Kappa Quartet

by Daryl Qilin Yam

  “Do you have any children?” he asked.

  “A girl,” I said. “Her name’s Michelle. And you?”

  “Me?”

  “Yes,” I said. “What about you?”

  “I have no children,” said Mr Five. “But I have a wife. We have been married for a long time.”

  “I see. You must share many memories together.”

  “Yes, I would say. We do.” Mr Five smiled. “We make a pretty uneventful couple, however, compared to what you have been through.”

  I turned towards the window. I said nothing, for a while.

  “Judging from your silence, Mr Alvin, I believe there is still one more part of the story that you have yet to tell.”

  I kept my eyes focused on the view.

  “The third time she disappeared, she took off for two and a half weeks. It was the last time, though. The disappearing thing didn’t happen anymore after that.”

  Mr Five didn’t reply. In the window I could see his reflection, his arms holding on to the wheel. There was a turn he had to make, and he made it; and then there was a traffic light, and he had to stop. And then the light changed. He kept on driving.

  It was half past midnight when we stopped at the hotel. We had driven along a huge lake: it stretched so far into the night, I couldn’t see where it ended.

  Hotel Koryu, it was called; a hot spring hotel. There weren’t any lights on in the reception, save for one spotlight trained onto the front desk. Mr Five turned back to me after exchanging a few words with the lady manager.

  “According to my friend, you have a room waiting for you on the second floor.”

  “Thank you,” I said to him. I then bowed to the manager. “Thank you very much.”

  Mr Five smiled. “She also tells me that a particular acquaintance of mine is still here, in this very hotel.”

  “Oh, really?”

  “Indeed,” he said. “Like you, I too offered him a chance to stay at this fine establishment. If you do not mind, I would like to have dinner with the both of you tomorrow evening, at the dining hall down the corridor. I think it will be worthwhile, having the two of you know one another.”

  “All right,” I said. “I don’t mind.”

  “Thank you,” said Mr Five. “As a matter of fact, I believe this person might be Singaporean as well.” His smile grew wider. “Imagine the odds.”

  A while later, the manager and I stood side by side on the porch as we watched Mr Five get into his silver Lexus. After he drove away, the manager led me to my room, and passed me a brochure of the hotel’s facilities. “Onsen and dining hall, downstairs. Private onsen, this floor. Outdoor onsen, this floor also.” The manager then pointed down to the far end of the corridor. “That way,” she said. She then bowed. “Goodnight, Mr Alvin.”

  I went into my room. It had a simple layout, with a mattress on the floor and a small television on a wooden stand. I took my clothes off and slid beneath the sheets. I closed my eyes and a wave—the sudden rush of it—broke over my consciousness. I slept for the longest time that night: it was a long and restful sleep, full of dreams, none of which I could remember. I didn’t fully wake till four in the afternoon, and I stumbled about my room, trying to regain my bearings. Japan, I reminded myself. I was in Japan. I found a note slipped through the crack beneath the door: Mr Five will see you at 7pm.

  I went down to reception at six forty-five. The lounge was gorgeously lit, due to an artificial fireplace in the central wall. There were a few kids in the corner, banging on a couple of old arcade games plugged in behind the front desk. I went over to the sofas and sat across from a young man casually flipping through a magazine. He had remarkably pale skin, as well as a head of rich, dark hair. He wore a grey cashmere pullover. Everything about him was slim, from the bridge of his nose to the shape of his legs. I took a random magazine from the stands and began to browse its contents.

  The hour came and went. Once in a while I looked up from my magazine, and checked to see if a silver Lexus might be driving up the porch. I noticed how the light, spilling from the fireplace, grew like a puddle of water: it seeped across the floor and towards the front desk, without fully reaching the corners of the place. It became pretty clear that Mr Five was a no-show.

