The Reckoning

smoke of breakfast fires in invisible villages. Then, just as the sun broke the horizon, a faraway temple bell would ring once, just once. Each dawn broke that way, with the bell’s single gong. The early morning wanderers would fade off and she would return to make her breakfast.

On a whim one morning, Molly lugged along her tripod and snapped a shot of the villagers in the dim light. She didn’t expect much, and when she downloaded the camera into her wallet at the end of the day, there was next to nothing. The camera had captured the fields and haze, though none of the wanderers.

But a few days later, in scrolling through the JPEG files, she discovered that her morning shot was populated. The wanderers had been buried in the pixels somehow, and the camera was finally letting them rise to the surface. Not only that, every time she turned the display on again, the image changed. Like spirits, the villagers came and went. There might be five people when she turned the device off, and ten or dozens when she turned it on again.

The photo became something of a freak show, attracting a small audience of soldiers who would drop by to see if the digital figures had moved around or vanished back into the mist. Duncan joked that her camera was possessed.

A navy explosives specialist diagnosed the ghosts as faulty software. Digital noise, he called it. In getting compressed and decompressed, the image apparently altered itself, as if peeling away layers of reality.

One morning she noticed one of the hooded figures trailing her in the muggy gloom. She stopped. He stopped. “Hello?” she said, approaching him.

It was old Samnang, wearing a blue-and-white kroma like a shawl, and under that a headset for his tape recorder. All but buried in the mist, his prosthesis had a blue sandal glued to the pink foot.

“Ah, bonjour, Molly,” he said. Maw-lee. His accent, so beautiful.

“Samnang, what a surprise,” she said without surprise. It was so clear. “Did the captain tell you to follow me?”

“The captain? Not at all.”

“This was your idea,” she said.

Samnang sniffed at the air. “The hour is so fresh, don’t you agree?”

She could have been rude and insisted on her privacy, but she liked Samnang. He was as honest as a monk, and the American recovery teams hired him year after year to run their crews. He jokingly compared himself to a chicken scratching in the dirt for a living. She had never heard him speak about his past. He never mentioned the loss of his leg, never said a word about any family. Following Duncan’s example, she made a point of calling him by his full name, not Sam like the others did.

Finally she said, “So what are you listening to?”

During the wet season, when excavation was pointless, Samnang used his U.S. dollars to go around the countryside collecting folk songs. Before the water washes them away.

He laid the kroma along his neck and handed Molly his headset. He pressed the button. Expecting folk music, she was amazed to hear Margo Timmins singing on The Trinity Sessions. “The Cowboy Junkies?” she said.

He smiled sheepishly. “An old vice of mine.”

After that there was no way she could refuse his company. They started walking together.

“Duncan told me about your photograph of the morning people,” Samnang said. “I thought to see them for myself.”

It occurred to her that he had come to protect her. Did he fear they might resent her presence? But they seemed unaware of her. For that matter, they seemed unaware of one another.

“They’re harmless,” she said. “They never look at me. They never come close.”

“Are there any out there now?”

She counted a woman with two children in the fog, and a man standing in place, looking off. “Just three,” she told him.

“But some mornings, more?”

“Many more. I wonder if they’re studying the damage. You know, figuring out how to repair the paddy walls before the rains come.”

“What are they doing now?”

She glanced at Samnang and his black eyes glistened inside the lips of his shawl. He was watching her face, not even trying to look for them. Was he testing her, or were his eyes too old? She turned her head. Several more had appeared a hundred yards to the side, motionless or nearly so. One drifted along some hidden dike path. “Nothing,” she told him. “They’re just standing out there, like they’re waiting for a train or something.”

Samnang nodded his head slowly, intent on her face.

“My other thought was that they might be foraging,” she said.

“ ‘Foraging,’ ” he repeated.

“Like a cargo cult or something. Salvaging the plane’s wire and metal. Getting a little treasure before the day starts and the Americans show up. This is their backyard, after all.”

“Have you seen them taking anything? Reaching into the ground? Digging?”

“Never. They never do anything. They don’t even talk to each other.”

He had risen early for her. He could still be sleeping. She felt responsible. “You shouldn’t worry about me,” she said. “I can take care of myself.”

“The villagers are quite frightened by them,” Samnang said.

She frowned. These were the villagers. “I don’t understand.”

“They complain to the government. They want them gone.”

She was trying to keep up with him. “So these people come from another region,” she tried. “They’re poaching the metal.”

“No, it’s not that.”

“Then what?”

“It is a local matter.”

What a strange battle. A trespass each morning before dawn, and with babies and children, too. But never a confrontation.

“You said the villagers complained. Why don’t the soldiers make them leave then?” she asked. The Cambodian government had posted a dozen troops to guard—or contain—the American forensics expedition. They did little except lie in hammocks, or squat above the dig and gossip in the sun.

“They are just as brave as the villagers at this hour,” Samnang said. “No one comes, except you.”

“And you,” she said.

He smiled. “Anyway, it wouldn’t help. You find these morning people all through the country.”

That was the second time he had said it that way. “Morning people?”

“Now you have made me one, too,” he joked, growing even more elliptical. She decided to drop it. A local matter.

Just then the sun cracked the night. The haze lit like fire. In the sudden flare of color, it was hard to see. The figures began to dissipate. That distant bell rang across the fields. Its single note vibrated in the air.

Molly felt the heat against her face. “I have to see that bell someday,” she said.

Next morning, he was waiting for her again. It was clear. Since she was going to persist in these morning walks, he would accompany her. Their walks became for her the high point of every day.

When Kleat heard about her new friend, he advised her to dump Samnang. “Ditch him,” he said. “The old man’s KR. Or was.”

KR was a universal phrase, part of every language spoken in Cambodia. Khmer Rouge, a French label, the Red Khmers, red for Communist, red for blood. “That’s crazy,” she said. “He was a professor at the university. How could he be KR? They killed people like him.”

“Open your eyes. You haven’t seen him with the men? He never raises his voice, and he’s a cripple. But they always do what he tells them. One word and it’s done.”

“That’s how it’s supposed to work, Kleat.”

“But they’re afraid of him.”