Red Dot Irreal (10 page)

And still Troy could not stop coughing, each forced exhalation sounding more like a high squeaky bark, caught by a rush of nausea as the world expanded and loomed all around him, rushing away in all directions. The bed was huge now, no longer queen size but a vast platform, and Sheila, now the immensity of a giant, finally came awake and shrieked.

“A rat!” she cried, leaping off the bed. “A fucking big rat, Troy!” She ran into the bathroom and slammed the door.

Troy had stopped coughing, but he felt very strange. His body was smaller, but slinkier, stretched. He could smell Sheila’s fear in the air, like sour tar. His small heart pounded, and he involuntarily sprayed urine onto the sheets.

Sheila emerged from the bathroom, holding a pipe wrench in both hands, a leftover from when the contractors had renovated his condo earlier in the year. She lunged forward and swung the wrench, clipping Troy on his right haunch. He barked in pain and leapt off the bed. Sheila chased him around the room, yelling, “Troy! Troy! Where the fuck are you? Help me kill this thing!” From his vantage, all the furniture stretched up like skyscrapers, and he frantically searched on all fours for a nook or a hidden corner in which he could hide. He raced under the bed and curled into a ball. Sheila swiped at him for several minutes with the pipe wrench, then withdrew. Troy heard movement and the rustling of clothes, and then saw Sheila’s feet hurry out the bedroom door, which closed quickly behind her.

Troy breathed deeply, trying to calm down his adrenaline-spiked heart. His right hip ached where she’d hit him with the wrench, and he licked at the fur there; this made him feel only slightly better. Exhausted and hurt, he soon fell asleep.

And woke suddenly as he was being lifted up by two strong dark hands. He looked up into the calm eyes and smiling face of Sudra. Next to him, the cave witch Nyoman, smaller out of her element, but still freaky scary. No no no, it’s not fair, why is this happening to me, what did I ever do? Troy despaired in that moment, his cries coming out as barely audible squeaks. Sudra’s hands were smooth and soft, comfortable even, and he placed Troy gently inside a pet carrier, and closed the barred door with a click.

“Ah, Mr Troy,” Sudra said, looking inside, a face you could trust completely. “I am very sorry had to come to this, yeah? But no worry, we take care of you, keep you safe. Make sure you enough water and food. All the coffee berries you can eat.”

Paper Cow

X had never considered the possibility that his origami constructions might spring to life. Through all his years of paper-folding, his early fascination with the Asian craft blooming into obsession, the endless competitions, the early arthritis, the impassable barrier between his talent and his imagination, through all of this his miniature creatures remained inert, frozen in the act of running, or slithering, or pecking. But tonight, his most recent fauna, birthed from printer bond, stirred.

“We know what you have done,” said the paper cow, its hide revealing the left eye and nostril of a 13-year-old boy from Kuala Lumpur. The corner of the boy's eye was raised, suggesting a big smile. His skin was dark and rough, as if he had spent every waking moment in the scorching Malaysian sun.

“We know,” said the paper crane, its creases half-obscuring the face of a seven-year-old girl from Semarang. Though X could not see her face, he knew it in his mind, could remember the gap made by the missing front teeth as she had grinned up at him, taking his hand and trusting him as if her own kin.

“We know,” said the lumbering paper gorilla, made from the obituary notice of two ten-year-old twin boys from Penang. Their screams, too, had been identical.

More and more of the dead-tree atrocities, the collected evidence of X's crimes, printed from internet news stories and charity sites and then shaped into bats and elephants and frogs and tigers and pandas and a hundred other animals, rustled toward X, slow as the undead, each whispering, “We know.” An army of his perversities, his many sins, each folded animal a reminder of a life held, touched, taken.

“Stop,” X said. “I am sorry. Please stop.”

“We cannot stop,” said the paper cow, commander of this zoological army, edging ever closer to its creator. “You have made us so very thin and so very sharp.”

And then all of the origami animals moved as one.

Taxi Ride

The taxi driver was made of stone. Or so it seemed, for as he ferried Jules from his housing estate in Aljunied toward his morning destination, the man spoke not a word, not even an acknowledgment of where they were going, not even a grunt to show that he was alive. Perfectly still he sat, nigh immobile, with only the turning of the steering wheel to preclude any observation that he was, in fact, a statue rather than a human being.

