Текст книги "Dogs at the Perimeter"

Автор книги: Madeleine Thien

Соавторы: Madeleine Thien
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There is no air in the apartment, but I don’t want to open the windows as I fear that the ice will come inside. I get up, throw a coat over my wrinkled clothes and a hat on my head. Out, out, out. Down the treacherous stairs, sliding along the invisible sidewalk. My brother is here. Sopham and I take the quiet streets, we file past the silent houses. I am drawn to the windows, to rooms lit by the inconstant blue of their televisions. A car swerves around me, the driver punctures the silence with his impatient horn, but I am moving with the slowness of the old. When I get too warm, I pull my hat off and hang it on the spoke of a fence. My brother walks ahead of me. He is small and thin and he finds the cold difficult. Where are his shoes? I look everywhere for them until my hands are numb with cold. Tomorrow I will not remember where my hat is, tomorrow I will feel confusion, but for now I duck into St. Kevin’s Church. On the bitterest winter nights, they leave the front doors unlocked. My brother trails behind me. I sink both hands into the holy water and bring my fingers to my eyes. We sit in the very last row and gaze at a man, kneeling in prayer, who seems to be thinking of the heavens, of the high windows that no one can reach, he is somewhere far, far above us. The smell of incense calms me. Long ago, I read that the cathedral in Phnom Penh had, in 1975, been dynamited. Even the very foundations were dug out, as if to prevent these foreign ruins from ever competing with our own. The vast temples of Angkor Wat, the old kingdoms of Funan and Chenla, were the markers of a history that went back two thousand years. All else, the Khmer Rouge insisted, was mere transience.

An elderly woman turns toward me. She comes closer along the pew and says, “I’m glad that you’ve come.” Her white hair frames her head like a halo. She says, “You know that wonderful passage? It’s always been my favourite. ‘In my Father’s house there are many rooms.’”

I feel myself trembling.

“You’ve been drinking,” she says, compassionate. “Many of your people have this illness. But you’ve come home now. It will be all right.”

I tell her that she is wrong, that even though we are surrounded by the sea, there is nothing to drink. Yet the salt water is seeping into our skin, swelling our bodies, making us unfit for land. “You know,” I say. “Don’t you?” The woman hesitates, then she looks down at the boy in my lap who is nothing but a knotted, filthy scarf. Red-chequered, tattered. I unfold it and try to smooth the scarf against my legs. “I tried to save him,” I tell her. “I tried to keep him from drowning.” She looks up toward the high altar, the glowing lights, Jesus illuminated on his cross, then she gazes at me with understanding in her eyes. Sometimes it’s pity, undeserved as it is, that hurts me most.

When the unthinkable happened, I had gone to Hiroji’s apartment. Years ago, when he was travelling more frequently, he had given me a copy of his keys so that I could take care of Taka the Old. For nearly a month now I have slept on his couch, leaving the curtains open as if I believe he will re-enter through the unlatched windows. I know that he is in Cambodia, the place where his brother, James, was last seen. There is no other place he would go. I imagine him unpacking his suitcase, telling me what he has learned, all the things he has seen: the Tonle Sap reversing its waters, the sprawling jungle, bats high in the shadows of the caves. He will tell me how to accept this life. I dream of returning home, not only to the place of my birth but to my son. My mother who died without me, who died so long ago, will finally close her eyes. She will turn her gaze from this world, she will slide like a boat up against land, into her future.

–

In the morning, I walk to Kiri’s school. From Monday to Friday, I see my son once each day, we meet in the playground before school begins. This is the routine Navin and I have worked out. It is an interim measure, we have both said. A way forward.

When I arrive, Navin is already there, leaning against the fence. I go to stand beside him. He touches my cheek. For a brief moment, his lips are warm against mine. “You didn’t sleep last night,” he says.

I tell him that I did, a little, enough. My hands are icy and Navin takes hold of them. He says that I look exhausted, that I should take some time off. “It’s okay,” I tell him. Work gives me a feeling of order, of cheer. He kisses my frozen fingers, and the kindness that I have always loved in him, that he gives so freely, washes over me. But Navin, too, is worn out.

I say again, “It will be okay.”

In the playground, there are so many snowsuits in so many primary colours that my vision is temporarily dazzled. I stand at the fence and search the kaleidoscope for Kiri. There he is. I see him now, I see him. My son races across the grounds, a cub in a pack of awkward pups, pursuing a soccer ball. When his team scores, he howls with joy. The pink sky burns around us. Kiri chases the soccer ball, he tussles, fights, drops his hat, picks it up, and waves it like a flag.

