by May Seah
It was not an exciting existence. But, by dint of his custodial presence, he made sure that all was always well with the pharmacy. And, for a time, that was enough. But after several months had passed in this occupation, he began to discern the awareness that something was lacking in his life. For a long time, he wasn’t sure what it was. He went about his tasks with increasing listlessness, finding less and less joy in stacking the chest rubs and cataloguing the Band-Aids.
The angel was lonely.
All around him were people, browsing in the aisles, squinting at their shopping lists and making phone calls to check if there was anything that was needed at home. They bustled around the shelves and queued at the cash registers and walked in crazy zigzag patterns around the store, distracted and absorbed and fascinated by the merchandise. There were always people there. But they were not his people.
One day, downcast and weary of heart, the angel stepped outside the pharmacy and wandered away from the shopping mall, lost in a reverie. He loved his job and took pride in the knowledge that he was keeping the pharmacy safe from harm, but the time had finally come to ask himself the agonising question: was he content to continue stocking shelves, stacking displays and pushing discount breath mints into perpetuity?
When his head finally cleared, he realised he had been skiving off the job for more than an hour now. He dusted his hands off on his orange apron and hurried back towards the mall basement. But as he walked, he began to feel that something was amiss. And, when he rounded the corner, he saw the Guardian storefront, and it was up in orange flames.
He rushed towards the blaze, trying desperately to summon his powers, praying with all his might, as the firefighters battled the blaze. The guilt was more crushing than the panic. He had left his post. He had neglected his job. He had failed at his mission. And this disaster was all his fault.
When the flames were finally extinguished and the smoke began to clear, revealing the pharmacy’s charred, sodden interior, he sank down onto the floor amid all the pedestrian traffic with his head in his hands, heaving with sobs.
Then, a cool, slender hand alighted gently on his shoulder.
He looked up from his despair to see a girl peering down at him in concern. Her soft hair formed a halo around her lovely face, which was glowing with compassion. Her figure was slight but her limbs were strong, and her hand on his shoulder was infinitely comforting. As his eyes began to focus, he saw that she was wearing the turquoise-green and grey uniform of the pharmacy on the ground floor of the shopping mall.
It was the Watsons Angel.
14
When Keh woke up for real and realised he’d been dreaming that he was dreaming, he found himself in a hospital bed.
Apart from some bruising and tenderness, he was unscathed from being assaulted by the weight of his own image. Even though he was declared to be in the pink of health, they kept him under observation for a day or two, just to be certain that he didn’t have a concussion.
As he lay in his private room, surrounded by baskets of fruit, flowers and insipidly smiling stuffed teddy bears, he had the vague recollection that in his dream, he had been writing a screenplay. Viewed dispassionately, this amused him to no end, because he had never even been able to write so much as a coherent TripAdvisor review. And he could not even begin to imagine himself behind the camera instead of in front of it, generating ideas instead of acting them out. His talents, he knew, did not lie in that direction—after all, he struggled even coming up with creative excuses for flaking on people. It was interesting, though, that his dream self had seen fit to crack his knuckles and start typing up a script. That knock on the head must have been harder than he’d assumed. I must remember to tell April about this, he thought.
He wondered how the production team was scrambling to fill in for his absence on set. His sudden unavailability would mean they would have to revise schedules, shift scenes around and re-book locations, facilities and equipment. His phone pinged with texts, but he didn’t feel up to looking at any of them. Instead, he leaned back onto the pillows and let his mind replay the image of his own two-dimensional face hurtling towards him, grinning violently in shiny laminate.
Later, April showed up at the hospital escorted by Minnie, and she made her Lance photographer wait outside while she entered the room alone. After she’d given him a hug, she perched on the edge of his bed and said, “I’m really sorry, but I’m here in a professional capacity. Have to ask you how you’re feeling and all that. Your thoughts on what happened. Will you live to act another day.”
“Seeing you is all pleasure and no business,” he said, taking in the freshness of her white shirt, the dark wave of her hair against it, the absorbing black of her eyes.
“They keep replaying it on the news channels—shaky footage of that thing falling on you,” she said, with a little shudder.
“Good thing I can’t watch it,” he winked.
“I feel really bad about this. You should be resting, not granting interviews and posing for photos.”
“But I feel fine now that you’re here.” In fact, now that she was here, he did not want her to ever leave. He wanted nothing more than for her to sit on his bed and ask him question after question in a never-ending inquisition.
“I brought you something that will really make you feel better.” She produced a bouquet, prettily wrapped in crepe paper, of mini vanilla yoghurt pots hot-glued onto green wire stalks and tied up with a bow.
They both snorted with laughter.
“Look, they’ve started printing your face on the labels,” April said, pointing at one of the pots. True enough, there was his mug shot in a little circle, smiling out in miniature.
“I think Minnie mentioned this—they’re paying us extra for it.” He ripped the label off the pot and pasted it onto her arm playfully, his face adhering to her skin. “I’m stuck on you, April,” he said.