  Eventually I caught sight of the manager coming towards the lounge. She had two slips of paper in her hands, one of which she gave me, and the other to the young man. The note said: I’m afraid an urgent matter has come up, and I can’t stay in Yamanashi any longer. Please have dinner without me.

  I looked up from the note. The manager was gone—and so was the young man. I was the only one left.

  I walked over to where the kids were. The lot of them had gathered around one of the machines. Pac-Man, it was, and I laughed for a bit. I then headed back to my room; I still wasn’t hungry at all.

  •

  It had been July, the third time she disappeared, and she told me so in advance. “I think I’ll have to go away again, sometime next week.” She used the words go away as though she were taking a vacation.

  “Do you know when exactly you’re going?” I asked. She told me she didn’t.

  “I don’t have an exact date,” she said.

  I asked if I could come along somehow, on whatever trip she had planned in her mind. Su Lin shifted: she turned to look at me, straight in the eyes in the middle of the night. We were both in bed at the time.

  “The kind of place I’m going,” she said to me, “is the kind of place where only I can go. Nobody else can come along. You should know this by now.”

  I thought about what she said. Every word felt like a weight, like a heavy kind of thing that settled in the depths of my lungs. “I’m sorry,” I said in the end. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  She turned over. She grew quiet for a few seconds. There was a green star, shining from the corner of the air-conditioning unit, and it was our only source of light in the room.

  “Alvin,” she said. “I need you to listen to me, all right? I want you to cast aside all the thoughts in your brain, and listen very carefully to what I have to say. Can you do that for me?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Of course I can.”

  My wife remained completely still. Lying on her side, she barely seemed to breathe. I did that sometimes, in the middle of the night, straining to hear her breathing sounds. For some reason, I was convinced that Su Lin was going to die: not in some distant future, but in the now, the today or the tomorrow, and it would have all been my fault.

  Finally, she spoke. She said: “There is this world, and then there is another.”

  “Another?”

  “Yes. Another. And there is only one way by which you can escape.”

  She paused again. Her words kept sinking within me, in a slow, free-falling kind of way. My chest grew heavier by the minute.

  “Which way is that?” I asked, but she turned back over. She laid a hand on my chest, a perfectly cold and smooth hand; I could see the bare nape of her shoulders, and the perfect creases in her neck.

  Su Lin said to me, “The way by which you came, baby.”

  I was a wreck by the time she came back. Her parents had called repeatedly over the sixteen days, wondering where their daughter had gone. Twice they came over to our flat, demanding to know what had happened, where had she gone, why hadn’t anybody said anything. I told them I didn’t know. We had to call the police.

  It was the middle of the night. I don’t know what time. Su Lin stood at the front door, without a suitcase or a single piece of luggage. She looked as though she had simply gone for a walk and returned in time for supper.

  “Hey,” I said, and really, what the hell, it was all I could manage to say. I nearly fell to pieces before her, wondering what was going on. The whole time I kept wondering if this was her messed-up way of saying she wanted to leave. I don’t know anything, I wanted to say to her. I don’t know anything anymore.

  My wife took a step forward. She kissed me, at the front gate of o
ur flat, before leading me to the bathroom. My feet followed after her feet, my hand dragged forward by her hand. She was in control—she always had been—but at that moment, I was nothing. I was nothing, and I was also anything she wanted me to be. She took her pants off. She took mine off as well. She pressed her back against the wall, and hooked her legs tightly around my waist. We kept at it for an hour—fucking, and then stopping, and then fucking some more. “Come in me,” she then said—“come inside me.” I will never fully understand what happened that night, the way in which things unfolded; but all that mattered was that she had come back home.

  A thin barrier had formed around our flat, over the next several days. I wondered if this was how happiness worked: how temporary it was, and how fragile; how it demanded your greatest attention, lest any misstep caused it to break. When I finally asked Su Lin where she’d been during those sixteen days, she told me she didn’t want to say. “I want to talk about something else,” my wife said. For a minute, Su Lin and I stood in the kitchen, saying nothing to one another; already I could feel the barrier breaking down, one flaky piece at a time.

