0. Editor’s Note

The Great Stratagem of Lady Ikedanbu — Judith Huang

I can’t love artificially I’m too busy falling for my electric kettle
— Cai Png

Cactus Girl, Lobster Boy
— Alastair Wee

The Girlfriend
— Andrew Cheah

Keep Nothing on Your Person
— Levin Tan

Singapore goes cyborg but what
does this mean for families?
— Darcel Al Anthony

Science City #26
— Joseph Tan

Tensile Strength
— S.L. Johnson

The Winter of Our Science-Fiction Discontent, Part 1
— Vivekanandan Sharan

Cutting the Sapphire: An Interview with Joan Hon, Singapore’s First Sci-Fi Novelist
— Ng Yi-Sheng

A Review: Club Contango by Elaine Boey (Dark Matter INK)
— Wayne Low

Keep Nothing
on Your Person
TAGS | fiction , local

Levin Tan

Levin Tan mixes thoughts, words and feelings in an attempt to bake something fluffy and palatable to the gut. However, things often get foiled at the rising stage due to the inability to follow precision. Aside from writing, they make zines, seal stamps and commentaries on media.

Seeing the smile vanish from his face, I found myself stuck for an answer. I hadn’t come across this in the interview preparation course; but more importantly I’d let my guard down. He’d rejected my handshake, calling it too much of a formality, and made me a coffee, albeit instant, with his own two hands. He told me about his wife and kids, and regaled me with stories from his first job as a barista to his first corporate promotion.

“Do you have any plans to use up your request in the next few years?” He asked once more, an impatience bubbling over my silence. “We need to be prepared with whether or not it will affect us in the future.”

“And what did you say in the end?” Kane questioned. I phoned him immediately after the interview seeking assurance.

In that fight or flight state, I had defaulted to fumbling honesty: I hadn’t thought about anything I really wanted yet.

Kane was never the type to sugarcoat things even when it was sorely needed. “Oh no. That makes you come off as either an indecisive person or someone without strong ambition.”

“Well, maybe the other candidate will commit a bigger hiccup. How about a coffee to cheer you up? My treat. I need some fresh air.”

Yes, of course. This was what I could always count on Kane for—to nurse the little bruises from his blunt-force words.

#

***

#

When I arrived, Kane was several paces away from our meeting point, perched at the edge of a designated smokers’ corner with a cigarette pinched in his fingers, its smoke twirling upwards. I asked for a drag, but he stubbed it out on the sole of his shoe instead and wagged a finger at me. “Bad for your health—isn’t that what you always tell me?”

The coffee shop was teeming with other suit-and-tie office workers. After picking up our orders, we managed to squeeze into the last available table that was sandwiched between a large group of boisterous advertising types and the restroom corridor. The voices of the former stung our ears to an unnatural degree; they shouted at each other from across the table, with their words being flung upwards to the high ceiling and rattling the exposed piping that criss-crossed overhead before landing squarely on our heads. Kane and I had to talk directly into one another’s ears, as if we were a smitten couple exchanging words of endearment.

I asked Kane if I should send the company a follow-up email right away to help save the situation.

“That’ll make you look desperate.”

I couldn’t deny that I wasn’t. What if I made up something about when I would use my request and what for?

“When has lying ever turned out well?”

He had a point. I began erasing the draft I had been typing out when a new email arrived. There, in black and white, was a standard rejection notice.

I was itching to request for more specific feedback.

“Stop!” Kane strong-armed my tablet away from me. “Even if you knew the answer, how would that make your life any better?”

I genuinely pondered the question. Probably in no discernible ways, I responded in earnest, but this was the first time I’d made it to the very last round. Not knowing would definitely eat at me.

Kane disapproved, but he returned my tablet nonetheless, knowing that it was pointless to try and talk me out of things. “You know you won’t get a response, right? Personally, I believe it’s because they feel you might be one of two things: a short-stay or a threat. Think about Greg & Gaston. Rumour has it that the firm was taken down by one of their employees because of their request.”

