A blade of morning light falls in between the wall and the ceiling. The man, they call him Chorn, escorts James back to the storeroom. Before he leaves, the man orders in a bowl of rice soup.

“Good night, Kwan,” Chorn says through the locked door. James doesn’t answer. On the floor, beside his food, is a letter. It is a single, lined page torn from a notebook. He recognizes Sorya’s handwriting long before he deciphers the Khmer words. The letter is bare of details. It is written to him. She must be here, in Cambodia, somewhere. She did not escape to Bangkok. Sorya writes, They told me that you are safe. That you survived.

When Chorn returns at nightfall, James says, “What is this?” He has to control every word or they will overflow and hurt him. He says again, “What is this?”

“I can bring you a letter now and then. This is all I can do.”

The words don’t make sense to James. They don’t tell him how the letter got here, or what it means. He picks up the sheet of paper, turns it over, looks for the information that is missing.

“Can you bring her?”

“That depends,” the man says.

James takes a breath and the fetid air sinks sharply into his lungs. “You want to make every one of us small. Every one of us like you. Is that it?”

Chorn says nothing, he closes his eyes. He has a sharp face, a beak of a nose, and long, dark lashes, he has an armoured quiet that nothing James understands can penetrate.

“Listen,” Chorn says. His voice is low and the words come so fast, they seem to evaporate as soon as he speaks. “Listen. I’m trying to help you. There is no other way. You want to know what we need from you? Everyone has to work. That’s all. It’s simple. There is no divide any longer between work and life, between life and death, between you and the world, between the world and Angkar. If you act correctly, you are the enemy, if you act incorrectly, you are the enemy. These are Angkar’s own words. Can’t you see that I’m trying to help you? A long time ago you were my friend. Don’t you remember?”

James falters. He says, “You can protect her.”

Chorn shakes his head. There’s emotion on his face, like a mask that keeps slipping, that he pushes into place or removes at will. James is staring straight into his eyes and the man looks down.

“You still don’t understand,” Chorn says. “Unless you understand, we will both be accused. Not just her, but you and I as well. In Phnom Penh, you protected me. I never forgot.”

James tries to wipe the fog, the dust, from his thoughts.

“How did you get this letter? Explain it to me.”

“I have all the paper,” Chorn says, lifting his hands, opening his fingers. “All the paper in this district, all the files, are here.”

Chorn touches James’s shoulder and the shock of the gesture blinds him awake.

“She made a mistake,” Chorn says slowly, as if he is explaining himself to a child. “Her letters to you are a crime. She should never have tried to reach you. But, now, it’s too late to help her. She has been revealed to the authorities.”

James is not forced to work in the fields. He is not forced to do anything but wait. He hears a lot of things through the walls and what he hears is so chilling he believes, thought by thought, that he is a monster, that his mind is deforming. There was a woman in this prison. She was born in Phnom Penh but had gone away to study in France. She returned, a doctor also, to serve the country because she believed in the Khmer Rouge and a free Cambodia. The Khmer Rouge caught her in her home village, along with her family, and this woman was arrested and accused. After several days, she wrote her first confession, tortured into writing, claiming, that she was a cia spy. Tonight an ox-cart came and took her away to a different jail. James had helped prepare her for the journey and he saw her wounds, he saw the sadism of her interrogators, the ruptures on her skin. He wanted to tell her to succumb to her madness because madness is an escape, temporary or permanent, from this. From herself. But it was forbidden to exchange a word. He heard the ox-cart leave, turning up the earth, stuttering over the broken path, and the torturers laughing and saying their goodbyes. He saw this woman’s face.

Sometimes, Chorn brings him outside, but only at night, only when all is still. A vitamin deficiency is causing his vision to blur so that when he looks up the stars all seem to be falling. Another letter comes a few weeks after the first, also delivered by Chorn. I’m afraid, she has written. Every day I wonder if you will come. What should I do? They are watching me all the time.

He asks for paper, for a pen. He begs for help.

“I am very sorry,” the man says. “You cannot. It is far too dangerous.”

James feels his entire body sickening. “Then you must tell her to stop writing.”

The man shakes his head, frustrated. “Do you think it is up to me?”

“For god’s sake, I’m begging you. Tell her to stop writing.”

They left him alone all day. This is when you lie in the water, when you lie down on the shore of the Pacific and the tide comes in and you have to let it take you. You have to go. You belong to no one, Angkar says, and no one belongs to you, not your mother or your child or the woman you would give your life for. Families are a disease of the past. The only creature under your care is you: your hands, your feet, the hair on your head, your voice. Attachment is what will expose you as a traitor to the revolution, to the change that is coming, that is here. Attachment to the world is a crime. For too long, the people have suffered. For too long they have waited, but their desire is as great as the sea, as thirsty as the dry land. Even the rivers are cruel.

He pictured her in detail, her face, her mouth, her stillness. He begged her, in his mind, to stop writing, he wrote his letters to her on the wall of the store room, on the tiled floor. It’s a trap, he told her. It’s a goddamned trap.

He received another letter: My love. They told me that you are near. They promised to bring you to me and I gave them all the money. I will keep trying to reach you, no matter the consequences. I want to bring about another future, the one I carried in my head for so long, all through the war.

He started to weep and he couldn’t stop. “Help her,” James said. “Hide her somewhere. Bring her here.”

Chorn looked at James. “The truth is,” he said quietly, shamefully, “there is no James. I have never known this person James.”

“Then tell her that he’s dead. Tell her it’s useless to write.”

Chorn removed a straw bag that was hanging from his shoulder, and from the bag he withdrew bandages, pills, antibiotics, brandy, dressings, even a stethoscope.

It was fucked up, it was unbelievable. It couldn’t be.

“All this suffering,” Chorn said, “is for something. You don’t know what this country was like before. You have to trust me.” The man held on to the supplies as if they were religious objects, promises.

He must be hallucinating. He rubbed his hands over the cement tiles. “She didn’t do anything wrong,” James said. “I didn’t do anything wrong.”

“Only a dictator or an idiot would make that claim,” Chorn said. He looked at the ground, at his toes protruding from his worn-down sandals, at the trail of dust he had brought into the already dusty room.

Chorn said in his quiet, detached way, “Angkar knows about James. But it does not know about Kwan. You see how I have tried to help you? Because some of us have many tricks, some of us have many names. There are people who are loyal only to me, but even I know the limits of what is possible. Look at this,” he said, shaking the pills the way a mother might try to distract her baby. “Look what I found. There is still so much that we can do. Everyone had a different life before but it doesn’t mean we must all go to the same end.