Choo Yi Feng is currently an undergraduate majoring in life sciences at the National University of Singapore. He has previously been published in Curios, the annual student journal of Tembusu College at NUS. He also a volunteer who gives tour guides and conducts intertidal surveys on Singapore’s diverse seashores.
Brightest Day
In the dawn before the sun had fully risen, my bedroom was flushed in a deep blue light that promised to stain everything it touched forever with its saturated tint. My eyes opened, and it was as if my body was instantly filled with an electric vitality, my heart pounding from either the thrill of a forgotten dream or the anticipation of a good day. I eased out of bed and poured myself a cup of water. There was none of the usual grogginess and heavy lids, and even the usual stuffy nose was gone too. It was as if I had closed my eyes last night, counted to three, and simply opened my eyes to welcome the new day.
Inside the stale auditorium I was seated somewhere in the middle rows, finishing the remains of my bread. The lecturer entered with a tote bag slung on his shoulder. From it he drew out a thick stack of papers. His assistant divided them into even piles and laid them out on the table, and he instructed us through the mike to come down and collect our scripts. I did decently, but didn’t score as highly as expected. There was a particularly thorny question right at the beginning that tested Euler’s formula, which I didn’t understand very well. It had thrown off my momentum for the rest of the paper. At the end of the period, as I was sliding the swivel table back into place, I felt a sharp graze on my arm and swore in a low whisper. The auditorium was quite old, and the table had a crack in it. A sharp, jutting edge had carved a thin line, which quickly began to bleed.
The next few hours passed in a slow blur. I cleaned the wound. It stung for a while, but the blood cleared fast, leaving only a pale stroke. I was aware of a lot of walking, of one crowded venue growing in volume as it approached, until I was fully immersed in the ripe hustle and din of activity, and then fading with relief and growing quiet as I left. Then I would enter another space and the cycle would repeat itself, over and over. I tried to look for people, but I couldn’t find any. There were plenty of students and a smattering of staff, but if they were queuing at a stall for food, then that was all that mattered. They only existed to me in that very confined space for those short moments. I found it difficult to think of them as people rather than just elements of physical geography.
Someone was studying at the table next to me as I ate lunch in the canteen. I threw one or two glances at him because I felt like I had seen his face somewhere, but when he looked up I averted my eyes. Last week – I think it was a Tuesday – another person had also been studying at a table next to me as I ate. I finished my lunch and joined the short queue of people carrying empty bowls and plates to the return point. Later in the day I had a vague idea of failing to understand the cause of centripetal acceleration along a wave element. I leaned back and became conscious of a cold, mild ache in my legs.
Outside this lecture theatre there were booths set up – a makeshift basketball arcade game crafted inventively from basic materials. Young people in matching t-shirts were stopping passers-by to talk to them, and passers-by were listening to nothing in particular, deflecting away as though repulsed by an invisible current. There was a display of eco-conscious things, of pens and stickers, but also of folders, pouches, cases, cloth bags – things designed ostentatiously to hold other things. I lingered there, as I enjoyed looking at these things. Inevitably, one of the young people started sharing their ideas with me, about a project involving a neighbouring, poorer country, and rebuilding homes for displaced people and animals.
The difference that I noticed, which she later also explained, was that they were using a novel approach – reconstituting the natural habitat by first reconstructing the human environment, which sounded familiar to me but also very new – almost ground-breaking. I offered her my well wishes. As I approached the bus stop I heard someone speaking loudly. He was a middle-aged man dressed in loose clothes, and he walked with a pronounced limp. I couldn’t hear what he was saying but he kept repeating it, sometimes at a random stranger but mostly into thin air.
I was basically alone in the chill upper deck of the nearly-empty bus as it crawled along its route. At one stop, the sound of someone clambering up the stairs could be heard, growing louder with every step. She approached and fell into the seat next to me with such weight that I bounced slightly. She wore a black hoodie, and her eyes were framed by messy, dark purple bangs tinged with orange. Her eyes bore into me as I took in the sight of her. Someone in the lower deck pressed the bell for the bus to stop. The girl said nothing, and I said nothing, and afterwards I turned my attention back to my phone for the remainder of the ride. She stayed where she was. Her heavy, laborious breathing grated on me.
In my room I tried to sift through the tasks of the day, but the golden glow of the late afternoon cast sharp, oblique shadows that distracted me, splayed across the furniture in whimsical postures. I only tended to get any work done after the sky had darkened, but then it would almost be dinner time. I took my Lexapro and gazed out of the window instead. The heat of the afternoon was quietly receding, and there was a mild breeze stirring. I felt like going for a walk. Mommy would not be home for at least another half-hour.
The girl from the bus was at the void deck, seated at the green metal table with her feet propped up. She looked at me, and then turned her attention back to her cigarette, saying nothing. I walked cautiously towards the table but did not sit down. She puffed up her cheeks and blew a smoke ring. It pulsed in my direction and dissipated, leaving the sharp odour of tobacco. A pair of cats were meowling aggressively some distance away, perhaps in the next block.