I found that quite hard to believe. I didn’t think the government just allowed people to take over companies like that. The economy would be in constant chaos. In any case, did I look like a power-hungry person? I peered hard into my phone’s front-facing camera. Was my make-up too intense? I had learned it from a short video recommended to me by my feed, titled: ‘3 Makeup Looks to Land You That Dream Job’.

Kane let out an unrestrained laugh. “Even if you were barefaced, it’d be the same. Anyone can be a huge risk, no matter how innocent they look. You can never bet on anyone you don’t really know—hell, you can’t even bet one those you’ve known all your life.”

Perhaps it was simply inevitable for Kane to circle any topic back to his divorce, still not a year since, although what truly kept this wound festering was the the matter of losing his beloved car in the process, and the idea that some young, unappreciative punk might performing doughnuts with it in an abandoned carpark somewhere.

Kane had been so lucky, so most would say. Though everyone could submit their once-in-a-lifetime request to the government on their twenty-fifth birthday, if his had come two months later, when new trade sanctions dawned on the global economy due to a once again souring relationship between several nations, his request for a car would have been denied, as it was for many others who dreamed of the same material thing afterwards. That car was perhaps the most important thing in his life—you couldn’t ride as a passenger if you’d sat in a park or on public transport in the day, not unless you were willing to settle down on the plastic seat covers. On days where he worked overtime, the vintage corvette would receive a good polish before his wife even received a peck on the cheek.

When they split, all their property had followed suit; down in half as per their prenuptial—the car included. Kane appealed his case, but it turned out that any property granted by one’s request wasn’t above legal documents signed thereafter. Kane’s problem was never reading the fine print. His ex-wife probably didn’t need the extra money—she already came from a wealthy background—but liquidating his car, a source of many of their marital quarrels, must have been quite a pleasant victory after years of dead-ended pushing and pulling.

I let Kane rehash his grievances until he was urgently summoned back by his superior.

At the entrance to the train station, there was a middle-aged lady darting back and forth, pouncing on every passer-by who had the misfortune of being within visible range. She was smart to stand guard by the entryway, so that it was quite impossible to avoid her completely. I looked to the ground and tried to dodge outwards when I felt her shadow nipping at my heals, but I was too slow.

“Do you have a minute? It’ll just take a minute. Not more than a minute!” She came up so close that I found myself pressed up against the staircase railing. I might have expressed some form of consent under such duress. “Great! We are currently looking for volunteers to accompany the elderly at our senior’s home…”

She had not lied, indeed wrapping up her spiel in under a minute, though the bulk of her words smoothly slid out of my other ear. She sent me off with a flimsy, fifteen-centimetre charging cable a gratitude gift and an informational pamphlet with a QR code beneath.

As I waited for the elevator to arrive, I turned around to observe her. Unlike myself, everyone else seemed rather lithe, diving out of her reach with only a few bounding steps, yet her smile nor her energy never waned over each failure.

#

***

#

When I reached home, my parents crowded into the short, narrow hallway that led from the front door to the living room, standing over me as I took off my shoes. They wanted to know how the interview went. They refused my noncommittal murmurs and were resilient in excavating for more information.

What kind of questions did they ask? How did you answer? Did they let you know how long it would be before they got back to you?

I yanked at my laces, and they somehow ended up choked into a tight, unrelenting knot. I had to slowly tug at different sections to undo it, but each time I thought I had the right section, it would only cinch tighter at the centre. I struggled with the knot and addressing my parents at the same time, my eyes fixed downwards.

Maybe next week, I dithered, or the week after.

My mum’s voice gradually pitched higher and louder. “Maybe? Didn’t they give you a definitive answer? Follow up again! Don’t think to yourself that it’s too soon, because it never is.”

“Your mum has a point,” my dad added. “They might appreciate your eagerness.”

When I said that I’d do it later, my mum shot back, “No, do it now, before you forget. You always do.”

I was near to resolving the knot, but with one impulsive, impatient pull, all progress was undone.

I glared up at my parents’ narrowed eyes. Perhaps I might have been gnashing my teeth when I said, can’t you see I’m busy right now?

“There’s no reason to take this tone with us. People are trying to help you. We’ve been through this, so we know a thing or two, and you act like we are being annoying for no reason.”

