Текст книги "Dogs at the Perimeter"

Автор книги: Madeleine Thien

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Madeleine Thien
Dogs at the Perimeter

for my mother

Tell the gods what is happening to me.

HAING S. NGOR, Survival in the Killing Fields

~ ~ ~

Saturday, February 18

[fragment]

On November 29, 2005, my friend Dr. Hiroji Matsui walked out of Montreal’s Brain Research Centre at 7:29 in the evening. On the security video, his expression gives nothing away. For a brief moment, the camera captures him in passing: greying hair, neatly combed. Silver-framed eyeglasses, intense brows, a stubborn chin, the softness of an old man’s face. He wears no coat, despite the freezing temperatures, and he carries nothing, not even the briefcase with which he had arrived that morning. He exits through a side door, down a flight of metal steps. And then Hiroji walked into the city and disappeared into air. The officer assigned to Hiroji’s case told me that, without evidence of foul play, there was very little the police could do. In this world of constant surveillance and high security, it is still remarkably easy to vanish. People go to great lengths to abandon their identities, holding no credit cards or bank cards, no insurance papers, pension plans, or driver’s licences. I Dogs wanted to tell the officer what I believed, that Hiroji’s disappearance was only temporary, but the words didn’t come. Just as before, they didn’t come to me in time. Many of the missing, the officer went on, no longer wish to be themselves, to be associated with their abandoned identity. They go to these great lengths in the hope that they will never be found.

[end]

Janie

They sleep early and rise in the dark. It is winter now. The nights are long but outside, where the leaves have fallen from the branches, the snowed-in light comes through. There is a cat who finds the puddles of sunshine. She was small when the boy was small, but then she grew up and left him behind. Still, at night, she hunkers down on Kiri’s bed, proprietorial. They were born just a few weeks apart, but now he is seven and she is forty-four. My son is the beginning, the middle, and the end. When he was a baby, I used to follow him on my hands and knees, the two of us crawling over the wood floors, the cat threading between our legs. Hello, hello, my son would say. Hello, my good friend. How are you? He trundled along, an elephant, a chariot, a glorious madman.

It is twilight now, mid-February. Sunday.

Tonight’s freezing rain has left the branches crystalline. Our home is on the second floor, west facing, reached by a twisting staircase, the white paint chipping off, rust burnishing the edges. Through the window, I can see my son. Kiri puts a record on, he shuffles it gingerly out of its cardboard sleeve, holding it lightly between his fingertips. I know the one he always chooses. I know how he watches the needle lift and the mechanical arm move into place. I know the outside but not the quiet, not the way his thoughts rise up, always jostling, always various, not how they untangle from one another or how they fall so inevitably into place.

Kiri is in grade two. He has his father’s dark-brown hair, he has startling, beautiful eyes, the same colour as my own. His name, in Khmer, means “mountain.” I want to run up the stairs and turn my key in the lock, the door to my home swinging wide open.

When my fear outweighs my need – fear that Kiri will look out the window and see this familiar car, that my son will see me – I turn the ignition, steer myself from the sidewalk, and roll away down the empty street. In my head, ringing in my ears, the music persists, his body swaying like a bell to the melody. I remember him, crumpled on the floor, looking up at me, frightened. I try to cover this memory, to focus on the blurring lights, the icy pavement. My bed is not far away but a part of me wants to keep on driving, out of the city, down the highway straight as a needle. Instead, I circle and circle the residential streets. A space opens up in front of Hiroji’s apartment, where I have been sleeping these last few weeks, and I edge the car against the curb.

Tomorrow will come soon, I tell myself. Tomorrow I will see my son.

The wind swoops down, blowing free what little heat I have. I can barely lock the door and get upstairs fast enough. Inside, I pull off my boots but keep my coat and scarf on against the chill. Hiroji’s cat, Taka the Old, skips ahead of me, down the long hallway. On the answering machine, the message light is flashing and I hit the square button so hard the machine hiccups twice before complying.

Navin’s voice. “I saw the car,” my husband says. “Janie? Are you there?” He waits. In the background, my son is calling out. Their voices seem to echo. “No, Kiri. Hurry up, kiddo. Back to bed.” I hear footsteps, a door closing, and then Navin coming back. He says he wants to take Kiri to Vancouver for a few weeks, that the time, and distance, might help us. “We’ll stay at Lena’s place,” he says. I am nodding, agreeing with every word – Lena’s home has stood empty since she died last year – but a numb grief is flowing through me.

One last message follows. I hear a clicking on the line, then the beep of keys being pressed, once, twice, three times. The line goes dead.