Jules appreciated the silence. The
modus operandi
of the majority of Singaporean taxi drivers, at least in his experience, was boisterous loquaciousness, the activity of eager sponges willing to chat on almost any subject imaginable. The government, the road taxes, the building of the new casino (euphemistically labeled the Integrated Resort), their upbringing, their schooling (especially once they sussed out that Jules was a teacher), the water fights with Malaysia, the charismatic and calm new president of the United States (once they discovered he was American). All these topics and many more: was he married, was his wife Singaporean, was she ethnically Chinese, how much did he pay for his flat, why is he living in an HDB estate rather than a condo, did he have children, was he disappointed he had a daughter rather than a son, when would he be trying for his next child, in which primary school did he plan to enroll the aforementioned daughter,
et cetera
,
et cetera
,
ad infinitum
. Jules found it difficult to deny the answers to these questions, so affable were these taximen, but the process drained him, bled him of his internal strength, transforming him into an utterer of monosyllabic affirmations.

The landscape of early-morning Singapore rolled past, concrete and glass and steel and carefully managed nature, and Jules thought of what awaited him once the taxi had arrived at his destination and he had alighted in the secondary school's car park, his eyes still heavy with too little sleep, his canvas messenger bag weighed down with marked tests. His later class of the day was to be observed by his reporting officer, his immediate supervisor, the head of the English department, and the Dean of Student Development. Once a year he was subjected to this hour-long torture, set to stammering and sweating and nervous bloviation in the face of his superiors, a process to cast an eye to his teaching methods and the effectiveness of such, but which instead made of him an utter wreck, so different from his normal lessons full of lightness and whimsy and passion. So aware was he that this annual observation directly affected the quantum of his year-end bonus and raised the question of his continued employment that he gibbered and stumbled through the entirety of this sixty minutes of hell.

The mere thought of his forthcoming observation unleashed a fine patina of saline around the perimeter of his face, in his armpits, down the small of his back and between the cheeks of his buttocks, dampening his dress shirt and slacks in strategic places that were quickly chilled by the overpowering aircon of the taxi's interior. Were he a stronger man, of more confidence and extroversion, he would have instructed the mute stone-like taxi driver to return him home, to his wife and his infant daughter, or better yet, to just drive and drive over Singapore's expressways and flyovers and slip roads until the fare overcame the cash in his wallet, but look there at the driver's electronic payment machine, cashless funds transfer, and he with his debit card, so they could roll over asphalt and concrete until his bank account bled dry if he wanted. Could he dare? Could he shirk? Was he a shirker?

But Jules was not even given the chance to propose such a reckless irresponsible action, for it was in that moment that a vast fluttering of shadows filled the sky in front of them, an amorphous assemblage of darkness that still somehow featured coherence, as if a cognizant storm cloud, changing size, changing shape, but retaining a level of concrete thing-ness that allowed Jules to continue referring to it as one singular item. As the taxi sped ineluctably toward it, and as it pushed and twisted and writhed its way toward the taxi, Jules had the momentary thought that all of his several pressures both at work and at home, all of the stressors that coalesced his daily existence into a knot of worry in the pit of his guts, all of these things had finally driven him mad. Chauffeured by a sculpted simulacrum toward a vast patch of malevolent darkness, yes, he could only be mad.

Jules exhaled, his muscles unclenched, the sweat dried on skin. He had snapped, so be it. A calm acceptance washed over him, as if plunging into the coolness of a neighborhood swimming pool on one of Singapore’s many sweltering days. The other vehicles on the expressway had, at some point without him noticing, vanished, disappeared from the roadway, possibly as a result of the oncoming storm, or maybe as another function of his madness. He took a deep breath, the crisp dry conditioned air seeping into his lungs, and as he exhaled, the fluttering darkness descended and enshrouded the taxi.

Butterflies. A swarm of fuliginous butterflies, black as the void of space, thousands of them, millions of them, settling on every square centimeter of the taxi's exterior, bringing with them a barely detectable scent of night-blooming jasmine. Jules tried to recall the wording for a group of butterflies: was it a swarm? No, he remembered instead the word “rabble.” A rabble of butterflies. And as the rabble adjusted on tiny legs, so small that Jules could scarcely make them out through the taxi's side windows and front windscreen, there was a collective moment of polarization, as if an enormous magnet in the sky had lined them all up like an agglomeration of iron filings. As one, the butterflies flapped downward, and the taxi lurched.

