Corridor

by Alfian Sa'at

  * * *

  “Mak, why do you keep looking out of the window?”

  “Nothing.”

  “We’ll be reaching Singapore soon. Do you want to order anything?”

  “I’m just thinking.”

  “Thinking of what?”

  “Who’s taking care of our plants.”

  “Mak, one week won’t kill them. Anyway we watered them before we left.”

  “You don’t know those plants. You don’t know what they need.”

  * * *

  The day they found out my grandchildren were playing with their taps was the day things happened. That night, I couldn’t sleep because someone’s car alarm had gone off, and even though we lived on the seventh floor the sound still reached us: the shrill persistent wail, the boring tune played over and over. So I got up from my mattress and went to the toilet. When I turned on the tap it made a squeaky sound and then that hollowness, waiting for the sound of water, the feeling that instead of delivering water the tap had sucked in all sound.

  At that moment I felt like an old woman.

  The week after, my grandchildren confessed to have played with the water pipes. I had made up my mind to apologise to my neighbours one day and when I walked out of my house, I saw their daughter opening the door. She had a boy with her who was holding her by her hips. She saw me, and the look she gave was something I couldn’t forget, a vengeful look, as if I had stolen something from her, as if I had caused her life to take a wrong and irreversible turn. She told the boy to go home, and when he went off he also gave me yet another look, but by that time I had already realised that the girl’s parents weren’t home.

  “Where’s your mother?”

  “She’s not here.”

  “I want to see your mother.”

  “About what?”

  “About something.”

  “About what?”

  “About… about naughty children around here.”

  The next few days became stranger and stranger. For one thing, our slippers went missing, but we would find them near the staircase, as if someone had kicked them all the way there. And then sometimes in the afternoon while I was in the living room I would hear someone’s fist knocking on the wall. We didn’t keep our slippers outside anymore, and I realised that the wife next door was avoiding my eyes when we met each other in the streets outside. She would usually look down, looking tired, weighed down by the large supermarket bags in each hand, her head to one side. Bashful and weary, but done in a way so deliberate that I knew something had gone wrong. It was also around this same time that the slamming began.

  My son-in-law had bought a karaoke set, for the children he claimed; he would get them those educational sing-a-long videos and they would learn while having fun. But he was the one who ended up singing into the golden microphone, sitting on the sofa, making his voice have echo effects, sometimes even with his working socks on. He would sing songs like ‘Everything I do I’d do it for you’ and his favourite, ‘Right here waiting’. On one of the days when he was singing, and the children were watching the Caucasian man on screen chasing after a bonnet that the wind had blown away, we heard a loud bang. I realised soon after that it was our neighbours slamming shut their door. In fact, they continued from then on to bang the door shut whenever they could see that we were at home, regardless of whether my son-in-law was singing or not.

  There were other things also, most of them too ugly, not worthy of mention, small bitter annoyances, things to make your heart harden like mud in a kiln. There was urine one day at our doorstep. It could have been an animal that had done it, but my daughter claimed that it had been splashed methodically: collected, and then sprinkled from a vessel. We didn’t dare after a while to keep our windows open anymore, because one day we found a clump of earth beside the television. My son-in-law insisted it was dried dung. Our neighbours did the same, closed their windows and doors, bought air-con, stayed cocooned in their houses as if they were plotting something diabolical and new.

  My son-in-law one day almost wanted to buy a video camera because he “wanted to catch them in action” so that we could show evidence to the police. But it was not that we were completely innocent. My own daughter whom I raised in the best manner I could, once while sweeping the corridor, brushed most of the rubbish towards their doorstep. My grandchildren started calling the neighbour’s wife a witch. If they didn’t sleep early, she would pay them a visit and feed them with geckos, added my son-in-law.

  * * *

  “Switch on the lights.”

  “Ok, grandma.”

  “Help your father with the travelling bags, and open the windows.”

  “Ok, ok.”

  “Why are you switching on the TV?”

  “But grandma, one whole week we never watch.”

  “Open the windows first. The hall smells funny.”

  When I first entered the house there seemed to be so much sunlight streaming in, and in those shafts of light, I could see so many dust motes, so many sparkling like luminous punctuation marks in the air. I thought then, two things I could do, either clean the house from ceiling to floor, or to get curtains so as to not let in the betraying light. But I liked the house, I liked the children standing in the kitchen and turning on the taps, the echoing, empty bone-white rooms, the smiles we met along the corridor. Our neighbours had bought us canned drinks as a way of welcome, and we let the dust on our hands mingle with the condensation on those cans, smiling in gratitude, glad that our hands were dirty, as if we had been working on building a house. In which case we were taking a rest, offered drinks for our labour, and our smiles were filled with not only gratefulness, but the satisfaction of sunburnt workers.

