This Is Where I Won't Be Alone

by Inez Tan

  When I open my eyes again, I can tell that Sabra has made up her mind about something. I can sense the iron will through her fatigue.

  Dragon, she says. They told me that dying was brave. But it’s not. Living is brave. So by your leave, Dragon, I am returning to my kingdom. What will happen to me there, I cannot guess. But I cannot stay here anymore.

  I had assumed she would decide as much. The gates are wide open for her, and as a princess, she will not be turned away.

  She continues with commendable grace, I am beholden to you for sparing my life. You were all I had in my time of need. In the humblest of terms, Dragon, if you came with me, I would do my best to ensure your safety. I am sorry I cannot promise you anything, though I owe you so much more. I only perceive that if you stay here, you will surely die.

  Please come with me, she adds, after a moment. I do not wish to turn back alone.

  Please.

  I think to myself, Am I brave? Am I wise? Am I terrible? Years ago, when I left my family and homeland to seek my own way in the world, I thought I was. Afterwards, I resolved only to forget. Sabra still does not understand who I am, and she little suspects how her ignorance spares her. What does she have to know her mother by, especially with her mother returned in the guise of a dragon?

  I don’t deserve anything, but without her, I have nothing.

  I rise unsteadily to my feet, and she breaks into a fragile smile. She unfastens the girdle on her gown, the very same one I wore to my wedding as a girl, and loops it around my neck. I hold my head high, and she leads me into the city, back where I began. My daughter, my downfall. Once upon a time, I thought my place would be elsewhere.

  Reproduction

  THE NATURAL OBJECT is always the adequate symbol— ha, ha, ha! The boy is seven. The girl is five. They met in kindergarten and became friends. Their parents discovered that the four of them had gone to the same university. Today, the parents have taken the boy and the girl to the Singapore Science Centre in Jurong. All of childhood is learning that the world can be intelligible, even fun—in short, a pretty good place to keep living in. Look, a scale model of the sun! Diagrams of the food chain! It’s estimated that only ten per cent of all species that walked the earth still exist today—great news, you’re one of them! The boy and girl hold hands as they run through one corridor after another, like in every episode of Doctor Who they’ve seen. And there at the end—the rocket simulator! The children find their respective parents and beg for $8 to ride, and $8 to ride again. They’re in a rocket on tracks, careening on thin rails towards pits of lava. So great is the excitement of this space that it changes them forever. One embarks on a career of science, the other becomes a perennial dreamer. (Did you assume the scientist was the boy? Shame on you.) Twenty years later, the girl is watching the National Day Rally where it’s announced that the Science Centre is being relocated. Which really means that the old one is getting knocked down. In the same way that our bodies and passions will be transfigured beyond recognition in heaven, the new will be nothing like the old. Later that same night, the boy calls. They hadn’t spoken in years. Would she like to go to the Science Centre with him one last time? Oh no, the girl thinks, but on some weird level of principle, she can’t refuse him. She meets him at the bus stop, a really old one with the orange and white striped roofs and hard orange wedge seats. Paddle Pop Ice Cream, she thinks, that’s what it reminds me of. Soon this too shall pass. When they enter the Science Centre, everything is exactly like she remembers it, a singular experience in a city that changes as fast as Singapore. The scale models. The interactive displays. The sterile grey walls of the IMAX theatre. Dread blooms in her stomach. She knows where this is going. As they sit through a documentary on terraforming Mars, the boy tries to hold her hand and she pretends not to see. She has to fight the urge to hold his hand herself, this place is that potent. The Science Centre, which only poses as a modern, futuristic, technologically advanced space, is unmasked as a primal, old-world, superstitious site of eldritch power. Yikes. She thinks, okay, this place has to go. She’d kick down the first wall herself. But here they are now at the end—the rocket simulator! (Why is this science? Why is this here?) Would she like a ride? Of course she would. It’s just the two of them in the warm dark, brilliant. They sit together on a single plush bench, looking right at the screen as though they’re about to watch their lives flash before them, revealing every mystery. The door lowers, seals, the shuttle tips forward. The lava video comes on. This is a simulator. This is real. This is just too much, the girl thinks—the phallic thrust of the capsule, the womblike interior. Shaken up inside. More, more, the boy thinks. He reaches for the girl’s hand again. He seizes. She succumbs. And with that, the old Science Centre was content to die, knowing that through ones such as these, ridiculous, bewildered, its own kind would go on.