The fridge is remarkably empty. I scan its gleaming insides, then do a quick inventory: old bread in the freezer and in the cupboard two cans of diced tomatoes, a tin of smoked mussels, and, heaven, three bottles of wine. I liberate the bread and the mussels, pour a glass of sparkling white, then stand at the counter until the toaster ejects my dinner. Gourmet. I peel back the lid of the can and eat the morsels one by one. The wine washes the bread down nicely. Everything is gone too soon but the bottle of wine that accompanies me to the sofa, where I turn the radio on. Music swells and dances through the apartment.

This bubbly wine is making me morose. I drink the bottle quickly in order to be rid of it. “Only bodies,” Hiroji once told me, “have pain.” He had been in my lab, watching me pull a motor neuron from Aplysia. Bodies, minds: to him they were the same, one could not be considered without the other.

Half past ten. It is too early to sleep but the dark makes me uneasy. I want to call Meng, my oldest friend, we have not spoken in more than two weeks, but it is the hour of the wolves in Paris. My limbs feel light and I trickle, wayward, through the rooms. On the far side of the apartment, in Hiroji’s small office, the windows are open and the curtains seem to move fretfully, wilfully. The desk has exploded, maybe it happened last week, maybe earlier, but now all the papers and books have settled into a more balanced state of nature. Still, the desk seems treacherous. Heaped all over, like a glacier colonizing the surface, are the pages I have been working on. Taka the Old has been here: the paper is crumpled and still faintly warm.

Since he disappeared, nearly three months ago now, I’ve had no contact with Hiroji. I’m trying to keep a record of the things he told me: the people he treated, the scientists he knew. This record fills sheet after sheet – one memory at a time, one place, one clue – so that every place and every thought won’t come at once, all together, like a deafening noise. On Hiroji’s desk is an old photograph showing him and his older brother standing apart, an emerald forest behind them. Hiroji, still a child, smiles wide. They wear no shoes, and Junichiro, or James, stands with one hand on his hip, chin lifted, challenging the camera. He has a bewitching, sad face.

Sometimes this apartment feels so crowded with loved ones, strangers, imagined people. They don’t accuse me or call me to account, but I am unable to part with them. In the beginning, I had feared the worst, that Hiroji had taken his own life. But I tell myself that if this had been a suicide, he would have left a note, he would have left something behind. Hiroji knew what it was to have the missing live on, unending, within us. They grow so large, and we so empty, that even the coldest winter nights won’t swallow them. I remember floating, a child on the sea, alone in the Gulf of Thailand. My brother is gone, but I am looking up at the white sky and I believe, somehow, that I can call him back. If only I am brave enough, or true enough. Countries, cities, families. Nothing need disappear. At Hiroji’s desk, I work quickly. My son’s voice is lodged in my head, but I have lost the ability to keep him safe. I know that no matter what I say, what I make, the things I have done can’t be forgiven. My own hands seem to mock me, they tell me the further I go to escape, the greater the distance I must travel back. You should never have left the reservoir, you should have stayed in the caves. Look around, we ended up back in the same place, didn’t we? The buildings across the street fall dark, yet the words keep coming, accumulating like snow, like dust, a fragile cover that blows away so easily.

Sunday, February 19

[fragment]

Elie was fifty-eight years old when she began to lose language. She told Hiroji that the first occurrence was in St. Michael’s Church in Montreal, when the words of the Lord’s Prayer, words she had known almost from the time she had learned to speak, failed to materialize on her lips. For a brief moment, while the congregation around her prayed, the whole notion of language diminished inside her mind. Instead, the priest’s green robes struck her as infinitely complicated, the winter coats of the faithful shifted like a collage, a pointillist work, a Seurat: precision, definition, and a rending, rending beauty. The Lord’s Prayer touched her in the same bodily way that the wind might, it was the sensation of sound but not meaning. She felt elevated and alone, near to God and yet cast out.

And then the moment passed. She came back and so did the words. A mild hallucination, Elie thought. Champagne in the brain.

She went home and did what she always did. She closed the glass doors of her studio, unlatched the windows, lifted them high, and she painted. It was winter so she wore her coat over two shirts and fleece sweatpants, thick socks, Chinese slippers on her feet, and a woollen hat on her head. A decade ago she had been a biomechanical engineer, researching motor control, lecturing at McGill University, but at the age of forty-six, she had abandoned that life. Now, experience unfolded in a different pitch and tone, it was more fluid, more transitory, it enclosed her like the battering sea under broken light. When she closed her eyes she saw how the corners of improbable things touched – a bird and a person and a pencil rolling off a child’s table – entwined, and became the same substance. Even her loved ones seemed different, more contained and solid, like compositions, iterations in her head. Painting was everything. She painted until she couldn’t feel her arms anymore, ten, twelve hours at a time, every single day, and even then it wasn’t enough. She told her husband, Gregor, that it was as if she had arrived at high noon, the hour when all forces converge. Gregor, a chef, grew used to falling asleep to the rhythms of Debussy and Ravel and Fauré, Elie’s preferred accompaniments. Her husband grew accustomed to the smell of oil paint on her skin, the way she gestured with her hands in place of words, the way she gazed out with a new-found passion and righteousness. “I can see,” he heard her calling to him one day. “Look what I can see.”

