Red Dot Irreal (5 page)

Hero Worship, or How I Met the Dream King

The queue stretched a thousand people down past The Arts House all the way to the Singapore River. Each person clutched a precious text: a book, or a graphic novel, or single issues of comics; some hardy souls even carried the massive Absolute editions of his collected works. It was a response the organizers of the 2009 Singapore Writers Festival had not been prepared for, and still seemed somewhat baffled by. And at the very front of the queue, behind a plywood table, sat a literary rock star, the Dream King himself, signing autographs.

I stood to the side of the table, trying in vain to catch his attention; he was wholly and utterly concentrating on the task at hand, giving each person in line his undivided attention for several precious moments before moving on to the next. His enthusiasts knew well of his patience, his kindness, his endurance, his appreciation. A sense of lightness and festivity filled the air as they stood patiently, waiting for their thirty seconds of audience with the master.

The Dream King and I had traded direct messages on Twitter weeks and months earlier, hoping to negotiate a time to meet during his brief stay in the Lion City. But despite both our efforts, the festival organizers seemed to thwart every attempt, rushing him to and fro and barring any previously-unapproved communication. Luckily, a reader of my blog recognized me, and put me in contact with the owner of G&B Comics, one of the festival sponsors who had specifically organized to bring the King in, and all of a sudden I was being motioned over to the plywood table to shake his hand.

“Hello!”

“Hullo,” he said, a bit dazed, but smiling. His bottom teeth were slightly crooked, an unexpected detail. He looked exhausted, dark circles under his eyes, a weariness in his movements; he’d flown a very long way to participate in the festival, and was jetting off again the following day.

He didn’t seem to recognize me so I gave him my name.

“I know who you are,” he said. “I recognize you from your photo.”

After some brief small talk, I thanked him for making the long voyage, and expressed appreciation at getting to take a few moments of his time. He mentioned looking forward to my tweets (to which I smiled and blushed), and wished me luck with the colicky newborn waiting for me at home. It occurred to me then that he still gripped my hand in a shake that had lasted several minutes, that we weren’t so much shaking anymore as we were holding hands, and that I really didn’t seem to mind.

He thanked me for the copies of
A Field Guide to Surreal Botany
I had dropped off the day before; he had looked through his copy that night and remarked to me now on the premise and the gorgeous illustrations and book design. A Beautiful Thing, and worthy of recognition. He hadn’t yet told his girlfriend, The Dresden Doll, about her copy, as he had just placed it in her suitcase, but he would later that day.

Then he pulled me close and said, “I want to try something. Hang on a moment.”

The Dream King closed his eyes and let all his facial muscles relax, and an expression of serenity seemed to spread throughout his body. The air around his dark clothes shimmered, and a low vibration traveled up my arm and into my body, to settle in my stomach. Staticky hissing filled my ears and intensified to nigh unbearable levels, and then just as abruptly stopped.

It was completely quiet. The noises of the thousand-plus people milling around the area had been utterly silenced. I wondered if I had gone deaf. But then I looked around. Each person was frozen in place, caught in amber, as it were. The Dream King had stopped time.

He opened his eyes and looked down the queue, then turned back to me. “Wonderful,” he said, smiling brightly. “I had no idea if that would work.”

“How have you done this?”

“An old man in a shack in Guangzhou taught me how, in exchange for a copy of
Sandman
#74. It was the last issue he needed to complete his collection. Funny, he didn’t even want it signed.”

“Um. Okay.”

“I want to apologize for not being able to take more time with you. Grateful as I am for this career and this wonderful life of mine, it does mean I’m stretched quite thin. However, we do have a few minutes to ourselves now.”

“Can you show me The Secret Handshake?” I asked, half in jest.

He smiled and said, “Of course. You won’t remember it by tomorrow anyway, but still.”

And so he showed me The Secret Handshake, and How to Talk to Cats, and Which Sushi Increases the Flow of Qi, and Which Shade of Black is Repellent to the Elder Gods. In more ways than one, it was magical. One of my literary heroes was sharing his hidden knowledge, despite his exhaustion and his commitments. And he was right, I remembered none of it the following day except for the fact the he had shown these Mysteries to me.

Finally, he said, “Think it’s time we returned to the real world?” and then he let go of my hand. Sounds and motion rushed in as time resumed, and I had to grip the table as the accompanying dizziness unsettled me. I took a breath and looked up. The Dream King glowed, and I smiled.

“Thanks so much, Neil.”

“You’re very welcome. My best to your wife and baby daughter.”

And then he turned back to the queuing hordes and resumed his duties.

