Singapore Noir

10:19. You drive back to the apartment. I follow in my car. We head upstairs. We do not fuck. We lock the door securely behind us, we unload the groceries into the fridge and storeroom, fold away the plastic bags. We shower and then we make love. Sweetly, tenderly, with the curtains drawn, like some newly married couple who were school sweethearts in a small town and have never known much of anything else.

Afterward we go out for lunch around the corner to the French place at the little row of shops along Bukit Timah that gentrified as the property values raced and richer people with richer tastes moved there. A Frenchman who married local and never left runs it; a small place with some comfy tables amidst racks of food and wine that they stock for sale and which feels like a warehouse.

We come here often because of convenience but also, I realize, perhaps because there is a sense of a couple here, making a home and comfort food amidst the commerce and bare floors.

Then we are back, in the big bed with the rumpled white cotton sheets and comfortable pillows, even as the city busies itself with commerce and common things. We nap, holding each other, and wake and make love again. Then evening comes.

Sometimes in this place and time, between us, there is nothing that can be said. Perhaps I feel silly for the pangs I felt when you stocked up things for him, what he and no one else likes, when I know it is his money that pays for not just whatever is in the fridge, but the fridge and the apartment, and that he is the reason that you are here in the first place and that we met. Perhaps I feel guilty for the way I have forced myself on you, in such a place and manner.

But you do not ask and I do not speak of these things. In bed together, there is no need for such things.

In my life, I have known sex and death. Now in this time, I have begun to know life — what that might truly mean. But I still know death better.

And in such moments, I know that no matter why this started between us, no matter how long this goes on, no matter how alive we are in bed, in our passion, when I am in you, this must end and it will end in death.

5. Coming to Endings

You haven’t called or sent any messages all day. But that sometimes happens when he is in town, returning suddenly. I sent one text but then kept quiet when there was no reply. Instead of thinking about you, I have kept busy with all the scandals now in the political realm — not so immense and I am not directly involved. But our system has little experience handling such political scandals, and the agencies directly in charge must themselves be monitored for the ways they approach these issues. So it is dusk by the time I drive down that road to sit outside the gate that leads into your condominium.

There is a mover’s truck outside with boxes of different sizes being loaded up. Nothing unusual, because your condominium, like so many others, always has people coming and going. But something in my gut stirs me out of the car. I speak to the movers and then the security guard. The boxes are coming from your apartment.

I ask the guard to buzz me up. He is used to me enough not to ask questions. But he tells me there is no one upstairs, that he has not seen you all day amidst the moving. I don’t believe him and bully my way up, riding the elevator that has become so familiar in these months, and yet I arrive in a space that is unrecognizable.

It is the same apartment. But you are not there. Everything that you placed inside, and touched, has been emptied out until what remains is just a polished skeleton.

I head back down with questions. The movers — Bangladeshis paid by the hour — don’t know what to say, but when I show the supervisor my credentials he brings out the manifest. What they are moving now is a second load of boxes, which are being sent on to Tokyo, while the first are in storage. The name on the invoice is not yours but that of a Japanese company. The destination address is also in the name of that company.

I snap a photo of the manifest on my phone, for follow-up. I order the supervisor to allow me to inspect the boxes here and in storage. He hesitates but relents when I bark. I open every one, not even knowing what I expect.

What I find horrifies me: there is the lamp that was by our bedside, the cushions that you held against your lap when we watched television, the television itself, and our bed, and the couch and other places where we lay together — all these and more things that marked our time with each other are bundled into boxes and wrapped up in cellophane, made inhuman, as if no one has ever used them, as if there has never been an us.