Surrogate Protocol

by Tham Cheng-E

“Who?” Robert sounded tetchy. His extinguisher, almost empty now, protested in stuttering spurts.

  “Rachel!” Arthur yelled into Robert’s ear.

  Robert did not answer. The men who were with him had already retreated yards behind him. Part of the burning drapery had fallen over the watch counters, and the glass cases were shattering in the heat. Flames rolled across the ceiling, voraciously consuming the snowy trails of cotton wool that hung from them. Catenary lights stretched and melted and dispensed drippings of molten plastic.

  The men recoiled from the heat. A flash shot across the ceiling boards and flames appeared over the lingerie section just across the lobby. Molten drippings ignited racks of nylon petticoats. Nearby, mannequins at the women’s section fell prey to the radiant heat. Behind them rows of taffeta dresses flared in the updrafts before disintegrating in the billowing flames. Headwear shrivelled and succumbed to the conflagration.

  From the lobby a man came bounding over, his face contorted in anguish. “There are people in the lifts!” the man told Robert in a hoarse croak. “The doors won’t open!”

  “Good God almighty…” Robert tossed away the extinguisher and rushed over to the pair of lifts, trailed by Arthur and a few other men. Someone had brought tools: a wrench, pliers and a few screw-drivers.

  When Robert and Arthur arrived, the descending fumes had already swallowed the left shaft. The car in the right-hand shaft hung stranded between the first and second floors, its grilles opened. But the inner set of doors remained closed, and the teary, desperate voices of the trapped, most of whom were women, coalesced into a muddle of screams and manic pounding.

  There was hope nonetheless; the lower half of the car in the right-hand shaft was visible, and opening its inner doors just by a foot would allow sufficient passage. Someone yelled across the lobby for help, and Arthur heard something about a tourist and a pregnant woman. Aini. Dread closed its claws over Arthur’s heart. And where is Rachel?

  He inserted a screwdriver into the seam between the doors and Robert attempted the same. They pried and bent their tools in the process, but the doors grudgingly permitted only a quarter-inch gap and no more. The screaming grew desperate in the slightest sliver of hope, and beyond the gap Arthur could see the fitful, erratic movements of fingertips.

  Twice he yelled Rachel’s name into the gap as he pried, and in response obtained only panic-stricken screams. He pried on, now with frenetic haste, and no longer knew if the tears rolling down his cheeks were wrung of fear or smoke.

  Beside him Robert tried in vain to insert the head of the wrench into the gap, having already discarded two bent screwdrivers. Charged with adrenaline, he cast off the wrench and wedged his fingers into the gap. Arthur did the same, and in both directions the men pulled with all their might. But the doors yielded no farther than they already had.

  The smoke at the ceiling began descending as a rippling grey shroud. Everything felt blisteringly hot: the metallic tools, the lift door, the air around them. The first floor was engulfed and in imminent danger of a flashover. Only the lobby was spared, for now.

  Outside, store employees abandoned their efforts in fitting a fire hose into a nearby fire hydrant and rushed back into the burning store. They arrived to find the men fitfully working over the jammed lift doors with their bare hands. More fingers entered the gap, and Robert gave the count: “One, two, three, pull!”

  Still the doors refused to budge. The wailing in the lift was falling to a whimper.

  Arthur’s grip lost traction, and Robert’s arms slackened when he gave himself over to fits of violent coughing. The men cringed, squinted, their noses ran and their skin blistered. A man, daunted by the heat, fled the scene. Before long, Robert was plucked away from the lift and hauled to safety. Arthur would not leave. He went on heaving at the doors; teeth clenched in silent anguish, eyes red with despair, the tips of his finger flensed and raw. Two men wrapped their arms around him and tore him from the doomed lift, when at last his mouth fell open in a scream of agony.

  Plumes of black smoke poured copiously from Robinsons’ main entrance. Flames, proud and triumphant, roared forth from the windows on the second and third floors and began licking their way up the fourth. An audience stood in a wide arch that afforded a safe distance from the burning building. Fire engines, having encountered obstruction along Raffles Mall, failed to deploy and had to back slowly into a small street for a detour.

