Red Dot Irreal (4 page)
Far from my home and my warm bed, I race over dusty trails, vault thatched rooftops, and weave between large palms trees and vines, aware of the clicking and clacking of all my cables and gears now transformed to a steady hum, the same unearthly noise I first heard emanating from Dzurina’s courtyard as she constructed my legs. The air whistles past, in my ears, through my clothes. A dangerous predator I am, stalking imaginary prey.
A child’s cry behind me, and I stop. A small home in the jungle, and I do not recognize her, but she shouts again,
“Puaka! Puaka menggelinjang! Puaka!
”
I flee, an impulse that shames me, racing for home and comfort and safety, leaves and branches whipping at my face and my arms, escaping from a little girl, and suddenly aware of the revelation that the evil spirit I have been chasing, the
puaka
, has actually been myself. All those nights running down a fearsome spirit, investigating the unknown, leaping through brush and high over simple dwellings, and all that time the villagers were in fact frightened of me. I see myself through the child’s eyes: malformed, grotesque, unearthly, predatory, a monster.
A bogeyman.
~
Alarm. Shouts from outside. I claw through layers of sleep, drifting upward through consciousness until one word snaps me fully awake:
“Bugiiiiiiiiis!”
Dzurina and I jump from out of bed; in an odd bit of prescience, I neglected to remove my clockwork legs before sleep overcame me. After almost getting caught by the young girl several nights previous, I have scaled back my nocturnal ventures, causing increasing forgetfulness, fitful sleep and nightmarish dreams. However, it appears now that the nightmare has arrived in the flesh.
The Bugis are here.
Dzurina and I have an unspoken agreement in the case of this eventuality: kill all we can. I grip the blacksmithing hammer leaning against the wall, and my love unsheathes a nasty Malay
kris
, its wavy blade hungering for the bite of flesh after so long as an object of ornamentation. We race out of the house, and the night is on fire.
Huts and houses ablaze further toward the shore, but growing ever near. Screams, the piercing screams of those cut down with blade or spear or pistol shot. We reach Tun Perak’s home on the beach as he is felled by a volley of spears, dagger still in his hand, swinging all the way to the ground. Our friend and co-conspirator, a man of kindness and bravery and strength, and he is no more. A howl erupts from my throat as Dzurina and I burst into full view of the dozen Bugis warriors that have killed our friend.
Thaumaturgy crackles in the air as I leap into the fray, my hammer connecting with skulls and arm bones, as Dzurina stabs with her
kris
and hurls electric curses at her victims. I am consumed by my fury, at all the lives and livelihoods these pirates have destroyed, at the brutal loss of the innocence of my beloved, at the theft of my flesh-and-blood legs. I rage, blood full of vengeance and magics, not feeling the small slashes on my arms and chest. The simple name of the Bugis strikes terror into the hearts of thousands,
so let them fear me!
After the battle is over, and I am streaked with the blood of half a dozen men, for all appearances a demon incarnate, Dzurina rushes to the fallen body of Tun Perak. She wails for this man, this adopted brother, this boon companion. She touches each of the stab wounds, whispers something inaudible into his now unhearing ear, closes his eyes with fingers incarnadine, steps back and recites a spell in song, her voice watery and disconsolate. Tun Perak’s body darkens, blackens, and then collapses to ash. The ash drifts out to sea, borne on the gentle winds. I hold my sobbing wife, her body feeling as frail as all her forty-some years.
A war cry from behind, and I am unable to turn round before a blade slices through my prosthetic right leg, severing cables and belts, once more stumping me, pitching me into the sand and away from Dzurina’s arms.
I drop my hammer as a phalanx of thirty Bugis explode into the clearing, bare-chested, oiled skin gleaming in the moonlight, weapons raised. A spear runs through my mechanical left leg, anchoring it to the ground, and then hands are on me, restraining my movement, forcefully removing me from my now non-functioning artificial legs. Iron manacles are clapped around my wrists, although I am unsure of their use, for without my legs how would I escape? I shriek at the night, at this continued injustice, at the unfairness of the world, and Dzurina is gone, is missing, what have they done with her,
what have they done with my wife?