It seemed the law of nature that we should be at odds. Unlike mine, their trajectory was premeditated: entering civil service through a direct intake path from school, working steadily until retirement while reasonably climbing the ranks; at twenty-eight, having the means to buy their first house together; at seventy-five, maintaining a membership at a private fitness centre and driving to their favourite eateries in different neighbourhoods; combining whatever savings they possess with their pension, keeping them relatively worry free and still with enough to give their unstable and unemployed child a stipend. This was the complete opposite of my interminable post-graduation internships, then zipping between contract roles before, shortly after landing a secure role, being mowed down by cutbacks.

Getting free money would perhaps be anyone’s joy, but is there really anything that’s ever free? This ritual occupied the most unnatural position, for I had grown accustomed to an upbringing without my parents. There had been times where I felt that we were simply roommates, as we crossed paths only during the evenings. If they weren’t in the office, they were flitting back and forth between their social circles, and it would be classified as a boring week for them if we ended up having two meals together.

Their retirement was the first cataclysm. Those forty odd hours of working life having been requisitioned, the amount of time they stayed entrenched at home increased significantly. I went from being a teenager who made and kept their own decisions to an adult who could never seem to step out from their field of vision. They frowned whenever I came home early, believing that it reflected poorly on my work attitude; if I came home late, they had probing questions about who I went out with and if I were seeing anyone.

On top of that, my mum developed an anxiety about visitors dropping by, despite the fact that they were, in reality, nonexistent. She was convinced they would titter behind her back after catching a glance of the clothes and books scattered in odd corners of my room. But would they really? Where would visitors linger but in the living room? Or perhaps the kitchen to observe and make pleasantries, then the restroom for practical purposes.

Renting outside was a reprieve. The monthly cost always ate close to half of my earnings, but one could say that buying a slice of tranquility at that price was a reasonable trade-off. But now with my forced return home, my tail wedged between my legs, it made this fissure appear more gaping and cavernous than before. We could only lock horns over every minute matter.

It is wrong to bite the hand that feeds you; it is wrong to bite the hand that feeds you. Several times a week I chanted this in my mind as a form of meditation. It kept my guilt in sharp relief whenever I felt the need to erupt with anger; it let me eat the food that they bought and cooked in fabricated peace.

When dinner time came, I slunk out of hiding from my room. My mum didn’t delay in asking if I had done as she instructed.

There’s no need, I said without bothering to swallow my mouthful. I’ve been rejected.

She stopped piling the cut pieces of vegetable on top of her spoonful of rice. “When did they inform you?”

I shrugged. Maybe an hour ago, or maybe less.

My dad, seated between us at this square table, attempted to balance himself on the treacherous boundary line. “I’m sure it would not have made much of a difference,” he offered. When my mum didn’t acknowledge him, he retreated back to peeling soft white flesh from the steamed fish and placing the tender white meat onto one side of her plate.

I excused myself after what I felt could be accounted as a reasonable amount for my dinner; though in reality, I was still quite hungry.

Tomorrow was a Thursday. On the agenda: fix up my resume.

The verbs needed to be more appealing: changing the likes of ‘received’ to ‘achieved’, ‘oversaw’ to ‘led’. Then, I’d scour job boards and fill in applications.

For the past two years I’d managed to upkeep this routine out of sheer willpower: an aversion to inertia, an aversion to criticism, an aversion to undesired outcomes.

I looked at the clock at my bedside. My parents wouldn’t be asleep for another three or so hours. To pass the time until I could head for the snack cupboard, I turned over and reached for my phone. Something crunched and crackled underneath as I did; beneath me lay the pamphlet from earlier in the day.

#

***

#

After mere two days, I received a response: If I were available the next day, would I like to come down and be given a tour? They made sure to highlight that it was a no-commitment introduction.

They didn’t seem to mind that I arrived twenty minutes late; even the one other volunteer in attendance didn’t bat an eye. She rose from the plush armchair she had been lounging in, looking askance at me. “Got lost too, didn’t you?”

Named Sandalwood Manor, it was just one business among an odd hodgepodge of outlets crammed into a sparkling midtown high-rise enclave. According to the directory screen in the lift lobby, the floor above was a travel agency and the floor below an advertising firm.

