by O Thiam Chin
Wei Xiang quickly makes his way through the entrance of the low-ceilinged hall, careful not to trip over any of the dead bodies lying on the sediment-encrusted floor, moving aside for the helpers making their rounds, scribbling on pieces of paper or separating the bodies according to gender and size. He passes through the men’s section, a marked-out area near the entrance, with most of the bodies left uncovered; only the worst cases are occluded by torn sections of cardboard, pieces of clothing or newspapers over their faces or severed limbs. Wei Xiang catches a glimpse of a man with a deep gash that has split open his chest, his face covered by a flimsy rag soaked through with blood, with a stone on top to weigh it down. He moves to the women’s section, near the raised platform at one end of the hall; a wood-and-copper plaque featuring the school insignia—branches of laurel and a yellow lamp—hangs on the peeling wall above the platform. Dead children have been placed on the platform, lined up in neat rows, with white plastic sheets and blankets covering their bodies.
Wei Xiang preps himself mentally as he starts to examine the first row of dead women’s bodies. The faces of the women—ashen, grim, distorted—imprint themselves like a hot branding iron into his frayed, exhausted mind. Every face is a torture, and every anticipation of possible recognition raised and thwarted leaves him stricken with a deepening sense of futility. After the fifth body, Wei Xiang blanks out unwittingly. For a fleeting moment, he can’t remember anything about Ai Ling—her face or any of her features; she has become a phantasm, a figure made up of a multitude of disembodied, indistinguishable parts. What kind of ears or eyebrows or lips does she have? Does she have a scar or a mole? Nothing comes to mind. All the faces he sees are the same to him, each possessing a similar death mask. He closes his eyes to pull himself together, to let the images of the faces fall away. Then, hardening his resolve, Wei Xiang continues down the line to the next row of bodies, lifting the coverings and taking quick glances. He holds his breath; the air in the hall has thickened, and the helpers who wear improvised face masks made of dirty rags and handkerchiefs are fanning themselves with cut-outs made of cardboard.
Wei Xiang pauses beside a body, the face concealed by strands of long hair but clearly missing both eyes and nose; his gaze glides down the body, to check its shape and proportions for any recognisable traits or features—does Ai Ling have a mole near her right breast? Or a pale crescent scar on her hip? He covers the body and catches his breath, emptying his mind of the image of the woman’s face. From somewhere, he hears a shout and sees men bringing in another dead body, dropping it on the floor with a dull thud. Two women rush to identify it, pointing to the platform; one of them speaks in a firm voice to a helper who is propping himself up with both hands on his thighs, panting visibly.
Wei Xiang presses on. Nobody has stopped him so far from looking at the bodies, though he notices one or two helpers giving him strange, puzzled glances. After examining the last body in the section—a heavyset woman in her late forties with half-shut eyes, white-purplish lips and a stunned scowl on her face—Wei Xiang stretches, feeling the tension in his neck and waist, the nagging ache in his lower back.
He looks back towards the entrance of the assembly hall and sees the silhouette of a young boy standing there alone, his small form dark against the harsh sunlight from outside. By the time Wei Xiang blinks and clears his vision, the boy is gone. He wonders how a kid could have sneaked into the school compound, with the guard at the gate.
Wei Xiang notes the time on his watch: already half past four in the afternoon. He has spent more than two hours searching the assembly hall for Ai Ling. The stale air barely stirs, permeated with a strong, unbearable stench; Wei Xiang feels his nausea getting worse, so he steps outside. The helpers have finished constructing the makeshift tent in the courtyard and have placed Red Cross signs on the dark green canvas. Several people carry bundles of blankets and large boxes of medical supplies into the tent, the flaps tied as wide as possible to allow unobstructed entry. A few wooden tables sit at the entrance, with a radio crackling with alternating bursts of static and voices. From where he stands, Wei Xiang can hear muffled voices. A blue pickup truck pulls into the school’s driveway and disgorges a few young men in uniforms, who move in swift strides to the tent, led by a stout man with a severe buzzcut. A young woman with dishevelled hair and tired features stands up nervously to speak to the soldier, and passes him a handful of documents.
