Red Dot Irreal (7 page)

I stood on shaky legs and joined her on the edge of the bed. “I’m sorry, I should have told you before. It’s that same woman who was there the first day we met, at Mr Tea, remember? I just didn’t want to trouble you with it.” I took her trembling upper arms in my hands and stroked gently, trying to soothe away her adrenaline rage. She didn’t pull away. “
Sayang, sayang
,” I said, recalling the Peranakan words, “I’d never cheat on you, you know that.” I leaned her down prone on the bed and kissed her. “Right?”

She didn’t answer, but the anger was slowly sublimating from her features. I knew it wasn’t completely gone, and that the sex to come would be rough and vigorous, punishing me for my presumptive guilt, and so I made sure not to mollify her too completely.

~

October 2009

The ceramic turtle shattered against the concrete wall above my head, and I threw my arms over my face to protect against the flying debris. Incoherent screaming formed a wall of sound in the vicinity of the bedroom door, and I edged off the mattress onto the floor, feeling around for my boxer-briefs with one hand while still protecting my face with the other. I glanced up; Mei was still in bed, the thin comforter pulled up over her head as if it could protect her from Nicole’s fury. I managed to pull on my underwear and raise to a crouch.

“Sweetness, please—”

“Don’t you sweetness me, you shit! You lying pig-fucker!” Nicole’s hair seemed to expand into an afro of rage, and her eyes darted around the room for something else she could throw. I sprang forward and grabbed her by the wrists, and it was like gripping two fire hoses open at full blast.

In the eight months of our marriage I’d only strayed once. Our sex life (mine and Nicole’s) had dropped off dramatically since the I-do’s, with all of the horrible clichés that came along with it: the begging, the rebuffs, the fights, the sleeping on the couch. The affair with Mei had been going on for the past three weeks, and I felt little guilt at all; after an early morning chance meeting at the hawker centre within walking distance of my flat, and the not-so-obvious double entendres that took place during that conversation, I called in sick to SMU (a minor payback for the dicking over I’d received from them almost a year earlier) and we took a taxi back to her place. Until that day, I’d never pictured Mei as so flexible and creative.

This morning, Nicole had gone out to meet her mother for breakfast and then shopping at Vivo City, and so I’d called Mei and told her to come over, hoping to get that same feeling I’d originally had when fucking Nicole in her parents’ house, that anticipation of the danger of getting caught in the act, and either Nicole had come back early or Mei and I had lost track of the time tumbling in the sheets, it didn’t really matter either way, because the result was the same. The fantasy had come true.

Nicole screamed in my face, calling me a cuntweasel, a fuckmonkey, a douche nozzle, a buttplug, her hands slipping out of my grasp to slap and hit and scratch, and it was like trying to control a hurricane. A whimper from my left: Mei, still naked (presumably), still hiding under the comforter. Nicole took advantage of my distraction to push me away, and I nearly stumbled backward over the leg of the bed frame.

The sudden quiet of the room seemed to make the space between us waver visibly, as if a rippling pool of water was materializing in the air. And then, I must have blacked out for about ten seconds, or twenty, I don’t know for how long but it had to have been long enough for that familiar figure, the Eurasian woman in her drab clothing and obvious jewelry, to enter the room and stand between Nicole and me. A blackout because the only other explanation involved an abrupt appearance from nowhere, spontaneously bubbling into existence within that vaporous haze, and I just couldn’t accept that.

The Eurasian woman was facing a dumbstruck Nicole, and she said, “Nicole Tan Fann Wee, you were born at 10:56 p.m. on the 17th of November with a full head of hair, your favorite movie is Jeunet and Caro’s
Delicatessen
, you once ate half of a black forest
gâteau
in one sitting after being dumped by your junior college boyfriend, you have been trying to write a minimalist play for almost ten years, and you have always wanted to live in Switzerland.”

Nicole tried to step back, but bumped into the door behind her. I had never seen her eyes so wide. “What—? Who—? Who the fuck you, ah? How you get in here?”

