—You okay?
—Fine.
The sunlight is so bright here, unfiltered by the branches and leaves closer to the ground. It is almost too much, being surrounded, pushed down by the illumination, by the fiery ball close enough for you to reach up a hand and caress it. But gradually, your eyes begin to adjust.
She helps you up and hands you the walking stick.
—Here. You still need this more than me.
A walkway, wooden, cherry or mahogany, stretches out before you from the platform, disappearing into the upper branches, a latticework of struts and trusses. Once again, she takes you by the hand, and over the side of the walkway you see an infinity of branches descending to the ground. You stay to the center of the boards. From far below you can hear the sounds of birdcall, but it is muted. This high up, you expect the air to be cold and thin, a constant assault of wind currents, but it feels almost exactly the same as when you were on the ground, hot and sticky, the barest hint of a breeze.
From nowhere, a giant thing passes overhead, a creature like a pterodactyl with a two-hundred-foot wingspan, a leviathan of the air, and it screeches, filling the sky with its cry, and Ming Liu pushes you to hug the branches, to stay out of sight.
You whisper, —Will it attack?
—Not me. It won’t hurt me. But it’s still angry about what you did to its babies.
—What?
—Quiet.
—What did I do?
—Quiet.
The mammoth bird screeches again, then veers off, away. You press against the branches until she tells you it’s okay. A few moments later, from far away, the bird cries again, a mother raging over her lost children.
—Come on.
Around and over and through, a dizzying number of turns and doubling-backs, and then you are there. A clearing in the branches, a wide circular landing, above which hovers a small zeppelin, no more than thirty feet long, tethered to the landing with steel cables. Hanging from the sides of the balloon is a pair of flesh-colored flaps, lobes, like the ears of an elephant, thin material but sturdy-looking, blending into the fabric of the balloon, seamless. The deck underneath is enclosed, but surrounded by open windscreens. Through the windows at the bow of the airship, a middle-aged thin man is visible, working several controls in a brisk manner. As you and Ming Liu board the airship via the flexible gangplank that stretches from the landing up to the deck, the man looks familiar, and when he turns around, you see why. It is Kadek.
—I thought he wasn’t coming with us, you say, confused at how he could have beaten you two up here.
Ming Liu smiles. Kadek approaches, but ... he appears different, filled out, not so spindly, an easy smile that reaches up into his eyes, and his clothes are different, a sleeveless shirt and cargo pants, and he is clearly not the man you met before.
—I am Wayan, he says slowly, as if talking to an infant, or someone hard of hearing, or a foreigner. —I am the pilot of this ship.
—Amazing, you say. —You and Kadek, you’re twins?
—Septuplets, actually. Seven of us to keep the grounds. You think the Park’s a jungle now, you should see it when we’re not working on it.
Wayan laughs, a joyous boisterous sound that seems to come all the way up from his toes, as if he has just told the funniest joke in the world. It is infectious, and you grin involuntarily. He wipes a tear away.
—My job is reconnaissance, the eyes in the skies. I report anything unusual back to my brothers. And I’ve been known to take passengers where they need to go.
—We’re headed for the Undine’s Waterfall, Ming Liu says.
Wayan nods. —I figured as much. She would definitely want to see him.
It is unnerving, everyone you meet knowing who you are, but unwilling, or unable, to tell you anything, who you are, why you have no memory, what exactly you are doing in Jurong, how you came to be here. You take a deep breath, trying not to burst into an exasperated diatribe, or something worse, go with the flow, breathe, breathe, breathe.
Wayan smacks you on the arm. —Shall we make way?
Ming Liu sinks into a bean bag chair on the deck, made from the same leathery material as the couch in her cave, closes her eyes, and promptly falls asleep. Wayan chuckles.
—It amazes me the way she can do that. But I know how uncomfortable she is traveling by air, being so far up from the ground, from her earth. No worries, we will wake her when we reach the waterfall. Come, stand up at the front with me.