Lion City Daikaiju

That night, Singapore's landmarks declared war: the Merlion lurched off its concrete pedestal and flooded the riverfront with its eternally gushing masticatory fountain, catching untold numbers of tourists unawares, forced to leave behind their $20 mixed drinks and plates of tapas; the Raffles Hotel, in all its colonial splendor, leapfrogged across the downtown area, knocking over bank buildings and squashing flat petrol tankers and cars plastered with adverts; the twin metallic durians of the Esplanade curled into spiny balls of hedgehog lethality, and rolled over and through every upscale mall they could find, taking especial care to utterly demolish the shopping district on Orchard Road; the National Library took flight and glided to the MediaCorp building, dropping barrages of encyclopedias and folios onto transmissions towers and backup generators, destroying the link between the viewing public and the badly acted and written serial dramas that filled the broadcast airwaves; the twin statues of the country's patron saint, Sir Stamford Raffles, one dark bronze and one white polymarble, lay siege to every construction crane in evidence, leaping nimbly from structure to structure, leaving bright yellow wreckage in their wake.

Who was to blame, the people cried, why has this happened, could it be Jemaah Islamiyah and that terrorist who escaped, or was it resurgent aggression from Japan, or could it be an intelligent group-mind of dengue-carrying mosquitoes, or revenge-seeking Americans with outrage and the image of a public caning in their minds, why oh why is this happening to us, and the people fled in terror, at this revolt by the reminders of the nation's greatness, as those selfsame landmarks reduced to rubble every symbol of progress, sign of homogenized inclusion with the globalized world, and showing of shallow flash and glam over depth and culture and tradition, and when the sun rose over the tropical island the next morning it was all over, the assault had stopped, the landmarks as still and inert as their previous states, the country no longer globally competitive, but the people did not despair, because as they cremated their dead and began the rebuilding process, they remembered that they had endured the British occupiers, and the tyranny of the Japanese military, and they had arisen to become a global corporate power, and that they would now reinvent themselves into something new and bright and shining, a jewel of the future world, a unique visage of identity.

Dragging the Frame

September 2010

I waited in the mass queue for the number 80 bus, sweating under the metal awning at the bus stop outside the Cosmic Insurance Building on North Bridge Road, shoulderbag digging into my trapezius muscle from the weight of the MacBook inside, and wondering: What kind of policy could you get at Cosmic Insurance? Financial protection in the event of a malevolent alien invasion? Of comet or meteorite impact? Of catastrophic expansion of the sun into a red giant? As I smiled at my cleverness, my eye was caught by a young brunette in earthtone clothing making her way toward me. Khaki capri pants, white linen blouse, striped suspenders, giant purple Om ring. Tall, willowy. On her shoulder: a tote bag in natural undyed cotton, printed with the acronym SSC and a side-profile image of Virginia Woolf. So immersed was I in my daydreams that it took a full ten seconds to realize who she was, my Eurasian daughter (Amerasian, technically), and by that time I had nowhere to hide.

“Hi, Dad,” she said when she reached me. Her mouth was set in a firm line.

“No,” I said. “No, I’m not ready yet. It can’t be time.”

“What?”

“This can’t be the day, it just can’t!”

“I’m not sure what you mean exactly. Time travel isn’t an exact science; it doesn’t always happen in the right order, and you may have information that I don’t. What day is today?”

“Just go away. Maybe if you’re not here, then it won’t happen, right?”

“I can’t do that,” she said. Sofia. She’d said her name was Sofia. “I’ve traveled too far. I won’t let you push me around anymore. You’re going to listen to me this time.”

“No, no, look, I’ll do anything. Take me into the future with you.” It felt strange to shiver in such sultry weather.

Sofia looked down at her shoes, purple Chuck Taylors that matched the color of her ring. “It doesn’t work like that. One person per trip.”

“But I don’t want to die!” I shouted, the words erupting out of me before I could control content or volume, attracting looks from the other waiting passengers in our vicinity. Knowing the future was no consolation once it caught up with you. I lowered my voice and stepped closer. “I wish I’d gotten the chance to know you, but I just can’t be around you right now. If you’re not here to observe it, it won’t happen, like Heisenberg, right? So go, please go, leave now.”

She turned away, and I looked over her shoulder: the 80 was approaching from down the block. I shoved my way to the front of the mass of humanity so as to grab one of the few seats likely to still be available on the bus, and also to put some distance between myself and Sofia. Already in my mind, I was constructing a chain of logic that even the time-space continuum could not deny. If I could just make it onto the bus, grab a seat, and head down to my favorite bookstore at Club Street, like I’d originally planned, then I would avoid the inevitable. It was solid logic and I planted my feet in defiance.

I felt a hard push from behind and tumbled into the road as the bus arrived, its large wheels so very heavy and so very fast.

~

August 2008

“All right, class dismissed.”