  Arthur lay on the lawn and wept to the crash of chandeliers and the sporadic thuds and bangs of exploding hairspray bottles. Palls of smoke passed across his sight, and beyond them he saw that the sky was stunningly blue.

  Rachel would’ve loved to see this.

  We haven’t even kissed…

  11

  HYPNOSIS

  LANDON SITS AT the edge of his bed, hair tousled, jaws painfully locked. The ache of sorrow lingers in his chest and his throat feels parched and lumpy—the residuum of weeping. But he doesn’t remember the dream.

  A pile of yellowed newspaper clippings of the Robinsons fire reminded him of someone named Rachel from an entry he read last night. He reads it again like fiction, with a sense of detachment and indifference, as if it had never been a part of his life. There isn’t any more Rachel in the entries after. No Clara or Hannah either.

  All erased; in word and flesh.

  A note on the coffee table bears Cheok’s scratchy capitals, telling Landon to call him for supper when he is done for the day. He leaves it on the coffee table where it remains visible, and spends the morning sorting out antiquities that he might sell at an online auction.

  In the afternoon, he arrives at downtown Telok Ayer and sits ponderously in a food centre eating spiced noodles and fried dumplings. He feels unnerved, like a lamb waiting in its pen for some unspecified slaughter.

  He pushes away his bowl and goes outside for a smoke. He pulls out his pipe—a briar woodsquare shank billiard—flicks a match and lights the old tobacco inside. He draws, squints and exhales in quick bursts to get the embers going. Then he opens the carefully-preserved napkin from yesterday and passes a finger across Clara’s hand.

  / / /

  At the psychotherapy clinic an assistant—a slender, bespectacled lady—escorts him to a plush armchair that almost swallows him. The space is furnished with two more armchairs and a glass coffee table. The carpeted floor clashes with the wallpaper, which has squiggly vertical lines that look as if they have been drawn with felt markers. Certificates adorn one wall. A copper plaque reads:

  E W Peck

  MBBS (S’pore), MMed (Psychiatry), MMed (Psychotherapy), GDip

  (Neuropsychiatry)

  Dr Peck is a bird-like man with a narrow face and wilting cheeks that pull the corners of his lips down with them. The back of his head is shaped like an egg and his pate gleams beneath thinning hair. He receives Landon cordially and takes time poring over records of their previous sessions behind a delicate pair of reading glasses, turning the crisp white pages with the measured, deliberate movements of a sage.

  “We’ve had two hypnotherapy sessions,” he says. “You think they’re effective?”

  “I’m dreaming a lot more these days,” says Landon.

  “Sounds like progress.” Dr Peck eyes him over the rims and gives him the assuring smile of a medical professional. “The results from the neurologist are in.” He takes a document and scans it quickly. “Your brain function suggests a possible onset of psychogenic amnesia, or maybe TGA, though it’s rare for a person your age. You were born in—”

  “Nineteen seventy-two.”

  “It normally happens to much older people, like in their sixties or seventies.”

  Landon nods. He already knows how much of a freak he is.

  “Your PET and EEG indicate varying signals from the temporofrontal region of your brain.” He circles his pen over a scan of Landon’s brain in psychedelic colours. “The pattern is slightly different from what we see in most people. Something in that region is telling y
ou different things—things we don’t yet understand.”

  “You mean it’s controlling my body in a different way?”

  “Possibly,” says the doctor. “Have you been experiencing physical discomfort? Pains? Aches? Things that suggest an illness?”

  “I haven’t been ill for a long time.”

  “That’s the strange bit.” He points at Landon with his pen. “You seem to be a literal case of being wired differently.”

  “You mean I should’ve been ill?”

  “Or feeling ill, unless you’ve adapted to some kind of genetic mutation.” Dr Peck’s head lists slightly. “Perhaps in a manner observed in savants.”

  “So I’m supposed to be a genius.”

  “Yes, but you’re not,” Dr Peck blurts a little too carelessly. He breaks into a bashful laugh. “Sorry. Meant that as a question. No offence.”