Wayan gives you a leather strap, shows you how to thread it around your waist, hook it to a support loop on the control panel. He dons a similar strap, and does the same. On the panel are dozens of buttons, gauges, levers, a complicated array of controls, illustrated by simple pictograms. One button and the gangplank retracts, another and the cables unmoor themselves from the landing, slither up and disappear underneath the deck. The zeppelin rises slowly, clearing the last of the Mother Tree’s upper branches, your view now unhindered, the vast swath of Jurong extending in all directions, stopped only by the seas on either side.
—Here we go, Wayan says and pulls a lever. The elephant ears on either side of the airship raise, then lower, up down up down up down, faster and faster, building speed, producing an amazing amount of wind, faster, now up to the speed of a hummingbird, or a dragonfly, the sound a roar at tornado-strength, and Wayan grins and pulls another lever and the dirigible launches forward.
Windscreens slide up on all sides of the deck. Your ears pop. After a moment, Wayan tells you that it is safe to walk around. You unhook yourself from the control panel and step to a starboard windscreen. Below, far below, the ground passes quickly beneath the ship, out of the Park proper and into miles and miles of city buildings, all overgrown by lichen, ivy, fungi, luminescent violet kudzu. Streets are barely discernible as thoroughfares, so choked they are by hundreds of species of greenery. And above the dimmed roar of the passing wind is the combined sound of thousands upon thousands of cries and squawks and trills, the noise of the bird park writ large.
—Where are all the people? you ask.
—I do not know. In all the time I have been here, I cannot remember encountering anyone other than my brothers, the Undine and Ming Liu. And you.
—Was it always like this?
—It does not appear so, Wayan says. —At one point this whole area must have been a great metropolis, a thriving region of commerce. You see how tall the buildings are. Now, Jurong encompasses everything, all of Singapore, stretching up into Malaysia and Thailand, and down into Indonesia, where I am from.
—So how did you come to work in this place?
—I ... you know, I no longer remember. I have been here a very long time, but I cannot actually recall when or how I first came here. Isn’t that strange?
—Do you think the Undine knows?
—It is possible. She knows many things. I suppose I never really considered the question before now, content to do my work. Perhaps I shall ask her.
You pass the next minutes in silence, staring out at the verdant landscape, Wayan stolidly operating the controls. The flight brings you parallel to a wide river that runs the entire length of what used to be Singapore, a vast blue bifurcation in an otherwise field of green. In the distance, at the river’s source, rises a gigantic waterfall at least a thousand feet tall. The spray is visible even at this distance, powerful in its magnitude. And the déjà vu hits you, and you know you’ve been here before.
Something about this place, it gnaws at your guts, at your cullions, an importance. Ming Liu says the Undine has all the answers, but it’s more than that, more than just the promise of knowledge. It is the feeling of inevitability, as if you were meant to come here, that this is somehow right.
Wayan maneuvers the zeppelin to a landing platform at the waterfall’s cliff, discharges the mooring cables, extends the flexible gangplank. The hummingbird flaps slow and slow and slow and stop. He presses more buttons and the airship sighs, as if the trip has exhausted it
. You look back to Ming Liu, yawning and stretching in the bean bag.
The three of you disembark, the warm mist making the air heavy, hard to breathe. Underneath the cross-hatched metal platform: a spiral stairway, stretching down, all the way down, the bottom obscured, disappearing into mist and distance. Ming Liu takes the lead, and the three of you start down, the steps slippery from condensed vapor, every inch of handrail and stair and support covered with rust. You briefly wonder about the stability of the structure, whether it will hold your combined weight, but as you progress you hear no groans, no straining metal, and it’s entirely possible the rust is the only thing holding the stairway together.
