by Joel Arnold
The next day, my suspicions are reinforced. I hear a voice-mail message left for Ellen. It’s Ruth.
“I just got off the phone with Mr. Wishlow, and he said he made you a sweet, sweet deal. God, El, I hope it was as sweet as mine. Didn’t I tell you he was the best? And it was so easy, wasn’t it Ellen dear? I’m glad you’re finally loosening up. It almost makes me want to move every week. I gotta go. Call me when you can. I want to hear all of the details. You understand, darling? All of them.”
I erase the message and say nothing. It feels like a tourniquet has been placed around my heart and Ruth’s voice tightens it with every word.
The movers we hire are fast and efficient. We spend the first week taking down wall-paper, painting, cleaning, arranging furniture. We start with the living room, then the master bedroom. We move on to the baby’s room. The paint we choose is a bright, sunny yellow. We buy a crib, bedding, a changing table. My mother sends us a mobile to hang above the crib, a mobile of tiny stuffed bears and tigers and birds. When it turns, a song plays. I can picture the baby reaching up with her tiny pink hand, wondering what these little creatures are hanging above her. The thought makes me smile. The thought takes some of the anger away.
There is one room in the basement that we’re not quite sure what to do with. It’s a small room, only five by five. An old well room, we think. But now it’s only an empty cement cell, bare and dingy. Its door is paneled like the rest of the basement wall, and is hard to see unless you look closely. Then you see the small metal latch that opens it and its faint outline in the wall. It will make a good storage room, perhaps.
I meet some of the neighbors. Ken and Linda Hughes who live next door bring us fresh baked bread as a house-warming gift. John and Lisa Solomon from down the street pass by nightly while walking their German shepherd. Betty Sandford, an elderly widow who comes by on our seventh night here, asking if we’ve seen her cat, Princess.
At work, my imagination runs rampant. It’s hard to concentrate on the balance sheets, the expense reports, the reconciliations. Instead, I see my wife driving away from our house and meeting up with Mr. Wishlow at some cheap hotel, fulfilling her part of whatever bargain they struck as she’s down on all fours, letting him inside of her. The brashness of it, the audacity of him, placing himself so disgustingly close to our unborn child.
I have to get up from my desk often, take short walks around the office building to keep myself from yelling with rage.
That night when Ellen is gone, I begin to smell something. Something in the attic. Rotting. I set a ladder beneath the square of plywood and push it aside, raising my head above the attic floor. There is a buzz of flies like the hum of a high voltage power line. I shine a flashlight along the attic walls, and at first I see nothing but insulation, a thick pink snow. Then something catches my eye. A gray paw sticking up. And the flies circling it. A cat.
I get gloves and carefully climb into the attic, making sure to keep my weight on the wooden beams. I lift the cat up out of the insulation. Its belly has been sliced open. Its insides have been taken out. I wonder how long it’s been there.
The next evening, I hear Ellen answer the phone after one short ring. I turn down the volume of the television and try to listen. She speaks quietly, yet I hear her, the words like needles pushed into my ears.
“Not tonight. No. I can’t. Tomorrow. When he’s gone. Then we’re done.”
There is a soft click as the phone is placed back in its cradle. Anger overwhelms me. It’s as if a light bulb has exploded in my skull. I want to throw something, I want to hit someone. I want to scream my fucking head off. But instead, I swallow it. I save it in my stomach, keeping it ready, like gasoline. When I face him, he will be the spark that ignites it. He will feel its burn.
At three in the morning I wake as my wife gets out of bed. I pretend to sleep and can feel her hovering over me, watching. She tiptoes out of the room. I hear four short beeps as she deactivates out alarm system. The house shudders slightly as the garage door rises and her car rumbles to life.
My God, is she that desperate, that hungry for this man that she can’t even wait until I’ve left for work?
I wait for her to come back as I toss and turn in bed, my imagination a whirlwind of lurid images and sounds. But by the time she returns and slips quietly next to me in bed, I have somehow managed to fall asleep.
The next day after I get home from work, I can’t stand it anymore. I had spent the whole time thinking I could just let it go, just swallow the thoughts, the suspicions I had, but now they burst up into my throat like acid.
“What kind of deal did you make with him?” I ask. “Did you have to fuck him? Was that part of the deal?”
She sits on the couch, her legs tucked under her. Her eyes widen and turn to her lap. “No.”
“Don’t lie to me.” I’ve never felt this angry, this sure of something in my whole life. “Did you fuck him?”
“No,” she insists.
“Look me in the eye and tell me that. Tell me, ‘I did not fuck him.’”
She puts her face in her hands and shakes her head, then starts rocking back and forth. I can feel it now. I can tell she is going to break. I feel satisfaction coming on along with a new sense of nausea. The whole situation is unreal, and I don’t want it to be happening, but I have to hear her answer. I have to hear it.
This time I yell. “Did you fuck him?”
She looks up at me. Tears stream down her face, but she looks me in the eye and says, “You bastard, you goddamn bastard. No. I did not fuck him.”
