The Gatekeeper

by Nuraliah Norasid

  Walking northeast from Pak Wao’s shop—the only provision shop in Manticura—past the homes with walls of corrugated zinc and spray-painted plywood, and the occasional three- or four-family living spaces made out of shipping container walls, one would eventually come to a black door made of heavy wood, a “No Entry” road sign hung up on it. The sign bore the word “Dream” in thick black paint across the white bar. The door opened onto an alley between two rows of stacked houses, lit by red lamps hanging at intervals along one wall. Garbage-lined and with home extensions spilling into the narrow walkway, the alley led to an area the Nelrootians called the “Dream Garden”—a cruel, cruel joke by the drug lords who jointly owned it.

  When the Dream Garden was but a hollow of cave seized from a number of families who had been living there, a runner had come to the door to ask if anyone was interested in being a part of it. Ria remembered hovering in the background, at the edges of the shadows within the home’s interior, and on seeing her, the runner had started sweating more than he already was. The offer, Ria knew, was not for her, who tended to the sacred dead. Just Barani. “For which job?” Barani had asked as she leaned her shoulder against the doorjamb, unable as always to hide her bemusement. “Prostitution or assassination?”

  That was just the kind of place it was.

  Every world needed a seedy underbelly—that was true enough— and Nelroote’s Dream Garden was an underground within an underground. Brothels, alcohol tanks, gambling and drug dens were kept away from the good folk by walls of welded shipyard steel. Its neon lights could be seen from any corner of Nelroote when the main lights went off, casting their pulsing, pinkish hue onto the three immense stone statues in their lofty niches. Each serene face was tilted down towards the settlement, undisturbed by how much life went on to chase the prevailing desire for instant gratification.

  Some years after Nelroote’s entertainment district had been established, Ria had walked into the world of pulsing lights and sweaty bodies pressed into coital positions. She had only been an observer, watching in the margins as patrons in various stages of intoxication stumbled down labyrinthine alleyways, as body trades were plied and as addicts slumped against walls in a collective stupor. No one had dared touch her; not even the inebriated. People generally moved out of her way when she came through. The gesture had grown into a reflexive action over the years, done without thought or consciousness. She couldn’t decide if that warranted sadness or relief.

  Ria had not gone back to the Dream Garden after that initial visit. It was not that she was against it, or the idea of it; rather, what would a place like that offer her? The momentary forgetting of substance abuse? The empty contact of bodies whose warmth was only transient? More reminders of how the world moved while she was but a static object standing in an ocean of regret? Yet following a detour to change her route up a bit, Ria found herself standing in front of the gate again, peering at the “No Entry Dream” sign that no one had changed since the day it was put up on the door. The two burly men standing on either side of it eyed her warily; she didn’t know if it was because of what had happened before with Johan or because bouncers were generally suspicious of everyone. One uttered a terse, “Kak.”

  Ria found that strangely amusing, and the sound of her laughter, rarely heard within Nelroote, visibly startled and worried the men.

  She was about to reply when the dark door opened and a familiar voice called to her: “Kak?”

  She turned to Sani, the younger of Abang Seh’s two sons, crossing the Dream’s threshold. Sani was a Tuyun and he had a brother, Lan; four years apart and never more different. Lan was an active boy, big for a Tuyun, the way a lot of them were in Nelroote. Sani was stringy in contrast, though just as tall, and unlike his brother, whose yun scales covered his entire body, Sani’s were restricted to his right arm, making the appendage appear abnormally large and the hand a menacing claw. The rest of him took after his Human mother—all defined bone structures and pale, smooth skin the colour of new ash. He had been a sullen child with this way of sitting for a long time, hunched forward as he observed people without reserve or restraint.

  It was that intense, discomfiting stare that had drawn Ria to the boy when she had first seen him standing at the back of his house, holding a bun in one hand as he returned her gaze with an unfiltered stare of his own. Children generally made her uneasy, but she had gone over and asked how old he was.

  “Seven,” he had said, a little too loudly, his brows drawn low.