“Did you get my message,” Navin asks. “About Vancouver?”

I nod. “When will you go?”

“Next week, if I can pull everything together.” He says he is just finishing up a project, a new building design, but his colleagues can oversee it. He thinks the distance will be good for Kiri. He says that Kiri keeps asking when I’ll be coming home. “I’ll talk to him,” I say. We are surrounded by parents and children, by the rippling joy of the playground. Navin begins to say something but just then Kiri glimpses us. He runs forward. A girl stops him. “Kiri! Kiri!” she calls.

“I’m a caterpillar,” he says.

She frowns, “No! You’re not.”

“I’m a worm,” he says charmingly, and the girl waves both arms in kind of Hawaiian dance.

Kiri comes to me. I kneel down and he tells me, in a rush of words, that he’s going to visit his Auntie Dina later, they’re planning to build a rocket park, that she’ll make him murtabak and roti canai, that her dog, Bruno, is kind of old and shuffles very slowly. Kiri has taken to speaking quickly now, as if he is afraid he will run out of time. As if he will be too late.

“Will you build a moon?” I ask him, kneeling in the snow. I busy myself readjusting his hat, which has fallen between his neck and the collar of his coat.

“Oh!” he says, surprised. “Good idea.”

“What about moon boots?” Navin says. “Moon cakes?”

Kiri frowns.

“Moonlight,” I say.

My son frees his hands and begins buttoning my coat up, all the way to the top. “Don’t get cold, Momma,” he says. I promise that I won’t. His mittens, attached to his coat, swing back and forth like a pair of extra hands.

I kiss them both goodbye. They walk through the schoolyard, up the front steps of the building. Navin turns back, watching me, love and pity in his eyes. They go on, Kiri’s hat bobbing up and down. In this way, my son is embraced by the glow of the school. Snow hurries forward to lay its thin white sheet over the teeter-totters, the swings, and the monkey bars. Through the big windows, I can see a movement of colours, children swirling around one another. Even at the edge of the schoolyard, I can hear their voices.

I catch the 535, heading downtown. The man next to me is nodding off to sleep, his body propped up by his fellow passengers. When the bus jumps, startling him awake, he looks up, surprised to see us. Rivulets of melted slush glide back and forth along the floor. In our heavy boots, we step daintily through the muck.

We arrive at my stop and I exit through the back doors. Above me, in the clearing sky, pigeons roost on the high wires, clouds descend, and I turn and walk east along the frozen skirts of Mount Royal. The mountain, dipped in snow, has an eerie beauty, tree after tree rising up the hill, slender as matchsticks. The temperature is dropping fast and people, blank-faced beneath their hats and scarves, shoulder roughly by. This place wears its misery so profoundly. Mean-eyed women, sheathed in stiletto boots, kick the ice aside while small men in massive coats lumber down the sidewalk. The elderly fall into snowbanks. All human patience curdles in the winter. On University Street, I turn left, continuing until I reach the heavy doors of the Brain Research Centre.

Sherrington, Broca, Penfield, Ramón y Cajal: in the atrium of the building, the names of our scientific forebears are etched in gold lettering along the wall. The wide hallways buzz with fluorescent light. Rather than going downstairs to my lab, I climb the stairs to the airy fourth floor where the clinicians hold court. The morning neurology and neurological surgery rounds are already underway and this hallway is temporarily deserted. I come to Hiroji’s office. In January, the brc disabled his code but not the code of our laboratory group. When I punch in the numbers, a green light blinks fleetingly before some mechanism clicks. I turn the knob and enter.

Here is Hiroji’s window with a view of the mountain. Here is his desk.

I step inside, shutting the door behind me. File cabinets range against the right-hand wall, all the way to the ceiling. Morrin, the head of our research unit, has been pushing me to move our shared files from Hiroji’s office, but I hadn’t yet gotten around to it. I thought that, by the time I organized everything, Hiroji would be back and then the files, too, would have to return. There seemed no point in even beginning. The cabinets whine when I open them. Half of the contents are already gone, all the patient files have been moved elsewhere, but the entire history of our collaborative work remains, perfectly ordered.

I call Morrin’s extension and tell him that, if he’s looking for me, I’m in Hiroji’s office, doing the dreaded deed. He says he’ll bring up some boxes. When Morrin arrives, he, too, lingers for a moment. The three of us have spent many hours in here, discussing, arguing, idling. The office unnerves him. He goes to the window, glances out, and then returns to the relative safety of the door.