Jules reached out to touch the driver's face, to find the surface, rather than giving and pliable, now hard and rough, literal stone. He rapped knuckles on the back of the driver's head, abrading them, and causing a fine mist of masonry dust to drift downward. Jules leaned back again, and although the view out of the taxi's glass was completely obscured by the butterflies, he could still feel reality beyond, but the connection became more tenuous with every passing second and with every flap from the attached lepidopterae. As a child, he had often imagined that each automobile excursion was an elaborate facade, that the vehicle in fact remained stationary and the world rolling by was merely an complex illusion transmitted on a series of seamless connected projection screens. This impression revisited him now, as the flapping increased, and the taxi groaned and thunked and then humped itself upward, releasing its gravitational contact with the highway.

And as the taxi, now airborne, lifted up into the early morning skies of Singapore, to ascend above industrial hydrocarbon fumes and the constant hum and clank of progress, above stress and worry and the relentless pace of productivity, Jules recalled that butterflies were originally thought, but by whom he could not recollect, to be witches in disguise, consuming edibles carelessly left uncovered. Was this then his fate as well, consumption by this aggregated rabble, to be digested piecemeal in infinitesimally small stomachs? If this experience was still a breakage in his mental faculties rather than a fantastical event that was intruding into consensus reality, a supposition that he become more and more unsure of with each successive collective flap of tiny wings, then it did not really matter, did it?

He adjusted his posture, closed his eyes, and inhaled the faint hint of jasmine. Were he to ever return home, he would search out the fragrance as a present for his wife, but for now, he breathed it in, the smell of freedom, perhaps, or release, a manumission of the self.

Coast

Arthur Jura waited in the lobby of the dentist’s office only a block away from his flat on a cloudless Thursday at around 2:30 p.m., reading a short story collection by an up-an-coming Nigerian prize-winner, and levitating one meter above the plush white naugahyde sofa that was the lobby’s sole piece of furniture. He sat cross-legged, although had he preferred, he could have extended his legs to dangle in front of him, as if he were sitting on an invisible ledge, wall, or cliff. Not yet limber enough for the full lotus position, although he’d taken to extended periods of stretching to improve his flexibility.

The dentist, an attractive Malay woman named Dr June (most likely not her real name), poked her head out of Room 101, paper mask obscuring the lower half of her face so that her brilliant green eyes seemed to blaze, and said, “Mister, ah, Mister Jura?”

“Yes?”

“I can see you now.”

Arthur placed his bookmark in the crease of his book, aligning the lower edge with the paragraph he had just started, closed the pages, then coasted over toward the open doorway. Inside, the multi-armed dentist’s chair took up most of the room, making it difficult to even open the door properly. He maneuvered himself roughly above where he would normally lie prone in the chair, and leaned back until completely supine, parallel with the floor.

Dr June appeared above him. “I’ve, hmm, never worked on someone this way before.”

“I apologize,” Arthur said. “I didn’t mean to present a challenge. But I do need this cavity filled quite urgently.” The pain radiated from a vague area in one of his upper left molars through his cheek sinuses and both up into his eye socket and back to his ear. He had endured it for two weeks already, his American hesitation preventing him from getting it treated earlier, echoes of previous dental pain and exorbitant expense exacted in his homeland preventing him from obtaining Dr June’s services until the pain had begun keeping him up at night. Not that he feared the dentist’s drill, not at all, it was just that he was foolishly hoping things would somehow get better on their own.

“Luckily, I think all my instruments will reach,” Dr June said. “By the way, how do you do that?”

“Do what?”

“Move like that?”

“You mean, how do I coast around without obvious means of propulsion? I’m not sure. I just think of where I want to go, and move there. Kind of like walking, but without having to actually use my legs.”

“How long have you been like this? You weren’t, the last time you came in. I would have remembered that.”

Arthur smiled at her directness, the bluntness of speech and intention that all Singaporeans seemed to carry within their genetic code. “Two months,” he said. “After my wife left me to be ordained as a Buddhist nun. She’s living now at Phor Kark See Monastery.”

“Oh. I’m sorry. That must have been rough.”

“It was. It still is.” Arthur didn’t tell her about how betrayed he’d felt that day he’d come home and seen Alice, now ordained as Tenzin Palden, head completely shaven, her Chinese features thrown into sharper relief than usual, clad in the saffron and maroon robes of the Tibetan Gelug tradition, packing her small selection of possessions in a canvas shoulder bag. How she’d hoped to finish before he came home in order to avoid the unavoidable argument that followed. How he’d screamed at her, called her things he’d never before said to another human being, his rage and hurt roiling through his body and seeming to warp the physical space of the HDB flat they’d shared for the previous three years. How he’d begged her not to go, how he’d wept for days afterward, his insides feeling scooped out and tossed over the corridor railing outside. How he’d trolled the streets of nearby Geylang for the next week and a half, trying to drown his sorrow in Tiger beer and fuck away his loss with a new prostitute every night. How angry and resentful he was for the fact that Alice had dragged him from the US to Singapore in the first place, and that he still had a year left on his teaching contract, so he couldn’t even go back home right away.

