Heaven Has Eyes Read online

  Who’s that?

  Who?

  The man in the photo on your computer.

  What do you think?

  I think he’s going on a journey, a very long way.

  How do you know that?

  There’s a plane behind. He’s got a suitcase. It looks like it’s empty. Maybe his mother gave him it. I don’t think he has much money.

  And his clothing?

  He doesn’t look…comfortable. Like he’s wearing for the first time. And a long, long time ago. Like Gua Ma and Gua Kong’s wedding photos.

  Where is he going?

  She shrugs her shoulders, holds up her hands.

  Look again?

  A hat and a coat. Somewhere far away, very cold. Polar bear land? Will he see the polar bears?

  No, he won’t see polar bears. A few ageing wolves, perhaps, across a table.

  Can we make the paper plane now?

  Ten more minutes.

  Promise?

  Don’t worry. I won’t .

  Eh?

  Ten more minutes. You can watch the clock.

  I assemble the pieces of the story. Quickly, now. This first flight, to that other island in the North, was a good one. Slow, of course, and uncomfortable. He was different from the others who went with him: he found it difficult to share their jokes, or their laughter, their ease with the English. In the Northern Island, in that great grey city, in a season that for some unknown reason they called spring, he must have felt alone. But I can leave that out. At all those talks on Singapore’s future, he was on the sidelines, waiting. This was his job for now: to listen, to express his opinions, but above all to wait, until history composed itself in his and his country’s favour. But history has a way of not keeping appointments. There was a second flight, years later. No cameras this time; no photographs in the newspapers. A short transfer from prison, and then the journey. In the northern city, there were no service apartments in Westminster now, no chauffeurs, no ceremonies of welcome, only a fruit stall in Bayswater, the patter of rain. It was summer, and someone special to him had accompanied him. Yet he still found it difficult to recompose his life. He went for treatment. The psychiatrists were puzzled; after a while, they called on a young houseman from his part of the world, who listened and paraphrased. And so his words came back to him, like an echo from a well.

  Music again, from the television. Ge Lan has discovered that the darkly handsome, brooding pilot, Lei Daying, so remote and authoritarian in the air, has a soft side. After the flight, he sidles up to her, and asks her what she is thinking about.

  “A problem that isn’t clear to me.”

  “What problem?”

  “A person.”

  “What person?”

  She hesitates, smiles and walks on, leaving him with a single word.

  “You.”

  And then another break. My mother-in-law stirs, and looks impatiently up at the clock.

  Jin Jin, it’s time. We can fold the plane now. No, don’t use your homework paper. Take another sheet. That one.

  Like this?

  Correct. Like that. Fold lengthwise. Make sure you get it right at the beginning. You can’t afford to be like Ge Lan’s friend in Gua Ma’s movie: the one who was stuck doing ground service. She said she failed at the first step. That’s right: now press down with your nail, make the fold as clear as you can. Two triangles. Like this. Press hard. And then two more. Fold back; then on each side. Good? It doesn’t look like a plane now? Like egg prata? Wait. Pull here. Do you see it now? Not like the planes in the photo or the movie. Thinner, sleeker. Like SAF fighters before National Day, the ones you hear first, and only then look up?

  You want to try it now, in the alleyway? You don’t want to watch the movie? Gua Ma says this is the best part. Singapore in 1959. The prison doors are open, but we do not see this. The plane passes over the Cathay Building and lands at Paya Lebar. Lin Keping and Lei Daying go sightseeing. There’s Raffles on his statue, brooding over the Padang. The Sultan Mosque at Arab Street. And then Nanyang University, the central building just finished, the earth still raw and the gardens bare of trees. The Aquarium by Fort Canning. And then, finally, the Esplanade. They look out onto the great harbour, full of the world’s ships. This is a lost city that neither of us has ever known: only Gua Ma knows.

  You really want to go? You don’t want to wait for Ge Lan to sing Calypso? Let’s go, then, before it’s dark, before your mother comes. On the porch light. Wear your shoes. There’s no wind now: I don’t think the rain will come. Unlock the gate. Wait now, let’s ask Gua Ma one more thing.

