by Ho Sok Fong
This is a bit sentimental. Maybe everything we think about Bi is wrong. After all, we’ve never really thought about people who exist between two elements before. Take us: I never even wanted to think about the existence of Aminah. I have a crazy fantasy that Bi is our guardian angel. I have it even though the ustaz say this is a Western idea, that angels are servants of Allah, and our webbed friend is too lowly to compare. But I can’t control my fantasies. And so the amphibian sleeps by our side, with rugged scales and hardened scabs. The dream closes in on us, damp and cold.
Loneliness is to blame, there’s no doubt. Bi appears to me as someone small and thin, but in my fantasies Bi is tall and strong. Without even meaning to, I rely on my fantasies to lick my wounds. It can be a clear and sunny day or the depths of the rainy season and my loneliness doesn’t go away, so the fantasies just keep on coming. Maybe it should have toughened me up. But it’s like a non-stop carousel. Loneliness, exhaustion, fantasy, disillusionment. Fantasy fails and you’re confronted with reality, and the reality is that you’re lonely, and you have to get used to it. But you’ll never overcome it, because it’s tiring to be lonely and exhaustion sets in, and then the whole thing starts again. Should this be making me stronger, this perseverance in the face of the same ordeal, over and over? If I believed in God, I wouldn’t need to battle this alone. But if I choose not to believe in God, then loneliness is my own burden to bear. Does that make me pathetic, like a poor dog begging for scraps? I think it’s more pathetic when a person does not dare to ask questions. You don’t know what you should ask, so you prefer to stand as far away as possible. You prefer to believe whatever it is you have to say to make yourself feel better.
To be honest, I don’t really want to tell Aminah’s story. She always makes me feel pathetic. But there are some things that have to be done, whether we like it or not. In this story, Aminah is more obedient than I could ever be. I’m good at running away, although not at fighting back. When I want to run away, my gaze shifts outward, alighting somewhere else, for example on the fluorescent light in front of me that’s switched off now, a thick gray line like the crease in the wall.
When I ask myself questions and answer them, Aminah disappears and Bi vanishes into a little crack, or maybe dips back underwater. I dream up a little hideout for Bi: fireflies glow faintly on all sides, mossy rocks steep in ink-black river water, whirlpools gurgle and slap against Bi’s ears, slap-slap, slap-slap, as Bi drifts further and further away. Bi drops like a lead weight into the wild dreams of some Chinese ancestor of mine, fleeing his enemies all those years ago.
The ancestor lands on solid ground and is terrified. He pulls out a knife. At the edge of the field, he sees a huge, long-horned monster, ferociously charging toward him. He uses the knife. He races down the dirt track and villagers chase after him, brandishing their sickles and hoes, seeking vengeance. The field is vast and there’s nowhere to hide. He runs as fast as he can, until eventually he reaches a palace. The sultan is out for a stroll in the flower garden. He takes one look at the ancestor’s sorry state, and the hordes of angry villagers behind him, and says, “I will protect you, but afterward you will be my child.”
A newborn frog hops in the road, no bigger than a raindrop. Roads criss and cross. Shoes tiptoe over puddles. The hemlines of long skirts rise and fall, rise and fall, white socks, black shoes.
The wind masks the tip-tap, tip-tap of footsteps.
Two people escaped. That’s what all the girls in the dormitory are saying. Their voices come and go between the washbasins and their towels, brushing softly against the mirrors. The light bulb’s been dead for a long time now; three whole months. Everyone gathers around a candle. The wardens aren’t here. It’s ten o’clock and the front gate’s locked.
They looked all day. They searched everywhere.
It’s not actually that hard to run away. Or to climb over the gate. The hard thing is choosing where you run to.
“McDonald’s, KFC,” says one girl. “Whatever happens, you won’t starve.”
I shrug Aminah’s shoulders. Aminah, I call. I scratch at her chest.
Aminah looks down at her feet, as if I live in the tips of her toes. It’s easy for them and hard for me, she thinks. They were voluntary admissions. If they don’t find them, they’ll drop it. If I disappear, all the police and TV stations in the whole country will know about it. Like the court case.
