Chorn looks up, an embarrassed half-smile on his lips. “They are making an archive in which everything is accounted for, and once a file is there, it is eternal. This is Angkar’s memory. We are all writing our histories for Angkar.”

Chorn pauses and in the gap, James says, “What happened to your sister?”

He doesn’t answer. Instead he says, “Listen.”

The change happens so fast, James doesn’t quite trust his eyes, Chorn’s expressions come and go as quickly as a change in light. Chorn looks past him and James thinks that, finally, after all these months, he is about to be accused. Of what crime? It hardly matters. All the sentences are the same.

“This woman, Sorya. She had a child.”

Seconds go by but the words don’t mean anything. It’s a game, James thinks. It’s yet another one of his sadistic games. They used to do this when they were young, tell each other stories. Once he ran home and told his mother that Hiroji had been hit by a car. He had wanted to test her, and he remembers now the strange satisfaction he took from the agony of her cries.

Chorn says, “Maybe we’re at the end now. There are purges everywhere. One hundred people, five hundred people. Soon we won’t be alone, even here. The Centre is moving, you see. Angkar is running from itself, but it is meeting itself in every corner. Meeting all its enemies. Do you understand what I’m telling you? I have children too. I have children I want to save. I tried to find a name. Someone told me Dararith. I couldn’t ask more without attracting attention. But they told me Sorya named the boy Dararith.”

The air in the room is stagnant, like a pool of black water into which they are both sinking. It’s Kwan who finds the words, who asks the next question. It isn’t James, James is falling down.

“Did you keep her here? Was Sorya at this prison?”

“No,” the man says.

“Was she here?”

Kwan gets up from the corner. He comes so near to them, James can hear him breathing, this exhalation in his head. Chorn is looking straight at him, but Chorn’s face is closed, muting all the clues. Only his hands give him away, their immobility, their held breath. His hands are a lie. Was it possible that all this time his hands were a lie?

“You’re my friend,” Chorn tells him. “Why can’t you understand? I’m giving you this information because you are my friend.”

“Why did they kill her?”

Chorn shakes his head, visibly upset. “I don’t know. Maybe she didn’t die. Don’t talk about this. Lower your voice.”

But then he reaches into his pocket and he takes out Sorya’s letters, five of them, creased and beginning to tear. He sets them on the floor and, for the first time, looks straight into James’s eyes.

“Why are you doing this?” James says. He is nauseated and the man is breaking apart in his vision.

“Let her go. The past is done.”

The man stands up and dust comes off him, it sticks to the air. James wonders why he doesn’t stand up, push Chorn backwards, crack the weight of his skull against the cement wall, spill this man’s life onto the once-elegant tiles, into the black water, go to be tortured and executed for a crime he can truly understand. His thoughts are viscous and slow. He could stand up now and find some strength, take this because there is nothing left to take. So what if Angkar is everywhere, he could kill this one man and be done with it here, he could choke his own weakness.

The door scrapes closed. James opens his eyes.

A shadow comes and sits in front of him and James can’t help himself, his head drops forward against his brother’s chest. He can feel the bones there, his brother is skinny, still a boy, but he is stronger and more complete than James will ever be. He cannot bring himself to touch the letters, they sit on the tiled floor too lightly. The ox-bell has stopped ringing and now a voice is speaking urgently. Prodding the animal forward. Hours pass. Days fall down, maybe it is a month that he sits like this, or just a few days, eating and sleeping and wasting away, remembering everything. Her watchful face, her scent, her hands pushing him back. No matter what the voice says, the animal won’t move. There is water everywhere, he cries until all the rest comes out, all of it spills onto his ragged shirt, onto the tiled floor, and seeps into the cracks that lead out of the store room. There is no wind in this room, no oxygen. Where is emptiness? No matter where he goes, he can’t find emptiness.

“Do you believe him?” Kwan asks.

James, wherever he is, trickling across the ground, spreading down to the lowest places, says no.

“No,” Kwan says. “Okay, James. Okay. Let go.”

“I can’t,

I can’t.

I can hear her.”

“Don’t listen.”

“I promised to bring her to the sea.”

“Let go, brother.”

“I promised her.”

“Let go.”

The last letter comes to him much later. He is standing at the Laos — Cambodia border and it is 1981, two years since the Khmer Rouge was defeated. In all that time, James, now known as Kwan — a mute, a smuggler, and a solitary man — has heard the most remarkable stories: the people who have been recovered, the strange ways in which children were protected, the objects returned to their owner’s hands. He hears them at each and every encounter, when he trades the sugar and salt he has carried on his back from Thailand. The stories are repeated so often, they change into fairy tales of the most devastating kind.

In 1980, he went back to their apartment on Monivong Boulevard. There was a family living there, one of those new Cambodian families consisting of orphans: a man and woman with someone else’s children, a friend turned uncle, a stray niece. They had traded everything of value in the apartment but they had held on to the photographs, without the frames, which they kept together in a blue plastic bag. Kwan gave them one precious U.S. dollar and came away with photos of Sorya and Dararith, and of James. The stray niece came running after him and asked if she could keep the plastic bag, so now the photos stay in his shirt pocket, held to the fabric with a paper clip.

Chorn was right. This is the city of before. Five-year-olds fending for themselves, and the Khmer Rouge, arrogant, shit-faced, still prideful in their stronghold in the north, still holding their seat at the United Nations and hobnobbing with the Western elite, conspiring to take it back. Phnom Penh is no longer the agitated city he remembers, no, the dial has ticked back and stripped the place of people and goods, it is a city now where the kids run naked, where people walk around with photographs of missing family, where, by accident, you step into a pile of bones, rinse your foot off, and then move on, where men and women dress in hothouse colours, clashing motifs, to push back the memory of black clothes and black hearts. Those barbarians had sawed off the hands of the ancient Buddhas and thrown them into the water, now the children fish them up and stack them on the riverside and try to sell them to the aid workers or the off-duty Vietnamese. Other, more terrible losses, come up from the mud.

He went to Kampot, riding on the back of a moped driven by a ten-year-old who had stolen it from who knows where. This ten-year-old is so wizened, he doesn’t smile or laugh or anything. He just names, matter-of-factly, the price, U.S. dollars or Thai baht, no other currency accepted. When the boy takes the cash in his bony fingers, he chews his lip and studies the bills, already assessing the things he has to buy. What a bombed-out ruin Kampot is now, buildings made unstable by the shelling, buildings that look like someone kicked them in the kneecaps, hard. In his youth, Kwan drove a lorry so he knows these roads well, but still it’s a shock to see the devastation and how the sea just keeps rolling in, unstoppable.