Wei Xiang turns towards a covered pathway that leads to the back of the school, where there are three blocks of classrooms each two-storey high, a garden gone riotous, a scummy pond filled with floating aquatic plants, and a cobblestoned quadrangle. Along the corridors, a few men, thickly bandaged about the head and torso, are groaning and futilely swatting the flies from their bleeding wounds. Wei Xiang looks into the classrooms, giving them a thorough scan; most of the rooms are packed to capacity, and the walls and floors filthy, reeking with a fetid odour. The women’s and children’s quarters on the second floor are not any better; outside one of the classrooms, a woman carries a child swathed in rags on her back—a girl or a boy? sleeping or dead?—undecided over whether to place the child on the cramped floor inside. In another room, a young woman is weeping over a naked boy, her cries echoing off the walls. The bodies of those who have just died are dragged out of the rooms and stacked along the corridors, to make way for the incoming injured. After checking every classroom, Wei Xiang sits on the cement steps in a stairwell and rests his face in his palms. His head is starting to throb with a vicious intensity. He needs to head back to the school hall, he’s not done yet; there are bound to be more bodies now. He steels himself against the thought of this endless task, and then pushes himself to move.
Back in the assembly hall, the stench has become overwhelming, rushing out to hit Wei Xiang in the face before he has even stepped inside. Four standing oscillating fans have been set up to alleviate the situation, but they do nothing more than stir the miasma into a thick, putrid stew. Wei Xiang holds his shirtsleeve to his nose, trying to block out the smell, but it’s useless. Everywhere he turns, he is overcome by the corporeality of death. The helpers are still carrying in new bodies, forming additional lines that come up all the way to the entrance of the hall. A group of men with pens and clipboards and cameras is examining the corpses, taking snapshots and jotting down notes. On the concrete walls, beside the broken-paned windows, a woman is taping up sheets of paper, some of them showing grainy photographs.
Wei Xiang looks around, unsure where he has left off before. A pair of bloated legs with patches of dark bruises sticking out of a thin blanket catches his eye. He lifts the cover and recoils backward when he sees that a part of the head has been sheared away, revealing the mushy, wrinkled surface of the brain. Wei Xiang feels the bile rising at the back of his throat, and before he can take another step, the vomit gushes out of him and onto his shirt, his hands, the dead woman on the floor. He stumbles outside and squats at the clogged drain, puking and shaking in violent spasms, as if his body were trying to purge itself of something horrible inside him. He retches for a long time, then wipes his mouth on his sleeve, and sinks to the ground. It’s impossible. There is no way he can go back in. Fighting his growing despondency, Wei Xiang stares at the faces of the curious onlookers peeking through the chain link fence. Then he sees the boy again.
Standing next to two middle-aged local women dressed in floral-print blouses and dark pants, the boy is staring at him. The look on his scarred face is not hostile, but hovers in a state of neutrality and blankness. Standing motionless amongst the crowd at the fence, the boy seems composed, unruffled by the tide of noises and commotion around him. Wearing a dirty white singlet and a pair of drawstring khaki shorts, he looks like any other street kid in Phuket, who might be playing beside the busy lanes of traffic, or panhandling the passers-by for money or sweets or pens. Getting up from the ground, Wei Xiang moves towards the school gate, brushing past incoming stretchers and scores of arm-banded helpers shouting ins
tructions at one another. He bumps into a bony young girl with jutting shoulders and elbows, barely a teenager but carrying a baby slung across her back, and sends her toppling to the muddy ground. She shows no sign of annoyance, but simply gets back to her feet and makes her way to the Red Cross tent. By the time he makes his way through the crowd and out the gate, the boy is no longer standing at the fence. Frantically, Wei Xiang scans the area and again spots the boy walking away at a brisk pace towards the main road. He trains his eyes on the boy’s retreating back as he manoeuvres through the crowd. When he thinks he has almost lost him again, Wei Xiang cries out and the boy stops in his tracks, turning to look at him. At a road junction, the boy stands against the flow of human traffic, as if waiting for Wei Xiang to catch up.