Aminah’s hands flex in the candlelight. Her horse is almost blind, the light’s too bright. Looking straight at the light, you can’t see anything at all. Bi squeezes a webbed hand in between us. Bi’s hand shadows don’t have eyes, which means Bi’s hand shadows aren’t very good. Most hand shadows have eyes, at the very least a little hole to let a bit of light through. Look at the wall. There’s a blurry shadow flying around, though it’s hard to say what it is. Bi’s shadows are always racing around in a panic with their eyes closed. Sometimes I understand perfectly well that Bi is not our guardian angel. Maybe Bi is something more like a totem. But totem isn’t the right word either. Bi exists. Bi is very close to us, even if Bi does act like a ghost who can never step into the light. It’s not only me and Aminah who dream of Bi. If Bi is not a collective blindness, then Bi is a grain of sand in all our eyes. Bi is a house we all abide in, a road we want to go down, our prayer mats, luggage, clothes. Bi’s voice is low and raspy, traveling straight from my mind into Aminah’s: You’ll have to be clever about it. You won’t be completely free but you might be a little bit.
Of course, you’ll need a bit of luck too.
Bi gives very little. That’s all there is.
The wind surveys the highest point in the city.
When Bi runs away it looks like Bi is jumping out of her own belly. Bi’s clothes are like nets. Bi escapes from a dream and flashes through the streets, very much alive, passes through forbidden doors and does forbidden things, very much alive. Bi has two faces, Bi is two things at once, and this saves Bi.
It’s said that this place was originally an army barracks. Gunshots are always sounding along the periphery. Even in the rainy season, the drills go on. Shouts ring out from the jungle. I picture the mud on the soldiers’ boots. The fingers pressed against their temples.
Could those long, webbed feet jump over the fence? Aminah doesn’t know. Aminah sees a pair of long, webbed feet suspended in midair, a light jump and then they are flying, webbed toes spread wide.
In midair, in midair, and then down.
Owls sprout from the treetops. They fly off without making a sound.
A big gutter, an overgrown little path. The fence is just a layer of wire netting. Behind the wire netting is a little path. To the left are the mountain barracks, to the right is the main road down the mountain. There’s a bus stop at the side of the road, where you can catch a yellow minibus straight to the northern train station in Kuala Lumpur, where every street is lined with fast food places advertising for workers.
I don’t care what people say about me. They don’t know what I’m thinking. And I don’t care who they say I am, Aminah writes angrily in her book, I am who I am.
First you have to free yourself, says the tip of the nose. You can only be angry so long before your nose gets blocked, as if you’ve flung it into the sea and the salt water has come in to drown your heart and lungs and stomach. The exercise book is creased, hot and damp and wrinkled from the weight of our elbows. Bi’s webbed hands pat at a harmonica and the harmonica huffs beneath Bi’s gills. There is a chill, a trembling, the trembling flips the gills over. I want to love, says the tip of the nose, hotly, acidly. If hate means that I can’t love, well, then I truly am in prison.
The wind blows through the balsam flowers.
“The baby’s coming,” says Shaimah. “He’s kicking me.”
No hand can make a shadow shaped like a person. It has never been done. You can’t make a person. That patent belongs to God.
Stand up and you’ll see it. The candle makes your shadow grow. When the wind fli
ckers the flame, Aminah sees Bi hopping and dancing on the wall. The girls behind her are singing. They start out low and quiet. They only have one song. Night falls and I’m all alone, let me wash away the sin and I’ll come home. In the silent night, I wash alone, oh may my lusting heart be bright again.
Every so often they forget the words and giggle to fill the gaps, then resume the song. Why are you a hazy shadow, why am I a fish chasing bait? The air is damp and stuffy; the doors and windows are open only a crack, because too much of a breeze would snuff the candle. We cup the flame in our hands. The winds have passed now, don’t tarry on the seashore. Don’t entrust your hopes to dreams, because you’ll wake up with nothing. The candle casts flickering shadows onto the ceiling. The roof beams are like bones holding up the night. There’s a girl crying with her head in her hands, saying, “Sorry, sorry.” All through the long, long rainy season, the girls have been waiting for rebirth, rebirth. After rebirth, I will not be who I was before, writes one.
