Now That It's Over

by O Thiam Chin

  “That’s so cliché, boring. Think of a better one.”

  “I always have this fantasy that I’ll die of an incurable disease. There I am, on my deathbed, and I have just made a terrible confession to my family. There are tears all around, the nervous clasping of hands, and everyone offering kind words, consolation, forgiveness. You know, the whole works. And then I die very slowly, very beautifully.”

  “What the fuck! What’s wrong with you? This is so fucking Korean drama, so totally unoriginal.”

  “I know, I know. It’s weird. It’s just a fantasy.”

  “I always knew you were such a drama queen!”

  “Fuck you.” Cody leant in to kiss me on the forehead. I caught the scent of toothpaste on his breath and sought out his lips.

  A savage cry pulls me back from the shadow land of dreams into the present. I open my eyes to the bright, piercing sunlight, and look around. Where has the sound come from? Was it a part of my dream? Peering into the dark undergrowth, I can’t discern any movement. Perhaps I’ve conjured it up in my imagination—the sound seemed wild, distorted, unnatural. I push myself upright and lean against the rough trunk of the tree. I survey my surroundings and the quiet road in front of me. Nothing moves.

  I pull the bundle into my lap and take out a bun. Its skin has toughened, and already a few ants are crawling on it. I brush the ants aside and sink my teeth into the bun, the fillings spilling out of the corners of my mouth, flecks of vegetable falling on my chest. Within seconds, the bun’s gone. I’m tempted to eat another, but hold back, knowing that my supplies are limited. There’s no knowing whether I’ll be able to find other sources of food when I run out. I reach for the half-empty bottle of water and take a few sips, which barely satisfies my thirst. I have to keep moving. How long before night comes? The sun has hidden behind a strip of gauzy clouds. The insects buzz incessantly in the lethargic afternoon air.

  Suddenly, something moves at the edge of my peripheral vision; the skin on my arms prickles. Turning towards the direction of the movement, I brace myself—what is it? Across the road, partially hidden behind a tree, a presence—something or someone? How long has it been there, without my knowledge? Its shape remains indistinct, its edges blending into the surrounding darkness. It simply stands there, an outline cut out of the fabric of the forest.

  I stare for some time before the image slowly resolves into something that hits me like a punch in the stomach.

  It’s the boy from the old woman’s hut, the one we buried.

  I push myself off the ground, my legs unsteady. Leaning against the tree trunk, I blink several times, unable to make sense of what I’m seeing. The boy must be a projection of my fatigued, heated imagination, I tell myself. Yet, there he is, standing twenty metres away, staring, not moving. Perhaps he is some other boy who lives nearby and has chanced upon me—a stranger in the middle of nowhere; there’s absolutely no way he can be the same boy I buried two days ago.

  Neither of us makes a move, each staring at the other across a chasm. My mind is a field of warring thoughts, failing to come up with a plausible explanation. I gather whatever remains of my senses and strength, and take a step forward. The boy immediately takes a step back, moving into the deeper shadow provided by the trees. In the darkness of the foliage, his skin glows with an aura of pale light. With each movement, his figure becomes smaller and smaller, flitting from tree to tree with preternatural ease.

  I grab the bundle and move in ungainly steps towards the disappearing boy, not wanting to lose sight of him. Tripping over rocks and tree roots, I pick up my pace, trying to narrow the distance between us. But no matter how fast I’m going, I’m unable to cover enough ground to reach him. His retreating figure hovers at the margin of my vision, like a fixed point on the horizon, directing me. Ignoring the pain shrieking from every part of my body, I pursue the boy in fits and starts, my lungs on the verge of collapsing, each breath a razor-sharp intake of air. The perspiration stings my eyes and blurs my vision, but still I have the boy in my sights.

  Cutting through thick undergrowth and thickets of shrubs and thorny bushes, I finally emerge into a clearing that looks out onto a sloping hill where I see a clutter of huts with wisps of smoke rising from them: a small village. Breathless, and bent with exhaustion, I look for signs of the young boy, but he’s nowhere to be found, leaving no tracks or traces of his presence. He has disappeared as simply and swiftly as when he first appeared.

