by Ho Sok Fong
Cui Yi sat in a coffee shop in a nearby alley, drinking cold corn milk. Even once all her ice had melted, he was still on the railing, hunched over like a prawn. Ai. She shouldn’t have ordered an iced drink on her period; her stomach would cramp. If it got bad, her arms and legs would start cramping too.
He left, she followed. He got hungry and stopped for noodles.
In front of a red mailbox, as he was crossing the road, he paused and looked around. Cui Yi instantly turned to examine the window behind her, in which Joey Wong smiled winsomely beneath an umbrella.
A bus turned into the road, blocking him from view. Huge writing, blue and yellow stripes, sliced through the reflection in the glass. Had anyone seen her following him? Cui Yi passed the shoe shop, where the woman inside never moved from her post behind the window. She felt a jolt of panic. The woman spent all day leaning on the counter with her chin in her hands; she probably saw everything.
The old granny in the grocery store was the same. All day long sitting out on that rattan chair, like a human carriage clock. Nothing got past her. She sat there fanning herself in the walkway, watching the world go by, seeing what everyone was getting up to. Who caught which bus at what time, who cycled past with who on the back of their bike, who parked where, whose license plate was noted down by parking enforcement officers, who bought what in the shops across the way and how much it cost them—any little thing like that, all you had to do was ask and, assuming she was in a good mood, she’d tell you.
Cui Yi decided not to care what the old lady might think.
I’m not from around here, she reasoned.
So she took to following the guy on a daily basis.
Every day, he would dash into a women’s clothing shop. On his way down the street, he peered through all the doors, into all the shops, seeking out shadowy corners, looking at every hidden face. His route hardly varied. A left out of the guesthouse, along an alley, then onward past the furniture shop. The squeal of wood saws blended with the toneless rumble of construction site excavators, and the resulting noise sounded like someone nearby had dislocated their jaw and was screaming through their wrenched-open mouth, shaking so hard that it made their voice staccato. People walked calmly down the street or they drove their cars, completely unaffected, and the guy was just the same: day in, day out, strolling down the street.
At least, until the rain set in.
The rain interfered with his pace. When the rain came, he had to adjust to it. On days when he had an umbrella in hand, things were simpler. But still, he couldn’t keep dawdling by the hawker stands, because when the rain was heavy they didn’t come out, or else were too busy packing away their woks to sell anything. Instead he picked his way around the trucks and mountains of cardboard in front of the supermarket, skirting puddles and the spray of passing cars. Pressed on through the downpour, marching past the cinema, the women’s clothing store, the video rental shop, the hardware shop, the bakery, until finally, inevitably ending up at the bus station ticket counter, where he would ask something and then stand staring at the timetable.
On days when he didn’t have an umbrella, he might go into a shop and buy one, or buy a rain jacket, or hold a piece of paper or cardboard over his head and flap along the street like a bird, or stand like a pillar in the five-foot way, waiting for the rain to pass. He never seemed to learn his lesson from the day before; seemed always to forget how the weather changed.
Cui Yi started removing the umbrellas from his room each time he checked out.
The second drawer of the reception desk was currently home to eight umbrellas.
At three o’clock one afternoon, when Cui Yi had taken his deposit and given him a key for the eighteenth time in a row, she took out the umbrellas and piled them on the counter. Some were walking-length, others were collapsible. There were checked ones, floral ones, plain ones.
“Yours,” she said. “All of them.”
He looked at them blankly.
“They’re not mine.”
Cui Yi was silent for a moment. She felt sorry for him.
“You should take one,” she said. “It rains a lot here.”
“Thank you,” he replied. He raised his eyes to meet hers, his gaze calm and unblinking.
“Remember to take it with you when you leave,” she said.
