Red Dot Irreal (6 page)

Afterward, we spooned and I stroked the curve of Nicole’s hip, breathed in her musky post-coital scent. Her full frizzy hair formed a halo on the pillow. I told her about my meeting with Sunita, and the fact that I may not have a job next month, and might even have to move back to the US. She was still for several moments, and I counted the rise and fall of her breasts as she breathed shallowly. Then she turned to face me.

“Is this definite?”

“She’s going to look and see if she can find anything for me, but it doesn’t look good.”

“You’d leave me?”

“Not by choice, sweetness. But they’re making it very difficult for me to stay.”

“What if—” she started, then closed her eyes, placed a hand on my chest. “What if we got married?”

“What?” What?

“If you were married to a Singaporean citizen, you could become a permanent resident. They wouldn’t want to deport you, even if you didn’t have a job right away.”

“I don’t know, Nic. It’s a big move, and I wouldn’t want to do it for the wrong reasons.”

She grabbed my chin and looked directly into my eyes. “Do you love me?”

“You know I do.”

“Say it. Please.”

I exhaled. “I love you, Nicole Tan.”

“Then you’d be doing it for the right reasons. Correct?”

My heart was performing some fluttery motion within my chest, and the world seemed to ripple, as if I was looking up from underwater. Was I really considering this?

“Correct,” I said.

“Good,” Nicole said. “Then will you marry me?”

Later, after we’d made love a second time, riding the high of our nascent engagement, I left by the back gate, and followed the drainage canal down to the main road and the nearby bus stop. I should have been cavorting and yawping and all those things people do in moments of extreme happiness, but I couldn’t stop the dissenting thoughts from swirling, from telling me it was too soon, she was too young, questioning whether I’d really meant it when I said that I loved her.

A breeze swept across the canal, bringing a touch of saline carried all the way from the sea. My head and heart felt light and expansive, as if I might float away on that salt-water breeze. At the unoccupied bus stop, I sat down on the orange plastic bench and tried to breathe deeply. After several minutes, another person sat down next to me. All I noticed at first were the khaki-colored capri pants and the purple Chuck Taylors, but then the metal anklet of turquoise orchid petals glinted and caught the sunlight, and I looked up. The biracial woman, half-Chinese half-Caucasian, also wore a white linen blouse, a pair of striped earth-tone suspenders, and a giant purple ring on her left index finger in the shape of the Tibetan Om symbol, and all at once it hit me that I’d seen her before, walking away, middle finger extended.

“You,” I said.

“Me,” she said.

“Should I know you? You seemed angry at me before, at the tea shop.”

“Look, I don’t have much time to answer that, and I don’t know if I could since that event hasn’t happened to me yet. But I do know a lot of things about you. For example, how you proposed to your girlfriend just now.”

I edged away from the Eurasian woman, but the bench was short, so I stood up. “How could you possibly ... Who are you? We haven’t told anyone yet. I just,
just
, got engaged for Christ’s sake!”

“To you. To me, you’ve been married a long time. To me, you proposed twenty-six years ago.”

I looked frantically up the street but not a single bus was in sight.

“Just stop it, okay? It didn’t even happen like that.”

“What do you mean?”

“She proposed. Not me.”

“Are you sure?” The woman sat calmly on the bench and looked off into the middle distance. “It didn’t happen like that the first time.”

“Didn’t happen like
what?
No, look, never mind, I don’t care, I’m walking. Goodbye.” I strode off in the general direction of the MRT station, occasionally glancing behind me, but the woman didn’t rise from her place on the bench. I turned a corner and accelerated my pace, passing by a hawker center and rows of shops, including two 7-11 stores. I wasn’t followed, but I didn’t breathe a sigh of relief until I had descended into the subterranean safety of the station.

~

February 2009

My mother retied my necktie, straightened my collar, and brushed imaginary dust off of my jacket shoulders. Still treating me like the little boy who couldn’t tie his shoes. She’d just arrived the day before, and the concealer she’d applied didn’t completely cover up the dark circles under her eyes. The jet lag from flying twenty-five hours from Raleigh to Singapore was a real bitch; I was impressed she was even standing at all and making coherent conversation this afternoon.

