by YZ Chin
“Having fun?” he would ask.
His young child would laugh and say, “Yes, yes, so much fun!”
His daughter had not been back to hike with him since he’d unwittingly left her behind. He wondered if he would ever walk through these trees with her again. Squatting by the waterfall, he scooped up a palmful of water. It quickly fled from all sides, back to its whole. But still, his hand was wet.
He straightened up slowly, ready to go on, preparing himself for the usual small talk waiting at the second pavilion. Also waiting would be tea brewed from spring water, and the occasional clementines, clustered together in pyramid form atop the rickety wooden table that the retired carpenter had desultorily assembled.
His feet moved. Dead leaves and dry earth crunched. His eye floaters danced, then snagged on a spot of color. He blinked hard, at first thinking the floaters were getting worse. Then he saw that it was a dirt-hued mushroom with a maroon tinge along the rim of its bulgy cap, worn lopsided, one rakish edge almost touching ground. It was alone.
He had seen it before. Not always in this spot, and not always alone. It, too, walked the jungle as he did. Every time he’d previously seen it, he’d instinctively moved away. Everybody knew mushrooms could be dangerous, especially reddish-brown ones like these. People still talked about that child, unwatched for just a second, dying with dirt under his nails.
Then he felt it on his skin, sudden like standing too close to a sizzling hot wok. Remembered. Smelled it as if he were in a room full of boys soldering, tin fuming. He felt it: what it was like to be young and angry, believing in a fate that was personally interested in him.
His wife had left him, damn it! And maybe old men weren’t supposed to feel sorry for themselves, but he didn’t feel old, and even if he used his senior discount at the movies it didn’t mean he was definitely going to fall asleep, just that sometimes the noise and the drama dulled his mind, which still struggled in tangles over the fact that he really felt he had done absolutely nothing wrong, and yet here he was, and here she wasn’t.
He knelt down by the mushroom the way he’d knelt down by the waterfall. Then, knocked over by an unknown impulse, he sat heavily down, nearly squashing the fungus. Myths and legends he’d heard in his boyhood came to him: Young street urchins bestowed with great reservoirs of chi and latent kung fu greatness after ingesting gold mushrooms out of desperate hunger. Medicinal herbs that cured all diseases. A flower that bloomed once a year on a fullmoon night, granting immortality to those brave enough to scale the cliffs from which its petals beckoned.
The mushroom felt doughy in his hands. Its stem felt supple, but its cap, with its slender gills, was fragility. From its base, it bled dirt onto his hands. He started brushing it clean, but stopped himself and laughed. Before he’d finished laughing, the mushroom was in his open mouth, and he chewed it once, twice, then swallowed it before he was ready.
There he sat, and there he waited, to see if anything could truly happen to anyone.
DUTY
Ibrahim caught himself shaking his head at an empty room. In disgust, he threw down the newspaper he had spread at face level, annoyed that the lousy state of the country could manipulate him so physically, like a puppet. And now his fingers were smeared with black, the nonsense he read actually marking him. Sighing angrily, he got up to wash his hands, not noticing that his head was set to shaking again.
Malaysia was going to the dogs. They were releasing that idiot woman who had pretended to write those disgusting poems. Just a young person who’d blundered, they said. No, no hate in what she’d done, not at all, not at all! Tch. More than anything, he resented the rabble-rousers for muddying his thoughts. There was no benefit to embroiling his mind and soul—which he strove so hard to keep turned toward holiness—in the childish filth put out by headline chasers. His hands and brains were put to much better use behind the scenes, as it were, where no limelight shone and yet there was so much good done. For example, the work he did with the state Religious Department. It wasn’t just talking, talking, talking, which anybody could do. This was grassroots and on-the-ground, tackling concrete issues one human soul at a time. He was a real patriot.
