Landscaping For Amnesiacs
TAGS | fiction, local
Tan Rui Heng
Rui (he/him) is fascinated by all the ways that environments — be it natural, built, or technological — assert their influence on human relationships. His favourite sci-fi author and biggest writing inspiration is J. G. Ballard. In his free time, Rui enjoys exploring Singapore’s old malls and lesser-known urban spaces, and hopes that he will one day have the time, energy, and vocabulary to document all his adventures. Rui graduated from Yale-NUS College in Singapore with a degree in English Literature, and currently works full-time as a technical writer.
The tram glid seamlessly along the rails.
“School of Urban Design,” beamed the neutral voice from the intercom. “Alight here for Tram Service 2 to the School of Management.”
Patrick stepped off the tram and hurried into the cool comfort of the School corridors. It was already five-past-one – late for his meeting in Classroom 207. He had arranged to meet his group-mates for a homework assignment five minutes ago.
There had been significant buzz about the university campus when it had finished construction six years ago. It was a sprawling, integrated campus: dormitories, canteens, and other amenities to the north, an Eastern and Western Wing containing all of the different Schools, and to the south, a large general complex housing the rest of the University’s vital organs. All of these were linked by an arterial service of trams that ferried its inhabitants across the 40-hectacre grounds.
None of this, of course, was particularly new to a university complex: the old University had a generally similar array of elements. What made this new space ground-breaking was the infusion of a neater, more precise organisational logic. The formula had already been proven years ago – by Changi on the one hand, the Ministry of Education on the other. It was only a matter of replicating that for the university. New schools, like airport terminals, could be tacked on whenever the demand required it. Old schools could be easily phased out and repurposed as and when they were needed. ‘Modular’ had long subsumed ‘livable’ as a buzzword.
The neat organisation of the University at large, though, failed to scale down to its constituent elements. The need to ensure some level of scalar unity carried over to the self-same nature of the University’s sprawling corridors. Patrick knew he had to hurry, but the more he quickened his steps the more the corridors and stairwells spiralled into new, foreign – yet aesthetically identical – iterations. It was as if the space itself had anticipated his being lost, and in a well-intentioned but ultimately unsuccessful way, provided him barely workable solutions.
Patrick turned into the hallway and finally recognised that he was on the right track – second stairwell from the fire extinguisher. As he quickened his steps to Classroom 207 at the far end of the corridor, Patrick wondered just how much his navigation around the University was based on habit.
Sometimes he wondered if the labyrinthian logic of the corridors had embossed itself into the almost intentionally obtuse nature of those who had to traverse them. Just-about-lateness was endemic at the University and there had never been an adequate explanation of why. Everyone was always occupied with something right before they had to be anywhere else. Patrick, for his part, had been mentally rehearsing his excuse on the way over: “Lost track of time in the shower…”
Patrick entered the classroom. He was still the first person there.
***
Defensive Postures
Wei Min shivered against the cold leather of his chair. The Biomechanics Laboratory was stocked with a rich trove of equipment: a collection of sensors, cameras, wires and screens to record every moment and angle of human motion. All required frigid air-conditioning to keep them in their optimal working temperatures. This was a lab cooled for the comfort of its most important inhabitants – Wei Min was merely a passing interest for the series of machines that encircled the perimeter of the room.
In any case, Wei Min sensed he already had all the data he needed. What was left was only to put everything together. Wei Min was a ‘unicorn’, the word the University unofficially conferred onto the sole representatives of any particular major: for Wei Min it was Civil Biomechanics. The rush for so-called interdisciplinary studies had churned out a series of obscure new specialties, and with them, more and more ‘unicorns’. Wei Min found his time split between the Public Policy and Kinesiology departments, not fitting neatly into either. Wei Min only knew of one other student who had gone through this program. He had met Travis, his mentor, at a social event for civil scholars the year he received his scholarship. Travis had sold the idea to him on the spot: “This is what you’ll be wanting to do for the next four years, you’ll be solving problems with peoples’ bodies they even they don’t know about.” Wei Min had liked that. Travis, for his part, had recently completed his working paper on MRT ambient optimisation: by decreasing the temperature of a busy train station by 2 degrees Celsius, he was able to induce a 1.35% increase in walk speed, increasing daily passenger flow by 0.8%.
