by Ng Yi-Sheng
“It doesn’t look fine.”
“Ha na ha na ha na! You’re like an old woman.”
“Tomorrow night, we see Dr Bala. His clinic got extended hours on Tuesday.”
They lay in silence for a while, not touching. It was too warm to hold one another that night, especially when both were clothed.
“Must be painful.”
“No.”
“Don’t be stubborn.”
The bedclothes rustled, and Mrs Tan felt the weight distribution on the mattress shift. Amidst the noise of the estate, she listened as his bare feet padded their way to the living room to the sofa, where he lay for the rest of the night.
The following evening, he followed her to the clinic. Mr Tan pretended to be engrossed in a copy of The Economist that had been left in the waiting room. Mrs Tan spent her time looking at the clock.
It was almost 9pm when Dr Bala saw them. “Tan! Steady or not?” he bellowed as they entered his office. He and Mr Tan had been on the rugby team in secondary school, many years before, and he made a point of generously waiving his consultation fees every time they came.
“My husband has a problem,” Mrs Tan said.
“Tell me about it, balls. We’re not young anymore, eh? But still looking good, no?”
“Show him, Hiong.”
Mr Tan opened his shirt. With her finger, she pointed to the hole on his left breast. The room grew very quiet as Dr Bala examined it, first with his eyes, then, after a swab of alcohol, with a rubber-gloved finger.
“Tan, how long have you had this condition?”
“One month.”
“Two months,” said Mrs Tan.
Dr Bala retrieved a penlight from his drawer. He held it over the wound, turning it this way and that, so the reflected circle of light danced madly across the walls of the clinic.
“There’ve been other cases like this,” he said. “The causes are still poorly understood, but some of the patients are calling it silverpox.”
“How serious is it?”
“Research is still in progress, but…”
“How serious?”
Dr Bala cleared his throat. “Apart from the obvious damage to the skin, there’s no evidence that this will impair your husband’s overall health.”
Mr Tan stirred.
“So no need to take MC?”
“No need. I can issue one if you want lah, up to you. Or if the condition gets worse, I can certify that you’re fit for work.”
“So it gets worse?” asked Mrs Tan.
“Superficially.”
“What happens?”
“Nothing life-threatening. But essentially, it spreads.”
He beamed his penlight at Mr Tan’s left arm, and there it was, in the crook of his elbow. Another tiny hole, just as metallic and foreign and painless as the first.
The taxi ride home was very quiet. When they got home, Mrs Tan went to the kitchen to prepare some herbal tea and biscuits. She returned to find her husband’s clothes stripped off in a heap on the living room floor. He had crawled naked into bed, without even showering or brushing his teeth.
For a while, their lives were not visibly altered. The two continued to go to work in the morning and come home in the evening, just as they had for the past thirty years. Mrs Tan bought some band-aids from the pharmacy and left them in the bathroom, and after a few days, Mr Tan began wearing them on his person. He still kept his shirt on for dinner, but occasionally before bed he would dispense with his pyjama top, and Mrs Tan grew accustomed to the strange crinkle of his band-aids against her skin as he held her in the night.
But one day, at 7.30am, she heard him call her name from the toilet.
“Mary? Look at this.”
He was poised in front of the mirror, shaving cream over half his face, a scratch of blood marking where he’d cut himself with the blade. On his lower cheek, between the blood and the cream, there was a silvery hole as big as the O on a keyboard.
“We’ll go and see Dr Bala again.”
“After work.”
“You can take sick leave.”
“I’m meeting a sales rep today. It’s very important. And I’m not sick.”
In the end, he held still and let her spackle over the opening with makeup. She showed him how to use her foundation and powder, so he could do subtle touch-ups throughout the day, and they were each only twenty minutes late for work.
They met at the clinic. Dr Bala let them in as soon as he heard their names were in the queue.
“Sit down, sit down. I’m surprised you didn’t come sooner. Any developments?”
