Dogs at the Perimeter

by Madeleine Thien

  Navin goes from microscope to microscope, peering down, in case one of my colleagues has left a slide behind, a bit of hippocampus.

  I go to him and touch his elbow. One of his arms folds over me like a wing. I tell him, “I’m glad you came.”

  From his pocket he takes out a small, porcelain owl. “We saw this on the way and thought of you.” In my hand it feels like a polished stone, hollowed out, alive and perfect.

  “Ma,” Kiri calls. “Come look. Aplysia.”

  I go to him and put my eyes to the lens. Kiri rests his fingertips against my hip.

  Bit by bit, one micromillimetre at a time, I lower the tip of a glass electrode toward the neuron. My head feels heavy, but somehow the pipette glides with stoic precision. Anaesthetized, pinned flat, cut open with surgical scissors, this innocent creature and her brethren have given me more cells than I dare count. I feel as if I can operate on Aplysia blindfolded: first, removing a tangle of nerves, then, carefully, delicately, extracting a particular neuron and its spindly axon, the axon sagging out like fishing line. Aplysia was the first creature I studied long ago, in Vancouver. In the sea, she looks like a petal swirling through the water, her gills clapping softly together.

  When the electrode is touching the cellular fluid, I increase the voltage, waiting, hand on the dial of the amplifier, until the neuron fires. Here it comes: my signal amp is connected to a speaker, so we can hear the cell itself. Boom. Boom. It sounds like artillery fire, like a parade.

  This is Kiri’s favourite part. “What’s he saying?” my son asks.

  I close my eyes, listening. “He’s saying, ‘Open the door, let me in! I have a message!’ ”

  “Come in, come in,” Kiri whispers. “Tell me.”

  My son’s lashes, long and frail, are like tiny wingtips. I kneel down, touching his shoulders. They seem frighteningly small, weightless.

  “Where does a thought come from, Momma?”

  “From what we see. From the world inside us.”

  He considers this. “Can you make a thought?” he asks. “Can you grow one in a dish?”

  “Soon we’ll grow everything in dishes,” Navin says.

  I smile. “Not yet.”

  My son looks at me searchingly. “I’m waiting for you,” he says. He is trying to tell me something more, to make things right. The incomprehension in his eyes cracks my heart. I hold him and whisper in his ear. He says, “It was a mistake. Just a mistake.”

  Navin comes to us.

  Together, we put on our hats and scarves. I lock the door of the lab and then we go into the clear night. They continue, hand in hand, toward the stores and lights on St. Catherine Street. They have the same loping gait, their bodies sway, like paper boats, from side to side. For a long time, I stand there, trying to keep sight of them. They fade into the crowd. I turn in the other direction and begin walking back.

  We kept the secret, Kiri and I. When Navin came home and saw the discoloured skin on his son’s face, Kiri said he had fallen at school. I let the lie stand. It had happened once. In a moment that seemed so large and inescapable, anger had suffocated me and then, just as quickly, dissolved. A few weeks later, Navin went away to London. I tried not to be alone with my son but Kiri, so small and confused, followed me from room to room. “You’re not here,” he kept saying. “Why aren’t you here?” I went out of the house and stood in the cold, desperate to find the way through. I told myself that I could fix things, I must stop what was happening.

  In the apartment I turned the heat up high, but still my hands shook. The water came to me, everywhere, loud. Something had spilled on the kitchen floor and Kiri was walking through it, running, stamping his feet. I asked him to stop. My thoughts didn’t fit together. I heard noises all around us, I saw shapes coming nearer and Kiri shouting, oblivious. Stop, I said again. I tried to leave but he gripped my hands. I pulled away, but he was holding my clothes. I tried to free myself. In a moment of wildness, he grabbed a handful of forks and threw them down into the mess. The noise seemed like the ceiling crashing down, falling on top of us, blocking all the light. I raised my hand and hit him, once, twice. I cannot remember it all. And then, in an instant, the noise disappeared.

  He was sitting on the floor, gasping, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

  I knelt beside him, in shock. When I looked into his face, the bruise terrified me, I saw my child curled up, I smelled a burning in the room. He saw me watching him. “Don’t be scared,” Kiri said. “I’m going to fix everything. You don’t have to be scared of me.”

