Heaven Has Eyes

by Philip Holden

  “I write petitions to important people. Just now, I was asked to write a petition to the president by a family whose son is on death row. An appeal for clemency.”

  “Isn’t it difficult to change the president’s mind?”

  The petition writer smiled, suddenly conspiratorial, pulled out a draft letter that looked as though it had been composed on a manual typewriter, and began to unfold it.

  “That’s why they asked me. I know how to persuade him. He’s an Indian. Like me. So I must appeal to his beliefs. You see here? And then, I must also show him respect…”

  He interrupted by reaching up to the buzzer above their heads. “Sorry. This is my stop.” The old man had coughed, folded the letter up again, and then, just as he was standing up to exit, pushed the business card firmly into his hand.

  He felt like the letter writer now, typing out phrases he had turned over and over in his mind in the past few days. He loved words, and the flow of writing. He tried to nuance each of them: to weigh and balance each clause perfectly. Think of your audience, he told his students. Know the people you are writing to. Yet he was writing to a blank wall, or to something crouching there without a face, waiting.

  That night, he could not sleep. He slipped out of the bed, leaving his wife still sleeping, and went to the kitchen to pour himself a glass of water. He opened the windows. He could hear the frogs on the hillside, croaking after rain. To his right, the estate was lit up not by sunlight but by a huge gas flare in the industrial area on the horizon, orange-yellow, so bright that it hurt your eyes to look at it. Slowly, on his computer, he typed out a letter. These were the many things he had done for the Island, in the university and outside of it. He listed them. He had been thinking of applying for citizenship for many years, but had delayed it because of family responsibilities, an aged father in the Other Island, who might need his care. Perhaps the officer might like to meet him, to discuss his application? And to indicate pathways to citizenship? He reworked the letter once, then twice, and finally pressed “send”. Returning to bed, he slept easily, woken only by the alarm clock and the prospect of a new day’s work.

  In the morning, after his lecture, a reply was waiting in his inbox. He clicked on it.

  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. 3 We have forwarded your query on citizenship to Citizen Services, who will contact you in due course. Thanks.

  All my life, he thought, I have been lucky. Until now. I thought I would become a citizen of the Island, that my wife and I would die here, together. The place where my coffin is sealed is my home. But now, I might be left with nothing, with no claim on this place. I might have to return to the Other Island, or go to live in the Western City. I could blend in there, of course. Soon no one would know. A lifetime cut away with no visible scar.

  He had wanted to go to the Immigration Office alone. It’s my problem, he said to his wife. I guess I should deal with it. But he was glad when she insisted on coming with him. They arrived at the Office in the early morning before opening time, surprised that the queue was already snaking its way around the back of the building. Yet when the doors were opened, the line dissipated to all corners of the building, and when they took the final escalators to a higher floor, they were by themselves. They approached the receptionist through a maze of tape passageways marking out the ghosts of future queues. The young woman asked for his identity number, the number he had known by heart for twenty years. He began to recite it, and stopped halfway. It did not sound right, somehow. Perhaps he had transposed two numbers? He started again. If he could just remember the first digit that came after the S, then he was sure the rest would come. He paused again, until his wife, with a hint of impatience, recited it for him. He took a paper slip with a queue number from the receptionist. The doors hissed open and shut. He sat down, shaken. He had thought he was calm.

  The office was just waking up. Only a few of the booths in front of him were lit. Every minute a bell went off, and a new number, in red, flashed onto the screen above them. The same bell that you heard in government offices all across the Island. Someone would stand up, and scuttle forward. The room was cold. No background music, no smells, as if you were at the bottom of an ocean. He breathed deeply, and looked down. After only a little while, his wife touched his arm: their number was flashing on the screen.

  The woman at their booth looked up through silver-rimmed glasses, then gestured for them to sit as a phone call came in. She began a conversation on the phone, switching from English to Mandarin and then back again. They waited. She wore the blazer that all the immigration staff wore, crisp, dark blue. The surface of the desk had been wiped down very recently, and there were still one or two beads of water, picked out by the light. On the other side of the booth from the phone, the black plastic back of a screen. On her breast pocket, a name tag and picture ID. Madam Q. Outside, in the light of day, she must be someone’s daughter, somebody’s aunt, perhaps someone’s mother. There were words that she must use outside: kachau, manja, sayang. But not here. Only the scrubbed complexion, the mask of foundation, the eyebrows clipped and trimmed as carefully as her sentences.

  When the call was over, she listened to him, courteously but not quite sympathetically, and checked his application with a few strokes on a keyboard, looking at the screen he could not see. At one point, she went back into the office to collect a fat manila file, which she placed carefully on the desk, but did not open. She could not comment on his case, she told him eventually. But he could write in on a piece of paper. On this piece of paper. He could explain his case.

  He began to write the letter. As he did so, his wife started asking questions, which Madam Q blocked effortlessly, like practise shots before a tennis match, without even moving the manicured nails that she had placed on top of the file in front of her. She was not authorised to comment on individual cases. She did not know when there would be a result. If the permit expired when he was abroad he would have to come back to the Island with a White Pass. As a visitor, she said, responding to the confusion on their faces. In that case, could he get his permanent residence status back? She paused. He could apply. Explain why. Write in. See what they say.

