Dogs at the Perimeter

by Madeleine Thien

  ALSO BY MADELEINE THIEN

  FICTION

  Simple Recipes (2001)

  Certainty (2006)

  This story is written with love for my Cambodian friends.

  I am grateful to the Center for Neuroscience and Society at the University of Pennsylvania for scholarship assistance during my research.

  Copyright © 2011 by Madeleine Thien

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher—or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Thien, Madeleine, 1974-

  Dogs at the perimeter / Madeleine Thien.

  eISBN: 978-0-7710-8410-2

  I. Title.

  PS8589.H449D64 2011 c813.′6 c2010-905274-9

  We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.

  The author wishes to thank the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec for its financial support.

  The epigraph and the lines on this page are from Haing S. Ngor’s Survival in the Killing Fields, written with Roger Warner. Every effort has been made to contact the copyright holder and the publisher will be happy to amend the credit line as necessary in subsequent printings.

  Zasetsky excerpt reprinted by permission of the publisher from The Man With a Shattered World: The History of a Brain Wound by A.R. Luria, with a Foreword by Oliver Sacks, p. 86, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1972 by Michael Cole. Foreword copyright © 1987 by Oliver Sacks.

  Words attributed to Vesna Vulovic on this page are from her interview with Philip Baum, printed in the April 2002 edition of Aviation Security International.

  Chea’s words on this page – this page and Prasith’s words on this page are adapted from source material cited in Elizabeth Becker’s exceptional When the War Was Over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge Revolution (Public Affairs, 1986).

  Elie is inspired by the work and life of Vancouver artist Anne Adams. Further details can be found in “Unravelling Bolero: progressive aphasia, transmodal creativity and the right posterior neocortex” by William W. Seeley et al., published in Brain (2008), 131, 39–41.

  An excerpt from this novel appeared in Granta 114.

  McClelland & Stewart Ltd.

  75 Sherbourne Street

  Toronto, Ontario

  M5A 2P9

  www.mcclelland.com

  v3.1

  for my mother

  Tell the gods what is happening to me.

  HAING S. NGOR, Survival in the Killing Fields

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Janie

  Hiroji

  Mei

  Rithy

  Kiri

  James

  Hiroji

  Saturday, February 18

  [fragment]

  On November 29, 2005, my friend Dr. Hiroji Matsui walked out of Montreal’s Brain Research Centre at 7:29 in the evening. On the security video, his expression gives nothing away. For a brief moment, the camera captures him in passing: greying hair, neatly combed. Silver-framed eyeglasses, intense brows, a stubborn chin, the softness of an old man’s face. He wears no coat, despite the freezing temperatures, and he carries nothing, not even the briefcase with which he had arrived that morning. He exits through a side door, down a flight of metal steps. And then Hiroji walked into the city and disappeared into air. The officer assigned to Hiroji’s case told me that, without evidence of foul play, there was very little the police could do. In this world of constant surveillance and high security, it is still remarkably easy to vanish. People go to great lengths to abandon their identities, holding no credit cards or bank cards, no insurance papers, pension plans, or driver’s licences. I wanted to tell the officer what I believed, that Hiroji’s disappearance was only temporary, but the words didn’t come. Just as before, they didn’t come to me in time. Many of the missing, the officer went on, no longer wish to be themselves, to be associated with their abandoned identity. They go to these great lengths in the hope that they will never be found.

  [end]

  Janie

  They sleep early and rise in the dark. It is winter now. The nights are long but outside, where the leaves have fallen from the branches, the snowed-in light comes through. There is a cat who finds the puddles of sunshine. She was small when the boy was small, but then she grew up and left him behind. Still, at night, she hunkers down on Kiri’s bed, proprietorial. They were born just a few weeks apart, but now he is seven and she is forty-four. My son is the beginning, the middle, and the end. When he was a baby, I used to follow him on my hands and knees, the two of us crawling over the wood floors, the cat threading between our legs. Hello, hello, my son would say. Hello, my good friend. How are you? He trundled along, an elephant, a chariot, a glorious madman.

  It is twilight now, mid-February. Sunday.

  Tonight’s freezing rain has left the branches crystalline. Our home is on the second floor, west facing, reached by a twisting staircase, the white paint chipping off, rust burnishing the edges. Through the window, I can see my son. Kiri puts a record on, he shuffles it gingerly out of its cardboard sleeve, holding it lightly between his fingertips. I know the one he always chooses. I know how he watches the needle lift and the mechanical arm move into place. I know the outside but not the quiet, not the way his thoughts rise up, always jostling, always various, not how they untangle from one another or how they fall so inevitably into place.

  Kiri is in grade two. He has his father’s dark-brown hair, he has startling, beautiful eyes, the same colour as my own. His name, in Khmer, means “mountain.” I want to run up the stairs and turn my key in the lock, the door to my home swinging wide open.

