Dogs at the Perimeter

by Madeleine Thien

She is clever and fearless, she married him for practical reasons, and she will never be completely grateful. She once said that war makes people say far too many things, good and bad, that they’ll regret in calmer times.

  “But are peaceful days around the corner?” James had asked, wanting to provoke her.

  “Sure,” she said. “Wars always end. Peace always ends. People get tired.”

  Sorya doesn’t stay in bed past six a.m. What she does, he can’t imagine. The schools are closed and have been for months, so she has no job to report to.

  He remembers the days they went to the discotheque, Dararith bought the beer but they gambled with James’s cash. Dararith steered the moped that ferried them around but usually James and Sorya had to walk home without him, picking their way through the rubble. Dararith, he pursued women as if they were keys on a ring, and he was always falling in love because his brand of affection was endearingly sudden. Sorya was glamorous with her black hair loose and her bare shoulders and calf-high boots, her market-stall clothing that she wore like high fashion. She carried herself like a girl who’d been to Paris, to New York, but it was all show. Television, she told him, on one of those awkward walks home, can be a gifted teacher. And books. She married James, maybe, for his books. Something to distract her while she waited for her brother to come back, but it’s been two years and it’s obvious by now that people don’t come back.

  She doesn’t wear makeup anymore but her hair is still long. Unbrushed, it floods around her and it seems, to James, as if it eats the light and hides the things that no one says: I married you as a favour to Dararith, I married you because of the war, out of loneliness, out of fear. I love only you. They both think these things, they both hold themselves in reserve.

  “James,” she says now. “It’s a good name but it doesn’t suit you.”

  “King James.”

  She pushes the covers aside, stands up. When did she get so thin, so melancholy?

  “Don’t leave me,” he tells her but then he is suddenly embarrassed.

  “I hate sleeping alone,” he explains and she turns, a half-smile on her face, a half-sadness.

  The war was ending and he worked all the time. The storehouses were empty, he had no medicine, no needles, saline, or chloroquine, no bandages, no aspirin or dysentery pills. He patted shoulders, amputated limbs, blinked into the persistent heat, and turned his back on the worst cases. It was the cool season, supposedly, but his clothes were sweat-drenched by ten in the morning. In his gut was a feeling of panic mixed with the weight of inertia, he was light-headed and joyous and bitterly angry. The radio spewed bulletins from the war in Vietnam and the shaming of the Americans not only there but here in Cambodia and next door in Laos. Ask the diplomats – American, French, English – and this humiliation was everyone’s fault but their own. Ask the Cambodians what would happen next and they just shrugged and smiled their fatalistic smiles. James hoped it was the last time he would live in a place where no one carried any responsibility, where the days were predetermined by the hundred lives already lived, by a thousand acts of karma, by destiny that rubbed out other destinations. He was sick of this country and he would have left already if it weren’t for Sorya, that’s what he tells himself. But every day he goes back to the camps and the Red Cross shelters and feels strangely at peace. Ten years ago, he was smoking pot in a dive on Powell Street, coming home blinkered, but his mother and Hiroji, true innocents, never noticed a thing. When he gets high it reminds him of how the air burned his throat in Tokyo when he was small, how he was terrified of fire, and then the long journey by boat and plane and bus that took them to Vancouver where everything was green, where things were young and not skeletal, but still he was so fucking scared. Japan was finished, his father said, even the ground was poisoned but now, Now we go from fire to water, from the city to the sea. He had turned the words into a song, a nursery rhyme. His father had been a professor of medicine at Tokyo University, he had been a solemn, determined man, but the supreme effort of getting them out of postwar Japan had ruined his health. When his contacts in America disappointed him, he had turned to England. In the end, he settled for Canada. A year after they reached Vancouver, his father died, post-stroke, on a crisp, white bed in a Canadian hospital. James remembered the place well, the sharp, stingy smell of it and the squawk of rubber soles on the icy floors. Be brave, his father had told him, and all the while his kid brother had pressed his pink face against his mother’s skin and slept in ignorant bliss.