“I thought,” Elie told Hiroji, when he had been treating her for many years, “that my entire past was fantasy. Only my present was real.”

The champagne in the brain began reoccurring, blotting out people’s names, song lyrics, street names, book titles. She felt sometimes as if the words themselves had vanished, in her thoughts, her speech, and even her handwriting. There was a stopper in her throat and a black hole in her mind. In her paintings, she turned music into images, the musical phrases playing out like words, the words breaking into geometric shapes, her paintings grasping all the broken, brilliant fragments. When she worked, there were no more barriers between herself and reality, the image could say everything that she could not. Increasingly, she could not speak much. But she could live with losing language, if that was the price. This seemed, back then, a small price.

She was painting when she noticed the tremors in her right arm.

The first time she had met Hiroji, he had asked her if she found speaking effortful. The word had seemed to her like the priest’s green robe that day in St. Michael’s Church, an image blocking out all other ideas. Yes, how effortful it was. “I’m decaying,” she told Hiroji, surprising even herself. “What do you mean?” he asked her.

“I can’t … with the …” She put her hands together, straining to find the words. “There’s too much.”

Hiroji sent her for diagnostic testing. Those MRI films are conclusive. The first thing that strikes the viewer is the white line, the fragile outline of the skull, surprisingly thin. And then, within the skull, the grey matter folded around the hub of white matter. What has happened is that her left brain, the dominant side (she is right-handed), has atrophied – it is wasting away in the same manner that a flower left too long in the vase withers. Throughout Elie’s left brain this disintegration is happening. Language is only the first thing that she will lose. It may come to pass that, one day soon, she will not be able to move the entire right side of her body.

The images show something else too. While one side of her has begun to atrophy, the other side is burgeoning. Elie’s right brain has been creating grey matter – neurons – and all that extra tissue is collecting in the back of her brain, in the places where visual images are processed.

“It’s a kind of asymmetry,” Hiroji had told her, “a kind of imbalance in your mind, between words and pictures.”

“So what is it, all this, that I’m making? Where is it coming from?” She waved her hands at the bare walls, as if to pull her own paintings into the room, to trail them behind her like an army.

“It comes from the inner world,” Hiroji said, “but isn’t that where all painting comes from?”

“My diseased inner world,” she said. “I’m at war. I’m dwindling, aren’t I?” She picked up the mri scans from his desk. “Do you paint, Doctor?”

He shook his head.

“Have you ever thought about it?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

He paused for a moment. “My mother painted. She was a Buddhist, and she used to tell me that I was too analytical, that I had no understanding of the ephemeral side of things.”

“The ephemeral,” she said doubtfully. “Like dancing?”

He laughed. “Yes, like dancing.”

Hiroji kept Elie under what is known as surveillance mr imaging. Scan after scan, year by year, the films show the imbalance widening. Three years after her diagnosis, Elie’s paintings, too, began to change. Where once she had delighted in turning music into complex mathematical and abstract paintings, intense with colour and the representation of rhythm, now she painted precise cityscapes, detailed, almost photographic. “I see differently,” she told him. “It comes to me less holy than before.” He wanted her to go further, to explain this holiness, but she just shook her head and poured the tea, her right hand trembling.

“The conceptual and the abstract,” Hiroji told her, “are no longer as accessible. Your interior world has changed.”

Hiroji and I co-authored a paper on Elie’s condition. He described to me how, in Elie’s home, her paintings graced the walls. He had the sense that they pleased her because they brought the interior world into the world that we live in, the one that we hold and touch, that we see and smell. “Soon,” she had told him, tapping her fingers against her chest, “there will be no inside.”

Elie is almost completely mute now. When she telephoned Hiroji, she wouldn’t speak. She would hit the keypad two or three times, making a kind of Morse code, before hanging up again. Her disease is degenerative, a quickening loss of neurons and glia in the other parts of her brain, impeding speech, movement, and finally breathing itself. Unable to paint, she and Gregor spend long days at the riverside, where, she once told Hiroji, things move, ephemeral, and nothing stays the same.

