Though I Get Home

by YZ Chin

  “Poems.” “Inflammatory.” “Pornographic.” Even during the protest she had not felt such fear. It bloated her brain, pushing it against her skull. How did they know she used to write poetry?

  Under a picture of Anwar’s care-lined face were two poems:

  Let’s Talk About Sodomy

  By Isa Sin

  How it always starts:

  something goes in,

  something else comes out.

  Jail, I mean.

  A change of clothes,

  a change of goals,

  a change of souls.

  Would you?

  If you could self

  -inflict a white eye.

  Wide-eyed, we learn how

  bellies belie

  anus’ onus,

  how

  semen in seams of men,

  of mattress, matters

  in court, of course.

  The evidence, strained,

  not as if through a sieve,

  but meaning tough to conceive.

  We case a building

  where they are

  building a building

  because we are

  building our case.

  Let’s talk. Just

  Yes or No,

  Please.

  Let’s Talk About Sodomy II

  By Isa Sin

  There is always a sequel;

  truth lies in repetition.

  Re-dig ridic relics.

  Those who do not learn from the lessons of

  history are condemned to repeat its mistakes, ha haha.

  What century are we in anyway?

  Your Lordship has lied.

  Seriously, can’t you control your own lordship a little

  better?

  It’s bad enough we have to take seriously

  the application of the penal code

  toward penile penetration.

  It’s almost as bad as arguing that

  “anal canal” rhymes.

  Let’s talk, I go.

  You can can it, you say.

  “Can I fuck you today?” the nation is asked.

  But

  there was still light filtering through the curtains.

  Already there were over a thousand comments, most of them simple “likes” and thumbs-up icons accompanied by digital laughter. Interspersed were expressions of disgust and speeches about declining morals. Isa’s hand slipped off her mouse. Her palm was wet. Half-consciously she lifted it to cover her mouth, then grimaced as the film of sweat stuck, transferred to her face.

  An arrhythmic pounding startled her. She jerked up. Some part of her cracked, maybe a shoulder. The door handle rattled violently. The overlapping knocks and the energetic vibrations of the handle told her there was more than one person beyond. It wasn’t a friend, and it wasn’t anyone next door. It must be—

  “Polis!”

  She wanted to shout above the din that she was here, so that they would stop the assault on her door. But even the banging had a forceful authority of its own, and it muted her. She hurried across the living room, noticing on her way that one of the prints hanging on the wall was crooked. As soon as the door swung open they stomped into her apartment. She had barely time to scuttle aside and avoid contact. Dimly she congratulated herself also on her perspicacity, for it was the police, standing around her space in heavy boots—she knew it—and scanning rooms to find—what? Whom? Her heart roiled.

  “You are detained under the Internal Security Act.”

  She registered that the shortest man seemed to be in charge. He seemed gentle enough as he put a guiding hand between her shoulder blades and steered her deeper into the apartment. She made out that she was supposed to pack one change of clothes. As she walked out of the living area, she saw from the corner of her eye that the other taller policemen were rifling through the printouts near her computer, all of which were about some form or another of the government’s wrongdoing.

  “What am I being arrested for?” she asked, though she knew.

  She couldn’t find her duffle bag. Impatient, the short policeman shook out a Giant supermarket plastic bag from the kitchen and ordered her to put her clothes into the bag. She blushed, trying her best to sandwich her bra and panties in between a T-shirt and a pair of artificially distressed black jeans. A different policeman stood nearby, shaking his head, his face mournful. Isa did not understand what was intended by his emotive gesture. She looked at him inquiringly, pleadingly. He produced a pair of handcuffs.

  Meanwhile, over a hundred miles away in Taiping, residents were locking their gates and staying indoors. A tiger had escaped from the zoo, which was located smack in the heart of town. Visitors had been ordered to evacuate the zoo, and no one knew where the tiger was. The animal had cleared nearly six feet of wall in a single bound, because the commotion of a citizen’s protest nearby drove it mad, and it could bear the cacophony no more.

  Isa’s throat burned more than ever. She had not been given water for hours—how many she didn’t know because they had left her alone in the back of a truck. At least they had uncuffed her. With no windows, it had been impossible to follow the turns and pauses she had felt the truck make on its journey. They could be one, two, three states away by now, for all she knew. But it seemed clear that she had not been brought to a police station, for there was one just a few streets away from her apartment, and it would not have taken nearly as long to get there. If she had to guess, she would say that it was one of the silent hours just before sunrise.

  There had been a female officer in uniform waiting in the back of the truck when they herded her in. Twice during the dark journey, Isa tried to engage this woman, but Isa’s voice was still weak and easy to ignore. After the second attempt, Isa started crying. That was when the short policeman had leaned over and uncuffed her, so she could swipe at her face.

  She suddenly yearned for the Giant plastic bag that contained her clothes. She felt around for it with her hands and feet. No. No. Emptiness. Air. Her heart roiled again. They had taken it away.

