Heaven Has Eyes

by Philip Holden

Samuel turned to Jacqueline. A new plan was called for. She and Hani would search the garden; he and Jia Wen would descend to the parking garage.

  Jia Wen looked at Boy Boy, and the boy’s black eyes gleamed back at him. He was sure he detected the hint of a nod.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m sure he’s not very far away.”

  “Baba! I’m still hungry,” Boy Boy squealed.

  Samuel stirred impatiently, but Jacq placed a hand on his arm.

  “Fine,” he said, reaching for a chunk of black pork wrapped in soft belly fat. “We’ll look for him later. Eat! Eat!”

  IN TRANSIT

  It’s All in a Dream

  for Lucy Davis

  EVEN WHEN THE flight attendants cleared away the meal service, and his neighbours closer to the window reclined their seats to sleep, he still felt uneasy. Across the aisle from him, a mother held up her baby, big-eyed, its hair standing up straight with the static. The child raised its hands in front of its face, and wriggled them slowly in puzzlement, as though trying to work out what they were for. He picked up a discarded toy monkey from the aisle, and placed it on the seat rest. A gurgle of delight followed, and the mother’s eyes turned to meet his. She nodded in thanks.

  He tried to pinpoint what disturbed him. Not the baby and the prospect of a sleepless flight. Something closer to a sense of guilt, or a nagging regret. He glanced at the screen in front of him. The plane was now at cruising altitude, and had left the Island far behind. In two hours or so, it would descend, and he would change planes, fly off to that Western City where his wife would be waiting for him. Then he remembered. Reaching forward, he pulled out the travel pouch he had carefully stowed in the seat pocket, and took out his passport. He thumbed through it, anxiety growing into panic. Something missing. He fumbled again, then realised: the permit he was looking for had fallen out of his passport into the pouch. He reached down and fished it out. A blank piece of paper that unfolded to a watermark of a portcullis and chains. A crest, a stamp, and a barcode. Under a title marked “Description of Holder”, he read off his IC number and his name.

  Two months ago, he had been surprised to find how easy it seemed to apply for a renewal. When he’d first applied for the permit in the 1990s the process had involved a long paper application form, with supporting evidence, and then a formal interview in a now long-demolished building. Ten years later, extending it, he had still needed to fill out an application in hard copy, and submit a letter from his employer. Now he simply logged in, filled up an online form, and at once a reply winked back at him. He would receive an email registering his application, he was told. Confirmation of success or failure was usually given on the next working day. In the meantime, he should note down his unique serial number, in case he had any questions. As simple as that.

  After putting in his application that morning a couple of months ago, he had left the computer on its desk, and made coffee. His block of flats and its neighbours were newer than the rest of the housing estate: they clung to the side of a hill like a cliff, all windows facing outwards, away from the razor wire and the guard posts of the army camp, the radar array that turned restlessly at night, with a single red eye lit up as a warning for low-flying planes. Southwest, away from the hill, lower, older HDB blocks layered up to the horizon. An MRT train snaked by on its elevated track, empty of people now that the rush hour had finished, but filled up with sunlight. After the previous night’s storm, the sky was clear and cloudless; it was still early enough for the shadows of his block and its companions to etch themselves over the estate. Later, at noon, the shadows would vanish and the blocks opposite him would flatten out, like a pop-up book opened too far. He would go down to the coffee shop for lunch, and returning, scan the series of floors above him, layer on layer of lives stacked on each other up into the sky.

  In the next few days, he fell back into a routine. He was busy at the end of the semester: there were final lectures to give, a talk for the department on an obscure episode in the university’s history, and a series of consultations with students. There was something gratifying about these meetings. Some students, of course, were simply concerned about getting the final assignment right, and their overall grade in the course. But others were genuinely interested in their research, in making connections between their own lives, the Island’s history, and the poems, novels and plays that they had read. At this time they gave back something to him: they took the materials he had assembled for them, but used them in new ways he had never thought of. He was old enough now to meet former students in all walks of life across the Island, surprised by the enthusiasm with which they remembered his classes, recalled discussions or comments that he had long forgotten. Educate, from the Latin educare, to lead out. He could take no credit for their success, but he had perhaps enabled something to begin.

  It was a few days before he remembered the application. He had received nothing in his inbox, and so logged on to the official web site to check. His fingers were clumsy, striking two keys at once, and so he had to solve a barely legible Captcha that would surely defeat most humans as well as a machine. His application, he was told, was IN PROCESS. Nothing more. He checked the web site’s description again. “Most applications,” he read, “can be processed within one (1) working day. However, some applications may take a longer time.” So mine, he thought, is one of those.

  He had, of course, heard rumours from friends and colleagues. The Island was filling up with people. Permits were rightly not quite so easy to obtain as they had been before. And then politics. Only last year, he had heard, a colleague had waited seven weeks for his permit, allegedly because of his role in activism outside of the university. In the end, this co-worker had simply decided to quit his job and leave the Island for good. You couldn’t rely on rumours, of course. He had heard the story second-hand from three different friends, with details growing more lurid in each version. Now the colleague had left, he might never have the chance to ask for a full account. And this permit, to complicate things, was a strange thing. You were never asked to leave. Permanent residency was, as you might expect, permanent. What you applied for was a re-entry permit: a piece of paper that would allow you to keep your residency status on return from a trip abroad. If you never left the Island, you would never need it. The choice, as in so many things on the Island, was yours.