  When we lay down that night, he asked me to stop crying, he said I had been crying for days. “What’s happening to you?”

  “I don’t know, Kiri.”

  He gazed at me, his eyes older now, beginning to understand. “You have to know,” he said softly. “You have to.”

  Night after night, in the days that followed, he came into my room. “You’re dreaming,” he said, waking me. “Stop dreaming. Please stop dreaming.” He would crawl into the bed, saying that he was cold, that he did not want to sleep alone. I was afraid to hold my son. One day, Kiri called his father without my knowing. Bravely, he told Navin to return home, that I was ill. He didn’t know how else to describe what we were going through.

  Frantic, Navin took the first flight back. I told him everything. At first, he didn’t believe, couldn’t believe.

  “Ask him,” I told him. “Please.”

  It was January, and the ice covered everything and I didn’t know anymore, I couldn’t explain, how this could have happened, why I could not control my hands, my own body. We went through the motions, going to school, going to work, but something inside me, inside Navin, was dying. The broken world finally fell apart. Our son didn’t understand and I saw that he blamed himself, that he tried so hard not to be the cause of my rage, my unpredictable anger. He aspired to a sort of perfection, as if it were up to him to keep us safe. We sat down with Kiri. I told my son that the only person to blame was myself. I told him that I had to go away for a little while.

  “No,” he said to his father. “Please don’t do this. I take everything back.”

  Navin came to Hiroji’s apartment carrying a box of my books, Lena’s picture, and a photograph he had taken of Kiri and me at the fairgrounds, La Ronde, the bright halo of the Ferris wheel behind us, neon colours stretching across our skin. He set the box down, weeping without seeming to realize there were tears. He asked me why I had never confided in him, how we had let it come to this. He had been my lover for more than a decade and yet, he said, I remained a stranger to him. Navin wandered around Hiroji’s apartment, taking in the dusty shelves, the pillow and blanket on the couch.

  “I know you,” he said. “I’ve always known you.”

  I struggled to understand. I remembered a whiteness that came, debilitating, that I tried to remove from my body. One morning, Navin brought me a letter from Meng, who planned to travel back to Cambodia and wanted me to go with him. There were things, he said, that we needed to talk about, to end. Night after night I tried to bring back the ones I had left behind. In the mornings, when I opened my eyes, I saw only the bare walls. Everything, the good and the selfish, the loved and the feared, had taken refuge inside me. Thirty years later and still I remembered everything.

  The telephone wakes me. The cat startles, tips sideways, and runs away. Her paws drum along the hardwood floors as I wave my hand into the darkness, closing my fingers around the receiver. Navin. Before I can say hello, the person on the other end, a woman’s voice, has begun speaking.

  “Tavy,” I say, interrupting her, fighting my way out from under a net of sleep. Bit by bit, the room sharpens. I struggle for Khmer words. “What time is it there?”

  A long pause and I’m suspended on the line. “I’m not sure. I’m at the office, at DC-Cam. Maybe four in the afternoon?”

  Four in the morning, then, in Montreal.

  “But, you see,” she says, “I’m returning your call. You left a message l
ast night.”

  I start to say it wasn’t urgent but Tavy continues, cutting me off firmly. “I found something. There are letters, beginning in 1975. We found six, all addressed to James Matsui.”

  I fumble for the lights and end up knocking over a glass of water. “Tavy, wait. Letters from whom? From someone in Canada?”

  “No,” she says. She slows down, realizing now that I was sound asleep. “A young woman. Cambodian. All this time, since 1996, these letters were in the archives. They were filed under her name. Sorya. But now we’re updating the database, right? Everything is going into the computer. More key words, anything to help us identify people. After I got your message, I re-did the search for James Matsui, but I found Sorya’s file instead. He had donated the letters.

  “Listen,” she says. I hear movement, papers sorted through. Tavy begins to read, “My darling James, today is the first day of the New Year. Heng came today and returned your camera …” She keeps going.