  “You should go away sometime. One of these days,” she said. “In fact, the first time you go, you should just take off and not tell anybody. Not even me. Forget you have any ties at all.”

  I locked eyes with her. “Wouldn’t you want to know where I am?” I asked. She shook her head.

  “When it’s time for you to go, you won’t even know it yourself.”

  I continued to look at her. “You knew the last time,” I said. “You knew you were going somewhere.”

  A month later we found ourselves in the car, parked outside the neighbourhood clinic. She had to submit a blood sample; her period hadn’t come when it was supposed to, and she had suspicions that she might be pregnant.

  They took their time, her and the doctor; I could hear them both, laughing along with the nurse, as I waited in the reception. Su Lin was pregnant, of course, with Michelle, but I didn’t really know what I was in for back then.

  She settled herself into the passenger seat as I started the engine.

  “There was a song, playing in the clinic,” she said to me. “Do you know it?”

  I looked at her, trying to think back. There had been a lot of songs playing in the clinic. Songs I didn’t recognise. I told her I couldn’t remember.

  “It was ‘People’,” she said. “Shirley Bassey.”

  I asked her how she knew.

  “The doctor told me, after I tried asking the nurse. He said it was something his mother had listened to when she had gone through chemotherapy. Since then he’d play her albums in his clinic.”

  “Is his mother all right now?” I asked. My wife shrugged.

  “Our conversation kind of ground to a halt soon after.”

  “Why is that?”

  Su Lin looked out of the window.

  “He asked me what I did in my spare time,” she said. “I told him I didn’t know. I do nothing but time still goes by.”

  Neither of us spoke again until we were nearly home. Something was on her mind, but I couldn’t figure out what. There were all kinds of things racing through my mind as well, but I couldn’t focus on anything to settle on. All I could do was drive.

  My wife laid a hand on mine as I pulled up the brake. Her voice was soft when she spoke.

  “I have one more thing I need to tell you,” she said. “Will you listen to what I have to say?”

  I didn’t say anything. I merely waited for her to continue. She spoke after a few seconds.

  “You will experience a particular feeling when you reappear,” she said. “You will only experience this feeling when you come back, from wherever you’ve been to. You might hate that feeling, or you might like it. You might even like it a little too much.”

  I killed the engine. “What are you saying?” I asked her. “What are you trying to tell me?”

  All was quiet in the car. My wife spoke after a while.

  “I’m saying: you can either let that feeling go, or you can hold on to it as tight as you can. Whatever you choose, I won’t blame you. I’ll just accept your decision.”

  Neither of us said anything more. And neither of us got out of the car. She had her hand on top of mine, after all. Finally I said, “You’re holding on to it, aren’t you. That feeling you just talked about.”

  Su Lin nodded, quickly. “Yes,” she said. “I’m holding on to it.” Her voice had turned to a whisper at that point.

  Five years later, it was my turn to leave. And it was true, what my wife had said: when it’s time for you to go, you won’t even know it yourself.

  •

  It was a quarter to five in the afternoon when I sat up in bed. Nearly a day had passed since that time I sat in the lounge; I had simply lain on my mattress, drifting in and out of sleep, occasionally switching the television on. I checked my Blackberry—still no signal.

  I got up. I walked over to the mirror stand, groggy with sleep. I couldn’t focus. Some people have said my nose is similar to my wife’s. Others have commented that my eyes are my plainest features, while my wife’s are her best. As I continued to stare at myself, lethargic, I realised I hadn’t eaten a bite of anything since I’d arrived in Japan. I slapped my hands all over my body, just to wake myself up—I hit myself, repeatedly, until my skin turned pink. Had I lost any weight? It certainly didn’t seem that way.