  As the semester drew to the close, the Island was caught up with the death of a Great Man. Since his wife was away, and he was finding sleep difficult, he got up at four in the morning, and joined the queue for the lying-in-state. The first challenge was to find the end of the line. People called to each other in puzzlement under the lights by the river; policemen and NS men directed them further and even further away, beneath the trees and the soft darkness wrapped around the Padang. He found the tail of the queue far away, just across the road from a shuttered shopping centre. The line started moving, coagulated, came to a stop, and then started flowing again, with surprising swiftness, so that he was on the verge of breaking into a run. At one point, there were piles of water bottles, still nestled in boxes that had almost disintegrated under overnight rain, and he and those who followed him grabbed one each hastily, as marathon runners might. Once a young man tried to cut in front of him and then, realising where he was, suddenly slowed and waved him through. They were returning now, under trees with branches lit up yellow by the streetlamps. To the side, the Padang was wrapped up in darkness. At the Cenotaph, weary NS men rested on the steps, hunched over, the dull twilight washing away race, blurring the edges of each slim, uniformed body. Only when the line returned to the river did the queuing begin in earnest. They passed through scanners, as if in an airport. There were LCD screens, on which images of the Great Man were projected: they heard the sound of his voice for a minute, strident, much younger than in recent memory, and then the queue snaked out of range.

  Everyone was quieter now. “Twenty minutes to go,” a voice behind him said. He was disappointed: he had expected
to wait much longer, to compose himself. Another snippet of conversation: “ aircon.” They were given pieces of paper on which to write a message, but he could think of nothing to write. Perhaps I am really here, he thought, not for him but for those we have forgotten. A doorway, and the dazzle of light on the marble floors in Parliament House. You were propelled forward past a lacquered coffin you could not see inside, with barely time to stop and bow. Outside, in the darkness again, they dispersed, following lines of streetlamps to the river. The MRT was still not running. Retirees waited hopefully at bus stops; young men in stiff suits and women in pencil skirts paused in coffee shops before heading to their offices in the Financial District.

  Back in his flat, morning coffee in hand, he logged onto the government web site again. Still IN PROCESS. He decided to send an email, from his work address. This would show he was gainfully employed. He consciously kept things brief, and polite. Perhaps the authorities could explain the delay? Of course, the historic events of the past few days had no doubt held things up. He would, of course, be willing to supply any additional documentation that might be necessary. And then, just after the MRT started up, and the sky began to fill with light, he fell asleep.

  Waking later in the morning, he was surprised to already find a reply in his box.

  We note the content of your email. 2 We are processing your application and we will keep you updated with the outcome in due course. Thanks.

  He read the message again, slowly. The officer had signed off with her first name, adding another touch of informality. The number 2 was puzzling. Presumably this part of the message had been pasted in from a template. Beyond that, nothing.

  In the afternoon, in his campus office, he began to think about reasons that the permit might be delayed. There were several possibilities, of course. He had been one of a small group of people organising a public letter from intellectuals and arts workers protesting the denial of tenure to a prominent academic. But that was over a year ago. He had written letters and articles in the press about the role of the university, implicitly criticising current policies. Yet, if anything, he’d had favourable feedback from the University administration: he got the sense that he’d articulated things that more senior colleagues would like to and yet were unable to publicly say. Then there was the talk he had given on alternative histories in the Island. A smartly-dressed young man there whom no one recognised had been in the audience, taking notes and plenty of photographs of all his slides with an iPad. Yet he surely hadn’t been overly critical. What he’d tried to do was appeal to a common past of idealism that had now been forgotten. He had, after all, called into question both accounts that praised the Party without criticism, and others that were only critical of it.

  A flutter of wings. A pair of creamy white parakeets had settled clumsily on the ledge outside his office window, flexing lemon yellow crests. He saw the birds periodically in the sky above the ridge, circling, calling out. Not a local species, a student majoring in Biology had told him. And indeed they did seem awkward, out of place. They bumped into each other, chattered, and then took flight again. He returned to his computer screen, and to Excel sheets of student marks.

  He had always thought that he was safe. Lucky. He had come to the Island two decades ago, drawn by little more than a sense of adventure and the encouragement of a number of friends. He had grown with the universities he worked at, moving from a teaching institution to a “world class” establishment that rose higher each year in global rankings. He’d had always lived off campus, had friends in the community, not the university, got married to one of them. He had found this world that he’d become part of genuinely challenging, naggingly persistent. He realised, slowly, how narrowly culturally centric even much of the progressive scholarship he had read, and indeed which he had written, had been. He found himself leading a strange double life. On the Island, he worked, as well as he was able, inside and outside the university to help establish dialogues for the future, and for change: he was critical. When he travelled to conferences abroad, he continually found himself having to correct stereotypical views of the Island. Was it true that chewing gum was banned there? That cars cost $100,000? Wasn’t the Great Man, who had stepped down more than two decades ago, still really in charge? Could he really say, with hand on heart, that he had academic freedom? To the last question, taken off guard, he’d replied, Yes. Afterwards, thinking of a better answer, he thought he should have said, Do you?

