Kappa Quartet

by Daryl Qilin Yam

  I told her I wasn’t sure. “In any case,” I said, “my colleague and I will keep an eye on him, now that we know where he is.”

  “That’s good,” said Madam Lim. “Thank you for all that you’ve done, Ms Neo.”

  “Your problem is mine,” I said to Madam Lim. “Managing the situation is the best that we can do.”

  “Hmm,” she said. “You mean to say he can’t exist, am I right?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “It’s all right, Ms Neo. I understand.” Madam Lim paused. “You need to find a way to speak to Kevin. Of course, you can’t just walk up to him.”

  “No. Not after what happened to Mr Haruhito.”

  There was a second pause.

  “I recommend observation,” said Madam Lim. “See what he’s like now, what he does. Decide if he’s safe to be approached.”

  “That’s the plan,” I said.

  “Has he ever left the condo, by the way?”

  “No,” I replied. “Like I said: all Kevin does is spend his time by the poolside. And all he ever does is read.”

  “What is he reading?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said to her. “There’s a face on the cover, but I can’t really tell.”

  “All right,” said Madam Lim. “It doesn’t matter.” For some reason or another, I felt like I wouldn’t hear from her ever again. “When you do get to talk to him, could you please pass along a message from me?”

  “Sure,” I said. “If the opportunity arises.”

  “Tell him I’ve been to Japan,” she said. “Multiple times. Tell him I’ve been to the bookstore, and the hotel. Tell him I understand everything now.”

  I frowned. “What do you understand?” I asked, but Madam Lim didn’t seem to have heard my question.

  “Tell him I gave birth to him,” Madam Lim continued. “Tell him how hard it was for me that time, all those hours in pain. How I had given up. Tell him it’s my fault he doesn’t have a soul.”

  I bumped into Zhiwei again, on the nineteenth of June.

  It’d been more than two months since Ahab and I had started frequenting the coffee shop. It’s a pretty simple one, with a drinks auntie and a mee pok man and a nasi lemak stall. On one corner there is a television, tuned permanently to Channel U. Gathered beneath the TV set was the usual crowd of old men, in brown polo tees and dark pants and black leather sandals. The one with the perm always ordered the same five bottles of Tiger beer.

  “Eh auntie,” Ahab would say. “Kopi peng, thanks.”

  It had been one of those peculiar days. The sidewalks were empty, and the air smelt of dead things. Burnt things. Evening skies drenched in unnatural hues. Whoever you met passing by had a N95 mask on, strapped across their noses and mouths, so that you saw nothing but their eyes, a little vacant as they stared straight ahead. Even the five old men, seated beneath the TV, sat slumped back in their plastic chairs with their masks still on. Other than them, however, there was nobody else in that coffee shop: nobody except Ahab and myself, on Wednesday evenings.

  “We’ll have to be extra careful, yeah,” Ahab said to me that evening. He had taken off his mask so he could drink his kopi. “Dead things floating everywhere.”

  He had a book with him that evening, and he’d laid it down on the table. There was nothing on the cover: it was just a blank white surface. I stared at it, wondering why that was the case.

  “What is that?” I asked him. He spun the book around to show me the spine. “It’s Japanese?”

  “From one of Shimao’s authors,” he said to me. “Sora no Nikki.”

  “What’s it about?”

  “It’s about a notebook this guy purchases, except it turns out to be a diary, written twenty years ago,” he said. He flipped through the first few pages. “In the diary, the writer recounts how he had run away from home, and how he struggles to make his journey back.”

  “Two narratives,” I said. “Your Japanese has to be really good.”

  Ahab made a face.

  “Not bad la. I improved a lot after my trip.”

  “Do you like the book so far?” I asked. According to his bookmark, he was only through a third of the volume.

  “It’s okay. Two narratives like you said. It jumps between the present day and the diary, so that can be difficult.”

  “But Shimao likes it?”

  Ahab nodded. “Shimao loves it.”