  Pang pui ki.

  The sky is still light, as blank as the future. The lane is still empty.

  Come, Jin Jin, let’s fly the plane. Before dinner, before your mother comes. You’re nodding. These moments are golden, aren’t they, when someone doesn’t arrive on time? They are places where stories can begin, where words can take flight.

  Heaven Has Eyes

  WHEN THE HEADLINES finally announced the election date, Zi Qiang felt little surprise. After all, the ground had been prepared for months. At Chinese New Year, citizens had been showered with what was described as a prosperity package; as always, small but significant sums were added to their state retirement and medical accounts. This time, in a further gesture, each of them had been given national shares, tiny virtual financial stakes in the country with an interest rate that, they were promised, would shadow GDP growth. A week later, the annual upward revision of public transport fares was postponed indefinitely. And on his housing estate, a long-delayed covered walkway to the Mass Rapid Transit station materialised almost overnight, gleaming in steel and glass.

  He turned the page of his newspaper, weighing one corner down with his cup so that the wind from the fan wouldn’t blow it away. Early morning in the coffee shop; the tables had just been wiped and if you looked at them from a low angle you could still see thin, persistent arcs of water to which newsprint stuck obstinately. He peeled the paper away. On the second page was a map of the constituencies. Almost the entire lozenge-shaped island was coloured in the white of the ruling party, with two lonely opposition wards near its centre peeping out like twin eyes, one red and one gold. On the facing page was a calendar of dates, neatly colour-coded. A week to nomination day, when the candidates had to declare themselves. And then nine days—the minimum legislated campaigning period—before election day at the beginning of the next month.

  “Always like that,” said Adelyn when he mentioned it in the evening. “What do you expect? And it’s only a couple of weeks since they changed the electoral boundaries. They want to catch the opposition off guard.”

  She shuffled in fat slippers to the window. Evening closed in quickly on the housing estate and lights were coming on now in the living rooms of the opposite blocks of flats. Although they were on the sixteenth floor, noise travelled quickly upwards from the playground below: he could hear the high voices of children crying out to each other, the thud of the ball from the adjoining basketball court, then a second’s silence, followed by cheers as—he guessed—the ball landed in a basket.

  “What’s the time?”

  He looked at his wrist and realised he’d taken off his watch. He padded over to the carriage clock on the telephone table, the marble cold on his feet.

  “Almost 7.30.”

  She smiled. “Shall we?”

  “Heaven Has Eyes? It’s been a while.”

  By way of answer she reached for the TV remote. The green light below the screen winked back at them as they fought for the best place on the couch.

  Heaven Has Eyes was the longest-running drama serial on television. Channel 8, of course; the Chinese channel productions, although derivative, were much better than the gauche English-language imitations on Channel 5. The programme was filmed locally, but with that significant leavening of imported foreign talent from the region that was so important nowadays. It had been running for several seasons, long enough for most vie
wers to forget how it had all started. Zi Qiang had read that the show’s producers had to employ a panel of consultants from the local university, who could ensure that any new episode by a young screenwriter unfamiliar with the past did not wander too far off the rails of history. The plot revolved around a family. Three generations lived under one roof and ran a business, founded by the old patriarch when he’d negotiated a buyout at a substantial discount from previous owners, who had retreated in the face of an uncertain political situation. The old man was both charming and ruthless; through a series of mergers, acquisitions and total elimination of competition, he guided the family concern to ever greater heights. The genius of the series was that you could never fully like or dislike him. You wanted to be him, to identify what he stood for, and yet you had the nagging suspicion that something was missing in the relentless pursuit of progress he had bequeathed his descendants. In the last few seasons, he’d receded from view; Zi Qiang pictured him as a fat spider, motionless and thus invisible at the centre of a huge web of his own devising. But Adelyn said to him, no, he was more like one of those bugs in those old re-runs of Star Trek, the kind that you forcibly ingested and that then took up residence around your spinal column, embracing it so intimately that you were unaware of their presence. Much more effective if you worked through that kind of love.

