Now That It's Over

by O Thiam Chin

  The previous day, he was plagued with questions about the boy—who is he? where has he come from? why isn’t he accompanied by an adult?—but now, standing close enough to touch him, Wei Xiang finds himself dumbstruck, unable to speak. He mutters a simple greeting in Thai, but it does not elicit any response from the boy. He utters another phrase, but still nothing. Apart from these pleasantries, Wei Xiang does not know how to break the silence between them. Looking around, he hopes to find someone who might be able to interpret on his behalf, but the stricken looks on the passers-by hold him back.

  The thoroughfare where they are standing has been closed off to traffic, with roadblocks on both ends, only allowing in medical supply trucks and ambulances. The media has descended on Phuket—Wei Xiang notices a small television crew setting up their equipment near a toppled two-storey shophouse, and a swarm of photographers, wearing vests with many pockets and carrying bulky bags, aiming their long-lens cameras at every sign of destruction—and for a moment he imagines himself watching these captured images and videos on the nine o’clock news back at home in Singapore, with Ai Ling beside him. Then the spell breaks: he’s still here and Ai Ling’s still missing. The present moment sucks him right back in, demanding his full attention: the noise, the heat, and the water that is everywhere he walks.

  And the boy still stands before him, motionless, waiting.

  Wei Xiang offers the bottle of water, but the boy only stares at it, not moving to take it. Houseflies whir about the boy’s head, but he does not swat them away. Wei Xiang studies the face in detail; unlike the other street kids he has seen over the past few days, with their flat noses and wide-set eyes, the boy has a sharper set of features and a fair complexion. Perhaps he’s of mixed ethnicity, Thai-Chinese. And the deep scar across his left eye. Wei Xiang can’t shake off the impression that he finds the boy familiar, that there’s something about him that triggers a vague recognition. Maybe he has got the boy’s face mixed up with the numerous faces of the dead children he has seen. Yes, he must have been confused by all those faces. Yet when he looks into the boy’s face, Wei Xiang is very certain that he has seen him before—in a different place or time.

  The boy regards Wei Xiang with the same interest, a smile raising the corners of his mouth. It’s a strange, knowing smile, one that holds a deeper meaning unknown to Wei Xiang. He returns the smile. The noises in the background come and go—the sporadic shouting, the honking of trucks, and the desolate blast of the siren. Wei Xiang and the boy seem to be in their own bubble, surrounded but untouched by the sea of people around them.

  “Who are you?” Wei Xiang finally blurts out in English. The question hangs in the air, an invisible buffer between them, before fading away.

  The boy remains silent. Then suddenly he extends his left hand and slips it into Wei Xiang’s. It’s small, light and bony, like a tiny sparrow, frail and vulnerable in his hand. He could easily crush it with little effort. The boy glances down the crowded road, turns on his heel, and steps in the direction opposite from where Wei Xiang was planning to go, towards the southern end of Phuket. The boy’s gentle tug breaks Wei Xiang’s flow of thoughts, overcoming his hesitation. He quickly follows the boy’s lead, a small seed of hope sprouting inside him.

  19

  AI LING

  Back in 2002, Ai Ling visited her aunt in the hospital daily after the car accident. She knew it was not required or expected, but the act of visiting made her feel useful, as if she were helping in her aunt’s recovery through her presence. While her aunt slept, comatose, Ai Ling would keep up a steady one-sided conversation, careful to enunciate each word slowly, keeping the topics light. With plastic tubes running to the machines that stood to the side of the bed, beeping with stubborn regularity, her aunt looked like a creature entangled in its own mess of tentacles. Ai Ling would study the numbers displayed on these machines, trying to understand what they indicated.

