by Lu Huiyi
“Hey!”
Beng jumped violently. One of the boys had woken up. As soon as he saw that Beng was free, the boy jerked up and scrambled to his feet. Like a hunted animal, Beng staggered up as well, frenzied and trying to keep his eyes on five different aggressors at the same time. The scene before his eyes was splintered by panic into multiple, overlapping panels of action, and he could only process everything in the most primal language of starts and stops.
He had managed to work on the ropes enough that he could move again, but his right ankle was still encumbered by a short coil of thick rope. No matter. Instinct kicked in and he broke into a desperate sprint, just as the rest were roused into wakefulness.
Beng ran like he had never run before.
For a while he thought there was no way he could outrun them. He kept stumbling on the rope trailing from his ankle, his steps clumsy and a little unsteady from having been tied up. It was still pitch dark, but he couldn’t stop to get his bearings. If anyone was still outdoors at this hour, nobody gave any indication of it. Nobody was going to save him if the gang caught him again.
He had to go home. Home was safe. He had to go home.
A turning presented itself; it felt familiar and yet not. He took it.
He was very afraid that he might be going further and further away from home, opening himself to attack from his pursuers. His legs burnt but he kept going, graceless and panting and desperate. They were quick. At some point one of them nearly caught him; he yelled and dived forward and away. For a few minutes, it was a close thing, then his attacker gasped and backed off as though burnt, but it was such a tangle of limbs and such a flurry of violence that Beng wasn’t quite sure what he had done or how he’d managed it. All he could do was to start running again before the other party recovered and lurched back at him—somehow he got away, ripping his shirt in the process—he missed a few steps but caught himself clumsily and kept on going.
The L-shaped building…the fence…he knew where he was...
Then he was dashing up the staircase, three steps at a time, shouting and yelling as he went. He didn’t know what he was saying—he was probably incoherent, barely able to get fully-formed words out of his constricting throat. But it had the desired impact of alerting just about everyone in the apartment. At the fifth storey, he found the door to his unit slightly ajar—it swung open the minute he approached and his father’s hands pulled him in. There was a frenzy of movement as they slammed the door shut and double-bolted it before the hooligans could get near enough to fight.
Beng and his father stayed very still and listened. There were a few violent bangs on the door, some muffled speech—and then they were gone. Maybe a break-in didn’t seem worth the effort or risk to them, but Beng didn’t know if they would come back. Maybe they would. They seemed like the revenging kind.
Beng stood in the living room, probably looking like as much of a wreck as he felt. Father’s hand was on his shoulder, and he removed it with uncharacteristic gentleness, as though he was afraid that Beng was going to shatter. Beng looked up and saw that Mother and Grandfather were staring at him, wide-eyed. Or rather, Mother was. Grandfather was giving him this massive shit-eating grin, because the old man, even in docile agedness, had spirit and ferocity aplenty in his blood.
“Did you hit them good?” asked Grandfather in an inappropriate outburst of childlike glee.
“You’re bleeding,” said Mother, at the same time.
She was right. The small gash in his forehead was gushing like a waterfall; maybe it was actually deeper than it looked. His shirt was torn to shreds, and he could feel the twinge of half a dozen stinging scrapes that he didn’t think were necessary to mention.
“What happened?”
Beng looked up to see Huat at the other end of the living room, having just emerged from his bedroom. The shock in his eyes was mingled with a sort of protective anger that Beng hadn’t seen since he was little and tormented by bullies, and Huat had gotten revenge so thoroughly that he had had to surrender his prefectorial board position at school, but he had said it was worth it, and—
“Beng!” Huat snapped, his voice sharp with worry. Beng forced himself to pay attention. “What the hell happened to you?”
Beng grasped at words that did not come.
“I’m fine. People are horrible,” he said, by way of succinct summary. The past few hours were a mad blur that he didn’t know how to talk properly about.
“I know,” said Mother, instead of denying it or providing a “yes, but…”
“I’m never going out again,” he told them, and at that point in time he really meant it.
Three months into the Deprivation, the family had begun to worry quite a bit about Huat. He was permanently exhausted, sometimes to the point where he looked like he might keel over any moment. He had gone out job-hunting every day since the insurance company he was working at had unceremoniously shut down, and the exertion and suspense combined had taken its toll. Yet he refused to give in or take a break, and was usually out from dawn till dusk, cold-calling every company or office that was still running, and trying his hand at any stint or job that would take him, no matter how menial or dirty.
“You’re going to kill yourself like this,” Beng told him one evening, unable to keep up the front of tense, watchful patience that the rest of the family had chosen to adopt.
“Couldn’t wait till I’ve got both feet in the house, could you?” said Huat, who didn’t like neighbours hearing about goings-on in the family.
Beng waited pointedly until the door had clicked shut behind them, and then spoke again.
“Well, you can’t expect me to wait for anything when you’ve got one foot in the grave already,” he said.
