Heaven Has Eyes

by Philip Holden

  “Look there.”

  The edge of a concrete lintel, covered in moss. She reached up with a hiking pole and scratched at it, peeling the moss away like skin. Letters, weather-stained but legible.

  KEEP OUT. NO ADMITTANCE.

  “Watanabe was right about this, at least.”

  She touched his shoulder. “And it looks as if someone else came later, to make sure.”

  A few feet into the tunnel, easily visible from the entrance, was a padlocked gate of metal slats. He rattled it, but it would not give.

  “It’s not just locked,” he said. “Rusted shut, or bolted, somehow, from behind.”

  No entrance this time. She handed him a tissue.

  “Lunch?”

  Her fingers, she noticed, were already purple with blackberries. The back of one of his hands had been scratched, and blood was now beading, seeping through the skin.

  “I’ll figure it out,” he said. “But you’ll be gone before I can come here again.”

  “I know.”

  They put down the packs. She held up her hand, and shivered, feeling a draught of cold air from the mine, a shallow, barely perceptible breath.

  • • •

  She found the return to Singapore easy at first. Two weeks, and the newness faded: she no longer noticed the heat, the sudden darkness in the evenings, the sweetness of evaporated milk in her morning coffee at the canteen. A frenetic series of lunches with friends, many of whom did not even know she had been away, gave way to a routine. She might never have been absent. With Wei Ming, too, there was a sense of immediate loss. In the morning, an undisturbed bed, which her body was not yet able to spread out into. Or those moments when, coming across something on the internet or television, she’d turn to share it with him, and realise he wasn’t there. After a week, this too dissipated.

  She woke early. On some mornings, she would work from home, writing, or preparing teaching for the new semester. At noon, she would go out, lock the gate, and descend in the lift to the void deck. The estate had been upgraded a few years ago, and the lifts now had thin vertical slit windows in their doors, crisscrossed with embedded wires. She had not noticed them before, in her decade and a half in Singapore. Now they recalled to her the classroom doors in her school, in Quesnel, as a child. A recorded voice chanted the numbers of the floors—Floor Eleven: Going Down—in American English. English only. A woman’s voice that had always irritated her, and that she now realised for the first time reminded her of herself. If there were neighbours in the lift, she would talk to them: a mother with tiny twins clamouring to share a smartphone, or the retired couple with whom she spoke Mandarin, going marketing. The speed of the lift gave her comfort: conversations were always too short to go very far. The doors would open in the void deck, and she’d say goodbye in relief. Not from the effort of another language, she realised, but from the growing effort of intimacy.

  There were other rhythms to the day. An hour at the gym, carefully calibrated weights followed by a routine on the cross-trainer. She showered, weighed herself, dried her hair. Meetings. Teaching at the University would start in three weeks. She had a large lecture class, with graduate students taking the tutorials. She liked that. She could perform, hide in full sight in the lecture hall.

  On those late mornings at home, she would sometimes Skype Wei Ming. It would be evening for him, still light, and still warm enough to sit on the veranda looking out over the North Shore. He told her of the progress of his research. He’d applied for permission to enter the mine. In the fading yellow light, her husband’s face seemed suddenly distant: she was sure that in the course of their conversation it receded, as if he were falling away from her, imperceptibly slowly. Yet he seemed not to notice that anything was lacking: he chattered eagerly of his plans, and his conversation was peppered with new words, drawn from this suddenly practical turn in research: compaction, hoist, pillar and bord.

