When she walks towards her waiting flight, the corridor narrows. She tries not to think too deeply, to drink in sensations of the present: the purple carpet, the potted palms, the advertisements for credit cards and frequent flier miles. On either side, the gates in orderly rows, dimly lit, like empty glass tanks. Or cells, she thinks. As she reaches the brushed silver walkway it sighs suddenly into life. And as she’s propelled forward, she becomes conscious of the soft music. Lennon’s “Imagine”, without the vocals. She smiles: a protest song become Muzak, oiling the smooth flow of money through the airport. For a moment, she remembers again: the packages on her body, the white crystals reduced to powder in the cheap hotel room, the door locked, the fan switched off in the gathering heat. Keep walking. Don’t think. By the gate ahead, the early crowd is gathering. When she steps off the walkway, she feels calmer again, as if she’s entered a ritual, like one of the masses of her adolescence. Her body moves forward—it does not disrupt the ceremony—yet she is propelled towards her destination by habit only. She notices herself join the line at the gate.
When he stands up, he’s wearied by the sudden weight of his body. It’s hotter now, and he can taste acid in his mouth; his right knee creaks in protest on the first few flexes. Strange, he muses, how he can control all bodies other than his own, weigh each one, subtract the weight of the head, calculate the exact length of rope for the clean, momentary fall into darkness. What he does is not the most difficult thing to do. Think of the doctor who is always waiting. If the organs need to be harvested, Doctor Yeh will wait two minutes, then go up a free-standing ladder next to the corpse that is still not yet quite a corpse. He’ll lean forward, hold the body still, put stethoscope against the heart and listen: only then will the doctor give signal to lower the body down. Compared to this, what he does is nothing. There’s a mirror on one of the pillars in the coffee shop, and as he passes, he catches sight of his reflection. Still a full head of hair; a fuller belly. He doesn’t look his age. When he comes out from the shade of the awning, the space between the buildings seems less like a corridor than a conduit, a storm drain filled up to the brim with a surge of light.
Before they meet, there’ll be a process. First the court case, then the failed appeal, then letters to the press, fruitless representations from politicians and celebrities for clemency. A war of images: her old passport photo, her mother in tears, lawyers at the prison gates, the Prime Minister with his awkward smile. A war of terminology, also: barbarism, colonialism, sovereignty, rights. Her face slowly becoming invisible, written over with layer upon layer of words.
He keeps his mind active. His grandson taught him how to use the Internet. He likes those sites where you can find an address on a map, and then zoom out, from a block of flats to the town, and then to the whole island of Singapore caught in an indentation in the tip of Asia, snagged like a corpuscle on the wall of a vein. Reclamation has long ago softened the island’s shape. It’s rounder, fatter: Tanjong Maling has been swallowed up by the wharves and gantries of a container port. But he’s still struck by an uncanny symmetry here: how the impossibly large resembles the impossibly small. The lines of silt that trail out into the Straits of Malacca are viscous, like venous fluids under a microscope.
In public life, too, he’s haunted by unacknowledged symmetry. This is something that he senses but can’t articulate, why he celebrates the new but seeks out the old. He does not want to think further, and yet in this gleaming, brilliant city, he always feels unclean, something that persists beyond the daily rhythms of showers, clean tissues, or the careful soaping of hands. The memory of something else swells beneath the skin of the present, something before, when he was younger, when a nation was coming into being. There were words he and his friends heard often and were not ashamed to speak: equality, rights, socialism, democracy, justice. If he searches hard, he can still detect traces of them in the present, but they are almost erased, written over by the crisp new language of social order, economic imperatives, retribution, discipline, punishment. He’s not sure how to picture this change. You think the city is perfect; visitors love its shining schools, hospitals, factories and shopping malls. Then you look more closely, and you see scar tissue, like the keloids that grow on your arm after an immunisation jab. Imagine a scarified body, its skin like armour, memories and desires sealed up within it, their retrieval an impossible effort. Yet these perfect scars are also not without their beauty: they are hard, and can resist the storms of the world.
In this particular storm, they will both be in places of calm. She behind reinforced glass, thick concrete walls. Even her mother will not be allowed to touch her hand. He, and so many others, behind other walls: routine, the soft intimacies of family or of friends, the forgetful business of living.
At the end of the island, next to the airport, there is a prison. It is clean, modern, well planned; its corridors meet at perfect angles. Like the airport. Like the estate.
They will meet there, in two years. Two among many.
The First Star from the Moon
THEY COME ON a rainy afternoon. Chu San, the third day of New Year. I’m in my study, writing. I get to the door just as the notes from the doorbell die away. In the peephole, their faces rummage up towards me like hungry koi in a pond: a middle-aged couple and a girl in her early teens. At first I think they must be selling something, and decide not to open the door. But then, just when I begin to turn away, the girl lifts up her hands, as if in prayer, and I can see that she carries two oranges, smooth skinned, red-gold in the darkness of the corridor. They are visiting me, then.