I hadn’t expected a nursing home to be in a commercial downtown location like this, nor had I expected the place to be so full of life—nurses in magenta uniforms; patients in flowy teal pyjamas; and in the hallways, one could sniff out something akin to orange and clove essential oils from the calming fog cresting from little diffuser units with a warm, gentle glow.

Our guide was a portly man named Crisanto, who introduced himself as the volunteer manager, and the other person also joining the tour was a mid-fifties housewife named either Athena or Aleena.

Crisanto was charming and verbose, a blessing that he entered this industry and not finance or retail, and flashed the straightest teeth I’d ever seen whenever he burst into uproarious laughter. As we ambled down the wide corridor and past the rooms, my eyes swept back and forth, peering into some of the spacious, empty rooms of patients who had been temporarily shuttled elsewhere, some for physical therapy and others for their regular check-ups. Each room, seemingly more spacious than my own, had two adjustable beds, a wall-mounted television, a short shelf that people arranged books or plants on, and a chest of wooden drawers in a corner. The ensuite bathroom had a counter long enough that toiletries from different owners weren’t forced to mingle with one another.

“You must be wondering why we need volunteers,” Crisanto said as we rested in the pantry and drank from our zero-sugar prune juice packets.

“You see, some of our residents come from…unfortunate circumstances. We take them in if we can, and volunteers like yourself—or potential volunteers like yourself—are our frontline supporters.” He knit his hands together and lowered his head. “We have limited staff on hand, so we can’t always keep them company, unfortunately. They can get quite bored, or worse, quite lonely. Volunteers help to fill this gap and alleviate the situation.”

I excused myself for the restroom and sequestered myself in a stall after peering under all the doors to make sure no one else was in here with me. I pulled up my phone and searched up ‘Sandalwood Manor’: locally, it produced only the official website and a social media page that had been abandoned several years back. Crisanto’s trademark smile donned several of the posts, and he hadn’t seemed to change at all—even his hairstyle was perfectly replicated today.

As I wound my way back to the pantry, there came a sound:

Psssst, psssssssssst!

I spun on my heels and locked eyes with a an old lady whose mattress pushed her up to a forty-five degree angle in her bed. Her dark skin was shrivelled and lifting away from her bones, mottled with lighter shades of brown that resembled little floating isles across the map of her body. Only a few lonely strands of hair were left on the crown of her head, all slumped in a right parting. I had no idea who she was and wrote it off as, perhaps, just senile behaviour. Yet as I was about to walk on, she hollered, “For heaven’s sake, yes it was me, get in here!”

Warily, I perched myself at the doorframe and waited for her to go on.

“Do you smoke?” she asked.

There was a smoke alarm on the ceiling right above her. I pointed at it. Won’t that go off?

“It won’t if you don’t say anything about it. So, do you smoke or not?”

I shook my head.

“Not even a vape?”

Since I denied the affirmative she sought, she rolled her head back and stared in the distance with her clouded eyes, letting out a long puff of air. “Ah, what a drag. There’s so little joys left at this age.”

I ventured several steps closer and saw, on a pull-out table set across her lap, a shallow silicone cup filled with a rainbow assortment of pills. Noticing my approach, she pushed it aside like a petulant child and lolled her head back upwards to scan me from head to toe.

“Who are you anyway? I’ve never seen you on the roster before.”

Nobody; I was just here for an introductory tour.

“What’s wrong with your comprehension?” Her nostrils flared. “When someone asks who you are, you give them your name.” She tapped the name plate above the bedside table, which read: Bed #108: Darsha D.C.

Upon telling her my name, Darsha was sent into a coughing fit. “That’s so old fashioned!” I poured her a cup of water from the bedside, but she refused to take it. “I had a friend in primary school with the exact same name, and it was extremely dated, even back then.”

Finally, she accepted the cup, only to produce an egregious sound from the depths of her throat and expelling a wad of phlegm into the untouched water.

She added, “You must be unemployed right now, if you’re here at this time.”

Or I could be a business owner who got to decide their own hours.

Darsha appraised me with a sweeping glance. “All right big boss, if business isn’t too busy, come back next week, why don’t you? I’ve got tonnes of stories from failing to die for over a century.”

