by O Thiam Chin
Over the next twenty minutes, the acts varied only slightly with a change of men and positions, each performing their roles in a parody of lust and exaggerated pleasure. Cody’s drink, a Singha beer, came halfway during the show; he took a single sip that left a bitter, corrosive taste in his mouth. When the show ended, he stumbled to his feet and made his way to the exit as if fleeing from a fire or a crime that he had unknowingly committed.
Bursting out of the club, with the night air cooling his heated face, he made ghost tracks back to the hotel, trying to slow the pounding of his heart. The hotel room was dark when he entered; a voice rose from the darkness.
“Cody? Is that you?” Ai Ling said.
“Yes.”
“Back so early?”
“Yes, it was too crowded out there.”
“I must have fallen asleep immediately after you left.” Ai Ling’s voice was groggy, sticky with drowsiness.
“How are you feeling?” Cody asked.
“I think I’m okay now. My stomach’s not hurting anymore.”
“Good. Do you want a drink or something?”
“No, I’m not thirsty.”
“Think I’ll shower now. Go to sleep, if you’re tired.”
“I think I’ve slept enough. What did you do just now?”
“Nothing much. Just walked around and checked out the street stalls.”
“Bought anything?”
“No, there was nothing I wanted. Let me shower first, I’m all sweaty.”
“Okay.”
In the toilet, Cody stripped and threw his clothes into the sink, and then stood under the jet of hot water in the shower. The room quickly filled up with steam. Summoning up images of the men from the sex show, he masturbated and came quickly with a brutal convulsion that left him panting against the wet wall tiles. He caught his blurry reflection in the fogged-up mirror, a dark silhouette moving beneath a cloudy veil of condensation. He washed himself twice over with soap, dried off and put on a clean pair of shorts. He used up a small travel bottle of mouthwash, the insides of his mouth bristling with tiny pins. He dried his mouth with a towel, turned away from the mirror, and stepped back out into the dark bedroom.
“Cody?” Ai Ling called.
“Yes?”
“Can you come over here?”
He padded over to her bed. Moonlight illuminated Ai Ling’s face in a warm glow. Cody sat on the edge of her bed, but could not read her expression. Ai Ling reached out and touched his hand, drawing it to her.
“Do you like me?” Ai Ling asked.
“Yes, of course. You’re my good friend.”
“Only a friend?”
Cody hesitated. “Yes, a very good friend.”
“That’s all?”
“Yes.”
For a long while, they stayed like that. Cody could hear a car passing on the road outside, a rumbling sound that surged and then gradually faded. In the dark, he could sense Ai Ling’s thoughts taking several turns across the busy, intricate landscape of her mind. He resisted breaking her train of thought with a sound or movement, even though he wanted desperately to know what she was thinking.
Then, without a word, Ai Ling moved her body aside on the bed, and Cody lay down next to her. She turned her back and pushed herself into him, radiating heat. He put his arms around her shoulders, and she nudged closer to fit into the contours of his body. He inhaled the scent of her hair.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
Ai Ling did not say anything, nor did she move away. She drew Cody’s arms tightly around her. Cody listened to her falling slowly into sleep, her breaths getting deeper and longer, and then she disappeared into the world of dreams. He stayed awake for as long as he could, but soon he too fell into the void of sleep.
25
CHEE SENG
“Don’t bring so many things. Just travel light. It’s only for a few days,” I told Cody, two days before the vacation to Phuket, taking out my haversack from the store room, giving it a shake.
“Yes, I’ll just bring my underwear because I’m not leaving the hotel at all. I heard the weather is going to be extremely hot,” Cody said.
“Okay, sure, whatever suits you, lazy ass. Just don’t wear any of my shirts.”
Cody was sitting on the sofa in front of the television watching a Channel 8 drama series. The volume was set to low, and from where I was standing, I could barely make out the dialogue.
“When are you going to start packing? We’re leaving the day after tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow. I’m a fast packer, unlike you, always so slow. I know what to bring. Anyway, it’s only for a few days, so I only need three changes of clothes.”
