Now That It's Over

by O Thiam Chin

  Wei Xiang gets out of bed, refusing to give in to the downward spiral of thoughts that threatens to cripple him into paralysis. Action is better, and to keep in motion—that is the thing he should do. No point thinking about things that lead nowhere. He steadies himself with the thought as he runs through the few places in his head—emergency centres, makeshift hospitals, schools—where he has been the last few days. He was told that there are two new emergency centres, which also serve as drop-off points for dead bodies, located at Phuket Town. After changing into a new set of clothes and gathering up his watch and the well-worn map, Wei Xiang charges out of the room.

  As is his habit now, he makes it a point to stop at Chee Seng and Cody’s room. He knocks on the door a few times and listens to movements behind the door. No sounds. The day after the flood, Wei Xiang heard a feeble voice when he knocked on the door: Cody. So he’s in there; but why is he hiding? And where is Chee Seng? Whatever the case, Wei Xiang is at a loss at what to do with Cody. Isn’t he worried about Chee Seng? Shouldn’t he be doing something instead of locking himself in the room? Even if he should barge in and force him to come out, Wei Xiang knows it would be pointless if Cody lacks the will or wherewithal to deal with what has happened. And if this is what he has chosen—to hide in the room—there is nothing much Wei Xiang can do. He knocks a couple more times, and when he hears a faint sound from inside, he turns and walks away, ready to begin his day. He stops by the front desk for directions—it will take about an hour to walk to the new, and nearest, emergency centre—and steps out into the noisy street.

  The situation in Patong has changed little, even though it has been four days since the tsunami. While the water in many parts of town has subsided, only calf-high at places nearer to the sea, many roads are still blocked by the debris of fallen huts and shops. The decomposing bodies that littered the waterlogged streets are slowly disappearing, having been picked up by teams made up of local and foreign volunteers, as well as by residents looking for their lost kin. Yet the stench of death has stayed in the air, like an invisible, malodorous blanket settling over the entire town, and worsens during the long afternoons when the sun bakes everything in sight. Wei Xiang holds his breath when he moves through certain streets, the foul, dank smell of decomposition coming from haphazard piles of rubble. Once, he steps on a severed hand with loose red strips of flesh trailing from its end, and quickly kicks it aside. By refusing to acknowledge what he’s seeing, disconnecting the object from its association, he is able to control his stomach from churning; it’s something he has to put into practice at every turn, a survival tactic.

  With the morning still young, the air is cool, sunlight scattered across the puddles along Bangla Road. Already, people are thronging the main road of the town—lines of rescue workers clearing the collapsed walls of a shophouse, while a demolition crew drills the large sections of the broken structure into smaller, manageable chunks; scattered groups of locals searching under the rubble, still hopeful; ragtag gangs of children running from site to site, curious, craning their necks to see what has been uncovered, shouting lustily. Whenever another body is discovered, Wei Xiang rushes towards it, his heart sick with anticipation and fear. But none of the bodies he has seen so far is Ai Ling.

  The new emergency centre, which Wei Xiang took two detours to locate, is manned by the locals, and try as he might, he can’t convey what he wants, but they do not stop him when he goes into the different tents, lifting up the flaps and checking the occupants inside. Once Wei Xiang has exhausted his search among the injured in these tents, he heads for the open compound where there is a long line of bodies enclosed in thick bags of varying size. When he attempts to unwrap one of the bags, a matronly woman with short cropped hair stops him with a raised voice and a stern stare. Wei Xiang tries to explain what he’s doing, but the woman shakes her head and points to a notice board where they have taken photographs of the deceased and pinned them up. Scanning the photographs with as much detachment as he can muster, Wei Xiang finds himself holding his breath every time he comes across a grainy photograph of a woman, trying to see beyond the death mask for any familiar features he might recognise. But Ai Ling is not in any of the photographs, a fact that gives Wei Xiang the barest of hope.

