Lake Like a Mirror

by Ho Sok Fong

  She saw the husband (or father) half-floating, half-kneeling in between the two children. His extended arms were glaringly white, each one clutching a tube attached to a child. The three of them were chained together by those sturdy arms, holding them steady against the waves. A wave broke and they were giddy with laughter, splurting water out of their throats and noses. The man relaxed his grip for a moment, as he moved to wipe a face. Then all their faces creased, their three pairs of eyes angling down at the corners as they smiled. They were so alike.

  Su Qin decided to play a silent game. To shut up, say nothing. She decided to quietly vacate her position, leaving them to their happy, motherless scene.

  “Having fun?” A nod.

  “Time to get out?” A shake of a head.

  The man held the children close, nervously reminding them to hold tight to their inner tubes. They were having a wonderful time. Their father’s hair was thinning on top, but his shoulders were broad. He looked reliable.

  Su Qin thought of her own mother. Bestower of so many strengths and so many flaws. She remembered that hug, her mother’s mouth pressed to her ear, breath hot on her neck, as if trying to blow life into a stubborn clay doll. “Now listen to me, wherever you end up, make sure you get married and have children. You hear? Don’t let yourself grow into a lonely old woman.”

  Su Qin felt the tears come, right there in the pool.

  Her mother had found a hundred ways to tell her the same thing. She had repeated it so many times that Su Qin came to think of it as her mother’s golden rule. It seemed the thing she most wanted to say, in all her life.

  There were words trapped in Su Qin’s gut. Words that she desperately wanted to say but couldn’t seem to get out. It was never the right moment, and so they had stayed inside her for years, wearing each other down. Maybe they were pointless and she didn’t really mean them. She had no way of knowing which ones were worth saying. Maybe in the moment before she died, she would suddenly know, and as soon as she spoke them out loud everything would be OK. But then again, what if it meant that she would go her whole life without ever knowing? Then what?

  One of the best things about the amusement park was that it was like a big party where you barely needed to talk. You could prove yourself by how enthusiastically you had fun. How wildly you laughed, shrieked, ran away in terror. You carried your inner tube, rushed from here to there, slid from high to low, charged from low to high. As the sun burned into her skin, Su Qin discovered the amusement park had a face other places didn’t show. Every place has expressions particular to itself, like the ones you encounter inside a train car, or an elevator. The amusement park’s face was permanently convulsed with gaiety. An intense, deathly gaiety that radiated from bodies in beams, like sunlight, gradually cooking every bodily fiber until your whole being was scalding hot and you had no choice but to run around in panic.

  Tired of the artificial waves, the girl came back across the sand, picking her way in quick little steps. Now the three of them were running somewhere else. In all this joyful coming and going, they would never have believed her if she’d told them that time was fleeting, and they had only a few years left to be together like this. Imagining herself an invisible mother, ignored by her family, Su Qin silently followed, watching their shadows bounce beneath the sun.

  They came to a big castle and the children launched into climbing up its slides and stairs, riding the water flumes into the pool. Along with other park children, they splashed down and climbed back up while waves crashed in and knocked them over, showing off to the assembled parents how quick and clever they were, how nothing could stand in their way.

  They ran to the beach to play volleyball. Then, somewhere else again, the three of them sat in a rubber dinghy, shrieking as it spun round and round in a huge inflatable bowl. Ten minutes later, Su Qin watched as they were discharged into a small artificial river, weak with exhaustion.

  “Shall we go home now?”

  “No, no! We haven’t done that one! Let’s go on that one!”

  “My God.” The father looked at the train, currently climbing leisurely up its tracks, soon to come swooping down at breakneck speed, almost nothing standing between its passengers and the air. “Am I allowed to say no? Will you come?”