  “What were you like as a boy?” I asked Cody once.

  “I don’t know, I can’t remember. You ask my sisters next time we go over to their place for dinner.”

  “Seriously, nothing from your childhood? Like what did you do in school, who were your friends?”

  “No, really, I can’t remember much of my childhood. Maybe some memories and impressions from here and there, but nothing worth remembering anyway.”

  “But aren’t our impressions what count in how our memories are formed?”

  “We embellish our memories all the time, don’t we? I mean, we revise them according to how we see and feel about our past at different points of our lives.”

  “Yes, but they are all we have, right? Anyway, we can’t go back in time to relive what we’ve gone through, so we are stuck with what we can remember. But really you can’t remember anything from your childhood?”

  “Well, if you are so dying curious to know, I guess you could say I was a weird kid.”

  “We’re all weird in our own ways. When I was like six or seven, I used to catch butterflies and eat them because I thought their wings were so soft and light, like candy floss. Except their bodies were too gooey for my liking, bitter too. But their wings dissolved in my mouth like powdered sugar.”

  “Damn, Chee Seng. Really?”

  “Now you tell me something about your childhood, anything.”

  “Okay, if you must know, my father always said I was very quiet, sometimes too quiet for my own good. Apparently I could go for days without saying a word. This was after my mother passed away.”

  “For days?”

  “Yes, my father told me I had a so-called ‘episode’ after she died, though I don’t remember anything about it now. He told me it went on for a week, and at the end of it, he was so worried that he even considered admitting me to the hospital, because I wasn’t eating or drinking. I just lay in bed the whole time and refused to talk to anyone. And then one night, I simply snapped back to myself and carried on like the past few days had never existed. My father told me all this later on. Like I say, that period of my life is a complete blank. It’s not like it’s something I’d want to remember.”

  “You don’t remember a single thing from that incident?”

  “Nothing. Anyway, it’s not important after a while, so why bother?”

  By the time the villagers understand where I want to go, I’m exhausted beyond measure, no longer able to stand upright, and finally collapse. They carry me into a tiny thatched hut and lay me on a dirty straw mat. A cold drink is brought to my lips, and I gag and spit up while trying to swallow. Strange voices fill the air around me as my sight slowly resolves into a series of heavily-creased faces that crowd my vision. The villagers bring out plates of rice and fried vegetables and cajole me to eat, but I decline, my stomach raw and pulverised. Once again, I seek directions to return to Patong, through a fluttering of hand gestures and an odd word here and there. The men shake their heads and sigh loudly, uttering a stream of words, the gist of which I understand to be: don’t go, stay, wait. Again, I beseech them for help until they walk away to talk amongst themselves.

  A small group of young children in tattered, threadbare rags surrounds me, excited like a litter of puppies, asking question after question, none of which I can decipher. Finally, one of the men comes up to me and takes me down a lane to where a row of houses stands. Women stand at the thresholds, watching us with open curiosity. In front of a small narrow courtyard, the man points to a rusty motorbike with a badly-torn sea
t, gets on it, and motions for me to hop on. He revs out of the village, a spray of dust trailing behind us. Not wanting to fall off the bike, I grip the man’s waist, praying that my strength will hold up for as long as it takes to get us to Patong.

  Even before we reach the outer fringe of the town, the road is already jammed with traffic and people moving in both directions, making it almost impassable. Along the way, winding down the hills, I finally see the full extent of the destruction that has been inflicted on Patong and the beaches that line the coast; from high up, the town looks like a huge debris-clogged swamp, dark brown with large pools of brackish water glistening in the afternoon light, studded with stumps of decimated buildings. The shoreline has cut deeper inland, like the curved edge of a sickle. The sea remains proudly innocuous, placid.

  The drive slows to a trickle, sometimes barely moving at all. Occasionally, a shrill vehicle siren sounds out, and a small path suddenly, miraculously, appears, making way for an ambulance or emergency vehicle to pass, and immediately after it has passed, the path would be swallowed up again, the cars and bikes and humans coming together like an organic mass. In a few pick-up trucks, I see piles of blackened bodies, barely covered by flimsy tarpaulins, hands and feet sticking out, stiff as mannequins. The death smell that rises from these bodies is thick and rank and cloying, forcing me to hold down the little that is in my stomach.

