by May Seah
With eyes of wonder he turned to April, threw his arms around her and lifted her clean off her feet.
When they stepped outside the building, they were surprised to see the entire sky overcast, swollen dark pink and orange, groaning with the weight of shimmering multicoloured clouds. The portentous silence that precedes a storm enveloped them, interrupted by sharp zaps of lightning. In the clammy gloaming, he felt April shiver slightly. “It’s finally going to rain,” she said.
21
The Cloud broke in showers of memories.
At first it was a few pixels that fell skittishly to the ground, scattered by gusts of wind.
Then digital photos started to pour from the laden skies, raining down one after another and shattering on impact with the earth. They lay in broken pieces on the concrete: wefies smashed and dispersed, a splintered sunset snapshot, bits of a fragmented smile. Some shards became lodged in the branches of swaying trees, where they glimmered with coloured light for a while against the dark leaves before the intensifying deluge washed them down towards the soil.
People hurried home from work, drew in their laundry and bolted their windows against the storm, which battered on for five hours, then subsided into a relentless and maddening drizzle.
For seven days and seven nights, it rained interminably.
The collected weight of the population’s digital memories sluiced steadily down, shrouding the city in a fog of multicoloured mist. Schools were shut. Flights were cancelled. Traffic came to a halt and cars stood haphazardly abandoned as the roads began to flood. A river of photos, videos, data and histories rushed through the city’s drainage system and into its canals and reservoirs, rising and swelling until it spilled over and covered all the streets and houses and fields.
Now and then, through your clouded window, you could see a person intrepid or foolhardy enough to venture outdoors, sloshing laboriously through the knee-deep flood, clutching his umbrella over his head as a feeble talisman against the elements while the trees bent and sighed in the gale.
Otherwise, time stood still in a mottled amber haze of unmemory as the Cloud steadfastly discharged its torrential contents.
When the deluge finally faded out and the sun begrudgingly returned from its sabbatical and people had lost all of their digital memories in washes of pixelated sediment, it was difficult to reboot.
With their contacts wiped out, for instance, it was days or weeks before people managed to find their friends and family members. Important emails and records that had been obliterated resulted in backlash for businesses. And every photograph lost was a memory lost.
People could no longer recall their last holidays, the faces of friends they kept in contact with only through social media, and even what they had worn or eaten or seen before the Cloud broke. They had stored everything carefully in their memory backups so that they wouldn’t be subject to the vagaries of human forgetfulness, not realising that to do so was to commit to forgetting. For days, the population wandered in broken circles around the sodden streets, in which bits of videos and chat histories were still dissolving away and shrivelling up, like confused ants that could not find their nests.
The event was not without its physical casualties. One of them was the acclaimed director Gareth Abraham, who was dragged out from under a flood of rubble, exhausted and barely breathing, his lungs choked, his limbs bruised and his skin shrivelled. For days on end, he had been combing the streets searching desperately, without nourishment or rest, for the lost videos of his wife.
And so it was that filming for The Movie That Everyone Saw never resumed and the project was forced to be shelved—not because another director could not be hired, but chiefly because its leading lady, Holliday Heng, was never seen or heard from again.
Reports said that Holliday, bereft of her lifetime of treasured selfies, shut herself up in her house and sank into a reclusive depression. Rumours, passed down from reliable sources, said that she had started to despair when, having lost her painstakingly collected digital memories, she could not remember what her own face looked like. Seized by fear, she spent all of her time seated at her dressing table, gazing fixedly into the mirror so that she would have no opportunity to forget her own appearance. There were some, including members of her household staff, who swore that one day, mesmerised by her own image, she had simply pressed up against her reflection, stepped into the glass and disappeared.
Things could never be the same again. And yet, in some other ways, they remained exactly the same.
Keh eventually received the lens implants that fixed his vision. He was able, from then on, to look at any screen he wanted for as long as he wanted.