The students in front of me, twenty-seven young men and women around a decade my junior, closed their laptops and packed up their bags. The horseshoe-shaped room filled with low muttering, and I reached behind me to turn off the ceiling-mounted overhead projector. My first Academic Writing night class at Singapore Management University was now over, and I exhaled in relief. I’d relayed my expectations and the assignments for the semester, started discussing the concepts of identity and discrimination, and managed to get through the ensuing awkward discussion and remainder of the 90 minutes without sweating completely through my shirt, my nervousness battling it out with the room’s central air-conditioning. Teaching a brand new class was always stressful, especially in a foreign country; I’d moved from North Carolina to Singapore for SMU’s two-year contract and was still adjusting to the different social mores, so I hadn’t been sure what to expect.

The students all filed out, and I unhooked my own iBook from the cables in the podium and slid it into my green canvas Converse shoulderbag. I looked up and one student had remained behind, a fetching young woman who’d taken a seat in the front row, wearing a sleeveless dress that ended just above her knees, her long hair frizzed out full. Her smile was wide and genuine, her teeth small and even. I recalled the class roll: she had a Chinese surname, but her features belied a blending with another ethnicity, possibly Malay.

“Professor?” she said.

“Nicole, right?”

“That’s right. Um, would it be possible to talk to you about the first essay assignment? I’m still a bit unclear on what you’re looking for.” Her voice was low and musical, with hardly a trace of a Singaporean accent.

“Sure,” I said, looking around at the empty classroom, aware of how it might look, a professor and his female student, alone. “Is there someplace a bit more public we could go?”

“Yeah lah,” she said, smiling again. “I know a great place.”

She stepped outside, I turned off the lights, stepped out myself, and locked the door with the EZ-Link card that doubled as my university ID. “Please, lead the way.”

We exited the building and wound our way along the brick walkways, with Nicole asking hesitant questions: where was I from (North Carolina), why did I come to Singapore (teaching work), how long had I been here already (one month), did I like the food (for the most part), had I traveled anywhere else in Southeast Asia (no), was I married (no), did I have a fiancée (no), a girlfriend (no)? I answered as best I could, acutely aware of her line of questioning, trying not to stare at the way her dress flowed around her body, at the long line of her neck, at the way her bountiful hair came tantalizingly close to brushing my arm.

Nicole said, “Okay, we’re here,” and I looked ahead at a small lighted glassed-in café emblazoned with a tyvek sign reading MR TEA, the shop tucked underneath one of SMU’s many class buildings on Victoria Street, with dozens of occupied tables set up outside, crowded with young people (when had I started to think of them as young people? after I turned thirty?) working on assignments next to open textbooks, or tapping away on high-end laptops. I noticed more than a few with the lit Apple logo and smiled, myself a devotee of Steve Jobs. It seemed Singaporeans had money to burn.

We stepped inside Mr Tea and up to the counter and the sign reading “Q Here.” Short for queue, rather than line, one of the many Britishisms still sticking around after the country’s colonial days, yet another thing for me to have to get used to. Nicole ordered something called Teh Tarik, and before I could interject, she called a Ginger Masala Tea for me. “Forgive me,” she said. “But it’s an amazing drink. And if you’ve only been in Singapore for a month, you haven’t tasted anything like it before.”

“Is it similar to chai? I like chai.”

“Sort of. You’ll see.” Her eyes glinted. Was this now a date?

Our drinks arrived and Nicole paid, shooing away my open wallet, pointing out that it was less than three Sing dollars for the both of them, an astonishingly cheap price in such an expensive country. We took a two-top table near the side wall, next to a rickety plywood bookshelf overflowing with used paperback crime novels and stacks of board games like Risk and Settlers of Cataan. Out the window-wall, the foot traffic was a continuous thing, and I was taken back to my graduate school days, hanging out at Cup A Joe on the NC State campus, soaking up the intense academic vibe from the surrounding caffeine addicts. There was an energy one got from a university café that could not be found in any other setting.

I expected Nicole to ask about the first class assignment, a thousand-word essay on self-identity, but instead she continued with the personal questions. She asked about my favorite books and authors, and told me I just had to visit BooksActually, Singapore’s best and quirkiest literary bookshop. She inquired on the movies I’d seen lately, my opinion of Singaporean politics (I hadn’t been here long enough to form one yet), the tourist sites I’d seen (only Chinatown and Little India so far).

“We’ll have to remedy that,” she said. “I’m an excellent tour guide.” She took a sip of her Teh Tarik, and I couldn’t help noticing a bead of sweat trickling down the left side of her elegant neck, over her collarbone, between the swells of her small breasts, and underneath the V of her dress that formed at her solar plexus. The aircon in the café was just as cold as it had been in the classroom, but we’d both worked up a bit of exercise on the walk over. I looked up and she was smiling widely; she’d caught me staring, but didn’t seem to mind.

After about half an hour more of pleasant conversation, Nicole stopped abruptly, looked to the window-wall at her right (my left), and said, “Do you know that woman? She’s been staring at you for the last five minutes or so.”