“Janie,” he says. “Sorry to make you do this.”

“You were right. It’s time.”

He nods. Weeks earlier, he had tried to draw me out on this subject, but I had rebuffed him. Now, he takes a pen from Hiroji’s desk and taps it soundlessly against his fingers. He says that I should call downstairs if I need anything.

“A second brain?” I say.

He laughs. “Hmm. No, but there’s a new dissecting scope. Come and see it when you’re done.” Still holding the pen, he leaves.

When all the files have been removed, I shut the cabinet and sit down in Hiroji’s chair. The morning light, tipped in gold, has laid its gaze across the desk, illuminating a stapler, a box of paperclips, and a thumb-sized bronze Buddha in a seated posture, both hands extended in the gesture of protection. Hiroji has an object coveted by all the other neurologists: a phrenological map of the brain, drawn onto a porcelain head. During the Victorian era, the brain was believed to have forty-eight mental faculties, and each of these had a specific location that could be felt via bumps on the skull. Destructiveness, for instance, curves like a horseshoe behind the ear. Immortality floats at the crown of the head, far above vagrancy and animality, low qualities that swell the neck. Blandness is neighbour to agreeableness. My own head has a bump above my left temple. Hiroji had studied the map.

“Mirthfulness,” he had said, grinning, looking up.

We had both laughed. He used to rest his glasses on the head’s porcelain nose, so much more upright, he said, more Roman, than his own.

I open the drawers. This trespass shames me, and yet I continue, running my fingers through the contents of his desk. In the middle drawer, I see a box of slides, various batteries, an adapter, and a half-finished roll of wine gums. Underneath all this is a small yellow notebook. Hesitantly, I reach for it, thinking that it might be a calendar or even a journal. When I open it, my friend’s handwriting is so familiar, so known, that a surge of emotion hits me. Names, addresses, and numbers fill every page. Under my own name, there are at least a dozen crossed-out entries, a decade-long list of all the cell phones I have lost and the apartments I have vacated. I see where Navin’s name has been added to mine, or Naveen as Hiroji writes it, and then Janie/Nav/Kiri, so that we become variations of one another. Our names are accompanied by two exuberant exclamation points, which makes me suspect that Hiroji is beside me, pulling my leg. I continue through the alphabet. At the very end, on the inside back cover, is one last entry. Ly Nuong. Underlined once. Two numbers have been written beneath it, one appears to be North American and has been crossed out, but the second remains. It begins with +855, the country code for Cambodia.

I close the address book and put it back in the drawer. I carry the boxes downstairs, one by one. On the last trip, sweating, I return to the desk. I take out the address book and place it, carefully, into the box.

Evening arrives quickly. In the foyer where the brc branches off to the hospital and the university, I sit, unable to face the freezing cold. This foyer is an intersection, a place where patients, neurologists, researchers, families, and students meet and part. I have been a researcher at the brc for twelve years. Many floors below, in my electrophysiology lab, I have listened, hour after hour, to the firing of single neurons. In my work, I harvest cells, gather data, measure electricity while, in the upper floors, lives open and change: a patient with a brain tumour begins to lose her vision, a girl ceases to recognize faces, including her own, a man stares, disgruntled, at his left leg, refusing to believe that it belongs to his body. So many selves are born and re-born here, lost and imagined anew.

Now, a woman in a hospital gown has been brought to a halt, overwhelmed by the patterned lines on the floor. A nurse comes and prods her forward. My friend Bonnet, rushing by, catches sight of me. He asks me what I’ve been dissecting today and I tell him sea slugs. Bonnet, who works in brain imaging, and whom I often tease for walking fast to nowhere, is already halfway down the corridor. “How’s your boy?” he says, walking backwards now. “Seems like ages since Kiri visited.” I deflect. “You never weep for the sea slugs.” He laughs, pirouettes in his lab coat, saluting me, and vanishes around the corner. The woman in the hospital gown is still walking, considering each line as it comes to her. Parkinson’s, well advanced. The nurse says, “Are you sure you don’t want a wheelchair, Nila?” The woman looks at me, aggrieved. “It’s like being in a pram, isn’t it? Why race to stand still? They won’t bring the lunch trays for another hour yet.”

As they move across the foyer, I retrieve the yellow book from my coat pocket. All afternoon, the name Nuong has been clamouring in my thoughts. I calculate the time difference once more. In Cambodia, tomorrow morning has arrived. I take out my phone and dial the international number. On the sixth ring, a woman answers.

