by Lu Huiyi
“I need a pair of pliers,” he said, with impressive faux calm.
“Huh?” said Huat.
“Pliers. Or actually, anything sharp should do.”
“We are not enacting another sequel of Saw,” said Huat.
“That was just once, and we were kids then—”
“It’ll heal,” Huat went on, inexorable. “We’ll need to find alcohol, something to disinfect—”
“I don’t know what it is,” said Beng. “But look at this shit—it’s some kind of tracker, or some sort of killing device or something—we have to get it out—”
“Beng,” said Huat, very slowly, tension permeating the single syllable. “Stop picking at it.”
Beng hadn’t even realised he was doing it, but the fingertips of his free hand were already wet with fresh blood, as he tried to pry and pick at the wound to remove the deeply-embedded piece of metal. His finger grazed the surface of the metal—and sparks flared from it, white and hot and so horribly painful that for a moment he must have blacked out. It wasn’t the same kind of blackout as when he had suddenly come into power, deadly and sweeping and above consciousness, but a nauseous gasping dying kind of unconsciousness that his mind clawed at in desperation, before yielding helplessly. He came back to himself with a sense of lost time, to find Huat almost wild with panic.
“What happened?” he managed. His arm hurt something awful. The wound was still there, but it was now accompanied by an ugly dark burn, blistered and raw.
“There’s some sort of self-destruct mechanism on that thing,” said Huat. His eyes were huge, and he was barely holding himself together. “It protects itself. It went off when you tried to take it out.”
“So it’s gone?”
“Still there—may’ve gone deeper—you can see a bit of it. Don’t touch it. It’ll kill you.”
“So I should just let it grow inside me?”
“It’s not growing.”
“So I should just let it stay inside me?”
“I don’t know, Beng.” Huat looked a little lost. He wasn’t used to not knowing what to do. “But it’ll kill you if you fiddle with it.”
“Maybe you try digging it out.”
“Vagrant, twenty-five, kills own brother. I can just see the headlines.”
A long pause ensued.
“So you’re not going to try?”
“Stop touching it,” snapped Huat, sharp with anxiety. “I’ll find you something to clean it with.”
“This means we can’t run away,” said Beng. Huat had risen to his feet and was looking around for a water source, and was only half-listening.
“Don’t worry,” he said automatically. “I’ll think of something.”
Somehow they managed to keep the wound on his arm from becoming infected. Red, raw, stretched skin slowly obscured the device from sight, healing a bit faster than what any of them had expected. After a while, Beng barely felt it anymore. In fact, if he didn’t think too much about it, he sometimes forgot that the device was there.
After two weeks of a dirty, foraging half-life in the shelter, they had been evicted to fend for themselves. The shelter couldn’t afford to house anyone indefinitely; it was a halfway house between the old world and the new regime.
Along the way, they picked up pockets of news, word-of-mouth fragments that could never be fully relied on, but were corroborated by far too many people to be disbelieved. It seemed as though every time anyone in the family managed to speak to someone, something new had occurred, and it was always something more drastic and shocking than what had come before. After a while, they became immune, if not numb, to the horror of the news, and listened to them with the sort of muted interest with which one might regard celebrity gossip, or something equally inconsequential.
The Parliament House, stormed. Prominent figures taken hostage and ransomed for political favours and concessions. More and more towns falling under the control of the Society—the Society, the Gahmen, armed and political factions melting into one destructive force. Military and police forces defecting to the Society. Gahmen members reluctantly permitted to sit in on Parliament sessions—and then, finally, a sudden coup and a brief, bloody battle, and now there was a girl with bloodied tracks on her cheeks and a parang hooked onto her belt, declaring new promises and new beginnings and the birth of the Gahmen military state.
People reacted badly at first, but rations were given out almost immediately after the coup. Soothed by the familiar routine of queuing and the comforting reward of rice and tinned beans, they slowly warmed up to the idea of new leadership and went on with their paltry, confused deprivation-laced existences. This Beng knew was fact, having joined one of the snaking lines and departed with his meagre gifts clasped tightly to his chest and quickly stuffed into his bag, because hungry eyes were everywhere these days and poverty made thieves and robbers of them all.
The family ate well that night.
But it was only one night out of many others. And the bits of news they were hearing were but little blips forcing their way through the white noise of hunger and rootlessness and worry. Living on the street was difficult. They were constantly tired and grimy. Grandfather was weak with exhaustion, Father frazzled and Mother—
Mother had always been something of a trooper, even at the expense of rational calculations and probability.
Mother was hopeful, for the longest time, that they would find a decent residence soon. Somehow Beng and Huat were less optimistic. They remembered the whispered warnings of the vicious guards. Nobody would house him if news got around, and the ticking time-bomb throbbed beneath his skin, warning him that he was never quite free. He wondered why, if the Chief of the Society was holding such a grudge, they didn’t just come right out and have him quietly killed.