  Dear Famous Poet

  DEAR FAMOUS POET,

  You are giving a reading tonight at 7pm in Room 101 of Wembley Hall at an important university. Please do not forget it. You have less than two hours left of not forgetting it, which someone of your stature ought to be able to manage. Ideally, you would be punctual and sober and ON FIRE (metaphorically), and you would give such a reading that a spell would come over the room, that your voice and words would haul the stars above Wembley Hall into alignment, that everyone inside would weep and smile and sigh and gaze at one another with a new, sort of candlelit tenderness, and so that the girl who has agreed to meet me at your reading, assuming she has not been detained by foot traffic or inclement weather or a sudden and perhaps rightful epiphany of revulsion for my person, will look upon me with favour instead of mistrust or disgust, as could be the case if I had set her up to attend a reading that was boring, off-putting, inaudible or otherwise really, really bad.

  Dear famous poet, please don’t take this the wrong way. I love your work. In response to how people have been claiming forever that poetry is dying, I think it was Eavan Boland who said that almost every person carries in their heart one poem, one poem they really love their whole lives, and that means more than they can say. My heart poem is one of yours, and if there is anybody on the planet who could take this the right way, it is you. And hopefully also the girl I am meeting! Her name is Sarah. She is a junior, like me. I’d seen her around campus before but we officially met last fall in ENGL 321, Romantic Poets. The class was actually pretty awful—it was just after lunch in a hot classroom, it contained a large number of 17th century snobs stuck in the class to fulfil their 18th century period requirement, and the professor had no apparent interest in his subject. He wrote his stuff about a hundred years ago and has just been trotting out his old typewritten notes since: basically, flogging a very dead horse (as I hope you are not going to do tonight at 7pm in Wembley Hall).

  During the first class as he droned through the syllabus, I noticed a weird thing he was doing. The best way I can describe it was that he was rolling his l’s, just spending way too much time on them. His name was Professor Lionel Elroy, but he said Lllionelll Ellllroy. We would be studying Llllord Byron and Samuelllll Tayllllor Colllllleridge. I started thinking that if the professor were my age, which is twenty, I wouldn’t take him seriously for a second. I thought, someone ought to tell him to stop doing that, it’s so amazingly pretentious, but it’s not going to be his equally pretentious friends, and it’s not going to be me either. Suddenly, I worried that that was our common destiny: strangers ignore you, and your friends stop telling you the truth. Then I happened to look over at the person next to me, and she was making this funny face, sticking the tip of her tongue against the back of her front teeth: Lllll. Of course, this person was Sarah.

  Dear famous poet, as a professor yourself, you are probably not as amused by this as we were, but at the time in class I could barely keep from laughing. And that’s when Sarah and I locked eyes, and that’s when I first saw her smile. I thought of her smile all through this really dull section of the syllabus about posting responses to the onli
ne forum by 9pm on Sunday for class on Monday, but 9pm on Tuesday for class on Wednesday, blah blah blah. I was probably even smiling myself. Dear famous poet, maybe you do get it. After all, you have had to endure a great deal more classes than we have, and didn’t you choose your profession out of a love of language, with all its absurdity? Do you lie awake at night rhyming words instead of counting sheep? Did you hop around as a child saying one word over and over until it seemed to lose its meaning? (Pineapple pineapple pineapple pineapple pineapple pineapple pineapple…)

  Anyway, I was telling you about Sarah and me, forcibly hemmed in by the uncomfortable right-handed folding desk sections of our chairs (we are both lefties), gazing not at each other but, in accordance with Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s definition of friendship, looking outwards together in the same direction, if only at a chalkboard upon which nothing of consequence was ever written. From that day on, I always took care to casually sit next to Sarah. Our professor never bothered to switch up our seating arrangements, and unfortunately that’s the best thing I can say about him. I came into that class with excitement and I got most of it squashed out of me. Among us, only Sarah fought the squashing. It was as though, when she signed up to take that class, she also signed up to take it personally. Every day, she put up her hand and asked angry analytical questions. The answers were long and boring, but dear famous poet, she was enthralling.

