by Ho Sok Fong
“Hey,” she whispered to him. “Why do you come here every day?”
He did not stir. His eyes stayed closed. She examined his face, which was resting on the red-checked pillow. He was sleeping like a child. She couldn’t see his eyes, but she could see his nostrils flaring with his breath. His legs were as hairy as a gorilla’s.
His palm was tucked beneath the pillow, the heel of it peeking out. She placed her own hand beside it on the bed, wanting to compare the two. She remembered something an older cousin had once said, and tried to conjure the feeling: if someone’s hand makes you feel safe, that’s love for you. Or, at least, a kind of love. A hint of it.
Who are you looking for?
How did you get here?
There was a shallow dip above his upper lip. She had assumed he was looking for something, or more likely someone, but maybe he wasn’t. This could be a separate version of him, in the habit of searching for searching’s sake. Sometimes, people carried on living even after a part of them had died. Then that dead part started to reincarnate. She had read a weird story about it once, which said it was possible for a person to meet their reincarnated self. A monk from the Gourd Temple in Balik Pulau said so too. If this was the case here, it seemed like a mystery that would be hard to crack, even if hung out in broad daylight, even if seen with one’s very own eyes. Who does he look like? she wondered, and tried to think back. Trying to remember felt like looking for a waterway in a cliff constantly lapped by the tide, while the surrounding rocks and weeds looked on, oblivious. It was a mystery. Life was a mystery. So were newspapers. And the door to every room in the guesthouse; those even more so. Every sentence anyone said, tears, laughter, time, loneliness, existence. It was all a mystery. Including this matter, this moment. Especially this.
A moth settled on the lampshade. The light changed.
Is it something you can’t talk about?
She turned over, feeling oddly devastated. The winter bird was dying. It was inside her stomach, shrunken like a plant’s tendril, and heat and time were turning it into a fossil.
“Can I help you?” she asked. Whispering, as if talking to herself.
She went over to the window. The rain was black and she couldn’t see anything. The window screen was too bright. She reached through it to the desk lamp. If I can reach through it, I must be dreaming, she thought. The moth flew away. She took the thing she’d found in his room on the first day out of her pocket. It was a chunk of stone now, the kind you might find scattered on a riverbed, rubbed smooth by the current. There were a few gray squiggles on the top, a little bit like writing but not quite; maybe it was still growing. She put it on the table.
“I’m about to go home and I’m not coming back,” she said. “I know you’re not here looking for me.”
Her right arm tingled, and she almost fell on top of him. Her heart thumped. He was curled up. He seemed very far away, at the bottom of a sea she couldn’t access. Never mind. Everyone has their own sea. She watched over him for a while, and it was like watching the surface of water. And even though he was right there, she started to miss him. But she couldn’t get any closer.
Whatever happens, I am a keeper of mysteries, not a child anymore.
If only the blue waves could wash all my sorrows away…
Her aunt’s singing voice was a fragile thread, nothing like her ordinary speaking voice. It grew strained and thin at the high notes. This was bad singing technique, she’d been told; it would ruin her vocal chords. It was a long-standing source of regret. For years, she’d been singing in fits and starts. She wasn’t the best singer, but still she sang.
Cui Yi wrote:
Will you come looking for me?
If you come to my house, you should know that the floor is cracked. It is cracked into many pieces and swollen in the middle, as if there’s been an earthquake, but there hasn’t; it’s like that because of the whale.
Kedah province used to be all sea (the Kedah Sea, the Laut Kedah). One day, the sea water retreated, and all the boats suddenly dropped, crashing onto the back of a whale, and they all cracked open along the bottom. The whale had been living at the bottom of the sea for years and years, and after all that time it was covered in sand, shells, seaweed, and parasites of all shapes and sizes. Imagine: its encrusted skin was as hard as rock. After the sea retreated, my grandpa found some wood and earth and set about mending the floor. But it didn’t work, because it has been cracked ever since and every few years it cracks all the way open again.
My grandma consulted the spirits of our ancestors, and according to her, the only thing left of the whale is bones. Our family isn’t like other families. Ah Nei would never lie about something like that. Why should she? Unless her memory is playing tricks on her. If you ask her: Were the Japanese the bad guys? She will say: Some of them. There’s always good and bad, no matter what people you are.
Last year I finished my exams. I learned two or three reference books by heart for every subject. One is never enough, because no book can tell you everything. The contents might be mostly the same, but there’s always some tiny thing that’s different, like one might have lots of words and simple illustrations, and another fewer words and more detailed illustrations. I learned spore diagrams, maps of mineral distribution, diagrams of frog and human dissections, cross sections of complex and single-celled organisms, electron cloud models of heavy metal atoms—and that last one amounts to dozens and dozens of diagrams. Every single thing you touch is made up of a hundred million tiny galaxies. A model of the most infinitesimally small electron cloud can be rotated and redrawn in an infinite number of ways: a figure eight, a ring of Saturn, a double ring of Saturn, layers of flower petals…it’s such a complex equation. Like the mating dance of an insect, with all its seeking, posturing, and fighting rituals. Have you ever watched the documentaries on the Discovery Channel? No matter how hard you try, you’ll never finish drawing those strange dances. To start with, they’re invisible to the naked eye and you need a camera to put them in slow motion. A hundred million dance moves in the blink of an eye. What are they saying, in the space of that fraction of a second?
She mulled it over for a while. She thought about the sea no one believed in and the whale hiding under the floor. If only she could understand the silence inside the whale’s belly. The floor cracked, the roof shook, bodies shook. And then something surged up. At first there were no words, just an inaudible high-pitched whistle. But where was the rumbling coming from?
“Dear listeners, it is now one o’clock.”
“Aunty, I’m going out for a bit.”
Cui Yi ripped out the page she’d been writing on and hid it in her pocket, then put the room register back on the shelf. As if these actions had the power to steady the pendulum in her gut. It hung there, suspended in its place, waiting for a rush of air to set it in motion again. Cui Yi felt restless, incapable of just sitting around and waiting. She wanted to scream from the bottom of her lungs.
The singing in the tea lounge reached a climax, then abruptly broke off.
“Off you go then,” said her aunt.
Cui Yi walked alone past the cinema, where the wind had swept torn-off ticket stubs, straws, and candy wrappers into a pile in front of the steps. The cement floor of the five-foot way was elevated in some places and lower in others, and her feet stepped to match it, up and down, up and down as she walked. Ah Feng said things like: “It’s a dead-end town, full of dead-end people.”
Cui Yi didn’t think that was true, although she couldn’t have said what was. Maybe Ah Feng was right, but then again maybe it was just that everyone had left. Even I’m leaving tomorrow, she thought. She passed by a shop selling clocks, which forced her to glance at the time. The whole wall was covered in clocks.
Her feet dragged her past the bus station, the pharmacy, the mini mart, the three-story police station, painted in blue and white. Two Malay policemen stood chatting underneath a tree outside. Beyond the tree’s dappled shadows lay a b
urning expanse of cement. Looking at it made Cui Yi frown and screw up her eyes.
In front of the bus station was a pool of thick black oil. I should take the train, thought Cui Yi. She pictured the pebbles beneath the tracks and the peeling metal benches on the platform. How the tracks looked so still and desolate in the rain, how at a certain point they would pause and diverge, to let another train pass. She poked her head into the furnace-like bus station and instantly everything was dark. There was light at the far end, where sun poured in through a grate over the door and fanned across the ground, scattering into endless shadows.