But the passwords for accessing the databases that stored all his previous productions—copyrighted, encrypted, anti-piracy protected—had all been lost in the Cloud. No one knew how long it would be before they would be accessible once more.
By some miracle, though, he found a short, twenty-minute clip that someone had shakily recorded and then uploaded onto an Indonesian forum. It was from The Life and Times of Tan Kah Kee. It was a Thursday and the dry cleaning had just been delivered when he tapped the play button with trembling hands.
He’d gone back and forth so often, imagining what the act of watching himself on screen might feel like. Would it be thrilling? Depressing? Vainglorious? Embarrassing? Would he want to go back and do each scene again? Would he be able to recognise himself in any of his roles? Would he find himself magnetic or would he cringe through the scene? Would he finally be able to see why viewers seemed to enjoy watching him so much?
When his own image came to life before his eyes—dressed in a tan-coloured suit and dark tie, sporting a little moustache on his upper lip and speaking powerfully with gravitas, every inch the important historical figure, even when raising his arms dramatically to the heavens and imploring them to be on his side—Keh knew right away that he had over-thought it.
Tan Kah Kee had no need of deliberating whether his performance had been perfect. Tan Kah Kee was not concerned with what viewers would think of him. Tan Kah Kee simply existed. Within that screen, Tan Kah Kee simply was.
He watched the clip to its end with dispassionate serenity. And when it had ended, he shut his laptop calmly, feeling no desire to replay it. He knew then that, between Adjonis Keh and Tan Kah Kee, only Tan Kah Kee was real.
Feeling only a sense of numbness, he pulled on some jeans and a T-shirt and left his flat. He was a little early for a scheduled fitting with his stylist and he thought that maybe he would take out the recycling and see if the inside of his car needed a bit of a vacuum. But as he wandered through the basement car park, he came across the door leading to the complex’s security headquarters, which he’d walked past nearly every day, but was now, for the first time, lying open. Through the doorway, he could see a wall covered in black-and-white television screens.
He was still getting used to the idea that he could now look at screens without his eyes protesting, and, overcome by curiosity, he stepped into the room. A uniformed security guard sat in one of the swivel chairs, his head on the table next to a few takeaway cups of half-drunk coffee, ravaged candy wrappers and the crumbly remains of a curry puff. Now and then, a benign snore escaped from his sleeping form.
Keh sat slowly in an empty chair, his gaze still fixed on the screens.
Before his eyes, dozens of grainy, monochromatic scenes danced. In the lift lobby of Block A, he watched the tops of people’s heads, bobbing almost imperceptibly as they waited for the lift to arrive. At Block B, the lift doors opened, but no one exited or entered. The car park area near the main entrance buzzed with activity for a good couple of minutes: someone had organised a poolside barbecue party and teenagers in flip-flops were carrying bags and boxes in and out; a trio of girls had a bunch of buoyant balloons floating above their heads. In one of the corridors somewhere, a woman was fussing over her young child, taking forever to wipe his nose and adjust the tiny backpack on his shou
lders. One of the security cameras seemed to have fallen, become dislodged or gotten stuck at the wrong angle—it only showed a trash bin, filling its view with this preferred object to the exclusion of all else. Over by the landscaped lawn near the granite fountain, a domestic helper set out to walk a dog—a portly Yorkshire terrier—but then sat on a bench and looked at her phone instead. And at the recycling bins near the back of Block C, there was almost no activity at all, save for the occasional mynah or passer-by far below the security camera.
Keh had forgotten where he’d been going, what he’d been about to do and the fact that he’d left his house at exactly 11.07 on a Thursday morning. Amid the gentle music of the security guard’s snores, he found that he could not drag his thirsty eyes from the black-and-white scenes playing out before him in scratchy silence: quotidian acts airing in anaesthetic perpetuity; suspenseless cliffhangers of faraway people disappearing into lifts, never to re-emerge; colourless pantomimes of everyday banality.