  The man drops me off at a makeshift medical centre, previously a school with a basketball court and three-storey buildings, a Red Cross sign hanging on the gate. He looks concerned, but after I give him a thumbs-up, he drives off, disappearing around the corner. Standing amidst the sweaty swirl of people, I have no idea where to go, unable to discern the way back to the hotel. From nowhere, someone pushes me roughly aside, issuing a shout, and carries a body into the medical compound—a young girl in the arms of a woman, her head lolling like a broken doll, her ashen face bloated. The woman—mother? sister?—is screaming indiscriminately, her voice cracked and hoarse, until a nurse appears and directs her into one of the tents. The air is abuzz with a taut tension, alive with the flow of movements and cries and smells.

  Rooted to the spot, I suddenly feel a sharp jab of longing, to be back in the hut with the old woman, somewhere up in the hills, away from all this misery and death.

  23

  WEI XIANG

  The coastal town of Patong is in a much worse state than Wei Xiang imagined, from where the boy has led him over the course of the day. Rows of houses and shops that run parallel to the beach have been flattened to rubble; palm trees are slanted at impossible angles or have been ripped out of the earth. Near the beach, the pewter sea water is stagnant and foul-smelling.

  From time to time, Wei Xiang catches a glimpse of a bloated body bobbing in the water like discarded flotsam, or caught between staggered piles of debris. The boy does not seem to pay much attention to these distractions, focused only on leading them onwards, still not saying a word. Wei Xiang has somehow concluded that the boy is either deaf or mute, or both, and has given up trying to talk to him. Even without the aid of a common language, he has found it easy, almost effortless, to communicate his intentions to the boy, whether to stop or slow down or make a detour; the boy is able to read him without any trouble or assistance. But when Wei Xiang tries to read the boy’s face for signs of distress or fear, he gets nothing—the boy’s expression is stone-like, his eyes always looking straight ahead, as if expecting something important to appear any time soon.

  Whenever they come to the flooded places, Wei Xiang stoops to lift the boy onto his shoulders, and they wade slowly through the water. The boy’s weight feels negligible—a bag of feathers—and Wei Xiang has to hold on to the latter’s ankles to keep him steady.

  Sometimes they stop to allow small teams of rescuers to pass, hauling bulky bags containing bodies. The rescuers are often so engrossed—frazzled by fatigue perhaps, or numb-shocked by their task, Wei Xiang can’t tell—that they rarely look up to take heed of the passers-by who have stopped to stare at them. Wei Xiang holds his breath as they pass, his guts turning at the barest hint of the fetor of death.

  They have gone on for hours without rest, and at some point in their seemingly pointless meandering, Wei Xiang has started to question his own actions, this blind ceding of will and reason to a complete stranger—a boy—being led to places unknown. What has compelled him to do this—an unexamined motive, or a dark impulse? What is preventing him from staying put, or going in the opposite direction, or more importantly, doing what he ought to have done in the first place—finding Ai Ling?

  Wei Xiang stops in mid-stride, and the boy walking beside him stops as well, looking up at him. Wei Xiang flings up his hands in exasperation and shakes his head. The boy watches him for a few moments before reaching out to pull at his hand, tugging him to continue walking.

  “No, I can’t follow you around all day. I’ve other things I need to do,” Wei Xiang says. “I need to find my wife, she’s missing. I have to find her. Do you understand me?”

  The boy gives Wei Xiang a peculiar look, one heavy with sadness, and releases his hand. He drops his shoulders and looks away, as if contemplating his next course of action.

  Around them buzz different hives of activity: scores of locals are breaking up the towering stacks of rubble along the streets, frantically searching for missing people; skinny, dark-skinned kids, oblivious to the destruction, are playing in the water, leaping from the shaky peak of a pile of mortar. Wei Xiang feels a deep, fractured sense of disconnection from the scene before him, a man severed from life.

