The Disappeared by Kim Echlin Page A

lover here? And why would he lose someone as pretty as you?
    I took a drink and said, What are you doing so far from home?
    Forensics.
    I looked at him.
    Counting.
    Counting?
    They are trying to figure out how many.
    Will Maracle opened massacre sites, released the bones. We talked all afternoon. I asked him what Maracle meant and he didn’t know. He asked me what Greves meant and I told him it was a whaler’s word, the refuse of tallow. I told him about looking for you in all the bars of the city. We talked about French and English and how he got started digging Indian burial grounds, trained with a man named Clyde Snow in Argentina and ended here. I asked him how he could bear his work and he said, Truth is as old as God. He shrugged and said, Someone else said that, not me.
    I answered, And will endure as long as He, A Co-Eternity.
    Will laughed.
    It must be hard work, I said.
    It is not shards of pottery. I like the intuition it takes to get bones together, to make sense of the scene. It is human work. Anyway, I’m used to it.
    His eyes drifted away and he said, Sometimes I have this dream about severed legs in bed with me. Then he looked back and said, You are a good listener.
    Sometimes. Where are you working now?
    I’m fucking the dog. Things stop and start. There’s no political will. The leaders don’t want to know. But I like it here.
    An elephant swayed up the street. Thin holiday traffic separated around it. I told him I got up at dawn to watch a Mountain and Sand ceremony, five piles of sand in the temple courtyard, the five footsteps of the Buddha, and the monks planted rice sticks decorated with colored paper in the piles and lit incense sticks and sprinkled the sand mountains with scented water.
    Will said, I have heard you speaking Khmer. You are lucky. You know what is going on.
    We fell silent, listened to each other’s breath.
    Will said, Want to go see the Buddha get bathed?
    What’s that?
    He took my hand and pulled me off the bar stool, said, Too depressing sitting here alone on New Year’s. Let’s go. I’m meeting some people.
    We walked to a small neighborhood temple near a massage room called Seeing Hands, a workplace for landmine victims. An old woman who had lost a leg at the knee waited on a wooden chair beside a young woman with a face that shocked me. She had no eyes and no nose. The center of her face was a rectangle of shiny skin graft. The skin on her forehead, abovethe graft, was moist and young. A hole near the center of the graft had been constructed as a nostril. Below the graft her lips were sensual and full and she had a delicate chin and a beautiful neck.
    Will touched her hand, said, Sineth, I brought along a friend, Anne Greves. She speaks Khmer.
    She smiled with those full round lips and reached her hand gracefully toward me. In English she said, Hello. This my friend Bopha. We go now?
    She stood and took Will’s arm and walked beside him down the three steps. In the courtyard of the temple a few monks and some elders and a scatter of people. People sprinkled consecrated water on the elders and monks. Sineth explained they were asking forgiveness for any mistakes they had made and promising to make the elders happy in the coming year. I translated for Will, then Bopha said where she came from in the north at New Year’s there was a coconut dance for the young people. Suddenly a middle-aged man poured a jug of water on a man beside him and everyone laughed and splashed water at each other and the monks withdrew. Sineth smiled at the sounds and whispered, When I was young, this ceremony was much bigger, everyone got wet. I used to go with my sister and mother and father and brothers.
    Later, walking on the quay, I asked Will, What happened to Sineth?
    He said, A pan of acid. Jealous boyfriend. Crazy fuck. In another world I would ask a girl with lips like that to dance with me.
    I said, Why not? Why not fall in love with her lips?
    I wish it were so simple.
    We watched