by O Thiam Chin
To avoid detection, Cody dissolved into a corner of the club, hiding in the dark, his eyes never straying from Chee Seng or the man. They danced for some time before turning to the bar for drinks, with Chee Seng paying for them both. Cody watched, riveted, as if watching a play, two men on a stage with their lines and movements and gestures executed in perfect harmony. He was not sure what he could do at that moment; just the idea of crossing the room and confronting Chee Seng was almost unbearable, a feat that required unimaginable strength that he did not possess. He continued to watch as they danced, and then later left the club, laughing like schoolboys sharing a private joke. Cody followed them, keeping a fair distance. They flitted down several dark lanes, sometimes stopping to kiss, before emerging out onto the beach.
In the darkness, they sneaked under a huge open umbrella and made out on the deck chairs. Cody crept closer—he felt exposed, conspicuous under the milky glow of the moonlight—and he saw everything. They were taking off their clothes, frantic in their urgency, and then one of them stopped suddenly; Cody could not tell which one. Neither moved. After a while, the other man moved away, trudging through the loose sand back towards the road. Cody did not move until he was sure the man was finally gone. From where he was hiding, he could hear the waves hitting the shore, their gentle pulses.
Cody crept over to where Chee Seng was lying on the deck chair with his eyes closed. He did not move when Cody came closer, perhaps too drunk to notice. Cody blocked the moonlight that shone across Chee Seng’s body and waited for him to sense Cody’s presence. But there was no sign of movement; he had passed out, dead to the world. Cody stood and waited for his thoughts to straighten themselves out. He shook with fury and sorrow at the state they were in, at how they had allowed things to fall into this mess.
Before he knew it, Cody was weeping, soundlessly and wretchedly, for all that he had lost—there was no way they could stop what was coming. And when he was done crying, he stared at Chee Seng’s sleeping form, then turned his back and walked away.
The dreams, when they come, pull you deep into their folds, ensnaring you.
In one of them you’re in a room, not unlike your hotel room, and people are passing through it in multitudes, coming and going in such numbers that you have to squeeze your body into a foetal position for fear that you’ll be trampled. Yet there is no danger of that, as they never come close enough to even brush against the sides of your body. They walk past and, without looking, throw things at you: a flower, a handful of soil, a tattered book, a plate, a dead snake, a dirty rag, a wad of saliva, a handkerchief embroidered with flying swallows, rice, hair. These things slowly pile up. Yet, even under the cumulative weight of these familiar objects, you do not feel as if you’ve been weighed down; instead, what you feel in the dream—soft and impenetrable—is a strange sense of security, as if a place of refuge has suddenly been revealed, and it’s a place that can take you, broken, into its depths. Each object that covers you carries its own weight of history and significance, one that you somehow know instinctively and exactly; soon, you are completely covered, buried out of sight. The darkness is full and complete and assuring.
In another dream, you find yourself being eaten by a beast twice your size, a cross between a hunchbacked wolf and a steely gargoyle, heavily muscled with matted fur, and wet, yellow pits for eyes. It glances at you, then turns its attention back to the gaping hole in your torso, devouring your insides. There is hardly any blood, and the beast is taking its time, chewing leisurely before swallowing. You can only feel the faintest trace of pain. Somehow, it is the right thing to do, offering yourself up to the beast. You’re not afraid. Only when it has eaten its fill do you feel a jolt of desolation, of forlornness, and the sensation is not the pain of self-annihilation or death, but of desertion, of severance. The beast turns its head and glares at you; in its bright enraged eyes, you see how the beast sees you, as a man with nothing to lose. In his stare: pity, contempt, recognition. Then, after shaking its body roughly and flicking away the blood, the beast rises to its full stature and roars. And without even a final look, it turns and saunters off.
Cody woke early the following morning still in his clothes, the acrid stink of cigarette smoke and alcohol emanating from his body. The sunlight seeping in between the half-drawn curtains was weak and feeble, the sky just starting to lighten. The other half of the bed was empty, though the sheet was roughened up. His mind felt heavy and sodden, unwilling to snap to full wakefulness. Sounds travelled up from the street to reach his ears: an occasional shout, a dog’s whiny bark, the revving of a bike.
Was he still where I left him last night? Shouldn’t he be back already?
Cody pulled himself out of bed and went over to the balcony, drawing back the curtains and pushing open the glass doors. He blinked and scanned the rusty rooftops of the three- and four-storey houses nearby, most of them bedecked with antennae or satellite dishes. Farther out, the hills rose out of the mist, like a woman casting off her membranous robes for a fresher set of green. The air carried the coolness of the night, and hurt his lungs as he took in a long breath. Leaning against the railing, he glanced down at the street and saw Ai Ling emerge from the hotel, dressed in a white T-shirt and running shorts. For a moment, she stopped and looked around, and Cody wanted to call out to her, but before he could, she was already running down the street, towards the beach. He watched as she turned down a corner and disappeared.
His thoughts went immediately to Chee Seng—they would have to talk about the previous night’s dalliance once he returned, and the thought of a potential fight was enough to cast a shadow of weariness over his mind. He sat down on the rattan chair at the balcony and rubbed his face roughly. Then he closed his eyes and leant back in the chair. Without intending to, he fell into the pit of sleep.
