by Lu Huiyi
The doctor eyeballed him in a way that felt both very clinical and very intrusive.
“Any allergies?”
“Yes—oh, I mean—no.”
The doctor made a note on a heavy index card.
“Pre-existing medical conditions?”
Beng shook his head.
“Take off your shirt.”
Beng obliged, but did not lay the garment aside. He didn’t want anyone to steal it; the other waiting men seemed like the kind to snitch every stitch one owned. The doctor opened a briefcase of equipment and went through the motions of taking his blood pressure and checking his pulse and breathing; with every test, he would hum happily. Beng had never seen someone take so much pleasure in administering a routine medical examination.
“You’re in perfect health,” said the doctor at last, with an air of almost-surprise.
“I did come to donate blood,” said Beng, who was still out of his element, but beginning to feel a little ill at ease.
“It’s rare to get a donor so clean—and so young,” said the doctor. Beng felt a little like a hunk of meat, hung out for sale. “Especially in these conditions. You are very valuable to us.”
“Thank you?”
“No, thank you.” The doctor’s expression of benevolent geniality had evolved into one of beaming cordiality. It sat poorly upon his features. Beng felt, briefly, an urge to run.
“Maybe we could get started,” Beng said, to quash the foreboding feeling that was simmering within him.
There was a row of old-fashioned dental chairs at the far end of the room. Each chair came with an assortment of tubes and wires and a stand with an empty blood bag attached. He made to move towards a vacant chair but the doctor held him back, hand heavy on his shoulder and surprisingly forceful for a man his age.
“No,” he said. “For healthier participants, something better. This way.”
One of the walls had been mostly obscured by some ugly, dirty floral curtains and Beng had assumed that the fabric had hidden the windows. But the doctor reached over and parted them, to reveal a narrow metal door, securely padlocked. As Beng stepped through, guided by the doctor’s insistent hand on his shoulder, he noticed the glances of the other waiting men. Their gazes were unreadable.
The room within was a whole different world.
It was wallpapered, blotchy and uneven as if it had been refurbished in a huge hurry, with cheap-looking pink floral paper. Bubblegum pop played softly and incongruously in the background, from a shiny hand-cranked gramophone.
The entire room had the sort of apologetic, slightly crass and overdone air of a place owned by someone who was trying to act like a man of means, not realising that his true poverty lay not in money but in taste. A puff of coolness cut unexpectedly through the muggy air, and Beng leant towards it involuntarily. It was wind. Cool wind. Clean air. They had a working fan, powered by clear water. The sheer extravagance of such a fixing was unbelievable.
“Why am I here?” Beng asked.
“Oh,” said the doctor, smiling in a weak, oily kind of way. “I thought maybe we could sit down and have a talk.”
They sat down on two overstuffed armchairs in a corner of the room. There was a side table with a full tea set between them.
“Would you like tea?”
“I’m not thirsty.”
“One doesn’t have to be thirsty to have tea.”
The doctor reached over and poured two cups of tepid tea, and then passed one over, smiling his stiff overwrought smile all this while.
“Um,” said Beng, setting his cup down with a soft clink.
“Drink up,” said the doctor.
“I’m not thirsty.”
“It’s very good tea.”
“Oh.”
A pause.
“So why’re we here?” Beng asked again.
“I was wondering if we could work out something a little more long term.”
“Long term?”
“We value healthy donors a lot, Mr Koh. Just a standing agreement, or something.”
“Maybe I could see the agreement first?”
He nodded, unsurprised. “I’ll ask someone to fetch it for you,” he said. “Do finish the tea.”
Beng did not pick up his cup. The doctor stared at him so intently that he felt rather uncomfortable. When their eyes met, the doctor nodded and angled his hand towards the tea set in an obvious prompting gesture. It was that final, excessive gesture that set off alarm bells in Beng’s mind.
“This feels like an episode of Stranger Danger,” Beng said conversationally, breaking the awkward stand-off.
“I beg your pardon?”
Beng abandoned caution for frankness.
“Why don’t you drink your tea?”
The doctor frowned.
“Don’t you think you’re being a little silly?” he said, but still he did not drink, and that made up Beng’s mind.
“I don’t think I’ll sign the agreement,” said Beng. He rose to his feet and made for the door. As soon as he did, the doctor reached over and tugged at some sort of hidden lever next to his seat. There was a general creaking and squealing of pulleys and bolts, and the door was bolted shut by a complicated locking system that Beng could never hope to undo by brute strength alone.
“I was hoping we could do this peacefully,” said the doctor, as Beng stared, stunned, his gaze moving from lever to locked door and then back again.
“This is the crappiest day of my life,” said Beng.
The doctor rose, stalking towards him like a cat towards its prey.
Beng stepped back by instinct.
The doctor moved forward.
Beng stepped back.
The doctor moved forward.
Beng hit the wall.
The doctor smirked.
Beng swore, using words he didn’t even realise he knew.
