Madeleine Thien - Dogs at the Perimeter

It is surprisingly easy to impersonate his brother and, each time he passes for James, he feels more in control, more at peace with himself. He gets a new driver’s licence, opens a bank account, and deposits a small sum of money. The truth is, they don’t really look alike, but Hiroji has a trustworthy disposition, people look at him and see an honest face. They seem glad to help. A month later, while attending a conference in Rome, Hiroji gets a fresh haircut and presents himself at the Canadian Embassy. Calmly, believing his own illusions, he tells the wary man behind the glass that his passport has been stolen and could he apply for a new one? He has a police report showing that he, Junichiro Matsui, had his briefcase stolen while visiting the Trevi Fountain. The hard-nosed man barely looks at him: he takes Hiroji’s falsified id, photocopies it, and hands it back. Two weeks later, Hiroji signs for the passport of Junichiro Matsui. He buries it in his suitcase and tells himself that he is only preparing to meet James again, that these are necessary preparations for his brother’s repatriation. On paper, his brother still exists, he still belongs to a country, a home.

Finally, he is able to enter Cambodia, flying in on a Red Cross plane with two French doctors who murmur the rosary.

It is mid-1979, months after the fall of the Khmer Rouge. All over the city, people are rebuilding their lives in the street. He sees old men cooking meals in front of the Royal Palace where gold shingles sparkle like the crests of the ocean, he sees girls who sleep in the rusted carcasses of tanks, in straw huts, in silken hammocks. Farther along, on Monivong Boulevard, a wide road shaded by blossoms, smashed cars are piled four, five high, in a kind of monumental fuck you to Mercedes. Heaps of refrigerators and sofas are degrading in the humidity, bourgeois comforts evicted from their homes and left to rough it out. A boy waits with a car jack slung across his chest, cradling it like a mini AK-47. Alert with insomnia, Hiroji wanders the city that hardly seems a city at all. The citizens are all sleeping outdoors, where they can see and hear in every direction. He passes Vietnamese patrols, women ringed by children, people on mats and sheets all along the pavement, no electricity but dozens of candles shivering in glass jars. People follow him, they ask him if he knows the man from UNHCR who promised to bring charcoal last week, or the technician from the factory who was supposed to repair the sewing machines, or the doctor who ran out of bandages but said he would be back. Hiroji cannot bring himself to say that these experts have already flown out. All the Western aid is at the border, in Thailand, not here, in Phnom Penh. They ask him to please pass on their requests, to impress upon someone that there are things they need, now, right away. Persistently, they crowd in on him, but it is as if they are restrained, their limbs move slowly, or is it his eyes that are deceiving him because all he sees are wraiths, bodies out of proportion who, in the morning when he emerges from his cotton sheets, might very well be dead. An old man who speaks English and claims to be the former Minister of Public Works asks him to come back tomorrow and take a letter to his sister, now living in California. He wants to tell her that her children are dead but her husband concealed his identity and lived. The volume of his voice flickers along with the lights in the jars. Hiroji shows the man a photograph of James. The former Minister of Public Works studies his brother’s face and then directs him down along the road, to Tun or Old Mak, maybe one of them will know.

“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?”