  Ahab had received the call from Mr Shimao a week before I’d learnt about Kevin’s whereabouts. We still hadn’t known where he was at the time, but Ahab took on the job anyway, hoping to learn more about how shirikodamas could be stolen or extracted from other people. But when he came back, he said he’d learnt nothing: he never got to meet the kappa, and this girl in their team had a plan of her own the whole time. The only thing he gained was a bad case of athlete’s foot, which meant less groundwork for him when he returned and more time on the job for me. Ahab resumed charge on the twin brothers’ case after he made a full recovery.

  “The wife’s hearing will take place in a couple of days,” he said.

  I nodded. Over the years I’d learnt to trust his instincts, when it came to picking which cases were worth pursuing. “How is she?” I asked.

  “She’s okay,” said Ahab. “A bit thrown off by everything. But the haze isn’t helping things.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “She’s just staring out of the window,” said Ahab. “Nothing’s a better sign for crazy than that.”

  The wife’s name was Noor. Her husband was a restaurateur, a man in his forties named Henry Tan. Harry was the name of his twin. Ahab had been keeping tabs on both husband and wife, but he’d been paying special attention to Noor, watching her from the HDB flat directly opposite her parents’. A car park stood between the two blocks.

  “Her parents have been keeping their windows shut, just like everybody else,” said Ahab. “But Noor keeps pulling them wide open.”

  A while later, we moved on to Kevin. I told him that Kevin was appearing less regularly by the pool.

  “My assumption is that the haze is disrupting his usual schedule,” I said to Ahab. “If the weather keeps up like this, we might find ourselves less able to predict his movements.”

  Ahab pursed his lips.

  “What about the other guy?”

  “The other guy?”

  “The one who’s always swimming in the pool,” he said. “Is he going less often as well?”

  “He hasn’t appeared in two weeks,” I said. “Not once. He might have stopped his routine altogether.”

  Ahab nodded.

  “You say they might be friends, yah? You saw them speaking to one another a while back.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “But I can’t make any guesses beyond that. That was the last time the swimmer went to the pool.”

  Ahab leant back in his chair. He took what was left of his kopi peng and drained it.

  “I wonder what they could have talked about,” Ahab said. He set his cup back down. “You think the swimmer might be Kevin’s next target?”

  “I hope not,” I said.

  Ahab paused. I felt the weight of his gaze upon me.

  “What’s up?”

  I looked at him. “To be honest, there’s something about the guy…”

  “What about him?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “He looks familiar, somehow. Like I might have met him before.”

  “You think?”

  I nodded. “A boy I used to know.”

  Ahab left twenty minutes later. He put his mask back on, and made a grab for his book. “Ciao.” He then made a beeline across the field of grass, straight towards the train station. It was nearing eight o’ clock.

  I got up, and went over to the nasi lemak stall. There was somebody else already standing in front of it, and I recognised him in that instant: it was the swimmer, the one whom Kevin had spoken to the previous Friday. The swimmer was in a white shirt and blue shorts, and a good hea
d taller than myself. His crew cut hair was bleached in some places. I knew he was my only way into the condo.

  I tapped him on the shoulder. “Do you know what’s good here?” I asked.

  He looked over his shoulder. We locked eyes. He appeared stumped, for some reason.

  “No,” the guy said. “No way.”

  I didn’t get what was going on. “I’m just asking,” I said automatically. And then I knew.

  A friend had once asked me what the biggest regret in my life was. We were drinking beer, just the two of us, over the bridge at Clarke Quay. This was way before I’d met Ahab; before I got my life all sorted out, and learnt the value of cutting ties. I told my friend about the time I’d slept with a fifteen-year-old kid, some boy whose name I didn’t remember. I’d slept with him because he told me he loved me. When he had said those words he looked so much like Eric.

  “Do you remember Eric?” I asked my friend. She said she did.

  “He was in that car accident.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “That’s right.”

  My friend chugged down her beer.