Wei Min fed the data he’d collected that day into his computer. It had been hard to find test subjects for the experiment he was conducting due to the small risk of injury he had to declare on his participant form. The only sign-up he’d had was a third-year Urban Design student by the name of Patrick. They had struck up a cordial enough acquaintanceship over the course of this two-week data collection, and even though the tests were strictly biomechanical, Wei Min still felt some obligation to profile him mentally. Patrick was reserved, pleasant enough, with a deliberate way of speaking that Wei Min expected from an Urban Design student. Yet there was a lingering patina to his personality that Wei Min could never quite look beyond. There was something about his mannerisms that seemed reactive; rehearsed. Attuned precisely for life within the four walls of the University; as if he had come into being at the moment he enrolled and would disappear the moment he left it. As his computer loaded up the data from all the recorded test sessions, Wei Min humoured himself with the image of Patrick tossing his graduate cap high on graduation day and instantly vanishing into thin air, leaving a set of robes to fall flatly onto the ground.
Information glimmered across his console screens in an infinite series of potential talking points. The experiments consisted of Patrick, adorned with sensors and cameras on his protective gear, jumping from a range of heights and postures onto a heavily cushioned surface. Here was a series of Patrick falling with his hands tucked into his chest, another of him spread-eagled. The impact areas showed as zones of red on his screen — the redder the zone, the stronger the impact on the sensors. Wei Min could then scale these data points up to the levels he wanted to work with. The experiment was complete.
Wei Min’s mind wandered back to the two weeks of data-gathering. After a few sessions of experimentation, he realised that Patrick no longer needed any express instructions. He was, in some sense, driven by self-preservation’s logical opposite: cocooned by his state-of-the-art protective gear, he was now free to plummet repeatedly, in postures that were reflexively unviable yet biomechanically plausible. In some way, Wei Min concluded, Patrick had been the perfect test subject. On a subconscious level, he had mastered the art of the defensive posture, tempered to perfection over his three years in the University.
Wei Min logged out of his console and closed the notebook containing the lifeblood of his research. Written across the front, in his perfectly weighted handwriting: “A Biomechanical Analysis of the Ideal Defensive Posture for Adult Subjects Falling from a Low-to-Medium Height.”
***
Monomania
Rina streamed out of class, her attention split between mentally calculating her travel time to the Counseling Centre (five minutes late) and the semester-end project that had just been assigned to them in class. “Built Solutions to Social Problems”: the class was enjoyable for its too-clean scaling of development to social progress, but now that they had been tasked to go out and actually write about a real-life urban project, Rina felt a sense of apprehension surge into her chest.
“Going somewhere?” She flinched at the sudden voice coming up from behind her.
“Hmm? Oh, yeah, the Counseling Centre.”
Patrick was a classmate and a familiar enough face to be considered a rare acquaintance. Ever since Rina had defected from the English department in her second year, she had found friends here hard to come by – not that she particularly tried searching. Her social circle here still consisted of her former English course-mates, and she had enjoyed the degree of separation that that now offered her.
“You managed to book a session?” Patrick quizzed.
“What? No, I just have a shift at the front desk.”
It was common knowledge that the University’s Counseling Centre was permanently overbooked, and severely backlogged. The Centre was conveniently located just a ten minute’s walk away from the main dormitory block – and in a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, almost all of its visitors were students who lived in the dormitories. Every shift Rina did a mental count of how many people showed up in their pajamas.
“You live on campus, right? Don’t you think the Counseling Centre is just… a little too close for comfort?” Rina asked. The thought of having to unravel any sort of mental health crisis, essentially moments away from her own bedroom, sent a chill down her spine.
“But isn’t that the point?”