“Yes, fast packer, always forgetting things, always asking me whether I brought extra.”
“And you always bring so many things. I’m just trying to help you make full use of all the things you have brought. See, I’m actually helping you in a sense.”
“Yeah, and if you forget anything for this trip, you can forget about asking me for it.”
“I won’t.”
It had not been easy living with Cody since we moved in together after getting a place of our own two years ago. I was used to a certain lifestyle with a fixed routine, having lived almost my entire life with my mother and three younger brothers, and it was tough to break away from what had been comfortable for me. In the beginning, it was trying to figure out what worked for both of us, finding the right amount of space—personal and physical—that each of us needed, and coming up with a routine in which we could anchor our lives, together and separately. We quarrelled from time to time, though nothing serious. Because of his work as an editor, the spare room in our flat was converted to a study for him. On one of the walls he had framed some of his freelance features that had appeared in well-known regional travel magazines, pieces on Angkor Wat and Borobudur.
Through trial and error, we had managed to carve out a domesticated living arrangement that was part mutual agreement, part compromise, in which we still had our own freedom, our individual lifestyles. We had, in popular parlance, an “interdependent” relationship, which seemed to be the politically correct way to describe a non-needy, self-sufficient relationship, which in our case, was undeniably true. We had some things in common for sure, and for other things we could not quite come to terms with, we left them as they were or closed our eyes to them, which was the usual way we dealt with things that we could not change. We learnt to live with what we could manage.
“Did you print out the air ticket confirmation?” I asked from the bedroom, after packing my luggage.
“Not yet, can you print it out?” Cody shouted from the sofa, where he was now watching a tennis match on the sports channel.
“I’ll use your laptop,” I said.
Entering Cody’s workspace in the study felt like a minor form of trespassing. It was filled almost entirely with his stuff—books, magazines, CDs—and very little of my own, only a small section of the bookshelf which held my hardcover books, and files full of bills, letters and tax statements. Despite the organised mess in the room, his large work table was relatively clutter-free: only a laptop computer, a note pad, a stationery holder filled with 2B pencils and a drinking glass. The laptop was switched on, and, because Cody had not created a password, I was able to access it. It always felt strange using his computer, which was part of his guarded turf; he never allowed me to read his works until they were published, afraid of jinxing them.
His incoming chat messages were flashing. I clicked on one of them and a message popped into view. Blood drained from my face as I read it; I checked the other messages in the history folder. When I was done, I left the messages as they were, open and exposed. I sat in the swivel chair for some time, unsure how I should react—to confront or to ignore? A deep wariness settled over me, turning my insides cold. Then, after breaking through the strong grip of my thoughts, I did what I had come in here to do and printed out the ticket confirmation.
That
night, after Cody had finished watching the tennis match on TV and I was brushing my teeth, he entered the bathroom and stood behind me, trying to catch my stare in the mirror. Instead of meeting his eyes, I focused on the foam building up in my mouth, overflowing and dripping into the sink. He wrapped his hands around my waist and rested his chin on my shoulder. I bent to spit out the foam and started to rinse nosily. Cody stood behind me, waiting for me to finish. When I looked up, drawing his eyes to me, he remained silent, unable to utter anything. He must have read my expression: Don’t bother to explain.
I took one of the pillows and slept on the sofa. At one point, Cody came out and sat near me, his head bent low.
“I’m sorry. It was nothing,” he whispered. “Please come to bed.”
“No, go away.”
“I’m really sorry. It was just a one-time thing, nothing more.”
I turned away from him. Cody tried to mutter something, but his words were caught in his throat. He sat beside me through the night, his presence a malignant force. I was wide awake the whole night, keeping up the defence.
The next morning, we followed our own routines determinedly. We had breakfast, read the newspapers, and put away the dishes. One thing we did not do was talk about what had happened, as if nothing was amiss. I did not want to ruin the trip, I rationalised; we would have time to talk about this soon enough, just not now.