  The family, indeed, seemed uncertain how they might inhabit the house the old man had built for them. At first, they moved through the rooms like some strange, transparent species, exploring the confines of a cave in which they had long been sealed off from the outside world. The eldest son, Yee Siong, was groomed for succession, but succumbed to the inevitable cancer that always made its entrance at a strategic point in such dramas. For some time, machines were his closest companions, their screens registering every murmur of his body, sensors nestled like tendrils into his flesh so it became impossible to figure out where machine ended and body began. Many heartrending scenes were acted out over and on his narrow bed in the hospital ward.

  A mild-mannered uncle watched over the company as a caretaker CEO. Yet when Yee Siong recovered and finally took the helm, things were more fractious than before. A third generation had grown up, less tractable than the last. As children, they ventured beyond the high gates at the end of the drive and brought back found objects, dirt and misshapen playmates from the world outside. Then, as teenagers, some turned their attention to the house and its garden. They found a forgotten cellar full of damp stacks of newspapers, photographs smudged with fungus; even, in a drier area, the desiccated carcass of some unidentified species of cat. In the corner of the garden a grandnephew discovered—and partially unearthed, until he was prevented from continuing—a solitary grave, its headstone curved like a tortoise shell, the characters worn indecipherable with age. When they were young adults, this generation ventured further afield. Then they returned or, more frequently, simply passed through, filling up the house with things: lacquered laptops left casually on tables or counters, plasma screens bigger and brighter than the windows, airtight wall-to-wall closets of clothes that sighed when prised open.

  But all this didn’t explain how Heaven Has Eyes held your interest. The series kept you watching by building up to a miniature crisis at the end of every episode; there would always be some new secret yet to unfold or discovery whose terrible consequences might yet be avoided by prompt action. Viewers would be left with an image of a couple in a passionate embrace, shot through a furtive telephoto lens, or a character’s frozen face crumpling in response to an unexpected discovery. If the crisis was solved in the next episode, another one would arise. The title of the series, of course, promised a final judgment, but it was a judgment infinitely deferred.

  “Quick,” Adelyn said. “It’s starting.”

  She finally made room for him on the sofa, behind a wall of cushions.

  The first scene, they saw, was in the family home. A young Indian woman, smartly dressed, nervously sipped tea and made small talk with Yee Siong and his wife.

  “Who’s that?”

  “Shakuntala,” Adelyn said. “You know, Ah David’s new girlfriend. David, you know, Yee Siong’s nephew. The one you said was gay.”

  “Look at the wife. What’s she wearing? Some sort of pyjama suit? Doesn’t she have any dress sense?”

  “She’s not so bad. Quiet. I want to listen to what they’re saying.”

  • • •

  The days to nomination day passed quickly. The university wasn’t in session and so Zi Qiang worked mostly from home, trawling the internet and online databases for next semester’s readings for his students, building a module website brick by virtual brick. After breakfast, he’d retreat to the third bedroom they used as the office, the taste of coffee still lingering in his mouth, and turn up the aircon until the cold was almost unbearable. To concentrate. A few hours’ work and then he’d emerge for lunch, rubbing warmth back into his joints. He’d pass his neighbours’ padlocked doors in the corridor and enter the empty lift that chanted out the descending floors in a crisp British voice, like a nagging schoolmistress. The estate would be clean and bare in the morning sunlight, the province of the very young and the very old. Retirees sat companionably in the shade of the void decks; old men in singlets and polyester shirts clustered over newspapers and cigarettes in the coffee shop where he bought a packet of bee hoon for lunch. On the way back, he crossed the playground, the brown paper wrapper comfortingly hot in his hand. A pudgy, fair-skinned boy was playing by himself on the slide, watched over from a distance by an Indonesian maid. The boy fell awkwardly, but did not cry out; the maid turned away. Zi Qiang stared and a pair of hungry eyes looked up into his. They looked at each other uncertainly, the child on the brink of tears. A small arm reached forward; on the white skin, a red thread of blood slowly thickened. And yet everything felt distant, as though the boy were reaching up from underwater, swimming up into focus but still trapped beneath the surface. Zi Qiang was just reaching in his pocket for a tissue when the child turned away to call the maid. He shook his head, straightened up and continued to the lift lobby.