  The water spreads in a puddle, touching my bare feet.

  “She was his wife,” Tavy says. “Maybe Sorya is not her only name, probably she had an alias, many aliases. Nearly everyone did. I should look …”

  “James wasn’t married. Or Hiroji never mentioned it.”

  “But according to what she wrote …” Voices in the background, rising and falling. “She thought her letters were being smuggled to James,” Tavy says. Her voice is low, it mirrors my own surprise. “She took a risk and gave these letters to someone she trusted. Whoever it was, they told her that James Matsui was in hiding in the northeast, in the caves by the Cambodia–Laos border. Who knows if it was true? But in late 1975, she was arrested. I found her prison dossier – the usual, her biography, confessions, and also her photograph. There is nothing after 1976. But, also, there is no date of death.

  “I’ll keep looking,” she says after a moment. “The letters are scanned so I can send them by email. I’m sorry I woke you … Usually when we find this kind of information, people like to know right away. One last thing, when James Matsui donated the letters, he left a phone number. I tried calling it but the number is out of service.”

  “Thank you, Tavy,” I say.

  “Yes,” she says. “I’ll keep looking.”

  The dial tone hums in my ear. I hang up, step across the puddle of water, kneel down, and begin to wipe it with a T-shirt. The starlight is dim, a fine wash against the window. The water seems to keep on spreading. I give up on the puddle. On it goes, touching the feet of the couch, swelling against the carpet.

  Unable to sleep, I go to Hiroji’s office and open the file.

  Wednesday, February 22

  [fragment]

  This is the way Hiroji once described it to me. In 1976, Nuong arrived, alone, at the Aranyaprathet camp in Thailand. He had been ten years old when he and his brothers escaped from their cooperative, a mountain camp outside of Sisophon. The six boys had walked into the jungle and they had survived, on roots and stolen watermelons, for more than a month, finding their way west, toward Thailand. They scaled the Dangrek Mountains and descended into a dry, open forest. But then the mines separating Cambodia from Thailand, mines planted by the Khmer Rouge, began. The detonators were the size of melon seeds and the colour of rust, with trip wires, luminous nylon thread, that curled through the grass. The brothers walked single file, the eldest first, and Nuong last. Nuong saw only the black shirts of his brothers ahead of him. They whispered to him not to panic, not to be afraid. But leaving Cambodia was like trying to walk through a forest of glass. They set off a series of mines. Within seconds, all of his brothers were dead.

  For a long time, he stood where he was. Bits of earth were everywhere around him, they fell in clumps from the trees, triggering yet more explosions. A deer leapt toward him, the ground burst. He stood with his hands pressed to his ears believing that he, too, had come apart. He saw his brothers again. They were impatient and they yelled at him to hurry, so Nuong closed his eyes and did as he was told. He began to crawl. Flies covered him. He was less than twenty metres from the border, he crossed without knowing it, and kept going until a Thai farmer saw him, reached down, and carried him away.

  In 1980, Nuong was sponsored by a family in Lowell, Massachusetts, and he lifted off for America. For nearly two years, his letters arrived at Hiroji’s apartment every month, the upright alphabet giving way to cursive, to scribbled notes, and then to postcards. By the time Nuong was a teenager, even those no longer came. The boy had passed through a curtain, he belonged to a new family.

  And then, last summer, Hiroji had answered the telephone and a voice he didn’t recognize, with an unfamiliar accent, said, “It’s me, Nick.”

  “Nick?” Hiroji said. “I’m sorry. Who is this?”

  “Nuong,” the voice said after a moment. “Nuong. From Aran camp.”

  Hiroji was overjoyed. He asked a handful of questions but Nuong managed to evade them all. After a few minutes of dodging and deflecting, he told Hiroji that he was in trouble.

  “What’s happened? Let me help you.”

  But by then it was too late to intervene. Nuong had made too many mistakes, starting with the wrong friends, a quick temper, drinking, drugs, and finally a vicious fight that ended up blinding a man. Nuong and his adoptive family had not realized that, despite Nuong’s papers – his refugee status in the United States, his high school diploma, his green card – he was not an American citizen. He had neglected to apply. Instead, he was a refugee who had committed a felony and, now, under the law, he was subject to deportation. He was being sent back, forcibly, to Phnom Penh.