Mr Tan removed his shirt and began peeling off his plasters. There were ten of them now: mostly clustered around his sternum, but with a constellation of three on his lower arm. Mrs Tan had counted each one as it appeared, but this was the first time she had beheld them in the light. The oldest ones had grown: they were as big as ten-cent coins now, and inside them were strange spangles of wire.
Last of all, he scratched away the makeup from his cheek with a fingernail. Dr Bala leant in to examine the wounds.
“Very nice,” he said. “No other symptoms? No itching? No nausea?”
“A bit of runny nose. But I think that’s the haze.”
“Good, good. There’s a topical cream you can use for your face, you know. Water-resistant, so there’s no smudging.” He wheeled away on his typist’s chair, and came back with an unlabelled glass jar full of nut-brown jelly.
“You’re very lucky. There’s been a wave of progress in the field since your last visit. In fact, the National Skin Centre is already doing clinical trials. Here’s the phone number. There’s also a regular support group, so we can brainstorm how to manage the condition.”
“So it’s not dangerous?” asked Mrs Tan.
“Not at all.”
“He can still go to work?”
“Why not?”
She said nothing.
“Oh, you want to know if it’s infectious! That we don’t know. That’s what makes it interesting. Shall we do an examination?”
She let him beam his penlight across her naked body, from forehead to ankle. There was nothing to report. Only the wrinkles, moles and stretch marks typical of any woman of her age.
“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” he told her once she was dressed. “Not only is it painless, it’s becoming quite common.” He rolled up his sleeve as he spoke, and there on his forearm were the familiar marks of the pox, as dense and as glistening as honeycomb.
The clinical trials paid money. Mr and Mrs Tan were not poor, but they felt compelled to accept any course of treatment that would benefit both modern science and their wallets. However, the trials required that Mr Tan be present at the hospital three times a week: Tuesdays and Thursdays for medication and observation, as well as Saturdays for therapy.
Mrs Tan accompanied him to the hospital at first. She did not enjoy reading, so she passed the hours listening to old Taiwanese pop songs on her mobile phone, surveying the other denizens of the waiting room. She took note of their tastes in clothing and accessories, the tension in their voices as they made small talk, the various means they used to disguise the pox creeping over their skins. Eventually, she began to recognise some of the regulars: the fat woman in a tudung and gold-rimmed glasses, the twin brothers with bald heads, the young girl with short spiky hair and too much metal jewellery and black eyeliner. She would smile at them when they came. Sometimes, they smiled back.
“What are they like?” she asked her husband. They were on the long journey home on bus 197 after Saturday’s therapy.
“Just normal people.”
“Nice?”
“OK lor.”
“What do you talk about?”
“Can’t say. It’s supposed to be private.”
She knew to respect his silence. Their marriage would not have lasted so long otherwise.
Then in the wee hours of a Sunday morning, she was jolted awake by the nonstop blare of the d
oorbell. By the time she had found her glasses, this had transformed into a desperate drumming against the door. “Hiong!” she said, but Mr Tan rolled over and covered his ears. The doorbell buzzed again, and a muffled voice began yelling. She hesitated, then reasoned to herself that robbers would be more stealthy, and left the room.
At first, she did not recognise the figure at the peephole, beating its fists on wood. Then she saw the spiky hair and realised it was the young girl from the clinic. She opened the door, keeping the safety chain in place, and the girl plunged her face right into the crack, shouting gibberish. “Please I’ve gotta have the—” she said between splutters. “Tan Boon Hiong,” she also screamed, which surprised her, because neither she nor her husband’s friends addressed him by his full name anymore.
She turned and saw Mr Tan watching the scene from the bedroom door. “Shit,” he said, and retreated into the darkness. A moment later, he came back holding a length of black cable and a laptop computer. He fed the cable into the girl’s hands, which were grasping at it through the gap in the doorway. Then he fastened the other end of the cable into the computer, entered a password and logged on.