But then he’d come back to the Dharma himself, pulling down from the top shelf of his bookcase titles by Venerable Thubten Chodron and Ajahn Chah and Lama Zopa Rinpoche and the Dalai Lama. He recalled the many times Alice had quietly mentioned the desire for nunhood, as a way to calm her mind and the inexplicable anger that was always a hair’s breadth from exploding out of her. He thought on her depression at not being able to conceive a child through their five years of trying and the many many visits to Singapore General Hospital’s Centre for Assisted Reproduction. He began visiting the Amitabha Buddhist Centre once more, meditating for hours in the Prayer Hall. Arthur still hadn’t recovered from Alice’s abandonment of him, continuing to think of the both of them as The Two A’s, but he had tamped down the negativity to more manageable levels.

Arthur did not tell all these things to Dr June, but he did reveal the fact that three weeks after Alice’s departure, he had woken in the middle of the night, hovering above his sheets. He’d sneezed repeatedly, the aircon unit above his bed venting cold dry air directly onto his face. Terrified and convinced that he was dreaming, he’d forced himself back to sleep, yet several hours later, he found himself in the same position.

“That must have been horrible,” Dr June said, “What did you do?”

“I adjusted. I figured it out. Those first few days of landlessness were probably the most difficult of my life, more so even than Alice leaving. But I’ve discovered a hidden talent about myself during my time in Singapore: adaptation to change. I never realized it was there until moving to the other side of the world from my home of 28 years, but I managed to learn how to live in a foreign country, teach English Language using the legacy of the British education system, revel in not having to own a car to get around. And so I also learned to live with the additional challenge of constant levitation.”

“I see,” she said, passing out of view and picking up some object with a rasp and rattle of plastic. “So you can live a normal life, then?”

“For the most part, although my sleep has still yet to return to normal. I just can’t seem to get used to the idea of waking in mid-air, and each time I do so, my body instinctively jerks me fully conscious for a full ten seconds before the panic can abate. Hypnogogic myoclonus; I looked it up.”

“All right, well,” Dr June said, placing over his nose a clear plastic mask interpenetrated by various corrugated tubes, “just breathe deeply. We’ll get this tooth filled quickly so you can float on out of here and enjoy the rest of your afternoon.”

Arthur breathed in the nitrous oxide pumped through the mask, and almost immediately began to feel better, more serene, euphoric even. The lights in the room brightened each time he inhaled, as if the room were breathing with him, and he was tempted to see how bright he could make them glow. He sucked air and nitrous through his nose once, twice, thrice, the bluish-white compact fluorescents in the ceiling and the yellow operatory light connected via armature to the chair flashing more brilliantly with each inhalation, until the light filled his entire field of vision, and then faded to darkness as he fell into an active dream state.

What Arthur dreamed whilst hovering above Dr June’s dentist chair:

He was Sir Thomas Stamford Bingley Raffles, Singapore’s patron saint, that mythologized ambitious British statesman who had, seemingly with his own bare hands, raised the small island of Singapura from the muck of third-world obscurity to establish one of the world’s most busy and prosperous sea ports. Bingley. He’d always hated that name. He’d also hated the fact that operations in his newly created territory seemed to fall all to hell in his absence; corruption, gangland warfare, race riots, gaming, slavery—all had to be wrangled with Raffles’ own hands in order to sculpt civilization out of lawless heathen clay.

Raffles, in Arthur’s dream, lay in bed, arm draped over his eyes in an attempt to suppress one of his many headaches, the fierce pounding in his skull that plagued his waking hours and would someday kill him, thoughts of responsibilities chasing themselves through his mind, until exhaustion overcame him, and he also dreamed.