  His mother had opened a dry goods shop on Powell Street and James had taken his first paper route, his first of many: The Vancouver Sun, the Province, the Sing Tao Daily. Hiroji used to lie on the mat in the back of the store and coo at them, and the baby’s cooing made James feel improbably wise. He was eleven years old when he told his baby brother that they would both be doctors, real professionals. Maybe Tokyo and his father had given him a taste for calamity, maybe he had inherited his father’s uneasy, chafing mind. He scraped through medical school, finished his residency. The Vietnam War was in full swing and he signed up with the Red Cross. When all hell broke loose, he preferred to be busy and not just standing around. Saigon was fine, but Cambodia is something else, manic depressive, split with contradictions. They take him for local here, a regular Chinese-Khmer slogging through the mud.

  On the night he travelled from Phnom Penh to Neak Luong, he packed and unpacked three times, removing his camera, adding his journal. Removing bandages and adding chocolate and whiskey. Overhead, helicopters circled and he told Sorya, “Maybe it’s better if you come with me.”

  “I don’t think so,” she said.

  He was on his way east and he realized she was right. Any day now, Neak Luong would fall to the Khmer Rouge. Probably he’d be shot by a sniper, or his boat would be shelled, or some hideous Communist maquis would poach him and serve him for supper.

  “Write me a letter,” she said and they smiled because the postal system was a joke.

  “Take this money,” James said, “and buy us two tickets for Bangkok.”

  “Honestly, you want to leave Phnom Penh? This heaven.”

  “Do you?”

  She laughed. “All this time, I only stayed because of you.”

  “Don’t joke,” he said, confused.

  “Careful in the wild,” she said. “Don’t come home dressed in black, carrying an AK, and wearing rubber sandals. I’ll shoot you on sight.”

  “I’ll come in a stampede of elephants.”

  Her eyes teased him with restrained laughter. The foolish things he would do, the foolish dances he would perform, to make her laugh.

  “In better days,” he said, “we’ll go to the sea.”

  “Promise me.”

  He saw the lines at the corners of her eyes, he heard something in her voice, a foreboding, a hopelessness he’d tried so hard to banish with bravado, with laughter. What other avenue was left them? Every day they were surrounded by corpses, women without faces, men without limbs.

  “Yes,” he said. “I do promise.”

  —

  They were ambushed in the dark. The cruddy boat tipped right then left, and James had a crushing sense of déjà vu as black-clothed creatures lifted from the water and slithered into the boat. He wondered whether Sorya would open the cache of money he had left her, whether any tickets remained for Bangkok, whether she would stay or go. For a split second, before the first kick, he thought he was being sent to join Dararith in the afterlife to which all doctors disappeared: a haven of arrogant, self-pitying men, a fate worse than hell. But this wasn’t a joke. These creatures had no sense of irony. They beat him and he, a soft Canadian, was already begging for mercy after the first punch. So this is what blood tastes like, he thought. So this is what real suffering is. They threw him into a hold. He thought of his father, who’d had the good sense to pass away in a clean bed rather than down in the reeking underground, in the terrifying Tokyo shelters, and now he, King James, would pass away in the dar
k, sucked into the careless water. One day he would wash up, bloated and unrecognizable, onto the shore of a shitty country. He heard them shoot the boat driver. He cried harder as they threw the body away.

  They kept him blindfolded all of the time. Once, when they took the blindfold off, they asked him to identify tablets they had found in his bags. The samples were pink, like cotton candy at the Pacific National Exhibition fair grounds, like orchids, a pink that seemed foolish and innocent in this burned, exhausted landscape. “These are vitamins,” he said. He answered them in Khmer and they said he was a spy and he said, “No, I am not.” “Where are you from?” “Japan. Tokyo.” “Where is your passport?” “Lost.” “Why are you here?” “To treat the wounded.” “The wounded?” they said, taunting him. “You mean the Lon Nols, the traitors?” He shook his head vehemently. “I treat the people hurt by American bombs.”

  They covered his eyes and returned him to darkness.