You descend for nearly an hour before stopping to rest. Your clothes are saturated and Ming Liu’s short spiky hair is plastered to her skull. From several hip pockets, Wayan produces bean paste balls, seven-treasure dumplings wrapped in banana leaves, and bars of tamarind candy: sweet, salty and chewy. Munching without words, the roar of the falls preventing conversation, and after finishing, the descent begins again, down and down and down. You lose all sense of time, as if you have been walking these stairs your entire life, the step-step-step a hypnosis, a trance, down the spiral forever, the aching in your calves and quadriceps always there. Haven’t you reached the center of the earth already?
A few close calls, wetness on the steps or handrail, a brief vertigo, a momentary slip but a quick recovery. No one loses his or her balance, grabbing for the handrail, the bolts coming free, eaten away by rust and time, as he or she plummets end over end, a wordless shriek, disappearing into the mist, swallowed up by the natural world. You almost prefer something like that to this endless walking.
And then, abruptly, you stop. You’ve reached a wide landing, cross-hatched with moss and clover and bird droppings, though you’ve seen no birds in the vicinity, with a plank that leads behind the waterfall, perhaps to a cave in the rock. Ming Liu smiles at you, squeezes your hand, says something you can’t hear.
You don’t want to go inside. This place curls up in your stomach and scrabbles like a bag of rats. You’d happily stay on the landing, getting wetter and wetter from mist and spray, skin wrinkling and puckering, a meat statue for all time, ossifying, calcifying, an everlasting reminder of cowardice, but then Ming Liu and Wayan nudge you gently from behind, propelling you onto the plank and beyond the waterfall and into the cave.
Only, it’s not a cave. The roar of the waterfall is gone, and your ears ring in the sudden silence. You stand in a vast ornate chamber, lit by candles in sconces along the walls and in holders on tables, decorated with abstract paintings and complex tapestries. Upon turning around you see no evidence of the entrance through which you passed, no waterfall, no walkway, just solid wall, wooden, or something like it. It is a chamber of royalty, intimidating. The floor is constructed of slowly shifting black and white tiles, constantly forming new patterns, fluid art. At the far end of the room is an intricate fountain, three layers of marble animals spouting water from mouths and other orifices and cisterns, and on the top sits the most beautiful woman you have ever seen, made entirely of water.
—Welcome back, Dane, she says, her voice crystal clear and immediately familiar. —It is good to see you again.
She hurts your heart, her beauty a palpable thing in the chamber, a gravitational well, drawing your attention and fixing it. The dim light from the candles bends to flatter her every curve, while simultaneously reflecting off of her liquid form, throwing wavery patterns onto the walls and the floor. You feel an intense urge to kneel before her, to pledge your undying loyalty, but you remain standing.
—You know who I am, she says.
—You are the Undine.
—That’s correct. Partially. I am the water goddess and the ruler of this place. I was there when the world cooled and the elements formed, springing to life from the natural magic of this new existence. As were you.
—I was?
—Yes, Dane. You are my brother, and I am your sister.
The Undine stands, and an arc of water trickles from her position down to the floor at your feet. She steps into the arc as if it is an escalator, and travels the short distance to directly in front of you, her liquid conveyance disappearing into her form, reassimilating into her body. The barest touch of her fingers on your cheek and you are sobbing, though you can’t think of why. Her smile is beatific. You cannot imagine being a sibling to this goddess.
—I know, she whispers, a susurration that reverberates throughout your body, and all at once you feel exhausted, and the only thing you want to do is sleep in the presence of this beautiful woman, this creature who fills you with longing and shame. You sink to your knees and close your eyes, feeling her hand on your bald head as the world slips away and you sink into the darkness of dream.
~
You awaken in a large bed of silk sheets, naked, surrounded by pillows, in a room decorated with Chinese characters and delicate watercolor landscape artwork. It feels as if you have slept for days, your mouth gummy, your eyes crusted at the corners. Yawn and stretch, and there is a tureen of water on a table next to the bed from which you drink, greedily. You stop for a moment, suddenly struck with the notion that you are drinking the Undine, that this is her sleeping place, and you find that you don’t care, that you would drink her down completely if you could, in order to feel closer to her.
