“Shanti, Shanti,” I said breathlessly against the smoke. “Don’t waste your energy on this. Take them and find a way to stop Durshirah.”
“No, there has to be a way!” She coughed and retched. The smoke had grown intensely dense.
“Go now!”
“I’m waiting here to kill him, so please listen to what he says,” Gyava said coolly, addressing my friends.
Cantona had tears down his face. “We are not leaving you! Please, you’re part of this family.”
Seeing Cantona cry for the first time in my life raised a rather peculiar feeling in me. It was total acceptance of my fate. I was going to die—but it was okay because I was doing it for him. “Go!” I told him. “Forget about all of this. Go with Shanti. Diyanah can help you. Go somewhere far, where you don’t have to live like a dog on the run. This is your chance, Cantona! Find another Hilda. Be an artist. Leave, and live!”
“I don’t care if we come from different countries,” Cantona yelled. “I don’t care if we’re criminals or not. I don’t care if you’re human or undead. I’m never leaving you. We’re family!”
“Don’t be a fool!” I cried. “Go!”
A vice-like grip clamped around my neck, and I felt myself being flung back. A bright wave of pain reverberated from my back up to my temples. I let it pass, and opened my eyes. Gyava, huge and imposing, was ambling towards me.
I vaguely heard Cantona cry my name. “Shanti, Diyanah, take them away now!”
I continued scrambling back, until I reached the metal wall, and leaned against it. The wall seared my back—it had conducted heat from the flames and though it was not burning, it was scorching to the touch. My only relief was that my friends were nowhere to be seen.
Gyava, meanwhile, held a red hot length of rebar that had been pulled from the flames with his blackened hand. He swung the metal rod left and right, trying to get a sense of its weight and balance.
Then he glared at me, a crazed, searing look that, in no uncertain terms, told me my end was near.
He had marked me as a kill. He thirsted for my death. The reality of it overwhelmed me, that something could want me dead so badly. If he was going to die by flame or sunlight, he would have a final bout of sadistic fun with my easily breakable body. My mind scrambled for something positive to draw from this. I thought of my father, and how it would not be long before I would see him again.
“Stop squirming, vermin,” he growled, holding the metal rod like a spear.
I could not help but plead, “No, no, no, please no.”
But Gyava was not a creature of mercy. Pivoting expertly with his hips, he pierced the rod into my shoulder. It pushed through my flesh like a knife through butter. The searing heat cauterised the wound it created, and I smelled my own cooking flesh. A chorus of extreme pain quaked violently through the nerves. The agony sent blinding flashes in my vision, and through the horrid flickers, I saw that the rod had penetrated right through, and stuck out my back.
I cried; I wept uncontrollably. I had never felt pain like this before. A morbid thought filled my head—this would be the last earthly sensation I would feel before I died. I began coughing—I did not know if it was from the smoke that filled the place, or the fact that my breathing was becoming too laboured in my torment.
“If this were nighttime, I would have turned you,” Gyava said, pacing before me. He continued speaking, but I could not discern what he was saying. My vision and my hearing were blurring, as all the stimuli of this world began sullying through the filter of pain.
When my vision cleared momentarily, Gyava was kneeling next to me. He began slapping me, telling me to stay awake. “I need you to struggle some more, or you’re going to make the final moments of both our lives very boring.”
He reached for the end of the rebar in my shoulder, and with inhuman strength, snapped off a short portion of it. He heated it in the flames like an iron marshmallow.
Though the foreign metal in my shoulder sparked protests in my nerves, I managed to stand—barely. There was a boarded-up window by the wall. A small flame ignited in the dying embers of my mind.
I punched at the board with my left hand and caused a slight dent. It was not a thick board. Judging by the acoustics it made when I punched, the board was no thicker than a centimetre.
“What are you doing?” Gyava asked leisurely from the barrier.
I punched again, and it dented slightly more. I raised my right hand instead—the simple act of doing so reignited the sharp pain in my shoulder—and I punched, as hard as I could. The wood was splintering now, although still intact, but the resulting agony was too much to bear. I cried, clutching at my right shoulder, under where the rod had penetrated.