I looked. Sitting about twenty feet from the window on a concrete bench, by herself, was a woman in her mid- to late-twenties, wearing a white blouse, khaki-colored capri pants, and suspenders. A glint of something at her ankle, a large ring on her forefinger. Straight hair stretching halfway down her back. Her gaze was focused, and she didn’t turn away as I returned it.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve never seen her before.” It was true.

After another moment, she picked up a tote bag lying on the ground at her feet, stood up, and flipped me the bird; the fingernail polish on her middle finger was a dark color. Then she turned and walked around a corner and out of sight.

“What the hell?”

“She seemed cross,” Nicole said.

I shook my head. What a weird night. Had I actually met the woman before and forgotten? “Whoever she thinks I am, I hope she can forgive that person. Angry stalking is not a good way to live your life.”

“Well, ah,” Nicole said, gathering her things, “I think I should be going off now.”

“Right.” I walked behind her out of the café, through the outside seating area, and back to the brick sidewalk. I wasn’t sure what to say. “See you in class.”

She waved and smiled once again. “You won’t be able to miss me,” she said.

~

December 2008

“What? Are you kidding?”

“I’m afraid not,” Sunita said. Her tiny office, the approximate size of a coat closet, was stuffed to overflowing with file folders and thick textbooks on pedagogy. “The school has decided not to continue the Academic Writing program for the next semester. Not a priority for business students and future bankers.”

“But I have a two-year contract. You’re seriously telling me that after teaching here for such a short time, after I moved halfway around the world, that you won’t have any work for me come January?”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s out of my hands. It was hard enough getting this program approved in the first place, but the purse-strings have been tightened university-wide, and anything that doesn’t show an immediate and urgent importance to our students’ future professional lives becomes unnecessary fat to be cut away. Their words, so you know. Not mine.”

“But you have to find me other classes to teach, right? My work visa explicitly states that I can only stay in the country if I’m teaching.”

“I’m sorry there too. Your contract states that Singapore Management University can terminate your employment at any point. And there just aren’t any open English-related classes that need teachers right now. We’ll of course keep your records open in case positions do open up. Meanwhile, you could try some adjunct teaching at NUS or NTU.”

“What, go back to getting paid twice a term? Not knowing if I’ll have a job after every semester? Having to scrabble and scrounge for classes just so I can pay my rent? I did that in North Carolina, and I don’t want to go back to it. Isn’t there
anything
else here? No other introductory comp classes? Remedial? Whatever?”

Sunita sighed and rubbed the bridge of her nose. She’d apparently had this same conversation four times already today. “I’ll see what I can do, but don’t get your hopes up. I like you, you’ve taught good classes, your students seem to enjoy your teaching style, and did well on their final papers. I’ll ask around.”

I sat back in Sunita’s guest chair and exhaled. She single-handedly managed the Centre for English Competence; as bad as I felt, I knew her own position was also tenuous. SMU could easily decide tomorrow to do away with the entire CEC curriculum altogether, and those in charge wouldn’t spare another thought about it.

I left Sunita’s coat closet, said goodbye to the admin staff in the outer office, took an escalator up to street level and walked down Stamford Road toward the City Hall MRT station. Through the throngs of Raffles City shoppers, down the escalator, through the turnstile, and down another escalator to the platform. While waiting for the train, I pulled out my phone and sent a quick SMS to Nicole:
Some not-so-great news. Can I come over?
She always laughed at the formality of my text messages; sometimes our ten-year age difference might as well have been thirty. Her response:
yah. home now. rents out.
It still struck me as odd that young people in Singapore lived as long as they did with their parents, staying with them sometimes even after they got married. Americans just didn’t do this; at eighteen, my own parents practically kicked me out the door. Nicole was twenty-two, and in no fear of being booted out of the nest anytime soon.

A crowded breathless train ride later and I alighted at the Tanah Merah station. Up to street level, waited ten minutes for the number 9 bus to carry me down three more stops, then afive-minute walk to Nicole’s parents’ condo. I suppose I could have walked the whole way, but I didn’t feel like showing up at my girlfriend’s house sweaty and out of sorts. I rang the bell and she opened the door straight away; she must have been watching TV in the living room whilst waiting for me. Without a word, she pulled me into a forceful kiss, and then breathed, “Upstairs.”

On top of the naughty rush I got from sleeping with a student (even if she was legally an adult) was the illicitness of doing it in her parents’ house. Her mom and dad were nice people (yet still unaware that I was their daughter’s teacher), but, as with many Singaporeans, on the conservative side when it came to whom their little girl chose to date. And as an
ang moh
, I was not exactly their favorite choice, although they would never say so to my face. The idea of getting caught
in flagrante delicto
was an unbelievable turn-on, and our lovemaking in these cases, as it was today, was intense and passionate. We’d both be sore later.