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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.
    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, tomorrowI 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