  “Why are you not in school?” she asked, referring to the schoolhouse in Nelroote run by a Scerean ex-schoolteacher who’d escaped to Nelroote during the Tuhav. It was where the settlement’s children were taught reading and writing along with basic mathematics. “Father say I cannot go.” As an afterthought, he had added, “Because the children beat me.”

  “Why would they do that?”

  He had shrugged, but from the unblinking way he continued to stare up at her, she knew. She had straightened up almost too abruptly, causing a shadow of surprise to cross his young face. She had gone to his house that very same day, and her arrival was met by clattering cups and saucers, and a frantic mother hustling her sons about to make them presentable to the metu’ra. When they were finally brought before Ria, Sani’s hair had been combed back with cream, so that the flat black surface was furrowed like a tilled field. His face had been washed and powdered—two pats on the cheeks and one across the forehead—clean shirt tucked into shorts pulled up high. No one had fought her decision to tutor him at home, even though she recalled Abang Seh’s reluctant expression as the man sat at the dining table while she spoke to Kak Sab, his wife.

  And when Sani’s intellectual capacity and hunger for knowledge had far surpassed what she could teach him from the books she owned and got from the schoolhouse, she had convinced Abang Seh to send him to the surface to study. With the help of some surface relatives, they had been able to do so, even if the processes involved were not entirely cheap, or legal.

  Ria couldn’t help but admire him a little right then. Sani had grown handsomely over the years, though the knobs along his back caused his back to arch into a permanent slouch and the dark shadows under his eyes were starker now against his pallid skin.

  He had his backpack over one shoulder and a ring file tucked under his elbow. Looking down, Ria saw that Sani had his customised black glove over his right hand as if that was going to make him blend with the Humans, who were always quick to see when someone was different.

  “Back from classes, Sani?” she asked.

  He nodded in reply, keeping his face carefully averted and only stealing glances at her through the partings of his long fringe. She felt a familiar urge to push the hair aside, but she remembered the way he’d flinched when she’d done it once, as if her touch was poison. The memory stayed her hand, as it always had.

  “I am not a boy any more,” he had told her then, and she hadn’t had the heart to tell him that to her, he would always be a boy. Until she could look upon him—until he could look upon her, could see her properly without fringe curtains or the evasiveness of stolen glances. Or the lies of secret gazes he thought she couldn’t feel on her back when she hung the washing out or swept the bit of space in front of her house.

  Ria caught a glimpse of a group of men, four or five of them in the alleyway behind Sani, leaning on walls or just standing about. One man called out and stretched his hand to Sani and, with some familiarity, Sani reached back to grasp it with a curt nod.

  “Remember to send eh?” the man asked. To Ria, he said, “Evening, Kak,” trying his best at a friendly smile and wave that came out feeling forced anyway.

  Sani only nodded and closed the door behind him. He ignored the two burly bouncers and started to walk in the direction of home. His strides were long, so Ria had to run a little to keep up. She glanced at his bag, saw the way it bulged and the slight unease with which he carried it.

  “Your bag looks heavy,” she remarked. “W
hat’s inside?”

  He pulled the strap further up his shoulder.

  “Books?” she pressed.

  He nodded. Ria looked back at the Dream door receding behind her. She wondered when Sani had started going to a place like that, lacking a good history with people as he did. Too many times in his teenage years had she found him pushed up by an angry group against a wall, or returning home appearing a little worse for wear than he was before—for staring, always for staring, or being too good for Nelroote, always too good for Nelroote with his better spoken ‘dals—big-big Ro’ ‘dal words, as if he was too good for Sce’ ‘dal. She wondered if he resented her for his proficiencies. There were days when he made it seem as if he did resent her; by ignoring her questions, brushing off her help, falling into debates about politics, strife, the “disordered notions” of law. Only to go back to stolen glances, oblique gazes, the shadowing, the early morning visits filled with awkward silences.

  “Are they your friends?” she asked, walking fast to keep up.

  Sani hesitated, then replied, “Yah. Friends.”

  “We have not seen you in a while, Sani.” Three weeks, nearly four. “You shouldn’t live in your dormitory all the time. Once in a while come back lah, to your ibu and ayah.”