A vine climbs up to the roof, silently wrenching open a crack in the wall. The white daffodils bloom in July and are washed away by the September rain.
“Aminah, what do you think of Ustaz Hamid?” asks Shaimah, under her breath. “Every evening when he recites the scriptures, Imah wishes she could grow wings and fly to him.”
Aminah listens, her mind blank. She stares at Shaimah’s belly, then up to her face. Then back down to her feet.
“Aminah, don’t make fun of Imah! He doesn’t know,” says Shaimah. “Imah wants to love and she’s fallen in love with Ustaz Hamid, who knows why.”
She’s talking nonsense, I hear Aminah say to herself. They force us to love Allah and it confuses people. Aminah faces Shaimah. She manages not to say anything, but her puzzlement provokes me. I squeeze back inside her eyes and settle at the top of her nose, looking out at Shaimah. Shaimah seems to be holding back. She also seems to be smiling. Her lips are twitching at the corners, her nostrils are flaring, she’s leaning against the headboard of her bed, hand pressing on her stomach, breathing deeply.
“It’s shameful to be pregnant like this,” she says. “Minah, maybe you hate the ustaz, but Hamid is different. Aminah, Minah, don’t look down on Imah, Imah hates being laughed at. Sometimes Imah forgets her own big belly and the child inside it. But every time I forget, he kicks me.”
Shaimah rubs her belly again.
Aminah closes her mouth. Crickets chirp. The song swells beneath the ceiling. O Allah, free me from suffering, grant me peace. Neither Aminah nor I pay much attention to Malay songs. They all blur into one another, the syllables as indistinct as the cricket noise. But suddenly I find myself listening, and the song I thought was about God turns into a love song—no, maybe it was a love song all along. In the misty evening, I long for his shadow. In the dusky twilight, a tide rises in my chest.
I drag Aminah around, I loathe Aminah. Once, I wanted to give birth to a different self, in order to dilute her. But every time it seems I could be rid of her forever, I hesitate. It is so hard to decide. What if one day I want Aminah back? Unless I could run far, far away, to continental Africa, the grasslands of South America, the feet of the Rocky Mountains, places like that. Places from a dream, where there are no regrets, from where I could never come back.
The wind blows across my mother’s mother’s grave, shuddering on the frangipani.
Every fourteen days, I meet my mother at the pavilion in the parking lot. She always arrives on time and she’s never once missed a session. When I sign my name in the register, I count, and she’s been nine times in total. My father, only once. I don’t know if this is because he doesn’t want to or because he’s not allowed. We get very few visitors here. Sparrows fly low over the parking lot. The guard is crouched beneath a faraway mango tree, smoking. Gleaming white smoke drifts behind it, the trunk slick-black from the rain.
“I’ve been so stupid these past years, dreaming such stupid dreams,” says my mother. “The time has come for me to wake up. I can’t stand the way he looks at me, like I owe him something. I never forced him to do anything!”
“So when can I come back?” I ask.
Her face falls. It’s old and wrinkled, as if thoroughly wrung out by the years.
“Once you get out, I’ll help you change schools,” she says, after a long pause. “You can go wherever you like.”
I want to tell her that there’s no point, but after turning it over in my mind, I say nothing. For someone like me, all the schools will have the same sharp spears. They want me to stay here nine months. It doesn’t matter to them that this will set me back a whole year behind everyone else. I try to imagine the place I want to go, once I’m out. What I hoped for, a long, long time ago. No ustaz, no warden, no one claiming to have my best interests at heart. I want to go far, far away and be reborn, like a child. I want to give birth to myself.
“Any letters for me?” I ask.
“No,” she replies.
