by O Thiam Chin
Sometimes, when they were kissing, Tien Chen would imagine the man’s tongue in Yifan’s mouth, teasing, searching, wet and slippery with intention and desire. He imagined his hands—the other man’s—on Yifan, as he held it behind her back, down her butt, on the firm curves of her breasts, on her thighs. Was this how the man would hold her, how he would trail his fingers across her body or taste her skin? He was racked with doubt and jealousy, and at the same time he could not deny the effect the thoughts of Yifan and the man had on him, opening up a pit inside him that allowed his darker yearnings to come unbound. In his imagination and actions he was a different man—or was he the other man?
He wondered whether Yifan knew exactly who she was with when they were together, whether she really, truly wanted this other man he was inhabiting—alive in another skin—or someone else entirely. Does love always divide the lover, splitting him into numerous other beings? Did Yifan come to him as an amalgam of different parts, of different identities? Which one of her did he love then—the woman in front of him, or the one in his imagination, conjured up with words and wild fancy? He did not know.
Some nights, when Yifan slept over at his place, her mobile phone would buzz intermittently with messages. She smiled when she read the messages, though she never revealed what they were about, or from whom. Sometimes, when she was in the toilet or kitchen, Tien Chen would pick up her phone and read the new messages: Wrote a new story, want to read it to you. Come over soon? I miss you. Any plans tonight? Because Yifan always deleted the messages she read—no old messages in the inbox, only the latest ones—there was no way Tien Chen could form a clear story in his head about the relationship between her and the other man.
If Yifan knew about his snooping, she did not let on. On her part, she managed to keep up appearances, not minding when Tien Chen refused to do anything on her day off apart from a long session of lovemaking at his place and staying in afterward. I can cook for you, he said, you have everything you need here.
But aren’t you bored? she said.
No, not with you. And if there was a choice, he would have thrown away her mobile phone, so she would not be so distracted with any new messages.
When Yifan needed to head back home, Tien Chen would accompany her right to her doorstep. She lived in the western part of Ang Mo Kio, and usually they took the twenty-minute walk back. By this time her flat mates were well acquainted with Tien Chen, and made small talk with him when they saw him. Yifan shared a small, tidy bedroom with another Malaysian, a girl from Taiping, who worked shifts in an electronics-manufacturing factory, and whom Tien Chen had just met twice. The bedroom held only the barest of furniture: a peeling cupboard, two beds with thin mattresses, an aluminium hanging rack, and a tiny bedside table. Four other occupants, all women, took up the other bedrooms, and there was never a dull or quiet moment in the flat. A heavy miasma of smells hung in the air: spicy ramen, citrus shampoo, floor cleanser. The TV was always on, no matter what time of the day it was or whether anyone was watching: a drone of white noise against the fuzzy background of chatter and voices. Once, Tien Chen had asked Yifan to move in with him, but she declined. I’ve got used to this, she said, and all of us get along fine anyway.
In some ways, Yifan was very much like Tien Chen: her side of the room was kept extremely clean and sparse, with beige-coloured bedclothes; all her belongings were kept out of sight in the cupboard or in the small suitcase under the bed. The smell of talcum powder lingered lightly in the room, one Tien Chen associated closely with Yifan.
The first time he spent a night in her room—he persisted, knowing that her roommate had gone back to Taiping for a family visit over a long weekend—they made love quietly on her bed. Don’t make too much noise, the walls are thin, they can hear us, she said.
Let them hear, I’m not ashamed, he said.
But I live here, and it’s embarrassing for me. She covered Tien Chen’s mouth with her hand when he was about to come, and they had laughed at the end of it.