She peeled it off and tacked it to his forehead and as they were laughing he reached for her hand, but she was already hopping off the bed. “I’ll go put these in water,” she announced with a dry flourish.
She opened the door for the photographer and Keh peeled the label from his face, then straightened his sheets and rearranged the expression on his face for the camera. As he held a practised smile, the clicking flashes began to explode, slowly saturating the hospital room with blinding light. Much later on, he would come to understand that she was a girl who defied possession; that if he wanted to love her, he would have to learn and re-learn what love was.
15
The heat and the humidity were engaged in a showy battle for supremacy when Keh crossed the cracked concrete of the baking production lot and headed into the Props department, a long, low building in a quiet corner of the lot. It was not more than two storeys high, but inside it was a cavernous warehouse filled to the rafters with all manner of random objects. The building had existed since time immemorial, and in fact, many of the people who worked in it looked even older. With the wealth of schizophrenic miscellanies it contained, there was no way it could have been expected to look put-together.
Wiping the sweat off his brow, he navigated his way through the space cluttered with objects, from a 19th-century rickshaw to part of a spaceship’s control panel, towards a sunlit back room where Uncle Hong was pottering around at his workbench. The little old man was bent over a pile of tools, fiddling with the pair of ancient spectacles that sat on his nose. To cope with the heat, he wore a white singlet and khaki shorts, as he did every day. Nobody had ever seen him enter or leave the building. Nobody could remember a time when he had not been around. And nobody would have guessed the level of this craftsman’s artistry unless they had seen his gnarled hands shaping and breathing life into his props.
Uncle Hong was the best of the Props department’s artists and he worked alone; his studio was overgrown with money plants that had been allowed to creep their way along the old wooden shelves, up the walls and around the window frames, so that the
air remained clean despite the ever-present dust. His workspace was littered all over with his creations: papier-mâché animals, elaborate fans and lanterns, ticking time bombs, towering ceremonial headdresses. It was said that he continued to spend his days working and his nights watching television with the devotion of an ardent lover, so that when death came knocking on his door every night he was always told to come back the next day, because it was imperative that Uncle Hong find out what happened in the next episode.
“Oh, you’re here,” the impossibly wizened man said, looking up as Keh entered. “Have a seat.” He pushed over a stool and picked up a measuring tape. After surveying Keh’s face intently in silence for several minutes, he smiled. “So, Jon Keh, you’re doing another movie.”
Keh nodded. “The Movie That Everyone Saw. Production starts in about three weeks. I’ll be playing an actor. And, as you know, it doesn’t end well for him.”
“Your character gets killed off at the end? Or at the beginning?”
“At the end,” Keh chuckled. “I have lots to do before that happens.”
The old man nodded slowly and grinned. “How many times have you died before?”
“Oh, at least five or six.”
“But you’ve never been beheaded, eh?”
“Nope. There’s a first time for everything.” Keh smiled. “How many severed heads have you made?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I’ve been doing this for so long. At least fifty or sixty. The scripts don’t call for heads all that often, to be honest.”
Keh was rather looking forward to the scene in The Movie That Everyone Saw in which he would be chased down, overpowered and unceremoniously beheaded. At the table read, he’d clearly seen the potential that this scene offered. He’d done plenty of gory fight scenes and overwrought death scenes, but he’d certainly never been offed in such a visceral manner.
Uncle Hong held the tape up and began to take unhurried measurements of Keh’s head, starting with the circumference of the crown and then working his way to the forehead, ears and each of the cranial features, pencilling each figure down with care. Keh had never had the proportions of his head and face scrutinised with such intensity and, by the time Uncle Hong was satisfied he had all the measurements, was absorbed in curiosity as to how the artist was going to proceed.
Uncle Hong brought out a block of compressed foam that had already been sculpted into the rough shape of a bald head and neck. He surveyed it for a few moments, then went right to work. With nothing but a penknife, he began to chisel out features quickly and deftly, flicking bits of foam away with every incision. Before long, Keh’s profile began to appear in an almost recognisable form.
When at last he finished sculpting, Uncle Hong began to cover the foam head with a layer of self-drying clay. As the wet substance was smoothed over the features, Keh felt an uncanny shiver go up his spine, as if the old man’s gnarled hands were caressing his own face.
“This will dry hard, and then I’ll cover it with modelling paste that will look like skin,” Uncle Hong explained.
“What happens next?” Keh asked.
“I’ll paint it. And add on the effects. Blood, bruising, pallor mortis—everything.” Uncle Hong wiped his hands on an old rag and chuckled. “Too bad you won’t get to see the thing on set. You can’t both be in the same scenes.”
Sitting near the artist at his cluttered workbench, Keh felt a reluctance to leave. The smell of sawdust and the sunlight streaming through the window made him feel so warm and comfortable. Uncle Hong was such a master. His studio was filled with the most fascinating objects, and he surely knew a wealth of secret things.
Sitting there that afternoon, Keh could almost believe that the Moving Talkies Pictures corporate office, standing just across the production lot in a tower of steel, glass, security scanners and whooshing lifts, was not even real.