When he woke later, to the sound of something breaking in the near distance, he was thrown momentarily into a state of disorientation. A long series of cries and shouts rang out. As he stumbled to his feet, his vision whitening out for a second or two, he looked out into the streets below.
For a long time, he could not properly register what he was seeing. It felt wrong, as if the images before him had all given up their forms and meanings and purposes, jumbled up into chaos, into spectacular disarray, and nothing could put them back in their rightful places again.
The heavy, mercurial waves, coming in fast and livid, had swept everything up in their wake, and from where he stood he could only feel their full-on urgency. A succession of voices rose and quelled and faded, and then rose again. Hands reached out of the surface of the choppy water, bodies collided with other bodies, smashing into walls and trees and telephone poles. An explosion of birds took to the sky. The tough, unsparing wind carried the wails and cries deeper inland.
Cody did not know how long he stood there watching, but at one point he turned and stumbled back into the room and shut the glass doors. He switched on the television, but it had gone dead, its reflective surface a blank, unresponsive darkness. Then he pulled the curtains shut and lay on the floor and closed his eyes to the world raging outside.
A knock on the door. You’re roused from the dark well of sleep. The dim universe of the room materialises before you, light-stripes seeping through the fabric of the curtains. Is it morning or afternoon? You breathe in the dust of the cold floor and imagine it entering your body, settling over tongue and lungs, accumulating in layers of sediment.
The knocks come again. You hold your breath, wishing for them to go away. Your body aches. The room holds the fragile silence even as the knocks penetrate into every corner and ricochet against the walls. Three knocks, pause, three knocks.
Go away. Go away, please.
There is a respite, as if the person on the other side of the door has finally given up. You coil up and open your mouth; your tongue feels parched and raw. You utter something; the words vanish under your breath: Go away.
The knocks resume. Someone calls out your name: “Cody
, it’s Chee Seng. Please open the door.”
You press your hands to your ears. You shift your body, which feels heavy and ancient and mountainous; your arms and legs move like glaciers, inch by inch, breaking apart in their movements. Three more knocks, fired off like gunshots. You edge yourself up against the wall, your heart jackhammering, your thoughts narrowed to the rigid mechanics of your body. You fold your knees into sharp angles and push yourself up. Every joint in your body flares up in blasts of vengeful mutiny. You hold still and try to straighten your body—nausea seizes you but soon passes—and take a small step. The ground shakes unsteadily, as if about to give way under your weight. You take another step.
The voice again, louder: “It’s me, Cody. Open up.”
Then you’re at the door, leaning against it. The knocks stop. You can feel the person behind the door silently acknowledging your presence, waiting for you to make the next move. You place a hand on the door handle and, with some effort, push it down. The door opens slowly towards you, and, after what seems like a lifetime of missteps and stumbles and doubt, you peer out of the room and hold your breath and never let it go.
28
CHEE SENG
I have come back to Phuket alone every year after the tsunami and stayed at the same hotel, until it closed down several years later. In its place, there is now a large gelato shop and an adjoining playground that draws in hordes of sweaty tourists, mostly parents with children in tow. I have chosen a new hotel along Thaweewong Road, just beside the beach, where I swim every day if the weather permits. Some nights, when the breeze is cool and light, I go for long walks along the beachfront, from one end to the other, looking out at the night sky pierced with sharply blinking stars. On these walks, my mind is crowded with thoughts about the past, though the memories that surface no longer have any hold on me.
They never found Ai Ling, and in the end, after a week of searching and waiting, Cody and I returned to Singapore, leaving Wei Xiang behind to keep up the search.
“She’ll turn up,” he said. “It’s just a matter of time.”
He stayed for another week before returning home, heavy with a broken spirit. A small wake was held, where most of the mourners sat quietly in twos and threes, wary of making eye contact with Wei Xiang. Before we departed, I left a note, offering him our condolences. After replying with a thank-you email a few days later, I never heard from Wei Xiang again, though I tried to contact him several times, to meet up for coffee or a meal.
I usually do not have an itinerary when I come to Phuket, preferring to go where I want to go when I feel like it, or stay put in my hotel room reading and sleeping and thinking. My mobile phone is switched off throughout my stay, so there is no way I can be found if I’m lost or missing—a thought I entertain quite frequently. For the first three years after the tsunami, whenever I returned to the island, I would try to find out where the old woman had lived, and whether she was still alive. Though the island is not big—you can complete a car ride along its coast in less than two hours—there are hilly regions in the north and east that are relatively remote, the interiors only known to the well-versed locals who have stayed on the island for decades. On the map, there are a multitude of passable vehicular routes, interspersed with small, nondescript villages that all look alike after a while. I would hire a motorbike driver, and using my well-worn map direct him to the places I had marked down. I was lucky, in my third year, to locate the village where I was able to find help after my long walk out of the forest. Through my driver-translator, I was able to get a clearer picture of what had transpired the day I stumbled into the village, though further questions about where I had come from were met with a muted response. Unwilling to give up, I pressed on with the few leads I had, going down every route indicated on the map, looking for signs along the road that would show me a way into the forest, and lead me to the old woman’s hut, to the unmarked grave where the young, unknown boy was buried. But all the routes I took ultimately, eventually, led me back to the town, no matter the distance. There was never going to be a way to find what was already lost—this was something that took me much longer to realise, and finally come to terms with.
