At the main entrance of the open-air pavilion along the promenade in front of the Royal Palace, a little boy in a Spider-Man outfit cups in his hands a bamboo netting with a sparrow inside. He looks about five or six, but his wispy hair and wispier silhouette make him appear younger, fragile. His mother has bought the captured bird for him from one of the vendors. They climb the short stairway into the pavilion, the boy pressing the tiny captive to his chest, his mother a step or two behind, her palms splayed to catch him should he fall. The boy hesitates, gasping, when he spots Teera standing in one corner, her back lit by the late-afternoon sun so that she must appear to him as only a dark outline, a malignant spirit perhaps waiting to claim him.
Teera moves out of the corner to where he can see her clearly. It’s obvious the little boy is sick, has been sick for some time, his eyes sunken, his entire complexion anemic, ghostly, reminding Teera of her aunt, the way Amara looked those last couple of months before her death, as if the most vital part of her had already left and what remained was just a translucent shell. The irony of his superhero ensemble, the mask off and strapped around his neck like a ruined second face, does not escape Teera. The masquerade is over, it seems to say.
The boy’s mother, a delicate beauty with long black hair and porcelain-white skin, bears all the accoutrements of the country’s new elite—expensive clothes and shoes, a Louis Vuitton satchel with gold trimmings, a great deal of jewelry on her slight frame, and most notably, armed bodyguards, one waiting outside the pavilion, another guarding the shiny silver Mercedes SUV parked on the street, with the engine running.
As they walk past, others move out of the way and keep a deferential distance, noting the wealth, the pistols glinting from the bodyguards’ midriffs, their impassive faces behind the dark sunglasses. The young mother asks her son if he’s ready, the little boy nods, and she carefully unties a knot on the bamboo netting still pressed to his chest. Then, like a magician opening his palms, the boy releases the sparrow into the air. The tiny bird flits up and down and circles for some seconds, confused by all the open space, its regained freedom, before it darts straight ahead and disappears into the glimmering expanse of the Tonle Sap River.
“Did you pray to the spirits and guardians?” the mother asks, her attention fully on her son as if she notices no one else, cares for nothing else.
The little boy nods.
“And what did you say?”
“I . . . asked . . . them . . . to take . . . my sickness away.” Each word seems a monumental effort for the boy, a journey of labored breaths. “So that . . . Father said . . . you will laugh again.”
The young mother looks at her son, her face quivering, and she appears to Teera at once vulnerable and steeled. “No,” she says to him after a moment, the pools in her eyes receding, returning to the source of grief inside her, “so that you will laugh again. Like this!”
She makes as if to tickle him but stops midgesture when he begins to heave, his chest rising and falling, flimsy as a balloon with insufficient air.
The bodyguard waiting outside the pavilion hurries in, lifts the boy into his arms, gently but firmly, and carries him toward the Mercedes, as the other bodyguard rushes into the driver’s seat. The mother trails a few steps behind, looking straight ahead, refusing to meet anyone’s gaze, to see her son reflected in another’s eyes.
Once she’s inside, the doors shut and locked, the driver revs up the engine and forces the Mercedes through the throngs of pedestrians and vehicles that have amassed to enjoy the cool hours of late afternoon along Sisowath Quay. In no time at all they are gone, their car having turned the corner at the end of the block.
But the sound of the boy’s breath stays with Teera, circling her eardrums, like the exhalation inside the spiraled chambers of a seashell, muffled but persistent, as if part of some greater susurrus. Again, Teera remembers her aunt, the last evening of Amara’s life, the breath that grew more faint with each passing hour, as if inside the still, almost lifeless body under the white sheets, Amara was taking an unhurried stroll, saying her silent farewells to Teera, to the doctors and nurses, to the walls and windows, the hospital bed, the morphine drip, thanking everyone, always grateful and ever gracious.
A month or so before her death, when she was still fully coherent, not wanting the memories of her death to overwhelm their home, the life they’d shared, Amara had made Teera promise to let her die at the hospital, where she knew many staff members from having taken her clients—refugees and immigrants who did not speak enough English—for various medical visits over the years. She’d firmly refused even the offer of a hospice close to home, where it would be quieter, more peaceful. There’s nothing quieter or more peaceful than death, she’d said good-naturedly, and I’ll go there soon enough. The evening that was to be her last, Amara summoned enough strength through her haze of pain to utter these simple words—Hospital. Take me.
Teera quietly left Amara’s bedside and walked to the living room, a fist in her mouth to block the howl threatening to escape her throat. She recollected herself, sucking back the tears that’d come through her nostrils, and called for an ambulance. She’d been expecting this moment, and yet when it came, it rattled her and she pushed against it, anguishing. No, not now, not tonight . . .
By the time they reached Hennepin County Medical Center, Amara had already lost consciousness. The doctor explained Teera’s choices. While she knew Amara would’ve wanted the least struggle, Teera chose life support, to which the doctor said calmly, You understand that this will only prolong her death. She shook her head, unable to explain that long ago, as a child, she had learned death was inevitable—sooner or later everyone was going to die—but if she could live just a bit longer, then it was worth all the fight.
She didn’t have the peace of mind to explain this to the doctor, so she kept shaking her head, until he complied with her wish. Less than an hour after they’d hooked her up, Amara took her last breath, so long and slow it sounded like a sigh, a yawn before falling into the dark void of sleep, into that silent, unobserved journey.
Death, Teera realizes now, was only a second’s moment, its certainty registered on the machine with a bleep. Life is the prolonged voyage, the unhurried return to the beginning.