I pull down my sleeves, open the door and welcome them in, ushering them to the sofa by the coffee table. In the light of the flat, the couple seem to expand, as if they are thawing out. Their skins are waxy, I notice, as if they’ve been hiding for a long time underground. Only the girl is perfect. Fourteen or so, I guess, brimming with life. She passes me the oranges, and then leads her parents to the couch, where they sit down in pallid solidity. When I go to the kitchen to get the titbits ready, she is right behind me, dodging the red paper pineapple that dangles too low from the ceiling.
“Can I help you, uncle?”
And so I show her where the love letters are. Can she open the tin, put them out on the plate? Careful with the knife now: use the blunt end. Just a few, unless she thinks her parents would like more. And the pineapple tarts—in the jar there. These are the best in all of Singapore. Yi Ming gets them from a small shop in Katong: if her mother likes them, I’ll give her the address. She tastes one and crumbs catch in the braces on her teeth. I pour two glasses of white wine for her parents, and bring them out to the living room. When I come back, she is arranging kueh bangkit, a constellation of small, pink-white stars on the red of a plate.
“Coke?”
“It’s fine, uncle. I’ll get it myself.” And when I struggle to peel the tape from another jar, she gently takes it from me, teasing up the leading edge with the slender nail of a long forefinger.
“I’ll do it. You go out and talk with them.”
I’ve been avoiding going out into the living room. Truth to tell, I still don’t know who they are. I sit opposite them, seeking a handhold on their faces, something where memory can grip. But the thawing is complete: their complexions are smooth as porcelain, dimpled with eyes and nostrils above the thin crease of their lips. Something in them turns away from me, like preserved ducks hanging sadly on skewers. At one point I feel I am on the verge of recognition. Relatives, perhaps? Some long-lost branch of the family: cousins twice removed I’ve met at a wedding banquet or a wake a decade or so ago, and who remember me much better than I remember them? We fence with questions.
“How’s work?”
“Fine, fine.”
“And school?” I nod towards the open kitchen doorway, the clattering of plates the girl is taking down from the drying rack. If I said your daughter without naming her, it would be as good as admitting I don’t recognise them.
“Oh, she likes it,” the father says. “Much better than the old school. Less pressure.”
“Sec three now?”
“Sec four. Just started.”
“Not too far to travel in the morning?”
“Oh, no. I can drop her off before work.”
I give up, gesture to them with open hands. “Please. Please.”
I offer them love letters, and then the bak kwa that the girl has cut and arranged artfully on the plate. Her mother reaches out with pincer fingers and takes a piece.
“It’s very kind of you to invite us into your home,” she says, “especially these days. With the risk of transmission.”
I nod. Yellow flesh at the armpit flaps as she withdraws her hand. The man’s eyes reach out like hooks, dragging me into acquiescence.
“This virus,” he says. “We are very troubled by it. For the sake of our family, of course. What do you think about it?”
“You think it’s a virus?” I say.
They stiffen. I’ve got that wrong.
When the government first announced it, of course, we assumed it was a virus. The way that those bouquets of flesh suddenly bloomed in a body. It couldn’t be natural. At first, it only happened internally, in the darkness of the body cavity. Doctors the world over using the latest probes would find small areas of disturbed flesh, like knitted stars or slivers of a new moon, lodged in a breast, a buttock, the spare flesh of the abdomen, or often in the forearm, pressing upwards against the surface of the skin. The World Health Organization issued an alert. Our government was particularly scrupulous. Scanners were installed at airports, surveying incoming passengers for the elevated body temperatures characteristic of the incubation period of what we quickly came to call a disease. Hot-blooded foreigners were given the choice of a return flight or a week’s enforced rest at a holiday resort ringed by barbed wire fences and guard houses, free daiquiris and a regime of daily full body scans. Returning citizens created greater problems: at first those with confirmed infections were asked to stay at home for a period, and not venture out. Yet their numbers grew, and at last they were released into the community, with admonishments to stay away from the very young and the very old.
In the outside world, medicine and science moved rapidly. The disease—if it was such—did not seem to be particularly infectious: or at least its mode of transmission was mysterious and indirect. Tests on preserved cadavers in Western China indicated that it had been present in the human population for decades, if not centuries. Some studies went further. Far from being symptoms of a disease, the lesions in the flesh seemed to give an advantage to the bodies of their hosts: these people were if anything stronger, and aged less slowly. One scientific paper claimed that the scintillating contusions were in fact a new kind of organ, a further stage in human evolution. The WHO revised its policies, and the world relaxed. People got on with their lives: residual discrimination, after a few last twitches, subsided. Young people, my nieces and nephews tell me, now spend money on tattoos or temporary make-up, applied to their forearm, in the hope of imitating that hint of a star shimmering just below the surface of the skin.
Only our government remains unmoved. It recognises the scientific evidence, of course, it tells us, but the fact is that the majority of our citizens are not yet ready to accept it. We are a conservative society, after all, and respect has to be paid to our traditions. We have to move slowly. And so any reference to these tiny, knotted stars in the flesh, these white moons like sickles, is carefully monitored in our media, and often filtered out of foreign television shows that might be watched by the impressionable.