  When my fear outweighs my need – fear that Kiri will look out the window and see this familiar car, that my son will see me – I turn the ignition, steer myself from the sidewalk, and roll away down the empty street. In my head, ringing in my ears, the music persists, his body swaying like a bell to the melody. I remember him, crumpled on the floor, looking up at me, frightened. I try to cover this memory, to focus on the blurring lights, the icy pavement. My bed is not far away but a part of me wants to keep on driving, out of the city, down the highway straight as a needle. Instead, I circle and circle the residential streets. A space opens up in front of Hiroji’s apartment, where I have been sleeping these last few weeks, and I edge the car against the curb.

  Tomorrow will come soon, I tell myself. Tomorrow I will see my son.

  The wind swoops down, blowing free what little heat I have. I can barely lock the door and get upstairs fast enough. Inside, I pull off my boots but keep my coat and scarf on against the chill. Hiroji’s cat, Taka the Old, skips ahead of me, down the long hallway. On the answering machine, the message light is flashing and I hit the square button so hard the machine hiccups twice before complying.

  Navin’s voice. “I saw the car,” my husband says. “Janie? Are you there?” He waits. In the background, my son is calling out. Their voices seem to echo. “No, Kiri. Hurry up, kiddo
. Back to bed.” I hear footsteps, a door closing, and then Navin coming back. He says he wants to take Kiri to Vancouver for a few weeks, that the time, and distance, might help us. “We’ll stay at Lena’s place,” he says. I am nodding, agreeing with every word – Lena’s home has stood empty since she died last year – but a numb grief is flowing through me.

  One last message follows. I hear a clicking on the line, then the beep of keys being pressed, once, twice, three times. The line goes dead.

  The fridge is remarkably empty. I scan its gleaming insides, then do a quick inventory: old bread in the freezer and in the cupboard two cans of diced tomatoes, a tin of smoked mussels, and, heaven, three bottles of wine. I liberate the bread and the mussels, pour a glass of sparkling white, then stand at the counter until the toaster ejects my dinner. Gourmet. I peel back the lid of the can and eat the morsels one by one. The wine washes the bread down nicely. Everything is gone too soon but the bottle of wine that accompanies me to the sofa, where I turn the radio on. Music swells and dances through the apartment.

  This bubbly wine is making me morose. I drink the bottle quickly in order to be rid of it. “Only bodies,” Hiroji once told me, “have pain.” He had been in my lab, watching me pull a motor neuron from Aplysia. Bodies, minds: to him they were the same, one could not be considered without the other.

  Half past ten. It is too early to sleep but the dark makes me uneasy. I want to call Meng, my oldest friend, we have not spoken in more than two weeks, but it is the hour of the wolves in Paris. My limbs feel light and I trickle, wayward, through the rooms. On the far side of the apartment, in Hiroji’s small office, the windows are open and the curtains seem to move fretfully, wilfully. The desk has exploded, maybe it happened last week, maybe earlier, but now all the papers and books have settled into a more balanced state of nature. Still, the desk seems treacherous. Heaped all over, like a glacier colonizing the surface, are the pages I have been working on. Taka the Old has been here: the paper is crumpled and still faintly warm.

  Since he disappeared, nearly three months ago now, I’ve had no contact with Hiroji. I’m trying to keep a record of the things he told me: the people he treated, the scientists he knew. This record fills sheet after sheet – one memory at a time, one place, one clue – so that every place and every thought won’t come at once, all together, like a deafening noise. On Hiroji’s desk is an old photograph showing him and his older brother standing apart, an emerald forest behind them. Hiroji, still a child, smiles wide. They wear no shoes, and Junichiro, or James, stands with one hand on his hip, chin lifted, challenging the camera. He has a bewitching, sad face.

  Sometimes this apartment feels so crowded with loved ones, strangers, imagined people. They don’t accuse me or call me to account, but I am unable to part with them. In the beginning, I had feared the worst, that Hiroji had taken his own life. But I tell myself that if this had been a suicide, he would have left a note, he would have left something behind. Hiroji knew what it was to have the missing live on, unending, within us. They grow so large, and we so empty, that even the coldest winter nights won’t swallow them. I remember floating, a child on the sea, alone in the Gulf of Thailand. My brother is gone, but I am looking up at the white sky and I believe, somehow, that I can call him back. If only I am brave enough, or true enough. Countries, cities, families. Nothing need disappear. At Hiroji’s desk, I work quickly. My son’s voice is lodged in my head, but I have lost the ability to keep him safe. I know that no matter what I say, what I make, the things I have done can’t be forgiven. My own hands seem to mock me, they tell me the further I go to escape, the greater the distance I must travel back. You should never have left the reservoir, you should have stayed in the caves. Look around, we ended up back in the same place, didn’t we? The buildings across the street fall dark, yet the words keep coming, accumulating like snow, like dust, a fragile cover that blows away so easily.