“Look, I don’t really want to be here either, but it felt like it was necessary to at least make you aware of this. If you’re just going to stand there and show me that ugly pout then give me the word and I’ll go.”
I took a deep breath and slid into the chair opposite her, chewing my lower lip. We sat in silence for a while more, the lighted tip of her cigarette flaring up with every breath she sucked through it. Her hair was really quite mesmerising. It was a rich, deep purple, but when she brushed her hands through it, there were unmistakable patches of bleached orange that almost glimmered. We stayed silent together for a while and watched as the daylight faded further.
“You used to write letters to me. Remember?”
I groaned involuntarily, burying my face in my palm as the goose-bumps rose on my neck.
“Oh don’t act so coy. It happens.” She stubbed out her cigarette against the table and flicked it aside, shifting her feet off the chair so that she could turn towards me.
“I need to go back to that day. Jog the memory. What happened?”
I leaned my chin against my hand and stared at the space around her, trying to recall. Now I really was pouting.
“I stapled a whole bunch of recycled paper together and started scribbling down everything on my mind. About why I was doing this and how I felt and what my intention was, and who I was sorry to and what would happen to the things in my bedroom.”
She made an attempt at a sincere smile that came across as a smirk instead.
“Because it felt like the worst day of my life and it felt like I wasn’t going to make it through, and I thought I should write a letter and that way I could either feel better after that, or if I didn’t it wouldn’t be a total waste.”
“On your way home. You had your report book in your hand because it wouldn’t fit in the bag. Just after the overhead bridge. Was the neighbourhood quiet that day?”
“I – I can’t remember.”
“Did you remember somebody dropping a bunch of coins?”
“Yes. I… think so.”
“And you stopped to help him pick them up.”
“Oh yeah. Okay, I remember that.”
She stayed quiet for a while. I felt like asking her now. She got up and turned towards the small field next to the flat.
“Come with me. We’ll go somewhere. Field trip.”
I stayed in my seat, fingers curling weakly. She turned back around at me.
“Come on. You’ll like it.”
We travelled there by bus. We sat in the upper deck. Again it was basically empty. I sat on the inner seat, the one closer to the window. She sat next to me, closer to the aisle, and when she took her place again it was with a force that caused me to bounce a little in my seat. She was heavily built, and I could feel her weight pressing against me at every sharp turn. The streets were so quiet that we skipped many stops. Eventually we got off on a secluded road that I didn’t recognise.
She opened the gate and I walked through it. The guard at the post didn’t notice us and he looked monumentally stoic. The prison compound was almost empty. We passed through gantries and steel doors that I didn’t even know how to operate. Every handle opened magically under her hand, and every door without a clear mechanism seemed to give way at her touch. We passed through a warren of passages, making turns to the left and right, taking elevators, climbing staircases.
At last we were in a sparse, tight room with silver panels lining the walls and a couple of surgical beds in the middle. It was unnaturally cold, and I was reminded of my lecture theatre. We stood against the sides of the room. I felt the cool concrete of the wall, and heard the silent whirring of the vents. In the stillness, again I felt like asking her, but she spoke first.
“That person whose coins you helped pick up. Let’s call him Jared for simplicity. In a sense, you could say that he was your neighbour, even though he lived in the rental flat two blocks down from your own. I’m not usually in the business of judging, but somebody like you would say that he was an actual waste of a life.”
She took out an iPad from her bag and scrolled through it. I was facing her and couldn’t see what was on the screen.
“He did some pretty fucked up things, by your standards. Stole money from his mom’s medicine fund to fuel his addiction. At an earlier point he had twice tried to get away with not paying prostitutes, and later raped them. But that part isn’t on his criminal record. The thing that did the job was just the packet of heroin found in his jeans, on the day that you nearly jumped.” She looked up at me.
I opened my mouth wanting to say something then closed it again, thinking. Finally I just said, “That was seven years ago. And I’m guessing it was today.”
“Clever kid. It’s unfortunate, because he was running the drugs to buy more medicine for his mother but, well, guess he was already in too deep.”
“Is he…dead?”
“Yeah, they hanged him three days ago. His wife came to collect his body afterwards. There’s no funeral because she doesn’t have any money.”
I tried to recall if I had ever seen a funeral at the bottom of the rental flats. There were weddings, which were usually glimmering, riotous affairs, but no funerals.
“That’s the whole lot of them. His mother was cremated just two months before that, too, from neurodegeneration – genetic, but those years of heroin didn’t help either. The father…he’s somewhere in my archives, long gone. His only living relative is the uncle in prison – for sexual abuse – but he’s due soon, too. His sentence is going to outlast that cancer-ridden body. No funerals for any of them, just straight into the chute. Well, at least that makes things easier for me.”
“If he’s already gone, why are you only telling me now?”
She gave me a certain kind of a look, brows furrowed. “What, did you want to watch the hanging?”
“No!”
“Then?”
