Dogs at the Perimeter (19 page)

“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.”

“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.”

“Why did they kill her?”

Chorn shakes his head, visibly upset. “I don’t know. Maybe she didn’t die. Don’t talk about this. Lower your voice.”

But then he reaches into his pocket and he takes out Sorya’s letters, five of them, creased and beginning to tear. He sets them on the floor and, for the first time, looks straight into James’s eyes.

“Why are you doing this?” James says. He is nauseated and the man is breaking apart in his vision.

“Let her go. The past is done.”

The man stands up and dust comes off him, it sticks to the air. James wonders why he doesn’t stand up, push Chorn backwards, crack the weight of his skull against the cement wall, spill this man’s life onto the once-elegant tiles, into the black water, go to be tortured and executed for a crime he can truly understand. His thoughts are viscous and slow. He could stand up now and find some strength, take this because there is nothing left to take. So what if Angkar is everywhere, he could kill this one man and be done with it here, he could choke his own weakness.

The door scrapes closed. James opens his eyes.