  When he was much younger, he had been a social worker in that Other Island, far to the north. He had headed a reception centre for refugees fleeing Southeast Asia. The organisation he worked for had organised seminars for staff. There was one session he remembered in particular. They were gathered in the cold, bare drawing room of a suburban mock-Tudor mansion, now entering a second life as a processing centre for the most recently arrived refugees. A winter’s morning, frost melting on the lawns outside, the heating system grunting slowly into life. They had sat in a circle, listening to a cassette tape. He could still remember the clunk of the buttons, the hiss of the tape, and then that voice speaking, hesitant at first. A well-known scientist, whose perfect cut-glass accent and the entitlement that came with it always made him wince. And, then, in an interview that crackled and slipped, a life slowly unwound. This man was not what he seemed to be. He had come as a refugee as a young adult, from the Mainland, in a time of War. Nothing on the Other Island was familiar to him: religion, language, dress, food, the way bodies moved together, and then apart. Yet he had thrown himself on the culture of his hosts. He resolved to become better than they were at being themselves. His old self vanished: in the mirror, in the morning, talking to himself, gesturing, shaving, he slowly cut away any last traces that remained.

  Later in life, on the Mainland, a Wall came down. The scientist could return to the place of his birth. The house in which he had spent the first few years of his life still stood. There was something here he connected with, at some deep, limbic level that was not really part of him. A taste, perhaps, or a smell lingering on a street corner, or the rhythm of a child’s voice. But he could not return. At best, the scientist said, his voice crackling and slowing as the tape came to an end, he felt like a fossil, crushed beneath the pressure of layers of rock.

  Outside the office window, the birds fluttered back to their perches again, calling out to one another. Of course he could not quite be like the scientist: he was visibly different, and could not ever quite vanish. But there had been that same hunger to know this new place. In a cemetery, now threatened by one of the new roads that snaked across the Island, he had found an inscription that might have been written for him. A friend showed him the grave: that evening he carefully transcribed it from a photograph, his crumbling Mandarin shored up by an online dictionary. Why is it necessary to bury my bones in my ancestral land? The place where my coffin is sealed is my home. His best home. Having fallen out of love with one flag, he could never quite become a patriot again. But at least this new flag, on the Island, had no history of conquest. Not a patriot, he thought to himself, but citizen. His old self had already vanished: he was not sure of what he had become. And he had never quite got around to this changing passports, this shuffling of flags.

  He could still not quite believe that his application was deliberately delayed. He consciously counted off a few more days before he checked online again. Still in process. In conversations now, with friends, over coffee or dinner, he heard again of others who had suffered similar difficulties, or often worse ones. He had not thought they would be so many. Had he been deliberately blind? One fellow scholar, indeed, had decided that these cases should not be met with silence: he was monitoring them, and other breaches of academic freedom, and compiling a history. He found himself at this friend’s office one morning, with early sunlight and shadow brushed across the floor by the trees. He had arrived early, one of those scheduling mistakes that he seemed to be making more frequently these days. He waited. They drank coffee toge
ther. His was a minor case. If things went to form, he would never know, at least not yet. There would be no interview, no formal contact. In due course, after much waiting, the permit might be renewed. Or not.

  He leaned back, for a moment distracted by the play of light and shadow on the desk in front of him.

  “But isn’t that politically ineffective? What’s to stop me just assuming that it’s a bureaucratic delay, nothing to do with politics at all? Why would I change the way I behave?”

  Hands in front of him on a desk. Coffee, steaming, in a mug. He was tired, he realised. He hadn’t been sleeping well.

  “Think,” his friend said. “What have you been thinking about for the last few weeks? Why are you here?”

  • • •

  Part of him still wanted to think it was all a misunderstanding. He would write another letter to clear it all up. Once, he remembered, he had fallen into conversation with an old man on a bus. Spry, with a starched shirt, scanty hair Brylcreemed back strand by strand. A gold watch, Rolex, and a large golden ring with a green gemstone inlaid its centre. They had fallen into conversation. Guess how old I am, the old man had said, and he’d deliberately guessed lower to flatter him.

  “Sixty? Sixty-five?”

  The man’s eyes lit up in triumph. “Seventy-four this year!”

  “Wah, and still so youthful!”

  “You want to know my secret?” He leaned closer, a silver bangle emerging incongruously from beneath the cuff of his shirt. “I keep my mind active. I still work.”

  “What do you do, uncle?”

  “I’m a letter writer.” And he drew out a business card from a pocket, theatrically, almost as if it were a magic trick. “What does it say?”

  He read out the name, and the words after it: “Petition Writer.”

  “Do you know what that is?”

  He shook his head in response. The older man seemed disappointed.