  It was dusk when I walked out of the house, and the memory of the dead man stayed with me as I wandered barefoot out onto the corridor. The cement floor was cold, a polished cold, and a breeze flickered across the slivers of leaves of my Japanese bamboo. I went over to the ledge and felt a stickiness on my soles. It was then that I remembered the kampung,˚ and how on one night, a thief who had stolen money had gone off to the forested area to hide. The entire kampung went in search of him, even little girls like me, and we searched for half an hour without any success. I was getting sleepy, I kept rubbing my eyes, and then suddenly I felt it. I felt the powerful sensation that he was around, and the shadows around me started rustling. It seemed as if something was travelling among the bushes like a snake under velvet cloth. Then I saw him perched on a tree, shivering, the boy thief. I pointed him out, and later on the way back everyone was saying how I had sharp eyes, and I, I just knew I had a feeling, the feeling for these things.

  So I closed my eyes and thought about the man, the unfortunate man who stumbled upon our corridor and got killed, seven stab wounds, no relatives found, dying words unrecorded, nothing to answer to but a ledge that blocked his view of dawn, and the fast-fading stars. I took a few steps to my right, towards the side of the staircase, my neighbour’s house. My hands were still holding on to the edge of the ledge. I should have been there when the crowd had assembled, with the running Indian man and the screaming woman, and that Linda.

  I tried to feel for the man, the exact spot where he lay, a part of me wondered if it was in front of my house or the neighbour’s, or in between, what it would all mean, what judgements it would spell for us. And then a feeling washed over me when I realised it didn’t matter where he died, there was no crowd. And I was not there. No one was. No one knew.

  I opened my eyes and turned around to find my neighbour looking at me from her window. I looked down, at her stillsurviving plant, the branches stripped bare because my grandchildren had torn off all the flowers one day. When I looked back she was gone, but she had left her window open, for the first time in a long while. For a moment, I saw a wind steal in to lift the curtains of her house, and I could see the curtain trimmings, the powerless, domestic lace. And like an answer or a question the warm amber lights in her living room came on.
/>
  DUEL

  There is this light that I see each night before I sleep. As I lie on my bed, it is the only bedroom light that is still burning on the black-cliffed block across the street. I’m guessing that my bedroom is the only other one that has its light on at that hour. My bedroom is on the second floor, the other person’s is on the eighth. Between them, I imagine a causeway of light through which those things attracted to light can make their pilgrimages. Moths, for example.

  Kamikaze window-crashing beetles.

  Horny winged ants.

  Unidentified flying six-legged objects.

  It bothers me sometimes what the person might be doing up so late. For me, I have a completely valid reason. I take long naps in the day. At night, I watch television until the Sellavision infomercials come on, where enthusiastic people try to sell you things by dropping their jaws or exclaiming, “That’s unbelievable!” I watch until it starts getting unreal, where alone in a sparsely furnished living room you witness how a blonde American woman with fluorescent teeth is showing off her fantastic abdominals on Venice Beach. I watch until the sense creeps in that I am sitting at the opposite end of the world and that it’s only a satellite, like a church pastor, who’s brought me and Miss Six-Pack together. Then I switch off the TV, usually with some wry comment to myself. I do this not so much because I’m afraid of the silence that sheets all afterthoughts, or the sight of the television screen, a ghostly square in the dark, still with an illusionary half-light. I do it the way cartoon characters go “That’s all folks” at the end of the show. Just the other night I was switching off the television and saying “Why the hell is the audience clapping like that, it’s like they’re on drugs,” and then making the remark, “What am I saying? I’m the one on drugs.” Then I’d laugh. At first it scared me to laugh all by myself, but when I later decided that I wasn’t laughing at myself I found it very comforting.

  Anyway, after television I would stay in my room trying to read something or else, just thinking about things. I’d have my thinking pose, which was to lay the back of my head on my palms. I’d imagine that my armpits were sensitive information centres that picked up thought waves from the air. Like my mother’s death, for example. Ovarian cancer at 55, she left behind everything to her only son. I sold the Honda because I couldn’t drive and didn’t feel like learning, and kept everything else. I never told her about my condition, of course, because how do you break the news to someone whose precious waking hours were spent complaining of pain? I wondered sometimes whether pain was more bearable if you kept on talking about it. Come to think of it, we never had any important conversations as I kept watch by her hospital bed. She had her mood swings, which I blamed on the painkillers she took. Sometimes she would say, “I’m sorry that I’m doing this to you,” and sometimes she would tell me, “Why don’t you just go and bring home girls, there’s nobody around to nag at you anyway. I never asked you to be here. I never asked for anything from you in all my life.” One day it would be, “I can’t remember what my mother was wearing when she passed away,” and the next day she’d yell, “Can you stop staring at me as if I’m going to die?”

  However there was one day when she woke up with a start, and reached for my hand. “I was dreaming of you,” she said. “Why did I dream of you when you’re sitting right here by my bed?” I had asked her then what her dream was all about. “The kind of dream that you can’t forget,” she said. “I dreamt that you were gone.”