True, the RD was no police force, nor was it as far-reaching as a rival volunteer corps whose successes included sting operations that sniffed out buildings full of illegal immigrants, capturing them for deportation all in one fell swoop. Ibrahim’s work had a more personal touch to it. It wasn’t just rounding up foreign parasites clearly on the wrong side of the law. In his work, the focus was instead on cultivating and nurturing the young, strayed sons and daughters of Malaysia. These were often mere kids he dealt with, after all, barely mature enough to think beyond immediate gratification. Ibrahim was given the chance to be a father figure for these wayward youngsters who had but momentarily deviated from their true paths.
What he did required much more finesse. He was handling issues that were maybe more gray than strictly black and white. Black and white was leaving your own country in a little fishing boat by cover of night, and then plundering innocent, upright citizens when you found out jobs did not, in fact, grow on Malaysian trees. Gray was the teenage girl from last week, barely older than his own daughter.
Ibrahim scratched his chin, seeking the abrasive texture of his short beard. His wife peeked around the doorframe, her features drooping into worry when she saw that her husband was staring fixedly, eyes glazed, at his own reflection in the bathroom mirror.
“Dinner time.” The bath tiles echoed her voice.
Ibrahim cleared his throat and said he would be there soon.
It must have scared his wife, too, his nightmares that had begun visiting every evening. That sweet woman. After patiently enduring the first few nights of his sweaty, flailing limbs, she’d started making him herbal tea before bed. But it caused Ibrahim to struggle up for bathroom runs in the middle of the night, grunting, and the nightmares then actually multiplied, since every travel from wakefulness to sleep was a brand-new trigger for another version of the same nightmare.
Next, she’d suggested Western classical music. He’d tried it for ten minutes. It only bewildered him. Flutes and violas and trombones, things from another realm—it was all so alien, and it made him uneasy with its strangeness.
In the end, he’d given up on sleep and signed on for nocturnal operations with the town’s RD. They lived in a sleepy, traditional town, nothing like the big-city lights of Kuala Lumpur or Penang, but in small towns too there were bad influences and crooked elements at play. If God kept him up and wished him to have more waking hours than most men, then he would not squander the extra time granted to him.
“Bang!” his wife called from the dining room.
“Ya!” he shouted back, leaving the bathroom at last.
His wife and daughter sat waiting at the dining table, plates and bowls of food between them. Out of the corner of his eye, he gleaned his wife’s glance of worry.
Retirement threw him off, she was probably thinking. He’ll adjust to it, she might hope. Give him time. It’s only been a month. God will guide.
That was his wife, Marina—hopefully patient, if nothing else.
He scooped up a piece of beef and cradled it with his fingers. Across the table, his daughter was chewing contentedly, right hand loose, ready for the next scoop of food.
Last week a teenage girl, barely older than his own Siti, had peered with disbelief from the amoral dark car in which she had been trapped, trying to see around the flashlight beams and make out the faces of the men who shone them. It’d been a hot night. She and her partner in crime had cranked down all the car windows.
Whose cage of sin was this scratched blue Proton Saga? Ibrahim, putting off the mental processing of such an unbelievable thing as a young Malay girl willingly entwining with a Chinese boy, started pondering the ownership of the vehicle.
It must be his, this hairless young man, engorged pupils blinking in the light of justice that cleared away the dangerou
s darkness of a tree’s canopy, their intended shelter from discovery.
Now the boy was putting on a brave face as Ibrahim’s RD brothers practiced the highly effective tactic of divide and conquer, ordering the boy to step out of his car. Stay inside, they gestured to the girl, palms pushing against the night air.
When the boy emerged, he had all of his clothing on without disarray. Ibrahim breathed out heavily. Perhaps they had arrived in time to preserve her purity after all.
In the back seat the girl shrank, hunched in belated modesty. One of his colleagues leaned close and hissed, jeering, “Is Chinese penis really that good?”
Ibrahim felt exceptional sorrow then. To think, how unfair it was. The boy, the mentally stronger of the two (sometimes the mentally stronger, he heard his wife’s voice correcting him gently), instigates the whole disgraceful mess, tempts the poor girl to give up her natural honor and sense of shame to commit khalwat. And yet he gets to walk away free, without a mar on his life, because he is not Muslim and thus not subject to the jurisdiction of the RD or the Syariah courts. The best they could do was shine strong battery-powered light into his eyes, shake him up a bit. But the poor girl, so young, has sinned! Has sinned and will forever be under the scrutiny and judgment of both men and God. Ibrahim sighed once more. The silver lining was that she, at least, fell under their jurisdiction. He would do what he could for her.