Because of his pressing and unspoken curiosity about how she lived, Tien Chen began to devise ways to spend his nights over at her place. More than anything, the time he spent at Yifan’s gave him the opportunity to find out whatever he could about her from the things she kept and the possessions she had. He peeked into the cupboard and suitcase whenever she was in the shower and went through her clothes and books, hoping to uncover some letters or a diary, but she kept none of these things. There was an old Samsung phone hidden behind a clump of underwear, but it was dead. In one of the pouches, he discovered an old photo of Yifan and a few classmates in uniform. She had straight shoulder-length hair then, held back with a hair clip, and was leaning against a tall, lanky boy with a narrow, pimply face. Tien Chen studied the boy’s face; there was nothing distinct or prominent in his features. He took it out a few more times after the initial discovery, trying to commit the boy’s face to memory, but it never stuck. To ask Yifan about him would betray his snooping, so he kept the questions to himself.
Tien Chen also looked into a black accordion file where she kept her travel and work permit documents, and took down the address of her hometown in Ipoh. Among the papers, he found several pieces of printouts. Fragments of stories. One was about a band of ancient swordsmen exacting revenge on a rival group, another about a boy’s fascination with collecting dead moths. There was one he was particularly interested in, a story about a fox spirit. He read it several times, and because the fragments were disjointed, he was only able to form a rough outline in his head of what the story was about. Who wrote these stories—Yifan? If not, where did she get these stories? Who gave them to her? And why was she keeping them? Tien Chen hid the fox story in his bag and brought it home. He had expected, even secretly hoped, that Yifan would bring up the missing story somehow—was it important to her at all?—but she never once showed any signs of noticing its absence.
His obsession grew as time passed. He started to steal other things whenever he went over to Yifan’s place: a comb, a stick of lipstick, an old T-shirt, a pair of panties that had lost its elasticity. He would stash the items in a small messenger bag and put it in a disused army haversack which he hid at the back of his wardrobe. He would take Yifan’s things out on nights she was not able to meet him, running the comb through his hair or applying a gloss of lipstick on his lips and kissing the reflection in the mirror. He would slip into Yifan’s underwear and, lying on his bed, imagined running his tongue over her hardened nipples and the wet flaps of her vulva. Working his hand frantically inside the underwear, he would ejaculate furiously, the thick gluey semen rising through the lacy fabric. After he was through with his ritual, he would take up the lighter and work the flame across his skin, the edge of pain bringing his mind to heel. He would skip out of existence for a brief moment and become absolutely nothing, only a bright, dying pinpoint of illumination, now here, now gone. He often felt calmer after each burning, his senses returned, focused.
Because he was burning himself every day, Tien Chen became careless about monitoring his wounds. He still ensured that they were treated immediately after each burning by applying lotions and aloe vera gel, and hiding them with plasters and dressings, but there were simply too many for him to keep track of constantly. Some of the wounds started to leak, while other grew itchy with scabs. On busy days at work, he sometimes did not realise the blood and pus had seeped through his work shirt until he noticed the stains on the papers and files on his desk. He began keeping a supply of dressings in his drawer at work, along with a backup of dark-coloured work shirts. He got so worried that he started to skip lunch with his colleagues, choosing to eat in at the office pantry.
One night, whilst he was lying in bed with Yifan, she turned to him, a strange, perplexed expression on her face. I know what you have been doing, she said.
Tien Chen’s heart took a few lurching leaps; his skin went cold. Why are you hiding this from me? she asked. You know that I know, right? Tien Chen kept mum. You can tell
me.
Still, he maintained his silence. This, all these, I know what they are, she said, holding up his hand, these scars. You did this to yourself, right?
Though they were lying side by side, Tien Chen had never felt more distant from Yifan, as if they existed in two separate, vastly different dimensions. After some time, Tien Chen nodded.
Why can’t you be frank with me? Why can’t you tell me this? she said.
For the same reason you can’t, or won’t, tell me about your relationship with the other man, Tien Chen had wanted to say, but knew it wasn’t the right time to bring it up. It’s nothing, you don’t have to worry, just a bad habit.
Her gaze drilled into him, a fleeting hint of sympathy—pity?— in her stare. She took a deep breath. I used to cut myself when I was sixteen. Small cuts at first, very superficial, like light scratches on my skin. They didn’t hurt too much. And then I began to cut more, and deeper too. I’m not sure why I did it then. For release, for attention, I don’t know. I wasn’t depressed or anything, or at least I didn’t think I was. I told myself it was nothing serious. Some of my classmates were cutting themselves as well, I saw the lines on their wrists and hands. I thought it was a passing phase, something a stupid teenager would do, like smoking or shoplifting. And I did it for a long time, through my adolescence, and then I didn’t want to do it anymore. I decided one day to stop and forced myself to follow through with my decision.
