Free Dogs at the Perimeter by Madeleine Thien Page A

strength. He said, “If your life brings us nothing, why should we not obliterate you?”
    In front of us, the old man tried to crawl free. He swung his head away to shield himself, from Prasith and from all the watching eyes.
    I wanted to block out the sound that his throat made, the panic in his hands. “Don’t be afraid, mit,” the teenager said, touching the old man’s head, his face. “The earth is quiet. It will bring you quiet. Everything is only beginning again.”
    My mother came back with her eyes alight and her hands shaking. She had a plan, she told us. The time had come to run away. We were to be reunited with our father. “Phnom Penh,” she said. “Norodom Boulevard. Of course he’s there.”
    The world was upside down. I wanted to tell her there was no Phnom Penh, no Norodom, but it was like speaking to my father on those days when he couldn’t hear us, his drinking had turned the volume down low. We were the sun going down, we were nothing but projections of light on the wall.
    “Escape to where?” my brother said gently. “Escape to what?”
    Feverish, my mother held her hands over her ears. Her body was both skeletal and swollen.
    “He’s been asking for you,” she said. “Father has the plane tickets already. The flight. We’ll go through Bangkok. See the water, see how it’s receding?” She turned to me. “Terrible girl. Why do you blame your father? They sent him to study. They know his worth.”
    All night, my mother cried and twisted on the ground. Her legs were tender, bloated with water, she needed food, she needed vitamins, but all those things had vanished as if they’d never been. Kosal gave us medicine but the strange black pills dissolved on her tongue like charcoal.
    “Ma,” I whispered. “They’re listening.”
    My brother stroked her hands. “She doesn’t know us.”
    She lay between us, feverish, laughing.
    The stars were everywhere. My father came and knocked at the door, repeating my name like an incantation. From room to room, I ran, turning my back on him. I walked through the hallways, I found the staircase that led to the rooftop. My father was there waiting for me. He held my hand and pulled me through a window and into a hidden space. He was covered in dust, it slid into the air, it coated everything. I lay my father down. There were pills everywhere, in his hands, tumbling out of his pockets, cascading down and skittering along the floor, a thousand riels for a cupful , I remember, a thousand riels,sometimes less. The boys playing kick sandal by the riverside, the cyclo drivers asleep in their vehicles. Endless colour and movement, a wonder before my eyes. “Are we going home now, Pak? I’m hungry and the moon is already out.” His eyes were open. I filled this room with the names of books I remembered, I saw them on the thin, hard spines, floating on typeset pages, the texts of the Tipitaka , the Buddhist cannon, books by Alexandre Dumas, novels of Hak Chhay Hok and Khun Srun, I read their titles on clean sheets of paper that were rolled into the little typewriter my father had given me. My friends laughing when I had told them, puffed up like a tiger, that my father had given me this clattering machine, this grown-up beauty, something of my own.
    “If I leave you,” I asked him, “where will I go?”
    “My sweet, you can never travel far enough.”
    Along the pitted road a truck came, churning up the ground with its thick tires. A beam of light advanced across the huts but I lay close to the earth, inside the darkness. Beside me, our friend, Oun, the dentist’s son, was reciting verses in Pali, I could hear the running of sound: There are trees bearing perpetual fruit, on these trees there are multitudes of birds. There also is heard the cry of peacocks and herons, and the melodious song of kokilas. There near the lake, the cry of birds who call, Live ye, Live ye. The birds roam the woods … Passages he had memorized in school, just as we had