by O Thiam Chin
I closed my eyes and wiped the scene from my mind.
Yet the black dogs were still there; I could feel their presence, their shadows stretching over my life. How long could I hold up before they came for me again? Was madness a slow progression, or a sudden fall?
I had always suffered from these dark spells since I was a child— extended periods when my mind would spiral into free fall, and every thought I had was a thought that reached for some kind of oblivion, for the relief of death. They came to me, quietly and unannounced, and then they stayed. Days that I couldn’t get out of bed, let alone eat or sleep, days that felt like the longest days ever, each second beating its own deadly knell. When I was 18, my parents sent me to a doctor who sent me to a psychiatrist who dispatched me for two months to Woodbridge Hospital. I took all the pills, and I listened to all the advice: go out, make more friends, get some sunlight, take up a sport, smile more. I tried, I did everything I was told, and I had good days. My parents were pleased.
And then the dogs would appear again, snapping at my heels.
My father: Why are you doing this to yourself? Why are you doing this to us?
My mother: Can’t you try harder? You know you can overcome this if you want to. You only need to want it.
My brother: Don’t be weak, you’re a fucking man. Don’t give in just like that.
And so I tried. I kept the black dogs at bay, I left them cold and starving. I saw another psychiatrist, I took the new drugs. I met new people, new faces. I dated and I had sex and I felt positive. I learnt to write fiction, and the words became a weapon and a shield that I used to defend myself; the stories were maps to plot my escape. I built up an arsenal of words; I wrote story after story. The world grew inside me, now a fortress, now a city: I had my control, my authority, the light pouring in and flooding every corner. I felt good about myself for the first time in my life.
And then my parents died, one six months after the other.
Still I held up for a while, for four, five months. Then, without any warning, the dogs came back. The days stretched bleakly on in a long bated breath, a seam of time without end, unfurling inside me, feathers like razors, cutting.
What if I had died the last time—would it have mattered to anyone? I no longer stayed in touch with my older brother after my parents’ deaths; we had our own lives and we lived with the decisions we made. I had enjoyed solitude from a young age and long grew used to being alone. I managed life on my own terms, living with very little, and expecting even less from other people. People are needy and demanding and they will never be able to help themselves, I often reminded myself. I did not feel the need to impose myself on others, and likewise, I refused to be burdened by others. I would die, and there would be no one to mourn for me, and it would not be a terrible thing.
But with Yifan I had doubts. I knew I had leant too heavily on her, and the gaping pit inside me was widening and deepening over time. When I was with her I felt the pangs of my own loneliness more intensely, and I was suddenly afraid of my urgent, desperate need, and where it would lead me eventually.
Yet for the first time in a very long while my days were filled not with fear or encroaching darkness, but with a small sense of wonder, even possibilities.
• • •
“Derrick, I’m not what you think I am,” Yifan said, after we had been seeing each other for four months. “I take different forms, different disguises, and this is just one of them.”
I turned to look at Yifan when she said this. With her head on my chest, and her words flitting across my skin, I thought, for a moment, that I had heard something else. I had just finished telling her a new story, one about a young woman who had to take care of her late father’s cat. Yifan had liked the story, judging from her nodding throughout the reading.
“I’m much older than I look. I have lived for so long that the days or years no longer matter to me. Not in the way that they matter to you,” Yifan said, lowering her voice, keeping it soft, steely.
“I don’t understand.”
“It’s okay. You won’t understand unless I tell you. I’m a fox spirit.”
With that, Yifan got out of bed, put on her clothes, and left the flat quietly.
For the rest of the night, I found myself in a state of restlessness and, not knowing what to do, went around the flat, cleaning and wiping and washing, unable to keep my thoughts in order. Even when I closed my eyes, trying to catch some sleep, my mind refused to shut down. I smoked and drank coffee to pass the long hours, waiting for the morning light to break through the night.
Yifan texted me the following day and came over late at night with a bag of supper: seafood fried rice and stir-fried kailan. Over the meal, she did not bring up anything about being a fox spirit, and I wondered if I had imagined what she had said. I’m coming unhinged, I thought. We ate supper in silence.
Then, later, after we had sex, Yifan continued her story.
“I was ten when I first started noticing the changes to my body, small signs that told me I was different from other people. I was so scared by the transformation—the tail, my canine teeth, the appetite. I thought I was a monster, until my parents assured me. They knew I would realise this sooner or later, having come to this stage of maturity. They were ready to tell me everything about our identity. They wanted me to know what, or who, I am.”
“So your whole family—are they all fox spirits?”
“Yes, all of us. We have been around for a long time.”
“How long?”
“Long enough to see people come and go, to see countries rise and fall, to see wars and battles and floods. The harvests and the passing of seasons. My parents were born in Gansu, China, in the eighth century, and they settled in Malaysia at the turn of the last century. They felt it was better in Malaysia after the famine and constant upheavals in their hometown. They wanted an unobtrusive, quieter life.”
