On the night he travelled from Phnom Penh to Neak Luong, he packed and unpacked three times, removing his camera, adding his journal. Removing bandages and adding chocolate and whiskey. Overhead, helicopters circled and he told Sorya, “Maybe it’s better if you come with me.”

“I don’t think so,” she said.

He was on his way east and he realized she was right. Any day now, Neak Luong would fall to the Khmer Rouge. Probably he’d be shot by a sniper, or his boat would be shelled, or some hideous Communist maquis would poach him and serve him for supper.

“Write me a letter,” she said and they smiled because the postal system was a joke.

“Take this money,” James said, “and buy us two tickets for Bangkok.”

“Honestly, you want to leave Phnom Penh? This heaven.”

“Do you?”

She laughed. “All this time, I only stayed because of you.”

“Don’t joke,” he said, confused.

“Careful in the wild,” she said. “Don’t come home dressed in black, carrying an ak, and wearing rubber sandals. I’ll shoot you on sight.”

“I’ll come in a stampede of elephants.”

Her eyes teased him with restrained laughter. The foolish things he would do, the foolish dances he would perform, to make her laugh.

“In better days,” he said, “we’ll go to the sea.”

“Promise me.”

He saw the lines at the corners of her eyes, he heard something in her voice, a foreboding, a hopelessness he’d tried so hard to banish with bravado, with laughter. What other avenue was left them? Every day they were surrounded by corpses, women without faces, men without limbs.

“Yes,” he said. “I do promise.”

—

They were ambushed in the dark. The cruddy boat tipped right then left, and James had a crushing sense of déjà vu as black-clothed creatures lifted from the water and slithered into the boat. He wondered whether Sorya would open the cache of money he had left her, whether any tickets remained for Bangkok, whether she would stay or go. For a split second, before the first kick, he thought he was being sent to join Dararith in the afterlife to which all doctors disappeared: a haven of arrogant, self-pitying men, a fate worse than hell. But this wasn’t a joke. These creatures had no sense of irony. They beat him and he, a soft Canadian, was already begging for mercy after the first punch. So this is what blood tastes like, he thought. So this is what real suffering is. They threw him into a hold. He thought of his father, who’d had the good sense to pass away in a clean bed rather than down in the reeking underground, in the terrifying Tokyo shelters, and now he, King James, would pass away in the dark, sucked into the careless water. One day he would wash up, bloated and unrecognizable, onto the shore of a shitty country. He heard them shoot the boat driver. He cried harder as they threw the body away.

They kept him blindfolded all of the time. Once, when they took the blindfold off, they asked him to identify tablets they had found in his bags. The samples were pink, like cotton candy at the Pacific National Exhibition fair grounds, like orchids, a pink that seemed foolish and innocent in this burned, exhausted landscape. “These are vitamins,” he said. He answered them in Khmer and they said he was a spy and he said, “No, I am not.” “Where are you from?” “Japan. Tokyo.” “Where is your passport?” “Lost.” “Why are you here?” “To treat the wounded.” “The wounded?” they said, taunting him. “You mean the Lon Nols, the traitors?” He shook his head vehemently. “I treat the people hurt by American bombs.”

They covered his eyes and returned him to darkness.

With the blindfold on, he felt absurdly safe. They surrounded him: bare feet on the thirsty ground, rifles smartly reloaded, the smell of a campfire. He heard someone getting a haircut, the scissors stuttering like a solitary cricket. He heard a fire starting and water boiling, he ate mushy gruel with his hands, he itched all over from the ants in the dirt, his tongue felt cracked. Night and day, his feet were shackled, he had to piss into a foul bamboo container, he was constipated and everything hurt. He couldn’t believe it was possible to be scared so long, to have his heart solidify in mute fear, and yet to continue day after day.

Sometimes, in his fantasies, he sits at his father’s bedside. The blinds let in whiskers of light and he can see his father’s right hand curled on the sheet, the skin over the knuckles flaccid and pale. He finds the doctors loud and the nurses kind and nobody really looks at him, not even his parents. James tells himself it’s not possible to disappoint the dead. All that matters to the living is the living, that’s what he had tried to explain to Sorya after her brother disappeared: “This is war, not a game. If you have the chance to escape you have to take it. If I go missing, don’t sit around like a fool.” He had felt like a hero when he said this.

But why waste words? Grieving Dararith, she had barely seemed to notice him. She just sat in the apartment thinking and reading, cleaning, cooking, disappearing. She didn’t need his devotion and this independence, her strength, made him feel confused him and shiftless, it made him feel temporary, like an insect clinging to a drain.

Suddenly there were no more planes in the sky and no more shelling. They stopped moving around so frequently. The blindfold was removed and he found himself in a small, square storeroom, or it would have been a storeroom had there been anything on the shelves. It was comfortable enough. The floor had French cement tiles, dirty now, but the design had been lovely once. A short, efficient man came in to give him water, rice soup, and, unexpectedly, a piece of soap. Eventually, the man started to extend his visits. He sat down on the floor and asked James questions about Phnom Penh, the Red Cross, about the war in Vietnam, about food and music and religion, about his wife, about Dararith. They always spoke in Khmer. James would sit with his arms tied behind his back while the man probed him, as if his life story were a confession, as if the two were the same thing.

The man was reedy, dark-skinned, with a way of tapping his knee rhythmically with his fingertips when he spoke. He studied the ground with such intensity that James found himself looking, too, at the tiled floor, taking in the stranger’s soft hands, and then the Kalashnikov laid confidently between them, the barrel of the gun covered by the cadre’s Chinese cap, as if in a decorative flourish.

One morning, the man surprised James. He said, “Let me tell you about someone I once knew. A friend. I was studying at the Lycée Sisowath in Phnom Penh. Do you know it?”

“Everyone knows it.”

The man went on, “This was more than twenty years ago. I lived with another boy, a Chinese-Khmer from Svay Rieng province. Are you familiar with that area?”

“Of course.”

“You’ve been there?”

James nodded.

The man was impressed. “His mother had a petrol stand,” he said, continuing. “The father was dead. The boy, Kwan, drove a lorry and he would give me lifts around the city. He was raising money for his tuition and he worked all the time.”

The man’s face was passive and kind, and it reminded James, disconcertingly, of his mother. His mother, too, had many surfaces, but he’d learned to see between the blinds, behind the clean edges.

“Kwan was trustworthy,” the man said. His voice dropped, not quite a whisper. “Can I tell you that I trusted him more than the friends I went to school with? Those were lazy boys who never worked. Inside their empty heads they didn’t even understand the concept of work. I started to tutor him. He got up very early to drive the lorry but, in the afternoons, when everyone slept, I gave him lessons. He was quick. The thing about Kwan was, he was mute. He could read lips, he could adapt, but he never, ever spoke. I confess, I was fascinated by Kwan. Boys my age were malleable. We swallowed each and every lesson without chewing it first. But Kwan, he was apart. He kept his thoughts to himself and he kept his peace.