The girl grew quiet. Somewhere a dog was barking, and the Australian expat woman from upstairs was yelling at it to shut the fuck up. “Help me,” Mr Tan said, and unfastened the safety chain on the door. He and Mrs Tan dragged the girl into their living room and lifted her onto the sofa. Her body was sweat-soaked, and her makeup had clumped together to reveal a skin that contained a dartboard’s worth of silver holes. One of them, just below her chinbone, held the jack of the black cable. Mr Tan took care not to break the connection as he placed a cushion beneath her head.
“What’s her name?” Mrs Tan asked.
“Nelly.”
“She’s very young.”
“Twenty-two years old. Design student. Very nice girl.”
He retreated to the kitchen. In the background, Mrs Tan could hear him turning on the kettle. Eventually, he emerged with a cup of Milo.
“What’s wrong with her?” she asked.
He made a vague motion with his shoulders.
“What are you doing? Is this part of your treatment? Is this safe?”
Her husband shut the bedroom door behind him. Mrs Tan did the only thing she could: she made another Milo for herself and settled into a rattan armchair to keep watch over the sleeping girl. At times, she quivered and uttered low moans, as if in the throes of a fever dream. Mrs Tan placed her palm on the girl’s forehead, but withdrew it immediately. A thousand tiny metal points had stung her with their coolness.
Around 5am, Nelly opened her eyes and groggily removed the jack from her face. She blinked in the half-light. Mrs Tan went to the fridge, poured her a glass of cold milk and began asking questions.
“We call it plexing,” Nelly told her. “Everyone does it.”
“Why?”
“It feels…good, I guess. Like nothing else on this planet. It’s pure information, pure sensation. Like I’m not myself; like being born in reverse, rising up and drowning in something greater. Not just the computer, you know. The entire Web. The entire world.”
“What do the doctors…”
“Oh, the doctors don’t care. They don’t encourage it, because they didn’t think of it themselves. But they can’t stop us. I mean, you saw what I was like just now. My parents took my cable, and I went nuts. I had to. I just had to.”
“You said everyone does it. Does that mean my Hiong…”
Nelly made a noise into her milk. It took some time before Mrs Tan realised she was laughing.
“Of course Boon Hiong does it. Everyone does it. Hell, who do you think invented it?”
Shortly after this, Mrs Tan stopped going to the hospital. Another woman in her office had taken maternity leave, so she had accepted some extra administrative work which kept her in the office until well after 7pm. She often ate dinner alone at kopitiams and fast-food joints, listening to her Taiwanese music on her devices.
But she could not shut the pox out of her life. There was her husband at home, of course, lying in bed next to her every night. He had grown lazier about applying the jelly to his skin, and had reverted to his old habit of sleeping topless, so that his body gleamed with the lamplights of the opposite block. In the morning, when he left for work, the holes littered his face like stubble.
Nelly would sometimes come over too. Plexing was safer at the Tans’ flat than at her own. She brought friends with her: both the familiar faces from therapy as well as other folks her own age, with long hair and baggy black clothing. The young people wore their scars with pride, sometimes colouring their rims with nail polish and lip liner to render them more visible to the outside world. Many of the older people had lost their misgivings as well. Dr Bala often turned up in short sleeves, and the fat woman with spectacles occasionally removed her tudung, exposing the ring of holes on her forehead like a coronet.
Mr Tan assumed a position of authority at these parties. He not only offered cables to newcomers, but gave detailed advice about which ports in the body would provide the best connectivity, as well as the ambient factors that might interfere with Wi-Fi or LAN. He had become a guru of sorts, with a uniform of an unbuttoned silk pyjama top and shorts. Nelly’s friends sat cross-legged at his feet while he expounded on the metaphysical aspects and ethics of plexing, speaking longer and more eloquently than in any of his dialogues with Mrs Tan over twenty years of marriage.