  No matter how she was feeling on any day, upon entering the hospital room where her aunt was staying, Ai Ling would feel a quickening sense of calm, as if she were entering a temporal state where things stood still, unchanging. She had never felt this way—whether at the childcare centre or at home with Wei Xiang—and the sense of serenity had continued to stay with her, deepening with each visit. Sitting on the bus on the way to the hospital, surrounded by other commuters, she could sense her body readying itself in anticipation, like someone preparing for an underwater dive. When she closed her eyes, she could imagine her aunt on the other side of where she was going, and if Ai Ling continued to stay very still, she could get a glimpse of her late uncle—a lonely figure in her mind’s eye, staring absently at her. These daydreams, Ai Ling told herself, were nothing more than illusions, mere flights of fancy. Yet the memory of her uncle was always at the back of her mind, a shadow hovering behind her consciousness; at times, she was afraid of confusing it with the other memories she had hoarded. Whenever she thought of her uncle or aunt, Ai Ling had to suppress the sadness, the sly encroachment of grief. She felt divided, like having many different selves working in tandem inside her, directing her down different paths. Still she was able to find the middle ground to exist, without breaking up over every stirred-up recollection. To her parents, who seemed to be having a worse time over her uncle’s death, Ai Ling was the embodiment of steadfastness. Yet, inwardly, Ai Ling knew she was barely holding everything together, always fearful of her moods running awry despite her self-control.

  After the accident, Ai Ling had tried to distract herself with reading books and articles that dealt with situations like this, and picking up pointers on how to help a person in times of trauma, though she was still unsure how she could help her aunt when she would finally wake up. Looking at her aunt’s face—placid and peaceful in sleep—Ai Ling could hardly imagine what her response would be when she later heard the news about her husband’s death. In her darker moods, Ai Ling wished her aunt would remain in her slumber and never wake up, or if her memories were all wiped clean so that she would never even know who her husband was.

  Unlike Ai Ling, her parents were industrious, keeping themselves busy with tasks and follow-ups. They would consult the doctors and nurses, arrange for further checks and scans and medication, and bring the necessary items to the hospital: a blanket, a change of clothes, packets of Milo, body and hand lotion. They barely stopped to stay in place for more than a few minutes, before they were onto their next task, keeping themselves occupied. Only once did Ai Ling see her mother standing quietly by the bed and looking down at her sister, but when she heard Ai Ling entering the room, she quickly excused herself, muttering about something she had forgotten to pick up on her way to the hospital. Ai Ling tried not to notice that her mother’s eyes were red and puffy when she picked up her shoulder bag and left the room.

  Her parents had wanted to hold the funeral without any delay. Ai Ling protested, but later dropped it when she knew it would not change her parents’ minds or decision. During the entire period of the wake—three long, seamless days—Ai Ling prayed for her aunt not to wake up from her coma, to remain in her blissfully undisturbed dream. For three days, Ai Ling was a bundle of tired nerves and fraught emotions, moving from the hospital to the funeral parlour, and vice versa, several times a day. She felt strangely disembodied, cut out of time.

  It was during those days—Ai Ling had taken a week of compassionate leave, and gone home only to sleep and shower—that she sometimes imagined the kind of conversations she would have with her aunt when she woke up. Her aunt had a measured manner of speaking, as if she were always weighing her words for the correct tone or delivery. She never seemed to hurry when she talked, and it was this particular trait of hers that Ai Ling was drawn to. She could tell her aunt anything about her life, and she would listen patiently, never once jumping in to interrupt her with her opinions or views. Though her aunt’s replies were occasionally clichéd—”You have to be more patient with him…” “A married life is full of ups and downs…” “Give
him time and his own space, and he will come back to himself…”—Ai Ling had never felt patronised or brushed over by her aunt’s advice or encouragement.

  On the last day of her uncle’s funeral, after they had cremated him, Ai Ling went straight home with Wei Xiang. When they were alone in the bedroom, Ai Ling laid her head on Wei Xiang’s chest and wrapped her arms around him. The warmth of Wei Xiang’s skin brought tears to her eyes. When she kissed Wei Xiang and started to take off her clothes, he was taken aback.

  “Are you sure? Don’t you want to rest?” he asked.

  “No, no need.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yes.”