  “None taken.”

  Dr Peck pushes up his glasses and returns to the document. “You said the hypno helped. So how much of your memories come in dreams?”

  “Slightly over half of them.”

  “And what were they about?”

  Landon frowns. He decides to leave out the part about his corny quest for a forgotten past and a mystery woman. “You mean the content of the memories?” he says.

  “I understand they might be personal.”

  “It’s just that I tend to forget most of them by the time I wake up.”

  Dr Peck nods. “Whatever you can remember.”

  “They’re about events that happened over 30 years ago.”

  “Childhood?”

  “Yes.”

  “Detailed ones?”

  “Quite,” says Landon. “Most of them are random, isolated scenes that don’t make much sense. But I could tell their age by their details.”

  Dr Peck pouts approvingly. “What kind of details?”

  Landon blows air through his cheeks. “Well…telephones, street scenes, music, car types. Especially car types—they’re quite telling.”

  “Fascinating.” Dr Peck grins. “We talked about semantic and procedural memories the last session. Do you remember them?”

  “Yes. I’ve written them down.”

  “How would you rate them?”

  “Good, no problems with work or knowledge.”

  “How about immediate episodic memories?”

  “Worsening by the day.”

  Dr Peck holds up a document and scans it with a habitual frown. “The changes in your brain patterns are quite consistent with our hypno findings. They might be affecting the temporal lobe and the brainstem physically; good or bad we don’t know yet.”

  Landon says nothing.

  “Then again hypnotherapy remains a controversial subject in this field. It is experimental but it generates results. With your consent I think we should continue it.”

  “Bring it on.”

  The doctor’s eyebrow twitches at the alacrity in Landon’s response. With a stately swing of his arm he beckons him towards the clinical bed at the other end of the room.

  “As always I’ll have to regress you first,” Dr Peck says, drawing up a chair. “Whether you move forward or deeper back in time depends on your responses.”

  The assistant enters the room, uncovers the EEG recorder, rolls it beside Landon, and begins to attach electrodes all over his head. She then offers him an eye-patch, which he politely declines because he has no problems keeping his eyes shut. The assistant turns down the lights. In the darkness he hears a few melodic beeps from the recorder, then Dr Peck’s trained, reassuring voice.

  “I want you to liberate your limbs. Every joint, every muscle. You are soft, limp, like a doll on a couch.”

  Silence.

  “Your body is free. You are so relaxed that your slack limbs flutter at the lightest breeze. You find yourself slipping from the bed like the slow, viscous flow of oil. You let yourself slip, because you know you are perfectly safe.”

  Silence. The shuffling of papers. A beep. The scribble of a pen on a pad.

  “You are a feather drifting slowly through air, spinning. You are falling deeper, and below your feet there is a vortex. You are slowly entering this vortex.”

  Silence. A gentle hush, a caressing breeze.

  “You are approaching the vortex, and I shall count, from ten to one.”

  Silence.

  “At the end of the count you will pass beyond the vortex. At the end of it you will emerge into the daylight of a distant past. You alone know where you are going. Now you will hear my count—of ten…nine…eight…”

  The body floats, the buoyancy lightens. “Five…four…three… two…”

  Silence. I see light.

  “One.”

  / / /

  Light glimmers above a rippling surface. Landon blinks repeatedly and feels moist tracks down the sides of his face. His vision sharpens and focuses upon the fluorescent light tubes with its reflector fins set into the ceiling. He inhales in alarm and lurches forward. A hand touches his chest and pushes him back onto bed. In his pounding heart he feels a subsiding rage.

  The assistant waits by the bedside with water in a plastic cup. Landon takes it and almost crushes it. Dr Peck sends her outside and picks up a pen and pad and leans against a filing cabinet. “Do you remember anything?”

  “Lights,” Landon drawls.

  “Any sensation of pain, negative emotions?”

  “Sadness, fear, anger…” Landon stares absently at the floor. “Did I do anything?”

  Dr Peck scribbles. “Do you recall any physical pain?”