  The double doors of the truck swung outward. Isa made no move to get up until her eyes had adjusted. She peered. Four men and a woman materialized, waiting for her. The woman was the same one who had made the journey with Isa. There was a giant mole on the officer’s right cheek, a mound of matte on an otherwise porous surface. Isa hadn’t noticed it back in the truck’s blindfold of boxy darkness.

  She duckwalked to the rim of the truck and extended one leg, but the woman with the mole shooed her back in, punching her fists aggressively forward.

  “Please,” Isa begged. “No need to cuff me. Tak payahlah, puan, tuan. I’m not going to run away.”

  The woman clucked her tongue and grabbed Isa’s hands. Behind her, an officer Isa had not seen before met her eyes. She turned away, scared.

  The truck was parked only a few feet away from a building entrance, which opened up into a room with lights that were too bright for her. She blinked her scrunched-up eyes as they flanked her forward.

  “Where is this?”

  “Police Remand Center.” Isa wished she didn’t have to cough so badly. What was a “remand”?

  “Please, water.”

  This time no one seemed to have heard her. She lifted her head and realized that it had been bowed all this while, and all she had seen of the room was its blank cement floor. She chastised herself and made a mental note to be observant. She should be scrutinizing any and all details. It seemed like an important thing to do in her situation.

  The room was fluorescent ceiling lights, yellow once-white walls, one single small window, and uniformed bodies occupying spaces where furniture should be. She was estimating the room’s dimensions when the female officer came up, tapped her arm, and then was propelling her by her elbow down a hallway that branched from the main space they were just in.

  Doors appeared on both sides of the hallway. Immediately, Isa saw the lone open door waiting for her near the end, before the hallway
became part of a T-junction. Fear that had been numbed to a pause now came back in a strong burst, like yet another wave of fireworks when a lull had seemed to signal the end.

  She must have slowed because the woman was wrenching her elbow forward. Isa listed and involuntarily remembered the protest, when she had also been lopsided, hauled along by her armpit. She shook.

  Staring at her, waiting in the room, were one tall man and two other women. There was a single wooden chair, but no one sat on it. The tall man had a plain, nondescript face forming the backdrop for an impressive mustache. He spoke first, telling the woman with the mole to uncuff Isa.

  She rubbed her wrists together and looked from one strange face to the next, her subconscious inventing hope by having her pick out the person most likely to help her. Perhaps the petite woman in a tudung, whose lips looked soft and sympathetic? She looked out of place here, more like a kindergarten teacher.

  “Please, water,” Isa repeated. Her stomach flared when the woman with soft lips was indeed the one who moved, walking out of her field of vision, then returning with a bottle of Spritzer.

  The water was oddly warm, like it had been sitting out in the sun, but of course it was still night, dumb and dark.

  “Take off your clothes,” the tall man ordered while the bottle of water was still tilted, sloping into her mouth. Isa choked and sputtered water down her shirt and jeans.

  The tall man sneered.

  “Please,” she begged.

  “Please what? Oh, don’t worry, I’m not interested in your body, I like pretty women only, not ugly ones like you,” he laughed.

  Isa trained her eyes in turn on the women in the room, but none of them had any expression on their faces. When the woman with the mole advanced a step, Isa knew that the reason they were present was to help strip her. She grabbed hold of the hem of her shirt.

  “I want a lawyer, a lawyer.”

  The man laughed again.

  “Lawyer-lawyer semua still sleeping lah, ah moi. Come on ah moi, don’t be shy, I already said you are too ugly for me. Look at you! Everything flat. Eyes dirty color. Macam mongrel. You want me to close my eyes? Okay I close my eyes.” He shut his eyes, but immediately opened them again. “See? I close my eyes when you take off your clothes.”

  “Why?” she cried, nonsensical.

  A hand touched the skin of her arm. She shrieked.

  “I’ll do it myself!” she sobbed.

  “Good girl,” said the man.

  She pulled her shirt upward, moving as slowly as possible, and then suddenly yanked the whole thing off in one move, afraid somehow that by undressing slowly it would look like a striptease. She held her shirt in a fist by her side until the woman with soft lips came and took it from her.

  The man’s eyes were not closed, but he was making a show of staring at a corner of the ceiling. Isa looked up. In that corner was a water stain and, nearby, a black arrow pointing to Mecca.

  She stepped out of her jeans and looked helplessly at the woman with soft lips. From behind her, she sensed the woman with the mole coming.

  The man started up again: “Rilek lah ah moi. You must have shown your body to lots and lots of guys, right? I know you enjoy different-different men. You look like that kind of woman. So this is nothing special, right?”

  “Please,” she begged, this time looking at no one, at the wall in front of her. “Let me keep my underwear.”

  The woman with the mole stepped behind Isa and unclasped her bra, but pinched the two halves together until Isa surrendered, raising her own hands to take over. “It’s okay,” the woman whispered, very softly. Her voice was unexpectedly high and childlike.