I stand there watching her, waiting for her gaze to break, but it doesn’t. It seems like we are frozen like that for hours, yet it is only a matter of seconds before she mumbles the next words
“He gave me a second option.”
My gut twists in on itself. Even though part of me is so completely sure she slept with the real estate agent to get our house, there’s another larger part that thinks the whole idea was ridiculous. And now these words. Second option.
“And what was that?” I ask. “What was your second option?”
She stands up. Her eyes flash. “Why can’t you trust me? You’ve never trusted me.” She storms out of the room.
The next night, the buzz of flies is so loud I can hear it through the ceiling like a muffled power generator. I wait until Ellen leaves, get my gloves, and climb into the attic again. The smell is intense.
It’s a dog this time. A big German shepherd, lay across two beams on its side, it’s back haunches and snout sticking above the pink insulation. Is it the same dog I’ve seen the Solomon’s out walking night after night? My God.
It’s hard work removing it. The thing is heavy, but again, the insides have been scooped out.
I confront Ellen about the dog. It is strange accusing my five month pregnant wife of this deed. Accuse? That is too harsh of a word. I question her. But instead of pleading ignorance and acting shocked and disgusted, she just stares at me. Looks me in the eye. Tears run down her cheeks as she says, “I told you, I did not fuck him.” How do you respond to something like that? I shut down. Walk away. Sit at my desk and stare at a blank computer screen for over an hour.
Even though we spend that night in the same bed, we might as well be on opposite sides of the world. The space between us seems infinite and cold. I can barely sleep, and when I do, it is only for minutes at a time.
At work the next day, I realize I have never met our real estate agent, Mr. Wishlow. He is faceless and dark in my imagination. He looms like a giant shadow in the corners of my mind. I can barely get any work done. When my boss asks what’s wrong, I tell him I can’t talk about it. I mumble something about family troubles.
When I get home, I find Ellen groaning in the bathroom. Her face is ashen. When I ask her what is wrong, she breaks down and collapses in my arms. I feel her tears warm and wet on my shoulder. “What is it?” I ask.
“The baby,” she says. “The baby.”
; She crumples to the floor, her body heaving. She’s hysterical. Blood trickles from beneath her skirt.
I take her to the emergency room. They tend to her, give her a sedative, tell her everything is going to be all right. A young intern takes me aside and tells me Ellen has miscarried. He asks me what she did with the fetus.
I make no secret of placing the ladder beneath the attic opening, of donning gloves, of climbing into the attic, staying on the beams, of screaming with rage when I see it, a tiny hand poking through the pink insulation. I lift it and cradle it in my arms. It’s so small. So light. Dressed in doll clothing to hide the cut. I climb carefully down the ladder, balancing it in one hand.
“When does it end?” I ask her.
She won’t look at me. “It’s over,” she says. “It’s done.”
Can I believe her? When will it really end? How far does she have to go? Was I part of the deal? Was I included in this escalation of sacrifices?
When I ask her this, she replies quietly, “I could never hurt you.” I stand and wait for her to say something else. I watch her as she walks away, her head bowed down, weary and defeated. At that moment, I believe her. At that moment, I feel my heart colliding against my rib cage. What pain she has gone through. What heartbreak. An ugly sound breaks from my throat. I am overcome by loud, body wrenching sobs. To want something so bad…
I run to her. Put my arms around her. Tell her how much I love her, how much I need her.
Two weeks have passed and things are almost back to normal. I outfitted the well room with a comfortable chair and a table full of her favorite books. I sawed a hole in the door at eye level and moved the television at an angle where she can see it. I let her have the remote control.
I don’t believe she’d ever try to kill me. I would hope not. After all, I love her with all my heart. I always have. But still—
I don’t entirely trust her.
Not quite…
Pran’s Confession
The young men in Bangkok sometimes called him Grandpa or Uncle as he clutched their lithe oiled bodies. His fingers grasped a bit too tightly; his nails dug into their skin and drew beads of blood. Sometimes he’d choke them, but never enough to kill them. He had to be careful. He was gaining a reputation among them, and a reputation was something he had to stay away from. But it was hard not to let the old feelings overcome him, the memories flooding into his mind of how it once felt to watch a life quickly fade behind the suffocating film of a plastic bag.
Samnang startled. He clutched frantically at his shirt pocket. The piece of paper was still there.
It was a long, tedious train ride from the Thai border in the northwest to the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh. He slept most of the way, getting out to stretch at Battambang and again at Pursat, where he ate a quick meal of fish soup. He fell back into another short, fitful nap. Hard to sleep because of the dreams. His dreams of Pran.
There were other dreams, too, other nightmares of those times. Dreams of Duch, the prison’s director; his parchment-like face, teeth too big for his mouth, his death-like smile. How could one not have nightmares about him? But it was Pran who coaxed Samnang back to prison S-21. Not the nightmares of the beatings, the beheadings, the children in black peasant garb with red scarves, suffocating men and women with clear, plastic bags — men and women who could’ve been their parents.
No.
It was the simple dreams of Pran whispering to him in a voice worn down from days of screaming—
“You took my soul.”