  After about a month of this, as we were leaving the classroom one day, Sarah turned to me (to me!) and said, “Why did we have to write those 500-word responses to the readings and post them online if we weren’t going to talk about them in class?”

  I said, “Yeah, I know, it’s too bad because I really liked your point about how Blake differentiates the poems and plates in Songs of Innocence and Experience as a way of evoking distinct levels on which to view the world: the former being literal, and the latter more figurative and abstract.”

  She said, “I had been thinking about your point that innocence and experience seem like fundamentally incompatible states, yet Blake insists on holding on to both of them. I think you had the right idea before you veered off erroneously trying to reconcile them. Okay, I’ve gotta run or I’ll be late to Chaos and Fractals, see you Wednesday.”

  Dear famous poet, even if Sarah had noticed me just that once, it was all worth it: the weeks of waiting until her forum post went up so I could respond to it on my own (“I strongly agree with Sarah’s point…”), the late nights combing her posts for personal information and trying to reciprocate (“Comparing my favourite book as a child, The Silmarillion, to Sarah’s excellent observations on ‘Kubla Khan’…”). I don’t mean that I flattered her; on the contrary, I worked really hard to put up an argument (cp. “Sarah, I agree with your point, however…”). That was when I realised how much I enjoyed writing those responses, and that got me thinking about how good things can come out of bad things. Someone more metaphysically inclined might say redemption emerges from evil, but I’m freaking out about your reading at 7 and I can’t keep metaphysics on the brain right now. It’s the same reason why they don’t serve hot drinks on an airplane during turbulence. But back to good from evil: my brother crashed our car a year and a half ago. He’s okay; it’s not that kind of story. What I’m getting at is, two years ago, after he got into college about an hour from where I am, he and I came up with this great plan to pass the car between us and drive home together during breaks. So we put the car down in both our names and split the payments and took turns filling up the tank, and everything was fine until Doug parked on a slope one day without pulling the handbrake, and as he was blissfully stuffing his face with wontons across the street, our car slid all the way down the hill and slammed into a telephone pole. Thankfully no one was hurt, but that, I felt, meant that I could really rip into my brother, since my rage at his carelessness did not have to compete with some other more important cause, e.g. the loss of human life. All year, I had to go back to bumming rides off other people to get to the grocery store or the high school where I was volunteering, and I just hated it. The next summer, I stocked produce at Trader Joe’s every morning at 4 and saved up enough to take out a first payment on an older, junkier car, and that’s when I thought, people were good to me last year and I need to pay this forward, and just then, seriously almost to the second, there was this Facebook post from Sarah, whom I hadn’t seen since Romantic Poets ended, saying she hated to ask for a favour but she urgently needed to go to the post office in the next town to get her passport renewed, and would someone be willing to drive her?

  I responded so fast that I almost dropped my phone twice and believe me, dear famous poet, it was a real struggle to play it cool as I went to pick her up. She looked so pretty that day. Her brown hair had gotten longer and curlier since the fall, and she was wearing a white wool coat with bright gold buttons down the front. Something about her shampoo or perfume reminded me of Christmas. She thanked me repeatedly as she got into the car, but was otherwise a bit standoffish. She seemed deeply embarrassed to have to ask for a ride, like she as a normal human being should have sprouted four tires and a steering wheel by now and been able to drive herself about. The whole way there she didn’t say much, but on the ride back she blurted out that she didn’t have a licence and took her hat off to anyone who did. I told her it wasn’t exactly bravery on my part: (for all the good it did Doug) everyone in my high school had taken the driving class for an easy A.