Back at the main entrance, Crisanto hugged a thicket of papers to his squared chest, poised to deliver his elevator pitch. I’m sure it would have been enlightening, but I told him he could save it; I promptly signed above all the little dotted lines.

#

***

#

When the request system had been introduced, she had been twenty-three. Darsha recounted this with a sparkle emanating from behind drooped eyelids.

She added, with a chuckle that shook her entire frame, that the programme’s pilot name had been ‘State Your Request’, or SYRe, for short.

“Pronounced like the thing English royalty used to do to bestow titles on common people. But you can see why that silly acronym never caught on. They’re obsessed with the English, and they’re obsessed with acronyms!” she cried. “Doesn’t it make everything sound like an eccentric side quest in a low-budget video game?”

Kane would have a field day with something like this. I asked Darsha if this was confidential information, to which she replied, “Of course not, be my guest, share it with whomever.” Then, leaning closer, she ventured, “What have you used your request for?”

I said I hadn’t yet.

“I get it. There’s nothing I could really wish for right now that would make a difference in my life.”

Did that mean she was happy?

“Do I look like I am?” She punched me squarely on the arm with a haggard fist. I shimmied my stool back a few centimetres. “I can’t walk and go wherever I want, I’ve got to eat this slush for food, the TV here doesn’t have any streaming services, and I’ve got no one to talk to for most days of the week. Tell me, would you be happy living a life like that?”

She had a point, though I kept it to myself: this was surely a caveat of a long, healthy life. But why didn’t she socialise with the others in the facility? Though there might be an age difference of ten to twenty or so years, it would be nothing in comparison to—without thinking, I gestured at the sliver of physical space that ran between us.

Her smile flattened into a thin line. “You must be fun at parties,” she said.

I wouldn’t know; I didn’t particularly get invited to them.

“That’s because you don’t smile enough.”

How often this saying came up in my life recently—at home, at work, probably even behind my back. A wall sprung up around me, fending the words from crossing over the precipice by raising itself ever higher. Outwardly I offered a nod, neither in acceptance nor in rejection. My parents were willing to read this as assent; Darsha on the other hand, softened the hardness in her brow.

“Have you heard about the Happiness Index?” she asked.

I shrugged—what about it? Last year, we finally surpassed our long-standing fifth placement, overtaking our insurmountable rivals to come in at number two. Second Happiest Country: Citizens Cite Safety, Among Others. For an entire week, it dominated the news cycle in glaring, bold text; yet the more I chanced upon it online, the more I felt gripped by its surrealism: a satellite view that saw only the city lights and not the tangle of wires underneath that could ensnare you in its web.

What I gleaned from the lines of text was not an outline of where I lived and breathed but the shape of possibility, a ripe fruit that, as I’ve been told, anyone can taste. An idea that would be appealing to anyone who’s being sucked dry of hope under the harsh scarcity of a desert landscape.

I don’t believe in that, I said. Maybe it’s the case for others, but I’ve never been asked for my opinion in the survey. That means it can, at most, only be part-truth.

Darsha wagged an upright finger at me. “Now how about this: in my time, we were over a hundred. Believe that?”

Surely things back then were much better than they were now! Surely the air they breathed must have been cleaner; surely the weather was less inclined to switch from inclement to an oven draft; surely narrow little studio apartments didn’t cost an offering to the devil.

“You’re not wrong,” Darsha replied, “on some level. They say money can’t buy happiness—that much is true still—but you can buy over people’s happiness. Want to know the secret?”

I nodded enthusiastically and leaned in when she beckoned me with the curl of her hand.

“Give them something they think they want,” she whispered. Without any further elaboration, she leaned back into her pillow and closed her eyes.

Then, a nurse popped her head in to announce that visiting hours would be ending in fifteen minutes. Darsha’s breathing seemed to have mellowed out to a raspy crawl. Yet as I made my way out on tip-toe, she suddenly said, “We jumped to number five…seventy nine years ago! I think! See what you can find.”

I turned back only to see her as dead still as before, though her breathing had inched towards a stronger auditory affinity with laboured snoring.