  “I was home two weeks ago, Kak,” he said, a little too sharply, “but you weren’t around.”

  Guilt washed over Ria. There was a time some weeks before when Eedric had wanted to spend a night in the catacombs—just for the experience, he had said. “And what about Adrianne?” she had asked, knowing his girlfriend was not fond of being kept out of contact. Eedric had only shaken his head and sank beside the airman who’d come to be his treasured catacomb companion. “She can wait for once,” he’d replied. Turning to her, he’d later added, “She wouldn’t do these things with me.” He had not even asked her if she needed to go back home to someone. Barani wouldn’t worry, of course. It was likely she wouldn’t even notice. Ria had not protested, though. She’d only sunk down beside him and they’d spent the night like that: talking, staring into the dark, telling each other ghost stories they knew as children and seeing whose was more terrifying. Ria had never known more mirth than she had that day, watching this surface dweller jump at every sound he thought he heard coming from the tunnels and corridors.

  Right then, Sani was quiet. Ria stole a glance up at him, hoping he couldn’t read the reams of memory running through her mind. He seemed a little paler and gaunter than she last remembered. He held himself with great rigidity and unease wrapped like suckered tentacles around him.

  While they rounded a corner, Ria cast her eyes back to the Dream gate. The two burly men were watching them leave. Ria noticed they didn’t lower their eyes from her face.

  When they were far enough from the Dream Garden, Sani spoke up: “You shouldn’t go to the Garden, Kak.”

  Ria turned her eyes to him. Saw how his were full of worry, perhaps even guilt as well.

  “It is not a good place,” he added.

  When he said that, Ria pictured him with a Human girl; fair skinned, long-haired, black roots gradating into auburn. Tall, slim, pretty… Everything a boy like him—like Eedric—would want. Entangled, folded in, one into the other.

  “Then why were you there?” demanded Ria, feeling uncharacteristically miffed.

  Something about the cadence of her voice made him stop. He stared ahead at the end of the alley they were in.

  “How did you stop, Kak?” he asked finally.

  Ria paused and looked at him. “Stop what?”

  “You,” he began with difficulty, “have not changed anyone in a long time, and I heard…” He trailed off, clenching his jaw.

  “You forget about Johan.” No one spoke about Johan, but Ria was not one to let herself forget.

  Sani made an annoyed sound, “I heard. I heard about the Changer too. I hope he left without too much trouble.” He glanced at her as if there was more that he wanted to ask her about that, but he went on to ask instead, “Did it have something to do with the Two-Half? Did something happen?”

  “The war happened. The Occupation happened. People died. That happened too.” Ria spoke quickly, harshly.

  “So,” Sani went on with deliberation, as if he hadn’t heard her tone, “it is easy to decide and just stop?”

  Ria took a few steps up to the boy. “Sani…” she began, suspicion and worry creeping up on her. “What is this about?”

  Sani straightened up, as if in alarm.

  “Kak,” he said, “I cannot go home today. Y-you tell Mak for me. Or tell Kak Bara to tell Mak.”

  “Why—”

  Sani was already backing away. He ran his Human hand through his hair and for a moment, his fringe came away from his face, leaving it exposed. She saw that his eyes were fully fixed on her, looking as if he was seeing her for the first time.

  He shook his head. “I have a lot of school work, Kak. A lot of work,” he said. And then he was gone.

  Multi-umbilici

  Old Waro’s shop was a small single-storey shack, with a shopfront made up of a counter and a small courtyard containing a freezer, two ageing refrigerators and wire racks filled with snacks and dry ingredients. It had stood at the centre of concentric circles of houses and tenement apartments for as long as anyone could remember, making one wonder if the settlement had been built around it instead of it being a product of the settlement’s need for provisions.

