemn beauty. I had no photographs from my childhood. “Describe your father to me,” Navin had said. He was making lunch for us, a thin, savoury roti canai. His cooking filled with air with heat, with a floury residue.

  “Tell me what he was like.”

  I told Navin how easy it had been to make my father laugh, how his hands had danced when he spoke, clipping and prodding the air. I remembered how my father’s entire body had always seemed to lean forwards, propelled into the future, how my brother and I had to run just to keep up with him. I remember how, at weddings and celebrations, he was always the first to start dancing the ramvong, how he never slept well, how he stood on the balcony singing to himself. “What songs?” Navin asked. I remembered. My father had told me they were the songs of my grandmother.

  On the residential streets outside Navin’s apartment, brick duplexes had stood, shoulder to shoulder, exhaling chimney smoke, all along the boulevard. Growing up, I remember arak singers trying to tempt wandering souls, the pralung, back into their bodies. I remember celebrations, ceremonies, the words Meng had spoken before I flew away to Canada. Your daughter is crossing the ocean. You, too, must go on. You, too, must walk to your own destiny.

  In the sky on the way to Saigon, the hours pass slowly. The plane sails on, food arrives and disappears, trays fold up, windows darken. The man seated beside me watches one movie after another, he laughs big belly laughs and then falls asleep, his headphones askew, his blanket slipping across his shoulders.

  I had gone to see my family last night. Navin told me Kiri had started a new set of drawings. Aplysia, waving like a flower. One cell, two cells, or Aplysia its entirety, a wide creature billowing through the ocean. At the kitchen table, Kiri sat across from me and asked me where I was going. “To Laos,” I said. “To see Hiroji.” Morrin had given me two weeks of leave. In my son’s bedroom, I put my fingers to the globe, turned the Earth on its pedestal, and showed him the place. The names inscribed were in French. Cambodge, he read. Viêt Nam. Laos.

  Kiri gave me a drawing to bring with me.

  I touched the blue, waxy openness. “The sky,” I said. “Or maybe the ocean?”

  He nodded. “It goes off the edge of the page.” At school, he said, they had been looking at images from the Hubble telescope. “See? Like a galaxy, and you can go forever but the universe, it just never ends.”

  He looked at Taka the Old, who would be staying with them while I was away. When they left for Vancouver, Navin’s sister would come to house-sit. “This cat has a big nose,” he said, suddenly interested. “Like a rabbit.”

  “You’re part of us,” Navin told me when I left. “We’re your family. We have to find a way.”

  Now, the flight attendant hands out ice cream that we eat with spoons shaped like tiny wooden paddles. I pace up and down in the aisles, between one set of dark blue curtains and another. Nearly everyone is sleeping, heads turned to the side. Hours later, as we are lowering toward Vietnam, I can see the Mekong River, I see temples like patches of gold, the delicate crowns of trees, dry fields ready for the next season. I breathe it in, this landscape so like Cambodia’s, like a painting I memorized long ago, shade by shade, curve after curve. Gamboge, the colour, was named by Flemish painters some three hundred years ago, after my country, Kampuchea. Cambodia. Deep yellow, burned orange, saffron, the colour of the monk’s robes, of tigers and the petalled eaves of the Khmer temples. I can’t stop looking. I am trying to follow this path to its end, I am trying to continue by buying a ticket, pushing my bag through the X-ray scanner, folding myself into the impossible drawer of seat 23D, flying away from Montreal, through the rough turbulence that joins these continents. In Saigon, when we exited the airplane, heat came suddenly, thick and heavy. In the airport, I drank tea. I bought postcards of the south coast. Women in ao dai and women in slacks, men my father’s age, businessmen in polyester suits, the ones who had survived the long wars and now crossed and recrossed the sky, hurried past me. A juddering, unhappy plane carried me north to Vientiane, Laos, and from there I took a bus twelve hours over the mountains. A wet humidity enveloped us. I could not understand the language. Some Lao words drew images in my thoughts but most were puzzles to me. This country was so mesmerizing, the bus climbed up into the mountains, slowing in the high altitudes, descending through limestone valleys and supine clouds. There was a woman on the road with her worried chickens. Little children torpedoed baguette sandwiches through the windows of the bus in return for a few thousand kip. I imagined Kiri here. Where are you going? a woman asked me. I don’t know, I said. She smiled and smiled. I cried and no one noticed. I wanted to go home but this was as close as I could bring myself, floating by sea, floating in air.