What made you stop? Tien Chen asked.
Something happened, which made me realise… Her words trailed off.
What was it, Tien Chen pressed.
Yifan shrugged, and turned the topic back to Tien Chen. I know it’s hard to quit this if you’ve been doing it for a long time. I’m not going to pester you to give it up. I know you have your limits. But you need to decide whether it’ll do you any good in the long run. You have to make that decision, not me, she said. Then, holding Tien Chen’s hand towards her, she touched the still-tender wound in the middle of his palm.
For a long time after that night, Tien Chen took great effort not to burn himself whenever he felt the urge rising inside him. He knew its shape and pulse intimately, and to overcome it he took to burning other things in the flat, starting with his own. The clothes were the first to go: his old army uniforms and PT attire, work shirts and pants showing signs of wear and tear, T-shirts and bermudas that had not been worn for some time, loose-necked socks. He cleared them in small batches, burning the clothes in the soot-covered bin beside the refuse compound in the neighbourhood. He applied only one rule to the frenzy of clearing his stuff: keep only the essentials. By the end of the second week, his wardrobe was down to just five work shirts, two pairs of black pants, one pair of dress shoes, one pair of running shoes, one tie, three pairs of socks, five pairs of underwear, seven T-shirts, two bermudas, one belt. He stared into the bare cupboard, and the empty spaces inside filled him with an irrational sense of achievement.
Next: the stacks of CDs and DVDs. He ripped their contents onto his hard disk, keeping nothing. When it seemed he had burnt all that he could of his belongings, Tien Chen finally turned to the books his father had bought for him when he was a child. There was a bookshelf in his room where he kept them in neat, straight rows, and he took pride in still having these keen reminders of his childhood around. Jungles of the World: a present for his seventh birthday; Lost Ancient Civilizations: for coming in fifth in class when he was in Primary Five; UFOs and Other Supernatural Phenomena: for scoring high marks on a science test. He had once held these books as faithful companions, providing paths into all kinds of knowledge about the world while keeping at bay the sharp loneliness he had always felt as a child, left alone in the flat when his father was at work.
But Tien Chen could no longer connect these books with his childhood, and whatever effect they had on him was long gone. To him, they were just tattered edges and age-faded pages, dusty and useless. He had thought about giving them to the Salvation Army or the karung guni man who came to his block once a fortnight, but the idea that they would fall into the hands of some stranger did not appeal to him, and so he pushed back the decision every time. This time, he refused to be deterred. He filled up a storage box with as many books as it could hold and carried them to the burner-bin.
He picked up the first book, Dinosaurs and Other Prehistoric Reptiles, and brought the lighter to a page and watched as the tiny flicker of flame trembled and moved across the glossy surface, blackening the words and pictures. He threw the book into the bin and waited for the fire to catch on. As he burnt the books, he stood close to the bin and felt the waves of heat licking him, tingling under his skin.
It took him three days to burn everything, in the end. Later, he dismantled the bookshelf and burnt it as well. His father had come in with an armful of folded laundry one night and surveyed Tien Chen’s bedroom. What happened to the books? he said.
I gave them away, Tien Chen replied, not looking at him. His father shook his head and left the room.
The amount of stuff in his bedroom dwindled. Some nights when he coughed, he could hear an echo bouncing off the walls. At the same time, over the weeks, the items he took from Yifan and hoarded in his old army bag multiplied. He took only what he assumed Yifan would never miss: a scrunchie, a pen, an old photograph of her (from a stack she kept in her suitcase), an unused tube of face cream. He bought a bigger storage bag, and also a lock. Whenever he stayed over at Yifan’s, he would scan her belongings minutely, assessing the next item to take, weighing the risk. On nights he left empty-handed, Tien Chen would feel dispossessed, as if he had been unfairly deprived of some vital material need. He could not understand why: this need that demanded so much to be sated. He had Yifan—he possessed her in all imaginable ways, he thought—but still something was lacking, something invisible but substantial. He took and took, as if he were trying to gather and assemble all the pieces of her, and yet there were always some more missing pieces he could not quite find. He did not want to give up, though it felt like there was a long way to go still.