He lunged forward, ready to fight his way out of this if he had to, but the doctor reached for something—another pulley? A button? Beng wasn’t sure, but this was surely the most tricked-out sitting-room ever—and suddenly metal cuffs emerged from ports in the wall and clicked shut around his ankles.
Beng let out a yell like a creature possessed, flailing wildly and somehow managing to clip the doctor on the side of his face with such force and fury that his captor was momentarily stunned. The doctor reeled back briefly from the impact, and Beng took the few seconds of delay to try to loosen the ankle cuffs. There was no give in them.
“You didn’t have to be nasty about it.”
The doctor had gotten himself upright again, and swivelled back around to face Beng. His hair was mussed and Beng was pleased to see that a bruise was beginning to bloom across his left cheekbone. Beng was, however, significantly less pleased to see that the doctor was holding a fragile-looking sphere in one hand, and a handkerchief over his nose with the other. The sphere seemed to be made of thin glass or something similar, and there were tendrils of smoke curling ominously within.
“I don’t even know what I did,” Beng said, helplessly.
The doctor was done making small talk, however, and he casually let go of the sphere so that it could shatter on the floor at Beng’s feet.
The smoke within smelled saccharine, in the medicinal sickly-sweet kind of way. Beng tried desperately to hold his breath, so desperately that he could feel his eyes water up from the strain. He tore at the ankle cuffs so violently that he could feel his skin start to tear and bleed—but eventually he had to breathe so he allowed himself the slightest gasp of air.
Just a little was all it took. Whatever drug the doctor had unleashed was potent. Beng suddenly felt lethargic and ill; nauseous and weak at the knees. For a while, he thought he was going to throw up, or faint, or perhaps even do both at the same time—and then he stopped thinking altogether.
He woke up in a surgical facility.
“Whuh?” he managed, bleary and heavy-limbed.
“Good morning,” a foreign voice replied.
Beng tried to sit up, but there were hardy straps on his wrists and ankles and he could only manage to raise himself into a slight incline. He tried to roll over onto his side but could barely turn his body. It was more effort than it was worth, and made him feel worse.
“Ugh,” said Beng, and then threw up promptly on the man’s shoes.
“Seriously?” said the man. He sounded angry. Beng felt a little sorry; good shoes were so expensive nowadays. Then his vision focused briefly and he saw a metal tray of surgical instruments on a trolley, right next to the man. He did not feel guilty anymore.
“Nooo,” he managed, in a dying man’s gurgle. His tongue wouldn’t cooperate enough for him to say anything else.
“We probably need another dose,” said the man. Then Beng was seeing double again—or not—it was a different person who had stepped up to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the stranger. It was the doctor from earlier. He was smiling. Beng blinked and swallowed and tried to get his body to work properly again, but his body didn’t feel like his own.
“Will it kill him?” the doctor asked. “These drugs are nothing like the old ones.”
“Well, we can’t do this if he’s moving.”
“He’s not going anywhere.”
“Don’t be an idiot”—this time with a touch of impatience—“it’ll just knock him out. Put him to sleep. It’s safe.”
“And what’re you going to tell them if he dies too soon?”
“Just get his organs on the ice fast enough and nobody will know.”
Two thoughts flashed simultaneously through Beng’s addled mind. The first was ORGANS? The second was a vague irritation at the sheer inconsideration of talking about their dastardly plans in front of him as though he wasn’t even there.
He must have lost a bit of time, drifting in and out as he was. There was a pinprick of pain in his arm; they had injected something into him.
He felt its effects almost at once. This was not the kind of anaesthetic that he had been exposed to in better times, benign and swift and gently tipping him into unconsciousness. Instead it was a kind of vicious burn, consuming him from within, flaring up in his limbs and paralysing him as his muscles cramped up from the strain and the pain.
Beng thought he was going to die—he almost wished that he was going to die.
His vision whited out but he was still conscious, his mind racing and wild from panic. The doctor and his assistant said something, but Beng couldn’t make out the words anymore. Something was swelling dangerously within his chest—pain, or fear, or something else, he wasn’t quite sure.
There was a sharp pain blooming in his chest. It took a while before Beng could process what it was. The slice of a knife, or a scalpel, or something sharp. They were cutting him open. This awareness burst through him with unrelenting sharpness, and Beng tried to part his lips in an anguished animal scream, to tell them that he was still awake but his body was no longer his own. His tears were the beads of blood gently pebbling on his wounded chest, and the throbbing span of his chest was the screaming wilderness of his mind and the wilderness was the crawling insect spread of the unknown drug and he wasn’t so much as separate from his body, as that his body was in a thousand pieces of agony, distinct but whole, every part of him hyper-aware of the rest, and yet every component was a unique shard of suffering on its own—
Beng thought he was dying, an in-between stage of torment that did not press towards its inevitable conclusion so much as spiralled wildly around it.
For a moment he thought he could see again. Then he thought that maybe he wasn’t seeing so much as hearing the sharp tang of blood, and then he did not (could not) think anymore.
Beng knew suddenly that he had the answer, but he couldn’t quite remember what the question was.
There must be a question, if there was an answer to it.