“Nicole, I know he’s a selfish asshole,” she said, pointing at me. “He doesn’t deserve you, he doesn’t listen to you, and he’s fucking your best friend. But you’re very close to doing something you’ll regret. Please, come in to the living room with me.” She put a tentative hand on Nicole’s shoulder and to my surprise, Nicole left the room with her. After a moment, the Eurasian woman stuck her head back in and said, “Best you get Auntie Mei out of here.”

I coaxed Mei out from under the comforter, passed her her clothes from where they’d been scattered on the floor, and got dressed myself. Once we were both decent again (although I’m sure Nicole would take umbrage at either of us being “decent”), I peeked out into the living room; Nicole sat on the couch’s left-most cushion, bent over, head in her hands, shoulders heaving, crying silently, while the Eurasian woman sat next to her, arm around her shoulders, patting Nicole’s knee, saying something I couldn’t hear. Mei and I edged out of the bedroom, past the two women on the couch, out the door of the flat, and down the corridor to the lift lobby. Downstairs, we stood on the curb waiting for a taxi, not speaking. Finally, after about fifteen minutes, a silver cab approached from down the block, and I said, “This can’t happen anymore.”

“I know,” she said, waving the taxi down. “I’ve lost a lover and my best friend all at once. Stupid, so stupid. I’m going home to bash myself with a hammer now.”

“Look, don’t blame yourself too much. I knew what I was doing. I’ll call you, when this whole thing blows over.”

Mei nodded. The silver cab stopped, Mei opened the door, and then she closed it behind her without looking at me.

Not eager to return to the domestic nightmare upstairs, I wandered to the rear side of the housing block. My path took me through the small park adjacent, with about a dozen carefully managed types of trees—palm, rain, angsana, yellow flame, mahogany, tembusu, sea apple, saga, sea almond, trumpet—all crammed into a compact public space. Mynahs, pigeons, crows, and diminutive brown sparrows noisily populated the branches above in cacophonous song. I sat down at one of the wrought iron benches along the cobbled path. Somewhere, in one of the seven housing blocks in the vicinity, a jackhammer indicated a housing renovation, the rat-at-at-at-at of pulverizing concrete and ceramic floor tiles.

After a time, the Eurasian woman approached on the path from the direction of my block, her movements fluid. The breeze tossed her straight hair around her head in a way that immediately reminded me of Nicole. She sat down beside me.

“Nicole has gone to her parents’,” she said. “She’ll take you back eventually, but not for a while, and you’re going to have to suck up like you never have before.” She opened her mouth to say more, and instead punched me hard in the upper arm. The next day, a bruise would blossom there in the shape of a backwards Om.

“Ow!”

“You stupid shit,” she said.“I told you. I
told
you that you couldn’t keep it in your pants. I’d hoped the warning would somehow make things different. I guess I’m the idiot here.”

“How did you do that?” I said. “Enter the room without anyone seeing?”

“I’ve told you already,” she said.

“But it’s ... it’s just impossible.”

“Nothing’s impossible, Dad.”

I looked at this young woman, really looked at her for the first time. In her face I could see my nose, my ears, Nicole’s mouth and chin, and features from both her family and mine, or which were new and unique to the Eurasian woman, like her eye color, the dark grey of worn concrete. With everything that had happened, how could I deny it any longer?

“I’m sorry,” I said. “For whatever I did, or will do, to you. I’ve been an incredible bastard. I’ll make things better, for all of us.”

“I know you’ll try,” she said, “but I need to tell you something. Time travel tends to be a non-linear process for the traveler. I’ve visited important moments in your and Mom’s lives, not just as a tourist, but hoping to catch you when you’d be most open to listening.” She paused and looked into the middle distance. The wind rustled the leaves in the trees around us. “I’ve just come from about a year in your future. And I saw you die.”

“What?” The blood drained out of my face. “But that can’t be right. You said I raised you, that I was still alive even after you left at sixteen. Right? And if I die, doesn’t that mean you’ll never exist?”