One night, on a weekday, Yifan saw him standing at the block of flats opposite the kopitiam. Tien Chen had not moved fast enough to hide behind a pillar, and so he waited while Yifan walked up to him, her face strangely calm, inscrutable.
What are you doing here? she said.
Nothing, I was feeling restless at home, he said, glancing at the bag of food in her hand.
He waited for her explanation, but the answer never came. Instead, Yifan stared into his face, reading something there that he was not able to conceal. He felt exposed.
How long have you been doing this? she said.
What, he feigned, what are you talking about?
The look on her face shifted. Barely suppressing an undertone of chill and impatience, she asked: Have you been following me?
Tien Chen stayed silent, his insides balling up into a tight fist.
I can’t talk to you now, I don’t think I can say anything, she said.
Tien Chen reached out for her, and Yifan reflexively blocked the gesture with her raised hand, letting go of the bag of food. It fell to her feet with a wet thud, spilling everything across her sandals.
Why are you doing this? Tien Chen asked, taking another step towards her.
I don’t know how to explain it to you now. With that, Yifan turned on her heel and moved away from Tien Chen, her back hunched but resolute.
Yifan, he called out. She did not turn around.
That night, Tien Chen called and sent her messages, and only received dead silence as reply.
For a week, he did not hear from Yifan. He turned up at the kopitiam for dinner but Yifan refused to acknowledge him, giving him a wide berth. He pleaded for a reply of sorts, through his messages. I’m sorry. I just needed to know. Who is he? Who is he to you? He heard nothing from her, and it almost drove him out of his mind. He took out Yifan’s possessions from the bag and held them every night, trying to breathe some meaning into each piece of
item. He took out the story of the fox spirit he had stolen from her, and read it repeatedly.
In his vivid, fretful dreams, Yifan was the fox spirit, making her way through a dark forest, running away (or towards?) some form of danger, her glistening sheen of fur catching the moonlight, slipping in and out of the shadows. He followed her (who was he in the dream, this moving presence? Another fox? A ghost?) for a while, coming so close he could smell the heavy dank scent of her sweaty fur, and hear the panting of her breath. She stopped from time to time, pricking up her ears to pick up the nocturnal noises, or sniffing the damp foggy air for signs of life. Did she sense his presence? Did she know he was there, beside her?
Every time, an anguished cry would sound out from somewhere in the dark, shattering the cloak of silence in the forest, breaking the grip of his dream. Tien Chen woke shivering to these visions in his dream, his limbs aching as if he had been traversing across great distances.
At the end of the week, he could bear it no more; he took out the lighter and held it over his palm, the old scab softening in the heat of the flame. The pain swept over him, blinding, rapturous. He held himself still for as long as he could before he finally passed out, weeping pus and blood from the melted flesh.
Tien Chen woke up with a start, feeling someone nudge his arm. How long had he slept? His body felt weakened, pulverised, his head all light and spikes. A hand was put to his forehead—his father’s hand. He tried to raise his body upright, but invisible weights pinned him down. A piss-yellow trickle of pus-blood dripped from his half-clenched palm onto the bedspread; he closed it. Short pulses of pain, claw-sharp.
He saw the shadow of his father moving out of the room and, a moment later, coming in with a damp towel. He pressed it gently against Tien Chen’s palm, sending a shock of pain across his hand, up his arm. You’re having a fever, he heard his father saying, you’re burning up. In his mind’s eye, Tien Chen saw the spread of red across the dead spaces inside him, creeping up the walls, filling up the air. He sensed a flurry of movements out of the corner of his eye, a glimpse of—paws? pointy ears? Was it the fox? He breathed hard, choking on the gulps of air burning down his dry throat.