There was nothing to stop me from punishing Cody with my silence. On the morning of Christmas Eve, we met Ai Ling and Wei Xiang at the airport to check in together. At the time, I was still not talking to him, distracting myself with the usual drivel with Ai Ling, leaving Cody to Wei Xiang. On the plane, I plugged my earphones into the inflight entertainment system and turned away to look out the window. At one point, Cody leant in to check whether I was asleep and lowered the window shade. When we were waiting for the mini-bus at the airport to take us to the hotel in town, Ai Ling pulled me aside and asked whether everything was okay. I pulled out the excuse of my inability to sleep before an overseas trip, and gave a tired smile. She looked at me, unconvinced, but did not probe further.
In the hotel, after we had got the keys to our adjacent rooms, we arranged to meet half an hour later for a walk to Bangla Road, a few streets away. Alone with Cody in the hotel room, I was unable to face him. It felt like a century had passed since I sat at his work table and read the messages on his laptop; my anger was still there, but somewhat diluted, its edge blunted, and I could not work up the energy to fuel it again. I did not know what I was supposed to feel and act, and so I did nothing.
“Let’s not do this,” Cody said, coming out of the bathroom, his face wet from a wash.
“I’m not doing anything.” I tore into my luggage, tossing pieces of clothes on the bed.
“I mean, let’s don’t fight. I know what I’ve done and I’m really sorry, I am.”
“Sure, that’s easy. Just say sorry and everything is forgiven? It’s not that easy.”
“Then what do you want me to do?” Cody came up behind me, putting his hand on my shoulder. I flinched and pulled away.
“I don’t know. I don’t know what you can do.” I looked into Cody’s face, hoping to find something there to defuse my rising anger. He stepped in front of me and placed his hands at the back of my head, pulling me into the proximity of his body. I fought to break away but he kept his hold on me, his arms tight around my back. I felt suddenly worn out, drained.
“It’s not over,” I said.
“I know. Let’s just do this a step at a time. You can take it out on me later on, if you want. I understand.”
Cody pushed aside the luggage on the bed and began to peel off my clothes. Wordlessly, I let him. He nuzzled my neck and kissed my ear. Whatever I felt—anger, resentment—quickly receded into the background, replaced by an inebriating rush of sensations. With little resistance, I yielded, not just to the physical act of sex and its pleasures, but to the familiar, restorative comfort of a lover’s touches, a return to safer shores. Perhaps, I sensed, Cody was trying to redeem himself, to assuage his guilt by offering the very thing that I needed—the refuge of his body, its irrepressible hold and heft.
Yet, barely had we finished, after Cody left the bed to shower, that the old feelings came sweeping over me again, like ghosts that had always haunted the dark passageways of my mind. Everything felt forced, useless—my thoughts, our actions, the need to salvage what was lost. In looking for some sort of respite, a truce, I came up blank, hitting a wall. The sounds of showering came to me from the open door of the bathroom, along with the broken snatches of a song that Cody was humming. I stared at my palms, unable to master what I was feeling.
When Cody came out of the bathroom, I got to my feet and started to dress. We were already running late. Ai Ling and Wei Xiang must have been waiting for us in the hotel lobby. Time to move on.
Ai Ling wanted to check out the Banzaan market at Sai Kor Road while Cody and I were keen to head down south to Karon Viewpoint, a short taxi ride away. Ai Ling gave us the address of the hotel, just in case. “Don’t get lost,” she said.
The taxi driver, sensing that we were new in town, haggled for an exorbitant fare that we managed to cut down by half, and hastily dropped us off a few streets from our destination. With nothing to guide us, we fumbled our way to the location through a maze of small lanes that wound past corrugated tin-roofed houses that hugged close to one another and open plots of knee-high grass where chickens and small dogs wandered, searching for scraps of food. At one of the ramshackle shophouses, we bought two bottles of mineral water and asked the shopkeeper for further directions since there were no signs to indicate where we were. A pack of boys stopped their game of football to watch us pass; one of them lifted an arm to salute us, which Cody returned with a similar gesture. The rich smell of frying food wafted out of windows, along with staccato sounds of canned TV laughter and sudden explosions from action movies. Mosquitoes buzzed around us like a party of persistent, unrequited suitors.