“The way it was explained to me is that when we travel to the past, a parallel alternate universe is formed in that moment. Any changes I make won’t affect the reality of the altuniv I came from, but it means I can’t go back there either. I’m stuck in this one now. So if you die before I’m conceived, I won’t fade away into causality, but I’ll continue to live in an altuniv where I was never born. I’m not sure which option’s worse.”

Though I could see the birds above us flapping and tweeting and making all the movements that would indicate noise, I couldn’t hear any of it for the pounding in my ears. I cleared my throat, my mouth suddenly arid.

“How ...” I cleared my throat again. “How does it happen?”

“You’re pushed into the street and hit by a bus. I want you to know, it wasn’t me who pushed you. Will push you.”

“Are you sure? I don’t seem to be your favorite person.”

She sighed. “I may have wanted to hurt you for all the things you’ve done, but I never wished you dead. It was a middle-aged Chinese man you bumped into when you rushed to the front of the bus queue. Singaporeans hate queue jumpers, especially an
ang moh
with no manners.”

“But isn’t there anything that can be done to change it? You’ve already altered things, can’t you change this as well?”

The Eurasian woman, my daughter, shook her head and swiped at her eyes. “The event has already happened, the moment has been burned. I’m sorry.”

“I see.” I sat there and seemed to fall into myself, as if the world was rushing away from me in all directions. In a year, I would be dead.

“Look, I don’t have much longer. The transition team will be pulling me back anytime now. I only had enough social credit for five jumps, so this is the last time we’ll meet, at least from my point of view. Is there anything else you want to ask?”

“When you arrive back in your time, will you take care of Nicole? I know she won’t be the exact mother that you knew, but I want to make sure she’ll be okay.”

“I promise,” she said. “I always looked after her before.” The air surrounding her gradually took on the same wavery quality as before in the bedroom, as if I was now seeing her underwater. It was happening, she was leaving, going to a changed home in the future.

“What’s your name?” I asked quickly.

“Sofia,” she said, her voice fading. “You named me. It means wisdom.” And then the rippling air seemed to coalesce around her body, forming a person-shaped bubble with Sofia inside, the light inside the bubble intensifying and brightening to incandescence, as if Sofia, the future daughter that I would never have, was exploding into a supernova, and then I blinked and she was gone.

Big Chief

The back of your head: bumpy, uneven, overly large for your frame, dark hair oiled to a high shine and pulled backward in inverse rilles, dragging grey over brown to end just above the collar of your starched white shirt, your ears nearly perfect semicircles that stick out as if vestigial wings, sweat beading along your creased neck at the periphery of your hairline. I cannot escape this view, trapped and weakened inside this wooden form, captured in this box of leaded glass on the shelved display space behind your large teak desk in this tower of manmade corporate greed so far from my homeland.

You hunch over your desk, engaged in paperwork that reeks of import, yet which, in the grand scheme, is but a blip of nonsense within the deep time of the numinous. So enamored are you of this pointless capitalist exercise that were you even able to hear me, I am certain my words, which once held sacred power as the messenger of the gods, would be ignored. Laughed off. The endless creation and retention of wealth being as strong today as when this ligneous aspect of mine was first carved in Borneo’s forbidden rainforest of
Tana Olen
, by that talented artisan of the Dayaks. So intensely he performed the continuous seven-day ritual dance and mantras in order to gain my blessing so as to cut down the venerable ebony tree for his medium. I do not remember his face or his name, but still do recall the confident feel of his hands and fingers as he manipulated ebony into a stylized representation of my immortal form, a glorious apotheotic rhinoceros hornbill, my feathers left unpainted black, my bill colored the deep red of Alocasia berries, my fan-shaped tail the rich gold of sunset bisected by a stripe of night, my majestic horn curled back into a tight kinetic spiral.