“Oh, human,” Gyava said with mock sympathy. He walked to me, the piece of metal he had plucked from the rod now glowed a bone-melting yellow. “Keep punching,” he said absently, as he knelt by my foot.
He held the short, cylindrical thing near my leg. I punched at the board again with my left hand. The exertion, combined with my earlier attempts, caused pain to spread through my entire body. Then it was muted out by a new, searing excruciation in my left leg. Gyava was pushing the heated cylinder into my calf, as though it were a lit cigarette he wanted to extinguish.
The pain only grew as the metal melted my skin and flesh. It took even more effort to remain standing. Tears flowed freely from my eyes, and I tasted their salt. I thought it was an appropriate final use of my tongue.
A thought churned from the inky depths of my mind: I was not ready for Death’s embrace. Driven by the weight of my anguish and the force of my pain, I punched at the board with my left hand once again. This time, my hand went clean through. There was a new pain—this time, dozens of splinters had stabbed and embedded themselves into my fist.
Below me, through the pain in my leg, I heard a soft clink. I fell, uncontrollably, onto my left knee.
“Oh, look, it hit the bone,” Gyava said—happily.
There was a sudden crash behind me as something inhumanly strong punched through the wooden wall from outside the warehouse. For a split second, I felt a cool breeze blowing against the small hairs of my left arm. A hand, thin and feminine and immeasurably strong, grabbed my wrist. Then, with a mighty heave, my entire body was pulled through. In mid-air, as splinters flew around me, I saw that my saviour was Diyanah, majestic in the morning sun, yelling some unintelligible battle cry as she hoisted my body out of the burning warehouse. I crashed to the grass, the rod cutting downwards into my flesh as it pushed against the ground. My roar of pain intermingled chaotically with my cry of freedom.
With the board gone, sunlight flooded into the warehouse and illuminated Gyava’s pallid face. The bright rays cooked the vampire; his skin and flesh melted off the bone and crackled into ash. He screamed for nearly a second before he disappeared into the oblivion.
I lay on my left side in the grass—it was the only position that afforded me the least amount of pain.
The sun shone into my eyes, shoving its way into the approaching darkness. A shadow soon blocked the light, and as my eyes opened, I saw that it was Diyanah.
“Help me pull it out,” I said to her, the words struggling to escape my throat.
“No,” she said gently. “You’ll bleed out.”
She cradled my head on her lap. Everything was cold, and I trembled pathetically, helplessly. “It’s going to be okay,” she told me, and because it was Diyanah, I believed her.
I could only respond by shivering.
“Don’t be afraid, sayang,” she said soothingly.
“I’m not,” I told her honestly, the throbbing in my shoulder and leg growing more intense. “You’re by my side.”
“I am. I am,” she told me. She kissed my forehead. “I’m here, with you.”
The side of my head suddenly smacked into the ground. I no longer felt Diyanah’s skin on mine. I looked up. She was about a metre from me now.
Diyanah wept and was pulled fart
her away in sudden jolts. She got up and tried to make her way towards me, fighting an invisible force that was dragging her away. Tights must be far enough that I was outside her spiritual boundary. I cried again. I needed her now more than ever. I wanted to yell for her but could not muster the strength.
Diyanah was the one who yelled. “Bukit Halus!”
The sawmill fire blazed behind me. I felt cold. It felt like my body was being wrung out as it approached complete shutdown.
Diyanah reached a hand out to me, but she was already too far away. Succumbing to the power of her covenant, she disappeared into the trees and out of sight. I heard her shouting my name, and I held the voice in my heart, until the reverberations faded into nothing. I fell onto my side again.
Time deliquesced, and when I found a miniscule reserve of strength to crawl away from the smouldering remains of the sawmill, the sun had begun retreating into the horizon. I shivered uncontrollably from the exertion. Everything burnt, and everything felt icy, deathly cold.