“I – I don’t know, I could at least see him, see what he looked like before they hanged him.”
Her eyes bore into my and she smirked again. This time it was the kind of smirk that would ordinarily have got on my nerves, but now made me wince in fear.
“See him? What are you talking about? Nobody sees Jared.”
“What do you mean?”
She stifled a chuckle, a manic look in her eyes as she stared at me, first in silent disbelief, then with an explosive bark of laughter as she threw her head back.
“Trust me, nobody in this country wants to see Jared. Nobody thinks about people like Jared, and nobody talks about people like Jared. Your lot do such a good job of turning death row criminals into a series of numbers and things that it makes me look bad. That’s saying something. That’s a big fucking deal.”
The idea seemed to amuse her so much that she doubled over, clinging to my shoulder for support. She laughed and laughed and laughed. I looked at her in horror, unsure of what to say. The pumping in my chest was so intense it seemed as if my heart was trying to drown the world in blood.
Eventually she laughed herself out. All that remained was a smile. She got up and shook her head, wiping a tear from her eye and sweeping the bangs out of her face.
“So that day, and those coins,” I said. “What was that? Was it like, he had to die because I didn’t die in the end?”
She stifled another giggle. “Not everything’s about you, you know. Look, it’s so simple. You borrow something and you return it when you’re done. You romantics make it into such a big deal – your masochistic jack-offs, your lurid death cults. Do I care whether you come back to me in a carriage or a sack, in April or December? No. The answer’s no.”
I leaned back against the wall and felt my knees buckle. I suddenly felt tired and out of place. I sat on the floor and looked at the bare, white tiles. She was busy with her iPad. She walked over to the silver panels and grabbed the handles, pulling out the long drawers with a tremor of stainless steel. She lifted the blankets, took notes of the faces, and dropped them back before bumping the drawers shut with her hip. Occasionally she made noises of approval or looks of surprise.
“You know sometimes, the cord’s too short. You can tell when there’s a gash on the neck. That’s what you might call a botched execution, and you could actually sue for that. Oh, but – not here, of course.”
A while later she gave her document a quick appraisal and put the iPad back inside her bag.
“Ready to go, kid? My car’s parked nearby so I can give you lift home.”
It turned out that she drove a Lamborghini. We cruised over the road without a single bump, and made clean, sharp turns at junctions. I sat next to her in silence, looking out of the window. My hands were shaking a little, and my fingers were curled on my lap in a loose fist. Inside my head, our conversation in the morgue looped over and over. We stopped at a red light at the junction right outside the promenade. We were the only vehicle on the road.
“Sometimes I think about what might have happened if I really had ended up killing myself seven years ago. At lunch, in the middle of an especially boring lecture. I think of all the pain, the guilt, the confusion of the people that I love so, so much. I think of them having to sort through the things in my bedroom, or just leaving the door closed. I think of all the little moments this week when things were actually okay, I guess, and how I would have missed all that. I think that I don’t deserve this. Maybe I have it too good.”
She didn’t turn to look at me. She just stared straight ahead at the traffic light, nodding lightly. She had been tapping her finger on the steering wheel but stopped by the time I finished speaking. The light turned green and the car accelerated to a smooth sixty.
“Look, all this cause-and-effect stuff is really… I just don’t deal with it. It’s not in my business. I take numbers. I track the inflow and the outflow. Maybe it’s God. Maybe it’s Dharmic karma. Maybe it’s just pure cosmic chaos.” The blinker went on and we flushed into the leftmost lane. “I don’t know if you’d call it good luck or bad. But if you’re thinking that way, maybe the universe dealt you a joker.”
“And it’s up to me to decide how to play it?”
“Clever kid. No wonder you’re at university.”
“I grew up without a father too. But for Jared, that… on top of everything else. It’s almost like he never got a chance to be anything other than a shadow of his parents’ failures. And if they couldn’t even raise him right, I wonder why they tried. I wonder who gave them the right to cause all this suffering.”
“It’s a mystery. The world could be burning and they’ll try anyway. Over and over, with their children, and their children’s children. On and on for as long as it’s possible. Many things change, but that doesn’t.” “Waiting for the execution date nearly broke him. Each time the prison officer came to announce the coming month’s numbers, he would think it was him. Days before he would tell his girlfriend his final wishes. They would announce it, and his number wouldn’t be there, and he would have salvaged another month. This happened repeatedly over fourteen months. Even I had to change my projections a few times because his attorney tried to stay the date.”
“At least it’s done now.”
We drove on until we were back at the bottom of my flat.
“Well, don’t think too much about it. It’ll just fire up your depression again.” She tousled my head. “Don’t talk to lawyers, don’t listen to politicians, and don’t go on Facebook. It’ll pass out of your brain in about a week. I’ll see you whenever, I guess. If it starts hurting when you pee, get yourself checked for cancer. Just in case.”
I managed a weak smile and waved, watching as the bright orange car slipped back into the moonless night and vanished from my view. I stood at the same spot, staring at the space where it should have been. It was all quiet now.