Mrs Tan learnt to avoid these noisy Saturdays by devoting them to shopping, diligently ploughing through the weekend queues at the wet market, the supermarket, the shopping mall, until her arms could carry no more. Much of what she purchased was for her guests: cans of Danish cream crackers and Heaven and Earth iced tea. She did not want her husband to be seen as a poor host.
She was weathering one night in the aisles of Mustafa Centre when someone tapped her on her shoulder.
“Mrs Tan?”
It was a stranger with slicked-down hair and a chequered shirt. She had never met him before; she was sure of it. He was the darkest-skinned man she’d ever seen, and under the strip lighting the holes in him shone like crystals in granite. He was pushing a shopping trolley full of copper wire and metal fittings.
“I’m such a big fan of your husband’s. He’s a very great man.”
“Thank you.”
He must have seen the confusion in her eyes, because he added, “I’ve never been to your house. But at the hospital recently, when I was plexing, I—”
“Where?”
“Sorry?”
“Where did he put my picture?”
The man smiled, and placed his jewelled hand on her own. “No lah, ma’am. It’s nothing like that. We were interfacing directly. You just need the right cables, and you can share all your knowledge, your memories, everything. So I wasn’t just plexing, ma’am. I was plexing with him.”
She let him talk for a while longer, nodding numbly, then abandoned her shopping cart and went home by taxi. Nothing had changed, she thought, as she looked for her keys in her purse. Nothing really. He was the same person, just more famous now.
His disease was not a disease. He was having the time of his life. But it was only his life. She could no longer claim a part of it.
It was nearly midnight. Outside her flat, the corridor was littered with shoes: sneakers, high heels, bowed flats, moccasins, flip-flops, even a pair of chalk-white schoolroom shoes from Bata. Yet the house was quiet, and through the curtains she could see that the lights had been lowered to a dull amber glow. She opened the door.
She thought for a moment that a disaster had happened: that a giant insect had broken into her home and woven a nest from the bodies of those present. But as her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she could see the guests as they were, healthy and intact beneath the cable spaghetti that surrounded them. They were simply plexing, only in a more complex configuration than anything she had hitherto witnessed. Each person had festooned himself or her
self with multiple cables—five, ten, twenty—protruding from every imaginable surface of his or her body. The ends of these cables criss-crossed the room, linking them with their fellow brethren. In their slumbering union, they smiled and moaned and whimpered. They had become one organism. One holy beast.
She went to the bathroom. Over the course of a long, hot shower, she decided what she had to do. First, she emptied the fridge and the cabinets and cooked a feast. It was not an elaborate affair. There was egg fried rice and bee hoon and various soups and stews and curries, but she did not marinate the meat, nor was she punctilious about the proportions of pepper and onions and garlic. Mr Tan’s friends did not appear to notice as the surface of the dining room table filled with food, served on mismatched crockery, from their fine pink porcelain bowls painted with green dragons to dusty paper plates taken home from long-forgotten office parties. She cooked and she cooked, and still the guests slept on.
When the last rusted-over tin of rambutans had been emptied into a plastic punchbowl, Mrs Tan left the kitchen. By now, she was soaked with oil and sweat, so she had another shower, massaging the entire bottle of rose-scented conditioner into her hair. When she had dried herself off, she packed a suitcase of clothes and valuables, got dressed, then applied her makeup in the mirror, matching the hues to the rings she wore on her fingers.
By now, the sky was rosy purple with the approaching dawn. She had decided against leaving a note, but she knelt by her husband’s body all the same, stroking the familiar remnants of his face.
He stirred.
“Mary?”
“I’m here, Hiong.”
“Mmmm.”
“But I have to go.”
“Go where?”
“If you ever need me, you have my number.”
“Mmmm.”
She heard a yawn and a couple of clicks in the corner. The guests were beginning to rise, unjacking themselves, lumbering to their feet. Clumsily, a handful of them began gathering in the dining room, helping themselves to the feast.
Mrs Tan checked her watch.
“Just promise me you’ll take care of yourself. Can?”