But he, James, is living off the fat of the land: a noble Red Cross doctor healing children who will be pushed to the front lines tomorrow, boys who, day by day, are learning to revel in their worst tendencies. Tomorrow, he could be in Bangkok. Today there was an old woman eating the bark off a tree, stripping ribbons from it the way his mother used to de-vein the celery stalks, and he didn’t have the energy to go home and fetch this old woman some sugar and chocolate, something from his magnificent store of abandoned goods, bequeathed to him by the fickle bureaucrats, expatriates, and socialites leaving Phnom Penh en masse. What would his mother say? She saw the war in Tokyo. She saw much worse than this. The black dust covers everyone, even the healers. Physician, heal thy self, but what he wants is to sleep for days on end and wake up in a tropical paradise where a compassionate Buddha smiles down on him and touches his golden fingertips to the dirt to remind James of what we are and what we must be, dust to dust, being to nothingness, and how we err in the pursuit of an existence more lasting.

“You never understood God,” his mother used to say.

He had teased her by answering, “Why is it that God always fails to understand me?”

The hours are passing. The smell of fried food wafts thickly in through the porous walls. Morning light shifts across the bed, across the walls, into his open hand. It’s so distressingly beautiful here, so deformed and alive.

—

Sorya tries to make the bed with him still in it. This, he knows, is her quiet way of telling him that it’s past noon and a man should not be so slovenly. He doesn’t like speaking Khmer in the morning, before breakfast, so he addresses her in English. Let me sleep a little longer. She brings him a cup of coffee and he feels like a wet-nosed boy home sick from school. Her fingertips smell of anise. He drinks, burns his tongue, and then he pulls her back into bed with him, strips her, fucks her, tells her to forget everything but him. He says this in English and she answers in Khmer. In the end they speak the same loop-holed language that says only a little and lets the big things slide through.

“James,” she had said when they first met. “What a serious name.”

She is clever and fearless, she married him for practical reasons, and she will never be completely grateful. She once said that war makes people say far too many things, good and bad, that they’ll regret in calmer times.

“But are peaceful days around the corner?” James had asked, wanting to provoke her.

“Sure,” she said. “Wars always end. Peace always ends. People get tired.”

Sorya doesn’t stay in bed past six a.m. What she does, he can’t imagine. The schools are closed and have been for months, so she has no job to report to.

He remembers the days they went to the discotheque, Dararith bought the beer but they gambled with James’s cash. Dararith steered the moped that ferried them around but usually James and Sorya had to walk home without him, picking their way through the rubble. Dararith, he pursued women as if they were keys on a ring, and he was always falling in love because his brand of affection was endearingly sudden. Sorya was glamorous with her black hair loose and her bare shoulders and calf-high boots, her market-stall clothing that she wore like high fashion. She carried herself like a girl who’d been to Paris, to New York, but it was all show. Television, she told him, on one of those awkward walks home, can be a gifted teacher. And books. She married James, maybe, for his books. Something to distract her while she waited for her brother to come back, but it’s been two years and it’s obvious by now that people don’t come back.

She doesn’t wear makeup anymore but her hair is still long. Unbrushed, it floods around her and it seems, to James, as if it eats the light and hides the things that no one says: I married you as a favour to Dararith, I married you because of the war, out of loneliness, out of fear. I love only you. They both think these things, they both hold themselves in reserve.

“James,” she says now. “It’s a good name but it doesn’t suit you.”

“King James.”

She pushes the covers aside, stands up. When did she get so thin, so melancholy?

“Don’t leave me,” he tells her but then he is suddenly embarrassed.

“I hate sleeping alone,” he explains and she turns, a half-smile on her face, a half-sadness.

The war was ending and he worked all the time. The storehouses were empty, he had no medicine, no needles, saline, or chloroquine, no bandages, no aspirin or dysentery pills. He patted shoulders, amputated limbs, blinked into the persistent heat, and turned his back on the worst cases. It was the cool season, supposedly, but his clothes were sweat-drenched by ten in the morning. In his gut was a feeling of panic mixed with the weight of inertia, he was light-headed and joyous and bitterly angry. The radio spewed bulletins from the war in Vietnam and the shaming of the Americans not only there but here in Cambodia and next door in Laos. Ask the diplomats — American, French, English — and this humiliation was everyone’s fault but their own. Ask the Cambodians what would happen next and they just shrugged and smiled their fatalistic smiles. James hoped it was the last time he would live in a place where no one carried any responsibility, where the days were predetermined by the hundred lives already lived, by a thousand acts of karma, by destiny that rubbed out other destinations. He was sick of this country and he would have left already if it weren’t for Sorya, that’s what he tells himself. But every day he goes back to the camps and the Red Cross shelters and feels strangely at peace. Ten years ago, he was smoking pot in a dive on Powell Street, coming home blinkered, but his mother and Hiroji, true innocents, never noticed a thing. When he gets high it reminds him of how the air burned his throat in Tokyo when he was small, how he was terrified of fire, and then the long journey by boat and plane and bus that took them to Vancouver where everything was green, where things were young and not skeletal, but still he was so fucking scared. Japan was finished, his father said, even the ground was poisoned but now, Now we go from fire to water, from the city to the sea. He had turned the words into a song, a nursery rhyme. His father had been a professor of medicine at Tokyo University, he had been a solemn, determined man, but the supreme effort of getting them out of post-war Japan had ruined his health. When his contacts in America disappointed him, he had turned to England. In the end, he settled for Canada. A year after they reached Vancouver, his father died, post-stroke, on a crisp, white bed in a Canadian hospital. James remembered the place well, the sharp, stingy smell of it and the squawk of rubber soles on the icy floors. Be brave, his father had told him, and all the while his kid brother had pressed his pink face against his mother’s skin and slept in ignorant bliss.

His mother had opened a dry goods shop on Powell Street and James had taken his first paper route, his first of many: The Vancouver Sun, the Province, the Sing Tao Daily. Hiroji used to lie on the mat in the back of the store and coo at them, and the baby’s cooing made James feel improbably wise. He was eleven years old when he told his baby brother that they would both be doctors, real professionals. Maybe Tokyo and his father had given him a taste for calamity, maybe he had inherited his father’s uneasy, chafing mind. He scraped through medical school, finished his residency. The Vietnam War was in full swing and he signed up with the Red Cross. When all hell broke loose, he preferred to be busy and not just standing around. Saigon was fine, but Cambodia is something else, manic depressive, split with contradictions. They take him for local here, a regular Chinese-Khmer slogging through the mud.