It was an extremely wet March. Sometimes the rain waited until evening, other times the patter started at two or three in the afternoon. Like most people, if he looked outside and saw brilliant sunlight, he didn’t bother with an umbrella. But the moment the wind cooled, black clouds descended like sailboats. She always trailed two or three shops behind him, observing from afar. He would freeze, lurking moth-like among the dark shadows of the goods in the five-foot way. Observing from afar, even when she had an extra umbrella, she never approached.
The umbrellas folded March into their spindly bones. It wasn’t supposed to be this wet.
With every rainstorm, his route altered in unpredictable ways. But the changes were in the tiny details; there were no major surprises. Or if there were, they faded instantly from memory. He might meet an old dog by the side of the road, or stop to give an old man change for cigarettes. Or pause at the department store bulletin board to examine the “for rent” ads, causing Cui Yi to wonder whether he was planning a move. Once, he ended up sheltering from the rain in front of the old Chinese temple, where he bought a damp packet of peanuts from an Indian boy and attracted the attention of a fortune-teller. Another time, he accidentally knocked over a bicycle selling ambarellas. He crouched down and began apologetically collecting the hard, green fruits, although some were flushed away by the rain. It must have lost the vendor quite a bit of money, but when he passed by the next day, he acted completely oblivious. One day, he finally stopped just looking at the posters outside the cinema and went in to buy a ticket. This was a breakthrough. Cui Yi went to buy a ticket for herself, but sat far away from him. The East Is Red was showing, with Brigitte Lin swirling and flying as the invincible Dongfang Bubai. They stayed in the hushed theater as the film played on a loop. When the opening credits came up for the fourth time, Cui Yi had had enough.
A few dead leaves lay scattered on the pavement. Not even the rain could revive them. She pondered this idly as she went to buy a soda, which she drank through a straw while sitting on the railing outside the cinema, holding an umbrella in her other hand. How weird, she thought, now I’m just like him. On holiday, on holiday! A weird out-of-towner! It felt like something had happened, but nothing really had. Maybe it was just him. He had arrived to amble the streets in his haphazard, barely detectable way. If change was happening, then it was creeping into town in that same haphazard, barely detectable way: in the pockets of the street hawkers, a cinema seat, wet footprints along the sidewalk, a frog leaping out of his path (and because of that maybe the frog would bump into a lady frog, or find a few more grasshoppers to eat, or a cockroach, or ants). In Cui Yi’s own memories of this particular March, she followed him and followed him as he meandered around and around the town. As if there were an impenetrable border preventing escape. There were mountains on all sides. The town was in a bowl.
From half past three until well past eight, they wandered, each clutching an umbrella.
I’m so bored, thought Cui Yi. But rereading the same old serialized novels that she’d read countless times before was boring too. She couldn’t figure out his purpose. What was he looking for? Someone or something? Or nothing at all? Had he forgotten why he was there? Maybe every time he paid his bill and left the guesthouse, he did one turn around the block and forgot again?
By the fourth Saturday in March, Cui Yi had collected a total of eighteen umbrellas from his rooms. He acted exactly the same as always: he came to the desk to settle the bill, counted out his returned deposit, then picked up his luggage and left. Cui Yi locked up the cash box and slipped the key into her aunt’s pocket; her aunt who was snoring away in the canvas chair.
Cui Yi opened her
umbrella and trailed him through the brilliant sunshine.
He walked briskly past the pharmacy and the mini mart, did not stop at the bus station, passed by the mamak stall, crossed the river, and headed toward the train station.
Cui Yi stopped. She observed from afar as he went up to the ticket counter and bought a ticket. Then, at around half past twelve, he went through the barriers to the platform.
She stayed where she was, standing beneath a tree. There were three flagpoles beside it: one for the national flag, one for the provincial flag, and one that was empty, a boring white line standing at attention. At the side of the road, yellow trumpet flowers bloomed wide as suns.
He’s leaving, she thought. The train screeched against its tracks.
Off he goes. It’s all over, just like that! And I still don’t understand a thing. She walked gloomily away from the train station.