I crawled on, and eventually, the vague outline of a blue Toyota occupied my vision. I reached into the pocket of my sweatpants with my left hand and fished out a deafening jangle of keys. I unlocked the car and pulled myself into the driver’s seat. On the floor of the car were a singular almond and a bottle of water. I drank, and an exquisite relief overwhelmed my parched throat.
In the following silence, a shrill ringing began in my ears. With my left hand, I reached for the car radio.
A soothing, elderly voice came on. “It’s not time to make a change,” coaxed the voice. “Just relax, take it easy.” I closed my eyes, and my final thought before oblivion came was of the almond by my foot.
Chapter Seventeen: Fever Dream Almond Soup
I sat up. I thought I was dreaming, but it did not feel like a dream. It felt more like a transfusion of consciousness, like my mind had been decanted from a solid vessel to one made of aether and the stuff of reveries.
It had to be a dream, however. I felt no pain, and no metal rod was stuck absurdly through my shoulder.
Where I was, a white fog permeated all I could see. It was not dense and stagnant—it shifted languidly in pale, flowing wisps. They clotted into more distinct shapes. I could see thin columns supporting a white wooden platform. Panels of wood coalesced above the platform, stacked atop one another. And then the wisps settled into fog again, and before me was a great whitewashed wooden house on stilts that came up to my shoulders. It was a rumah kampong. Wooden steps led into the rumah and, with surprising ease, I climbed.
The interior was like something from a furniture showroom curated by my father. The walls were painted white with no ornaments or decoration. There was a singular couch, made from a hollowed-out tree log such that its back and bottom were gnarled and barked, but where I sat, the wood had been smoothed and polished.
The fog had followed me in, so a dense mist filled the inside of this roomless rumah. Before the couch, a tall, gaunt, balding male silhouette formed. I recognised the figure instantly. “Father!” I cried.
“You!” he cried back.
I ran to him, overcome with emotion. I was smiling at him, overjoyed to finally see him again, but the euphoria quickly died. This was my father, after all, who thought everything I did was stupid, who always wished he could have had a better son.
And, as expected, he did not look happy to see me. If he had been the father to the biblical prodigal son, it would have been a far shorter parable. Prodigal son asks for inheritance. Father goes, “Verily, thou should go fuck thyself.” Presently, my father asked irritably, “Why was I summoned here?”
I did not realise I had summoned him. Maybe he was merely a manifestation of my desires. Obviously, there was more than meets the eye with this place, and what met the eye seemed to be the wet dream of a dry-ice hoarder. “Well, I just wanted to see you,” were the words that came from my mouth.
“I’m sorry, you what?”
“I miss you, father.”
“You pulled me out of heaven because you miss me? What in Satan’s favourite polka dot blazer is wrong with you?”
This was not how I had thought our reunion would go. “I haven’t seen you in six months!”
“Of course, you haven’t!” exclaimed my father. “I’m dead!”
I sighed. This was my father as I remembered him: infuriating, insensitive, self-centred. He always seemed to be on a different page—possibly of a completely different book, too. That is, until now. “I think I am, too.”
My father gestured at the ghostly rumah. “No,” he said. “This is not dead. Dead is very different. This is a creation of your subconscious. You want something, and it seems, from the fact that I’m here, you want something from me.”
Maybe it was time I was fully honest with him. Maybe it was time I put all my cards on the…table. The fog began coalescing again and a white oak table materialised before us. Two stools appeared on either side. I sat on one. My father sat on the other. “I think I summoned you—inadvertently, I would like to point out—because I want to fix things between us.”
“What do you mean?”
The fact that he had to ask angered me. “I wanted you to come back!” I was shouting, without meaning to. “I did everything you told me not to do! I brought home whores, I did every conceivable stupid thing in that house. You said you would haunt me. You promised!” I realised how child-like I must sound, how petulant I must be to demand my father’s return.
“And so what if I did? So what if my ghost came back and haunted you? What would it achieve?”