  She would go regularly, once a week, to visit her parents-in-law, and stay for dinner at the round table in the kitchen, with its lazy Susan and unused stack of plastic stools. They’d catch up on news, and then retreat into a companionable silence. Her father-in-law would read the newspaper in the living room, while her mother-in-law would switch on the television, and watch a Channel 8 soap opera. At this point, her eyes would roam around the room. Below the flickering shadows of the ceiling fan was a cabinet of trophies Wei Ming and his sister had won at school, now corroded by age. On the wall, a brush painting of fishes, graduation photographs, and then a family portrait taken a year or so ago, in which they all posed, slightly awkwardly, at a photographer’s studio. Wei Ming’s parents sat in the centre, surrounded by grandchildren: Michelle, eyes downward, and Wei Ming’s elder brother’s two sons on either side, stiff as stone lions at a temple gate. Behind them were the middle generation: the elder brother and his stolid wife in the centre, sister-in-law and Ee Kiong to the right, smiling a little too brightly. On the left, Wei Ming and herself, her red hair dark, the pupils of her eyes underexposed, so that there was only blackness. She had always thought that she belonged. Culturally Singaporean, one of her students had said. Never easy, but possible. But if she looked at the photograph again, she didn’t fit in: she stood awkwardly at the periphery of the group, as though she had been photoshopped in as an afterthought.

  On one occasion, her sister-in-law visited while she was there. They said grace before eating, and then conversation meandered. Michelle’s grades were not as good as they should be; Kiong’s work was drawing him further and further from the family. After a couple of hours, Justine took her leave, returned to the silence of her flat, the cool hiss of the aircon as its louvres opened.

  At some point, the structures you have built for yourself in your life begin to fail. Lights flicker, and go out: in this new world, you know by touch alone, supports bulge, beams creak. Water enters, drop by drop. What was it Watanabe had written? There are feelings nearby. You know their shape: you can hear an echo of their sound. Yet you can no longer grasp them. Small things at first. She found that she could not answer the phone: if it rang while she was present, she would mark time until the tones stopped, and only then check for a message on the voicemail. She always switched her handphone to silent mode during class time: now she found she kept it on silent all the time. She would check the voicemail inbox religiously, whenever a message was left, but then spend hours summoning the courage to call back. Her greatest fear was that a friend or colleague would not recognise her voice. This would persist through the beats of the ringtone, the pickup, and the first, familiar words of greeting. She would fumble with her own words, conscious of the tension in her voice, reaching out for recognition; when it was given, the anxiety would finally subside. Before lectures, too, she found herself short of breath. She would review her notes in her office, but find it impossible to concentrate: five minutes would go by, and then half an hour, her thoughts sliding away before she could catch hold of them. And then the lecture. She would come to the podium, take a deep breath, cough nervously, and begin. As if, in a dream, you let yourself fall from a cliff face, knowing at some level that you would not die, but rather wake. And yet she could not wake: there was no way out of this world.

  It was worse at nights. She found that, with some pampering of her body, she could easily fall asleep at ten o’clock or so, in that high marriage bed. In the middle of the night, she would find herself suddenly awake, and unable to sleep again, unable to still an avalanche of thoughts. She would listen, in those first moments of waking, for the sound of the MRT, in the hope that it might be six o’clock, close to dawn. Nothing. After a few minutes, she’d reach for the clock. Midnight, or just afterwards, with long hours of sleeplessness ahead. She tried getting up, reading, or listening to music, preparing hot milk with honey, in the hope a memory of childhood might jog her back into sleep. Once or twice she went into the bathroom, and switched on the light. The face she saw was familiar enough. A little older perhaps, than she still imagined:
more streaks of white in the red of her hair, more lines in the corner of the eyes. The face was mottled, but serene. You age well, her colleagues told her: you have good bones. You are so happy, she had been told only last week: you always have such a positive attitude. She ate well; she exercised. On the scales at the gym, she was little heavier than she had been at twenty-five. And yet something deep in the body refused to obey, stubbornly resisted this optimism. This woman in the mirror was not her.

  The quick hiss of the aircon, and then a slow sigh when the thermostat cut out again. Fingers of rain on her window, in the channel between the HDB blocks. Slick car tyres in the estate below, on the road by the playground. Silence, and then another sound, following each other in a slow procession. If silence returned for long, there was always the interruption of breath and, however much she tried to calm it, the too-fast beating of the heart. She might lose herself in a cycle of thought for ten minutes, perhaps, but then it would return her, exhausted, to the present, more wide awake than ever. At five or six o’clock, she would finally sleep, only for the alarm clock to sound after another hour, pulling her, worn out, into the routine of a new day.

