Red Dot Irreal (3 page)

I must escape.
Bomoh
,
bomoh
, the word echoes in my head, drawn from the commodore’s memories,
bomoh
, the Malayan word for a witch doctor. How can I trust such a woman in league with the devil himself? How can I believe her words about my legs? Perhaps they could have been saved instead of amputated. I shudder. Did she eat them?

The door is not so far away. I shall crawl, crawl on my stomach as the lowest of animals, crawl all the way home to England if need be. The horrors of my situation overwhelm my weakness, and I swing the hammock in my efforts to tumble out, landing on the dirt floor and producing a fresh wave of throbbing pain from my stumps. My vision swims, objects drifting out of focus, and I fear I may go unconscious again. My fingers reach out and claw at dirt; every speck and pebble is magnified in my proximity. The muscles in my arms strain and quiver, and I move forward hardly at all, aware painfully of the lack of assistance from my missing feet. Slowly, slowly, in measured piecemeal fits toward the door, exhausted, out of breath, layered in reddish dirt and my own sweat, and it seems as if I make no progress at all.

I collapse, unable to continue, and weep.

~

I awaken on the floor, Dzurina standing above, scowling.

“Stu
pid!
” she says in her accent, emphasis on the second syllable, making the word somehow even more insulting.

She leaves my field of vision, returning several minutes later with a native man approximately my age, but bulging with musculature, a coolie or laborer for certain, his hairless chest sheened with sweat. So this is to be my punishment, a beating suffered under the blows of this much stronger man, to be pummeled for my simple desire for freedom and a return to my old life.

I flinch as he reaches down with both hands, looming enormous, and then he gathers me up into his arms and places me gently back in my netted cradle, all as if I weigh no more than a child.

They talk for several minutes following in a rapid tonal dialogue, and she doles out a bone-colored powder into a sachet, carefully measuring each grain, then gives it to him. Payment for services rendered? Or a bribe to quiet his tongue? He smiles before turning to leave, his expression generous and without malice.

“Stay, lah,” the witch commands, pointing hard at my chest. “You still sick, is it?”

“Please,” I say, “where am I?”

“My home, what,” she says, as if this fact should be painfully obvious.

“No, where ... what nation? What port?”

“Pulau Blakang Mati you on. Island Behind Death, near to Singapura. The Bugis come, pillage, rape, leave death.” She draws a three-legged stool from another corner and sits, motions at my stumps with her chin. “Your legs they take, ah?”

“You should know.”

“My life also,” she says. “My father
bomoh
, very respected man near Malacca. Teach me to prepare spells, gather clients. I help him, lah, and he help me. Then Bugis come, kill my parents, younger brother, slit they throats. I wish they kill me also. But they come, one man, another man, another man, again, again,
sio kàn
, until all is
through
.” She spits this last word, dropping the aitch so that it sounds like
true
, the rage in her eyes pressing me back against the hammock. “Only a girl and they do this. After finish, they leave, laughing. A disgrace to the village I am, outcast, orphan. But I
smart
, make cures for aunties and uncles out of sight, for the poor, and survive. Save money, sail to Pulau Blakang Mati. If Bugis come again, I take they
butuh
and they
bodek
and I
cut
.” She draws an invisible knife upward through the air, making a
zwick!
sound in the back of her throat, and her rings clack together on her fingers.

The air sits thick and awkward between us. Never has a woman revealed so much of a personal nature to me. I am momentarily at a loss for words. She breathes heavily, her amulets rising and falling with the motion.

“Is that why you saved me?” I ask.

“Victims of Bugis we both,” she says. “Stick together, ah? Strong are many.”

~

Time, meaningless time spent swinging my days, weeks, months away. But I do heal and eat and regain my strength, an unexpected addition to Dzurina’s assortment of oddities. Customers to her home come and go, a steady trickle of impoverished Malay and Chinese, as well as initiates from the nearby Buddhist monastery, paying with coin when possible, and bartering when not with pottery, fish, spices, live chickens or herbs. All of these people looking at my crippled form swaying in the corner and asking about me in hushed tones. I do not understand the words, but can infer the content.