  Ai Ling then led Wei Xiang to the bed, holding her body to his, reaching for his physical presence—a weight to hold her down when all she could feel was a benumbing sense of lightness, of being unmoored from everything around her. She felt lost, and had a terrifying desire to regain what was missing from her, to seize it back for herself. She needed Wei Xiang’s body, his physicality, to make her feel she was still alive.

  “Please, I want this,” Ai Ling said, breathlessly.

  In their lovemaking, Wei Xiang was gentle, almost too careful, with her. But Ai Ling wanted it rougher. She clamped her legs tightly around his waist, forcing him to thrust deeper into her. Still Wei Xiang remained cautious. At one point, she saw his face registering signs of held-back pain.

  “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” she whispered, when Wei Xiang finally came inside her.

  “No, it’s okay,” he said, his breath warm on her chest.

  Ai Ling held onto him until he fell asleep. In the dark, she listened to his light snoring and watched his body move through the quiet stages of sleep.

  It was easy to forget that other people existed outside one’s own realm of existence. In her preoccupation with her own thoughts, Ai Ling sometimes failed to see how her aunt’s current state was also affecting her parents, especially her mother. It did not help that her mother was never one to wear her emotions on her sleeve, unlike her father, who was much more open to expressing his feelings. Ai Ling had often wondered whether the trait—the reticence—ran in her mother’s side of the family, and in her too.

  Whenever she was in the hospital, her mother tended to her aunt with minimum fuss—covering her with another blanket, dabbing her dry lips with lip balm, changing the socks on her feet, combing her hair—and mostly when Ai Ling was out of the room, so when Ai Ling returned to the bedside, she would always notice something different about her aunt. One time, behind the closed door of the hospital room’s toilet, Ai Ling heard her mother crying, though she had tried to mask it by running the sink tap.

  A day before her aunt woke up, Ai Ling and her mother were in the hospital room—her father had returned home to rest, after a night of keeping watch—and in the midst of wiping down the mobile side table, her mother looked out of the window, staring into the distance.

  “Your aunt loves the outdoors. She would have loved the weather today.”

  Ai Ling glanced out the window and saw the leaves of the trees fluttering in the breeze, lusciously green, the sky full of clouds.

  “I’m sure she would.”

  “When she was younger, when we were still living in the kampong, she never wanted to stay indoors for long, always clamouring to go out, to the vegetable fields where my father and uncles worked, to the stream where she would catch tadpoles and small fish. Nobody could stop her. She was very stubborn.”

  “Really? But she always seems so agreeable.”

  “Don’t be fooled.” Ai Ling’s mother smiled and glanced at her sister before turning back to what was outside the window. “She hurt herself badly one time, but never told anyone. Got her foot cut by a nail. Didn’t once mention it to anyone, until she started limping the next day. The infection was really bad, took almost a week to heal properly. It was just like her to keep everything to herself until it got worse.”

  Ai Ling’s mother moved nearer to the bed. She tucked her sister’s hand under the blanket, patted it over the covers. “Why are hospitals always so cold?”

  “I’ll raise the temperature.”

  Ai Ling got up from her chair and adjusted the thermostat with the remote control. The air-con, perched over the bed, beeped once and lowered its louvres. Silence descended on the room, making it feel more confined.

  “She will come around soon.”

  The crack in Ai Ling’s mother’s voice was magnified in the quietness of the room, and Ai Ling started to cry, holding her hands up to her face, unable to halt the rapid transition from sobbing to wailing. She could feel her mother’s hand on her shoulder, light and steady, an anchor keeping her still. Her mother did not say anything, but waited till Ai Ling had finally finished before withdrawing her hand. She then left the room, leaving Ai Ling alone with her aunt.

  “Let’s go home,” Wei Xiang said later that day. He had stayed by Ai Ling’s side from the moment he stepped into the room. From time to time, he would bring Ai Ling a cup of coffee or massage her shoulders or go to the nurses with minor requests. Ai Ling would smile at him, to acknowledge what he was doing.

  “Yes, go home and rest, I’m here,” Ai Ling’s mother said. “If there’s anything, I’ll call you.”