  She did not reply right away. She lifted her camera and aimed it at them, adjusting the lens to bring his face closer, magnifying it and then pushing it away, making it shrink again. She wanted his face to tell her whether it was a genuine plea, or just asked for the sake of asking. But all she saw was exhaustion. Flat, lifeless eyes that were entirely devoid of warmth, staring stonily into the lens. She hoped it was from all the playing, not because of the last few years. On the camera screen, the three of them were standing side by side, hemmed in by colorful balloons, cartoons, giant metal skeletons, and plastic toys, with almost no space left for anything else.

  Now they were in a long line, waiting to board the roller-coaster. Su Qin was very close to them; any bystander would naturally assume that she was the real mother of the family. The father reached out as though to touch her shoulder, but at the last minute his hand settled on his daughter’s soft hair. He hugged her to him and planted a kiss on her forehead. He pulled a face, causing his sunglasses to slip down his nose, but the girl didn’t find it funny. She scowled. In the background, chatter swelled like a sponge, pressing itself so tightly around them that no joy could permeate.

  At regular intervals, there came a deafening cheer from the descending ride. As it swept over their heads, Su Qin felt her scalp go cold, as though scraped by a razor. She had agreed to come because of that ghostly voice; because otherwise the wind that blew past the apartment at night would suck her in like a whirlpool and spit her out below.

  Of course I’ll do it, she thought, confused. Even if it only numbs me for a while, at least that’s something.

  She observed the boy, who was standing in front of her, calmly blowing bubbles. She guessed he must be nervous, but he hid it well; if he was shaking, she couldn’t see it. His face was blank and his eyes were fixed serenely on the tip of his straw as it sprouted iridescent orbs. They rose into the sky, getting bigger, higher, even bigger, even higher, and then they popped. That was how the carnival felt too. As if it might suddenly stop.

  She heard a girl behind her tell her mother that she needed to pee. Without hesitating, her mother led her away from the line. They didn’t come back.

  You need to find a way to talk to him, she thought. Once he starts talking, the line will go faster. Except you know you can’t do it, because the second you open your mouth, there come the tears.

  She told herself it was all a dream. Now, all those impossible discussions would be possible. All those things she never thought could happen, would happen.

  “Are you OK?” The boy had turned around to look at her.

  “Yes,” she smiled. “Of course.”

  The silent game was over. But this time, one of them had spoken first. In spite of her tight voice, in spite of her strange accent, they had had to open their mouths and speak to her. She ruffled the boy’s hair and he didn’t resist. In all this time, he had yet to address her directly. What was he supposed to call her—Aunty? Stepmom?

  “You don’t have to come,” he said. “If you’re scared.”

  “I’m not scared.”

  “My mom would be scared. Last time she waited for us at the exit.”

  This was news to Su Qin. Had they always been similar, she and this woman? Or had she, by stepping in as a replacement, grown to become like her?

  “I’m not that scared.”

  “But if the train falls off…”

  She tried to reassure him. She didn’t understand this hellish merriment at all; tear down the flimsy fun houses, and all you would be left with was sand. But she was willing to convince him of what she wanted to believe herself.

  “It won’t fall off, not in a hundred years.”

  She would never get on this ride again. Being
flipped over and suspended upside down made her feel like a trash-can, upended and shaken vigorously. Her body felt tightly absorbed into the seat but something inside it seemed about to fly out, as if a piece of her soul were being claimed by the wind.

  She screamed uncontrollably along with everyone else, although she didn’t know whether to scream “waa” or “yaa” and couldn’t hear what the others were doing. An intense, almost painful gaiety seized her body, pressing against her heart like a swollen sponge.

  Maybe this was all a dream. Maybe she’d passed out. A cloud of white fog rose up from beneath her nose, gradually expanding, swelling until it completely covered her eyes. For a moment, she was blinded, no longer able to see the blur of scenery racing past her. All she saw was slick, dense, pristine white. A nauseating blankness. A clamminess. There was nothing there, but nothing could get through it. It squatted on her head, smearing itself against her face. She couldn’t struggle against it; it was as if she were a rigid corpse wrapped inside milk-white wax. All she could do was scream, angrily emptying the air from her lungs, until something else came creeping along her throat and she felt herself start to vomit.