“But then why did you leave your family?”
“Why? Why do we leave what’s so familiar to us? Simple. We leave because we want a different kind of life. I left because I needed to.” Yifan drew away from me, her gaze moving inwards.
“Don’t you miss your family?” I ventured again, my voice subdued.
“Sometimes, but I’ve gotten used to it. The thing is, I can sense my family through my body, no matter how far I am from them. I can feel them right in my flesh, a unique sensation for each one of them. My parents, each of my siblings. I can feel their pulse in me, as if their hearts are right beside mine. I know how each of them is doing from different parts of my body.
“Once, I felt a sharp jab of pain on the right side of my lower abdomen, and I knew something bad had happened to my third elder brother. I could feel his heartbeats getting weaker, and it was a terrible, awful feeling: I could feel his life leaving me, and there was nothing I could do about it. The sharp pain ended after some time, and there was this strange hollowness in place of it, a vast emptiness.
“Later, I found out from my mother that my brother had been killed by loan sharks over a gambling debt. He bled to death after they stabbed him in the chest. It was so sudden that none of us had a chance to come to his rescue.
“The place where my elder brother used to live inside me remains dark and hollow, even now.”
• • •
The first man Yifan fell in love with was someone who worked in a provision shop in the kampung where her family lived. She was 15, quiet and introverted, and had noticed the young man when she was helping her parents make the runs to the shop, picking up groceries or buying the nightly Chinese newspaper. The man, bespectacled and sinewy, was the shop assistant—the middle son of the shop owner—and had been working there since completing secondary school, at the same school that Yifan attended. They had been in each other’s orbit for a long time—they were both born in the same kampung in Ipoh and had never left the state in their lives, not even for a short holiday. Growing up, they were friendly but not close. He was there a
ll the time, Yifan explained, and then something happened—a shift of perception, the tide of inexplicable feelings—and she could not stop noticing him.
When this happened, Yifan found herself paying close attention to his clothes and gestures and tics, musing contemplatively over his words from the brief conversations they had. Something grew and gnawed inside her—a wild, unwieldy feeling that had seemed like a physical pain; to be near him felt like an ordeal, as if she were treading on thin ice, waiting to fall through. On the surface nothing had changed between them, but the change inside her had irreversibly split her into two distinct irreconcilable states, like night and day, air and water.
Naturally, Yifan told nothing of this to her parents or siblings; it was something she was still unable to put into words or make any sense of. She nursed her infatuation for the man quietly, privately, and her feelings grew in accordance.
Then one day, Yifan did the inevitable—she made the first move. She did not approach him or talk to him; instead she followed him. At that point in her life, four years after discovering her true nature, she had learnt how to transform herself, though her abilities were weak and limited. A sparrow, a mouse, a house lizard—these transformations could be achieved with some practice. She would throw her whole being into an image of an animal in her mind, and then she would physically become the creature. It took a long time before she even got round the idea of the transformation—losing the particularity of her physical self, yet still retaining her sense of self and her thoughts in the mind of the beast she was impersonating. It is an odd feeling, to live in a completely different body, to be that very thing I imagined, Yifan said. Every transformation was a novel experience, and each one would take its own toll, something she only realised much later.
The first time she decided to follow the young man, she transformed herself into a sparrow. By then, she had been observing him from a distance for weeks, and was well aware of his daily routine, the cycles of his life. At 4.30 in the afternoon, he left the shop for his usual half-hour break, carrying a bag of sunflower seeds. Yifan, as a sparrow, followed him to a clearing under a large casuarina tree, a short distance from the back of the provision shop. Often he would head there for a short nap or to daydream on a wooden bench he had constructed out of a few old planks. The shade provided by the tight canopy of branches was gentle and cooling, and the occasional breeze had a soothing, calming effect on the mind. There was no one around; the silence was punctured only by the shuffling of the leaves and the persistent droning of the crickets. Yifan stayed on a low branch of a nearby tree, keeping her gaze on him, her heart pounding madly in her newly constricted chest. The young man remained quiet as he sat on the wooden bench.
After staring into the field of lalang for some time, the man untied the knot on the bag of sunflower seeds and reached in for a handful, scattering them on the ground before him. Two stray chickens, plump with luscious brown feathers, crept towards the seeds, pecking at the sand. The man watched them studiously. Yifan came closer, skipping to a branch that overlooked the arc of the man’s back. Had she made the slightest sound, a chirp, he would have noticed her. Being so close to him set her body thrumming with a deep excitement. She was barely able to hold everything inside the tiny form she inhabited.