Bunches of power cables tangled around the street corners, painting wobbly brush strokes against the gray sky. At some distant point along the road, a hammer was banging, steady and constant, a sound as hollow as a woodpecker in a far-off forest.
She followed the five-foot way home. In the heavy air of the pre-rain afternoon, all the merchandise was dull and gray: the schoolbags, the dangling prayer offerings, the lotto stands with red and green paper fragments strewn across the floor. Nothing raised her spirits.
It felt like her legs had shrunk. Her right foot seemed to be dragging through an endless quantity of cotton wool.
Back in the guesthouse, she mopped her sweat with wads of torn-off paper towel. Fragments stuck to her neck and chin. The fan stirred the warm afternoon air. Outside the door, the cement of the walkway was a plain of blazing white. She let her eyes droop, feeling tired.
Five to three. She stared at him in shock—like a figure from a dream, he had stepped through the doorway and walked in.
But he had no idea that he was coming back. He acted like a newcomer, leaning forward to examine the price list beneath the counter glass.
“How much for your cheapest room?”
The same sneakers, pale checked shirt, travel bag.
“The deposit is forty-two ringgit fifty,” she said.
The same gloomy face as he stood with his back to the light and counted out his money. Maybe he’s bringing the rain with him, she thought.
She dropped a few coins of change into his palm, brushing his fingers for the very first time. They were warm, after all.
She led him upstairs and stood in the hallway as he entered his room. Light spilled out from inside, splashing her toes.
He set down his bag and went to close the door, but her presence seemed to unsettle him. After a while, noticing that she was still there, apparently without any intention of leaving, he pulled out his wallet and offered her a coin.
She immediately fled downstairs.
At noon the next day, he once again paid his bill and left. Once again, Cui Yi followed him to the train station. This time, she stood just outside the barrier to the platform, beside a plant pot containing a luxuriant Japanese lily, and pretended to be seeing someone off.
“Here to wave goodbye? Want to come through?” asked the Malay guard at the gate.
She shook her head. The guy was close; she could see him.
He was hunched over, arms crossed. Sitting on a bench with peeling paint, looking thoroughly miserable. But where was he going? She desperately wanted to know, but there was no hope of talking to him now. His eyes were looking away, not seeing anyone. A ratty old jacket was screwed into a ball and stuffed haphazardly into the half-open zipper of his bag.
The train pulled in. She watched him board.
As the train departed, she felt herself take a step back. She had an urge to wave, like it was a required formality. She left the station, passing through the arch under the tracks. The green of the embankment was masked by a layer of fallen flower petals and dead leaves. She crossed a bridge, pausing in the middle to inspect the water below. It had come all the way from the mountains. Cement had been laid around it, turning it into a canal. Some time back, a young student had drowned in a waterfall upstream. Her body had washed down into the town, where it got stuck somewhere between the church and a Malay hawker stand. Cui Yi remembered how sad she’d felt when she first heard about it. And then every time since. Every time she thought about it, she felt that same sadness all over again.
Her right foot was numb, on the verge of becoming dead wood. Maybe I’m turning into a wooden person, she thought. A puppet! It would start with one foot and gradually spread through her body, like it did with her fourth big sister. They said it was because she had had children too young, and didn’t take a convalescent month after giving birth. The whole family lived in the factory, working day and night making plastic cups for rubber tapping. The doctor said that the part of her sister’s brain controlling the nerves on the right side of her body had atrophied, and that eventually she would lose all motion in her right foot. “What if she exercises more, will that help?” her mother had asked. “Worth a try,” said the doctor.
But she couldn’t do housework, not even the dishes. Cui Yi thought her sister’s life seemed impossible, but her sister didn’t seem to care; pain itself seemed to have been excised from her brain. She kept on laughing her cheery laugh, her voice booming through the dust-scented air of their factory home. Sometimes, Cui Yi wondered whether she was carrying the pain on her sister’s behalf.