  He sits down heavily on the curb and puts his face in his palms. In his bones, he feels the heaviness weighing down on him, the hours and days of mindless exertion and fear, walking the tight rope of desperation and dread. He can’t take another step. He rubs his eyes on his sleeve and sinks into himself. Wei Xiang imagines that he looks like one of the survivors he has often come across the past few days—sitting by the roadside or near a collapsed house, a soulless look on their faces, their bodies reduced to hollow shells. He has felt helpless looking at them, and now he is one of them. He shakes off this mental image and looks up, and in his temporarily glazed vision, the world before him suddenly becomes hazy, as if he were looking through thin gauze.

  The boy is still standing beside him, hovering at the periphery of his sight, waiting. Wei Xiang stares at the boy’s bare feet, caked with mud and streaked with tiny red cuts. They look frail and breakable, like feet of clay hardened in the heat of the sun. Wei Xiang takes off his sandals and places them before the boy, nodding at him. The boy steps into them and starts clomping around clumsily, a faint smile playing at the corners of his mouth. Despite himself, Wei Xiang chuckles and proceeds to tighten the straps of the sandals. The boy moves to take them off but Wei Xiang signals to him to keep them. The boy practises walking around with the sandals, trying not to trip.

  Wei Xiang hesitates for a moment as he stands up, uncertain what he should do next or where he ought to go, the gritty grains of sand poking into the soles of his feet. He rubs his feet across the surface of the ground and surveys the surroundings—where is he now? He senses a heavy density in the air, something he has not been conscious of for a while: the salty smell of sea water. The sea must be near.

  Narrowing his eyes, Wei Xiang tries to make out the silvery horizon in the distance. Then turning in the opposite direction, he scans the rugged features of Radar Hill—the subtle gradation of green that changes imperceptibly with each shift of sunlight that breaks through the cloud cover—and the deep scars of hiking trails and paths that wind up and round the hill. A thought sneaks into him: Ai Ling planned for a trek through one of the forests in Phuket—was it for today or yesterday? The days are all muddled in his head. In the itinerary, the trek would end up at a lookout with the “best views of Patong and the sea”, according to Ai Ling. Wei Xiang feels his chest tighten. A wild thought suggests itself to him: maybe Ai Ling has gone up the hill on her own
and lost her way there. But she has never been an impulsive person. Still, the thought persists, creeping down a darker path: what’s to say that she did not change her mind at the last minute, and ran up the hill? Just days before the trip, Ai Ling was behaving rather erratically, acting out of sorts.

  Wei Xiang recalls the night before their trip, when she left the house late at night to go to the nearest pharmacy to buy motion-sickness pills; neither of them had ever been ill on their previous trips, let alone from motion sickness. As expected, Ai Ling came home empty-handed after an hour. Wei Xiang could not imagine what had possessed Ai Ling to head out alone in the middle of the night to look for something that they would not need, knowing well that the shops in their neighbourhood closed at ten. When she got back, all she offered as an explanation was that she was afraid she would get nauseous on the flight. In the end, she bought the medication at a pharmacy in Changi Airport before their flight.

  A touch shakes him from his daydream. The boy has nudged him and is pointing at a distant spot towards the sea, signalling for Wei Xiang to follow him. Whatever he’s feeling, whatever misgivings or doubts, Wei Xiang can sense the boy’s urgency, evident in his animated gestures, beckoning him to take heed. The sun is edging towards the west of the island, tracing the height of the hill; it must be around four o’clock. It would be foolish to turn back now; it’s already too late to change to a new course of action.

  So, with Wei Xiang’s silence as consent, the boy takes off down the street in the sandals. They slip through the ravaged townscape, across fallen, twisted telephone poles, through a flooded backyard filled with bloated bodies of chickens, stiff dark-hued feathers covering every inch of the water surface—Wei Xiang can smell the air getting danker, heavier in density—towards the sea. He feels a charge of adrenaline in his blood, aware that he’s running headlong into all kinds of danger, not knowing what will become of him should the waves rise again.