Dogs at the Perimeter (4 page)

“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