I ask to speak to Ly Nuong.

When she doesn’t respond, I ask a second time, switching to Khmer, though the words no longer come easily to me. She laughs, relieved, and says, No, Nuong isn’t here, he’s already left for work. She has a Phnom Penh accent, the same as my parents.

“Who is this?” she asks.

My English name feels awkward so instead I say, “I’m calling from Canada.”

“Canada, yes. I will tell him.”

I thank the woman and hang up. The phone feels heavy in my hand. I pick it up again and dial Meng’s number. Though it rings for a long time, nobody answers.

The first time it happened, it was January. I had been anxious and overworked, and then, that day, I couldn’t find my wallet, and then my keys. In the confusion, I forgot to pick Kiri up from daycare. By the time the aggravated staff reached me, my son had been waiting in the deserted rooms for more than two hours.

I ran all the way. At the daycare, I thanked the staff and apologized as best as I was able, then I took Kiri’s hand and we made our way through the snow, stumbling together on the patches of ice. The sky was charcoal and the cold ambushed us. My son had lost his scarf. He asked me where I had been and when I didn’t answer, he started to cry, he pulled on my hand but my body was light and my hand felt far away.

At home, I made dinner and he wandered around beside my legs, tugging at my clothes. “What’s wrong, Momma?” he asked me over and over. In my head was a thick sadness, but I tried to concentrate on the rice and the carrots and then the faded green beans. I knew that if I spoke, my words would be slurred and broken so instead I tried to conserve my energy. My child began to weep. He picked up his cat and buried his face in her fur. There was a memory at the edges of my consciousness, but with a great force of will I managed to avert my eyes from it. I put rice and carrots and green beans into a small plastic bowl and I set the bowl carefully on the table. I stood in front of the stove for one long minute after another, trying to make certain that all the burners were off. Kiri asked for a spoon. I switched the dials on and off to make sure. I must do things in order. I walked through the darkness to the bedroom. Kiri’s voice was far away, like the scuffling of mice between the walls. “What happened, Momma? Why are you crying?” I went to the bedroom and shut the door as softly as I could.

Jambavan was lying on my pillow. Kiri’s cat watched me lazily. I liked her company. I remembered the day we brought her home, this tiny kitten who loved to nestle inside Kiri’s sock drawer. Around the apartment, my son would crawl like a maniac, sputtering, “Jambajambajamba.” Navin said, “Sounds like a Latin dance.” The name had been my idea, Jambavan, the king of bears, a hero of the Ramayana, the epic that, in Cambodia, we called the Reamker.

My son scratched at the door. “Can I make you dinner?”

“I love you, Kiri,” I said. I could hear him sobbing for what felt like hours, and the sobbing was like a coat of skin that I wore, that I couldn’t remove.

Navin came home to this wreckage and still he forgave me.

I wanted to tie my son’s wrist to mine with a piece of string and in this way save us both. It’s in the night, I know, that the ones we love disappear. Once, when I was ten years old, Kosal, the head of our cooperative, had given me the clothes of another girl. He told me to wear them out into the fields. Later on, when I undressed in the half-light, I saw that blood had seeped through the fabric and marked my skin, it covered my chest and my thighs. I remember the sound of water, my mother scrubbing the clothes over and over. I remember she scrubbed so hard the black dye came off in streaks. We wrote the girl’s name on a piece of bark and buried it in the earth. My mother prayed for life. I looked at the sky, at the trees, at the disturbed mound of earth and saw no possible gods.

While Navin slept beside me, I fought to contain my thoughts. In my dreams, I saw everyone and everything, but never my mother, never Sopham. The Khmer Rouge had taught us how to survive, walking alone, carrying nothing in our hands. Belongings were slid away, then family and loved ones, and then finally our loyalties and ourselves. Worthless or precious, indifferent or loved, all of our treasures had been treated the same.

Outside, I am surrounded by tiny sequins of snow. I walk downhill on University Avenue, toward Café Esperanza, where inside, the heat welcomes me. The owner is washing the laminated menus, vigilantly, as if polishing fine silverware. He grimaces out the window at a man in yellow overalls, harnessed to a complicated system of belts and clasps, floating above the traffic. The man is part acrobat, part city worker, repairing the wires. The orange light of his truck spins over us like quiet laughter.

Hiroji

In fits and starts, Hiroji tells me what has happened. It is March, not quite a year ago, nighttime, and we are sitting in his apartment.