  The sheet of white over her eyes and nose gradually lightened, shrank, pulled away from her face. It became weightless, took on a kind of glossy curve. She could clearly see an enormous white O emerging from her open mouth.

  Two Os. Three. She lost count. They floated up one after the other into the boundless blue of the sky.

  No one saw, she thought. She had vomited white balloons.

  The father was sitting in front of her, of course he hadn’t seen. The boy was sitting next to her, but she didn’t know if his eyes had been open. He hadn’t stopped screaming for the whole ride. Oh, he definitely hadn’t seen: afterward he said to her, “You weren’t sick.”

  He looked confused. She could read the sentence that was hiding inside his chest: You see, you’re not like us.

  As soon as they were off the ride, the three of them opened paper bags and violently threw up. Su Qin thought back to that morning, when they’d ordered hamburgers, rice au gratin, ham and chicken cutlets, fries, icy soda. She hadn’t tried to stop them.

  They kept their heads lowered, convulsing in the same way, at the same tempo. They were so alike, from how they kneaded their stomachs to their dazed expressions as they tried to calm their breathing. She handed out tissues. When she collected their bags of vomit, she felt a wave of nausea.

  It wasn’t just because they were another woman’s children. Even if she had given birth to them herself, they could still have grown up to be more like their father. But if they could become his children, maybe they could become her children, if she fought for it. If, if. If she loved them until she died. Maybe then they would have to talk to her, despite her obvious accent, and slowly, eventually, bit by bit, maybe they would love her back.

  But they would still leave her. When she died, she would be alone, she would die a lonely old woman.

  The afternoon was never-ending. She felt like she’d been stewing in it for days. On the other side of the park, they walked by a big heart-shaped spinning teacup.

  “How about another ride?”

  The children looked at her in alarm.

  Su Qin went in first. She sat down and waited, gazing out at the three of them, wanting to see what they would do. The husband (and father) walked in. He sat down beside her and took her hand.

  “What’s this about?” he said. “Everyone’s tired.”

  She ignored him. She turned to the children and shouted, “Hurry up! Get in here, the park’s closing soon!”

  They quickly climbed in, and the boy leaned against his father. The girl hesitated, unsure where she should sit. Su Qin reached for her, pressing the girl’s ear against her heart.

  The cup was slow at first, moving in time to a gentle melody. Then the music grew more impassioned and the cup spun faster. Su Qin felt as if she were being stirred faster and faster by an invisible spoon. The calm guardedness of the other three quickly melted away and each of their mouths seemed to have been shoved inside another mouth, from which came piercing shrieks. Shrieks that knew no tone or accent, but blended together into a yell that hung in the sky over the amusement park.

  It was just as Su Qin had imagined. When the ride came to a stop, the four of them looked like an ordinary family, stuck close together, like four melted sugar cubes at the bottom of a cup.

  Aminah

  Note: By law, all ethnic Malays, including mixed-race Malays, must be Muslim. Applications to leave Islam are heard by the Syariah Court. Procedures vary according to state, but such applications are rarely successful.

  IT WAS PROBABLY THE MEWLING of a cat that woke the warden. Then again, it might have been the wind. The wind blew through the doors and windows along the verandah, delivering anxious noises from the real world into the women’s dreams. The warden had dreamed that a woman came up to her bed. The woman’s face was in shadow, her features hazy.

  “They’ve given you a place to stay for a while, that’s all,” she said. “But this isn’t even a room. It’s just the lights are off, and the darkness is giving you the wrong impression.”

  The warden tried to see the woman’s face but could make out only a pitch-black strip of shadow, perched on the end of the bed. She stared for a while, unafraid, until a cold wind gusted in, making her shiver, and the woman disappeared into it. Then she heard the wails of the cats beneath the window and owls hooting in the mountains. Reality crowded back in, noisy and fragmented, pressing in from all directions. Long shadows skimmed the walls and pallid moonlight fell across the floor. It was a room like a box with a ceiling like a lid, sealed up. The door knocked in its frame and the warden sat up, intending to secure it. She glanced down the row of beds, where the women lay fast asleep, like a line of white cocoons. Only Aminah’s bed was empty, the sheet pushed aside, pajamas crumpled on the floor. The warden started in alarm.