  Tonight is a special night for me. The thing is that, the light at the bedroom I was talking about had been bothering me for the past two weeks. Somehow or the other it seemed to challenge me. Each night while on my bed, I would watch for it to turn off, but it never did. I would be the one to surrender, falling asleep to wake up sometime before dawn to switch off the lights. By then, the other person’s lights would have gone out.

  There was even one night when I decided to keep a whole night’s vigil. I drank two cups of Nescafé and laid still on my bed, watching his stark fluorescent ceiling lamp persist throughout the night. To occupy myself, I reached my hand out for the curtain and played peek-a-boo with the light. The novelty of that wore off within minutes, and that was when I started inventing stories for my oblivious late night companion.

  He was a chronic insomniac, and just like me he didn’t wear a shirt to sleep, kept his windows open, smoked maybe two packets of cigarettes in one night. Once in awhile, he glanced out of his window to see a couple quarrelling in the street, the woman twisting her wrist from the man’s hand, the man sitting on the kerb with his face in his hands. But unlike me, he was involved in some work, maybe he was writing his memoirs, or carrying out a ridiculous vow of not sleeping until he could make a girl fall in love with him. He spent most nights devising various ways to win her heart, and there was the perverse notion that since she was sleeping she was at her most vulnerable. He felt a certain sense of power then at being awake, and having full control over his fantasising faculties. I preferred this version of the terminal romantic a lot more than the others and soon the whole fable became very elaborate. The object of this yearning lived in my block, her bedroom just opposite to his. Each night, he would keep his bedroom light on like a devoted lantern. If at any one time her feelings for him took a turn, then she too would turn on her bedroom lights, and like some harvest ritual, two lanterns would be burning, and two silhouettes would press themselves like moths against window grilles.

  As I constructed the story, it turned out that the girl’s interpretation was that the guy had turned on the lights as a form of warning. Like a beacon, it alerted her of the nearby presence of danger. It was a sign for her to steer clear, to hide within the protected darkness of her room from a larger abysmal darkness. She was thankful, and wanted to show her gratitude, but knew it was impossible because he could not see her. For her, being in the dark was an act of obedience which she understood only as love.

  Later, it also struck me that the sleepless person on the eighth storey could very well be a girl herself. With an incurable fear of the dark. Whenever it was dusk, panic would set in for the girl and she would walk around the house remembering the colour and shape of every conceivable object before the night turned everything shapeless and grey. Every night, she would sleep with the lights on, like a body in a floodlit mausoleum. It was her grandmother who sleepwalked each night to switch off the lights because she feared that her granddaughter’s skin would turn to wax.

  Behind these fantastic stories however, was the faint hope that somehow, I had found someone who shared something in common with me. Someone who stayed awake for the same reasons I did, who feared excursions into reminiscence because he was aware how riddled with holes his body was. Such that when the wind of memory blew, it would tear him with the force of a hurricane. In fact, I had an impulse one afternoon to meet this person. It didn’t take much deliberation, I was going to knock on his door and tell him that I was a neighbour who found inspiration in him. If he wasn’t in, then maybe I should come with a pen and a notepad to leave behind the message that I had paid him a visit. I would bring along a book also, some self-help tome that I had found useful at one point of time, which had since lost any meaning for me. I had one day flipped through the pages to ask myself why I had underlined so many strange and irrelevant phrases.

  Anyway, I had actually gone up to his house this afternoon, and knocked on the door, with no idea at all what to say once he opened it. He wasn’t in, and I wasn’t sure if that was a good or a bad thing. There was a Christian pamphlet that had been folded in half and stuck between the bars of his gate, with a dove on it, biting a rainbow. I was about to turn away and leave when a thought struck me. I scribbled hastily on the notepad, tore out the piece of paper, and slotted the note under his door. When I was inside the lift I almost couldn’t remember what I had written, all in block letters. I didn’t think of it until much later.

  Which explains this special feeling I’m having right now. The feeling that I h
ad done something I would never have dreamt of doing before. I wonder what he might have been thinking, or she, for that matter, lifting up the note and then reading those words, “I know exactly how you feel.”

  For the fifteenth night in a row I am on my bed, watching the eighth storey light on the block opposite mine. There are no stars in the sky, or if there are, they are hidden. Gradually I fall asleep and that sense of defeat washes over me yet again, the light I had grown accustomed to beginning to blind me with its stubbornness. My eyelids are powerless against it.

  My mother speaks to me in English, something that she had never done in real life. She is wearing a powder blue blouse and coral pink lipstick. I had never been good at describing colours before so I know I am inside a dream. When she sees me, her eyes light up and she mutters something about the doctor having made a mistake. Her ovaries were all right, or else how could she have given birth to her son and be here talking to him right now? It didn’t seem to make any sense, but at the same time was perfectly logical. And then she asks me how I am. I tell her insignificant things, like how I think my counsellor should go for plastic surgery and how I now shave twice a day because I don’t like to look skinny and unshaven like they do in the movies. She nods and seems to understand, nods as if I am saying the precise things she has been wanting to hear. And then she tells me, “The virus is a small thing. It has no soul. Do you know how small it is?”