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away.
    The ground was rubble, strange twisted shapes. If you touched them, pieces came off in your hands. Once, he and Ani had come across a coconut plantation that no longer bore fruit, and he asked her now if she remembered where it stood. The trees, thin and silvery, had been sawed off at the top so that nothing grew from the crown. A pale forest with no canopy, hundreds of slender lines, as if they had been surprised and then somehow ambushed.
    “Near to the ghost road,” she said. “But nobody goes there at night.”
    Matthew had heard rumours about this place, Mile 8, the prisoner-of-war camps. There, prisoners were cursed to walk forever. They said only,
jalan jalan
, carrying other soldiers on their backs. Men lay in the mud and begged for food, but they disappeared when you reached out to help them. Ani said that if you walked there, you might cross the line unknowingly and find yourself unable to return to the place of the living.
    “Do you think it hurts?”
    “No,” she said. “It happens too fast.” Her eyes were closed, and when she spoke again, her voice was clear, as if bracing itself. “I think people don’t realize they’re dying, they feel no pain. It comes too quickly, when their thoughts are turned the other way.”
    He moved his fingers along the ground, tracing a series of lines in the dirt. Sometimes his thoughts felt like a moving stream, a flickering light. He missed his shoes. He remembered the feel of them, how they rubbed against his heels, reminding him all the time of their presence. He and Ani were sitting up on the edge of the crater now, in the shade of candlenut trees. Ani placed her hands one over the other, making the shadow of a swan on the ground. She set the swan down on his knee. When it touched his skin, the hands flew apart, the illusion vanished. “Don’t be afraid,” she said, so softly that the words seemed a part of his own thoughts. “We’ll always take care of each other, no matter where we go.”
    She laid her head against his shoulder, and he closed his eyes for a time.
    Ani had told Matthew how, three days after her father disappeared, she had walked the Leila Road to Mile 8. It was early in the morning, still dark; only the rubber tappers had started the day. The night before, rumours of mass killings had spread to the huts. She had followed the rumours there, to the airfield, where she saw pieces of clothing, stained, and then she recognized her father’s body. Bullets had opened his chest. She stood a few feet away, unable to move closer, to touch him. The nightjars and the cicadas crowded her ears with their sound. She cried without hearing herself; for how long, she didn’t know. By the time she looked up, the sky had grown pale. She had to leave. The road that she walked on led past the prisoner-of-war camps. Someone in the dark reached through the fence, took hold of her hand.
Tolong
, he said.
Help me.
He pressed money into her palm, a few words in broken Malay, a name. He wanted her to take a message to someone who lived on the hillside. She could smell him, the prisoner, blood and sweat and urine.
    Ani grasped the money in her hand and turned, running, her bare feet sinking into the mud. She expected to hear a voice, a gunshot, but nothing followed after her. The road curved down along the hill, and, in the dawn light, the sea was a burning blue. It reminded her of the chrome on a car she had seen once. Before. Long ago. When cars had first appeared in Sandakan, rolling off the steamers.
    She saw the mangrove trees, vividly green, curving away from the shore. Her thoughts spun loose. There was no way for her to bury her father. Before, a gravestone would be made and there would be ceremonies, the same as they had carried out for her mother, the doors of the house kept open for three nights to mark the passing of her mother’s soul into the land of the dead. In the dark, she and her father had stayed awake, naming the birds by their sounds, each