Several times an older white man arrives, makes a hurried transaction in murmured English, and departs without even a glance at me. His movements are nervous, his eyes sunken. Dzurina tells me that he used to serve as ship’s surgeon on a royal schooner, but was discharged because of his addiction to narcotics, and now lives on the other side of the island. He is the one taught her the small amount of English she knows. It was also he who expertly removed my destroyed legs, in exchange for opium. As the only other fluent English-speaker on the island, it would make sense for us to congregate and share our tales of woe, but I find myself fundamentally repulsed by the man. He may well have saved my life, but something about his character produces a primal revulsion in me, and I am thankful that his visits occur infrequently.

Dzurina cooks in a building separate from the small house, and her dishes are more spicy and flavorful than anything I have tasted before, often served on a large banana leaf. At first, this new cuisine does not at all agree with my constitution, but I have grown to tolerate and even enjoy it. At night, she sleeps on the other side of the curtain, and her soft snores are a kind of reassurance that I am not alone.

However, before sleep, in the darkening evening hours after her business has concluded, she produces a cacophony of noises from what I assume to be the courtyard adjacent to the house. The clangs of metal against metal, as if Vulcan himself were at work at his forge. Sawings and poundings and scrapings and loud female curses after hard thumps, possibly tools dropping to the ground or on a wayward thumb.

And, this evening, a low throbbing hum, as though Satan’s minions have struck up the sound, a harmonic of devilry, intensifying until the noise shakes the items on the shelves and rumbles the ground beneath me, a quake of preternatural intensity. The sound building and building, filling the air and the dirt and the entire world, and then abruptly stopping, the silence become unbearable, assuaged only by my nervous breathing.

Several minutes pass before Dzurina shuffles through the door with a candle, the flickering light playing across her excited features, turning her wide grin demonic. She places the candle on a low table, walks outside, and then enters again, her arms laden with two metal monstrosities, vaguely cylinder-shaped, with a thick disc on one end and a ball socket on the other, bulging with cables and pulleys and springs and toothed gearwheels, a bricolage of machinery. She stands each cylinder vertically on the ground in front of my hammock, two metallic columns, and the realization of their significance strikes me with the force of a timber to the forehead.

Legs. She has created prosthetic legs.

“So?” she says. “You like, ah?”

“What ... how ...”

She pulls me up to a sitting position and maneuvers me perpendicular to the hammock, facing the mechanical legs. My stumps fit perfectly into the cool ball sockets constructed to act as knees, and the pain immediately vanishes. Its absence is strange after having endured it so miserably these past months. Leather straps from the exterior of the metal are harnessed around my waist and thighs so as to secure me to the devices. After tightening them to her satisfaction, she steps back and admires her handiwork.

“Do you believe this will work?” I say.

“Up to you. You believe, it work.”

Could it be possible? Might I walk again? Such an invention should not be possible, but then neither should be ingesting another man’s memories. This exotic region of the globe seems suffused with improbabilities, as if the laws of the natural world hold no sway. It is as if sheer belief can construct reality.

I nod.

Dzurina bends down and whispers, “
Hidup
,” and the metal cylinders hum with life. Pendulums swing and gears turn, clicking and whirring loudly in the confines of the small shop. A vibration starts in my stumps and travels throughout my body. Hairs stand on end and my skin pebbles, a truly odd sensation in the tropical heat. She reaches out both hands, veined with age but strong as iron, and grips me by the armpits, assists me in leaning forward. Using her strength for support, I rise, slowly, until I am vertical.

I am standing. For the first time in months I am standing upright. On clockwork legs.

“I don’t know what to say.”

She steps forward and kisses me full on the lips, her mouth tasting of betel juice and spices. I am abruptly aware of my precarious balance, but she holds me tight, erect.

“Say you no leave,” she says.

