Dogs at the Perimeter Read Free Page B

fighting, at that time, raged in the borderlands. I remember staring up at the sky, transfixed by the airplanes. They were everywhere above us – commercial planes, fighter planes, transport planes, helicopters – a swarm that never ceased. My father told me about a woman named Vesna Vulovic. The plane she was travelling in had exploded over Czechoslovakia and she had fallen thirty-three thousand feet to the ground. She had survived. I named all of my dolls – I had three – Vesna. To me, she was like a drop of rain or a very tiny bird, someone whom the gods had overlooked.
    From the file, I remove James’s letters to Hiroji. Born Junichiro Matsui, nicknamed Ichiro when he was a boy, he chose the name James when he was a teenager. His letters home are brief, scattered with ellipses, and yet I keep returning to them, convinced that I have missed some crucial detail. In 1972, the Red Cross sent him up the Mekong River, away from Vietnam and into the refugee camps of Phnom Penh. Cambodia was in the last stages of a civil war, a brutal war of attrition.
    “Undying,” my father told us once, in admiration of the resistance, the Khmer Rouge.
    “The undying,” my mother answered, “are always the most wretched.”
    In January 1975, James’s letters stopped. Three months later, the Khmer Rouge won the war and the borders closed around my country.
    Turn my head, go back, and I’m hiding with my brother in the hall closet, crouched on top of my mother’s shoes. “You’ll see,” my father is saying. We can hear his voice, tipsy and melodious, through the wooden door. “The Khmer Rouge will turn out to be heroes after all.”
    My uncles, great-uncles, and distant uncles shout to be heard. “Lon Nol,” I hear. “Traitor!” “Crawling into bed!” “Contemptible!” “Chinese rockets!” My father’s parties are always boisterous, more and more as the war goes badly. The North Vietnamese Army against the American military, the Khmer Rouge versus the Khmer Republic, Communism against Imperialism, everyone takes a side, and some take every side. My father says that this war is about the future, about a free Cambodia, that we have to liberate the country from our own worst selves. He says our leaders have lost their moral centre, they are obsessed with cognac and soda, and villagers’ mumbo jumbo. The uncles cackle, and someone scratches at the door. I think it must be my cousin, Happy Nimol, who clings to us like wet grass.
    The door bursts open and for a moment the room is stunningly bright. My father leans down, scoops my brother up. I see the pale soles of Sopham’s feet kicking in the air. My father looks down at where I’m curled tight as ball. “Aha!” he says. “My little chickens, hiding from the farmer!” He carries us, laughing, screaming in terror, out into the gathering.
    Years later, when I remembered the story of VesnaVulovic, I tried to find her in the archived newspapers of the Vancouver Public Library. As I turned the microfilm, an image, eerily familiar, stopped my hand: an exhausted face subsiding into white pillows. I paid for a printout of the image. Vesna’s plane had been shot down by two surface-to-air missiles, fired by the Czechoslovak military because the Yugoslavian plane had crossed, innocently, into restricted airspace. “I’m not lucky,” she said. “Everybody thinks I’m lucky, but they are mistaken. If I were lucky I would never have had this accident.” She sounded ungrateful but she was not. I understood. I remembered arriving in Canada, my stomach clenched, ashamed that I had lived yet terrified of disappearing. Chance had favoured us, but chance had denied so many others.
    At home, I taped Vesna’s picture to my bedroom wall. For long stretches of time I would lie on the carpet, staring up at her. Sometimes I would see the shadows of Lena’s feet, faint beneath the door. Like messages, I told myself. Missives. Janie, sweetheart. Can I come in? I was twelve when I