Father’s thoughts on their housing search were impossible to decipher. He had begun to undertake their travels and schemes with a sort of sullen unresponsiveness, which everyone initially mistook for stoicism and eventually understood as defeat. Grandfather, meanwhile, was too spent to say or do much. After they had used up their maximum residency period at the homeless shelters, they went from house to house, but somehow all rental schemes and instalment plans had clauses that priced them out or made them ineligible. Beng kept telling Mother that the state had it in for him, but Mother kept telling him to not be so self-absorbed, and so they kept trying.
The first thing the Gahmen did, once they were sure of their power, was to mess with the Merlion.
Maybe not the first, per se. There were some very public denouncements and imprisonments and executions and exiles of any prominent figure who dared to speak against them, against the smooth takeover of Parliament. Those were unstable months, when the Gahmen ding-donged easily between polite threats and the brandishing of arms. And then, once they were pretty much the de facto leaders that anyone dared to look to, there was the methodical kick-starting of the Steam Revival: a few public exhibitions of steam trains and new factories and anything they could set up to prove that they were going to rebuild the nation. But once they had moved beyond the chaos of the Deprivation into the promising ventures of the Revival, the first thing they did was to mess with the Merlion.
For some reason, the Chief had had some particular contempt for the Merlion, in all its white gleaming purity. It was the subject of a lot of her public speeches. She called it a monstrous symbol of the old regime, a lily-white coward that had never worked a day, a creature ill-fitted for a nation of steam and sweat. Beng felt a bit bad for the Merlion; this was probably more abuse than the poor guy had ever thought it would have to take.
But in any case, it was not a worthy symbol of the Chief’s new reign. And its permanently stunned, open-mouthed expression had become too reminiscent of the way the previous head-of-state had died, in a bloody public scrimmage, under the swift hands of the Gahmen forces. It was a sign of the old times, and the old times were never going to come back. It had to go.
“What do you mean, I�
�m not a citizen?” said Mother in genuine puzzlement.
They were standing at the front of a long queue of very irritable and sweaty people, all crammed under a temporary makeshift shelter that did little to shield everyone from the scorching afternoon sun. The air was still. Beng’s shirt clung to his sweat-soaked body; he felt overheated and uncomfortable and a little like a child again, cranky and longing for respite after a long, overstimulated day.
They had come here because it was the only remaining place that seemed like it could help, after their eviction from their original home. It was based in the Central region of the country, and they had begun walking from a long way away after a sleepless night on the streets. This was meant to be a Citizens’ Welfare Shelter, here to address the new problems faced by individuals in the wake of the Deprivation, from hunger to illness to homelessness. It had only seemed logical—if the homeless shelter had no space for them, and the re-housing centre was reluctant to qualify them for rehoming, then the only solution was to make a general welfare complaint. The only problem was that they didn’t seem to be the kind of people that the shelter cared very much about helping.
“Don’t you know what the word ‘citizen’ means?” said the lady at the counter. Her gleaming name tag identified her as Jane, which was complete bullshit, just like the Customer Feedback booth they had set up in a corner of the room. At least five of the other folks in uniform had Jane name tags, and even more had simply decided they didn’t care enough to even write a fake name down, and went around placidly wearing blank tags.
“Of course I do,” Mother snapped. She waved her pink identification card around a little aggressively. People were beginning to look at her out of the corners of their eyes. “You see this? It says Singaporean.”
“I’m sure it does,” Jane-the-Sixth said agreeably, without even bothering to look. “But you don’t fit any of the CARE criteria.”
“The what?”
“CARE,” said Jane-the-Sixth. She had a gently smouldering cigarette in her mouth, and she casually took it out before continuing her explanation. “Citizenship is a privilege, ma’am. It’s only for those who earn it by contributing to the nation.”
She stepped neatly to the side and gestured to the huge hand-painted poster that had hung behind her all this while.
“One can earn citizenship via meeting any of these four requirements,” she said. “Community or a strong social network, the ability to excel in the workforce, the resources to own assets and rejuvenate our economy, or quality achievements in one’s education. Community, Ability, Resources and Education. CARE. I don’t think you meet any of the criteria.”
“I was holding down a stable job. But the firm shut down—” Mother began, but she was cut off immediately.
“Was,” Jane-the-Sixth repeated. “I think you have your answer right there.”
“I’m looking; I’ll find something—”
“Anyway, anybody can hold down a stable job,” said Jane-the-Sixth dismissively. “We’re looking for high performers.”
“That’s not fair,” Beng cut in, seeing that Mother was a little out of her element. “What happens to all of us who don’t fit?”
“I don’t see how it’s not fair,” Jane-the-Sixth replied, with cool unconcern. “We go by the principles of meritocracy.”
“That’s bullshit and you know it!” Beng snapped, raising his voice involuntarily. His voice cut above the general murmuring conversations around him and a dozen heads turned at once.
“Did you just say meritocracy was bullshit?” said Jane-the-Sixth, in loud, carrying tones.
“He doesn’t believe in meritocracy,” someone whispered in the background, as instant and as cooperative as an ancient Greek chorus.
“—Insulted the state—”
“—State ideals—”
“—Called them bullshit—”
“I can hear everything all of you are saying!” Beng snapped, and the crowd stopped their attempts at subtle whispering, looking a little sheepish. Beng turned on Jane-the-Sixth, fuming.
