Madeleine Thien - Dogs at the Perimeter

In the fall, he went to Leipzig, a guest of the Max Planck Institute. Every week, he telephoned me, he gave me detailed descriptions of the city, once home to Bach, Hertz, and Heisenberg. He said he strolled in the Botanical Garden every evening. James’s letters had opened something in me, and I began sliding into a numb melancholy. The world seemed bled of colour, yet I had vivid, exhausting dreams. I felt as if I had realized some truth, returned to someone I longed for, just at the moment of waking. On Hiroji’s return, in late October, we took a walk together through Mount Royal where, at the top of the mountain, we saw the evening lamps coming on. I remember how the oratory, St. Joseph, held the sun the longest, while everything below it slid into a coppery twilight. For the first time in many weeks, Hiroji brought up the subject of James. By then, I had set the file and its contents aside. I told Hiroji what I believed, that no matter how much we wished for it, no matter what we did, some ghosts could never be put to rest.

Hiroji nodded. “Maybe James would have said the same.”

The mountain fell into dusk. We let the subject go. For the rest of the evening, we talked about our various projects. He directed me to studies I had not yet come across, he promised to put me in touch with researchers he had met in Germany.

Weeks passed.

I invited him to dinner at a restaurant in our neighbourhood. Before leaving home, I slipped the file into my bag, promising myself that I would return it to him.

Over the course of two hours we spoke in a careful way about work and the weather, about the headlines and the wars. It was a frosty November evening. I had never seen him look so energized, so strangely bright. But his hands were nervous.

“Are you sleeping well?” I asked.

“It’s funny,” he said. “Sleep feels like the last thing that I need.”

Throughout the meal, I wanted to bring up James, the file, but I didn’t know how. Eventually we bogged down in silence.

“Nuong called,” he said, catching me by surprise. “He’s living in Phnom Penh now.”

He saw my confusion.

“The boy I took care of in Aranyaprathet, in the refugee camp. Do you remember? Nuong. He’s around your age. He was adopted by a family in Massachusetts, back in 1981. Anyway, he’s moved back to Phnom Penh. I was thinking that I could put you in touch with him. He can help us find James.”

Hiroji kept speaking but the words didn’t register. I took a sip of water, a bite of food, and then I put down my fork.

“Morrin says you’ve been in the clinic constantly this month. He says you’re working all the time.”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re not sleeping. You haven’t even touched your food.”

The restaurant was full now and the noise pressed in on us.

“Would you come with me?” he asked. “If I went to see Nuong. Could you come with me?”

November. It was the beginning of the dry season in Cambodia. Drenched fields, a slow, thirsting heat. I saw it all with a clarity that shook me. Hiroji’s eyes seemed lighter, joyful. I looked away, ignoring his question. I couldn’t hear my own thoughts. I leaned down, picked my bag up from off the floor, and withdrew the file.

He leaned forward.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I tried, but I couldn’t get anywhere with it. There’s no information to find. There’s nothing.” The words came out wrong. They came out thinly, dismissively.

He took the file, holding it in his hands for a moment as if he did not fully recognize it.

“I can’t abandon him again.”

“There isn’t any other choice,” I said. “We have to let them go.”

His bag, a leather satchel, hung on the back of his chair. He opened it and put the file clumsily in. A waiter, hurrying by, bumped Hiroji’s elbow and the bag fell. Some pages scattered on the floor. He leaned down, reaching toward them, the waiter kneeling to help him.

When he had gathered everything, Hiroji took out his wallet. He pressed a hundred-dollar bill into my hand. “Take this and buy a birthday present for Kiri.”

Kiri’s birthday was still a month away. I shook my head, upset.

“Take it,” he insisted. “I had an antique microscope for him, but I couldn’t get it repaired in time.”

“He’s only six. How could it matter if it’s late?”

“It matters,” he said. He signalled for the bill.

I asked him to come for coffee, to see me tomorrow or the day after. He said he was busy. “I’m behind,” he told me. “I’ve let things get away from me.” He signed the bill and turned it over so that it was face down. Some feeling between us had been extinguished but it would not last, I thought. I would repair it, I would make him understand. “Janie,” he said when we parted. “Don’t judge me too harshly.” The words were pleading. “I have many regrets.”

A week later, when I couldn’t reach him on the phone, I went to his apartment. Inside, everything was neat and orderly. The cat had food and water to last for another week but, still, she ran to me crying. On the kitchen table, I found the file. He had left it behind, along with his driver’s licence, his bank cards, and the hundred-dollar bill he had tried to give me for Kiri’s birthday. I put all of these things into my bag, I packed up Taka the Old and took her home with me. From there, I called the police.

The next morning, before dawn comes, I walk out onto the wide boulevard of Côte-des-Neiges where the queue for the downtown bus winds along the sidewalk, serpentine, a half-dozen men and women lost inside their winter coats, a light snow falling on us, as fine as sand. I ask someone what day it is, and he says, “Tuesday. One more Tuesday.” He smiles and points out something on the horizon. The bus arrives and, gratefully, the people climb inside.

I begin walking, unsure where to go. I smell coffee from a nearby bakery, I see my little brother and myself, and the smell of bread permeates the air. We are caught outside when the air raid sirens begin. I try to pull him away. It is last night’s memory, when mortar fire started and the rockets began to fall, the middle of the hot season, the beginning of the last Khmer Rouge offensive. There is a shelter nearby, a dry, shallow well in which we sometimes hide, but in my panic I can’t find it. Instead, Sopham and I crouch against the wall of a building. He is carrying his drawing pencils in a blue cloth bag. The air turns to gas and the sidewalk heaves, splitting apart. I hold on to my brother, gripping him as if he is the world itself and an explosion will claim us together or not at all. His screaming becomes a wide emptiness, a pressure in the air blinding me, and in the darkness I hear a strange, familiar ticking — insects, the typewriter, a clock counting time, the melody of a piece of music — and then my brother repeating my name. He wipes my face with the sleeve of his shirt. The air explodes me from its grip and suddenly I see blood everywhere. Run , I hear him saying. Sister, sister. Come with me . Words begin to pour from him. He says there is another song he has learned but he cannot remember it, cannot remember. “My pencils,” he says, “look at my pencils.” But when I look all I see is the river, brown and churning, and a yellow boat idling, impossibly, on the surface. “Are you hungry?” he says. He asks me to find bitter sdao shoots for him to eat. I reach for the little purse in which I keep American coins but when I reach inside, the coins burn my fingertips. My brother takes the purse, turns it over, scatters the coins on the ground, and when I look down it seems as if they are writhing, they are melting on the road. We leave the money where it is and walk and walk, and my brother comes across a book of Buddhist prayers. We start laughing when we see it, the book seems like a trick of our father’s who often recited verses when he was drunk, when he had gambled our money away, as if beautiful lines would save him in the eyes of our mother. Still, he would come armed with verses, unfurling them like peacock feathers, dazzling the eyes so we would be blind to the fear and anxiety below. My brother carries the book and we walk on, calling for our father and then, out of the smoke, he appears and runs to us. It is unbelievable, it seems a miracle that he could appear just because we say his name. He raises my brother high, sets him on his shoulders, then he picks me up and begins to run.