Dogs at the Perimeter

by Madeleine Thien

  “I thought you knew me! You said my name.”

  “You seemed familiar to me.”

  Upset, the man began to ramble. He was soft-spoken, and Hiroji had to lean forward to catch all the words. The man described waking, suddenly, on the wet ground, his entire body convulsed with pain. Things were broken, blood was sticky on his fingers, but he couldn’t remember why, he didn’t know how this had happened. For hours, maybe days, he had walked in a dream, not comprehending how things moved in the world. Cars hurried down on him. There were too many voices speaking too many languages and he didn’t know which one belonged to him. His stomach hurt and his legs felt empty, but he didn’t know that this hollowness was hunger. He had no memories, no thoughts, no ideas, nothing. Everything had been taken away, that much he understood, but by whom and when did it happen? He walked to the middle of the Pattullo Bridge and stood there for a long time and the river kept flowing, he saw timber bobbing on the surface, log booms and log traffic, a gull standing on a bit of rope, and he had the sensation that both sides of the river were tightening like a vise. Someone had tricked him, someone had come in the night and robbed him of his possessions.

  “I got up on the railing,” he told Hiroji. “I looked at the world and I thought, What now? What happens now? I wasn’t angry. I just wanted to stand there and ask my question. I wanted someone to acknowledge me.”

  He stared up at the lights of the café, wild-eyed.

  The man was starving. Hiroji caught the waitress’s attention and asked if there was any more food to be had. The girl was young and she gazed at them with curious eyes. She returned with a few slices of bread, an enormous hunk of cheese, and a little dish of jam. “The owner’s fridge,” she said. “But he won’t be back until after the weekend.”

  The man ate intently.

  “Someone found you and brought you to the hospital,” Hiroji said. He had a glimmer, now, of a patient he had long forgotten.

  The man swallowed the bread that was in his mouth. He reached for a water glass that wasn’t there, then let his hand rest limply on the table. “The others called me John. Johnny Doe. That was unkind, wasn’t it? A name that shouts that no one’s home. Useless. You called me James.”

  “But it was long ago, wasn’t it?”

  The man smiled. “You’re asking me? That seems a problem, Doctor. Did you fall and hit your head too? It must be thirty years at least.”

  “I remember that we discharged you.”

  “I’ve done all the tests: PET, SPECT, fMRI, EEG. Even a polygraph, in case I was just a liar.” He picked up a piece of bread, wiped it in the remaining jam, and then added the last rectangle of cheese. “I met a woman from St. John. I met her at the theatre. She invited me to her house for a visit. I could make it there tomorrow but I have no money for the bus.”

  “Where do you live?”

  The older man shook his head. He stared at the waitress, who had her back to them, wiping down the machines.

  “I’ll pay you back,” he said. “Believe me. I’m good for it. If I stay in St. John and find work … that’s tough at my age but I have skills, good skills. I wasn’t from Vancouver, was I? Nobody knew me, but you and I, we were friends. I sounded American, Californian, that’s what you said. Maybe San Francisco, you said. Some things stick. You were friendly to me, as if I were a whole person and not a zero. A waste.”

  Hiroji didn’t know what to say. His memories of treating this man were tenuous, almost nothing.

  “Wait here a moment,” he said at last as the man continued to gaze at him. “Don’t go anywhere, please.”

  The man smiled down at his lap. “Oh, I’m in no hurry.”

  Hiroji went across the road to a bank machine and he withdrew six hundred dollars. The cash went into a deposit envelope, which he sealed, with difficulty, and then he ran, slipping, across the pavement, between the pedestrians and their shopping bags and groceries. He fell on the ice, but through his coat he felt no pain. At the café, he gave the envelope to the man, who accepted it solemnly. Then Hiroji paid the waitress, tipping her generously. He hailed a taxi for James or Johnny or California, and he gave the driver money too. All he had was money.

  “Don’t worry,” the man said, holding Hiroji’s business card between his fingers. “I’ll return the favour. Wait a few days.”

  “No,” Hiroji said. “It’s fine.”

  The wheels of the taxi spun on the snow, then the car pulled away.

  “I started walking,” Hiroji told me. All the way, he kept replaying the encounter in his head, the way this man, this patient, had counted his words out, like his brother used to do when he was drinking, as if he meant to spend the sentences wisely. He thought that his brother must be alive somewhere. He could be wandering, just wandering. He remembered, now, how the patient – Johnny, James – had been persuaded to come down from the railing of the Pattullo Bridge. He had been thirty-five years old at the time, older maybe. Someone had whacked him hard at the back of the head, so violently that his brain had crushed up against the front part of his skull. They had not been able to help him. Someone had joked, carelessly, that the two young men, Hiroji Matsui and Johnny Doe, the two Japs, looked like brothers. It had not been funny and nobody had laughed.

  We were sitting at his kitchen table. Hiroji had opened a bottle of champagne and now he drank it like tap water. “I still remember the name of the doctor who made that joke,” he said, his voice shaking. “He’s dead now, but I still remember. I remember.”

