Madeleine Thien - Dogs at the Perimeter

I call Morrin’s extension and tell him that, if he’s looking for me, I’m in Hiroji’s office, doing the dreaded deed. He says he’ll bring up some boxes. When Morrin arrives, he, too, lingers for a moment. The three of us have spent many hours in here, discussing, arguing, idling. The office unnerves him. He goes to the window, glances out, and then returns to the relative safety of the door.

“Janie,” he says. “Sorry to make you do this.”

“You were right. It’s time.”

He nods. Weeks earlier, he had tried to draw me out on this subject, but I had rebuffed him. Now, he takes a pen from Hiroji’s desk and taps it soundlessly against his fingers. He says that I should call downstairs if I need anything.

“A second brain?” I say.

He laughs. “Hmm. No, but there’s a new dissecting scope. Come and see it when you’re done.” Still holding the pen, he leaves.

When all the files have been removed, I shut the cabinet and sit down in Hiroji’s chair. The morning light, tipped in gold, has laid its gaze across the desk, illuminating a stapler, a box of paperclips, and a thumb-sized bronze Buddha in a seated posture, both hands extended in the gesture of protection. Hiroji has an object coveted by all the other neurologists: a phrenological map of the brain, drawn onto a porcelain head. During the Victorian era, the brain was believed to have forty-eight mental faculties, and each of these had a specific location that could be felt via bumps on the skull. Destructiveness , for instance, curves like a horseshoe behind the ear. Immortality floats at the crown of the head, far above vagrancy and animality , low qualities that swell the neck. Blandness is neighbour to agreeableness . My own head has a bump above my left temple. Hiroji had studied the map.

“Mirthfulness,” he had said, grinning, looking up.

We had both laughed. He used to rest his glasses on the head’s porcelain nose, so much more upright, he said, more Roman, than his own.

I open the drawers. This trespass shames me, and yet I continue, running my fingers through the contents of his desk. In the middle drawer, I see a box of slides, various batteries, an adapter, and a half-finished roll of wine gums. Underneath all this is a small yellow notebook. Hesitantly, I reach for it, thinking that it might be a calendar or even a journal. When I open it, my friend’s handwriting is so familiar, so known, that a surge of emotion hits me. Names, addresses, and numbers fill every page. Under my own name, there are at least a dozen crossed-out entries, a decade-long list of all the cell phones I have lost and the apartments I have vacated. I see where Navin’s name has been added to mine, or Naveen as Hiroji writes it, and then Janie/Nav/Kiri, so that we become variations of one another. Our names are accompanied by two exuberant exclamation points, which makes me suspect that Hiroji is beside me, pulling my leg. I continue through the alphabet. At the very end, on the inside back cover, is one last entry. Ly Nuong . Underlined once. Two numbers have been written beneath it, one appears to be North American and has been crossed out, but the second remains. It begins with +855, the country code for Cambodia.

I close the address book and put it back in the drawer. I carry the boxes downstairs, one by one. On the last trip, sweating, I return to the desk. I take out the address book and place it, carefully, into the box.

Evening arrives quickly. In the foyer where the brc branches off to the hospital and the university, I sit, unable to face the freezing cold. This foyer is an intersection, a place where patients, neurologists, researchers, families, and students meet and part. I have been a researcher at the brc for twelve years. Many floors below, in my electrophysiology lab, I have listened, hour after hour, to the firing of single neurons. In my work, I harvest cells, gather data, measure electricity while, in the upper floors, lives open and change: a patient with a brain tumour begins to lose her vision, a girl ceases to recognize faces, including her own, a man stares, disgruntled, at his left leg, refusing to believe that it belongs to his body. So many selves are born and re-born here, lost and imagined anew.

Now, a woman in a hospital gown has been brought to a halt, overwhelmed by the patterned lines on the floor. A nurse comes and prods her forward. My friend Bonnet, rushing by, catches sight of me. He asks me what I’ve been dissecting today and I tell him sea slugs. Bonnet, who works in brain imaging, and whom I often tease for walking fast to nowhere, is already halfway down the corridor. “How’s your boy?” he says, walking backwards now. “Seems like ages since Kiri visited.” I deflect. “You never weep for the sea slugs.” He laughs, pirouettes in his lab coat, saluting me, and vanishes around the corner. The woman in the hospital gown is still walking, considering each line as it comes to her. Parkinson’s, well advanced. The nurse says, “Are you sure you don’t want a wheelchair, Nila?” The woman looks at me, aggrieved. “It’s like being in a pram, isn’t it? Why race to stand still? They won’t bring the lunch trays for another hour yet.”

As they move across the foyer, I retrieve the yellow book from my coat pocket. All afternoon, the name Nuong has been clamouring in my thoughts. I calculate the time difference once more. In Cambodia, tomorrow morning has arrived. I take out my phone and dial the international number. On the sixth ring, a woman answers.

I ask to speak to Ly Nuong.

When she doesn’t respond, I ask a second time, switching to Khmer, though the words no longer come easily to me. She laughs, relieved, and says, No, Nuong isn’t here, he’s already left for work. She has a Phnom Penh accent, the same as my parents.

“Who is this?” she asks.

My English name feels awkward so instead I say, “I’m calling from Canada.”

“Canada, yes. I will tell him.”

I thank the woman and hang up. The phone feels heavy in my hand. I pick it up again and dial Meng’s number. Though it rings for a long time, nobody answers.

The first time it happened, it was January. I had been anxious and overworked, and then, that day, I couldn’t find my wallet, and then my keys. In the confusion, I forgot to pick Kiri up from daycare. By the time the aggravated staff reached me, my son had been waiting in the deserted rooms for more than two hours.

I ran all the way. At the daycare, I thanked the staff and apologized as best as I was able, then I took Kiri’s hand and we made our way through the snow, stumbling together on the patches of ice. The sky was charcoal and the cold ambushed us. My son had lost his scarf. He asked me where I had been and when I didn’t answer, he started to cry, he pulled on my hand but my body was light and my hand felt far away.

At home, I made dinner and he wandered around beside my legs, tugging at my clothes. “What’s wrong, Momma?” he asked me over and over. In my head was a thick sadness, but I tried to concentrate on the rice and the carrots and then the faded green beans. I knew that if I spoke, my words would be slurred and broken so instead I tried to conserve my energy. My child began to weep. He picked up his cat and buried his face in her fur. There was a memory at the edges of my consciousness, but with a great force of will I managed to avert my eyes from it. I put rice and carrots and green beans into a small plastic bowl and I set the bowl carefully on the table. I stood in front of the stove for one long minute after another, trying to make certain that all the burners were off. Kiri asked for a spoon. I switched the dials on and off to make sure. I must do things in order. I walked through the darkness to the bedroom. Kiri’s voice was far away, like the scuffling of mice between the walls. “What happened, Momma? Why are you crying?” I went to the bedroom and shut the door as softly as I could.