Singapore Noir

With this knowledge, a world of domesticity closed for me. I cannot marry. I cannot believe in love. It is too much make-believe, a Disneyland world; everything is pretty up front, but artificial, unreal. There is a man in the Mickey Mouse suit. Playing Snow White is a girl, just a girl. A girl who can be bought, for a price. A man who can be corrupted and indeed will corrupt others. I recognize that not just in the working women but also in so many others that I meet, in the city offices, in the fine restaurants and stylish clubs, and, yes, even in the areas where the rich and respectable live.

What I no longer recognize is myself. I think back to the time before I joined the force and I can remember what clothes and spectacles I wore, even the scent my T-shirt had when I put it on, fresh from the laundry and just after my mother ironed it. Yet, while I remember all this so clearly, I cannot recognize the world that I would see through those now out-of-fashion horn-rimmed spectacles.

What I do see now when I look around is this: We are guilty. The germ of a terrible crime is already in your mind.

3. Stolen Under a Thief’s Moon

I work at the DSI — the Directorate of Surveillance and Inspection. We are an agency no one has ever heard about but that has been around since the founding of the state, reporting directly to the leader. There are other departments that do so, including those that look at internal and external threats and the bureau to investigate corruption; in the early years, even the pollution-monitoring department.

At the beginning of our country’s history, our leader gave much attention to details, and the DSI’s mandate — surveillance and inspection — was to assist in that oversight of all things, to provide the many eyes that could quickly and shrewdly scan so that when the alarm bells rang and the red lights flashed, the leader and those he trusted could dive down into the muck and fix whatever was wrong.

These days — as the city has grown in pace and complexity — that may seem quaint and quite impossible. I don’t know if anyone looks at the details anymore. Sometimes it seems like everything is too sophisticated, on auto-pilot. But in case anyone cares, we still do what we used to do.

We continue to watch and listen and survey and investigate. We continue to do so quite without attention — not just from the public but even within the state apparatus. If I meet you, and if I should give out my name card, it would simply say, Deputy Assistant Director (Special Duties), Public Service Division, Prime Minister’s Office.

This is me, at least as much as I would like to say about myself. How about her?

When we first met, there was a thief’s moon — what I learned as a child to call that night when the moon is at its ebb and things are darkest. It was in a Japanese restaurant, an izakaya along the Robertson Quay stretch of the river — small eats, many drinks — and the lights allowed us to accept the darkness. Someone I somehow knew asked me along for the opening of the restaurant, hosted by the owners; I sat on a high stool at the end of the counter, with a person on my right more interested in the person on his other side, so I didn’t have to talk too much.

I drank my super-dry Asahi. The beer was icy and the dishes were hot from the furnace, with a squeeze of lemon and a dusting of salt. Okay, I thought, even if I don’t talk to anyone, at least the food’s good.

Then she bumped into me. Literally. Turning the corner, the idiot waiter with the tray of cold beers gets too near her, and so she moves to one side and bumps into me as I’m putting the beer down. It spills a little on my black T-shirt but I respond quickly enough so no more than a bit hits the floor and counter. I don’t get soaked and the glass does not empty or fall and break. No big deal.

But she turns, says “So sorry” more than a couple of times, and finds a napkin to dry me, dabbing the drops along my chest, while I just stand and look at her, and tell her, “No problem, it’s okay, please don’t worry.”

Then she pauses, glances up at me, and realizes that we are standing close and she is touching my chest, the chest of someone she does not know and has not been introduced to, and she looks down, embarrassed, and takes a step back, bumping into her stool. She stumbles and I reach out and hold her so she steadies.

Our host comes over. He asks if everything is okay and I nod, while she says nothing. I withdraw my hand from the small of her back. He introduces us. I look her in the face.

Her features can be simply stated, drawn on an identi-kit in a police station: a long, straight, narrow nose; wide-set, rounded eyes; and a wide mouth, neither too full nor stretched and thin.