  With the blindfold on, he felt absurdly safe. They surrounded him: bare feet on the thirsty ground, rifles smartly reloaded, the smell of a campfire. He heard someone getting a haircut, the scissors stuttering like a solitary cricket. He heard a fire starting and water boiling, he ate mushy gruel with his hands, he itched all over from the ants in the dirt, his tongue felt cracked. Night and day, his feet were shackled, he had to piss into a foul bamboo container, he was constipated and everything hurt. He couldn’t believe it was possible to be scared so long, to have his heart solidify in mute fear, and yet to continue day after day.

  Sometimes, in his fantasies, he sits at his father’s bedside. The blinds let in whiskers of light and he can see his father’s right hand curled on the sheet, the skin over the knuckles flaccid and pale. He finds the doctors loud and the nurses kind and nobody really looks at him, not even his parents. James tells himself it’s not possible to disappoint the dead. All that matters to the living is the living, that’s what he had tried to explain to Sorya after her brother disappeared: “This is war, not a game. If you have the chance to escape you have to take it. If I go missing, don’t sit around like a fool.” He had felt like a hero when he said this.

  But why waste words? Grieving Dararith, she had barely seemed to notice him. She just sat in the apartment thinking and reading, cleaning, cooking, disappearing. She didn’t need his devotion and this independence, her strength, made him feel confused him and shiftless, it made him feel temporary, like an insect clinging to a drain.

  Suddenly there were no more planes in the sky and no more shelling. They stopped moving around so frequently. The blindfold was removed and he found himself in a small, square storeroom, or it would have been a storeroom had there been anything on the shelves. It was comfortable enough. The floor had French cement tiles, dirty now, but the design had been lovely once. A short, efficient man came in to give him water, rice soup, and, unexpectedly, a piece of soap. Eventually, the man started to extend his visits. He sat down on the floor and asked James questions about Phnom Penh, the Red Cross, about the war in Vietnam, about food and music and religion, about his wife, about Dararith. They always spoke in Khmer. James would sit with his arms tied behind his back while the man probed him, as if his life story were a confession, as if the two were the same thing.

  The man was reedy, dark-skinned, with a way of tapping his knee rhythmically with his fingertips when he spoke. He studied the ground with such intensity that James found himself looking, too, at the tiled floor, taking in the stranger’s soft hands, and then the Kalashnikov laid confidently between them, the barrel of the gun covered by the cadre’s Chinese cap, as if in a decorative flourish.

  One morning, the man surprised James. He said, “Let me tell you about someone I once knew. A friend. I was studying at the Lycée Sisowath in Phnom Penh. Do you know it?”

  “Everyone knows it.”

  The man went on, “This was more than twenty years ago. I lived with another boy, a Chinese-Khmer from Svay Rieng province. Are you familiar with that area?”

  “Of course.”

  “You’ve been there?”

  James nodded.

  The man was impressed. “His mother had a petrol stand,” he said, continuing. “The father was dead. The boy, Kwan, drove a lorry and he would give me lifts around the city. He was raising money for his tuition and he worked all the time.”

  The man’s face was passive and kind, and it reminded James, disconcertingly, of his mother. His mother, too, had many surfaces, but he’d learned to see between the blinds, behind the clean edges.

  “Kwan was trustworthy,” the man said. His voice dropped, not quite a whisper. “Can I tell you that I trusted him more than the friends I went to school with? Those were lazy boys who never worked. Inside their empty heads they didn’t even understand the concept of work. I started to tutor him. He got up very early to drive the lorry but, in the afternoons, when everyone slept, I gave him lessons. He was quick. The thing about Kwan was, he was mute. He could read lips, he could adapt, but he never, ever spoke. I confess, I was fascinated by Kwan. Boys my age were malleable. We swallowed each and every lesson without chewing it first. But Kwan, he was apart. He kept his thoughts to himself and he kept his peace.

  “When you first arrived, I was astonished. I said to myself, Maybe Kwan got an education after all! Maybe he paid his way to medical school and made himself a gentleman. I congratulated myself that I, alone, had recognized you.”

  In the room, a mosquito buzzed at James’s cheek and he wondered how the insect had found its way into the locked room where there were no windows and the air was stale. It must have come in with the man.

  “Are you Kwan?”

  “No.”

  Generously, the man extended his hand and hushed the mosquito away. “Can you be certain?”