  “You know, Irena and Daria—they both had a crush on him.”

  “Really?”

  “We’re Europeans,” she said. “We love big tits on a man.”

  And then my friend laughed. I tried to as well, but my face hurt. We’d smoked so much weed beforehand, and we were still high. Later, my friend said: “All it takes is a single thing—just one, single thing. And then everything else will follow.”

  Meeting Zhiwei again was one of those things you don’t plan for. People say this all the time: that things will come and go, that things are always coming and going. They enter your life and leave it, never to return. But that’s not true. Things come and go, but they always come back. This is the part I have yet to learn.

  The following Wednesday, Ahab and I met again, except this time he had to avoid the field. It’d been pouring wet that afternoon—the largest rainstorm we’d seen all month—and the field was left ruined and muddy. It even hailed at one point, somewhere in the west. Ahab slammed his book down on our table.

  “Oh, dude,” he said to me. “Dude!” He pointed to his bookmark. “Look at how far I’ve read. This book is amazing.”

  I smiled. “Tell me about it,” I said.

  He began.

  “So the protagonist, yeah, his name is Maru, and the diarist is only known as X. And X is, like, trying to go back home to his parents, except he can’t even remember the address of his old house. All X has are these rich details of his childhood home, like his bedroom and the kitchen and his parents’ study, and the garden that surrounds his house. It’s like a fantasy land he can’t connect to reality. And so in his diary, the most he can do is record the trains he’s gotten on, the strangers he’s hitched rides from, as he tries to make his way back home. At one point he finds himself stuck at a bakery he remembers, and takes a different bus each day from the nearby bus stop. Day after day after day, X is led down a different route, and he does this for a whole week until he gets on the right service.

  “Maru, on the other hand, is the total opposite. He’s stuck in his home, and he doesn’t step out of it. We learn that he is a hermit, but never why. The readers just have to accept it. All his food he gets from his parents, who feed him every day and demand nothing more from him. But Maru is traumatised, however, by this constant barking from his neighbour’s dog—he can hear this constant yapping and barking through the walls, and it drives him insane, like totally loco. So much so that he starts dreaming of ways to kill it.”

  “Oh wow,” I said.

  “Uh huh, uh huh. There are these long scenes that Maru comes up with, yeah, of tying the dog up and muzzling it and feeding it bad things to make it throw up. It’s horrible.”

  “It does sound that way.”

  “But then!” says Ahab, “it turns out that all of these plans were in fact the ways in which he’s been torturing himself. He’s been killing himself the whole time, in all those cruel and horrible ways he described. Maru’s the ‘dog’, basically, in the house that he lives in. He’s the metaphorical pet that his parents have been keeping and sheltering from the outside world, for the past however-many years of his life.”

  I felt impressed. Ahab’s enthusiasm was rubbing off on me. I asked him who the author was, and whether any of her works had been translated yet. He said her name was Chiba Mari.

  “She must have been translated,” he said. “She’s an award-winner and everything.”

  I picked up the book. I flipped through its pages; Ahab only had a few chapters left to the end. I then closed the book, and stared once more at its cover. Under the light of the coffee shop, I could spot a couple of indents on the jacket, spelling out the title of the novel.

  “I know the first character,” I said to Ahab. “It stands for ‘sky’ in Chinese.” I set the book back down. Ahab smiled and nodded.

  “It also stands for ‘empty’,” he said.

  The sky was red that night, as Zhiwei drove us down the road. He looked forward, and then looked to the side. He looked forward again. His left hand moved the wheel, seemingly of its own accord.

  “You’re just the same,” I said to him.

  Zhiwei smiled.

  “I’m really not,” he said to me.

  He turned into an alleyway. It was a small, narrow kind of road, with shophouses standing on either side. Zhiwei had to drive slowly because there were people about, people with drinks in their hands and gas masks over their faces, shouting about the apocalypse. “The world’s ending,” one of them shouted at our car. The guy knocked on my window. “It’s the end of the world, baby,” he said.

