Dogs at the Perimeter Read Free Page A

soul is the brain, etc. But it’s like watching a hand cut open another hand, remove the skin, and examine the tissue and bone. All it wants is to understand itself. The hand might become self-aware, but won’t it be limited still?
    A few days after the lecture, Hiroji received a letter from a man recently diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. I have been wondering , the man wrote, how to measure what I will lose. How much circuitry, how many cells have to become damaged before I, before the person my children know, is gone? Is there a self buried in the amygdala or the hippocampus? Is there one burst of electricity that stays constant all my life? I would like to know which part of the mind remains untouched, barricaded, if there is any part of me that lasts, that is incorruptible, the absolute centre of who I am .
    [end]
    Before, on my sleepless nights, I used to tiptoe down the hallway and stand in Kiri’s open doorway. My son,collector and purveyor of small blankets, is a light snorer. The sound of his breaths calmed me. Daring to enter, I would listen to his sleep, to the funny, stuttering exhalations that seemed altogether unearthly. Kiri, you are a godsend, I’d think. A mystery.
    Taka the Old appears at the ledge of the window. Hiroji’s cat watches me nervously, twitchily. Hours ago, I must have forgotten to remove my coat so I unbutton it now, shake it off, and fold it neatly over the back of a chair. The cat sidles nearer. We are two nocturnal creatures, lost in thought, except that she is sober. She rubs her face against the coat’s empty arms, she purrs into its dangling hood.
    I open the curtains. Nearly four in the morning and the view outside is fairy-tale white, a sharpened landscape that seems to rebuke the darkness, Go back, go back, return from whence you came! Snowdrifts and frozen eaves merge into cars, outlined in inches of snow. On the frosted windowpanes, I trace Khmer letters, Khmer words, but mine is a child’s uncertain calligraphy, too wide, too clumsy. I was eleven years old when I left Cambodia, and I have never gone back. Years ago, on the way to Malaysia with my husband, I glimpsed it from the air. Its beauty, unchanged, unremitting, opened a wound in me. I was seated at the window and the small plane was flying low. It was the rainy season and Cambodia was submerged, a drowned place, the flooded land a plateau of light. From above, there were no cars or scooters thatI could see, just boats plying the waterways, pursued by the ribbon of their slipstream.
    Silence eats into every corner of the room, creeping over the furniture, over the cat. She paces the room like a zoo lion. At the desk, I sharpen pencils ferociously, lining them up in a row.
    On the floor is the file I keep returning to. When Hiroji disappeared, I had found it sitting on his kitchen table and had taken it away, never mentioning it to anyone, not the police, not even Navin. I had kept it in an old suitcase, as if it were a memento, a relic that Hiroji asked me to safeguard. The file contains the same documents and maps, the same letters from James, that Hiroji asked me to examine last year. I remember him unfolding the map, putting his finger against Phnom Penh, here , where the ink is smudged, the city at the confluence of the rivers. Back then, the map had seemed too flimsy to me, too abstract, a drawing of a country that had little relation to the country I had left behind. I couldn’t see what he was seeing.
    James Matsui had vanished in 1975. Four years earlier, having finished his residency at St. Paul’s Hospital in Vancouver, he had signed up with the International Red Cross. Soon after, he had left Canada and landed in Saigon, into the mayhem of the Vietnam War. That same year, Nixon’s bombs were falling on Cambodia, spies were breaking into the Watergate building, scientists had found a way to splice DNA , but I was young anddidn’t know those stories. I was eight years old, a child in Phnom Penh, and the