Into view walks a middle-aged white man in full Royal Navy regalia, his uniform spotless, proudly displaying a number of medals, fat with the spoils of Empire, depilated, smiling a cruel smile, his eyes wrinkling at the sides. The man exudes authority, a casual aura of power that I abruptly yearn to snuff out. He leers above me, gazing down with satisfaction at my capture. Behind him stands an entire platoon of Her Majesty’s soldiers, rifles at the ready.
“Henry Keppel,” I say through gritted teeth.
“You presume correctly, young man. Lieutenant!” he barks to the officer behind him. “Please be so kind as to place Mister Davenport under arrest. Let him feel the result of crossing swords with the greatest Empire on this Earth!”
~
The charges are read by an officer in a monotone, as if reciting the weather: miscegenation, trade in illegal goods, consorting with pirates, use of thaumaturgic enhancements, treason. The punishment: death by hanging.
The Bugis, smart and ruthless and canny, operate now under a treaty with the British, who employ them as privateers to further “civilize” their claim on the East Indies. I rail and froth at this development, raving to anyone who will hear about the attacks on the fleet of Commodore Kennedy, but none will listen. I yell until my throat goes hoarse, but my only audience is the bevy of cockroaches that also occupy my prison cell. In the eyes of the Crown, it matters not what justification I had for my crimes. The law is the law, and any who oppose it are a menace, rabid dogs to be put down for the common good.
Word arrives that our home has been ransacked, razed, and then burned to the ground. Everything we worked for is gone, obliterated. No news has come of Dzurina. I do hope my beloved did not suffer much before she was killed.
~
It is almost over, I can feel it. My life slipping away, my identity evaporating into the mists, my thoughts and memories annihilated, my very soul returning to the wellspring from which it—
~
In the hours before death, I sit quietly in my stone cell, attempting to take some pleasure from the cool breeze that enters my one barred window, resigned to my fate at the hangman’s noose. It is still difficult for me to fathom how my life has come to this, from meek ship’s scrivener to enemy of the Crown. But had I do it again, I would change not a thing. A life not spent alive is not a life at all.
At least my death will happen on a pleasant day, the heat subdued somewhat by the recent monsoon season, the sky a sparkling cerulean, the vocal birds a symphony of avian musicality. I hear the hangman is especially skilled, so that upon the trapdoor dropping, one’s neck is snapped and death is instant, rather than the humiliation and indignity of slow strangulation.
A key turns, and the door of my cell opens. I expect guards with their rifles, ready to accompany me to my fate, but instead a Buddhist monk enters, head shaven and bowed to the floor, robes the deep color of freshly turned mud. His face obscured, I cannot tell if he is an acquaintance from the island, but he must be if he is visiting me in my final hour. The door closes behind him, and he sits down beside me on the simple wooden bench.
“Here to give me last rites?”
“No, lah,” he says, no, a
she
, a woman’s voice, and she looks me square in the face. At my expression, she clamps a hand over my mouth and makes a shushing noise. It is appropriate that she arrives in such garb, as she often commented that she would join the sisterhood after my death; naïvely, optimistically, I assumed this would occur many many years from now. It is not her lack of hair that strikes me most of all, but her missing rings; I have never see her so naked.
“But how did you escape?” I whisper.
“It not matter,” she says and kisses me hard. Her lips are familiar and strange, changed inexplicably with her shaven head and nun’s robes. I say her name and we embrace and weep quietly, for our situation, for our impending separation, for her continued survival in this cruel world. I grip her and never want to let her go. My beautiful, fiercely intelligent, wildly inventive true love. “I soon lose you,” she breathes.
I can think of nothing I can say, I am lost in my sorrow. I hold her, frightened and joyous at once. She will live on, she will grow old, she will continue to be. “I shall always be with you,” I say.
“Yes,” she says. “I know.”
She reaches beneath her robes and unstraps a
senapang kenangan
, but no model I have ever seen. It is smaller, the size of a Derringer, and adorned with her aesthetic touch, flourished with knobs and curlicues, brass filigrees and inlaid thaumaturgical symbols. It is a work of art as much as a functional tool.
“Improved,” she says. “We take seven years worth.”
And all at once, her plan becomes apparent.
“Yes,” I say. “Do it. Quickly.”