“You haunted me when you were alive. What did that achieve? Why couldn’t you give me what you gave Uncle Jun? What you gave Pakcik Dollah?”
“What did I give them?”
“More than you ever gave me. Friendship. Kindness. Goodbyes.” I thought of the best word to encapsulate all of that. “Closure.”
“Closure is stupid, son. Closure is a contrivance created by people for one awful reason: to give their emotions more value than they’re worth. It’s a storytelling tool, so you feel that the hero’s journey is complete. But we’re not heroes, and our journey is never complete.” He gestured at his pale body. “Death isn’t even the end of our journey.”
“You’re wrong,” I said defiantly. “Closure is not stupid. Closure is a means of clearing the self of negative emotions.”
“That’s catharsis, son,” my father replied. “Catharsis and closure are two different things. Closure is the lie lovers tell one another to move on from a break-up. Catharsis happens when the lovers finally embrace the truth—that all things were leading to their separation.”
“Catharsis, then.”
“You may want to sit down for this.”
I gestured at the stool under me. “I already am seated.”
“Indulge an old man, will you? Dramatic timing is nonexistent in heaven.” My father sighed. “When you were a baby, Shiri and I travelled a lot. Neither of us believed in having a career, so we just went from country to country with you, working enough to cover accommodation, food, diapers and tickets to our next destination.”
I remembered this vaguely. My earliest memories were of loud noises and general discomfort. “What did my grandparents think of this?”
“Well, Shiri’s parents passed the year before you were born, and left her with some money.”
“What did your parents think of you travelling around with a woman you weren’t married to?”
“My parents were furious.”
I’ve seen my grandparents in old photos. They were always well-dressed. My grandmother wore well-fitted, silk kebaya dresses, while my grandfather was frequently photographed in a handsome suit and a velvet songkok. “Why?”
“Well, after we left Kampong Sri Kuching and moved to the city, my father’s textiles business grew, and he wanted me to work for him. But I did not. I wanted to see the world. Your grandfather used to think this was merely a rebellious streak, an undesirable result of your
mother’s influence. It was not.” His tone dropped to an almost juvenile indignation. “I just did not want to work textiles! Do you know how boring it is, to watch dyes set on a length of cloth?”
I thought warmly of Cantona. “Yes, I do.”
“I had a difficult relationship with your grandfather.”
“I guess it’s genetic for us, huh?”
My father lowered his gaze. It was strange to see him feel guilty. It was like walking in on God masturbating.
“What was my grandmother like?”
“She was strong, kind. In every way, she was your grandfather’s equal. And she loved you so much. Your grandmother didn’t want me travelling the world simply because she wanted to spend time with you.”
“How come I don’t remember her?”
“Well, we left for Hyderabad when you were slightly over a month old. Then we went to Colombo, Baghdad, Cairo, Istanbul, Sofia, Athens, Marseille, Paris, Bilbao, Edinburgh.” Like an old boy scout showing off his badges. “And then one cold Scottish night, when you were about five, I received a letter from my father, telling me that my mother had died of a broken heart, and it was my fault.”
“Of a broken heart?”
My father laughed. “Your grandfather had a flair for the dramatic. She had died of high fever. But I didn’t know that at that time. I genuinely thought it was my fault. I took the next flight back to Singapore. By then my mother had already been buried.” His face quickly recomposed to accommodate a heavy touch of melancholy. “I didn’t get to say goodbye to her.”
I remained silent. A thoroughly unfamiliar feeling was surging through me: sympathy for my father.
“Once I was back, your grandfather pressured me to marry your mother. He said it was immoral of me to have a child out of wedlock, to marry someone from a different religion from ours. Worse still, she’s a Jew. The following year, we had a civil marriage.”
“What took you so long?”
“I needed time to get your grandfather on board with the fact that I was not going to force Shiri to convert. On top of that, your mother and I never thought of getting married. ‘Wife’ and ‘husband’, ‘girlfriend’ and ‘boyfriend’ are just labels and contrivances that set boundaries and limitations to something boundless and eternal.”
The Minorities Page 23