The man lay back and stretched himself out, taking up the full length of the bench. He looked up into the overlapping branches, his left hand blocking out the light. Had he seen her, she wondered? Her heart leapt into her beak, and she broke out into a barely suppressed twitter despite intending to keep herself hidden. Then she froze—the body was still new to her, with its strange little tics—her head cocked at a slight angle. She could feel the man’s curious gaze on her; the sudden awareness was a heavy cloak that held her immobile. The man sent up a whistle, smiling. Yifan did not dare to look down, or do anything.
After what seemed like an immeasurably long time, she peeked down and saw that the man had closed his eyes. He had fallen asleep. From her perch, Yifan studied the man’s features—the fringe of hair that fell across his forehead, his loose, full lips, the delicate line of his ears. She had never had the chance to look at him so closely— there was always an impulse to pull away, to lower her eyes, by her own volition—and now that she had been presented with one, she felt at a loss. What did she want from all this? What was she hoping to get from him—a reciprocation of feelings? Or something else entirely, something she had yet to come around to—a deep yearning, or a dark urge, perhaps?
She flapped her wings tentatively, then flew down to the edge of the bench. Deep in sleep, the man’s hands had dropped to his sides, extending to the ground. Up close, Yifan felt the soft heat emanating from his body, a warm invisible skin wrapped all around him. The sounds of the surrounding forest came to Yifan as if from a different age, from a time fractured from reality—discordant, shrouded, tempestuous. What was he dreaming, if he was dreaming?
She came as close as she could, never lifting her eyes from him. Yifan was breathless with the possibilities running through her head. She had wanted to return to her human form there and then, but it would have been unthinkable. So she perched there, silently and stolidly, and bade her time, observing him and restraining her thoughts.
Around them, the world throbbed and pulsated with strong, stubborn beats. A deeply magical place, full of air and light.
• • •
This went on for two weeks before Yifan discovered something about the young man. During one of her observations, she heard him—or rather she felt his thoughts, as if he had spoken them aloud. She had discovered this while she was spying on him in his room at night, in the disguise of a house lizard. There was a sudden interruption in the flow of her thoughts, as if something had barged into her consciousness. At first, she brushed the mental nudge aside, and then in the flicker of realisation, she knew it was something from outside of her, that it had come from the man.
“It was like he was speaking directly to me,” Yifan said. “But not in words, or anything that could be put into words.”
“Not in words?”
“No. Only the shape of his thought, but it was enough. I could sense its weight and outline inside me, and I could make out what he was thinking. It’s like how you know a chair is a chair in the dark—you recognise its form when you run your hands over it. It was a frightening thing.”
“Frightening?”
“To have a small access into his mind, or anyone’s mind—to really know someone from his core, how he thinks or feels… It’s just…”
Yifan closed her eyes, taking a deep breath. She moved her fingers across my chest, as if tracing some invisible script across my skin.
“That first time, I held on to his thought for very long. It took a while to fully form in my head, and I was very careful not to disturb it lest it disappear. It was my first experience of hearing someone’s thoughts, and I wanted it to last as long as it could. The thought itself was mundane—something about clearing out part of a storeroom for new stocks the next day. But it was a secret knowledge of his life that had been revealed only to me. Only I had been given a glimpse into its workings. I was so scared of being discovered that I just let the thought sit in me until it faded away.
“After this happened, I became very restless, unable to keep myself from fretting all the time. I still helped my father with deliveries to the provision shop where he worked. But when our eyes met, I would quickly glance away, afraid he could sense what I could do.
“I still held on to the images of his thought in my head, though they became more vague every time I dredged them up, as if their imprints were slowly being wiped away. I was terribly afraid of losing the thought altogether. I wanted more—I needed to know more. I wanted to get inside him, into his head. This idea gave me such a thrill that I could barely think of anything else. I knew it could happen again. And of course it did, not long after.”
• • •
A week later, Yifan took the form of a moth and went to t
he man late at night. He lived in a room at the back of the shop, a dingy place that only had space for a single bed, a chair, and a wire clothesline. It was just past one and the man was still awake, lying on the thin mattress. Yifan stationed herself on the wall, hiding in the shadow. The man had cast only a brief glance at her when she flew in through the open window, before turning back to stare at the ceiling, where a single light bulb hung from a wire cable. Weak, yellow light saturated the room.
Gliding down, Yifan came closer to the man, keeping herself motionless on the edge of his chair. Soon enough, she felt a nudge in her head—one light push and a stray thought rose forth. She steadied herself against the surge of feelings rippling through her.
And then an odd thing happened: barely had she grasped the form and contents of the man’s thought—something from a sketch comedy he had seen on TV that night—that she was nudged by another thought. It hit her suddenly that she was reading his mind. The man’s thoughts snuck in and slipped through her mind as if the latter had suddenly become porous. Don’t lose your mind, she told herself. Hold on, hold on.