His mind had shut down; he wasn’t able to think.
The key question was essentially this.
Will you get up?
The key was to never be still.
We need to move, to move, we’re running out of time.
He was splintering. He was falling apart.
They’re not going to get me. They’re not going to get us.
The key question was whether one could move, and move, and never be still—in a world running out of energy, a world running out of time.
Beng was sitting up.
He didn’t know when he had risen from the operating table. The stasis of a lying position did not seem to make sense to him; he was movement, action more than self, he had to move.
A massive cut on his chest was knitting itself back up, smoothly, efficiently, like a video on rewind. Beng watched the process for a fraction of a moment, but stillness did not suit him anymore.
He was undoing the straps on his wrists, which didn’t make a lot of sense given that his very hands were strapped down. It didn’t matter.
He was energy, untameable by rules and forces and known ways. He was not energy, but something purer, something more. It didn’t matter.
The room was very still, still and washed-out in the way that made him feel like he was the only alive thing in the room. He felt like he had the one time he had gotten buzzed on a reckless quantity of drink—time had passed independently of him, and he had felt separated from the world, barely conscious of the stink and sweat of his limited body. But this was different, almost transcendent, as though he had discovered a way to move without start and end, as though he need not ever stop.
Beng felt almost happy. He felt almost strong. But what he really felt—if at all possible—was an absence of feeling. He was automation, he was power, he was nothing more than a constant unrelenting flow of movement. Quicksand, pulsations and liquid fire—Beng was barely conscious of how he managed to push aside the heavy metal door that held him in, and how he managed to walk, with a drunken placid fluidity, through corridors and odd entrances, past people whom he vaguely noticed only due to their extremely apparent alarm.
He was moving very quickly.
He caught a few bars of an old-timey melody, something about lipstick and better days, and then he was back where he had begun. He was in the waiting room, safe and distinct from the hidden surgical quarters. The room wasn’t quite empty, but there were different people there now, lolling about waiting for their donations to be done. Everyone had stopped short when Beng had re-entered.
He was coming back into himself, his limited real body with its aches and discomforts. Beng was feeling a pins-and-needles kind of tingling; he felt like he had woken from a very long and unrestful sleep. His flip-flops squished grotesquely under his feet, but he had no memory of stepping in anything along the way. Beng looked down to find that he had left footprints of rusty blood.
He was not wounded.
There were more traces of red streaked down his arms and under his fingernails—he, who had never so much as thrown a punch or started a brawl in better times. Beng felt sick, sick with knowledge and terror. The waiting men looked delicately away, but did not make to leave. Twenty dollars was worth risking quite a bit for.
Beng wondered fleetingly, fearfully, whether he had been possessed by a spirit or demon. But somehow he knew with chilling certainty that it had been him all along. He didn’t remember, but it must have been as much him as the trembling figure skulking out of the murder scene right now.
Nobody stopped him.
He didn’t know why. He would have stopped himself if he had been a cop. His shoes were still wet and he took them off to avoid leaving a trail, operating purely by instinct and a childhood education based primarily off Crimewatch. He gave himself the luxury of a second to take a deep breath, to recall that they were goin
g to harvest his organs so that he could keep moving without getting all out-damned-spot about this—that would kill him and he was not going to think about killing and there was no way to move but forward.
He got home in record time. He didn’t know if anyone saw him as he half-ran from the facility to his house, and frankly, he wasn’t in any state of mind to care. In the toilet, he scrubbed his hands furiously, heedless of the amount of water he was wasting. The red streaks swirled in the sink and disappeared. He did not feel clean.
“Beng?” It was his brother’s voice. “Are you okay?”
Beng looked himself over quickly. His shirt was dark so hopefully nobody would see the worst of it, and most of the blood seemed to have been washed off already.
“I’m good,” he said, trying to keep his voice steady. He stepped out of the washroom. Huat was frowning at him in that way that suggested he knew more than he was letting on.
“Did you get into a fight?” he said.
“No,” said Beng.
“You’re lying,” said Huat.
“What were you doing?” Beng asked, gesturing to Huat’s arms, which were messy with streaks of dust and paint.
“Building maintenance. One day only, though,” he answered briskly—and then the frown returned in full force. “But why were you out there fighting with people?”
“I wasn’t fighting,” Beng repeated.
“Like the last time?”
“I was being attacked that night.”
Huat considered this carefully. “Okay,” he said. “So were you being attacked today?”
“Yes, you dumbass.”
His frown deepened. “Were you injured?”
“No.”
“Wait,” Huat said in great disbelief. “You got into a fight—and won?”
“That was rude,” said Beng. “But yes, I got lucky. That’s all.”
“How do you even end up getting in fights? Where do you go during the day?” said Huat, with the concerned exasperation of someone confronted with the irrepressibly foolish.
“Around? Nearby. Finding work, y’know. Like you.”
“Of course nearby la, not like you’ve got a ride,” said Huat. “But maybe you should stick to the safer neighbourhoods. Go where I go—the Kallang area isn’t too bad, and they’re always open to new people.”