Madeleine Thien - Dogs at the Perimeter

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, snowplows 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.