She looks at me, her gaze landing on my face like a handkerchief. I probably look terrible. In the damp, cramped little pavilion, bathed in light so blindingly white that it seems to pierce through everything, we look at one another and eat the food she’s brought, but don’t say much else. People always say that we’re mirror images of one another; that looking at one of us is like looking at the other through a mirror with a time lag of twenty years. I look into that mirror hoping for guidance, some sign of what’s to come, but it’s a mystery. I can’t see through it, and neither can she.
The wind blows across shoes drying in the sun.
Luck can’t stay bad forever. Two cats snarl nearby. They’ve been fighting long enough that both their ears are bleeding. A fruit thuds onto the roof and then rolls off onto the ground, where it will rot before it has the chance to ripen. A dead bird lies with its legs to the sky. Aminah looks everywhere for a good omen but there are only bad ones.
Whatever the omens, no more letters come from Kai. Everything feels unbearable. The world spins fast and it’s flung me out of its orbit. This separation is pointless. His name peels away from inside me and I want to scream it. Water sours in my chest. I look at the trees, look at the blank road ahead. The wind loosens rainstorms from the leaves. Stand at the railings and you can feel the whole valley is dripping, the rain turning everything black: window lattices, tree trunks, roofs, pillars. Birds build nests in holes beneath the eaves. Spiders are massacred and then reborn, lurking in the corners of the ceiling while their legs grow long again. Cat shit stinks up the garden.
Shaimah’s gone to have her baby. The warden’s at the hospital and now there are just two lazy guards, crouched under the mango tree with their cigarettes. They’ll stay there smoking for a couple of hours, then go and make their rounds.
Wring out a cleaning rag and hang it over the railing. Pick up the shoes that have been drying underneath. They’re still a little damp; tie the laces together and drape them over your shoulder.
The wind bangs open an exercise book.
Bi’s webbed hands bring me a sleepwalking horse. A swaying black horse with its eyes closed. It gallops very quietly, as soundlessly as shadows moving on the ground. When I sit astride it, it carries me away like a time machine. The two guards don’t even notice us as we pass right in front of them. At most, they notice a slight breeze, something moving in the garden, here one moment, gone the next. Everything is as it should be, and no one will remember that there was ever an Aminah here. In the files, there’s a blank space where her name used to be. They might find that puzzling, might wonder what used to be there, in that emptiness above the line, or wonder where all the exercise books on top of the cupboard have gone. Later, maybe a passer-by will wonder where all the people went, and what kind of place was here before it turned to rubble. Here in this valley, on this abandoned plot, by then all covered in broken glass and trampled grass. They might feel a flash of curiosity, but it won’t linger long. They won’t figure it out, not unless they really go chasing after answers. And why
would they? We’re not high-profile cases like Maria. We’re lost causes, forgotten dreams, that’s all.
Press your bare feet into the stirrups, grip the reins, squeeze its stomach with your legs. You have to learn to handle a blind horse; don’t let it buck you. Maybe I’m blind too. Freedom is a flower of kicked-up dust as you gallop down a mountain: stop moving and it’s gone. I want to run far, far away, to a place I’ve never been and no one knows about, and live a life free from desire. It’s not that I’m not afraid. Who knows whether I’ll succeed. Whether I’ll manage to vanish from this place, so that they hear no news of me ever again and cease to know a single thing about me.
You have to be smart about it, I say to Aminah, still unsure who is leading whom.
Aminah is very quiet. She doesn’t say anything. She’s temporarily mute. Where to now? Where to go for a peaceful, untraceable life? To no longer fear being alone? So long as I fear being alone, I will never be untethered, there will always be neighbors, friends, lovers. Desire will sweep me away again and send me back into the net. Then there’ll be no avoiding it, I’ll have to turn into someone else, but who? Aminah? Zhang Mei Lan? Maybe neither. Maybe they are both impossible. Who knows what kind of thing I’ll be by then. But if it doesn’t matter who I am, why not banish myself right now, and carry on being Aminah?
No, there has to be a choice. If I love somebody, I can choose whether to be like them or not like them. Maybe one day I’ll be Aminah again, maybe not. This is all so hard to predict. How am I supposed to know? I don’t even know when I should leave the valley.
