Singapore Noir

I stare at the boxes and hardly nod when the supervisor asks if they can seal them back up. Then I follow the truck to their office in an industrial park, just fifteen minutes away, up the road, in the part of upper Bukit Timah that still has some space for light industry and commercial buildings. Around them, more condos for millionaires are being built, and the construction crews are at work even at night. It is a different world from the quiet, upper-class, leafy neighborhood the boxes and their belongings have come from.

It is night as the supervisor and I stride across the cement floor between the office building and the storage area, where the first lot of boxes are kept. The sky is inky dark: a thief’s moon. I sense something and it feels like fear.

When we approach the boxes, the lights come on and I see the stain on the floor that seeps from one box. Dark red. There is a strong, putrid smell.

The supervisor sees it too and is startled, not knowing what it is. Without a word I shove the other boxes out of the way and get to the one that is bleeding. I reach for my penknife and cut it open and then I kneel and with my hands tear apart the heavy cardboard, and move aside one item and then another to get to the source.

I breathe hard and deep as I work. I move urgently as if there are wounds that can still be staunched, crimes that may still somehow be prevented, and limbs that can yet be sewn back together to make a whole person.

And then, with an exhalation of breath, I find it. It is nothing more than a bottle that has been broken in the move, a bottle of liquid that has not been wrapped carefully and that indeed should never have been in the box without refrigeration.

I stare at the supervisor and he obeys when I insist we open every single box that remains. I find cutlery, crockery, cooking things, towels and linens, and all the heavy, bulky things that once allowed us to feel at home. Now they seem like props for a stage where nothing was ever real.

There is no other sign of you, no clue to where you are and why you left like this. In the days that are to come, I will search, with all the skill and all the contacts I have accumulated.

I cannot put to rest the question of whether he somehow found out because you or I were careless, or if he was simply reposted to another city. I will try to figure out where you are, and if the move is something you wanted, somehow to get away, and if you are alive. Without any resolution to these questions, I cannot know the answers that must apply to my life, my crime, and my death.

I have prepared myself for different possibilities. That you are with him in Tokyo, and have gone back to that life which you never really left. Or that I will find that you are dead, killed in anger or icy vengeance. Or even that you are alive, having run away not only from him but also from me, to begin anew in a small town where nothing really happens as we sometimes fantasized about.

As I look, I will also cover every track that you and I could have left between us, for even as I am looking for him and therefore for you, I am aware of the danger that he could in turn be looking for me.

At night now, I eat alone, the simple dishes of vegetables, rice, and tauhu

. I clean my gun daily and do my push-ups and other exercises. Some mornings, I park the car and then run around the Botanic Gardens and down Bukit Timah Road to where we used to meet amongst the rich and respectable people, and sometimes — at all kinds of hours — I sit in my car on the street outside your gate as if expecting you to return to the scene.

I observe everything and write it down in my journal, with the pen that you gave me — which I fill with ink each day.

I am waiting for death, or life. I am waiting for something to happen, an ending that is to come.

I am a detective in a city they say has no crime. I am an artist in a city that — let’s not pretend — no longer has a heart.

Strangler Fig

By Philip Jeyaretnam

Bukit Panjang

The strangler fig begins as an epiphyte, when a seed germinates in the crevice of another tree. Its roots grow downward, enveloping the other tree. At the same time, its branches grow upward toward the sunlight above the jungle canopy. In time, the host tree perishes, and the strangler fig comes to support its own weight. The ghostly remains of the original tree fall away, leaving a hollow core at the heart of the strangler. The strangler is doomed to this parasitic quest, drawn to engulf and overwhelm the other.