Yet, every time I come back to Phuket, I can’t help but remember the old woman and the dead boy. The long years have passed, but the memories continue to hold strong as if they have already sunk into parts of me that still want to remember. Perhaps, remembering is the hardest part of everything that happened—the constant dredging up of memories that have stayed deep inside me, holding me to the past. They would have crushed me, if I had not learnt to live with them over the years.
My relationship with Cody did not survive after we came back, though we kept at it for another three months before deciding to end it. The separation was easier and more painless than I would have thought. I found a new flat, moved out, and quickly established a quiet life of simple routines. I kept myself busy, and the life I made slowly took on a definite—although not entirely unfulfilling—state, a life I could somehow manage with little disruption. It is strange and oddly easy how one can get used to being single after a period of adjustment.
I was clearing out some old boxes from the storeroom a few months ago and came across Cody’s old Motorola phone. The battery was dead so I searched around the flat for the phone charger, and realised later that I had thrown it out—the phone was already many years out of date—along with the other old, unused electronic parts, during my move. I wanted to check what was in the phone, to read the messages, but the urgency passed soon enough, and it seemed rather fatuous after I thought through it.
Yet it does not mean the memories are dead to me. I’ll be on the MRT heading to work, or washing the dishes after dinner, and suddenly a random memory sneaks into my thoughts—an image of Cody or the old woman, or sometimes the dead boy. These images flit and linger for a while, but I do not allow them any purchase on my mind; I have learnt to keep a distance from these old memories, to blunt their edges.
It is only during my annual trips to Phuket that I allow myself a deeper introspection, to give myself permission to think about those days back in 2004. I would walk down Bangla Road in Patong and see two men walking towards me, and I would pause and remember a similar scene from that time. Even a glance at a peddler hawking preserved tamarinds and sour plums near a junction was enough to trigger a fragment of memory about the old woman. And there was that time I came across a beggar boy with a shrivelled right foot at the night market in Phuket Town, wearing a tin can strung around his neck, and sitting before a dirty, badly scrawled square of cardboard—there was something about his face, in the tilt of his head, that caused a lurch in my heart; but of course it wasn’t him, it couldn’t possibly be. For one thing, there was no scar across his left eye. I knew enough to keep my thoughts grounded, to differentiate the real from the imagined. It’s not easy though—the pull of the past is a siren’s call, beckoning and summoning, and it’s inevitable to be tricked from time to time.
On my last trip to Phuket, I visited Phromthep Cape, at the southern tip of the island, having spent a day of walking without any particular aim or direction in mind. I had been there a few times over the years, and I always loved the views it offered—the sunset, the outlying islands, the sea. There was still a light crowd at that time of the day, mostly tourists armed with phone cameras, and I made sure to skirt the lighthouse and the shrine, to escape the noise and commotion. I took a narrow foot path down a slope and followed it for a while, as it wound itself up a slight incline, past dry shrubs of calf-height brown grass, and ended at a quiet lookout. From where I was standing, I saw two dark spots—eagles? seagulls?—moving across the sky, one behind the other, punctuating its wide, clear expanse. They never flew close enough to the island for me to identify them. For some time, I watched them glide through the sky before they disappeared, farther out into the sea.
Sitting down, I heard the tall grass swishing around me, and when I listened closely, I could hear the waves�
�so soft, barely there. Maybe because I was trying hard in such moments not to stir up anything in my head, I heard something: the faint traces of a song. I looked around, straining to catch further wisps of it, but there was nothing but the sound of the waves, and the wind making its way through the grass. I looked out to the sea—already darkening in the dying light—and let my mind quiet itself. Then, turning to my right, looking farther down along the coast, I saw something—a figure, standing at another viewing point along the ridge. I studied the figure for a while—a man, clearly—and waited for him to—to see me? to make a move? to disappear? I could not complete the thought in my head then.
But as I watched the man’s solitary figure, his stillness, I could not help but think about Cody and the last time we had stood at such a promontory—was it a lifetime ago?—and looked out at the sea, hearing the waves coming to us as if from another world, breaking into ours. In my mind’s eye, I saw both of us standing there, taking in the view, immersed in our own thoughts, alone in our separate worlds.
I could have let my imagination go—to recreate this memory in my head again—but I did not. The memory would not have been real; I would have coloured it with something else, and it would not have done me any good, to confuse what was there with what wasn’t. I would have changed Cody in that memory, making him into a man I wished he had been, but of course, he had always been who he was, no matter how I had imagined him in these memories.
I must have been steeped in my thoughts, for when I looked at the man again, I noticed that he had turned in my direction, holding his hand up. For a moment, I thought he was waving at me, and I wanted to return the gesture. But he was merely shielding his eyes from the glare, his gaze trained on something along the distant shoreline, down the coast. I dropped my half-lifted hand to my lap, feeling foolish at my near-mistake.