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  • The Draughtsman’s Snow Globe
  • Desmond Kon (bio)

“So, we’re all here to try to stop me from dying tomorrow.”

The claim seemed determined. Lauren Kunthea Moul was talking to Sopheap, her therapist, who was also her former lover. It wasn’t normal or proper for such an arrangement to take place, but Lauren wouldn’t have talked otherwise. She didn’t believe in cognitive therapy, much less narrative. Or anything that required her to relax into a trancelike state in which she felt more helpless and unprotected than she already did. Sopheap made Lauren feel that she could go inside her own head without becoming imprisoned within its walls forever.

The Buddhist monk had travelled far to get here, from the province of Preah Vihear. He spent his first fifty years in Lhasa, trained in Tibetan Buddhism, not Theraväda. The priest had a thick Midlands accent, wore a clerical collar, so he could have been anything from Anglican to Roman Catholic. Lauren couldn’t tell. Maybe Baptist or Episcopalian. She also thought he had a nice smile, like a grandfather’s. He peppered his speech with Welsh words, even a bit of Cornish, not randomly but for variation. Two women and two holy men seated, neatly around a square table, large tablecloth over it. They looked like they were about to play a game of beer pong or bridge, Lauren thought to herself, choking back a laugh.

“I don’t have to be under hypnosis to tell you I’ve killed children. And both my parents, too, when I emptied rounds into their chests.”

“Why did you do it?” The priest looked at her calmly.

“Because it was a command,” Lauren replied matter-of-factly.

“How did you feel about having to do that?”

“I was eleven. I didn’t know right from wrong.”

“How did it make you feel, Lauren?” the priest asked again. His voice was deep, sombre but soothing.

“I just did it. It was all we could do. Be trained to use a parang or sickle, and once we got big enough, to carry a gun as well. And to follow orders. There wasn’t the culture of questioning as a good thing, the way you’re running this conversation, this session, whatever you think this is. All this talk isn’t going to do any good, old man. I’ve made up my mind, so give me whatever blessing you need to. I’ll pay you, you can call it an early night, [End Page 99] even sleep in the extra room if you want to, and be on your way tomorrow morning.”

“So, you’ve decided,” the monk interjected. He had a conch shell in front of him, beautifully inlaid with mother-of-pearl. There was vermilion powder in it, which was very rare. He placed his forefinger in the red powder, dotted the back of his left hand with it. “And nothing will change your mind?”

“Yes,” Lauren said, a peremptory dart of her eyes in his direction. “Yes, I’ve decided.”

The world didn’t seem like something she could hold on to anymore. Its history had become too dark, too bloody. Its unwashed hands were tainted with the violence of the past, unreeling more unwanted thoughts, another cinema of another day, a day just as reprehensible—and dispensable—as the rest. Everyone in the streets seemed to be watching all of it, and everyone else. As if watching and waiting for the next bout of terror, the theatre of it, to exact itself on them, simply watching and waiting. The days no more that single slate she woke up to, its fine grain like the details that soon followed, from morning through noon, midday lethargy, and then, with an almost operatic finality, ten o’clock supper followed by quietly thinking herself to sleep.

Sopheap still kept a room in the house, though she had her own place two streets away. She would swing by once a month to check in on Lauren. Tonight, Sopheap chose a Javanese coffee, made a cup for Lauren, too, a teaspoon of cocoa and condensed milk to remind Lauren of childhood, its smallness...

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