  Leaving the centre, he checks his map and looks around the street for a prominent landmark from which he can orientate himself, and catches a glance of a man standing in the midst of a crowd, his movements slow, hesitant. Chee Seng. Wei Xiang leaps at the recognition and rushes towards him, shouldering his way through the thick crowd. When he places a hand on Chee Seng’s back, the latter whips around, a flash of tense alarm sweeping across his face. Looking at him, Wei Xiang can sense Chee Seng trying to pull something out of his memory, his eyes blank and uncomprehending. He waits for him to break out of his daze, but Chee Seng remains rigidly impassive. Wei Xiang grows exasperated; he pulls him aside, to a less crowded part of the street, where only the facade of a row of shophouses stands; a half-destroyed wall displays a faded monochrome photograph of a young couple in traditional tribal garb, a metal holder nailed under it, filled with the scrawny burnt ends of joss-sticks.

  “Chee Seng, are you okay? Where have you been?” Wei Xiang’s words trigger no reply. Noticing Chee Seng’s cracked lips, Wei Xiang grips his shoulders, speaking firmly into his face, “Wait for me here. Wait here. Don’t go anywhere, you hear? I’ll be back.”

  When he returns with the bottle of mineral water, which he has taken from the emergency centre, Chee Seng is still standing in the same spot. He shoves the bottle at him and watches him drink. Apart from a few scars and dark bruises on his face, Chee Seng seems relatively unscathed, at least from what he can see. Where has he been the past few days?

  “Where’s Ai Ling?” Chee Seng mumbles.

  “I don’t know. I can’t find her.”

  “What about Cody? Is he with you?”

  “He’s okay. He’s at the hotel.”

  “Is he injured? Did anything happen to him?”

  “He hasn’t left the hotel room at all.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He locked himself in the room on the day of the tsunami, and has not come out at all. But I could still hear him from behind the door this morning. Come, let’s go back. You’ll see,” Wei Xiang says, motioning to Chee Seng to follow him.

  It takes almost an hour to reach the hotel; they have to stop a few times so that Chee Seng can rest. Arriving at the hotel, Wei Xiang sees a porter cleaning the front steps, sweeping up the hardened clumps of soil and debris with a bamboo stick broom, and depositing them into black rubbish bags. The man glances up warily, then recognises Wei Xiang and presses his hands together in a greeting. Wei Xiang smiles and enters the hotel with Chee Seng, walking past a group of Japanese tourists standing around in the lobby, engaged in solemn conversation.

  On the fourth storey, they walk along the quiet corridor until they arrive at Cody and Chee Seng’s room. Wei Xiang looks at Chee Seng, waiting for him to do something, but he stands rooted to the floor, paralysed and uncertain. Wei Xiang, sensing his hesitation, says, “He’s in there.”

  Chee Seng returns a perplexed look, but does not make a move. Knowing that there’s nothing more he can do, Wei Xiang leaves Chee Seng in front of the room, and walks away.

  Standing at the entrance of the hotel once again, Xiang pauses to consider his next step. When he looks around, he sees the boy with the scar standing by a slanted lamppost a street away, in the same clothes he has been wearing for the past few days—a torn white singlet and khaki shorts. For a second, Wei Xiang isn’t sure it’s the same boy, but as his mind slowly pieces together the features, he runs towards the boy, afraid that he will lose him if he should hesitate a second longer. As he approaches, the boy looks up at him, a thin line of a smile breaking across his lips. Before he can reach him, the boy is already walking away, silently signalling to Wei Xiang to follow.

  “Wait, where are we going?”

  The boy
stops to glance back at Wei Xiang, as if to convey his reply: Follow me.

