Heaven Has Eyes

by Philip Holden

  After a month or so, she thought that the medication was taking effect. She was calmer: some of the anxiety receded. She could think, could begin to search again with greater confidence. But the life she uncovered was abbreviated, reduced to a pattern, a shallow imprint of its former self.

  • • •

  Another night. She woke to darkness, cold in the vast ocean of the bed. The aircon sighed, sputtered, and then fell silent. She listened for the hiss of tyres, or the rumble of the MRT. Nothing. Early, then, with long hours of sleeplessness stretching out before her. She lay still, struggling to quieten her mind, refusing to check the clock.

  Something haunted her; a trace, a smell, or an echo. A thread that she held onto, and then followed back into the tunnel of a recent dream. She was in the mine, she remembered. With Wei Ming. She had led the way, her flashlight fingering the rough rock around them. They had decided to split up. It was only when they had entirely lost contact with each other that she found what they had been looking for. The side-turning with its sign, just as Watanabe had written. Steps upwards, and then a sudden doorway. The flashlight flickered out. She inched forward, fumbling with its switch. No walls to touch. She shook the flashlight and the light flared again. A marble floor, panelled walls, and above her the interior of a tower lined with books, so many books, shelves of grey spines climbing ever upwards into the darkness.

  She was spellbound. She wanted to tell him, of this secret she had discovered, and that she would share only with him. And so she turned round, but could no longer find the door she had entered through. Only panels of marble. Touch it, and it is cold. Push, and it resists you, indifferently. Scratch at the surface, and it still reflects yourself back at you, unchanged save for your bleeding hands. Shout at the top of your voice, as loud as you can. There will still be no sound.

  In your waking life, you know you will never escape the taste of this dream. On Skype to Wei Ming, the light from the screen creeping into the lines of his face. On the bare walls of the psychiatrist’s office, which you paper over with those landscapes of the past. In the seminar room, where your students learn, haltingly, to speak a language that you know you have to forget.

  But there is a way out, you know, if you can find it. If you can sleep, if you can retrace your steps in the mine, enter once again that chamber with its marble walls. Don’t look up at the library above you. Put out your fingers again, softly. Press. Nothing. Press again, and the wall slowly thaws, warms, becomes soft as flesh. You dig. Somewhere in there, you know, is a body, his body, waiting to be pulled out. And then you are no longer in the mine. You are digging, with your bare hands, into the bottom of the river, with your eyes open. Just at that place where Michelle fell: at the bottom of that pool. The spines of the books crumble under your touch, leaving only grey silt. Quiet now.

  You find him buried there. First his fingers. You uncover the wrist, trace the curve of the forearm. You hesitate to pull too hard: perhaps he will also come to pieces in your hands. But you are running out of air. You reach out again, take the shoulders and his body comes suddenly free, limp, floating upwards. You hold onto his hand. The water surface is still far above you, bright but frosted. As you rise towards it, you feel a pulse in his wrist; he twists like a fish, kicks out blindly. He turns to you, his free arm curling around your waist. You place your palm on his palm. And then, just before you surface, he looks into your eyes.

  THERE

  September Ghosts

  KIAN COULD NEVER quite get used to the rhythms of this city that clutched the western edge of the continent. Summer quietly became Fall. Salmon in the rivers, fruit spilling from grocery stores onto the sidewalk—blueberries in July followed in August by peaches, and then in September by dark plums, curved like small sea shells. On September evenings when they were both free, he and Jan strolled to the beach while there was still light. They walked out onto the wooden jetty and looked back at the glass and concrete towers of downtown filling up with yellow light under low waves of cloud. The mountains of the North Shore were blacker then, anticipating winter, their lower levels still scattered with the gold of not-yet fallen leaves. Turn northwest and you could see the entrance to Howe Sound, wedges of grey water, ridge and island layered up on each other.

  As they approached the end of the pier, they picked their way among the fishing lines that extended like tripwires across the wooden decking. Voices spoke together in Mandarin, northern-accented, tongues curling around modulated vowels; children pouted, asked parents questions about their catches, and parents replied in low, weary voices. Mothers and fathers prepared artfully cut pieces of chicken bait, fastened them to crab traps, showed shivering sons and daughters how to bait a hook, how to pull a caught fish from the line with an inimitably precise turn of the wrist, where to measure the catch between two nails hammered into a board. Kian listened, hauling in words and then watching them escape, wriggle free into an ocean of sound.

  Mum, what kind of fish is this?

  Better do it this way, put it there …

  …Dad, I’m cold!

  Yet he never spoke to the fishermen, with their young children, scuffed shoes, their clothes from Value Village. He liked to listen, but not to reveal himself to others. It was Jan who would say hi to them, her voice rich with the assured tones of belonging; they’d return greetings, like casual handshakes, before turning to their affairs again. She’d once asked him, walking back down the beach, what the people on the jetty were talking about, and he’d told her nothing much, nonsense really. His own disinterest puzzled him. Perhaps they reminded him of his newness here, of the thinness of the camouflage of his own clothes, the Gore-Tex jackets and the branded fleece sweaters. He could fit in here effortlessly until he opened his mouth.