What Raffles dreamed within Arthur’s dream:

He flew high above the landscape, a great bird of prey, his wingspan considerable, his feathers a dark brown. Raffles pumped his wings and then coasted on the uplifting air currents, the wind streaming sensually over his avian body. The view below him: Arthur’s recollection of the island-nation that Raffles had been instrumental in founding nearly two hundred years earlier, laid out in reality (or at least in reality as presented within a dream within another dream) as clear as it had been in his mind’s eye and the draughting pencil of Phillip Jackson, the colony’s engineer and the only man Raffles had trusted to impose planned order on swampy chaos. There was the luscious green of the Padang, the crux of his colonial footprint, the gathering ground for his countrymen’s social existence in this tropical demesne, surrounded by the administrative buildings necessary to govern: City Hall, the Supreme Court Building, Saint Andrew’s Cathedral. Legislation, justice, and organized religion: all required elements of enlightened culture. This entire area had been coastline upon Raffles’ initial arrival in Singapore, providing a picturesque view of the gentle waves that lapped upon the sandy shores; he was startled by how much land had been reclaimed and added to the country’s landmass since his death.

In flight, Raffles was tempted to oversee the nearby ethnic kampongs set up for the native Oriental races—Chinatown, Little India, the Arab Quarter—or to admire once again the orthogonal layout of the city streets that subdivided the land into orderly blocks, or to immerse himself in the Botanic Gardens (his true passion) and the hundreds of varieties of orchids occurring naturally in the environment and others guided by human hands into new hybrids, but instead, movement on the Padang itself caught his eye, figures running around in the manner of sports competition. He descended quickly, much faster than a bird of his size would have been able to in real life, landing on the pitch amidst a multicultural mix of sportsmen kicking around a creased white ball. Not cricket then, for which the Padang had been originally intended, but football.

Without transition, Raffles stood there in all his stately finery, human once again, in cravat and coattails and boots polished to a high shine, his jacket breast decorated with medals indicating his many achievements and years in service to the Crown. All around him, players in short pants and colorful shirts that glinted in the fierce sunlight performed a fluid ballet of energetic footwork designed to gain control of the ball. The footballers ignored Raffles for the most part, veering and swerving to avoid him, manipulating the football toward the goal and into the hands of the agile keeper. Then the game stopped and each player stared directly at Raffles, parting so that the goalkeeper had a direct line to him; time slowed as the keeper punted the ball, his aim straight and true as the ball progressed inevitably through the air, speeding up as it approached, then rocketing forward and striking Raffles directly below his left eye at his cheekbone. The pain exploded through the side of his face, and a high-pitched drilling whine started in his ears, pushing higher and higher in frequency as Raffles tumbled the ground, slowly so slowly, falling and falling forever, until, at last, as he touched earth, the sound and pain abruptly stopped, and he awoke, and then so did Arthur.

Arthur stirred and cracked open his eyes, curiously wondering why he had dreamed of Stamford Raffles of all people, and why he’d dreamed him as such a pompous egomaniac and a bit of a bigot. As he came fully awake, he realized that a weight was pressing down on his entire body, and that it was, in fact, Dr June lying on top of him, her head resting on his collarbone. Also, he felt, for the first time in two months, the feel of a cushion pressing against his back. The dentist seemed to have pinned him to the chair with her own slim body.

“Uh. Hi,” he said, at a loss for words.

She raised her head, looked into his eyes, and smiled. “Hi, Mr Jura. Arthur.” She had removed the paper mask, and her teeth were even and straight, although he would have expected nothing less from a dentist. Her green eyes looked, up close, to be the result of tinted contact lenses, an unusual affectation, but one that would, he supposed, set her apart.

“So ... what’s going on?”

“You fell asleep under the anesthesia, and I was curious to see if this would work.”

“I had a strange dream.”

“That happens sometimes.”

“Your name’s not really Dr June, is it?”

“No,” she said, edging her way off of his body. Arthur was thankful that her physical presence hadn’t given him an erection; he didn’t think he could have handled that embarrassment. As she clambered down, feet delicately touching the floor, he once again floated up and stopped at a meter above the chair. “It’s Faradilla Palaniappan. I was born in the month of June, and I always liked that as a name, so I took it for my professional moniker. It’s silly, I know, but sometimes you have to do things that make life interesting. Or, at least, I do. My friends call me Fara.”

“Fara. Would you like to have coffee with me, Fara? Or do dentists not drink coffee? You know, the whole staining-the-teeth thing.”

“Of course dentists drink coffee. You’re living on an island of
kopi
addicts, you know. And I would be happy to join you.”

Arthur smiled, suddenly very aware of his own teeth, his whole body tingling with a rush of endorphins that he hadn’t felt in quite some time, even before Alice had left him, and he was so caught up in this brief moment of victory, this one small spike of happiness amongst nearly three months of loneliness and pain and rediscovery, that he didn’t notice his body slowly lowering of its own accord and settling in the indentation that he and Fara had made in the dentist’s chair.