Transfixed, he found himself glued to the edge of his seat, unable to move.
22
As it turned out, Keh never had much of a chance to test or even flex his acting skills again.
Minnie, who fortunately had not tendered her resignation before she lost her inheritance in the Cloud, called him into her office to tell him the big news: that Moving Talkies Pictures was restructuring, re-identifying its foci and streamlining its processes. Since there was now so little money to be made in film production, and audiences’ attention spans had shrunk so drastically, from now on the company would exclusively be scripting, filming and producing trailers.
“People still like trailers,” she said. “Nobody watches the actual movie. But they’ll watch trailers.”
Not understanding, he said, “So we’ll be making advertisements for movies that don’t exist?”
“That’s right. That’s the stuff that people love. Our trailers will be entertainment events in and of themselves. You still get just as much exposure, if not more. Close-ups with ‘Adjonis Keh’ in huge lettering, while the rumbly male voiceover pronounces your name at the same time. Oh, and they won’t just be advertisements for movies that don’t exist. They’ll also be advertisements for brands and products that do exist.”
“Excuse me?”
“Yes, each one will be sponsored by an advertiser who wants to sell their brand by associating it with a story. That’s how brand marketing works these days, you know. Household products, spas, salons, restaurants, hotels, travel companies, luxury brands, even government agencies—they’re all in the game.”
Seeing his face, Minnie exhaled loudly. “Listen to me, dear. You’re earning an honest living. A very good living. So many people would kill to have what you have—money, fame, celebrity, success.” She put her hand on his shoulder. “I’ve known you for such a long time. You’re not the kind who feels the need to rock the boat. Go with the flow and keep your nose clean until things start to change again. They always do. Everything moves in recurrent cycles, you know.”
For a moment, he sat chewing on a nail. Then he looked up and said, “If I’m going to do this, can you at least take me to see the Scripts department?”
Minnie made a face. “Why would you want to do that?”
“Well, maybe change is good. Since there are already all these changes going on, maybe I can be more than just an actor. Maybe they’ll let me work with them and give some input—you know, storyline, character, that kind of thing.”
She stared at him. “I didn’t know you were interested in the creative process.”
He shrugged. “It’s always good to diversify, right?”
“I don’t know.” She squinted. “It’s not really a department you’d want to get involved with, if you ask me.”
“Please, Min. At least show me where it is. I’ve never been in the writers’ room. I’ve never even seen a picture of it. All these years and I don’t even know which floor it’s on.” He turned his most winning smile on for her, the one that never failed him.
She narrowed her eyes at him and sighed. “Fine, let’s go.”
They walked out of her office, through snaking corridors, got into a lift, got out at a landing and changed to a different lift, and walked through more windowless corridors. More than once, they had to retrace their steps because Minnie wasn’t quite sure of the way.
At last, in a particularly dank corridor, she came to a stop outside a little brown door. When she rapped on it, the door flew open and a young boy in a cap emblazoned with a spool of thread blinked at them. “Wah,” he breathed, “you’re Jonny Keh. Can I take a selfie with you?”
“Who are you?” Minnie demanded.
“I’m the new intern,” the boy said.
“Oh, the old one went back to school already?” She turned to Keh. “Well, here you are. This is Scripts. Can we go now?”
Keh peered dimly into the room, which was smaller than his dressing room, lit only by one flickering electric lamp. It seemed to contain little more than a laptop, which was running some code, and a few large cardboard boxes that had been decorated with leftover gift wrap. The boxes were filled with what looked like little bits of scrunched-up paper.
“This is the Scripts department? Are you sure?” he said to Minnie.
“Yah,” the boy said. “I’m doing the characters for the first batch of new trailers. Now it’s…” He peered at the laptop. “Twenty-three-year-old single female. Profession—” He stuck his hand into one of the cardboard boxes, withdrew a slip of paper, unfolded it and read, “Prostitute.” Rummaging in the second box, he drew out another slip of paper, peered at it, and said, “Oh, not bad. ‘Heart of gold’.” He entered both values carefully into the computer.