Rina wondered if, on some level, the University itself was the source of the melodrama from which the Centre’s visitors needed escaping.
“Maybe you’re more right than you think.”
***
The Drywall Has Me In Its Sight
It was eleven at night, but the ceiling of his dormitory room still called out to him with a regular series of thuds. Patrick could trace the phantom sound across the length of the ceiling – the regularity of the sound, as well as the velocity with which it seemed to travel across the room above him, made Patrick certain that his upstairs neighbour was throwing some kind of object against the floor and then the wall. Every semester Patrick created an aural map of his ever-changing cast of neighbours – the walls and ceilings were thick enough to blur their voices, but thin enough such that larger movements or actions could still be transmitted.
Part of the reason why dormitory life had initially appealed so much to Patrick was the proximity in which he’d be living with other students. Things did not necessarily pan out as he expected: classmates ended up filtering off to their respective commitments, and their lives refracted back into the dorms only in their most intimate forms. While Patrick was glad to finally have had his own room, his neighbours enacted a pressure through the walls that threatened to break through at any moment. That was the worst thing about such an ‘integrated’ setting – the uncomfortably close quarters in which he lived with his classmates meant that Patrick often saw himself getting sucked into a social centrifuge from which he found impossible to escape. He found himself exposed to some of his neighbours’ most closeted secrets – wittingly or otherwise. Last year the ebbs and flows of a couple’s sex life were occasionally revealed to him. They stopped about halfway through the semester, and never resumed.
The thuds stopped, and Patrick took that as a cue to prepare himself for bed – he’d been sitting at his desk thinking about his Urban Design project, and all the brainstorming had put him in a strange state of hypervigilance. It was in this state that he’d noticed the blemish in the wall, right above his wardrobe. It was almost small enough to be imperceptible; a rougher and darker pastel against the smooth beige of the drywall. In the dim light of the desk lamp, it only made itself visible as a result of the precise angle at which Patrick was facing the wall; some kind of anamorphosis. A hastily corrected construction defect? Maybe, but by now it stuck out like a sore thumb in Patrick’s mind and there was no leaving it behind.
Patrick dragged his desk chair along the ground – someone downstairs would be upset about that – and propped himself up and across his wardrobe. Gliding his nails across the coarseness of that section of the wall gave Patrick a shudder. Like a scab on an incompletely healed wound, he felt tempted to prick at it; pull it off. Patrick pushed into the scar tissue, and it gave way immediately. The frayed ends of a string peeked through the open wound of the wall. The wall had been clumsily plastered over to hide the presence of a deliberately-constructed (and almost too-round) hole from which the string had been inserted.
Without a second thought Patrick began pulling, but intentionally slowly. As more of the string poured through the wall so too did that peculiar pressure Patrick had imagined had been pushing against the bounds of his room all this time. What purpose had led the previous tenant (or somebody else) to inject this length of string into the wall? What lay at the end of the string? Was this some form of lapsed communication with the other side? Something about this now felt intimate in ways that appealed to Patrick. The string turned taut with the weight on the other end. With the full expectation that seeing this mystery object would irrevocably bring him closer to someone he’d never meet, Patrick pulled one final time.
Popping neatly into his hand was the eye of a camera, no bigger than the size of a pin, with its facepiece painted perfectly beige in camouflage. The battery had long run dry.
***
The Terminal Sea
“And so, it is projected that Stage 3 of the Merdeka Development Project will be completed within the next ten years…”
Wei Min glanced around the auditorium. Amongst the usual cast of faces that would attend a seminar such as this were a few faces sprinkled in from the Urban Design department: the restless face of Patrick one of them. At the podium was the Planner-in-Chief of the Urban Redevelopment Authority – he was giving a talk on the urban principles behind Singapore’s Merdeka Project. It had been the country’s crowning project in its long history of land reclamation. The construction of Merdeka Square was already well under way, envisioned as the perfect monument to top off the final leg of Singapore’s physical expansion that had allowed the country to claw back land area equivalent to 20% of its previous landmass to the south and east.
