Madeleine Thien - Dogs at the Perimeter

“I used to teach that poem,” she said. “I taught, ‘Through me is the way to the sorrowful city, through me is the way to the lost people.’”

“Admit it, you have a lover somewhere, don’t you?” he said lightly, wanting to turn the darkness aside. “A boy much nicer than me.”

“I’m twenty-six years old,” she said. “Everyone around me is married with ten children. I live in a city that’s about to fall to the Khmer Rouge. What can I possibly know about love?”

“Come with me to Neak Luong. Come tomorrow.”

She shook her head.

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

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

“Do you?”

She smiled at him, she folded her sadness away. “All this time, I only stayed because of you.”

The sea, the sea. The words ran in his mind, the future his father had once envisioned, the promises he had kept before he died.

“Some things don’t end,” she said, kissing his lips. “We both knew, didn’t we? From the very beginning. I knew. You would be the one I loved.”

What did he say? He had only kissed her. He had treated everything as if it were ephemeral, as if things could only be beautiful if they were passing, if they were mortal. “Can you hear me,” she had whispered one night, thinking he was asleep. He had kept his eyes closed. All those months, he had put on such a show of being brave, he had made a joke of his needs. He had wanted to please her, to keep her, and he didn’t know how.

He sleeps on the cement tiles, in the prison, segregated from everyone else because he is useful to Chorn. Sometimes the man comes and sits with him. Sometimes he brings a grandchild or a daughter and James gives them medicine, he cleans a wound, he works according to the tasks he is given. His own body is unrecognizable, it is a parody of a human being, mere bones, dark shadows where muscle used to be. Kwan sits in the corner and day by day grows stronger, Kwan feeds memories to James, experiences that are part James, part Dararith and Sorya, part Hiroji, part Chorn. King James is a useless army of invisible men, of stories given and received like bread on the communion line, and it’s the only bread he has to keep him going. King James is a rotten child, he’s losing his mind and also his sight. Piece by piece, day by day, Kwan is taking over, and James is tired now, but he hangs on like a cat at the table because any scrap could be the one that saves him. He dreams of Sorya in the daytime, but never at night. Water seeps down the walls, along the green lines of invading grass, dribbling down to the ground.

Chorn goes away for many days, and a child, blind in one eye, brings the food. When Chorn returns, sick-looking, he asks James, “Do you know anything about planting rice? About crops?”

James shakes his head. “But when I was a teenager, I worked one summer in the forest, I felled trees.” It was in Port Hardy, on the northern cusp of Vancouver Island, a job found for him by his mother’s hairdresser. He had learned to swagger in that isolated logging town and give off the impression of solidity.

Chorn looks at him, skeptical. “With an axe?”

“Sometimes.”

Chorn nods, pleased with this information. They sit quietly, and Chorn drums his fingertips against his knees. His hands are pale, as if, outdoors in the drenching sun, he keeps them safely hidden in his pockets.

“What’s it like now?” James asks, breaking the stillness. “In the cities.”

Chorn waits, without responding, without looking at James, as if Chorn, too, is expecting another person to answer. In the pause, there’s the hard melody of an ox-bell, the only music James has heard in too long, and it seems to stretch like a physical object through the air and knock against the walls of the room.

“Everything is very organized,” Chorn says. “They are making an archive in which nothing is missing. Every person must write a biography. They must write it many times to ensure that all the details are correct.”

He prays his hands together to stop the drumming. “Phnom Penh is very still. In fact, it is empty. Every movement you make is like the first one ever made. I thought I was the only one alive. In the market, where the vendors used to be, there are small trees growing. Less than a year but already the jungle has arrived, it is threatening to strangle everything else.

“They have thousands and thousands of files. I delivered my share as well. I had to sign my name many times because they are terrified of missing pieces. Many times I signed my name.” Chorn runs his hand over his mouth, closes his eyes, and nods. James feels as cold as the walls. “They put me in an apartment. A family’s apartment. There were plates on the table, but the food had rotted. The owner collected stamps. Some were framed on the walls. I was standing there, looking at them, when the telephone rang. I went into the kitchen and the telephone kept ringing and ringing, I thought if I answered I would be punished, I was convinced it was a trap so I just stood there and waited, without moving, I waited for it to stop. Like a child.

“Somebody’s photos were sitting there, in the room, in picture frames. I don’t know why, but I put one in my pocket. A photograph of a woman. She reminded me of my oldest sister. Do you remember her? You always thought she was pretty.”

Chorn looks up, an embarrassed half-smile on his lips. “They are making an archive in which everything is accounted for, and once a file is there, it is eternal. This is Angkar’s memory. We are all writing our histories for Angkar.”

Chorn pauses and in the gap, James says, “What happened to your sister?”

He doesn’t answer. Instead he says, “Listen.”

The change happens so fast, James doesn’t quite trust his eyes, Chorn’s expressions come and go as quickly as a change in light. Chorn looks past him and James thinks that, finally, after all these months, he is about to be accused. Of what crime? It hardly matters. All the sentences are the same.

“This woman, Sorya. She had a child.”

Seconds go by but the words don’t mean anything. It’s a game, James thinks. It’s yet another one of his sadistic games. They used to do this when they were young, tell each other stories. Once he ran home and told his mother that Hiroji had been hit by a car. He had wanted to test her, and he remembers now the strange satisfaction he took from the agony of her cries.

Chorn says, “Maybe we’re at the end now. There are purges everywhere. One hundred people, five hundred people. Soon we won’t be alone, even here. The Centre is moving, you see. Angkar is running from itself, but it is meeting itself in every corner. Meeting all its enemies. Do you understand what I’m telling you? I have children too. I have children I want to save. I tried to find a name. Someone told me Dararith. I couldn’t ask more without attracting attention. But they told me Sorya named the boy Dararith.”

The air in the room is stagnant, like a pool of black water into which they are both sinking. It’s Kwan who finds the words, who asks the next question. It isn’t James, James is falling down.

“Did you keep her here? Was Sorya at this prison?”

“No,” the man says.

“Was she here?”

Kwan gets up from the corner. He comes so near to them, James can hear him breathing, this exhalation in his head. Chorn is looking straight at him, but Chorn’s face is closed, muting all the clues. Only his hands give him away, their immobility, their held breath. His hands are a lie. Was it possible that all this time his hands were a lie?

“You’re my friend,” Chorn tells him. “Why can’t you understand? I’m giving you this information because you are my friend.”