  He began writing the letter. The pen she had given him was made of transparent plastic, and yet felt heavy. He was worried that he might press too hard. The piece of paper she had offered him was blank, unruled. A strange sensation of being sent back to school: it had been years, he realised, since he had written a letter longhand. He began expansively an inch or two from the top, leaving enough room for a salutation that he could return to later. Yet in five minutes, he realised that he was cramping his lines together, reducing the size of the letters, fearful of running out of paper. When he finished writing, he asked her who he should address the letter to. To Whom It May Concern. He looked over what he had written again, surprised at the spidery writing, the scratchy phrasing.

  He passed up the letter. For a moment, he thought that she was going to go through it, correct the grammar, and then hand it back. But she simply took it and filed it, after checking that his email address was written clearly. She shifted perceptibly in her seat. The interview was coming to an end. His wife had run out of questions. A few seconds, only, to find a way through.

  “I’ve been writing in about this for a month.”

  She nodded.

  “I’ve had replies. From…” And then he mentioned the first name of the officer who had replied to him, the one who loved to paste from templates.

  “Miss X?”

  It was the first time he had encountered a surname. “Yes.”

  “Wait a minute.”

  A key had turned. He had found a way in.

  She took the hard copy file from the desk in front of her, vanished through the doors. They waited a minute, and then another. She returned.

  “The officer’s not in yet. Would you like to wait?”

  They wa
ited. His wife went off in search of food, and returned with teh-C and . A sign warned them not to eat or drink in the office, and so each took turns to go outside, and to stare back through the glass windows into the room at the flashing numbers, listening for the muted chimes of bells. When they were called forward, the officer was more formally dressed, in something close to police uniform. Conversation was much easier now. She was younger, very kind, very understanding. She listened carefully. She was, she reassured them, working hard on the case. They should not worry. She smiled, leaning back in her chair, pushing back a stray strand of hair. She might have been one of his students, a few years after graduation. Afterwards, they could not agree on exactly what they had said to her. They were, his wife thought, very close to asking why the renewal of the permit was taking so long, but a sense of politeness prevented them doing so. Or perhaps they had raised the topic, and the officer had brushed their concerns away as delicately as she brushed her hair, so lightly so as to leave no trace in the memory. Yet they still left feeling relieved, with a lightness in their steps down the long escalators. In the bright sunlight of the car park, they felt nothing but relief. The officer was on their side. Surely this was a mistake, after all? When a week later he received notification of renewal of permit, he was elated. And then, logging on to check the details, he had been brought back to reality again. Renewal not for ten years, nor five, but for one year only. He was being put on notice.

  The aircraft cabin was hushed now, with only the murmur of the air conditioning. The baby was asleep in its bassinette, tucked up in a blanket. His companions nearer the window had fallen asleep, too, mouths open, hands stroked by sunlight. The patch of sky he could see through the window was featureless: they were flying over a blank seam of cloud and, even when he twisted his head, he could not see the sea below. The cabin staff had vanished, and for a moment he thought he might be on a ghost plane, flying on autopilot, its passengers and crew unconscious. For all he knew they might be falling towards the sea. And then a patter of footsteps behind him, and the sound of a curtain being pushed aside. Reassured, he put the seat back, plumped his pillow, and allowed himself to fall asleep.

  He was woken by a buzzer, and then a woman’s voice in English, Mandarin, and then Hokkien, announcing the beginning of the descent. He checked his seatbelt, and pressed the button to bring his seatback upright.

  He had been dreaming, he realised. He had been on a road on the Island, one he drove down every day. But he was walking this time, north, uphill, in the heat. Behind him, rising as high as his shoulder from the horizon, was smoke. The city was burning. The mother from the plane had entrusted her big-eyed baby to him, and he struggled to carry it. He cradled it in front of him, and then brought it upright against his chest, so that it looked back over his shoulder. The sun was hot, and the road narrowed to a path leading into the forest. The baby’s hair tickled him, but he walked on.

  They were being followed. He looked for somewhere to hide the baby, and to escape the approaching fire. To his right, a hill of towers. A cemetery, with its mounds and tombstones climbing up the hillside into a canopy of trees. He turned towards it, to the two white pillars that marked its entrance. Near its gate, he noticed, the ground had been disturbed. A section had been cordoned off with metal hoardings, and the roadside was littered with broken gravestones. He passed them and went inside. He had only taken a few steps when the baby wriggled like a fish and escaped from his grasp, crawling away into the undergrowth. He looked back. He could smell burning, see the smoke rising above the trees. Whatever was following him, he felt sure, was gaining on him. He did not have much time.

  He needed to find the child quickly, to hide it. Behind the first grave, he could hear something crawling, pushing leaves aside. Yet when he got there, there was nothing: only the trace of a path, or a tiny green tunnel in the long grass. Above him, a pair of cream-white birds fluttered and settled on a branch. He listened. Nothing. And then the scrabbling sound was repeated, further up the hill. The second grave he reached was larger, squat pillars with those familiar couplets flanking the tombstone, the mound rising behind like a marital bed. One of the pillars was broken, and at its foot was a hole; looking inside, he could see the glistening edge of a lacquered coffin. He could hear the child’s gurgling laughter, underground now. He reached down, parting grass as soft as baby’s hair. And then a hand reached out from the hole towards his, a baby’s hand at first, but then swelling to adult size, pulling him down into soft darkness among the roots of trees.