On his way home from the BRC, Hiroji says, passing by Café Esperanza, he glimpsed an older Japanese man, moving slowly, dressed in a raincoat, with neither hat nor gloves. For a brief moment, the man looked at him. A shock of recognition stopped Hiroji where he stood. How could such a thing be possible? But there was no mistaking it.

The Japanese man was in his mid– to late sixties. His once-dark hair was now completely grey and there was a line, a scar, running from the corner of his right eye across his cheek. By the look of it, an old injury. He had the same high forehead, Hiroji said, and slight, dark eyes, but his body had gone brittle and crooked. His jacket was far too thin and the scarf he wore was ineffectual, open at the neck and hanging loose like an unknotted tie. Hiroji stared at the stranger and he knew, instantly, that it was his brother. That it could not be his brother. And yet, that it was.

“Wait,” the man said. “I know you.”

“Ichiro,” Hiroji said. Cold air caught in his lungs. “James.”

“You remember! It’s astonishing. Come have supper with me.”

“Tonight? But I have plans.” Hiroji hardly knew what he was saying. The older man seemed insubstantial, a reflection of a reflection.

“Just a coffee, then. Please. We must, after all these years.”

In the distance was an electric sign flashing sharp red digits. He could just make it out: nearly five in the afternoon, minus 22 centigrade. Hiroji felt his legs beginning to give way. “All right. Just a coffee.”

They passed through the doors of Café Esperanza. On the counter was a cake stand with a glass cover, inside of which curled a half-dozen croissants. Hiroji bought them all and, at first, the older man, ravenous, ate without speaking. He dipped the croissants one by one into his bowl of café au lait until the serving plate held only crumbs. Then he licked the tip of his index finger, pressed it to each of the remaining flakes, and ate those too.

“You eat croissants just as the Parisians do,” Hiroji said.

The man looked up, crumbs on the corners of his mouth, pleased, almost childlike, at the thought. “Maybe I was one. Maybe that’s who I was, in my other life.”

In the warm interior light, the man looked younger. He smiled in a way that seemed giddy and unfamiliar.

“Forgive me,” Hiroji said, embarrassed. “I’m very sorry, but I can’t seem to remember how we met.”

“I thought you knew me! You said my name.”

“You seemed familiar to me.”

Upset, the man began to ramble. He was soft-spoken, and Hiroji had to lean forward to catch all the words. The man described waking, suddenly, on the wet ground, his entire body convulsed with pain. Things were broken, blood was sticky on his fingers, but he couldn’t remember why, he didn’t know how this had happened. For hours, maybe days, he had walked in a dream, not comprehending how things moved in the world. Cars hurried down on him. There were too many voices speaking too many languages and he didn’t know which one belonged to him. His stomach hurt and his legs felt empty, but he didn’t know that this hollowness was hunger. He had no memories, no thoughts, no ideas, nothing. Everything had been taken away, that much he understood, but by whom and when did it happen? He walked to the middle of the Pattullo Bridge and stood there for a long time and the river kept flowing, he saw timber bobbing on the surface, log booms and log traffic, a gull standing on a bit of rope, and he had the sensation that both sides of the river were tightening like a vise. Someone had tricked him, someone had come in the night and robbed him of his possessions.

“I got up on the railing,” he told Hiroji. “I looked at the world and I thought, What now? What happens now? I wasn’t angry. I just wanted to stand there and ask my question. I wanted someone to acknowledge me.”

He stared up at the lights of the café, wild-eyed.

The man was starving. Hiroji caught the waitress’s attention and asked if there was any more food to be had. The girl was young and she gazed at them with curious eyes. She returned with a few slices of bread, an enormous hunk of cheese, and a little dish of jam. “The owner’s fridge,” she said. “But he won’t be back until after the weekend.”

The man ate intently.

“Someone found you and brought you to the hospital,” Hiroji said. He had a glimmer, now, of a patient he had long forgotten.

The man swallowed the bread that was in his mouth. He reached for a water glass that wasn’t there, then let his hand rest limply on the table. “The others called me John. Johnny Doe. That was unkind, wasn’t it? A name that shouts that no one’s home. Useless. You called me James.”

“But it was long ago, wasn’t it?”

The man smiled. “You’re asking me? That seems a problem, Doctor. Did you fall and hit your head too? It must be thirty years at least.”

“I remember that we discharged you.”

