Sofia and the Utopia Machine

by Judith Huang

  To her astonishment, Yang Zhe materialised before her, and slowly so did the houses and people of the village under the mirror-shield. They were still under it, so Sofia reached out to the edge of the boundary, and felt the familiar repelling static.

  It was disorienting to see the people she associated with Singapore and the world of her origin in this new universe. Sofia had to shake her head a few times and pinch herself to ensure it was no dream.

  At last, they were safe. They were all here, and the government and the ISD could not reach them in this world.

  Her father came up to her, his face full of sorrow.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Sofia.

  “It’s Father Lang,” said Peter. Sofia felt the bottom fall out of her heart.

  She followed Peter into the house on stilts three doors down from the blue house, which served as an infirmary.

  Father Lang was in a bed with white sheets, his face as pale as them. Everyone was gathered around the bed. He looked older than he had ever looked.

  “Sofia…” he croaked. Sofia came up to the side of the bed and clutched one of his clammy hands.

  “We’re in your new world now?” he asked.

  Sofia nodded.

  “I’m blessed…to be here…to see this…” said Father Lang between wheezes. “My faith taught me…to look for…a new heaven and new…earth…” he continued. “I believe one day this new world will come to our old one, and somehow…make it right. Make it good… again…”

  “Shhh…” Huge tears were rolling down Kirk’s face as he looked into the holy father’s face. He put a hand on Father Lang’s shoulder, trying to stop him from overexerting himself.

  “At least…I got to see this…” Father Lang trailed off.

  “No!” Sofia cried. But the effort had been too much. Father Lang lay back onto the pillow, closed his eyes and said no more.

  Chapter 35: The Oak Bed

  “Pete?” asked Clara softly.

  Peter looked at her with unfathomable eyes. He was moving towards her. Here he was, his narrow sloping shoulders, that tiny jerk of the hip that made her heart ache a little, just like he had been when he was 19.

  “Clara,” he said. Her heart was full.

  “You left me,” said Clara, her eyes dry.

  “I was arrested,” said Peter. “In the middle of the night. I didn’t have a chance to tell you.”

  “No, before that, you left me.”

  “We just had a stupid argument.”

  Clara brushed the hair out of her eyes. “No, way before that. In your heart. You left me.”

  Peter was silent.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, suddenly flushing with shame for his cowardice. “I didn’t mean for it to be like this.”

  “I was a rebound for you, wasn’t I?” Clara’s voice was low, almost a whisper. Peter stole a glance at her. Her eyes were steady, but her voice trembled on the point of the question.

  “No, I…”

  “You were still in love with her. That girl from your JC. The writer.”

  “I loved you,” said Peter helplessly.

  “I found the Greyhound bus ticket in your wallet. I asked the other Singaporeans there. They told me. They said you went down to Ithaca that weekend. To Cornell. You went there to beg her to take you back, didn’t you?”

  Peter was silent.

  “And then when she wouldn’t see you, you came back to Cambridge.”

  “I loved you,” said Peter, his eyes starting to burn.

  “No, what you really wanted was her. I was just the consolation prize. And you still dared to blame me for not being present, for not working on our marriage… You could take the high ground, couldn’t you? It was so easy in Singapore. All you had to do was say, to make your relatives understand, was that I worked too hard, that I was a career woman.” She spat the last two words out.

  “I know where you were the night you supposedly went to that conference. You were with her, weren’t you? She had flown in. I heard from her friends. You’re so stupid sometimes, you know, even though you think you’re so smart. You probably planned it months in advance.”

  “I just wanted to meet her for coffee. I hadn’t seen her for fifteen years.”

  “But you still loved her. You never loved me like that.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “Stop lying to me! I may not have a degree in English—” at this, her voice grew more shrill “—but I know how to read poetry. I read yours. And I knew it wasn’t about me.”

  “I told you…”

  “That poetry has a lag time? Of fifteen years? You think I’m an idiot? I knew you were talking to her the whole time we were working on the Machine. You were building a world together, thinking you were so clever, hiding it right under my nose. All that mythology—don’t think I don’t know. You think I have no eyes? You think I cannot feel it?”

  “Clara, I married you, not her.”

  “Because she wouldn’t marry you, smart girl.”

  “No,” said Peter. “She wanted to leave her husband. But I told her, no. Because I love you.”

  “You didn’t come back for me,” said Clara, stubbornly, tears streaming from her face.

  “I couldn’t. I was in prison.”

  “You didn’t come back for me. You came back for Sofia.”

  “She was the only one with the modifications—the link to the Machine—the only one I could contact.”

  “Because I made it that way,” said Clara, her voice dropping to a whisper. “So she would be more like the woman you really loved—the love of your life. The girl you couldn’t forget. I did it so you would love her, and maybe, because you loved her, you would love me.” She laughed bitterly. “There were always three people in this marriage…”

  They sat silently for a long time. He reached out for her hand.

  “I’m sorry, Clare—I’m really sorry.”

  “You know, all this time, I thought maybe you had left for Australia, to be with her…”

  “That didn’t happen.”

  “It might as well have.”