But no matter how fast Wei Xiang pursues him, he can never reach the boy, who disappears momentarily and materialises somewhere farther ahead of him, always drawing Wei Xiang to him with his presence. Wei Xiang chases him down a network of lanes and alleyways across town, determined to reach him no matter what it takes, his feverish mind fired up by this all-consuming task.
16
AI LING
As the sun begins to set on the third day after the tsunami, the tiny island falls into shadows, steeped in silence. Across the iridescent spread of the sea, the waves ripple, a skin of shimmering light. The breeze, blowing from the northeast, has turned a few degrees colder, stirring the tufts of grass on the island, caressing the topography of the sand dunes.
A fine layer of condensation has formed over the woman, cooling the body that has been baking under the sun for days. In the soft, forgiving dusk light, the woman’s body exudes a frail, otherworldly beauty, as if released from its struggle. Along the stretch of beach, more things have been deposited by the waves: a few broken planks, pockmarked with decay and tiny holes where the screws used to be; a rutted car tyre; half-filled soft drink bottles; a decapitated plastic doll head with half-closed eyes.
With her head tilted westward, facing the horizon, the woman seems to be contemplating the sunset, and the trembling lights pirouetting on the surface of the sea. With her lips parted, as if in mid-sentence, the unspoken words that have pooled in her mouth slowly leak out in dark, viscous drips. The wind carries her silenced words out into the sea, scattering them like dust.
“Look at this,” Ai Ling said on the evening of Christmas Day. “It looks amazing, right?”
The quartet of friends had just settled into their seats at the seafront restaurant, and the waiter had left them with the menus. The view from where they were seated opened out to a commanding, picturesque vista of Patong Bay, with the sun sinking down to the horizon. It had taken them nearly twenty minutes to find the restaurant, following the bad directions given by the hotel bellhop, and using the grainy map that Ai Ling had photocopied from the Lonely Planet guidebook, which only showed the main roads of Phuket, conveniently leaving out the many arteries that branched out into every perceivable nook and cranny of the city. Ai Ling had insisted that they walk instead of taking a taxi or tuk tuk, and by the time they found the restaurant along the stretch of Prabaramee Road, they were all covered with a thin coat of dust and perspiration, the collars and armpits of their clothes stained dark.
Wei Xiang turned to take in the view of the sea, while Cody and Chee Seng studied the menu and scanned the drinks list. The waiter, a waifish teenager with a gaunt, acne-ridden face, came over and filled up the stain-spotted glasses with ice water, leaving the almost-empty pitcher on the table, and waited with a pen and a dog-eared notepad, smiling awkwardly. Chee Seng dismissed her with a request for more time. Ai Ling allowed her vision to follow the vanishing line of the horizon from one end to the other, noting the gold-and-red swathes of light piercing through the heavy, low-lying clouds. From somewhere, hidden out of view, Ai Ling could hear the gentle bobbing of longtail boats and the occasional cawing of seagulls.
“What do you feel like having?” Wei Xiang spoke up, drawing her attention.
“You order. I’ll eat anything,” Ai Ling said, turning back to the sea.
Wei Xiang, in turn, deferred to Cody and Chee Seng when the waiter came around to take their orders for dinner. They picked papaya salad and fried spring rolls for starters; green curry, minced pork with basil leaves and sweet-and-sour tilapia for entreés; and held back on dessert, unsure whether they could finish what they had already ordered. The restaurant was sparsely decorated: a few old-looking tribal masks hung up on the wall, a Chinese scroll of unintelligible scribbling, and a bland painting of an island sunset. Couples and small groups trickled into the restaurant from time to time, and the din of chatter soon filled the room. The sun had submerged halfway into the sea, sending out its last rays of the day.
“Nice little place, great view,” Chee Seng said, taking out his Motorola phone from his pocket to snap a few pictures of the scenery. “You can never take a bad picture with such a view, it’s just impossible.” He previewed the pictures and showed them to Cody.