  Zhiwei found a parking lot by pure luck; the streets had been packed that night.

  “Can you drink at all?” I asked Zhiwei.

  “Just a little,” he said.

  “Do you drink often?”

  “Define often.” He laughed. “Come on.”

  He took me to a bar. It was in the courtyard of a shophouse, with tall white walls surrounding the space on all sides. The red sky was nothing but a large square above us, like a section of something unreal. Zhiwei went up to the bartender and ordered two pints of Guinness.

  “You like this place?” I asked. We found a small bench by a corner, placed against one of the walls. House music played from the speakers.

  “I come here with my friends,” he said.

  I cast a look around the courtyard.

  “Who are your friends?” I asked. “I want to know.”

  He told me. They were a group of laidback guys, guys he had known from the army and from his modules at university. One of them had found out about this place, and the lot of them had frequented it ever since.

  “We’re not really into clubbing,” Zhiwei said. “We much prefer sitting down.”

  I nodded.

  “So you live in a condo near Potong Pasir?”

  “Yep.”

  “Is it nice?”

  “My family moved there,” he said. “Shortly afterwards.”

  I didn’t know what he was referring to.

  “After what?”

  “After us,” he said. “After our night together.”

  “Ah,” I said. “Okay.” I scratched at an eyebrow. “It’s been a long time.”

  “It has, yeah,” he said.

  There was a pause. We drank from our pints. I asked him if he was seeing anybody at the moment. Zhiwei shook his head.

  “And you?” he asked. “Are you seeing somebody right now?”

  I felt warmer, all of a sudden.

  “No,” I said to him. “I’m not attached.”

  “Are you busy with work?”

  “You could say that,” I said.

  He asked if it was teaching. I told him it wasn’t.

  “That was just something I did for extra cash.”

  “Oh,” said Zhiwei. “So what are you doing now?”

  I smiled.

  �
�Something else,” I said.

  Zhiwei smiled back at me.

  “That’s a coy thing to say, Ms Neo.”

  I let out a laugh. He laughed as well.

  “Oh god,” I said. “Ms Neo. It sounds so different coming from you.”

  Zhiwei kept on smiling.

  “How do I say it differently?” he asked. I looked at him. He was looking right back at me.

  “I had a boyfriend once.”

  “You did?”

  I nodded.

  “His name was Eric,” I said. “He was a good guy. When he found out about my plans to start relief teaching, he started calling me Ms Neo. Ms Neo, Ms Neo, can I have your permission to go to the toilet, Ms Neo? Shit like that.”

  Zhiwei laughed again. And then he stopped.

  “He was a good guy?”

  I blinked. “Huh?”

  Zhiwei paused for a bit. “The past tense,” he said. “You’re using the past tense.”

  “Oh,” I said. “I’m sorry. He’s not—he’s not dead, or anything.”

  “Okay.”

  “He was involved in a car accident,” I said to him. “Somewhere in Kota Bahru. Several cars, and one giant truck. His sister passed away.”

  “What?”

  I nodded.

  “Eric hasn’t been the same since,” I said. “He’s still a good guy, though. He just became different.”

  “Right,” he said. He looked at my glass. There was barely any stout left.

  “Shall I buy you another drink?”

  “Excuse me?” I said to him. I nearly laughed again. “I’m the working adult here.”

  He shrugged. He was smiling at me again.

  “I don’t have to work for my money,” he said. He stood up. “Hang on, all right?”

  When he came back, the music had changed. It was a slow beat: a rising sort of cadence, a chorally layered synth. Columns of sound. Some people rose from their seats and benches, and some even began to dance. They danced beneath the section of the sky, burning red above them all. Zhiwei came over, with a new pint of Guinness in his hand.

  It was a big sort of hand. It was wide and smooth, with fingers twice as large as your own. It was a hand you could hold on to and then let go of, just as easily. It was a hand larger than my own.