  Dear famous poet, I realised too late that that could have come across as pretty insensitive, but Sarah didn’t seem to take offence. She started telling me about how terrified she was of cars (dear famous poet, she doesn’t even like Mario Kart!). Her mother is a diplomat, and their family has lived in over 12 countries. Sarah attended the American school everywhere she went and described her experience as “consistent”, but she always found herself disoriented by the different rules of the road. She learnt to bring a book to read in the four-hour traffic jams in Jakarta, to check her seatbelt in Prague, and to close her eyes and pray to the traffic gods that they would not collide with cyclists in Beijing or overloaded buses in New Delhi. They never did, but the underlying anxiety she had about moving vehicles never went away.

  Her parents tried to give her and her little sister an “American” childhood, or at least as much of one as they could manage with her mom flying out to summits every few days and her dad always off working on screenplays about young aspiring pastry chefs that he never quite thought were good enough to send out. The thing they fixated on was that Sarah should learn to drive. That summer her dad started taking her around her grandparents’ farmhouse in North Carolina, rolling over late crab apples on dirt roads. But a few weeks later they relocated to Singapore, where the driver sits on the right side of the car and drives on the left side of the road, because Singapore was a British colony and British people and Americans can’t do anything the same way. So in her mind, Sarah was already having to flip the left/ right everything, including the windshield wipers and turn signals, and all the rest of that stuff you only really have to concentrate on when you’re learning. (Dear famous poet, stay with me here.)

  Sarah said Singapore was a city and a state, as in, the whole country was one big city, so there wasn’t a lot of space to practise driving. But her dad realised that their house wasn’t far from an old, sprawling Chinese cemetery, which was sort of like a park. The graves were pretty spread out, and the whole cemetery was connected by a series of looping roads and roundabouts: plenty of good routes for a learning driver. I asked Sarah if it was scary driving in a cemetery and she said no, it wasn’t, not in broad daylight. Bukit Brown Cemetery was leafy and cooler than the rest of Singapore because there weren’t big concrete buildings around absorbing heat. It was a little wild. You’d see feral monkeys—hundreds of them, large and small—dropping out of the trees like spiders. Twice she caught sight of this old shirtless Chinese man with a belly like a drum, standing outside a shack surrounded by dogs on heavy chains. They n
ever found out exactly who he was. The other weird thing was that at the time, graves were being cleared to make room for a highway. There was always construction going on in Singapore. Sarah said it was like living on the Internet, the landscape changing as quickly as a trick of the light. There were big blue banners everywhere that read EXHUMATION EXERCISE, with instructions on how to get a special numbered stake which you’d plant by the grave of your relative followed by the paperwork you’d fill out to have the remains returned to you. I asked Sarah if that wasn’t all kind of harrowing, but she said no, she was a lot more terrified of messing up U-turns and forgetting to put on her lights.

  Actually, she said, the lessons became almost funny, which meant they were almost fun. There were rarely other cars or people, so she wasn’t stressed out about hitting anyone. From time to time, she did have to manoeuvre around small piles of oranges and red incense, offerings for the dead. “Just pretend they’re potholes,” her dad said. He hummed songs by the Beach Boys and stopped mashing his foot against a brake pedal he didn’t have on the passenger side of the car. Sarah said the place was as calm as it could be—“Not something you get to say often in Singapore.”

  The incident happened after two months of those lessons. It was a Sunday, and the family had driven to a mall. Her dad did the difficult ramp down to Basement 4, and then, seeing as there was no one behind them, got out of the car and asked Sarah to park it: a narrow but straightforward head-in.

  Sarah climbed into the driver’s seat, but her heart was hammering in her chest and her hands shook on the wheel. She’d slept badly the night before (a premonition?) and woken up groggy that morning, and what with trying to remember to flip the left/right sides of things, just after she’d nudged the car perfectly into the lot, she pressed the accelerator instead of the brake and revved the car forward over a concrete divider into a wall, cracking the licence plate and blunting the nose of the car. What followed was an ugly scene, with Sarah crying because she’d damaged an embassy BMW and her dad crying because he felt guilty about making her drive and Sarah’s younger sister crying and screaming that she was pregnant and Sarah could have killed them all. (Later they confirmed that she wasn’t, but both Sarah and her sister were so traumatised afterwards that they still don’t talk about it. In fact, Sarah hadn’t told anyone that story, before me.)