The train pulled into the Phnom Penh Train Station. Samnang got off with a small backpack. He pulled his New York Mets cap down low on his forehead and looked out over the waters of Boeng Kak. Tendrils of dawn reached out over the lake’s surface revealing the shapes of small boats and early risen fishermen setting out nets.
He felt for the piece of paper folded in his shirt pocket. Rubbed his fingers absently over the tiny protrusion it made against the shirt’s fabric. A tremor ran along his arm up to his shoulder. His tongue felt dry. He wanted to lay down here as the sun rose, shut his eyes to the sound of the cormorants and egrets, and sleep for a hundred years. But he knew if he did that now, Pran would continue to come to him in his sleep. Plead to him forever—
My soul.
He turned in a circle to work out the painful cramps in his calves, then found a cyclo and driver to take him south down the city streets and boulevards. He recognized many of the buildings, the monuments, the roads — yet something had drastically changed in his absence. What was it?
In the markets, vendors busied themselves over colorful displays of fruits and vegetables and the silver bullet shape of fresh fish. Monks shuffled past in bright saffron robes. Children with outstretched hands implored him to toss them spare change. So many people bustling about in the warm morning air. So many people.
That was it. The people. They moved about freely now, and there were so many of them. Not like the days of the Khmer Rouge, when the city had been emptied of nearly everyone, its citizens forced to the outlying hills and labor camps. They’d been promised peace, but were given nothing but violence and death.
Now the city thrived. But the urging of the dead kept Samnang moving. He closed his eyes and tried to sleep as the wheels of the cyclo whirred over fresh blacktop.
Was that the only reason he came? To put a continuing dream to rest? To give peace to just one of many souls that begged for justice? Surely, there were other reasons.
He awoke when the cyclo driver braked to a squeaky stop.
There it was. The prison.
Now it was a museum. The Tuol Sleng museum. A testament to the atrocities of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. Back then it was referred to simply as Security Prison 21.
S-21.
Samnang tipped the cyclo driver and stood alone outside the gate, reading the old red sign.
Fortify the spirit of the revolution!
Be on your guard against the strategy and tactics
of the enemy so as to defend the country, the people, and the party.
The words chilled him.
Was I such a monster?
Samnang kept his sunglasses on and his Mets cap pulled low. Would anyone recognize him after all these years? Most of the ones who’d feared him were killed long ago, and besides — his hair was mostly gone now, the rest of it wisps of bone white. His skin was creased with age, and there were scars on his neck and face where dozens of black, cancerous moles had been removed.
He nodded at the guard standing casually at the museum’s entrance and stepped into the compound. For one dizzying moment he felt as if he’d never left, as if his years in Bangkok were nothing but a sweet, vivid dream.
Phantom smells of sweat, blood, and feces invaded his nostrils.
My uniform. Where’s my uniform?
He’d be punished without his uniform.
And Duch — he sensed him in the walls. Felt that he’d step around a corner at any moment with his donkey teeth, guards on either side. One nod and the guards would descend upon Samnang with hard black batons.
The sound of children playing on the grounds of the compound snapped him back to reality.
Before this was a prison, it was a school. Funny how things have come full circle. Children again play on the open field.
How many have I watched die here?
Do these children know the ground they now play on is saturated with the blood of human slaughter?
Samnang swept back thin strands of hair and tucked them back up into his cap. He walked into one of the buildings.
Prison cells that had once been classrooms.
You will write your confession now.
Samnang gasped as he peered into one of the cells. Black and white photographs covered the walls from floor to ceiling. Mugshots that Samnang himself had taken.
There were hundreds of them. Thousands. Every room that he passed was full of them. Photographs of the prisoners who lived and died here. Doomed faces, blank eyes
, unsmiling mouths. They continued to look at Samnang as they did all those years ago.
This one died easily. And here — she hung herself with her trousers. And this one — and here — taken out to Choeung Ek. The killing fields. And this boy here begged for his mother.
So many of them crowding around him. How could he remember them all?
Over 17,000 prisoners.
Only seven survived.
He felt once again for the paper folded neatly in his pocket. He searched for Pran’s face among the photographs on the walls.
So many. So many. The light from their eyes lost as they stare at the camera, their wills smashed. It’s as if they are already dead.
Why this obsession with documentation? Duch was meticulous about keeping records. His red-inked notations peppered many of the confessions. It was as if the Khmer Rouge wanted to leave behind proof of their cruelty.
Another room full of pictures.
More familiar faces.
Samnang remembered how dazed they were, their blindfolds freshly removed, beatings freshly stopped, his own diatribes halted as he asked them to look at the camera lens. Duch would tell them to smile. He’d laugh at his own joke, his tongue waving behind ghost white teeth.
But the prisoners never smiled.
How long ago had it been? Twenty-five years?
His index finger twitched at the phantom memory of taking Pran’s photograph—
—placid face, darkly tanned, his prisoner number — 10572 — stitched on his tattered shirt.
Pran squinted. Poor eyesight. Owl-like circles of light skin where the frames of glasses once sat.