“Yes, you’re right. I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of seeing this,” Ai Ling said, and held Wei Xiang’s hand on the tabletop, giving it a gentle squeeze. She sipped from her glass of water. “See, I made the right choice in picking this place, right?” The guys chorused their approval in unison.
The food soon arrived, and the conversation turned to past relationships.
“You wouldn’t believe the kind of guys Cody dated before,” Ai Ling said. “Some of them were plain creepy.”
“Just one of them,” said Cody. “You make it seem like I dated so many guys, which I didn’t.”
Ai Ling went on: “Remember that one guy, the one who worked in the bank? He locked you out of his place one night when you came home late and refused to let you in, all because you forgot to tell him you would be late. You called me after that, so pissed off, and didn’t know what to do. I had to calm you down.”
“You’re just being overly dramatic with your storytelling. It didn’t happen that way. I just panicked, for no good reason. Okay, enough about him,” Cody said, noticing Chee Seng looking at him.
“You never told me this before,” Chee Seng said.
“There’s nothing to say. It all happened in the past, water under the bridge,” Cody said, and quickly changed the subject. “Wah, so much food left.”
“What I could not understand was why you stayed with him for another two months before you finally broke up with him,” Ai Ling said. “He was such an asshole, so overbearing, possessive and demanding. He bullied you into submission all the time.”
“But you’re seeing it from just one point of view. You don’t know unless you’re in my shoes. It’s hard to understand, even for me. He had a nice side to him, and he treated me well.”
“He pestered you for months after the break-up,” Ai Ling said, unable to stop herself. Cody glared at her, but was silent.
“Hey, why are we talking about all this?” Wei Xiang said.
“Ask your wife. She brought it up first. She always likes to make a big production out of my past,” Cody said.
“But your life is always filled with drama, and anyway, it’s way more exciting than mine. I live vicariously through you, you know that, right?” Ai Ling said, and Cody rolled his eyes.
“Well, you guys seem to be quite stable,” she said, nodding at Chee Seng. “How long have you been together now? Eight, nine years? You guys are doing well.”
“Ten years, come April next year,” Cody said, looking over at Chee Seng.
“You guys are like practically married, anyway. Ten years, that’s long, that’s like a lifetime,” Ai Ling said. The men laughed.
“Yup, and it feels like it, too,” Chee Seng said. Cody punched him lightly on the arm and creased his face into a mock-wounded expression.
“Maybe you should consider, you know, getting married. Maybe move somewhere, like Canada, to get hitched.”
“No lah, don’t be ridiculous. It’s not for us. Remember we are Singaporea
ns. We are too risk-averse,” Cody said. “I’m happy where we are now, with what we have. What’s the point of getting married, anyway?”
“Don’t you want your commitment to each other to be recognised, in one way or another?”
“In Singapore? Gays getting married and being lawfully recognised? Who are you kidding? You must be joking. It’ll never happen in a hundred years. And what’s the use of getting married overseas, and then coming back with a meaningless certificate that’s worth nothing here?”
A loud crash suddenly erupted from the entrance of the kitchen, where two waiters had collided into each other, sending a tray of empty glasses and a plate of fried chilli fish to the ground. The manager of the restaurant hurried over from the cash register and scolded the waiters loudly, instructing them to clear up the mess with a mop and some wet towels.
“I’m just saying, that’s all,” Ai Ling said. Wei Xiang waved a waiter over to refill the drinks.
“How about you two? How long have you been married now?” Chee Seng asked, taking a sip of water.
“Seven years. We dated for three years before getting married,” Wei Xiang said.
“That’s long too,” Chee Seng said.
“You know how it is with a woman like Ai Ling, the moment she set her eyes on me, she was head over heels in love and pursued me until she got me,” Wei Xiang said with a smirk.
“Says who? You bloody liar,” Ai Ling said, slapping Wei Xiang’s hand. “You’re the one who had to chase after me, okay? I didn’t make any move on you, just for the record.”