Free Dogs at the Perimeter by Madeleine Thien Page B

done. Words pushed out of his mind, they floated down on us like air.
    “My son, my son,” his father said.
    Oun’s voice fell silent, he moaned as if trying to reel the sentences back in again.
    His father said, “Angkar is listening.”
    There were spies, chhlop , everywhere. They came and waited in the darkness.
    I fell asleep and became a small child again. I saw Wat Langka, its tiled rooftops, its rising eaves, stupas in the courtyard, the stone undulations of the Naga at the foot of the stairs. These were the forms that had coloured my earliest dreams. When my grandmother died, the monks had written her name on a slip of paper. They had set the words alight, watching the paper coil and burn, becoming ash inside a golden bowl. In the bright heat of morning, the monks’ voices had risen through the air, arcing up against the temple walls.
    All mortal things are impermanent, their nature is to arise and decay, having arisen they cease, in their stilling is happiness .
    I opened the door to our apartment but nothing was visible. All the walls had been folded away.
    “Tell me a story,” my father said, his voice disembodied and sad. “My thoughts are dissolving. Don’t turn away,” he begged. “I was walking, the sky goes forever. Why is it changing to dust?”
    —
    I caressed his hands, I forced the pills between his lips.The next morning, our mother could not stand. When Prasith came, we tried to tell him that she was ill and couldn’t work, but the teenager just watched us with a faint smile on his lips. Kosal, he said importantly, had granted us permission to take our mother to an infirmary.
    Prasith raised our mother up from the floor and carried her out of the hut. Her eyes flickered open and she tried to nudge him away. “Don’t worry,” he said. “Your children are here.” Carefully, almost tenderly, he lay her inside a wooden cart. My brother and I took hold of opposite handles and began to push. Prasith led us away from the cooperative, his face tilted toward the clouds, as if luxuriating in the rising warmth. When our path joined another road, he gave us further directions and turned back.
    “That boy,” my mother mumbled, barely conscious. “I know that boy.”
    Nothing seemed real. The road we walked on was desolate and cratered and the sun never seemed to move, only to come steadily nearer, expanding into a dense fog. Twice, Khmer Rouge soldiers stopped us. They examined the permission slips Prasith had given us and then they waved us on, past workers who dissolved into the mist, past grey animals. Hours later, we arrived at the infirmary, a ruined concrete building where the nurses were only children and the sick lay everywhere on cots on the ground.
    Upstairs, we found a place for our mother. There was no medical equipment but nurses came around withmedicine, small white cubes that they stirred into bowls of water. Our mother was more alert now. She drank the medicine, her hands shaking, the water spilling. When the bowl was empty, she smiled weakly at us.
    “Sugar,” she said. “It’s sugar.”
    Heavy rains began, lightning bursts, flooding. Hurriedly, we unrolled the bamboo blinds that clung to the ceiling. They were tattered and the wind swung them back and forth. We sat close to our mother, trying to keep her warm. I watched as she stared feverishly into my brother’s face, looking for something, a detail beloved to her, a trace of someone I couldn’t see. Sopham’s eyes were like still ponds. I leaned my head against the wall, unable to rest.
    Often, my father had gone away. He would return home, to Norodom Boulevard, with empty pockets and bloodshot eyes, he would say things like, “I got carried away. I started walking up Monivong and suddenly it was Tuesday but how that happened, I don’t know.”
    “We don’t know,” my brother and I would echo. “We don’t know!”
    “All I remember,” my father said once, his hands drifting limply in the air, “is looking up at