We would have walked past a side entrance leading to the viewpoint if I had not noticed a mangy dog limping out of it, emitting a low, unthreatening growl. A gravel path led upwards into the shaded enclosure of tall trees with signs pointing to different routes. We took the route which would lead us to the promontory that overlooks Kata Noi Bay, and beyond that, the Andaman Sea. Cody went ahead of me and we walked in tandem, breaking the silence when one of us spotted something interesting—a heavy shrub abloom with star-bursts of white-petalled flowers, a patrol line of shiny-shell ants each the size of a fingernail, the sighting of a brightly-feathered bird resting on a branch. From time to time, we would stumble into a clearing, and the sudden touch of sunlight on our sweaty skins felt salubrious. Later, when we slipped back into the comfort of the shade, it felt like we were entering the shallow end of a pool, cool and curative.
When we reached the promontory, the sun was dissolving over the far horizon. The sky was a riot of warm smudgy reds, yellows and oranges. A flock of seagulls clung to the craggy surface of the cliffs, among the rocks jutting out of the coast; from where we stood, we could hear their faint cries. A strong sea wind ruffled the unruly patches of grass that sprouted out of the dry, clayey soil.
We drank from our bottles of water and stared out into the sea. Given the time of the day, nearing evening, we were the only people at the observation point. The silence around us deepened. Cody drew near and stood beside me, his shoulder touching mine.
“I’m glad we did this,” he said.
I kept my silence. The trek up the hill was tiring, but it had at least distracted me from my thoughts. Cody’s hair was whipping manically in the air, and he tried to placate it with little result. Then he reached for my hand, gripping it. He opened his mouth but before he could say a word, I cut him off.
“No, not now, let’s not talk about it now.”
In that moment, looking out into the sea, everything seemed impossibly clear, every thought fallen into its rightf
ul place. This glimpse of clarity had a sobering effect on me before it quickly passed, leaving behind a wearying sense of sadness, a new weight in the pit of my gut. But for the moment it lasted, nothing else mattered—my life, Cody’s, our relationship.
“This won’t last forever, will it? What we have before us now?” I said, nodding my head at the view. The sky had already darkened into heavier shades of its original colours. The winds were getting stronger now, and the air cooler.
This time, it was Cody who remained silent. He released his hand from mine and stepped to the edge of the promontory, looking down at the sea. He picked up a small stone and threw it down. I strained my ears to hear the stone hit something—a rock or the water—but of course, at this height, it was impossible to hear anything. Cody straightened up and turned to me.
“It’s beautiful,” I said, and then added, “Shall we go? It’s getting dark, and it’ll take a while to get out of here.”
He came up to me and put his arms around me. Closing my eyes, I held the scene in my mind, trying to burn it into memory as if the moment were already a thing of the past, and there was nothing to do but to hold onto its simulacrum. We stayed like this for a short while, the shadows at our feet stretched into dark, slanted lines.
“Let’s go,” I said, and took a long, hard look at the fading sunset, already tipping into evening. Then I turned and walked towards the gravel path that would take us down the hill, back to Patong, back to the lives we had no choice but to live.
26
WEI XIANG
Awake and lying in bed, Wei Xiang stares at the dusty shafts of light streaming through the curtains, and listens to the filtered sounds of shouting coming from the streets below. He recalls the boy and several scenes from their forages through Phuket over the past few days, how the boy led him through the torn landscape, taken him to the edge of the sea and brought up the ring from the depths. Even as Wei Xiang tries to conjure up the boy’s face from memory—a face that can never seem to settle into any set features—he still can’t get a full image in his head, only bits and fragments, the deep scar across his left eye. He shoots a glance at the side table where he sees Ai Ling’s wedding ring and reaches for it. This is just not possible, yet here it is, the proof right in his hand, irrefutable.