“Your father really wishes he could be here, but his back, you know. He can hardly stand to drive an hour to his chiropractic appointments, let alone such a long flight.”

“I know, Mom. But we’ve got the laptop set up at the reception so he can see everything on Skype. I know it’s not the same as being here, but at least he can be part of things.”

The queue board at the Registry of Marriages produced a squealing tone, and then the number 1075 flashed in red. Nicole and Mei, her best friend since Raffles Girls’ School (Secondary), got up from their seats along the waiting room wall. Nicole was wearing a
sarong kabaya
that had been tailored in India (a sheer purple top with embroidered gold and pink flower petals, and a light green skirt with matching floral patterns), and which fit her curves perfectly; her frizzy hair had been tamed into a swirling pile on top of her head. She normally didn’t wear makeup, but had applied lipstick and a bit of blush for the occasion. Mei wore a tight black skirt that ended at mid-thigh; not entirely appropriate for a marriage solemnization, but I had to admit the look suited her. Quite sexy. I tried to keep my focus on the correct woman.

In the solemnizing room (though I didn’t think it was technically called that), our officiant stood at a podium, shuffling paperwork. Nicole handed over our appointment letter, her IC, and my passport. It seemed odd that our marriage was being made official in such a sterile and bureaucratic place, but this was how things were done in Singapore. Civil ceremony first with two witnesses, then a big banquet dinner later for all the family members, featuring toasts and songs and an embarrassing slideshow and dancing. The officiant, or solemnizer, or whatever the hell he was called, was an old Indian man with a face like a hawk, nostrils gaping wide, the kind of guy I imagined as my unseen neighbor at the rented flat in Bedok, who sounded as if he had violent phlegmatic battles with malicious throat demons every morning and night. The old man before me put a hand to his mouth to stifle a yawn.

The ceremony was quick, only ten minutes long. Nicole and I recited our vows, exchanged the rings we’d special-ordered online, signed the registrar (along with Mei and my mother, as the witnesses), received our marriage certificate, and were congratulated with a sleepy smile. And that was it: we were now husband and wife. Though the officiant had not told us to, we kissed, and the taste of Nicole’s rambutan-flavored lipstick stayed with me for the rest of the day.

At the reception that evening, hosted at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, I tried to keep names and familial relationships straight in my head, shaking hands with an endless number of aunts and uncles and cousins and grandparents, twenty tables worth of new family, and after a while just gave up trying to remember. Eventually, we sat down at the head table, wife (it seemed so odd to think of her as my wife) on one side and mother on the other (with Mei sitting on Mom’s other side, chatting her up and laughing unashamedly, a musical sound), as Nicole’s father held a spirited discussion in Teochew with her uncle. Her dad had been generous enough to spring for a premier room with an ocean view for Nicole and me to spend our wedding night, and I frankly couldn’t wait to escape this well-wishing mass of humanity and test the bed springs with my new wife.

The dinner was buffet-style, for which I was grateful; I’d been to too many weddings back in the States where catering was served, and took forever to do so, dragging a reception hours past the tolerance point. A number of incredible-looking dishes on display, including rendang, chicken masala, assam laksa, mee siam, oatmeal prawns (one of my favorites), kueh lapis, and an unexpected surprise for dessert: bread pudding. Heeding the advice of my married friends back home, I loaded up my plate, and headed back to the table to tuck in before I could be interrupted, but I hadn’t taken three steps when from an open doorway at the back corner of the room, a familiar figure was motioning for me to join her. Same outfit as before: white blouse, khaki capris, striped suspenders, anklet, ring. What was
she
doing here? I walked back to the head table, strongly considering just ignoring her, but this chick was crazy enough to track us down on our wedding day, so who knew what she might do to disrupt the reception. I placed my plate down, kissed Nicole on the cheek, and said, “Be right back.”

The Eurasian woman had disappeared from the doorway, so hopefully Nicole hadn’t seen her; I found the woman down the hall, sitting on a low fabric bench patterned with pastel-colored tropical flowers, expectantly waiting for me. The compact fluorescent in the wall sconce on the wall above made her face looked washed out, bleached of color.

“What do you want?”

“Not here,” she said, taking my hand. I pulled back, refusing to move.