  After lunch, concentration was difficult. If he wasn’t careful, his fingers on the mouse took him elsewhere; he’d find himself checking the news site for updates on the upcoming elections. Not that he really expected to find anything new there; there was something compulsive in the action, as though time might slow down and finally become solid if he returned to the site often enough. The governing party’s candidates had been introduced in batches over the past week, four or five at a time. They were always amiable, well-groomed, well-dressed and well-fed: they had studied and played hard at school, been sent abroad on scholarships and then returned to take up challenging positions in the public or private sectors. Most eagerly displayed how happily married they were, with designer spouses and beaming children who seemed to have wandered off set from powdered milk advertisements; all had long résumés packed with voluntary work. Reporters dug deep to find something unusual about them: one of them was a marathon runner, while another could play the saxophone. But, truth to tell, it was difficult to find anything very interesting to say. They stood obediently as trained seals at press conferences, picking the questions that were gently lobbed their way through the air like fish. Occasionally, a young reporter or a recalcitrant member of the public came up with something unanticipated; at these times, their heads would turn and they’d anxiously look towards the senior Member of Parliament who stood next to them. Who would stare back pointedly as if to say, Get on with it. The boldest of them might then venture a direct reply: a very interesting comment and something that of course would be given due consideration when they were elected. Of course, balance was needed, no decision should be rushed. Then the others would smile in unison, showing perfect teeth. One would venture that his experience in the recent Bukit Kechil town council oral hygiene campaign made him able to truly empathise with the problem discussed. Standing there on the stage, dressed in white, they seemed le
ss like politicians than a newly-formed sports team, perfectly prepared for an upcoming tournament, planed and honed into splendid inhumanity.

  He also liked to browse the opposition candidates’ profiles, though not without a certain sadness. The photographs here were less posed: hairs were out of place, a jacket crumpled or a face slightly out of focus. The résumés were shorter and grittier. At press conferences, they would answer questions straightforwardly, even unguardedly. Reporters for the established press would lay out a trail of questions like a row of chocolates and a candidate would munch her way through it, taking bigger and bigger bites until all caution was left behind. Then the reporter would spring the trap that he had prepared. “So,” he’d say sweetly, “you’re saying that our country is a Third World Country?” Or “Let me get this straight: you are alleging that the minister is corrupt and incompetent?” The ruling party would threaten a defamation suit and the candidate would issue a carefully-worded apology and perhaps disappear from view for a few days. As the campaign began, the newspapers and television highlighted the eccentricities of opposition candidates: the one who campaigned in a torn singlet, shorts and slippers; or the man who seemed more interested in promoting his taxi company than campaigning. For those who seemed less eccentric, questions of “character” were asked. Why had Candidate X underpaid his income tax by $15 ten years ago? Could such a person govern the country? Or why had Candidate Y attended the premiere of the movie Spider Lilies, which featured a lesbian love affair? Was she part of an LGBT conspiracy to take over the government? The last few days of campaigning reminded Zi Qiang of the dying seconds of the video games his nephews coerced him into playing at New Year; the opposition candidates stood backed into corners, fending off projectiles hurled at them with increasing speed from all directions.

  In the late afternoon, he went to buy dinner: economy rice from the eating house opposite his block. If you went early, you could get the food at its freshest before it dried up under the lights or was picked over by the waves of commuters returning home. He ordered two packets of rice and then pointed out the dishes they wanted. For Adelyn first, bitter gourd with black beans, salted fish with bean sprouts, steamed egg so soft it could be sliced with a spoon; then he chose steamed fish, white in the dark sauce dotted with red chillies, buttery pumpkin, green-black sweet potato leaves. The young men serving him liked to joke with customers. He remembered that Adelyn was particularly good with them. She’d ask them what was best to eat. They’d say the fish, very good looking, and she’d reply, “Not as good looking as you,” and they’d look back at her in surprise, at a thirty-something woman with a wedding ring, then relish a harmless flirtation.