“Would you find it hard to believe,” Chorn said, “that once, long ago, I was a monk? They came to the temple and they took all the children away. They went and made us into something else.”

Before, when Dararith was still alive, the three of them had taken the motorcycle to Kep and they had stayed a week on the seaside. The ocean comes into this storeroom and covers it like a drawing. He can see the tide taking morsels of the land, bit by bit, away. That week, Dararith had disappeared for three days, he’d met a French girl with long, wavy hair, he’d offered to take her photograph with his brand-new Leica, but really it was Dararith who should’ve been the model. He was a handsome man with romantic eyes and full lips, a mysterious, colonial sexiness that made the women foolish. In contrast, James was a bore, or at least that’s what Sorya told him, teasingly, looking past him to the sea.

“And what about you?” he’d asked in English. “If I wanted to take your picture?”

“I’m the true photographer,” she had answered in Khmer.

“Take your brother’s camera, then.”

“I tried!” she said, laughing. “Believe me, I tried. But Dararith, he uses it to meet women, it’s only a toy for him, whereas I know I’m a photographer. If only someone would give me a chance.”

“What would you shoot?”

“Once I took a picture of my students at the lycée.”

He never knew whether she was serious or joking. He was a buffoon, a hippopotamus, sitting beside her.

“I’m your friend, aren’t I?” she had said on the last night that he saw her.

“Am I being demoted?”

“You’re my best friend,” she had said, “and you don’t really know it. You don’t value it.”

He’d felt belittled. He had wanted to raise his voice: I’m in love with you, is that such a small thing? I’ve loved you since the day I met you, why is that worth so little? Now he wonders how he misunderstood her so badly. How stupid, how arrogant was he, that he couldn’t persuade her to leave for Bangkok, pride had made him unforgivably blind. He’d wanted her to wait for him. In his heart, he’d wanted this, to prove something, because they had both been alone. They had already left their families even before Angkar came. They only had each other.

“Tell me about Tokyo,” she had said, just like Hiroji. They were like two birds pecking at his head. On the southern borders of the city, rockets were falling. They could see the fighting, like sheaves of fire.

“There’s nothing much to tell.”

“They bombed it very badly, didn’t they?”

“It was Dante’s fifth circle.”

“I used to teach that poem,” she said. “I taught, ‘Through me is the way to the sorrowful city, through me is the way to the lost people.’”

“Admit it, you have a lover somewhere, don’t you?” he said lightly, wanting to turn the darkness aside. “A boy much nicer than me.”

“I’m twenty-six years old,” she said. “Everyone around me is married with ten children. I live in a city that’s about to fall to the Khmer Rouge. What can I possibly know about love?”

“Come with me to Neak Luong. Come tomorrow.”

She shook her head.

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

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

“Do you?”

She smiled at him, she folded her sadness away. “All this time, I only stayed because of you.”

The sea, the sea. The words ran in his mind, the future his father had once envisioned, the promises he had kept before he died.

“Some things don’t end,” she said, kissing his lips. “We both knew, didn’t we? From the very beginning. I knew. You would be the one I loved.”

What did he say? He had only kissed her. He had treated everything as if it were ephemeral, as if things could only be beautiful if they were passing, if they were mortal. “Can you hear me,” she had whispered one night, thinking he was asleep. He had kept his eyes closed. All those months, he had put on such a show of being brave, he had made a joke of his needs. He had wanted to please her, to keep her, and he didn’t know how.

He sleeps on the cement tiles, in the prison, segregated from everyone else because he is useful to Chorn. Sometimes the man comes and sits with him. Sometimes he brings a grandchild or a daughter and James gives them medicine, he cleans a wound, he works according to the tasks he is given. His own body is unrecognizable, it is a parody of a human being, mere bones, dark shadows where muscle used to be. Kwan sits in the corner and day by day grows stronger, Kwan feeds memories to James, experiences that are part James, part Dararith and Sorya, part Hiroji, part Chorn. King James is a useless army of invisible men, of stories given and received like bread on the communion line, and it’s the only bread he has to keep him going. King James is a rotten child, he’s losing his mind and also his sight. Piece by piece, day by day, Kwan is taking over, and James is tired now, but he hangs on like a cat at the table because any scrap could be the one that saves him. He dreams of Sorya in the daytime, but never at night. Water seeps down the walls, along the green lines of invading grass, dribbling down to the ground.

Chorn goes away for many days, and a child, blind in one eye, brings the food. When Chorn returns, sick-looking, he asks James, “Do you know anything about planting rice? About crops?”

James shakes his head. “But when I was a teenager, I worked one summer in the forest, I felled trees.” It was in Port Hardy, on the northern cusp of Vancouver Island, a job found for him by his mother’s hairdresser. He had learned to swagger in that isolated logging town and give off the impression of solidity.

Chorn looks at him, skeptical. “With an axe?”

“Sometimes.”

Chorn nods, pleased with this information. They sit quietly, and Chorn drums his fingertips against his knees. His hands are pale, as if, outdoors in the drenching sun, he keeps them safely hidden in his pockets.

“What’s it like now?” James asks, breaking the stillness. “In the cities.”

Chorn waits, without responding, without looking at James, as if Chorn, too, is expecting another person to answer. In the pause, there’s the hard melody of an ox-bell, the only music James has heard in too long, and it seems to stretch like a physical object through the air and knock against the walls of the room.

“Everything is very organized,” Chorn says. “They are making an archive in which nothing is missing. Every person must write a biography. They must write it many times to ensure that all the details are correct.”

He prays his hands together to stop the drumming. “Phnom Penh is very still. In fact, it is empty. Every movement you make is like the first one ever made. I thought I was the only one alive. In the market, where the vendors used to be, there are small trees growing. Less than a year but already the jungle has arrived, it is threatening to strangle everything else.

“They have thousands and thousands of files. I delivered my share as well. I had to sign my name many times because they are terrified of missing pieces. Many times I signed my name.” Chorn runs his hand over his mouth, closes his eyes, and nods. James feels as cold as the walls. “They put me in an apartment. A family’s apartment. There were plates on the table, but the food had rotted. The owner collected stamps. Some were framed on the walls. I was standing there, looking at them, when the telephone rang. I went into the kitchen and the telephone kept ringing and ringing, I thought if I answered I would be punished, I was convinced it was a trap so I just stood there and waited, without moving, I waited for it to stop. Like a child.

“Somebody’s photos were sitting there, in the room, in picture frames. I don’t know why, but I put one in my pocket. A photograph of a woman. She reminded me of my oldest sister. Do you remember her? You always thought she was pretty.”