  While walking through the hospital ward, Ai Ling peeked into some of the rooms and glanced at the faces of the relatives of the other patients. While most were serious and glum, there was sometimes laughter from a few, a snatch of cheerful dialogue or conversation. Evening was approaching fast, as the exhausted daylight slowly extinguished over the horizon. Crossing the garden compound to the hospital entrance, Ai Ling could smell the sweet leafy scent coming from the recently watered patch of grass. She found herself taking deep, long breaths, as if she had been barely able to breathe while she was in the room with her aunt.

  “She’ll be all right, the doctor said so,” said Wei Xiang.

  “I don’t know. What will she do when she hears the news, when she wakes up?”

  “One step at a time. First she needs to recover, and then you can break the news to her. It’ll take a long time for her to accept this.” In his voice, Ai Ling could sense Wei Xiang’s optimism. He had always believed in keeping his hopes up, especially when things were going wrong. Ai Ling had never had what came so naturally to Wei Xiang: an easy, buoyant sanguinity.

  “What would you do if I died?” Ai Ling asked.

  “Statistically, I’ll die before you, husbands going before wives…”

  “No, I’m serious. What would you do?”

  Wei Xiang stopped in his tracks and turned to Ai Ling.

  “I wouldn’t know what to do,” he finally said.

  That night, Ai Ling woke from a long dream in a state of panic, gripping the sheet in fistfuls. In the dream, she had been held down by something huge that loomed darkly over her, a force that broke down all her defences, despite her fight to break through. The stretch of thin light that arched over her, hovering above the darkness, was out of reach, holding out a promise—of what? salvation? survival?—something she could never come near to. When the fingers of the surrounding cold crept into her, she had let go—and only then was she able to break out of her dream and wake in her bed. She steadied her breathing until it was manageable, then got up, went to the wardrobe and changed into a new T-shirt, throwing aside the drenched one. In the kitchen, she drank two full glasses of cold water. Her mind was alert to her surroundings; the milky shafts of moonlight coming through the windows offered little illumination. Ai Ling felt a deep relief, as if she had survived some sort of test.

  Finding herself unable to sleep, Ai Ling sat on the sofa in the living room for some time. Then she went into the study and searched through the cabinet where she kept all the important documents; near the bottom, she found what she was looking for: the marriage certificate, in a cylindrical container. Unrolling the certificate, stiff and resistant with age, she noted the date and signatures, before putting it back.

  Ai Ling
thought about her marriage to Wei Xiang and was reminded again by how short it was compared to her aunt’s—how little she knew about living with Wei Xiang, despite their similarities and compromises. She knew, of course, that life was fickle and irrational, that whatever one built was subject to the pulverizing effects of time. Yet the knowledge brought little comfort. No matter how much she fretted about the future—about Wei Xiang, or her aunt—she could only live one moment at a time, one day followed by another. And Ai Ling suddenly felt terribly weighed down by it all.

  She knew there was no comparison between her marriage and her aunt’s. She and Wei Xiang had only been married for five years, while her aunt and her late uncle had spent over forty years together. Those decades made all the difference: their history, seasoned with joys and miseries, hopes and wasted opportunities; the years had borne them along, carried them through, and now this, a rupture, a death. How was one supposed to deal with the fact of death? It cast a long, unwavering shadow over everything, and Ai Ling had felt its hand on her in her dream, scorching the edges of her self.

  She looked at the framed portrait of her wedding photograph on a long wooden shelf beside the study table. For the shoot, they had opted for a dressed-down, everyday look: a light blue tailored shirt and dark pleated pants for Wei Xiang, and a red floral dress with an empire waistline for Ai Ling. Their faces were beaming with happiness. Ai Ling stared at her own face in the photograph, trying to bridge who she was at that moment with the woman she was now, the divide invisible but deep. What had she been thinking then? She tried to extract the memory, but could only recall the flashes of the camera, the encouraging instructions of the photographer to smile brighter. Remember, you’re happy, so must smile more! She had quietly and obediently done what she was told.