I heard the crank of an ak. My eyes flicked open.

A man stood in front of us, a tall, thin shadow, appearing as if he had melted from the walls. There were noises behind him, a woman’s nervous warning, and then footsteps, quickly retreating. Beside me, my brother woke. He lifted his hands, the palms facing out.

“Mit,” Sopham said. The word echoed off the walls.

The man cut him off. “What district?”

“Peam Ro district, Prey Veng province.”

The rifle edged nearer.

My brother’s voice was trembling. “The river has flooded this year,” he said.

Surprise showed in the man’s eyes, and then it was gone. “Has it, child?”

“Yes, mit. The river has flooded this year.”

“At oy té,” he said softly, ambiguously. “Let it flood.”

He crouched down in front of us, the gun supported on his hip, and studied our faces. His skin was faded, tinged grey. “Let’s have the truth. Who are you, really?”

When neither of us answered, the man pushed the tip of the rifle against my brother’s heart. “Hurry up,” the man said. “Time is running down.”

“Our friend showed us the way,” Sopham said finally.

“He had a map.”

“I see. Where is this friend?”

“He was ill, mit. He died on the road. I’m sorry, he didn’t —” my brother tried to say more but the words stuck in his throat.

The man lifted the barrel of his gun, rapping it twice against Sopham’s AK. It was still strapped to my brother’s body but now, carefully, he slid it free. The man took it. “Stand up,” he said. He searched my brother and then me, his hands moving roughly down my arms, my jutting ribs. “Please,” I said. “We have nothing.”

He paused and stepped back. “If you have nothing, what should I do with you? What good are you to me?”

“All we want is to leave.”

“Do you think it’s so simple?”

I looked into his eyes, unable to answer.

A long time passed and Sopham and I lay together on the ground. The man watched us intently. Later on, people came. I saw a teenager wearing a belt of ammunition and, behind him, a woman carrying a baby. Her breathing was shallow, as if they had climbed far to reach this place. They sat down opposite us. Once, the baby came loose from her mother’s arms. She crawled to me, pulled my hair, touched my face with her warm, birdlike hands. “No, baby,” the woman said. Her baby made a happy sound, like a cat licking milk, and the woman looked at me with sadness and wonder.

The teenaged boy went away and then returned; I heard the scratch of his footsteps.

It was no longer possible to track the sun, to identify the hours, the nights.

My brother woke in a panic. “Feel my hands,” he mumbled. “See how thin they are?” I held them. “No,” I said, easing him back to sleep. “No.” The baby in the woman’s arm was snoring lightly. I fought to stay awake. “You have to deal with them,” someone said. “Yes. The risk is too great.” “They’re harmless,” the woman said. Someone grunted in dismissal. “But the others —” “The others are not coming.” “We can’t wait. They’ll have to go separately.” The name Chanya touched the air, but maybe it was only my brother’s dreams seeping into me. I heard the dull clicking of bats, small pips, the beat of tiny wings.

“Please, luk,” I said. The term of respect came back without my realizing. He looked up, startled.

“At oy té.”

“Don’t leave us behind.”

“No one will get left behind.”

“You’re frightening me,” I whispered.

Ignoring me, he opened his krama and removed some crabs and a handful of rice. He offered this food to the woman and the teenager. They began to eat. The woman took a portion from what she had and brought it to us. In my mouth, the little crabs had serrated edges, it hurt to chew, but I could feel the blood flowing in me again, a quickened pulsing.

When the food was gone, they rose to their feet.

“Come,” the man said, turning to us, his expression lost in the shadows. “It’s time to leave.”

We stood. My brother began washing his face in the water that slid along the walls, and then I, too, did the same. In his eyes I saw my own fear, my own acceptance.

The man walked first, and then the woman, myself, Sopham, and the teenaged boy. Every moment, I expected to hear voices, the release of the safety, the word Angkar. Instead, I smelled the sweetness of leaves, of roots, of the wet earth. The man disappeared through a narrow mouth of the cave walls. On the other side, I saw a soldier in army fatigues holding a green helmet in his hands. Without speaking, the soldier hid us in a nearby truck, underneath sacks of rice. The teenaged boy didn’t come with us, he faded back into the opening of the cave. The truck shuddered into life, time seemed to contract and expand. I pulled one of the bags open, fed the grains into my mouth, held them there until they disintegrated. I willed myself to feel nothing, neither fear nor hope, only the jolting road beneath us, the weight of the burlap sacks. Twice, the vehicle was stopped. Both times, I heard men speaking Vietnamese, low voices followed by gaps of silence. Nobody searched the truck. We continued on.

Finally, the sacks were removed and what I saw seemed impossible, the night sky and a thousand stars burning. The woman and the child were bundled away down another road. “Are you ready?” the man asked us. We didn’t know what to say, who to believe. “It’s time for us to leave,” he said. The soldier gave us biscuits, noodles, dried fish, a few cans of milk, and water, and then we climbed into a small wooden boat. It ferried us to another boat that waited, anchored in the sea. Inside was a shallow cargo hold filled with many people, many families, who watched us descend, their faces etched with fear. The man spoke to them in Vietnamese. He told us that these people had been waiting several days; already, they were running out of water.

We took turns lying down, first my brother and I, then the man, who told us to call him Meng. Above us, slats of wood had been removed and we could see up into the sky.

My last image of Cambodia was of darkness, it was the sound of nearly forty mute wanderers, of silent prayers. I closed my eyes. My father told me how Hanuman had crossed the ocean, how he had gone into another life. Look back, my mother said, one last time. I followed her through our twilit apartment, walked in the shade of my father, past bare walls and open windows, the noise of the street pouring in. Between us, she said, I had known love, I had lived a childhood that might sustain me. I remembered beauty. Long ago, it had not seemed necessary to note its presence, to memorize it, to set the dogs out at the perimeter. I felt her in the persistent drumming of water against the boat’s hull. Guard the ones you love, she told me. Carry us with you into the next life.

Exhausted, holding tight to my brother, we set out across the sea.

Our time in the boat was infinite. One long night that battered on and on until the food was gone and the water drained away. Meng, ever watchful, would take my hands. Gently, he would massage my fingers and my cupped palms, telling me that soon, any day now, we would arrive.

He showed us a photo of a smiling man in an oversized floral shirt and dark slacks. This was his younger brother, Sann. They had hidden in the caves together and then his brother had gone ahead with his wife and sons, using the same smugglers, arriving finally off the coast of Malaysia. The smugglers had given Meng this photograph. “To reassure me,” Meng said, “and to raise the price.”

“Do you come from the city?” I asked him, trying to see Phnom Penh, to hold it once more in my mind’s eye.

“I was born there,” he said. “But I lived many lives. Teacher, farmer, soldier.”

“Khmer Rouge?”

He nodded. After a moment, he said, “Your father, what work did he do?”