  She saw her doctor, and things moved quickly. She had noted down her symptoms, anticipating that she would be questioned and then dismissed with a wave of the hand, an earnest admonition to pull herself together. Instead, she found herself taken seriously: she emerged with a small plastic sachet of pale green pills—“take one at night, just before you sleep”—and the telephone number of a psychiatrist at the hospital. She called, without her usual fluster, and made an appointment in two weeks’ time. Even the notion that she had done something gave her a faint flush of relief; in those first few days after the visit to the clinic, her sleep improved. And then fell away again. Deeper in. Mornings were always dark, no matter the quality of the light outside. From her office, she looked out over the condominiums to Jurong, to the sea, and the towers of petrochemical complexes hooped in red and white. She would see squalls building from miles away, slate-grey, eating up factories, trees, the containers stacked on the wharves at Pasir Panjang, until falling water beat against her window. Yet even in the bright sunshine that followed, the darkness inside did not lift. She took to locking her office door from the inside.

  If she was brave enough, she might Skype Wei Ming, hunched in his study, his face underlit by the screen. The trip to the mine was on hold now, he told her. Something about permits, and the deteriorating weather. She listened to him, answering any questions he had for her with monosyllables, and then a quick shift of subject. He did not seem to notice that she had changed. She could not think of any way to raise her illness with him. It was not part of the bargain between them, this snapping in her soul. He did not look directly at her, but away, to her left. She, too, looked into the camera, a tiny sesame-seed size rupture just above the screen, not into his eyes.

  Around lunchtime, the darkness often lifted, as the doctor said it would. She would go out into the corridor, summon up the courage to ask a colleague out to lunch, and together they’d walk from the shade of the building into the sunshine of the car park, between the brilliant red stems of the sealing wax palms, up the crumbling brick stairs to the canteen. Returning, she was almost but not quite reassured. She wanted to be alone, and yet did not quite trust herself. As though the surface of the red brick path might open in front of her at any moment: there would be a tunnel, or a dark shaft, down which she would be tempted to let herself fall.

  In the cool of her office, she sat looking at the spines of books on her shelves, all read, barely remembered. She could plot each one onto the story’s own life: when she had bought it and why, when she had first read it, when she had used it in her teaching. Yet she had mostly forgotten what was inside.

  • • •

  The hospital corridor she walked down was airy, with a wall on one side only and a railing on the other through which she could look down over rising escalators to the entrance two storeys below. The doors of the neuroscience clinic, when she found it, opened automatically, and then closed noiselessly behind her. Her IC was scanned; she was registered, weighed, her blood pressure taken. She ticked boxes on a form, the pen scratchy and unfamiliar in her hand.

  The clinic was full, mostly with the elderly, with maids or younger relatives in tow. She took a seat, one of four bolted together in a row. Its back rocked rhythmically: someone next to her, or in the row behind, was making a repetitive movement. She did not look up. In the corner of her vision, a limb twitched once, and then again. A child’s voice, in sloppy Mandarin, asking how long the wait would be, and then the parents’ voices, soothing, precise, silencing.

  She found a new seat in an empty row, nearer to the restless television. She picked up a health magazine, one of the kind that seemed to have been written only for waiting rooms, skimmed it briefly, and then let it fall. Despite the bright lights, this too was a place of darkness. She held her hands out in front of her, almost as if groping for a way ahead. She had scraped the skin bare off a knuckle, and yet she couldn’t remember doing it. No pain. She turned her hands, so that the fingers curled up towards her. They seemed distant: opening without conscious thought, like a chrysalis emerging, or a fern frond unfurling. She looked more closely at a map of her life. That half-moon scar on a second finger, where a balsa knife had slipped at school, and another indentation, in the swell of muscle between thumb and forefinger, made by an unruly potato-peeler years ago. And yet in some way these hands were not hers: she was a parasite, perhaps, inhabiting the shell of an ageing body.

  “Mrs Koh?”