“I didn’t say that it was bullshit,” he said, although this seemed like a very silly thing to clarify and he thought he might be getting a little side-tracked. “I said that you are bullshitting us—we’ve been citizens since we were born—”
“Is something the problem?”
Suddenly, Jane-the-Sixth was flanked by a burly man, who had appeared by her side so quickly that Beng was caught by surprise.
“I heard somebody was raising dissent around here,” said the man, his voice steely. One of the brutish Society Guards, here to restore order and ensure compliance.
He had a raised crooked scar that spread across the right side of his face. Beng noticed it with an almost-painful flash of recognition. They made eye contact and Beng saw the lack of surprise—it was almost triumph—in the guard’s eyes.
“You guys are everywhere,” he said.
The scarred man smiled.
“You have a good memory,” he said blandly, and Beng thought of blinding lamp-light and the cutting roughness of the ropes and the prospect of being sold off the next day. “And luckily, so do I, Beng Hock.”
These people had taken the effort to not just track him, but to find out his name and to be around when his family was trying to get themselves re-registered as citizens of the Gahmen State. Even as Beng tried to suppress his terror, he had to admit that there was something very impressive about how meticulous they were, even over an encounter so fleeting. He remembered his primary school teacher harping on about how Careless Mistakes Are the Worst Mistakes, and suppressed a sudden irreverent compulsion to ask his aggressor how he had done in the PSLE.
“This is about the night I got away, isn’t it?” was what he said instead.
Scar was holding some kind of contraption, a gimmicky elaborate thing with strange bells and whistles and light bulbs attached to it. He waved it at them with an over-dramatic flourish.
“You really shouldn’t make everything about yourself,” said Scar.
A pause. Then the device went off next to Beng’s arm; a sudden shock went through him but he pretended that he had not felt anything. A couple of heads turned as the light bulbs flashed red and the bells jangled in ugly cacophony. Scar shrugged.
“But yes, it might be,” he said. “Maybe also the time you blew up one of our clinics, but who’s counting?”
“This is really very petty,” said Beng.
“Oh?” said Scar politely, but in a way that showed he did not really care.
“What else could I have done? I think you would’ve been more surprised if I didn’t try to escape.”
“I’m not surprised you tried to run,” Scar acquiesced. “But you did a hell of a lot of damage too. You shouldn’t be petty about it, really. We’re just doing our jobs. It just means that you can’t be a part of the Gahmen State.”
“How about my family?” Beng said, a little desperately. Scar considered the confused elders that were huddled behind Beng in a bedraggled group, waiting to see if Beng was going to say something that would get them killed. Pulled up short by their frightened expressions, Beng restrained himself from saying anything more and waited for the answer in what he hoped was a display of docility and good manners.
Scar considered this matter seriously for a very long time, to the point where Beng suspected he was just making them wait to screw with them a little more.
“We are a pro-family society,” he said finally. “Your family is likely to share your beliefs and behaviours.”
“No, they aren’t,” said Beng, who had absolutely no idea how he was going to back this claim up.
“Yes, they are,” said Scar.
“No, they aren’t.”
“Um,” said Mother, who was visibly concerned at the argument’s rapid descent into toddler fisticuffs, and seemed to be driven by a compulsive parental obligation to get into the sandbox and break things up. But Scar turned and gave her a menacing look, and she stopped spea
king and quailed at once.
“Don’t intimidate my mother,” said Beng.
“I don’t try to intimidate people,” said Scar. “It’s not my fault people tend to get scared of weapons and the complete license to use them as I please.”
He looked at Beng meaningfully. Beng got the hint and shut up too.
“So,” said Scar, smiling like a shark. “Is anything the problem?”
He was gloating, and Beng hated it. He opened his mouth to snap something back, but Huat got there before he did.
“No, no problem at all,” Huat said, with a sickening amount of meekness in his voice. Scar smirked, gloating and triumphant, and nodded a business-like dismissal in Jane-the-Sixth’s direction.
“I’ll show you out,” he said, in a way that made it clear that it wasn’t a request.
They were left standing out in the humid heat, guards flanking the shelter, keeping them out.
“This isn’t fair,” said Father.
“Maybe we can try again,” Mother said, almost to herself. “We can find work. Surely they’ll let us back in if we find work.”
“I can work,” said Grandfather.
“It’s CARE, right? We just need to meet the criteria. It’ll be fine then.”
“I don’t think it’s that simple—” Huat began, and stopped short at the withering, brittle look his mother shot his way.
“It’ll be fine,” she said again.
Poor Mother, with her blind faith in her hands and brains and willingness to work. Beng suddenly felt a profound sense of pity for her and her foolish hope. It was that pity that convinced him that he had to act.
“Maybe,” Beng said, cautious and noncommittal. Logically, he knew what to do. If his presence had become a burden, the one roadblock holding four others back from the privileges and protections of citizenship, then it would be foolish for him to cling to what he had at present. It was the logic of self-sacrifice but also the logic of utilitarianism; both were ideals that Beng never thought he would have the courage or strength to live by.