Dogs at the Perimeter

by Madeleine Thien

  [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.