*
I cradled him, his head in the nook of my arm, the long chain on my wrists encircling his torso so that it must have appeared I was trying to bind him to me. Had such a thing been possible, I would’ve done just that—I would’ve bound your father’s breath to mine, given it the force of my own life. But he was beyond reach, the wounds accumulating on his arms and legs in addition to the gashes and sores covering his entire body, the sites the needle had punctured now swelling like blisters, the blood clotting beneath the bruised skin, leaking crimson, caking around him on the floor. What self or consciousness remained was undetectable, trapped inside the frozen mirrors of his eyes.
They’d come several times already to draw blood. I’d stopped counting. The same two young “doctors” would come, illiterate adolescents, fumbling over the grimy page of illustrations they’d brought along each visit to guide them through the procedure. I was certain, having seen how such things were decided, they’d been chosen for “medical” training precisely because of their youth and ignorance, which, according to revolutionary logic, made them fierce, unafraid to “experiment.” When they came for the first blood collection, your father had still not recovered from the previous ordeal; the streaks of red coating his earlobes had yet to peel away completely. His effort to speak to me, moreover, had drained him of every ounce of physical strength so that he lay there on the floor as if waiting for them, as if complying with the cruelty, the demands of some beast-like appetite. This time there was no pretense of taking him out for interrogation. The bloodletting would be performed there in the room, in front of the other prisoners, as the chief interrogator had instructed. The two doctors—children really—started off arguing in hushed voices over which arm to try first, the difference between a vein and an artery, who should hold down the prisoner in case he struggled, and who should handle the needle. I’ve only practiced on a banana stalk, the younger of the two said, looking uncertain and scared, and the older tried to rationalize, Well, that’s why they sent us. Doesn’t matter if we do it right. We just need to make sure we get some blood . . . Despite their terrifying incompetence, their own panic and fear, they’d obtained what was needed, and more important, they had conducted their first pisaot manuh—“human experiment.”
Now I no longer cared what they’d do to me. I gathered your father tighter in my arms, as if he were the broken pieces of myself, his bruises my battered faith, his blood my own irreversible bleeding. Even if I lived to eternity, I knew I would never recover from these wounds we shared.
I retrieved the tiny blade from its hiding place inside the hem of my shirt. I’d kept its existence concealed from your father, thinking it was meant for me, my own termination. There was no need to involve him, I’d decided. If I were to take my own life, it would be just my crime alone. I’d thought and rethought, until I could think no more, and there had never once been a doubt in my mind, or my heart, that between the two of us your father should be the one to live. But now this moment had arrived, and I realized our last conversation was not a reinstatement of our pact, an entreaty for me to hold to my promise, but was your father’s farewell. There was a choice, and he’d chosen his executioner. All that remained was that I must exercise my own terrible bounded choice.
I had at my disposal this blade, a craftsman’s tool no bigger than a plectrum. As your father lay still in my arms, I searched his paralyzed gaze again for any movement, any shimmer or sign, anything other than this look of transfixed agony. I don’t want to end that way, he’d said of such entrapment. I pressed my ear to his mouth and tried to detect breathing—the cycle of exhalation and inhalation that might’ve suggested he was struggling to resurface. When I touched his wrists or the swollen veins on his arms I could not be sure if what I felt was a pulse or the throbbing of injured nerves. His body seemed to be sinking, collapsing on itself—his cheeks, the hollow at the base of his throat, the basin of his chest. I was witnessing the slow concaving of a life beneath the weight of unimaginable brutality, one layer of suffering amassed upon another.
With my left arm, I cradled your father as if he were an instrument, the most sacred of all, and with the blade in hand, the plectrum held firm—like the sharpened tip of a lute player’s bow—I swept my right arm and, in a single clean stroke, played the only note left to play.
A sob. A howl. An animal’s cry escaped my throat. I pulled him closer to me, rocking us both, burying my face in the pool of our spilled humanity.
When the guards heard Tun’s anguished cry, they burst into the room, revealing a reddish full moon at twilight in the open doorway. For his unforgivable transgression, robbing the Organization of its authority to determine the time and manner of a man’s death, he was punished even more savagely than before. At the height of his agony, Tun misread the changing atmosphere, the prolonged gunfire, the lapses in guard surveillance, the urgent hushed exchanges. Just weeks after Sokhon’s death, Democratic Kampuchea collapsed against the invading forces from Vietnam, revealing in its retreat a ravaged land and people.