Dogs at the Perimeter

by Madeleine Thien

  “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 criss-crossing 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 moto
rbikes. 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.