  Hoping a good shower might wake me up, I browsed through the hotel brochure, and took note of the outdoor onsen that the manager had mentioned. It was conveniently situated down the corridor, just like she said. In the end, I decided that it didn’t matter if it was cold outside; I’d rather be alone than bump into the other bathers downstairs. I stumbled around my room, and searched for a towel.

  The sun had fully set by the time I left my room. The length of the corridor, lit by ambient lights in the ceiling, was utterly empty as I made my way towards the bath. There was no sound either, save for the faint hum of the boiler, and the gurgling of water travelling down the pipes. There was a wide window at the end of the corridor, located just beside the entrance; I could barely make anything out as I looked through the glass. It was completely dark outside.

  I went through the Male entrance and began taking off my clothes. I had never been in an onsen before, but I had gone to a jjimjilbang in Seoul, so I figured the same rules applied. I placed my belongings into a tray and shelved them into a locker. I then noticed a second set of belongings, pigeonholed in a far corner, in which I saw a grey-coloured pullover. The young man at the reception, I thought to myself.

  I tried to peek. I could see him through the partition, seated in the middle of the outdoor bath. He was submerged up to his neck, gazing out at the view beyond. But there was nothing much to see, beyond the wooden trellis: from where I stood, I could barely distinguish the lake from the surrounding low mountains. Spanning the lake was a bridge, an expressway, with red and yellow points in the night.

  I first warmed myself with a brief shower before sliding the partition open. The young man looked over his shoulder. I felt his eyes scan me from head to toe as I stood before him in the nude, with nothing but a small white towel clutched before my crotch.

  “Cold?” said the young man.

  It was four degrees Celsius. “Y-you think?”

  He smiled. “Come in,” he said, moving to the side. The water lapped over the edge of the bath. I tested the temperature with a foot, and then with a leg, followed quickly by the rest of my body. I let out a deep sigh as I settled into the water, and allowed the cold to leave my bones. I closed my eyes.

  “It’s nice,” the young man said. “Especially before dinner.”

  I opened my eyes. I didn’t expect him to keep talking. “I wouldn’t know,” I said. “I haven’t eaten at all.”

  “I noticed,” the young man said. “You’re not hungry?”

  “No,” I replied. The young man didn’t say anything more for nearly half a minute.
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  “I’m hungry all the time,” he said.

  “Really?”

  He nodded.

  “You’re Singaporean, aren’t you?” I asked.

  He nodded again.

  “That’s right,” he said. “I’m Kevin.”

  “Alvin,” I said. I paused. “Mr Five brought you here, didn’t he?”

  “He did, yes,” said Kevin. His pale face looked almost golden under the warm lighting. “I didn’t expect him to bring a second person,” he added.

  “Hmm,” I said. “He brought you here from Tokyo?”

  Kevin nodded. “I was looking for a bookstore. In Nakameguro.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t know where that is.”

  “That’s all right. What about you?” he asked.

  I tried recalling the name of the place. “Kichijoji,” I said. “Park Exit. You been?”

  Kevin shook his head. We didn’t say anything more. This time the silence lasted for about a minute or two, until he let out a snigger. I looked at him, surprised by the sudden laugh. He looked at me as though he felt guilty.

  “It’s a bit pervy, isn’t it?” he said. “When it’s just two men in a tub.”

  “You’re a joker,” I said. “But this bath is outdoors as well, so it’s got that kinky element.”

  Kevin shook his head, and rubbed at the corner of his eye. “Are you having naughty thoughts about me, Mr Alvin?”

  I let out a laugh. “No, unfortunately. No.”

  Kevin made a face. The young man looked almost discouraged. “That’s too bad,” he said. He turned back to the view beyond the trellis. “I’d make a good lover, I think. Or, at least, I imagine myself to be so. Except I wouldn’t know for sure.”

  “So you’re gay,” I said. He nodded. “Virgin?” He nodded once more. I said to him, “You’ll find somebody eventually.” I then asked him how old he was.