  They turned and walked back to the shore; when the deck broadened, Jan reached for him and they walked for a while hand in hand. Her fingers were cold, he noticed, even in September. This was a new discovery. In the middle of the coming winter, he was sure, she’d torment him in bed, reaching forward to scratch his back or his chest with digits like icicles.

  • • •

  As the evenings got shorter, he found he liked to be alone more often, to begin to build himself a cocoon against the early darkness of the winter months. Not a physical cocoon, of course, more a way of absenting himself from the cold to come, the curtains of rain that would sweep the city, the fog and then the bare whiteness of the mountains when the sun—all too infrequently—shone.

  There was another city in which he still lived, a city which he now knew from the slow accumulation of e-mail in his inbox. Singapore was different from Vancouver, built on a flat island linked to the southern end of a continent by a causeway, a few green central hills standing in for mountains. No creeping cold here; no wild seasonal abundance. You submerged yourself in a bath of warm air, in nature prolific but parsimoniously pruned and trimmed, carved into hedges or channelled into watercourses, reservoirs, and drains. In this city, space turned in on itself. If you found a jetty, and walked out on it, you’d see only ships, water, the smudge of low islands on the horizon. After a few moments, you’d find yourself turning round, looking back at the city itself, the tall buildings that crowded out the hills. Even the fishermen and their kind were invisible. Service workers cleaned throughout the night and then vanished to dormitories in the daytime; migrant construction labourers built huge buildings screened from the public eye and returned to their places of origin before the scaffolding was taken down. Yet there were traces of their presence, if you cared to look. Not noticing them was a habit of mind: after a time, you no longer saw the dark figures trimming the plants on the expressway, the domestic workers who sat just outside the circle of the table at family meals.

  Kian found it easy, three years after leaving this city, to rebuild it virtually inside his head. He could imagine a walk from the government housing complex in which he lived, taking the well-groomed pathway that ran between blocks of flats like a crack between paving
slabs, out onto the road outside, then following the grey pillars of the subway line to the nearest station where he would board, and watch each stop go past him like the page of a photo album until he reached his destination. The effect was like gaming on a console: everything was photo-perfect but crisply defined, a little too clean to be quite real. And here there were no monsters to fight, no obstacles to overcome, only the slow unwinding of the ground beneath his feet. Each time he imagined a journey, he thought of a different destination, and eventually arrived without effort, without incident.

  He’d anchored this connection by subscribing to email groups from the city: some with enough traffic to constitute virtual communities, others silent for days, only to burst into life in a spate of urgent announcements. He was a lurker, skimming daily but contributing nothing, sometimes opening each message and studying each report intensely, at others browsing and selecting interesting headlines only. On days when he was pressed for time he’d taken to deleting new postings en masse, yet he was always reluctant to do this. Among the messages that bubbled constantly into his inbox were a few personal ones. Banks or companies that had somehow found his address, of course, but also the occasional queries from friends, or the twitchings of the tentacles of a largely migrated family. He liked to read these, and yet when he came to reply, he found the task burdensome. It was like trying to write in a long-forgotten language, dragging him back into involvement in a world he now only wanted to watch from a distance, like a tank full of brightly coloured fish. He replied with terse, reluctant messages, and most of his revived conversations soon lost animation again, sputtered and then died away.

  On that particular September evening, there were fewer messages than usual, and so he hunched in front of the laptop screen, scrolling through them one by one: a talk at the museum on the bank of the downtown river; a protest meeting against an upcoming execution in a modest hotel; a promotional offer for a new bistro in a part of the city that had hesitated for years on the threshold of gentrification. The next message also looked like an advertisement: the title was “Friends of Ng Li Jun: Update.” He puzzled over the name while the full message loaded in the view pane; his first thought was that this must be a fan club for a newly-discovered actress, or a singer, or maybe a support group for one of the bloggers who’d recently got into trouble with the government. But there was something familiar about it. He turned to the message pane and began to read.

  Hi,

  This is Kenneth. I’ve added a few new names to the list this time. If this is the first time you’re getting this message, you might want to check out the e-group info at the bottom of the page. To all of you who have responded and sent cards and flowers, many thanks. Jun’s able to talk now, and she wants to thank you for your messages of support. If you want me to say anything to her, or pass on a note to her, let me know.

  Kian read on quickly, stumbling over words that were clearly now part of the everyday vocabulary of Kenneth’s messages: metastasising, ablation, angio. The email was precise, neutrally phrased, considerate of its audience, mapping the movement of cancer through Li Jun’s body. I don’t know you, Kenneth, Kian thought. Are you someone who doesn’t feel, or are you someone who keeps his emotions curled up inside himself like me, always smiling but not smiling inside?

  Li Jun. He held onto the name for a minute, feeling memories return like a slow intake of breath, wanting to extend the moment, to pause before they came to the surface of thought. Remembering was suffused with guilty pleasure, like unwrapping chocolate. Even though Jan wasn’t here tonight, he found himself looking over his shoulder, making sure that no one was watching.