On every journey back to the guesthouse, Cui Yi passed the mamak stall. The golden rain tree behind it was in full flower. The yellow petals hung in drooping clusters from the branches, like fretwork lanterns. They blazed, even in broad daylight. The slope they grew on was a long way back from the sidewalk. She imagined what it would look like in the coming spring, or autumn.
Black clouds surged up from behind the tree and the rain rushed in. A thundering indigo. Once again water flooded the drains, swirled, gurgled, flowed into every tiny crevice with the precision of a fine-tooth comb, cascaded in waterfalls large and small. A thousand needles and ten thousand tiny threads ran down foreheads and into eyes, to be brushed back into hairlines. The wind swept Cui Yi’s umbrella away and she watched it drift with the water for a while, before plunging beneath the surface. Her arm looked stunted and the bones in the back of her hand were splayed like a coconut palm broom. Delicate, fanned wide open, skin and flesh stretched between like frail wings. Like a fish fin. The town was small and the water was immense. Her right leg was part kite, part fish tail, but even a partial transformation was enough. She swam bumpily along the high street, past the walls and windows of shops, past a green verge like a pasture. Bump, bump, bump. She rode the water. As she passed the pasture, she saw a little girl running. “I need to escape from my mistress,” shouted the little girl, but she was a long way down.
Cui Yi swam bumpily past television antennae shaped like fish bones. She felt so free.
Until fingertips drummed crisply on the counter. She started, sat up, wiped saliva from the corners of her mouth.
“Do you have a room?”
She felt like shouting. But no, she opened her mouth and her voice fled her body, fled the fan-churned air of the lobby.
“How much for your cheapest room?”
Where would the train be by now? Cui Yi couldn’t even begin to understand.
“How did you get back?” she asked.
He looked at her as if she were crazy.
Half an hour later, when he walked out holding an umbrella, she followed him through the door. He was so familiar to her, but she was nothing to him. It was unfair but it didn’t matter. With her eyes pinned to his back, she stumbled through the town behind him, along the same alley, the same Bank Street, past the bus station, the police station, the post office. It was all so familiar that it barely registered, as though those landmarks were just shadows flitting across water, serving only to create a path for her to follow; it was all a hazy, floating sheet of water, sometimes calm, someti
mes splashed with rain. Gray pillars, shadowy shops, boxes of musty goods, frail people, old people, meek people, all passed by without a glance. Countless pillars, another alley, and then they left the shelter of the five-foot way. Rain against every available surface. It dripped off her umbrella. In a clogged drain, it beat bubbles into backed-up sewage, and the bubbles circled like flying saucers, then exploded, vanished, reappeared. He dashed into the women’s clothing store and she waited outside, beneath the awning of an Indian food stand. Her legs were cold and wet. The right side of her body felt frozen but her thoughts were red hot, telling her to rub her limbs, so they would still be working when he came out again. With every step, she worried that other people would notice her. But then again, what did that matter. If they noticed, they noticed. So what. As long as he didn’t. It was all exactly the same: walk, stop, rest, shelter from the rain. It was also totally different: where he stopped, where he looked, what he approached, who he brushed past. The stray cats and dogs. The film posters. A few weeks ago, Jet Li had been swapped for Bruce Willis.
Then they went back to the guesthouse. Soaked, cold, shivering.
Later, Cui Yi blamed the fever for jumbling her brain. Her whole body was burning up; her neck boiled. Raindrops smashed violently against the window awnings, drowning out any other sound. In the hallway, the foggy glow of the lamps covered the peeling wallpaper. Her right fingertips were still solid but inside they felt useless, soft as algae on the surface of a river. Soon enough, she wouldn’t be able to move a single one. She unlocked the door with her left hand. That night, she’d put him back in 102, the first room he had ever stayed in.
Inside, he was asleep. The desk lamp was still on.
Some mysterious witchcraft urged her to lie down. To her own surprise, she did: she softly lay down beside him and he did not wake up. He was asleep, maybe dreaming. Just for a minute, she thought. He won’t remember. When he comes back, he never remembers anything.