  They cut across Phang Muang Sai Kor Road, choked with rescue trucks and medical vans. The local and international news agencies have sent in reporting teams to cover the disaster, descending on the survivors like packs of vultures searching for the best stories, the most memorable sound-bites, mikes and audio recorders thrust into the faces of people willing to give interviews. The young boy keeps a steady pace, paying no attention to what is happening around him, weaving through the crowd without stopping. They move south, to Karon, then Kata, through places that reveal new scenes of destruction, the landscape littered with ruins and brokenness. Before long, they are standing at the entrance leading up to Karon Viewpoint. Wei Xiang can faintly recall Cody and Chee Seng mentioning this place in the conversation at their last dinner, something about the views of the sunset. Ai Ling wanted to check out the place the day after their dinner, the day she disappeared. This shard of memory is now as foreign to him as something conjured up by someone from a different time.

  The boy does not wait for Wei Xiang to catch up; he slips into the shady canopy of the trees, onto a rock-paved path that ascends in gentle-curving bends. Wei Xiang trails behind him like a shadow. After what seems like a long trek up the hill, they stumble into the blinding light of the afternoon sun, into the clearing of the promontory, the calm, undisturbed sea below them stretching to the vanishing line of the horizon, and in the distance the dark patches of islands. The boy walks to the edge of the cliff and points to somewhere out in the sea. Wei Xiang looks in the direction that he’s pointing: a series of small islands scattered at the southeastern side of Phuket. Is this what the boy has wanted him to see? But why?

  “What’s there? What are you trying to tell me?” Wei Xiang asks. The boy gives no reply.

  Wei Xiang looks down at the waves breaking against the sleek walls of the cliff, sending up huge sprays of water, the sound of the impact like a distant rumble of thunder. How many of the dead are still lost at sea? How many will be returned, in the days, weeks or months to follow? Will Ai Ling be one of those returned? Barely has the thought entered his mind that Wei Xiang realises what he has been secretly harbouring in his heart, something he has refused to give utterance to. He shakes his head hard, as if the act of doing so will dispel the thought from him.

  When he turns his face aside, he notices the boy looking intently at him, and in his stare, Wei Xiang sees something akin to sympathy. The boy puts his hand on Wei Xiang’s stomach, and again points to the islands. He pats it several times.

  “I don’t understand what you’re trying to tell me,” Wei Xiang says, his voice cracking as the words come out of his mouth. “Please help me understand what you’re saying. Please.”

  The boy suddenly looks crestfallen, an expression of helplessness clouding his face. His eyes slowly fill with tears. He opens his mouth but nothing comes out. Unable to articulate what he wants to say, the boy seems stricken. Apart from his furtive gestures, which are barely adequate to convey his intention, they are lost to each other, strangers grasping at shadows.

  The boy leans his head on Wei Xiang’s stomach, tears wetting the front of his shirt. Wei Xiang holds the boy’s head in his hands, stroking his hair. He smells a hint of eucalyptus rising from his shaking body. When the boy breaks from the embrace, he turns to look out at the islands again. And then he gives Wei Xiang a long, thorough look before turning back to walk into the forest, vanishing into the darkness. Wei Xiang watches the boy leave, and in his absence, the promontory feels bare and desolate, a place marked only by silence and emptiness.

  After the boy has disappeared, Wei Xiang heads back to Patong. In the recesses of his heart, Wei Xiang knows—without knowing why—that this is the last time he will see the boy, and now it’s up to him to make a decision, to act. But to decide what, and to act on what? He can continue to search for Ai Ling and hope that at any moment she will turn up, that things would be all right. But this no longer seems possible to him now, this continual, indeterminate search, in light of what the boy has prompted in his heart.

  With no destination in mind, Wei Xiang stands at a junction along Thaweewong Road, with streets branching into several directions. He wants the boy to appear again, to see him standing at the lamppost, signalling to him, showing him what he needs to do. Perhaps, if he waits long enough, the boy will reappear, and, because he wants so much to believe this is true or possible, he is willing to wait for as long as he can. And so he loiters at the junction, the flow of people around him breaking like water over a rock. Then, as afternoon tilts into evening, Wei Xiang is unable to keep up the blind hope any longer. He closes his eyes, forcing himself to snap out of his delusion.