She presses the barrel of the memory gun to my temple. How will it feel, to empty my mind,
seven years
of my memories, all of our experiences together, every drop? The experience can only leave me a simpleton, the extraction of so much of myself, but my doomed physical form will not soon require a mind to fuel it. After she ingests me, consumes me, incorporates me into herself, will some part of me continue to live within the mind of my lover, even as my body rots in the ground? To exist as a spirit,
momok
, nestled within the mind of my life’s love, to travel to her new monastery, to gain peace and enlightenment, to become one with the world ... there are worse fates to embrace.
As she squeezes the trigger, I briefly think to ask her about the locked wooden cabinet in our home, and whether she retrieved the contents inside before it all burned down, but it matters not. In a moment, I will not remember the answer anyway.
Ikan Berbudi (Wise Fish)
Mrs Singh raised the segmented metal gate on her fish head curry stall with a raucous clatter, prompting several sparrows to alight from their feast of kaya toast crumbs on a nearby table and erupt upward into the hawker centre’s metal rafters. Block 117 Aljunied Market and Food Centre was sparsely populated at 10 a.m., most of the breakfast diners having already finished eating, and the lunch rush yet to begin. She appreciated the calm and the quiet that came with this time of the morning, a time of reflection and of gathering herself for the onslaught of customers to come. Her stall was not nearly so famous as those on “Curry Row” in Little India, like Muthu's Curry or Banana Leaf Apolo, but her portion of the hawker centre filled to overflowing every single weekday, and she’d done so well last year that she was able to buy her elder son Anand and his new wife their very own HDB flat.
She pushed the gate on its curved track all the way up, turned on the stall’s fluorescent lights and oscillating fan, and looked to the far corner of the stall, where, on a shelf above the stainless steel sink, away from the heat of her gas stove, rested a glass aquarium. Inside the aquarium, lazily treading water, was a grand red snapper with pointed teeth and auspicious markings, and it perked up as she approached. She stroked the side of the aquarium with her index finger and the fish waggled its fins.
“Good morning, fish,” she said cheerily.
“Good morning, dear lady,” said the fish. “Today is the day I will die.”
Mrs Singh stood there dumbfounded, but not because the fish had spoken; she had enjoyed a loquacious companionship with the snapper for nearly three years, ever since it had pleaded with her to let it live, that it would bring her good fortune and good health as long as she gave it a restful place to exist. And it had made good on its promises; her sales had more than quadrupled in the intervening time, which was a sort of consolation after the death of her husband Harshad from lung cancer. The money could not bring back Harshad, but it did allow her a measure of security and material happiness. Which was why the fish’s announcement terrified her with its consequences.
“Why would you say this, fish?”
“Because it is true. I have lived a long life, in part thanks to you, but it will come to an end later today.”
“Are you certain? How can you know for sure, ah?”
“It is a gift, dear lady, one that all red snappers, communicative or silent, are born with. In my experience, this knowledge is never wrong, and is not to be taken lightly.”
Mrs Singh let the implication hang in the air as she went about preparing her kitchen for the day. She chopped eggplant and okra and tomatoes into thick slices to be used later in her curries. Her knee was bothering her again today, the result of a hard twist earlier in the week; she’d pop down to one of the neighborhood private clinics later this afternoon after she closed up. Yet another irritant of her advancing age. She had run track in secondary school and junior college, and even won a few regional prizes; injuries were part of any sport, and she couldn’t count the number of times she’d twisted or sprained a knee or an ankle. She thought about the fact that she could no longer recover with the speed of her youth, and let her Chinese chopper come down with added force on each innocent vegetable.
Mrs Singh also needed to prepare the fish themselves, but her younger son Vishal was late returning from the wet market. Again. Where was that boy? Almost eighteen, going into National Service in three months, but more often than not he had his nose in a book. And not in a medical or law book, as she hoped for him, but
fiction
of all things. What use was fiction in the real world? she’d repeatedly asked him. He’d tried to explain how experiencing life through someone else’s eyes would make him a more empathetic and understanding person, less likely to be closed-minded or judgmental, more willing to think for himself rather than blindly follow a given ideology. But she wasn’t sure she accepted his argument. When Vishal had been born, his large head nearly killed her—she’d lost a lot of blood, and the doctors had to rush her into emergency surgery, which meant she hadn’t been able to hold Vishal for the first time until the next day as she recovered in the ICU—and she tsked him now in his absence that he would choose to fill up that big cranium with literary nonsense rather than something useful.