  She could have stayed in bed, but instead she ran outside to look for Aminah. The verandah was cool and the lamps were dim. She groped around for her slippers and then hurried through the dark shadows of the building and the banana trees, heading toward the front gate. In the security hut, the guard was slumped in a canvas chair with his eyes closed. The warden rapped her knuckles against the counter and he woke up, peering blearily through the glass.

  “Aminah’s run off, I don’t know where to,” said the warden. “What if she’s gotten out, or something’s happened to her?”

  “She won’t have gotten very far, not at this time of night,” said the guard. He adjusted his haji cap, clearly reluctant to move.

  The warden understood. She really did. If Aminah was in her usual state, any devout Muslim would be ashamed to lay eyes on her. Ever since her stay at the rehabilitation center had been extended, Aminah had been acting out. The teachers kept trying to persuade her that it wasn’t worth it. “It’s all been decided, there’s nothing you can do about it now. You have to face reality, Aminah.”

  Aminah, they said, had gone mad. She had torn off her dress, exposing herself. She refused to cover her head or study the Quran—not that she’d ever read it in the first place. One evening, she climbed into a well. According to the aunty who did the cooking, this was when the demon got in and sent her well and truly crazy. After sunset, the wilderness spirits get restless, especially in areas so close to forests. They creep out with the fog, in search of vulnerable prey.

  The warden did not set much store by folk superstitions. Anytime a ghost story was playing on television, she’d watch until the most suspenseful part, then get up and start pacing around, making a show of her indifference; the Quran was more powerful than any sorcerer. But now, in the pre-dawn gloom, with the ghostly murmur of the wind brushing through the trees, the darkest, most nonsensical of those ideas rose from the undergrowth, along with the mist and the damp. A chill rolled out in waves, making her hair stand on end. There was a heavy scent of mangoes, pungent as the breath
of an evil spirit. She pulled her shawl across the icy tip of her nose.

  The grass had grown tall during the rainy season. Everything was black. She couldn’t see clearly but knew where to find the well: beneath the mango tree, covered in weeds. No one used it anymore. It was centuries old; ancient forest dwellers had probably relied on it for water. It had existed long before the rehabilitation center. The land had been used as a military training ground for a while, then transferred to the religious authorities. They had built a garden with a boundary fence that ran along the edge of the forest, capturing the well inside.

  Barbed wire coiled along the top of the chain-link fence. As the warden walked, she kept an eye out for holes. It’s not possible, she thought. There’s no way she could jump this. There weren’t any gaps and all the gates were locked. Aminah had to be in there somewhere.

  Cats chased one another around the garden. They came into season, mated, gave birth to too many kittens. The cats could leave, but not the people. The people had to wait. Perhaps for three months, perhaps for one hundred and eighty days. Their arrival and departure dates were written in their files, the same way birth and death dates are noted down in Allah’s Book of Decrees. And no matter who they were, none of them would stay as long as the warden. This was her home now; she could navigate the garden with her eyes closed. The wind roared behind the mountain and the sound crashed in like a breaking wave, but even that couldn’t mask the shrieking of the cats. The kitchen was dark. The kitchen workers were still asleep. There was no sign of Aminah. She seemed to have vanished into the air.

  The mosque started broadcasting the dawn azan, its solemn tones carving through the wind, and the warden went back inside to pray. One by one, the women rose from their beds and knelt on their prayer mats, facing Mecca, foreheads on the floor.

  Do not fall by the wayside, the warden recited to herself. There is no god but Allah.

  Another endless day, full of never-ending responsibilities. The trials would never be over, for there was no end, not until the end of this worldly life. She looked up at the window. The moon illuminated a cobweb over the glass. She heard the door creak, then open.