That night there was no scheduled RD operation, and so Ibrahim had no choice but to put himself into a horizontal position under a blanket and close his eyes, first gently, then tightly, listening to his wife’s breathing, waiting for it to slow and lengthen.
She had massaged his shoulders right before bed and he had allowed it, willing himself to unclench, understanding that she was just trying to help.
Tonight, the nightmare started out as an audio-only presentation: a loud clacking of what sounded like high heels on tar. Gradually, his dream-eyes adjusted to the black blank, and he saw that, once again, it was night in a marsh.
AUDIO VISUAL
Loud clacking on tar. Night.
MADU: “Spread out! Don’t follow me!” One hand holding up bunches of a purple dress, running feet in heels, tar road.
Loud clacking abruptly turns into subdued squishing sounds of heels sinking into grass and soil. Running heels abruptly sidestepping from tar road onto the beginnings of a riverbank.
Rustling of grass, panting. Heels coming off of stumbling feet.
Rustling of fabric, different panting. Cut to entryway of a nondescript building, where volunteers, all men, herd a group of sequined evening dresses from within the well-lit foyer into the gloom of evening.
Rustling of grass, different panting. Cut to a different pair of heels coming off a different pair of running feet.
Rustling of fabric, different panting. Cut to an evening gown being forcibly torn off a shoulder.
Rustling of grass, different panting. Cut to bare feet scissoring.
Rustling of fabric, different panting. Cut to previous evening gown being completely torn off, revealing a torso.
Rustling of grass, different panting. Cut to a river lit up by moonlight.
Rustling of fabric, different panting. Cut to discarded heels, suddenly obscured by an evening gown dropped from above. Pan up to bare legs and buttocks.
Rustling of grass, different panting. Pan out over moonlit river.
Sound of spitting. Cut to volunteer spitting on the ground in disgust.
Sound of splashing. Cut to a shadow leaping off the bank into the river.
Sound of spitting. Cut to volunteer being spat at in the face.
Sound of splashing. Cut to two more shadows throwing themselves into the river.
VOLUNTEER: “Spread out! Find the ones who escaped!” Cut to Volunteer A picking up a stout branch from the ground.
MADU: “Spread out! Or they’ll find us!” Cut to Madu swimming backward while gesturing wildly for Mawar and Omar to keep their distance.
In the distance, the call for Azan prayers transmitting through the air from the nearest masjid. Cut to Omar in his room, praying on his prayer mat.
Shears snipping. Cut to Volunteer A going into his garden.
Brush pulling through hair. Cut to Omar brushing a wig in his room.
Shears snipping. Cut to Volunteer A pruning a tree.
Brush pulling through hair. Cut to young Omar, grinning wickedly, cutting the hair off a doll while his sister bawls beside him.
Cut to a wig floating on moonlit water.
Sounds of splashing and spitting intermingled. Cut to Omar and Mawar climbing out of the river onto the bank, Omar almost naked, Mawar’s waterlogged evening dress dragging.
OMAR: “Madu! Mana Madu?” Omar’s face, distressed.
MAWAR: “She swam away from us.” The back of Mawar’s head, long wet hair.
Cut to a brightly hued wig floating on sunlit water.
Rustling of fabric and grass. Cut to one hand holding up bunches of a purple dress. Pan out to reveal child of indeterminate sex discovering purple dress and dragging it through the grass.
Blue skies.
Rustling of fabric, panting. Cut to Omar kissing and undressing his wife in a sunlit room.
“Sayang, oh, sayang!”
NEWSCASTER: “A transexual beauty pageant being held at a resort near here was broken up by the Kelantan Islamic Religious Affairs Department. Its chief assistant director Abdul Aziz Mohd Nor said the group, in their twenties and thirties, was detained at about 10:00 p.m. on Friday while posing in women’s dresses. Three of them managed to get away by diving into a nearby river . . .” Cut to cutting of hair. Pan out to reveal Omar’s wife trimming her ends in front of the television.