  The bus carried me to the ancient city of Luang Prabang, where I stayed for two nights, waiting, thinking. In my bare hotel room, I spoke to Navin. We talked about our son. Navin told me about the years in Malaysia, after his father had passed away, and he and his sister were left to raise themselves. He told me details that we had never shared before, afraid of pity or misunderstanding, unwilling to give meaning to the past. I fell asleep thinking of telescopes, microscopes. Galileo and his polished mirrors, how they carried, magically, more visible light to the eye, making the tiny things large, and the distant stars near. How they collapsed space and time. The next morning, I arranged a ride to the village that Nuong had described to me, a dirt road with fifteen or twenty wooden houses and two small restaurants. By then it was late February, almost three months since Hiroji had disappeared. I was let off beside the village temple and the truck driver, a boy in his late teens, smiled at me wistfully. It was Monday, late afternoon. When the truck heaved away, the rising dust hung before me. A tired light veiled the temple, which was painted red and gold, lush as a woman’s fancy dress, like a tirade against the brown landscape. I waited. This village was so small, news would spread within a few minutes that a stranger was here. I stood beneath a blossoming tree and children came out of nowhere to peek at me, and I wondered if I had been like this, Sopham and I, fascinated by the strangers on the riverfront, with all our lives ahead of us. My mother once told me that we are born, into the world, whole. Year by year, our heads grow crowded with to
o many voices, too many lives. We begin to splinter apart. We take in too much, too many people and places, we try to keep them inside us where the world won’t alter them.

  This is what I saw then: a Japanese man wearing a light blue, pinstriped shirt, creased as if it has just come from the store, and dark slacks. He wore no hat, carried no cane, had neither glasses nor sunglasses. His loafers were scuffed. He was clean-shaven, thin in a ragged way, he walked well but slowly, his face was sun-darkened and deeply lined.

  He came toward me, the same as I remembered but softer, older. Another man stood behind him, so alike in appearance, so different in bearing. It must be a trick of light, I thought, we are separating and merging, intersecting and dividing.

  “Janie,” Hiroji said. “Is that you?”

  My friend held me for a long time.

  “Don’t cry,” he said. “You’re here.”

  In James’s house, the walls and floors were built of wood and bamboo, the structure stood on wooden stilts, and evening light ran in as if through a straw basket. Hiroji’s brother had been living here for almost a decade. James was very quiet. He moved in the corners, he set a table for us but when it came time to eat, he went away into another room and shut the door behind him. Hiroji served sticky rice that came from a conical basket, and some kind of wild green whose name I didn’t know, and a clear, rich soup. He asked me about Montreal, and I told him about the winter, about Kiri and Navin, the things that had happened. I kept glancing into his face, trying to reassure myself that he was here. Hiroji was quiet and for long moments he stared awkwardly at his hands. He told me that he had been with James for a month, that when he found his brother, James had not recognized him. Hiroji had wanted to go home to Montreal but he didn’t know how and, at night, lying in bed, he was overcome by shame. “I couldn’t explain this,” he said, gesturing to the room, the closed door, the village, “and so I put off writing to you. I didn’t know how to begin.” In Laos, he said, one could abandon the past and become someone else. But to what end? He was lost here. His brother did not seem to need or want him.

  Hiroji took off his glasses and folded the arms down.

  “Is it really James?” I asked.

  He nodded, meeting my eyes. “But now I’m here, and he’s here, and … there’s no way for me to cross the last few steps.” He smiled, embarrassed. “I had pictured things so differently.”

  The village had fallen still. We finished our drinks and then Hiroji showed me the rooms upstairs. He offered me his but I wanted to sleep on the open veranda, surrounded by the humid air. He acquiesced.

  “Good night, Janie,” he said, and then he left me.

  Under the mosquito net, I heard the jungle that ran along behind the village and climbed up the mountains. It was the first time in many years that I’d heard those sounds and when I finally fell asleep, I felt protected because the jungle never ceased, there was no such thing as silence or purity, there was no such thing as an ending even though all my life I’d been looking and keeping faith.

  In the morning, a thunderstorm came, threads of lightning connecting the earth to the clouds. When Hiroji went into town for supplies, James and I sat outside in the diffuse, changing light. A woman brought us coffee and sat with us. She was Khmer and we began speaking, in tangents and in drifting conversations, and eventually James, too, began to speak. The days and nights we remembered began to overlap. Afterwards, and in the days that followed, I wrote so many things. I did not know what I was making. Terrible dreams came, but I tried to let them run through me and reach the ground. I saw that they would always return, this was the shape of my life, this was where the contours lay, this was the form. Yet I wanted, finally, to be the one to describe it. To decide on the dreams that took root in me.

  As I work, my son comes to me in my memory. Kiri names the rivers for me just as I once taught him: St. Lawrence, Fraser, Kootenay, Mackenzie, Yukon, Chaudière, Assiniboine. Words to keep him company, to name the world, to contain it.