“And then there’s our Book,” she said, eyes like needles, the bak kwa poised just below her lips. “Have you read what it says about the virus? And the marks?”
I cough, the kueh bangkit suddenly dry in my mouth. And then the girl comes to my rescue again.
“Ba, Ma, let’s not talk about this. Uncle wants to take a photograph.”
And so I take out my handphone, line them up on the sofa so they form a blunt pyramid, the mother in the middle. The girl, I notice for the first time, takes care to never quite touch her mother, until a hand stretches out to pull her close.
“Smile.”
The girl grins easily through her braces. Her parents unfurl rows of perfect teeth in something between a smile and a grimace. I show them the picture, and they agree it is very nice. A small, perfect family. But I excuse myself temporarily. In the bathroom I text Yi Ming with the photograph. Who are these people? They won’t go. Then I flush the toilet and step out.
They won’t go. They circle, like a pride of lions, velvet paws prickling with the fiercest claws. Not literally, of course. They sit immobile on the couch, munching their way through the pineapple tarts. If they stay long enough they may eat the whole flat. It’s their conversation that circles, always, back towards this heavenly virus, this thing they cannot let go.
“It’s beautiful here,” the father says. “Your view.”
The rain has softened now, a thin veil over the silent trees of the hill.
“Would you like a tour?” I ask. “I don’t think you’ve been here before.”
So I lead them to the master bedroom, with its en suite bathroom. They admire the carved bed from Indonesia, the dark wood wardrobe, the false shelves in the wall cabinet that conceal the bomb shelter. So impressive, the mother says, to have done so much with so little. Our spare bedroom is narrow, and they press in behind me, husband and wife, with their bright, sharp eyes. The mother moves past me, blocking out the light from the window. I feel a sudden panic, a sense of suffocation, as though her body has swollen up, paper thin, to fill the whole room.
“About the virus,” she says, a little out of breath. “Better safe than sorry, wouldn’t you agree?”
“My study,” I say. “You’ll like it. Next door on the right.”
But when we go inside, she pins me against the bookcase, transfixed like one of those insects in cases at the museum.
“If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s apathy. We need to act. For our children’s sake.”
I swallow. I try to keep my voice level.
“But what would you do? It’s part of us.”
There are drugs, she says, that you can inject directly into those swellings in the flesh. And other, more modern methods of erasure: lasers or ultrasound, focused invisibly beneath the skin. Or body wraps. The husband chimes in. There is also faith. And the laying on of hands. And here he touches me with his creamy, waxy fingers, lightly—but I feel as if they are digging into my flesh.
“The kitchen,” I bleat. “We have the latest ceramic hob. This way.”
They troop out. As I leave the study, I turn back. The girl hasn’t followed us. She’s standing at the open window, looking down. I go over to her. The rain is even softer now, as thin as combed hair. When we look down, we see cross-sections of lives identical to our own—open windows, shut cupboards, a handphone lying on a few rumpled inches of bed—diminishing steadily in size towards a square patch of ground, twenty stories below. Her knuckles are white on the window frame. She sees me, shrugs and sighs, and follows me back through the doorway.
They like the kitchen: the gleaming stainless steel, the grey tiles that are so easy to clean, the powerful extractor fan with its filters that can conjure away cooking smells in an instant.
“More love letters?” I ask, my hand on the tin, and she looks at him uncertainly. When he nods imperceptibly, she acquiesces, and the girl, whose fingers are smaller than ours, extracts the brittle rolls and lays them reverentially on a plate.
In the living room, we sag back into our accustomed positions. The girl refills their glasses. I try to think of a topic that they surely cannot get their teeth into. The weather perhaps? The rain has stopped, I point out. So much rain this time of year: good for the plants. And no haze.
“They say water makes it easier to transmit the virus,” the mother says, but she’s fading, defla
ting on the sofa, a weariness creeping into her voice. And then, just when I’m gathering my breath, the husband speaks, like a relay runner taking the baton. Perhaps I know someone with the disease? Personally? That would explain my reluctance to talk about it.
He persists, across the table with its neatly divided plates of delicacies, the fan turning silently above us. The sun is shining now and an oriole passes the open window, a bullet of brilliant yellow. The girl sits quietly, her face blank. Having rested, the mother returns to the conversation. They hang on me like lampreys; when I reply to them, I breathe slowly, keep my voice level. I do not know why I let them continue like this, biting ever deeper into my flesh.
“Uncle,” the girl says when the conversation pauses for a moment. “I think you just got a text message.”
She’s right, although I’ve missed the tone. Yi Ming, texting back in full sentences, always the English teacher.
I think I knew them once, but no longer.
“Nothing serious?” asks the father.
An opportunity like an unexpected exit sign.
“It’s Yi Ming. I’m sorry: she’s just reminded me that we have to visit a friend.”
The father purses his lips.
“Ma,” the girl says. “We should go. To let uncle get ready.” Her mother exhales interminably, like the hiss of air from a punctured tire. Then silence. Finally she stands up. Her husband shakes my hand, presses a pamphlet upon me.
“Read this. You’ll understand. We know you’re not from here originally. And Yi Ming spent such a long time abroad.”
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