Omar’s wife’s hair drops in clumps onto newspaper spread out on the floor. Pan in to reveal a news article beginning with “A transexual beauty pageant being held at a resort near here was broken up . . .”
Shears snipping, faint. Falling strands hit a small mound of collected hair on the newspaper.
OMAR’S WIFE: “Abang, where are you going?” Cut to a brightly hued wig floating on sunlit water.
Shears snipping, loud. Cut to Omar bursting out of his front door. Pan to reveal his neighbor, Volunteer A, pruning branches in his garden.
Rustle of grass, panting. Cut to Omar running through grass.
Rustle of fabric, panting. Omar taking off his shirt, his bare torso.
Sound of spitting. Omar jumping into the river, one hand still holding on to his shirt.
Sound of splashing. Omar swimming against the current, spitting out mouthfuls of water as he advances.
Sound of spitting. Omar climbing half out of the water onto the bank, where Madu’s naked upper body lies sprawled.
Sound of splashing. Close-up of Omar’s face, tears, snot, mouthing inaudible words.
Shears snipping in a regular beat, each snip a second apart, as in a clock ticking. Cut to Omar’s wife at the window, watching a pruned branch falling through the air.
Snip. Omar no longer crying, wiping thick makeup off Madu’s face with his soaked shirt.
Snip. Omar, turning Madu’s face to the left,
Snip. to the right,
Snip. wiping off one last smudge of eyeliner.
Snip. One hand holding the dirty shirt, bunched up,
Snip. plunging into the river,
Snip. another hand joining the first in the water
Snip. to scrub the dirty shirt back
Snip. and forth
Snip. against itself.
Snip. Shirt, raised out of the water,
Snip. dripping,
Snip. twisted to let water
Snip. out.
Snip. Hands struggling
Snip. to put the shirt
Snip. on Madu’s body.
Snip. Cut to a brightly hued wig floating on sunlit water.
Snip. Pan out to reveal Omar
Snip. holding a stout branch
Snip. reaching out to draw th
e wig in toward shore.
Snip. Cut to Omar on the shore, dripping wet,
Snip. digging a hole near the roots of a tree,
Snip. the wet wig lying beside the gradually enlarged hole.
Snip. Cut to sunlit water, ripples forming where the wig used to float.
Snip. A hip-
Snip. po-
Snip. po-
Snip. ta-
Snip. mus
Snip. rising out of the
Snip. water.
Snip.
Snip.
Snip.
Snip.
Snip.
Snip.
Snip.
Snip.
Snip.
Snip.
Next to him, close to Ibrahim’s face, the whites of his wife’s eyes shone dully in the dark. He felt her hand reaching for his.
“You were calling his name,” she said.
He tried to think of something to say.
“It’s been so many years,” she said. “You are not responsible for him, even if he is your brother. He made his own choices. He was old enough to think for himself.”
For his virgin raid, Ibrahim had gone to Jaya supermarket and bought a pair of Bata shoes. That had been a week ago. The shoes waited for him now, still shiny and alien next to his worn rubber slippers. The sales clerk had said that the shoes were best for badminton.
He let himself fall back for that very first operation, bringing up the rear of the RD raid party. The moon was out that night, pockmarked and almost full.
One of his RD brothers turned to reassure him that this was one of their “regular” raids, and that they did not expect any extraordinary developments. Ibrahim wanted to ask what the other man meant, but he was facing ahead again, and his back was ruler straight. This one had a goatee, which therefore meant his name was . . . Safee. Safee’s hand swept a flashlight in steady arcs at waist level, as if showcasing selected scenery—to their left a padang, clumps of wild lalang reaching for each other’s shadows with every gust of wind; to their right a silhouette of a tree growing next to what looked like tatters of a soccer goal. Ibrahim and his new RD brothers walked on the paved road running alongside the padang. Ahead, someone’s slippers slapped loudly with each step. Ibrahim was glad for his new shoes, quiet and solid in a rubbery way.