Huat shrugged. He sank gracelessly onto the floor and began to wrestle with his shoes. Caked with grime and sopping wet, the laces of his ratty sensible sneakers had somehow knotted themselves into an inextricable mess.
“There’s got to be work out there,” Huat said.
“Mother’s worried about you.”
“She doesn’t have to be.”
“You could come back earlier.”
“What does it matter so much?” said Huat, looking a little harassed.
“All the companies hire through connections now,” said Beng, trying a different tack. “Going door-to-door is kind of inefficient, don’t you think?”
Huat glanced up at him briefly, irritation suddenly flashing across his usually stolid expression.
“The family needs to eat,” he said. “I don’t see you guys complaining when there’s food on the table.”
The sudden out-lashing of spite soured his sacrifice. Beng’s well-meant platitudes dissolved into ashes in his mouth.
“I’ve been going out to find work too,” he snapped. “You don’t have to martyr yourself like that.”
Huat looked up again, this time meeting Beng’s eyes. Huat looked visibly surprised. That was the way he had always been, caustic in words but benign in deeds, always taken aback by the unintended backlash of his careless words. Beng sometimes thought that Huat, despite being the most educated and scholarly member of the household, had been built more for the bluntness of war and labour than the delicate dance of office politics and verbal warfare. Now he looked a little contrite, contrite without understanding, the way he had always been. The sudden gentling of his expression made him look tired and worn and almost vulnerable.
“I didn’t say you weren’t,” Huat said slowly and confusedly. “But the insurance company used to pay me quite a lot. We can’t do without some of that money, at least.”
“Huat, what are you trying to prove?”
“My name is Archibald,” Huat said absently, instinctively, but then he stopped himself. “Anyway, stop worrying about everything. There’s work out there. I just need to look harder.”
Chapter 2
There were bad days.
On those days, it seemed to Beng that the world, undulating and i
nexorable, was a great wave of grief that crashed with destructive regularity over the pathetic little castles that men boldly built out of coarse, crumbling sand. Mother was the kind of person made brave by bitterness and enduring through erosion, who would sink to weary knobbly knees and re-craft her work, knowing full well it would fall again. And Huat, whose rage was so fierce and hard as to be almost brittle, was the kind to plot and reconstruct, to plan a whole fortress of cement that no wave could take down. And Father, poor lost prideful man, would stand at the shores ranting and raving at the sea, as though the sea had time and patience to pay attention to the frustrations of one mortal man.
But Beng—he knew he was not in possession of any such strength and resistance. It was a disappointment, but not a surprise, to realise that he was the kind of person who would indulge in long introspective musings about metaphorical waves and then proceed to wallow in passivity; Beng was used to defeat and the laziness that it imbued into lesser men.
The key question was essentially this—whether one could move, and move, and never be still—in a world running out of energy, a world running out of time.
Spurred into diligence by his brother’s frenetic energy and mulish persistence, Beng betook himself to the streets earlier than usual the next day. He still thought that Huat was being a bit excessive, but part of him also felt guilty about lounging around at home so much while his brother was out scrabbling for loose change.
There was work out there, he kept telling himself, repeating his brother’s words in his mind. He was young and able-bodied and reasonably qualified; surely someone would pay him for work. His old, poorly-maintained bicycle creaked and whimpered, and Beng wished he had gotten it greased up back when it was easy to buy oil or go to a shop. Between the squeaking rust of his bicycle, and the sweat stains forming at the armpits of his last good shirt, Beng wasn’t sure he was exuding the employability and enthusiasm of a prospective recruit.
He usually liked to go by the markets, to keep an ear out for news and an eye out for scraps he could get at low prices. But today he veered off towards the Central Business District, where most company headquarters could be found.
The whole area was greatly changed, though it had only been months since the power had been cut. The top floors of the highest office buildings had all fallen into disuse, and due to the demise of air-conditioning, the windows on the lower floors had all been thrown wide open. Most offices gave off an air of barely-suppressed panic; staff members were obviously handicapped by the disappearance of telephones and computers and other artefacts of modern technological innovation. The smaller storefronts and companies were generally vacant—the doors were boarded-up and the windows smashed, making them the first victims to the madness of the Deprivation.
Beng wanted to be systematic about this. He started at one end of a street that didn’t look overly ravaged by looting and arson, knocked on the doors of every building that hadn’t been chained up or defaced, and worked his way down the line with more patience than finesse.
The first company to even entertain him was some sort of textile company; even the lobby itself was packed with people busy weaving and winding thread. After blundering around and getting casually pushed out of the way now and then, Beng was eventually given a number tag and directed to a room, stuffy and smelly and full of grimy, waiting labourers.
At first he thought people were just milling around. After a few nasty pushes and sharp glances, he realised that everyone was actually organised into long lines, queued up by number, like game-pieces tucked neatly into a box. He found his place in one of the rows. The room was so packed that if he so much as moved, he would brush against either the person in the row in front of or behind him. He stood around for a good ten minutes or so, feeling like an idiot, before he realised that he didn’t quite know what was going on.
