“Cigarettes,” the kid demands.

Kwan shakes his head.

“You can speak now,” the kid says abruptly. “Angkar is done. Finished.”

Kwan gestures that he can’t speak, he has never spoken.

The kid shrugs, folds the bills up, tucks them somewhere in his pants. “My name’s Joe,” he says, mangling the word. “You need anything, you ask for Joe.” He revs the accelerator, the engine hacks, and he wobbles away over the cracked street.

That night, sitting on a mound of stones, he hears someone playing music on a record player. A man calls out the name Sorya and he lifts his head and sees a thin woman dancing slowly, her wrists turning in the same way they must have done decades ago, when she was a girl and this was Indochina and the French swanned down the wide boulevards and hid their guilt in a veil of opium smoke. Khmer dance is its own language, this is what Dararith had once explained: “This gesture means you have come across a flower, a lotus, and you are offering it, and this gesture here means love. And this gesture is water.”

“Water, water, everywhere,” Sorya had said. “Come and dance with me, Dararith. Nothing so classical. Just the ramvong. Just the lindy hop.”

“Wait,” Dararith had said. “Let me take your photo.”

“Click away,” she said.

Here she is now, in his pocket.

He had felt, at the time, lonely: an outsider watching these two siblings, this self-sufficient love. But he knows now there are no outsiders. There is no walking away at the end, delusion has to finish somewhere, it has to end or else weakness will outlast them all. He has to commit to something or be done. From Kampot he travels to the prison where Chorn, too, was eventually arrested, eventually tortured and killed. In the storeroom where he passed nearly two years, boxes are rotting in the heat, files and pages, confusions, accusations. He went through them and found the sixth letter, the last one, the same thin weight of paper, but her handwriting had deteriorated, the pen had hardly any ink. Who was she writing to? Not James anymore, or not just James. They are throwing us away, she wrote, and I can’t understand why because all I wanted was for the war to end, no matter who won. I never admitted any allegiance. My name is Sorya. I am the sister of Dararith, the daughter of Kravann and Mary, the wife of James. I was a teacher. There was a biography and a confession, and in the biography was the name of their son, just as Chorn had told him. The prison file had dates, but no date of death, there was not even a photograph, there was no file for the baby, and he dared to believe that they had been absolved. That she wandered, like him, with a different name and a new soul.

Everyone is searching. Everyone is looking into every passing face and wondering if the next person along the road will be the beloved, the dreamed of. Maybe this life is the dream. If gods existed, he would still be waking up to the sound of her moving through the apartment. Here she is now, coming into the room to wake him. Here she is.

“I’m a selfish Buddhist,” she had told him once. “Something of me will return, something will come around and around forever, but it won’t be Sorya. I have only this one chance.”

He travelled on, chasing a rumour of Dararith, to the Laos — Cambodian border where caves slip into one country and out the other. He, too, had hidden here for several months after running away from his work unit, they had been cutting trees in the forest when he attacked the lone cadre and left him for dead. Now he hardly remembers that he killed a boy. It is difficult to move during the rainy season. He can guess the date of his son’s birthday. Small children, he knows, were sent to America, to France, they took flight to places he can’t imagine, or they persevered, here, like Joe. They sold things or sometimes they sold themselves. The jungle has invaded the cities but now the hungry people are cutting it back. They are skinning the trees again and eating the bark. From place to place he defaces the walls with a black marker, Khmer words, Khmer letters: Sorya Dararith James. You can follow the trail but you can’t know in which direction you are headed, down to the end, or reversing, forever, to the beginning.

Monday, March 6

[fragment]

It is April 1976. A burning hot day and the sky so delicate a blue, the white sun will surely burn the colour off. Hiroji should have sunglasses but he lost them in a Bangkok government office where an official with concerned eyes hid them under an airmail envelope, distracting Hiroji with instructions to another border town, where the sixth and hopefully final permit could be obtained. He should have said something, he should have snuck his hand under the envelope and retrieved his sunglasses, but he didn’t. He could only sit, dazed by the heat and the man’s shy audacity, and watch.

Now, a half-dozen permits later and several months gone by, he stands on the Thai side of the border and stares across a narrow river into Cambodia. When Phnom Penh fell to the Khmer Rouge, the airport was in ruins. A year later, and it hasn’t reopened. There’s been no word from his brother in all that time, not a letter, not a clue. James has been wheeled into another room but the room itself has disappeared. On the opposite bank, the Cambodian side, blistered grass unrolls, folding up into stark mountains. The heat is dizzying. He shifts his feet on the dry ground, blinks the sweat from his eyes, and tries to comprehend what he’s seeing. A black-clothed boy, the Khmer Rouge guard, stands alert at the end of a one-lane bridge, his Kalashnikov leaning against his fingertips, barrel up. The border is eerily quiet and then, abruptly, gunfire sounds. Khmer Rouge soldiers arrive. They gaze disdainfully across the border, at Hiroji. When they depart, one remains, like a black feather fallen from the crow.

Soon the rainy season will arrive and it will be nearly impossible to travel in the flooding. Even James won’t be able to manage it. Hiroji paces the border. In his head, he adds up his expenses: how much cash he needs to stay another month, another two months. How much for a lift to the next refugee camp, from Sa Kaeo to Aran, and farther north. Fees and living expenses for September, when he must return to university. The return flight, all his bills. He paces until the sun has burned a headache deep behind his eyes. It’s a twenty-minute walk back to Aranyaprathet, a long walk through wrinkled scrub and gnarled trees, behind tin shacks, beside military trucks that shake the road and heave the dust up. He walks slowly because he is still not used to the heat. In all his life, he has never felt so powerless.

—

Aranyaprathet smells of overripe pineapples and mangy dogs. Beside his guesthouse, a shrill, dead-eyed woman tries to sell him Buddha heads. She scratches at him with her fingernails, tugs at his clothes, alternately whispers and barks at him until, finally, he chooses one, a sleepy bodhisattva with its eyes half-open, cold against his fingertips, too light for this world. The old woman clucks reassuringly, scratching the bills together, she drums them on the surrounding objects, holds the money up against her forehead, smiles generously.

Upstairs, inside his room, he sets the bodhisattva on the desk, inside the square of sunshine floating through the window. He removes, from his shirt pocket, two colour photographs of James, damp from his sweat, and lays them on the desk to dry. Hiroji sits on the edge of the bed, thinks of making tea, thinks of calling his mother, thinks of an empty stairwell in the School of Medicine at the University of British Columbia, the carpet of grass out front, where he used to read and watch the girls go by. Objects in the hotel room begin to disconnect from one another, first the mirror turns away, then the table stutters toward the door, then the walls come apart. The bodhisattva falls face down as if to kiss the earth, he’s so tired and he hasn’t slept in days. Hiroji blinks his eyes. It’s his birthday, today or tomorrow depending on the time zone, and he wonders if the party (the non-existent party) will bring him gifts or money, plans for the future, or just fond memories.