“A rapist.”
Jake was silent. Then he said, “Yes. Why not?”
Chemda spoke quietly: “The skulls on the Plain of Jars. The same. They were the same, Jake.”
“I know… exactly the same wounds.” Jake’s eyes focused on the dust smearing the car window. He was thinking intensely. “There is — or there must be — a connection. But I can’t work it out. Two thousand years ago, then suddenly again. The violence…” He gazed her way. “Ponlok. Jesus, Chem, are you OK?”
Her hand reached for his across the torn vinyl of the taxi’s backseat. She said to him, with softness: “Yes. I’m OK. Ah. I just…” She closed her dark eyes, then opened them once more. “Thank you for doing that, back there. We saved each other. We are the same. You lost your sister and I lost my grandmother… and God knows who else.” Her kissing lips were a warming whisper on his cheek, momentary and elusive, then she sat back. “We are the same.”
Jake yearned to believe this, yet he also wondered, helplessly, if this were really true. Some of him still resisted the equation. Were they the same? Were they definitely and entirely on the same side? Even as he was falling for her, some element inside him still didn’t or couldn’t wholly trust her. And yet he didn’t know why. He thought of the black-toothed spider witch. Her muttering and curses, her kitsch pullover with the sequined turquoise heart. Kali, the Eater of Men.
Chemda said, “Could that be why they did it, the Khmer Rouge? These, ah, horrible experiments, to actually make some kind of behavioral change? Make people more violent and cruel? Like beasts?”
“Maybe.” Jake had already been thinking on these lines. “But why would anyone volunteer for this? Like your grandmother?”
Chemda exhaled. “That’s the puzzle, isn’t it? Why volunteer for that? It simply doesn’t make any sense. But we could ask my uncle, he might know.”
“Your uncle?”
“My father’s brother. Tek Sonisoy. He works in Siem Reap. He’s a scientist. Conservation. That’s where we’re going.”
“But—”
She lifted a dark yet somehow pale hand and put a finger vertical to his lips.
“He renounced my family years ago. The wealth and the power and the politics. Resents my grandfather, dislikes my mother, hates all that political stuff. He grew up in California with me, but then he went traveling, disowned my family; ah, he backpacked. And then he ended up in Cambodia. He was a real monk for a while, now he works discreetly at Angkor. We get along. He has helped me before, kind of, when I was researching the Plain of Jars. We’ve been e-mailing, though I haven’t told him everything.”
“Why not?”
“Because I didn’t want to load this on him; he hates all this. He’s spent his life escaping the past. The recent past. But now we have no choice. I trust him… implicitly. He can shelter us. I’m sure he will.”
“But won’t your grandfather know where we are?”
“He might guess, eventually. I wonder if my grandfather even knows that Sonisoy is in the country. He certainly won’t know his precise location in Siem. Why would he?”
Jake sat back. He gazed down at his empty hands. Suddenly and acutely, he felt the lack of his cameras. Lost in the fire. Without them, what could he do, how could he handle it all? How could he mediate and understand the world? Without his cameras, what was he? Jake Thurby, photographer? Not anymore. Just a man running, with a girl.
“Chemda, we can’t stay in Siem for long. A few hours. We need to find a way to get to Thailand.”
“OK, but we can work it out at Sonisoy’s place. Ah, please. I need to… rest. Just one night?”
Just one night. The phrase was simple. But what it embodied was not: their continued flight, away from the horror and further risk and danger. But Jake also saw no other obvious escape route. And Siem Reap was on the way to Thailand. And Thailand would be safe. Wouldn’t it?
Rich, developed, comparatively sensible Thailand.
Crossing the frontier would be dicey, but they’d done it before in Laos, and once they were in Thailand he could draw breath — and then at last give vent to his despairing anguish at the trail of violence they had left behind. And yes, he understood why Chemda needed to rest. The ghastly image of the cratered man, the altered man, groping inside her thighs, trying to rape her: that still hurt, like the cut on his head still hurt, under the haphazard bandage Chemda had applied at the apartment.
It was just a flesh wound, but it stung. Jake touched his scalp, then he winced, and sweated, and gazed at the sunlight, serrated by the palm fronds.
Two hours later, as the twilight finally relieved the countryside from the torment of the sun — like a good cop taking over from a bad cop — they arrived in Siem Reap.
Jake had been here, briefly, once before. A sweet little Indochinese town, not unlike Luang Prabang, full of hotels and spas and moonlit walks and klongs and night markets, all dedicated to watering and sheltering the millions of tourists who flooded the nearby sites: the clearings of Angkor Wat, where the great temples and palaces of Jayavarman and Suryavarman moldered nobly in the rasping jungle.
But they were not here for sightseeing. They parked by the biggest night market, already busy with stalls selling obese wooden Buddhas and antique incense burners and pirated DVDs of Thai horror movies. Jake glanced at one image as they passed: it was a DVD called Demonic Beauty, and the label showed the disembodied head of a woman with her spinal cord and lungs trailing from her severed head like a grisly bridal train of viscera. He turned away.
Sonisoy was waiting for them at a doorway. He looked like Chemda, in male guise. Taller, handsome, older, with the shaved bald head of the monk he once was. He seemed intensely Khmer, but spoke flawless American-accented English.
Hands were shaken. Jake’s hands were shaking anyway. Sonisoy escorted them into a house just around the corner from the night market, a house of wood and sweet smells of incense and paper Chinese lanterns, with photos of the Temple of Ta Prohm on the wall.
He served them red Khmer tea as he listened to Chemda tell their story, in one gushing monologue. His face was sober and his head was shaved and his demeanor was monastic. He nodded.
Then he handed out some Khmer sweetmeats: nom krob khnor, a translucent blob of gelatin with a yellow mung bean in the middle, like a sweetened little embryo in a placenta. Jake wanted to be sick. He wanted to be at home in England. He could see the blank milky eyes of the smoke babies, the horrible pulsing scar of the janitor; he could see blood and death, the blank eyes of his sister and the disembodied smile of his mother and…
He snapped out of it. Turned the wheel of his mind. He had gone off-road, for a moment, he had veered into the bush, where the minefields lurked, the UXO of the past.
The room was quiet. Chemda had finished her story. Sonisoy put down his cup of red tea and, with the nocturnal murmur of Siem Reap just audible beyond the shutters, said:
“Of course, I understand, I believe I have some more information that may piece it all together.”
“What?” said Chemda. “How?”
“I think…” Sonisoy sighed. “I believe, from what you have told me, that I know who else was a victim of these experiments. Another member of the family. Close, Chemda. Very close.”