“He was a translator. Angkar took him away.” I didn’t know how to continue. Hearing the words, I felt defenceless, ashamed. Meng lowered his eyes. Even here, in the crowded boat, he tried to shelter us, to give us space to breathe.

I curled on my side and watched my brother sleep. All the time he asked for water. “There is the tap,” he said, half-dreaming. “But look, nothing comes out. I twisted it all the way around but there’s no water, no water anywhere.”

That morning, Meng paid the fishermen and they let us up into the open air. Sopham and I climbed out of the hold, clinging to the sides of the boat. We were impossibly small. The waves crowded against our ears, muting our thoughts. All was blue, all was noise.

“I saw so many things,” Sopham told me. “One day, I promise, I’ll find a way to tell you everything.”

On the sea, we moved through a turbulent world, forever adrift. Three or four nights passed, but each day, no land appeared on the horizon. On and on we went until the night when the men came. The collision hit like an explosion. Once, these men had been fishermen, but now they were something else, some instinct that has no pity, no name. They robbed us, and then they forced the girls up out of the cargo hold. I remember the sound of crying, a noise like a serrated edge. Minutes passed, hours. I remember crawling between the bodies to the edge of the deck, away from the smell of fuel, but still the men were there. Pulling us back, taunting us. Time stopped. I have no words for what was done. Sopham appeared and we fell into the sea. I fell, I kept falling, and then my body rose to the surface. Still they were behind me, holding me, crossing oceans and continents. Coming into every room, every place, preceding me into my life. I no longer wanted to breathe the air. My brother kept repeating my name. He used his krama to tie my wrist to a piece of floating wood, checking and rechecking the knot. Don’t leave me, I said. The boat withered and dark shapes bent across the water. I tasted salt, dreamed salt. Morning came and it seemed that we were caught on broken glass, countless fragments that turned the light aside. My brother said the guard had gone to sleep, he could go past, he could leave without her waking. I told him that our wandering was over, we had nothing more to be afraid of. The key was gone. I said that I could not bear to be alone. My brother wept. I was not strong enough to hold him. He opened his hands and I watched as the ocean breathed him in.

I saw my wrist and my hand bound to the wood but I no longer recognized it as my own. The knot my brother had tied would not come loose. Inside me, all the feeling went away.

I can taste the faint, distilled light, it rests on my tongue like a coin. I am nearly at the edge of the city. The road gives way to open space, untrodden snow. The northern reach of Boulevard St-Laurent comes to an end and I stand at last at the river. Behind me, trees tower up into the pale sky.

On a park bench, a woman wearing ski gloves is carving letters into the wood. I can hear the hard edges of her blade, like an animal burrowing into the frozen ground. I remember how, in the ocean, the water had become a shining mirror, how the sun had touched everything and left no shade, no chasms. The fishermen who drew me from the water hurried across the sea until, finally, their boat reached land. I remember the sudden, incomprehensible, stillness. One of the men lifted me from the boat and I looked up and saw the high palms, the amber sky. The man who carried me began speaking, words that rustled together, and then I was passed into another person’s arms. They brought me into a house where I was laid down and washed and covered.

Something has turned over in me, broken and come undone. I take my phone and begin dialling Meng’s number. He picks up on the first ring. When he hears my voice, he shouts in joyful surprise. “It’s Mei,” he says to someone, to us both. “It’s Mei!”

Voices rattle behind him. Grandchildren, he tells me, laughing proudly when I ask. “Mes petits canards,” he calls them. One by one, they come to the phone and greet me in high-pitched voices, then my friend returns.

“Meng,” I say finally. “On the boat that night, did you hear them coming?”

In all these years we’ve stayed in touch, I’ve never been able to talk about what happened. He, too, had been pulled from the water and saved. He asks me where I am. I tell him I am at the river, I have walked as far as I can away from the city, I cannot find a way to go any farther.

“No,” he says. His voice is quiet. “I didn’t hear them. Until the very last moment. I never heard them.”

I want to tell Meng that I know too much, I have too many selves and they no longer fit together. I need to know how it is possible to be strong enough. How can a person ever learn to be brave?

“Janie,” he says. “My child.” He says that my parents, my brother, lived their lives. “They wouldn’t want you to fight on and on. To fight even when it’s done.” Long ago, Meng and I had stood together at the water’s edge. “Your daughter is leaving now,” he had said, addressing my ghosts. “Your sister has found a new home. You, too, must walk to your own destiny.” The incense in my hands had left its smoke in the air. The next day I would depart for Canada.

“We have to try again,” he says. “Not just once but many times, throughout our lives.”

I feel as if I am swaying over the river, but that this river, finally, is blind to me. I can see it now for what it is, only a membrane, a way down. Leave me, I think. Let me go.

Down in the subway, the tiled walls begin to shudder. A train storms in, coats flap backwards, a little girl’s golden hair blows wild. One by one, we find seats inside the nearly empty cars.

I take out my phone again but there’s no signal. Meng’s words circle in my head, the train hurries through long tunnels, emerging into stations. We move from brightness into a furtive grey, my reflection floats against the window. “Entre chien et loup,” Hiroji would have said. It was his favourite expression: that quality of light when we confuse the dog and the wolf, the beloved and the feared.

I was a graduate student when I heard him lecture for the first time.

On that day, I had arrived early to class. The visiting professor, dressed in a pinstriped shirt and pressed trousers, laid an image on the overhead projector. I recognized it from Lena’s books, an ink drawing by Ramón y Cajal depicting a single neuron, a deep pool fed by, and feeding, dozens of arterial streams.

Students shifted papers, slept, took off their shoes, and daydreamed, but I was transfixed. The ebb and flow of Hiroji’s voice, its polite refinement, its insistence, caught all my attention.

Partway through his talk, Hiroji described the experience of a woman who suffered from asomatognosia: for varying periods of time, she ceased to feel her body or its boundaries. All sensation — air on her skin, warmth, cold, the weight of her hands — vanished. Her thoughts continued, anchored to nothing. She herself was immaterial.

“She had lost her body,” he told us, “but not her being.

“Let us take the example of Zasetsky,” he continued, “a university student, a young man, shot in the head. But he survived.” The bullet had cut a path through the parietal and occipital lobes of his brain, affecting Zasetsky’s vision, movement, language, and sensory perception. His world was constantly shattering apart.

Hiroji laid a second image on the projector: a notebook page, crammed with sentences.

Zasetsky’s physician, Aleksandr Luria, was, Hiroji said, one of the first to write the narratives of his patients. Luria treated Zasetsky for more than thirty years, finally collaborating with him on a medical text. Zasetsky wrote more than three thousand pages over the course of two decades, pages that he himself could barely read. Each sentence required that he hunt through the disintegrated rooms of his memory, fumble blindly for words, the simplest words, hoarding them like gold dust until he had enough to construct a sentence. An entire day would pass in which Zasetsky underwent a superhuman struggle to remember language itself; he might, if lucky, emerge from the effort with two or three sentences. Luria had hoped that, through this text, Zasetsky would not only remember his life, but he would make a wholeness of it. Neurologically, Hiroji said, it was possible for the world outside to fragment, to splinter, and yet for the self to remain intact.