  He put his glass on the coffee table, went to the sideboard, and returned with a file. Inside were letters he had received from James, sent from Cambodia. The airmail paper was decades old, the sheets dry and ready to crumble, the Red Cross insignia faded. “I went there, to the border,” Hiroji said. His voice was insistent, upset. “I went to Aranyaprathet, to the refugee camps, to Sa Kaeo, I lived in Aran, I took care of a boy, Nuong. I loved Nuong like my own son but even he was lost. I came back without him. My mother asked me, ‘Where is your brother? Where is Ichiro?’ I told her, ‘We have to wait.’ ‘Wait for what?’ she asked. There was nothing I could say.”

  I remembered Phnom Penh the day I walked out of it, the day the war ended. I saw the assault rifle against my father’s stomach, the way the barrel pushed him viciously against the wall.

  “When my mother died,” he said, “I stopped looking. I wanted to be free of him.”

  I told Hiroji, “You did everything possible.”

  His hair, normally so immaculately in place, had fallen forward over his eyes. “I’m old now. I foolishly think that he … I dream about him. Do you find that strange?”

  “No.”

  Hiroji swayed slowly to his feet. He looked around the room as if he didn’t know where to go, to the couch or to the window, or even farther. Behind him, the blinking Christmas lights, up since December, dabbed the walls with colour, rhythmic and persistent.

  I said, as gently as I could, “It wasn’t possible to save your brother. It wasn’t possible to save many people.”

  For a moment my eyes watered. His expression changed, guilt-stricken now. Ashamed. I wanted so much to help him, to make him understand that there was nothing we could do. We had to let go. “I only mean that it’s difficult to find one person. It’s difficult. For you, for me, for anyone.”

  “Forgive me, Janie. It’s my foolishness, nothing more.”

  “No. Don’t say that.”

  We fell into silence. He went to the table, took the champagne bottle, and refilled my glass. It frothed over the lip and ran between my fingers.

  “Hiroji,” I said. “Listen. If you could have seen Phnom Penh that day. Or afterwards. If you knew what it was like.” I remembered my brother, his thin shoulders. To end up in one of the Khmer Rouge prisons meant that a person would die alone, in torment that was unimaginable. You had to hope that a brother, a father, died before reaching that point. You had to hope for the best.

  “I know, Janie,” he said. He stood
up unsteadily, lifting his plate.

  “Wait,” I said.

  “I’m not myself. I wasn’t thinking.”

  I got up to help him but he said no, he asked me to sit for a moment. He went into the kitchen. I could hear Hiroji scraping the plates off, setting them in the sink. The file remained on the table. I slid it toward me. In the kitchen, the water ran thinly. Alone in the dining room, I began to sift cautiously through the pages. They were translations of Khmer documents, correspondence with various government officials, maps. Pages and pages of requests for information.

  “Right,” Hiroji said when he came back into the room. “Don’t ever let me host a party again.” He smiled at me, reached out, rested his fingertips against my shoulder for a moment. He saw the pages spread across the table and, embarrassed, began to gather them up.

  I stilled his hands. “Let me.”

  I put everything, the maps, the letters, back into the file. It was full. Hiroji had been seeking information for years, but despite his efforts he had never found any trace of his brother. He began speaking about the Documentation Centre of Cambodia, DC-Cam he called it, an institution that was collecting documents related to the Khmer Rouge.

  “Do you mind if I take these?” I said. “I could call them. It might be easier for someone who speaks the language, who knows the country.” I knew that searching was futile, that James was gone. He was one of the many, one of the two million dead. Still, I thought that if I did my best, if I came back empty-handed, it might bring Hiroji some release.

  He looked at me, surprised. Grateful.

  Together, we went to the door and I proceeded to wrap the layers around me, coat, scarf, hat, gloves. Bundled up this way, I leaned forward to kiss him.

  “Thank you for the gift, Janie,” he said. “It is a wonderful gift.”

  On the sidewalk, I turned back once. He was still watching me, I could see the narrow doorway and the frail silhouette that he cast.

  That week, I contacted DC-Cam and was put in touch with a researcher named Tavy. She had been working for the centre since it opened nearly a decade ago, cataloguing prison records, photographs, biographical information, and witness statements, documents that might be used in the upcoming War Crimes Tribunal. But, primarily, she told me, her job was to help Cambodians trace their missing family members. On the telephone, I struggled with words that should have come easily, but Tavy was patient. She said she would try to find James Matsui in the meticulous records of the Khmer Rouge. As the months went by, we spoke intermittently. There was never any new information. “Is there something more?” she asked me once. “I feel that there’s something more you wish to ask me.” I couldn’t answer at first, and then, finally, I told her, “No, nothing.” She said, “I understand.” By then, I knew, clearly, that the search for James would lead nowhere. I stopped by Hiroji’s apartment and tried to return the file. It was August. He asked me to hold on to it for a little while longer.

  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 t
able, 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.

  Mei

  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.