~

A whirlpool, a hurricane worse than any at sea, a recession back, back, backward to the start, the days, weeks, months, years. The stone against my back, just a sensation, no longer real, nothing, nothing is real, the vastness of the universe is mere illusion, shadows on a cave wall, we hold the world in our memories and when mine are gone the world will disappear, void, oblivion.

~

Five years. Five years of suffering under the indignity of being unable to walk under my own power, but that I must rely on these monstrous appendages, always ticking and dripping lubrication fluids, as if I were a clanking beast from legend. Five years of legal impropriety, acquiring pirated silks, spices, and
senapang kenangan
devices, and then selling them, discreetly, to the foreigners who visit our home, all while staying beneath the notice of Captain Henry Keppel, who is determined to rid all of Singapura of those who would flout the authority of the Crown. Five years of rarely venturing outside to expose my lurching gait, relying on Dzurina for support, for sustenance, for a reason to continue. Never did I thank her for my current limited ability to perambulate through the rest of my days, so ashamed am I.

Five years and a live-in marriage, and she still refuses to reveal what is hidden in the locked wooden cabinet.

Tun Perak, named after an ancient Malayan warrior, who gently replaced me in my hammock all those years ago, and who, I learned recently, was the fisherman scooped me out of the waters after that fateful battle with the Bugis, acts as Dzurina’s client liaison for those souls too trepidatious to venture ashore and deal with her in the flesh. He is increasingly adept at avoiding the royal patrols as he delivers payment to us and goods to her clients. Although our small island lies only slightly south of Singapura, many of the transactions take place far from the prying eyes of the harbormasters. For Perak’s trouble, he receives a twenty-five percent commission on all successful dealings, which, with the increased business due to her trade in illegal goods, is no small amount.

I imagine my parents proud of my current merchant status, even if my contribution is small—keeping the books and suggesting new commodities to trade—but I know not how to explain all the events proceeding from my “death at sea,” and so I do not write to them. However it pains me, I cannot imagine how they might react to my crippled status, native wife (though our union is not legally or religiously recognized by the Empire, as we have chosen to remain beneath the notice of the Crown), dangerous and illegal dealings in addition to her witch doctor cures, association with pirates (although we refuse to do business with the Bugis), and an everyday co-existence with thaumaturgy. Pious God-fearing people both, Mother and Father simply would not understand.

I have also reacquainted myself personally with the ecstasy of contact with
senapang kenangan
bottles, sneaked from our bountiful stores. How I missed savoring the bliss upon the ingestion of another’s memories, more potent than the most passionate night with my lover. I also have come to experience the lives of dozens of men and women, from the nearby southern island archipelago, from the vast mainlands of China and India, and from as far away as my English homeland. I also note an alarming recent trend of terrifying memories, of villages being sacked by pirates and privateers, of rapine, of pressganging to tiny cramped dwellings with memories being extracted forcefully, of the frightened sobs of the persecuted. The hue of memories in these bottles has also changed from red to a sickly yellow, and I fear we may need to halt trafficking in the technology, lest it continue to be supplied by such ruthless means.

Rumors have also spread round our little island of an evil spirit, a
puaka
, who has been spied late in the nights prowling the shores and thoroughfares. Although I have taken to patrolling our section of the island due to an impossibly chronic insomnia, I have not yet been witness to such a spirit. Even tonight, as the moon shines down a muted pale light, and as the breeze from off the sea has quit, leaving the air in a sultry stillness, the very climate lends itself to supernatural speculation, and yet the only soul awake at this hour is me.

The insomnia has driven me from Dzurina’s side, true, but I lately notice an increasing tendency in my prostheses to build up a thaumaturgic charge in my person, to levels recently where the very top of my skull felt as if it might launch itself away at any moment. I know not whether this is the result of technological aging, or whether it is a mingling of magics, a result of my
senapang kenangan
habit. The only solution I have devised to bleed away this accretion of energies is to run. And to jump. During the day, I lurch and stomp and shuffle through the hours, but at night, at night I am a tiger, a great cat speeding through the villages of Pulau Blakang Mati, gamboling and cavorting and reveling in the unbridled joy of such freedom.