Keh turned to Minnie. “What’s going on?” A thought occurred to him: “Is this because of the Cloud?”
“Yes, the scripts are being done manually now, until everything is properly fixed,” Minnie said. “Before the crash, it was all computerised, of course, and there was a lot more data for the software to run through. It can perform functions that are lots more complex, like applying all the different preset scenarios to different characters. Saves a lot of labour.”
Standing in the doorway, his head almost scraping the top of the frame, Keh felt a strange lightheadedness coming over him. He rocked back on his heels, simultaneously cowed and impressed by the realisation that all the dramatic performances of his career, and all the ones to come, were founded on a lottery of random selection.
Minnie watched the boy’s work with some interest. “Actually, I’ve never really looked into how they do this, either. Quite efficient, it seems. That downsizing thing they did five years ago doesn’t appear to have made anything worse. Now we only need one or two writers to supervise each show, instead of four or five writers doing the plot and the characterisation and the dialogue and all that stuff. The code writes everything. It’s remarkable. You can do anything with technology these days.”
She tapped the intern on the head. “Boy ah, there’s some pandan cake in the pantry—help yourself.”
Grabbing Keh’s arm, she dragged him out the door. “Come on. We still have to talk about how many hours you can commit to that new yuzu skincare campaign. And you have to get ready for the road show that’s taking place tonight. You’re wearing that shirt over my dead body.”
23
The trailers, each funded by a major sponsor and any number of smaller ones, had a two-in-one function: in addition to being entertainment, they were also elaborate advertisements—for perfume, for cars, for fashion brands, for lifestyle brands. Their production value was unimpeachable. They were magnificently scored by top composers. And all the big-name directors signed on to direct them, because that was how they could earn enough to finance the indie movies they actually wanted to make.
The trailers had magnificent budgets. He starred in one funded by a major luxury fashion and accessories distributor that hinted vaguely at a reproductively unsanctioned but
sartorially faultless intergalactic romance. They built a lavish spaceship set that spanned at least one football field, complete with holographic control panels, blinking navigation systems and—because why not?—individual massage pods. There were even space poodles, each wearing monogrammed, hand-tooled calfskin collars.
Another trailer—which brought up but left unanswered the question of whether the condemned prince with the luxury watch would be able to rescue the rebel princess with the luxury watch before the time on their luxury watches ran out—was filmed entirely on location at a heritage castle in Wales; he was flown there in a private jet and served beluga caviar for breakfast.
In yet another production, everything was green-screened except for one scene in which an entire year’s salary’s worth of fireworks was set off as he enjoyed a brand-name beverage, while being told that only he could save the world.
In all of the trailers, he was barely required to act; only to look very, very handsome. More of his time was spent in wardrobe fittings, tailoring sessions and grooming sessions than in reading scripts or working on characterisation. His directives on set mainly consisted of walking towards the camera or through alleyways, staring intensely into the middle distance for close-ups, doing a few leaps and stunts, or locking lips passionately with a beauteous co-star.
Truth be told, life had never been easier. He was earning more for far less work. There were barely any lines to learn. None of the characters needed to be developed, since there was no story arc. He just showed up and squinted intensely for a few hours. And he was still as popular, famous and influential as ever.
Chinese New Year rolled around, and as a gift to his grandmother, he had a new koi pond built for her, with a little stone fountain, in her narrow back garden. All throughout her house, she had tacked up his posters on the walls, some of which always caused him to self-consciously avert his eyes; but she could never be persuaded to take them down. She’d lived there for as long as he could remember, and even though he had been so busy with work in recent years that he hadn’t made much time to visit her, the house still greeted him with a feeling of comfortable stasis, as if nothing had ever changed or would ever change within those brick walls.