  Waro was a wiry old man who had not aged well; his thinning fur clung in patches to leathery skin that showed the tattoos he sported, relics from a younger, more boisterous time. He could always be found watching the small black-and-white television perched in the corner of his shop window, behind clear plastic kuih bottles filled with different varieties of sweets. His father used to own the store and had later relinquished it to Waro when he retired a few years after the war. Barani always thought Waro’s father the better shopkeeper, may his soul rest in peace. With Waro in charge, much of the merchandise was covered in a layer of dust. He never bothered to keep track of the expiry dates and took forever to restock. Moreover, drunks had turned the rubbish pile at the back of his shop into a urinal, so his shop always smelled like a toilet, but nothing anyone said could make him improve. Kalau dah dasar kepala batu.

  “Rolling paper satu packet dengan sabun Trojan,” Barani ordered, once she was within earshot of the old Feleenese.

  Waro nodded without a word and disappeared into the back of the shop with a jangle of his many earrings. While he was gone, Barani surveyed the shop counter, cramped with shallow plastic trays of little snacks and knick-knacks. She remembered Waro as a young man, crude and crass, a troublemaker who ran with a gang that sometimes risked their activities even on the surface; a Pak to nobody then. He used to give the young women all sorts of trouble with his salacious remarks, sometimes his brazen bum-grabbing, and not even the threat of Barani was able to keep him in check. When the war came, he was one of the first to sign up with chest-pounding bravado, thinking it was some big gang fight he was entering into.

  The story went that he’d got captured not long after the surrender and had been put to work at a rail with other POWs. He came home after the liberation of Manticura, trudging behind an impassive Ria, all the while staring at the back of the younger woman’s head as if he was seeing the war happen all over again. Ria wouldn’t speak of the state that he’d been in when he had apparently stumbled into her chamber of horrors. Trauma was one thing, but Barani always thought adding Ria into the equation was the worst kind of punishment the Divine could impose on him for his wrongs.

  “Shopping, Ani?” a voice spoke up beside her.

  Barani started and turned to see Kak Sab, Abang Seh’s wife, watching her with a gentle smile. The woman was short, wide of girth now that she was getting on with the years, and one of the rare Humans who’d made a home in Nelroote. Barani returned the smile, thinking with amusement how Kak Sab was also the only one around who addressed her by her old n
ame.

  “The usual, Kak,” Barani replied. “The family good?”

  Here, Kak Sab sighed and shook her head, surprising Barani.

  “Something wrong?” she asked, feeling concerned.

  “Nothing lah,” Kak Sab replied, but she was just standing there, instead of examining the basket of potatoes off to the side and complaining about how they were growing shoots big enough to cover the whole of Nelroote, or picking through the snacks to get the dust on her fingertips so that she might accuse Waro with it. “Sani has not been back from last-last week. Call, tak angkat. I ask Lan to message, no reply. Nowadays I don’t know what to do with that boy.”

  Barani smiled. “He is no longer a boy, Kak.”

  “We try to tell ourselves that, Ani,” Kak Sab told her, “but the truth is they never truly grow up in our eyes.”

  Barani nodded. “True,” she replied. “Girlfriend maybe?” she added amiably. “You know how boys are at this age. Want to try. Want to touch-touch.”

  Kak Sab looked up at her and Barani thought she had upset the woman. For all of Kak Sab’s open heart and acceptance, she was still a mother of boys, and mothers of boys always loathed losing their sons to another woman.

  “If he has a girlfriend also, Ani…” she began, “I don’t mind. But what kind of life can we give that girl down here?”

  The words struck a chord in Barani as she remembered the old days when she’d led Ria into the underground settlement. She was about to say something when Waro returned to give her the items she wanted. The transaction ended with Waro’s quiet, “Send my regards to Ria,” and Kak Sab taking hold of her arm to tell her the same. This was the tradition among people in the settlement. Not that Ria ever received the wishes with much warmth, just an inclination of her dark head and a stony expression.

  When she left, Kak Sab was finally starting to deride Waro for the state of his merchandise and Waro was, as usual, keeping his eyes fixed on the television screen. Buat tak dengar. The walk to her house was uneventful—strolling past homes, returning greetings with her usual good humour and ease, automatically stepping over roughshod drains and refuse, and just as automatically reprimanding any wasted youngsters she came across.