#

***

#

Nothing; not an iota of information about what I was seeking from the last century. The digital trail only began with an accomplishment of a ranking they were pleased with. The national archives, the online search engines, the AI platforms—none of them spat anything out despite my prodding and interrogating.

I don’t understand, it said; can you rephrase or ask another question?

This time I returned to Darsha bursting at the seams with questions.

For her, this was ecstasy.

“Don’t I have the story for you!” she exclaimed.

Darsha spoke of scrawls and scribbles growing rampant across the imposing edifices lining the streets of the financial district. She described, with much fanfare, people who donned curious masks such as that of popular cartoon characters or, eventually, detailed constructions of animal heads, with bulls and horses being rather popular for some reason. All this to conceal their visages from the CCTV cameras as they lugged around haversacks of spray paint cans.

“There were some real poets out there working the streets.” She swelled with something bigger than pride. “These strangers all banded together, united by a common objection towards the request system.”

Suddenly, she stopped herself short. Her enthusiasm quickly dulled to a mournfulness that clouded her gaze. “I’ll also never forget that my parents nearly ended their marriage then.”

Her mother, Darsha elaborated, came from a family of police officers. Against the protests of her family, she had become a housewife, a decision more so questioned in an age where two working parents was more of the norm. Darsha’s father, on the other hand, had always been cryptic about the exact nature of his work. All she knew was that it probably had to do with computers on a higher level; during a half-a-year work-from-home stint, a massive desktop setup of a curved hundred-and-eighty degree screen had materialised in his work corner, accompanied by a PC that always exhaled fumes of hot air. As a kid, on days where the whether was biting due to excessive rains, she liked to act like it was a mild campfire, and she rotated her hands back and forth at its exhaust fans as her father towered above. At times she watched her father from the corner of her eyes, huddled under his standing table; only his fingers did an elaborate dance across the keys while every other part of his body was staunchly rooted in time and place.

It must have been a generously paid role, for on his takings alone their modest household of three could enjoy overseas holidays once a year and the occasional fine cut of beef, which had always been her father’s guilty pleasure, much to the displeasure of everyone who nagged him about his cholesterol levels. Though he never let any specificities let slip, he often spoke proudly about where he worked and the significance of his standing.

“Perhaps, then, this was why my dad took it especially hard when he was retrenched,” Darsha said with a wry smile. “I don’t know why, but for a time I was convinced that my dad had become increasingly dispirited because he could no longer enjoy marbled tenderloin.”

The roles in the household quickly reversed: her mother went out to work as a personal assistant, a job she cinched due to some connections, and her father turned into the homemaker. At the same time, Darsha began struggling with poor, interrupted sleep, just like her father.

“Even in the most tranquil hours, my eyes would suddenly spring awake from a dreamless state, and I’d need to make a trip to the toilet no matter what. It was always around three to four in the morning, like clockwork.

“One day, as I was creeping out of my room, I caught sight of my dad just as he was stepping out the house, closing the door so carefully that the latch could not click. At first, I had no reaction, for we had crossed paths before plenty of times in these odd hours of the morning. Though I preferred to return to bed and wrestle with the prospect of sleep, my dad tended to go for walks. Yet in the small sliver of space before the closed door separated us, I saw something that had me choke on a gasp. Hanging from the black messenger bag slung across his body was the more than familiar mask of a bull.

“I didn’t do anything. I was stuck at the threshold of my bedroom with the door ajar, peering out like a thief. As my dad scurried down the corridor, there was a distinct metalling rattling akin to maracas. I waited until silence returned.”

I asked Darsha what she did afterwards. She shook her head, then replied, “What could I do but pretend not to know?”

“Most of all,” she added, “I didn’t dare to do anything, for it was around this time that I saw him smiling again.”

And so this twilight facade continued: her father pretended to go on innocuous walks, while she pretended to be asleep, at least until he was out of earshot. For the interim, this was what a peaceful and happy home life took the shape of, until a month later when Darsha, as she turned the corner from the elevator after coming home from school, heard a shrill cry followed by something heavy being hurled to the ground. Recognising her home as the source of the commotion, she dashed forward, only to halt by instinct before the corridor-facing windows. By chance she overheard her mother hiss, “You’re breaking the law, and you want me to sit by and act like I don’t know about it?”