  Peter felt his face flush with anger. “Look at me, Clare.”

  She turned to look at him.

  “What can I do to make you believe me?”

  Clara glared at him for half a minute. “Stand up,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Stand up,” she said, her voice hard.

  Peter stood.

  “Sit down.”

  Bewildered, Peter looked at her again. Her eyes were steely. He sat.

  “Stand up.”

  Peter looked at her. He felt his heart breaking.

  “Sit down.”

  “Stand up.”

  “Sit down.”

  “Stand up.” He did what she told him to each time.

  “That’s how I felt, like a…like a puppet. Being jerked around. For fifteen years.”

  “I love you,” said Peter, looking straight at her.

  “I never changed my name,” said Clara. “I always called myself Clara Tan, even when you left.” He looked at her in wonder. And then, she opened her mouth again. “You didn’t owe me anything, you know.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When I got pregnant. I would have been okay even without you.”

  “I know. That’s what I admired about you…your resilience. But I wanted to do the right thing.”

  “Was it the right thing?”

  “I don’t know. Did you think it was the right thing?”

  “It was the thing we did. That’s all that matters now.” Her hand moved in his, and, quite suddenly, she brought it to her heart.

  “I gave you this a long time ago.”

  Peter smiled, and leaned in to kiss her cheek. They pulled each other into a strong embrace, so hard and furious that it squeezed all the air out of their lungs.

  Platonic Love.

  That was the tyrannical idea that had ruined his life.

  And he wished it hadn�
��t.

  He wished that he could have longed for this instead—for the ordinary, for the beautiful, rather than the sublime.

  Why had he needed Clara to love him that way? Wasn’t it enough that she loved him at all? Why did he insist she conform to his every need, his every idea of what true love must be?

  He could not square the tired woman, her eyes ringed with dark circles, her attention elsewhere, with the idealised spouse in his head. In his stupid, selfish narrative, he had made up someone imaginary, to play out the silly tragic scripts he wrote for them in his head.

  Not any more, he decided. He would love her, choose to love her, the way she would be loved. If that meant merely tolerance, the mundane tasks of accompanying her grocery shopping (if they could ever return to that life), then so be it. He would change it all for this. Here was the real woman, the actual flesh and blood he had pledged himself to, once upon a time, and not the mirage.

  Peter flicked through the controls of the blue sphere in the house to project a holo he had worked on in the week before they had gone to rescue Clara. The air melted around them into the small green flat. Their flat, the one in Ang Mo Kio. Their feet were on the speckled linoleum tiles. The air was humid and stuffy. The clock on the wall ticked insistently, the sound of children playing drifting in the window. It was real. They were home.

  The bed, the dust, the light were real. The tattered books, handed down to him by his grandmother, were old. The clock upon the bedside table, ticking down the time, was all too real. He loved it all. He loved her.

  He looked at her face carefully. She looked extraordinary, as though some ancient goddess had anointed her for this reunion with her favourite. But it was no goddess—it was her soft smile, lighting up her eyes. With a finger he traced her right cheekbone, then the underside of her jaw. When he brushed her hair aside, she saw a glint of grey.

  With her left hand, Clara explored the back of his head. There she felt the old scar, the one she knew had been cut by an iron bar during some inane exercise in the army.

  “It is you, isn’t it?” she breathed.

  “Yes, my sayang, it’s me.”

  Clara closed her eyes, feeling his breath on her breath. “I knew it,” she said.

  And the sun set, and the moon came up.

  Chapter 36: The Funeral

  It was the first funeral in the new world, a solemn ceremony marking the small colony’s beginning on its island. The Mari Kita had not had anyone die during their years on Pulau Ubin, and so they did not have any established rites.

  Sofia just knew that, as a priest, Father Lang would have wanted a Catholic ceremony. They agreed to let Peter choose the hymns, the passages to be read, and to be the master of ceremonies more generally, since they had no clergyman amongst them now.

  It seemed wrong, somehow, that the people in the Voids whom Father Lang had served so selflessly for decades did not have a part in saying goodbye to their friend.

  “Father Lang was a man for the whole world,” said Sofia. “He helped me, he helped and loved many people from all walks of life. We shouldn’t just bury him in the ground. He should be sent out into the world the way he sent himself out in his life.”

  So it was decided that they would send Father Lang off in a boat, a sampan very much like the sky-blue flying one, down the river and off into the sea, to his final resting place.

  They gathered on a white sand beach at the north of the island. It reminded Sofia of Changi Beach because of the abundance of pine trees, though here the sand was smoother and whiter than the rough granules at Changi.

  Kirk had undertaken the task of laying out the body in the small wooden boat. This one was plain unpainted wood, and had been crafted specially for Father Lang by all the hands of the Mari Kita. Kirk had an artistic eye, and had laid out the body on a bed of fresh tropical flowers—mainly bright sunset-coloured birds of paradise that glowed under the pink sky, so Father Lang’s face looked as though it were surrounded by bright flames. The leaves of the palm tree also surrounded Father Lang on either side, so he looked as though he slept in a bower. A votive candle burned at his feet.