  James didn’t know what to say. Now there were insects thrumming nearby, in the ceiling corners they made a sound like a headache. Loose greenery was growing through hairline cracks in the wall, the colour too vivid for this room.

  The man nodded, satisfied. “Keep your peace, that’s what I wanted to tell you. Just keep your peace for now.”

  He gave James a new set of clothes, trousers and a loose shirt, faded black.

  “What is this place?” James asked.

  “Once it was a school,” the man said.

  James waited for him to continue. The man just looked at him, tranquil, silent.

  That night, the rains started. The grass in the wall dripped tiny beads of water. James felt unbearably cold. He remembered, one weekend, taking his brother to the Pacific Ocean. They had caught the ferry across the Strait of Georgia, and then driven the old Datsun to the western edge of Vancouver Island, through the shamelessly fat trees with their towering canopies. His brother, ten years younger, always wanted to hear about Tokyo, but James had little to say. He remembered the bomb shelters and the charred dog he saw once, and the brief sojourns home his father made, and how the war in China had sculpted his father into someone both powerful and empty. His brother waited patiently and James just shrugged and said, “Fuck Japan.” The bottom of the Datsun was rusted through and the floor on the front passenger side had a magnificent hole, you could see the asphalt blurring by: drop something and it was gone forever. How many things had they lost to that gaping hole? His house keys, Hiroji’s plastic watch, apples tumbling from their grocery bags, all sorts of rubbish.

  “But one day you’ll take me to Tokyo, right, and show me things.”

  “Show you what?” James had said, shrugging. “I’ll introduce you to the girls I knew when I was four.”

  He could smell the sea through that hole long before they got there, the salt heaviness, the fresh green-ness of it. He loved the ocean no matter how desperately cold it was. He’d bought a wetsuit, a used one (he’d had no money for a new one) because he was addicted to the fury of the tide. Those currents knocked him back, they overpowered him, and yet he felt alive, not fragmented, not broken. He tried to explain this to Hiroji when they lay, th
at first night, in their one-season tent.

  “It’s religious,” he had said finally, lacking words.

  Hiroji said, “I like it too.”

  In the narrow glow of the flashlight, Hiroji’s face was round and small.

  James wanted to tell him, “I’m not your father. You don’t have to look at me like that. You can yell at me and tell me I’m a fake.”

  Instead he said, “You didn’t pack your schoolbooks, did you?”

  Hiroji looked at him nervously. “Just a few.”

  “I’m going to lock them in the Datsun.”

  “Ha ha,” his brother said.

  “Ha ha,” James answered.

  The rain started. It drummed the ocean, it slipped through the high canopy of trees and reached their tent, a tapping of needles.

  “Ichiro,” his brother said tentatively. “Do we need to sleep in the car?”

  “No, brother,” James said. “It’s fine. I chose a good place for us.” James reached his fingers up and touched the tent walls, they were heavy with moisture, rain filling up all the pores, soon the wet would force its way through.

  “Just close your eyes and get some sleep. The light will wake us early tomorrow.”

  “Okay,” his brother said. “Okay, James.”

  He felt, sometimes, like Hiroji’s father, as if the best part of his youth had already gone by. But these moments were fleeting. James was only seventeen after all, he was just a kid.

  It rained all night. Sometimes he heard voices floating through the schoolhouse, he heard trucks stalling in the mud outside. James knew they would come for him in the middle of the night, slash his throat, and push his body into a pit before he was even alert enough to be afraid. He didn’t want to die in the unthinking mud. He couldn’t let this happen because there were people relying on him. There was Sorya and the promises he had made.

  Kwan, this stranger, came to him in the shape of his brother and leaned his body against the far wall. His black hair fell forward over his eyes, his skin was the colour of cedar, he had thin lips and high, faint eyebrows. Every movement he made was precise, as if wasted movement itself was a crime, like spilled water in a time of drought. Kwan had Hiroji’s watchful eyes. He was the opposite of James, he was not reckless or weak or self-pitying. Kwan took his time because he knew that the seconds were precious, doing the right thing in the right moment, every single time, was the only thing that could save him.