Darsha didn’t enter the house until fifteen minutes after her mother had slammed the bedroom door shut. Her father was peeling potatoes over the sink, and greeted her as per usual, asking how her day went.

“Whatever did he do with those potatoes?” Darsha suddenly asked. She tumbled this question about in her mind so violently that the wrinkles on her forehead seemed to have tripled, and she chewed on her lower lip with such vigour that I felt they would soon split and bleed.

Outside, the sun was obediently tucked behind a thicket of clouds. I stood up and insisted that we go out for a walk. Darsha resisted at first, but eventually gave in to my insisting. She was abnormally quiet as I pushed the wheelchair several laps round the pond.

At last she spoke again. “I should talked to my dad about all this before he passed away. He had a photographic memory, always remembering more than I did.”

Humorously, I said that I couldn’t even remember what I did yesterday.

Her lips flattened into an unreadable line. “You could start writing a daily diary. I should too.”

Before I left, I suggested that we could do a shared diary, an intertwining of our stories, as a team project. Shamefully, I admitted that all the things she described today were astounding, yet I could not at all imagine any of it in my mind’s eye.

This idea excited Darsha enough that she forgot about what she was trying so hard to remember.

“Pictures might be helpful!” She clapped her hands. “There might be some on my old hard drive, if it still functions. I used to snap photos with my phone on the street; I had a dream of being a photographer. I even won the junior civilian photojournalist competition in the newspaper when I was sixteen! Bet you’ve never even heard of it before. My niece is due to visit me soon. I’ll ask her to bring the drive for me, and we can look at my old photos together. How about that?”

I promised to come more often.

My parents wanted to have a chat. They’d noticed, of course, the frequency of which I had been leaving the house, and wanted simply to know where I had been going off to in the past few weeks.

“Is it more job interviews?”

I shook my head.

“Then what is it?”

But I was reticent, downright unwilling; for some indecipherable reason, I felt compelled to keep my whereabouts tucked away, as if Darsha were my secret.

My mum eventually lost her patience, and so we entered into a new argument once again.

It ended with me stomping off to my room, and my mum to hers; my dad, meanwhile, was caught between two slamming doors.

#

***

#

I had stopped by a fancy stationery store the day before my next visit to purchase a hardcover scrapbook filled with a rainbow of smooth glossy paper, coloured pens and decorative tape. I had also borrowed Kane’s portable photo printer.

While I had been amusing myself with trying a series of overpriced pens, Darsha had had a severe stroke.

“She must have been at peace,” the nurse relayed to me as she patted me on the shoulder. “Her eyes were closed and the blanket still tucked snugly around and under her body.”

Darsha had shared that the tight embrace of the blanket made her feel held, and that was a prerequisite, she believed, for anyone to enjoy a good night’s sleep.

They didn’t allow volunteers to see the body, so I simply sat in a stool by the pantry, staring into space for some time. When the nurse walked by once more, I suddenly remembered something else of importance. I flagged her over and enquired if Darsha’s niece had come by—would be convenient to pass my contact details to her?

The nurse was puzzled. “Darsha hasn’t had any visitors for the past decade or so,” she said. “She’s in here because she had no one around to take care of her.”

There was nothing left for me to do but to go home.

On the bus, I was squeezed into a corner by a gaggle of rapturous tourists who crowded up against the window to survey the downtown scenery with gleaming fascination. I mimicked their gazes, though all I saw were things I had grown up amidst, and as such was incapable of recreating any of the same enthusiasm. The architecture, the infrastructure, the roadside construction, the impatient cars revving at the red light—then, in the distance, I caught sight of a familiar building. Instinctively, I pressed hard on the stop button and vaulted off the bus as soon as the doors swung open.

Under the scrutiny of the relentless midday sun, the steel-and-concrete behemoth shone with the flash of a blade. What stood out the most was its rounded glass-covered dome, taking on the image of the cloudless sky in its visage. The public entrance facing the street consisted of three doors, which devoured a stream of people who filed into its gaping mouth.