But you have no interest in my provenance, or for the artifact of power that you so casually display in your office, handed down over seventeen decades, going all the way back to a Dutch trader named de Vroome, whose surname you share. He was also ignorant of the knowledge that to capture so precisely the image of a deity is to imbue that image with an aspect of the deity itself. The Dayak artisan who fashioned my form knew this, the villagers who presented offerings and hoisted me above their heads in celebration during the
Gawai Kenyalang
festivals knew this, yet Westerners have generally neglected due respect to the cultures of those tied more closely to the land, couching their aversion in superiority to “heathen superstition” as a form of justification for the expansion of empire.

At least I was able to demonstrate my abilities with your ancestor, calling down all manner of my extended family from the skies to plague de Vroome’s expedition party, dozens of hornbills summoned from every island of the archipelago and as far north as the peninsular island where I now reside. My birdly pranks may have continued at length were it not for his encounter with the Illanun, who recognized me for what I was, and fashioned for de Vroome the leaded glass cage which has held me prisoner ever since, in exchange for de Vroome’s entire stock of silks and spices, as well as his pet capuchin monkey.

Would you ever own a monkey? I think not. You have not inherited your forefather’s sense of adventure, preferring to close yourself off in this temple of finance, finding innumerable ways to desperately clutch onto this currency that you have inherited and then expanded. Even someone like your personal assistant Azizah—smarter and more savvy than you by far, who gives off a faint strain of the Dayaks herself, barely detectable, possibly from a dozen generations ago but still present nonetheless, and who presses her hands together in an anjali mudra as a gesture of reverence to me when you are out of the office—is beneath your general concern. Last month when you were away negotiating some contract or other in Hyderabad, she left a humble offering of flowers, seeds, and rice cakes next to my glass prison, did you know that? I assume you also are unaware of how that solid month of worship strengthened me, returned to me a semblance of my old power, enough to communicate with her via subliminal whisperings, to nudge her compulsions, to weave her into my machinations.

And look there, now she comes, striding confidently through the doorway, and my heart soars at the sight of the ordinary claw hammer in her right hand, purchased last week from the hardware shop down the road from her housing block, the steel head made fantastical through Azizah’s carefully acid-etched runes of negation, the glyphs influenced by my mental urgency. You leap upward from your ergonomically tailored mesh chair and demand something I am unable to detect clearly, but your posture and gestures speak volumes. Azizah, my rescuer, my savior, my unlikely worshiper, steps easily around your gesticulations in a motion of swiftness and grace augmented by the hammer’s temporary infusion of discarnate paramountcy. She raises the holy bludgeon as you watch, impotent with shock, and brings it down with the force of Jubata the Highest when he forged the mountains and the rivers through force of will alone, the impact shattering both glass and Illanun borstal incantation alike.

For the first time in nearly two hundred years, I feel the currents of gentle air caressing my ebony form, and a shriek of pure bliss erupts from within me, the concussive force of my exhalation causing your office windows to explode outward, and sending both you and Azizah to the floor with hands cupped futilely over your ears. I cry again with all of my being, summoning my direct descendants from every corner of Southeast Asia, lending them otherworldly speed so as to arrive immediately, regardless of their original location. Dozens of rhinoceros hornbills burst through the gaping hole left by the absence of the office’s windows, a whirl of wings and beaks and glorious horns, their joyous combined piercing calls funneling belief and benediction into my wooden shape, reconnecting me to my source of divine power, filling me with existence.

My form shifts, enlarges, fills the office occupied by riotous hornbills and two terrified humans, my aspect charging the air as I regain my fullness of being. I stretch and stretch, my wingtips lengthening until they encompass the entirety of the world itself; I inhale and drink in the currents of air and water and slow-moving rock and celestial bodies making their patient way through the universe; I trumpet, my utterance of self resonating through the world of men and birds and up into the realms above, and my avian children raise a million million calls in simultaneous response. In the office, where you gibber in the corner, your trousers reeking of urine, I bend down my massive godbody and lay a blessing on Azizah’s forehead, of long life, prosperity, and happiness, and her smile is as beatific as I imagine mine to be.

I soar through the maw of the office wall, and glide upward on the currents of my being, surrounded by my horned children. I am Singalang Burong, messenger of the gods, chief of all birds, and I am at long last going home.