  Though he has no clue where he should head next, Wei Xiang turns into one of the alleys and walks to the end of it. He only wants to walk and walk and not turn back, as far and as long as his legs can carry him, before he finally collapses—perhaps to the farthest reach of the island where the land disappears into the sea. In his mouth, he holds onto Ai Ling’s name, saying it over and over again, an incantation he hopes will lead him to a specific location, where he can find her at last, until it finally hits him that what he’s really doing is trying to take hold of the grief that has only just materialised inside him, a grief that will never let him go. He stops in mid-stride, doubles over, and starts to heave, gasping, as if someone has just punched the air out of him. Then he pulls himself together and staggers on.

  Without meaning to, Wei Xiang finds himself back at the edge of the sea. Why is it that everywhere he goes on the island, he returns again and again to the sea, as if it were never out of sight, always present, always here to remind him of what he has lost? Now, looking out across the expanse of water, Wei Xiang can no longer drum up the strength he needs to deal with the doubts that have finally overwhelmed him. He feels utterly sapped, his mind in tatters.

  He takes off his shoes and steps into the sea; the waves crawl to meet his feet, cooling his skin. He moves slowly through the water, which embraces him like a tight second skin. It is only when the water comes up to his chest and the ground under him pulls away that he hears someone calling out to him. Wei Xiang cranes around, and on the shoreline he sees someone in the subdued afternoon light, a dark figure, waving at him. And Wei Xiang knows that he will not be able to take another step further, that this is as far as he can go.

  Even as the voice is calling out to him—louder, more urgent—Wei Xiang remains still, his body swaying in the gentle tug of the waves. For a long time, he stays like this, hoping and waiting for something that is lost to him forever.

  27

  CODY

  The room holds the silence well, the walls letting nothing in. As you lie on the floor, time no longer makes any sense. Your thoughts have grown vague, more oblique, worn smooth by repetition. Chee Seng, Ai Ling, Wei Xiang—mere figures that appear like nebulous shadows on the horizon of your perception, disappearing in a flicker of thought. When you do not stir, they stay where they are—dark, ominous creatures strutting across the plains of your mind, wary of one another, yet hungry for contact. Thoughts of them hurt your head, like knife slashes.

  Your body’s noises: persistent stomach growls, tight pops of the joints in your legs and arms as you turn, breaths inhaled and expelled in long bursts. Your body resists all effort to shut it down, continuing relentlessly, not stopping until every part of you has eventually turned to dust.

  A gecko chirps from somewhere in the room—a peal of shots from a toy ray gun. Your heartbeat thumps in your wrist.

  The night after the dinner and their big fight, Chee Seng had stormed out of the hotel room. Shortly after, Cody, too, left the room, unable to bear its oppressive silence. He ran after Chee Seng, thinking he could catch up, but by the time he got to the street outside the hotel, Chee Seng was already gone. Droves of people filled the street, stopping to eat at the food carts or play shooting games at the makeshift stalls or surround a stre
et performer guiding his monkey through a series of tricks. Recalling the name of the club that Chee Seng had mentioned earlier, Cody went back into the hotel and asked the receptionist for clear directions. The club was only five streets away, and given that he was still wired from the fight, he decided to walk there.

  The evening breeze cooled his skin and brought some relief. He followed a group of locals, dressed in tight T-shirts and jeans, down a side street and found the club, located at the end of a narrow lane; the sign above the entrance was bright and kitschy. He paid a nominal entry fee and entered the club, the tight space of the hall akin to a dark, clammy hole in which strobe lights beamed and sliced and glided over the dancing figures and shaking silhouettes.

  It took little effort to find Chee Seng across the huddle of tightly-packed bodies, partially hidden from view. He was talking to a young man, his face pressed close. The man looked at Chee Seng with an overt interest, putting his hand on Chee Seng’s chest and shoulder, pulling him into a hug. The moving tableaux of electric lights and shadows across Chee Seng’s face gave his expressions a heightened quality, as if he were trying to shape his features according to the moment. On his lover’s face, Cody recognised something he had not seen for a long time: a look of unequivocal desire.