“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 screen 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.