Two years ago, delivering a lecture in Montreal, Hiroji spoke briefly about consciousness. He said that he imagined the brain as a hundred billion pinballs, where the ringing of sound, in all its amplitude and velocity, contained every thought and impulse, all our desires spoken and unspoken, self-serving, survivalist, and contradictory. The number of possible brain states exceeds the number of elementary particles in the universe. Maybe what exists beneath (tissue and bone and cells) and what exists above (ourselves, memory, love) can be reconciled and understood as one thing, maybe it is all the same, the mind is the brain, the mind is the soul, the 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 that I 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 and didn’t know those stories. I was eight years old, a child in Phnom Penh, and the 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 Vesna Vulovic, 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 arrived in Vancouver, when Lena became my foster mother. We’d sit and watch tv together, The Nature of Things, game shows, movies of the week, anything that might improve my English. But television, with its dizzying pictures and chaotic chatter, with its sudden images of love and violence, disturbed me. I turned instead to the shelves and shelves of books. Even though my reading was slow, painstaking, I worked my way through her collection. She was devoted to biographies – she admired mathematicians Kurt Gödel and Emma Noether and neuroscientists Santiago Ramón y Cajal and Alexander Luria.

To the surprise of my new mother, I stole these books as frequently as I stole canned food from the cupboards, and I hoarded all the words for myself. In my mind, it was as if these people walked through Lena’s rooms, as if they were family and they were still alive.

Every weekend, Lena would descend into her office. “Down to the basement,” she would say. “Down to my ballroom.” Lena, an academic, wrote about the history of science. Her world was populated with mathematicians, physicists, chemists, and biologists, with the institutes and the drawing rooms of another era. Todd, my foster father, lived in Nepal and worked for Unicef, and he came home once each year, at Christmas. Some days, my new mother would spend hours sifting through piles of paper, trying to lay hands on a single reference. “Hopeless!” she would say, turning away from me, trying to mask her sadness. “Like trying to find a peanut floating through outer space.”

From the time I was sixteen years old, I worked in the ballroom, helping Lena organize her documents. Not just papers, she would have said, but thoughts. Her office was a city all its own: towers of research notes, clippings, books, interview transcripts, recordings. I wanted to be of use to her, to repay her somehow. I liked the idea that I could stand in her place and find my way along the avenues she had built, the knowledge she had accumulated.

One night, wanting to surprise me, Lena dusted off the projector and sat me down in the living room. The sofa was covered with brown velour, a fabric unfamiliar to me, and I always felt as if I were sitting on an animal. The film spun into life. I gazed up, mesmerized by the world projected onto the white wall. I saw a much younger Lena walking on the beaches of Kep, on the southern coast of Cambodia. The camera closed in on Lena’s bathing cap and her lemon-coloured dress. She and Todd had vacationed there in the 1960s, when Cambodia was at peace, a few years before the fighting had begun. She had never forgotten it, she told me, the heat, the saffron temples, the sea. She and Todd had been newlyweds.

Night after night, I crept downstairs, thieved the reels, and fed the film into the machine. I sat on the couch staring up, hearing only the ticking of the projector as the reels spun and the tape ran, and this clicking became the wordless sadness of a lost time. I saw the skyline and the light-flecked water, Lena’s legs smooth against the ocean as she dove and dove again. In another reel, the city of Phnom Penh flickered grainily into the room. Todd, holding the camera, turned slowly, taking us in a 360-degree tour of the intersection in front of the Central Market. Cars glided, cyclos wobbled through the field of vision, and families, clothed in oranges and pinks and browns, turned to stare into the lens. The images came one after the other, now in a place I recognized, and now not. There was no order, no chronology, yet it was so real I could smell it, I could feel the city’s grit on my skin.

One night, I sat on the edge of Lena’s bed and told her that I wanted a new name, a new existence, and she had stared at me, her eyes wet with tears. I admired those tears, she was not ashamed of them, or frightened by them. Jane. Janie. In the language of the aid world, I was an unaccompanied minor, a separated child, but Lena told me that I was no such thing at all. “Sometimes,” she said, across the gap of space I kept between us on the bed, “we are granted a second chance, a third one. You don’t have to be ashamed of having lived many lives.”

I thought of my friend Bopha, about my brother, Sopham, and my parents, I wanted to tell Lena that we were too many, that I needed to guard the world that held us all together. I was afraid that I would drop it, shatter it, let it break apart.

The Khmer Rouge had taken Phnom Penh and then, quietly, they had gone around and severed the lines that connected us to the outside world. They named their own leadership, their own government, Angkar. The word means “the centre” or “the organization.” In the beginning, our family had stayed together. But afterwards, when it was no longer possible, I tried to imagine a way back. Time had to be held, twisted, cut wide open.

Angkar had been obsessed with recording biographies. Every person, no matter their status with the Khmer Rouge, had to dictate their life story or write it down. We had to sign our names to these biographies, and we did this over and over, naming family and friends, illuminating the past. My little brother and I were only eight and ten years old but, even then, we understood that the story of one’s own life could not be trusted, that it could destroy you and all the people you loved.