  The women half pulled, half nudged Isa out the door, naked. Then she lost control, howling and struggling with them as they marched her down a different hallway, feeling it harder and harder to breathe as her sobs became hiccups, ignoring remonstrations that if she did not stop making so much noise she would wake the male inmates and then they would see her buck naked; did she really want that?

  After a while, they were in front of what was obviously a jail cell of some kind. The fight had gone out of her for the last hundred feet or so, and she could barely hold herself upright when suddenly, in synchrony, the women’s hands and arms left her body. They retreated out of sight, and Isa was left tottering in front of the open cell. What did they want her to do? Did they mean to complete her humiliation by having her walk, tame and docile, into her own cage? She was about to turn around and face her abusers when she was kicked in the buttocks with great force. She fell forward and her left cheek hit the hard floor first, followed by her sprawled arms and then the rest of her body, the impact vibrating through her gut, her bare ass laid out on view.

  She braced, but no one laughed.

  When day broke, she could see enough to distinguish a tiny barred opening high off the ground. It did not deserve the name of “window.” Her hand shuffled forward, and she worried the sharp edge of the cement platform on which she lay. It was obviously meant to be slept on, this cold dais, for they had placed on it a thin cotton blanket and a pillow that felt like it was stuffed with plastic straws. She could choose between sleeping on the blanket to counteract some of the cement’s harshness and hiding her naked body under the thing.

  She had not slept, not really. The “bed” grew out of the wall like a rigid tumor. Lying down, she had found it was too short for her, even though she was only five four. She curled up. Some time ago she had almost drifted off, exhausted, when she thought she heard a knock come from the wall right next to her. She jolted, banging her shin hard against the platform. Was it a friend, a fellow inmate unfairly detained without trial? Or more likely than not it was a trick they must be playing on her, preventing her from getting sleep, trying to confuse her or get her hopes up. Oh god, she thought. Who would miss her? Surely someone would do something for her, out there? Think, think on the bright side. Maybe her mother was getting help at that very moment.

  And that was enough to bring back a memory she had suppressed for years.

  When she was nine, her mother had caught her with fruit stolen from their neighbor’s tree. Young Isa defended herself, explaining that although the guava tree had roots stemming from the neighbor’s compound, its branches stuck their way over the fence into what was technically their house, so it wasn’t really stealing, right?

  For this bit of talking back, her mother had made her wait in the living room while she went off to fetch a rattan cane. When she came back, she instructed Isa to display her right palm, holding it outstretched and faceup. Then her mother showed her how to steady the upturned palm by encircling her left fingers in a tight grip around her right wrist, and even helpfully demonstrated this offering of the right palm by the left to prevent the diving board effect. The diving board effect, her mother went on to explain, happened when the cane came whipping down on the palm and the palm could not withstand the force, thus drooping to an angle that made it cumbersome to deliver the next strike, and the next, and the one after that, without unnecessary delay. It was more efficient if Isa used both hands to support the target palm and keep it horizontal. Then it would be over quicker.

  It began. After about ten strokes, both hands started their descent toward the ground anyway, and her mother, impatient, clucked for her to turn around. As soon as Isa’s back was to her mother, the tears flowed. Before Isa had time to feel a smidgen of pride at keeping them unseen, she was wailing hysterically against her will. But she did what she was told well enough despite the crying, lifting up her pinafore and holding hands out at her sides, a fistful of fabric in each. The hem pressed into her right palm and it burned.

  Now the cane came down again and again, and she could not see its arc to brace herself. Her knees quaked. There was a horrible crunching sound, and her first thought was that her mother had broken her bones. But it was only the rattan cane snapping in half.

  Breakfast slid through a slot was two pieces of toast with a pat of margar
ine. One of them was an endpiece, something she used to despise and always tossed into the trash when she was living free. There was also lukewarm Milo in a deformed tin mug that looked like it had been used to bash someone’s head in. No spoon.

  Rallying after food, she reminded herself to be observant. She got up and wrapped the thin blanket around herself, as if she were on her way to a relaxing hot tub. The material had long ceased to be scratchy, sometime shortly after dawn.

  She paced. Her cell was tiny, about twelve Isa feet by fifteen Isa feet, although her feet were not very large, so maybe the actual measurements were closer to—nine by twelve? The cement dais was maybe five by four real feet, but it loomed, looking like it took up most of the cell’s space. No, she would not think about human sacrifices.

  “My name is Isabella Sin,” she murmured. She had read that prisoners kept in isolation often lost their minds. “I am twenty-eight. I thought I was a writer, then I thought I wasn’t, but now I know I am.”

  “Take off the blanket. Squat.”—were the orders.

  She started to plead again, but remembered from a few hours ago that it just made them crueler. She did as told. Her labia parted and it felt cold, down there. She tried to draw her knees closer together and almost toppled over. She hadn’t realized that she felt dizzy.

  A man in uniform stood just outside her cell. The door was open, but she knew he counted on her nudity to keep her in place. Unfamiliar. A different man. How did they all possess the same grim coldness?