  The psychiatrist’s door was open. When she sat down on the seat by his desk, she noticed a flicker of surprise on his face that was suppressed almost as soon as it had come. Those green eyes, red hair, freckled forearms. Not your everyday Mrs Koh. She told him the symptoms, and he listened patiently, kind but tired eyes moving from her face to the folder of notes before him, and then back. When he replied, to reassure her, his voice was plum-like, full, Received Pronunciation almost, but with those full, Malayan vowels. She looked at him again. When he reached out his hand to take her pulse, she noticed that the skin was loose, speckled with liver spots. He was older, then, than he seemed.

  He paused, listened again to her worries, reassured her. There was nothing unusual here. He would give her something she could take when she felt panicked, or uneasy. And then an antidepressant, to correct imbalances of serotonin in her brain. This would act more slowly: it might be two or three weeks until she noticed any changes in the way she felt. And then, with the time the medication had bought her, she could work on other changes in her life. She could, in time, escape those cycles of thought. She only half listened. Her eyes rustled the books on his shelves, rifled the certificates on his wall. One from Singapore, from a university so much smaller than the one she worked in now. Then London. And then, finally, home.

  He looked at her file again. She was from Canada? His daughter had studied in Vancouver: he and his wife had visited her a few times. In summer? Twice, but once in winter. They had taken a cable car up to the top of a mountain. Where would that be?

  Grouse Mountain, she told him.

  And a creek, he said, with rocks and a small suspension bridge? Not the commercial one.

  Lynn Canyon.

  They had gone there one day on that winter in December, in the snow. They had not expected the snowfall; the shoes he wore, he remembered, had no grip, and they walked gingerly, with short, firm steps, through the parking lot. They did not try the bridge, but rather descended a long flight of wooden stairs to the river, clinging to the railings at every turn. It was a weekday, and they were totally alone. The snow was still falling, noiselessly: even the sound of the water seemed very far away. The branches of the trees were layered in white: he had pulled on one in wonder, and there was a shower of powder over his hair and face. If she was worried, she should think of Canada.

  In her meetings with him, it would always be li
ke that. That desire he had for an outside, for her past. He thought that this would give her comfort, perhaps, but it was really all for him. If she burrowed back far enough in her past, she could find a trophy for him, a memory puffed up with light. So she told him stories, about Quesnel, about the smell of the pulp mill in the air that you could never get away from, seeing your breath on a winter’s day, the first snow falling through your fingers, falling on your back and making snow angels on the field that, in summer, was the lawn.

  But she wanted something different from him. Not to be pushed out of history, but to be pulled in. I am here, she thought, now. It was his past she wanted: to read through those books, to pilfer the certificates. To be that unexceptional everyday Mrs Koh: to walk into a store, into a supermarket, without anyone giving her a second glance. To speak Mandarin badly without anyone saying, oh your Mandarin is so good, so correct, with that Beijing accent, not like ours. To talk in that effortless voice, with the ripe, overprecise vowels. To have a past here as long as his. Not to have privilege, not to have deference, not to be asked to speak for Canada, the West, not for anything but herself. For your partner to understand this.

  And so, she had entered the mine. Easy enough when you try: the mind slips casually through all locks. Below the surface, it was always the same: dark, unchanging, in summer or winter, the temperature of the human body. You search there, scouring its arteries. You are searching for something. Someone is also trapped in here with you. Sometimes you find traces of him, flickering in your flashlight. A footprint. Litter, neatly bagged up, hanging from a jutting nail. A book, placed carefully on a stone, left just for you. But if you move closer, he will retreat, move further away.

  When she left her psychiatrist’s office, she felt she had entered a new world. She followed his instructions to the letter. Three times a day, she would pop a chalky pill out of its blister pack, swallow, and then drink deeply from a glass of water. Once, after two weeks, she thought that the medication was having no effect. I can’t concentrate, she wrote in an email to her doctor. What can I do? His reply was curiously unsympathetic: she could clearly concentrate enough, he wrote, to write so coherent a letter. They met again, and then once more, sitting next to each other in his office, reaching forward, fabulating her past.