  “We’ll get a lawyer,” Hiroji said.

  “But I have one already.”

  “I have a friend in Boston, don’t worry about money –”

  “No,” Nuong said. “I just wanted to tell you. I wanted you to know that I was going back. That it was all for nothing.”

  Hiroji was stunned silent.

  “I don’t even speak Khmer anymore, I barely remember the language,” Nuong said. He laughed hurriedly, and then the discomfort came back. Hiroji saw the sullen Thai soldiers and the Khmer Rouge who had come like spiders across the border, taking truckloads of refugees. He saw the small boy who would sleep at the foot of his bed, motionless, unblinking.

  “Nuong,” Hiroji began.

  “I don’t even know if that’s my name. It’s what my brothers called me. It’s just the name I remember.”

  In November, a few weeks before Hiroji disappeared, he had received a letter from Nuong. Hiroji told me that the boy’s American family had gone to visit him in Phnom Penh. They had decided to invest in a small hotel that Nuong was now managing. The Lowell Hotel, Nuong wrote. Their idea. Here was his telephone number, here was his address. Send me a photograph of James, Nuong wrote. Don’t forget. I want to keep looking.

  Hiroji told me that he remembered following Nuong to the border. The boy stood there, in the dry, sunlit field, holding a stone in his hands, staring across the bridge. The Khmer Rouge guard taunted Nuong to step forward, to throw the stone, to cross the bridge back into Cambodia, to come home, but the boy just stood there staring like a sick dog, a dying child. Come home. If you come home, Angkar will give you everything you want. “Nuong,” Hiroji had called. But he already knew what would happen. This was a country, he had learned, in which no one responded to their names. Names were empty syllables, signifying nothing, lost as easily as a suit of clothes, a brother or a sister, an entire world.

  [end]

  Unable to settle, I put the espresso maker on the stove. While the coffee warbles up through its pipes, I free a chocolate bar from its wrapper, set it near the element so that it melts a little in the heat, and then I carry it to Hiroji’s desk, eating it slowly.

  Tavy’s email has arrived, along with the scans of Sorya’s file. My darling James, Sorya’s letters begin. There are six of them, dating from April 1975 to the end of that year.

  I read them through once, and then again. The s
creen glows whitely in the dark room and outside all is hushed. From the pocket of my coat, I retrieve the yellow notebook and open it to the back cover where Nuong’s number is written. The cat comes in and begins to clean herself as I dial. The line rings several times and then a man answers.

  In English, I ask for Ly Nuong.

  “Yes. Speaking. Who is this?”

  I tell him my name and say that I am a friend of Hiroji Matsui. That I am looking for him. Brusquely, the man says that I have the wrong number, that I am misinformed. In Khmer, I ask Nuong not to hang up, I have found something that might lead to Hiroji’s brother, James. I tell him about the letters, written by Sorya, about Tavy at the Documentation Centre, and the file Hiroji gave me last year. I ask for his help and then, abruptly, the words stop. I say my name again.

  “He’s already gone.”

  The words don’t register.

  Nuong says. “Hiroji is in Laos.”

  I ask him a string of questions. When, how, where.

  “Wait,” Nuong says. “Slow down. I won’t hang up. I’m listening.”

  We talk for a long time. Near the end of our conversation he tells me that, when he first arrived in America, at the age of eleven, it wasn’t the war he had left behind – the refugee camps, the Khmer Rouge – that had struck him as incomprehensible. Rather, he was confounded by the vastness of this new country. America’s bright smiles and proud efficiency, its endlessly flowing water, cinemas, fairgrounds, and easy optimism, shamed him. He felt out of place, unknowable.

  “Here in Phnom Penh, in Sisophon,” Nuong says, “people went on. The mulatan are still there. Some are farmers, some are soldiers. Nobody had anyplace to go. And all the new people, the April 17 people who couldn’t leave, they’ve gone back to the cities where they began.” He says that hardly anyone outside the country remembers this war. Only us, only here.