“Yes.”
“Then get me one.”
“But do you really want one?”
“Not really.”
After this, we never brought up the issue of the ring again.
Lying on the mat in the darkened hut, I can’t sleep, my eyes glued to the ceiling. Light from the table lamp throws long shaky shadows across the floor of the hut. The lonesome moth that has flown in remains stock-still on the wall near the stove, the pattern on its wings like the unblinking eyes of a nocturnal beast. Toads drone mechanically, along with the insistent chirping of the cicadas. Darkness lurks like a predator outside the hut.
The old woman sits on a wooden stool at the threshold of the hut, fanning herself with a straw fan, looking out into the courtyard, into the dark forest. From where I’m lying, looking at her arched back, she seems vulnerable. Under her breath, she mutters something rhythmic to herself, perhaps a song. The sound comes to me, in a mellifluous cadence, and I strain to catch the notes. In my mind, I play out memories of my dead grandmother, my head on her lap on warm, lazy afternoons, her hand patting me gently on my back, coaxing me to sleep. She would always sing to me in Hokkien, always a song about a lonely, tragic woman pining for her faraway lover, and waiting for him to come back to her. I would tried my best to decipher the lyrics with my limited knowledge of the dialect, waiting for the song to end before asking my grandmother about the things I did not understand. Why couldn’t the woman in the song go and find her lover? How could she not have eaten for so many days, wasn’t she hungry at all? Why did she drink the poisonous potion? My grandmother would answer some of my questions, and then tell me to hush and close my eyes. I would try to think of the ways I could save the woman from her misery.
Now, with the night sounds pressing in on us, I wonder about the old woman’s life in the middle of this deep forest, high up in the hills, surviving all on her own. How can she live the way she does, with nothing except for the barest of necessities? Yet, she can, and she has, for god knows how long. Does she have a family, or someone who’s aware of her existence? Over the past few days, I have seen no other person in the vicinity. For all I know, she might have lived this way for a very long time, without the need for anyone, or anything else.
And in imagining her life, I recall my grandmother’s, who lived alone for twenty-two years after my grandfather passed away. While she had taken care of my brothers and me on days that my mother was at work, she was often alone, occupied with her own life. She did not trouble my mother, her second daughter, with anything, even on occasions when she was sick; one time she even admitted herself into the hospital after she had a bad fall, and did not inform my mother until the day she was checking out. She claimed she did not want to inconvenience anyone, to make my mother take time off from her job, seeing how busy she already was with us four boys. She did not say much when my parents got divorced, and it was hard to tell how she felt over the whole thing, given the stoic front she put up before us. She kept our lives going on track, and did not let up her tough discipline and punishment whenever one of us misbehaved. In a way, my grandmother had taken the role of our missing father, writ large by her actions and influence over us. She died when she was eighty-five.
The old woman gets up from where she is sitting and closes the wooden door. She steps towards me, and with the weak light behind her, I can’t see her face clearly. Again, she places her palm on my forehead and utters something. Then she moves to turn off the lamp, reducing the hut to a near-complete darkness. I hear her getting into her bed—a structure made of long wooden planks tied together with ropes—and within minutes she is asleep, her breaths light and even. In the dark, I listen to her breathing and measure it against mine. I stay up for as long as I can, trying to stay afloat against the irresistible pull of the unknown.
18
WEI XIANG
Wei Xiang wakes with a start, the memory of a hand brushing across his face lingering on his skin, and looks around the hotel room. He has slept in the clothes he wore yesterday, which reek of sour perspiration, and have hardened with dirt stains. He feels disoriented; he can’t remember how he managed to get himself back to the hotel and into bed the night before. He lifts his heavy head from the sticky, stale-smelling bedsheet, before letting it fall back again. Wrecked with exhaustion, he rubs his temples, feeling the start of a low-grade headache.
In his half-awake state, his thoughts run immediately to the strange boy who eluded him the day before in the streets of Phuket. Wei Xiang can’t remember how long he trailed him, always just missing him. Sometimes the boy was right in front of him, and at other times appearing far away, a lonesome figure amidst the thronging, agitated crowd. It was as if the boy were playing a game of cat-and-mouse, teasing and frustrating Wei Xiang at the same time.
Yet, as he tries to recall what the boy looks like, his mind draws up only fractured images—a mop of wild hair, small seashell ears, skinny legs, dirty unshod feet, a deep scar across his left eye—an incomplete picture. Even when he attempts to put the different parts of the boy together, the resulting image is incoherent, indistinct, an out-of-focus photograph.
Wiping the dried saliva from his cheek, Wei Xiang checks the time on his watch. 10.45am. The morning is almost over. He rolls out of bed, shocking his body into action. In the toilet, looking into the mirror, he sees his reflection: days-old stubble, dark eye-bags, deeply creased lines across his forehead. His eyes are dull, the light gone out of them. He slaps his cheeks hard, trying to wake himself up fully, his body still steeped in lethargy. He notices Ai Ling’s barrette lying beside the bottles of hand cream and body lotion, and sweeps everything into her toiletries bag on the counter, putting them out of sight. Then he wets a hand towel, rubs his face roughly with it, and steps back into the bedroom to change his clothes.
At the hotel lobby, Wei Xiang notes that the level of water has dropped significantly, barely at ankle-height now, and a coarse layer of sediment has settled on the exposed surfaces. There is a water-level stain on the walls; the wallpaper has peeled and curled into long stiffened strips. Large flakes of paint have fallen off as well, floating on the water like wood shavings. The furniture has been arranged back to its original layout, though there is something amiss about the placement, as if nothing fits the scene any longer, incorrect props in a stage setup. Stripped of the usual accoutrements—flower vases, throw pillows, travel magazines, mural paintings—the lobby looks like a shell of a room. Nobody seems to be around, not even behind the front desk, a sharp contrast to the commotion the day before, when the noisy hotel guests hounded the staff for updates and whereabouts and flight changes.
As Wei Xiang walks through the lobby, a man appears from a walkway, carrying a metal pail. Wearing a dirty uniform, he seems surprised to find Wei Xiang standing there, his brows coming together in a crease. It’s the same porter who advised him to stay in the hotel yesterday, to wait till things were better.
“Morning, sir. How are you today?” the man says, hiding the pail behind him.
“Okay. How come there’s nobody around? Where are the other guests?” Wei Xiang asks. A face pops out from behind the reception, a sleepy-looking girl with frizzy hair, and looks around nervously. She gives Wei Xiang a wan smile and ducks her head under the countertop.
“Many people gone yesterday. Only few left.” He hesitates, darting glances to his side, before saying, “Do sir want breakfast? I can get.”