While she waited, she began putting together the ingredients for the curry: softened dried chilies, cumin seeds, coriander, curry powder, chili powder, garlic, fenugreek, curry leaves, tamarind paste, coconut milk. She ground the dried chilies, cumin seeds and coriander in her heavy stone mortar, then placed a metal pot on her gas stove, lit the fire, and poured in ghee to start heating. The recipe was instinct now; she often bragged that she could assemble a curry blindfolded, but no one yet had taken her up on the challenge. Mrs Singh’s mother brought the recipe with her from Kerala when she and her new husband, Mr Menon (Mrs Singh’s father), had traveled by boat to Singapore so that he could start his career as a mechanical engineer. Mrs Menon had passed the recipe down to Mrs Singh in that same instinctual way, eschewing precise measurements in lieu of feeling her way through the food.
Mrs Singh paused in her work, and looked to the aquarium. “Fish?” she said.
“Yes, dear lady?” She normally ignored the affectation, but it always made her a bit uneasy, as if it was claiming that she was something more than she really was. She also couldn’t help noting that it was one letter away from “dead lady.”
“I could change your food, buy the expensive dried shrimp from Thailand.”
“It still would not change the fact that I will die.” The fish turned so that its eye fixed directly on hers. “And your ghee is burning.”
Mrs Singh cursed and turned her attention back to the pot, scraping in her curry paste to fry. In her large rice cooker, she steamed enough basmati to get her through the initial rush. Vishal finally showed up, laden with a Rubbermaid container full of red snapper. She’d once asked the talking fish if he was bothered by seeing so many of his kind butchered, beheaded, and served up as food, and he’d said, “Of course. Wouldn’t you be disturbed seeing a stall selling fresh ‘long pig,’ with human heads cooked in curry? Your practice makes me shudder to the root of my self, but what can I do about it? Even Buddhists, who work toward the enlightenment of all sentient beings, eat fish.” Since that conversation, she’d asked Vishal to have the fishmonger scale, gut, and behead the fish they bought, so that at least her friend would not have to see her doing such violence to them; it was worth the extra cost.
She checked her watch; it was getting on to 11:15. Fifteen minutes until she officially opened for the day. As she finished her preparations, Vishal checked the stocks of rectangularized banana leaves that she used as eating surfaces, as well as utensils (a true devotee of curry ate with her fingers, but most of her customers were Chinese men and women who lived or worked nearby, and she didn’t expect them to do so) and plastic trays. She noticed a growing group of potential diners gathering at the tables nearby, and pointedly looked toward the small handmade placard affixed to the front of her stall: No Early Queuing.
At 11:30, she flicked the switch that excited the neon in her Open for Business sign, and the loiterers rushed to form an orderly queue. No one was interested in filets or steamed whole-body snapper, they were all after her fish head curry. She cooked as quickly as the orders came in, with Vishal acting as waiter. The temperature in the kitchen rose, and she turned the fan to high, glad that she had long ago given up wearing a sari whilst working; a simple t-shirt and capri pants did nicely enough. Although, at times, the choice, practical as it was, made her feel as if she were turning her back on her homeland.
She paused again in her work and addressed the fish: “What if I buy you a new tank? Or a pond in which you can freely swim? Someplace where you can feel more at home.”
“It will not matter, auntie. I will still die.” The fish blew a few bubbles, and they popped inaudibly at the top of the water in the tank. “And you are still bargaining.”
“But there must be something can be done. I have always believed that your life is what you make of it, not the result of the whims of chance.”
“I am sorry, dear lady, but this is not a thing you can control. It is karma, and is therefore inevitable.”
“Fish have karma?”
“Of course. All living beings have karma. We cannot escape it, but carry it with us from one life to the next. It is very likely that you yourself were a fish in a past incarnation. My actions have determined that this afternoon, shortly after you close your stall for the day, my body will expire. It is the way of things. But I do ask for one kindness in return for the years of wealth I have brought you.”