  The funeral party, dressed in black and white with small patches of black mourning cloth pinned to their sleeves, filed past the body on the boat. They paused, looked down at Father Lang’s face and bowed their heads before moving on.

  Sofia had a bundle of flowers in her hands—also birds of paradise, their architectural curves and florid sprays like a fountain. She approached the sampan tentatively, then peered in to look at his face. No glass separated her from him, yet there seemed to be a barrier between them—the barrier between life and death. The face looked drained of colour, despite Kirk’s efforts to add make-up to his cheeks and lips. The face was so impassive and expressionless it was hard to believe the gentle, humorous Father Lang had once animated it.

  “Friends, family, thank you for being here,” said Peter. “I did not know Father Lang for a long time, but I knew him in my time of need, when I needed help to rescue my wife. And before I even knew him, he helped my daughter Sofia rescue me from prison. For that I am eternally grateful. They say that friendships forged in fire are the strongest, and that was certainly true of me and Father Lang. It breaks my heart that he did not live to help us rebuild our lives here, and I have not known a kinder, more resourceful, wiser or more spiritual being than the one who lies here before you.

  “Father Lang believed that death was not the end of things. He believed in the resurrection of the body, and the life of the world to come. Father Lang died in the act of rescuing us. He lived up to his own ideal of sacrificial love, and that, I must say, is the highest praise I can think to give, for he was a man of high ideals. As we remember him in death, we celebrate his life, a life spent in the service of the powerless and the poor.”

  Peter bowed his head, and then looked up at Sofia, whose tears were falling down her face.

  “Would anyone else like to share?”

  Sofia stood up and stood in front of the boat. Her voice was steady and strong.

  “When I first met Father Lang, he asked me how I could make the world better. I didn’t really know how to answer that question, but I do know that he made things better by being kind. He took me in when I was lost, gave me somewhere to stay when I was homeless, helped me in ways I didn’t even know I required. He listened to me when I needed someone to talk to. And he told me one thing—that he was blessed that he managed at least to see us in this new world.

  “He told me he believed that one day, somehow, a new heaven and new earth would be brought to our world—the world we came from, the world of injustice and suffering and poverty and oppression. He said that we would get a second chance. I don’t know if this world is that world, but I’d like to think that maybe it is. That maybe, maybe God gave us this chance, a blank slate, to start over.” Sofia paused.

  “I don’t know why—” She stopped, then collected herself and started again. “I don’t know why we had to begin life in this new world without Father Lang to guide us, but I know that he is somewhere looking down on us, rooting for us… I can’t believe he’s just gone. He was a good man.” Sofia paused to wipe her tears. “We love you, Father Lang. I hope—I know—you’re happy, wherever you are.”

  Sofia picked up a candle and lighted it from the votive that was burning at the front of the boat. The little flame leapt high, turning wax into light. The other mourners followed her lead, their candles lit from the larger flame, and they formed a glowing semi-circle around the boat.

  Kirk began to sing the first notes of the final hymn, “In the Sweet By and By”, and the rest joined in, their voices varied yet harmonious. The little flames illuminated the trickle of tears down the faces of the people who had known and loved this man.

  Halfway through the second chorus, Peter led a few others to shoulder the boat and place it down upon the waters. With a gentle push, the prow parted the water beneath it, and the little boat, carrying its votive flame and
its precious cargo, crested and fell, riding wave after wave away from them.

  Julian put an arm around Sofia. Sofia looked up at him. He was unusually quiet. Sofia turned her head towards his shoulder and let her tears flow into his shirt sleeve, feeling the warmth and reassurance of his body in her grief. There was no need to say anything more.

  Peter walked back from the water’s edge as the boat drifted away and stood beside Clara. She, too, had tears in her eyes, as did he. Peter took Clara’s hand. She didn’t resist, instead leaning her weight on him. Kirk stood on Clara’s other side, large drops falling off his distinctive nose. He made no effort to wipe them away. It seemed they mourned more than just their friend.

  The funeral party watched the boat get smaller and smaller, until only a speck of flame could be seen, like a star in the distance, flickering over and under the waves.

  Julian turned to Sofia. He looked serious.

  “Sofia—” he began, then stopped. He didn’t really know how to phrase what he was going to say next. He knew he had to choose his words carefully. “I’m really happy you and your family are safe here,” he said, “but I don’t think I can really stay here with you.”

  Sofia looked at him. Somehow, this didn’t come as a surprise to her, even though it hurt.

  “I can’t just leave everything. My family, my country, my world. It’s wonderful here,” Julian gestured expansively, “but I need to go back.”

  “I understand,” said Sofia, biting her lower lip. “But if you leave, could you do something for me?”

  “Anything,” said Julian.

  “You know the Utopia Machine? The golden cube that opens up this place?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Dr Yang left it on Pulau Ubin. Can you please bury it somewhere safe so no one will find it?”

  “Consider it done,” said Julian, then moved to shake her hand. As he took her hand in his, the profound awkwardness and formality of this gesture made him blush. He converted the handshake to a kiss on her hand at the last minute.

  “You’ll stay in touch?” asked Sofia.

  “I think it’s probably better if we didn’t, actually,” said Julian.