  “No. What exactly did I do?”

  “Any dialogue? Words?”

  “No.”

  “You recall any objects? Persons?”

  Landon sighs. “I don’t remember anything.” “Nothing?”

  “No, Dr Peck,” he says. “Would you mind telling me what exactly happened? Like was I running away from someone or something?”

  “No, Mr Lock.” Dr Peck lowers his pen and pad and looks at him. “It appears to me that you were trying to kill someone.”

  12

  JANUARY 1969

  THE TAXI, A dusty little black Austin Cambridge A60 with a yellow top, sputtered away on worn-out tires, trailing a cloud of sooty exhaust. Tembusu trees and coconut palms rustled, and even in their shadow Arthur baked in the tropical heat and caught the greasy fragrance of the brilliantine in his hair. The glare of daylight leapt at him from the whitewashed walls of the two-storey house. It had a steel gate webbed in sinewy, floral motifs. He brought his hands down on it and rattled it hard on its hinges.

  He had traced this place from the records of the residence hall in London. The day after Hannah left him he figured whatever that was arranged for him in London must have had some form of legitimate administration. Someone had to fix up the residences, the contacts, the jobs he took and so on. Using the pretext of a change of address, he got the residence office in London to reveal the original address to which their mails were sent.

  The address they gave led him here.

  Since he got back from London Arthur had visited the house so many times he had worn out his welcome. The landlady had declared him an obsessed, deranged lover who’d stab Hannah dead before killing himself in a calculated act of passion.

  Now with an expression as grim as death she swaggered up to the gate like an empress en route to proclaim the execution of a common thief. Cheeks, pale and blowsy, drooped into jowls. Her hair was impossibly black, styled in an olive-shaped bouffant and held up with plenty of hairspray. Her demeaning gaze lanced into him and from her lips came a fusillade of dialect.

  Arthur slid a bunch of folded notes between two fanning curves of the ornate steel motifs. She narrowed her eyes and made the money disappear into the copious drapery of her wax-print garment, simultaneously executing a remarkable feat of unlocking and unlatching the gate without having to look at it. Arthur entered, but she did not lead the way. From the shrubs that bordered her lawn she pull
ed out a metal rod. It was her defence.

  The house was mostly what he had expected. It was cluttered and dark in the hallway. An old shoe rack stood by the entrance corridor of russet floor tiles with floral motifs. Brick partition walls with faux creepers.

  The landlady prodded Arthur with the rod, and when he turned around, pointed to a flight of steps that led to the bedrooms on the upper floor. “Seung min. Yau bin dai yat gan.”

  Arthur smothered his vexation. “Mm goi ler.”

  There were three sublet bedrooms. Hannah’s door had a coat of pale green paint and a round brass handle drooped and jiggled. Inside Arthur found an unadorned double-leaf wardrobe. A bed clad in white sheets flecked with tiny printed flowers. A dresser with a gilded, elliptical swivelling mirror and a small hardwood box. Everything basked in the mellow glow of daylight through orange curtains. A floral scent hung in the air like a haunting spirit. It carried with it a familiar longing that made Arthur’s his heart race.

  He sat down on the bed and ran his hand adoringly across the sheets. Against a wall he saw three sacks. He sifted through them and found clothes, some bedcovers, books, a Gideon Bible. Then curiosity drove him towards a wooden box on the dresser. It was crafted of lacquered jelutong and resin inlay. The landlady had probably fished it out of the sacks thinking she could sell it. But he could tell that it wasn’t valuable, although it was well-made. He flipped open its lid and a melody infused the room like an old perfume. In the box there were hairpins, dozens of them; ornamented and pearly, most of them murky with an oxidised crust.

  He shut the lid and killed the haunting tune.

  The wardrobe doors opened soundlessly. Mirrors on the inner panels, its interior redolent of the same familiar scent. Only a few dresses hung from an old brass bar. They must’ve been the nicer pieces. Quite a snake of the landlady to be sifting through her things like that. Arthur slid them aside one after another and stopped at one— an old, high-collared Mandarin gown in red silk and black lace.