16
“Darling, the director just called cut. It’s a wrap.”
“But darling, I—weren’t my lips too pale? And when you kissed me, I don’t think your head was at the right angle. I think we should do the scene again, after the make-up artist has given me a touch-up.”
“No, darling. We must complete this production before your time runs out. And that take was perfect.”
“But might it be even better if I changed my intonation a little? There’s still time, darling. Let’s do it one more time.”
“No, darling, you’re exhausted. Look, you’re pale. We have to get you back to the hospital.”
“Oh! I knew it! I did look too pale! We must do the scene again, darling.”
“Darling, you mustn’t strain yourself. I’m telling you, the take is good. You’re a star. And we must get you back to the hospital before it’s too late. Look, the ambulance is waiting. Why are you being so insistent?”
“Because—because—oh! Because I don’t want this production to wrap! Don’t you see? Once they call ‘cut’ on the final scene, the curtain of my life will drop along with it. As long as we keep working, as long as this film is unfinished, my life shall be extended. But once it’s a wrap—oh! That will be the end!”
“Oh, darling! I curse the wasting disease that is snatching you from me. But death can never separate us, you’ ll see. We’ ll live happily ever after—in another life.”
“Cut!” roared The Movie That Everyone Saw’s director as Keh pulled his lips from Holliday Heng’s and set her back on her feet. The man’s face displayed a thunderous scowl. “Jon, I’m sorry, but this take is the last straw. This isn’t like you. Your delivery has been so poor. What’s the problem?”
“Are you trying to use an accent that’s slightly off? Why do you sound so weird and stilted?” Holliday snapped, her face still just centimetres from his.
Keh felt a pulse of panic shudder through his chest. For the past few days, nothing had gone right for him on set, not even the shortest take of the smallest line. “I know, it’s my fault,” he mumbled, wilting under her flashing eyes. “I’m sorry—I’m trying my best.”
“You are wasting everybody’s time, especially mine,” she accused, her voice dripping with razor-sharp icicles as she took out her phone to snap some selfies.
From a few metres away, Jerome watched him with a puzzled expression, his arms crossed over his chest. Jerome had been cast as Lee, the director who was also in love with Holliday’s character.
Keh looked around the set and licked his lips nervously. He could not fight this feeling of surreality that came with being on a sound stage where there was a camera set up behind a camera and clapper boards and apple boxes lying in frame.
Something was wrong with him, and he didn’t know what it was, much less how to set it right. It had been such a long time since he had known this frustration of failure and dread that he felt paralysed by impotence. It had been days now, and he’d thought the fog would have cleared up already; it was becoming steadily clear that this was no passing dark cloud, but instead a veritable shit storm of unrest.
The truth was that, like a superhero who finds himself suddenly stripped of his superpower, he was entirely unable, try as he might, to morph into his actor persona to play Henry, the actor with a dark past who was in love with Violette, the actress with the incurable illness, in The Movie That Everyone Saw.
Where previously he had sped through each production riding on highs of energy, on this accursed set he felt like he was fuzzily going through the motions while suspended in aspic. It was like dreaming helplessly on when you knew you really ought to wake up. He learned the lines, but when it came to their delivery, it was like the first time he’d walked onto a set all over again—his lips formed themselves awkwardly over the words, which tripped out like Tic Tacs spilling from their box. Directors usually had nothing but praise for his performances, but he had succeeded only in frustrating this one. He simply could not play the actor who was playing an actor.
There must have been something in quantum physics—or at least Lacanian psychoanalysis—th
at could have explained the phenomenon satisfactorily.
They had filmed a scene two days before in which Henry and Lee had a tension-fraught, passive-aggressive battle of wills on set, a veiled power struggle between professional collaborators who were also rivals in love.
“My duty is to my audience,” Lee was supposed to snarl.
“And my duty is to my art,” Henry was supposed to growl back, rather pompously, Keh had thought, when he’d first read the script.
The lines were simple enough; in theory, so was their elocution. But for the love of Brecht, he could not get the word sequence, pace, intonation or volume correct. His brain went so far as to mix his lines up with Jerome’s lines, throwing Jerome hopelessly off as well.
An assistant producer asked cautiously if he would like her to bring him some ginseng tea and medicated oil. Even the sound man inquired if he was feeling all right, and whether he was experiencing any ringing in his left ear, sort of like the sound of a giant motorised dragonfly during Chingay season, because he, the sound man, had once experienced that himself, and it had been sibeh jialat.
“I think Jon is having some kind of nervous breakdown,” he overheard Holliday telling the makeup artist—the one known for having the biggest mouth—as she typed busily into her phone, interacting with the social media followers she was rumoured to have bought.
Holliday was miffed because their kissing scene the day before had gone so badly, it made Armageddon look like a Tupperware party. The script had him grabbing Holliday’s head gently but passionately and pulling her towards him for a deep, intense lip-lock. It was such a routinely easy scene to pull off, even a kindergartener and a blob of grape jelly could have accomplished it in record time.