“Are we waiting for an interview?” he asked the person right in front of him.
She turned and stared at him as though she thought him a little stupid. She was a stout lady in her early thirties, wispy hair pinned back into an unforgiving bun, with three small children darting about her ankles in a continual merry-go-round of mischief.
“There’s no interview,” she said. “We’re waiting for work.”
“Oh,” said Beng. He craned his neck and tried to see to the end of the queue, but it was ridiculously crowded. The combined forces of Hello Kitty and Gong Cha couldn’t have done a better job.
“You aren’t going to get any work here,” she said.
“Thanks so much for your encouragement,” said Beng.
“No, I mean it,” she said. “They want children because children only cost two dollars a day. Or families like mine, because I get the full five dollars but my kids chip in for free. They won’t call your number.”
Beng felt somewhat aggrieved. The misfortune of being an able-bodied young adult was a difficult cross to bear.
“Why didn’t they tell me?” he said waspishly.
“They don’t need to,” she shrugged. “We need them. They don’t need us.”
Just then, a stocky man in uniform walked into the room.
“Thirty-five!” he shouted. There was a rustle as everyone stopped talking and glanced at their tags.
“Me! That’s me!” the lady shouted, waving her green tag eagerly. Her children trailed after her as she ran to the door, leaving Beng with half-finished sentences in his mouth.
There was nothing for it. At least three children would get to eat that night, Beng thought, but he was beginning to find that that was limited consolation when he didn’t get to eat as well. He dropped his number tag carelessly on the floor, and headed out to try again.
“I can do this,” Beng said. He was at a washing house, having skidded his way across the soapy floor to the front counter.
“I’m not saying you can’t,” said the boss, sitting comfortably with his feet propped up. “But we’ve got people who would do a lot more for a lot less.”
“I can do that too,” said Beng, who had pretty much been repeating some variation of the same statement at a sizeable number of companies by now.
The boss looked Beng over, gaze lingering on his reasonably-clean button-down shirt and his uncalloused hands.
“No, I don’t think you can,” he said.
Beng was about to argue again, careless and unreserved from too many exhausting hours being out and about, but was stopped dead in his tracks by a sudden scream. It was a guttural, deep, animalistic howl. A man tore out of the inner rooms and slipped on the floor at once, landing in a spray of misty red. For a while Beng thought the fall had caused the injury, but then he pulled himself together and understood that the man had come running out already with a giant slice across his left arm. The cut was a deep one. He had his fingers clenched over the wound but it didn’t seem to do anything to stop the blood flow.
“What did you do?” the boss asked with impressive calm and aplomb.
“D-dryer—repair—the blades,” the man managed. He was trembling violently.
The boss looked him over briefly, and then pulled opened a desk drawer and retrieved a roll of bandages.
“Wrap it. Tightly,” he instructed. “You’ll work with the coloured clothes. Don’t go near the whites.”
The man reached over and took the bandages with his good arm. He didn’t linger in the lobby, not even to bind the gushing wound. Instead, he made his way unsteadily out and back into the workrooms, leaving a trail of dark blood as he went.
The boss looked back to where Beng was staring, jaw open in shock and horror.
“Like I said,” he said lightly, taking in Beng’s appalled expression. “I don’t think you can.”
Beng left the washing house empty-handed, and stopped outside the complex only to find that his bicycle had been stolen.
“Twenty dollars. Easy money,” said the meticulously-groomed lady at the front desk.
Beng was exhausted. It had been the crummiest of days and the bicycl
e was worth more than any job he could get today and he hadn’t gotten any hope of work despite hours of working the street in the humid heat and unforgiving haze. His shirt was plastered to his back, and his skin was sticky with sweat and grime. He had caught a glimpse of himself in the window-glass and knew that he looked exactly as bad as he felt.
This was the first positive statement he had heard from anyone all day.
“So just a blood donation,” he said.
“It won’t take more than an hour or two,” she chirped. “I just need you to step over—over here. That’s perfect.”
Beng did as he was told, stepping into a small side room where a couple of tired, sallow men lolled on narrow wooden benches. He tried to look them over surreptitiously. They looked almost bored; Beng supposed this wasn’t their first time donating plasma for money. If they could keep this up, he thought he might be able to as well.
“If you think about it, it is a perfectly respectable job,” a voice said quietly, right into his ear. Beng jumped, and snapped around to find that an elderly doctor in a lab coat was at his shoulder. He must have sidled into Beng’s personal space when Beng was unaware.
“Yes,” Beng said politely and meaninglessly.
“Some people get a bit—skittish—about this line of work, but we’re always selling parts of ourselves, after all,” the doctor said. It sounded like he had said this many times, but also that he never tired of this rehearsed argument. “We sell our energy and our brains, so why not our bodies as well?”
“Yes,” said Beng again. He didn’t really know what an appropriate answer to this might be. He was here already, wasn’t he? There was no need to convince him. He was bound not to go home till he had made a little cash, no matter how meagre.