  Sunday, February 19

  [fragment]

  Elie was fifty-eight years old when she began to lose language. She told Hiroji that the first occurrence was in St. Michael’s Church in Montreal, when the words of the Lord’s Prayer, words she had known almost from the time she had learned to speak, failed to materialize on her lips. For a brief moment, while the congregation around her prayed, the whole notion of language diminished inside her mind. Instead, the priest’s green robes struck her as infinitely complicated, the winter coats of the faithful shifted like a collage, a pointillist work, a Seurat: precision, definition, and a rending, rending beauty. The Lord’s Prayer touched her in the same bodily way that the wind might, it was the sensation of sound but not meaning. She felt elevated and alone, near to God and yet cast out.

  And then the moment passed. She came back and so did the words. A mild hallucination, Elie thought. Champagne in the brain.

  She went home and did what she always did. She closed the glass doors of her studio, unlatched the windows, lifted them high, and she painted. It was winter so she wore her coat over two shirts and fleece sweatpants, thick socks, Chinese slippers on her feet, and a woollen hat on her head. A decade ago she had been a biomechanical engineer, researching motor control, lecturing at McGill University, but at the age of forty-six, she had abandoned that life. Now, experience unfolded in a different pitch and tone, it was more fluid, more transitory, it enclosed her like the battering sea under broken light. When she closed her eyes she saw how the corners of improbable things touched – a bird and a person and a pencil rolling off a child’s table – entwined, and became the same substance. Even her loved ones seemed different, more contained and solid, like compositions, iterations in her head. Painting was everything. She painted until she couldn’t feel her arms anymore, ten, twelve hours at a time, every single day, and even then it wasn’t enough. She told her husband, Gregor, that it was as if she had arrived at high noon, the hour when all forces converge. Gregor, a chef, grew used to falling asleep to the rhythms of Debussy and Ravel and Fauré, Elie’s preferred accompaniments. Her husband grew accustomed to the smell of oil paint on her skin, the way she gestured with her hands in place of words, the way she gazed out with a new-found passion and righteousness. “I can see,” he heard her calling to him one day. “Look what I can see.”

  “I thought,” Elie told Hiroji, when he had been treating her for many years, “that my entire past was fantasy. Only my present was real.”

  The champagne in the brain began reoccurring, blotting out people’s names, song lyrics, street names, book titles. She felt sometimes as if the words themselves had vanished, in her thoughts, her speech, and even her handwriting. There was a stopper in her throat and a black hole in her mind. In her paintings, she turned music into images, the musical phrases playing out like words, the words breaking into geometric shapes, her paintings grasping all the broken, brilliant fragments. When she worked, there were no more barriers between herself and reality, the image could say everything that she could not. Increasingly, she could not speak much. But she could live with losing language, if that was the price. This seemed, back then, a small price.

  She was painting when she noticed the tremors in her right arm.

  The first time she had met Hiroji, he had asked her if she found speaking effortful. The word had seemed to her like the priest’s green robe that day in St. Michael’s Church, an image blocking out all other ideas. Yes, how effortful it was. “I’m decaying,” she told Hiroji, surprising even herself.

  “What do you mean?” he asked her.

  “I can’t … with the …” She put her hands together, straining to find the words. “There’s too much.”

  Hiroji sent her for diagnostic testing. Those MRI films are conclusive. The first thing that strikes the viewer is the white line, the fragile outline of the skull, surprisingly thin. And then, within the skull, the grey matter folded around the hub of white matter. What has happened is that her left brain, the dominant side (she is right-handed), has atrophied – it is wasting away in the same m
anner that a flower left too long in the vase withers. Throughout Elie’s left brain this disintegration is happening. Language is only the first thing that she will lose. It may come to pass that, one day soon, she will not be able to move the entire right side of her body.

  The images show something else too. While one side of her has begun to atrophy, the other side is burgeoning. Elie’s right brain has been creating grey matter – neurons – and all that extra tissue is collecting in the back of her brain, in the places where visual images are processed.

  “It’s a kind of asymmetry,” Hiroji had told her, “a kind of imbalance in your mind, between words and pictures.”

  “So what is it, all this, that I’m making? Where is it coming from?” She waved her hands at the bare walls, as if to pull her own paintings into the room, to trail them behind her like an army.

  “It comes from the inner world,” Hiroji said, “but isn’t that where all painting comes from?”

  “My diseased inner world,” she said. “I’m at war. I’m dwindling, aren’t I?” She picked up the MRI scans from his desk. “Do you paint, Doctor?”

  He shook his head.

  “Have you ever thought about it?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  He paused for a moment. “My mother painted. She was a Buddhist, and she used to tell me that I was too analytical, that I had no understanding of the ephemeral side of things.”

  “The ephemeral,” she said doubtfully. “Like dancing?”

  He laughed. “Yes, like dancing.”

  Hiroji kept Elie under what is known as surveillance MR imaging. Scan after scan, year by year, the films show the imbalance widening. Three years after her diagnosis, Elie’s paintings, too, began to change. Where once she had delighted in turning music into complex mathematical and abstract paintings, intense with colour and the representation of rhythm, now she painted precise cityscapes, detailed, almost photographic. “I see differently,” she told him. “It comes to me less holy than before.” He wanted her to go further, to explain this holiness, but she just shook her head and poured the tea, her right hand trembling.