Madeleine Thien - Dogs at the Perimeter

“She made a mistake,” Chorn says slowly, as if he is explaining himself to a child. “Her letters to you are a crime. She should never have tried to reach you. But, now, it’s too late to help her. She has been revealed to the authorities.”

James is not forced to work in the fields. He is not forced to do anything but wait. He hears a lot of things through the walls and what he hears is so chilling he believes, thought by thought, that he is a monster, that his mind is deforming. There was a woman in this prison. She was born in Phnom Penh but had gone away to study in France. She returned, a doctor also, to serve the country because she believed in the Khmer Rouge and a free Cambodia. The Khmer Rouge caught her in her home village, along with her family, and this woman was arrested and accused. After several days, she wrote her first confession, tortured into writing, claiming, that she was a cia spy. Tonight an ox-cart came and took her away to a different jail. James had helped prepare her for the journey and he saw her wounds, he saw the sadism of her interrogators, the ruptures on her skin. He wanted to tell her to succumb to her madness because madness is an escape, temporary or permanent, from this. From herself. But it was forbidden to exchange a word. He heard the ox-cart leave, turning up the earth, stuttering over the broken path, and the torturers laughing and saying their goodbyes. He saw this woman’s face.

Sometimes, Chorn brings him outside, but only at night, only when all is still. A vitamin deficiency is causing his vision to blur so that when he looks up the stars all seem to be falling. Another letter comes a few weeks after the first, also delivered by Chorn. I’m afraid, she has written. Every day I wonder if you will come. What should I do? They are watching me all the time .

He asks for paper, for a pen. He begs for help.

“I am very sorry,” the man says. “You cannot. It is far too dangerous.”

James feels his entire body sickening. “Then you must tell her to stop writing.”

The man shakes his head, frustrated. “Do you think it is up to me?”

“For god’s sake, I’m begging you. Tell her to stop writing.”

They left him alone all day. This is when you lie in the water, when you lie down on the shore of the Pacific and the tide comes in and you have to let it take you. You have to go. You belong to no one, Angkar says, and no one belongs to you, not your mother or your child or the woman you would give your life for. Families are a disease of the past. The only creature under your care is you: your hands, your feet, the hair on your head, your voice. Attachment is what will expose you as a traitor to the revolution, to the change that is coming, that is here. Attachment to the world is a crime. For too long, the people have suffered. For too long they have waited, but their desire is as great as the sea, as thirsty as the dry land. Even the rivers are cruel.

He pictured her in detail, her face, her mouth, her stillness. He begged her, in his mind, to stop writing, he wrote his letters to her on the wall of the store room, on the tiled floor. It’s a trap, he told her. It’s a goddamned trap.

He received another letter: My love. They told me that you are near. They promised to bring you to me and I gave them all the money. I will keep trying to reach you, no matter the consequences. I want to bring about another future, the one I carried in my head for so long, all through the war .

He started to weep and he couldn’t stop. “Help her,” James said. “Hide her somewhere. Bring her here.”

Chorn looked at James. “The truth is,” he said quietly, shamefully, “there is no James. I have never known this person James.”

“Then tell her that he’s dead. Tell her it’s useless to write.”

Chorn removed a straw bag that was hanging from his shoulder, and from the bag he withdrew bandages, pills, antibiotics, brandy, dressings, even a stethoscope.

It was fucked up, it was unbelievable. It couldn’t be.

“All this suffering,” Chorn said, “is for something. You don’t know what this country was like before. You have to trust me.” The man held on to the supplies as if they were religious objects, promises.

He must be hallucinating. He rubbed his hands over the cement tiles. “She didn’t do anything wrong,” James said. “I didn’t do anything wrong.”

“Only a dictator or an idiot would make that claim,” Chorn said. He looked at the ground, at his toes protruding from his worn-down sandals, at the trail of dust he had brought into the already dusty room.

Chorn said in his quiet, detached way, “Angkar knows about James. But it does not know about Kwan. You see how I have tried to help you? Because some of us have many tricks, some of us have many names. There are people who are loyal only to me, but even I know the limits of what is possible. Look at this,” he said, shaking the pills the way a mother might try to distract her baby. “Look what I found. There is still so much that we can do. Everyone had a different life before but it doesn’t mean we must all go to the same end.

“Would you find it hard to believe,” Chorn said, “that once, long ago, I was a monk? They came to the temple and they took all the children away. They went and made us into something else.”

Before, when Dararith was still alive, the three of them had taken the motorcycle to Kep and they had stayed a week on the seaside. The ocean comes into this storeroom and covers it like a drawing. He can see the tide taking morsels of the land, bit by bit, away. That week, Dararith had disappeared for three days, he’d met a French girl with long, wavy hair, he’d offered to take her photograph with his brand-new Leica, but really it was Dararith who should’ve been the model. He was a handsome man with romantic eyes and full lips, a mysterious, colonial sexiness that made the women foolish. In contrast, James was a bore, or at least that’s what Sorya told him, teasingly, looking past him to the sea.

“And what about you?” he’d asked in English. “If I wanted to take your picture?”

“I’m the true photographer,” she had answered in Khmer.

“Take your brother’s camera, then.”

“I tried!” she said, laughing. “Believe me, I tried. But Dararith, he uses it to meet women, it’s only a toy for him, whereas I know I’m a photographer. If only someone would give me a chance.”

“What would you shoot?”

“Once I took a picture of my students at the lycée.”

He never knew whether she was serious or joking. He was a buffoon, a hippopotamus, sitting beside her.

“I’m your friend, aren’t I?” she had said on the last night that he saw her.

“Am I being demoted?”

“You’re my best friend,” she had said, “and you don’t really know it. You don’t value it.”

He’d felt belittled. He had wanted to raise his voice: I’m in love with you, is that such a small thing? I’ve loved you since the day I met you, why is that worth so little? Now he wonders how he misunderstood her so badly. How stupid, how arrogant was he, that he couldn’t persuade her to leave for Bangkok, pride had made him unforgivably blind. He’d wanted her to wait for him. In his heart, he’d wanted this, to prove something, because they had both been alone. They had already left their families even before Angkar came. They only had each other.

“Tell me about Tokyo,” she had said, just like Hiroji. They were like two birds pecking at his head. On the southern borders of the city, rockets were falling. They could see the fighting, like sheaves of fire.

“There’s nothing much to tell.”

“They bombed it very badly, didn’t they?”

“It was Dante’s fifth circle.”