It was a little late in the afternoon, and the Planner-in-Chief’s speech began to blur into itself. All the usual refrains were present: limited resources, maximising land-use, difficult decisions… yet the speech itself was tinged with a tension that underlined a certain kind of finality. The Merdeka Project was soon to be concluded.
Wei Min knew all too well that this cessation was not consensual. Rather, Singapore had reached its theoretical (and legal) limit of expansion: its land reclamation had been so successful that the country had begun to approach its maritime border with Indonesia – any further, the Planner-in-Chief noted, and Singapore would no longer have unfettered access to its shipping routes. What was once a fertile territory for the country’s colonisation had now so joylessly run out – or, rather, had its access closed off to it by forces beyond its control.
The thought of reaching some sort of terminal wall – wholly arbitrary in a sense, yet virtually impenetrable in another – sent a shiver to the base of Wei Min’s spine. The good people at the URA would come up with something, they always did. For a moment, though, Wei Min harboured the ludicrous idea of some kind of downwards expansion. A second subterranean Singapore propping up the first, shuttling around in ever-longer lifts a new generation of children, who had long since been accustomed to verticality.
***
Across Vanishing Land
Patrick strolled along the Amphitheatre down to the Campus Green. From this high vantage point he could see the most of the University’s Southern Wing: despite the different facilities that peppered the length of the building, its grey geometries were made from the same bright concrete material, meeting in a harmonious medley of too-clean lines. Harmonious was just about the only compliment Patrick could give it – nothing about its bland style would linger long in his memory, but at least it approached a unified set of flat lines and curves a colouring book would likely appreciate.
Patrick had decided that this façade of the Southern Wing would be the topic of his final assignment for the Built Solutions class: it had been constructed with a new kind of concrete that was at once self-healing and self-cleaning. A cocktail of chemicals added to the concrete mix allowed the material, once hardened, to be able to not only patch up any of its own blemishes with atmospheric carbon dioxide, but also to wick off any dust and pollutants with runoff rainwater. The surface of such a building would be fixed into a permanent state of newish greyness. This was a structure that appeared to be built totally independent from the machinations of time, and of senescence.
Today was the last day of his Built Solutions class, and the topic had been on the space of the university itself. Allegedly, the old university had been designed to avoid the assembly of large groups of students: buildings were arranged in a specifically linear way so as to avoid the formation of open squares or rectangles from which bodies could congregate. That was no longer the case for its successor: the Southern Wing, as the social and administrative ‘heart’ of the university, was shaped in the form of a giant bowl, where human traffic was quite naturally poured into the heart of its Campus Green. The worry of large assembly had been, by now, fully erased.
In other words, Patrick reflected, it was no longer space that made up the canvas on which the university’s logic impressed itself upon its students. It was rather anti-space. Perhaps the resistance of the University to time was an intentional design choice; something about its structure was antithetical to the very formation of memory. The curiously bland architecture, the winding corridors and intentional neutrality… it would always return to some freshly grey and forgettable state, supported by a skin that could so readily erase its own scar tissue.
Patrick thought about the Merdeka Project and the seminar he had attended weeks ago. In just a decade, when the limits of land reclamation had been reached, the country would come to represent most strikingly the spatial logic it bestowed upon its inhabitants – an enclosed box wherein the only direction of movement was the constant rearrangement of its interior contents; some kind of wash cycle that always brought back an unflinchingly clean and sterile state. No longer was expansion possible; merely constant and unceasing rearrangement of its contents in which there would be no perfect recombination of parts sans the very next one. The junior college he had attended was now a housing estate; the housing estate he had lived in had served its 99-year lease and was now a shopping mall.
Seen in that light, the University’s self-effacement appeared for a brief moment beautiful and perfectly logical in the needy crevice of Patrick’s mind. Perhaps it had succeeded in creating a perfectly amnesiac species, who thrived on traversing a perpetually vanishing land.