“Anything, fish.”
“Cook me as you would any of my brothers and sisters, and then consume me yourself.”
“What?” For Mrs Singh, the request bordered on cannibalism, as if one of her sons, or her best friend from junior college, had asked her to eat them. She wasn’t sure when she had crossed the threshold between considering the fish a fish and considering it a friend (regardless of species), but there it was. “I don’t know if I can do this.”
“Please, auntie. Consider it my deathbed request.”
Mrs Singh exhaled. “Very well.”
“Hey, Ma,” Vishal said, poking his head into the kitchen, “orders are backing up. You talking to that fish again, ah?”
“Never mind, you,” she said, and turned back to the task at hand. Vishal couldn’t hear the fish, and teased her for holding conversations with it, but this just went to show that his big head wasn’t all filled with smarts. Mrs Singh kept her head down and concentrated on producing the best food that she was capable of producing, which was, after all, all anyone had a right to expect.
The afternoon passed quickly, and at 2:30, she served her last customer, having exhausted her pescetarian supplies for the day, excepting a few errant vegetables. She and Vishal thoroughly cleaned the stall, scrubbing down every visible surface, and some that were not; Mrs Singh took pride in her cleanliness, and in the “A” rating that her stall had received from the government, one of the few in the whole hawker centre. She made a list of ingredients for Vishal to pick up in Little India for the next day, and he tucked it into the pages of the book he was reading, a short story collection by a science fiction writer named Vandana Singh (their shared surname was common enough that she hardly took notice of the coincidence). He kissed her on the cheek and then walked off to his motobike; Vishal was such a good boy, even if she didn’t always understand him. She hoped he’d meet a nice Indian girl and be happy like his elder brother Anand.
Once he was out of sight, Mrs Singh stepped back into her stall and closed the segmented metal gate with her inside. She looked to the aquarium, hoping to have one final conversation with her friend the talking fish, but he had quietly stopped moving and now floated upside down in its tank. Her eyes began to water, and she swiped at them with her fingers. She could cry later; she had work to do. Mrs Singh reached up and gently lifted her dead friend out of the water. She scaled the snapper, gutted it, and cooked it whole in fiery curry along with fingers of okra and slices of eggplant.
With the first bite, she experienced a heightening of all her senses. The normally drab concrete and stainless steel of her food stall exploded with colors and textures she couldn’t have imagined possible. The flavors of the fish’s flesh and the curry itself filled her mouth, her sinuses, rising up to the top of her head, the ultimate fish, the apotheosis of fish. She could taste the Atlantic sea water of the fish’s original home in the Gulf of Mexico (it was thankfully caught before the cataclysmic oil spill there), the small fish and crustaceans on which it fed itself, the silt that was filtered through its gills. She could hear each individual conversation on the other side of her stall’s gate, each intake of breath, each clattering of flatware on melamine plates, all as if it were right there in the stall with her. Her world expanded, as if she were experiencing reality through a wide-angle lens.
With the second bite, she gained understanding of the speech of plants. Combined with her augmented hearing, she could detect faint laughter as a breeze rippled through the bushes in a park nearby, the harrumphing discontent of various old angsana and palm trees, the shrill excitement of tridax seeds adrift on the wind. As well, the echoes of sad resignation from the okra and eggplant she had employed in this curry, and, she assumed, in all the dishes she had cooked today. The buzzing of a weedeater from the direction of the road, and the subsequent cries of “Danger!” and “Help!” from the grass being cut down there.
With the third bite, Mrs Singh perceived the sticky strings of the vast LifeWeb that connects all living beings. Ropes of infinitely thin energy crisscrossed through and around her, a visual and mental manifestation of the karma the fish had earlier alluded to. Every action she made had consequences somewhere on the web, and actions by others manifested results in her. The LifeWeb also extended backward and forward in time, to her past and future selves, and to selves that never existed or would exist. Never again would she be able to blindly go about her life without thinking about the impact that she made on the world.
With the fourth bite, she came to the realization that her new perceptions would fade by tomorrow. As with all things, this perspicacity was temporary and impermanent. She would need to savor the moment, because it would not last.
Mrs Singh wept for the fish's gift, eating every last bit of flesh until her wise friend was completely gone.