“I’ve done all the tests: PET, SPECT, fMRI, EEG. Even a polygraph, in case I was just a liar.” He picked up a piece of bread, wiped it in the remaining jam, and then added the last rectangle of cheese. “I met a woman from St. John. I met her at the theatre. She invited me to her house for a visit. I could make it there tomorrow but I have no money for the bus.”

“Where do you live?”

The older man shook his head. He stared at the waitress, who had her back to them, wiping down the machines.

“I’ll pay you back,” he said. “Believe me. I’m good for it. If I stay in St. John and find work … that’s tough at my age but I have skills, good skills. I wasn’t from Vancouver, was I? Nobody knew me, but you and I, we were friends. I sounded American, Californian, that’s what you said. Maybe San Francisco, you said. Some things stick. You were friendly to me, as if I were a whole person and not a zero. A waste.”

Hiroji didn’t know what to say. His memories of treating this man were tenuous, almost nothing.

“Wait here a moment,” he said at last as the man continued to gaze at him. “Don’t go anywhere, please.”

The man smiled down at his lap. “Oh, I’m in no hurry.”

Hiroji went across the road to a bank machine and he withdrew six hundred dollars. The cash went into a deposit envelope, which he sealed, with difficulty, and then he ran, slipping, across the pavement, between the pedestrians and their shopping bags and groceries. He fell on the ice, but through his coat he felt no pain. At the café, he gave the envelope to the man, who accepted it solemnly. Then Hiroji paid the waitress, tipping her generously. He hailed a taxi for James or Johnny or California, and he gave the driver money too. All he had was money. “Don’t worry,” the man said, holding Hiroji’s business card between his fingers. “I’ll return the favour. Wait a few days.”

“No,” Hiroji said. “It’s fine.”

The wheels of the taxi spun on the snow, then the car pulled away.

“I started walking,” Hiroji told me. All the way, he kept replaying the encounter in his head, the way this man, this patient, had counted his words out, like his brother used to do when he was drinking, as if he meant to spend the sentences wisely. He thought that his brother must be alive somewhere. He could be wandering, just wandering. He remembered, now, how the patient – Johnny, James – had been persuaded to come down from the railing of the Pattullo Bridge. He had been thirty-five years old at the time, older maybe. Someone had whacked him hard at the back of the head, so violently that his brain had crushed up against the front part of his skull. They had not been able to help him. Someone had joked, carelessly, that the two young men, Hiroji Matsui and Johnny Doe, the two Japs, looked like brothers. It had not been funny and nobody had laughed.

We were sitting at his kitchen table. Hiroji had opened a bottle of champagne and now he drank it like tap water. “I still remember the name of the doctor who made that joke,” he said, his voice shaking. “He’s dead now, but I still remember. I remember.”

He put his glass on the coffee table, went to the sideboard, and returned with a file. Inside were letters he had received from James, sent from Cambodia. The airmail paper was decades old, the sheets dry and ready to crumble, the Red Cross insignia faded. “I went there, to the border,” Hiroji said. His voice was insistent, upset. “I went to Aranyaprathet, to the refugee camps, to Sa Kaeo, I lived in Aran, I took care of a boy, Nuong. I loved Nuong like my own son but even he was lost. I came back without him. My mother asked me, ‘Where is your brother? Where is Ichiro?’ I told her, ‘We have to wait.’ ‘Wait for what?’ she asked. There was nothing I could say.”

I remembered Phnom Penh the day I walked out of it, the day the war ended. I saw the assault rifle against my father’s stomach, the way the barrel pushed him viciously against the wall.

“When my mother died,” he said, “I stopped looking. I wanted to be free of him.”

I told Hiroji, “You did everything possible.”

His hair, normally so immaculately in place, had fallen forward over his eyes. “I’m old now. I foolishly think that he … I dream about him. Do you find that strange?”

“No.”

Hiroji swayed slowly to his feet. He looked around the room as if he didn’t know where to go, to the couch or to the window, or even farther. Behind him, the blinking Christmas lights, up since December, dabbed the walls with colour, rhythmic and persistent.

I said, as gently as I could, “It wasn’t possible to save your brother. It wasn’t possible to save many people.”

For a moment my eyes watered. His expression changed, guilt-stricken now. Ashamed. I wanted so much to help him, to make him understand that there was nothing we could do. We had to let go. “I only mean that it’s difficult to find one person. It’s difficult. For you, for me, for anyone.”

“Forgive me, Janie. It’s my foolishness, nothing more.”

“No. Don’t say that.”

We fell into silence. He went to the table, took the champagne bottle, and refilled my glass. It frothed over the lip and ran between my fingers.