  • • •

  A single summer, some ten years ago. They’d both flown from Singapore to Taipei to improve their Chinese to get ready for graduate work. He’d known her vaguely as an undergraduate, but they hadn’t been close: their decision to rent an apartment together had been a pragmatic one, dictated by the difficulty of finding accommodation. On a friend’s recommendation, they’d found a place near the Youth Park, a short bus ride from the city centre. Or rather, she’d found it; he remembered arriving two days later than her, in the evening, making his way with his clumsy backpack from the bus stop through the stalls of the night market, so chaotic after the order of home. Yet when he arrived, the apartment seemed as though it had been lived in forever: she must have rearranged the furniture, bought or borrowed posters for the wall, a corkboard already stuck with post-it notes, kitchen appliances, even bathroom towels. Only his room was empty: bare tiles, a low mattress, a plastic-skinned portable wardrobe and a small desk and chair. Over the next three months, he’d always be conscious of its bareness in relation to the other rooms. He worked hard to make his room lived-in, but a feeling of temporariness always hung over it, as though all its contents might, at a few minutes’ notice, be thrown into a few large suitcases and transported elsewhere.

  You know those blissful few days when you both desire each other? When you’re sure of the other person’s feelings, but you don’t express it yet? When every touch, every glance is woven through with meaning. You are no longer anxious; you know what will happen. And yet you pause, like a diver before leaving the board. You know where you will end up, the arc, the trajectory of falling in love, into the water, but you still wait, savour the last moment when you have volition, measuring out the weight of your body. You cannot avoid falling, but you can still decide how you will fall.

  He remembered that with her. Not when it happened—perhaps after a few weeks living in the same flat?—but those moments: together in the creaking lift, arms full of shopping, their fingers accidentally overlapping on the lift button, then withdrawn as though stuck through with needle. Low light through the frosted glass partition that separated their rooms; behind it he could see her shape, like a fish underwater, fall and recede, grow magically and then fade away to nothing. Later, when they made love, they’d always go to her room, and he’d be amazed at how full it was of things—old posters, jade from the market, postcards, batik hangings, plump cushions on the bed. Afterwards, much later, when he had a room of his own elsewhere, in another city, he’d always try to replicate this richness but would fail. He’d buy things in an initial shopping spree, arrange photographs, cover surfaces with brightly printed cloth. And then he’d forget about his surroundings: emptiness would grow in the room, like mould.

  Other memories: the smell of her, like the soap from his childhood. The way that her legs were very short between knee and ankle. An abbreviation of the fibula and tibia, she’d said. We all have it, in my mother’s family. Look: you can pick me out from my school photos. I’m the one in the skirt with the little legs. And something you couldn’t see in the photographs: a birthmark like a small, brush-painted dragonfly in the hollow valley of her back.

  Afterwards, when they’d gone their separate ways—she abroad, to another city; he back to Singapore—after the telephone calls and the mail conversations had slowly died away, after her final message to him—“So what shall I tell this new man? Do I still have a boyfriend?”—he’d put this all away, filed it on an obscure shelf, neatly, of course, lovingly, but tightly sealed up. He’d never met her parents or family.

  He opened up one more memory. After she had gone. He’d walked in the Youth Park, over the bridge that spanned the water, the carefully manicured grass, the small, reluctant trees, out of the gates. He’d felt her come up behind him, as she used to do, touch him on the inside of the elbow, then slip her arm into his. He felt it distinctly, and then he turned to her. No one there, only air. Later his neighbour would say to him that there were ghosts in the Park, especially in the Seventh Month: the Japanese had used it as a killing ground during the occupation. He liked this explanation: after all, what are ghosts? Memories that write themselves indelibly into flesh, perhaps, like pain from an amputated limb.

  And now she was dying. He found that he’d pulled back his right sleeve, despite the growing coldness of the room, and was pinch
ing the muscle of his upper arm between thumb and fingers. Memory attached itself to the body just here—he remembered just how his limbs used to fit together with hers, how his arm would clasp her small shoulder when they lay next to each other, her back against his chest. An inexplicable tessellation of flesh, bone, and blood. And yet for her now, something inside the body turned on itself, cells blooming unexpectedly like weeds in the darkness, carried away by currents of blood to snag at every turn of the body, and then to grow wildly again. He felt uneasy, as if the intimacy of recollection was a further contamination. He deleted the other messages, showered, and went to sleep.

  • • •

  In the next few days, he felt a gnawing restlessness. He taught his scheduled classes at the college, letting student discussions go on a little longer, more formlessly than usual; he held office hours, began marking a stack of papers that had accumulated in the mailbox. On Wednesday evening, he went out to see a movie with Jan. They ended up at her place, spilling red wine on a comforter which they then proceeded to fight over for warmth during a noticeably colder night.

  At work and at home, he found himself logging on to his email at every possible opportunity: it was almost a compulsive disorder, like cleaning a surface on which no dirt remained. Nothing from Kenneth. He had at first thought he should take action, and sat down to compose a message to be relayed to Li Jun, but words were recalcitrant, refusing to come. A couple of days later, he typed a brief acknowledgement, thanking Kenneth, wishing Li Jun well, asking to be kept updated.