  James

  Monday, February 27

  [fragment]

  The hills are a fading purple, already the colour of dusk. James Matsui knows these mountains well, they are visible from Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, a once-elegant city that now sleeps with one eye open, like Cain dreaming of Abel. In October 1974, on a night when trails of mortar fire glint in the southern skies, James writes the last letter that he will send to his family in Canada. He takes the envelope to the Red Cross office and then he detours beside the river, the Tonle Sap. He is lost in the crowd. Couples brush past him holding hands, children strut along the boulevard, tall as peacocks, parading past the throng of beggars. They and he are surreal in the evening light, dissolving in and out of focus, strolling to the rhythmic boom of artillery fire. Around him, people giggle in response to the shelling, maybe to prove they aren’t afraid, or maybe because the long war has made everyone careless or shameless or easily amused. On the boulevard, young swindlers in military uniforms stop the traffic. He doesn’t like the look of them, not when the stinking, starving man letting them pass is their grandfather’s age, not when beggar boys swarm at their feet waiting for treasure. He can’t abide their rifles and their ammunition belts, their cheap, flagrant uniforms. This is a city about to fall.

  That night he works the midnight shift at the refugee camp and in the morning, his driver delivers him home to bed. Sorya is there, in her slippers, twisting the radio dial back and forth, catching mostly static.

  They married a year ago. Sorya’s brother, Dararith, had been a Red Cross doctor, a Cambodian doctor (James is in the habit of differentiating, and he finds it hard to break this habit). Sometimes the three of them would stay up late talking about the war, about movies and TV shows and rock music. Dararith was an average doctor but a brilliant singer. He used to serenade them on those long nights when they bunkered down to wait out the shelling. James and Sorya get by in Khmer and crusts of French and English. She is well read and polite and funny, but sometimes, lately, for split seconds, he knows that she wants to hit him, or fling something heavy at him. For his carelessness, the way the war no longer touches him. Sometimes he comes to bed and wonders why she’s there, what she wants from him, why she keeps her eyes closed when they have sex, why she makes him come so hard and almost bitterly, and then she rolls out from under him and leaves the room so that he falls asleep to his own solitary breathing. It’s this ridiculous war that drags on and on and gradually covers everyone in dust so that, in the end, it would be just a small step to crumble like the stone buildings and the once-paved roads, to accept the degradation.

  The Red Cross had sent him to Saigon in 1971 but he couldn’t abide the depressed, strung-out Americans. His superiors said, Well, try Cambodia, so up the river he went, a boy on a barge looking for better company. And it was better for a while, especially when Dararith was here. Phnom Penh wasn’t as frenetic, it wasn’t so obviously a lost cause. But what was once intoxicating to him is now dreary, Phnom Penh is catching up to Saigon. The end is near and everyone who doesn’t know it is either a diplomat or a king. The barbarians are at the gates with their rubber sandals and their Chinese-made rockets and it’s useless now, worrying over the bombing runs, legal or illegal, even though he sees the damage every day, thousands crawling into the city with missing limbs and missing children, people mutilated by the Khmer Rouge or bombed into hysteria by the Americans. They appear like wraiths. He knows men who have thrown themselves into the Tonle Bati, even Dararith used to joke about it. Nothing changes, he used to say. We’re caught in an infinite war.

  But he, James, is living off the fat of the land: a noble Red Cross doctor healing children who will be pushed to the front lines tomorrow, boys who, day by day, are learning to revel in their worst tendencies. Tomorrow, he could be in Bangkok. Today there was an old woman eating the bark off a tree, stripping ribbons from it the way his mother used to de-vein the celery stalks, and he didn’t have the energy to go home and fetch this old
woman some sugar and chocolate, something from his magnificent store of abandoned goods, bequeathed to him by the fickle bureaucrats, expatriates, and socialites leaving Phnom Penh en masse. What would his mother say? She saw the war in Tokyo. She saw much worse than this. The black dust covers everyone, even the healers. Physician, heal thy self, but what he wants is to sleep for days on end and wake up in a tropical paradise where a compassionate Buddha smiles down on him and touches his golden fingertips to the dirt to remind James of what we are and what we must be, dust to dust, being to nothingness, and how we err in the pursuit of an existence more lasting.

  “You never understood God,” his mother used to say.

  He had teased her by answering, “Why is it that God always fails to understand me?”

  The hours are passing. The smell of fried food wafts thickly in through the porous walls. Morning light shifts across the bed, across the walls, into his open hand. It’s so distressingly beautiful here, so deformed and alive.

  —

  Sorya tries to make the bed with him still in it. This, he knows, is her quiet way of telling him that it’s past noon and a man should not be so slovenly. He doesn’t like speaking Khmer in the morning, before breakfast, so he addresses her in English. Let me sleep a little longer. She brings him a cup of coffee and he feels like a wet-nosed boy home sick from school. Her fingertips smell of anise. He drinks, burns his tongue, and then he pulls her back into bed with him, strips her, fucks her, tells her to forget everything but him. He says this in English and she answers in Khmer. In the end they speak the same loop-holed language that says only a little and lets the big things slide through.

  “James,” she had said when they first met. “What a serious name.”