I, too, had once in this spot. It had been my twenty-fifth birthday. But I left empty-handed because I couldn’t at all decide on what I wanted. Despite all my planning, all my conjecturing, when the time came and I pictured my dream house, or a sleek car, or a specific job I could be bound to, I found myself unable to take a single step forward. I said I would think more about it, and so I went home and never came back again—until now.

I seamlessly joined the line of entrants and scanned my ID card at the automatic gantry. All my belongings, including my phone and the items I had brought for Darsha, had to be deposited onto a conveyor belt in exchange for a token before I was waved through the full body scanner. Only my ID was kept on me. Finally, I got to take a queue number and waited in a sectioned-off booth, which was completely empty. Unless you wanted to study your own personal details, you had to content with looking at the wall until your turn came.

Thankfully, the wait wasn’t long.

The news always said that the terminal had never changed since it was first installed; only its software was constantly upgraded, and minor internal and external parts replaced when necessary. To think that it looked just as it had from decades ago—perhaps Darsha’s father and mother, too, had stood here at some point, and seen their faces reflected in the same convex glass.

In any case, Darsha never stood here herself.

Not that there was any regret in that.

And neither could there be of my impulse, if it could be called that, for I felt convinced of what I was doing.

I walked up to the terminal and typed in my request via the touch-screen keyboard. The monitor flashed a warm yellow, and regarded me with its expressionless countenance.

“Why do you wish to see these materials?” it asked with an upward inflection. Among the motherboards and crisscrossing wires I pictured bemusement, a head cocked to one side.

I had no strong reason except that I wanted to see, and I wanted to know.

It pondered my response briefly, then continued, “I understand. I have scanned through my protocols. I have to inform you that this is restricted material. This means that I do not have sufficient authority to make a decision on whether to approve or deny it. I will have to confer with my superiors. If you will kindly give me a moment.”

The terminal’s face returned to darkness.

I hadn’t realised I’d been holding my breath until it came back to life, and I let out a prolonged sigh that completely flattened my abdomen.

“I’m happy to report that a decision has been made in your favour. However, you must first be presented with the necessary terms and conditions, and you may only be allowed to proceed upon agreeing to them.” A long reel of paper slid out from a printing port. “Mainly, you will only be allowed to browse through the material in our confidential archives under supervision. Though you have already undergone our security checks prior to entering, you will have to be thoroughly scanned once again, including a full body pat down. You will also be required to sign off on a non-disclosure agreement, which includes a clause whereby all of your social channels will henceforth be monitored for the next ten years to make sure that you abide strictly by it. After these ten years, you will be required to return for an assessment. A more detailed breakdown can be found be in the document for your perusal. Please take your time to read through, and I will be on standby for any questions you may have.”

The only other contracts I’d ever signed had all been employment-related, and I usually consulted with my parents about all the confusing clauses and terminologies before I put my pen to paper. This time, however, I was informed that even the existence of the contract was for my eyes and ears only.

It took me over half an hour to digest everything, and what stood out to me the most was the fact that I wasn’t technically allowed to not sign anything today. If I wanted, for example, time to think, then I would have to sign a different non-disclosure agreement. The clauses under that seemed an even greater labyrinth.

In the end, I was already here.

And just like that, I got to witness what I imagined Darsha had also seen.

#

***

#

Several months later, I joined a publishing company that specialised in online travel magazines that you could browse on any mode of transport: trains, buses, self-driving cars, planes—name it, and they would be found in an inconspicuous corner of the ‘entertainment’ tab. My parents and I could finally put one of our major points of conflict to rest.

On my first day, I got asked by my co-workers the standard questions.

Are you married?

Have you used your request?

To both, I answered in the negative.

I saw in my co-workers’ eyes an overflowing astonishment, though counting on the fact that I offered no more than that, they didn’t dare to dig deeper.

On top of that, they liked to head to the bar together on Fridays after work, but I always turned them down. I had begun a beginner course on photography.

They eventually stopped asking me to join them for things. I was relieved that, without saying so much, they could perceive that I wanted to go my own way.

Keep Nothing on Your Person TAGS | fiction, local

Levin Tan

Keep Nothing
on Your Person
TAGS | fiction , local