“Lady, I’m not going anywhere with you until you tell me what the fuck this is all about. You’re taking me away from my own wedding, and—”

“I’m your daughter, all right?”
she stage-whispered. “I’m your daughter, and I’ll explain everything, but
not here
.”

I was stunned enough to follow when she strode down the hall to the elevators. We took the lift in silence to the fifteenth storey, then stepped down the hallway to a room which the Eurasian woman opened with a keycard. The view from the windows was of the sparkling lights and automotive activity around Marina Bay, with the various downtown skyscrapers offering a panorama of illumination that threw geometric shadows onto the walls. The woman closed the door with a very audible click.

I sat on the farther twin bed. “I’m here. Talk.”

She faced me on the opposite bed and seemed to gather herself.

“Like I said, I’m your daughter,” she said.

“But that’s not possible. You’re what, in your mid-twenties? I’m thirty-two years old. Are you suggesting I had a kid when I was seven?”

“No. You and Nicole conceived me when you were thirty-four. Two years from now.”

I shook my head. “So, what then? You’re from the future?”

“Of course,” she said. “Wasn’t that obvious?”

“I’m going back downstairs,” I said, standing up. “My food is getting cold.”

“Wait, I came here for a reason.”

“I don’t care!” I shouted, feeling the blood rush up my neck and into my cheeks. “Look, please, get help. Stop stalking me. Just leave me alone.”

“You’re doing it again!” the woman shouted, and I involuntarily flinched. “Pushing me away, not listening, being the same overbearing asshole that I remember. You disapproved of every decision I ever made. We yelled and fought for most of my childhood. Nothing I did was right in your eyes. I left home at sixteen, and we hardly spoke afterward. And then you had that heart attack and I never got to take any of it back.”

“I’m not listening to this,” I said, and stepped toward the door. She leapt in front of me and barred my way. “Move,” I said.

“It’s not just me, you know. You were also a prick to Mom. Cheating on her with a new student every semester. Even after her fourth suicide attempt, you couldn’t stop. Don’t you see how much you hurt the ones you love?”

I shoved the woman aside and lunged for the door, hearing her bang against the wall but I didn’t slow down, charging out of the room, down the elevator and back to the banquet hall, ignoring those little voices telling me to go back and make sure she was okay. Part of me hoped I’d knocked her unconscious.

I managed to get my breathing under control as I sat back down at my seat at the head table. Twenty minutes had passed. Nicole wouldn’t meet my eye.

“Everything okay?” my mother asked.

“Fine, no worries,” I said. I pushed around the food on my plate, no longer excited by the contents; the oatmeal prawns had gone rubbery, and the bread pudding was an unappealing grey mess.

Later that night, as Nicole and I undressed in the room her father had paid for, she asked, “Where did you go before?”

“It’s not important,” I said. I tossed my shirt on the plush chair next to the room’s cherrywood desk. She unbuttoned the top of her
kabaya
, revealing the cream-colored slip underneath.

“And who was that woman?”

I exhaled. Nicole had seen her after all. “No one. She’s no one.”

In one fluid motion, Nicole’s eyes snapped up at me, she cocked back her right arm, and then slapped me hard, the shock and the impact knocking me to the floor. She towered above me, arms flung to the sides, eyes ablaze, and yelled, her Singaporean accent bursting through, “
Twenty minutes, lah!
You go off with strange woman for twenty minutes,
on our wedding day!
Time enough for quickie, ah? Don’t dare fucking tell me she’s no one!”

“All right! Please, stop yelling and hitting! She’s not no one, but we didn’t do what you think. She keeps popping up and being cryptic and tonight she told me she was our daughter. She’s a psycho, a stalker. I didn’t sleep with her, I swear!”

Nicole straightened. “If you already knew she was a psycho,” she said through gritted teeth, “why the hell you go off with her in the middle of our reception?”

“Because I wanted to make sure she wouldn’t
ruin
the reception. I thought that if I could just see what she wanted, maybe I could get her to leave me alone. Please believe me, sweetness. When I came back to the table, did I seem sexually satisfied to you?”

Nicole stepped back, wiped her eyes, then sat on the king size bed. “I suppose not, lorh.
Alamak
, you going to kill me, you know.”