You roll out of bed, the tiled floor cool on your bare feet. The clothes you were wearing are stacked neatly on a small table next to the bed. You dress quickly, not bothering with the hiking boots, happy to feel the cool floor with your toes, and then step out of the bedroom and back into the main chamber. The Undine is nowhere to be seen.
Next to the fountain is a dining table for one, adorned with a shiny red tablecloth and laid out with an unusual meal of cooked fish, a lychee bunch stuffed in its mouth, and next to it a glass of pale wine. As you get closer, you identify the fish as one of the amphibious weasels swimming around in the swamps of Jurong. A slice has been cut and displayed on a bone china plate, the food still steaming, and the smell makes your stomach clench with hunger. Saliva springs into your mouth as you sit down to the table.
You alternate between pieces of the weasel and the golf ball-sized lychee, a mixture of fishy and sweet tastes that dissolve on your tongue. The wine is in actuality a type of mead, a powerful concoction with all the flavors of springtime, honeysuckle and jasmine and flowers in bloom, and you stop at half a glass, wary of becoming drunk on the ambrosia. After finishing the weasel and the fruit, leaving nothing but the head and bones, you sit back in the chair, pleasantly full, content. Happy.
Movement from behind you, delicate footsteps, and the Undine appears at the side of your table.
—Feeling better?
—Yes. Thank you.
—I suppose you have many questions. Let me start by saying that I wish your amnesia had not been necessary. Hurting you is the last thing I wanted to do.
—You did this to me?
—Yes.
—Why?
—You had become obsessed with the nature of this place.
—Jurong?
She nods. —You could not handle the reality of the situation, that Jurong is a prison, a fictive imagining. After an eternity of folly and trickery, it is my punishment, and yours as well. We were sent here by a man you and I both wronged, one I had seen die with my own eyes. But he was just the agent of retribution for a hundred thousand acts of pain and ruin.
—This is a prison? Is there any way out?
—No, and this is what drove your rage. I still see this rage within you, still burning, ready to leap out and consume us all.
You breathe slowly, but she is right, you can feel the frustration and humiliation rising again, like a living thing.
—And I take most of the blame for our being here. You always followed my lead, obeyed my commands, like a trusted lieutenant. But I was the one behind all our schemes, our reign of amoral terror, done for my amusement. If I
had not ordered you to kill the one who sent us here, we never would have been enslaved in the first place.
You smell smoke, burning cloth, and realize you are scorching your own clothing. It is her fault that you are here, trapped in this jungle setting. Who is she to take your memory, to rob you of your identity?
Between gritted teeth, you say, —How long have we been here?
— It is impossible to tell. Time moves strangely in this place. Many decades, if not centuries.
You explode.
The Undine throws up a protective shield of water, but it evaporates in seconds. She screams, a multi-harmonic shriek that would shatter glass, the sound ringing in your ears as her form is completely transformed into steam. The walls of the Undine’s chamber burst outward, and you see the waterfall in front of you, and it boils and evaporates with the power of your rage. Your feet lift from the ground and you pass through the hole in the chamber back into the outside air, your heat melting the spiral stairway on which you traveled, transforming the rust and metal into slag, the anger unending now, expanding outward in all directions.
You are a supernova, a hundred thousand nuclear bombs, the Big Bang. The energy of your wrath sears the landscape, turns to ash any living thing in the Park, the trees, the plants, the birds, the insects, the fish.
Before you, the scenery becomes a wasteland, a charred and scorched destruction. You drift down and down, to the bottom of what used to be the waterfall, now nothing but blackened rocks and ash. You scream yourself hoarse, you sob uncontrollably, the tears misting as soon as they leave your eyes. Your muscles contract to the point of pain. It isn’t fair. The screams of protest carry to the skies, but there is no answer.
You sit, alone in your misery, emptied out, the ash of a million million trees drifting around you. You are immortal, and the only thing you want right now is to die.
The Alchemy of Happiness: Three Stories and a Hybrid-Essay Page 4