  The buzzer again. When he landed, he would transfer planes, walking the corridors of the airport for a couple of hours before he went to the gate. On the next flight, to the Western City, he would fall asleep, and he could re-enter the dream. If not, on the next night, in his wife’s arms, in the Western City. Surely.

  Library

  SHE HAD NEVER thought, she told her parents later, that she could fall. Late summer, and the banks of the river were thick with blackberries. She tasted some greedily on the way down to the water, trying to remember what her Canadian aunt had said. Pull gently, and if they come away in your hand, they’re ripe. But she found herself pulling here and pulling there, until her hands were purple with juice, a second’s sweetness overwhelmed by bitterness in the mouth. She fumbled. When they pulled her out, they would find scratches on her bare forearms, made before the bruises from the river, traced over the skin. The flesh around them had swelled up, as though someone had gone over them again with a marker pen, drawing a long trail down towards the stains on her hands.

  At the water’s edge, she could no longer hear her family, halted for lunch by the pile of tailings from the old mine. The water in the stream was low: too low even to try to skim stones, but low enough to tempt you to cross on the line of rocks that rose from the river. She started out; there was a slap of heat after she left the shade of the tree on the bank. She paused a minute to gather herself, and then walked forward easily, from rock to rock. Don’t stop. Only when she reached the safety of a flat midstream boulder did she rest, looking up at the V of the valley, the green-black layers of trees above her, an empty mountain face of bare stone, and then the barer blue of the sky. She looked down. In front of her was a pool of calm water, protected from the river by a worn cedar log. Easy enough.

  The next stage was more difficult. Another boulder, and then another log, this one thinner, with stumpy branches and limp green foliage, wedged above a natural weir. She could cross it, she was sure, but she wondered if it might twist underfoot, slip away over the lip of stone into the pool beneath. She looked back at the line of rocks she had crossed. Nothing much there: more unripe berries, a fussing mother, and then the slow trudge home. No going back. The log gave slightly under her weight, then held. Its bark was grey, broken into long lozenge-shaped strips. Everything was new in this country: new textures and backgrounds, like going into a new level in a game. She tugged at a branch to pull it out of the way, but her foot slipped, and her knee jarred against a knot in the trunk. She reached out again, hanging on to the branch, her legs spreading out in the water. She shouted for help. When she let go, she was surprised that the water in the pool was not so very cold, but that it was heavy, pressing down on her as firmly as she had pressed the berries.

  • • •

  In the car, after her father’s scolding, she was obstinately silent. When she cleared the WhatsApp messages on her handphone, she opened the game with the alligators again. Here you could burrow through sand and rock, make a channel for water. If you wiped out, there was no fuss, no pain. You simply began again.

  At the clinic, she rolled her eyes in the waiting room, but cooperated with the doctor when they were called in. She didn’t have a headache; she didn’t feel sick; of course she knew who and where she was. Michelle Tan Yi Ling, aged 17, from Singapore, on holiday in Vancouver with family, visiting her Uncle Wei Ming and his wife Auntie Justine. Yes, she knew those mountain streams were dangerous. Luckily, the hiker had been there
on the far bank. Yes, yes, of course she was lucky to be alive.

  • • •

  I told you, she muttered to her mother as they hunted for Dettol at the pharmacy. No concussion. Just scratches. No need to waste an afternoon at the clinic like that. But in the evening, she felt sapped of energy. She curled on the couch in her aunt’s apartment, picking up and then discarding a magazine. The conversation at the dinner table was a buzz of noise: she did not listen, as she usually did, to see if they were talking about her.

  “Michelle?”

  Her aunt had brought out cut fruits for her. She took one.

  “Okay?”

  “Mmm.”

  She turned back to the magazine, but her aunt persisted.

  “How do you feel?”

  “Okay.”

  “Pain?”

  She shrugged, shook her head. Go away. And then a strange question.

  “What was it like, in the water?”

  She looked up at her aunt. Green eyes, and a cloud of red hair. White arms dappled with freckles.

  “Cold.”

  “What did you see?”

  “Books. In the river.” It was only now that she remembered.

  “You mean garbage? Litter?”

  She shook her head. Clear water. Her eyes open. A rock floor, with scratches of quartz leading downwards. And then a recess, a deeper pool, grey with sediment. For a moment she had been directly above it, floating, still waiting to kick out. The books were there. She could see the spines only. Jade-grey, peeling, like the dying salmon below the hatchery, slowly merging back into the riverbed. A shaft of golden light made the quartz in the rocks fizz and sparkle, then fingered the covers. One book was stamped, she thought, with letters in an indecipherable language. She thought she might dive down to it, pull it towards her just as you took a book down from a library shelf. And then her foot hit something hard; she gasped and took in water, not air. She had coughed, and realised where she was.